Night on Fire

by Douglas Corleone

  Erin nods. “I didn’t dare risk bringing a knife on a plane these days. So the day after we arrived, we drove down to Waikiki and I bought one at a store on Kuhio Ave.”

  “It’s illegal to sell or possess switchblades here in Hawaii,” I say.

  “It was a backroom deal,” she says. “Just like you can buy weed in the back of any head shop in L.A.”

  A part of me trembles but it passes as I speak. “Lauren caught you with the knife before or after you learned that Trevor had cheated on you with Mia back in San Francisco?”

  Erin doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to.

  Her haunting stare is answer enough.

  CHAPTER 25

  When I arrive at the district court in Honolulu, my client Turi Ahina is already on the courthouse steps waiting for me. As usual, Turi is all smiles, his round fleshy cheeks rising like the sun on either side of his lips. “Aloha, Mistah C!”

  I stick my hand out for a shake but he grabs me by the forearm and pulls me in for one of his patented bear hugs. When he finally releases me it takes me a long moment to catch my breath, and another ten minutes for me to smooth out my suit.

  Inside the courthouse, Turi is subject to a security search, while I flash my bar card and walk right past. We meet at the elevator bank at the end of the hall.

  “Same t’ing as usual?” Turi says.

  “You bet.”

  The prosecutor on Turi’s case is a young attorney named Heather Raffa. In fact, Raffa has prosecuted nearly every drug case I’ve defended over the past year-plus, beginning with a buy-and-bust involving Turi Ahina himself. That case—and every case against Turi since—has been dismissed for want of prosecution, in accordance with Hawaii’s speedy trial statute, Rule 48.

  Beat the Speedy Trial Clock is a game I played in New York City with some regularity. Here in Honolulu, Raffa caught on quick. She began driving out to police officers’ houses personally on the day of court to ensure they would appear on every case in which I went up against her. That was no good for business at Harper & Corvelli. So I did what any good lawyer would do under the circumstances: I asked her out.

  Heather Raffa demurred, tried to convince me that she was seeing someone, that the relationship was going somewhere, and I relented. Whether she was flattered or felt sorry for me, I don’t know. But ever since I extended my invitation Raffa and I seem to have an unspoken understanding. I cop to reasonable pleas in most drug cases I’m involved in, mostly small-time stuff, charges of possession, occasionally with intent to distribute. Raffa’s conviction rate goes up in exchange for one precious exception. She lays off my friend Turi Ahina.

  Since our first case together, Turi has been arrested four times. All minor drug offenses. Each case thus far has been dismissed, thanks to our unwritten contract. Raffa doesn’t know that Turi saved my life—and she doesn’t need to. All she needs to know is that he’s important to me, and that so long as she plays ball with me on Turi, I’ll continue to make her professional life a hell of a lot easier.

  “Listen, Turi,” I say in the hallway outside the courtroom after a silent ascent in the crowded elevator, “I’d like you to do me a favor. It has to do with the Kupulupulu Beach Resort arson case.”

  “Anyt’ing you need, brah.”

  “Keep your eyes and ears open on the street. I’m looking for an empty seat.”

  Turi purses his ample lips in thought. “An empty seat, yeah?”

  “Someone I can point the finger at, someone who won’t be in the courtroom to defend himself. Ideally a fire buff. Someone who likes to watch things burn.”

  “You mean, besides the end of a glass pipe, eh?”

  “Yeah, besides that.”

  When I step into the courtroom I have Turi take a seat in the gallery, while I head up to the rail to have a brief discussion with Heather Raffa. The judge has not yet taken the bench, but Raffa is already standing at the prosecution table, arranging files and gabbing with her assistant.

  “Pssst.”

  Raffa turns, her big bright blue eyes bearing into me like a laser. She says something in the ear of her assistant then takes her time approaching the rail.

  “What is it?” she says.

  In the courthouse hallways, she’s as flirtatious as a Hooters waitress working the tip. But in the courtroom, Raffa’s all business. As anal as any obsessive-compulsive I’ve ever met. And she always dresses the part. Today she’s in a smart navy suit, her light brown hair falling perfectly at the top of her collar.

  “We have Turi Ahina on today,” I tell her.

  “I know.”

  “So you’ll ask for a month?”

  “No. The State’s ready,” she says. “The officers are downstairs, waiting to be called up.”

  Half my mouth lifts in a smile, thinking she has to be fucking with me. This has to be some sort of joke.

  “The State’s ready,” she repeats. “If you need a two-week adjournment, we’ll consent. But that’s all.”

  “And in two weeks?”

  “The officers will appear again.”

  I take a step back from the rail and draw a deep breath. “Did I do something?” I ask.

  She shakes her head no, then turns and heads back toward the prosecution table. I reach over the rail to snatch the back of her suit jacket but she’s too quick.

  Barbara Davenport and now Heather Raffa.

  I officially have another catastrophe to deal with.

  CHAPTER 26

  We are seated in a dark corner of Chip’s Steakhouse, an elegant open-air restaurant abutting the Kupulupulu Beach Resort. From here, Kerry Naikelekele and I are in full view of the quiet lagoon and ocean beyond. A full moon illuminates the goings-on at a private party by the pool, and I think briefly of Erin’s wedding reception, of how she must have felt, watching Trevor from the corner of her eye, wondering how she could be subject to such a vicious betrayal.

  “You’ve hardly touched your filet,” Kerry says quietly as I brood. “Isn’t it cooked right?”

  It’s cooked perfectly—charred on either side with a warm pink center—and I tell her that. I tell her, too, that I have the Simms case on my mind. That’s not entirely true. I’m distant, but not because I’m pondering the evidence, the possible witnesses, my opening statement. My appetite is buried fully under thoughts of Erin Simms herself.

  “How is the case going?” she asks.

  I push aside the plate and lift my Glenlivet, postponing an answer. Dragonflies skip across the surface of the koi pond like pebbles on a lake. It’s the stuff of dreams, yet I’m unable to escape the maze of land mines I’ve set for myself. All in a mere two weeks.

  “Let’s not discuss the case,” I tell Kerry.

  “All right. Then let’s finish the conversation we started the other night.”

  This is our second date, not counting the evening I got my ass kicked in the Kanaloa’s men’s room. The conversation we began—well, she began—on our first date involves yet another territory of the psyche I have no desire to explore. My law partner Jake Harper has been asking me such questions for the better part of a year, and he’s still no closer to learning about the pre-lawyer Kevin Corvelli than Kerry is.

  “Which conversation?” I ask, attempting to steer the ship into another harbor. “Our talk about the humpback whales?”

  “Your parents,” she says. “Come on, Kevin. I told you all about mine the very first night we met.”

  True enough. “I don’t mean to sound aloof, Kerry, but—”

  My eyes inadvertently fall upon a woman sitting three tables to my left. She looks back at me with a mischievious grin across her face. Then a bulbous bald head abruptly eclipses my view.

  Sherry the cougar. And her husband Bruce Beagan.

  Sometimes an island can feel so small.

  “But what?” Kerry asks.

  Truth is, I’m not even comfortable saying that I’m uncomfortable speaking about my childhood because I worry it places too much weight on the topic. Nei
ther can I lie, because then I must admit to myself that there are things I want to hide. But the past, for me, doesn’t need to be hidden; the past, for me, must simply step aside.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I just have something else on my mind.”

  We finish our drinks in silence and pass on dessert. Kerry’s beauty is beyond words, but just like the scenery that surrounds us, it cannot pull me back to earth. A few weeks ago I’d be inviting Miss Hawaii back to my villa to meet Grey Skies, but tonight all I can do is tell her I had a great time and ask her to forgive my remoteness.

  My decision to cut the date short has nothing to do with Sherry or Bruce Beagan. Nothing to do with Kerry or her persistence in asking questions about my parents. Nothing even to do with the fact that I have a brand-new jet-black Maserati sitting in the resort’s garage and I’m dying to ride it into the night.

  No, my decision to cut the date short rests on a desire much more sinister.

  I suddenly need like nothing else in the world to be on the other side of paradise, to unclothe myself in candlelight, to meld my body with that of my client’s.

  To burn away this long, hot summer night with Erin Simms.

  CHAPTER 27

  Sitting with three strangers in the waiting room, I browse the headlines of today’s New York Times on my Kindle, because I refuse to touch any magazine left hanging around a doctor’s office. Even a psychiatrist’s.

  I check my watch. I arrived a half hour early for my appointment, but forty-nine minutes later I’ve yet to see a single patient exit the office. My initial thought is that Dr. Damien Opono is fucking with my head.

  It came to me last night, as I was flooring the Maserati through the dreamlike tunnel punched into the side of the mountain on H-3 on my way to see Erin Simms in Kaneohe, that I am about to break.

  Get thee to a doctor of psychiatry, I told myself. So with my hands-free—yes, it’s finally a law here in Hawaii—I dialed Hoshi’s home number and asked her to set up an emergency appointment with the first psychiatrist on the island she could get in touch with at such a late hour. Thirty minutes later, Hoshi left a message on my cell saying that I had a ten o’clock appointment with Dr. Damien Opono in downtown Honolulu.

  By the time Hoshi left said message, I was already in Kaneohe, melting inside Erin in the hot tub on her lanai, the jets like a third set of hands massaging us in the warm, dark night. When my lips moved from hers down to the nape of her long smooth neck, Erin’s soft moans soared like gulls over the bay and I knew that every thrust was putting us further at risk. But I didn’t care. I had dropped Miss Hawaii at her Ewa Beach home and raced across the island to make love to an accused mass murderer. Something, I realized as my heart thumped hard in my chest, is not quite right.

  When my cell phone buzzes, I put both my thoughts and Kindle to sleep, then reach into my front pants pocket. The Caller ID reads RESTRICTED but I answer the call anyway. Just another occupational hazard.

  “Mr. Corvelli, this is Isaac Cassel. Erin tells me we need to meet.”

  “Where?”

  “Waikiki?”

  “All right. The Bleu Sharq on Kalakaua across from the beach. When?”

  “Right now?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Just as I stand, a woman with a bunch of balled-up, wet tissues steps out of Dr. Opono’s office.

  “Mr. Corvelli,” the receptionist says from behind her desk, “Dr. Opono will see you now.”

  “Sorry,” I say, returning the phone to my pocket. “Please tell Dr. Opono that I’m flattered but I’m afraid he’ll have to wait.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “Tough man to get ahold of,” I say as I sidle next to Isaac Cassel at the Bleu Sharq. Together we lean on the wooden ledge, he with his bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, me with a pint of Blue Moon.

  “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

  He is. And that’s to his credit. Getting charged with homicide is perhaps the easiest way in this world to lose friends. With the exception of Tara Holland, all initial calls to witnesses in this case have, until today, gone unanswered.

  “I was told to stay away from you,” he says. “Prosecutor says you’re a shark.”

  From our open-air spot on the second floor we have an unobstructed view of Waikiki Beach. As the Pacific laps against the white sand and the Blue Moon works its magic, it’s easy to forget why we’re here. Yet not quite easy enough.

  “Erin finally convinced me to call you,” Isaac says. “But that prosecutor, Maddox, he’d have a shit if he knew we were talking.”

  I shrug, speak slower and softer than usual. “The prosecution doesn’t own you, Isaac, whether you intend to testify against Erin or not. We have every right in the world to be speaking to one another. So don’t let Luke Maddox push you around.”

  Isaac reaches into his pocket, pulls out a crushed box of Marlboro Reds, and sets them on the ledge, along with a mustard-colored Bic lighter.

  “So Maddox called me a shark, huh?” One of Cashman’s Ten Commandments is Thou shalt not call the prosecutor a cocksucker to his face. But this guy Maddox, he’s getting into my head like no prosecutor has before. I’ve already broken two of Milt’s Commandments in this case, so I’d better watch my tongue, lest I break a third.

  Isaac bows his head then says, “So, what do you want to know, Counselor?”

  “Why don’t you start by telling me about your relationship with Erin Simms.”

  It’s Isaac’s turn to shrug. “Not much to tell,” he says, scratching the back of his neck.

  Small talk, tics—it’s all currency in my field. A witness trying to buy himself some time. I try not to aid a witness by keeping silent; the less I talk, the more he has to. In this case, the longer the pause, I figure, the longer Isaac will likely gabble following it. Compensation for the time wasted.

  “Erin and I were together a few months,” he says. “Three, I’d say. Two years ago. Then, well…” He fiddles with his crushed cigarette pack, his eyes never leaving the ocean. “Then I introduced her to my best friend Trevor.”

  “If Trevor was your best friend, why did it take you three months to introduce him to your girlfriend?”

  “Trevor had been away, out on his boat when I met her. Traveling the California coastline with his father.”

  Isaac has a couple days’ worth of stubble but he’s got the kind of face that wears it well. I’m picturing him with Erin, can’t help but see him lying with her, that stubble moving up and down her long, lean body, leaving light scratches along her flesh. I clench my teeth and push the image away. This is why you don’t fall for a client.

  “Trevor and Erin hit it off right away,” he says, finally looking me in the eye. “And that was that.”

  “And you?”

  “I moved on.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “No strain on your friendship with Trevor?”

  “None,” he says a little too quickly. “We were best friends. We stayed that way. Neither of us was willing to let a girl come between us.”

  “How about things between you and Erin?” I say. “Awkward?”

  “Sure, at first. But time took care of it.”

  Isaac drains his bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, sets the empty down hard on the ledge, and resumes his glare at the calm ocean. “So what does she need?” he asks finally. “An alibi?”

  “Doesn’t work that way, Isaac. I read your witness statement. You were nowhere near her at the time the fire started.”

  “Earlier I was.”

  “Earlier doesn’t help.”

  “I could retract my statement, say I misspoke.”

  I shake my head. “Maddox would have you for lunch.”

  “So what can I do?”

  “You can tell me why you’re flitting the bill for Erin’s luxurious digs over in Kaneohe.”

  Isaac stares down at the swimsuited passersby crossing Kalakaua Avenue, silent. “She told you that?”r />
  “She didn’t have to.”

  “I care for her still,” he says softly. “I admit it. I just told you, I’ll do anything I can to help her.”

  “Like commit perjury.”

  He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to.

  “You think she did it?” I ask him.

  “Do you?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think, Isaac. My job is to create reasonable doubt.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “Well,” I say, scoping out the crowd, making sure no one can hear us, “when the circumstantial evidence is stacked up against a client as it is in Erin’s case, I look for other suspects I can feed to the jury. Try to show those twelve people in the box that it’s reasonable to believe someone else could have committed this crime.”

  He bows his head but doesn’t look at me.

  “Know anyone like that?” I ask.

  “Like what? Someone that could’ve killed Trevor?”

  “Someone with a motive to, yes. Someone I can place at the Kupulupulu Beach Resort at around two A.M. on the night of the fire.”

  “You can point at me. I can take the Fifth.”

  “That’s chivalrous. Only I’ve got a credit card receipt with your name and signature on it, along with a date and time stamp that says you were drinking at the Ali’i Bar at the Meridian until twenty after two.”

  Isaac steps away without a word and I watch him move slowly toward the bar. When he returns, he’s got another bottle of Mike’s and a pint. He slides the Blue Moon over to me as I finish the last of the first.

  “It was Erin’s lighter?” he says. “Erin’s knife?”

  “I can’t discuss the physical evidence with you, Isaac. You’re still a witness for the prosecution.”

  “I know. My point is, it wasn’t her lighter fluid. Trevor bought that himself for a barbeque we were supposed to have the day after the wedding.”

  “But Erin had access to it.”

  “So would anyone else who stepped into that room.”

  “That’s right,” I tell him. “But who?”

  “There’s someone,” he says as his eyes drop to his feet. “Someone I didn’t mention to Maddox or the cops because I didn’t realize it was relevant until now.”