Mahu Vice (9 page)

I figured it was my penance. I stripped him, sponged him off, and laid him down on my bed. It was a level of intimacy we’d never shared when we were dating; we’d both been pretty self-sufficient, and the only times we’d undressed each other had been as a prelude to sex. But there was something sweet about the intimacy, despite the stink of vomit.

He started snoring as soon as his head hit the pillow. I cleaned myself up, scrubbed the tile floor, then took his dirty clothes and my shorts downstairs to the washing machine on the first floor of the building. There was a comfy chair there, and I sat there and read my book and dozed while the clothes washed and then dried.

It was almost two o’clock when I went back upstairs. Mike was still asleep, still snoring, spread-eagled on my bed. I grabbed an extra pillow and lay down on the sofa. I was asleep myself within a few minutes, despite the noise emanating from the other side of the Japanese screen.

It was just after daylight when I woke up to see Mike, naked, standing at the foot of the sofa. “What happened to my clothes?” he demanded.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said, yawning.

His body looked good—better than good, actually. Muscular forearms dusted with black hair. A broad chest that narrowed to his waist, meaty calves, and a half-hard dick that I remembered well. “What happened last night?”

“You showed up at my door drunk off your ass,” I said, sitting up. I pulled the comforter over my crotch so he wouldn’t see that I was hard just from looking at him. “You threw up all over yourself, me, and my floor. Then you passed out. I washed your clothes for you—they’re over there.”

I pointed toward the front door.

“For real?” he asked.

“For real. You don’t remember?”

He shook his head. “I guess I am fucked up.”

“Guess so.”

I watched as he pulled on his clothes. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he was getting ready to leave.

“Me, too,” I said. “For everything.”

THE FIREMAN OR THE TIGER

On Friday, Ray and I went around to homeless shelters and showed pictures of Jingtao, without making any connections. I was glad we had Saturday and Sunday off; maybe something would break over the weekend.

Ray was doing special duty both days—security for a gun show at the Blaisdell Center—so he was fine with an easy Friday. Me, I was bored and antsy, trying not to think about Mike, or about my dinner that night with Haoa, Tatiana, and Sergei.

Sergei, like his sister, was tall, sturdy, and blond. He’d bummed around a bunch of jobs in Alaska—working the pipeline, cooking at a diner, helping train dogs for the Iditarod. It didn’t sound like we had anything in common except being gay. Not the kind of fix up I was looking forward to.

I arrived at my brother’s house just before seven. My truck was making some unhappy noises on the steep, twisting climb up into St. Louis Heights, and I thought that I’d have to make an appointment to take it in for what would turn out to be some very expensive repair.

Most of the houses in the neighborhood had no yards to speak of, front or back, but Haoa’s was on a wedge-shaped corner lot. Walking into his backyard is like entering a tropical exhibit at a botanical garden. Combine my brother’s intuitive feel for plants and flowers with Tatiana’s artistic sensibility, and you get a lush landscape full of short and tall palms; spiky red and orange heliconia; the five-petaled plumeria with orange centers and a frosting of white at the edge; dark red anthurium; and single, double, and triple hibiscus in red, pink, purple, and white. The sensory overload is amazing—from the bright colors of the flowers, to the glossy green leaves, to the scent of the tuberose. It’s like being draped in a full-body lei.

I’d met Sergei before and liked him. Maybe it was a physical thing; I prefer my men big and beefy, and he had that in spades—six two, broad-shouldered, with thighs like tree trunks. He had tribal tattoos around both biceps, which bulged out of his short-sleeved aloha shirt. He wore long board shorts and rubber slippas, and his hair was the same honey blond as Tatiana’s and nearly as long.

My brother was grilling steaks, and Tatiana went inside to get the salad. I asked Sergei, “What brings you to Hawai’i?”

He laughed. “It’s Tatiana’s turn to watch me. Everybody else in the family has given up.” He downed his wine in one big gulp. “I was staying in our sister Natasha’s guesthouse until her husband caught me screwing the neighbor’s teenaged son in the sauna.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Hey, he was eighteen, and horny. Nothing illegal about it. Of course, Arnie had the whole sauna ripped out and rebuilt afterward. Tasha was pissed about that.”

Tatiana returned and the meal passed quickly. I laughed and joked with my brother, my sister-in-law, and Sergei. At some point his bare toes were tickling the inside of my leg, and at another point he reached over to touch my hand and an electric current shot through my body.

I helped Haoa clean up the grill after dinner. “You ever go over to the center on Waialae Avenue?” I asked, scrubbing a grate with a bristled brush.

“The one that burned? Sometimes.”

I knew Haoa placed the occasional bet on ball games, and that he and his college buddies played poker together. “You know anything about gambling over there?”

He looked up from tying up a bag of trash. “You still investigating that fire?”

“Yeah. We think there might have been gambling going on out of the acupuncture clinic.”

He shrugged. “Not that I knew of.”

Sergei was house-sitting for Haoa and Tatiana’s neighbors who were on a round-the-world cruise, and after dinner I walked down the hill with him so he could show me his digs. I was pretty sure he’d be showing me something else, too, and I was fine with that.

The living room, dining room, and kitchen were all fine; what I wanted to see was the master bedroom suite. Sergei flipped on the overhead lights as we walked in, and I flipped them off.

He turned to me, and I wrapped my arms around his broad back and pulled him in for a kiss. “Hey, there, sexy,” he said, when we parted.

Sergei unbuttoned my aloha shirt and dropped it to the floor, then attacked my nipples with his mouth. First one, then the next; starting with a gentle licking and sucking, then just the hint of teeth, then it felt like he’d grabbed them in his jaws and started twisting.

All I had to do was whimper and moan and rub his head and shoulders. Every now and then he’d pull off for a deep kiss, and by the time my nipples were tender and achy the rest of me was hungering for his touch. We stripped in the moonlight and tumbled into bed, talking in low voices as we touched and stroked each other.

Sex with Sergei was like a return to a more innocent past, before all the kinky stuff I’d gotten involved in. I was relieved that I could enjoy sex that was romantic and gentle once again. Though he was wild, everything he did was approached in the spirit of fun. “You like that, Kimo?” he asked, as he tickled my butt hole with his tongue. “That turns you on?” he whispered, as he stroked my sensitive inner thigh and I squirmed under his touch.

His body was like a candy shop I hadn’t visited in a long time. I remembered how much I enjoyed sucking cock, kissing a guy, feeling the weight of a big man sprawled on top of me. We had sex in a couple of different positions, him in me, me in him, until we both were so wiped out all we could do was lie there and breathe.

As Sergei was drifting off to sleep I remembered the sound of Mike in my bed, me on the other side of the Japanese screen, and despite the thorough fucking I’d just gotten from the sexy Sergei, I missed the touch of my hunky fireman.

I drove down to Waikiki the next morning, cheerful after a little more romping with Sergei. I’d had some great sex with a guy who knew how to enjoy another man’s body, and I had two days off to relax and forget about the arson and murder at the shopping center. I was just trying to decide what to do with my free time when my cell phone rang.

Harry wanted to know if I’d join him and Arleen for lunch. One of her many cousins had opened a little café in Aiea and they wanted to give him some business. I arranged to meet them at noon, and spent the morning rollerblading, reading, and puttering around the apartment.

My truck groaned again as I climbed up Aiea Heights Drive, and I reminded myself to make an appointment at the garage. “We’ve got some news,” Harry said, after we’d been seated at a café table. “Arleen and I are getting married.”

“About time,” I said.

“We wanted to make sure Brandon was okay with it,” Harry said. Brandon was Arleen’s eight-year-old, from a guy she’d forgotten before the boy was born.

“What’s not to be okay?”

“Harry loves Brandon, and Brandon loves Harry,” Arleen said. “I think it was just your friend here taking his sweet time.”

“So when’s the wedding? And am I going to be the best man?”

“April,” Harry said. “And yes, you’re the best man.”

“There’s more,” Arleen said. “We’re buying a house. Just up the street from here. We wanted to show it to you.”

The rest of the lunch was taken up with details—buying the house, fixing it up, selling Harry’s condo in Waikiki, where Brandon would go to school, and so on. I think I zoned out for a bit, thinking about the case, wondering if my brother had known more than he let on. Was he gambling at the clinic?

When we finished eating, I followed Harry’s SUV up a couple of winding streets to the new house. They hadn’t closed the sale yet so they didn’t have a key, but we walked around outside, peering in the windows. “Looks great, brah,” I said, as we came back to the street. “I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.”

We hugged, and then he and Arleen piled into the SUV and drove off, and I got into my truck.

It wouldn’t start.

I cursed a couple of times, then reached for my cell phone to call for a tow.

The phone battery was dead. I was sure it had been charged when I used it earlier in the day, but it must have been low then, and run down while I was at lunch.

I cursed again. I was stuck in a residential neighborhood, no pay phone in sight. I could always walk up to a random house, but it was the middle of a Saturday afternoon and most of the driveways around me were empty.

I could walk downhill toward Aiea Field, look for a business, and maybe hail a patrol car, if one passed me. I was staring out over the steering wheel at the street ahead of me when I saw the sign at the intersection, and realized it marked the street where Mike Riccardi lived.

He’d driven me past the house once, pointing it out, but I’d never been inside. I have a pretty good visual memory, so I thought I could recognize it again. But did I want to?

Hell, he owed me a favor, after that drunken visit Thursday night. And all I needed was to use the phone and call a tow truck. If Mike was around, and feeling generous, he could drive me home. But that was it.

Before I could change my mind, I got out of the truck and started walking to the corner. I turned onto his street and began climbing. After a couple of twists and turns, I saw his truck ahead of me, parked on the street, the yellow and red flames streaking the side.

There was just one problem: I couldn’t tell which half of the duplex belonged to him, and which half to his parents. It was that “the lady or the tiger” dilemma—from the short story we’d read in high school English class. Behind one door lurked a tiger; pick that door and get ripped to shreds. Behind the other door was a beautiful lady—or in my case, a handsome guy. Pick the right door and live happily ever after; pick the wrong door and confront the doctor who’d diagnosed my gonorrhea, and who blamed me for breaking his son’s heart.

I stood on the street, rethinking my plans. Suddenly, the idea of walking down to Aiea Field seemed a lot better. But any time I think about running away from something that scares me I know I have to man up instead.

I took a guess that Mike’s half was the right-hand side, because there were a couple of weeds under one window. I didn’t think his father would tolerate any unwanted foliage. I walked up the path and knocked on the door.

The man who answered didn’t look happy to see me. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

TRUE CONFESSIONS

Mike stood before me in a pair of ragged athletic shorts and nothing else. “You stalking me now?”

“In your dreams.”

He looked behind me. “Where’s your truck?”

“Invite me in, and I’ll explain.”

Mike’s house was nothing like I’d imagined it. First of all, it was a mess, and I’d always had the idea he was a neat freak. Second, it was nondescript, and I’d thought he’d have beautiful, simple things.

Maybe he wasn’t as gay as I thought.

“Want a beer?” he asked, leading me into the living room. Newspapers were scattered everywhere, along with dirty clothes. The place had an unpleasant smell, too—sweat overlaid with dirty dishes and garbage that hadn’t been taken out.

“How many have you had today?”

He turned around to face me. “Fuck you. You come up here just to harass me? Gonna tattle on me to my folks again?”

“Somebody had to. Jesus, Mike, you can’t bring a bottle of vodka with you to work at eight o’clock in the morning.”

“I needed a little pick-me-up. What’s it to you?”

What was it to me? Before I could think, the words spilled out of my mouth. “Because I still fucking love you. I don’t want to see you kill yourself.”

Mike grabbed me and kissed me hard on the lips. I kissed him back, not considering the consequences or deliberating the reasons why it was a bad idea. I just knew that I wanted to kiss him more than anything. We were all over each other, my hands slipping down in the waist of his shorts, his grabbing onto my ass and pulling me into him, when the front door opened.

“Michael, you left your door unlocked,” his father said, walking in. “Your mother and I are—”

He froze in the doorway, and Mike and I pulled apart and turned to face him.

“I didn’t realize I was interrupting,” Dr. Riccardi said. “Detective, I wish I could say it was good to see you again.”

“I’m thirty-five years old, Dad. Get a grip. Blame anything you want on me, but leave Kimo out of it.”

“You may be thirty-five, but you’re still my son. You expect me to stand aside while you ruin your life?”

Maybe that walk down to Aiea Park really had been the better idea. “I’ll leave you guys alone,” I said, starting toward the door. Kissing Mike had been an impetuous act, and one I knew was only going to lead me into trouble.

“Stay where you are,” Mike said, reaching out to take my arm. “Dad, I’ll talk to you later. You can go.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, Michael. Have you been drinking again? My God, boy, do you ever stop?”

“Out. Now,” Mike said.

His father turned and walked out the door, closing it gently behind him. “He won’t even slam the fucking door,” Mike said. He shook his head. “Jesus, to think I’m the product of his sperm.”

He looked at me and tried to smile. “How about that beer now?”

“I’ll take one.”

He went into the kitchen and returned with two Bud Lights. “At least you’re watching your weight,” I said dryly.

“Sorry about that,” he said, popping the top on his beer and waving it toward the front door. “My dad still thinks I’m about twelve.”

“Maybe if you acted like you were thirty-five he’d think you were.”

“Don’t you start.” He knocked a dirty T-shirt off a chair and sat down, then motioned me to the sofa. “Make yourself comfortable.”

I looked at the sofa. One end was piled with rumpled newspapers, the other with dirty jeans, socks, and T-shirts. Feeling like I was channeling my mother, I piled the papers neatly on the floor and then sat down.

“I don’t remember you being such a priss,” Mike said.

“We going to do this all afternoon? Snipe at each other?”

“What do you want to talk about?”

I sipped my beer and considered. “You ever hear of MenSayHi?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Yeah. Hookup site. What about it?”

“I put a profile on there a few weeks after we broke up.”

“You mean, after you dumped me.”

I ignored that. “I said that I was pretty much into anything. And men started contacting me. There are some kinky guys out there, I’ll tell you.”

I drank a little more beer. “I’ve always been a romantic about sex,” I said, settling back against the sofa. “But after…you know…I just wanted to get laid. Now that I think about it, I guess I was punishing myself.”

“Getting laid as punishment? That’s a new one.”

“It wasn’t just the sex. It was like I wanted guys to treat me badly. I was angry at myself for not giving you the chance to explain, for throwing away a relationship that had real potential. I felt like I was a loser. And when guys treated me badly that just reinforced that idea.”

I drank some beer. We sat there.

Mike said, “I treated you pretty badly, too. I shouldn’t have cheated on you. And I should have ‘fessed up, instead of infecting you.”

“We were both at fault. And I think we’ve both been beating ourselves up over it.”

Mike looked at the beer can in his hand. “I used to drink a lot in college, I ever tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“I’d go to these frat parties, and guys would be hooking up with girls, and I knew I didn’t want that, so I just drank. I’d pass out and wake up the next morning on some strange floor, massive hangover. A couple of times I was lucky I didn’t choke on my own vomit. Sounds a lot like the other night, huh? Except you were nicer to me than the guys in those frats.”

“When we were going out, you weren’t drinking, were you?” I asked. “I mean, did I miss something?”

He shook his head. “I cleaned up my act when I came back from college. Partly, it was fear of my dad. I was living at home, after all. He wanted me to do something stable, something with a future, and I started taking these fire management courses at the community college. Right away, it was like, I don’t know, I fell in love.”

He looked at me, and I could see the old Mike coming through, his eyes shining, his mustache curving up at the ends with his smile. I got chicken skin just looking at him—what mainlanders call goose bumps.

“I wanted to be the best damn fireman I could be. I started taking these one- and two-week courses at the National Fire Academy in Maryland, so that I could get promoted and move into fire inspection. That was all I thought about. I shoved being gay back into the closet. I didn’t see any way I could be gay in that environment, so I just wasn’t.”

“I did the same thing with the police,” I said. “Until I couldn’t anymore.”

“It’s like I was asleep. Then you came out, and you were all over the papers and the TV. The gay cop. I had such a major crush on you, and I thought, well, maybe if you could do it, I could.”

He smiled wryly. “You know the next part. I wasn’t as together as I thought. I started to resent you, that you could be out, that you could go places and tell the truth to people and not be ashamed. And I couldn’t.”

“That takes time, you know,” I said.

“Yeah. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. The stupid thing is, I got drunk in San Francisco, because I was so pissed off at the way things had worked out—that I was too much of a pansy to face up to the guys at the conference and bring you along. When this guy made a play for me at the bar, I just went along with it.”

“I don’t blame you, you know. I mean, yeah, you hurt my feelings, and I was totally pissed off that you gave me gonorrhea. But I should have listened to your side of the story. I shouldn’t have been so quick to kick you out of my life.”

“You think we can be friends again?” Mike asked.

“I don’t know.” What was friendship, after all? A warm feeling for someone else? Harry and Terri were my friends, had been since high school. I knew I could count on them, and I’d walk over broken glass for them. But Mike? Could I be just a friend, when every time he touched me electric charges shot to my dick and I wanted to kiss him and rub my body against his?

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.”