I stand, take her hand in mine, and help her up. She is petite, at least six inches shorter than my six feet.
“Where do you live?” I ask.
“Kailua.”
“Do you have a car here?”
“No. A couple of the bartenders live right near me. I usually catch a ride home with one of them.”
Sufficiently sobered up, I say, “I can drive you home if you’d like.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the least I can do. You’ve been very helpful.”
“T’anks. I’d appreciate that.”
I lead her to my Jeep, parked not three blocks away. I deftly unzip the soft top and open her door. I help her in and hold on to her hand maybe a moment too long.
I walk around to the driver’s side and get in, all the while thinking about what to talk about on the half-hour ride to Kailua. I start the engine. I put the transmission in reverse and slowly release the brake. That’s when I do it. That’s when I make the rookie mistake of telling her to tell me all about herself.
And, for the love of God, that is exactly what she does.
CHAPTER 12
I can picture Nikki Kapua as an eleven-year-old girl, content with life as only an eleven-year-old girl can be. I can picture her on the island of Kauai, the Garden Isle, so named for its natural beauty. I can picture her under one of Kauai’s waterfalls, wet and smiling at the lush landscape all around. I can picture her in her small hometown, so beloved by its members for its simplicity and quaint allure. I can picture her playing hopscotch in the schoolyard with friends, local kids having local fun, already developing the sense of place, of community, so often lacking on the mainland, particularly on the coasts. I can picture her posing for a photograph with the beauty of Kauai as her backdrop. I can picture her with her younger brother, Alika, making funny faces for the camera. I can picture her and Alika standing stoically with their parents, Kanoa and Maru, all smiling broadly with their arms draped across each other’s back, counting down from three, while a friendly local snaps the shot.
I can picture all this because she describes it all so vividly, in ways I could never describe New York. Then again, she calls Kauai “home,” and I call New York “New York.”
They struggled, she tells me, her family did. Kanoa was a laborer, like many locals. A long day for little pay. It was a fact of life, a fact her folks accepted, yet dreamed to live without.
Nikki remembers the day her father came home, minus the exhaustion and sadness she usually caught on his face. She remembers the skip he had in his step that day, a skip she had never before seen. She remembers that his voice was different. Not the voice of a man who spent his day in dirt, laboring in the heat. It was more like the voice of a child, a child sliding down a slide or swinging on a swing. It was a voice devoid of despair and filled with hope.
I can picture Kanoa and Maru sitting in the kitchen. I can see them as Nikki did through the crack of her bedroom door. I can hear Kanoa telling Maru that a friend of a friend of a friend had told him of a job, a job with twice the pay for half the work. I can see the reluctant look on Maru’s face. I can hear her warning Kanoa about how things that sound too good to be true always are.
I know Kanoa. I know Kanoa because Nikki knows Kanoa, and Nikki needs someone else to know him, too. I know Kanoa is stubborn but well-intentioned. I know that he wants more for his family. I know he wants to spend more time with his children. I know he wants for them everything he grew up without.
I hear the yelling back and forth. I can see Kanoa put his foot down, but nothing more, because that’s when Nikki saw fit to close her bamboo bedroom door. I can feel Maru relent. I can feel the twinge of fear of an eleven-year-old as she packs to leave the only home she ever knew.
I can picture the Kapua family setting out in search of the so-called better life.
“And so off to Oahu we went,” she says.
Enter the blond-haired, blue-eyed man Nikki knew only as M.
She would learn it all years later, the terrible truth of what her father became when he went to work for the man called M. Kanoa never knew quite what he was getting into, of that much Nikki is sure. Ice, after all, was a quiet epidemic. There were no bloody turf wars in Hawaii. On the islands, even death peddlers peddled death with the spirit of aloha. Nikki knows that once the family was on Oahu, Kanoa had no choice in the matter at all. He either sold ice or he watched his family starve.
Ice is the smokable form of crystal methamphetamine. In the early nineties, the family-run Mexican cartels took advantage of the opportunity to seize control of the Hawaiian drug trade while Hawaii law enforcement cracked down on Asian gangs. Ice was growing wildly in popularity on the islands. After all, Hawaii is a smoking culture, and the transition from pakalolo to ice was hardly difficult at all. Pounds of meth manufactured in labs in Mexico were smuggled into California and then carried to Oahu by couriers, mules who, for a paltry sum, used their body cavities like duffel bags, giving new meaning to the term fanny pack.
M, masquerading as a legitimate businessman, was in charge of meth distribution on the island of Oahu.
Nikki remembers the day her father was arrested, taken from their home in Pearl City in handcuffs while she and Alika watched. I can see Kanoa looking back at them, mouthing an apology while being hauled down the concrete steps. I can see Maru crying in a corner, holding the pot in which she was about to cook her husband’s breakfast. I can see Nikki holding Alika back from grabbing hold of the police.
I can hear Kanoa’s lawyer advising him to turn state’s evidence against the man called M, because I would do the same. I can hear Kanoa’s protests, because I’ve heard them all before. He feared for his family, as well he should. M, he was sure, would kill them all, one by one by one.
I can hear Kanoa pleading guilty, taking his medicine like a man. I can hear the judge sentencing him to six years imprisonment, a sentence that would be carried out in a prison on the mainland. Hawaii prisons were already filled to capacity and couldn’t hold Kanoa for even the first leg of his six-year stretch.
“And so off to Colorado he went,” Nikki says.
Enter M again.
In return for Kanoa’s loyalty and his silence to the end, M promised Maru he’d take care of them. After all, he was a friend. True to his word, he helped Maru. He helped by supplying her with ice, by getting her so fiercely addicted to the drug that in three years’ time, she was unrecognizable.
I can picture Nikki at age sixteen. I can picture her running home from school to call her friend, whom she had just left, to gossip more about the boy in algebra class, a transfer from a school on the Big Island. I can picture her picking up and putting down the phone, deciding first to pee. I can picture her opening the bathroom door, thinking it strange that it was closed. I can picture what she must have seen. Her mother, the top of her head barely visible above the crimson bathwater. No note. Just the razor, the pipe, and a plastic bag with a quarter gram of ice. The surreal aftermath of a literal bloodbath.
“And so off to heaven she went,” Nikki says.
When she and Alika needed each other most, they were split apart, sent to separate foster homes. Alika to Kaneohe. Nikki to Ewa Beach.
Nikki heard that her father was released, but all she knows for certain is that he never returned home.
When Alika turned eighteen, Nikki asked him to move in with her. And they live together now, in a cozy cottage in Kailua, complete with shutters and a brightly painted red front door.
We stand at that red door in silence, Nikki and I, our hands intertwined. At some point during the ride to Kailua, at some point in her unfortunate tale, I developed the uncontrollable need to touch her, and so my hand found its way into hers.
“It was nice meeting you,” I say lamely.
She smiles in the glow of the porch light. Her face defies the fact that she’s lived a difficult life, such that one would never guess to look at her that she’s the author of the story she�
�s just told. Perhaps it’s just the luxury of youth. Perhaps, in time, the calamities of her past will catch up with her and make her but a shadow of the girl that stands before me right now.
“Would you like to come in?” she asks.
The butterflies turn to bats. My free thumb goes straight to my mouth and offers it a snack. My leg trembles, and suddenly my face feels flush. I want to get away from under the glow of the porch light, but I am frozen in place with nowhere to go.
I nod silently.
“We need to be very quiet,” she says. “My brother will be asleep.”
She quietly unlocks the door, the jingle-jangle of the keys doing nothing for my nerves. The door creaks open, as I knew, of course, it would. We step into the small foyer, and my sandals sound like gunshots upon the hardwood floor. Nikki navigates in the pitch-blackness like the blind, guiding me past furniture and walls. Finally, I feel carpet, and behind me she closes a door.
“We’ll have to keep the lights out,” she whispers, her sweet breath tickling my left ear. “I hope you don’t mind.”
I shake my head silently, though I know she cannot see.
She guides me to the bed, pushes me lightly on its spread.
It was another of Milt Cashman’s ten commandments. Thou shalt have sex with neither client nor witness. It was number six, I think. A little bit higher on the totem pole, yet all the more tempting. Back in New York, I lived by Milt’s commandments. I never considered breaking a single one.
Thou shalt not take a case without being paid up front.
I would never dream of it.
Thou shalt not be held in contempt of court.
I came close, but never sinned.
Thou shalt not drink before court.
No need to. There’s plenty of time to drink right after court.
Honor thy magistrate and judge.
Always have, always will.
Thou shalt not go into business with a client.
Never have, never will.
Thou shalt not count your money until the check has cleared.
Goes without saying.
Thou shalt not call the prosecutor a cocksucker to his face.
A little less clear-cut.
Thou shalt live and die in the press.
Well, we all know how that turned out.
And here I am about to break two of Milt’s commandments in a single day.
I hope.
Her lips press against my own, her tongue searching deftly for a dance partner. Her hands work at my belt.
“On the Hawaiian Islands,” she whispers as she works, “it is very inconsiderate to leave your shoes on when you enter someone’s home.”
“I’m sorry,” I manage to say between deep breaths. “I didn’t know.”
“I can forgive you that, but on the islands, it is absolutely forbidden to leave your pants on when you enter someone’s bed.”
“I wouldn’t dream of doing that,” I say, lending her a hand.
I pull her shirt over her head, her hands reaching for the skies as if I’d told her this were a holdup. Her left breast falls into my mouth as my pants slip off my feet and fall to the floor.
There is no pretense. She refrains from offering me the usual drivel. She doesn’t say, “I never do this on the first date,” or push away my hands until I try a second time. She allows it all to happen without hesitancy, assuring us only pleasure with complete freedom from guilt and second-guessing.
She slides her panties down over her legs and climbs on top of me, reaching with her hand around her back, putting me inside. She moans, a soft, gentle purr, and reminds me what I need not be reminded of.
“We. Need. To be. Ve. Ry. Quiet.”
CHAPTER 13
The ad I placed in the Honolulu Advertiser is no bigger than a postage stamp, but it has netted me my second client, a small-time, large-framed pusher named Turi Ahina. I handled a great deal of drug cases back in New York. They are, Milt taught me, the criminal defense attorney’s bread and butter. It doesn’t get much better than being handed an envelope filled with tattered twenties with white powder flavoring the edges of each bill. And there is no shortage of dealers in Manhattan. You have pushers downtown on Wall Street selling big-time brokers eight balls of coke during their lunch hour. You have low-life peddlers inside Manhattan’s hippest nightclubs selling ecstasy and other designer club drugs to club kids from New Jersey. You have stereotypical minorities dealing crack up in the Harlem ghettos. You have bicycle messengers delivering marijuana to customers from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side. You have NYU students peddling hallucinogens such as shrooms and LSD to other NYU students looking to expand their otherwise not-so-expanded minds. You have gangs on street corners waiting for pale, malnourished skeletons with rotten teeth and tracked-up arms who are looking for one more hit, just one more goddamn hit, of heroin before going clean. And, of course, you have the good ol’ New York City Police Department—the NYPD—watching over all of them, making arrests, bringing them all to your office door with their envelopes filled with tattered twenties.
Here on the Hawaiian Islands, we have ice.
Ice is made of highly volatile, toxic substances melded in differing combinations, forming what many describe as a mix of laundry detergent and lighter fluid. Smoking ice results in an instantaneous dose of almost pure drug to the brain, providing the user with a cocainelike rush, followed by up to sixteen hours of euphoria. Exhilaration and sharpening of focus can lead the user to any erratic behavior from obsessive cleaning or tidying to mad, abandoned sex for hours, sometimes days, on end. With a quick and lasting high that is easy to get and relatively cheap, ice is now to Hawaii what crack was to New York City in the eighties. Ice has attached itself like a leech, particularly to impoverished people of Hawaiian ancestry.
The ice epidemic has led to a crackdown here in Hawaii, the ice capital of the nation. Although the epidemic has been building for over two decades, public officials decided to take action only recently, when Gerry Maltese, a young, sharp trial lawyer who headed the narcotics division of the Honolulu Prosecutor’s Office, got himself pinched for selling a gram of ice to an informant. An “Ice Summit” quickly convened at the whim of the lieutenant governor. State authorities were ordered to seek out and capture the enemy by any means necessary, one of the enemy combatants being the short, rotund man standing before me, smiling like a child about to get himself a big red balloon.
“Howzit, Mistah C?” he says by way of introduction.
The first time I saw a client facing serious charges smiling at me from across my desk, I thought he was a psychopath. I now distinguish it for what it is, the cockiness of a young guy familiar with the system. Familiarity goes a long way in extinguishing fear.
He holds out his hand, and I look at it for a long while, hoping he’ll get the hint and pull it back. Who started this fucking handshaking business to begin with? I’ll have to check that out on the Internet. Why not just bow and have it over with? Or wink? At least we wouldn’t be spreading any germs. But, noooo. We’ve got to shake hands to let people know we’re pleased to meet them, even when we aren’t in the slightest.
His hand is still out there, waiting for me. I take it. And shake it. I hope it was at least good for him.
Turi takes a seat in one of my two new client chairs, and I fear he’s too much for it. I listen for the sound of snapping wood, but it doesn’t come. It’s a good thing I took the Gianforte case or I’d be conducting this interview on the floor. The fifty grand allowed me to furnish my office last week. I bought a large cherry desk and immediately cluttered it with client files, calendars, bar journals, half-used legal pads, and unpaid bills. When it arrived, it was just a desk. Now, it’s a lawyer’s desk. A genius’s desk, some might say.
I start with some preliminaries and learn that Turi is a local from the windward side whose speech flutters frequently from pidgin to English and back. He is twenty-two years old and this is his third arrest. Turi has one misd
emeanor conviction for possession, but he is not presently on probation. He has been unemployed since being fired from Taco Bell three years ago for eating a few too many tortilla shells without paying.
“Okay, Turi,” I say, reclining in my new leather chair, “tell me what happened.”
“I sold some ice to one undercover cop.”
“How much did you sell him, Turi?”
“Just a forty-dollar bag. That’s all I had on me, Mistah C.”
It’s a small case. A simple buy and bust. The trick now is to gauge how much money is in his pocket. He’s familiar with the system; his smile and his rap sheet tell me as much. If I quote him too high a price, he’ll walk. If I try to lower my price as he waddles out the door, I’ll look inexperienced and desperate. If I quote him less than what’s in his pocket, I’ll have failed myself. So, what’s it going to be, Kevin? How much green is your new plump pal carrying in his pocket?
“Okay, Turi, I’ll need you to provide me with a thirty-five-hundred-dollar retainer, and I’ll be at your side at your next court appearance.”
I wait for the song and dance about the money, how he’ll pay me over time. Instead of singing and dancing, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a white envelope stuffed with cash.
He takes out a stack of twenties and counts out $3,500. The rest go back into his pocket. Son of a bitch. My chubby new buddy had at least five grand.
Turi lays the money atop one of the files on my desk. I begin to count it out, unable to hide my disappointment at having lost the other $1,500. Milt can always tell how much a client is carrying down to the nickel. Milt is a truly gifted lawyer.
“I can’t be taking no plea, Mistah C,” he says as I count.
“No plea,” I say, thinking about the money I left in his pocket.
“We need to go over some evidence or something?”
“Nah,” I say. “We’re not going to need to deal with evidence in this case.”
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