My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
>> Queen's Medical Center Writing of guilt
After leaving Tony Martinez's condo at the Marco Polo with the three framed postcards from Bobo Ah Sun, Lily Ah Sun drove straight to the Honolulu Soap Co. plant on Democrat Street. How passe, she thought with a smile. And how great it was to be out of the closet as a Republican.
She let herself in, searched her office for anything with her father's handwriting on it -- no, she had to quit thinking of Sheets Ah Sun as her father, but that was easier said than done after 27 years of calling him Daddy -- but came up empty.
But Sheets was famous for posting hand-written memos on bulletin boards, and sure enough, in the employee lunchroom Lily found an old memo on letterhead detailing the company's holiday schedule. Her stomach sank.
Feeling rather like a burglar but also like a detective, Lily entered her father's -- no, Sheets' -- spartan office, from the desk lifted the yellow legal notepad in which he wrote numbers, ideas, messages. Her stomach hit bottom.
Then, feeling ill, Lily sped back to Queen's to show her cousin Quinn -- no, she had to stop referring to him in that way too -- the postcards and the writing samples.
In the hallway she saw Nina Ramones, who had just come from Quinn's room, where she learned that while she'd been out on strike Quinn rekindled a relationship with his cousin and thus Nina was out of the picture.
"Slut!" Nina whisper-hissed as Lily passed.
"Nani-nani-boo-boo," Lily said sarcastically over her shoulder.
And then she was in Quinn's room, and in his arms, and they were kissing and both trying to talk at the same time, and it was ridiculous babble.
"Whoa," Lily said with a giggle, catching her breath. "OK, you first."
"No, you," Quinn said. He wanted to tell her everything his mother had shared about the days leading up to their fathers' feud, but that would lead to how Lily was fathered, and that was something he wasn't sure how to say.
"These are the three postcards Tony Martinez received from Bobo -- who turns out to be Tony's half-brother, but I'll tell you more about that later," Lily said, and spread the three framed postcards out on Quinn's bed with the message side up. "Compare the writing, not the words."
After just a moment Quinn said, "This one's different."
"That's the last one, from Miami, that arrived the same time Donnelly received one and printed the item that Bobo was alive and well."
"So who wrote this one?"
"Hold on. Now compare the writing on the last postcard with this." She handed him the yellow notepad. The memo would be a dead giveaway.
"Whose writing is this?"
"Someone, I'm afraid, who knows what happened to Bobo."
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