We went back to the station and worked for a while, and around six we headed for the Ward Warehouse, a complex of shops between downtown and Waikīkī. It’s a mini-mall, two long lines of stores facing each other on two levels with parking in the middle. To me, it’s one of the least attractive shopping centers around—it looked like a child’s play set, girders bolted together, corrugated metal sheets painted clashing colors. The Lobster Garden was a touristy Chinese restaurant on the upper level.
The very sexy Chinese girl behind the podium wore an incongruous happy face nametag attached to the shoulder of her tight red cheongsam that read “Hi, I’m Treasure.” We showed her our ID and asked if we could talk to her.
“Here?”
“You could get us a table, and then come over when you get a break,” Akoni said.
“All right. Follow me.”
The centerpiece of the restaurant was a huge fish tank filled with live lobsters, their claws tightly banded together. Grandma and Grandpa from Des Moines could walk up to the tank with their waiter and decide which of the spiny creatures crawling around on the bottom of the tank would become that night’s dinner. It was a festive place, decorated with framed Chinese calligraphy and red paper lanterns, and it was lively, full of tourist families resting after a day’s trek to Pearl Harbor, the Kodak Hula Show, or Hilo Hattie’s aloha shirt factory.
Treasure seated us at a four-top in the back corner, where we could talk relatively undisturbed. “At six-thirty the second hostess comes on duty,” she said. “When she gets here I can take a few minutes break, but not much, because we get a big rush by seven.”
We ordered cashew chicken and shrimp in lobster sauce. “So you think we made any progress today?” I asked, after the waiter left.
Akoni shrugged. “Hard to say. We learned a lot about Tommy’s businesses, but not much about why anybody would want to kill him.”
“There’s that stuff going on at the pack and ship. Those boxes Wayne and Derek bring over. There could be something there.”
The waiter was back with big steaming bowls of won ton soup, and we dug in. We had just finished when I saw Treasure Chen approaching us.
Treasure came up to sit with us, and I couldn’t help noticing Akoni’s appreciative glance at her narrow waist and tight butt. It was interesting, though, that she made no impression on me beyond an aesthetic one. “I guess this is about Tommy,” she said.
“You knew him?”
She nodded. “I was his mistress for the last six months or so.” She paused. “That is, until he dumped me for that Mexican bitch.”
“Excuse me?”
“The night he was killed, I worked until ten, and he picked me up here. We went out to a club for a couple of hours, and that’s when he told me, he was seeing another woman. Had been seeing her, for a month or more by then. We had some words, and then I left him. Took a cab home. I don’t know where he went from there—probably to see her.”
“Do you know her name?” Akoni asked. “Anything about her?”
“He said her name was Luz Maria,” she said, running her right hand through her sleek black hair, cut bluntly so that it just brushed her shoulders. “She’s a Mexican woman he met through some business deal. I don’t know anything more about her.”
Akoni and I looked at each other.
She looked directly at me. “I didn’t want to know anything about his business. I know he owned Sally’s, that’s the place I was working when he met me, and he owned a couple of other things, but he didn’t talk about business with me and I didn’t ask him.”
“You worked at Sally’s?” I asked.
“She’s my auntie, Norma. I didn’t do anything but model. I’d worked there for a couple of months when I met Tommy, and he helped me get this job.”
“Do you know what he did after he left you?” Akoni asked.
“He got a call while we were at the club, on his cell phone. I don’t know who it was, but it was somebody he was going to meet back at his office.”
I made a note of that. We had to get hold of the records on Tommy’s cell phone. “Do you have any idea who it might have been?” I asked. “From the tone of his voice, from anything he said? Was it a friend, a business colleague?”
“I was pretty angry,” she said. “I mean, we were in the middle of this big dramatic scene, he’s telling me he’s fallen in love with someone else, and his cell phone rings. I got up and went to the ladies’ room.”
I looked at Akoni. “Anything else you want to ask?”
He shook his head. Treasure looked at her watch. “I have to get back,” she said, and stood up.
I handed her my card and said, “If you think of anything else, will you call?”
She took the card and nodded. “I did love him, you know. I mean, he was very good to me, up until that night, and lots of people thought he was really hard, but he had a good side. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”
She turned and walked away fast, dodging a party of six with two babies, and two busboys carrying infant seats behind them. The waiter was right on Treasure’s heels with our dinners. We started to eat. “That Luz Maria’s got to be the same one from the black tar bust,” I said.
“Got to be. That would mean Tommy was behind the drug deal. You think she was mad that things didn’t go as planned, maybe blamed Tommy?”
It was my turn to shrug. “It’s a possibility. Maybe this Dong Shi-Dao will know something useful.”
Akoni was about to answer me when the restaurant erupted into song. It was someone’s birthday at the next table, and we had to wait while the waiters sang a Chinese-accented Happy Birthday to him.
“We’ll put him at the top of our list tomorrow,” Akoni said. He bent over his teacup, and I couldn’t help noticing the way his black hair stood up in stiff bristles at the top of his head, falling into spiky bangs on his forehead. Funny, I thought, you can work with somebody for years and never really look at him.
I thought about the way Norma had been able to look at me and see who I was, see something others hadn’t seen, or at least that I’d tried to hide for years. I wondered what Akoni was hiding, and if it would change my opinion of him.
I picked up my fortune cookie and cracked it open. None of the numbers looked particularly lucky to me, but then I wasn’t feeling very lucky. I flipped it over to read the fortune. “Your future will be very interesting,” it said.
I read it out loud to Akoni. “I’ll bet.” His read, “You are talented in many fields.” He said, “Be nice if investigation was one of them,” and threw it in the ashtray.
* * *
The next morning I called Harry at six. “Hey, brah, you want surf?”
“Shit, Kimo what time is it?”
“Come on. I’ll meet you at the park in fifteen minutes.”
“Asshole,” he said, and hung up. But he was there, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The sky was gray and there were still street lights on, and the water was cold when you first stepped into it. But I felt connected, and peaceful. Happy, almost.
We didn’t speak much, just paddled out beyond the waves and then surfed back in, and passed at least an hour that way. By then the sun was up and I was feeling great. There was a little tightness in my thighs and my lower back, but it was a good feeling, reminding me I had muscles. I watched Harry off and on, saw that he was starting to gain his confidence again. It reminded me of the endless hours we’d spent as kids at that very beach, surfing waves that had seemed so much bigger then. Energy seemed to flow back and forth between us, rising up out of the salty water and the trade winds.
We walked back through the streets of Waikīkī together when we were finished. We passed a man with a bulldog on a leash. The dog was wearing a flowered hat, and two Japanese women stopped to take its picture.
An elderly woman wearing headphones and towing a shopping cart stopped in front of us, in the middle of the sidewalk, and began to do a little dance. “Waikīkī,” Harry said. “You gotta love it.”
I picked up coffee for myself and Akoni on the way into the station, and we arrived at the same time. “Just to let you know, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at nine,” Akoni said. “You’ll have to keep things together here for an hour or so.”
“How about we try for an appointment with Dong Shi-Dao,” I said, picking up the phone. Just to show that luck comes when you don’t particularly need it, I got through to him right away and scheduled a meeting for eleven a.m.
I called Peggy and left a message for her, letting her know we were going to need a subpoena for Tommy Pang’s cell phone records. Akoni left a little later, and I got caught up in a bunch of Internet articles on tongs, not noticing the clock until it was almost too late. I had just enough time to make it to Dong Shi-Dao’s office downtown. I sprinted home for my truck, racing past eager families on their way to or from the beach. It was a nice day, and sprinkled among the commuters on the drive downtown were bunches of tourists, driving rented convertibles with the top down or strolling along Fort Street gawking at the high-rise office buildings. I could almost hear them commenting how our business district looks just like home, only with palm trees.
My favorite thing is when mainland tourists ask dumb questions, like if I ever get over to the States, or if we accept all the regular U.S. coins, or wonder if they have to dial any special telephone codes to call back home.
I parked in a garage and cut across King Street to Smith, where the office was, in a small one-story building sandwiched between high-rises. There was a nice trade wind coming off the ocean, and the sky was a deep blue dotted with small white clouds. I had a moment of real longing, wanting to chuck this case and go back to the beach. Then I ran into Akoni.
Just as we met, I saw a woman come out of Dong Shi-Dao’s office. She looked both ways, then set off in the direction opposite us.
“She looks familiar, doesn’t she?” I asked. Akoni and I walked a little faster, trying to catch up to her.
“We’ve seen her before,” he agreed.
She stopped at the corner of Smith and Hotel to let a bus pass, and turned her profile toward us. “I know,” I said, stopping short. “It’s Luz Maria.”