One Man's Paradise Read online

  Questioning other lawyers is no fun. They know what you’re looking for and they’re tougher to trick. They anticipate your questions and have answers at the ready. Truth be told, I fucking hate lawyers.

  “Fine. Then let’s stop pissing in the kiddy pool and get right down to it. You came to Waikiki to spend two weeks alone with Shannon, isn’t that right?”

  I take his silence as an admission. I suppose it could’ve been one wild coincidence, but now I know it’s not.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police when you found out Shannon had been killed?” I ask.

  He takes another gulp of Tom Collins as the bartender sets another Grey Goose martini down in front of me. I didn’t order it, but I’m not one to complain.

  “I’m irrelevant to their investigation,” he says. “I didn’t want to sully Shannon’s name.”

  “Sully her name how?”

  “I’m fifty-nine going on sixty. I’m a divorced father of three. I’m a grandfather for Christ’s sake. Hell, I’m older than Shannon’s parents.”

  I want to ask him what the hell he thought she saw in him, but if I get too far under his skin early on, he’ll walk out. And probably stick me with the tab.

  “Why the two rooms at the Grand Polynesian?” I ask.

  “That was at her insistence, of course. She wanted to keep up appearances.”

  “But you had a sexual relationship with Shannon?”

  He nods and drains the Collins glass.

  The thought of him atop that beautiful young girl makes me angry. I can count on its making the jurors angry, too.

  “And Shannon’s insisting on two rooms didn’t bother you?”

  “Of course, it bothered me. I was paying for both rooms. I put mine on my credit card and I gave her cash for the other.”

  “If it bothered you so much, why did you do it?”

  He looks at me as if I’d sprouted a second head. I suppose if he’s half as drunk as I am, he’s already seeing double. Then he smirks as if the question I posed to him were funny.

  “How old are you, Mr. Corvelli?”

  “Thirty-one,” I say, taking a hit off my martini.

  “Then ask me again in another thirty years.”

  Some guys even my age will do just about anything for a piece of ass. I suppose it only gets worse as they get on in years. From the look on his face, Shannon could probably have made him reserve an entire floor.

  “When did you arrive in Honolulu?” I ask.

  “Late that night, the night she was killed.”

  “Was she expecting you, Professor?”

  He shakes his head and signals the barkeep for another Tom Collins. Then he points to my glass, too. I hope I’m not already blacked out, or the entire night will be for naught.

  “Shannon wasn’t expecting me until the next day.”

  “How did you come to arrive earlier?”

  “I wanted to surprise her,” he says. “I conjured this fantasy of arriving early, decorating the hotel room with rose petals and scented candles, ordering a couple bottles of champagne and fresh strawberries from room service, and surprising her with it all. I loved her.”

  Catus regrets saying that last sentence the second it escapes his lips. It’s too late. He’s said it, and if I’m not blacked out, I’ll remember him saying it. He takes a healthy sip of the fresh Tom Collins, trying to wash his words back down.

  “What did you do when you got to Waikiki?” I ask.

  “I checked in at the Grand Polynesian. I called her room from my cell phone just to see if she was there. She wasn’t, so I dispensed with the preparations and set out to find her.”

  It all sounds a little too rehearsed, right down to the rose petals. I know he’s about to tell me he never laid eyes on her that night.

  “Did you have any luck finding Shannon when you went looking for her?”

  He’s silent for a moment, then surprises me with a “Yes.”

  “When and where?” I ask, suddenly somewhat clearheaded.

  “Around one a.m. or so. At a bar. The Bleu Sharq.”

  I might just be about to hear a full confession pour from the professor’s lips. Some people are compulsive confessors. Some cannot help but confess. Some know the consequences, but are guided by an irresistible impulse to confess. The same goes for killing.

  “Shannon was with someone when I saw her,” he continues. “A local boy. They were dancing, rather provocatively, in fact. I stood at the bar awhile, waiting for her to blow him off, but she didn’t. So I was reduced to hoping that she’d see me. But she never glanced in my direction. Not once.

  “The place was crowded, and I tried to get closer to them. I couldn’t bear to approach her under the circumstances, but I figured if I could just get close enough for her to see me, she’d stop doing what it was she was doing.

  “Then, I watched them kiss. I felt disgusted, sick to my stomach, in fact. I felt like I was a teenager again, at a dance at the high school gym, and the girl I really, really liked was making out with some other guy.

  “Just after last call, I decided to leave, wait until the next day, and meet her as planned. I figured she’d never know I arrived early, and we could both pretend as though nothing had happened.”

  It all comes down to whether Catus has an alibi. I try to put myself in his shoes. I fly thousands of miles to meet a lover less than half my age. I pay for two rooms for two weeks because she’ll have it no other way. Although she tells me it’s for appearances, I’m not at all naïve. I know that she’s ashamed of me. I arrive early to surprise her, to help myself win her heart. And maybe because I cannot wait to have her, not another single day. But the surprise is on me. I witness her taking advantage of our night apart, allowing herself to be molested at some local bar by some local boy, the polar opposite of everything I am. I leave the bar barely able to withstand the ache in my gut. Do I return to my hotel? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

  “Where did you go after you left the Bleu Sharq?” I ask.

  “I went for a walk.”

  No alibi.

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone.”

  No alibi.

  “Where did you walk?”

  “Along Kalakaua, along the beach.”

  No alibi.

  “When did you get back to the Grand Polynesian?”

  “Around six thirty in the morning.”

  No fucking alibi.

  I have Catus right where I want him. I have him alone near the scene of the murder, from last call until sunrise. I take a long sip from my martini. There’s no way I’m forgetting any of this. My only regret is that I didn’t bring Flan. He could’ve testified to what Catus is telling me tonight. But I never expected Catus to come completely clean the way he is. There must be more. There’s something the professor isn’t volunteering. He wants me to extract it from him like an impacted wisdom tooth.

  “Did you speak to anyone between the time you left the bar and the time you arrived back at your hotel?”

  “I didn’t want to spend the night alone.”

  It all comes rushing back. Just like Carson Reese. He’s about to lay something on me. Something big, as if he, too, spent the night with a priest.

  “I solicited a prostitute,” he says.

  If I were one of these fucking sailboats in one of these fucking pictures on one of these fucking walls, I’d stop dead in the water. The wind has been knocked out of my sails. But a prostitute does not a concrete alibi make. Nor will it gain the professor any favor with the jury. Besides, it may not even be true. He could’ve conjured the harlot just as he conjured the scented candles and rose petals. My boat’s still afloat, and I’m not jumping overboard just yet.

  “What time did you hire her?” I ask.

  “Approximately two thirty.”

  “How long were you with her?”

  “Until sunup.”

  I rattle off my questions like machine-gun fire, hoping to catch him in a lie. But he’s prepared f
or all this. He knew it was only a matter of time before someone came around asking these questions. He swats my questions away like Superman. The bastard thinks he’s bulletproof.

  “How much did you pay her?”

  “I gave her six hundred for the night.”

  “Did you use an ATM?”

  “No,” he says flatly. “I often carry that kind of cash.”

  He’s thought this all through. I have little doubt that were I a cop, he’d pull from his pocket his wallet and produce no less than $900 in cash.

  “Did you have sex with her?” I ask.

  “I didn’t pay her six hundred dollars to play Scrabble with me all night.”

  If I were a cop, I’d crack this wiseass across the jaw. I finally understand why police brutality is not uncommon and how I picked up so many civil cases in New York. Hell, right now, I’m all for it.

  “Where did you have sex with her?”

  “She had a room at the Leilani Inn.”

  I breathe a small sigh of relief. The Leilani Inn is not the type of establishment to have video surveillance, considering its clientele. I’m satisfied I can punch enough holes in the professor’s story to make him suspect in the eyes of the jury. I’m still convinced Catus might be my client’s ticket out of jail.

  I take a long pull off my martini, finish it off. This interview is over. I pay my tab and stand up to leave. Catus almost seems sad to see me go. He’s one lonely sack of shit.

  “A hooker?” I say, right in his face. “That’s your alibi?”

  “Yes. Her and three bellhops. They made a stink about me not being a guest at the inn. So, I paid them each fifty dollars to allow me entry and to be discreet.”

  He smirks, proud of himself.

  “Clever lads,” he says. “It must be a little scam they run to get themselves in on the hooker’s action.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Best seven hundred and fifty bucks he ever spent,” says Jake, taking a nip from his flask. “Only thing I ever got from a hooker that I didn’t pay for was crabs. This guy gets a fucking alibi circus.”

  “These witnesses will never testify, Jake,” I say from behind my desk.

  “The prosecutor will subpoena them, son.”

  “These kinds of people, they wipe their asses with subpoenas. They’ll disappear if they ever get served.”

  “The prosecutor will grant them immunity if they agree to testify,” says Jake, a little whiskey dribbling down his chin.

  “I’ll have Flan check out their backgrounds. If they do show up in court, I’ll make them wish they never had.”

  “Well, I suppose we should get to work on our much tougher witnesses this morning.”

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  “The video surveillance discs from the hotels.”

  “Not today, Jake. I’ve got a date this afternoon.”

  “A date? May I ask with whom?”

  “Let’s just say our first night together was billed to the Gianfortes.”

  “The bartender? You son of a bitch,” Jake says, as I toss some extra clutter on my desk. “Shit, the only witness I ever slept with was the prostitute who gave me crabs.”

  “I’m going to the jail to see Joey tomorrow morning. I’ll call you on my way back to the office, and we’ll get together to sort through this mess.”

  “Have fun, son,” Jake calls to me, still sitting in my client chair as I walk out the door. “Have fun.”

  My shrink in New York thought it less than wise for me to model my career after that of a man the likes of Milt Cashman. He thought it downright criminal that I should model my love life after Milt’s. After all, when I last left Milt, he was putting the finishing touches on his fourth divorce. Each separation, of course, was initiated by the female on the grounds of Milt’s relentless infidelities.

  With women, as in my career, I’ve always felt like a fraud. I’d enter relationships with good intentions, but somehow they always turned out bad. I never trusted my own feelings, let alone a woman’s feelings for me. I’d question their motives, and then I’d inevitably question my own.

  Manhattan produces a certain kind of woman. The kind of woman who consults Sex and the City for love advice, not just fashion tips. The kind of woman who thinks finding the right man is anticlimactic to the joyous struggle of looking for him. The kind of woman who drinks too much and has too little to say. Of course, my universe in New York centered around me, and more than likely these generalities ring true only for the women who populated the circles in which I ran.

  It’s too soon to tell what the women of Hawaii are like, but if Nikki is any indication, then I’m in for a real treat. I’m meeting Nikki at the entrance to the Honolulu Zoo, where Kalakaua Avenue becomes Monsarrat. The day is brilliant, as just about all of the days on Oahu are.

  I do a double take when I see her, radiant in a white sundress with a neckline that dips low on her chest. The contrast of the white cotton against her caramel skin is mesmerizing and I allow myself a hearty pat on the back. The sunlight does her a certain justice that a forty-watt porch light never could.

  “Aloha, Kevin!” she says, waving one supple arm when she sees me. She approaches me as I exit my Jeep and plants an enthusiastic kiss square on my lips.

  I was expecting that awkwardness that comes after first sleeping with someone, but there’s none of that. She grabs me by the arm and leads me to the zoo. She selected the setting for our first real date during our two-hour telephone conversation Sunday night. I’ve always loathed the chitchat between girl and boy on the phone, but our talk didn’t consist of the usual grade-school drivel. She told me what she loved, what she lived for, what she’d die for, all with a fervor that stirred even the most abstruse passions in me. She cherishes writing, she said, and animals, hence the zoo. She adores Alika, the only family she has left, and admires with every ounce of her being the endearing spirit of Hawaii’s people.

  The Hawaiians received a raw deal, there is no doubt about that. Their land was stolen by western businessmen, and their language and culture soon followed. The Hawaiians share much with the Native Americans on the mainland, and as on the subject of the American Indians, little is being said and even less is being done to rectify the wrongs inflicted upon them. Nikki knows that a single haole named M did not orphan her and Alika, but rather a collective endeavor by a contingent of Caucasians begun about a century and a half before she was born.

  I pay the discounted kama’aina admission price and we enter the zoo. My last visit to the Bronx Zoo was as a small child, and I wonder as I step through the gate why I’d never gone back. Then it hits me. The pungent odor of animals and their excrement. I gag and nearly vomit from the combination of the stench and my five martinis last night. A zoo person I am not.

  Nikki puts her hand upon my back and whispers softly in my ear the ever comforting words “You’ll get used to the smell.”

  I thank her and we move forward.

  Our first look is at flamingos, feeling underwater for fish and insects with their spoon-shaped bills, stepping elegantly in every which direction, their pink feathers demanding to be photographed.

  I’m anxious that it’s daytime and I’m not at work, even though much of my work of late has been done at night. I want to be with Nikki, but I’d prefer her at my side as I pecked away at the keyboard, drafting Joey’s motion to suppress. I always saw leisure time as time to get ahead, and leisure activities as cutesy fun for the unambitious and lazy. I take a deep breath and look past a pair of giant Indian elephants toward Diamond Head. Nothing impedes my view of the incredible crater on the horizon. No ugly skyscrapers or tacky video billboards. I’m not in New York, and perhaps I need not work every waking moment of the day.

  Nikki holds me close to her as we walk around a bend.

  “We didn’t wake Alika the other night,” she says.

  “I’m certainly glad of that.”

  An only child, I don’t pretend to fathom the relationship between brother
and sister. But had I a sister, I would fear for the man she brought into my home. I don’t know Alika and I’ve little desire to know him. These connections I’m unable or unwilling to make have contributed to my remaining so utterly single this first decade of my adult life.

  “Alika never came home that night,” she adds.

  I ask her why not, not because I want to know, but because I know she wants to tell me.

  “He was working all night,” she says.

  “What is it he does?”

  Nikki gives me a look as if she’d rather not say, but were that the case, she wouldn’t have led our conversation down this path. She had ample opportunity to discuss her brother’s whereabouts over the phone, but she chose to do so only now, in person, where she can gauge the reaction on my face.

  “He sells ice.”

  I remain stoic. Six years in the criminal courts in New York City have desensitized me. I can tell by her face that this is a big deal to her, and thus, I know, it should be a big deal to me. But I’m no good at hand-holding, at comforting the sad and hurt. I am, however, a fucking champ at changing subjects.

  “Monkeys!” I shout. “My favorite!”

  Swinging from branches on a single tree are three white-handed gibbons, Southeast Asian rain-forest primates with no tails. The tree rests on a small island surrounded by a moat replete with turtles, some swimming while others rest leisurely on logs.

  “I hate that he sells ice,” she says.

  Much like the gibbons, the topic is here to stay.

  “How did he get into it?” I ask, turning toward a group of spur-thighed tortoises, all standing stone still like rocks, heads popping out only to gnaw the leaves of fallen branches.

  “How do you think? M.”

  Nikki’s voice is shaking. I put my arm around her shoulders and lead her to the vacant herpetarium, the reptile house. Alone, in the darkness, standing before tanks of toads, lizards, frogs, and geckos, she leans into me and I feel her tears soak through my shirt and onto my chest.

  I am new to this. I wonder how she can cry on the shoulder of someone she hardly knows. I wonder, too, if it’s terribly wrong that I’m so turned on.