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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Between stories
>> Note to readers
When the police investigation was done, they returned the yacht Pet Shop to its owner and determined that Daren Guy had killed four people, and that with his death justice had been served, poetic and otherwise.
In the case of Mano the shark god, dinner had been served.
Thus "False Teeth," the third book in the "My Kind of Town" series which began on June 9 last year, ended yesterday.
On Monday, we turn the opening page on the fourth book, "Lama On the Lam."
As it begins, a number of characters from the first two tales, "Honolulu Soap Co." and "Hunt Club," are all part of an SRO crowd at the Blaisdell Arena. There's Lily Ah Sun and her new husband (and former cousin) Quinn.
St. Meg the Divine and Chookie Boy Kulolo are there, she looking for pointers in the holy biz because she's still new at it. And Dr. Laurie Tang is there, having dragged along Detective Sherlock Gomes.
Well, dragged isn't quite accurate. Gomes is, as always, more inquisitive by nature than eight other people you know combined, but as a staunch Catholic he has mixed emotions about going to hear a talk by a Buddhist priest. It's one thing to consort with Laurie, a practicing Buddhist, he figures, quite another to listen to the exhortations of a priest from another religion.
"He's not a priest, he's a wise and holy man," Laurie explains on the drive over. "And Buddhism is not a religion."
Even Sen. Donovan-Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka is there, still wanted by the police but unrecognizable in shaved head and orange mendicant robes of a Buddhist monk.
They're all there, along with thousands of other locals and visitors, to hear and see the first reincarnation of the beloved Tibetan Lama Jey Tsong Khapa, the part-Hawaiian Liliha native who was identified as a Buddha at age 2 and now is returning to Hawaii for the first time after 16 years of studying and meditating at a monastery in the Himalayas of India.
And so Te-Wu is there as well, the Chinese secret police. They go back to 550 B.C., and no secret service is meaner. This evening some wear business suits, some aloha shirts, some dresses, taking positions at strategic points throughout the arena and outside. Their orders are simple: Know where the young lama is at all times, stay close and when the time is right, strike.
But there is another group at the Blaisdell as well. Its history also goes back over a thousand years, but on this night as always its members march to very different orders from those given the Chinese secret police. And that's where the trouble really starts.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com