Zero Break (14 page)

We went back to headquarters and set out to learn as much as we could about Wyatt Collins. Ray worked on getting copies of his police records, and I started looking into his personal life. I found the street address where he had lived as a kid, in a small town in eastern Tennessee, and used a reverse directory to get phone numbers of every house on the street.

The first person I reached was his next door neighbor, Rebecca Czick, which she pronounced Chizzik. “I’m not surprised he’s in trouble,” she said, after I’d introduced myself as a police detective. “Honolulu, you said? That’s in Hawai’i?”

“Yes, it is, ma’am.”

“That Wyatt, he was always trouble,” she said, and there was a slight southern twang in her voice. “He was a nasty little bully, used to beat up other kids on the corner and in the school yard. But he started getting in serious trouble when he turned twelve.”

“What happened then, ma’am?”

“He started smoking cigarettes. He was real proud of it, used to sit on the porch smoking. And then I caught him in a shed in his family’s back yard when he was thirteen, drinking moonshine whiskey and making out with this trampy girl who was twenty if she was a day.”

I started taking notes. “He was smoking marijuana when he was fifteen. I used to smell it coming across my yard. No matter how much I complained to his parents they didn’t do a thing about him. And then a year later the sheriff caught him with cocaine.”

That meant he had a juvenile record. It had probably been sealed, but I scrawled a note and passed it to Ray.

“He went to prison when he was nineteen, and I thank God every day he got out of this neighborhood,” she said. “I used to just live in fear of what he might do. I could have been murdered in my bed.”

That reminded me of Zoë Greenfield, who had been in bed when the events that led to her murder began.

“Thank you very much for your help, ma’am,” I said. “Is there anyone else in town that I should talk to?”

She gave me a couple of names and phone numbers. “Most of the old timers, they’ve passed on,” she said. “Wyatt’s parents went to Jesus while he was in prison. And the young people, they don’t stay in town, with no work for them.”

I worked my way down the list of neighbor houses, and then spoke to the two women Mrs. Czick had given me. They didn’t have as much specific information as she did, but they agreed that Wyatt had been a very bad boy. A woman named Mary Elizabeth Kraun told me that a girl had accused Wyatt of raping her when he was seventeen.

“Of course, she was no better than he was,” Mrs. Kraun said. “So no one believed her. She liked the bad boys, anyway.”

I left a message for Ellen Toyama, the woman who had given Wyatt’s name to Greg. When I hung up, Ray swiveled his chair around to face me.

“Wyatt has an impressive record,” he said. “He went to prison at nineteen for his role as the getaway driver in a bungled bank robbery, and served six years. But almost as soon as he was released, he robbed a 7-Eleven and went back to prison.”

“What the hell did Zoë see in him?” I asked. “He sounds like a loser from the word go.”

“When he was in prison the second time, he passed his GED and got an associate’s degree in accounting. That must be how he came to be reading accounting journals, and came across Zoë.”

“I wonder how many other women he was corresponding with from prison,” I said. “If we subpoena her bank records you think we’ll find that she was sending him money?”

We went in to see Lieutenant Sampson and give him an update. His polo shirt was white, and there was a loose thread on his sleeve, but I resisted the impulse to pull it off. There’s only so far you can go with your boss.

“So you think this guy is a solid suspect?” Sampson asked, when we’d laid it out for him. “What’s his motive?”

I looked at Ray. “Not sure yet.”

“The woman likes him enough to get him a job. He’s trying to go straight. I’m not saying he didn’t kill her—but you’ve got to have something more than what you’ve got if you want to charge him.”

“We’ll talk to him again,” I said. “See what he says when we tell him we know about his record.”

“Give it ’til Monday,” Sampson said. “It doesn’t sound like he’s going anywhere, and my overtime budget for this month is shot.”

Ray was disappointed; I could see he’d been hoping to pick up some extra cash for his new house fund. But there’s always special duty assignments; he could spend a few hours as a security guard for the Aloha Stadium flea market, if no one else had signed up for the job already.

I went home, walked the dog, and read until Mike got home. We went to dinner, then ended up back on the sofa watching TV. I couldn’t help wondering how our lives would change if we had a baby to look after.

BABY DADDIES

Saturday morning we woke up early and went for a long run around our neighborhood. I did our week’s grocery shopping while Mike repaired a shutter that had come loose. I remembered when I was a kid, our Saturdays were filled with running errands and visiting family. How many hours had my mother spent buying us new shoes, fixing meals, sewing buttons back on, or doing the million other chores that went with having a family?

At three, Mike and I went to see Lui’s oldest son Jeffrey in a junior surf competition at Makapu’u Point. It was a gorgeous afternoon, the kind the tourist office brags about, endless sunshine and blue skies, with just a few wisps of clouds decorating the sky. An offshore breeze churned the water, and Jeffrey’s first wave was a strong one. He had a great take off from the peak, followed by a backhand bottom turn.

“Damn, that was nice,” I said.

“He’s got the surfing gene,” Lui bragged.

Jeffrey rode the rail a bit, managed a decent forehand snap, and finished with a bottom turn that showed excellent control.

The key to success in a competition is to use the most powerful part of the wave, and demonstrate as much skill with it as you can. If you play it safe, you get a low score—so I’ve always believed you go big or you go home. Jeffrey was strong, agile and fearless. He had his father’s slimmer build, and the height my brothers and I share—he was nearly six feet tall, with none of his cousin Alec’s gangliness.

In a contest, you can get anywhere from a point-five to a ten for your ride. The surfer who rides his or her wave with the most speed, control, and power in the most critical section gets the best score; getting to your feet and riding the wave, without doing anything more, gets you a .5. Every move you manage, every bit of difficulty in the wave itself, adds to the score.

Jeffrey’s maneuvers brought him a nine-point-five, which I thought was pretty damn good. I couldn’t have done that well when I was just turning sixteen.

The whole family—my parents, and both my brothers and their wives and kids—had turned out to watch and cheer Jeffrey, even my Aunt Pua and a couple of my cousins. Aunt Pua is my mother’s youngest sister, and as different from her as two siblings can be. My mother is organized and no-nonsense; she raised us with an iron hand. Aunt Pua is an aromatherapist in Hawaii Kai, a faded flower child whose kids were allowed to run wild.

Her youngest son, Ben, was a championship surfer, but he was out of the country at a surf match somewhere. Her daughter Selena, from her second husband, was there, with her own two sons, who both wanted to be surfers. Selena reminded me of Zoë Greenfield in a way; though they looked nothing alike, they both had rebelled against flaky parents by becoming straight-laced worker bees, though Selena was an engineer rather than an accountant.

Jeffrey wasn’t the best surfer in the competition; a kid a year older than he was scored a couple of perfect tens, and my nephew had to settle for second place. But it was a great performance, and lots of fun to watch.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, of my conversation with my mother Thursday night. What would a kid with my genes be like? Would he look more Japanese, like Lui, or be big and Hawaiian like Haoa? Would the haole genes that dominated in me follow through to my son?

Would he like to surf? To read? Would he be gay, too?

Or would the combination of my sperm and a woman’s egg result in a girl? How in the world could Mike and I raise a daughter, in a house full of testosterone? I could just imagine Mike and me sitting down to a tea party with our little daughter, her eyebrows raising at our clumsiness.

First, Mike and I had to be on the same page about procreating. I’d seen too many kids on the street who were the children of ill-advised couplings, teen moms who just wanted someone to love, babies born in attempts to save failing marriages, children brought into households without financial stability. I sure as hell wasn’t going to commit to bringing a child into my world until I knew that Mike and I both could manage.

Sunday we met Gunter for brunch in Waikiki. The beautiful weather had moved on, as it often does, and a cold front had come in. Not too cold, you understand, just enough so that we had to bring out the long-sleeved shirts and sit indoors to eat. Bruddah Norm was singing “We are Hawaiian” on the loudspeakers.

As if the universe was conspiring to keep the idea of child-rearing in the air, Gunter was full of news of a mutual friend who had just discovered that he was a father. “Can you just imagine?” Gunter said, after we’d ordered. “Out of the blue, this girl he slept with in college calls him up and tells him he has a kid.”

We were drinking mimosas at a window table, and the restaurant buzzed around us, a combination of gay men and vacationing tourists. When a man passed us wearing a t-shirt that read “I’m shy, but I have a big dick,” I saw Gunter try to catch his eye. Fake flower leis hung from the ceilings, and the walls were hung with reproductions of
hapa-haole
music covers, the ones from the twenties and thirties with a beautiful island girl strumming a ukulele.

“Is he sure it’s his?” Mike asked.

“She wants him to have his blood tested,” Gunter said. “The kid is twelve or thirteen, and he has some kind of a blood disease. He needs a transfusion from a close relative who matches him, and no one in her family will work.”

“Wow,” I said. “What a way to find out.”

“Yeah. He’s flying to Chicago tomorrow for the testing.”

The waiter, a slim-hipped blond with a flirty manner that I was sure brought in big tips, delivered our platters. Gunter was having an egg-white omelet with a side of steamed vegetables. “A boy’s got to watch his figure,” he said. “Now you two, you can get fat together and no one will mind.”

“I’ll mind if Kimo gets fat.” Mike poked my stomach. “We both need to do some more exercise.”

“Speak for yourself, big boy,” I said.

Neither of us were heavy—but settled domesticity, regular meals together, and a lack of physical activity were definitely adding a couple of pounds. But I still ordered a plate of chocolate chip pancakes with a side of bacon, and Mike had a sausage, onion and pepper scramble with home fries.

“So, Kimo,” Gunter said, a sly grin on his face. “You ever worry you’ll get a phone call like that?”

Mike looked over at me. He knew that I’d slept with a lot of girls before coming out. And I knew that he’d never been with a woman, despite staying in the closet for years before he met me.

I shrugged. “I was always pretty careful. Haoa got a girl pregnant when he was in high school, and that made my folks hyper-conscious. From the time I was fourteen or so, my father was leaving condoms in my room.”

“You never told me that about Haoa,” Mike said. “What happened?”

“The girl had an abortion. She was sweet, but kind of lost. Beautiful voice, though. Eventually she moved to Vegas to become a singer.”

“Wow,” Mike said. “That experience must have been tough for your brother.”

“This is Haoa we’re talking about. He’s not exactly Mr. Sensitive now, and he sure as hell wasn’t when he was seventeen.”

“Still. You see how he loves his kids. I wonder if he ever thinks about that one.”

“Somebody wants to be a daddy,” Gunter said.

“We’ve been talking,” Mike said.

I was surprised he’d bring it up again—and with Gunter there. It was too public a space, and I hadn’t figured out where I stood on the issue.

“You thinking turkey baster, or doing it the old fashioned way?” Gunter asked.

Trust Gunter to get right to the nitty gritty. “We’re not even at that stage yet,” I said.

The waiter kept stopping by to see how we were doing and flirt with Gunter, so there was no way we could have a serious conversation. The subject seemed to hang in the air the rest of the day, though neither Mike nor I addressed it. I didn’t even want to talk about Zoë Greenfield’s murder, because every time I thought of her I remembered those two little girls and wondered what was going to happen to them.

Mike and I went for another run in the afternoon, working off that big brunch, and everywhere where we ran we saw families and kids. Sometimes they were having fun, but other times babies were crying or parents were yelling.

That was life, for sure. But was it going to be our life?

MOVING TO THE MAINLAND

Monday morning, Ray and I drove back out to Hawai’i Kai to talk to Wyatt Collins again. He wasn’t happy to see us. “Look, I told you everything the other day,” he said. “I didn’t kill Zoë.”