Mahu (25 page)

Danny Gonsalves was sitting in the middle of the living room floor crying. There was no sign of Evan anywhere. “I’ve got a screwdriver in the car,” Akoni said, and walked toward the driveway. While he was gone I tried to communicate to Danny, to get him to come to the door, but I couldn’t reach him. Akoni returned a moment later with the screwdriver, which he used to jimmy the lock on the sliding door.

I stepped in first. “Evan!” I called. There was no answer.

Danny didn’t move. He was dead scared, rocking back and forth and crying. I squatted down next to him. “What’s the matter, Danny?” I asked. “You remember me, don’t you? Kimo? I’m a friend of your mom and dad.”

He didn’t talk, but he grabbed onto my shirt with his fists and held on fiercely. “Something’s wrong here,” Akoni said. “I’m gonna take a look.”

Greenberg and Saunders stood outside, waiting, in case Evan came back, and I stayed in the living room with Danny while Akoni explored the house. He was gone a few minutes when he came back, a grim look on his face. “He’s in the study,” he said. “The room just behind here. He’s dead.”

I looked at him, not really believing. “Evan?”

Akoni nodded. “We got a pile of shit here.”

END OF THINGS

I disengaged Danny from my shirt and left him sitting on the sofa, with Akoni watching him. He had stopped crying but he still wasn’t talking. We had Alvy Greenberg radio in for a crime scene team, and I walked into the study to see Evan Gonsalves. He was sitting behind a modern computer desk, and his
five
-shot Smith and Wesson Undercover .38 in his right hand. The hand lay on the desk and his body was slumped forward. There was a hole in the side of his head where the bullet had gone in, and a lot of blood around him, on the desk, the chair, his body and the floor.

I didn’t touch him, but I did lean down and see that the powder burns matched what I saw, death at close range. It seemed clearly a suicide, even though there was no note anywhere.

I looked around the room, trying to get some sort of psychic sense of what had happened there. What was Evan doing in his study? Had Danny been napping, maybe, and then walked in to discover his father’s body? I’d seen a lot of bodies during my years on the force, but the first couple had wrenched my stomach and torn at the linings of my heart. I wasn’t surprised Danny was nearly catatonic.

I looked around. The rest of the room was neatly organized—books on the bookshelves along one wall, the stereo and the TV off, Danny’s Nintendo sitting on a shelf with the cords neatly wrapped. I knew Evan had been in trouble, and I hadn’t reached out to him—I had been too careful, waited too long, because I thought I was protecting him and his family. Fat lot of good that had done.

There was something in the room, some kind of negative energy, and finally I had to walk back out to the living room. Akoni was sitting on the floor next to Danny, talking to him gently, but Danny was not responding. I watched Akoni reach out to stroke the boy’s shoulder, and Danny flinched and moved away. I rarely saw Akoni being gentle, and it was always a surprising sight. For such a big man, he
wa
s light on his feet, a great dancer, and he ha
d
something sweet and kind inside him that he rarely let out, usually only around kids and animals.

It was the same with Danny. Akoni responded to whatever was hurt inside him, and wanted to make it better. I hoped he and Mealoha would have children soon, though Akoni often pooh-poohed the idea. I knew he would make a good father.

I had thought Evan was a good father, too, and I didn’t believe he’d kill himself when Danny was around. He’d been a cop long enough to see what death looked like, and how it hurt those who saw it. What if this wasn’t suicide at all, but just a carefully constructed replica?

Akoni looked up and saw me, and got up from the floor. “You think he knew we were coming for him?”

“Must have,” I said. “Though I didn’t say anything to him. Maybe he knew somebody in the DA’s office, who tipped him off.”

“Damn shame,” Akoni said.

We searched the house until we found a list in the kitchen, places Terri was going to be, and their phone numbers, in case anything happened to Danny and Evan needed to reach her. Her flight from Maui was due in at three, so she was probably on her way home.

The crime scene techs arrived and got to work. We notified District 4 and claimed jurisdiction because of our investigation into Evan, and a couple of the local cops came out to give us a hand. Even though we thought it was a suicide, it was still a crime scene, and Akoni and I took careful notes regarding the condition of the study and the house itself.

Terri arrived as we were finishing up, and Alvy Greenberg held her outside and called for me. “What is it, Kimo?” she asked. “What happened? Is Danny okay? Where’s Evan?”

“Danny’s okay,” I said. “It’s Evan.” I paused. “It looks like he killed himself.”

She crumpled. I put my arms around her and she cried. Then Akoni brought Danny to the front door, and when he saw his mother he ran for her. She cried even more, kneeling on the ground holding her son. It was a beautiful day in Wailupe, high seventies, mauka trades, a light scent of plumeria on the breeze, but there was something hard in my throat, and all I could think of was Terri on our graduation day from Punahou, how pretty she’d looked holding down her cap as the wind lifted the black gown and her brown hair flew back from her face.

It was a scene that happened all too often in the islands, and I was sure, even more often on the mainland. The lives of ordinary people were touched by tragedy, and they would never be the same again. I felt worse than I ever had before. I didn’t kill Evan, and I didn’t make him turn bad, but I had put the events in motion that had led us to this point, from the day I first heard about black tar and made arrangements for the bust.

I spent a while with Terri, holding her, letting her cry. While my brain ran forward at a hundred miles an hour, I said I was sorry, and promised her it would be all right, though I knew I was lying. Police and technicians ebbed and flowed around us, Akoni managing them, coordinating with the local cops.

Terri called her parents and her sister Betsy, and there was more crying. Danny sat nearly catatonic next to his mother, and screamed if anyone tried to move him away. Eventually Akoni and I left and drove back to Waikīkī
.
The black and whites, ours and the local ones, pulled away and were replaced by the cars of Terri Clark Gonsalves’s friends and family. The memory of what he’d seen would stay with Danny Gonsalves for years, no matter how much therapy he had, and those images would probably recur in his dreams and nightmares forever.

We’d done what we were supposed to do. We had closed the case. As we walked into the station, Saunders was standing at the desk talking to the sergeant. “So just be careful,” he said loudly, as we walked past. “If you’re in the shower with him, don’t drop the soap.”

They both laughed, and Saunders gave me a particularly piercing look. I stared him back down, and he looked away.

Akoni and I filled out paperwork for the rest of the afternoon, closing out the case on Tommy Pang. I felt bad about what had happened, but at least the case was closed, and I could get on with my life. I called and left a message for Tim, who was in a meeting. Akoni left and I hung around for a couple of minutes, hoping Tim would call back. While I was waiting Alvy Greenberg came up to my desk.

“Is it true?” he asked.

“I think so. We have witnesses who put Evan together with Tommy Pang.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean is it true you’re a fag?”

I sat up, and looked at him. He looked kind of half angry and half ready to cry. “That’s the rumor going around the station, you know. You’re a cocksucker. I just want to know, is it true?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“Damn right it does. I looked up to you, Kimo. I thought you were the kind of cop, the kind of detective, I wanted to be. Now I see who you really are.”

“I haven’t changed,” I said. “I’m still a good cop. I’m just not lying to myself anymore. Or anybody else.”

“So it’s true.” He paused, then looked me in the eye. “You make me sick.”

He turned and walked away.

I sat back at my desk, reeling. I couldn’t believe he’d been so angry at me. I’d never come on to him, never acted like anything more than a friend or a mentor. I thought it was bad when I told Akoni, but his reaction had been easy compared to Alvy’s. I wondered if everyone at the Waikīkī station knew, and if that was the way they all felt.

While I wondered about that, my phone buzzed. “Kanapa‘aka,” Lieutenant Yumuri’s voice sounded out of the speaker. “To my office, now.”

Jesus, what next, I thought. I supposed the rumors had traveled up the line of command and reached his ears. I got up immediately and walked down the hall to the lieutenant’s office. “Have a seat.”

“I’ll get right to the point,” he said, as I sat down. “Your work on this case was a mess. If you had handled this case better, Evan Gonsalves might still be alive. I’m suspending you, pending an internal investigation.”

“There was nothing wrong with our investigation,” I said. “We did everything you asked for. It’s all spelled out in the files.” I paused and suddenly I understood. “Word got out, didn’t it?” I asked. “That’s what Saunders was talking about, and Alvy Greenberg. You don’t want a gay cop on your force, do you?”

“I don’t,” he said. “Clean out your desk and your locker. You’ll be hearing from the department attorney.”

I left his office in a daze. It had been a hell of a day. From my encounter with Wayne, through discovering Evan’s body and ruining Terri’s life, to the failure of my own career. I stumbled through a quick cleanup of my desk and locker, avoiding the stares of the other cops, and walked out onto Kalākaua Avenue, without an idea of what I was supposed to do next.

CERTAIN CONDITIONS

I don’t know how I made it home. I dumped my things in my apartment and curled up on the bed. I knew I ought to get out, go surfing, clear my head, but I couldn’t. I didn’t sleep much that night, just lay there thinking and worrying. I always th
ought
, whenever I ha
d
trouble nodding off, that sleep
was
this kind of magical land far away. Sometimes you just forg
o
t how to get there.

I tried to go over everything I had done in the case, remembering each detail, every conversation, every note, every official police document. The guy upstairs was playing Pearl Jam at high volume, blasting the same CD over and over again, but I didn’t bother to yell or call him or go upstairs. It just didn’t seem to matter.

As the sun was rising I did doze off for a little while, then woke finally at seven-thirty and decided to get up and take a shower. I thought about going to the beach, but I just couldn’t seem to get myself together. I scrubbed the kitchen, throwing away anything in the refrigerator that looked suspicious, reorganized the books on my bookshelves, and I’d started filing away articles I’d clipped from the paper when the phone rang.

It was nine-thirty. I jumped for the phone, hoping it was Tim, but instead it was Peggy Kaneahe. “We need you down at the main station,” she said. “Ten
-
thirty.”

“Why?”

“I can’t talk about it with you now. We’ll talk then.”

“But what’s going on?” I asked. The phone went dead in my hand.

I called Akoni at the station and told him what had happened. “I know,” he said. “The lieutenant called me in this morning.”

I waited, and finally Akoni said, “I told you this was going to happen, Kimo. I tried to stand by you as long as I could, but I just can’t anymore.”

“I understand,” I said, and I did. I hoped that if something happened to a friend of mine, I would have the courage to stand by him, all the way, but I wasn’t sure I would, and I wasn’t sure courage was really at the heart of it. After all, we
we
re all born alone in this world, and we die
d
alone, and there
wa
s a limit to what you c
ould
do for anyone else. “You’ve been a good partner,” I said. “I’ll try not to let any of this wash off on you.”

“I’ll take my lumps. You do what you need to do. Don’t worry about me.”

I wanted to say something more, but I didn’t know what to say. “Let me know how it goes,” he said finally.

“I will.”

I finished getting dressed, pulling on a white oxford cloth shirt and a pair of clean, pressed khakis. I thought about wearing my uniform but figured that was a bit much—and I guess maybe I was afraid they would make me take it off, hand it over to them. I didn’t think I could take that.

At a few minutes after ten, I got into my truck for the ride to the main station on South Beretania. The weather seemed restless and quickly changeable, a brisk wind sweeping down from the mountains and bringing heavy gray clouds with it. I signed in with the desk sergeant and he told me to go to a meeting room on the third floor. I took the elevator up, and had to walk through a warren of cubicles. Maybe I was being self-conscious, but I couldn’t help feeling people were watching me, that the tide of conversation quieted in a wave before me, and then rose again as I passed. The cops around me worked in special operations, Vice, Sexual Abuse, School Intervention and the like, and there was a general feeling of despair there, of men and women who worked with the dregs of the population and never saw any hope for the future.

I walked out to the exterior hallway that overlook
ed
the courtyard at the center of the building. The sky was the color of burnished aluminum, a solid layer of cloud, and I could hear distant thunder. The static electricity in the air raised the hairs on the back of my arms.

The meeting room was stuck in a corner of the building, and a big circular concrete column stood like a sentinel along one side. There was a cheap folding table and a handful of old wooden chairs, nothing on the walls and no window to look out.

Peggy Kaneahe was there, with a leather briefcase by her side and a folder open on the tabletop in front of her. Lieutenant Yumuri sat on one side of her, and on the other side was Hiram Lin, a representative of the police union, a dried-up prune of a man counting the days until his full pension kicked in. He hadn’t been on the streets since statehood, I thought, and he hadn’t even ridden an active desk for a decade, preferring to hide out in the union office. “Come in,” Peggy said. “Sit down.”