We walked off to a bench in the shade of a big kukui tree. I saw Ray leaning up against a palm across from us, watching, and I said, “I remember you. You didn’t give me your name then, either.”
“My situation is difficult. My wife doesn’t know what I do. Her father is paying my law school tuition, and he will cut me off and force my wife to divorce me if he ever finds out.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “I thought this was about the fire?”
He frowned. “I was here at the library Sunday night. Studying. I got a text from a man I had met on MenSayHi. He was working late, had the whole office to himself. Wanted me to come over.”
“Office on Waialae Avenue?” I asked.
“Across from that shopping center that burned. We finished, like maybe ten o’clock, and I walked out to my car.”
“Where was your car parked? In the lot in front of the office building?”
The guy shook his head. “I was afraid someone might see my car. So I parked around the corner, on that side street that dead-ends into Waialae Avenue.”
I pictured it in my head. “Facing toward the street, and the shopping center?”
He nodded. “I sat in the car for a while, thinking. I knew that what I had been doing was wrong, and that I needed to stop.” His mouth set into a frown and his brows came together. His palms were sweating and he wiped them on his pants.
I knew the feeling. I’d had it myself, more than a few times. It wasn’t until I’d come out of the closet that those feelings of shame began to fade away.
“After a while I knew I couldn’t just sit there forever, and I was about to leave. I saw this guy, like a ninja or something, all dressed in black, come running out from behind the shopping center. From where I was parked, I couldn’t see where he went, but about a minute later, a dark sedan came zooming across the parking lot, turned onto Waialae Avenue, and drove off.”
A group of students passed us, laughing and fooling around. One of the guys was shirtless and buff, and I watched my caller’s eyes track him as he passed. I could see beads of sweat pooling on his forehead. “Just then my cell phone rang, and I saw that it was my wife. She wanted to know when I was coming home.”
He wiped his forehead. “I told her that I was just leaving the campus. She wanted me to stop at the ABC Store near our apartment and get some milk for the morning. We talked for a couple of minutes, and I was so scared that she knew I wasn’t at the library at all.”
A gray cloud passed overhead, heavy with rain, throwing us into shadow. “When I hung up the phone, I turned the car on and rolled down the windows. As I drove away, I smelled smoke and realized it was coming up from behind the center, and I called 911.”
“That was pretty good of you,” I said. “Considering the circumstances.”
“I’m not a bad person. I believe in the law.” He paused. “I saw you on TV, and I thought I could trust you. That you’d understand.”
A cool breeze swept past us, rustling the dead leaves under the kukui tree. “I do. I understand. Tell me about this ninja. Man or woman?”
“Definitely a man. I saw the way he ran.”
“Height? Weight?”
He shrugged. “Too far away to see much. Maybe a little on the chunky side, average height, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention.”
“How about the car. Did you notice anything about the car as it drove away?”
“Fancy sedan,” he said. “BMW or Mercedes. I have to drive a piece of crap Toyota. I tell you, as soon as I pass the bar I’m leasing one of those nice cars.”
“Color?”
“Dark blue,” he said. “With a white interior.”
“You saw that in the dark?”
“Oh, the ninja’s car. I thought you were asking about the car I want.”
I wanted to bop the guy on the head. He was cheating on his wife, and maybe he’d married her just so that her father would put him through law school. But he thought he was honest and righteous because he’d called me. I did understand the pressure he was under, though, so I cut him a little slack.
“The ninja’s car,” I said patiently. “Notice anything about it? The color?”
He shook his head. “Dark color, that’s all I saw.”
I pulled out a business card and scrawled my personal cell on the back. “If you think of anything more, please call me,” I said.
“You don’t need to know my name?” The relief was evident on his face.
“I appreciate your call, and the information you’ve given me,” I said. “But I have your e-mail address if I need to get in touch with you. I don’t want to know your name because I don’t want it to get into any paperwork.”
“Thank you.” It felt as though he wanted to hug me, but it was a public place-and after all, we’d done a lot more than hug the one time we’d hooked up. He settled for shaking my hand once again.
I watched him leave, and Ray came over to me. I told him what I’d learned. “Ninja, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. A ninja in a fancy sedan.”
“Arson pays well,” Ray said.
“Better than police work,” I said.
FINALISTS FOR MISS CHINATOWN
Ray hung around UH to wait for Julie, and I walked to my truck. On my way, Mike called my cell. “I’ve got a lead,” he said. “You going to be home tonight?”
“I’m on my way there now,” I said, then regretted it. I was having enough trouble dealing with Mike on neutral ground, with others present. What was I doing inviting him over? And what was he doing asking?
It was just after five, the height of rush hour, and the sun was setting. The streets were alive with neon and with car stereos blasting hip-hop as the tropical night descended rapidly. The air was hot and humid, without a hint of a trade wind. The slow traffic and intermittent showers made me edgy, combined with the sense that our case wasn’t moving forward either. Or maybe it was just knowing that I was going to see Mike.
When I pulled into my parking space, he was sitting in his truck on the street, the same one with the flames painted on the side that he’d been driving when we dated. “I had an idea,” he said, getting out of the truck and walking toward me. “I cross-referenced a bunch of unsolved arsons, and I think I found a pattern.”
He showed me a list of ten arsons over the past two years, but the sun was setting and it was too dark to see clearly, so I led him upstairs to my apartment. Fortunately, I’d cleaned up on Sunday so most of the clothes and sports equipment were put away, and there were no crusty dishes in the sink or dirty underwear on the floor to embarrass me.
He sat down at my kitchen table, and I got us a pair of Longboard Lagers from the fridge-only realizing as I popped the caps that if Mike was an alcoholic, based on that vodka in his water bottle, it was a bad idea to give him a beer.
He accepted the bottle gratefully and took a deep swig. “Long day,” he said.
I sat across from him and looked at the list. The other fires had been at a massage parlor in Waikele, a quick mart in Kaneohe, a coffee shop near the airport, a Christian religious shop downtown, and a lingerie shop in Chinatown. “They were all places where the business closed down before the fire,” Mike said. “I want to see if there’s anything else that connects them. Business licenses, phone numbers, that kind of thing. You have any ideas?”
There was something familiar about that lingerie shop, and I struggled to make the connection. Then it hit me. “I know this shop.”
Mike looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “My old partner from Waikiki, Akoni, and I went there when we were investigating Tommy Pang’s murder. Tommy owned the place. I wonder if any of these others were owned by tong guys.”
“Can you run them by your Organized Crime unit tomorrow?”
“I will.” Something was tickling around the edge of my brain. “The pharmacist’s wife told me that she thought the old Chinese woman at the clinic was named Norma. And at this lingerie shop, there was another old Chinese woman named Norma.” I reached over to the sofa, picked up my laptop, and brought it to the table, where I turned it on. “If I can pull up the report online, maybe I can find her last name, and we’ll see if we can connect her to both places.”