CHAPTER 29
“Kevin, line one.” Hoshi’s voice over the intercom disrupts the perfect silence of the conference room. “New case.”
Jake looks up from the crime scene photo he’d been squinting at. “Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I was beginning to think I’d never hear those two words again.”
I drop the folder I just opened onto the table. “What’s he charged with?” I say, running a hand through my hair, trying to conceal my frustration.
“It’s a she,” Hoshi says. “And she’s charged with Hawaii Penal Code chapter 711, section 1108.5.”
“What the hell’s that?” Jake says. “Abuse of a corpse?”
“No,” Hoshi says. “Cruelty to animals.”
Jake frowns. “All right. Schedule an appointment for this afternoon at—”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Hoshi, what are the facts of the case?”
Hoshi hesitates as Jake and I stare each other down across the table. Finally she says, “Defendant in Makaha killed a peacock, Kevin. With a baseball bat.”
“A peacock?” I say. “Why in the hell would anyone do that?”
“She said it was constantly squawking. It drove her crazy, so she took a bat and smashed its head.”
I take a deep breath. “Tell her to find another lawyer.”
“What?” Jake shouts.
“We can’t defend someone who did that,” I say. “It’s sick.”
“Sick?” Jake stands and throws his arms up in the air as though the ref just blew a call in a Texans game. “We’re representing a young woman accused of setting fire to a resort and killing eleven innocent people, including two children. Hell, that blaze was a hair away from killing you.”
“This woman took a baseball bat to the head of a defenseless peacock, Jake.”
He stands there, mystified. “And?”
“And we’ve got to draw the line somewhere,” I say.
A solid twenty seconds of silence is interrupted again by a tentative Hoshi. “So, gentlemen, yes or no?”
“No,” I tell her. “Refer her to either Russ Dracano or Mickey Fallon. Their numbers are listed in the phonebook.”
* * *
Ten minutes after Jake storms out of the conference room, I’m in my office on the phone with our investigator Ryan Flanagan.
“Flan, I’ve got a name for you to check out. Javier Vargas.”
I tell Flan all about my visit last night to the Angry Rooster, about my chat with the bartender who served a heavily tattooed Hispanic man the Monday of Trevor Simms’s bachelor party. The bartender Ken Walls was kind enough to sift through that evening’s receipts to identify the target of Trevor’s impromptu pissing match. Walls then introduced me to a bouncer named Brent, who remembered ID’ing the guy at the door. Brent remembered that Javier Vargas and his two pals each flashed California drivers licenses. Two of the three had addresses in Los Angeles.
“Flan, I also need you to find Lauren Simms and—”
“No,” he says.
“What?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Not you, Kev. Sorry. Casey, I said no.”
When Flan returns to the line he tells me how Casey has been borrowing money from him every day for the past week. “And with nothing coming in…” he says.
“What do you mean ‘nothing coming in’?”
“Money. You know, to the firm.”
“How the hell does that affect you? I pay you a salary.”
“Yeah, but Jake says that the coffers are going to dry up sooner rather than later, and—”
“Listen to me, Flan. Your job is secure, I promise. Jake’s had a cattle prod up his ass ever since he dumped Alison, and he thinks he’s pissed at me for taking on the Erin Simms case. Pay no attention. Hopefully, we’ll have the old Harper back before the start of trial.”
“If you say so, Kev.”
“I say so. Now let me run. I have a meeting set up with Tara Holland back in Ko Olina, and I don’t want to be late.”
I hang up the phone and consider knocking on Jake’s office door, offering up an apology. I consider telling him to have Hoshi call that new client back to set up an appointment.
But no. There have been plenty of days in my life when I wouldn’t have cared if someone set the whole world on fire just to watch it burn. But I can’t recall a single moment in thirty-two years when I would’ve sat back and abided some so-called human being purposefully taking a baseball bat to the head of an innocent bird.