Ryan Flanagan, or Flan as Jake calls him, is a gruff-looking native of New Orleans who had nothing to lose when he decided to call Honolulu home. He walks into the Sand Bar with a cigarette dangling from his lips, chest hair creeping out of his mostly unbuttoned aloha shirt. He is middle-aged with salt-and-pepper hair, at least two days’ scruff but not a beard. He is thin and wiry but solid. Billy Bob Thornton with different tattoos.
His hand is coarse like sandpaper and I instinctively pull mine back at the touch. I’m used to shaking lawyers’ hands. Flan’s hands are no lawyer’s hands. Not a private investigator’s hands either. He’s got a broad smile on his face, but his eyes don’t hide the hand in life he was dealt.
Flan, Jake told me, was blue-collar by blood, a steel cutter who never bitched about a life cutting steel. He loved it, took great pleasure in earning a good day’s pay for a hard day’s work. He cut steel for just over two decades, waking at the crack of dawn and quitting at the cusp of dusk. He followed orders. He cut steel. He went home dirty and went to bed clean. Woke up the next morning and did it all again.
Flan was thirty-four, on a job just outside New Orleans, when he met Victoria, a twentysomething princess from the suburbs. Her daddy was the owner of the property Flan was working on, and she decided to check out the property, not to mention the men working on it, late one September afternoon. It was ungodly hot for autumn, and Victoria strutted over to Flan and offered him a bottled beer. As Flan will tell you, a woman brings a workingman an ice-cold beer on a damned hot day, he falls in love with her instantly, no questions asked. It didn’t hurt none that Victoria herself was hotter than the August sun.
They married and Flan soon learned that Victoria was as spoiled as she was gorgeous. Or as Jake put it, she was a bigger pain in the ass than a Texas-size hemorrhoid. Three years and two children after he said “I do,” he was out on his ass, cutting steel eighty hours a week just to pay alimony and child support.
A year after his divorce, Flan was working on his day off for a subcontractor hired to refurbish a bulkhead at the pier of a large beverage importer when a wake from a tugboat caused him to fall from the floating stage he was working on. He grabbed hold of a small anchor hole just large enough for his hand to keep himself from falling into the creek and drowning. His weight, along with the fifty-pound tool belt he was wearing, was too much. After tearing his rotator cuff and nearly ripping his right arm out of its socket, he dropped into the water, the tool belt pulling him to the bottom.
Freeing himself of the tool belt, Flan escaped with his life. But his life wasn’t much after that day. Permanently injured, he couldn’t work, so he couldn’t pay his bills, including the hefty monthly amounts for alimony and child support. Victoria cut off contact with him, thus effectively severing his ties with his two lovely young daughters. He declared bankruptcy and contemplated suicide.
Rather than kill himself, he decided to try his hand in paradise. He’d been to Waikiki on his honeymoon, and it surely beat the cemetery, with the exception of the company he’d had. He escaped his life in New Orleans and all the shit that came with it, but for one thing. He could not escape the physical pain caused by the accident. To this day, he eats Vicodin the way baseball players eat sunflower seeds, and he wears at all times a fetanyl patch, which releases morphine into his body just to get him through the day.
Jake and Flan moved to the island within a month of each other. They met at Margaritaville two months after Flan arrived. They told each other their stories. Flan had made it off the mainland, but he didn’t know where to go from there. Because of the endless pain, he couldn’t perform hard labor, the only kind of labor he knew. Jake suggested Flan become a private investigator. Flan looked into it, but to get licensed, he needed four years experience in the field. Jake told him, to hell with the license. He brought Flan in as an investigator on some cases and referred him to other attorneys on the island. Thanks to Jake, Flan had found a new career, albeit a bit of a shady one.
We take a booth away from Seamus and his ears. The bar is empty, but in criminal law, one person hearing your business is one too many. Flan orders a bourbon from the waitress, and Jake and I go another round with the whiskey.
“Flan, Kevin here has some work for you if you’re interested,” Jake says. “He represents the Jersey kid charged with murdering that young girl on the beach in Waikiki.”
“I’m familiar with it,” says Flan, taking a drag on his cigarette.
The smoke floats across the table and I swat it away. I’m ready to get up and walk away. One thing I can’t stand is smoke. I celebrated for a month when Mayor Bloomberg banned smoking in bars and restaurants in New York. I think I read somewhere that they banned smoking in public places here in Hawaii, too. You can make a bet I’ll check that out on the Internet as soon as I get the chance.
“Saw the girl’s mama on television this morning,” says Flan. “Excuse me,” he adds, pulling his chirping cell phone from his pocket.
That’s another thing I can’t stand. Cell phones. Yeah, I carry one because I have to in my business. But I keep the ringer off, and I never pull it out when I’m in the middle of a conversation. It’s rude and obnoxious. Flan is chatting with someone on the other end, about the New Orleans Saints, no less. I’m growing annoyed at him, what with the cigarette smoke and the cell phone conversation. His fucking car alarm goes off and I’m out of here. Don’t get me started on car alarms.
Fortunately for everyone, the drinks arrive.
Flan folds the phone and doesn’t apologize. I ask him how he is at making friends.
“If they drink like ol’ Jake here, makes it pretty damn easy,” he says.
Flan and Jake clink glasses, another annoying ritual. At least they didn’t toast.
“Well, I’m not sure about that,” I say, “but if you can get some liquor in her, it’ll make your job that much easier.”
“Her?”
“Yeah, her.”
“You mean the girl’s mama?”
“I do, indeed.”
I don’t slur my words when I get drunk. I do, however, start talking like Doc Holliday in Tombstone. I tell people I’m their huckleberry and remark at how everyone’s so cosmopolitan. This behavior has not yet led to my getting my ass kicked, but I’m sure I’ve come close.
“I’d like you to find her,” I tell him. “Get close to her. I want information about her daughter, things my client either doesn’t know or won’t tell me. I want her version of the background on the relationship between Joey and Shannon. I want information on the people Shannon spent time with, from high school on up.”
I see Jake out of the corner of my eye, shaking his head but saying nothing, staring into his empty glass, wishing it full. I signal for another round, even as I feel myself getting sick.
“I don’t have much experience interviewing witnesses, Kevin. Jake and the other lawyers usually have me track down documents, run papers to the courthouse, that sort of thing. You might wanna handle something as important as this yourself or hire someone with better credentials.”
“She may have seen my picture by now,” I say. “She’d spit in my eye. Besides, she’s probably lawyered up in preparation for a wrongful-death civil lawsuit against my client. I wouldn’t be permitted to speak to her without going through her attorney.”
“Nor would your agent,” Jake adds helpfully.
“That’s why I need someone off the radar,” I say. “Someone without a license. Someone invisible.”
“What makes you think she’ll talk to me if she’d as soon spit in your eye?” Flan asks.
“Your backstory. You’re going to play a role, do a bit of acting. You’re going to comfort her, sympathize with her. You’re going to tell her that you also lost a daughter.”
“I lost two daughters,” he says gruffly. “I’ll probably never see them again.”
“That will make it that much easier for you,” I say. “It’s called Method acting. You borrow from your real emotions to act more convincing in the role you’re playing.” At least I think that’s what it is. I don’t know. Too much whiskey on an empty stomach.
“I’ll let you know as soon as I find her,” Flan says, finishing off his bourbon.
“Do you want Flan to talk to that third bartender over at the Bleu Sharq?” Jake asks me.
“No. If Flan is seen speaking to anyone else connected to the case, all the wells will dry up at once. I’ll handle the barkeep.”
Flan pulls out his wallet to pay. I tell him to put it away, that I’ve got the tab covered. I hand him a modest roll of cash and tell him to use it to buy Carlie Douglas some cocktails.
“Always pay cash,” I tell him. “You’re not going to be giving her your real name, so you can’t pull out a credit card. Carry your wallet with pictures of one of your daughters, but leave all of your identification at home.”
“I appreciate the business, Kevin,” Flan says, pocketing the cash quickly, as if we just transacted a drug deal.
I nod, and Flan turns to walk out.
Before Flan reaches the door, Jake asks me, “Did you learn this kind of shit from Not Guilty Milty?”
“No, Jake. I learned it from my mistakes. If I had bothered to do some background on Moss and Reese, Brandon might be alive today.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Maybe not. But at least I could’ve lived with myself, knowing I overturned every stone.”
“Well, son, just bear in mind that this isn’t New York. People have very different notions of fair play on the islands.”
I raise my hand and make the international signal for the check.
“How about one more round, son?” Jake pleads.
“No, thanks. I’m going home to throw up. Besides, I’ve got an early day tomorrow. I’m going kayaking.”
“Kayaking? I thought you said you were gonna track down that Palani fella and ask him some questions?”
“Why, indeed, Jake. That is precisely what I intend to do.”