“No, you won’t,” said the man who called himself Rocco.
39South Kohala
Though he sometimes forgot, Kawika tried not to go into a meeting without a specific objective. Kawika’s objective for his meeting with Michael Cushing was simple: get the man talking. Here he applied a lesson from Dashiell Hammett’s fictional detective Sam Spade. “Get a man talking,” Spade observed, “and maybe you can get somewhere.”
Kawika didn’t suspect Cushing of murder—not after interviewing him that first day. Cushing had been terrified of an unknown killer and desperate for Kawika to catch him. Cushing had suspected Peter Pukui, but Kawika no longer did. He half suspected Jason Hare, but half suspicion was as far as he could get. Hare didn’t strike him as a killer. An accomplice, maybe. Perpetrators betray themselves, Kawika believed. Hare hadn’t done that.
Kawika felt Hare had been clumsy, though. He’d lied in his statement. The graffiti messages seemed clumsier still, assuming they were his, and a stupid idea to begin with. They might have been missed entirely, and the first ones seemed meaningless. The third—“KW: MC KKL”—managed to convey information. But to Kawika, its only practical import seemed to be that he should interview Cushing again—something he’d already arranged. So was “KW: MC KKL” clumsy of Hare too?
Nothing could overcome Kawika’s powerful first impression: Cushing didn’t know who’d killed Fortunato. So why, Kawika thought, would Hare bother to compose “KW: MC KKL”? Occam’s Razor suggested Hare hoped to misdirect him, to have Kawika suspect Cushing instead of the real killer. But who could know for sure?
Kawika wondered if Fortunato’s real estate fraud—not his sex life, not his battles with HHH or others—might have gotten him killed. The exact nature of the fraud eluded Kawika. He had wisps of understanding, nothing more. He felt—and this was his most elegant notion—that if he could get Cushing talking, he might finally comprehend the real estate scam. Then he could winnow through motives and opportunities and come up with possible suspects.
40South Kohala
Cushing, too, tried never to go into a meeting without a specific objective. Now, alone and pacing around his KKL office, he tried to think what his objective with Kawika should be.
Cushing’s ultimate objective—wealth—didn’t require rethinking. He’d grown up with tastes dependent on it. His mother’s fortune came from two Big Five families, the missionaries’ descendants who’d grown rich. But Cushing’s father had ruined Cushing’s mother and vanished, and the family scandal had mortified Cushing’s wife. She now spent little time in Hawai‘i, preferring to lose herself in the South Pacific on tours she led for National Geographic. Her earnings helped, but Cushing wanted real money.
With KKL, he’d thought, he and Fortunato had a very good thing going. Then, inexplicably, Fortunato had begun jeopardizing it all—jeopardizing a billion-dollar project and multimillion-dollar paydays for them both. Why? Cushing had no idea. He tried to restrain Fortunato, cautioning at first, then arguing, finally pleading, but Fortunato had just laughed.
In desperation Cushing hired Rocco, a contract killer from the mainland—but someone else had killed Fortunato first, in precisely the place and manner Cushing had planned. Who had done that, and how? The question nagged Cushing incessantly.
Cushing opened a sliding door, went out onto the office deck, and lit a cigarette. He’d quit smoking a decade earlier. But now he’d started again. He inhaled deeply, looked out at the mist-shrouded Mauna Loa and Hualālai, and tried to think.
After Fortunato’s death, Cushing learned—from Melanie Munu, of all people—that the whole development rested precariously on a faulty legal title. The heiau incident and the hunters—KKL could survive those, Cushing figured. But a title problem running all the way back to the Māhele? Fortunato had not only concealed this potential fatal flaw but clearly intended—somehow—to exploit it. It presented a mortal threat to KKL. And Melanie couldn’t be trusted to walk away even if he paid her. So Cushing had arranged for Rocco to solve the Melanie problem, and with it, he thought, the Māhele problem. Who else would know or care about a long-dead Hawaiian chief’s title to a lava field?
Then Cushing had traveled to Tokyo. There he found Shimazu violently upset by the killings of Ralph and Joan. But Shimazu made clear he wasn’t going back to help the Hawaii police.
“I doubt you’re a suspect,” Cushing had told him, although the thought had occurred to him.
“Not the point,” Shimazu had replied. “Got no time for that, with KKL in the spotlight because of these murders.” He demanded that Cushing prepare a revised business plan quickly, something Shimazu could use with investors, banks, and regulators. “They’re pressuring me,” he said. “Hard.”
Now, on the night before he was to meet Kawika, Cushing had finally gained access to KKL’s real books, the ones Ralph had never showed him. Cushing understood their significance immediately: no way could KKL possibly succeed. Period. Shimazu was wiped out already; he just didn’t know it. Ralph had cheated him.
Fortunato had paid too much for the land—far too much, even if he’d gotten valid title. Ralph had wasted—stolen?—far too much as well. He’d grossly inflated income estimates for the hotel and golf courses. And it would be impossible to sell real estate at prices high enough to make a profit, because the prices Ralph had projected for the benefit of the Japanese investors were a joke. Cushing couldn’t believe it. Ralph had used real estate at the Mauna Kea, the Mauna Lani, and Hualālai as comparables, for Christ’s sake. Hawai‘i’s top three resorts. But Kohala Kea Loa won’t even have a fucking beach.
It was time to put KKL into bankruptcy, a victim of Ralph’s fraudulence, although only Cushing knew that yet. And with KKL dying, Melanie Munu couldn’t extort a cent as the supposed heir to some long-dead Hawaiian chief.
So Cushing could have called off her killing. But he’d already frustrated Rocco once, when someone else had murdered Fortunato. Cushing crushed out his cigarette and lit another. He worried that Rocco had traveled a long way—twice. It
