I handed him a plastic bag holding the shell casings I found at the beach. “Can you send these downstairs to the SIS lab and see if they can match the markings to the gun that shot Mike Pratt and Lucie Zamora?”
He nodded. “And I’ll get hold of Al and make sure he knows I’m behind him.” He made a note on his Palm Pilot. “I want you to keep a low profile for the next couple of days.” He motioned to the folder on his desk. “Let me get this stuff squared away, and let’s try not to give this shooter the chance to take any more pot shots, for your sake and for the sake of the general population on the North Shore.” He looked up at me. “Anything you think you can do?”
“Go surfing?”
“Hold off a day or so,” he said. “Go back to your own apartment. Check with me tomorrow morning.”
It was strange to pull up in my own parking lot, walk up the outside steps to my own little studio apartment. My whole place would have fit into the living room of the house Ari was lending to me, but it was home, and I was glad to see it. The place had a musty, closed-in smell, and I opened the windows and turned on the fan to air it out.
I hadn’t been home for more than a few minutes when my cell phone rang. It was Harry, with a plan for the evening. He would pick me up around six, we’d get some take out Chinese and a six pack of beer, and head to Terri’s house in Wailupe. I’d get to see her son, Danny, who was still traumatized from his father’s death, and then the three of us could hang out and talk.
I made one change in the plan. I had to swing past my parents’ house late in the afternoon, to see them, so I said I’d get the beer, and leave Harry in charge of take out, meeting him out at Terri’s house.
Due to the way the buildings stack up between me and the beach, I’ve got a decent view of the ocean from the big picture window in my living room, and after I hung up on Harry I walked over and looked out toward the Pacific.
A lot had happened to me during the past couple of months, and I hadn’t had much time to process it. Watching the surf dash itself against the shore gave me a minute to stop and think. The pace of my life seemed to have accelerated lately; I had moved much farther in the last few weeks, in many ways, than I had in several of the years before. It was enough to make a guy dizzy.
I imagined running into a friend who’d been off island for a couple of months. “Hey, what’s new, Kimo,” he’d say.
“Well, I caught a really tough case and nearly got killed solving it,” I’d say. “Came out of the closet, nearly lost my job, saw my life splashed all over the media, fought with my brothers and my parents, saw a friend die and killed a man myself, went undercover and had to be nice to a guy who basically raped me ten years ago. I’ve been pretty busy.”
It was a wonder I hadn’t started knocking back shots, or popping pills or smoking Maui Wowie. I stared at the water for a while, trying to think of what else I had to do. I had my laptop with me, so I plugged it in, got online, and looked for information on The Next Wave. There had been a few police reports to the property, including the time Rich Sarkissian punched out that customer, but nothing in the police system about drug connections there.
I read about the store’s involvement in the community, sponsoring a softball team, collecting funds for an injured surfer, and donating merchandise for charity auctions and raffles. Dario had been a good citizen. I read about Ari and his meetings before the zoning boards. Finally, around noon, I ran out of research. It reminded me of a page Harry Ho had referred to me to once. It read “You have reached the end of the Internet. Go out and have a life.”
So I went surfing. I didn’t want to go to Kuhio Beach Park because of its proximity to the Waikiki station, so I drove out to Black Point. I surfed for a couple of hours, trying to clear my head enough so that everything about the case would come together-but I didn’t have much luck. Eventually I gave up, went home, showered, changed, and drove up to my parents’ house.
My mother did not kiss or hug me when she opened the door, before I had a chance to fish out a key or even ring the bell. “Tell your father he is a silly old man with a heart condition,” she demanded.
“No.” I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Nice to see you, mother.”
“Maybe he’ll listen to you, since he won’t listen to me.”
“Quiet, old woman,” my father said. He enveloped me in a big bear hug. “You’ve been gone too long, Keechee.”
My father has nicknames for all three of us boys. Lui is Lulu, Haoa is Howgow, and I’m Keechee. Unless he’s angry, in which case I’m James Kimo Kanapa’aka, my full legal name. Each of us has an English first name and a Hawaiian middle name, because until 1962 it wasn’t legal to give a child a Hawaiian first name. Paperwork is complicated in my family, as you can imagine.
“Tell your son what you did today, Al,” my mother said. We were standing in the foyer of our house, a modified ranch with a single story set on a sloping piece of land.
“Can we go into the living room?” I asked. “Or at least the kitchen?”
“Your mother’s a little upset,” my father said.
“Duh. I got that part. Why?”
“I told you I didn’t want to tell Kimo about it, Lokelani. But you insisted.” My mother’s name means Heavenly Rose, and at the moment she was definitely showing her thorns.
“Tell me about what? Will you two stop arguing long enough to let me in?”
“A man at the doctor’s office said a bad thing about you,” my father said. “So I hit him.”
I put my head in my hands. “Ai yi yi,” I said. “Did he call the police?”
“He wasn’t really hurt,” my mother said. “The nurse took him into the examining room, cleaned him up and put a bandage on him. She was very nice. She put us into another room right away.”
“Probably to keep Dad from beating up the rest of the patients.” I turned to him. “Don’t I remember you saying, ‘Violence is the never the answer’ when one of us wanted to beat somebody up?”
“I was wrong. Violence is the answer sometimes.”
“Did they take your blood pressure at the doctor’s office?”
“Two hundred over one-twenty!” my mother trumpeted. “We have to go back again tomorrow for another reading, but your father had to promise the nurse he wouldn’t hit anyone else.”
I sat down on the sofa. “This is all my fault. I should move to the mainland. I heard the LAPD is hiring.”
“No!” my parents both chorused at the same time.
“No one is chasing you away from your home,” my father said. “Not while I’m your father.”
“Dad, give it a rest,” I said. “You’re sixty-three years old, you have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. If I hear about you punching anybody else, whether you’re sticking up for me or Lui or Haoa or some neighbor down the street, I’m going to call in favors and get you locked up. You understand me?”
“See?” my mother said. “Your son talks sense. You should listen to him.”
The whole encounter was surreal. Usually my mother rules our household with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. My father might raise his voice occasionally, but all it takes is a look from my mother and he turns into a penitent schoolboy. Now, though, he was looking sullen and openly defiant. “Don’t make me call my brothers,” I said. “You don’t want all three of us ganging up on you.”
“I’m your father. I have to protect you.”
“No you don’t. I’m younger than you are and stronger than you are. I have self-defense training and weapons training, and I know a little kung fu. If you really want to protect me, you’ll take care of yourself and protect me from ever having to bail you out of jail or visit you in the emergency room.”
“How about some lemonade?” my mother asked, satisfied now that my father had been suitably chastened.
“One glass,” I said. “I can’t stay long, but I couldn’t come to town without seeing you.”
When my mother went into the kitchen, I leaned over and kissed my father’s grizzled cheek. “Thank you for standing up for me.”