“I can come by the club. How about tomorrow, like two o’clock.”
“That’ll work.” We said our goodbyes and hung up. I walked back to the table where Harry was paying the bill.
“Harry, I can pay.”
“You don’t know where your next paycheck is coming from. I can treat you once in a while.”
I shook my head. “Well, I hate to eat and run, but I’ve established that Wayne and Derek are both home. I’m going to run over there and take pictures of their cars.”
“You can’t do that by yourself. You need a lookout. What if they see you?”
“I don’t want to get you involved. I’ve gotten too many people in trouble already.”
“You’re my friend. I’m already involved. Come on, let’s get a move on.”
While we drove, I called my brother Lui and made a date with him for lunch the next day. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“You wouldn’t ask the question if you didn’t think I had a right to be, but, no, I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry I put you in a bad situation.”
“I should have called Mom and Dad. But I figured you’d already talked to them. I didn’t know you were holed up in your apartment with the phone off the hook.”
“Your reporter could have told you,” I said. “But come on, I don’t want to argue with you, Lui. Just name the time and place for lunch.”
We agreed to meet at noon at a little coffee shop around the corner from his station. “You talk to Mom at all?” he asked before we hung up.
“Last night,” I said. “She was all right.”
“She laid into me the other day for not calling them. You think you can tell her to lay off?”
“I can try,” I said. “See you at noon.”
We parked around the corner from the high-rise in Kaka‘ako where Derek and Wayne lived and walked over to their building, a luxury condominium with valet parking and an underground garage. While the valet was in the lobby chatting with the security guard, we slipped through a fire door that had been propped open and into a stairwell that led to the garage. “How are you going to tell which ones are theirs?” Harry asked.
“While you were hacking into Tommy’s computer, I was chatting with Arleen. She was telling me how egotistical Wayne and Derek both are-they have vanity license plates, DEREKS and WAYNES. If I were still on the job, I could just run a DMV check, but instead we’ll just have to find the cars that match those plates.”
We looked around. The garage was about half-empty, which was good for us. Even better, the parking bumpers had unit numbers painted on them. It was harder to figure out how the numbers ran. They seemed to go in sequence for a while, then have a break and a bunch of random numbers in them, and then resume again in order, and so on.
‘This is the goofiest system,” I said. Harry stood there, lost in thought. “Harry? You still with me?”
“It is a system. There’s a pattern here. See, wherever the garage is completely sheltered, the numbers run in sequence. Wherever there’s a grating, they jump out.”
“So?”
“So when they first assigned parking spaces, they must have given one good space to every unit. Then I’ll bet people started wanting second parking spaces, so they got these ones that aren’t so good, that were probably intended as guest spaces originally.”
“Fascinating,” I said dryly. “So find me the spaces for unit
1612.”
“You take the sequential ones,” he said. “I want to see if I can find a pattern in the non-sequential ones.”
I shook my head and walked down the aisle. Once a geek, always a geek. It was a little spooky in the garage, open and brightly lit and echoing, and I wanted to get out as soon as possible. I found the space for #1612 easily and took a couple of pictures of the big black Jeep Cherokee that was parked there. It had a Yale sticker on the back windshield and the vanity plate I expected, WAYNES.
Alarm bells started going off in my head. A black Jeep Cherokee, just like the one I had seen peeling away from the Rod and Reel Club the night Tommy Pang had been murdered. Was Wayne the guy Evan and I had both seen dragging Tommy’s body down the alley? Were Wayne and Derek responsible not just for Evan’s murder, but for Tommy’s as well? And if they’d killed Tommy, then why had they killed Evan?
All those thoughts were ricocheting around my brain when I saw Harry down the aisle waving toward me. Just then I heard the engine noise of a car coming down the ramp. I waved to Harry and we both ducked behind cars.
The valet squealed around the curve and slid into a space, stomping the brakes at the last minute as the concrete wall loomed ahead of him. We get our thrills where we can, I thought. The valet, a cute blond guy in tight white shorts and a white shirt with epaulets, jumped out of the car and jogged back up the ramp.
I hurried down to the white BMW convertible Harry had found. It had a Yale bumper sticker, and a vanity plate that read DEREKS. I snapped my pictures and we got out of the garage.
Back at my truck I showed Harry the Polaroids. They were pretty standard shots, showing the front and side of each car, along with the license plates. They were both in mint condition, not a ding or a dent, nothing to identify them to witnesses.
It was almost ten by then, and I drove Harry back to his condo and then went home myself. I watched the evening news on Lui’s station again, and saw a special report on a gay task force in a city on the East Coast. It was a mixture of straight and gay officers and detectives who investigated crimes against gays, patrolled gay neighborhoods, and gave lectures to the community on personal safety and community patrols. The report compared it to other units in communities with language or cultural barriers. “Our officers in Little Saigon speak Vietnamese,” one spokesman said. “In the gay community we have officers who are sensitive to residents’ concerns. It’s the same thing.”
It was an interesting idea. I yawned and went to bed. I woke early and went for a brief surf, which refreshed and energized me, and prepared me for all I had to do.
SOMEONE IS WATCHING
The next morning, Thursday, I stopped off at Harry’s apartment, where he had downloaded new copies of the photos of Derek and Wayne for me from the Yale website and printed them on his color printer. He wanted to come to Wailupe with me, but he had a class at UH to teach.
“I have to give a pop quiz this morning, which I already know is a bad idea. Then I’ll have twenty-five quizzes to correct.”
“What you need to do,” I said, “is give multiple choice tests. Then you just make a guide with the right answers on it, and stick it over the papers and then check, check, check, you’re done.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Wahine I dated once, teacher from Wisconsin,” I said. “She told me.”
“You dated a vahine from Visconsin?” he asked, giving both words the Hawaiian pronunciation.
I laughed and headed out the H1 toward Wailupe with the pictures and the Polaroids I’d taken of Derek’s and Wayne’s cars. I parked in Terri’s driveway and knocked on her door. Though it was still early, the sun shone strongly in a cloudless sky, and it was already getting hot.
Danny answered. “Kimo!” He put his arms around my leg.
Terri came up behind him. “I guess you can see he missed you. He kept asking me when you were coming back.” She sighed. “I still can’t get him to go back to school. Maybe next week.”
I leaned down and picked him up. “You missed me, huh? I wish I could be here more, pal, but I’ve got lots of stuff to do. I’ll come and see you as often as I can, okay?”
He nodded. I put him down and explained to Terri what I was going to do. “Why don’t I come with you?” she asked. “I know the neighbors, and they’re more likely to talk to you if I’m around.”
“I don’t know. They may feel awkward, seeing you, thinking Evan killed himself.”