Shimura Trouble

31

I KNEW ENOUGH not to show myself-too much was at risk. I remembered Braden’s words about dying if he snitched. And now I felt anger build in me, as I remembered what Kainoa had said, and how he’d effortlessly gathered intelligence on my family’s futile quest. Everything was starting to fall into place: Kainoa’s mention of a sideline construction operation, and the nervousness he had shown about Albert Rivera, who must have seen him on Pierce lands before and suspected something.

It took Kainoa almost half an hour to carry the rocks he needed out of the house, and the worst part about waiting was knowing that I could have been recording it all with the camcorder, if Courtney didn’t have that with her down by the shore. Don’t show yourselves, I prayed silently to her and Uncle Yosh, who surely must have been wondering what was happening, for such a long time.

Finally, Kainoa’s heavy breathing and grunting stopped, and I heard a tarpaulin being whisked over the payload. The truck drove off, slower than it had come, no doubt because of the weight. When the truck had disappeared, I ran out from the side of the house and gestured for Uncle Yosh and Courtney to join me.

“It was the rock man,” Uncle Yosh said. “The bastard who get Braden in trouble, and won’t tell nobody the truth about it! I peeped around the rock and caught a glimpse-very big guy. Hawaiian or Samoan, for real.”

“Yes, it’s Kainoa Stevens. The guy who owned the coffee shop that burned down.” Now I was remembering Kainoa’s tear-stained face the morning after the fire. Just how bad was he? Was he grieving for Charisse-not just because he’d found her, but because he had some culpability in her death, too?

I was caught unaware by the sound of wheels on a rutted path. Oh God, he’d come back, and we weren’t in a position to get to the water in time. I saw the fear on my relatives’ faces as well, but the cloud of dust revealed a surprising sight: our battered Honda Odyssey. Braden had returned. He drove slowly all the way over to Uncle Yoshitsune and my father, and then stopped. He made no move to open the passenger door, so I pulled it open for us.

“I got lost.” Braden looked sheepish. “I couldn’t read the map and drive at the same time, and the damn GPS sent me in a circle back to this place. Then I got to thinking, I really should come back for you.”

“I’d say so, fool!” Uncle Yosh sputtered. “You leave us out there to…what, sweat to death?”

“It’s OK,” I said, helping Uncle Yosh and my father board into the blessedly cool car. I shot a glance at the dashboard; Braden had burned a lot of gas driving through the fields. Hopefully, we’d have enough to get back home. “Courtney, can you get some water bottles for everyone out of the very back?”

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Braden said. “It’s just, when I saw where we were going, I didn’t know who we’d meet there.”

“Well, you were right to be wary. We met him,” I said, and as Braden’s eyes popped, I clarified, ‘I mean, we saw Kainoa. He didn’t see us and wound up leaving with a load of lava rock about five minutes before you returned.”

“A tremendously lucky circumstance,” my father said.

“Well, it’s my beiju,” Uncle Yoshitsune said. “A lucky year.”

But not for everyone. As I showed Braden the way home, I thought about how the first thing I would do, once I got back to civilization, would be make Kainoa pay for what he’d done.

IT WASN’T THAT easy. Later that evening, sitting in the Kapolei police station with my father, Uncle Yosh, and Michael, a Kapolei police detective called Bill Vang told us he was interested, but needed much more to arrest Kainoa. They even pointed out that I hadn’t positively identified him at the scene, just on the basis of the truck and Courtney and Yosh’s physical description.

“Can’t you just put out a call to all police on the island to look out for his truck, and once they stop it, check under the tarps?”

“It’s five hours since you saw him. He probably already unloaded it at whatever construction site he’s working at,” said Lieutenant Vang. “And if there’s rock dust in his truck’s payload, well, that’s no big deal. On the Leeward Side, there’s dust from rock and ashes from fire and red earth everywhere you look and touch. Of course that payload’s gonna be dirty. My truck’s dirty, too.”

“What about a wire?” Michael suggested.

“Huh?” Vang responded.

“I could confront Kainoa, wearing a wire, and get him to admit he was the one who ordered Braden to work.”

“You think he’s going to talk about all of this to a haole? He’s either gonna think you’re a cop, or stupid. Better for the kid to face him, and get the direct instructions to hush up, or whatever. Yeah, tell you what, Braden wears a wire, and it turns out there is truth to this business about Kainoa Stevens’ sideline, I’ll talk to the arson investigator about it.”

“It’s too dangerous for him,” Michael answered shortly, as Uncle Yosh, my father and I all nodded in agreement. He continued, ‘Braden was too scared to come with us to see you this evening. How’s he going to be effective with Kainoa and successfully hide the fact he’s recording their conversation? You need someone with experience doing that kind of thing.”

“I could do it,” I volunteered, because the thought had come to me a few minutes earlier. “It makes perfect sense. Kainoa considers me a friend. He gave me his card, and wrote down his phone number another time. Obviously, he’ll meet me if I call him.”

“Rei, that’s nice of you to want to help your cousin, but like Mike said, there’s a lot to this kind of operation.” Vang sounded patronizing.

“I not only know how to wear a wire, I can set up a listening station,” I protested. “Tell them, Michael!”

In a few minutes, Michael had laid out my few accomplishments at OCI in a way that left my father looking dazed and Uncle Yosh quite approving.

“You willing to do something, then, day after tomorrow maybe?” Vang asked.

“Tomorrow,” Michael said firmly. “It has to be tomorrow. I’m leaving the day after that, and I want to be part of this operation.”

BUT BACK AT Pineapple Plantation that evening, I learned that my job was harder than I anticipated. My father was distraught and had to be reassured constantly that the police would be waiting moments away, ready to take over at the slightest indication of trouble. He enlisted Tom and Uncle Hiroshi in the effort to get me to change my mind, but I knew what I had to do.

“I couldn’t do squat for our family, in regards to the cottage property,” I said. “But you know, this is more important. How can I not try to save their child?”

After a while I left Michael to talk to them, and I went into my bedroom, where after fifteen minutes of scavenging through my messy underwear drawer came up with the card with Kainoa’s various phone numbers. I rang every number, and either got no response, or a chipper voicemail message: ‘It’s Kainoa. Leave it at the beep, brah.”

He might be fast asleep in bed, but I doubted it. I left messages on the phones that allowed me the chance. My request was simple-and, I hoped, intriguingly vague. I wanted him to call me back because I wanted to see him before leaving the island.

Michael retreated to the Hale Koa by midnight and we all went to bed, but I barely slept, turning over thoughts of how the operation would work and how I could best lead Kainoa into an incriminating conversation-that is, if I could locate him. In the wee hours of the morning, I remembered the second time Kainoa had given me a phone number; it was on a takeout menu, tucked into the pocket of some running shorts. I located the shorts lying neat, clean and folded, with an empty pocket, in my drawers. As soon as I judged it late enough in the morning not to disturb anyone, I went upstairs to the washing machine and dryer, and found the takeout menu crumpled in the wastebasket there. Tom must have tossed it when he was washing the clothes during my illness, I thought, looking with gratitude at the number. Maybe, just maybe, this would work.

I waited until seven to call, and it was answered by a young woman.

“Who’s calling?” she demanded after I asked for Kainoa Stevens.

“This is Rei, a friend. I had a question about a building project.” I decided I had to say something, in case I was speaking with a girlfriend or wife.

“I’m Kainoa’s cousin, Carrie. I could take a message for him.”

“Oh, are you the one who makes the crocheted bikinis?”

“Yah. Why?”

“Your work is amazing.”

“For real?” She sounded warmer. “Kainoa left for work around six this morning. Probably won’t be back till dinner. He works a lot now, you know, because he lost everything in the fire.”

“Yes, it’s terrible about Aloha Morning, not to mention Charisse. Could you tell Kainoa to call me?” I gave both my local number and the cell phone.

“I’ll do that, but like I said, he isn’t really a building expert. He helps my brother-in-law Gerry with labor sometimes, is all.”

“Oh, do you think I should talk to Gerry, then-is he based in Waikiki?”

“Gerry doesn’t have a lot of time for talk. And no, he doesn’t live in Waikiki. He’s lives in Lanikai and got an office in Chinatown. Unless he’s on site, that’s where you’ll find him”

“Lanikai the island?” I was trying to recall the geography of the Hawaiian chain.

“No, not Lanai! Lanikai is a neighborhood near Kailua. Where you from?”

“California. And what was Gerry’s last name again?” I asked, although she’d never said it in the first place.

“Liang. They’re Chinese. My sister Randy married a Chinese guy called Chin, and his sister Millie married Gerry. That’s the connection.”

It was almost too much to follow, but there was one thing I had to verify. “Is that Liang with an I?”

“Yep. How did you guess?”

THE WIRE AND microphone were undetectable, once I’d gotten it all inside the strapless bra I was wearing under a sundress with a tightly smocked bodice. I had friendly, hands-on assistance from Michael in a police station ladies’ room with Vang and another police officer, Jose Fujioka, standing outside. I also had a tiny speaker in my ear that would permit all of them to secretly communicate with me in the duration of the time I was talking with Kainoa. But the first step was tracking him down, and since he still wasn’t answering his cell phone, it seemed the likeliest place to start was with Gerald Liang.

Lanikai, the town that Carrie had told me about, was on the windward side of the island-the green, picture-postcard Hawaii. I drove Michael’s Sebring by myself through Kailua, a charming small town with huge old trees hanging over streets lined with simple, mostly 1950s houses; Lanikai was smaller, a neighborhood, really. As I drove along, Vang and the others were in a police van two blocks behind, but never seemed far, keeping up a steady travelogue in my ear. Apparently Lanikai had once been as unpretentious as Kailua, but now, the rich had torn down the old bungalows and replaced them with the elegant mansions that sat cheek-to-jowl. Almost every Lanikai home was surrounded by a wall and had a fancy gate, many of them crafted out of copper, just like the Kikuchi mansion back at Kainani. The wall around Gerald Liang’s house had been built beautifully out of irregularly shaped green, gold and gray rocks. Lieutenant Vang confirmed my suspicion that this was a lava rock wall. I parked, watching their Escalade go by and take a left on the next street, where they’d wait for me.

I waited for two teenagers carrying surfboards to disappear into the neighbor’s garden before I emerged from the convertible. Belatedly, I realized I’d left the top down, so I went back to the car to close it. It was sunny for the moment, but I knew that on the windward side, rain showers dropped by like uninvited guests.

I walked slowly toward Mr. Liang’s fancy copper gate decorated with dolphins-no, I realized with some distress, they were hammerhead sharks. I located a buzzer and pressed it, thinking what a shame it was I couldn’t just go to the front door, where it was harder to be turned away.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice yelled out of the speaker, making me jump.

“Hi, this is Rei Shimura,” I stammered. “I’m a friend of Kainoa’s; I came to see him-”

“Why you think he be here? My husband doesn’t run a boarding house.”

I was guessing that this was Millie Liang. Her accent sounded local-local and pissed off. I asked, ‘Oh, is Mr. Liang on site somewhere? Maybe I could track him down there. It’s kind of important,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? You pulled me out of the bathtub for this, and I was doing my ginseng mask. Now it cracked!”

“Your ginseng mask cracked? I’m so sorry!” As I spoke, I could hear Vang chuckling in the receiver I wore in my ear and fervently hoped the sound wouldn’t pick up.

“Yah, it done crack, and I’m gonna get off now before my face is ruined.”

“Will you tell them I stopped by?” I asked, desperate to come away from the house with something.

“Don’t repeat your name.” Vang’s voice came in my ear.

I spoke again, before she could answer. “Oh, thanks, then! Bye.” I stepped back, and walked back to my car, got in, and started it up, not bothering to take the time to lower my roof before I peeled off.

“If he’s on site, it’s not going to be too improbable for Rei to show up there,” I overheard Michael saying, at his location a block away.

Once I was back in Michael’s car, I asked Vang why he’d told me not to repeat my last name.

“The less information that’s left behind, the better,” he answered. “You don’t want Gerry Liang or Kainoa Stevens to feel stalked, especially as this search is turning out to be ongoing, and there are some things about Liang that could be trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“Well, there are some rumors about gangs,” Vang said. “Gangs and construction go hand in hand in a lot of places.”

“You know, we should try Chinatown,” said Fujioka. “Liang’s got a building on Smith Street.”

“I saw the name on a building, but it was so faded I didn’t think anyone was there anymore,” I said.

“They are still there-I know, because they were cited for a fire code violation last year,” Fujioka replied, as I parked my car behind their Escalade, got out, and went to its driver’s door to talk to them. “It’s a big shop, and they got all kinds of construction odds and ends below, and the office up top.”

“OK, to Chinatown then,” said Vang, ‘Though I think the chances are slim. Liang is probably out working, and Stevens is probably hiding out somewhere.”

“So you guys will be around the corner again, listening?”

“Yah,” Vang said, grinning. “And maybe while we wait, Mike can pick up some manapua from Char Hung Sut.”

I’d thought Michael would flatly refuse to leave the listening station when he thought I might be in danger, but instead, he eagerly started asking about other kinds of char siu pork dumplings sold, and whether they carried half-moon cakes. Perhaps he assumed that this stop would be a failure, like the one before.

But I had a hunch that something would happen. Maybe it was because this section of Smith, once I’d reached it, looked even shabbier than I’d remembered: a succession of attached twenties and thirties storefronts marred by peeling paint and grit. The only people on this particular block were a pair of lost Italian tourists and a veteran panhandler heading determinedly their way.

“What about you, Rei? Are you there?” Michael asked, while I was parking my car in front of the Liang Building.

“I just parked in front of the building. Can’t you guys see me?”

“No, but we can hear you, and that’s good enough,” Michael said. “Before you go in, tell me what I can pick up for your lunch.”

“I don’t know, Michael.” I was too distracted to think about food. “Maybe something with tofu.”

“Tofu, are you kidding?” Vang laughed in the background.

“Hey, if nothing happens here, I want a sit-down lunch at Little Village. OK?”

THE GLASS DOOR was stamped Liang and Sons, in faded gold print that looked pre-war. I pulled at the grimy door handle, expecting it to be locked, but it opened to a narrow, terrazzo-tiled foyer lit by an exposed light bulb. My eyes passed over a listing of floor numbers and names. Horace Liang, Doctor of Chinese Medicine, was supposedly on the third floor. Liang and Liang real estate was on the second, and Gerald Liang, construction, on the floor where I was standing.

“First floor, construction,” I said aloud, as if I were talking to myself, though of course I wasn’t. The Escalade was parked blocks away, and I wanted Vang and Fujioka to know exactly where, within the building, I planned to be.

The obvious way into the construction office was through a different glass door, which had brown paper, taped over it, the way businesses do before they open to the public. Interesting, this place looked as if it had been around for a long time. I tried the door lightly and found it to be locked.

“Yah?” A rough male voice answered my knock. I thought it sounded like Kainoa, but I couldn’t be sure.

“I can’t hear you,” I called back. “Can you let me in?”

I’d taken a gamble, but the door jerked open. I remained in place, but found myself looking at Kainoa. If he’d looked bad the morning of the fire, he looked worse now, with the kind of facial stubble that reminded me of the villain in old Popeye cartoons.

“Hi, there,” I said, and from the way his eyes studied me, it seemed as if he knew why I had come. Still, he kept the door open. Beyond the bulwark of Kainoa’s massive body I saw the edges of a dusty room packed to overflowing with cardboard boxes, pipes and other construction materials.

“How d’you figure to find me here?” Kainoa’s voice was still borderline unfriendly, but he stepped back into the room, allowing me to enter.

“So how long have you been working here in Chinatown?” I was scanning the room, looking for something, I just didn’t know what.

“Just got here this morning, to help Ger- my boss get some shit together. I need something full-time, and this is going to be it for a while. As I was asking, how did you find me?”

“Your cousin Carrie told me-I spoke to her on the phone this morning,” I added, when I saw Kainoa’s shaggy eyebrows rise slightly. “And she said you were the middleman for Gerald Liang on his construction projects.”

“Might be doing more, now that the shop’s gone.”

“Was it just labor you sub-contracted for him before?” I was trying to phrase my questions carefully, the way the cops had suggested.

“Yah. How you know that?”

I was going to get nowhere, if I didn’t reveal some of my hand. “I know about the rocks you’ve been stockpiling in my family’s old cottage.”

“That what Braden told you?” Kainoa’s voice remained calm, but his expression was deadly.

“No, I drove out and saw the rocks myself. Braden didn’t say anything; he was too scared, said the boss would kill him if he gave him away.”

“He said that about me?” Kainoa’s voice cracked. “What a liar-and you, too. I thought you were here out of compassion, or some bullshit thing like that.”

“Kainoa, just tell me what happened. You could save my cousin, if you’d just admit you sent him to get the rocks that morning.”

“But I didn’t! I mean, not exactly.”

I wondered if ‘not exactly’ was going to be enough to satisfy the cops-somehow, I doubted it. I tried again. “It was a case of bad timing, wasn’t it?”

“Who’s the girl?” A new voice cut through my concentration, and I saw Kainoa was no longer focused on me, but somebody else.

I turned and saw a short, scowling Asian man in his early forties. He wore a baggy green and white print aloha shirt and black shorts that revealed solid, muscular legs with tattoos like Kainoa had. But while Kainoa’s tattoos were geometric Polynesian designs, Liang’s were quite different; one leg was marked by the kanji characters for moon, power, and aggression, and the other bore the emblem of a Sino-Japanese mafia group, the Night Runners, which I recognized from a book of Michael’s.

“My name is Rei Shimura,” I said. “Are you Gerald Liang?”

“See if you can get him on the record,” Vang whispered into my ear.

No way, I said to myself. After reading the fine print on Liang’s legs, I intended to separate from him as fast as possible.

“Yes, I’m Mr. Liang. Has Kainoa been talking about his friends?”

“Not at all, Mr. Liang,” Kainoa said hastily.

My mind was working overtime as the men exchanged tense looks. The cottage with the rocks piled up was still rented by the Liangs, according to Josiah Pierce. Maybe my original assumption that Kainoa had seized a forgotten property for his own purposes was wrong. Gerald Liang might have known about the cottage’s uses for storage of illegally gathered lava rock-in fact, he might have been the one to decide to use the abandoned cottage to warehouse rock.

Belatedly, I realized both men were looking at me. I said, “I was just catching up with Kainoa before I left the island.”

“You know how the mainland chicks are, Gerry.”

I glanced at Kainoa, who seemed to be trying to help with my cover. Why? Was Gerald Liang that dangerous? Yes, I thought, and perhaps he, and not Kainoa, was the actual big boss that Braden feared.

“You work for me a long time, Kainoa. You should understand by now to keep your social life off this jobsite.” Now Liang was scowling at Kainoa.

“Got it, boss. You go, babe. But first, this.” Kainoa grabbed me at an awkward angle for a hug that filled my nose filled with his musky body scent and my ear with his hot breath. As he kissed my mouth, and then moved to my ear, he whispered one word: ‘Careful.”

And as I pulled apart from him, shocked by both the intimate touch and the warning, my earpiece dislodged. It bounced off my shoulder and landed on the floor with a soft click. Kainoa glanced at the earpiece lying between us, but, instead of picking up the tiny, peach-colored piece of plastic, he moved his foot over it. His eyes held mine for a second, as if to intensify his warning.