“Best seven hundred and fifty bucks he ever spent,” says Jake, taking a nip from his flask. “Only thing I ever got from a hooker that I didn’t pay for was crabs. This guy gets a fucking alibi circus.”
“These witnesses will never testify, Jake,” I say from behind my desk.
“The prosecutor will subpoena them, son.”
“These kinds of people, they wipe their asses with subpoenas. They’ll disappear if they ever get served.”
“The prosecutor will grant them immunity if they agree to testify,” says Jake, a little whiskey dribbling down his chin.
“I’ll have Flan check out their backgrounds. If they do show up in court, I’ll make them wish they never had.”
“Well, I suppose we should get to work on our much tougher witnesses this morning.”
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“The video surveillance discs from the hotels.”
“Not today, Jake. I’ve got a date this afternoon.”
“A date? May I ask with whom?”
“Let’s just say our first night together was billed to the Gianfortes.”
“The bartender? You son of a bitch,” Jake says, as I toss some extra clutter on my desk. “Shit, the only witness I ever slept with was the prostitute who gave me crabs.”
“I’m going to the jail to see Joey tomorrow morning. I’ll call you on my way back to the office, and we’ll get together to sort through this mess.”
“Have fun, son,” Jake calls to me, still sitting in my client chair as I walk out the door. “Have fun.”
My shrink in New York thought it less than wise for me to model my career after that of a man the likes of Milt Cashman. He thought it downright criminal that I should model my love life after Milt’s. After all, when I last left Milt, he was putting the finishing touches on his fourth divorce. Each separation, of course, was initiated by the female on the grounds of Milt’s relentless infidelities.
With women, as in my career, I’ve always felt like a fraud. I’d enter relationships with good intentions, but somehow they always turned out bad. I never trusted my own feelings, let alone a woman’s feelings for me. I’d question their motives, and then I’d inevitably question my own.
Manhattan produces a certain kind of woman. The kind of woman who consults Sex and the City for love advice, not just fashion tips. The kind of woman who thinks finding the right man is anticlimactic to the joyous struggle of looking for him. The kind of woman who drinks too much and has too little to say. Of course, my universe in New York centered around me, and more than likely these generalities ring true only for the women who populated the circles in which I ran.
It’s too soon to tell what the women of Hawaii are like, but if Nikki is any indication, then I’m in for a real treat. I’m meeting Nikki at the entrance to the Honolulu Zoo, where Kalakaua Avenue becomes Monsarrat. The day is brilliant, as just about all of the days on Oahu are.
I do a double take when I see her, radiant in a white sundress with a neckline that dips low on her chest. The contrast of the white cotton against her caramel skin is mesmerizing and I allow myself a hearty pat on the back. The sunlight does her a certain justice that a forty-watt porch light never could.
“Aloha, Kevin!” she says, waving one supple arm when she sees me. She approaches me as I exit my Jeep and plants an enthusiastic kiss square on my lips.
I was expecting that awkwardness that comes after first sleeping with someone, but there’s none of that. She grabs me by the arm and leads me to the zoo. She selected the setting for our first real date during our two-hour telephone conversation Sunday night. I’ve always loathed the chitchat between girl and boy on the phone, but our talk didn’t consist of the usual grade-school drivel. She told me what she loved, what she lived for, what she’d die for, all with a fervor that stirred even the most abstruse passions in me. She cherishes writing, she said, and animals, hence the zoo. She adores Alika, the only family she has left, and admires with every ounce of her being the endearing spirit of Hawaii’s people.
The Hawaiians received a raw deal, there is no doubt about that. Their land was stolen by western businessmen, and their language and culture soon followed. The Hawaiians share much with the Native Americans on the mainland, and as on the subject of the American Indians, little is being said and even less is being done to rectify the wrongs inflicted upon them. Nikki knows that a single haole named M did not orphan her and Alika, but rather a collective endeavor by a contingent of Caucasians begun about a century and a half before she was born.
I pay the discounted kama’aina admission price and we enter the zoo. My last visit to the Bronx Zoo was as a small child, and I wonder as I step through the gate why I’d never gone back. Then it hits me. The pungent odor of animals and their excrement. I gag and nearly vomit from the combination of the stench and my five martinis last night. A zoo person I am not.
Nikki puts her hand upon my back and whispers softly in my ear the ever comforting words “You’ll get used to the smell.”
I thank her and we move forward.
Our first look is at flamingos, feeling underwater for fish and insects with their spoon-shaped bills, stepping elegantly in every which direction, their pink feathers demanding to be photographed.
I’m anxious that it’s daytime and I’m not at work, even though much of my work of late has been done at night. I want to be with Nikki, but I’d prefer her at my side as I pecked away at the keyboard, drafting Joey’s motion to suppress. I always saw leisure time as time to get ahead, and leisure activities as cutesy fun for the unambitious and lazy. I take a deep breath and look past a pair of giant Indian elephants toward Diamond Head. Nothing impedes my view of the incredible crater on the horizon. No ugly skyscrapers or tacky video billboards. I’m not in New York, and perhaps I need not work every waking moment of the day.
Nikki holds me close to her as we walk around a bend.
“We didn’t wake Alika the other night,” she says.
“I’m certainly glad of that.”
An only child, I don’t pretend to fathom the relationship between brother and sister. But had I a sister, I would fear for the man she brought into my home. I don’t know Alika and I’ve little desire to know him. These connections I’m unable or unwilling to make have contributed to my remaining so utterly single this first decade of my adult life.
“Alika never came home that night,” she adds.
I ask her why not, not because I want to know, but because I know she wants to tell me.
“He was working all night,” she says.
“What is it he does?”
Nikki gives me a look as if she’d rather not say, but were that the case, she wouldn’t have led our conversation down this path. She had ample opportunity to discuss her brother’s whereabouts over the phone, but she chose to do so only now, in person, where she can gauge the reaction on my face.
“He sells ice.”
I remain stoic. Six years in the criminal courts in New York City have desensitized me. I can tell by her face that this is a big deal to her, and thus, I know, it should be a big deal to me. But I’m no good at hand-holding, at comforting the sad and hurt. I am, however, a fucking champ at changing subjects.
“Monkeys!” I shout. “My favorite!”
Swinging from branches on a single tree are three white-handed gibbons, Southeast Asian rain-forest primates with no tails. The tree rests on a small island surrounded by a moat replete with turtles, some swimming while others rest leisurely on logs.
“I hate that he sells ice,” she says.
Much like the gibbons, the topic is here to stay.
“How did he get into it?” I ask, turning toward a group of spur-thighed tortoises, all standing stone still like rocks, heads popping out only to gnaw the leaves of fallen branches.
“How do you think? M.”
Nikki’s voice is shaking. I put my arm around her shoulders and lead her to the vacant herpetarium, the reptile house. Alone, in the darkness, standing before tanks of toads, lizards, frogs, and geckos, she leans into me and I feel her tears soak through my shirt and onto my chest.
I am new to this. I wonder how she can cry on the shoulder of someone she hardly knows. I wonder, too, if it’s terribly wrong that I’m so turned on.
“I’m so afraid of losing Alika like I did my mom and dad.”
It’s often said that lawyers like the sound of their own voices, and I suppose I’m no exception. But this is one of the rarest of times when I am at a complete loss for words.
I lead her by the hand back into the light.
We are met by Jun, a Malaysian sun bear with poor eyesight. At least that’s what the sign reads. The small bear ambles toward us to Nikki’s delight. I’m relieved that there’s someone to shoulder the load, to help take Nikki’s mind off the ruination of her family.
Unfortunately, Nikki finds another sign that reads that Jun was just a cub when her father was carted off to the mainland to live in captivity at the Oakland Zoo. The look on her face tells me she’s thinking of her own dad, of the time he served on the mainland. And that he never came back.
I’m thinking, Of all the goddamn luck.
We walk to the entrance of the African Savanna, where an East African tribesman made of copper stands guard, bidding us karibu or welcome.
Nikki’s mood switches from somber to chipper and she apologizes if she brought me down.
“Not at all,” I lie. “I want you to be able to tell me everything that troubles you,” I lie again.
“You’re so sweet, Kevin.”
Nikki and I walk the length of the zoo, watching the animals be animals. We see two seven-thousand-pound hippos, who spend the warm days resting underwater, coming out to play only at night. We pass all kinds of creatures, from gazelles, dainty and alert and graceful, to warthogs, ugly and fat and smelly. A rhino, brown and dirty, swats flies with its tail, while zebras and giraffes mingle like old friends.
Chipper Nikki makes for great company, and the date makes for one great afternoon. As we wave good-bye to a chimpanzee, I regret my inability to console and decide to take one last lick.
“It’s nice that you stuck together, you and your brother, despite everything that’s happened. I’m sure with you at his side, everything will turn out all right for him. In my business, I deal with a lot of youths who get mixed up with the wrong crowd and make some bad mistakes. But those that have the right family support are able to turn the corner and change their lives for the better.”
It sounds lame and melodramatic even as I say it, but it makes her eyes a little moist.
“The only ohana—the only family—Alika and I have left is each other. I would do anything for my brother, and I know he would do anything for me.”
Nikki holds me and invites me back to her place to spend the night. Over her shoulder I watch a Komodo dragon pacing back and forth in its cage. Some living things would rather die than live a life behind bars. I have an appointment to meet with Flan this evening. And I am scheduled to meet Joey at the jail come morning. So, as tempting as her offer is, I ask for a rain check.
Just as I’m about to give Nikki the long, hot kiss good-night, we hear the merry melody of the cell phone in my pocket. I apologize and pull the damned thing from my pocket. I cup my hand over the screen to shield it from the glare of the setting sun. The caller ID reads FLAN.
“Speak.”
“Kevin?” Flan asks. “May I speak to Kevin please? Kevin, is that you?”
Here we go again.
“Yeah, Flan. It’s me.”
“Are we still meeting tonight?”
“Yeah. Sand Bar, seven o’clock.”
“I just left Carlie Douglas at her hotel,” he says.
“You have some news for me, Flan?”
“Yes, I do, Kevin. I recommend you get to the Sand Bar early and have a few drinks before I get there.”
“Why’s that, Flan?”
“Because you’re not going to want to be sober to hear what I have to say.”