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We left Kaneohe a half-hour later. “You mind if we stop at my parents’ house on the way home?” I asked. “I want to talk to my dad.”
“It’s all about you,” he said. “I’m just along for the ride.”
I called my mother and told her we wanted to stop by. “Your father’s already asleep,” she said. “I don’t want to wake him. But if you come over for dinner tomorrow you can have coconut cake for dessert.”
My mother was famous for that dessert, coconut milk infusing the white cake, with a rich cream cheese icing, dusted with shaved fresh coconut. I turned to Mike. “Dinner at my parents tomorrow? Coconut cake for dessert.”
“It’s a date. But only if I get two pieces.”
My mother heard him. “If there’s that much left by tomorrow. Lui’s boys came over this afternoon and ate half the cake.”
“You’ll just have to make another one,” I said.
“Drive carefully,” she said, and hung up.
When we got home, I pulled together everything I had on Fields’ murder, creating folders on my netbook for the arson, the homicide, his family background and so on. It helped me feel like I was making progress when I did stuff like that, and it was easier to find things when I need them.
Mike watched TV, and I ended up on the couch with him for a while, Roby sprawled on the floor next to us. Mike scratched behind Roby’s ears, and I rubbed the dog’s stomach. He was one spoiled golden retriever.
≈ ≈ ≈
As I was driving to work on Friday morning, Peggy Kaneahe called me. “I have some material for you. Can you be here at nine?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Should we bring the coffee?”
I thought I was being sarcastic; lately everyone had been expecting me to be their errand boy. But Peggy took me seriously. “I’ll have a Caramel Brule Latte, and Sarah likes the Macadamia Mocha. Mr. Yamato will want a bold coffee—he’ll put his own milk and sugar in here. Better make all three of them Longboard sized. It’s going to take a while.”
She hung up before I could complain. I had to repeat her order like a mantra until I got off the H1 and I could pull over and write it all down.
I had only enough time to get up to my desk, check for phone messages—none—and email—nothing important, general department crap sprinkled in with the occasional piece of spam that somehow slipped past the filtering system. Then Ray and I had to scoot to stop past the Kope Bean, the local-grown Hawaiian chain.
Ray laughed when I told him about the pizza the night before, and the coffee we had to stop and pick up. “Hey, if I’d known you were taking orders I’d have started placing them a long time ago.”
“Ha frigging ha.”
“You get anything from Greg last night?”
“Just vague speculation and general bullshit. I’m sure I gave better than I got.”
“That’s what I hear Mike say all the time.”
“You like this neighborhood?” I asked. We were driving through a scummy corner of downtown, taking a shortcut to the offices of Fields and Yamato. Bums and bag ladies regularly strolled the streets, pushing shopping carts laden with soda cans and unnecessary sweaters. Half the buildings were shuttered and scrawled with graffiti.
“Just saying.” Ray laughed as I pulled into the drive-through lane for the Kope Bean. Instead of small, medium and large, or the tall, grande and venti of Starbucks, they served up shortboard, funboard, and longboard sizes. We waited behind an old man so short his head was blocked by the headrest on his seat. I saw they were debuting a new, even bigger size, the twenty-ounce paddleboard. I decided that if we were going to be in a long meeting we’d better try those out.
My drink is the raspberry mocha. Ray is a coffee snob; he maintains it’s worthless to drink expensive coffee if you can’t taste the quality of the beans. He’ll only drink pure Kona, which the Kope Bean charges extra for, with extra foam. I felt like a true yuppie when I placed my order through the hula dancer’s mouth.
The tab was nearly twenty-five bucks, which would have shocked my father, who had never paid more than a dollar or two for a cup of coffee. But I handed over my credit card without a whimper. I drove to the office tower where Fields and Yamato have most of a floor, and Ray and I carried the two trays of coffee up in the elevator.
Sarah Byrne met us at the reception desk. “You’re my savior! I was wondering how we were going to make it through this meeting without massive doses of caffeine.”
“I love coffee, I love tea,” Ray sang, surprising me. “I love the Java Jive and it loves me.”
Sarah got it right away, picking up the next stanza from the Manhattan Transfer song, “I love java sweet and hot, Whoops Mr. Moto I’m a coffee pot.”
I hadn’t known Ray could sing until the last time we’d been on a case that involved Sarah, when he had sung along with her. This time, they both broke into laughter, which carried us down the hall until we reached the conference room, where Peggy Kaneahe was speaking in low tones to Winston Yamato.
Every time I see Peggy I’m reminded of the girl she was in high school, though she’s twenty years older and there are the occasional gray streaks in her close-cropped dark hair. She’s just as slim as she was then, and she dresses the way we did when we had to pose for formal portraits. She wore a high-necked ivory silk blouse with a single strand of pearls, and a navy blazer and matching skirt. Only the few lines around her eyes and on her forehead showed her age.
Winston Yamato had to be in his sixties, with a mane of white hair and a tanned face. He was still a competitive sailor, and often participated in races on his own boat. Peggy looked up from their conversation and said, “Good, you’re here. We can get started.”
Ray and I had met Yamato in the past, but Peggy introduced us again as we distributed the coffees. Peggy had a stack of file folders in front of her. “These are from the firm’s archives,” she said, as we sat down at the oval conference table, in front of big windows that looked out at Honolulu Harbor. “More recent cases are all digital.”
“These all involved Alexander Fields?” I asked.
Peggy nodded. “And they’re all cases that ended badly for Mr. Fields’ opposition, and which might provide a motive in his murder.”
“How many cases?” Ray asked, his mouth slightly open in surprise.
“Twenty-four that we’ve found. The most recent was ten years ago, but the cases go all the way back to the fifties, when Alexander Fields was a sole proprietor.”
“You really think there’s a motive in cases that old?” Ray asked.
I remembered what Greg Oshiro had said, that Fields had some kind of bombshell to drop about something in the past, and that he had been seen with a woman of about his age as he went to his death.
“I can see a motive,” I said. “If anything, I can see way too many motives.”
“Sadly, detective,” Yamato said, “I have to agree with you.” He sighed. “I don’t know if it’s relevant, but Alex Fields was a very sick man. Another few months and...”
“That’s what his daughter indicated,” Ray said. “Cancer?”
“Of the pancreas,” Winston said. “I don’t know why we’re hearing so much about that particular type right now, but apparently it’s very deadly.”
“As is murder,” Peggy said, her years as an assistant prosecuting attorney coming out. “Shall we work backwards, in chronological order?”
“You’re running the show, counselor,” I said. “We’re just the audience.”
The last case Fields had been actively involved in took place in 2005, during his final year “of counsel” to the firm. “Alexander took the case as a favor to an old friend,” Yamato said. “Eleanor Keli’i Poe was a close friend of Yuki Fields, who was still alive then. Eleanor’s nephew on the mainland alleged that she was losing her faculties and wanted to establish a conservatorship over her assets. Alex defended her.”
“And?” I asked.
“He won. Alex usually did. Eleanor died a few months later, leaving her estate to her houseboy, a young drifter named Kasuo Yamamato. The nephew, Lee Poe, alleged that Alex was deficient in his responsibility to Eleanor and her original heirs, and complained to the Bar.”
“Li Po?” I asked. “Like the Chinese poet?”
Everyone in the room looked at me and it was Peggy who finally said, “Your education is showing, Kimo.” She spelled the name for me.
“Was Fields deficient in Poe’s grandmother’s case, do you think?” I asked.
Yamato shook his head. “I knew Eleanor Poe myself. She wasn’t the smartest woman in the world, but she knew what she wanted, and she wanted that boy. It was her money, after all. Lee Poe continued to send threatening letters to Alex for several years. They’re all in the file.”
“Where is Lee Poe now?” Ray asked.
“He lives in Oregon.”
That rang a bell. Stephanie Cornell lived in Oregon, too. I wondered if they happened to know each other.
“Next?” I asked.
Fields had specialized in representing big corporations in disputes, often against much smaller, less powerful adversaries. Peggy took the lead, and with the occasional reminiscence from Winston and additional research from Sarah, we went through a mind-numbing list of cases, starting with a farmer in the Kalama Valley who believed that a nearby factory had polluted his land and destroyed his crops. Fields hired high-priced consultants to argue that there were other factors at work, and the farmer got nothing.
In the next case, a woman alleged that a hotel owner had been negligent in not cordoning off a part of the building under reconstruction. She fell and broke both hips, and sued for her medical bills and damages. Fields brought up her membership in Alcoholics Anonymous and argued that she had fallen off the wagon, gotten drunk, and ignored the warning signs. She settled out of court for a pittance.
And so it went, back decade by decade. In the 1980s Fields represented a Japanese company that was on a land-buying spree in the islands, when the yen was strong and natives of the Land of the Rising Sun were investing in U.S. real estate like they weren’t making any more of it. Several small landowners had refused to sell, and been strong-armed into doing so.
In the early seventies, when the islands were a staging ground for the Vietnam War, and many GIs came to Waikiki for R&R, Fields defended a club owner accused of gouging patrons. Then in the sixties, he had represented numerous corporations in suits brought by unions over working conditions. Back in the late ‘50s he had defended a developer named Emile Gardiner against a lawsuit by native Hawaiians over development of their ancestral property in the Kalama Valley.
In each case there was someone with a vendetta against Alexander Fields and a record of credible threats.
“But what I don’t see is why now,” Ray said, when we finished going through the folders. It was nearly lunch time, and my stomach was grumbling from the excess of caffeine and the lack of nutrition to balance it out. “Why would someone who wanted to kill Fields way back when wait until now?”
“That’s your job to figure out, isn’t it?” Peggy asked. “We’re giving you the information you need.”
“Can we get a copy of Fields’ will?” I asked Winston Yamato.
He nodded. “It’s already in the file for you.”
Sarah left the conference room to make copies of the documents we needed. Yamato stood up. “Please let me know if you need me to open any doors or grease any wheels for you. Alex was my friend as well as my partner. I want to see justice done for him.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
When he was gone, Peggy turned to me. “Of course if you find any connection between the death of Alexander Fields and this firm, you’ll let me know.”
“Peggy, you know the rules as well as I do. You’re not a prosecuting attorney anymore. We don’t have to share anything with you or your firm.”
She glared at me, and once again Ray had to step in as mediator. “If any of the firm’s cases end up being connected to the murder, of course we’ll come back to you. And please let Mr. Yamato know that we’ll do everything in our power to solve this case.”
She nodded curtly and stood up. She led us out to the lobby where we waited for Sarah to finish the copying. “Sometimes you can be a real ass,” Ray muttered to me. “You need to stop letting your past get in the way of your future.”
“That something else you learned in your college sociology classes?”
Fortunately Sarah arrived then with a banker’s box of paperwork, as well as a jump drive filled with data. I volunteered to carry the box as a small gesture of apology to Ray for being a jerk.
“How are we going to get through all this?” Ray asked, as we rode down in the elevator, my implicit apology accepted wordlessly. “It’s going to take weeks to sort through all this stuff, and to track down the people, if they’re even still alive. Sampson’s never going to let us work on this that long.”
My stomach rumbled, as if in agreement. We stopped at a Zippy’s on the way back to headquarters for lunch and brainstorming.
“Say we start working backwards, chronologically, just the way Peggy laid it all out for us,” I said. “I like the coincidence that Stephanie Cornell and Lee Poe both live in Oregon.”
“It’s a big state, you know,” Ray said, digging into his chili.
“Yeah, but you want to bet they both live in the same city?”
“Loser pays for this morning’s coffee,” Ray said.
“I already did.”
He held two fingers up to his forehead in the shape of an L, and I kicked him under the table.
Back at headquarters, though, a quick search told us that Ray was the real loser. “Fork over the cash, pal,” I said, turning my monitor to face him. “They not only live in the same state, same city. They live in the same damn house.”
Sure enough, the address we found for Lee Poe matched the one for Stephanie Cornell. “And he’s her alibi, isn’t he?” I asked.
“Looks like we’ve got a pair of prime suspects,” Ray said.