My Kind of Town
>> Honolulu Soap Co. The eyes have it
Wearing a protective suit, booties, cap and face mask, HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes was an appreciative audience as Sheets Ah Sun gave him a tour of his plant. Gomes wasn't forgetting the reason he was here, but he was absorbed in the experience of learning something new, of seeing -- and smelling -- things for the first time. He'd rather expected the plant to smell like soap, but instead the air was clean, fresh. There were endless stainless steel tanks and vats, and overhead clear plastic tubing sent still-liquid soap to stacks of molding trays where the soap would be poured to harden. At the moment, a river of creamy soap with chunks of something in it was speeding past.
"What's that stuff in the soap?" Gomes said. "I thought your motto is 'the purest soap on Earth.'"
"That, "Sheets replied, "is one of our more most popular products. And it's a total accident. But sometimes you gotta be lucky in business."
Sheets told Gomes how back in the early days when he was still experimenting with soap recipes at home in the kitchen, his daughter Lily, who was then about 6 or 7, was going to microwave some oatmeal, but when she opened the cannister her hand slipped and all of the oatmeal went into a fresh batch of soap on the counter. She tried to scoop it out, but succeeded only is smushing it all around the thick liquid.
"When I seen 'em later, at first I was all pees off. But the way I was raised, plantation-style, you nevah throw nothing away. So I cut 'em up and you know what, it's like a miracle! The oatmeal makes the soap even more creamier, plus it gives it that little extra scrub-a-dub."
Gomes followed Sheets to where bars of soap were being individually sealed in hermetic cling-wrap. "You have any questions?"
"As a matter of fact, that's why I'm here."
Sheets was afraid of that. "Mo' bettah we talk in my office."
>> Queen's Medical Center
"What I'd like to know is what happened to Bobo after that postcard from Miami to Donnelly," Quinn Ah Sun said, looking up from a sheaf of photocopies of old newspaper stories. "There must have been other references to him over the years."
"So it's back to the State Library," his cousin Lily said.
"I still say Bobo doesn't look like an Ah Sun," her brother Laird commented, looking from one of the photocopies to Quinn. "Sure doesn't look like you, Cuz."
"You neither."
Laird and Quinn turned their eyes and their photos of Bobo toward Lily. "That's it!" Laird said.
"You're right," Quinn said. "It's in the eyes."
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