Undue Influence

Chapter 14

Shafts of light pierce the louvered shutters of the room like golden arrows. The songs of exotic birds erupt from the verdant bush outside my room, along with the rush of water over rocks in the gardens. There are random voices, people walking on the path beneath the balcony.

My senses, dulled by half-sleep, detect a shadow moving in the distant reaches of the room. I am wrapped in rumpled sheets, sprawled on the bed, feeling the warm humid air of morning in the tropics.

As I open my eyes and focus, she’s sitting in a chair, her eyes locked on me, smiling. Dana is wrapped in two bath towels, her hair wet from a washing.

‘Did anybody ever tell you that you make these little noises when you sleep?’ she says. ‘Little mewing sounds.’ She mimics something like a kitten complaining to get out of a box.

‘Lovely,’ I say. The bright daylight outside the window finally registers.

I roll over and sit up, a sheet wrapped around me.

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost ten,’ she says.

‘What! Why didn’t you get me up?’

‘Oh, I did,’ she says. ‘Last night. At least three times.’

‘Cute,’ I say. I can still feel the yen for Dana climb in my groin, a frolic on the edge of hedonism, and wonder what God-made substance can possibly flood the brain to produce such pleasure.

‘You were tired. I thought I’d let you sleep.’

I feel the scratches on my face from the flying glass of yesterday. Two of the bandages have come off during the night. I wonder how much of the soreness that racks my body is from the explosion and how much derives from our antics of the night.

‘We oughta be halfway to Hana by now,’ I tell her.

‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes,’ she says.

I’m up, sheets of modesty dragging on the floor, tripping, grousing through the trail of discarded clothing, looking for my pants. I have distant memories of someone taking a shower in the middle of the night. I feel my body. Sticky. It wasn’t me.

‘They’re on the other chair,’ she says. My pants.

I grab them and start to put a leg through, then discover that I have nothing on underneath.

She’s laughing, out loud.

‘Your suitcase is over there,’ she says. ‘By the table.’

First things first. I rummage and find a clean pair of Jockeys.

She’s out of the chair and into the bathroom in her room. I can hear the sound of the hair dryer.

‘There’s croissants and coffee on the table in here,’ she shouts over the drone of the dryer. ‘I ordered from room service.’

In two seconds I’m hovering over the table in her room, scarfing with both hands.

‘Hungry?’

‘Famished like a bear,’ I tell her.

‘And just as fuzzy,’ she says.

I am hairy chested and without a shirt.

‘How long will it take to get to Hana?’

‘Depends how dangerously you want to live,’ she says.

The way to Hana seems its own form of paradise, verdant sugarcane fields and plantation villages, a rocky coastline, the many surfaces of the sea, cresting emerald waves crowned by white froth. Lava ridges rise from white-sand beaches, forming a dark tawny color to match the tanned brown thighs of girls in thong bikinis as we whisk along the highway.

Then forty miles in heaven turns to hell. Single-lane bridges on hairpin turns, white concrete walls, and plummeting waterfalls that drop a thousand feet out of virgin jungle; switchbacks so severe that half the time we are going in the wrong direction.

The locals drive like someone has loaded their java with testosterone. Life on the road to Hana, it seems, is a perpetual game of chicken.

The road begins to narrow until at one point I have to back up a hundred feet, to a soft spot on the shoulder over a vertical cliff, to let a cement truck pass in the other direction. The driver, a big Hawaiian, beams me a grin like some sumo wrestler who’s bounced my ass out of the circle. Like what’s amatter, hauole? No balls? Even Dana gives me a look, like if I’d pressed it I could have slid between his tires and under the axle.

I offer her the wheel but she declines.

It is after two o’clock by the time I see the dark basalt landing strip of the Hana airport. It lies on a flat point of land over the sea, chopped out of the jungle and carved lava stone. A couple of miles on is the town of Hana. Two churches, the post office, a couple of grocery stores, and a gas station.

‘The road gets worse on the other side of town,’ she tells me.

‘How can it?’

‘I’ve been there,’ she says. ‘Trust me.’

There’s a single hotel. Dana points me in the direction, and a couple of minutes later we roll into the circular drive of the Hotel Hana-Maui, single-story bungalows with plantation roofs of tile and tin, old Hawaii before American and Japanese megabucks tried to marble it over like ancient Rome.

But one thing is certain. Hana would be the place of choice for anyone wanting to get lost from the prying eyes of this world.

A woman directs us to the registration desk. We are already registered, adjoining rooms in a bungalow on the grass. I figure Dana was busy on the phone from the plane last night.

‘Mr. Opolo is in the bungalow across the way,’ says the clerk.

‘Good,’ says Dana.

‘Who’s Mr. Opolo?’

‘I’ll introduce you in a minute,’ she says.

I sense there’s some surprise coming. ‘Tell me now,’ I say.

‘You’re going to meet him in just a minute.’

‘Then humor me.’

‘He’s a friend. From Honolulu.’

‘What kind of a friend?’

‘Professional colleague,’ she says.

‘Dana.’

‘Okay. He’s with the FBI. Agent in charge of the Honolulu office.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ I say. ‘I thought we had a deal.’

‘Listen, you’re not going to get anywhere on your own. Jessie can help.’

I’m shaking my head. ‘Wonderful.’

‘He knows the people. This is an insular place,’ she says. She makes it sound like the Ozarks of Polynesia. ‘The locals want to run you in circles, they’ll do it. There’s a thousand houses in these hills, from estates to the stars to one-room stone huts. The Merlows could be in any one of them.’

‘And they could be here in the hotel, in the room next to us,’ I say.

‘They’re not. We already checked,’ she says, droll.

‘Great.’

The clerk hands me a map of the hotel grounds. At this moment I could spit on it. A bellhop grabs our bags and loads them into an electric cart, Dana giving me a million and one reasons why I should thank her for calling in the FBI.

I’m beginning to think Harry was right, and wondering who fucked who last night.

She’s still talking at me minutes later when the phone rings in her room.

‘Jessie.’ Relief in her voice. The troops are here.

‘Where are you? Come on over,’ she says.

Two minutes later there’s a knock on the door, and Dana opens it.

Outside is a man, maybe late forties, hair like white silk, skin the color of burnished wood. He’s barrel-chested, a big man, a face like a totem, austere. He’s wearing one of those loud print shirts, flowers in every color of the rainbow.

‘Hey, girl. It’s good to see you,’ he says.

‘It’s been a long time,’ Dana greets him.

‘Let’s see. Since San Francisco,’ he says. ‘What — five years?’

She agrees with him, puts her hands on his shoulders, and gives him a peck on the cheek.

Opolo has to bow his neck a little to get under the low lintel of the door.

‘Jessie Opolo. Paul Madriani.’ She makes the introduction, unsure how I’m going to respond.

‘Glad to meet you.’ He smiles. I wonder if it’s as artless as it looks or the face of Polynesian guile.

I won’t be an asshole, so I take his hand.

‘A pleasure,’ I say.

‘How long have you been here?’ she says.

‘Since this morning,’ he tells her. ‘Coptered in about nine.’

‘Anybody with you?’

‘Two agents,’ he says.

It’s a fucking army, I think. I’m waltzing away, rolling my eyes.

Dana can read my mind. ‘I assume you’re keeping a low profile.’

I have visions of Humvees with recoilless rifles mounted on the back.

‘The other two agents are in the room,’ he says. ‘The only thing we’ve done is check the post office for the package.’

‘What package?’ I ask.

‘The ring,’ he says.

I’d forgotten about this. The ring Kathy Merlow mentioned in her letter, the one she wanted Marcie to send to her.

‘It was picked up yesterday afternoon,’ says Opolo. ‘Unfortunately we were too late.’

‘Did anybody sign for it?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’ He pulls a small notebook from his pocket and opens it, then unfolds a sheet of paper that’s been placed inside it. It’s a copy of the postal receipt.

‘It was addressed to Alice Kent, and the receipt was signed in that name.’

‘Can I see it?’

He hands the sheet over.

I flatten it on the table, then take out the note from my pocket, the one sent to Marcie Reed by Kathy Merlow, and compare the handwriting with the signature on the form. Like peas in a pod.

‘She’s here,’ I say. ‘She signed for it herself.’

Dana looks at me. ‘Maybe we’re halfway home.’

Dana and the agents are huddled in the next room around a coffee table, discussing methods for locating the Merlows. The adjoining door between the rooms is open, so I watch from a distance. They’ve already exhausted several avenues of search. Utility records, telephone, and power show no new hookups under the names Merlow or Kent. If they’re living in the area, they’re using another alias. They’ve checked the rental car agencies, figuring that the Merlows would need wheels.

‘If they rented a car on the island, they used some other identification,’ says Opolo. ‘No record of a rental in the name of Merlow or Kent, and no charges on George Merlow’s credit card since the couple disappeared from Capital City.’

Dana was right about one thing, Opolo and his agents have been able to gain access to information that we could not: personal credit-card data.

‘I think we talk to the carriers.’ Opolo wants to concentrate on the mail carriers who service the area around Hana.

‘It’s a small place. Even if they don’t deliver mail to these people, they might know who’s new and where they live.’

‘There’s six carriers. Five are out on their routes. We can’t get ’em all until later this afternoon.’ One of the agents has already checked this out.

I’ve drifted into the room, standing in one corner like the proverbial potted plant.

‘There’s the grocery store, and the little ranch market,’ says one of them. ‘The only places to buy food for two hours in either direction. They gotta eat,’ he says.

‘Maybe,’ says Opolo. ‘People may have seen them in the stores, but will they know where they live? The Merlows aren’t going to volunteer this information.’

‘We could stake out the stores,’ says one of the agents. He’s young and eager.

Opolo looks at him, wrinkled eyes of skepticism. ‘An army of strangers loitering outside the market?’ he says. ‘We’d stand out like bumps. Word’d be out in an hour. This is a small town.’

‘That’s charitable,’ I say.

‘Okay, so it’s a village,’ he says. He smiles at me.

‘Still, if one person talks,’ he says, ‘a clerk at the post office, one of the employees at the hotel. In an hour everybody in town’s gonna know who we are, that we’re looking for somebody. The word won’t take long to spread. If Mr. Madriani is right, the people we are looking for know how to lose themselves. We won’t get a second chance,’ he says.

Despite Dana’s going behind my back, I’m warming to Jessie Opolo. Maybe she was right.

‘What about the realtors?’ he says. ‘The ones who rent out houses and cabins? The Merlows would have to obtain accommodations from somebody. Do we have any pictures of them?’ he says.

This sends one of the other agents scurrying through an open attaché case.

‘Not a great copy,’ he says. ‘We got this from the mainland. State DMV. Faxed this morning.’ He hands Opolo two poor-quality fax transmissions, tortured pictures like Rorschach cards of human images, so bad the subjects would not recognize themselves.

‘Nothing better?’ says Opolo.

‘We can try to get wirephotos,’ says the agent. ‘It would take a while.’

‘Fine. In the meantime we run down a list of realtors in the area,’ says Opolo. He looks at his watch. ‘We meet back here in an hour to go talk to the mail carriers.’

They’re up on their feet, going over a few last-minute details. Dana and Opolo in one corner talking privately. I take the opportunity to slip back into my room.

I’ve ditched my coat in the closet. Even in winter the Hawaiian sun is too hot. I slip my hand into the patch pocket and remove the photograph of the little church. Two seconds later I’m out the door, heading up the path toward the office. It’s a five-minute walk, and by the time I reach the shade of the lanai near the office I am wet with perspiration.

One of the employees, a young woman, is sitting at a table, like a concierge, tour books and pamphlets spread before her. She greets me warmly, a paying guest.

‘I have a question.’

‘Of course. If I can help,’ she says.

‘I have a picture here. A little church in the area. I wonder if I showed it to you whether you could tell me where it is?’

The smile fades a little from her face. ‘I could try,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of churches.’

‘I noticed.’ Dana and I passed a half dozen on the way in, none of them resembling the one in the picture.

I show her the photo. She studies it for several seconds. Looks at me, up and down, a tourist on the prowl. There’s a spark, a fleeting moment where I think she’s going to say something, then hesitation. She changes her mind. ‘I don’t think I recognize that one,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

‘Is there a phone where I can make a long-distance call and bill it to my room?’

‘In the library. Just pick up and wait for the operator.’ She points the way.

It’s a large room, a couple of club chairs and some rattan furniture, tasteful, quiet, and cool. One wall, from wainscot to ceiling, is a glassed-in bookshelf. I find the phone, take a seat, and wait for the operator, perusing titles on the spines of books stacked on the shelves, and a framed picture on a shelf behind the glass, a black-and-white glossy print.

The operator comes on the line, and I give her the number in Capital City. Harry answers on the second ring, the backline. It’s after hours on the mainland. He’s been waiting for my call.

‘How’s it going?’ he says.

I don’t tell him I’m camped with the FBI. I wouldn’t need a phone to hear Harry’s ridicule.

‘Fine,’ I tell him. ‘Anything from Mason’s?’

Charles Mason amp; Co. is an old-line photographic studio in Capital City. In days past they did daguerreotypes of whiskered gents from the gold rush. Today they do family portraits, wedding pictures, and in my case, large poster-size exhibits that I use in court, enlargements of documents, and in this case a major blowup of one photograph. It is the errand I ran on my way home from the office yesterday afternoon before meeting Dana.

‘They took it out to twelve magnifications. Nothing,’ he says. ‘Just a lot of dots.’

‘Any name on the church?’

‘No. The picture’s of the side of the church,’ says Harry. ‘The phototech at Mason’s figures any name would be on the front.’

‘Great.’

‘The enlargement did pick up one sign,’ he says. ‘But nothing helpful.’

‘What does it say?’

‘White letters on black paint. Hard to read ’cuz it’s in script. Best we can make out, it’s just telling people not to go tramping around on the graves. Doesn’t really make much sense,’ says Harry. ‘A churchyard in the middle of nowhere. Does it look like a place where you’d draw crowds?’

‘Far from it,’ I tell him.

‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘From what I can see, the picture’s a big zero.’

A woman has come in. She’s straightening some of the books on a shelf, replacing a few others.

Harry wishes me luck and we hang up.

The woman is dusting, opening the center glass panel.

I get a closer look at the framed picture propped on the shelf. A man in a leather flying cap, standing in front of a plane. A face recognizable to any schoolkid of my generation.

She sees me looking.

‘He lived in the area for a while,’ she says. ‘In fact, he’s buried just down the road — a little churchyard.’

I’m doing almost sixty, looking at my watch. It is nearly four o’clock, and I’m wondering what the parameters of Kathy Merlow’s afternoon are. Her note said she spent her afternoons in the churchyard. I am praying that she is still there today.

It hit me with the intensity of a moonbeam through an open window, the inscription on the back of the snapshot. Something about the wings of the morning.

When I showed the woman in the library the snapshot, she said, ‘That’s it. That’s the place he’s buried.’

Directions were something else. Reluctant at first, she said they’d had a lot of problems right after he died, the curious flooding the little church, taking pictures and picking flowers. But that was twenty years ago, and things are now quieter. Still, the locals are protective. After assurances that I was supposed to meet somebody there, that I was late, she finally told me where it was.

Past the Seven Pools, not to be fooled by the little church out on the highway, ‘most tourists are,’ she says. A left turn off the road, and then a dogleg, another left.

Dana was right. The road is worse on this side of town, beyond Hana. It is more narrow, overgrown with vegetation that brushes both sides of my car in places as I rocket past. I come to the top of a hill and nearly careen down a private driveway before I see the turn in the road. By now Dana and the agents are probably wondering where I am, looking for the car in the parking lot.

A few camera-toting tourists are crawling on the highway at the bridge, near the path to the Seven Pools. A couple of them give me dirty looks as I rocket across the bridge ahead of a line of cars coming the other way.

Two miles on I see a church on the right. False lead. I pass it. A mile down is an open gate, on the left, a sign. I turn in. Gravel and lava stone, chained-off private drives two hundred feet in, so I turn left, under a grove of giant banyan trees that transform the driveway into a cave of foliage, dead moss hanging from their limbs.

Then I see it. The little church from the snapshot, green clapboard over white plaster.

I dead-end in a dirt parking lot under the shade of the trees. Two mangy dogs lying like they are dead a few feet away. One of them raises his head enough to look at me as the dust from my wheels reaches, then settles on him. He sneezes, then puts his head down and goes back to sleep.

There are two other vehicles in the parking lot, a small pickup with gardening implements and a sedan. A guy is loading a mower into the back of the truck, along with some plastic bags of cut grass.

A man and woman standing, looking at a headstone in the cemetery at the side of the church, under a large banyan tree. Some distance off beyond the cemetery, through a gate, an old lady, cloaked in flowing garb, a broad straw hat, sits at an easel painting. The signs of serenity. Fronds clacking in the dwarfed palms that line the open grass.

I take the little path through a gate in the low stone wall leading to the church. The door is not locked, but I peer through one of the windows. A few wooden pews and a raised pulpit up front. There is no one inside, so I take the path to the right, toward the graveyard at the side of the church. Here the sun’s rays are warm. The humid air hangs heavy. In the distance is a fence, maybe a hundred yards away, where the world drops off, land’s end, blue water to the horizon, white breakers crashing on the few rocks that have clawed their way up from the depths.

There is the rumble of a junker engine and the sound of rubber on gravel as the gardener in his beat-up pickup pulls out.

Headstones and other monuments line the narrow path that zig-zags toward the open grass and the cliff beyond. I wend my way through.

The couple, Asian tourists, seem finally to lose interest in the headstone. They make their way across the grass toward the parking lot.

I take their place. Under the banyan tree at the near edge of the grass is a grave, a plain flat marker, nothing fancy, no shrine. The name engraved there had been its own monument during life, flashed ‘round the world before the information highway was a deer track in the electronic brush.

We make idols of rock stars and bobbing heads doing gangsta rap, people whose contribution to life is as fleeting as the pixels that carry their image to our televisions screens. Nothing enduring. It is a measure of our spiritual poverty. He was from a different time.

A rectangular pile of lava rocks ringed by a pinioned chain just a few inches off the ground. The headstone, unpolished gray granite, a soft cursive script:

Charles A. LindberghBorn, Michigan, 1902Died, Maui, 1974

‘If I take the wings of the morning

and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea’ CAL

As I look up, the aspect of the little church looms before me through the hanging frowns of trees that ring it. Whoever took the snapshot had done so from this location.

There is no sign of Kathy Merlow. I turn and walk toward the fence, the cliff fifty yards away; undulating blue waters, and the glint of sunlight on crested waves.

The old woman is packing up, folding her easel, the afternoon’s work done. She is in on a section of grass beyond a gate, a sign hanging on the fence.

KIPAHULU POINT PARK

This seems to merge with the grass of the cemetery.

I plant myself by the fence and wait, looking at the sea, hoping that Kathy Merlow will appear. I look at my watch — after four-thirty. I wonder if Opolo has had any luck with the mail carriers, whether Dana is frantic looking for me.

I see a big blue sedan out on the highway. It cruises by at a slow speed. Stops at the gate. The driver, his head a dot in the distance, stops to read the sign on the gate. Then he drives off.

The Asian couple have made their way to the car, the thunk of doors being closed, the engine started. Pretty soon they will be closing the gate on the road. My chances of slipping back here tomorrow are not good. Dana and Opolo will want to know where I’ve been, the third degree.

The old lady is drifting by on the grass, thirty yards away, struggling with her easel and a small stool, a wooden box of painting paraphernalia. I look at the parking lot. Except for my car it is now empty. I watch as the old lady moves away from me now, toward a small opening in the fence, near the entrance to the park, and suddenly it hits me — not the gait of an old woman.

I am off the fence, moving toward her at a good rate. Ten feet away, staring at her back.

‘Excuse me.’

She turns. Not the wrinkled and weathered countenance of age, but tan and more vigorous than our last meeting, the vacant gaze of Kathy Merlow.