“And you said…?”
“I said I was going to fucking kill him.”
I allow a brief silence to fall over the room. Nothing but the hum of the fan overhead and the sound of the waves washing onto the shore, while her words slowly sink in. It’s a natural reaction, of course, and I’ll make that point to the jury when and if this case goes to trial. But Maddox will tell it a different way. When the words leave his lips—when he extracts them from a witness on the stand—they’ll ring in jurors’ ears like a bell. These words will play like a threat, like a prediction, like a promise.
“What then?” I say.
Erin went ahead with the wedding, of course. Too many plans, too many guests, not enough time to process all this new information, and what would she tell her parents? They’d just blown their life savings on her dream wedding. No use either in confronting Trevor before the vows. Maybe this was his way of getting out of the wedding, maybe this was planned—by him, by Mia, an entire conspiracy. No, she wasn’t going to let him out of this that easily. If Trevor wanted out, he’d have to file for divorce. And she’d take him for everything he had, the cheating cocksucker.
The ceremony went off without a hitch. It was held on the beach rather than at the small chapel wedged between the two colossal resorts because neither she nor Trevor was particularly religious. The bride and groom, and seven guests, had all been flown in from the mainland at her parents’ expense. She hid the tears, buried the hatred and burning frustration she felt. Her mind was understandably whirling while she recited her vows.
“It’s all on video if you want to watch it,” she tells me. She rises to get me the videographer’s card.
“I’ll need the photographer’s, too,” I say, as she makes her way down the long hallway, the walls adorned with original tropical oil paintings from some local artist whose name stops at the tip of my tongue. This will drive me crazy for hours; fortunately, I have the artist’s business card at home. She and I shared an evening together a few months back at her Diamond Head home.
When Erin returns she hands me a small stack of business cards, and I sort through them. Wedding planner, minister, florist, ukelele player, videographer, and photographer, all of them with local addresses here on Oahu. I pocket them.
Then it’s back to business, back to the night of the fire.
The argument began the moment the newlyweds were alone in their honeymoon suite. Because of the heat, the wedding party had gone up to their rooms to change out of gowns and tuxedos and into more suitable island attire. Erin confronted Trevor even before he had his white tuxedo jacket off his shoulders.
“You fucked Mia?” she’d screamed.
Trevor was clearly caught off-guard and didn’t have the sense to deny it. Instead he took the more practical approach, assured Erin that it was a one-time thing, that it didn’t mean anything. It was a stupid, just fucking awful mistake, and it would never, ever happen again. “I love you,” he told her. “That’s why I married you today.”
Erin made it known she wasn’t satisfied with the explanation. Apparently she made it so known that another hotel guest—she assumes from the adjoining suite—phoned the front desk and told the voice on the other end that some young lady was having a conniption.
A few minutes later hotel security knocked on Erin and Trevor’s door, asked whether everything was cool inside. Erin opened the door wide enough for one of the two security guards to poke his head inside. Erin calmly stated that her new husband was a lying, cheating, piece of shit and whoremongering prick. “But otherwise,” she told him, “everything is fine.” Then she slammed the door in the security guard’s face.
After a half hour of futile attempts to calm her, Trevor finally went downstairs to the reception alone. Erin stayed in the room and vomited. Then she hit the mini bar with a vengeance, mixing a concoction that would have made Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas recoil in disgust.
Good and liquored up, looking as sexy as she could, twenty minutes later Erin went downstairs herself, trying to act as though nothing had happened.
“The reception is a blur,” she says now, wiping at her eyes. “I spent most of the time alone at the bar. I remember dancing, but with Isaac not Trevor, and I remember once or twice falling down.”
“Isaac?” I say.
“Isaac Cassel. Trevor’s best man.”
She doesn’t know if she said a single word to Trevor during the reception, but she knows the party was cut short by unanimous decision. Everyone seemed to want to go their own way.
“The next thing I remember,” she says, “is sitting at Kanaloa’s with Trevor. I think I made a bit of a scene.”
I keep silent.
“The bartender wouldn’t allow me to smoke,” she says, shaking her head. “At a fucking outdoor bar, can you believe that?”
I don’t mention it’s people like me who pushed for those antismoking laws to pass. If I’m going to die as a result of a vice, it sure as hell better be one of my own.
“Then I tried to step past the gate where the bartender said I could smoke,” she continues, “and he stopped me from bringing my drink.” She shakes her head in anger. “Finally, I said, ‘Fuck it, Trevor, let’s just go up to our room.’”
And that’s just what they did. But according to Erin, she didn’t stay very long, just long enough to get another visit from hotel security for causing yet another commotion. This visit went very much the same way as the first, she tells me, with the security guard getting an earful of venom, followed by a door in the face.
Twenty minutes later, Trevor passed out. Erin snatched her handbag and went downstairs with a bottle of Dom in a brown paper bag under her arm. Last thing she remembers before the fire, she was headed with the bottle in the direction of the beach.
“At some point earlier my mother reserved me another room and gave me the key,” she says. “But I never made it back to the hotel.”
“How about Trevor’s room key? Did you have it on you when you left the honeymoon suite?”
She nods. “It was in my handbag, I think. I was carrying this cute little leather Fendi.”
When she heard the alarm screaming from inside the hotel, she snapped out of her drunk and stared at the twitching flames, the dense smoke rising unabated from the few open windows. She could tell the fire was consuming the top floor. She panicked, she says, and ran toward the hotel, tossing the bottle of Dom into some shrubs.
“What about your handbag?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I must have left it somewhere because I know I didn’t have it on me when everyone was gathered outside, watching the fire. To this day, I haven’t found it and no one’s given it to me.”
I swallow hard, wondering whether the police have the handbag. The little leather Fendi reminds me too much of a certain pair of bright white Nike cross-trainers. A pair of sneakers owned by Joey Gianforte that were spattered with his ex-girlfriend’s blood. These things tend to pop up. Typically at the worst possible time for the defense.
Behind us the moon is reflecting off the sea. I glance at my watch and decide it’s time to leave. I take one last sip of lemonade and rise from the couch.
“One last thing,” I say, flashing on yesterday’s meeting with Erin’s parents. “Have you ever started a fire before?”
She glares at me while grinding her teeth. “I don’t understand what you mean?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll rephrase the question. Have you. Ever started. A fire. Before?”
Suddenly she’s on her feet and pacing, deliberately scuffing up the shiny hardwood floor. She stops briefly at an end table, opens a small ceramic box and removes a cigarette. “How old are you anyway?” she rants, a deep red rising steadily up her neck. “My parents said they were hiring the best. I was expecting some gray-haired old man who’s been practicing law for forty years or so.”
“My law partner has a few gray hairs left, if that helps.”
Erin places the cigarette between her lips, strikes a
match, holds the flame to the business end and inhales. “I think you should leave,” she says, her voice suddenly soft, a thin stream of white smoke emanating from each nostril. “I need to talk to my mother. I mean, this isn’t some kids’ game. My entire fucking life is at stake.”
“You’re absolutely right.” I dig into my pocket for a business card. “Do some research tonight. Find out who I am.” I consider the rash of online articles covering my defense of Brandon Glenn, of the infamous photo of me, standing in the rain at his funeral. I take out my pen. “I’ve handled one homicide case since I moved to the islands. Defendant’s name was Joey Gianforte.” I jot Joey’s number on the back of the business card and hand it to her. “Call him if you’d like a reference.”
She takes the card without looking at it and frowns.
I turn from her and move toward the door.
“And the client before that?” she asks, as I turn the knob.
I stop, a light cloud of tobacco smoke enveloping my head.
“Can I get a reference from him?” she says.
“Sure,” I say, without facing her. “But you’re going to need a medium.”
With that, I swing the door open and step into the sweltering Hawaiian night in search of a cold, hard drink.
CHAPTER 15
On little sleep, I’m at the office early the next morning, my head heavy, vision blurry, the lids of my eyes already threatening to close up shop and call it a day. But we received Luke Maddox’s motion to have me taken off the case yesterday, so I’m at my desk with the papers in front of me, sucking down my second Red Bull.
I swivel my chair, pull up a WordPerfect document on my desktop, and fill in the caption for State versus Simms. Ten minutes later my fingers are hovering impotently over the wireless keyboard, my face washed in the glow of the kaleidoscopic screensaver, while I stare down yet another silver-blue can of energy drink.
“Hell with it,” I say, reaching for the phone.
It’s ten after six A.M. here in Honolulu, which means it’s just after noon in New York. Not that time matters much to the legendary Milt Cashman.
Milt’s always working, even when he’s not.
“Speak,” Milt barks when he answers his cell.
“Hey Milt, it’s Kevin.” I still feel a pang of loss when I phone my former mentor, even though on a personal level we were never particularly close.
“What gives?” Milt says. “I’m seeing your mug all over the news again. You representing that hot piece of trim that burned down that hotel in Hawaii?”
“Allegedly.”
“What do you need?”
One thing I love about Milt Cashman, there’s never any beating around the bush. No pretext. Friend or adversary, you need a favor you just come right out and ask and he’ll respect you for it. Fuck the niceties, the quid pro quo, the tit for tat. Lawyers help lawyers whenever they can, and whoever doesn’t want to play ball, well, fuck ’em. A lawyer refuses to extend Milt Cashman a professional courtesy and Milt will remember that slight forever. Because Milt will face that lawyer in another case sooner or later. And then he’ll break the son of a bitch in open court.
“This prosecutor, some L.A. pretty boy, wants me off the case.”
“Why?” Milt teases. “’Cause you’re so fucking good?”
“That’s my bet. Anyway, he filed a motion to have me removed on the grounds of conflict of interest.”
“Sounds like what happened to me,” he says, “on the Brandon Glenn case.”
A lump forms in my throat, as I’m transported back to the day Milt asked me to take on the People versus Brandon Glenn matter. “It’s a big fish,” he’d said. “Sure you can handle it?” I had grinned like a schoolboy about to get his first hand job and nodded. He handed me the file and said, “Then go have some fun. And be sure to smile for the cameras.”
Were it not for the Brandon Glenn case, were it not for his conviction, for his subsequent rape and murder on Rikers Island only days before he was vindicated, I’d still be in Manhattan sharing office space with my mentor Milt Cashman. Or, as the media refers to him, Not-Guilty Milty.
“It’s a little different,” I tell him. “The prosecutor says he intends to call me as a material witness. I was there at the resort on the night of the fire.”
Milt chuckles. “Thought you said the prosecutors were human out there in Shangri-la.”
“More human, I told you. This one’s different. He plans on making a name for himself on this case.”
“Hold on a sec, Kev.” Milt hollers out to his secretary. “Candi, pull up the Sigler file, case where the DA tried to have me removed based on conflict and we buried him.” He pauses, mumbles something to himself. “Better yet, Candi, fuck the Sigler file. Grab me People versus Tagliarini, 1998. The whole file.”
“Tagliarini?” I say. A mob case in which our client was tried for murder and racketeering under the federal RICO statutes.
“Remember, Kev? When you first came on board, the fucking guinnea prosecutor tried to accuse me, a harmless Jew, of being a member of the mob. Said I was too close to Vito Tagliarini to try the case, had relevant information, blah, blah, blah. Same shit they pulled on Bruce Cutler in the John Gotti case.”
It all comes rushing back. My first year of law school, my first days with the Cashman Law Firm in New York. I arrived after the motion had already been decided, but I remember leafing through the papers with a smile.
“Use this, Kev, and you’ll toss the fucker on his head. Before we’re done, they’ll pull the bastard’s law license. Let him open a tiki bar on the beach or some such shit. Better yet, send him the hell back to L.A.”
The great thing about practicing law is that everything’s already been done. Every argument’s been made, every issue decided. You just have to find out where and when and by whom. Then you make the connections, no matter how tenuous, to cases within your own jurisdiction. You caution the judge that a ruling contrary to your position will result in her ruling being overturned. You persuade the Court not so much with your own tongue, but with the words of great lawyers and jurists past. That’s where a connection the likes of Milt Cashman really comes in handy.
“Listen, Kev,” Milt says now. “Bottom line: You convince the judge you cannot, under any circumstances whatsoever, be called as a witness in this case.”
“And how do I do that?”
“Easy,” he says. “You demonstrate that you don’t satisfy one of the basic criteria for serving as a witness.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re fucking incompetent.”
* * *
Red Bull pumping through my veins, I jump out of my chair and head down the hall to wait for the fax from Milt Cashman’s secretary, Candi.
“Another rough night?” I say when I see Jake heading up the hallway. He looks like hell and smells like the men’s room at the Bleu Sharq ten minutes after a cruise ship full of twentysomethings pulls out of port.
“Think I got the swine flu,” he says.
I keep walking. With three cans of Red Bull jolting my brain, it’s no time to get pulled into a verbal headlock by Jake. “How many bottles of Jack Daniels does it take to get you infected?” I mutter under my breath as we pass each other.
Jake grabs my left arm and spins me around. Suddenly I see what thousands of people must have seen in Houston bars and courthouses over his decades-long career: the anger, the hatred, the pushing away of life’s defeats. Mad at the world and unafraid to show it.
“Listen, Kevin,” he growls, “I made my first court appearance before you could take a piss standing up. I won my first acquittal in a capital case, saved an innocent man’s life, before you saw the inside of a schoolroom. So don’t you presume to tell me how to spend my days or my nights.”
“Easy, cowboy,” I say, my palms out in case he makes a move. I figure the situation with his girlfriend Alison Kelly has come to a head. “I just—”
“You just what?” Suddenly he’s in my face,
the odor of stale coffee so pungent I have to breathe through the mouth. “If you think I’m bringing this practice down, then draw up the dissolution papers. We’ll go our separate ways. ’Cause if I hear you mumble something under your breath again, you and I are going to go round and round. And I don’t care if you kick the hell out of me, ’cause life’s been kicking the hell out of me for near sixty years, and I’m still fucking standing.”
I stand still and silent, even lower my eyes to let him have his ground. “Is this about Erin Simms and the bail assignment?” I say quietly.
Jake turns without another word, pivots, and disappears into his office. He slams the door, knocking from the hallway wall my own twelve-hundred-dollar oil painting by that artist I slept with whose name I still can’t quite remember. Lilly something? The bottom of the large frame hits the floor and the painting falls forward, landing at my feet.
Mandy? I turn and resume course to the fax machine. Come to think of it, the artist’s signature must be on the front of the artwork. I’ll have to take a look once Hoshi comes by to hang the painting back up.
CHAPTER 16
Stonewalled by the prosecutor’s office again, I call it a day and climb in my Jeep at one thirty in the afternoon. Traffic on H-1 West is merciful this time of day, so I take a deep breath, sit back and try to enjoy the ride while listening to The Very Best of The Doors. But it’s difficult to enjoy anything with Jake’s dressing down still ringing in my ears.
The old bastard ambushed me with a murder case a day into my tenancy on South King Street last year, yet for some reason, I still seek his approval. I’m smarter, more clever and resourceful, think quicker on my feet, but still I look up to him. I’m a better litigator, a better lawyer, maybe even a better man in recent days. Yet as I press my sandal against the gas pedal, an atrocious lump develops in the pit of my stomach, the base of my neck begins to ache, and I feel as though at any moment I’m going to combust, hit the fuel tank, and cause my electric-orange Jeep to explode into flames.
Fact is, I owe Jake my career. If not for his roping me into the Gianforte murder case, I’d probably be spending my days in traffic court, as was my original plan when I fled New York.
Night on Fire Page 8
