He looked at me, his eyes wide like a child’s, his mouth set in a straight line beneath his mustache. I sighed. “I still have major hots for you. But there’s a part of me that’s pissed off, too, and doesn’t know if I can trust you. Especially not…” I waved my hand around his house. “I mean, you’re kind of a loser now.”
“Man, you know how to dish out the tough love,” Mike said, but the ends of his lips snuck upward into a smile. He was quiet for a minute, then said, “So where do we go from here?”
I looked around the living room. “I am absolutely not going to start up with you again until you get your shit together,” I said, and I knew I was saying that as much for my own benefit as his. “But it took my brothers and Harry to give me a hand to get over my own problems. Maybe I can do the same for you.”
“I’m up for it.”
“Are you?” I stood up. “Let’s get started, then. First thing, pick up your dirty clothes and run a load of wash. I’ll help you clean up this place.”
He smiled. “I wish I had one of those French maid costumes you could wear.”
“Don’t fuck with me, brah. I’m serious here. And you’ve got to go to a meeting or something.”
“A meeting?”
“AA. Face it, Mike, you’ve got a problem with alcohol. You’re not going to get over it on your own.”
“I can stop drinking. Right now.”
I just looked at him, resisting the urge to cross my arms. Finally, he said, “I’ll go to a meeting.”
“You got recycling?” I stood and picked up the pile of papers.
“Bin’s in the kitchen.” He stood up, too, and began collecting the dirty clothes.
It felt like we’d already ventured too far into emotional territory, so I said, “We’re stalled on the arson homicide. Ray and I have been focusing on identifying the kid who died. We handed the sketch out to all the beat cops, and we canvassed the stores and offices in the area. It’s like he was hiding under a rock or something.”
“I checked out all those other clinics you gave me,” Mike said, as he put a load of clothes in the washing machine. “No suspicious fires at any of them.”
We worked together for nearly two hours, sometimes in silence, sometimes tossing ideas around. “Any leads on the arsonist?” I asked, as I scrubbed caked food off the dishes in the sink and loaded the dishwasher.
He shook his head. “Whoever he is, the guy’s a pro. There wasn’t much evidence beyond what we found that morning. I’ve been looking for other cases using the same MO but I haven’t found any that fit.”
He took the vacuum from a cabinet and dragged it to his bedroom. As he ran it there, in the hall, and the living room, I mopped the kitchen floor.
“We’ve looked at the boy, and we’ve looked at the arsonist, and we’re looking at gambling,” I said, as I helped him make his bed with fresh sheets, though I knew I wasn’t getting in it myself, at least not for a while. “What aren’t we looking at?”
“The owners of the center have no motive. None of the other tenants do, either,” he said, tucking in the sheet at the foot of the bed. For a minute, I thought about what it would be like to be nestled under those sheets with Mike.
“If I can get a line on Norma Ching from my aunt, that’ll give us a new direction.”
“We could use one of those.” He laid a pair of decorative pillows at the head of the bed, then stood back, looking satisfied. We walked back out to the living room, where Mike lit a vanilla candle someone had given him, and between it and the furniture polish and the kitchen cleanser, the house started to smell better. “You never did tell me what you came over here for,” he said.
I collapsed on the sofa. “My truck wouldn’t start.” I told him about lunch with Arleen and Harry and seeing their new house.
“So they’ll be my neighbors.” He looked over at me. “You think you’ll be coming by to visit them now and then?”
“I might. I might have other reasons to come up here, too. You never know.”
“You want me to drive you home?” he asked.
“That’d be cool. But I’ve got to call the tow truck first.”
I called and arranged to meet the truck down in front of Arleen and Harry’s new house. We walked out to his truck and Mike said, “My parents are still out. My dad’s going to freak when he sees how clean my house is.”
“I thought your dad didn’t freak,” I said.
“He doesn’t appear to. But I’m an expert at knowing what to look for.”
We hung out and talked while we waited for the tow truck to arrive, and for a few minutes I forgot all that had happened over the past year. I remembered how much I’d enjoyed just being with Mike, and wondered if we’d ever get over our problems. I still wasn’t sure of the future, but I felt better that he was starting to get his act together.
After the tow left, Mike drove me down to Waikiki. “Hey, did you forget?” I asked, as we passed Lili’uokalani Street. “That was my turn.”
“I wanted to check something out first,” he said. He cruised another couple of blocks down Kalakaua to the big A-frame church. He slowed down and peered out at the big sign out front. “Thought so,” he said. “I’m on time.”
As he turned I saw the sign myself. The AA meeting was about to start. “I can run you back home, if you want.”
“I can walk from here.” He nodded and pulled into a parking spot. “Maybe we’ll get together Monday, compare notes?” I asked, as I got out of the truck.
“It’s a date.”
MEMORIES OF A CASUAL ENCOUNTER
Sunday morning I slept late, made raspberry chocolate chip pancakes, and tried to recharge my batteries for the week ahead. Late in the afternoon, Aunt Mei-Mei called to give me Norma Ching’s address and phone number.
“She no happy,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “Norma. I no talk to her myself, you know, not since very long time. But my friend say Norma mad about something.”
That was good, I thought. Angry people often made the best sources of information, because they had scores to settle.
“Thanks, Aunt Mei-Mei. You doing okay?”
“Ai ya, very busy. Jimmy and his friends come again tonight. Lot of food to cook!”
“You’re not running a restaurant there, Auntie. Don’t you let Jimmy take advantage of you.”
She laughed and her voice sounded like a young woman’s. “Jimmy nice boy.”
I called Ray and told him that I had an address for Norma Ching-but that my truck was in the shop. “I’ll drive Julie up to UH first thing tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll swing past your place, pick you up, and we’ll go see this woman.”
An hour later, I got a text message on my cell phone. Thinking it was from Mike, I bounded over to the phone. Instead, though, it was from a number I didn’t recognize. It read “Know u from house in Black Pt. Need ur help. Meet me?”
Alarm bells started to go off in my head. When I’d been at my lowest, emotionally, I’d met a man I only knew as Mr. Hu. He owned a house in Black Point, a very fancy neighborhood just outside Waikiki where I’d gone many times. He had arranged various sexual escapades for me, sometimes with him, but sometimes with other guys. If this guy had met me through Mr. Hu, was he trying to hold that over me? Or had he been on the same kind of desperate dive I’d been on, and gotten himself into deeper trouble?
I texted back, asking him who he was and what he wanted. He didn’t want to tell me, though, and for a minute I wondered if he was just being coy about a hookup. I didn’t want to mess around with a casual trick, though, because my head was so caught up in considering getting back together with Mike.
But after a couple of messages back and forth it seemed that he needed police help rather than a quick blow job, and I agreed to meet him at the Kope Bean at the Royal Hawaiian shopping center, which was only a few blocks from my apartment. He assured me that I’d recognize him.