CHAPTER 44

He has the reddest hair I’ve ever seen, so red that it can’t be real. But then, what the hell do I know? The red jungle of tresses hasn’t been cut or cleaned in some time, that much I’m sure of. His face is so white that it blends in with the institutional walls. Eyes so pale blue that the irises are nearly transparent. He’s slight; still, there’s danger in those skeletal hands with or without a weapon. True madness makes up for a good deal of brawn. For once I’m glad that a sheet of protective glass separates me from the prisoner. This is because Corwin Pierce is not my client. I’m simply a visitor visiting during visitors’ hours on visitors’ day.

Corwin Pierce stares at me. Studies me and smiles. Smiles as though he’s about to let me in on the greatest secret the world’s ever known.

I’ve already sanitized the scratched-up black phone. Still, I hesitate putting the receiver to my ear. I hold it just close enough so that I can hear him.

“Turi says you’re a lawyer.”

The voice is strange, doesn’t remotely match the face. It’s as if his words are emanating from some bizarre far-off place. There’s a disconnect, an odd time delay as though the audio and video are running on separate tracks. I shake off the eeriness and lift the receiver in front of my mouth to speak.

“That’s right,” I say softly. “And Turi tells me—”

“You’re the lawyer I seen on the TV.” His is a sleepy voice. Quiet, shy, almost as soft as a young woman’s. Yet, originating from that face the slightest utterance becomes intimidating.

I nod. “You watch a lot of television, Corwin?”

He giggles. “Only the news and nature programs. Sometimes, if no one’s home, the naked channel.”

I lean forward, keep my own voice low and steady. “Who do you live with?”

“Who do you think I live with?” More sniggering.

“I don’t know.”

His gaze follows something behind me but I don’t turn around. “I lived with my father’s mother till they put her in a home.”

“So now you live alone?”

He looks at me as though I’m hurling insults at him. “I didn’t say that.” Suddenly, he covers his mouth with his free hand as though to control his own laughter. When he recovers, he says: “That’s not what you came here to talk about, is it, though?”

“No.”

“You came to hear my poetry.”

Before I can respond he’s reaching into his pocket. He pulls out a wrinkled piece of lined paper folded four times over. He opens it slowly as though he’s about to announce the Academy Award winner for Best Picture. Finally he presses the page up against the glass. My eyes reluctantly follow the words as he recites them from memory.

if i were a god,

god help you all.

the world would witness why.

i’d drown the fish,

fell the trees,

cut man down to size.

i’d clip birds’ wings

and damn all good things,

while i laughed at their demise.

if i were a god,

god help you all.

the world would catch ablaze.

i’d douse this sphere

in gasoline,

end this planet’s days.

i’d strike a wooden match,

warm my ice cold hands.

i’d toast my bread

and clear my head,

while my new sun

     sung my praise.

“You wrote that?” I say quietly.

“Well, who in Hell do you think wrote it, Corvelli?”

The voice accompanying his outburst is decidedly masculine. A guard looks over, first at Corwin, then through the looking glass at me. I bow my head as if to say it’s all right, everything’s under control. Madmen are a large part of my line of work.

When I look back at Corwin Pierce he is rocking back and forth. His mouth is a straight line, his lips seemingly sealed with cement.

“You know why I’m here, don’t you, Corwin?”

It’s a solid minute before he says, “You want to talk about fire.”

“Not just any fire, Corwin. The fire in Ko Olina this past July.”

“That was a good fire,” he says without emotion.

I keep my hand from trembling by pressing the receiver tighter against my ear. All concern for germs has abruptly vanished. “Was that one of yours?”

Corwin Pierce has a history of setting fires. Over the past decade he’s pleaded twice to destruction of property, even served a little time. He burned a garage. An abandoned shed. A field. But never before has he taken lives or even come close. True, his fires have escalated in size. In fact, the fire he’s in for now involved a pickup truck and a tree. Word is, his actions could have resulted in a brush fire so large it could have competed against a recent disaster in northern California.

“It was one of mine,” he says, giggling again. “My masterpiece. My opus.”

I lean forward, try not to flinch as I look him in those dead blue eyes. “Tell me what you told Turi Ahina. Tell me how you did it.”

“I was bored,” he starts, his feminine voice falling into a monotone. “I don’t usually get so bored but I did that day, so I went outside and walked to the road and I hitched a ride with some locals from Waianae early in the afternoon. Didn’t know where they were headed and I didn’t care. I curled up in the bed of their pickup and fell asleep, and when I woke we were passing through the gate into Ko Olina, headed for one of the lagoons.”

“What were their names?”

“The locals?” He shrugs. “Don’t know. Never saw them before, never saw them again. We drove down to the fourth lagoon, parked and parted ways. I found myself a nice shade tree and sat down under it and at some point I fell asleep. I woke sometime late that afternoon, walked around a bit, found someone’s unattended cooler full of sodas and sandwiches and helped myself. Then the night came around.

“Ran into some guys who were drinking beers out past the marina by Barbers Point. I was going to try to steal some but they offered and I accepted and we got to talking. I only had but one or two, but I sat there with them for hours.”

“What were their names?” I say.

“I’ll get to that,” he snaps. It’s Corwin’s first break from the tone he immediately fell into when he started his story. Corwin clears his throat and scoots his chair forward. “First the fire.”

I lean back on the hard plastic chair and cross my legs. “It’s your show,” I tell him.

*   *   *

He’d seen them earlier in the day, he tells me. The bride and groom, the wedding party. So he knew his target. He’d found an old Seattle Mariners cap that afternoon and placed it on his head, along with a cheap pair of sunglasses he’d found near the garbage. Probably ladies’ glasses, he says.

He spied on the last leg of the reception, waited while everyone went up to their rooms, then watched the newlyweds argue at Kanaloa’s from beyond the gate. Heard the bride cussing out her husband and the bartender.

“I didn’t like the looks of her chubby hubby,” he says. “Thought it would be nice to see her doughboy go up in flames.”

So when the couple left Kanaloa’s he followed them up to their room.

“How did you do that?” I ask.

“They got in the elevator alone, the two of them, and I waited until the door closed, then watched the lights above it. Saw that the elevator traveled up and up and up and up until it reached the sixteenth floor.”

Corwin took the stairs. At this point he had no real plan, just knew he wanted to do some damage. Maybe not kill anyone, maybe just scare someone a bit. Then opportunity knocked. Or rather hotel security.

He heard a few expletives, then saw the door slam in their face.

As they walked away, he heard one security guard say to the other something about charcoal starter fluid in the room and it felt as though destiny were calling.

He hung in the stairwell, thinking, checking the floor every once in a while. His heart was pounding—it was one ginormous rush, he says, as though he’d just snorted three fat lines of crystal meth.

Then the luck. Serendipity, he calls it. The bride left the room and made for the elevator and she was alone.

He followed her. First downstairs then to the lagoon, which was beautifully pitch-black and empty.

She was drunk, no question about it, he says, so it was easy. She stood up, walked around a bit, left her handbag perfectly unattended in the sand.

In the darkness he couldn’t make the bag out, but later he would see it was a little leather Fendi. He crossed over to the nearby construction site, unzipped it, and examined its contents.

He found the knife first. A switchblade, he says. And, of course, the Zippo lighter that he figured belonged to her husband Ed because of the engraved letters. Both of these finds were great but what Corwin really wanted was the key card to their room. And the key card was in there, too, zipped up in a small side compartment.

Finding the valve to the water main was easy. He knows this kind of shit, he tells me. He removed his T-shirt and used it like a glove so that he wouldn’t leave any prints when he turned the valve.

He couldn’t waste much time. Sooner or later, even in the dead of night, someone might notice. Some guest might call the front desk and complain. “There’s no fucking water,” someone might say. But then, he had to time it all just right, too. He couldn’t be seen. Not by security or staff, not by the guests, and certainly not by any of the resort’s video surveillance cameras.

He figures it was just past two when he made it back to their room. First he listened at the door for conversation, television, radio, anything. Then he used the key card to enter the honeymoon suite and found the man in bed and asleep.

“I was able to pour out all the charcoal starter fluid before he even stirred,” Corwin says. “Then the fucker woke up so I buried the bitch’s knife in his gut. Watched him bleed like a stuck fucking pig.”

“Then what?”

“Well, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure the rest out, lawyer. I slapped my thumb down on the flint wheel of that bitch’s lighter and tossed it onto the juice.” He smiles that sick, twisted smile he smiled when I first arrived. “Then God said, ‘Let there be fire.’”

*   *   *

I have Corwin Pierce tell me the story again and again and then once more. Barely a word of his narrative changes—certainly none of the facts—though on the fourth and final time around Corwin Pierce lets me in on the big secret, the denouement of his tale.

“The spics I drank beers with over at Barbers Point,” he says, “turns out they were gangbangers from L.A. They paid me to do this shit.”

“How much?”

“A couple hundred.”

“Why did they want it done?”

Corwin leans forward, presses his nose up against the glass. “One of the spics said this guy pissed down his leg the night before,” he says, barely able to keep from cracking up.

“I see.” I glance at the clock on the wall. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

He sits back, blows out a breath. “Suspense, lawyer. It’s not what you put into a story, it’s what you leave out.”

Tired, I nod and remain silent for a while. “You left something else out,” I say finally.

“Did I?”

“You did.”

Corwin Pierce waits. When I don’t elaborate a look of pure fury creeps back onto his stark white face. “Well, what was it I left out, Corvelli, that you would like to know?”

I let his question hang in the air for another few moments. I set the receiver down on the counter and stand as though I’m ready to leave. I smooth out my suit and straighten my tie as he watches me. Finally, putting the bulk of my weight on my good left leg, I lean forward, lift the receiver and press it against my ear.

“Tell me. What did you do with the knife, Mr. Pierce?”

On this and only this, Corwin Pierce remains perfectly silent.