For a Song

by Morales, Rodney;

  “Oh my god. She could be here.”

  “That’s just it. She could be here. Just gotta find out where.”

  “It’s gotta be Matthew’s boat.”

  “Possible, but the chronology’s not quite right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The boat was there on Monday, but it wasn’t there today. Obviously the boat didn’t disappear when they did.”

  “But it seems hopeful.”

  Yeah, hopeful. “I better get going.”

  “Thanks so much for stopping by.” She held out a hand.

  I clasped her hand, then stepped outside as she held the screen door. As I slid into my shoes, I remembered something else I wanted to ask her. “You used to be Minerva Bosch. Then Johnson. How’d you get the name Alter?”

  “A few years after Lino died, I met Stanislaus Alter.”

  “Isn’t that the guy who owned AlterNatives?” There used to be a shop with that name in Kahala Mall.

  “Yes, that was his store. It used to be in Hale‘iwa, under a different name. After we got married, I convinced Stan to move it into town, and we ran it together till he died. Three years ago. Mesothelioma.” She sighed. “I sold the shop two years ago. Couldn’t deal with the day-to-day hassles.”

  Jesus. This woman has buried two of her husbands.

  “I’ll find her,” I said against my better instincts.

  She said nothing. Just looked at me gratefully. That alone felt like a dagger.

  As I followed the walkway back to the street, I thought of what she had said about Lino: He dared to want more for us. If there ever was a loaded line, that one was it.

  Speaking of loaded lines, Give it a day, David, Sal had said. If I didn’t hear from Sal soon, I wasn’t going to wait. I really needed to see Smokin’ Joe.

  16

  I stopped at Diamond Head Theatre to get tickets for that evening’s performance. The elderly woman at the ticket booth asked, “You know any of the performers?” What made her think to say that?

  “Not really.”

  “There’s a few single seats left, scattered about. You want to sit way up front, in one of the middle rows, or way in the back? I’d go for the middle.”

  “The middle, then.”

  After a little more back-and-forth I paid for my ticket. “By the way,” I asked as I pocketed the ticket and receipt, “do they allow people backstage after the show? Like, ah, to offer congratulations?”

  “Oh, you do know someone.”

  I shrugged.

  “You can wait in the lobby, actually.”

  “The lobby?”

  “Yes. The actors come out after a while, often to greet friends and other well-wishers.”

  “Ah, it’s the director I may want to congratulate.”

  She smiled, conspiratorially, leaning forward and speaking softly, though no one was near. “You know, just go to his office. Knock on his door. Tell him Helen, that’s me, said it was all right. But don’t go in right when the curtain falls. Give him a few minutes to regroup.”

  “Great. Thanks, Helen.”

  She winked.

  Since I had a little time before I needed to shower and dress for my night out, I made a few calls, then turned on my laptop to check airfares to Papeete. They weren’t cheap. Two grand for a round-trip flight. Hotel prices weren’t cheap either. Le Méridien was priced at $244 per night in U.S. dollars when you added the tax. Royal Tahitian was $180 (not counting tax), and everything else was way more. Hell, why go lavish in paradise? I could get a tent and crash out on the beach.

  But I wasn’t ready to pack up and fly to Tahiti just yet. If I went there and checked into the cheapest bungalow at the Papeete Radisson, found no trace of Kay or Matthew, then hooked up a boat ride to Moorea, and then Bora Bora, and then the Tuamotu Islands, covering an area as large as Europe—that would be a costly venture. Now that I had seen how Minerva lived, I wasn’t about to go flying all over the place on her credit card unless I had more to go on than stray comments from a kid with a bodyboard and an elderly woman carrying grocery bags up steep stairs.

  I had to let it simmer, just for an evening.

  17

  A LONE KNIGHT’S JOURNEY

  Going to a play alone on a Friday night says a lot about your state of affairs. I had thought about corralling Mia for my engagement, the way she had corralled me for hers, but what if the unlikely happened, and she got in the way? It’s better to go at it alone than to ask your date—date being a presumptuous word here—if she would mind getting home on her own because you have a lead to follow, that it wasn’t a fool’s errand after all.

  One evening. That’s what Amber’s case warranted. That was my calculation. I’ll learn what I can, report to her my lack of success, refuse to take any money, not even for the ticket. Hell, when did I last sit back and enjoy a show?

  I put on my best jeans, a linen shirt that didn’t have holes, and comfortable walking shoes that were black and looked dressy from afar, since you had to be up close to see the embossed New Balance logo, and went to see the play.

  Around 7:30 I parked my Toyota at the Kapi‘olani Community College lot, just across the street from the theater and free of charge. It wasn’t like I couldn’t afford the piece of change it took to park in the theater lot; I just didn’t see the point.

  I lingered near the small white chapel next to the parking lot for a few minutes, taking a few quick drags from a cigarette while basking in the breezy trades, which were back. A play, I kept thinking, I’m actually going to see a fucking play.

  I put out the cigarette in the drinking fountain before I trashed it. Knowing full well that the slope of Diamond Head was tinder dry and teeming with kiawe, I was not inclined to provide the kindling.

  After finessing a couple of breath mints out of my shirt pocket and tossing them into my mouth I crossed on over.

  It was 8:01 when I got to my seat. No doubt, the play would begin promptly at 8:05, in keeping with theater tradition. I scoured the director’s notes in the program:

  The Rose and The Sword is an updated version of Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, a Restoration Period costume drama….

  And, as Minerva would say, yaddy yadda. I skimmed the text till a line caught my attention:

  On April 10, 1865, recently retired actor John Wilkes Booth professed a desire to return to acting to perform in this very play. This was later seen as a veiled allusion to his intent to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, which he accomplished only four days later, with dramatic flair.

  I skimmed further, to the concluding statement:

  The Rose and The Sword, then, could be termed a Neo-Restoration-politico-tragi-comedy that owes as much to Mel Brooks as it does to poor Otway.

  The whole second page of the program consisted of an analysis written by humanities scholar Jacob Choen. After noting for anyone who cared that his surname was pronounced “Shane,” the author stated that the original story was typical of the post-Dryden 1680s in that it was marked by themes of betrayal and power, and an abundance of bloodshed and gore. He added that the original play quite insightfully addressed the vulnerability of women at a time when women had few rights and were practically never seen onstage.

  It was eight-oh-five. The curtain had yet to open.

  I quickly scanned the synopsis. The plot involved two young couples, Belvidera and Jaffeir on the one hand, Aquilina and Pierre on the other, who felt betrayed not only by their elders, but by greed, power, and conventional wisdom. Ultimately it was their passions that really betrayed them.

  The synopsis covered only the first half, then ended on a cryptic note, promising a modern-day twist on Otway’s tame-by-today’s-standards original.

  The curtains were lifting and the lights were dimming as I read the last lines. I looked up and saw a dazzling stage set. It was Venice, with gondolas riding the rippling blue sheets that created, thanks to some incredible work with the lighting, the illusion of water. The costumes were positively medieva
l.

  A herald entered from stage right, announcing that Senator Priuli, the Duke of Asswhip, had been slain by two masked men. Immediately after this announcement, ribbon-wielding cast members ran about the stage, avoiding stepping into the illusory water. The blue sheets were then swept away and replaced by white and pink ribbons, signaling a wedding engagement: Belvidera, the slain duke’s lovely daughter, had been bethrothed to Jacob, son of Senator Antonio, the Earl of Shaftesbury. The same cast members who had altered the stage décor were now carrying champagne glasses and shouting hurrahs. Confetti fell from above. Then they all ran off, leaving Belvidera all alone. This was Penelope Langham, the woman who replaced Amber in the role. She walked about the stage wiping away tears with an embroidered handkerchief, stopped to face the theater audience, then said in a shaky voice that she was being forced to marry the son of the man that she knew was behind the death of her father.

  Belvidera was about to exit when she almost crashed into Jaffeir, her impoverished true love. He greeted her with a flurry of kisses. After calming her down, Jaffeir told Belvidera that her maid had told him she had seen the Earl of Shaftesbury, in passionate embrace with Aquilina, a courtesan and the beloved of Jaffeir’s closest friend, Pierre. Of course, Jaffeir didn’t tell Belvidera why he was with the maid. With a timeliness that could only be termed theatrical, Pierre stepped out on stage and hugged both Jaffeir and Belvidera. They commiserated. Belvidera exited, stage right. A back-and-forth commenced between Jaffeir and Pierre, with Jaffeir convincing Pierre to bring a complaint to Antonio’s fellow senators.

  The next scene showed the two young men approaching a group of cigar-smoking older men, anachronistic but somehow fitting. They were arrogant, rude. After listening to the two young men plead their case, they laughed, cited senatorial privilege, and in essence, told them to fuck off.

  By now the story had abandoned its Restoration origins and appeared to allude to recent scandals: Jaffeir and Pierre fed revelations to the local media about a coterie of senators who were using campaign donations to pay for escort services and high-priced whores. This twist underscored still another twist: Jaffeir and Pierre were obviously flirtatious with each other.

  In the scene that followed, two masked men reported to some shadowy figure. While the audience couldn’t see this person, they could hear the distinctive gravelly voice of Senator Antonio. The scene that followed was a dispassionate encounter between the overbearing Antonio and the lovely Aquilina.

  The first half closed with the indictment of Senator Antonio. Members of the media hounded him as he held court on the steps of what looked like the U.S. Capitol building.

  The curtains began to come down, signaling intermission.

  Or maybe not.

  The two couples, Jaffeir and Belvidera, and Pierre and Aquilina, suddenly appeared onstage, pushing the falling curtain out of their way as they hugged and kissed and drank, celebrating the indictment of the senator. While Aquilina and Pierre kept kissing and celebrating at the apron on stage left, drawing our eyes there, as soon as the lights dimmed on this couple, and a single light beam took our eyes stage right, we saw Jaffeir comforting Belvidera, whose sobbing got progressively louder, AND who cried out between sobs that she was still, still betrothed to Jacob.

  Then the curtains really fell.

  Smokers quickly exited the side doors. I removed myself to the foyer where drinks were being served. I ordered a glass of overpriced house wine at the kiosk. Taking sips from the clear plastic cup, I went over to a railing and while leaning with my back against it I scanned the play-going crowd for recognizable faces. Except for a deputy prosecutor I had been introduced to way back when, who pretended he hadn’t seen me, I didn’t recognize anyone. What I did recognize was a type. These people never frequented cheap bars, except for some clandestine affair. Where did they live? If I had to guess, I’d say the upscale segment of communities like Kailua or Mānoa, maybe even Kahala or Portlock, where my gambling friend Andy resided, or way up on those various ridges going out toward the East Honolulu ’burbs. Or in some dream loft in a renovated warehouse in Kaka‘ako. They have flood insurance, take summer trips to Europe or China, and go skiing in Utah or some Black Sea resort. They participate in fundraisers for friends with cancer or MS, ride high-end bikes on weekends, study dance and tai chi, and take swim lessons. A housing project, to these people, is just something on the news on occasion. Poverty sucks, as far as they know; they’ve heard about it, maybe experienced a touch of it in college before dad’s check or the Pell Grant arrived. Their kids, named Bruce, Rory, or Ikaika, attend exclusive private schools and they have dogs named Bruce, Rory, or Ikaika.

  I dumped the crappy wine in a flowerbed, tossed the cup in the trash, and went back in.

  18

  FROM AMBER TO INDIGO

  A round ten that evening, as I drove away from the theater and on toward downtown Honolulu, I was still sorting out the inspired mess that made up the play’s second half. It was more than suggestive about recent events, and it had me thinking up new angles in my search for Caroline Johnson. I had the odd inkling, the terrible hunch that this affair was connected to Kay in a way that I was not seeing yet.

  Why had Amber Kane shown up at the hull of my boat? What was it about her that held my attention?

  The better part of me knew it was wishful thinking. I had already internalized the case of the missing girl, and experience has taught me that when this happens, all roads seem to lead in that direction.

  I loosened my grip on the wheel.

  Intermission had gone on interminably and I had thoughts of an early exit when the lights suddenly dimmed. The music that had been playing during intermission had been intentionally subdued, there for one’s subconscious, it seemed, and while I could detect faint strains of classic rock songs by Jethro Tull and Procol Harum, among others, I had for the most part tuned out. But when the lights began to dim, the music got louder, hoovering the audience back inside with its irresistible groove. The song was “Waiting on a Friend” by the Rolling Stones. Cast members were all over the dimly lit stage, moving to the syncopated rhythms created by Charlie, the two Micks, Keith, et al., as they set up for the second half, all of them singing along with one line and one line only: a smile relieves a soul that grieves….

  For Act II, which I relived as I drove toward Kapahulu Avenue, the “Venice with gondolas” set had been pulled back—diminutized, you might say—and rendered as background and part of the Las Vegas Strip. The stage was a recasting of the strip and it didn’t take long for the audience to see that the actors were dressed as people who worked in and out of the various hotels on the strip: strippers, sharply dressed gambler types, street hawkers, stoners, prostitutes, tourists with fanny packs, Cirque du Soleil clowns and acrobats, and … Roman senators.

  Not only was the rendition of the Vegas strip painfully elaborate. It was enhanced with composites of European landmarks. A winding river, suggesting maybe the Thames or the Seine, replaced the famed Boulevard, running down center stage. Both stage right and stage left featured an Eiffel Tower, different in scale, and at first I thought that both sides featured a Harrah’s. But one turned out to be a Harrods. A sign on the top of one “building” brightly lit and blinking, flashed the words Vatican—Slots. As the music wound down, there was a flurry of activity, with cast members running in and out of the finely constructed façades.

  The Stratosphere doubled as a leaning tower, and it was stationed right next to the Lincoln Memorial, which was where, if you knew the Strip, you might expect to see Circus Circus. When any of the characters entered the Lincoln Memorial façade, casino ringtones rang out, suggesting it too was a gambling spot. In fact, as smoke rose up from the stage floor, it became obvious that casino ringtones sounded every time a character stepped through any door, which prompted some in the audience to check and recheck their cell phones.

  When the smoke finally cleared, three characters appeared in Roman regalia. They were crossing the mak
eshift waterway in a gondola. The gondolier turned out to be Jaffeir, who was giving Belvidera and Jacob, son of the earl, the ride of their lives. Jaffeir would snarl with disdain as Jacob torturously serenaded and pawed at Belvidera, and every time one of Jacob’s hands surreptitiously slid toward her private parts Jaffeir made the gondola sway and Jacob would find himself grasping the sides instead.

  I was turning right into brightly lit Kapahulu, passing its shops and restaurants, in no hurry to get to the agreed-upon meeting place. Still reliving the play, I had unconsciously succumbed to the well-worn surface streets, cruising toward downtown via King and Beretania, rather than flying down the H-1.

  In the scene that followed, after a quick shift of the set that turned the outdoors indoors, Jaffeir and his buddy Pierre made a killing at the craps table. Jaffeir, in a soliloquy rendered in rhymed couplets, informed the audience that he could now finance his act of revenge aimed at the earl and Jacob—the parties, he was convinced, behind the slaying of Belvidera’s father.

  I reached for a cigarette in my shirt pocket, and rediscovered my half-smoked one.

  By this point Jaffeir and Pierre had spoken and acted courageously; they had stared beyond the brink together, and when they embraced as comrades, it became clear that they were more attracted to each other than they were to their respective women. So when the Vegas/Europe backdrop again went dim, and a hotel bed appeared at front stage, it shouldn’t have been a total surprise to see the two male actors sitting at the edge of the bed tongue-kissing. Some in the audience squirmed and there were at least two dramatic exits. Aquilina walked into this “room,” caught the two young men in flagrante, and ran to Senator Antonio to inform him that the two men had been the source of his troubles.

  In the next scene, outside a Vegas-strip-styled version of the U.S. Capitol, a pissed-off Antonio stood before members of the media and announced that he’d been “framed by faggots” and was suddenly transformed into a martyr. An angry crowd chased after the two men.