Mahu Fire by Neil Plakcy Page A

trust him?” my mother asked. “Uncle Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei are old, and Uncle Chin is sick. What if this boy causes trouble?”
    “Enough, Lokelani,” my father said. “If Kimo says this is a good boy who needs help, then we all help him if we can.”
    We ended the conversation by saying that we were all looking forward to seeing each other the next evening at the party for the Hawai’i Marriage Project. My mother and her two daughters-in-law had apparently been burning up the phone lines discussing what to wear, and my father complained about having to wear a suit. Business as usual in the Kanapa’aka household.
    I spent most of the next day working all my old cases, reviewing my notes, tapping away at the Internet trying to find information, reviewing autopsy reports and generally working hard and getting nothing accomplished.
    Just as my shift was ending, Sandra Guarino called me. Cathy Selkirk’s partner, she was the director of the Hawai’i Marriage Project, and she was so upset she could hardly speak. “What’s up?” I asked.
    “Bastards,” she said. “Somebody tried to trash our office this afternoon.”
    I calmed her down a bit, then looked at the clock. I blew a deep breath out. If I hurried, I could stop at the Marriage Project office on my way home to get dressed for the party. “That would be terrific, Kimo,” Sandra said. “I’m sure Robert would feel a lot better.”
    Robert, I thought, as I drove the couple of blocks from headquarters over to the Marriage Project. Harry had fixed us up; Robert was a first or second cousin of Harry’s girlfriend Arleen, and they’d been anticipating double dates, because Robert and Arleen were so close.
    Robert had skinny bird legs and two front teeth that he always felt were too prominent. He’d told me that someday he wanted to get braces to rein them in. And someday, too, he might motivate himself to get to the gym and fill out his muscles. But in the meantime, he was accustomed to making do with what he had. “A little eyeliner and a little blush could go along way toward making a boy look better,” he’d said, the one time we went out to dinner together.
    He was a nice guy, but I wasn’t his type, and he wasn’t mine. Harry and Arleen were more upset than either of us were; that’s the way it goes with dating.
    I pulled up in front of the two-story stucco building that housed the Marriage Project to see a very butch lesbian in cargo shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt nailing a piece of plywood over what had been a front window.
    “If you need something done, ask a lesbian,” Robert said, after we’d exchanged greetings.
    We went inside, and I asked, “Want to tell me what happened?”
    “I was on the phone with Haley’s Helium Heaven asking why the rainbow arc of multi-colored balloons wasn’t here yet, when there was this noise and the window just exploded.”
    He pointed to the square pane in the front window, now securely covered with plywood. “The floor in front of my desk was just strewn with shards of glass. I was so startled I actually just hung up the phone and stared.”
    He crossed his arms. He was wearing a bright pink polo shirt and a pair of white clam-diggers that exposed a chunk of ankle. “I mean, I was a pretty girly teenager, bad at sports and in love with Broadway show tunes, your typical fag-in-training, so I got teased a lot, got pushed around in the halls a few times and called a couple of names that I’m glad to admit to now, like cocksucker and butt pirate. But I was never gay-bashed, and I just couldn’t believe it.”
    I smiled reassuringly, and as I did, I wrinkled my nose with the recognition of a bad smell. At first I worried that maybe the aroma of dead chicken was still lingering around my truck, attaching itself to me, but there was a different note to this stink.
    “You smell it,” Robert said, noticing my reaction. “The rock that came through the window was just part one. The guys yelled, ‘Take that,