Zero Break (9 page)

“You never heard the term?” I asked. I looked at Mike, and he shook his head. “You guys are clueless.” I explained what it was as Mike opened the door for us.

We entered the restaurant through a
torii
gate, and the hostess seated us at a four-top in the back of the restaurant. The name might have been Simple Sushi, but the décor was anything but. The walls were papered with something that looked like the pattern from blue willow china. There were little brass lanterns on each table with a votive candle, chopsticks, and placemats with a map of Japan.

Before we looked at the menus, Julie reached over to Ray and pushed the edges of his eyes up diagonally with her index fingers. She considered, then shook her head and pulled back. “Nah, I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got.”

We all laughed. “Anybody want sake?” Ray asked.

“You hate sake,” Julie said.

“Hey, I’m trying to go with the flow.”

We all just wanted water. Mike has had problems with alcohol in the past, and though he’s been fine for a long time, I always get a twinge when the chance comes to order a beverage. I know he’s watching me so I try not to let it show.

We ordered a couple of sampler platters and a teriyaki chicken entrée to share. After the waiter had taken our order, Ray and I went up to the hostess to ask about Zoë Greenfield. When we showed the picture, she nodded her head. “Yeah, she in here just few days ago,” she said. “They sit in back with chef, Shinichi. She like him.”

Ray and I walked back to the counter at the rear of the restaurant. The real sushi connoisseurs like to sit where the chef is preparing his dishes, so they can talk to him about what’s best that day.

Shinichi was a Japanese guy in his late twenties, with straight black hair cut at a weird angle, and a pink stripe on the side. Clearly an island Japanese, not a tourist. And if he wasn’t gay, you can take back that toaster they gave me when I came out.

“You remember this woman?” I asked, showing him the photo.

He recognized her. He recognized me, too, but that’s another story. “Yeah, she was here Sunday night.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “With a man.”

“You noticed that?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. She always used to come in with this Chinese chick. I thought they were partners. But then the last couple of times, it’s been with a guy.”

“Same guy every time?”

“Yeah. Tough-looking white guy, tattoos on his forearms. I guess when she went the other way, she really went the other way, if you know what I mean.” He continued to chop and roll sushi as we talked.

“I know. Anything more about the guy? Age? Hair color?”

He put his lips together like he was thinking. “Maybe thirty-five or forty. Buzz-cut hair, like light brown. Looked like he worked out.”

“You remember how they paid?” Ray asked. “Credit card?”

He shook his head. “The guy always paid. Cash. Pretty good tipper, too.”

He wasn’t sure exactly what time they’d been in, it had been a busy night, but the place closed at midnight and he knew they were gone before that.

“You find anything out?” Mike asked, when we returned to the table.

“Yeah. Don’t know if it will help, though.” We told him and Julie what the waiter had said.

“Sounds like she had a boyfriend,” Julie said. “If the waiter said they’ve been in a few times.”

“Maybe you could see if anyone she works with knew who she was dating,” Mike suggested.

“Been there, done that,” I said. “Her coworker didn’t even know she was a lesbian.”

We shared the sushi and the teriyaki and tried to forget that it was murder that had brought us all together. Mike told us about the fire he was investigating, at a wind farm under construction in the Koolau mountains. “Neighbors don’t like the place. They say it’s going to spoil the view, make noise, frighten away the birds.”

“You think it’s arson?” Ray asked.

“Not sure yet. It looks like one of the generators the contractors were using might have short-circuited and started the fire. But it’s not clear why that happened.”

I was always fascinated to hear the details of Mike’s cases; they were a lot like mine, in that they required deductive powers and lots of nose-to-the-grindstone footwork. But there was an extra layer of knowledge he needed, about fire and electricity and combustion. Sometimes the details made my head spin. I was always in awe of his ability to interpret the data and come up with conclusions.

When we got home, Mike and I relaxed on the couch with Roby. It had been a nice evening, and I wondered how things would change if we had a child to worry about. I saw the way my brothers’ kids dominated everything that went on in their households. They needed to be fed and clothed and driven around, and even when the whole family was at home, they were always asking questions, banging things around, playing music too loud.

My sisters-in-law were often frazzled, even Liliha, who tried to make everything look effortless. Tatiana, the artsy one, was more haphazard in her parenting, but I had seen her put her painting ability on the sidelines while she focused on her kids. Even now, when her youngest daughter, Akipela, was seven years old and in school all day, Tatiana was swamped with laundry, PTA and chauffeuring duties.

Did Mike and I want to sacrifice everything in our lives that way? It wasn’t all taking the kids surfing or playing video games with them. Were we too selfish to let ourselves in for years of diapers, homework and then dating dramas?

I wondered if the idea of kids was percolating through Mike’s brain the way it was with mine. Neither of us brought it up again as we watched TV, but the idea stayed in the back of my mind.

WHAT JUDY KNOWS

On my way in to work Wednesday morning I plugged in my Bluetooth and dialed Anna Yang’s apartment in Chinatown on my cell. When she answered, I heard at least one of the girls crying in the background. “I’ll try and make this quick,” I said. “Did Zoë have an email account?”

We thought maybe Zoë might have been corresponding with the guy she had dinner with, but I didn’t see the need to pass that information on to Anna until it became relevant. “Yes. She has an account with IslandMail. Her user name is MissNumbered.” She spelled it for me.

“Clever. Password?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know it.”

“I have a friend who might be able to get into the account. Can you give me some clues? Maybe her birthday, the girls’, that kind of thing?”

She listed a bunch of dates and a couple of Zoë’s favorite words, and I pulled up in front of Harry Ho’s house and added them to my computer file. I heard her turn to the girl who was crying. “Because I say so,” she said.

I remembered that one from my own childhood. I guess Anna had heard the same thing, growing up in China, and it had imprinted on her the same way it sunk in to every American kid who grew up to be a parent. I hung up and sat in front of Harry’s house for a minute.

Harry and Arleen live in the same neighborhood as Mike and me, though their house is a lot nicer than ours. They have a single-family, while ours is a duplex with the added pleasure of having Mike’s parents sharing a wall. We have two bedrooms, while Harry and Arleen have three. We had a nicer bathroom, because Mike had remodeled it a year before he met me, but I knew it was just a matter of time before Harry’s house surpassed ours in that regard, too.

Arleen had had the kitchen remodeled and expanded before they moved in, with sliding glass doors to the back yard, where they’d had a swimming pool put in as well. Our kitchen was small and dark, but since neither Mike or I cooked much, that didn’t matter. I did want a pool, though.

In addition to being my best friend, aside from Mike of course, Harry’s a computer genius with degrees from MIT and a bunch of patents in his name. Arleen was just walking out the front door, with Brandon in tow. Harry had met Arleen a couple of years before, when she was working for a man who’d been murdered, and Harry had helped me with some computer problems. Brandon was a toddler then, but he was growing up smart and confident.

Arleen was a sweet Japanese girl, just a couple of years younger than Harry and me. She had finished her associate’s degree in computer science with Harry’s tutelage, and now worked with him. She’d lost the baby fat she once had, and her black hair was styled into a sleek bob.

I watched Harry kiss them both goodbye. Once again I felt that little pang, wondering about parenthood.

When Arleen had Brandon in the car, backing down the driveway, Harry turned to me. “Hey, brah, howzit?” he asked.

“Pretty good. Think you can hack into an email account?”

“Brah, you insult me. Of course I can.”

I could have tried to get a subpoena to IslandMail, and if I needed evidence that would stand up in a court case, I would. But for now I just wanted to figure out who Zoë was dating.

We went into Harry’s home office, where computers, printers, scanners, and all kinds of other equipment were on tables that lined the room. He sat down at a monitor and keyboard and started typing. “Give me the user name.”

“MissNumbered.” I spelled it for him, just as Anna had spelled it for me. We worked our way through her birthday, their address, the kids’ birthdays. None of them worked.

“Time to get creative,” Harry said. “Know anything about her childhood? Address? Nickname?”

“She grew up on a commune, but she hated it,” I said. “You know what, though? Try fallopian.”

“You mean as in tubes?”

“Yeah, that was the name her parents gave her.”

Harry made a face. “Yuk.”

“She has a brother named Vas,” I said. “As in vas deferens.”

“At least they didn’t call him Scrotum.”

Harry typed fallopian into the password box, and immediately the screen clicked forward into Zoë Greenfield’s email list.

She was still involved with the volunteer group she’d met Anna Yang through; there was a message from one of the organizers. A bunch of spam, too. Nigerians asking for help investing money, someone touting açai as a breakthrough drug, that kind of thing. She didn’t seem to archive old messages, and there weren’t any emails from guys confirming a date for Sunday evening.

We read through everything in her in box, and there was nothing useful. “Great, another dead end,” I said.

“You doubt my skills, young grasshopper.” Harry opened a new message and clicked into the “to” box. When he typed the letter ‘a,’ the web interface obligingly listed all the people Zoë had ever emailed whose addresses began with that letter.

“You want to take notes?” Harry asked.

“Yes, honorable master.”

A lot of the addresses weren’t useful; it was doubtful, for example, that Zoë had made plans to meet “[email protected]” for dinner on Sunday night. But I did harvest about fifty email addresses, from a to z.

“So what do I do with these?” I asked Harry, when I had added the last address to the list on my netbook. “Email them all and ask if they had dinner plans with Zoë Greenfield on Sunday night?”

“It’s a possibility. But let’s try something more subtle first. Give me a couple of hours to play around with these addresses and see what else I can dig up.”

Under Harry’s tutelage, I’ve been getting better at using the computer. I can Google, email, and place online orders as good as anyone, and I was increasingly comfortable with using my netbook as a tool for organizing case materials. But when you get into more sophisticated techniques, I bow at his feet.

When I finally got to headquarters, Ray was filling out paperwork. I explained that I had Harry on the case, and I sat down to help him. The brass hadn’t yet moved into the computer generation, so we had to transfer my notes to the appropriate forms. We had to document everything we’d seen and done at the house on Lopez Lane, as well as our interviews with Ryan Tazo, the people at Zoë’s office, the receptionist at the homeless shelter, and the waiters and other staff at the restaurants we’d visited, including Shinichi at Simple Sushi.

We worked until noon, and we were just about to break for lunch when my cell phone rang. From the display I could see it was Judy Evangelista, the Waikiki prostitute. “Yo, Judy,” I said. “Wazzup?”

“Cut the crap, detective. I’ve got a name for you, but it’s going to cost you.”

“Judy, Judy,” I said. “I just gave you fifty bucks yesterday.”

“You want the name? It’ll cost you another fifty.”

I arranged to meet her back in an hour at the International Marketplace in Waikiki, an open-air market of stalls and carts that was a tourist favorite. It was also where Judy scored her regular fixes, so I figured it was convenient that we’d be giving her the cash to complete her next transaction.

We got there early, so we wandered under the banyan trees, looking at the tourist crap. They were playing the Matt Catingub Orchestra’s cover of “Oh, Pretty Woman,” and I liked the way they’d changed up Roy Orbison with an island beat.

Moms with babies in strollers navigated the crowd, kids carried shave ice that dripped on the ground, and a tourist with a heavy German accent was trying to negotiate for a koa bangle with a woman whose Chinese accent was equally as impenetrable. We picked up some gourmet hot dogs from Hank’s Haute Dogs and sat at a table in the food court, next to a tiki-hut stand.