Ida shrugged. I took that for “yes.”
“If you wanted to talk,” I said, “you should’ve just stopped by my hotel.”
Ida grunted a laugh. “We draw reporters and coppers like shit draws flies. You think Ala Moana boys can go waltzing into Royal Hawaiian?”
Henry Chang was smirking; the expressions of the other two remained grimly blank. These four—with the late Kahahawai—were of course the so-called “Ala Moana boys,” named for this lonely stretch of ruined blacktop along which their crime was supposedly committed.
“Besides,” Ida said with a little shrug, “how we know you pay attention? Here you pay attention.”
He had a point.
“What do you fellas want from me?”
“If we want to fuck you up, we could, right?”
I started turning in a circle again; my hands balled into tight fists. “It might cost you more than you think….”
Now Henry Chang spoke, only it was more of a bark: “But we could, right, haole?”
“Yeah,” I admitted; my stomach was jumping—the first guy who hit me in the stomach was getting a cotton candy facial. “Yeah, I think the four of you got me sufficiently outnumbered. What do you say we go one at time, just to be sporting?”
Ida slapped his chest and the thump echoed in the night. “You hear our side, okay?”
“Huh?”
His voice was so quiet, the sound of the breakers on the reef almost drowned it out. “We not gonna fuck you up. We ain’t gangsters like haole papers say. We just want you hear our side.”
Tentative relief trickled through me. “I, uh, don’t mind talkin’ to you boys—but isn’t there someplace a little less cozy…?”
“Yeah.” Ida nodded, smiled, and there was something unsettling about the smile. “I know a good place. We take you for a ride….”
To a guy from Chicago, that phrase had a certain unhappy resonance.
But I couldn’t see trying to make a break for it; at least one of these guys, brawny Ahakuelo, was a top athlete, a boxing champ and a star of the local variety of football, which was played barefoot. What were my odds of outrunning him?
Besides, I was feeling increasingly not in danger. Melodramatic as this stunt may have been, luring me by way of an Oriental siren to this weed patch in the boonies between Waikiki and Honolulu, this didn’t seem to be about harming me. Scaring me, yes. Harming me—maybe not….
Ida was gesturing around him. “This is where Massie woman say we bring her and screw her and beat on her.”
Henry Chang said bitterly, “You think I got to force a woman? You think Benny here gotta force a woman?”
What was I going to do, disagree?
“This doesn’t seem like too tough a town to get laid in,” I granted them.
“We can kill you,” Ida said. “We can beat shit outa you. But we ain’t gonna.” He turned to Takai. “Mack, get the car.”
The lean Japanese nodded and headed out of the clearing onto the blacktop.
Ida said, “You know what the cops do? When they not find my tire tracks here, they bring my car out and drive it around and make tracks. But they not get away with it.”
“I heard,” I said. “But I also heard you’ve got supporters in the department.”
Ida nodded and so did Ahakuelo; Chang was studying me with apparent hatred.
“Lemme tell you how far that help go,” Ida said. “That just means when some cop is doin’ things to frame us, another cop warn us.”
Nearby, an auto motor started up. In a few moments, headlights came slicing into the clearing as Takai pulled up and, leaving the engine running, hopped out of the tan Ford Phaeton, its top down.
“The infamous car,” I said.
“Come for ride,” Ida said.
Soon our little group had piled into the Phaeton, Takai, Chang, and Ahakuelo in back, Ida behind the wheel in front with me in the rider’s seat.
“We didn’t rape on that woman,” Ida said over the gentle rumble of the well-tuned Model A engine. We were tooling down Ala Moana smoothly, but for the occasional pothole.
“Why don’t you tell me about that night, Horace?”
“My friends call me Shorty,” he said.
So we were pals now?
“Fine, Shorty,” I said. I turned my head to look back at the three unfriendly faces in the backseat. “You guys call me Nate.”
Takai pointed to himself. “They call me Mack.” He pointed to dour Henry Chang. “He’s Eau.” It sounded like he was saying, “He’s you.” But I figured it out after a second.
Ahakuelo said, “Call me Benny.”
And I’ll be damned if he didn’t extend his hand. I reached around and shook with him. No similar offer came from the others.
“That Saturday night last September,” Ida said, “I was just fooling around. Go to Mochizuki Tea House, no action. Try a Filipino speak over in Tin Can Alley, run into Mack and Benny. Some beer, some talk.”
The lights of Honolulu were up ahead, and the nearly jungle-like area was thinning out. The ocean was visible at left, endless black glimmering gold, stretching to a purple starry sky overseen by a golden moon.
“Benny knew about a wedding luau we could crash,” Ida said.
Behind me Benny said, “We weren’t invited but the son of the host, Doc Correa, he’s a friend of mine.”
“We had beer, some roast pig. We run into Eau and Joe Kahahawai at the luau. Then things got kinda slow, and somebody say, how ’bout we go to dance at Waikiki Park?”
We were passing by a Hooverville, a city of shacks fashioned from flattened tin cans, scrap sheet metal, crates and boxes…nothing uniquely Hawaiian about this squatter’s town, except that it was oceanfront property.
“We get to dance at eleven-thirty. We don’t wanna pay for tickets ’cause we know at midnight, it pau, over. So we bum a couple ticket stubs off some friends who was leaving the dance, and Joe and Eau take the stubs and go in, I wait in parkin’ lot.”
Ahakuelo said, “Plenty of witnesses saw us in there.”
“Yeah,” David Chang said, “like that wahine you slapped on the ass.”
Takai laughed. “Glad he did! That way she remember him.”
Chang said bitterly, “She remembered you were drunk.”
“Kulikuli,” Ahakuelo snapped at Chang with a scowl.
The landscape along Ala Moana had a marshy look, now; I had a hunch I could find those mosquitoes here that had been driven out of Waikiki.
“It does sound like a lot of drinking was going on that night,” I said. “How much did you boys have?”
“Benny hit the oke a little hard,” Ida admitted. “Joe, too. Rest of us, couple beers. Joe and Eau run into Benny and Mack at dance, then after while, Joe come out to parking lot and pass off a ticket stub to me. I go inside a while, and he wait in lot.”
To the left were tiny wharves where small boats were tied, mostly fishing boats, distinctive low-slung sampans, with a few sleek yachts interspersed, looking as out of place as white tie and tails at a country hoedown.
“Midnight,” Ida said, “dance over, stand around lot talkin’ to people maybe five minutes—then we pile in the Ford and go back to the luau.”
“How long were you there?”
“Ten minutes maybe. Somebody was playing music in the house, but no action, it was pau. They was singing ‘Memories.’ They was outa beer. Benny wanna go home, he have football practice next day, so I drop him off and he head home, over on Frog Lane.”
The buildings of Honolulu up ahead, the ships and lights of the harbor over at left, were distinct before us now.
“You must’ve had that little fender-scraper with that white woman,” I said, “along about then.”
“I show you where it happen,” Ida nodded, turning to the right onto Sheridan Street, the first opportunity to turn onto any street in some time.