“You’re good, Lenny.”
“Thanks.” Lenny took a swig.
They went on to argue about whether Martina Hingis was good-looking or not, and after a while they went over to the Shorebird and cooked their own meat on a grill big enough for a couple of dozen customers. Paul got pretty loaded. He felt as if he had dropped twenty years and reverted to a college kid in flip-flops, it was great, and he finally left Lenny and staggered a few long feet to the Outrigger elevators. It was four A.M. Hawaii time, which made it seven A.M. in California, an official all-nighter.
He tossed in the too-firm hotel bed, wondering whether attacking this judge so frontally had been the wise choice. He pictured Miss Watanabe’s glistening eyes and thick shining black hair, and he wondered again if the judge was getting any. And then he thought some more about that opening sequence on Hawaii Five-0, with the lithe hula dancer in a grass skirt and a lei encircling her long sleek hair, dancing, shaking it, then stopped suddenly by the camera, stopped in an erotic pose, with her hips cocked and her brown waist creased—how that soft crease in the smooth flesh had riveted him to his set when he was twelve or thirteen.
He thought of Nina and felt the familiar exasperation and pain. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to try anymore.
Next day, not too early, after making sure that Lenny’s wife was hard at work over at the courthouse and downing a raw egg in Tabasco and tomato juice, Paul went to see Dr. Justin Jun, who had treated Dan Potter.
Jun’s office was in one of the towers near Queen Emma Hospital, just off Lusitana and the Pali Highway. The exterior of the building was impressive, even for high-rise Honolulu, with entry pillars stretching like elegant silver candlesticks toward the sky, but inside the twelfth-floor reception area the walls were dun, partitions poked out here and there, and the magazines deserved rejection by the Salvation Army. Jun probably never even saw this room with its intimidating frosted window, and probably didn’t care what it looked like. The doctor was, Paul decided after cataloging the detritus, a neglectful bachelor in his private life, overworked, young, and abrupt with his patients.
The nurse beckoned Paul in. They walked down a depressing dun hall under fluorescent light and turned in to a gray cubby full of files, where Paul shook hands with the doc and sat down. Jun appeared very young and very wary, but then all docs have good reason to be wary; they’re waiting to get sued, no matter how good they are.
After they finished talking about the islands and the weather and Paul’s flight, Jun seemed more relaxed. Paul saw no point in shilly-shallying around. He started in on Jessie Potter and the case in Tahoe.
Jun nodded all the way through Paul’s story. Puffs under his eyes indicated he’d just finished a long shift, although it was only 8:15 in the morning. When Paul finished, he held up a finger and went out, returning a second later with a couple of orange cans of soda.
They popped the tops.
“This is embarrassing for me. I want Jessie Potter to know her husband’s father subpoenaed my records. I never met him. Then I was subpoenaed.”
“They pay you as a treating doctor when you testified?”
“No, they paid expert witness fees. That’s usual here in Hawaii. There’s a greater emphasis on courtesy than on the mainland. They could have paid me less.”
“So you didn’t have a problem being subpoenaed for this trial?”
“Oh, I did, I did. I called Mr. Potter’s lawyer and tried to talk him out of it. But he said I wouldn’t be the principal witness. He said the evidence was overwhelming and all he wanted me to do was authenticate the records and confirm that I had not been able to diagnose any problem.”
“But you were the principal witness,” Paul said.
“I figured that out afterward. I am truly sorry. I couldn’t believe he got that judgment. Whether that girl did something to her husband—I wouldn’t know, and I would doubt it. She came in with him both times and she seemed concerned.”
“Mind running through it with me?” Paul said.
“No. I have the file right here. They were still married and she can have the files if she wants. No confidentiality problem. I made copies.” He passed them to Paul, and Paul decided he was an all right guy.
“I’m a gastroenterologist,” the doctor said. “He came to see me the first time for an attack of severe abdominal pain that lasted about forty-eight hours. I examined him and took a blood sample and stool sample, had him X-rayed, and gave him a prescription for an analgesic. He was in a lot of pain. There was local abdominal tenderness. I thought about appendicitis, but the pain wasn’t in the right lower quadrant. I thought about peritonitis, but there weren’t any obvious signs of an infection. A strangulated hernia, twisted bowel, cancer—I thought about all these and many more. I wanted to put him in the hospital but he said no, he had had a couple of attacks like this before and it would be over by the next day. He called the next day and said he felt fine. The lab tests all came back negative, except for a slight elevation in inflammatory parameters. WBC, ESR, CRP, and fibrinogen . . .”
“Which meant?”
“It’s a general indicator that some sort of inflammatory process was occurring. But I couldn’t pin it down, especially with the speed of the recovery. He came back in a week later and even those tests were normal.”
“It says here in the court file that you checked for poisoning, ” Paul said. “Anything about the wife make you suspicious?”
“Not at all. I liked her. But it could have been inadvertent, who knows—I had a series of lab tests done and nothing turned up, not even pakalolo. . . .”
“What’s that?”
“Marijuana. Pretty usual for young guys, but he was a straight-up citizen at least as far as his ingestion habits. I liked him too. He wasn’t exaggerating, I don’t think. Anyway, we didn’t find anything—”
“But you said in your testimony that poisoning was as good a guess as any.”
“I didn’t say it like that. The lawyer was very persistent. Like, ‘It could have been poison, right? You couldn’t rule that out?’ Well, how could I? There are too many poisons in this world and they don’t all show up on lab tests.”
“What about the second attack?” Paul said.
“Same as the first, same abdominal pain, same forty-eight hours. Very peculiar. I tested him up, down, and sideways. There was nothing objectively wrong with him except that slight inflammation.”
“Stress? Mental illness?”
“That’s where you go when you can’t figure it out, but I never had time. He knew it would go away by itself, and he knew I couldn’t treat it, so he wouldn’t go into the hospital. He refused further testing. Six weeks later he was dead.”
“Well, the fact that he had already had at least two attacks of acute pain before the day he drowned would seem to confirm Jessie Potter’s story,” Paul said.
“But we had no diagnosis. The lawyer insinuated to the judge that she must have been doing something to Dan Potter. She made it sound suspicious, like she was setting up a murder. I didn’t like the way she questioned me.”
“You said a few minutes ago that you were embarrassed,” Paul said.
“Well, if she had been there with a lawyer my testimony would have seemed quite different. I wanted to be objective but this lawyer turned what I said into other things. She could cut me off when I tried to explain, and she never asked me the right questions. And she wouldn’t let me volunteer anything. It was very frustrating.”
“Volunteer? Like what?”
“Well, like—like the fact that my notes contain a very significant statement that supports Mrs. Potter. It just never came out. This default hearing business is very unfair.”
“I’d like to hear more,” Paul said. “Even though it may be too late.”
“Right here. See? I even underlined it—‘Attack came on suddenly, in less than five minutes pain severe.’ ”
Paul leaned back and thought about that. “Shows he could have got into trouble fast,
” he said.
“Right. The judge seemed to think he would have had plenty of time to talk to her, to turn back for the shore, to do something. But I think what she told the police could be true. Dan Potter was fine one minute, then he was writhing in pain. That’s what he did in my office. Maybe he fell over and couldn’t stay afloat. It’s possible.”
“But you never got to tell the judge that.”
“It was the way the lawyer asked the questions.”
“If you were looking at Dan Potter today, knowing what you know now, what would you do for him?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know. I still don’t have the slightest idea what could have been wrong with him. I hate to say it, my patients wouldn’t want to hear this, but rather often I don’t have a clue. Some transient disturbance occurs in the body, and it rights itself. I sometimes just try to stay out of the way. I talked to several colleagues about this here in Honolulu. They had never come across anything like it.”
“Send him to another specialist?”
“There simply weren’t any test results to work with.”
“Okay,” Paul said. He got up.
“I could file another declaration for you expressing my doubts that she killed him—I was very uncomfortable with that trial.”
“I may be back in touch. Thanks, Doc. I’m gonna pass all this on.”
Paul left frustrated. What had killed Jessie’s husband? Sandy had called Hawaii for the coroner’s reports and so on, but nobody except Judge Otaru had ever come to any conclusion.
Walking out to the shady parking lot with his haul of files, Paul noticed a whole fence of flaming pink bougainvillea. The parking lot of the tower was bordered by this fantastic sight and Paul went over to look at it. Where the fence had broken down, on the other side, dwarfed by the skyscraper, he saw a ramshackle bungalow with peeling green paint, a front veranda, and a front yard rioting with flowers, including many flowers Paul had never seen before. But he recognized the mango tree and the banana palms, the green bamboo in the corner, the red ginger and the jasmine looped over the door. A little old Asian lady came out, carrying a shopping bag. She went down the steps slowly and opened her umbrella and started down the street.
Honolulu was like that, full of exotic contrasts. The sun made everything beautiful and at night the moon did the same. All seemed benevolent, in balance, even the meth heads and bar girls part of the golden whole.
He decided to can his next city appointment. The morning was too sensational.
He took the H1 freeway to the H3 just past the airport, and went over the skyway through the jungly mountains, through the tunnels and onto the Windward side of the island. Several hundred feet up, he was still coming down the mountain, and he could see a quarter of the island, Kaneohe Bay with Coconut Island basking in the sun, the golf course, and the cliffs over toward the north shore. With all that condensed geography, he was surprised to find himself pulling into the public beach at Chinaman’s Hat less than forty minutes after leaving Jun’s office.
Dan Potter had died out there.
Across the long expanse of yellow sand, the ocean looked overflowing, as if it might spill over and cover all the land any minute. But it was as calm as Tahoe today, just a different color entirely. Pale jade. And then there was the island, close enough to touch, it seemed, tall and pointy and brown and about a half mile offshore. Chinaman’s Hat.
Shoes off. After taking the field glasses and camera out of the glove compartment, he rolled up his pants legs. Pearly clouds scudded across a lurid blue sky. Walking across the warm sand onto the sun-splotched beach Paul felt tension leach out in a rush, the same feeling that happened when he got poison oak rash and attacked it with a shower of hot water. His body let loose.
Two kayaks were just setting out from the beach, a boy and a girl in each kayak. Paul sat down under a coconut palm and took some photos for Nina. Wiggling his bare toes in the sand, he watched them, thinking of Nina, remembering that she had come to Oahu with another man.
The girls climbed into the back benches and the boys pushed the kayaks out and pulled themselves in in a practiced way that showed they did this a lot. In seconds, all four were paddling smoothly, the double paddles synchronous between the partners in each boat.
They got smaller fast. The water wasn’t glass at all. Currents and choppy waves impeded their progress. The trades gusted. Chinaman’s Hat was no pushover, at least in this kind of weather. A current of air seemed to flow between the shore and the island, stirring up the waves and making the kayakers work hard. He saw whitecaps.
He imagined Jessie and Dan out there, the boy clutching at his stomach, trying to stand up, falling, the girl jumping in after him.
The kayakers pulled up on an invisible beach on the island way out there in the ocean. The landing didn’t go smoothly and one kayak went over but in a minute they had recovered and brought the kayaks in and out of Paul’s sight even with the field glasses. If they climbed up the central cone, which was rocky and barren, he would see them again. Meantime, he stretched out luxuriously in the sand under the riffling palms. Warmth flowed through him, and, in the natural way of things, he fell asleep.
When he woke, bathed in sweat and nibbled by tiny red ants, he looked around. A weekday in summer on a superb beach, and there was hardly anyone around.
A witness would have saved Jessie so much trouble.
He stripped his pants down to blue shorts. His shirt went next, down to bare skin. Making a bundle out of his clothing, he hid everything well out of sight under a bush.
He ran in and dove and came up tossing his head and blowing water out of his nose.
It wasn’t solving the case, but then again, the case might not be solvable.
17
CURIOSITY DROVE KENNY past his family’s restaurant. The desperate hopeless feeling grabbed him again as he watched the lights dim in the Inn of the Five Happinesses. They would be going home, bringing something from the restaurant for a midnight snack.
Even now, his stomach ached when he realized how low to the ground he had sunk. Why couldn’t he be the son his parents deserved? He was a bad fit in the real world, hopeless at the restaurant, skating by on the fringes in human relationships. . . . His father had been right calling him a malcontent.
He had been so sure he had finally found his place in Silicon Valley. There, under the sunny skies of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, Linux rebels welcomed him with stimulating technobabble, and the jeans-and-dress-shirt trailblazers rousted him out of bed for power eggs at Buck’s in Woodside or smoky chai at Konditorei in Portola Valley. He had fit in. Everyone needed to feel purposeful, and Kenny’s purpose had seemed so clear, so beautiful, so twenty-first century.
How strange! He hadn’t even thought about the City of Gold for days!
Pulling over beside a heavy bush, he parked his car near a two-story cabin with a wide yard on both sides. He felt very tired.
Locking the car door, he slipped around past the garage and shimmied up the tree to his old bedroom. Good. The window, as it had been for all the years of his childhood, was cracked open for air. In defiance of his father’s basic distrust of anything that moved except for his family, his mother held on to certain naive truths, such as the one, so often disproved by the teenaged version of Kenny, that said a window on the second story was not accessible. She always wanted Kenny’s window open, because it caught the evening breezes.
Flopping rather noisily onto the floor beyond the window, he looked around his room with a melancholy sense of the time that had passed. In the dark, he saw shadowy forms, but not familiar ones. A treadmill and Exercycle now took the place of his bed.
He set the nylon bag which held his computer down on the floor in one corner. Creeping into the hallway, he gathered up a sheet, pillow, and blanket in the closet and dragged them to an open space on the floor. Lulled by the creaking of the tree branch against his house, the same one that had scared him as a boy, he fell asleep.
“Who’s there!” Kenny’s father shouted.
Dressed in sweat shorts and a loose T-shirt, Kenny’s father was standing in the doorway to Kenny’s room, morning sun pouring down the hallway behind him, coffee mug spilling coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Tan-Kwo?” He peered into the face of his son. Setting his now half-full mug into a plastic holder on the treadmill and newspaper on a nearby table, he stood over Kenny and ruffled his head. “Hey, son! Good golly Miss Molly! What a shock!”
Kenny scrambled out from under the covers, looking for a rag to wipe up the spilled coffee. Finding nothing handy, he used his shirt. “Son, you better watch your step,” he answered, wanting to please and no longer needing to pick rock ’n’ roll bones with his father’s taste. His dad was a big Jerry Lee Lewis fan.
“Your mother will kill you,” his father said.
“For showing up without calling? For being out of touch? I’m sorry, Dad, I . . .”
“For using that expensive shirt to wipe up coffee. Well, go see her. She’ll make you some breakfast.”
“Wait, Dad. Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”
“Before you have tea? You’re pretty grouchy before that. I haven’t forgotten.”
“I’m fine. Really. There’s just something I have to say to you, and it’s hard.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“But—I can see you were about to exercise.”
“This sounds more important.” He seemed to understand that Kenny needed him to go ahead. He had always seemed to read Kenny’s mind, which was why Kenny hadn’t been home for several months. Nodding, his father got onto the Exercycle and began pumping away. “Now, what’s this about? Why do we have to talk before breakfast?”
Kenny opened his mouth, fully intending to tell him everything. He had the story worked out in his mind, even some of the words. He would pull no punches. He would not attempt in any way to present himself in a positive light. This story of loss and failure was all his, his alone. There would be no blaming of business rivals or the stock market.
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