CHAPTER 35
Scott Damiano and I were on Nuuanu Street by the time darkness fully fell over Chinatown. We stood in the shadows as Scott finished a cigarette, no words spoken by either of us. A light drizzle fell onto the street, soon followed by a full rain. It seemed fitting that the skies would open up as we searched for Lok Sun. I wouldn’t have been terribly shocked if the seas rose, if the earth trembled and swallowed us whole. This was how surreal my life had become.
Scott flicked the cigarette onto the wet sidewalk, and we left our nook and stepped into the downpour. Since it seemed impossible to learn anything significant about the Pharmacist, I decided to learn as much as possible about the drug. Through speaking with our forensics expert, Baron Lee, I absorbed a number of pertinent facts about strychnine, which could well aid us in our investigation.
First, the substance occurred naturally in the tree known as Strychnos nux-vomica, which was native to India and other tropical places, including Hawaii. Although small doses of strychnine were widely used to treat stomach ailments before World War II, it had no modern uses in Western medicine. However, Strychnos continued to be used in Chinese herbal medicine, particularly in the treatment of cancer.
Unfortunately, the Chinese pharmacies we were interested in weren’t listed in the Paradise Yellow Pages. So I went on the Internet and found a few relevant Chinese symbols that might assist us in tracking down a pharmacist in Chinatown.
“There,” I said, pointing to a second-floor window marked with several Chinese symbols.
“See?” Scott said, following my finger. “I would’ve guessed that read ‘unisex hair salon.’”
“Never mind that. Just get your gun ready.”
I tried the downstairs door. It was locked, but not nearly enough to keep Scott Damiano out. I watched the street while Scott played with the tumbler.
“Got it,” he said ninety seconds later.
We stepped into a dank, dark hallway that smelled like a Dumpster parked behind a cheap Chinese takeout.
“You have enough bullets?” I said as we crept up a flight of creaky wooden stairs. “Because if the stench is any worse up there, I’m going to ask you to put one in the back of my head.”
“Just say when,” Scott said a little too deadpan.
As soon as we reached the second landing, we were greeted by a hideous centipede, no less than eight inches in length, moving like a bullet across the short hall.
“Christ,” Scott said, keeping his voice low. “If we come across one any bigger than that, I’m shooting it.”
“Be my guest,” I said softly. “No one here will mind. The Chinese consider the centipede one of the five evils of the natural world.”
“What are the other four?”
“The snake, the toad, the scorpion, and the gecko. They’re each said to symbolize corruption.”
“Why the gecko?”
I looked at him. “How the hell should I know?”
Three doors were on the second landing, one in the front and two on either side in the rear. We moved toward the door that would open to the room with the Chinese symbols on the window.
I gave the door a light rap. Then I stepped back and let Scott do his thing.
“Last time I broke into a pharmacy it was for Oxys,” he said from his knees as he worked the lock.
“Well, let’s see how this one goes and maybe we’ll try our hand at a Longs Drugs on the way home.”
By the time I finished my sentence, Scott was already in. He opened the door, and we stepped inside. The walls of the creepy little hole were lined with shelves, lined with small, colorful boxes, presumably filled with medicinal herbs. Jars everywhere, some filled with strange-looking berries, others with what looked like animal parts. The stench nearly brought me to my knees.
This was no traditional Chinese pharmacy. I’d been to a few of those in New York’s Chinatown during law school, when my stomach was in constant distress. This looked more like something out of a horror movie.
“Look at this,” Scott said, picking up a small jar of white powder.
“Careful with that.”
He twisted the lid and stuck his index finger into the jar, then touched his finger to the tip of his tongue.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Relax, Kev. It’s Yunnan Baiyao. The Vietcong used it to stop bleeding during the Vietnam War.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“Nico Tagliarini used it on a gunshot wound when Danny Flakes winged him in the Bronx.”
“Danny Flakes?”
“He had bad dandruff,” Scott said.
“Had?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s gone. They found his body on the side of the road right off the Throgs Neck Bridge the next day.” Scott stuffed the jar into his pocket. “This shit’s expensive. You can’t find it in the States.”
“Do your Christmas shopping later. Right now we’re looking for strychnine. And if you find it, don’t touch it. And sure as hell don’t put any on your tongue.”
The small space had too many items. I worried we’d be here all night and find nothing. Worse, I didn’t imagine that Chinatown had many of these underground pharmacies in its three-block radius.
Forty minutes after we entered the place I was ready to give up. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Scott playing on his cell phone.
“What are you doing? We don’t have time for you to be sending text messages to Chloe.”
“It’s a fucking iPhone,” he said as though that cleared everything up. “I’m on the Web. Come here, look.”
He handed me the phone, and I studied the picture on the screen. Then my eyes moved over the jar Scott was pointing to. The jar was filled with flattened seeds covered with red hairs radiating from the center of the sides.
I studied the screen on the iPhone again. The caption read: STRYCHNOS NUX-VOMICA (SEEDS).
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.
CHAPTER 36
“Take care of the lock,” I said to Scott. Then I stepped back into the shadows of the dark hallway to watch him play.
Instead of reaching into his pocket for his tools, he lifted his right foot and kicked the door in with a thunderous bang.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t even hesitate to step inside the apartment alone. My mind was locked in, conscious that the son of a bitch who lived here was complicit in attempting to poison me, and complicit in killing Oksana Sutin and very nearly Audra Karras.
From invoices in his store, I already knew his name.
Zhi Zhu, a middle-aged Chinese man, blew out of a back bedroom dressed in his nightclothes, a dirty white tank top and boxer shorts. When he saw me, he froze, then attempted to retreat.
I rushed him, grabbed him by the shirt, and threw him hard against a living-room wall before he could utter a word. His head snapped back and his eyes temporarily rolled back in their sockets. Then he became fully alert.
“Where is Lok Sun?” I shouted into his face.
He closed his eyes, his mouth contorting into a cry. “No speak,” he muttered. “No speak English.”
“Let’s see if I can’t give you your first language lesson.” I rammed my knee into his groin.
He screamed, tried to go to the ground, but I held him up against the wall.
“Where is Lok Sun?”
“No know,” he cried. “No know no Lok Sun.”
I jabbed him in the mouth with my right fist. “Try again, you piece of shit.”
“No know! No know!” he screamed as blood flowed down his chin. “No know no Lok Sun!”
My right hand went to his throat and held there, my fingers threatening to squeeze. “Who did you sell the strychnine to?”
“No sell strychnine! No sell strychnine!”
I buried my left fist into his gut this time.
“Plea! Plea!” he cried. “No have no strychnine! Never! Never!”
Scott’s voice suddenly boomed
from behind me. “Is that so?”
Scott crossed the room, pushed me aside, grabbed Zhi Zhu, and tossed him onto the ancient couch standing lopsided in the living room. I waited for Scott to pull his gun, but he didn’t. Just got right into Zhi Zhu’s face, hovering over him.
“Ten seconds you have to tell us where to find Lok Sun,” Scott said to him.
“I tell your friend, I no know no Lok Sun!”
“One,” Scott said.
“You waste your time!”
“Two.”
“I no know Lok Sun! You crazy man!”
“Three.” Scott reached into his pocket.
“I already call police!”
“Four.” Scott pulled out a small plastic bag.
“Police be here any second.”
“Five,” Scott said, waving the plastic bag in front of Zhi Zhu’s face.
“What! What that?”
“Six.” Scott split the Ziploc with his finger.
“Fuck you!” Zhi Zhu said.
“Seven.” Scott tilted the bag over the man’s mouth.
“Plea no! Plea no!”
“Eight.” The flattened seeds began to descend toward the top of the bag.
“No know! No know no Lok Sun! Plea no!”
“Nine,” Scott said, just as one of the flattened seeds breached the top of the bag.
“All right! All right! I tell! I tell!”
Scott pinched the top of the bag, a seed still dangling over Zhi Zhu’s mouth. With his other hand Scott gripped the man’s jaw, ready to hold his mouth open if necessary.
“Lok Sun,” Zhi Zhu cried. “He stay in abandon building cross the street. Used to be big whorehouse. He no there tonight, but when he there, he protect by men with guns!”
Zhi Zhu continued weeping as Scott carefully rezipped the plastic bag, returning it to his pocket.
Then Scott stared into Zhi Zhu’s red, puffy eyes. “I’m not scared of men with guns. I’m not scared of anything.” Scott stood up and smiled at me. “Except maybe centipedes. Those fucking things are disgusting.”
CHAPTER 37
The next morning Flan and I returned to Pearl City. Political signs sprouted from front yards like weeds, a constant reminder that the election was less than two months away. We were inching ever closer to October and whatever surprise awaited the governor then.
This morning in the Jeep we passed an inordinate number of signs to reelect Dave Iokepa to the State Senate.
“Why does that last name sound so familiar?” I said, easing on the accelerator.
“I questioned a young lady named Mindy Iokepa a few weeks back.”
“Where does she live?”
“A couple houses over from Max Guffman.”
“What did she say?”
“Same as everyone else. Didn’t recognize Turi except from TV. Knew Kanoa Bristol only in passing.”
“You have an iPhone?” I said.
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
I pulled the Jeep over and plucked my cell phone out of my pocket. I dialed the office and waited for Hoshi to answer. When she did, I asked her to pull up the Web site for Dave Iokepa. “See if it says anything about his ‘ohana.”
A few seconds later she informed me that Dave Iokepa had a wife named Diane and a daughter named Mindy.
“Thanks.” I ended the call and turned to Flan. “Mindy Iokepa is the state senator’s daughter. Notice anything unusual when you spoke to her?”
Flan shrugged, then shook his head. “No, she was polite. The conversation was a little rushed because she was carrying her baby.”
“Did you speak to her husband?”
“No husband. I asked. She lives alone and doesn’t see the baby’s father.”
“Boy or a girl?”
“A baby girl.”
I sat back and thought about it. “Think we can get the kid’s birth certificate?”
Flan smirked. “Doubt it. Not here in Hawaii. Remember the flap over President Obama’s? We’d need the mother’s signature.”
I closed my eyes tight, leaned back, and thought about it some more before I said, “Or the father’s.”
* * *
That evening I went to see Audra at her home in Ewa. Since her near-death experience at my villa, she’d become reclusive, frightened, rarely leaving her house. She’d taken a leave of absence from work at the US Attorney’s Office. She only ate food that came out of manufacturer-sealed containers, and even then, only if she opened the container herself. She’d lost weight, at least fifteen pounds, reducing her to practically nothing. She stood five foot six and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds.
“I found him,” I said, as I sat next to her on her sofa. “He’s living in an abandoned brothel in Chinatown.”
Her eyes, perpetually tired since her release from the hospital, widened. “Did you contact the FBI?”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet? Why not?”
“Because,” I said, gently placing a hand on her slender forearm, “eliminating Lok Sun doesn’t eliminate the real threat. Handing the Pharmacist over to the feds at this point is like handing over a murder weapon without knowing who pulled the trigger.”
She pulled her arm away from me. “And what if it was Wade Omphrey?”
It was a legitimate question, one I hadn’t given much thought to. What lengths would I go to, to protect the governor, a man I had no respect for and didn’t like, but who was nevertheless my client? If it turned out Omphrey had hired Lok Sun to kill Oksana Sutin, would I allow Lok Sun to flee the country, knowing that he’d ultimately lead the feds to the governor if he was caught? Would I permit Lok Sun to run even after what had happened to Audra in my own home? No, I didn’t think so. But that didn’t mean I’d have to turn Lok Sun over to the FBI either. After all, justice didn’t always need to derive from the courts.
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” I said.
“How did you come by this information anyway?” she said, her anger evident in the hue of her cheeks.
“We found his source of strychnine. A man named Zhi Zhu.”
“And this source, this Zhi Zhu, what’s to keep him from running to Lok Sun and warning him you and your mob friend are coming?”
I felt a rush of contempt in my chest. “My mob friend,” I said evenly, “is more dangerous than Lok Sun could ever be. And Zhi Zhu knows this. He learned it firsthand.”
Audra sank deeper into the sofa. She remained perfectly silent for a few moments, then appeared to calm and changed the subject. “Do you ever find yourself wishing you did things much differently since graduating high school?”
“How could I? I don’t even remember who the hell I was back then.”
She frowned. “You were Kevin Corvelli.”
“No. Kevin Corvelli is twice as old as that guy. He’s wiser, better equipped to make decisions. That kid, he did the best he could with what little life experience he had. I feel sorry for him, actually. It’s unfair that seventeen-year-olds are expected to make decisions that will impact their thirty- and forty-year-old selves. Get arrested, it follows you to college and beyond. Choose a major, chances are you’re stuck in something you hate for the rest of your life. Go to law school, and you’re shackled to the practice because of mountains of student-loan debt. It’s an unforgiving world. We do the best we can. There’s not enough time for regret.”
She leaned over, rested her head on my shoulder. “So, when exactly do our decisions start to matter, Kevin?”
I turned my head, stared into her eyes, and experienced a warmth in my stomach I hadn’t felt in months. My lips brushed against hers as her soft hand traveled up the length of my neck.
“In the morning,” I whispered as our cheeks touched, and we both shut our eyes. “Our decisions begin to matter tomorrow morning.”
CHAPTER 38
The time had come in Turi Ahina’s case to move from investigation to trial preparation. The investigation woul
dn’t truly end until the verdict was read, but our trial date was coming up fast, with jury selection scheduled to begin in early October.
So Jake and I sat in the conference room staring blankly at a table blanketed with filled legal pads, photographs, pleadings, motions, police and autopsy reports, witness statements, copies of the Hawaii Penal Code and the Hawaii Rules of Evidence, and a single birth certificate from the Department of Health.
By now I was eating Percocet as if they were Tic Tacs, but they didn’t alleviate the ferocious pain at the base of my neck. So I started adding ibuprofen, and before I knew it I’d developed a peptic ulcer and needed to include Nexium, Zantac, and Prilosec to my daily regimen of pills.
“Hoshi’s preparing the subpoenas,” I told Jake. “We’ll have Flan serve them next week.”
“How about pretrial motions?” Jake said.
I shrugged. “There’s no confession. The only issue is the gun used to kill Kanoa Bristol. That’s coming in, and we don’t care if it does. No prints, no gunshot residue on Turi’s hands or clothes. Dapper Don can’t introduce the fact that this weapon was the same weapon that killed Alika Kapua. Judge Narita would throw him out of court. Besides, there’s no proof Turi was the one who shot Alika Kapua three years ago.”
“Unless you testify.”
I stared at Jake, suddenly struck with what I hoped was an irrational fear. What if, after this trial—after we admitted that the weapon used to kill Kanoa Bristol belonged to Turi—the prosecutor’s office came back and obtained an indictment against Turi for the murder of Alika Kapua?
It was as though Jake read my mind. “You sure your ‘choice of evils’ strategy is the way to go in this case, son?”
Since justification was not considered an affirmative defense in Hawaii, I wouldn’t need to disclose our intention to use it before trial. Thus, neither Narita nor Watanabe knew it was coming. Which also meant I had time to change strategies if necessary.
Jake voiced his reasons for such a change: “As you said, there were no prints on the gun, no gunshot residue. You have one witness, a seventy-two-year-old woman, who claims she saw an obese man scampering away in the dark following gunshots. I don’t doubt for a minute you could shred her like a piece of paper on cross-examination. And that’s really all they got on our man.”
Last Lawyer Standing Page 13