One Man's Paradise Read online

  “I’m sorry, Gretchen. I’m not at liberty to say right now. I was told by the police and prosecutors not to discuss issues that may directly relate to the case.”

  “I understand. But you’re convinced that the police have the killer behind bars, that it was Joseph Gianforte who murdered your daughter, isn’t that right?”

  “Absolutely. I know it was him.”

  “How long do you plan to remain in Hawaii, Carlie?”

  “I have no immediate plans to return home to Knoxville. As far as I’m concerned, my business is here, helping ensure that some semblance of justice is brought to Shannon’s killer.”

  “Thank you, Carlie. We’ll be watching this story very closely as it unfolds. We hope you’ll join us again soon.”

  “Thank you, Gretchen.”

  “When we come back, we’ll go to local correspondent Mike Oliver in Honolulu with the latest on the case against Shannon’s accused killer, Joseph Gianforte Jr.”

  I start in on my second whiskey and wonder what the weather is like in New York. I can check it out on the Internet when I get back to my apartment if I’m not too drunk to work the computer. Who am I kidding? I’m going to make sure I’m too drunk to work the computer. I drain my glass and order up another.

  “Easy, cowboy,” says Jake. “It’s not yet noon. You’re gonna wake up tomorrow with the brown-bottle flu and you’ve gotta question that doorman in the morning.”

  “It’s almost six in New York, Jake. Remember?”

  Seamus is quick on the trigger. My third drink hits the bar as Mike Oliver comes on.

  Oliver tells us that Joey has been indicted on first-degree murder. He’s being held in lieu of $3 million bail and he’s likely to plead not guilty when he’s arraigned on the charges in the indictment next week.

  “Mike Oliver,” Gretchen says, “we’ve spoken a bit about the defendant in this case. What do we know of his attorney, Kevin Corvelli?”

  “We haven’t yet been able to reach him for comment, Gretchen. We’re told he’s actually very new to the islands, having been admitted here just over a week ago, coming by way of New York. He’s a young attorney, a former protégé of Milt Cashman of the Cashman Law Firm in Manhattan.”

  “Would that be Not Guilty Milty, the criminal attorney who represents all those rap artists?”

  “That’s right, Gretchen. Since then, Corvelli has been in private practice in Manhattan. He ended his career there on a very sour note, a fairly high-profile murder case, which he lost in spectacular fashion.”

  “Tell us what happened, Mike.”

  “Well, Gretchen . . .”

  I ask Seamus to mute the volume and change the channel. The image of Mike Oliver is replaced with that of Jon Stewart, a journalist with real integrity and a show even I could watch.

  The Irish whiskey has lost its flavor, which is a good thing for someone who prefers Scotch. I drink it down and order another.

  “Jake, do you know a good investigator?” I ask.

  “Of course, I do. A good fella. His office is just down the block.”

  My head is swimming. I should eat, but nothing on the board looks appetizing. Corned beef and cabbage with a side of poi? Kalua pig and Tater Tots? I don’t think so. I’ll eat my ice.

  I think back to three days ago when I first met Jake. I think back to what he warned me about. I have placed myself in a position to repeat the mistake that led me here, this time on a national scale. Thanks to Gretchen Hurst and Mike Oliver, that which I escaped from has followed me here to Oahu. Now, with four whiskeys soaking my mind, I am about to forget where I am. Malihini or not, I want to run the table.

  “Would you mind calling your investigator, Jake? Having him meet us here if he’s available?”

  “Of course not, son. May I ask what for?”

  “Carlie Douglas is here to help the prosecution try Joey in the press,” I say. “I intend to level the playing field.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Ryan Flanagan, or Flan as Jake calls him, is a gruff-looking native of New Orleans who had nothing to lose when he decided to call Honolulu home. He walks into the Sand Bar with a cigarette dangling from his lips, chest hair creeping out of his mostly unbuttoned aloha shirt. He is middle-aged with salt-and-pepper hair, at least two days’ scruff but not a beard. He is thin and wiry but solid. Billy Bob Thornton with different tattoos.

  His hand is coarse like sandpaper and I instinctively pull mine back at the touch. I’m used to shaking lawyers’ hands. Flan’s hands are no lawyer’s hands. Not a private investigator’s hands either. He’s got a broad smile on his face, but his eyes don’t hide the hand in life he was dealt.

  Flan, Jake told me, was blue-collar by blood, a steel cutter who never bitched about a life cutting steel. He loved it, took great pleasure in earning a good day’s pay for a hard day’s work. He cut steel for just over two decades, waking at the crack of dawn and quitting at the cusp of dusk. He followed orders. He cut steel. He went home dirty and went to bed clean. Woke up the next morning and did it all again.

  Flan was thirty-four, on a job just outside New Orleans, when he met Victoria, a twentysomething princess from the suburbs. Her daddy was the owner of the property Flan was working on, and she decided to check out the property, not to mention the men working on it, late one September afternoon. It was ungodly hot for autumn, and Victoria strutted over to Flan and offered him a bottled beer. As Flan will tell you, a woman brings a workingman an ice-cold beer on a damned hot day, he falls in love with her instantly, no questions asked. It didn’t hurt none that Victoria herself was hotter than the August sun.

  They married and Flan soon learned that Victoria was as spoiled as she was gorgeous. Or as Jake put it, she was a bigger pain in the ass than a Texas-size hemorrhoid. Three years and two children after he said “I do,” he was out on his ass, cutting steel eighty hours a week just to pay alimony and child support.

  A year after his divorce, Flan was working on his day off for a subcontractor hired to refurbish a bulkhead at the pier of a large beverage importer when a wake from a tugboat caused him to fall from the floating stage he was working on. He grabbed hold of a small anchor hole just large enough for his hand to keep himself from falling into the creek and drowning. His weight, along with the fifty-pound tool belt he was wearing, was too much. After tearing his rotator cuff and nearly ripping his right arm out of its socket, he dropped into the water, the tool belt pulling him to the bottom.

  Freeing himself of the tool belt, Flan escaped with his life. But his life wasn’t much after that day. Permanently injured, he couldn’t work, so he couldn’t pay his bills, including the hefty monthly amounts for alimony and child support. Victoria cut off contact with him, thus effectively severing his ties with his two lovely young daughters. He declared bankruptcy and contemplated suicide.

  Rather than kill himself, he decided to try his hand in paradise. He’d been to Waikiki on his honeymoon, and it surely beat the cemetery, with the exception of the company he’d had. He escaped his life in New Orleans and all the shit that came with it, but for one thing. He could not escape the physical pain caused by the accident. To this day, he eats Vicodin the way baseball players eat sunflower seeds, and he wears at all times a fetanyl patch, which releases morphine into his body just to get him through the day.

  Jake and Flan moved to the island within a month of each other. They met at Margaritaville two months after Flan arrived. They told each other their stories. Flan had made it off the mainland, but he didn’t know where to go from there. Because of the endless pain, he couldn’t perform hard labor, the only kind of labor he knew. Jake suggested Flan become a private investigator. Flan looked into it, but to get licensed, he needed four years experience in the field. Jake told him, to hell with the license. He brought Flan in as an investigator on some cases and referred him to other attorneys on the island. Thanks to Jake, Flan had found a new career, albeit a bit of a shady one.

  We take a booth away from Seamus and his
ears. The bar is empty, but in criminal law, one person hearing your business is one too many. Flan orders a bourbon from the waitress, and Jake and I go another round with the whiskey.

  “Flan, Kevin here has some work for you if you’re interested,” Jake says. “He represents the Jersey kid charged with murdering that young girl on the beach in Waikiki.”

  “I’m familiar with it,” says Flan, taking a drag on his cigarette.

  The smoke floats across the table and I swat it away. I’m ready to get up and walk away. One thing I can’t stand is smoke. I celebrated for a month when Mayor Bloomberg banned smoking in bars and restaurants in New York. I think I read somewhere that they banned smoking in public places here in Hawaii, too. You can make a bet I’ll check that out on the Internet as soon as I get the chance.

  “Saw the girl’s mama on television this morning,” says Flan. “Excuse me,” he adds, pulling his chirping cell phone from his pocket.

  That’s another thing I can’t stand. Cell phones. Yeah, I carry one because I have to in my business. But I keep the ringer off, and I never pull it out when I’m in the middle of a conversation. It’s rude and obnoxious. Flan is chatting with someone on the other end, about the New Orleans Saints, no less. I’m growing annoyed at him, what with the cigarette smoke and the cell phone conversation. His fucking car alarm goes off and I’m out of here. Don’t get me started on car alarms.

  Fortunately for everyone, the drinks arrive.

  Flan folds the phone and doesn’t apologize. I ask him how he is at making friends.

  “If they drink like ol’ Jake here, makes it pretty damn easy,” he says.

  Flan and Jake clink glasses, another annoying ritual. At least they didn’t toast.

  “Well, I’m not sure about that,” I say, “but if you can get some liquor in her, it’ll make your job that much easier.”

  “Her?”

  “Yeah, her.”

  “You mean the girl’s mama?”

  “I do, indeed.”

  I don’t slur my words when I get drunk. I do, however, start talking like Doc Holliday in Tombstone. I tell people I’m their huckleberry and remark at how everyone’s so cosmopolitan. This behavior has not yet led to my getting my ass kicked, but I’m sure I’ve come close.

  “I’d like you to find her,” I tell him. “Get close to her. I want information about her daughter, things my client either doesn’t know or won’t tell me. I want her version of the background on the relationship between Joey and Shannon. I want information on the people Shannon spent time with, from high school on up.”

  I see Jake out of the corner of my eye, shaking his head but saying nothing, staring into his empty glass, wishing it full. I signal for another round, even as I feel myself getting sick.

  “I don’t have much experience interviewing witnesses, Kevin. Jake and the other lawyers usually have me track down documents, run papers to the courthouse, that sort of thing. You might wanna handle something as important as this yourself or hire someone with better credentials.”

  “She may have seen my picture by now,” I say. “She’d spit in my eye. Besides, she’s probably lawyered up in preparation for a wrongful-death civil lawsuit against my client. I wouldn’t be permitted to speak to her without going through her attorney.”

  “Nor would your agent,” Jake adds helpfully.

  “That’s why I need someone off the radar,” I say. “Someone without a license. Someone invisible.”

  “What makes you think she’ll talk to me if she’d as soon spit in your eye?” Flan asks.

  “Your backstory. You’re going to play a role, do a bit of acting. You’re going to comfort her, sympathize with her. You’re going to tell her that you also lost a daughter.”

  “I lost two daughters,” he says gruffly. “I’ll probably never see them again.”

  “That will make it that much easier for you,” I say. “It’s called Method acting. You borrow from your real emotions to act more convincing in the role you’re playing.” At least I think that’s what it is. I don’t know. Too much whiskey on an empty stomach.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I find her,” Flan says, finishing off his bourbon.

  “Do you want Flan to talk to that third bartender over at the Bleu Sharq?” Jake asks me.

  “No. If Flan is seen speaking to anyone else connected to the case, all the wells will dry up at once. I’ll handle the barkeep.”

  Flan pulls out his wallet to pay. I tell him to put it away, that I’ve got the tab covered. I hand him a modest roll of cash and tell him to use it to buy Carlie Douglas some cocktails.

  “Always pay cash,” I tell him. “You’re not going to be giving her your real name, so you can’t pull out a credit card. Carry your wallet with pictures of one of your daughters, but leave all of your identification at home.”

  “I appreciate the business, Kevin,” Flan says, pocketing the cash quickly, as if we just transacted a drug deal.

  I nod, and Flan turns to walk out.

  Before Flan reaches the door, Jake asks me, “Did you learn this kind of shit from Not Guilty Milty?”

  “No, Jake. I learned it from my mistakes. If I had bothered to do some background on Moss and Reese, Brandon might be alive today.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Maybe not. But at least I could’ve lived with myself, knowing I overturned every stone.”

  “Well, son, just bear in mind that this isn’t New York. People have very different notions of fair play on the islands.”

  I raise my hand and make the international signal for the check.

  “How about one more round, son?” Jake pleads.

  “No, thanks. I’m going home to throw up. Besides, I’ve got an early day tomorrow. I’m going kayaking.”

  “Kayaking? I thought you said you were gonna track down that Palani fella and ask him some questions?”

  “Why, indeed, Jake. That is precisely what I intend to do.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Contained in Palani’s statement to police was the tidbit that on mornings he isn’t working at the Waikiki Winds he kayaks from Lanikai Beach, on the windward side of Oahu, to the twin Mokulua Islands. He brings breakfast in a dry bag, according to the statement, and enjoys it leisurely, sprawled out on the pristine stretch of sand in complete solitude. He then paddles his way back before the tourists are out and about, fumbling with their rented equipment and gear. This information seemed extraneous at the time I first read it, but would ultimately prove quite useful for my purpose of finding him alone.

  At dawn I park my bright orange Jeep Wrangler a half mile down the road from my intended launching point. I had always wanted a Jeep, but figured it would look rather silly sitting in traffic in Manhattan, especially in winter. I zipper up the soft top, lock the doors, and finger a nick I’ve already put in the side panel. Hell, it’s not my Audi. It’s a Jeep. The nick adds character, makes it look tough.

  I begin my walk to the launching point and immediately wish I’d parked closer. I do a lot of walking these days, especially compared to the amount I walked in New York, where I took taxis and subways all day every day. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to walk back then. It was that in New York I always felt that if I could get somewhere faster, be somewhere sooner, I was dutybound to do so. I don’t quite feel that way here. I’ll get there when I get there.

  I breathe in the morning air, and it smells strange. Strike that. There is a lack of strange smell. As my mind drifts back to commuting to work in New York, I realize just how different these two worlds are. The Pacific doesn’t give off the ugly scent of the Hudson River. I don’t smell tar or hear jackhammers. No smoke or steam emanates from manhole covers in the street. No taxis bear down on me as I cross the street, no skyscrapers block the rising of the sun. I hear no horns. I hear no shouts or sirens. I hear nothing, nothing at all but my own footfalls. It is peaceful, like nowhere I have ever before known.

  I reach the beach and kick off my sandals
. After calling the Waikiki Winds yesterday and learning that Palani had this morning off, I made reservations for a kayak rental and arrangements to have one waiting for me on the beach before the rental shop opened. It’s sad and amazing what a lot of money can do.

  The kayak is there on the grass, hidden between two trees, covered in a drop cloth. I undress it and find a dry bag and paddle, but no life jacket. The kayak is yellow and large and much heavier than I anticipated. I drag it along the sand of Lanikai Beach toward the launching point. I looked up kayaking on the Internet and thought I knew everything I needed to know. Now I realize I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing.

  No matter what the temperature, the ocean is always chilly at first touch. I ease into it with the kayak banging against my shins. As the water gets deeper, the kayak stops banging against my shins and starts banging against my knees. When it starts banging against my hip, I know it’s time to somehow get in.

  The sun is up, illuminating the crystal clear water. The ocean is balmy now that I’ve ducked my entire body under, nearly getting knocked unconscious when the kayak came at my head. I am finally out past the breakers, though the waves weren’t cooperating, rushing into the shore as if they had some party to go to.

  I let go of the kayak’s leash and the kayak immediately starts to float back to shore. It’s no doubt as frightened of me as I am of it. I grab the kayak, and in one great feat of athleticism, I hurl my body on top of it. The kayak immediately capsizes, sending me to the ocean floor. I surface and spit out an ounce or two of seawater, choking out every curse I can. Son of a bitch. Practicing law is hard work.

  On the third try I’m in, paddling like a master, yet heading in the wrong direction. Through trial and error, I somehow turn the kayak around and face the Mokulua Islands, sitting as they are like two large breasts, jutting above the sea. In the distance they wait for me but a mile away. I figure it’ll take me a week and a half to reach them. Luckily, I took into account my inexperience and Palani’s probable prowess and gave myself an hour’s head start.