I held him close to me and stroked his head. “It’s okay, Danny. It’s okay to cry. Sometimes bad things happen, and they make us feel like crying. You go ahead and cry.”
He cried for a few minutes, and then he was calm for a while, and then I sat up. “You know what?” I asked. “I remember you have some really neat pogs. Can I see them?”
He nodded. Well, that was a start, I thought. He got up and ran inside, and I got the bag of pogs from my truck, and when he came out again with his I had mine lined up in neat piles. “You want to flip some?” I asked.
He nodded again and sat down across from me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Terri standing in the front door, but then she went back inside. “I’m warning you, I haven’t flipped pogs for a long time,” I said. “I might have forgotten how.”
“I’ll show you,” he said. “You make a stack like this,” and he piled up ten of his pogs, all face up. “And then I flip my shooter at them, and the ones that stay face up are still mine, and the ones that go the other way are yours.”
He flipped, and the pile toppled. Eight of them stayed right side up, and he pushed the other two over to me. “Now you do it,” he said.
We flipped back and forth for a long time, and pogs seemed to migrate from my side over to his. I guessed you had to be six years old to be a champion pog flipper. Some dark rain clouds blew in off the ocean, blocking the sun, and then Terri came to the door and said, “Who’s ready for some supper?”
“Will you play with me again?” Danny asked.
“Of course.” We gathered up our pogs and went inside.
“Go put your pogs away and wash your hands,” Terri said, and Danny went off toward his room. “Any progress?”
“He’ll come around,” I said. “He did talk a little, but don’t say anything to him.”
Terri had made meatloaf and mashed potatoes. We sat at the kitchen table, under a montage of old hapa haole sheet music covers Terri had collected and framed. In the twenties and thirties hapa haole music, or half-white music, was popular in the islands. It featured the ukulele and the slack key guitar, and often was about the romance between a haole and a native, under the Hawaiian moon.
She cut meat loaf for each of us. “Would you like some potatoes?” she asked Danny.
“Yes, please.”
She raised her eyebrows to me and smiled.
After dinner Terri and I sat on the overstuffed couch, her with her feet tucked under her, mine stretched out onto the coffee table. Danny sprawled on the floor and didn’t speak again, but this time his silence was calmer, less pained. We didn’t make a big deal about it. Terri and I talked easily about old classmates, things we’d done at Punahou, while the big-screen TV played in the background.
When Terri announced it was Danny’s bedtime, I asked, “I know tomorrow’s only Wednesday, and it’s normally a school day, but I was wondering, would you guys like to go on a picnic tomorrow? We could go down to Makapu‘u Point. I could bring my board along and give Danny a surfing lesson.”
“He already loves his boogie board,” Terri said.
“Please, Mom? Please?”
“All right. Now go take a bath and then get into bed. I’ll come and tuck you in.”
“Can Kimo come too?”
“Sure,” I said. I reached out and ruffled his hair. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
Terri waited until he had left the room to speak. “I don’t know what you did, but it worked. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“This is just a start. Give me a little while, and I’ll talk to him about what happened to his dad.”
“God, you know, I’d almost forgotten. Just for a minute or two there. It was like we were just sitting around watching TV, and our worlds hadn’t fallen apart.”
“I’m on the way to picking mine up,” I said, reaching out for her hand. “Come on along, we can pick up yours on the way.”
AN ASSEMBLAGE OF TREASURES
While I was getting ready for bed I turned on the TV news, Lui’s station. I was just in time to see part three of their series on gay cops. Lucky me.
But as I watched, I got more and more interested. There were police forces around the country that had incorporated gay officers into their regular patrols. They primarily worked neighborhoods with large gay populations, and they were more sensitive to issues like gay bashing and regulating gay clubs than straight officers were.
It was a surprisingly well-balanced piece. I didn’t know if that kind of enlightenment would ever come to Honolulu, but seeing such a piece on my brother’s normally scandal-packed station was a nice change.
The next morning the phone rang at eight-thirty, just as I was getting ready to go out for a late swim. It was Lieutenant Yumuri. “Can you come over to the station this morning?” he asked.
“Sure. What for?” I thought maybe he wanted to talk about the case, ease up on the pressure. Maybe this was the first step toward getting my badge and my weapon back. There were a couple of discrepancies I wanted to talk to him about, mostly centered around Evan’s suicide, which I was now sure was faked.
To his credit, Lieutenant Yumuri sounded uncomfortable when he spoke. “Officer Greenberg is getting his shield. I want to put him at your desk. I’d appreciate it if you’d come by and pick up your personal belongings.”
I couldn’t speak for a moment. It was all over. My career as a cop, as a detective. And this was how it ended. Finally I said, “Sure. I’ll be over in a little while.”
“Thank you.” He hung up his end, and I held my receiver there for a minute, listening to nothing, until a female voice came on the line and said, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”
I pulled on a pair of khakis and an aloha shirt and walked over to the station. As I was about to walk in, Lidia Portuondo came out in uniform. “Kimo,” she said.
“Lidia.”
I started to walk past her, and then she said, “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I never should have told anybody what I heard in that interview.”
“I guess you shouldn’t have. I thought you could keep a secret.”
She shook her head. “Couldn’t even keep my own. The lieutenant found out about me and Alvy. So he gets a promotion and I get transferred to Pearl City.”
“I heard he got his shield,” I said. “He’s taking over my desk.” I hesitated for a minute. “Are you two still…”
“For now.” She gave me a forced smile. “Who knows, I might meet some handsome guy out in Pearl City.”
I gave her my hand. “Good luck.”
“You, too.”
I nodded at the desk sergeant and started to walk back to my old desk. He said, “Sorry, Kimo, I’ve got to call the Lieutenant before I can let you back there.”
“I understand.”
I cooled my heels in the waiting area for a few minutes until Akoni came up front. “I can take him back,” he said to the desk sergeant.
“Hear you’ve got a new partner,” I said as we walked back.
“We’re working a new homicide, behind the Royal Hawaiian Hotel,” Akoni said. “He’s got a lot to learn.”
“Be nice to him, all right?” I asked as we got back to our desks. “What happened to me has nothing to do with him.”
I started to pack up my desk. I could see Alvy Greenberg had already been sitting there. “I punched him yesterday,” Akoni said. I looked up. “He was talking stink about you. I kept telling him to stop and he wouldn’t, so I hit him.” He had a kind of sheepish grin on his face, like a kid who knows he’s done wrong but can’t help bragging about it.
“Don’t make a habit of it, all right?” I asked. I smiled at him. “It doesn’t make for good relationships between partners.”
It didn’t take me long to box up my stuff. A favorite coffee mug, some pictures of my nieces and nephews, a miniature surfboard I won in a contest once and kept around for good luck. It hadn’t brought me much luck lately, and I could have just tossed it, but I didn’t want to tempt fate any worse.
“See you around,” I said, sticking my hand out to Akoni.