“No, you didn’t, Jake. And let’s keep it that way for the time being, huh?”
He nods, takes one final look at me, says, “I reckon a closed book is better than no book at all.”
Then he walks on down the hill.
CHAPTER 65
Standing in the shallows of Hanauma Bay, Josh looks back at me and asks for the third time why I won’t join him in the water.
“Jellyfish,” I tell him.
“Jellyfish?”
“Yeah, someone lost a foot here the other day. Didn’t I mention it?”
Josh scrambles to the beach and drops down at my side, breathing as hard as a beached dolphin. “Holy moly,” he says.
Holy moly, indeed. Actually, there are no box jellyfish in Hanauma Bay today. They only visit the island of Oahu once a month, nine or ten days following a full moon. But I can’t go into the water with my stomach freshly stapled up, and I don’t want to explain that to Josh. And I sure as hell don’t want to explain how I was injured or show him the wound. Safe to say, the kid’s been through enough.
“Thanks for coming with me to the inner-view yesterday,” the kid says.
“No worries, Josh. It was my pleasure.”
“That lady is nice.”
“Good people,” I agree. “You run into them every once in a blue moon.”
Josh digs a hole in the sand in front of him while I lie back in my Tommy Bahama trunks and T, tipping my Panama Jack over my face. The last three Percocet are kicking in and I feel content, could probably even drift off to sleep.
“Are you going to keep your promise to me?” Josh says.
I nudge my hat up just enough so that I can speak. “What promise is that, Josh?”
“When I was giving my test-money you promised that if I told my secrets, you would tell me yours.”
Sighing, I say, “I did, didn’t I?”
Josh doesn’t say anything but I assume he’s nodding his head. Hell, he’s right. I owe the kid some secrets and it’s time I paid up.
“When I was a kid about your age,” I say, “I used to throw pennies in the fountain all the time. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, fifty-cent pieces even. Anything I could get my hands on. And by my logic—even then I tried to remain logical at all times—if a penny bought you one wish, then a nickel bought you five, and a dime bought you ten, and so on. But no matter how many wishes I bought, for as long as I can remember I always wished for the same damn thing.”
“That’s silly,” he says. “Because if just one of your wishes came true, you’d be wasting all your other wishes.”
“See, Josh, I looked at wishes more like lottery tickets. The more wishes I bought, I figured, the better the chance I had of one coming true. And the one wish I wished over and over again was the most important wish in the world for me.”
“What did you wish for?”
I lift the Panama Jack to the top of my head as I sit up and look at him through prescription sunglasses. My face does a hell of a job disguising the pain. “I wished I had a dad,” I say.
Josh stops digging his hole and stares up at me.
“I never met my father,” I tell him. “And I always thought I was missing out on this amazing … thing. Someone to take me to Mets games, teach me the proper way to shoot a basketball, tell me the secret to picking up women.”
“But you had a mommy.”
“I had a mother,” I say. “A mother who screamed at me at the top of her lungs when I didn’t put my toys away. A mother who held a blow dryer to my head till I cried every time I sweat, even in ninety-degree heat. A mother who hid food from me, who put me to work when I was just a kid. A mother who wouldn’t let me outside to play, who wouldn’t let me have friends my own age. A mother who hit me until I got too big and began hitting back. A mother who ransacked my room every time I left my house for school. A mother who spent a fortune on herself but refused to help me pay for college or my law degree.”
“Your mommy sounds horrible,” Josh says.
“Maybe. But there are a lot of mothers like that. A lot of fathers, too. And I didn’t realize until I started practicing law and meeting some of my clients’ parents that maybe I was better off having never met my father. Who you’re born to is like a crapshoot. Sometimes a kid is better off when he’s raised by complete strangers.”
Josh nods his head. “Like I will be,” he says. Then: “But, Kevin, my mommy was good.”
“I know,” I tell him. “My point is, kid, you’ll hear a lot of bullshit over the span of your life about how important blood is.”
“You need it to live.”
“Sure you do,” I say, grinning. Don’t I know it. “But it doesn’t matter so much whose blood runs through your veins. It doesn’t matter so much who you came from, only who you become.”
“I want to be a hero,” he says, “like you.”
“I’m the furthest thing from a hero you’ll ever find,” I say, shaking my head. “Fact is, there are no heroes or villains in this world, Josh. People just like to label other people that way because it fits neatly into their understanding of the world. It ties things up nicely on the ten o’clock news. There are good soldiers and bad soldiers on every side of every war. There are good cops and bad cops in every city, just as there are good lawbreakers and bad lawbreakers on every city street. But the important thing to remember is, no one is either all good or all bad, Josh. Everyone is gray.”
“Like Skies,” he says.
I take a deep breath. “Sure. Like Skies,” I say.
Josh returns to digging his hole in the sand. “When I grow up,” he says without looking at me, “I want to be a lawyer, Kevin.”
“That may change in time,” I tell him, tipping my Panama Jack back over my eyes as I lie down. “But you take your dreams, kid, and never let them out of your sight. There are these people out there, I call them the Dreamkillers, and you’ll meet them at every stage of your life. They’ll try to impose their own reality on you every chance they get, but you can’t let them. However crazy your dreams sound to everyone else, you chase them. Let your dreams, not the Dreamkillers, guide your every decision in life. Because no matter what anyone tries to tell you, kid, as far as lives go, you only get the one.”
Satisfied and slightly high, I close my eyes behind my hat and drink in the silence.
“Everything all right?” I ask Josh a few minutes later. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”
“Everything’s fine, Kevin,” he says, closing his tiny hand around mine. “I’m just watching the horizon.”
CHAPTER 66
“Have a minute?”
I’m standing in the hall outside Judge Narita’s courtroom waiting for my client, an icehead from Nanakuli charged with breaking and entering.
“Make it quick,” I say, not unkindly, to Sherry Beagan.
She points to a bench at the end of the hall and I walk with her, my right knee finally nearing a hundred percent, my upper abdomen another story.
“I’ve called your office a couple hundred times,” she says. “Your receptionist keeps telling me you won’t take my call.”
“I know,” I say, sighing. “For some reason, Hoshi still refuses to lie on my behalf. We may have to let her go.”
“All right,” Sherry says as we sit, “since we’re short on time, I’ll get right to it then. I’m leaving the island this weekend and I need to interview you for my book.”
“You have a book contract?” I ask, crossing my right leg over my left.
“I do.”
I lean back, bury my hand in my left jacket pocket and pull out a bottle of Percocet. I uncap the bottle, drop three pills in my hand, put my palm to my mouth, summon some saliva, and dry swallow them one at a time.
“All right,” I say finally. “What do you want to know?”
True to her word, she doesn’t hesitate. “The police report on Erin Simms’s suicide states that she left a note and that it was addressed to you.”
“Yeah.”
That note is now part of the record with the Disciplinary Board of the Hawaii Supreme Court in the matter of In re Kevin D. Corvelli. The grievance was filed by Rebecca Downey, Todd Downey’s name conspicuously absent from the charge. Todd Downey’s name is also absent from the lawsuit filed against Harper & Corvelli by Rebecca Downey through her attorney Russ Dracano for the return of the six hundred thousand dollars in legal fees we obtained once Erin Simms’s bail was finally released. There is no merit to either claim, but I’d be lying if I said all of this—the grievance, the lawsuit, the accompanying publicity—is not a major pain in the ass.
“Well? What did the suicide note say?” Sherry asks.
I hesitate—but then, what the hell do I have to hide? In a few months it will all be considered public information anyway, available to anyone by written request through the Freedom of Information Act.
“The gist?” I say. “That she feared I’d abandon her once the trial was over.”
“That’s why she killed herself?”
Slowly I shake my head. “It’s not that simple, Sherry. Erin Simms was remarkably complex. You could write a dozen books about her and you’ll still just be chipping away at the surface. But, to wrap it up neatly for the masses, yes, as a borderline, Erin possessed an irrational fear of abandonment and a complete inability to exist alone.”
“So her suicide…”
“Was a frantic effort to avoid abandonment,” I tell her without emotion.
Sherry tilts her head back to the ceiling, then looks at me. “Well?” she says, softly. “Was Erin’s fear really irrational? Was the threat of abandonment real or did she imagine it? Kevin, you’re the only one who can answer that.”
I smirk, ever surprised at how simplistic everyone needs things to be. “Not even me, Sherry. I have no idea what would have happened after the trial had Erin not committed suicide.”
She waits a few beats, then asks, “Do you blame yourself for Erin’s death?”
“No,” I say without the slightest pause.
There is plenty of blame to go around in the suicide of Erin Simms, and in all likelihood it should start with her mother. Erin was tethered to Rebecca Downey from the day she was born in California until the day she took her own life in a lagoon nourished by the Pacific in Ko Olina. But her mother didn’t have the power to hold her daughter hostage all those years. To a certain extent, of course, Erin allowed it. And Erin is partly to blame. But I have little doubt that during her teens and twenties, Erin was fed a steady supply of the usual platitudes about unconditional love. I’m certain that if she ever complained about the torture she was put through, she was told at one time or another to “honor thy father and mother.” The words “tough love” no doubt sprung from someone’s lips along the way. Sadly, still today, divorcing your mother or father—walking away from a bad parent even as an adult—carries a far uglier stigma than divorcing your spouse did in the old days.
Society can be so damn stubborn in its notions of right and wrong. For whatever reason it becomes ingrained that we have to remain loyal to those who bore us regardless of whatever else they’ve done to us during the course of our lives. Bullshit. That advice comes from the same people who tell you that you have to remain forever in any shit town you’re from, that you should die within a fifty-mile radius of where you were born.
“Who do you blame for Erin’s death?” Sherry asks.
I do blame Luke Maddox, though I don’t tell her that. It wouldn’t read well in a true crime manuscript, and my words would undoubtedly follow me around the rest of my legal career. But certainly Maddox’s attitude, many of the decisions he made—Corwin Pierce among them—contributed to this case continuing far longer than it ever needed to.
As though Sherry read my mind she says, “Luke Maddox has made some very strong statements against you.”
As well he should. After all, I did insinuate that the deputy prosecutor committed mass murder during the trial. It was his fingerprint on my Maserati that gave me license. He’s since admitted that he’d spotted Miss Hawaii getting out of the Maserati with me at Chip’s and he’d considered confronting us in the lot when we returned to the car. Oahu really is too small an island sometimes.
“To hell with Luke Maddox,” I say. “We’ll face each other again in open court and at the end of the day we’ll see which lawyer’s left standing.”
In the play for Kerry Naikelekele, however, it is neither of us. Word on the street is, she’s currently dating a native Hawaiian, who also happens to be an Ultimate Fighting champion.
Standing just outside the courtroom door my B & E client, whose name I can’t quite remember, waves to me. As I rise I apologize, tell Sherry time’s up, I’ve gotta go.
“Just a couple more things, Kevin,” Sherry pleads as she gets to her feet. “Two more things, then I’ll let you go.”
I hold up my arm and motion for the client to wait inside the courtroom for me.
“Go ahead,” I tell her.
“You killed a man, Kevin.”
I look her in those big brown eyes, pretty, even today, even in the murky hallways of the criminal courthouse. “In self-defense,” I say.
“Still, it changes people. A lot, I’ve been told. How has it changed you?”
I exercise my jaw. “To be honest, this is the first time I’ve given any thought to it at all.”
Her eyebrows lift to meet her bangs. “So killing a man hasn’t changed you even a whit?”
I tell her it’s something I’ll have to think over. “And the last?” I say.
“It’s about Luke Maddox again,” she says, timidly. “I’ve read the transcript for the Erin Simms trial over and over again.”
“And?”
“And when you had Josh Leffler on the stand…”
I knew the kid was harboring a secret. A big secret. He’d told me as much as he pet Grey Skies on his lap on my lanai. I just hadn’t been listening at the time.
Somehow the conversation stuck with me, just as it did the day Josh took me to his old house on Ke Iki Beach. “Over there,” he’d said, pointing out the window at some rocks jutting out of the ocean. “That’s where they say my mommy died.”
Not “That’s where my mommy died,” but “That’s where they say my mommy died.”
Then Josh plucked a pair of binoculars out from beneath a floorboard in his closet. At first I didn’t even consider the fact that the binoculars were hidden. But why would a kid hide a pair of binoculars—unless he’d seen something with them that could come back to haunt him?
Add that to all his talk of secrets and lies and it became clear to me that he had witnessed his mother die. And that it was no accident; it was murder.
Until then it had never occurred to me that Josh could have been the target of the arson. The evidence was there. I’d even pointed most of it out to the jury during my cross-examinations: the point of origin; the open door; the puddle of accelerant on the floor of the adjoining suite; the pennies in the hall. All of it, right in front of us.
Gently, I say, “What are you asking me, Sherry?”
Thanks to the information I received on Luke Maddox from Milt Cashman & Company, I’d had Baron Lee run the unknown print found on my rented Maserati against those of all state employees. The arrest of Luke Maddox for domestic violence in L.A. was bullshit. A pissed-off ex-girlfriend filed a false report and was later prosecuted for it. The domestic violence charge against Maddox was dropped and the case sealed. The rumor that Maddox had been investigated for obstruction of justice while working the sex crimes unit in L.A. County was just that, a rumor. But it was enough to justify digging deeper. More embers for the flames.
When Baron Lee called Flan and told him he’d finally discovered a match for the unknown print found on my rented Maserati, everything changed.
Why the hell would Luke Maddox try to kill me? I hadn’t even called him a cocksucker to his face.
Then I thought of Kerry Naikelekele and what she’d told me th
e day we went snorkeling at the Kupulupulu Beach Resort lagoon. When I told her I spotted Maddox surfing off Ke Iki Beach, she wasn’t the least bit surprised. In fact, Maddox had mentioned to her that he surfed there sometimes, that he used to date a woman who lived there.
That woman was Katie Leffler.
“Kevin,” Sherry says again, unable to look me in the eyes, “I don’t know quite how to say this.” She pauses, takes a deep breath and exhales. “When you had Josh Leffler on the stand…”
“Yeah?”
“You cut him off.” Her eyes finally meet mine. “You cut the kid off immediately after you got what you wanted.”
“He had answered the question I asked,” I say.
“But we know now that what Josh meant was that Maddox had come over for pizza that night. Maddox had come over and left. Josh was about to say that on the stand and you stopped him.”
“I didn’t know what words would come out of Josh’s mouth next.”
“But you knew they’d be the truth.”
“The truth?”
“You knew it wasn’t Luke Maddox,” she says. “Josh didn’t see who it was that killed his mother, just that someone did. It was too dark. There were no lights behind the house. It could’ve been anyone.”
“It could have,” I agree.
But juries don’t accept shadows, I want to tell her. They don’t acquit when you try to feed them ghosts. They want names, they want faces. They want to know that someone is going to be punished for what’s been done.
“You knew it wasn’t Luke Maddox,” Sherry says again. “You didn’t know who it was that killed Katie Leffler, but you knew it wasn’t Luke Maddox.”
I stand silent, my eyes shooting past her down the long sallow hall.
“But whoever killed Katie,” she continues, “could be fingered for the murder of Trevor Simms and the arson targeting Josh Leffler. You needed someone specific to point to. So you gave them Maddox. You went after Luke Maddox with no regard for the truth.”
“The truth,” I say again with the slightest smirk.
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