Flan pushes a stack of videotapes toward me.
I sigh, grimace at the daunting task before us. “Let’s start with the photos, shall we?”
“Sure,” Jake says, “but let’s sort through them downstairs, all right? I’m awfully hungry. I could go for some kalua pig and Tater Tots.”
I bow my head yes, knowing all too well that Jake isn’t hungry. He needs a drink.
Damn thing is, so do I.
CHAPTER 19
“How is this woman out on bail?” the talking head with the platinum-blonde wig and bug eyes demands to know.
I turn my head away from the television above the bar and send some rum and Coke down my throat. I’m off the scotch today because I’m attempting to maintain a somewhat clear head for tonight, when I’m scheduled to meet Erin at her home—ahem, place of confinement—in Kaneohe on the windward side of the island.
“Well, Marcy,” the quote-unquote legal expert says, “the Eighth Amendment of our Constitution guarantees—”
“Wait a minute,” Marcy Faith snaps at him. “Whose Constitution? Hawaii’s?”
“Um, no, Marcy, the U.S. Const—”
“Wait a minute. WAIT A MINUTE. Uno momento, por favor,” Marcy bellows as I take a bite out of my cheeseburger and peek at the screen above Seamus’s head. “You’re trying to tell me that the Constitution of the U-nited States of America grants special privileges if you commit mass murder in the state of Hawaii?”
The legal expert grimaces. “Actually, no, that’s not what I’m saying at all.”
“Then just what are you saying? That the Kingdom of Hawaii has its own laws?”
“I’m not quite following you, Marcy.”
“Ha-wa-ii,” she yells. Her southern drawl is so grating that Seamus slightly turns down the volume even though Jake, Flan, and I are Sand Bar’s only three patrons and we’ve asked him to keep the volume up. “More like Ha-die-ii. You won’t see me on vacation with the twins on the island of Waikiki anytime soon.”
“Well, Waikiki isn’t an island, Marcy, it’s a—”
Marcy’s eyes nearly pop out of her bulbous head. “That’s it! Someone cut his microphone, pronto!”
“Sorry, gents,” Seamus says with his thick Irish brogue, snapping off the TV with his remote. “I just can’t fucking take her anymore. I realize you three are the best customers I have, and that my bar probably can’t survive without you, but I’d rather the pub go under and I live under a fucking bridge than listen to another minute of that crazy bitch.”
“No worries, Seamus,” I tell him.
He turns up the stereo and Marcy Faith’s shrill voice is replaced by the soothing sounds of the Dubliners.
I’ve already been through the ringer on the national cable news, so I know what’s coming—constant coverage, all of it bad for the defense. Indignant legal analysts who prefer the television studio to the courtroom, know-nothing civilians phoning in and calling for crucifixion or execution-by-stoning before the first witness takes the stand. Then of course there will be round-the-clock trial coverage, during which the American system of criminal justice will be praised and/or criticized depending on the day’s events.
I don’t give a damn what they say about me anymore. But the fact is, a defendant who receives national attention from the media cannot take for granted that she will receive the same constitutional protections meant to afford all Americans a fair trial.
“Found a used condom in the backseat of my car,” Flan says, a string of lettuce hanging out of his mouth. His daughter Casey has been living with him now for a week. “That and four parking tickets. I don’t know what the hell to do.”
“Give ’em to me,” Jake says, popping a Tater Tot into his mouth. “I know a municipal court judge who’ll take care of them for you.”
“Not exactly what I meant,” Flan mutters. “But thanks.”
Jake pushes his plate away and continues flipping through the crime scene photos.
“I especially want to learn everything we can about Trevor’s business dealings,” I tell Flan, trying to bring us back on point. “Work with a San Francisco P.I. firm if you have to. And ask them to bring in an accountant, one who’s very discreet.”
“Sounds like I’m going to be out there for a while,” Flan says.
“Just until you find what we need. Remember, this is coming out of the firm’s own pocket for the time being, so work efficiently. Look fast, but look hard.”
“Speaking of looking hard,” Jake says, sliding one of the crime scene photos down the bar toward me. “What in the hell do you reckon this is?”
Flan studies the photo over my shoulder. “That’s the floor in the hallway.”
“Yeah,” Jake says, licking his sun-chapped lips after taking a gulp of ice water. “But what’s on it?”
“Burns in the carpet?” Flan suggests.
I lift the photo off the bar. “No, the circles are too perfect. Looks more like coins.”
CHAPTER 20
When I arrive at Erin’s home, scented candles are lit along a mantel, the flames flickering from the phantom sea breeze blowing in. Past her bare shoulder the sun is dipping slowly behind Chinaman’s Hat in Kaneohe Bay. The calm waters are shimmering as though lit from below, creating a scene fit for French cinema. Only here there are no cameras, no crew, no audience. Just us and the reality of the situation. Her situation. So when she suggests the couch, I point to the dining room table. More room. There are files, I say. Photos and such. We’ll need to spread out.
A grudging nod does nothing to mask her disappointment, and I suddenly wonder whether I shouldn’t have brought Jake.
There’s no mention of my cut-up face. She doesn’t ask and I don’t say. But for the first time I wonder whether the attack may be related to her case. It wouldn’t be the first punch I’ve taken in my capacity as a defense lawyer. The first was delivered on the steps of the Brooklyn criminal courthouse by one of my own clients. The second I received during Joey Gianforte’s homicide case here on the island.
I fold my hands atop the table. “The handbag is the problem,” I say, searching her eyes. “Absent evidence your handbag was stolen, the prosecution is going to infer that you were in possession of both the Zippo and the key card the entire night.” I unfold my hands, lean back, take a deep breath. It’s nearly time for me to ask for the truth. “The Zippo was discovered in the room, so we know it survived. The handbag, however, may have burned up without a trace.”
“What are you saying?”
I plant my elbows on the table and speak slowly so that she hears clearly every word. “First and foremost, I need you to be entirely honest with me. I don’t want to waste man-hours searching for something that’s never going to be found. The police won’t do much looking, because the Zippo being in the room and the purse having disintegrated in the fire fits perfectly with their theory of the crime.”
I watch her lips but they remain emotionless. Usually by now, the client is indignant, appalled at being accused of lying to her own lawyer. Erin simply shrugs her bare shoulders. “I don’t know,” she says. “Last I remember having my handbag on me was when I last left Trevor in the room.”
I sigh inwardly. We’ll continue looking for the little leather Fendi, hope that it turns up in the home of a known arsonist. But until it’s found, we’ll have to operate under the assumption that the handbag burned, the Zippo remained, and that the jury will likely believe that Erin was in possession of both in the moments before the fire started.
“Enemies,” I say.
“What about them?”
“Trevor have any?”
“None that I know of.”
“How about you?”
“Me?”
“Any enemies?”
She shakes her head as she stands, floats over to the end table, and rescues a cigarette.
I watch as she steps lightly over to the mantel, places the cigarette between her lips, lifts a scented candle, and holds the dark end to the fl
ame. “No one on the guest list?” I say.
Erin inhales, exhales, shrugs as though the answer is of no consequence.
“No one who might have wanted to hurt Trevor?” I say.
Quietly, “No.”
“No one who might have wanted to hurt you by hurting him?”
Again, “No.”
“All right,” I tell her as she sits, blowing smoke across the table. “Let’s go over the guests one by one.” I begin with Mia.
Erin insists that up until that day, she considered Mia a friend. Despite Mia’s betrayal, Erin is unwilling to entertain the notion that she might have had something to do with Trevor’s death.
“Tara?” I say.
“She’d never do anything to hurt me.”
“How did Tara feel about Trevor?” I ask.
“Trevor? She thought he was great for me. They always got along as well as any best friend and boyfriend could.”
“Tell me about Isaac Cassel.”
Her lips turn up at the corners like a burning strip of paper. “He was Trevor’s best man. Followed Trevor around like a puppy dog.”
“That’s all?” I ask because I know that’s not all. This afternoon I saw photographs of Isaac and recognized him at once. He was the man holding Erin outside the hotel during the fire. Not to mention the only man she remembers dancing with at her own wedding reception.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what was your relationship with Isaac?”
“Mine? Isaac and I were friends.”
“And now?” Once I identified Isaac in the photographs sent over from the prosecutor’s office, I immediately asked Flan to do a search, to find out who was paying the rent for this gorgeous Kaneohe house.
“Still friends,” she says. “In fact, Isaac is the one putting up the money for this house.”
She’s either being forthright or clever, guessing at how much I know, trying to gain my trust. “Why’s he doing that?”
“I don’t know.” She leans forward, lowers her head so that she has to lift her eyes to see me. “I’m sure the right answer is, ‘because he knows I’m innocent.’” Her breasts press against the table, accentuating her cleavage. “But the truth is, Isaac probably carries a torch for me.”
“You dated him?”
“Briefly. In fact, that’s how Trevor and I met.”
I consider how to phrase the next few questions. A query too blunt and she may experience a knee-jerk reaction, take the default position of any criminal defendant and lie, lie, lie.
“How long did you and Isaac date?” I ask. In other words, Were you fucking him?
“A few months.”
“Was it serious?” More than just sex?
“I think for him it was.”
“And you broke it off when you fell for Trevor?” Does Isaac have a motive I can use to create reasonable doubt?
“Around that time, yeah.” She sets her lit cigarette, now just a butt, onto the edge of a ceramic ashtray and leans back, arching her body like a kitten just waking from a nap. Her pale green dress creeps up, but her legs are mercifully hidden under the table.
Still I feel the heat of infatuation rising up my chest, clawing at my throat.
An hour later a few questions remain. About Trevor’s sister Lauren and her longtime fiancé. About Erin’s parents, particularly about her mother and how she reacted when she heard the news of Trevor’s infidelities. But I realize I can no longer stay.
Another of Cashman’s Ten Commandments: Thou shalt sleep with neither client nor witness.
Last time I disobeyed that one, things all went to hell.
When she stands, the silky dress falls like a theater curtain over her form, and I decide that yes, indeed, it’s time to go.
“Can I get you a glass of Merlot?” she says. “Because I certainly need one.”
I shake my head. “I have to be heading out.” I stand and try to prevent our eyes from meeting. “I have a date tonight.”
“Oh, really?” It’s the first time she smiled all evening. “May I ask her name?”
“Miss Hawaii.”
“Nice name.”
“That’s what I said.”
I pack up my papers and slide them into my satchel, failing for perhaps the first time in my life to place the contents of the file in their proper folders.
She steps around the table, just as I place the leather strap over my arm.
“May I ask you one more question, Kevin, before you go?”
I face her, and immediately regret it. Her eyes are merely inches from mine, and it takes a small moment for me to catch my breath. “Of course.”
“I spoke with Joey Gianforte,” she says. “Suffice it to say, I was very impressed.”
“I’m glad.”
Erin leans forward. When she speaks, her breath is warm and smells of smoke. “But Joey’s is the only number you gave me.”
“So?”
“So I don’t know your track record back in New York.”
I set my satchel down on the chair and stare into her eyes, the sun now all the way set, the candlelight soft, a light breeze blowing in from all sides. “Well, what do you want to know?”
Erin Simms is like the fire itself, something I should run from whether she started the blaze or not. In either case, she’s my client and can burn me in every way imaginable. Besides that, she’s vulnerable, was made a widow only a few hellish, hazy hours after being made a wife. Anything now but a curt good night would be unethical, immoral; it could downright damage her case.
She doesn’t say another word, doesn’t mention Brandon Glenn or anything else about my life and career back in New York. She simply stares up at me, her eyes steady, her lips pouting, all but begging to be kissed.
Only now do I realize that every action I’ve taken since the night of the fire has been leading to this moment. Taking her case, accepting her bail assignment, interviewing her here in her home alone, it’s never been about money or justice. She’s been my motive all along.
Our lips are nearly touching and I can almost taste the smoke on her tongue.
I want to leave. I need to.
But I can’t.
I’ve already traveled too far down this path to turn back.
PART II
LOVE HER MADLY
CHAPTER 21
Flan and I wear neon orange hard hats as we traipse along the ravaged sixteenth floor hallway of the Liholiho Tower of the Kupulupulu Beach Resort. We were cautioned that the crime scene is a dangerous place, yet not the least bit discouraged to go searching. “By all means,” Chief Condon told us with a mirthless smile, after speaking with Chief Attea of the HPD. “Just try not to fall through the floor.”
We start by stepping into the rooms with the least damage, but even in these rooms that were spared the worst of the blaze, nearly everything is a dead, charred black. Flan carries a large Maglite and a lightweight Samsung DVD Cam that records all but the horrific odor. I hold only a list of names—the nine original victims—and a map of where each of them perished. We remain perfectly silent for all of the first twenty minutes, then it’s I who finally feels the need to speak.
“This is the room we were in, Sherry and I.”
The room is a blackened relic of what it was. Only now does it truly hit me how close we came to dying that night. For me, it was a second brush with death, the second in less than a year here in the islands. Maybe it’s time to return to the relative safety of New York City.
Across the hall is the room where the Kenders died—Dean and Marlene, their children Dean Jr. and Missy. An entire family wiped out in a matter of minutes.
Next door is where the Wenecks met their end. Jared and Helen, a retired couple on the ironic mission of completing their list of “50 Places to Visit Before We Die.” According to their daughter Janie, Hawaii was only number three on their list.
On the end, in the corner across from the Simms’s honeymoon suite is the room where Marty Treese and Enis
McLaughlin suffocated from the thick black smoke. Both Marty and Enis were married, but not to each other. They worked together, though—he a high school principal, she an American history teacher at his school. Both of their spouses were apparently shocked by the news, not only of their deaths, but of their infidelities.
We step outside Treese and McLaughlin’s room and I can see that Flan is short of breath. I place a hand on his shoulder. “You all right, big guy?”
Flan nods yet appears anything but. Finally he sets down his equipment and bends over. Planting a palm firmly on each knee, he vomits onto the remains of the carpet. With the second violent retch, the hard hat comes tumbling off his head. I look away quick as I can, swallowing back down my own Red Bull and pound cake breakfast. My eyes instantly tear from the stench.
That’s when I notice the pennies Jake pointed out in the photograph taken by the fire investigators. There are maybe twelve of them on the crisped floor in the hall outside Josh and Grandma’s door. As Flan coughs and spits into his hands, I lower myself to my haunches to examine the coins more closely. Just a dozen or so pieces of blackened copper that could have fallen out of anyone’s pocket in their mad dash to escape the hotel.
Leaving Flan to settle himself in the hall, I creep into Josh and Grandma’s room. I realize instantly that the kid, too, would be dead if he hadn’t had a hankering for the twenty-three mysteriously refreshing flavors found in Dr Pepper. It makes me weak in the knees. Never before have I set foot on such a crime scene. Never has the damage been so extensive and touched so many lives. Never have I represented anyone accused of such brutal carnage.
I wonder briefly what I’m doing here. How can I defend the person who most likely committed this abominable act? Yet the conventional answer arises almost immediately:
Where would I draw the line? One victim? Three victims? Eight?
Does the method of murder matter? Is there a “cruel and unusual” standard that can be applied to homicide just as it is to punishment? Should the age and gender of the victims be of concern? Should I only represent the killers of men and not women and children?
Night on Fire Page 10
