Mahu Vice (19 page)

PROPOSITIONING GUNTER

“How does his assault tie into our case?” Mike asked, as we climbed the stairs to my apartment.

“He’s been around the edges for a while—he’s the one who called 911 about the fire at the shopping center. He was having sex that night in an office across the street, the office of the Wah Shing Corporation, which is also the parent company for the acupuncture clinic. Plus Wah Shing owns the condo where he was attacked—the one where Ray and I found Treasure Chen hiding out. That means the guy who assaulted Fouad is tied to the prostitution, and maybe the arsons.”

“But you said your guy was Chinese, didn’t you? The guy who burned Fouad was Caucasian.”

The doorbell rang. Mike looked at me. “You think that’s Fouad again? Or are you expecting someone else?”

“Only way to tell is to open the door.”

It was Gunter. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t realize you had company.”

Mike and Gunter looked at each other, and I remembered that neither of them liked the other. Gunter was angry on my behalf about the way Mike had treated me. As for Mike, Gunter was the kind of gay man who made him uncomfortable—flamboyant, aggressive in his sexuality.

“I can come back,” Gunter said.

“No, stay,” Mike said. “I was just leaving.”

Mike gave me a hug and quick kiss on the cheek. “Call me tomorrow,” he said. “Nice to see you, Gunter.”

“You too.” When Mike was out of the apartment, Gunter turned to me. “You’re not getting back together with him, are you? Because you know that is a recipe for disaster.”

“Things are complicated. We’re working together on a case. And I needed his help with something tonight.”

“I could have helped you with that,” Gunter said.

“We did not have sex. A guy showed up here with burns and Mike brought over some burn cream.”

“Right.”

“It’s true.” I told him about Fouad.

Gunter shivered. “Kinky.”

“You didn’t come over to harass me about my love life. What’s up?”

“I may be out of a job. That is, unless I do what Stan wants.” He sat down in my easy chair and I sat across from him on the couch.

“What does Stan want?”

“He wants me to fuck around.”

“And you’re opposed to that?”

“I don’t fuck for money. And I’m sure as hell not going to get caught on camera fucking somebody so Stan can blackmail him.”

“Whoa! Where did that come from?” Immediately I thought of the blackmail attempt on Brian Izumigawa, and the haole who had pictures of himself having sex with Fouad Khan. How many gay blackmailers were out there?

“You know Stan’s company took over the contract at the Kuhio Regent?”

I nodded.

“Well, he started replacing all the employees with his own people. Half of the maintenance guys don’t speak English. I’ll bet they don’t have green cards either.”

“How does that connect to Stan wanting to pimp you?”

“He pretty much told me that if I didn’t, he’d replace me.”

I got us a pair of beers from my refrigerator. I was working my way through a six-pack of Big Wave Golden Ales. “How did this happen?” I asked. “Over drinks at the Rod and Reel Club? In his office?”

“He’s been hinting around for a while,” Gunter said. “You know, talking to me about sex, flattering me, asking me if I liked to be photographed, that sort of thing. And at the same time he’s been asking me all these questions about the people who live at the Regent.”

“Any good targets there?”

He shook his head. “You know I have excellent gaydar. The only gay men in that building are a couple on the twenty-third floor, and a few younger guys who aren’t rich enough for blackmail.” He moved to the floor, leaning back against the chair.

“Today, he asked me to meet him at his office before my shift.” He took a swig from his beer. “I was worried he was going to fire me, like the rest of the staff. But instead he said he had a proposition for me.”

“Not the kind of proposition you usually get.”

“All the way there, I was psyching myself up,” he said. “I mean, thinking about where else I could work. I know a couple of guys at buildings, but what I’ve got at the Regent is sweet. The residents all know me, I have a great shift, I can walk to work from my house.”

“What did he say?”

“He started out with all this bullshit, how happy he was with the job I was doing, how he only heard great things about me. But things were different with his organization, he said. He expected more from his employees.”

He twisted around so he was looking at me. “He told me that he knew I wasn’t making a lot of money, and he had a way I could have some fun and make some extra cash at the same time.” He frowned. “I told him I was getting along fine on my salary, but he insisted.”

I’d never seen Gunter looking so vulnerable, not even when he’d been hospitalized with burns after the Marriage Project fire. “I can quit, I suppose. Or I can wait for him to fire me, and then collect unemployment. But it sucks that he can just do this.”

“Did he say he had a particular client in mind for you?”

He nodded. “This Japanese businessman. He likes tall, blond guys, and Stan said he’d go crazy for me. That he had a place I could take the guy, this nice apartment, and that he would show me where the cameras were in advance, so I could make sure the guy’s face would be photographed.”

“Did you ever hear Stan mention a guy named Mr. Hu?”

“Mr. Who?”

“Hu. H-U. A Chinese man. He’s blackmailing that guy you met at the park. I wonder if Stan is connected to him.”

“He hasn’t given me any names,” he said.

“But I can’t imagine there are two separate gay blackmail operations going on at the same time. Stan has got to be connected to Mr. Hu somehow. I’m trying to crack this other case, and you can help.”

“Me?” Gunter said, and his voice almost squeaked.

I looked at him. Gunter is tall, and though he’s skinny, he’s quite muscular. I’ve never seen him be afraid of anything—not even a couple of drunk frat boys who were calling guys names outside the Rod and Reel Club one night.

“It’s the only way,” I said. “Unless you just want to give up without a fight—quit your job and go find another one.”

He took a swig of his beer. “What if Stan finds out?”

“The worst he can do is fire you.”

“You haven’t seen his temper. We had this Filipino maintenance guy at the Regent, and one day Stan was doing an inspection and he didn’t think the guy had done a good job cleaning. He knocked him out.”

“Wow. And nobody reported him?”

“Reported him? The Flip was probably illegal. He left and never came back.”

“All the more reason to take Stan down, Gunter.”

“Will you watch my back?”

“I’ll talk to my boss in the morning.”

He drained the rest of the beer. “I’m going home,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Alone? Your bed will seem awfully empty.”

“I do sleep alone on occasion. When I find there’s nobody around who interests me.”

He stared at me for a moment and then swept regally toward the door, like Bette Davis in full flight. Unfortunately he stumbled over one of my rollerblades, which spoiled the effect.

I was just starting to enjoy having an empty apartment when my doorbell rang again. It was nearly nine o’clock, and I wondered who it could be. Fouad? Mike? Gunter?

Through the peephole, though, I saw Haoa and Tatiana. “I’m going to kill him,” my sister-in-law said, when I opened the door. “Either that or ship him back to Alaska.”

“Come on in.” I embraced them both. “Hey, brah,” I said to Haoa.

“She insisted we come right over,” he said. “After dinner we went to the office and she looked through the paperwork.”

“I cannot believe my brother is such a fuckup. The files are mess. And I left everything in perfect condition for him.”

“So you’re saying that he hasn’t been checking for working papers?”

“He’s been smart about it,” Haoa said. Tatiana glared at him, but he said, “It’s true. He’s messed up the files so much you can’t tell at first glance what’s going on. If Tatiana hadn’t known what was supposed to be there, it might have taken us a couple of days to figure out what he was hiding.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked Tatiana. “You want to talk to Sergei first? Send him back to Alaska?”

“I think the only thing that’s going to wake my brother up is a stint in jail.”

“Knowing Sergei, he’ll have some new racket set up inside,” Haoa said. Tatiana kicked him. “Hey, he’s your brother. Kick him, not me.”

“I’ll call my guy in Immigration tomorrow,” I said. “See what he says we should do.”

Haoa and Tatiana left a few minutes later, still squabbling, but I knew it would take more than a criminal brother to break them apart. I finally was able to lie down and read for a while, a thriller about an ATF agent who gets himself in trouble by his single-minded pursuit of the truth, by a Florida cop named James O. Born. I wished I could be so focused; it seemed that there were always detours pulling me away from what I was supposed to be doing.

MAHALO MANPOWER

The next morning, I called Juanita Lum as soon as I got in, but Lieutenant Kee was at a meeting at Honolulu Hale, our city hall, and wouldn’t be back till the afternoon. I hung up as Ray walked in, looking like he’d gotten too little sleep. “We were out pretty late with Treasure last night. That girl can drink.”

“She have anything to say?”

“She had lots to say. About her father and her sister and what a bitch Norma Ching was. Unfortunately, nothing that was useful. And the more she drank, the more useless the information was.” He massaged his temples.

“You okay?”

He shrugged. “I’m not accustomed to so much booze anymore. Got a little hangover. But I’ll survive.”

While Ray rounded up aspirin, I called Frank O’Connor at INS and made plans to meet at his office at eleven. Ray had a trial to go to for a case we’d closed a few months before, so he left to nurse his hangover at the courthouse. While I waited for the meeting, I did some more online research, this time on illegal immigration.

There were two different terms: smuggling and trafficking. A smuggled migrant is one who goes voluntarily, in exchange for payment. It might be as simple as hiring someone to drive you across a border. It might be more elaborate, as in the cases of men who brought in boatloads of Haitian refugees. In general, though, the relationship between the migrant and the smuggler ended upon arrival in the United States.

The smuggled migrants were often dumped somewhere—off the coast of Florida, for example, and left to make their way by swimming or wading through shallow water. In other cases, the migrants arrived with the names and phone numbers of relatives, and disappeared into the immigrant underworld.

A migrant who was trafficked was often lured by false promises or misled about immigration policies. They could also be driven by fear of violence, as from Haiti, or economic despair, as appeared to be endemic in Gansu Province.

These individuals were bound to their transporter in many ways—through fear, economics, or lack of knowledge. They were much like slaves, in that they had no way to leave their situations, and often all the money they earned went to pay back their transporters or reimburse their employers for living expenses.

It sounded like the Chinese workers at the acupuncture clinic had been trafficked. When I met up with Frank O’Connor, he agreed with that idea. “You have something new?” he asked. “I’m working on the information you gave me—but it was only yesterday, after all.”

“What would be the penalties for someone who hired illegals?” I asked. “Unknowingly. I’m talking about a company owner, and it’s a guy who works for him who hired the guys.”

He looked at me shrewdly. “Are we still talking about prostitution?”

“Nope. This is a guy I know, and I want to be honest with him about what might be involved.”

Frank punched a couple of keys on his desktop keyboard and glanced at the screen. “You say he had no direct knowledge that the workers were illegal?”

“Nope. This has only been going on for about a month, we think, and he trusted the guy who was processing the papers.”

“Is he willing to cooperate fully?”

“Of course.”

“He could probably get away with a plea and a fine, depending on the circumstances. When he’s ready to talk, bring him to me.”

On my way back to the station, I called Haoa and let him know what Frank had said. “Tatiana’s going back to the office tonight to make copies of everything,” he said. “I swear, when this is over…”

“When this is over, Sergei’s still going to be Tatiana’s brother,” I said. “You might as well accept that.”

“That doesn’t keep me from beating the crap out of him.”

“I have a feeling there’s going to be a line for that.”

When I got back to the station it was time for our meeting with Lieutenant Kee, but Ray still hadn’t returned from his trial so I went downstairs by myself.

“You’re the Lone Ranger today?” Juanita asked. “Where’s Tonto?”

“He go speak with big chief wearing robes,” I said. “The LT around?”

“In a meeting. But it shouldn’t last long. Have a seat.”

Juanita was multitasking again, carrying on a conversation with me while she filed documents and bantered with passing detectives. After about fifteen minutes, a couple of guys left Kee’s office and Juanita told him I was there.

“I might have a connection to that blackmail case I told you about the other day,” I said. I sat down across from him and told him about Gunter.

“What’s the boss’s name?” Kee asked.

“Stan LoCicero.”

“You know the name of his company?”

“Mahalo Manpower. They have the security and maintenance contracts for the Kuhio Regent.”

He turned to his computer and started typing, two-fingered, cursing periodically as he must have hit the wrong key. “Goddammit, Juanita, get in here,” he bellowed after a while.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?” she asked, appearing in the doorway with a smile on her face.

“Come over here and type in my password.”

He moved back from the computer, and she leaned over and punched a few keys. “While you’re there, find whatever you can on a guy named Stan LoCicero or a company called Mahalo Manpower,” he said.

Juanita shot me a glance and I had to struggle not to laugh. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and then with a flourish, she hit the last key. “It’s printing,” she said.

“Damned computers,” Kee grumbled as she walked out. He pulled a page off the printer and scanned it, then handed it to me.

There was nothing on the company, and the information available on Stan LoCicero didn’t fill a page. He had been mentioned a few times in the course of investigations—but then so had I. Nothing had stuck.

My brain buzzed, trying to fit together the pieces. Mr. Hu lived in a house owned by Wah Shing, which also owned the acupuncture clinic, which meant he was involved with the fire at the shopping center. He had hired Lucas Tyler to have sex with me. Lucas had told Vice that he was photographed or videotaped for blackmail purposes. And because Mr. Hu had set me up to have sex with Brian Izumigawa, I assumed he was the one behind the blackmail.

But was he connected to Stan LoCicero, Gunter’s boss? Or was there more than one guy out there videotaping gay men and blackmailing them?

Was Stan the haole guy who had burned Fouad, the law student? If so, had Stan left Fouad and then set the fire across the street? A lot of facts floated around, but what was missing was a good theory to tie them all together.

“I want to know a lot more about Mr. LoCicero,” Kee said, bringing me back to the present.

“So do I.” I told him I thought his investigation might tie into the arson and homicide Mike, Ray, and I were pursuing.

“I want you to find out everything about LoCicero,” Kee said. “Where he’s from, what he’s into, down to what kind of toilet paper he uses. I want you to know him as well as you know your best friend.”

“I’m on it.”

“Tell your friend to stall for a day or two. Say he’s got a flu bug or something, call in sick. Once we know more about LoCicero, we’ll know how to proceed.”

When I got upstairs, I called Gunter and told him what Kee wanted. “Fine with me,” he said. “I didn’t want to go to work today anyway.”

“I’ll call you tonight. We’ll do some brainstorming.”

“I brainstorm best over alcohol,” Gunter said. “Preferably in the presence of hot, handsome manflesh.”

“No you don’t,” I said. “And I’d stay away from the Rod and Reel Club if I were you, since Stan knows that’s your hangout.”

“You sure know how to ruin the fun of a day off.”

“Gunter, you have enough resources to entertain yourself for a month without breaking a sweat. I’ll call you later.”

By the time I hung up, Ray had returned from court. I briefed him on what I’d heard from Frank O’Connor and Lieutenant Kee. He asked, “What was the name of LoCicero’s company?”

“Mahalo Manpower.”

“That name sounds familiar.” He flipped through his notes. “Mahalo Manpower was one of the other companies owned by Wah Shing.”

“Well, that connects Mr. Hu and Mr. LoCicero.” That was a relief; it meant that all our cases were linked. We looked LoCicero up and found that despite his appearance on Vice’s radar, he had no criminal record. He owned a house in Hawai’i Kai, near where Treasure Chen had lived, and a Harley-Davidson VRSCDX, the Night Rod Special, was registered at his address. The corporate office for Mahalo Manpower was in a small building just on the other side of the H1 expressway.

“I say we find Mr. LoCicero and follow him around for a while,” I said. “See where he goes and what he does.” I thought for a minute. “And I think this is a good time to bring in our computer consultant.”

“Your friend Harry?”

“The same. There must be something in cyberspace about Stan LoCicero.”

“In the meantime, maybe Stan will lead us to Mr. Hu.”

We roughed out a plan, and then got Lieutenant Sampson to buy into the program. “With your permission I’m also going to get my friend Harry to do some cybersearching on him,” I said.

“Your friend still charging the same price?”

Harry had always worked for free, to help me out and because he loved poking around in places he wasn’t supposed to be. “Sure.”

“Then it’s fine with me. You need any overtime, I’ll authorize it.”

Back at my desk, I put everything I knew about Stan LoCicero into an e-mail to Harry. “I sent you a message, brah,” I said, when he picked up his cell.

“Just got it.”

It sounded like he was in some public place, so I said, “Where are you?”

“Looking at wedding invitations with Arleen.”

“How’d you get the e-mail, then?”

“BlackBerry,” he said. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, brah.”

I was barely up to speed with my laptop. “You have time to look into it?”

He lowered his voice. “Arleen’s got us booked all afternoon with wedding crap.” Back at normal volume, he said, “If you need this stuff ASAP, I’ll get right on it.” I heard him explaining to Arleen in the background. When he came back to me he said, “I owe you one, brah. Talk to you later.”

Ray and I drove to the offices of Mahalo Manpower. A black Mercedes was parked in the lot, and the license plate corresponded to one of the three cars registered to Wah Shing. Who was driving it, though? Richard Hu? If it was Stan’s car, it was one more thing that connected him to Mr. Hu.

My stomach grumbled. “Stan’s probably working. Let’s get something to eat, then come back here at the end of the day,” I said. We drove up University to a Zippy’s near UH and got some of their killer chili, and sat in the front window to consider what we knew.

Ray pulled out a steno pad and said, “I’ve been making some notes.”

The pad reminded me of Mike Riccardi, and I remembered the electricity that had passed between us the night before, wondering what would have happened if Gunter hadn’t shown up when he did.

But that, as they say, was another story entirely.