“Who says we’re going back?” he asked.
“I figured once Julie’s done with her degree, you guys would go home.”
He slurped up some noodle soup and then said, “She’s got three, maybe four years left on her PhD. By then, who knows where we’ll go? We might stay here.”
I nodded. When I transferred downtown from Waikiki I had spent six months working on my own. I figured it was because nobody wanted to work with the gay guy. Then Ray had walked in, refreshingly without prejudice, and once again I had a partner. We worked together well, and I was glad he was planning to stick around.
After lunch, we drove out to Kahala, where the pharmacist had been transferred, along with his assistant, who was also his wife. The pharmacy was a small chain, and he told us they were lucky that the owners were willing to accommodate them, transferring another clerk so he and his wife could continue to work together.
He was a skinny Filipino named Louis Cruz; his wife Lorna looked enough like him to be his sister. “I tried to get the old woman in charge to buy from us,” Lorna said. Louis stood behind the counter, Lorna in front. “But she said everything had to come from the owners.”
I could tell from the face Lorna made that she didn’t trust that at all. “I used to work near a clinic like that,” she said. “They were always running out of stuff-rubber gloves, ballpoint pens. They were good customers.”
“Can you describe this woman?” I asked.
“Old Chinese lady. I think her name was Norma. Looked about a hundred. Shorter than me.” Since Lorna herself was barely five feet tall, that made the old lady pretty small.
“There was another lady who worked there,” Louis said.
“Her,” Lorna snorted.
“A very attractive young woman. Chinese, too.” I could see he was hesitating, as if knowing too much about the attractive young woman would make his wife jealous. “I only spoke to her once or twice,” Louis continued. “In the parking lot.”
Lorna was glaring at Louis and I caught Ray’s eye. He nodded, and said, “Mrs. Cruz, could I talk to you for a minute? I’d like to see if you remember anything else about the elderly woman.”
They walked toward the front of the store, and Louis lowered his voice. “I think the woman’s name was Jewel, or Treasure, something like that,” he said. “I only spoke to her once or twice, but she was very friendly. Friendly enough that my wife was upset.”
“Can you describe this Jewel?”
“Tall. A little taller than me, in high heels. Black hair, always in one of those French braids. She wore those Chinese dresses, very tight. Silk, in bright colors.”
“Cheongsams?”
“That’s it. I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything more. That was a very busy location, and I never had time to talk to her.”
Louis Cruz was hiding something. If it turned out to be relevant to the case, we’d have to come back to him. If not, I would let him slide. We all have our closets, after all.
A DEADLY CLAUSE
On our way back to the station, I told Ray what Louis had told me, and he said, “Wife confirms what the cell phone girl said. Lots of customers, all men. Some of them came into the pharmacy afterward, and as she said, ‘They didn’t look like somebody had been sticking needles in them.’”
We both laughed. “What do you think was going on in that acupuncture clinic?” I asked. “My guess is not acupuncture.”
“Back in Philly, we had a case like this, in Chinatown. They were using a clinic as a cover for a gambling operation.” He pressed one knee up against the dashboard of my truck. “I got called there for a multiple homicide. I walked in, there was this big round table, six guys sitting around it. Every one of them shot. Blood and guts and brains everywhere.”
“That’s grim.” I’d seen a couple of those cases myself, the ones that were so gruesome you kept seeing them in your mind for months or years after. I took a breath and tried to focus back on our case. “You get a lot of men coming and going from a place like that. Like the cell phone girl and the pharmacist’s wife said.”
“Skanky guys, too,” Ray said.
“And the beautiful girl could be some kind of waitress. Like in Vegas.”
“You know anybody in Vice? Maybe they heard about this place.”
“I can ask,” I said. “But we can make a little detour to Chinatown ourselves.”
I continued Ewa toward Chinatown. In Honolulu, we don’t use directions like north, south, east, or west. Mauka means toward the mountains, makai toward the sea, and Diamond Head is in the direction of that extinct volcano. Ewa, which is in the other direction, is toward the city of the same name.
“Remember that bookie, Hang Sung?” I asked as we drove.
“Guy looked like a weasel?” Ray asked.
“That’s the one. If anybody knows about gambling in Chinatown, he does.”
I pulled up at a seedy building on River Street, next to Nu’uanu Stream. “Last I heard, Hang was hanging out here. Up on the second floor.”
Hang was on a cell phone when we pushed past his secretary into a small office that overlooked the street. “Gotta go,” he said into the phone, hanging it up quickly and slipping it into his pocket. “Detectives. What a nice surprise.”
“Talk to me about acupuncture, Hang,” I said, sitting down in a hard wooden chair across from his desk. Ray sat next to me.
“Acupuncture? Helped me quit smoking.”
“You ever hear of somebody using an acupuncture clinic as a cover for a card game?” I asked. “Dice, betting, that kind of thing?”
Hang gave me a half smile. “Why would I know of such a thing?”
I leaned back in my chair and put my feet up against Hang’s wooden desk. I had known Hang since I was a kid; he was a business acquaintance of my Uncle Chin, my father’s best friend. In his day, Uncle Chin had been a major figure in one of the Honolulu tongs, the Chinese gang operations. Growing up around his house, I’d met a whole lot of guys like Hang, never realizing their criminal connections until I’d joined the police force.
Of course, Hang knew that I knew who he was and what he did, but we went through this little dance every time we met. “You’re a wise man, Hang,” I said. “You know a lot of things, I’m sure. And if you knew anything about a gambling ring operating out of an acupuncture clinic in a shopping center on Waialae Avenue, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“The shopping center your father owns?”
“Owned. He sold it last year.”
Hang nodded. “I know the center. I know a little about the clinic. But there’s nothing I can tell you about gambling there.”
“Nothing you can tell us, or nothing you will tell us?” Ray asked.
“Your partner is a man of great discernment,” Hang said to me, smiling. “Let me rephrase myself. I do not know anything about gambling at that facility.”
I wasn’t satisfied, but it was clear we weren’t going to get anything more out of Hang Sung until we had something to bargain with. I figured a trip to Vice was still in order. I put my feet down on the ground, dusted off the place on Hang’s desk where they had rested, then stood up, Ray following me.
“See you around, Hang,” I said.
Our next appointment, the head of the karate studio, a short, wiry Japanese guy in his early thirties, was waiting to see us by the time we got back to the station. His name was Yuko Mori, and he wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt with the arms ripped off-the better to show off his muscles, I guessed.
It wasn’t hard to get him to talk about the acupuncture clinic. “I tried to make an appointment,” he said. “The dragon lady kept putting me off. No appointments, very busy. Every time I tried to talk to Treasure, the old grandma pushed me away.”
“Treasure?” I asked.
“Beautiful,” he said, making motions with his hands to indicate the girl’s measurements. “I like a tall girl. You know where she is now?”