My Kind of Town
>> Queen's medical Center Cop face
Lily Ah Sun had seen her cousin Quinn's cop face before. He was wearing it when he dismounted his big BMW motorcycle, walked up to her car and started to write her a speeding ticket. That was before they knew they were cousins. She'd also seen it that night at her home when he shot -- and was shot by -- the creep who'd broken in and was trying to rape Lily's maid Rosalita. And she saw it now as he read through the stack of photocopies of old newspaper stories that she and her brother Laird brought from the State Library. There was something about his cop-face she'd liked the first time -- so strong, confident, focused, in control -- and she liked it now.
"There's still too many things we don't know," Quinn said, "but seems to me this mysterious Bobo Ah Sun could have something to do with the feud between our fathers. Shortly after he disappeared, they quit speaking and you guys moved away." From Pearl City, where the Ah Sun brothers and their families had lived three houses apart, to Kailua. Quinn and Lily were 6, Laird 3. Their brother Lance wasn't born yet.
"You know what's odd?" Laird said. "These same two mug shots of Bobo show up several times in Donnelly's column, as well as in news stories of his disappearance. No offense, but he doesn't look like an Ah Sun."
"I noticed," Quinn said. Bobo didn't look anything like Quinn's father or uncle, with more Hawaiian features than either of them.
"But there is something familiar about him," Lily said. "Something in his eyes."
"The only problem with the Bobo-as-instigator-of-the-feud theory," Quinn continued, "is Bobo's postcard from Miami to Donnelly. That was ..." He riffled through the pages. "... July 27, 1981. Clarence 'Bobo' Ah Sun postcards from Jamaica: 'Call off the wake. Like Mark Twain, rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated. Between cruise ship gigs at the moment, heading back to sea soon. The Caribbean is nice, but it ain't Hawaii. Aloha to everyone back home.' Dot dot dot."
"The missing persons report," Laird said, handing a photocopy to Quinn, "was in the June 21 paper."
"Any idea," Quinn said, "exactly when you guys moved to Kailua?"
"Not the date, but I remember it was right at the end of first grade. The last week of school my mom had to drive me to school in Pearl City from Kailua every day. I hated getting up that early."
"So late May, early June," Laird said.
"The events do line up, but what I'd like to know is what happened to Bobo after that," Quinn said. "There must have been other references to him over the years."
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com