CHAPTER 51

I ate four Percocet, then entered the jail, signed in, and asked to see Turi Ahina. During the wait, the pills kicked in, but I didn’t feel quite as good as I would have liked. That’s how it is with pills. It gets so that the anticipation is more exhilarating than the payoff.

Once Turi and I were safely sealed away from the world, I said, “Lying to me about Mindy Iokepa was a no-no.”

Turi shrugged his colossal shoulders. “You know why I did it, Mistah C.”

I stared at him. “Makes me wonder though.”

“Wonder ’bout what?”

“What else you’re lying to me about, Turi.”

Turi shook his head, shifted in his seat. He remained quiet for longer than I would have liked. “That’s it, Mistah C. I was just trying to protect Mindy and my keiki.”

In the last twenty-four hours my mind had been working overtime, running through scenarios in which I could truly fuck things up. The possible state prosecution for the murder of Alika Kapua still bothered me. But worse was the thought of harm coming to John Tatupu or a member of his family. After what I had done, that was something I knew I could never come back from, even though my first duty was to my client. Even though Tatupu had no right at all to withhold information that could potentially free an innocent man.

“I am about to put another man’s life on the line to save yours, Turi. So I need to know the truth.”

“I told you all the truth awready, eh?” he shouted at me. “What you think, Mistah C?”

For a few moments the room fell quiet. I eyed Turi the way I might eye a prospective juror during jury selection. I wanted to read his mind, to know exactly what he was thinking. Whether he was telling me the truth or manipulating me, feeding me lies.

I decided to come right out with it. “I think that maybe Doris Ledford really only heard two shots. I think that maybe there was no third bullet, and no navy Honda Civic with a bullet hole in it.”

Turi didn’t flinch. His good eye remained locked on my face.

“I think maybe Masonet really did order a hit, only it wasn’t on you, it was on Kanoa Bristol. In that case, of course, Kanoa Bristol wouldn’t have been the assassin; it would have been the other way around.”

Turi still didn’t flinch even as I accused him of being a cold-blooded killer.

“And I think maybe that five thousand dollars you had wasn’t for Mindy, it was yours. Your payment for assassinating Kanoa Bristol, a dirty cop who had decided to come clean and corroborate another cop’s story.”

Turi said nothing, just stared at me with that one good eye, the other still hiding behind a bandage.

“Tell me, Turi, is it just a coincidence that Mindy Iokepa and Karen and Brian Haak are Facebook friends? Or is that how Mindy found this random Honda Civic standing behind Karen’s mother and Max Guffman?”

Turi backed his chair away a few feet, the metal legs screeching.

“Tell me, Turi, did you contact Tam after we left his bar in Chinatown? Did you tell him that this whole jet thing was a scam devised by the feds?” I punched the table and said through gritted teeth, “Tell me the truth, goddamnit!”

Turi said in a low voice, “The truth is, you paranoid, Mistah C. And I know why, eh? I can see it in your eyes. I seen it at the trial. Before that even. You high, brah. You always high. What you on, eh? Oxy? Vicodin? Percocet?”

I suddenly felt smaller than the room we were sitting in. My heart raced, my jaw exercised on its own. “You lied to me about Mindy,” I said again, almost in defense of myself.

“Yeah, brah. But not ’bout nothing else, yeah? The rest, it’s the demons in your mind tellin’ you these things ’bout me. Everything you just said, I don’t have the smarts for all that. Maybe some crazy motherfucker like Masonet, eh? But not me. Me, I’m a thug, Mistah C. You, you the one with the mind that works like that. You, Mistah C, you could be a thousand times the criminal I ever was. ’Cause you a million times smarter. And a million times meaner.”

*   *   *

I spent that entire night sitting up on my mattress in the living room, unable to sleep. I had just accused a man who’d saved my life of an elaborate plot against me. And I’d accused Mindy Iokepa, a helpless single mother caught in a hellish situation, of being in on it.

The sliding-glass door to my lanai remained open, and trade winds blew in from the sea. I was dressed in nothing but boxers, yet I was still sweating. Sweating and trembling and trying to keep my teeth from chattering.

I thought about the governor and whether he could have hired Lok Sun to murder Oksana Sutin. Did Omphrey know she was pregnant? Did he know she was a spy? Either was reason enough for him to off her.

Or was it whoever hired Oksana Sutin to spy on him in the first place? Could it have been his opponent John Biel or someone who worked for his campaign?

Could it have been Pamela Omphrey? After all, she’d admitted at the fundraiser to knowing about the affair.

It wasn’t my job to determine a client’s guilt or innocence. I wasn’t supposed to care. I asked for the truth from my clients only so that I could devise the best strategy to get them acquitted, guilty or not. My objective was supposed to remain the same in every case. Defend my client to the best of my ability. What was I doing, sitting up in the middle of the night, trying to discern truth from fiction?

Not long after I flipped my lights on that morning, I received a call from Jake. “Turn on the television, son.”

I stared at the spot in the living room where a television had once been. “Don’t have one, Jake.”

“Then go to the Internet.”

“Why?”

“Because they just pulled a woman’s body out of Lake Wilson in Wahiawa this morning. They haven’t identified her yet, but the description sounds a hell of a lot like Iryna Kupchenko.”

“A lake?”

My head felt dizzy with exhaustion, and the sharp pains rising in my gut did nothing to jerk my mind into motion. If the body was indeed Iryna Kupchenko’s, then I was directly responsible for her death. I came close to crying right there on the phone, almost screamed at the top of my lungs. I nearly broke down and begged Jake to take my place in court, to handle Tatupu’s direct examination.

But in the end, all I said aloud was “I didn’t even know Oahu had any lakes.”