Zero Break (21 page)

Aunt Pua had three kids, each from different fathers. Not that any of the men had been in the picture for long. My cousin Ben’s dad had been her third husband. They’d gotten married in Vegas, and then divorced six months later.

Aunt Pua had been an astrologer, had sold tie-dyed t-shirts at the Aloha Stadium flea market, wholesaled herbal tea, and who knows what else. She’d finally settled into a career that suited her, as an aromatherapist in Hawai’i Kai.

Selena, on the other hand, had always been a quiet, studious girl. She was a couple of years older than me, and while the rest of our cousins were outdoor kids, surfing, swimming, and hiking, Selena was a reader. She had big round glasses and frizzy hair, and whenever there was a family party you could find her in the corner, reading. I liked to read, too, and our best conversations had been ones about books, particularly once I was a teenager and she was in college.

She majored in engineering at UH, and went to work for a consulting firm after graduation. I just couldn’t remember her married name, or where she worked.

So I called my mother. “I’m still shaken up from that school shooting,” she said, when we’d gone through the ritual greetings, asking after her health and my father’s. “Every time I see something terrible on the news I worry that you’re there and you’re going to get hurt.”

“Oh, come on, Mom. You’ve got Lui and Haoa. I’m just the spare.”

“Kimo! How can you say something like that!” She laughed. “So what do you want? You never call me unless you need something.”

It was my turn to feign horror. “How can you say that, Mom? I called you last week when I was walking Roby. And I saw you on Saturday when we watched Jeffrey surf.”

“Lui calls me every day.”

“It’s not a competition, Mom. What’s Selena’s last name? And do you have her phone number?”

“Her last name is Mitchell. Hold on and I’ll get you her number.”

“You don’t know it by heart? I’m surprised.”

“Don’t start with me. I’m your mother.”

“So you say.”

“No one else would have put up with you. Here it is.” She read the number off to me. “What do you want with Selena?”

“I need a little help. Thanks. Kiss Dad for me. Love you.”

I hung up before she could probe any further. Selena’s receptionist put me through to her, and she said, “I was just thinking of you, Kimo. It was nice to see you last weekend. We should get together more.”

“That would be nice,” I said. “You have any time this afternoon?”

She laughed. “Is this in a professional capacity?”

“I have a couple of spreadsheets I need some help with. I’m thinking maybe an engineer can make some sense out of them.”

“I could use a break from load factors,” she said. “When can you come over?”

Selena worked in one of the high-rise buildings near the Iolani Palace, just a couple of blocks from headquarters. Ray and I walked over there after lunch. The receptionist was a young haole woman with an asymmetrical haircut and glossy makeup that made her look like a fashion model.

She buzzed Selena. “Ms. Mitchell will be right out,” she said, then punched a button to take an incoming call. I was fascinated to see how she managed the multi-line phone with the tips of her fingers, protecting the finish on her long, manicured nails.

Selena appeared a couple of minutes later, looked at Ray and me, and shook her head. As she led us back to her office, she said, “Even gay guys can’t resist Marisa,” she said.

“I’ve never seen anyone with nails like that who can actually work,” I said.

“If you can call what she does work. I call it decoration.” She motioned Ray and me to chairs across from her desk and sat down facing us.

Her office was organized for efficiency, much like Selena herself. The credenza, file cabinet, phone and computer were all within easy reach, and she had a slanted table alongside one wall with plans laid out on it. She could swivel her chair over with a minimum of effort.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” she said. I handed her the flash drive and explained what I thought we had. She popped the drive in and started hitting keys. It was a lot like watching Harry work—that same sense of complete concentration on the task at hand. After a couple of minutes she looked up at us.

“Harry was right, in part. The first couple of spreadsheets here are engineering data.” She shifted the monitor so we could see it, and Ray and I both leaned forward. “This sheet represents kilowatt hours generated by some kind of power project.”

She clicked a tab at the bottom of the screen. “Now this sheet represents the same time period, but the numbers are much lower.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the first sheet here is bullshit,” she said. “Somebody is trying to make a bad project look good.”

She opened a new window and pulled up a different spreadsheet. “These numbers here are dollar figures. It looks like the first sheet is what they would have submitted to whoever was funding them—notice how the figures are in black? That means they’re making money.”

Most of the numbers on the next sheet were in red. “I’m betting that these are the real numbers,” she said. “They’re bleeding money. If they let these numbers get out, they’d be out of business fast.”

“Can you figure out anything about the company?” I asked. “Aren’t there hidden thingies that tell you who created the sheet, or where they worked?”

Selena hit a couple of keys. “The file was created by Zoë Greenfield,” she said. “She works for the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.”

“Worked,” I said. “As in past tense. She’s the woman whose murder we’re investigating.”

Selena jerked back from her keyboard, as if Zoë’s dead body might pop out if she got too close.

“Nothing about which company she was investigating?” Ray asked.

Selena shook her head. “I don’t know enough about alternative energy projects to speculate. Nobody at her office can tell you anything?’

“We had a contact,” I said. “We gave her the spreadsheet, and she told me she’d figured something out. Then her car ran off the Pali Highway.”

Selena closed the windows on her computer and popped the drive out. “Sorry, Kimo. I can’t tell you anything more about this.”

GO FLY A KITE

Friday evening I was fiddling around on my netbook and checked my email. There was a message from Terri. “We had lots of fun skiing in Squaw Valley,” I read. “Danny fell in love with snow. I’ll tell you all about the trip when I see you. Danny has a kite entered in the Ko’olau Kite Fest tomorrow—any chance you guys can come up and cheer him on? He’d love to see you.”

I flashed back to the last time I’d seen Terri, when Levi had taken us out on his boat to show off his investment in Wave Power Technologies. Now that Levi was back from Squaw Valley, maybe he could tell us which company the spreadsheet represented. I emailed her back that we would be there. “Tell Levi I have some questions for him,” I added at the end. “Love you.”

On Saturday afternoon Mike and I met them up on a grassy slope in the Ko’olau mountains for the kite-flying festival. I hoped to pull Levi aside for a few minutes to ask him about the mysterious spreadsheets we’d found in Zoë Greenfield’s online storage.

Kites are a real Japanese obsession, and March is the month for many kite flying festivals in cities like Nagasaki. For the kids, there were two competitions, a demonstration of kite making, and even a candy drop, sending them scrambling as candy fell from the skies, released from special kites. But we got there an hour before Danny’s competition, and after establishing that Levi, Terry and Danny hadn’t arrived yet, Mike and I were drawn to the fighting kites.

From nosing around, we learned that the tradition had come from India, where special lines coated with ground glass were used to try and slice your competitors out of the air. The Nagasaki fighting kite was different from the traditional Japanese kites I’d seen as a kid. It was square, light, and flown diagonally, as opposed to the traditional Japanese form.

It was fascinating to watch the kites battle each other in the sky to the beat of fat, barrel-like Japanese
taiko
drums. The crowd cheered when one kite cut another’s string, and I wished all our violent and destructive impulses could take place in a way like that, with no one getting hurt or killed.

We strolled around, watching a Japanese kite master showing off his works, until I spotted Terri across from us. We called and waved and she came over to us.

I marveled again at how much better she looked than she had almost four years before, when she was married to a cop who had gotten in trouble, and the worry had started to etch lines on her oval face, on skin that had been clear and fresh ever since we had met as kids at Punahou.

Her brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore khaki Capri pants and a dark green T-shirt from Squaw Valley. “Danny will be so glad you came,” she said, kissing my cheek and then leaning up to do the same to Mike. “He and Levi are getting their kite ready for the competition.”

“How was the skiing?” I asked. “Not too cold for you?”

“Levi and Danny did most of the skiing. I’m too much of an island girl. I spent most of the time by the fire in the lodge. But Danny took to it. And of course he loves Ilana.”

Ilana was Levi’s daughter from his previous marriage, a beautiful twenty-something I’d only met once or twice. She was getting her MBA at Harvard. “I’m surprised she could get away for skiing,” I said.

“She had work to do every night,” Terri said. “It was wonderful to see her huddled up with Levi. I didn’t understand half of what they talked about, but he loved getting into her course work with her. You know he went to Harvard, too.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I assumed he’d gone somewhere in the northwest.”

It didn’t surprise me. Levi was a high-powered guy, and had a high-powered, Ivy League sort of vibe—Brooks Brothers clothes, a nose for good wine, and a sharp intelligence.

He joined us at the start of the competition. “Danny’s kite is made of mulberry bark paper from Japan,” he said. “We painted his dad’s name on it. He says he wants to let it go when the competition is over, so it can go up to heaven and his dad can see it.”

My eyes stung when he said that. Evan Gonsalves had been a good guy, and a good cop. We’d been friends mostly because he was married to Terri, but I liked him, and knew that he loved his son. It was good to know that his son still remembered him.

There were prizes for biggest and smallest kite, funniest kite and ugliest kite. In the competition, there were prizes for the highest flight, the angle of flight, and the sound that their hummers made in flight. Danny didn’t win anything, but he looked like he had a lot of fun. When the competition was over, the four of us took him off to the side of the site, where the hill was steep and looked out over the Pacific.

“You ready to let it go, sport?” Levi asked, kneeling down to Danny’s level.

Danny nodded.

“Well, let’s give it a good run, okay?” He took Danny’s hand in his and they ran across the grass, the kite gaining altitude behind them. Eventually Levi let go, and Danny kept running, the kite soaring behind him. “Let it go whenever you want,” Levi called.

We watched as Danny released his grasp on the kite string, and the wind currents made the kite soar and dip. Danny stopped running and waved as the kite climbed higher and higher, and then took a turn out over the mountain. Mike and I hung back as Terri and Levi caught up with Danny, each taking one of his hands, all three of them watching the kite soar to heaven.

Terri took Danny off after that to get a shave ice, and I pulled Levi aside. “Can I get together with you on Monday?” I asked. “I’ve got this spreadsheet that relates to power companies somehow, and I need some help interpreting it.”

“Sure,” Levi said. We made a plan to meet up at his office late on Monday morning. We all went out for an early dinner, and then Mike and I went home and walked Roby.

“You still thinking about having kids?” Mike asked, as Roby sniffed around a succulent hinahina plant, blossoming with white flowers.

“Seems like everyone we know has them, huh?” Roby began licking the grass and I said, “Roby, that’s gross,” and jerked on his leash.

Mike appeared to be waiting for me to answer his question. “I had lunch with Sandra Guarino on Monday.”

“What does that… oh.”

“Yeah. Oh. She asked me if I’d consider being their sperm donor. Not now, but sometime in the future.”

“What did you say?”

“I avoided the question. That’s not something you can answer off the cuff.”

“Who would be the mom?”

“Sandra. Cathy has some female problem.”

“I used to work with this female fire captain,” Mike said. “She was a ball-buster—tougher than most of the guys. Then she had a baby. She was still tough afterwards—but man, you should have seen her with her daughter. A totally different woman.”

“You think Sandra would turn out that way?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Mike picked up a stick from the ground and started twirling it in his hands. “Did she say how she wanted you to donate?”