My Kind of Town
>> Queen's Medical Center The Honolulu Soap Co.:
Sunday digestDialing the number for his cousin Lily's home, HPD solo bike officer Quinn Ah Sun's heart was filled with happiness. He wanted Lily in his life. Just this morning Lily had visited him, and she'd kissed him as he'd never been kissed. And right now, he wanted to tell her about the dream from which he'd just awoken.
"Rosalita," he said, recognizing Lily's maid's voice. "It's Quinn. Is Lily there?"
Quinn heard Lily's voice, then the sound of the phone being pressed against fabric. And then, "Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Quinn, she's not here right now."
Quinn hung up the phone, stunned. What had happened? Quinn heard a knock on the door, and in stepped nurse Nina Ramones, who qualified for the Florence Nightingale Award when she touched Quinn's forehead, checking his temperature the old-fashioned way, and gently adjusted the sheets.
"I'm glad to see you're doing much better," she said and patted his forearm. "And as long as you're doing so well, you have some visitors waiting outside."
Nina opened the door and in walked HPD Chief Lee Donohue, followed by guys from Internal Affairs, Lt. Dennis Nakasone and Detective Lopaka LaCroix.
>> Portlock
"Burning bridges." Lily Ah Sun didn't know where the term came from, but it was so graphic, creating an instant picture in the mind. It was also a philosophy in which she believed. If you never want to pass this way again, burn every bridge that leads here. Lily learned the tactic back at UH, when she caught her boyfriend and her good friend doing it in his van in the parking structure.
"I think he heard you, Mum," Rosalita said.
Lily knew Quinn had heard. She'd wanted him to hear her. She wanted to burn that bridge. It had been 21 years since the cousins last spoke, and it would be fine if they went another 21 without contact. This was the right thing to do after catching Quinn kissing and being fondled by that slut Gwen Roselovich.
But if Lily had done the right thing, why was she crying?
>> Queen's Medical Center
The beauty of Pidgin English, as Andy Bumatai once pointed out, is its combination of brevity and colorful description. A non-Pidgin speaker, for instance, might say, "I'm sorry, could you repeat that, please? I couldn't hear what you said because of the jackhammer in the foyer." A Pidgin speaker would say "Eh?" and leave it at that.
"Make die dead," was one of Pidgin's few emphatic redundancies. And Quinn knew he was in trouble when LaCroix from Internal Affairs used it to describe the guy Quinn shot.
"Heart attack," Lt. Nakasone added. "Partly it was the loss of blood from being shot, partly it was the crystal meth in his blood, partly it was the beating you gave him."
"Beating? I never touched the mutt!"
"Somebody did," LaCroix said evenly. "Smashed the guy's nose flat, broke ribs on both sides, stomped on his privates."
"We got the report," Nakasone said. "We want to hear your side."
>> Portlock
"Oh, Miss Ah Sun," Lily heard behind her. "Just in time. And I think you'll be very excited with what ..."
That's when interior designer Jenna Takara, breezing down the hallway, realized that her client was sobbing.
"Oh, Jenna, hi," Lily said, wiping her tears. "I'm OK, really."
"Oh, good," Jenna said, diving back into the reason she was here: recreating a new bedroom after the all-white one had been shot up and bloodied last night. "Hard woods! I think that's what we need. Hard woods! Masculine, for the new man in your life. Yet naturally elegant. And done in complementary hues, like you and your love."
Lily's tears ebbed, her anger washed back in. "No hard woods. No more new man."
"Oh," Jenna said, stunned. All that work for nothing. "What did you have in mind?"
"Somber, like a nunnery."
The phone rang, and Rosalita gladly withdrew to answer it.
Lily heard Rosalita answer, then exclaim "Mabuhay!" and burst into a torrent of Tagalog. After a moment, grinning ear to ear, Rosalita turned to her daughter, Elizabeth, holding her hand over the mouthpiece.
"Elizabeth, it's your Uncle Muhammed! He's here and wants to come see us."
Lily had already given her OK for Muhammed Resurreccion, cousin of Rosalita's late husband, to come out for a visit.
Lily nodded at Rosalita. "Now is as good of a time as any."
Rosalita finished her phone conversation. "Muhammed is here for a computer convention," she explained.
As usual, Muhammed Resurreccion had spoken only half the truth.
>> Queen's Medical Center
Quinn told the two guys from Internal Affairs everything - except the part about falling in love with his cousin Lily.
Nakasone and LaCroix had seen it before. A tough cop reduced to tears. But they didn't know the tears were for Lily, not last night's incident.
"To tell you the truth, Officer Ah Sun," Nakasone said, "if he's trying to rape the maid, he deserved it. That's God's own punishment. Honestly, you did the world a favor. Your Mickey Musselwhite had 47 priors.
"But the question remains," he continued. "If you didn't beat him, who did? We've got the media and some activists claiming police brutality."
"All I know is that I never touched the guy!" Quinn said.
It was bad enough to lose the love of his life. Quinn didn't want to lose the only job he'd ever loved too.
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