I wanted to drive right to Derek and Wayne’s apartment and confront them. I paced around, fuming and raging vendettas of biblical proportions against them. But the truth was I had no real evidence that they’d had anything to do with Evan’s death, which Doc Takayama had ruled a suicide. Unless I could do something, that ruling would stand. Derek and Wayne must have thought Evan killed Tommy, then taken their own biblical-style revenge.
With Gunter’s help, I thought I could tie Derek and Wayne to the Bishop Museum thefts that Peggy was investigating, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to nail them. I wanted to prove that they had killed Evan.
There wasn’t going to be any physical evidence at the house. It had been a week, and no one had dusted the study or the rest of the house for fingerprints or searched for other evidence. There was no evidence linking Derek and Wayne to Evan other than the fact that they’d identified his picture.
What could I do to prove they were guilty? I knew in my heart that they were the two men Danny had heard yelling at his father. If I got pictures of them and their cars and canvassed the neighbors, maybe someone would remember seeing either of them around the Gonsalves house.
But that would only be circumstantial. What I really wanted was a confession. I wanted Derek or Wayne to admit they’d shot Evan. That didn’t seem likely, though.
Or was it? Maybe I was focusing too much on Derek and Wayne as a couple. Divide and conquer. I remembered the bartender at the Boardwalk telling me Wayne had a taste for Asian boys, that he trolled there by himself on occasion. Suppose I offered myself up as bait? I already knew he was attracted to me. Of course, I was attracted to him, too, which was a problem. Maybe I could get him in a situation where he had his pants off and his guard down.
The phone rang. It startled me, bringing me back down to earth. “Hey, brah, just checking in,” Harry said. “Howzit?”
“I’m glad you called,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to talk to you about.”
We met at a pizza place on Kuhio Avenue just after dark. It was just a hole in the wall, a half dozen linoleum-topped tables and a couple of tattered posters of the Italian Riviera on the walls, but the crust was thick and chewy and they topped it with about a pound of shredded cheese. They did a major take-out business, sometimes customers lined up out the door waiting patiently for their pies.
By then I had refined my plan. “I want to be wired up when I get together with Wayne, but I can’t go to Yumuri for the equipment,” I said, when Harry and I were sitting at a two-top in the front window. “You’re the electronics wizard. Can you rig something up for me?”
“I can put the stuff together, but you need a lot of equipment,” Harry said. The waitress came over and we ordered a large pizza with mushrooms and sausage and a couple of Cokes. “A lot of it’s specialized stuff. You can’t just walk into a store and buy it. Some things, I might have to mail order from the mainland. I mean, I could have it Fed Exed, but I still might not get it until the beginning of next week.”
“I don’t want to wait that long. I mean, I wish I could go over there right now.”
I forced myself to calm down and think things through. Okay, we needed electronic equipment. Where else could we get it? We could rent it. There had to be a place on the island that rented that kind of equipment, for movies or TV shows, for example. “Would a TV station have the kind of stuff you need?” I asked.
“Sure. I might have to do some jury-rigging, but they’d have most of the things-you’re going to ask your brother, aren’t you?”
“He owes me a favor, the asshole. He could have called our parents when he knew there was a story on me, but he wimped out.”
“This won’t be easy, Kimo. You might get in a lot of trouble.”
“I’ve worn a wire before. I’ve set up stakeouts. I know, things could get hairy. But I’m prepared to take that risk. I have to. I set all this in motion and I have to bring it to a close.”
The waitress brought the pizza, and we ate. I told Harry about the other things I had to do to prove what Derek and Wayne had done. “Poor Terri,” Harry said. “She was always a sweetheart. I remember when I had a monster crush on Elise Chung and she gave me lots of advice. She even went with me when I got my hair cut and told the barber just what to do.” He sighed. “That was the best haircut I ever had.”
“You’re a sap,” I said. “You got a quarter? I need to make a phone call and I don’t want to use my cell in case they have caller ID.”
“Sure.” He handed me the quarter and I walked to the back of the pizza parlor, where the pay phone was mounted on the wall. I dialed Derek and Wayne’s number, and Wayne answered.
“Wayne, it’s Kimo Kanapa‘aka,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“Kimo.” Even his voice was sexy. For a moment I wasn’t sure I could go forward with my plan, but I knew I had to. “Heard about your troubles.”
“Yeah, most of the island has by now. It’ll get to my auntie on Kaua‘i pretty soon.”
“Maybe we can get together,” Wayne said. “I could give you some advice.”
“Who knows? I might see you at the Boardwalk sometime. You do go there, don’t you? By yourself?”
“I can.” He lowered his voice. “Friday night?”
“I think I can be there then.” I cleared my throat. “Can I talk to Derek?”
“Sure, hold on.”
“Hey, Wayne,” I said. “What kind of underwear do you wear?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
Derek picked up the phone a minute later. “What’s up? I thought you were suspended.”
“I am. This is more a personal thing. It’s about a mutual acquaintance we have, somebody who knows you through your family. I’d rather talk to you about it in person, if that’s okay.”
“Sure. You want to come by here, or meet at the club, or what?”
“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