“I haven’t made myself a poster child. I accepted the responsibility that comes with who I am and what I do. But that isn’t why Mike and I broke up.”
He waved his hand. “This is all old news, isn’t it, detective? Is that why you came here today? To ‘out’ my son to me?”
“Not at all.” I took a deep breath. “Mike and I are working together on a case again, and Monday morning I picked up a water bottle he’d been drinking from-just to take a sip myself. It wasn’t water.”
Dr. Riccardi’s brows closed together and he sighed again. “I was afraid something like this would happen. Seeing you has driven him to drink again. Why can’t you just leave my son alone?”
At that point I’d had enough of Dr. Riccardi’s attitude, and I stood up to leave. “I guarantee you, Dr. Riccardi, I didn’t want to come down here and speak to you. But I didn’t know who else to tell, and I do care about Mike and want to make sure he gets some help.” I took a deep breath. “But if you want to know the truth about why we broke up, it’s in your records here. Patient number 1423.”
I shouldn’t have said anything, and as I drove back to Waikiki I felt lousy. Not only had I told Mike’s dad that Mike was a drunk-I’d branded him as a careless slut as well. From the little I knew of Mike’s relationship with his parents, I could imagine his father’s icy stare, the disappointment radiating from him. I remembered Mike telling me that every time he got sick as a kid, his father took it as a personal affront. “How does it look when a doctor’s son is so careless about the flu,” I remembered Mike repeating to me.
How much worse would it be when it wasn’t the flu Dr. Riccardi was complaining about, but gonorrhea. Especially when he and Mike’s mom volunteered at the safe sex clinic.
It was after eight by the time I got home. I picked up a mystery novel I’d been reading, one of Charles Knief’s Honolulu private eye books, but I couldn’t concentrate. I got online and started making lists of homeless shelters and places that helped teenagers that Ray and I could check out the next day.
Around eleven I looked at the clock, yawned, and stripped down for bed. I’d just turned out the lights when somebody started pounding on my front door. “Jesus, hold on,” I said, jumping up and fumbling around in the dark for a pair of shorts. I looked through the peephole and saw Mike Riccardi there.
“You know what time it is?” I said, when I opened the door. “You’re gonna wake up the whole neighborhood.”
“You had to go and do it,” he said, slurring his words and pushing past me. I closed the door and turned around to look at him. “You had to tell my parents.”
“I was worried about you.”
“Fuck you, Kimo. You were pissed.” A wave of alcohol fumes washed over me. Mike was pissed, too-in more than one sense of the word. He was angry, and he was drunk. “Jesus, Mike, take a look at yourself. You’re drinking vodka out of a water bottle at eight o’clock in the morning. You don’t think that’s a problem?”
“What I do is my business. I’m maintaining.” He wavered a little on his feet, and I was worried he’d fall over on me.
“Yeah, and the first time somebody from the fire department catches you, you’re out on your ass.” I poked him in the chest and pushed him back. “Take a look at yourself, pal. How much have you had to drink?”
“None of your fucking business,” he said, and he burped.
I shook my head. “I couldn’t just walk away and pretend I didn’t see what I saw. I had to tell somebody, and the only person I could trust was your dad.”
Mike’s eyes glazed over, and suddenly he threw up-all over himself and the tile floor in front of my refrigerator. He looked at me and then he just collapsed. I caught him, getting his vomit all over me and my shorts, and he passed out.
I figured it was my penance. I stripped him, sponged him off, and laid him down on my bed. It was a level of intimacy we’d never shared when we were dating; we’d both been pretty self-sufficient, and the only times we’d undressed each other had been as a prelude to sex. But there was something sweet about the intimacy, despite the stink of vomit.
He started snoring as soon as his head hit the pillow. I cleaned myself up, scrubbed the tile floor, then took his dirty clothes and my shorts downstairs to the washing machine on the first floor of the building. There was a comfy chair there, and I sat there and read my book and dozed while the clothes washed and then dried.
It was almost two o’clock when I went back upstairs. Mike was still asleep, still snoring, spread-eagled on my bed. I grabbed an extra pillow and lay down on the sofa. I was asleep myself within a few minutes, despite the noise emanating from the other side of the Japanese screen.
It was just after daylight when I woke up to see Mike, naked, standing at the foot of the sofa. “What happened to my clothes?” he demanded.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said, yawning.
His body looked good-better than good, actually. Muscular forearms dusted with black hair. A broad chest that narrowed to his waist, meaty calves, and a half-hard dick that I remembered well. “What happened last night?”
“You showed up at my door drunk off your ass,” I said, sitting up. I pulled the comforter over my crotch so he wouldn’t see that I was hard just from looking at him. “You threw up all over yourself, me, and my floor. Then you passed out. I washed your clothes for you-they’re over there.”
I pointed toward the front door.
“For real?” he asked.
“For real. You don’t remember?”
He shook his head. “I guess I am fucked up.”
“Guess so.”
I watched as he pulled on his clothes. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he was getting ready to leave.
“Me, too,” I said. “For everything.”
THE FIREMAN OR THE TIGER
On Friday, Ray and I went around to homeless shelters and showed pictures of Jingtao, without making any connections. I was glad we had Saturday and Sunday off; maybe something would break over the weekend.
Ray was doing special duty both days-security for a gun show at the Blaisdell Center-so he was fine with an easy Friday. Me, I was bored and antsy, trying not to think about Mike, or about my dinner that night with Haoa, Tatiana, and Sergei.
Sergei, like his sister, was tall, sturdy, and blond. He’d bummed around a bunch of jobs in Alaska-working the pipeline, cooking at a diner, helping train dogs for the Iditarod. It didn’t sound like we had anything in common except being gay. Not the kind of fix up I was looking forward to.
I arrived at my brother’s house just before seven. My truck was making some unhappy noises on the steep, twisting climb up into St. Louis Heights, and I thought that I’d have to make an appointment to take it in for what would turn out to be some very expensive repair.
Most of the houses in the neighborhood had no yards to speak of, front or back, but Haoa’s was on a wedge-shaped corner lot. Walking into his backyard is like entering a tropical exhibit at a botanical garden. Combine my brother’s intuitive feel for plants and flowers with Tatiana’s artistic sensibility, and you get a lush landscape full of short and tall palms; spiky red and orange heliconia; the five-petaled plumeria with orange centers and a frosting of white at the edge; dark red anthurium; and single, double, and triple hibiscus in red, pink, purple, and white. The sensory overload is amazing-from the bright colors of the flowers, to the glossy green leaves, to the scent of the tuberose. It’s like being draped in a full-body lei.
I’d met Sergei before and liked him. Maybe it was a physical thing; I prefer my men big and beefy, and he had that in spades-six two, broad-shouldered, with thighs like tree trunks. He had tribal tattoos around both biceps, which bulged out of his short-sleeved aloha shirt. He wore long board shorts and rubber slippas, and his hair was the same honey blond as Tatiana’s and nearly as long.