Zero Break (25 page)

Even as I said it, the idea sounded dumb. I could see I was getting way out. Zoë’s killer wasn’t some anonymous energy company executive trying to protect market share.

The waiter brought our entrées, including the platter of steak tidbits for Roby, who immediately began to wolf them down, as if we never fed him at home.

The fish platters were beautiful, like works of art. “As my mother used to say, Gladys Yuu couldn’t have carved this better,” Mike said, looking down at his.

For a moment I thought I’d misunderstood him. “What did you say?”

“It’s an old family joke,” he said. “When my parents moved to Hawai’i, my mother took cooking lessons from this Chinese woman who was an expert at carving meat, trimming fish, all that knife stuff. My father used to tease my mother, when she did a bad job. ‘Didn’t you learn anything from Gladys Yuu?’ And then when something was good, he’d say, ‘Gladys Yuu couldn’t have done it better.’”

“I need to talk to your mother when we get home,” I said.

Mike’s eyebrows raised. I’d had a rocky relationship with his parents, mostly with his father, who still believed I was a bad influence on his son, and it was rare that I initiated any contact with them. It was awkward sometimes, but I managed to avoid them most of the time.

Usually we ran into each other in the driveway, waving and saying hello, maybe sharing a comment about the weather. Even Mike wasn’t that friendly with his folks, certainly not to the degree I was with my family. He had spent so many years hiding his sexuality from them that lack of communication had become a habit.

After dinner, we said good night to Ben and I got a plastic bag from the restaurant. Mike and I walked Roby down along Kam Highway. There were a million stars out over the ocean, and a cool breeze blowing in. “What do you need to talk to my mother about?” Mike asked.

“I wonder if the Gladys Yuu who taught your mother how to cut up meat and fish is the secretary in the office where Zoë Greenfield worked.”

Roby stopped to squat next to a hibiscus bush, the bright red flowers already closed up for the night. In the morning, though, new blossoms would open up. I wondered if new ideas would open up with the case the next morning, if the middle-aged Gladys Yuu we’d met at Zoë’s office would turn out to have the skill to put a knife into someone.

“Middle-aged Chinese woman,” I said, turning to look at Mike.

He stuck his hand into the take-out bag, reached down, and grabbed Roby’s poop. “Excuse me?” he said, standing up.

“Gladys Yuu is a middle-aged Chinese woman. At least the one at Zoë’s office is. And that fits the profile of the person who pawned Zoë’s jewelry at Lucky Lou’s.”

We turned back around toward the Jameson’s parking lot as I explained how Ray and I had traced Zoë’s dragon pendant to Lucky Lou’s. “But we were thinking that it was a home invasion then,” I said. “And that kind of person didn’t fit with what we were expecting, so we pushed it aside.”

“But now you think it might connect,” Mike said.

I was so excited about the possibility of a new lead that I probably drove too fast on Kam going home. “Slow down, Kimo Andretti,” Mike said once, as I sailed around a convertible full of tourists.

We pulled into our driveway just before nine. There was still a light on in his parents’ living room when Mike knocked on the front door.

His father answered, wearing a khaki t-shirt, denim shorts and reading glasses that looked just like Mike’s. If you saw Mike and his dad together, you’d know they were father and son. Mike was a couple of inches taller than his father, and he had a mustache and a slight epicanthic fold to his eyes, but otherwise, his facial structure and bearing were just the same as his dad’s.

Roby went nuts seeing his grandfather, and before he said anything to us, Dominic Riccardi knelt down to rub behind the golden retriever’s ears. “This is a nice surprise,” Dom said, standing up. “Come on in.”

He stepped aside to let us all in the house, and called out, “Soon-O. Mike and Kimo are here.”

Mike walked ahead of me and leaned down to kiss his mother’s cheek as she sat on the sofa doing a Sudoku puzzle. Even though I have Japanese blood, I think the gene for number puzzles was strained out of my makeup somewhere along the way. I love crosswords, but I can’t figure Sudoku out at all.

Soon-O put the puzzle book aside and motioned Mike to sit beside her. She was a tall, slim, Korean woman, a nurse who had met her future husband when he was her patient in an Army field hospital during the Korean war. She wasn’t a great beauty; her face was flat and almost circular. But her eyes revealed a deep intelligence, and she was quick to grasp a situation and deal with it.

Her husband still harbored a grudge against me for dumping his son when we broke up the first time, and driving Mike to drink. But Soon-O had more faith in Mike and his ability to control his own life, and never blamed his problems on me.

I sat in one of the wing chairs across from the sofa, and Dom sat in the other. Roby sprawled at Dom’s feet, the traitor.

“Kimo has a question about Gladys Yuu,” Mike said.

“It was something Mike said at dinner,” I began. “About a woman you studied cooking with?”

Soon-O nodded. “When we moved out here from New York so that Dom could start work at Tripler, I decided to take a couple of months off to help us all get settled.”

Tripler was the big Army hospital just ewa of downtown, where Dom Riccardi was a doctor and Soon-O a nurse. I knew that Soon-O had been very unhappy on Long Island, where Asian-Caucasian marriages were a rarity, where she hadn’t been able to buy the foods that reminded her of home, or hear her native language other than through the long-distance lines.

“A friend of Dom’s at Tripler knew a woman who taught Chinese cooking classes out of her house, and I signed up,” Soon-O continued. “Her name was Gladys Yuu.” She smiled. “I did learn a lot about using knives from her. I guess Mike said something about that.”

“Gladys Yuu couldn’t have carved the fish better,” Mike said. “We had dinner at Jameson’s, up on the North Shore.”

“Such a long way to go for dinner on a work day,” Dom said. He’d put aside his reading glasses, on top of a hardcover Tom Clancy novel on the wooden table next to his chair.

“I was chasing down a lead. My cousin Ben is on the board of a surf group that I thought might be tied into my case.”

Dom was a sports nut. Like my brother Haoa, he followed UH football, baseball and basketball. He watched golf and NASCAR on TV, and even followed surf competitions. “Ben Melville?” he asked.

I nodded. “I think you met him at our house once. He’s my Aunt Pua’s youngest son.”

“So how does this relate to Gladys Yuu?” Soon-O asked.

“The two women who were killed worked in the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. There’s a secretary there named Gladys Yuu. I wondered if it was the same woman.”

Soon-O frowned. “This was a long time ago, you understand. Mike was only seven, so that was more than twenty-five years ago. But I did keep up with a few of the women I studied with, for a while. I remember Gladys’s husband died, and she took a job with the state. I don’t know more than that.”

“Thanks. That’s helpful.”

Dom Riccardi wasn’t ready to let go so easily. “What makes you think this woman could be connected to your case?”

“The first woman who was killed was stabbed. You probably know it’s hard to kill someone with a knife.” As a doctor and a nurse, I figured the Riccardis had seen their share of stab wounds. “The person who killed Zoë Greenfield knew how to use a knife. When Mike said that Gladys had taught knife skills, I made the connection.”

“How was she killed?” Dom asked.

“Dominic,” Soon-O said. “You’re not a detective.”

“I have some background in this area, Soon-O.” He turned back to me. “Well?”

I tried to remember the autopsy report. “Zoë was slender, about five-seven. Her assailant was about the same height, and the first cut came from behind, right about here.” I pointed to where my neck met my right shoulder.

“As if he was trying to cut the jugular,” Dom said, nodding.

“Or she,” I said. “Then it looks like Zoë turned around to face the assailant. There were a couple of defensive wounds to her hands.” I held my own up in front of me, as if warding off the knife. “The final cuts were to her stomach, and it looks like she died from loss of blood.”

“Or shock,” Dom said. “Was she on any medication?”

“Dom, that’s enough,” Soon-O said. “Mike and Kimo don’t come over enough. We shouldn’t talk about murder when they’re here.” She patted her son’s hand. “So, tell us, Mike, what’s new?”

Dominic Riccardi grumbled but let it go. Mike told them about the case he’d gone up to investigate. “Stupidity, as usual,” he said. “This teenaged kid who’d been grounded was mad at his father. He knew that his dad kept a stash of dirty magazines in his bureau, so he dug around until he found them, then stacked them on the kitchen table and set them on fire.”

Soon-O looked like she was unhappy that she had changed the subject. “Of course, the house caught on fire,” Mike continued. “At first the kid said that the stove had shorted out but I could tell from the fire pattern that it had started at the table. Eventually he confessed.”

I’m fascinated by the technical aspects of Mike’s job, the way he can use the evidence to track back to how everything began. But Soon-O said, “Can’t either of you talk about anything happy?”

“Saturday afternoon we went to this kite festival up in the Ko’olaus,” I said. “My friend Terri’s son was flying in the competition.”

She turned to Mike. “In school we studied Admiral Yi of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea. When the Japanese invaded Korea in the 16
th
century, he used kites with special markings to command his fleet.” We spent a few minutes talking about the competition, and about the kites Soon-O had flown as a girl in Korea. “That must have been beautiful,” she said. “So many kites.”

I felt that sting in my eyes again as I told her how Danny had eventually let his go, sending it to his father in heaven. “I would like to go to a festival like that,” Soon-O said. “Will you let us know if you go again?”

We said we would, and left a few minutes later. “That was nice,” I said to Mike, as we walked into our own house, next door. “Your father didn’t bite my head off, and your mother got to enjoy a memory. We should do more with them. Maybe we’ll have them and my parents over for dinner sometime.”

Mike started to strip down. “If you want. I’m going to watch TV for a while and then hit the hay. How about you?”

I checked my email, surfed to a couple of websites, and then joined Mike in bed by ten. We snuggled up together, Roby on the floor by the bed, and my last thoughts were about how comfortable I felt there within the center of my family.

FIELD TRIPS

The next morning, I told Ray what I’d discovered about Gladys Yuu. “I went online and found some photos taken a few years ago, of Gladys teaching a cooking class. I’m pretty sure it’s the same woman.”

I showed him the album I’d found online. I printed a couple of the pictures, including a good shot of Gladys’s face. There was a photo of the students in front of what I figured was Gladys’s house. I popped her address into Google Maps and pulled it up on my screen, and what I saw there quickened my pulse.

But before I jumped the gun, I did some fiddling with another search engine. I found the address I was looking for—and I wasn’t surprised to find it wasn’t too far from Gladys’s. I hunted for a different picture and printed it. When I was finished I said to Ray, “Come on. Field trip.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see when we get there.”

He raised his eyebrows, but tagged along. It had rained while we were inside, and the air was fresh with negative ions. I didn’t even mind sitting in traffic on South Beretania Street, because it was fun to pretend to be a tourist, spotting green coconuts nestling in the crooks of palms, the bright red bursts of hibiscus blossoms alongside an office building, all the little things that make our visitors feel like they’re in the tropics. The high-rises and stores in downtown could be in any US city, but few cities beyond Miami or LA can match us for tropical splendor.

A young woman zipped past us on a scooter, a small boy perched behind her. She wore a simple white helmet, but the boy’s was bright blue, with a red Mohawk strip in fake hair blowing in the wind. A troop of schoolchildren walked in double-ranks down the sidewalk, holding hands in pairs, with what looked like a teacher or a mom in front and at the rear.

I took University Avenue until the commercial buildings faded and we were in a residential neighborhood. We passed an elderly woman in a baseball cap and sweat pants, walking backwards on the sidewalk, a harried Japanese mom pushing a tandem baby carriage, and an enormously fat man walking a very tiny Yorkshire terrier on a bright red leash.

When we came to Hillside Avenue, I said, “Recognize where we are?”

“The cat?”

“Yup. We brought her back to that house over there.” I pointed, and turned onto Hillside Avenue. Then I made a left, and pulled up in front of a single-story bungalow. “And this is where Gladys Yuu lives.”

“So Gladys could have picked up the cat and taken it up to Nuuanu Pali Drive,” Ray said.