Kawika, abashed, understood her reasoning at once. “I’m sorry,” he said. Still, he didn’t think Tommy would have told anyone. But it didn’t matter now.
“Look,” she replied. “You’re from Hilo, you’re just doing your job. I’m the one who had an affair. I was stupid. I wasn’t thinking. But it’s got nothing to do with the murder.”
Kawika swallowed, his lips dry. He hadn’t been careful enough here in Kohala. He should’ve called Joan Malo himself, not asked Tommy to do it. Shouldn’t have asked Michael Cushing to name Fortunato’s lover with Tommy present.
She began to weep softly. He handed her a tissue box, tried some comforting words. She composed herself, sniffled, wiped her nose.
“Thank you,” she said.
Her coloring matched that of Ku‘ulei and Carolyn: glossy black hair, eyes so dark that iris and pupil merged, skin a smooth and uniform tone of coffee with cream. Yet she also resembled Patience. It was her body, he realized: small, lithe, very fit. It occurred to him she must work out at a gym—and so must Patience. Women with lovers, women without husbands: What portion of the gym-going population? he wondered.
“Maybe I should start,” she suggested. “Then you can ask me questions.”
“Okay. That would be fine.”
Ms. Malo explained she’d joined KKL three years earlier, in 1999. For a long time she’d worked for Fortunato “without anything happening,” as she put it. Still, she’d begun to admire him and started to fall for him a bit. It was the situation. He was her boss—not especially nice, not especially handsome, although he could be very funny. But she saw him only at work, always in action, always powerful and making things happen. “And I didn’t have to wash his underwear,” she said. “Isn’t that what women say? I didn’t have to ask him to take out the garbage.”
Kawika nodded sympathetically, hoping to encourage her.
“He started making passes at me,” she went on. “Like he was teasing. Usually after a big meeting, when he was all pumped up. At first I treated it like a joke, tried to laugh about it. Then one day I didn’t.”
Fortunato had keys to empty houses. First he took her to Kohala Ranch, just past Kawaihae, but it made her nervous. “There’s a gatehouse,” she said. “The guard could see Ralph had someone with him.”
So Ralph took her to Waiki‘i Ranch, off the Saddle Road, the winding two-lane back route to Hilo. Waiki‘i Ranch offered seclusion and romance. At the Ranch’s high altitude, a tablecloth cloud creeps down the slope each day. By evening, mist shrouds the grassy meadows. Mist and rain—which South Kohala’s lower elevations lack almost entirely—make Waiki‘i Ranch lush and green. The parcels were large too, often forty acres. At Waiki‘i Ranch, Joan Malo felt safe.
“I didn’t think of myself as a fallen woman,” she said. “I’m faithful—by nature, and because I was raised that way.” But sleeping with Ralph, relishing the exhilaration and the novelty, she began to love him. She felt she was cheating if she slept with her husband. She also began to see her husband’s shortcomings—one after another.
Ralph warned he’d never leave his wife; she accepted that. He said he’d end the affair if she told anyone; she believed him. Still, he was always attentive, never critical, always grateful. “He made me feel good about myself,” she said. She was happy when she could be with him, moody when she couldn’t. Ralph gave her a company car—a little white BMW convertible. She began to travel to Honolulu or Hilo with him on business. Often Michael Cushing accompanied them, so by day they’d be discreet. But she’d come to Ralph’s room by night.
“Then,” she said, “two months ago Ralph had to go to Tokyo for his annual meeting with the investors’ group. He asked me to go too. Just me, not Michael Cushing. My husband was upset. He didn’t suspect anything—he just hates Japanese people, doesn’t want me near them.”
Kawika thought, Maybe Kai Malo did kill Fortunato. Maybe he wasn’t on Moloka‘i. Maybe he killed Fortunato because of something to do with Japan, maybe without knowing of Joan’s—
“Ralph made me sleep with Mr. Shimazu,” Joan Malo declared flatly.
“Wait—what?” Kawika was caught off guard.
“Mr. Shimazu,” she repeated. “The head of the Japanese investors. Ralph made me sleep with him after we got to Tokyo. He let Mr. Shimazu take me away for the weekend. He gave me to Mr. Shimazu, basically.”
“But why?” Kawika asked. “Why would you agree to that?”
“Ralph said we were going to lose the company. Mr. Shimazu was going to cut off the money. Ralph would have to leave the Big Island. He said he couldn’t bear to lose me. He hated asking me to do it, he said—he was actually in tears, crying. I was comforting him. I was sick to my stomach. But I told him I’d do it. I’d get through it, I said. I’d do it for him.”
She paused for another tissue.
“And so I did it,” she concluded, so softly Kawika could hardly hear.
For a long moment Kawika could think of nothing to say. Involuntarily, he saw her as Fortunato or Shimazu might have seen her: a highly desirable woman.
“That weekend was horrible,” she resumed, as if compelled to fill the silence. “Ralph said I should pretend to like Mr. Shimazu, call him Makoto, be nice to him. But that wasn’t what Mr. Shimazu had in mind.”
She took a deep breath. “Afterward, we couldn’t come back right away. I had bruises and other marks. So Ralph took me to Tahiti, to
