That was something I didn’t want in the police department rumor mill.
WHAT NORMA KNOWS
Ray showed up at my apartment at six thirty Monday morning, too early to spring a visit on Norma Ching. “I’ve got something to talk about downstairs in Vice,” I said as we drove. “While I’m down there, I’ll see if they know anything about this clinic, or about Norma.”
Ray didn’t ask about my other business with Vice, and I didn’t volunteer any details. I had to see how things worked out first, and how much involvement I would have in Brian Izumigawa’s case.
While Ray parked, I went down to the B1 level, the first of two levels below ground. The photo lab, narcotics, and the special investigations section, where they do research on evidence, are also down there. It’s my favorite part of the building, and I’m always willing to hang around the labs and talk to the techs.
Lieutenant Kee’s secretary, Juanita Lum, is a heavyset, no-nonsense Filipina, with lustrous black hair and skin so smooth she could do soap ads. From her wedding picture, which sat in a heart-shaped frame on her desk, you could see she’d been a real looker when she was younger.
“Hey, Kimo, howzit?” she asked.
“Pretty good, Juanita. The lieutenant have a minute?”
“He’s on the phone. And then he’s got a meeting. But let me see if he can squeeze you in.”
She kept an eye on the red light on Kee’s line while she chatted with me and kept on typing some kind of report. The multitasking made my head spin, but it was all in a day’s work for Juanita. When she saw the light go off, she buzzed the lieutenant. “I’m busy, woman,” I heard him say through the intercom.
“And next week you’ll want something from Homicide,” Juanita said. “You scratch Kimo’s back, he’ll scratch yours. And your back itches a lot.”
“Fine, send him in.”
In the four years or so that he’d been in charge of Vice, Kee had been perpetually grumpy. He had a long, sad face like a Bassett hound, and brush-cut black hair going gray at the sideburns.
“Thanks for giving me a minute,” I said, walking into his office. “You hear about the arson homicide up in St. Louis Heights last Sunday?”
“Shopping center up on Waialae Avenue?” he asked. “What about it?”
“That address ever come up in your investigations? There was an acupuncture clinic there that sounds pretty shady, and they closed down and moved out a couple of days before the fire.”
“I’ve heard the address,” he said. “But I’ve been short handed since the last round of budget cuts. I haven’t had a chance to get anybody up there.”
“You know the name Norma Ching?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
I paused, and Kee said, “That all?”
I took a deep breath. “Nope.” I told him about Brian Izumigawa, how he’d contacted me, making it sound like he recognized my name from the media. I showed Kee the note Brian had been sent. “You get this dusted for prints?” he asked.
“He was cagey about what was going on. I didn’t realize it might be evidence until he’d already given it to me and I’d put my prints all over it. I can still get it tested, though.”
“Do it.” He looked at me. “What do you make of this?”
Inside, I breathed a little sigh of relief. There was no reason why Kee should recognize my naked back, but I was still glad that he didn’t. I told him my theory that the blackmailers were amateurs, and explained about Brian’s connection to Mr. Hu and the mansion in Black Point.
“He told you all this?” Kee asked.
“We met up yesterday afternoon and I got him to open up.”
“This needs some delicacy,” Kee said. “You want to run this? Keep it quiet that way.”
“If you want.” Good. There was little chance that the story would spread around the department if I was in charge.
“I’ll clear it with your boss. Get back in touch with this guy. Tell him not to do anything until they contact him again. In the meantime, see what you can run down on this Hu guy.”
I dropped the note off for fingerprint processing, taking a photocopy back upstairs with me, and filled Ray in on the case, leaving out my personal involvement. I checked the property records for the mansion in Black Point where Brian and I had been fixed up. It was owned by a corporation, of course. I put in another call to Ricky Koele.
“You’re turning into my new best friend,” he said. “Pretty soon we’ll be surfing together.”
“You get a lead on some good waves, you let me know.” I gave him the name of the corporation that owned the mansion, and a few minutes later he was back on the line.
“It’s a shell,” he said. “The stockholders are another corporation out of Hong Kong. Wah Shing Ltd.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?” I asked him.
“Hold on. Let me do a cross-reference search.”
He was back on the line a couple of minutes later. “You won’t believe it. Remember that acupuncture clinic you called me about last week? Golden Needles? Wah Shing was their corporate parent.”
“No shit? Or should I say no Shing?”
“Call if you need anything else,” Ricky said.
After I hung up, I sat there staring into space. It was too weird that this random trick and his blackmail case had somehow become connected to our arson homicide. A million things were running through my head, not the least of which was how I was going to come out of all this with my secrets intact.
I didn’t realize Ray had been talking to me until he was waving his hand in my face and saying, “Earth to Kimo.”
I told Ray about meeting Brian Izumigawa and the blackmail attempt. I showed him the picture, too, and he didn’t recognize me-though there was no reason why he should have. “You’re sure this isn’t just some random shot from a porn movie?”
“Very. But here’s the weird part. The same corporation was behind the lease on the acupuncture clinic and the house where this was taken.”
“Whoa. What do you think that means?”
I looked at Ray. I liked him, and we worked well together. We’d shared bits and pieces of our personal lives as we got to know each other better. I knew about the money problems he and Julie were having, the way they argued sometimes about them. He knew about my complicated history with Mike Riccardi. But this was bigger. It was time to see if I could trust my partner.
“Let’s head over to Norma’s,” I said. “I’ve got some stuff to tell you.”
As detectives, Ray and I can either use personal vehicles for police business, or sign out an unmarked Crown Vic from the Vehicle Maintenance Section. Call me fussy, but if I’m going to feel something sticky on the seat or the dash, I want to have a general idea what it is. If there’s a funny smell in the car, I want it to be one of my funny smells. And I don’t want to have to worry about whether the last guy to drive it did something that’s going to cause me a problem.
So I was reluctant to take a car out, and Ray was willing to drive us into Chinatown in Julie’s Mini Cooper. Which put us on the road in a vehicle that didn’t say, “We are the police. Fear us.” But it had to do in a pinch.
There were big, puffy clouds outside, and a restless wind shook the kukui trees along South Beretania Avenue as Ray drove us. “I told you about how I broke up with Mike, right? About a year ago? After that, I started getting into this web site called MenSayHi. com, a hookup site. Through it, I met this older guy, Chinese. I always called him Mr. Hu. He got off on choreographing these scenarios for me. He’d pair me up with guys, for whatever reason in his head, and then sometimes he’d watch, and sometimes he’d participate.”
“Did you meet him up at that house?” Ray asked. “The one where the blackmail guy went?”
“Yup.”
Ray looked over at me. “Shit. Is that you in the picture with him?”
“Yup.”
“And you complain about me and one-word answers.” Ray pulled the car over a couple of blocks from Norma’s. “Tell me the whole story.”