Night on Fire

by Douglas Corleone

  “To be honest, I didn’t think much about it.”

  “Not exactly an ideal friend, are you?”

  “No. I’m not. Are you, Mr. Corvelli?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Sometimes we think just about ourselves, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there you have it, Counselor. That’s precisely what I did when I slept with Trevor.”

  “And when you told Erin about it when she was already in her wedding dress? Who were you thinking about then?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’d confided in Tara and Isaac and they each gave me contradictory advice. Finally, once we were here in Hawaii, Isaac threatened that if I didn’t tell Erin about my escapade with Trevor, then he would.”

  “Not exactly an ideal best man, was he?”

  “No. He wasn’t. But then, neither of us thought that my telling Erin about what happened on Trevor’s boat would get him and ten other people killed.”

  “You think Erin killed Trevor, then set the fire to cover it up?”

  Mia shrugs her shoulders theatrically. “Isn’t it obvious? Trevor was stabbed in the gut with a knife, Erin’s knife, the knife she used to cut herself just after she heard the news that I’d slept with her groom.”

  Mia’s making Luke Maddox’s opening statement. And doing a damn good job of it.

  “And the fire?” she says. “I mean, come on. Erin’s lighter? She’s set fires before, you know. Maybe not intentionally, but definitely accidentally while she was practicing her little self-mutilation act.” She turns, her voice cracking. “I’ve got to go or else I’m going to miss my flight.”

  “But you’ll be back to testify,” I say.

  She spins around to face me. “I don’t have a choice.”

  The clock’s ticking. I at least need to see her reaction when I ask her for her alibi. “Where were you when the fire started, Mia?”

  Her shoulders slump such that her light blue duffel falls to the floor. “I was at the Meridian,” she says. “After the reception, I went over to the luau there and I met some guy. When the luau was over, we went back to his room.”

  “And?”

  “And we fucked.” Mia takes a few steps toward me, looks me in the eye. “Look, I know what you’re going to do to me at trial, Mr. Corvelli. I know you’re going to make me out to be this heartless slut. And I realize it’ll be all over the news and that it’ll be in every paper from here to New York. But you know what? I don’t care. People have been crucified in the press before and gone on with their lives.”

  “But it’s no picnic,” I say.

  “I’m sure it’s not. But what are you going to do, Counselor? Sometimes the press gets it wrong. And sometimes they get it dead right.” She turns, picks up her duffel, and quickly resumes her gallop to the gate. But long before she’s out of sight, she twists that long, sexy neck around and calls back to me. “But you already know that, Kevin Corvelli, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER 32

  “Ouch,” Koa says later that night after I tell him about my meeting with Mia Landow at the airport. “You sure you don’t want something stronger than that ginger ale, Kevin?”

  “No,” I tell him. “I’ve got to meet the kid tomorrow morning. We’re going up North Shore to Shark’s Cove. I promised I’d teach him how to snorkel.”

  “So how are things going with Miss Hawaii?” he says.

  I shrug. “I’ve been preoccupied, so it hasn’t gone quite as I’d expected.”

  “Shame, brah. That is one hot lady.”

  A couple next to me orders a round of mai tais and Koa steps away to mix their drinks. When he comes back he asks me if I’m hungry.

  “I am.”

  “What you want?” he says. “Plate of them Buffalo wings?”

  Thoughts of my last Buffalo wing fiasco steer me clear. “Nah,” I say, getting up from my barstool. “I think I’m going to head over to Chip’s, maybe get myself some of those teri sticks.”

  “Awright, brah,” he says, reaching over the counter to shake my hand. “Be good.”

  What exactly does that mean?

  * * *

  Chip’s has a packed house tonight, so I sit at the bar. Not that I mind a table for one; in fact, sometimes I prefer it. But for teri sticks and a glass of ginger ale, the bar will do just fine. Besides, tonight I’m anxious to get home, crank up the A/C, and get some badly needed sleep.

  Mia is right. Sometimes it takes a non-lawyer to see through the smoke. The jury will hear witness after witness testify about how Erin was hurt, how she was fragile to begin with, how she cut herself, even burned herself at times. They will see her Zippo lighter up close, get to hold it in their hands. They may or may not see the knife, depending on whether it’s found, but they will hear testimony from Lauren Simms about how she saw Erin with it—a switch with a three- to four-inch blade with a serrated edge. The same type that killed Trevor Simms.

  Hotel security will testify. They’ll say they were called up to Trevor and Erin’s room not once but twice. That she reacted furiously to their visit, cussing them out and ultimately slamming the door in their face each time.

  If someone did indeed steal Erin’s little leather Fendi, the jury will want to know who. I don’t have an answer. And if I don’t have one come the time of trial—if I can’t place someone with motive at Trevor’s door—then Erin Simms is in peril. She will spend the rest of her life in a goddamn cage.

  And it may be that justice is served.

  Once I close out my tab I step away from the barstool and halfheartedly wink good night to a hostess I’ve had my eye on for months. Then I do a double take. At a table in the rear of the restaurant I see Kerry Naikelekele seated with a man with his back to me. I sigh; no question I blew it.

  As I walk along the koi pond, I notice the man stand. From the corner of my eye, I watch him move casually toward the men’s room.

  Can’t be, I think.

  But it is. He sees me, too, staring at me as he winds his way through the occupied tables, not smiling, not frowning, not offering so much as a nod of the head, the prick.

  Once he enters the men’s room I move a little faster, wanting to put as much distance between us as possible.

  I’ll see him in a few days when he argues his motion to have me removed from the Simms case. But tonight I need not spend another moment looking at or thinking about prosecuting attorney Luke Maddox.

  Or his date.

  CHAPTER 33

  After an hour of snorkeling at Shark’s Cove, Josh and I are famished, so we head to Kua ’Aina Sandwich in Haleiwa for some burgers. We take a table outside and let the heat continue to have its way with us.

  “Wanna see where I used to live?” the kid says after the meal. His face looks like an abstract painting, brush strokes of ketchup, mustard, and mayo beginning at his chin and working their way up past his nose.

  “Sure,” I say, handing him a stack of napkins. “You know how to get there?”

  He nods, wiping the one spot on his face that had remained flesh-colored.

  “You missed a little,” I say, snatching the napkins from him and wiping his face myself. “Chicks don’t dig messy eaters.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Maybe not. But I’m not letting you back in the Maserati looking like Heath Ledger’s Joker, so you’d better clean up.”

  “WHY SO SERIOUS?” he says in his best homicidal clown voice.

  It’s a moment before I catch myself laughing.

  * * *

  Josh’s empty house is a rather ramshackle two-story A-frame located between Waimea Bay and the Bonzai Pipeline on Ke Iki Beach. On either side sit bungalows hidden away by tall trees. We’re practically invisible from the road, so when Josh asks if we can look inside, I shrug my shoulders and look for a way in.

  And so, using my Bank of Hawaii debit card on the warped front door, I commit my first act of breaking and entering since that night I was nearly killed by gunfir
e in Kailua last year.

  “Mommy kept our house real clean, but it’s all dusty now,” Josh says when we first step inside.

  I sneeze. Kid’s right. A quick tour and then I’ve got to get out of here, back into the stifling but clean Oahu air.

  After a brief viewing of the kitchen and dining/living area, Josh takes me up the creaky wooden stairs. We peek into his mother’s bedroom, then head over to his.

  “It doesn’t look the same,” he says, disappointed.

  “It’s just a structure,” I tell him, staring out the room’s lone window. “In three decades I’ve never once lived in a place I thought of as home.”

  Josh silently crosses the room and stops at the window overlooking the ocean. There are a pair of surfers paddling out past the breakers. “Over there,” he says, pointing to some rocks jutting out of the water. “That’s where they say my mommy died.”

  As I stare at the spot where Katie Leffler met her end, Josh steps over to his closet and lifts up the rug inside. “What are you doing, kid?”

  He lifts a loose floorboard and pulls out a pair of binoculars. “I forgot these here,” he says. “Mommy bought them for me. She was teaching me about the birds. We used to watch them together. I know, like, twenty different kinds. Every time we saw a new one, we wrote it down in a notebook.”

  He hands me the binoculars. I dust them off with the tail of my T-shirt and hold them to my eyes. “What a horizon,” I say softly.

  “What’s horizon?”

  I hand Josh the binoculars and point into the distance. “See that line where sea meets sky?”

  He nods but says nothing.

  “There’s your horizon, kid.” So beautiful you could cry.

  I take back the binoculars for one last look before we leave.

  After a moment my gaze shifts from the horizon to one of the surfers in a wet suit and Wayfarers riding a large wave back in.

  Son of a bitch. If it isn’t my good friend Luke Maddox.

  CHAPTER 34

  “This island is becoming too small.”

  Kerry turns and smiles at me as we walk down the beach toward the Kupulupulu Beach Resort lagoon, snorkel gear on our heads. “Kevin, I never told you we were exclusive.”

  I shake my head. “It’s not that. Well, it is that, but only because of who you’re seeing.”

  “Oh, so I can see other people, but not Luke?”

  “You don’t understand,” I tell her. “The guy’s everywhere. In the papers, on the news. In the ear of once-friendly prosecutors. He’s turned his entire office against me.”

  “Aren’t you adversaries?”

  “Of course. But it was different here, my relationship with the prosecutor’s office. It wasn’t nearly as contentious as it was in New York. And it was a nice change of pace.”

  Our feet touch the water and Kerry wiggles her toes, splashing up a bit of ocean and sand. “Forget about him today. It’s Sunday. Forget about the case.”

  “I can’t forget about him. Even on weekends I have to see him.”

  “I told you I’m sorry I let him take me to Chip’s. That was wrong; I know Ko Olina is where you live, where you hang out all the time. It’s just that I love it here. But I promise, it won’t happen again.”

  “I didn’t just see him with you on Friday night,” I say, stepping deeper into the water. I’m not wearing fins but I lower my snorkel mask. “I saw him yesterday, too, when I was hanging out with my friend Josh.”

  “The kid?”

  “Yeah, the kid. We went snorkeling at Shark’s Cove, then we stopped by Ke Iki Beach, which was deserted—except for, guess who? Luke Maddox.”

  “Ke Iki Beach,” she says, lowering her snorkel mask, too. “Yeah, Luke told me he goes surfing there sometimes. He used to date a woman who lived over there.”

  “Well, I guess he sure gets around the island, doesn’t he?”

  Before she can respond to my juvenile—not to mention utterly hypocritical—remark, I’m underwater, kicking my legs toward the center of the warm lagoon. Visibility’s good. Fish glide right by me as though we were all simply passengers heading for the Fulton Street subway station. No noise below the surface save for my breaths, amplified by the mask so that I sound like Darth Vader. As my breathing regulates a familiar calm washes over me.

  For some reason I never feel freer than when I’m in the Pacific, when my entire body is underwater, weightless and untethered to anything tangible or intangible back on land. It’s almost as though when I’m out in the ocean, Kevin Corvelli ceases to exist. Step into the blue and, like magic, he’s gone. And with him go all of his worries, his appointments and calendar calls, his dissatisfied business partners and pissed-off members of the opposite sex. The whole lot of them. Gone.

  In the ocean I’m not Kevin Corvelli. Nor am I anyone else.

  Just a thought. A force.

  In the deepest part of the lagoon, where the Pacific dumps its excess every few seconds, I remove the mouthpiece from my snorkel gear and set it on a rock. Then I hold my breath and dive back under, my eyes wide behind my prescription mask. Below me are more rocks. I stretch my body toward them, reaching with my arm, fighting the current coming in from the ocean.

  Almost there. Just a touch and then up for air.

  Jammed between the rocks is something black and small like a hairbrush or a pair of sunglasses. With my right arm I reach for it, touch it, lift it gingerly with my hand, examining it like a child on his first visit to the bottom of a pool. Light hits it just right and its silver side glimmers, nearly blinding me. I shut my eyes tight, then open them again. I open and close the object I have in my hand, study it against the backdrop of the rocks.

  Then out of the rocks strikes an arm, reaching for my own. I drop the object but still the arm grabs hold. Not an arm, I see now, as panic floods within me. An eel. An ugly fucking moray eel, and it is sinking its teeth into my flesh, drawing blood, coloring the lagoon a gruesome red.

  I straighten my body, place my feet against the rocks, and push up with all my strength, struggling to free my arm from the eel’s grip as I launch myself toward the surface. But the eel simply grips me tighter, sinks its tiny pointed teeth deeper into my punctured flesh.

  When my head hits air, I fight for breath, kicking my legs so that I don’t get swept back under. I raise my right arm, eel and all, above the surface. Here, exposed to the air, the eel can’t breathe, so it lets go, falls back into the water like a stone.

  I remove my snorkel mask and throw it somewhere, unconcerned right now about whether I’ll ever find it again.

  The skin on my forearm is torn, but I’ll live.

  The eel dove back to its home in the rocks.

  But I now have another dilemma.

  Kevin Corvelli is no longer underwater, so again he exists, court cases and all.

  There is a murder weapon at the bottom of this lagoon. And, like it or not, whether the weapon surfaces is now exclusively my call.

  CHAPTER 35

  “It’s not an ethical dilemma,” I say. “It’s a strategic dilemma.”

  I shift in Jake’s ratty old client chair, as he rolls a chewed-up pencil back and forth across his desk. Tomorrow it will be two full weeks since the fire at the Kupulupulu Beach Resort and this case is already choking the life out of me.

  “The murder weapon,” Jake says quietly. “I think this one’s a no-brainer, son.”

  Jake and I have called a temporary truce to whatever has been transpiring between us these last two weeks. Looks as though Alison Kelly is out of his life for good and he’s finally coming to accept that. It also appears—surprise, surprise—that representing a defendant in a high-profile murder case is good for business. Over the weekend we received calls from three prospective clients, each asking us to take on their respective cases, each having been charged with at least one class-A felony. Hoshi returned the calls early this morning. And what do you know? Two of the three prospects actually have money. Harper & Corvelli is effectiv
ely back in business.

  Knowing this—and feeling alone and desperate—I stepped into Jake’s office earlier and asked for his advice.

  “There’s a lot to consider,” I say.

  I haven’t spoken to Milt Cashman, and I don’t dare trust the phones on something like this. If I do call him it’ll be from a pay phone, and I’ll ask him to find a safe landline, too. Paranoid? Maybe. But in criminal law it’s always best to err on the side of caution.

  “You’re pretty sure it’s her knife?” Jake says.

  “Pretty damn sure. Erin described it to me and I downloaded a few photos of the specific model from the Internet. I was underwater but I’d bet the house on it.” I down a slug of Red Bull. I didn’t sleep very well again last night. “Besides, how many switchblades do you think we’d find at the bottom of the lagoon abutting the Kupulupulu Beach Resort two weeks after the fire?”

  “That would be one hell of a coincidence,” he says.

  “My first thought was, of course, you don’t hand over the murder weapon to the prosecution. Then I thought, what if it actually helps to exonerate her?”

  “How in damnation would it do that?”

  “Prints,” I say.

  “After the knife’s been underwater for two full weeks?”

  I nod. “I spoke to Baron Lee, who I’m retaining as our forensics expert. He said, theoretically, there could still be prints on the knife.”

  “Say again?”

  “It’s a long shot, but Baron tells me he’s used the procedure in the past and a few times he’s gotten results.”

  “Lifted prints off an item that’s been submerged in water?”

  “Using Small Particle Reagent,” I tell him. “If there’s a latent fingerprint on the knife, the oily components of the fingerprint residue may have been held in place by the surface tension of the water.”

  “Then once the weapon is exposed to air…”

  “Exactly,” I say. “The oily residue that’s retaining the shape and details of the fingerprint will spread out or run, and we’ll have nothing but a smudged print. But,” I add, “if the Small Particle Reagent is applied immediately after the knife is retrieved from the water, it might work.”