Writ of Execution (8 page)

“What’s a Punahou boy?”

“Punahou is the school where all the rich, smart kids go in Hawaii, the kids who are going to grow up and run the companies and be big shots in the government. His name was Dan Potter. Danforth Atchison Potter. His father is a partner in a law firm in Honolulu.”

Jessie’s voice changed in a very definite and significant way, turning thick and anxious as she mentioned the father. What was coming was obvious. Nina made a face as the story recontoured itself around the unsettling information that a well-connected lawyer was after her client. The feeling this evoked was alarm, as if Nina had been snorkeling along a reef and suddenly found herself staring down the razor-tooth-guarded maw of a moray eel.

“What kind of law does he practice? Dan’s father?”

“Uh. I think Dan told me once it was insurance defense.”

The most dangerous species of them all, powerful, secretive, wily, impervious to the spear gun.

Jessie rushed ahead. “Dan grew up in a big
kama’aina
house in Manoa Valley. But Dan wasn’t a snob at all. I met him one evening running on the beach. He was a runner too.

“We started seeing each other. It got so we wanted to live together, but that wouldn’t have been good for me in the Corps.

“Anyway, he asked me to meet his father. We didn’t even go to the house, Mr. Potter said he’d take us out to the Sunset Grill in Waikiki. I knew the minute I met Mr. Potter that we were going to have some trouble, but I never could have guessed how bad it would be. I didn’t pass the test. Mr. Potter didn’t like me at all. He told Dan that he would be an idiot to get married. He had plenty of excuses—that Dan was too young, that he should get his degree first—everything but the real reason.”

“How old was Dan?”

“Nineteen. But he wasn’t a boy anymore.”

“And how old were you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Is Dan’s father the man you’re running from?”

Jessie didn’t answer.

“Guess that’s my answer right there,” Nina said.

8

“I THOUGHT IF I let Mr. Potter run me out of Hawaii he might forget about me,” Jessie said.

“Your husband’s father?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s his full name?”

“Atchison Potter.”

“How old is he?”

“I would say—fifty to fifty-five. He looks younger.” Nina realized that she was in the middle of a client interview. She should have done it earlier. She pulled a legal pad out of the kitchen drawer and found a pen. She wrote the date at the top and her initials, and “Jessie Potter” at the top. Then she started scribbling.

“Go on,” she said.

“It’s hard. Give me a minute.”

Nina had time to get the basics down on paper, have a bite of her breakfast, and drink some grapefruit juice. Hitchcock let out a yip at the back door. She pushed back her chair and went over and let him in, the phone still at her ear, and he raced for the kibble.

Jessie’s voice again, resolute. “You there?”

“Right here,” Nina said. She sat back down.

“Okay. This is pretty painful for me to talk about. We had been married eight months. Dan’s father didn’t come to the wedding, which was a civil ceremony in Honolulu. Just my friend Bonita and Dan’s friend Byron came. I told my superior officer that I needed to go off-base and he helped me fill out the forms. Dan and I rented a condo in Kaneohe. His father was still sending him money until he finished school, but Mr. Potter was—he just seemed to despise me. He was like granite. Dan couldn’t change his mind, so they stopped talking. I know that hurt both of them, but there was nothing I could do.”

“What did he have against you?” Nina said.

“It’s not easy to explain. Let’s see. Mr. Potter—Dan tried to explain this to me—Mr. Potter had some major insecurities. He was adopted as a baby into one of the old missionary families. His adoptive parents couldn’t have kids of their own, or something. They were hard on him. Whenever Mr. Potter did anything his mother didn’t like she would remind him about how they had adopted him out of Christian charity and he could be on the street. He didn’t look like them—he’s dark, but not like a Hawaiian—Dan told me they acted ashamed of him. So he never felt like he belonged, but he had the name, and, when they died, the property.”

“They never should have adopted,” Nina said.

“I suppose he could have become a lot of things with that background. What he became—it’s peculiar—he became a snob. A fanatical snob. Do you know what I mean?”

“I’m starting to.”

“Dan’s mother passed away when Dan was ten, so Dan was all Mr. Potter had. He wanted Dan to be someone, and to marry into the right family—you know, it still means something in some families in Hawaii. Social standing was everything to him. And then I came along and spoiled everything. I was”—she gave that short laugh again, the painful one—“way too dark.”

“An outsider,” Nina said.

“No. Might as well be specific. I’m too dark. Dan didn’t look as dark as his father, you see—didn’t look dark. But I’m darker than Mr. Potter. I know that’s what the real problem is. Mr. Potter hates his own skin color. He isn’t even that dark. He has no idea what his background is, Filipino maybe. I always thought he looked more like an Arab than a Filipino. But it’s so bizarre, in Hawaii of all places, where everybody, practically, is a different shade of brown, he wants to out-
haole
the
haoles
.”

“Haole?”

“The way I’m using the word right now, it means Caucasians. I won’t bother trying to explain Hawaii’s racial differences, because it’s much too complicated. Anyway, to be plain, Dan’s father wanted Dan to marry a Caucasian. I was a big slap in the face. He even winced when he first met me. I knew right away.”

“How do you know a thing like that?” Nina said.

“You know. It’s in the first split second. You just know. And later Dan talked to me about it. Nobody else knows Mr. Potter feels this way. I suppose he’s just fine with his colleagues and his clients. It’s a sort of personal, limited racism.”

“Can there really be such a thing?” Nina said, and realized how naive she was about the thing that Jessie was trying to explain. The shapes of racism were inexhaustible, and this was Potter’s. That was all she really needed to know. “Okay,” she said. “What was Dan’s reaction to all this?”

“Dan loved me a lot. But he was close to his father. He felt a lot of guilt that his father was so unhappy and had cut himself off from us. He kept trying to talk to him about it, but—it’s a funny thing about racism. To Dan the problem was as clear as can be, but Mr. Potter never once admitted it. He acted very angry that Dan would think such a thing about him.

“But we were happy. At night Dan had to study, so we stayed home a lot. I think Dan felt under a lot of pressure between school and worrying about his father. But we were doing all right.

“Then a strange thing happened. Dan started getting these abdominal pains every once in a while. They got pretty bad and he had it all checked out twice but Dr. Jun couldn’t find anything wrong. He had Dan take an MRI and everything. Finally Dr. Jun decided it must be anxiety over the—the marriage and his father, and Dan went on Xanax. But it didn’t help. The pain would still come on pretty suddenly, he never knew when, about once every two weeks or so. All of a sudden he would be in this agonizing pain, doubled up on the couch, moaning. It was difficult for me not to be able to help. I felt so sorry for him. He started just suffering through it at home, because he had realized that in a day or two the pain would go away and he’d be absolutely fine again.”

Nina scribbled furiously.

“It was—it was February seventh of last year. Dan and I were out in our kayak, over by Chinaman’s Hat. Do you know Oahu?”

“Not that well.”

“It’s on the Windward side, past Kaneohe, heading toward North Shore.”

Nina formed a hazy impression. She had visited Oahu briefly and remembered some parts of the Windward side of the island very well, over the mountains from Honolulu.

“It’s a tiny island not far offshore, a bird preserve. The morning was very hot and muggy, but you could see the mountain ridge on the island of Molokai to the south. I remember Dan talking about Molokai, how the light was hitting the mountain so it seemed to be floating. . . .” Jessie stopped again.

Bob threw open the kitchen door and came in, dropping pine needles all over the just-swept floor. Nina scowled and pointed down, and he said, “Oops!” and tossed his hat on the couch and kicked off his shoes, which landed in two different corners of the living room. Hitchcock, ever game, skidded after the shoes, pushing the Swedish rug askew, and in a moment appeared at Nina’s side, his jaws full of sneaker. His paws had something slimy on them. In an instant the neat living room had been reduced to rubble.

Nina mouthed severe words. Bob was trying to get his shoe away from Hitchcock. His hands were filthy. Hitchcock danced around him in circles.

“Jessie—I’m sorry—just a minute.” Hand over the receiver, she said, “Wash ’em.”

“Trees aren’t dirty! He’s got my shoe!”

“Wash ’em!” He went to the sink. As he passed Nina she smelled the scent of the trees on him, the sap and the fresh needles. She reached out and tickled his waist under the baggy sweatshirt.

“Okay,” she said to Jessie. Hitchcock lost interest and set the saliva-shiny shoe carefully on the seat of the easy chair. Nina anchored the phone against her ear with her left shoulder, bent over to hug the dog’s barrel chest from behind with both arms, and pitched the dog back out the kitchen door.

“Dan had an attack in the boat,” Jessie said. “It came on—one minute he was fine, the next—I started rowing us in to shore, but he was writhing, that’s how bad it was, and it was choppy, a lot of whitewater—we went over. We were alone out there. It was overcast and the water wasn’t clear. I saw him struggling and I crashed through the water to him but he wasn’t there anymore. He had gone under that quickly.

“I went after him right away and I dove and I dove until I—it was deeper than I thought. I couldn’t see and the waves were crashing over the rocks about thirty feet away. Dan was—he was gone in the first few seconds. I think he swallowed water right away. I don’t know if he even knew he was in the water, he was in so much pain. I never saw him, never touched him.” Her voice broke. “He wasn’t even twenty-one years old. It was shattering.”

Nina saw them in the water, the boy sinking, the girl searching blindly, thrashing to the surface for breath, diving for him, reaching for him.

“I stayed out there and I kept diving. About ten minutes later another kayak came by and they called for help. They made me come in. I was completely worn out by then. Some guys fishing off the sandbar in Kaneohe Bay found him the next morning. I went there. My friend Bonita came and helped me. I wasn’t in very good shape.”

“It must have been unbearable.”

“Dan was a wonderful person.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“We never should have gone out in the kayak, not until we knew what was wrong with him.”

So Jessie was playing that destructive game called second-guessing. Nina played that game, too.

“There was an autopsy?”

“Yes, an autopsy and an inquest. It was at the inquest that I realized Mr. Potter blamed me for Dan’s death. What a sickening shock that was. He came up to me, his voice shaking, his face really red, and he said, ‘You can fool them, but you can’t fool me.’ ”

“What was the finding at the inquest?”

“Accidental death. But the police talked to me several times. I was under suspicion of—killing Dan.”

“That’s what Mr. Potter told them?” Nina said.

“Yes. Because there was no sign of anything wrong with Dan that would make him fall out of the boat. They just didn’t want to believe what I told them. The autopsy report didn’t find anything wrong with him.”

“But he’d been having these attacks—”

“Dr. Jun—we had gone to him twice, did I mention that?—testified. He had his records. But all he could say was that he hadn’t been able to make a diagnosis. He said that all the tests were negative and he thought Dan’s pain must be psychological. The medical examiner wanted to know if Dan might even have been poisoned. He was a friend of Mr. Potter’s. You see what Mr. Potter was doing? But even so, the medical examiner ruled it an accident. I was there and I told what happened and that was that, I thought.

“Dr. Jun didn’t know Dan had kept on having the attacks, because Dan had stopped going to him. One of the officers asked me why I was telling all these lies about Dan having an attack if it was really an accident. I felt like saying, Make up your minds! Did I poison him so he was sick, or did I lie about him being sick and kill him some other way? I felt like because I was a Marine, it actually hurt me. Like I was some kind of freak, a woman Marine, who might do something like kill her husband. I think I almost was arrested, but the police finally decided there wasn’t enough evidence.

“But they had dragged me into this nightmare, with Mr. Potter pressing them to arrest me, and my superior officer started looking at me in this funny way. I’d walk into a room and they’d all be talking about me. Some of the guys complained to my superior officer that they didn’t trust me. I think Mr. Potter spread the word that I had something to do with Dan’s death. Mr. Potter wrote letters to the newspapers saying the police weren’t doing their job. He hired a lawyer. But the police closed the case. All this happened in about a two-month period between February and April.

“Mr. Potter was doing things to me that whole time.” Jessie’s voice changed again as though her throat were constricting.

“My landlord asked me to leave and wouldn’t give a reason. I found out later that Mr. Potter and he both belonged to the Honolulu Club. My credit card was canceled. I started getting phone calls, hangups. I couldn’t sleep. I changed my number and it kept on. I reported the harassment. No more calls, but then I woke up one morning and someone had been in the condo while I was sleeping. Somehow he had gotten a key.”

“And how did you know that?”

“It’s disgusting. I haven’t told anyone else this. I should have called the police, but I—”

“Don’t worry. I’ve heard it all,” Nina said.

“I had a photo of myself dancing in costume at a powwow in Carson City a few years ago. It was in a frame, next to the TV.”

“And?”

“I walked into the living room and the photo was in the middle of the floor. And someone had—there was feces on it.”

“And you didn’t call the police?”

“No! I mean, I was afraid. What if they thought”—her voice got small—“that I was trying to deflect suspicion and did it myself? What if it was reported in the paper? What would they think on base? My life was harsh enough.”

“Still, you should have.” Nina was thinking, there is a sexual component to this, and a mighty sick one. “Wait,” she said. “Just a minute. I just can’t follow this. Why in the world was Dan’s father so positive you killed his son?”

“Because he’s crazy with resentment that I took his son away,” Jessie said. Her voice caught on the last word. “That his son died on my watch. He has a lot of money and power and there’s nothing I can do. He’s been careful, so I can’t catch him directly at anything.”

“But what motive could he possibly think you have?” Nina insisted.

“I don’t know!”

“So what did you do?” Nina said.

“I went to talk to Mr. Potter.”

“That was brave.”

“A security guard met me at the gate. He called the house and said Mr. Potter wouldn’t talk to me unless I had come to confess. Mr. Potter called the police and said I was stalking him, coming to his house. It was hopeless!”

“Then what happened?”

“I was lucky about one thing. My tour of duty finished in April. I didn’t reenlist. I had no future in the Marine Corps.”

“They should have rallied around you.”

“Yes. The fact that my buddies didn’t quite believe me hurt the most. Bonita was the only friend I had left. I decided to leave Hawaii and come home. Here. I made some zigzags in case he was still following me. I think maybe he was, but when I came back to the Sierra last April, I didn’t notice anything. But I watched for him, expected him, any day.”