Mike scooted his chair around next to me and looked on as I logged on to the department’s intranet and searched for the right files. Being so close to Mike unleashed a wave of pure longing, followed by sadness. I had loved him, and I’d been devastated to find out that he’d cheated on me, thinking at the time that it meant he hadn’t loved me the way I’d loved him. I’d over-reacted-but if we hadn’t broken up over that incident, something else would have happened to tear us apart.
Mike still wore the same lemon-scented cologne, and I wondered if he’d reapplied it in his truck while waiting for me to pull up. What did he want from me? Why couldn’t this meeting have waited until the next morning, and included Ray?
I multitasked-talking to Mike, searching the files, and at the same time considering Mike’s motives. I’m no computer geek; I leave that to Harry Ho. It took me a lot of searching, because I wasn’t giving it my full attention, to pull up the reports from Tommy Pang’s murder.
It wasn’t an investigation I was happy to recall, since it was the one that had dragged me out of the closet two years before. But I found Norma Ching’s name in one of our reports. “You think this might be the same old woman?” Mike asked.
“Worth checking,” I said. A few minutes later, I’d run out of options. There was no listing for Norma in the phone book, or in Yahoo’s people search, and she had no criminal record.
Tommy Pang, who had owned the lingerie shop, was my Uncle Chin’s illegitimate son. Would his widow, my Aunt Mei-Mei, have known Norma? I looked at my watch. It was dinnertime, and I knew if I showed up at her house she’d ply me with delicious food. Mike, too, if he was along for the ride.
“Want to take a trip up to St. Louis Heights with me?” I asked.
On the way to Aunt Mei-Mei’s house, I reminded Mike of my relationship with her and Uncle Chin. “This is the guy whose wake was going on when we were fighting that fire in Wa’ahila State Park?” he asked.
“Yup. You met her there, or maybe at my parents’ house.”
Mike had come over for dinner a couple of times, and was being gradually absorbed into the Kanapa’aka clan when we’d broken up. Both of us were quiet, probably thinking the same things, when I pulled into Aunt Mei-Mei’s driveway.
She came to the door in a flowered dress, with a white apron over it. From inside, I could smell something delicious cooking. “Kimo! You just in time for dinner,” she said. “Jimmy on his way from college with bunch of friends.”
A year and a half before, just before Uncle Chin’s death, they had taken in Jimmy Ah Wong, a gay teenager whose father had kicked him out. Since then, he had completed his GED and been admitted to the University of Hawai’i, where he’d started as a freshman a few months before.
“Do you remember Mike?” I asked Aunt Mei-Mei. “He’s a fire inspector, and we’re working on a case together-the fire at the center my dad used to own. We wanted to ask you a question.”
It was strange to introduce Mike that way, without mentioning all that had gone between us. But if Aunt Mei-Mei was surprised to see Mike, she didn’t mention it. “You ask while you eat.” She hugged us both, then led us into the dining room, which had been set for a crowd. “Always room for more. Sit.”
She brought out a platter of tiny dumplings, delicately fried, and sat with us as we ate. “What you want to ask?”
“You know a woman named Norma Ching?”
Aunt Mei-Mei’s face darkened. “What you want with Norma?”
“I think she might have been working at an acupuncture clinic in the center.”
Aunt Mei-Mei laughed, exposing a row of tiny white teeth. “Acupuncture,” she said, and it was good to see her smile. She hadn’t done enough of that since Uncle Chin’s death. “No acupuncture if Norma there.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” I said.
“Do you know how to get in touch with her?” Mike asked. “These dumplings are amazing, by the way.”
I’d been so busy eating I hadn’t stopped to tell Aunt Mei-Mei how good they were, but I did.
She waved her hand. “Just dumplings. Lots more food in kitchen. Jimmy’s friends, they always hungry.”
“Norma Ching,” I said.
“I no want to talk about Norma,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “You eat.”
I was about to protest, but a car pulled up in the driveway, with the sound of loud music and laughter. Aunt Mei-Mei’s face broke into a smile again, and she hurried to the door. “You okay to stay?” I asked Mike.
“If the rest of the food’s as good as this, I’ll move in.”
Jimmy’s friends were all guys from his dorm, mostly straight, as far as I could tell, and as Aunt Mei-Mei had said, they were all hungry. We ate honey chicken, white rice, wonton soup, more dumplings, spare ribs-the woman must have been cooking all day to generate so much food.
The guys were all curious about being a cop and a fireman, and we carried on rapid-fire discussions, even as Norma Ching kept percolating in the back of my mind. One of the guys said, “Man, you guys must get a lot of babes in your jobs.”
I looked at Mike, and he looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. Jimmy laughed, too, then looked at his friend and said, “Dude, can’t you tell? They’re both gay. They used to be boyfriends.”
My heart did a flip-flop and I stole a glance at Mike. He was intent on eating.
The guys didn’t seem to care, just kept peppering us with questions. It was almost nine before we finished.
The boys left first, after lots of compliments to Aunt Mei-Mei, and kisses and hugs from her. “The poor woman’s going to spend the next two days cleaning up,” Mike whispered to me as we watched them pile into somebody’s old Chrysler LeBaron convertible, a rental car reject from the 1980s.
They turned up the car’s meager stereo and backed away, heading downhill to the tune of some Jawaiian reggae. “The future of America,” Mike said, as we walked back to the kitchen, where Aunt Mei-Mei had begun loading the dishwasher.
“Let us help you,” I said.
“No, no, you go,” Aunt Mei-Mei said.
“About Norma Ching,” I began, but Aunt Mei-Mei held up a tiny hand with pink lacquered fingernails.
“I have to ask for address for you,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “Someone tell me.”
We had to be content with that. But there was something else there, and I knew I couldn’t let it loose. When we were back in my truck, I picked up my cell phone and dialed my parents’ number.
My dad answered. “Hey, Tutu Al,” I said. “Howzit?”
“I’m not your tutu, boy.” He was grumpy, which probably meant my mom was watching his diet. “You can call me Dad.”
I laughed and said, “I’m driving, Dad, so I’m putting you on speaker. You ever hear of a woman named Norma Ching?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone, and for a minute I worried he really was angry that I’d called him grandpa. “What do you want with Norma?”
“Why does everybody ask me that? Aunt Mei-Mei said the same thing.”
“You asked Mei-Mei about Norma? Are you stupid?”
“Hold on, Dad. I’m missing something here.”
He sighed. “Your Uncle Chin was a good man, but he had many weaknesses. Pretty women were one of them.”
I remembered meeting Norma. “Dad, she’s an old woman.”
Mike poked me in the side and I looked across at him.
“She used to be one of the most beautiful women in Honolulu.” There was a wistfulness in my father’s voice that made me wonder a little. “She had Chin at the tips of her fingers. He bought her the apartment in Chinatown where she lives.”
I’d always heard rumors that Uncle Chin was a womanizer, but in the past my father had been cagey when I asked him. I knew that Tommy Pang was Chin’s manuahi, or illegitimate son, from a woman in Hong Kong, but I never paid much attention to any women he might have had after that.
“You know where that apartment is? Aunt Mei-Mei said she didn’t know the address, though she was going to try to find it for me.”