My Kind of Town
>> Makiki Heights Payback time
Anybody else, senator or no senator, and HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes was reading the guy his rights and cuffing him right now. No, he hadn't come with a search warrant. But he was invited inside because Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka wanted to get away from the Star-Bulletin photographer and writer on his doorstep. Once inside, Gomes quickly spotted the glass pipe on the corner table. It had obvious drug residue inside. Anybody else, automatic bust.
But the great Gomes faced a moral dilemma. He was who he was because of one man, Vern Matsuda, his old math teacher and wrestling coach at Leilehua High. Mr. Matsuda was the one who had seen something in young Sherlock Gomes that he himself didn't know was there, a superior mind, and Mr. Matsuda challenged and nurtured that mind. It came together in Mr. Matsuda's "Logic" class, and Sherlock fell in love with ordered thought. But of the many lessons he'd learned from Mr. Matsuda, the greatest was learning to believe in himself. If Vern Matsuda believed in you, how could you not believe in yourself? The problem for Gomes was that this great teacher was also the late father of Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka.
"I'm glad your father can't see you now," Gomes said. "But I know what he'd do, so I'm going to do it for him."
"Kick my ass?"
"I wish it was that easy."
>> Portlock
Three doors down from Lily Ah Sun's home and on the other side of the street, Tai, Seth and Wili watched from the black SUV as a weightlifter kind of guy lifted a woman in a white suit down from the cab of a big pickup truck.
"What I told you?!" Wili said from the back seat. "That's da kine, the woman in the teal BMW that creep Mickey was following."
They had started their traditional aufogo this morning, looking for Mickey, who had ripped off Seth's daughter Kimmee in a drug deal where the drugs never appeared. They found him at the Arco mini-mart on Wilder, and Mickey was easy to tail because he was concentrating on following the woman who just now staggered a little and clutched the guy's arm.
"Somebody been drinking, Cuz," Seth said. And they watched as the woman opened the door of the same house they had earlier seen Mickey enter. The big guy followed her inside.
"Things going get interesting, brah," Wili said. A regular soothsayer. Once again he would be right.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com