Just as I set the telephone receiver back into its cradle, Jake enters my office without knocking. His hands are orange from the bag of Doritos or Cheetos or whatever the hell he’s holding, and the flask sticks out of his left hip pocket like an appendage. As he takes a seat in the client chair in front of my desk, he licks his fingers one by one with orange lips and tosses the crumpled bag on my desk. He sees me eyeing the bag and quickly thinks better of it, removing the bag from my desk and depositing it in the waste receptacle on the floor. I’m not used to this kind of familiarity. Milt and I have known one another for over a decade, and neither of us would even think about entering the other’s office without knocking. Yet I’ve known Jake for a week and a day and here he comes strutting into my office like Chester the Cheetah, turning everything in his path a crummy and ugly orange.
“Who was that?” he says, pointing to the phone with an orange finger, while cheesy projectiles spew from his 80-proof mouth across my desk.
“That was Milt Cashman,” I tell him, grabbing the paper towels and the bottle of Fantastik from my bottom desk drawer.
Milt works fast. When I spoke to him last night, I briefed him on the entire Gianforte case. He said he was intrigued and offered to help. Since I’m not shy when it comes to accepting favors, I asked him to start by getting me some background on the victim, including the Newark law firm where she worked.
“What did Not Guilty Milty have to say?” Jake asks, unscrewing his flask.
“I had asked him to check out Shannon’s employer, the law firm of Carter, Backman and Knight.”
“They’re the personal injury lawyers, right?”
“That’s what Joey told me.”
“Was he lying to you, son?”
“I don’t think so, Jake. I think that’s what Shannon told him.”
“But it isn’t the truth?”
“Apparently not,” I say.
Milt Cashman informed me that the law firm of Carter, Backman & Knight is a front. All of the partners on the firm’s charter are former FBI, but Milt’s sources say none of them are really very former. The law firm is a cover. Shannon didn’t want to work for the FBI. Shannon was working for the FBI.
Finished with the Doritos, Jake begins to chew on this. “Does Cashman have any idea what Shannon may have been working on specifically?”
“No,” I say, “but if I had to hazard a guess, I would say organized crime.”
“Hell, that could be helpful to us, son.”
“Apparently, you haven’t spoken to Flan.”
“Not for a couple days,” he says. “Why?”
I tell him about Senior, about how the $50,000 check was written to me by the underboss of the Fiordano crime family. If Joey knew that Shannon was working for the Feds, it would give him even further motive to kill her, or so the state would argue. Claiming that Joey’s association with the Mafia goes to show motive would also allow the prosecution to explain that association to the jury. The notso-subtle message to the jury about Joey would be simple: killing is in his blood.
“Do you think Shannon was working this kid the whole time?” Jake asks.
“I don’t know, Jake. It’s a crazy post-9/11 world. The bolder the Justice Department becomes on the terrorism front, the bolder they’re going to become on other fronts, like organized crime. Times have changed. Donnie Brasco sure didn’t have to fuck the information out of his crew, but nowadays, who knows?”
“Are you gonna tell Joey about this?”
“I’m going to have to tell him at some point. But I’m going to give it some time. I just this morning dropped the information about Professor Catus on him. All this news on top of the stress of life behind bars could put him over the edge. Tomorrow’s his arraignment. We’ll go through the motions and I’ll tell him I’ll visit again next week.”
Jake takes a nip from his flask and shakes his head. “This case is taking on a life of its own. Sure as hell glad I’m not lead counsel.”
Taking on a murder case is a lot like getting a pet. When you’re deciding whether to go through with it, you focus on the negatives. Mainly, whether you can handle cleaning up all the shit that comes with the territory. Once you decide to go through with it, cleaning up the shit becomes just another part of your daily routine. The case or the pet quickly becomes a major facet of your life. Before you know it, you find yourself wondering how you would’ve ever lived without it, shit and all.
I swivel my chair around to face the mountains. When you’re knee-deep in shit, it’s easy to forget where you live. Even here in paradise.
From behind me, Jake’s voice takes me out of the moment and back to reality.
“Since I didn’t have a date at the zoo yesterday afternoon, I took it upon myself to view the hotel surveillance videos. Would you like the good news first, or would you like the bad news first, son?”
I swivel my chair back around to face him. “I could use some good news.”
The good news, he tells me, is that Palani left his post for some time after taking over for his fellow doorman at the Waikiki Winds on the night Shannon was murdered. However, he was gone for less than fifteen minutes, barely enough time to get to the beach and back, let alone enough time to find Shannon, get into another argument, and kill her.
“I’ll pace it off, from the hotel to the beach and back,” I say. “But why would he leave work to go back to the beach?”
“Maybe he still wanted to fuck her.”
“Must’ve been one hell of an erection.”
“Hell, haven’t you ever taken Viagra?” Jake says.
I give him a look and shake my head.
“Well, we’re not all thirty-one, son.”
“So, Jake, aside from your needing Viagra to get it up, what’s the bad news?”
“I have to get up to piss a dozen times a night.”
“Anything else?”
“You bet,” he says. “Let’s go into the conference room. I think it’s best you see it for yourself.”
Jake asks Hoshi to set up the DVD player in the conference room. We pull the shaded film over the windows to reduce the glare and take our seats.
Hoshi seems to know even more about the discs than Jake. She puts one in and fast-forwards as she looks down at notes she has scribbled on a yellow legal pad. She hits play and a minute goes by before I see Joey stepping off the elevator and into the lobby of the Hawaiian Sands hotel.
“At first,” Jake says, “I was only focusing on the time reference at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.”
The image of Joey disappears as he exits the hotel. Jake nods and Hoshi fast-forwards again. Minutes pass here in the conference room as hours pass on-screen. Finally, Hoshi hits play again. Another two minutes go by before Joey steps back into focus.
“The second time I watched it,” Jake says, “I focused in on Joey himself.”
Jake squints, and I find myself squinting, too. Joey’s face is fuzzy, so I can tell nothing about his mood. His clothes seem clean, and I’m thankful for that. He sways like someone who has been drinking all night. In other words, like everyone else stumbling into their Waikiki hotel at that time of night.
Then, I see them. A pair of flip-flops on his feet.
“Oh, shit,” I say.
There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about stumbling into your Waikiki hotel at four thirty in the morning wearing a pair of cheap rubber flip-flops.
Except, that is, when you left your hotel nine hours earlier in a pair of bright white Nike sneakers.