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THE STRAINS OF KHACHATURIAN’S “Masquerade Waltz” broke through my sleep. I spent a few disoriented moments trying to figure out where I was. Once I had established I was in Donnie’s bedroom, I quickly located my cell phone on the mango wood night table. Donnie had left for work already. I was alone on the vast platform bed.
“Molly,” my phone said, in Pat Flanagan’s voice. “Where are you?”
Pat used to be a crime reporter for the County Courier, before the layoffs. He now taught composition part-time at Mahina State, which was how I knew him. His adjunct position paid poorly, but it provided access to our library’s news and market research databases. He made his real living from Island Confidential.
“I’m just waking up.” I groaned.
“Emma and I are at the Pair-O-Dice. When can you be here?”
“I’m still down at Donnie’s.”
“She’s still at Donnie’s.” I heard Pat’s voice.
“Tell her to catch a ride with Donnie,” Emma said in the background. “Oh, maybe he starts work early.”
“Earlier than you can imagine,” I said. “I think he left hours ago.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that he’s always at work?”
Pat, whose Irish Catholic parents stuck it out until death parted them, was not a fan of the institution of marriage. His wedding present to me had been an early edition chapbook of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
I sat up.
“I really can’t complain about the hours Donnie puts in. I think the only reason Donnie’s Drive-Inn does so well is because Donnie’s always down there supervising and helping out. If you want to make a restaurant work here, you have to be single-minded and detail-obsessed, the way he is. Those poor souls who get into the restaurant business because they love cooking and playing host? They’re the ones who are out of business in two months. You’re having breakfast at the Pair-O-Dice?”
“After a fashion,” Pat said. “So what explains the fact that this place isn’t out of business yet?”
“A very good question. Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
The Pair-O-Dice Bar and Grill in Downtown Mahina was the kind of place most sensible people would drive right by. Donnie didn’t like it, of course. He thought it was a dump. The bar looked more impressive at night when its custom neon sign was illuminated. Pair-O-Dice was spelled out in curvy blue script, an animated pink pair of dice rolling from left to right, and green and yellow neon palm trees swaying jerkily on either side. During the daytime, the place had zero curb appeal and almost no customers. It was like having our own private club. As long as it stayed in business (and how it did was a mystery) Pat, Emma, and I were happy to spend time there.
Sitting together at one of the Pair-O-Dice’s wobbly wooden tables, Pat Flanagan and Emma Nakamura looked like a living tableau meant to illustrate Human Diversity. While Emma was short, sturdy, and brown, Pat was well over six feet tall and gaunt. His Irish complexion fairly glowed in the penumbra.
“So what’s for breakfast?” I took my seat, plucked a paper napkin from the chrome dispenser, and rubbed at a sticky stain on the table in front of me. It didn’t help. The napkin stuck and then shredded, the pieces rolling into tiny white pills.
“I was telling Pat he’s getting shaggy,” Emma said.
“I don’t know. To me it barely looks like a five o’clock shadow.”
Pat rubbed his head. “Yeah, might be time to break out the razor again.”
As part of his ongoing austerity project, Pat had decided to stop paying for haircuts and simply shave his head instead. To his surprise (but no one else’s), a rumor immediately sprang up among the students that Pat was a skinhead. In fact, Pat was a stalwart pacifist, and as progressive as they come.
“I was telling Pat what happened to us down at Art Lam’s place yesterday,” Emma said.
“Have you found out anything from your friends in Mahina PD? I was kind of hoping you’d tell us what was going on, Pat.”
“They’re not telling anyone anything,” Emma said.
“No. Not until they’ve notified next of kin.”
“Did Art Lam have any next of kin?” I asked. “I heard his wife died years ago, right?”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “And no kids, either. Hey, I’m still hungry. I’m gonna get another Breakfast Bento. Molly, you want one?” A stack of black plastic bento boxes sat on the bar, each one fastened with a tan rubber band.
“They’re just sitting out unrefrigerated,” I said. “Are they safe to eat? Won’t bacteria grow?”
“Yeah, it’s probably like a microorganism zoo in there.” Emma got up and helped herself to one.
“Can you get me one?” Pat asked. “Thanks, Emma.”
“I’ll just have some coffee,” I said.
“I’d like to interview you two,” Pat said when Emma returned with the bento boxes, “and get your story about what happened yesterday. I’ll keep your names out of it if you want.”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to talk,” I said. “Couldn’t it mess up the investigation? Sometimes they keep some details out of the paper on purpose.”
“Yeah, Pat, try wait a couple days,” Emma said. “What’s the rush?”
Pat blew out a sigh. “I gotta put up some clickbait, stat. For the ad revenue.”
“We know how it works,” Emma said. “Molly’s a business professor.”
“Anyway, Island Confidential could really use a grisly murder. All I’ve had up lately is a bunch of stuff about the proposed waste incinerator. There wasn’t even enough hurricane damage for more than one story.”
“The waste incinerator articles are good journalism,” I said. “People care about the issue. Or they should, anyway.”
“I don’t have the luxury of waiting for peoples’ taste to improve,” Pat said. “My landlord’s selling my place, and I need a down payment to rent an apartment.”
“Someone’s buying that—I mean, your house?”
Pat lived off the grid twenty miles out of town, halfway up one of the five volcanic mounds comprising our island. The tiny cabin he called home sat at the end of a private dirt road that turned to muck whenever it rained. It wasn’t my kind of place, but Pat liked the seclusion and the affordability.
“Who would wanna live all the way out there?” Emma chimed in. “Is it some nutcase with a truckload of canned food and guns?”
“Worse. Some overpaid idiot who wants to tear the whole thing down and build himself a swingin’ bachelor pad.”
“Isn’t there anything else you can do for money, Pat?” Emma opened the bento box. “How about another section of comp?”
“Too late in the semester. My only option is the Faustian bargain.”
“What Faustian bargain?” I asked.
“A job in Administration. Vice President Marshall Dixon’s office.”
“Really? Doing what?”
“Selling out,” Emma offered.
“Is that the job description in its entirety?” I asked.
“She wants me to be the interim social media manager. I’d actually be working for her new marketing guy. Victor Santiago.”
“Santiago’s the guy with the little devil beard,” Emma explained.
“He does have that Grand Inquisitor vibe, doesn’t he?” Pat chuckled.
“Actually, Tomás de Torquemada was tonsured and clean shaven. You think of him as having a sinister goatee, but he didn’t.”
“You just happen to know that?” Emma challenged me. “About Torquemada’s beard?”
“I said no beard. Pat, I think you should take the job. You’d be good at it. Look at the job you’ve done with Island Confidential.”
“I think they’re buying him off,” Emma said. “If he’s on the university’s payroll, he’s gonna hafta stop reporting. He won’t be able to do any more stories like the one he did about the library workers.”
“Exactly,” Pat said. “I can’t do that.”
“Good point. Just out of curiosity, what’s the pay like?”
“If I took the job for just one year, I’d be able to buy a place in town, not just rent.”
“Really?”
“What?” Pat asked, “Are you saying I should take it?”
“Of course. But I don’t have any problem with selling out. I’m the one who went to work for the business school, don’t forget.”
“Smartest thing you ever did. You don’t even want to know what’s going on in the English department right now.”
“What is it with Mahina State’s English department, anyway?” Emma asked. “You guys always have some mishegas going on.”
“It’s not just Mahina State,” I said. “My dissertation advisor used to say that hell has two English departments.”
“There’s something about studying the Greatest Expression of That Which is Human that brings out the worst in people,” Pat said. “Speaking of which, I need to go teach my class.”
“I have to get going too,” I said.
“You didn’t even have any breakfast.” Emma proffered the remains of her bento box: gravy-stained rice, and a congealed fried chicken wing. “Here, eat something.”
“Thanks anyway, Emma, but I’m not really hungry.”