Zero Break (10 page)

“You think Judy will have anything useful to give us?” Ray asked.

I shrugged. “This case just isn’t adding up yet, so who knows? Maybe somebody hired this person Judy knows. Or maybe it’s just a waste of time.” I took a bite of the hot dog. “At least we get a good lunch out of it.”

“My gut is telling me that somebody wanted her dead,” Ray said.

“Yeah, but yesterday your gut was telling you it was drug-related, because of the number of times she got stabbed. I think maybe your gut is suffering from indigestion.”

“As long as you keep thinking a couple of hot dogs are a good lunch, that’s not unlikely.”

We finished eating, threw our trash in a basket with the word “Mahalo” on the flap, and started looking for Judy. We found her a few minutes later at the Maui Divers store, looking at a ring with a giant Tahitian black pearl in the center and tiny diamonds wrapped around it.

“That’s a little out of my price range, honey,” I said, walking up to her.

“Everything about me is out of your price range.” She nodded her head toward a banyan tree outside, and we followed her out there.

“This name, you didn’t get it from me,” she said.

“Of course not.” I opened my wallet and pulled out another fifty, which I held folded in my fingers.

“I only know the guy as Freddie,” she said. “Skinny ice head, they say he used to play football at UH til he wrecked his knee. His dealer told me Freddie’s suddenly flush with cash, and his knuckles are banged up, like he’s been breaking into places.” She took the bill from me. “He’s a crazy motherfucker. Be careful with him.”

“Judy. You care. I could almost kiss you.”

“That’d be at least another fifty.” She turned on her heel and walked away, but I caught a smile before she left.

If there’s a bigger UH football fan in Hawaii than my brother Haoa, I’d be surprised. He was a linebacker when he was in college, and since then you’d think he bled green and white, the colors of the Rainbow Warriors. I wondered if he knew anything about Freddie.

“Kanapa’aka Landscaping,” he said, when he answered his cell phone.

“Hey, brah, it’s me. Can I ask you a question?”

“I’m just finishing up a meeting.” He named a hotel a few blocks from the International Marketplace. “Can I call you back?”

“How about I meet you over there?”

“Give me ten, fifteen minutes.”

Ray and I walked down Kalakaua Boulevard, taking our time. The sun had come out again, and it was a gorgeous spring day. You might wonder how I knew it was spring, because we don’t have a lot of seasonal change in Hawaii. But there are little things—trees budding, new bedding plants at the big hotels, a kind of freshness in the air. It’s not like we have crocuses pushing up through the snow or anything, but it’s spring.

Haoa was just coming out the front door of the hotel as we walked up. He’s the middle child, two years younger than Lui and eight years older than I am. He’s the most Hawaiian-looking of the three of us—as tall as I am, but broader. He looked like a proper island businessman, in a polo shirt with his company logo and a pair of aviator-framed sunglasses on his head.

“You bidding on this job?” I asked.

“Yeah. They’re not happy with the guy they’ve got doing it now. And they shouldn’t be. Look at these yellow leaves. And over there—weeds. A job like this, you’ve got to be on it every day.” He looked at us. “So what’s up, brah?”

“You ever hear of a UH football player named Freddie, who wrecked his knee?”

“Freddie Walsh. Tight end. Recruited from northern California, I think. Must be about twenty-eight, twenty-nine by now. Why do you ask?”

“His name came up in an investigation,” I said.

Haoa frowned. “I heard he got hooked on pain pills after his knee blew out. Then I think it got worse. Ice.”

Ice was what we called the smokeable form of crystal meth, a real scourge in the islands. “That’s what we heard,” I said. “Thanks. Now that we have a last name, we can run him down.”

Back at headquarters, Ray ran Freddie Walsh through the system while I Googled him. He had been a promising player at Mendocino High in northern California, as Haoa remembered, recruited for the Rainbow Warriors—who used to be called the Rainbows, until someone in the college administration thought that was too gay. He’d played JV for a year, then started on the varsity team his sophomore year. He was a good player, though a better partier, and one night during his junior year he’d fallen from a dorm balcony and broken both his legs.

That was the end of his football career. Ray picked up his story from police records. Freddie had built up a record over the past few years, starting back when he was still at UH with a couple of arrests for public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Then he moved on to assault, possession, and possession with intent to distribute.

He hadn’t been picked up for burglary yet, which is why he hadn’t shown up on our earlier searches. “There’s something just on the edge of my brain,” I said to Ray, when we’d looked it all over. “I just can’t put my finger on it yet.”

“What kind of thing?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Let’s go look for him. Maybe it’ll come to me while we drive.” We got his latest address, an apartment building a few blocks off the UH campus, and got into the Jeep. There was an accident on University Avenue, a Kawasaki motorcycle that had broadsided a Toyota Camry, so it took us forever to get up there. The building was a nondescript two-story on a side street, the kind of place that a bunch of undergrads share. We climbed the outside stairs and walked down the catwalk to apartment 2D.

Along the way, we passed several open doors. College kids were hanging out, playing music or video games. One or two were even studying. The aroma of
pakalolo
, home grown Hawaiian dope, floated around us. The door to 2D was open, too, and a Hawaiian kid in his late teens was sprawled on the sofa. I knocked on the door and stuck my head in.

“HPD,” I said, flashing my badge. “Looking for Freddie Walsh.”

The kid looked up from an anatomy textbook. His eyes were red and his speech was slurred. The future of medicine. “We kicked him out. Like two weeks ago. He was just too crazy.”

“You know where he went?”

He shrugged. “Dude had serious problems, you know? Anger management, for one.” He nodded across the room, where there was a fist-sized hole in the wall. “Landlord says we’ve got to fix that.”

“Focus,” I said. “He have any friends he might be crashing with?”

“Maybe this older chick named Zoë he knew from home,” the kid said. “I remember him talking about her. Nobody else would have anything to do with him.”

Mendocino. Zoë Greenfield had grown up on a commune in Mendocino. Had she known Freddie Walsh then? “You have any recent pictures of Freddie?” I asked. All we had been able to find were photos of him as a Rainbow Warrior, and then mug shots. None of those were going to be all that close to what he actually looked like.

“Facebook.”

“Under whose name?” Ray asked. “His?”

The kid got up reluctantly, and pulled a laptop computer out of a pile of junk on the kitchen table. “There’s some shots of him at a party in my album,” he said.

Ray looked at me while the kid booted up the computer. “Aren’t you and Mike on Facebook yet?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have time for that crap.”

“Yeah, well, you still live where you grew up. I use it to keep up with my old crowd from Philly.”

By then the kid had his computer up and showed us a slide show of party pictures, kids hanging out on the catwalk, drinking, mooning the camera. The kind of stuff potential employers would love to see. I handed the kid my card and asked him to email me the photos, and we waited there until I saw the email show on my netbook.

It was already the end of our shift. We had no leads on how to find Freddie Walsh, though he was looking like a good suspect in Zoë Greenfield’s murder. Perhaps he knew a middle-aged Chinese woman who had pawned Zoë’s jewelry and given him the cash; savvy pawn brokers like Lucky Lou were suspicious of ice heads pawning jewelry, after all.

We spent the next hour going from room to room in the building, asking if anyone knew Freddie Walsh or where he might be. Some of the kids were downright hostile, others too busy studying to be polite. The few who would talk to us had nothing new to contribute.

By the end of our shift we were both discouraged. “Maybe Harry will come up with an email connection between Freddie Walsh and Zoë Greenfield,” I said.

“We still have to find him in order to arrest him.”

“We’ll go back to Judy. She said she knew Freddie’s dealer. We find the dealer, we find the ice head.”

We drove down to Waikiki but couldn’t find Judy at any of her regular hangouts. We’d already put in an hour of overtime without making progress, so we hung up our shields for the night.

THE LINEBACKER

Haoa and Tatiana had invited Mike and me for a barbecue that night. Mike loved going over there; he often joined Haoa on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights to watch football on Haoa’s big screen TV. Because he had no siblings, and his only cousins were far away, he liked being part of my big family. That was fine with me, because I liked them, too.

Plus, Tatiana is an amazing cook. My mother can prepare a good meal, but Tatiana combines her artistic nature, her Russian heritage, and the fresh fish, meat and produce of the islands to create meals that rival any restaurant. Between my brother’s skill at the barbecue and hers in the kitchen, eating there is always a great time.

My niece Ashley answered the door. She’s the oldest kid, and at sixteen she was blooming into a great beauty. She was five ten, with her mom’s ash-blonde hair and blue eyes, as well as the high cheekbones from the Russian side of the family. From us, she got her deeply tanned skin and a slight epicanthic fold above her eyes. Haoa had been complaining about boys buzzing around for the last two years, and I could tell it was only going to get worse.

She kissed us both on the cheek, hardly stepping up on tiptoe to do so, and then said, “You are such a tease!”

It wasn’t until I saw the Bluetooth earpiece that I realized she wasn’t talking to us. “They’re all in the back yard,” she said. “No, I don’t say that to all the boys. Only the cute ones.”

I looked at Mike and we both laughed. We walked through the house, passing thirteen-year-old Alec, sprawled on the living room floor playing a video game. He was going to be as tall as his dad soon, but it looked like his arms and legs were waiting for the rest of him to catch up. I remembered poses like that myself, one leg on the sofa (when my mother wasn’t watching), the rest of me on the carpet, one arm crooked behind my head, though I was usually reading a book, not playing a game.

I waved hello to him, and heard his two younger sisters, Ailina and Akipela, squabbling somewhere upstairs. I wasn’t about to intervene.

The night was just cool enough to make you want to stand next to the barbecue, and that’s where I found Haoa and Tatiana, talking with Tico Robles, Tatiana’s best friend. Tico owned a hair salon, with Tatiana as a silent partner. He was about fifty, Puerto Rican, the kind of very dramatic gay man who made me uncomfortable before I came out of the closet.

Next to him was a handsome young guy in jeans and a white shirt, which showed off his biceps and his deep tan. “Tico’s got himself a young boyfriend,” Mike whispered to me as we walked through the sliding doors.

When Tico saw us, he said, “My favorite defenders of law and order!” and rushed over to hug and kiss us. Then he said, “I have someone I want you to meet.” He looked shy, which is unusual for him, but I assumed it was because his boyfriend was so much younger. “This is Alfredo. My son.”

“Close your mouths before the flies get in,” Tatiana said, laughing at Mike’s and my surprise.

Why did it seem like every gay man I knew was turning out to have kids? First Greg Oshiro, then Tico Robles. The next thing I knew Gunter would be cradling a buzz-cut blond baby in his arms.

“You didn’t know I was married back in Puerto Rico,” Tico said. “Just for a little while. But long enough to make a beautiful baby.”

Alfredo blushed. He shook hands with both of us, and Haoa delivered a couple of rum punches in big plastic globes. “You both look like you could use a drink,” he said, laughing.

“My son has finally come to visit me,” Tico said, putting his arm proudly around Alfredo’s shoulders. “After all these years.”

Tatiana brought out a tray of appetizers, tiny pastry tarts filled with cheese, chopped meat, and green vegetables. We learned that Alfredo had graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a major in Spanish, hoping to become a teacher, and decided to visit his father before embarking on his career. We nibbled, we talked, and eventually Haoa said, “I’m going to put the steaks on. Kimo, you want to help me?”

The lively beat of Times Five playing “School’s Out” was on the CD as he slapped the big hunks of meat on the grill and a sweet smell rose from the charcoal. “I called around to see what I could find out about Freddie Walsh.”

In the light of a tiki torch, I could see him frowning. “I feel bad for the guy. He was in the hospital for a week after he broke his legs, and then a month in rehab. In the end, he missed so much school that he flunked out. He didn’t want to go back to the mainland, so he moved around. A couple of the alumni tried to do right for him, but he pissed away everything anybody tried to give him.”