Free Mahu Vice by Neil Plakcy

charge of the clinic—you ever talk to them?”
    She shrugged. “Once or twice, in parking lot. I think maybe they need help with travel some time, they come to me. But no.”
    Between the language gaps, and Li Po’s fear, it was clear we weren’t going to get anything more out of her. After she left, Ray and I went over what we had. None of the tenants we spoke with had any motive for arson. The acupuncture clinic had closed their bank account and cleared out of the clinic before the fire, which was suspicious, but until we could get a lead on one of the employees, either the elderly dragon woman or the beautiful Treasure, we didn’t have anything to go on.
    I called Akoni again, and he picked up the phone. “Eh, brah,” I said. “Howzit?”
    “Not bad, not bad. Keeping busy.” I heard his fingers clicking on his computer keyboard in the background.
    “You guys know anything about gambling out of an acupuncture clinic up in St. Louis Heights?” I asked, moving some papers around on my desk. “Place that burned the other night.”
    “Don’t think so. Hold on.” He put the phone down while he called out to another guy in his unit. “Nope. Tony doesn’t know the place either,” he said, when he picked the phone up again. “But that doesn’t mean it was clean. What you got?”
    “Just suspicions.”
    “You get anything else, you let me know?” I heard Tony Lee say something in the background, and then Akoni said, “Gotta go, brah. Take care.”
    Another lead down the drain. I was fiddling around on the computer, checking my personal e-mail while Ray and I both let our brains roam over what we’d learned, when I saw a message with the subject line Contact me about fire.
    I didn’t recognize the sender’s address, except that it came from a student at UH. I clicked it open.
    Kimo: saw u on TV. I called 911. Can u meet me 2 talk? There was a cell phone number below. I called Ray over and showed him.
    “You know this guy?”
    “Don’t know yet. Don’t recognize the e-mail or the number.”
    Since I came out of the closet, I’ve occasionally been contacted by gay people in trouble. I’ve worked both sides of the street whenever I could. I help the person, if I can, and at the same time I try to provide a compassionate voice inside the station. Was this e-mailer someone I already knew—or just someone who recognized my name? But how could he have gotten my personal e-mail address? I was careful about giving that out.
    Or at least I’d tried to be. During my dark time, after breaking up with Mike, I’d hung out online a lot, and every now and then I’d given out my e-mail address for some hot cyber sex, or as a way to hook up with some guy I met online. The more I thought about it, the more I figured this guy was someone I’d known—perhaps, I thought wryly, in the biblical sense.
    I used my cell phone to call the number from the e-mail. “This is Kimo,” I said. Fortunately, Kimo’s about as common a name as you can get in the islands. Since I didn’t know who I was calling I was reluctant to start out with name and rank.
    “Thank God,” the man said. “I have been very upset about what to do.”
    He had a South Asian accent. “Well, let me see if I can help. You know something about the fire Sunday night?”
    “I do not wish to talk about it on the phone. Can you meet me?”
    I looked over at Ray, who was listening to the conversation from across the desk. “You at UH?”
    “Meet me in front of the law school library. Half hour?”
    “I’m downtown. I’ll get there as soon as I can. Will I recognize you?”
    “I know you,” he said. “And when you see me, you’ll recognize me, too.”
    He hung up. “You want to take a ride up to UH?” I asked Ray.
    “Sure. Let me call Julie and tell her I’ll meet her up there.”
    Clouds had swept in off the ocean, wrapping Diamond Head in ribbons of white, and a stiff breeze shook the palm trees on South Beretania Street as we left the