Thursday morning, Akoni and I had to put aside the investigation into Tommy Pang’s murder because we caught another homicide in Waikiki. This one was fairly straightforward, though; a young Filipina was found in her car in the parking garage at a hotel downtown. She was an assistant in the hotel’s marketing department, and her co-workers told us that she’d recently broken up with an abusive boyfriend.
Looking at her cell phone, we found she’d received a call from the boyfriend’s number shortly before the garage ticket indicated she’d entered. It took us only an hour to track the boyfriend down and haul him in to the station for an interrogation, where he confessed to shooting her.
Even so, it took us most of the day to collect evidence, take statements, and handle the paperwork. It was almost the end of our shift before we could get back to Tommy’s murder. The organized crime division had passed on some information about tong rivalries, but after a dozen phone calls, neither of us could find anyone who would say that Tommy Pang had been involved on either side. Lieutenant Yumuri was pleased we’d closed the girl’s murder so quickly, but he was losing patience with our lack of progress on Tommy’s murder, and neither of us wanted it to go unsolved. When our shift ended, I decided to do something I’d been holding off, to stop on my way home and see Uncle Chin. It was possible he could tell me something about Tommy Pang that the computers couldn’t.
“Good afternoon, Aunt Mei-Mei,” I said, when Uncle Chin’s wife answered the door of their home in St. Louis Heights, not far from my parents.
She peered at me for a moment, looking up with eyes that fought against cataracts. “Kimo!” she said. “Come in! Uncle Chin will be so happy to see you.” I followed her inside, down a long hallway toward the back of the house. “He doesn’t get many visitors these days.”
Uncle Chin was sitting in a bamboo lounge chair on their screened porch, looking down the hillside into the ravine. The porch was jammed with flowering plants-jasmine, hibiscus, and dozens of trailing orchids in hanging baskets. There were also a half-dozen bird cages, covered at the moment, that I knew contained exotic parrots. Next to the chair was a bamboo table with glass top. Uncle Chin’s wire-rimmed glasses sat on top of a hard-bound copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
“Uncle Chin, look who has come to see you,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. Uncle Chin woke out of his light sleep and seemed instantly alert. He must have been in his late seventies, but his eyes were still keen, and his smile was broad.
“I will bring tea,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “You sit.”
I sat. We talked first about my parents, my father’s heart troubles, my mother’s garden club successes. I heard about his plants and his parrots, and we discussed my brothers, especially Haoa and Tatiana’s new baby. Keikis always seemed to make Uncle Chin a little sad; I guess he remembered his own son, whose difficult birth had somehow prevented Aunt Mei-Mei from being able to have any more children.
His name was Robert, I knew, and he was a few years older than my brother Lui, so always a remote presence to me. He died when he was twenty-one, a drug overdose of some kind, and according to my father Uncle Chin had never been the same since.
But Uncle Chin had enjoyed the luau, and was glad to see us all at a happy occasion. “And what about you? No wife yet?”
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
He wagged a finger at me. “You not young forever,” he said. “Must make choices for life. Soon!”
“Yes, Uncle. I know.” Aunt Mei-Mei brought cups of sweet-smelling Chinese tea and then disappeared again.
Finally Uncle Chin said, “Your work. It goes well?”
“Interesting cases,” I said. “Always interesting.” I paused. “A man killed behind the bar he owned in Waikiki. Maybe you know him. A man named Tommy Pang.”
For a moment, the light seemed to go out of Uncle Chin’s eyes. Then he seemed to have returned, and considered, massaging the paralyzed nerve in his face with the fingers of his left hand. “I know him, but not well,” he said, finally. “Not important man.”
“No, it doesn’t seem so. Yet someone found him important enough to kill.”
“Ah, importance relative, no,” he said. He thought for a while. “I no can help you, Kimo. I not know who could have found this man important in way you suggest.” For the first time since I had known him, Uncle Chin looked old. He was older than my father, though I remembered him best when I was a child and he was tall and imposing and yet somehow not frightening at all. Now he had become an old man, retired among his flowers and his birds.
We finished our tea and Aunt Mei-Mei came back in. “You will go to see your parents now,” she said. “You are so close to them.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day.” I looked at my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. Not enough daylight left by the time I got back to Waikiki for surfing, or even swimming. A quick dinner, and then maybe a book. A quiet evening.
“Oh, no, your mother will be so disappointed. She has already put out a place for you at the dinner table.”
Of course, I thought. While Uncle Chin and I talked on the porch, Aunt Mei-Mei had been on the phone to my mother, announcing my presence in St. Louis Heights. There was no way out now.
The streets in St. Louis Heights are steep and narrow, and all the houses are very close to each other. We were lucky that my father had decided early he wanted to live in the neighborhood, and had built a simple fifties-style ranch on a lot that backed onto Waahila Ridge State Recreation Area. As a consequence, our backyard is several thousand steeply pitched acres of pine and ravine, and on an island where real estate prices are high, such a huge empty space is now nearly priceless. Though both my brothers have beautiful homes, I know they covet my parents’ property.
My parents had the main level of the house, street level. The master bedroom suite, the kitchen, living room, and dining room were all there. My brothers and I shared the basement, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a big playroom that spilled out to a patio my father had built into the hillside. It was a wonderful place to grow up-when my brothers picked on me, as big brothers always do, I could sneak out into the underbrush, climb the hill, and set my sights on the ocean. The other wonderful thing about our house’s situation was that if you climbed to the roof, as I did sometimes, you could see all the way from Diamond Head to downtown Honolulu, and the vast ocean between them. Sometimes my father would disappear for a few hours at a time, usually after a fight with my mother or after the three of us boys were making too much trouble. I knew he went up to the roof, but I never told.
I wondered if my parents would ask, like Aunt Mei-Mei, when I was going to settle down, add to their brood of grandchildren. They were baffled by my frenzied dating, the endless parade of one-night stands and tourist wahines that their friends saw me with all around Waikiki. My new situation would probably confuse them even more. That is, if I ever told them. I sat in Uncle Chin’s driveway for a while, thinking, before I turned the key in the ignition.