Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  Dana can read my mind. ‘I assume you’re keeping a low profile.’

  I have visions of Humvees with recoilless rifles mounted on the back.

  ‘The other two agents are in the room,’ he says. ‘The only thing we’ve done is check the post office for the package.’

  ‘What package?’ I ask.

  ‘The ring,’ he says.

  I’d forgotten about this. The ring Kathy Merlow mentioned in her letter, the one she wanted Marcie to send to her.

  ‘It was picked up yesterday afternoon,’ says Opolo. ‘Unfortunately we were too late.’

  ‘Did anybody sign for it?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’ He pulls a small notebook from his pocket and opens it, then unfolds a sheet of paper that’s been placed inside it. It’s a copy of the postal receipt.

  ‘It was addressed to Alice Kent, and the receipt was signed in that name.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  He hands the sheet over.

  I flatten it on the table, then take out the note from my pocket, the one sent to Marcie Reed by Kathy Merlow, and compare the handwriting with the signature on the form. Like peas in a pod.

  ‘She’s here,’ I say. ‘She signed for it herself.’

  Dana looks at me. ‘Maybe we’re halfway home.’

  Dana and the agents are huddled in the next room around a coffee table, discussing methods for locating the Merlows. The adjoining door between the rooms is open, so I watch from a distance. They’ve already exhausted several avenues of search. Utility records, telephone, and power show no new hookups under the names Merlow or Kent. If they’re living in the area, they’re using another alias. They’ve checked the rental car agencies, figuring that the Merlows would need wheels.

  ‘If they rented a car on the island, they used some other identification,’ says Opolo. ‘No record of a rental in the name of Merlow or Kent, and no charges on George Merlow’s credit card since the couple disappeared from Capital City.’

  Dana was right about one thing, Opolo and his agents have been able to gain access to information that we could not: personal credit-card data.

  ‘I think we talk to the carriers.’ Opolo wants to concentrate on the mail carriers who service the area around Hana.

  ‘It’s a small place. Even if they don’t deliver mail to these people, they might know who’s new and where they live.’

  ‘There’s six carriers. Five are out on their routes. We can’t get ’em all until later this afternoon.’ One of the agents has already checked this out.

  I’ve drifted into the room, standing in one corner like the proverbial potted plant.

  ‘There’s the grocery store, and the little ranch market,’ says one of them. ‘The only places to buy food for two hours in either direction. They gotta eat,’ he says.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Opolo. ‘People may have seen them in the stores, but will they know where they live? The Merlows aren’t going to volunteer this information.’

  ‘We could stake out the stores,’ says one of the agents. He’s young and eager.

  Opolo looks at him, wrinkled eyes of skepticism. ‘An army of strangers loitering outside the market?’ he says. ‘We’d stand out like bumps. Word’d be out in an hour. This is a small town.’

  ‘That’s charitable,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, so it’s a village,’ he says. He smiles at me.

  ‘Still, if one person talks,’ he says, ‘a clerk at the post office, one of the employees at the hotel. In an hour everybody in town’s gonna know who we are, that we’re looking for somebody. The word won’t take long to spread. If Mr. Madriani is right, the people we are looking for know how to lose themselves. We won’t get a second chance,’ he says.

  Despite Dana’s going behind my back, I’m warming to Jessie Opolo. Maybe she was right.

  ‘What about the realtors?’ he says. ‘The ones who rent out houses and cabins? The Merlows would have to obtain accommodations from somebody. Do we have any pictures of them?’ he says.

  This sends one of the other agents scurrying through an open attaché case.

  ‘Not a great copy,’ he says. ‘We got this from the mainland. State DMV. Faxed this morning.’ He hands Opolo two poor-quality fax transmissions, tortured pictures like Rorschach cards of human images, so bad the subjects would not recognize themselves.

  ‘Nothing better?’ says Opolo.

  ‘We can try to get wirephotos,’ says the agent. ‘It would take a while.’

  ‘Fine. In the meantime we run down a list of realtors in the area,’ says Opolo. He looks at his watch. ‘We meet back here in an hour to go talk to the mail carriers.’

  They’re up on their feet, going over a few last-minute details. Dana and Opolo in one corner talking privately. I take the opportunity to slip back into my room.

  I’ve ditched my coat in the closet. Even in winter the Hawaiian sun is too hot. I slip my hand into the patch pocket and remove the photograph of the little church. Two seconds later I’m out the door, heading up the path toward the office. It’s a five-minute walk, and by the time I reach the shade of the lanai near the office I am wet with perspiration.

  One of the employees, a young woman, is sitting at a table, like a concierge, tour books and pamphlets spread before her. She greets me warmly, a paying guest.

  ‘I have a question.’

  ‘Of course. If I can help,’ she says.

  ‘I have a picture here. A little church in the area. I wonder if I showed it to you whether you could tell me where it is?’

  The smile fades a little from her face. ‘I could try,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of churches.’

  ‘I noticed.’ Dana and I passed a half dozen on the way in, none of them resembling the one in the picture.

  I show her the photo. She studies it for several seconds. Looks at me, up and down, a tourist on the prowl. There’s a spark, a fleeting moment where I think she’s going to say something, then hesitation. She changes her mind. ‘I don’t think I recognize that one,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Is there a phone where I can make a long-distance call and bill it to my room?’

  ‘In the library. Just pick up and wait for the operator.’ She points the way.

  It’s a large room, a couple of club chairs and some rattan furniture, tasteful, quiet, and cool. One wall, from wainscot to ceiling, is a glassed-in bookshelf. I find the phone, take a seat, and wait for the operator, perusing titles on the spines of books stacked on the shelves, and a framed picture on a shelf behind the glass, a black-and-white glossy print.

  The operator comes on the line, and I give her the number in Capital City. Harry answers on the second ring, the backline. It’s after hours on the mainland. He’s been waiting for my call.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he says.

  I don’t tell him I’m camped with the FBI. I wouldn’t need a phone to hear Harry’s ridicule.

  ‘Fine,’ I tell him. ‘Anything from Mason’s?’

  Charles Mason & Co. is an old-line photographic studio in Capital City. In days past they did daguerreotypes of whiskered gents from the gold rush. Today they do family portraits, wedding pictures, and in my case, large poster-size exhibits that I use in court, enlargements of documents, and in this case a major blowup of one photograph. It is the errand I ran on my way home from the office yesterday afternoon before meeting Dana.

  ‘They took it out to twelve magnifications. Nothing,’ he says. ‘Just a lot of dots.’

  ‘Any name on the church?’

  ‘No. The picture’s of the side of the church,’ says Harry. ‘The phototech at Mason’s figures any name would be on the front.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘The enlargement did pick up one sign,’ he says. ‘But nothing helpful.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘White letters on black paint. Hard to read ’cuz it’s in script. Best we can make out, it’s just telling people not to go tramping around on the graves. Doesn’t really make much sense,’ says Harr
y. ‘A churchyard in the middle of nowhere. Does it look like a place where you’d draw crowds?’

  ‘Far from it,’ I tell him.

  ‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘From what I can see, the picture’s a big zero.’

  A woman has come in. She’s straightening some of the books on a shelf, replacing a few others.

  Harry wishes me luck and we hang up.

  The woman is dusting, opening the center glass panel.

  I get a closer look at the framed picture propped on the shelf. A man in a leather flying cap, standing in front of a plane. A face recognizable to any schoolkid of my generation.

  She sees me looking.

  ‘He lived in the area for a while,’ she says. ‘In fact, he’s buried just down the road – a little churchyard.’

  I’m doing almost sixty, looking at my watch. It is nearly four o’clock, and I’m wondering what the parameters of Kathy Merlow’s afternoon are. Her note said she spent her afternoons in the churchyard. I am praying that she is still there today.

  It hit me with the intensity of a moonbeam through an open window, the inscription on the back of the snapshot. Something about the wings of the morning.

  When I showed the woman in the library the snapshot, she said, ‘That’s it. That’s the place he’s buried.’

  Directions were something else. Reluctant at first, she said they’d had a lot of problems right after he died, the curious flooding the little church, taking pictures and picking flowers. But that was twenty years ago, and things are now quieter. Still, the locals are protective. After assurances that I was supposed to meet somebody there, that I was late, she finally told me where it was.

  Past the Seven Pools, not to be fooled by the little church out on the highway, ‘most tourists are,’ she says. A left turn off the road, and then a dogleg, another left.

  Dana was right. The road is worse on this side of town, beyond Hana. It is more narrow, overgrown with vegetation that brushes both sides of my car in places as I rocket past. I come to the top of a hill and nearly careen down a private driveway before I see the turn in the road. By now Dana and the agents are probably wondering where I am, looking for the car in the parking lot.

  A few camera-toting tourists are crawling on the highway at the bridge, near the path to the Seven Pools. A couple of them give me dirty looks as I rocket across the bridge ahead of a line of cars coming the other way.

  Two miles on I see a church on the right. False lead. I pass it. A mile down is an open gate, on the left, a sign. I turn in. Gravel and lava stone, chained-off private drives two hundred feet in, so I turn left, under a grove of giant banyan trees that transform the driveway into a cave of foliage, dead moss hanging from their limbs.

  Then I see it. The little church from the snapshot, green clapboard over white plaster.

  I dead-end in a dirt parking lot under the shade of the trees. Two mangy dogs lying like they are dead a few feet away. One of them raises his head enough to look at me as the dust from my wheels reaches, then settles on him. He sneezes, then puts his head down and goes back to sleep.

  There are two other vehicles in the parking lot, a small pickup with gardening implements and a sedan. A guy is loading a mower into the back of the truck, along with some plastic bags of cut grass.

  A man and woman standing, looking at a headstone in the cemetery at the side of the church, under a large banyan tree. Some distance off beyond the cemetery, through a gate, an old lady, cloaked in flowing garb, a broad straw hat, sits at an easel painting. The signs of serenity. Fronds clacking in the dwarfed palms that line the open grass.

  I take the little path through a gate in the low stone wall leading to the church. The door is not locked, but I peer through one of the windows. A few wooden pews and a raised pulpit up front. There is no one inside, so I take the path to the right, toward the graveyard at the side of the church. Here the sun’s rays are warm. The humid air hangs heavy. In the distance is a fence, maybe a hundred yards away, where the world drops off, land’s end, blue water to the horizon, white breakers crashing on the few rocks that have clawed their way up from the depths.

  There is the rumble of a junker engine and the sound of rubber on gravel as the gardener in his beat-up pickup pulls out.

  Headstones and other monuments line the narrow path that zig-zags toward the open grass and the cliff beyond. I wend my way through.

  The couple, Asian tourists, seem finally to lose interest in the headstone. They make their way across the grass toward the parking lot.

  I take their place. Under the banyan tree at the near edge of the grass is a grave, a plain flat marker, nothing fancy, no shrine. The name engraved there had been its own monument during life, flashed ‘round the world before the information highway was a deer track in the electronic brush.

  We make idols of rock stars and bobbing heads doing gangsta rap, people whose contribution to life is as fleeting as the pixels that carry their image to our televisions screens. Nothing enduring. It is a measure of our spiritual poverty. He was from a different time.

  A rectangular pile of lava rocks ringed by a pinioned chain just a few inches off the ground. The headstone, unpolished gray granite, a soft cursive script:

  Charles A. Lindbergh

  Born, Michigan, 1902 Died, Maui, 1974

  ‘If I take the wings of the morning

  and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea’ CAL

  As I look up, the aspect of the little church looms before me through the hanging frowns of trees that ring it. Whoever took the snapshot had done so from this location.

  There is no sign of Kathy Merlow. I turn and walk toward the fence, the cliff fifty yards away; undulating blue waters, and the glint of sunlight on crested waves.

  The old woman is packing up, folding her easel, the afternoon’s work done. She is in on a section of grass beyond a gate, a sign hanging on the fence.

  KIPAHULU POINT PARK

  This seems to merge with the grass of the cemetery.

  I plant myself by the fence and wait, looking at the sea, hoping that Kathy Merlow will appear. I look at my watch – after four-thirty. I wonder if Opolo has had any luck with the mail carriers, whether Dana is frantic looking for me.

  I see a big blue sedan out on the highway. It cruises by at a slow speed. Stops at the gate. The driver, his head a dot in the distance, stops to read the sign on the gate. Then he drives off.

  The Asian couple have made their way to the car, the thunk of doors being closed, the engine started. Pretty soon they will be closing the gate on the road. My chances of slipping back here tomorrow are not good. Dana and Opolo will want to know where I’ve been, the third degree.

  The old lady is drifting by on the grass, thirty yards away, struggling with her easel and a small stool, a wooden box of painting paraphernalia. I look at the parking lot. Except for my car it is now empty. I watch as the old lady moves away from me now, toward a small opening in the fence, near the entrance to the park, and suddenly it hits me – not the gait of an old woman.

  I am off the fence, moving toward her at a good rate. Ten feet away, staring at her back.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She turns. Not the wrinkled and weathered countenance of age, but tan and more vigorous than our last meeting, the vacant gaze of Kathy Merlow.

  Chapter 15

  She looks the part of the chic art set from the thirties, a loud silk kimono with wide sleeves, open down the front, like the academic gown on some Oxford don. Underneath she wears white cotton slacks and a blue top. Capping it all is a broad-brimmed straw hat, cocked at an angle for the sun, and oversized dark glasses.

  ‘Yes?’ Kathy Merlow’s smile is somewhat artless. ‘Can I help you?’ she says.

  She’s burdened by the folded artist’s stool and easel hanging heavily in one hand. The box of paints and brushes in the other.

  ‘You don’t remember me?’ I say.

  Wary eyes.

  ‘I’m Paul Madriani. We met the night Mel
anie Vega was killed. Out on the street in front of her house.’

  ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.’ She turns and starts to walk.

  I take her gently by one arm. ‘I don’t think so. But maybe you could take off the glasses,’ I say.

  ‘Take your hand off of me,’ she says.

  I let go.

  ‘I have to meet someone and I’m running late.’ She gives me the look of upper-crust arrogance, done so well behind dark glass, and dismisses me.

  ‘Can I help you with that?’ I reach for the stool and the easel.

  She pulls them away.

  ‘I can manage,’ she says. ‘Now leave me alone.’ She takes a step backward, full retreat, and walks out of one of her sandals. She trips, drops the easel and stool.

  I grab her arm again.

  The lid to the box of paint supplies has opened as she jostles for balance. Tubes of paint and tiny brushes all over the grass.

  ‘Now see what you’ve made me do.’

  I let go, and she steadies herself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not here to cause you any problems. I just need information.’

  ‘I’ve told you, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.’

  ‘You aren’t even curious as to how I found you?’

  She’s picking up the paints. I help her.

  ‘Marcie Reed,’ I tell her.

  She gives me a look. If there is any curiosity written in her eyes, it is hidden by shaded glass. But she curls her upper lip and bites it a little.

  ‘I don’t know any Marcie Reed,’ she says.

  ‘The ring on your finger,’ I say. ‘The cameo. Is that the one Marcie sent to you general delivery?’

  She stops picking up tubes of paint and covers the back of her right hand with the long sleeve of her kimono.

  ‘We could ask the people at the post office,’ I say.

  The outside of one of the tubes of paint is sloppy with green acrylic paste, and what appears to be the drying swirls and ridges of the owner’s thumb. She’s looking into my face at this moment. I pick the tube up by the cap and deftly slip it into my jacket pocket so she doesn’t notice. Last month she was going by ‘Merlow.’ This week no doubt she is called by another surname that I do not even know. It would be nice to have her real name.