The TV crew from Lui’s station arrived right on the heels of the ambulance, and the correspondent taped a segment outside the bar. They got some footage of me and the drag queen, both soaked in Wayne Gallagher’s blood, and Harry let them make a duplicate of the audio tape, which they edited and played on the news the next day.
The uniforms cleared the bar except for a couple of witnesses, the owner and the bartenders grumbling about the lost business, and the place turned into a standard crime scene. The cops kept me and my brothers and Harry separated, at different tables out in the bar, until Akoni came in and took over.
“You wanted that shield, now you’re going to have to work for it,” I overheard Akoni say, as he forced Alvy Greenberg to look over Wayne Gallagher’s body with Doc Takayama. He looked sleepy and a little lost, and I got a perverse joy out of seeing his visible discomfort.
By three a.m. Doc had released the body, and the crime scene techs had finished with the little room. “This place is a mess,” the bartender said, surveying the blood and fingerprint powder everywhere. “I’m not cleaning it up. I pour drinks. That’s what I do. I pour drinks and I listen to drunks complain. I don’t clean up nobody’s blood.”
They let us go a little while later. “Hell, I know where to find you,” Akoni said.
Harry, Lui and I got into the back of the van, with Haoa driving. “I’m wired,” he said. “No way I’m gonna get to sleep tonight. You guys want anything?”
“I could use a cup of coffee,” Lui said.
“Iced tea,” Harry said.
I said, “The Denny’s on Kalakaua is open twenty-four hours.”
We made a quick pit stop past my apartment so that Haoa and I could change out of our blood-soaked clothes, and then parked under the Norfolk Island pine trees near the band shell and walked up to the Denny’s, on the second floor overlooking the beach. There were a dozen other night owls scattered around the restaurant, one tired, middle-aged Chinese waitress in a pink uniform pouring coffee. We sat at a big round table out on the terrace, and Haoa ordered the Grand Slam breakfast. I got a big piece of pie, and Harry and Lui just had drinks.
“It almost goes without saying that I appreciate what you guys did for me tonight,” I said after the waitress left. “But I still want to say it. Thanks. I know Terri and Danny Gonsalves will want to thank you too. You’re a bunch of heroes, every one of you, and I’m proud to be your brother and your friend.”
They all looked down, not sure of what to say. The patio lights, which gave the terrace an other-worldly glow so late at night, made a low humming sound, punctuated by the occasional car passing on Kalakaua. “I never really knew what you did,” Haoa said finally. “I mean, I saw the cop shows on TV and I knew your job wasn’t really like that. I figured you sat around and ate donuts a lot, pushed paper, that kind of thing.” He shook his head. “Man, I’m glad all I do is work with plants.”
He looked up at me. “Dad said you might be coming into the business with him. I think that’s cool. Maybe the two of us can work together sometime, building and landscaping.” He paused. “I’d like that.”
I took a big drink of ice water to ease the swelling I felt in my throat. “If that doesn’t work out, I might be able to find something for you at the station,” Lui said. “You can keep your cool, work under pressure. That’s a good thing to have in my business.”
I smiled, and looked at Harry. “What about you? You got any job offers up your sleeve?”
“The only job description I’ve got to offer is friend,” he said. “And you’ve been doing that for about twenty years just fine.”
The waitress brought our food. Across from us, a single guy walked slowly along the beach, stopping to look up at the stars and listen to the waves. I thought about going surfing in a couple of hours. I said, “I appreciate what you want to do, guys, but I think now, more than ever, I just want to be a cop. Maybe it sounds goofy, but there are things wrong with the world, and somebody has to try and fix them. I’m not going to let anybody take that chance away from me, at least not without a fight.”
“Think the force will take you back?” Harry asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m not just going to walk away.”
It’s funny, I hadn’t really decided that until just that moment. I’d been so caught up in the task of seducing Wayne Gallagher, of putting him and Derek away, that I hadn’t thought past that night. Once I did, the answer seemed clear. I was still a cop, just like I was still a surfer and I was still a gay man. It was up to me to make a human being out of all those identities.
Haoa and Lui made plans to return the equipment to the station the next day, and Harry and I said our goodbyes and walked out together into the warm, fragrant night. “You feel good?” he asked.
“I do,” I said. “First time in a long time.”
“Good.” We walked along in silence for a couple of minutes. Somewhere a dog barked, and a cloud passed quickly over the moon. “Your brothers were definitely squirming in the van,” he said after a while. “It was kind of funny, or it would have been if we all hadn’t been so damned scared. And then when Gallagher found your wire, it was like somebody shocked them with an electric poker. Haoa jumped up, knocked back his chair, and lit out for the bar. Lui and me, it took us a little longer to react.” He shook his head. “I was going down that hallway and I heard the shot, and man, it just chilled my bones. I was never so glad to see anybody as I was to see you alive in there.”
We stopped at Ohua so he could head mauka toward his apartment. “I’m gonna walk for a while,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
He gave me a shaka. “Take care.”
I gave it right back to him. “I will. Maybe we’ll get together sometime this weekend. You have any plans yet?”
“Tomorrow night, I’m having dinner with Arleen. We were going to talk about her taking some courses at UH, sharpen up her skills, maybe she could jump up to a programming job next time. Now maybe we’ll talk about job hunting. Who knows what’s going to happen with the Rod and Reel Club.”
I shook my head. Once again, Harry surprised me. “Not tomorrow, then,” I said with a smile. I crossed over Kalakaua and walked along the beach, listening to the gentle lap of the waves. Waikiki almost never sleeps, but this is about as close as it comes, just before dawn, before the surfers and the early shift workers and the second watch cops come on duty and the city starts to wake up. I hadn’t been out this late in a long time, and I liked it. It was like Waikiki belonged to me, my private slice of paradise. You don’t get many chances to slow down, pay attention to everything around you, and I wanted to take this one. I picked up a piece of crumbled newspaper and put it in the trash, listened to the night birds calling and the sound of a siren somewhere in the distance. It meant that somebody’s life was falling apart out there, a fire or a rush to the hospital, an accident or a theft or maybe even a murder. That was bad. But I knew that there were people, like that little seven-year-old who watched her mother and her brothers and sisters murdered, who could find their way back. And now I knew that I was one of them.
We told our stories over and over again during the next couple of days, as my brother orchestrated the reports on his TV station, and those that followed on other stations and in the newspapers, to make me into the hero of the hour.
Derek was arrested in the early morning hours on Thursday, and not surprisingly, Uncle Chin stepped forward to organize his defense. It had made things a little touchy between him and my father, but they both believed in making the necessary sacrifices for your family’s sake, so I thought they’d come out of it okay.
It was interesting to see how the media treated Tommy Pang and Evan Gonsalves. From “a prominent Honolulu businessman” Tommy became “a local underworld kingpin,” a description I’m sure he would have relished.