by John Enright
“Well, come home and we’ll talk about it there instead of out here in the dark.”
Apelu liked it there in the dark, where he didn’t have to see her. “You won tonight, didn’t you?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“You always leave early when you win. Why is that? Are you worried about winning twice in one night?”
“You wouldn’t understand, and besides it’s not important. Why don’t you come home?”
“I don’t think it’s safe to come home right now. In fact, I was thinking it might be best for you and the kids to go visit your mom in Apia for a while.”
“What have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything. I was just going along, doing my job, when, like, everything went negative.”
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, then why are you acting so guilty?”
“I’m not acting guilty.”
“You disappear. Nobody knows where you are. That’s the sort of thing guilty people do.”
“Did you put my paycheck into our joint account?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Use it. Kids’ tuition’s due next week. You don’t want to go see your mom then?”
“You want the whole family on the run?”
“Okay, don’t then. But if anybody asks about me just say that I haven’t been around, that you haven’t seen me.”
“That wouldn’t be a lie,” Sina said. In the dark they were just two shapes with voices. While Apelu had dozed, rain clouds had gathered. The stars were gone. “People are talking, Pelu. Why are you doing this to me?”
“I’m not doing anything to you. I’m just doing what I have to do.”
“It’s like I don’t know you anymore. I’m not even sure I want to know you.” That familiar scolding tone had returned to her voice. “Why did you come here?”
“I’m not sure now. I don’t trust the phones. Look, just tell the kids I’ll be home soon, that I love them and think about them every day. And think again about taking them all over to visit your mom.”
“You don’t care at all about me, do you? Or what you are putting me through?”
The last bingo game had ended, and people—mainly women—were pouring out of the VA Hall.
“Give me a ride as far as the country club?” Apelu asked.
“You can go to hell, Pelu,” Sina said, but she got in the truck and started it up and beat most of the traffic onto the road toward the country club. Apelu scooted down in the bed of the truck so that no one would wonder who was riding in the back of Sina’s pickup. When they got to the country club road Apelu beat on the side of the truck with his hand, and Sina pulled onto the shoulder. Apelu climbed out over the tailgate. He was about to go up to the driver’s side window to say something—he wasn’t sure what, just something, anything so that it didn’t end this way—but Sina pulled away with a screech of tires, spraying him with dirt and gravel.
It started to rain on his hike back to Piapiatele.
When Apelu woke up in the morning he found a note from Asia and a small ring of keys on the bedside table in Leilani’s sun-flooded bedroom. They had not been there when he went to bed.
“Dear Apelu, Gotta go. Explain later. Here are keys to house and car for your use. Be careful. Don’t forget to feed Nick & Nora. XO Asia.”
Within two hours Apelu had transferred himself entirely to Asia’s house, leaving Ezra and Leilani’s as much as he had found it as he could remember, except for one thing—he took the fire knives from Ezra’s bunker with him, knowing no one would miss them. He left Nick and Nora in their kennel with full troughs of water and food.
He caught the ten o’clock local news on the radio in Asia’s car leaving her house. There was nothing on the news about Mati or a shooting. That seemed strange, very strange. There wasn’t much the local news liked better than a bullet-riddled corpse. He stopped at a bush store and bought that morning’s News. Nothing. For a minute or two he toyed with the idea of driving by the Korean graveyard to see what was happening, and then he rejected it. That old saw about returning to the scene of the crime. Instead he drove up to the house on Canco Hill, looking for Torque, who was there, sitting on the porch with Baby Peni crooked asleep in one arm and a Bud Light in his other hand.
“How’s your head?” Torque asked as Apelu came up the porch steps.
“Head? What head? How’s yours?”
“Sister’s still in jail,” Torque said. “Do you know how much trouble these things are?” he said, jerking his chin toward the sleeping baby. “I think she got her ass arrested just to teach me a lesson.”
“Which one?”
“That if you spread the seed, you got to tend the weed.”
“You mean that baby is yours?” Apelu asked. The only similarity he had noticed was a certain testiness.
“Yeah. Peni was my dad’s name.”
“The guy you hated?”
“You can’t really hate your parents, man. You’re just embarrassed by them.”
“What did they bust Sister for?”
“Interfering with an officer of the law, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, biting.”
“Biting?”
“Sister’s got a mean set of fangs on her, man.”
“It can be a criminal act.”
“Looks like she’ll spend the weekend in jail. Her lawyer, a little public defender bitch—”
“Palangi?”
“Yeah, ratty little thing. She couldn’t get Sister’s hearing scheduled for today. So, first court appearance Monday, I hope.”
“Where’s the baby’s mother?” Apelu resisted an impulse to take the child from its bent-neck discomfort inside Torque’s elbow.
“Long gone, maybe back in Apia, Auckland. Who knows? Sister is his only mom now. Where’s Sally at today?”
“Busy. Listen, Torque, you said when you and your guys cleaned out Ezra’s you took the stuff somewhere. Could you tell me or show me where you took it?”
“It’s sort of hard to describe, but I could show you. Why?”
“Nothing to do with you, just following the track.”
“You cops lead really boring lives, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” Apelu watched as the baby stretched and twisted trying to get comfortable, and Torque almost dropped him. “What do you say?”
Torque was struggling with the baby, who was now awake and complaining. “You mean now?”
“Yeah, soon. Here, give me that child.” Apelu stood up and took Peni out of Torque’s hands. Its disposable diaper was full and dripping. “Shit, Torque,” Apelu said.
Half an hour later Apelu had cleaned the baby and changed his diaper, found a jar of baby food and fed him, and had given him a nipple bottle of formula to suck on. He didn’t search for baby clothes. “Here,” he said, handing the peaceful child to Torque, “let’s go.” They went in Asia’s car, with the darkened windows rolled up and the air-con on low. “Just tell me where.”
“A container in Tafuna,” Torque said. “Don’t you have a kid’s car seat?”
Shipping containers had become a fact of life and a curse on the landscape of Tutuila. Sometimes the big orange or red steel boxes seemed to be everywhere you looked—taking up space in parking lots, dumped beside stores, piled four high along the once scenic road by the dock downtown, filling Pago Park, forgotten in the weed trees of vacant lots, even parked in people’s front yards. If you lived here, you ignored them. If you noticed them, you wondered how long it would take for them to just rust away.
The dirt road that Torque directed Apelu to was the same road that the Woos lived on. The container in question, in which Torque had deposited the goods—minus the steaks and CDs—that he had taken from Ezra’s house, was one of about a dozen strewn randomly in an overgrown field a couple of lots before you got to the Woos’ place. Apelu parked the car in ruts leading into the field when the median grass between the ruts got too high for Asia’s low Kia. He and Torque, carrying the baby, walked the
rest of the way. The grass in front of one of the containers had been recently beaten down. There were tire tracks in the mud.
“This it?” Apelu asked.
“That’s it. Number 12483, like they told me.”
“It’s locked.”
“No, it ain’t. It just looks locked. If you lift up the door handle there you’ll see that the bolt wasn’t thrown before the latch was padlocked.”
Apelu lifted the door bolt handle and turned the bolt ends at the top and bottom of the door clear of their brackets. “You’re right.” The door opened surprisingly easily. “That’s Ezra’s stuff all right,” he said, as sunlight lit up the interior.
“Hey, man, let’s go. This place gives me the creeps. You want some of that stuff or what?”
“No, just checking,” Apelu said, closing the door and turning the door bolts back into place. “Know who the container belongs to?”
“Haven’t a clue. Come on, man, let’s go. It’s hot out here. The baby doesn’t like it.”
On the road back out Apelu had to pull off onto the shoulder at one point to let a big black SUV coming at them pass. Apelu looked through the windshield to see if it was the Woos returning, but it wasn’t them. There was a male Samoan driver he didn’t recognize and a young woman in the front seat. They were talking. They never looked down at them in the short Kia. Apelu had driven on another hundred yards before it struck him where he had seen that woman’s face before. There was a gravel driveway into another container field. He pulled in there.
“What?” Torque asked. Peni was almost back to sleep in his lap.
“Wait,” Apelu said. “Listen to the radio, put the seat back, and take a nap with your kid. I won’t be long.”
Apelu left the car running with the air-con on and walked back up the dirt road the way they’d just come. There was a dogleg to the left where the road ran up against the airport fence. Apelu stopped there and checked around the corner before walking on more slowly. There was the sound of a larger vehicle coming up the road behind him, and he sidestepped out of sight into the tall manioka and wild papaya brush before it turned the corner. It was a large flatbed truck and it proceeded slowly past him up the road and then turned into the ruts that Apelu and Torque had just come out of.
Apelu worked his way up slowly through the brush to where he could see them without being seen. Both doors to the container they had visited were open, as were the doors of two nearby containers. The black SUV was there as well. A discussion was in progress—four Samoan men and the woman, who was wearing sunglasses now, her hair covered with a bright patterned scarf. She was just as striking as the first time Apelu had seen her, serving iced tea to Leilani and him in the luxury of Werner’s house above Apia. She was giving the orders. The men all nodded and began to unload the containers onto the flatbed. Apelu slipped back through the brush to the road and the car. When he got there, Torque and the baby were both sound asleep. The radio had been changed to a Christian rock station. Asleep together, Apelu could finally see their genetic connection. It was in the nose and the eyes. He tried not to wake them as he drove them home.
CHAPTER 16
THE NEXT DAYS were nerve-racking for Apelu. Nothing happened, and he didn’t know how to make anything happen. It was the weekend. There was no news on the weekends. No newspaper, and the radio station reporters always took the weekend off. Even if Asia had had a TV there would be no news broadcasts on the only channel, which, being government owned and run, was staffed by government employees who also got the weekends off. Broadcast news was sort of a western thing anyway, a very minor type of infotainment compared to what was out there on the coconut wireless, and Apelu had no access to that either. The rest of the world could annihilate itself, but they wouldn’t hear about it until Monday morning. At least there was a CD player at Asia’s place and a slim but interesting selection of disks to play. She favored female country-and-western and ballad singers, Nashville. Apelu listened to the backup slide guitars and fiddles, not the lyrics.
The days were long and empty, filled with too many thoughts, all of them uncertain. At least he felt comfortable, at home in Asia’s house and sleeping in her bed, which still held her aroma. He practiced with the fire knives, muscle memory returning. Late afternoons he walked down to the cove and then over to Ezra’s to feed Nick and Nora. Saturday he went shopping for groceries in Asia’s car and brought home a six-pack of Steinlager and a bottle of Stolichnaya. Saturday night he got solo drunk listening to Emmylou Harris. He had a lot of time to think, but he didn’t reach any conclusions.
Monday morning there was still no word of the shooting on the radio news, and he drove over to Vailoatai and past the graveyard. No car, no body, no yellow crime scene tape. He called Lisa’s Apia office. No answer. He called the home number she had given him and got an answering machine but didn’t leave a message. He called Torque and found out that Sister was still in jail. They were still waiting for charges to be formally filed. Monday night, at a loss for what to do, he drove downtown and went to the Captain’s Table. The place was almost empty, and the only waitress there was an older woman who definitely was not there to dance with the customers.
Late Tuesday morning Apelu was practicing with the fire knives in front of Asia’s house when he heard Nick and Nora off in the distance start barking, really excited. They didn’t stop. Apelu put down the knives and went to check. He loaded Ezra’s shotgun and took it with him, along with his badge and ID case. He had discovered Asia’s back trail through the pandanus to Ezra’s and he took that way, which brought him up behind the house. Two rental cars were parked above where the driveway got funky. As he watched, two palangi men came around from the kennel side of the house. Nick and Nora were still barking at their meanest. One of the two men went into the house while the other looked around outside. He opened the garbage can and rummaged around. Then he stopped and called out to the man inside, who reappeared along with two other almost cloned-looking palangis. The guy at the garbage can was poking around with a pen he had pulled from his shirt pocket. On the end of the pen he pulled something out of the garbage can—Apelu’s bloody shirt.
In the five days since Mati’s murder Apelu hadn’t been sure what to do, so he had done nothing. For whatever reasons, Mati’s demise had not been made public. And Lisa Ah Chong could still not be reached. He had tried again that morning. All he knew to do was wait for the next development. Well, maybe this was the next development he had been waiting for. The FBI. They had to be the FBI, the additional agents Mati had said were coming. They were all youngish palangi males he had never seen before. They all appeared sort of proud of the fact that they didn’t fit in to their surroundings. They seemed to be competing in the looking grim and businesslike category. They must have come in on the previous night’s flight from Honolulu. Apelu hid the shotgun in a clump of pandanus and walked to the end of the path where it came out across the driveway from the house, maybe fifteen yards away from the four men now all grouped around the garbage can and the bloody shirt.
“It looks too big to be Sparks’,” one of the men said.
“Head wound,” another said. “Most of the blood around the collar and shoulders. Days old.”
“Hello, can I help you?” Apelu said.
Four right hands went for the back of four belts.
“Step forward. Hands away from the body,” the tallest of the four said.
Apelu did as he was told.
“Stop there. Who are you?”
“Neighbor. Live up the coast. Heard the dogs. I look after them when these folks aren’t here. That’s all. Thought some kids might be bothering them. Who are you?”
“FBI,” the tall one said, walking toward him. “Turn around.” He gave Apelu a quick frisk, found the ID case but left it in his back pocket, probably thinking it was a wallet.
“Something wrong?” Apelu said, his hands up by his ears.
“So, you take care of those dogs?”
“That’s right.
”
“Have there been any other visitors lately?”
“No. No one here I know of since Mr. Strand went to jail.”
“Which was when?”
“Couple weeks ago now.”
One of the other agents had walked over to one of the rental cars and came back with a file folder. He opened it and showed Apelu a sheet of paper with six photographs on it. “We’d like to know if you have seen any of these people around here.”
Apelu took a moment to scan the photos and think. “That’s Ezra Strand, his wife Leilani, Mr. Woo—I don’t know his first name—and his wife Atalena. That’s Special Agent Matthew Sparks, and that’s me, Detective Sergeant Apelu Soifua, with a moustache and about ten years younger.”
“Put your hands behind your back, please.” The tall guy put the cuffs on gently. Two of the agents drew their weapons and conducted a quick tour of the perimeter, while the other two took Apelu inside. Nick and Nora were barking again.
The agents turned Leilani’s chair around so that it was facing the room not the windows and sat Apelu in it. As he sat him down the tall guy slipped Apelu’s ID case out of his back pocket, flipped it open, nodded, and handed it to the other agent.
The other agent started. “Know why your photo is in that file? Because you are a prime suspect.”
“A suspect in what?” Apelu shifted around in the chair, trying to get his hands behind his back comfortable so that he could sit back.
“In the disappearance of Special Agent Sparks. When was the last time you saw Agent Sparks?”
“Thursday, early afternoon.”
“Where was that?”
“In Vailoatai.”
“Where’s that?”
“West of here.”
“Why did you see him?”
“He wanted to meet with me.”
“Why?”
“To ask my help in locating a witness.”
“What witness?”
“A girl they call Tia.”
“Okay,” the tall agent cut in. “Detective, you look uncomfortable, and you are being quite cooperative. Rick, take those cuffs off him. I think we can treat the detective as if we are on the same side.”