CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was after five o’clock in the afternoon, and I had a choice to make: either put in for the night at Kawaihae Harbor, or brazen it out and remain on a heading for Maui.

Snyder and I talked it over and decided to let common sense prevail; it was too long a leg to risk running through the darkness in the unpredictable seas of the Alenuihaha Channel. So we trimmed the sails and put in at the harbor on the northwest end of the Big Island.

I had spent the last three hours tossing everything I could think of that I might have taken with me to Los Angeles over the side. Every fifteen minutes or so, I thoroughly shredded every shirt, my jacket, and even my shoes, into pieces no larger than a stick of gum and let them sink into the sea.

Out of fairness to Snyder, I had filled him in on my situation, omitting only the elements of detail that could still compromise my brother. It wasn’t as much about protecting myself as it would be better protection for Snyder if he knew as little as possible when the shit came raining down.

The last thing to go under was my cell phone. I crushed it beneath the heel of my deck shoe, extracted the memory card and tossed the whole mess overboard.

Snyder watched me without judgment as the last of the evidence of my trip to the mainland slipped beneath the surface and disappeared into our wake.

“You’re feeling like a chickenshit right about now, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, stop it.”

I leaned on folded arms against the railing and watched the harbor grow nearer off the starboard beam. I was thinking that perhaps the greatest illusion in our lives is that we have control over anything.

“I wish it was that easy, Snyder.”

“It is that easy. You want to know how a person quits smoking?” he said. “He stops putting cigarettes in his mouth.”

It had been several hours since I’d left my last message on the old-school answering machine Lani still had connected to her landline at home, and I was beginning to grow concerned. I debated, but only for a moment, sending an e-mail so that she would at least know I was okay. But that would likely only make things worse. I logged off the satellite feed and watched the screen go blue. I checked the strength of the cell signal on Snyder’s phone. Still nothing. Cell service had been nonexistent since we’d rounded Kaiwi Point.

“No bars on the phone?” Snyder asked as I handed the phone back to him.

I shook my head and went inside to the cooler to grab another beer. I dug around in the ice until I got one by the neck, dragged it out, dripping cold water all over my feet. I used the opener that was screwed to the bulkhead and caught the cap as it fell away. I tossed it into the Coleman.

“Need to put another case in there,” I said. “More ice, too.”

Snyder went below and came up a couple minutes later with more beer, and took a chilled one for himself before he dropped in the new ones.

I was sitting in the captain’s chair, my feet propped on the wheel and the bottom of a cold bottle imprinting wet circles on my shirt. I watched the blinking lights at the crown of the cargo crane as it loomed over the container ship that was pressing its bulk against the commercial pier and tried to figure why anyone other than Valden would want those two blackmailers killed. Still, Valden had known it was over, he’d practically skipped-rope down the hallway of the Mandalay Plaza when I had told him as much. But no one needed to remind me that fear is the human emotion that could drive the most extreme and bizarre of behaviors. It was unsettling to entertain the idea that my own brother might have actually ordered the hit, and in the process placed us both in the crosshairs. Despite the tension that existed in our relationship, Valden was anything but a fool. He had proven himself to be vicious when he felt threatened or backed into a corner. Having someone killed was not entirely out of the question. It was also not something I wanted to contemplate. The next few days would tell, and all I had to do was to stay off the radar.

“Nice night,” Snyder said as he reclined on the stern banquette and looked heavenward. I swiveled the chair toward where he sat, and nodded.

“I checked the weather for tomorrow,” I said. “Looks good to make Maui.”

Snyder shifted his focus to the weather vane on the mast, then back down the coast toward Kona. “South swell. A nice cross if it holds.”

“Things going to be okay at the bar?” I asked.

He waved it away.

“Fuck it, Mike. Lolly knows what she’s doing.”

We sat for long minutes in the quiet night, not speaking a word; the only sounds were the slap of the tide along the waterline and the popping of taut ropes against the masts. My mind drifted. To the south of us, down the coast, was nothing but darkness. The crenellated outline of the point displayed itself in silhouette against the blue-black sky, the lights of Kona town only a dim incandescence in the distance. To the north, a dusting of stars hovered over the wide channel that separated the Big Island and Maui, and the moon was a silver crescent hovering over the horizon.

Kehau swung around on her anchor and a breeze cast a lock of hair into my eyes. I swept it back with my fingers and looked over at Snyder.

“So, what now, Travis?” he asked.

Damned if I knew.

Later that night we were in Kehau’s salon, watching Apocalypse Now on DVD, tired of thinking, tired of talking.

The last thing I remember before I nodded off was Duvall’s voice coming down from the chopper, calling out over the bullhorn for Lance to give his stolen surfboard back. By the time I opened my eyes again, they were dropping Frederic Forrest’s head in Martin Sheen’s lap.

I blinked my eyes into focus and located Snyder, asleep on the couch with a book propped open on his chest. I yawned, stretched myself out of my chair and worked at a kink in my neck. I let the movie run while I inspected the length of the boat, and made my way to the bow for one final check on the lie of the anchor. It struck me then, as it happened sometimes, when my subconscious went to work on a psychic knot. I looked down into the black water, where the anchor chain disappeared into the darkness, and I knew what the first of the big questions was, and where I needed to start.

I went below and fired up the laptop. I had a new target in mind.

I punched up the Mandalay Plaza on my browser, read every word of every page that came up, but still didn’t find what I was after. A few keystrokes later, I was logged on to the site for the LA Times, working my way through the archives until I came across the first of several articles that mentioned the opening of the new hotel.

I scrolled back in time, through datelines some three years earlier, about the same time I had begun my retirement in Avalon, and I found what I had been seeking. It was an article written by Bob Childers, a Times staff writer. The headline read, “Luxury Hotel Breaks Ground Near Music Center,” and there below the bold type was the obligatory photo of a chorus line of businessmen wearing suits and spotless construction hard hats, and clutching the handles of ceremonial shovels in their fists. But it was the sidebar piece that caught my attention:

A BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH

PHILLIP LENNOX

By Bob Childers, Times Staff Writer

It is a quiet spring day at the Lennox estate, the kind of day that could make you believe Phillip Lennox controls even the weather. I am greeted at the door by a uniformed butler straight out of Central Casting, and led to the “Lower Garden,” where Mr. Lennox awaits me. He is dressed in a fawn-colored linen suit, a yellow-on-blue Parisian tie, and a starched shirt the color of the sky. There is a predictably firm handshake and a brief exchange of pleasantries before I am reminded I have been granted only fifteen minutes.

“I’m a self-made man,” he begins emphatically.

“You built your company on your own,” I repeat.

“I didn’t say that,” he answers with a smile in his gray eyes. “I’ve had many people assist me in very meaningful ways over the years. What I said was that I was self-made. Nobody gave me anything. Everything you see around you, I created out of nothing.”

These are the sorts of statements you’ll hear often from biopharmaceutical magnate Phillip Lennox. He is quick to point out his humble upbringing, and the absence of a university degree. He is a proud—though mainly benevolent—dictator in the corporate world he has created, and he does little apologizing.

“I do a great deal of work for both charitable and political causes,” he states in a tone that suggests you’d better do your own homework to understand the magnitude of the understatement. And when you do, you discover the tens of millions that have been spent on political concerns, and amounts of a similar size to establish the Lennox Foundation, a charity whose primary concern is the fight against communicable diseases. But Lennox makes no bones about his feelings on capitalism.

“I have always stood behind the right of every American to make a dollar. To make as many dollars as one’s desires may determine. That is the American way, and anything that undermines it should be fought tooth and nail.”

As for politics, he is nothing, if not equally direct: “Congress must be made to act in a way that is consistent with the intent of the architects of the constitution, and to defend ourselves on the battlefield of the global marketplace.”

A great deal of military allusion peppers any conversation with Lennox, an army veteran. “Everything is war,” he says seriously. “To imagine one’s daily conflicts in any other terms will ultimately undercut the probability of success. It is far too easy for complacency and lassitude to creep into a culture, whether a social culture or a corporate one; so every conflict is war, every war a call to reinvigorate your commitment to the cause: and my cause is success.”

Which compelled me to ask the question: Isn’t there more to life? Is financial success really everything?

“Success is who I am. To paraphrase Lombardi,” he says with the now-familiar Lennox smile, “it’s the only thing.”

My heart was beating faster as I finished reading. I checked my dive watch for the time; a little after one o’clock in the morning. Even with New York five hours ahead of me, I knew it was still too early to catch Thel Mishow—the only attorney I’ve ever met that I actually trusted—at his office, so I banged out an e-mail and asked Thel to get back to me, first thing.

I turned my attention back to the movie that was still playing on my TV screen in time to see the ox as it gets slaughtered from five different angles. And by the time Sheen pulled away from the Kurtz compound I was powering down the laptop, knowing that sleep would not come easily.