“Why didn’t you go to an emergency room?”
It is a logical question. I get up, limp to the window. I stare out at the street.
“Did you call the police?”
I turn back to her. “My husband’s a cop.”
“Did he do this?”
“Yes.”
“Children?”
I ignore the question. She doesn’t press me.
“Is he looking for you?”
“Probably.”
Phyllis thinks for a moment. “He can’t know you are here. It puts us all in danger.”
“I’ll be careful. But I can’t go back. He’ll kill me. I know he will.”
“I have to ask you for your cell phone. If you need to make calls, you use mine. It’s encrypted. Use yours, you can give away your location.”
I hand her my cell phone.
“We’ll have a doctor check you out. You’ll want to wash the blood off. There’s a bathroom over there. Coffee’s in the kitchen.” She gives me a clipboard. “And fill this out.”
“He drives a blue Camaro, if you see it.”
She nods. “You’re safe here, Lucy.”
I sit back down on the couch. The clipboard holds a welcoming statement, five pages of questions, and a list of rules. I learn I will get breakfast and dinner. I am asked to sign a statement that I will not reveal the location of the shelter. If I came by car, I will have to disable its GPS. I will submit to a drug test, take no photographs, not smoke in the house, blah blah blah, until my mind fogs.
But I’m in.
And I like Amanda.
Chapter 15
I step out of the airplane in Honolulu, thank the pilot for getting me there safely. It’s a short, steamy walk to the curb where Ernie is waiting, leaning against his rented car.
“I got a Honda for us, honey,” he says.
“I like Hondas.”
The ride takes six minutes. The federal detention center is across the street from the airport. On the way, Ernie invites me to come back with him to Maui for a few days.
“You look like you could use it.”
Do I?
“Tell me about this guy,” I say.
“His name is George Candler. He owns a condo behind the Royal Hawaiian. His plan was to retire here when he quit running guns into New York from Georgia and West Virginia. He had two misfortunes: one of his runners got busted; another ratted him out. He’ll be extradited to New York, where he will spend his last days in Rikers Island prison hospital because his other bad news is that he has stage-four pancreatic cancer. George will tell us everything. He just wants to die with a view of the ocean.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” I say.
Robin Stella, the US Attorney, meets us in the lobby of the detention center. “I was on your father’s case team when I was in the FBI. I met you then; if you don’t remember, it’s understandable. I know Ernie is still looking for the shooter, so I called him about this.”
She takes us up to the dayroom of the prison infirmary. It’s a sunlit room, with a worn couch, plastic chairs. Three sickly prisoners in wheelchairs watch a game show on a flat-screen TV. One of them, it must be George, sees us, grabs his drip stand, and backs his wheelchair away from the TV set. George is a tanned, wiry little man, made frail by his cancer. His face is blotted with dark chemo scars. As he talks, he moves his jaw from side to side, searching for lesser pain. Before he found his true calling—buying guns in the South, moving them north—he wholesaled oxy, meth, weed, coke, and the occasional runaway. He was a transporter of misery. Guns turned out to be easier and more profitable. George bought them legally with cash in stores or at gun shows. He owned a clean late-model Chevrolet Malibu, hired an apple-cheeked mom with kids to play in the back seat so they looked like a family, observed speed limits, filled the bottom of the trunk with pistols and automatic weapons for criminals in New York, Philly, Boston, wherever it was difficult or tedious for those criminals to purchase hardware of human destruction. George sold them out of his car after dropping off the “wife and kids.”
“In between, I surfed,” George said, “I was good enough to earn respect on the North Shore. Pe’ahi, Lanaiakea, the Banzai Pipeline—I was the real thing.”
In between selling guns, one of which may have killed my father. I will keep that in mind.
Robin Stella has a look of disgust on her face. Maybe she is also a surfer; the idea of George polluting the Pacific is offensive to her.
She says, “Okay, Mr. Candler, can we give these people the information we discussed?”
George adjusts his chair and faces me.
“It was a Remington M24. I had an ordnance sergeant at Fort Drum who boosted high-end stuff for me on demand—grenades, even rocket launchers, shit you can’t get. I already gave up his name. He’s in the stockade now. That counts. Am I right, Miss Attorney General?”
Robin nods.
“So, I meet a guy who tells me he wants something special, a sniper rifle, the Remington M24, if possible.”
“Where did you meet him?” I say.
“A gun show in Scranton. I tell him the M24 ain’t that hard to find, maybe even here at this show. Oh, no, he says, he wants something stolen, so if it got traced it would be plenty of distance from him.”
“Who was he?”
“From the Midwest, a tall white guy, probably a vet. He knew what he wanted.”
“Did he have a name?”
“Clyde.”
“That’s it?”
“He didn’t write a check. I didn’t ask. He said he was gonna save a lot of lives, do the Lord’s work with it.”
“We showed George some pictures of people of interest in the Ohio area. I brought them,” Ms. Stella says.
Ms. Stella opens her briefcase and shows me the pictures of possible suspects.
George wants to be helpful. “I have a bad memory, and it was a long time ago, but these three come close.”
I study their faces. I imagine them as children with fathers who loved them, beat them, toughened them, or deserted them. Now my son James has a tufty chin beard, a shaved head, a closed mouth to hide missing teeth. What’s with the face tattoo, Dee? Sig, your Mom wishes you would call. They are three hardscrabble working-class white guys. They’ve fixed your car, tarred your roof, broken into your store if your locks were easy. Maybe one of them killed my father. It’s a start.
“Who’s your favorite, George?” I ask.
George shrugs. His look says, Kill them all, makes no difference. They are meaningless. Likely, all three alibied out, and George doesn’t give a shit.
“How did the sale go down?” I ask.
“Same as always. We meet. I say where. I usually pick the quiet end of an empty Walmart parking lot. I bring a backup. I open the trunk and show you the guns. You like. You buy, you take it to your car, come back for the ammunition.”
“The buyer arrived in a vehicle. What was it?”
“I dunno. Shit Toyota. White.”
Robin Stella shakes her head. I am collecting useless information. I look at the mug shot faces. James, Donald, and Sig.
“Clyde. That’s the name he gave you?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Can I have a minute alone with George?” I ask Ms. Stella. She shrugs and leaves the room with Ernie. George is handcuffed to the armrest of his wheelchair. He isn’t a threat. I lean in a bit closer. I can speak softly, sympathetically.
“How long do the doctors say you have, George?”
“Five, six months.”
I take his hand.
“Is there anything I can do for you? Are you getting enough painkillers?”
George cocks his head to the side, contemplates a sarcastic reply, and changes his mind. He doesn’t have the energy. Instead, he sags into a real feeling.
“I got no one. Something, eh? A whole life, nobody.” He starts to cry. “You’d think . . . Nah, fuck ’em.”
“Kids?”
“M
y son lives in Boston. He says he can’t get away.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is.”
“George, tell me some more about surfing. Where did you start?”
“I grew up in Ventura, so I started there, moved down to LA. I was a regular in Malibu. In those days, there was a direct line to Oahu. We all knew one another. It was a fraternity. We had our beaches; they had theirs. We hassled kids from the valley when they came to Malibu; they did the same to the haole kids from Kahala. But if we came to Hawaii to surf, they were cool with us, and vice versa. Before long I was bringing back weed to finance the trips.”
I laughed. “I like that. Did you hollow out your surfboard?”
“Nah. I never carried anything. I had a girlfriend Alice, looked like a schoolteacher. She was my mule. She went first class, never got searched. Me, I had dogs sniffing my ankles the minute I got off the plane.”
I’m not behaving like a cop. I’m a reporter. We are having a conversation. We could be on 60 Minutes.
“That’s funny.”
“You know what’s funny? She really was a schoolteacher. Taught second grade at Horace Mann in Beverly Hills.”
“You still in touch?”
George thinks, searches for a memory—or is he thinking I am full of shit?
“In touch? No, we’re not in touch.”
Yes, you are, asshole. She’s your wife. She was your accomplice on your little West Virginia and Georgia gun-buying journeys. Of course I’m full of shit—I’m a smart cop. You don’t think I came armed with more information? You wouldn’t give her up, but there are enough lovely photos of Mrs. Schoolteacher Candler in her Chevy Malibu taken at various tollbooths on the New Jersey and North Carolina Turnpikes, on the G. P. Coleman Bridge, on the Dulles Greenway, and at a 7-Eleven in Durham. It’s not called the surveillance state for nothing, dope.
“Perhaps we can find her for you.”
“Don’t bother. It was too long ago.”
“George, I’m a desperate woman. I’m living with something that causes me a lot of pain. I’m not comparing it to yours, I’m looking to solve it, come to a resolution. You can understand that, right? It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to live with. I know you have something; you have a key to open a door. You have knowledge that would help me a lot. I know you do.”
George is quick to reply. “What are you going to do for me? You got a cure for cancer? I told you what I know.”
He turns away in his wheelchair. I am still sweetness and sympathy. I still care.
“George, here’s what I can do. I can make you comfortable. I can get you into a hospice in Hana. It overlooks the ocean. It’s clean, and you can hear the waves. You’ll wake up out of your chemo nightmare, hear birds, smell jasmine and pineapple. You will be medicated and leave this earth with a smile on your face dreaming of curls, tunnels, and dolphins as the pain eases out of your body and your soul floats into the ocean. Or you can spend your last days in a damp basement cell at Halawa Correctional. You know it? It makes Rikers Island, where I know you spent some time, look like the Four Seasons in Maui. That’s what I can do for you. I am looking for Clyde something. You have to do better than a tall guy with a white Toyota van and no last name.”
George swings his jaw into a smile. This will be a minor victory for him. It turns out he is a big fan of CSI.
“I have his fingerprints.”
Ah.
“I gave him a can of beer. Heineken. It’s all I drink. He crushed the can and tossed it. After he left, I picked it up. You want it? It’s in the back seat of my car.”
That means Clyde’s fingerprints and possible DNA on the beer can.
Later, Robin Stella, the US Attorney, says, “We still have the car.”
I buy Ernie an oceanfront room at the Royal Hawaiian. Dinner is on me at Alan Wong’s.
“We’ll get the bastard now,” Ernie says.
We both know better, but why spoil the meal with ifs. If the beer can is in the car, if we get prints off the beer can, if Clyde has been in the military, used a VA hospital, or been arrested in the last five years. Then, we might have a match.
“How long will it take?” I ask.
“A week. That’s pretty fast with professional courtesy.”
“Fine. You did swell, Ernie.”
“Yeah, sure, but you know all those promises you made to George? Like the hospice in Hana. I don’t think I have the kind of juice to get him in there.”
“Neither do I, Ernie. Fuck him.”
I book a late-afternoon flight to New York, which means Waikiki beach time, a long swim, and a farewell lunch with Ernie before he flies back to Maui. I wake up to a gray, lousy day with just enough rain to dampen the sand. I don’t care. I grab a towel and my snorkel mask.
The beach is empty except for a few high school kids ditching, smoking weed under a ratty umbrella, and a man with a metal detector scraping the sand for buried treasure. A few surfers bob in the ocean, hoping for bigger waves. Sun or not, I spent good money to get here, so I am not going to let bad weather get in the way. The water is warm; the rain is of no consequence. I wade out until the water is waist high, adjust my goggles, and swim.
In high school, I swam the two- and four-hundred-yard freestyle. I held a couple of school records that might still stand. My father drove me to practices and meets. There is no worse sport for a parent. A swim meet can last six hours, and you wait around for your kid to dive in the water and climb out two minutes later. Our team practiced from six to seven every morning. He was proud of me, meticulously keeping track of my times, waiting outside the car, handing me a cup of hot chocolate from a thermos. He liked to look up famous swimmers who had lesser times.
“See, Nina, your one hundred is now faster than Alice Nathan, who won the bronze in Paris in 1946. You are only a few seconds behind the great Johnny Weissmuller.”
“Johnny who?”
“You never heard of Johnny Weissmuller? He was Tarzan!”
The memories came fast and delicious; they kept me swimming, head down, breathing through the snorkel tube, a tickling drizzle of rain pinging on my back. I was into the groove now, my arms moving mechanically, the subtle rise and fall of a wave carrying me to the next.
“What do you think of when you swim the long distance, Nina? Do you go over the day’s activities, do you review your French verbs, do you think about what you will have for breakfast?”
“No, Papa, I don’t think of anything. I leave my mind on the pool deck.”
“I was a wrestler in high school. I had to stay sharp, decide on strategies.”
“It’s different. When I swim, my mind forgets my body can’t go on forever. I could swim forever. When I swim long distance in the pool, I zone out to the point that my mind doesn’t take notice of how tired I’m getting. It only reminds me when the bigger markers pop up—like my stroke is getting sloppy or the flips are becoming harder. I could swim and not really know how tired I am until my body finally collapses, and I can’t even stay afloat.” I swim. I swim.
And then I realize I’ve reached that point. My arms are close to dead. I stop. I am in a fog bank. I tread water, spin around. I can’t see the shore. I am blind. I try to sense a current. I feel one. It moves me. But where? Where is it taking me? Back to Honolulu? Or to China? I don’t know, but I will surely drown if I make the wrong decision. The fog can last for hours. I am a fast swimmer, how far have I come? Two miles? Even if I knew the direction, I would barely make it. Who will save me? A kind dolphin, Poseidon with fat cheeks blowing me to shore? It won’t be a sunset cruise sailboat, or a fisherman. I am alone. I feel a hand on my waist. My father is treading water next to me.
“Papa.”
“That way, Nina.”
He turns me, aims me into the current. I am six years old; I can feel his hand on my stomach, he is teaching me to swim. We are in a pool. My father walks beside me, holding me up.
“Just relax, Nina. Let the water hold you, b
reathe in, blow bubbles out in the water. I have you, I am with you. You are doing so well, darling. You will be a wonderful swimmer.”
I can see the spires of the Royal Hawaiian hotel. The sun has come out, and the white beach is dotted with umbrellas. I am on my way home.
Chapter 16
It never fails. I click my seat belt and raise my window shade as the plane begins its descent to JFK. I see the thin strip of a deserted Fire Island beach, green waves breaking over what must be frozen sand. Queens will be freezing-ass cold, and I instantly regret my decision to leave Hawaii.
I’m politely turning down whispered limo offers by gypsy drivers when I get a text from Tessa Harper that says she’s waiting for me at curbside. Tessa and I get along just fine. Especially since her husband tore up his knee skiing in Vermont and I sent him to my ex-fiancé. Darren did a brilliant partial replacement, gave him his best physical therapist, and kept the bill within their insurance. Tessa wants to tell me about her interview with Susan. A drive back to my apartment would be a good time to do that. I’m ecstatic. I just saved forty dollars.
“Can we turn up the heat, Tess? My body’s still in Hawaii.”
“Sure. You have a fun trip?”
“Rested and ready.” She doesn’t need to know about George Candler.
“Where’s your tan?”
“In my luggage. Tell me about Susan.”
“She didn’t kill him. I know you don’t think so, either.”
“Then where was she the night of the murder?”
“I’ll show you.”
Five minutes later, we are on Thirty-Second Avenue, in Jackson Heights. Rows of narrow two-story postwar houses with shingle roofs, aluminum siding, various heights of chain-link fence, a car in every driveway, and a chicken in every pot. The neighborhood has had its ups and downs, but the people who bought houses from one another in a succession of ethnic convolutions, from white GIs returning from WWII to black families who sold them to East Indians who sold them to Jamaicans. Where there were once Koreans, there are now Pakistanis. The only people who haven’t discovered the neighborhood are millennials, who will arrive later, when they realize they can’t afford Brooklyn. There is something about these houses that makes people responsible to them. They are always in fresh paint with tidy front gardens, and satellite dishes on the roof.
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