“I’m not letting him out of my sight,” Tatiana said.
Frank turned his attention to Haoa. “You have a list of the employees you think don’t have proper working papers?” he asked.
Haoa nodded. “Six of them. All Chinese.”
“I want you to talk to each one of them, Kimo,” Frank said. “See if you can get anything out of them.”
“You’re going to need an interpreter,” Sergei said. “Most of these guys don’t speak more English than good morning, yes sir, and paycheck.”
“I’ll try, but it takes a couple of days to line up an interpreter,” I said.
“We don’t have a couple of days,” Frank said. “As soon as these guys get the idea that something’s up, they’ll be in the wind.”
“Aunt Mei-Mei speaks Cantonese,” Haoa said. “You could ask her.”
“And Harry speaks pretty decent Mandarin,” I said. “You round up the guys and bring them to the station. I’ll get Harry and Aunt Mei-Mei.”
Haoa, Tatiana, and Sergei left, and Frank said, “Before I let you out of here, I want to hear about your case.”
“It’s complicated,” I said.
Frank sat back in his rolling armchair. “I may be a federal agent but I can do complicated.”
I started with the arson and the prostitution, and finished up with the blackmail attempt on Brian Izumigawa. “It looks like this guy Stan may be involved somehow. We’re not sure yet.”
“Federal trumps local, you know,” Frank said. “I don’t want you to do anything on your case that might mess up mine.”
I wasn’t going to get into a pissing contest with the guy, because I knew I’d lose. “You’ve got it, boss,” I said.
INTERVIEWING THE ILLEGALS
The demonstration was still going on, and I recognized a guy I’d gone to Punahou with, as well as a couple of mokes, or local criminals, that I’d arrested a time or two. I nodded and smiled at everybody. Including my mother.
She was wearing a formal muumuu in a Hawaiian quilt pattern and carrying a sign that read Protect My Islands for My Grandchildren. It wasn’t a surprise to see her there; both she and my father are half-Hawaiian, and they’d brought us up to value that part of our heritage. I knew she’d been volunteering with Kingdom of Hawai’i; she said she wanted to make sure that native culture and traditions were maintained.
I stopped to kiss her hello. Ray hung back until I motioned him over. He and I had been working together for over a year by then, and he’d met my parents a couple of times.
“We just met your other son upstairs,” he said. I glared at him, and from the way he pursed his lips I figured he’d realized it wasn’t the right thing to say.
“Which son? Lui?”
“Haoa,” I said. “Oh, look, there he is.” I waved over Haoa, Tatiana, and Sergei. “Gotta go, Mom. Try to stay out of trouble.”
“Your mom some kind of civic activist?” Ray asked, as we hurried away.
“Long story. Goes back to 1892 and the U.S. taking down the monarchy.”
“Sounds like it’ll have to wait.”
When we got to the Wrangler, he said, “When we get back to the station, you ought to match up the pictures on the site to the list of names,” Ray said. “I’m gay friendly and all, but…”
“No problem. I’ll do that. Why don’t you check in with Treasure?”
The time ticked by. It was a lot less fun than you’d think, looking over all the picture sets and trying to figure out who was the target and who else was involved. Lucas was in many of the shots, but there were also a lot of unnamed guys. Some looked Chinese, some Filipino, a couple Indonesian. Whether they were hookers or escorts or illegal immigrants was impossible to tell.
The only common denominator was that they were all male. Some displayed fetishes-diapers, urine, and kinky toys. Others were just vanilla sex. My shots, from the rear, were among the most ordinary.
Ray spoke to Treasure, and she admitted knowing Stan LoCicero. She said she thought Stan was creepy. Unfortunately, creepy was not against the law in Hawai’i.
I called Mike and brought him up to speed. “Stan sounds like a good candidate for the arsons,” he said. “We can get a warrant for his house if you get something useful on that tape.”
After scouring the Internet and police records, I found decent head shots of Richard Hu and Stan LoCicero, and put together a pair of photo arrays of guys who looked similar to them.
At three o’clock, Haoa and his superintendent, Naleo, showed up with a half-dozen Chinese men. Naleo was a Hawaiian bodybuilder, mid to late twenties, with some kind of inscription tattooed on his neck. He wore the Kanapa’aka Landscaping polo shirt, which clung to him in places that made me miss Mike Riccardi. He didn’t look happy to be in a police station, but maybe he was just nervous he’d get implicated in something.
Harry brought Aunt Mei-Mei, who had dressed up for the occasion in a bright blue pants suit with a blue-and-white striped blouse. She looked like she was going out for a ladies’ lunch with my mother. Maybe they’d meet up after my mother was done protesting outside the federal building.
Naleo brought the men into our conference room one by one. The first guy, Long, was tall and good-looking, with a shaved head and a big chest. I was pretty sure I recognized him from a couple of the pictures. He spoke a dialect that only Aunt Mei-Mei could comprehend. “Too bad Norma not here,” she said to me. “She speak like him.”
Long knew he was going back to China, and he wasn’t happy. There wasn’t much I could offer him without Frank O’Connor’s approval, so I brought my laptop in and logged onto the MenSayHi Web site.
It took me a few minutes to find the right pictures. Long, naked, stood over a nude haole man in a bathtub, a stream of urine flowing out of his fat dick, which was certainly long. The picture had been taken from the side, showing Long in profile, the haole full face. I’d identified him as an attorney with a prominent law firm that handled corporate litigation.
“Is this you?” I asked, showing Long the image on the laptop.
His face gave him away, though he didn’t say anything.
“Too bad,” I said. “If this was you, we might be able to help you.”
Aunt Mei-Mei didn’t see the picture, but I knew she had an idea what was going on. She translated, and Long looked interested.
“See, we want to get the guy who hired the men in these pictures,” I said. “If you help us arrest him we can’t send you back to China, at least not until after the trial is over. And after that, who knows?”
I could see the emotions warring in Long’s face. He didn’t want to admit that it was him in the photo. Maybe he was ashamed, or maybe he knew what he’d done was illegal. But he was smart enough to realize that this might be his ticket to stay in the U.S.
He said something in his guttural dialect, which Aunt Mei-Mei translated. “He says yes, this is him.”
In bits and pieces, we learned his story. He had been recruited in Gansu. He did not like having sex with men, but he needed money for his wife and family back in China. He had worked at the massage parlor in Waikele for about six months, and then at a series of manual jobs.
I showed him the array of photos that included Stan LoCicero. He didn’t recognize anyone. Then I showed him the array with Richard Hu, and Long said Mr. Hu had picked him up at the airport-he was the man who had brought him to the massage parlor. Long was very excited, chattering on so fast that Aunt Mei-Mei had to stop him several times so she could catch up.
It was good news for Frank O’Connor, but not for us, because Long couldn’t implicate Stan LoCicero in anything. I stopped the tape, thanked Long, and then turned him over to a federal marshal, who would see that he didn’t disappear until his role in Mr. Hu’s case was over and his immigration status resolved.
Harry translated for four of the remaining five, Aunt Mei-Mei the last. They all told variations of the same story and could only implicate Mr. Hu, not Stan. After the marshals had taken away all six, Harry said, “I have some stuff for you on Stan LoCicero. You got a computer I can hook up to?”