“Did Joan really tell you about Shimazu and his friends? What they’d done?”
“Joan?” Cushing snorted. “No way. Ralph told me. He bragged about it, saying he’d used Joan to buy time with the Japanese. Told me it would let us both get more money out of KKL. That’s when I realized he was flying the plane right into the mountain. He had no intention of pulling up in time.”
“And so? What happened that night with Joan?”
“That night with Joan, I was scared,” Cushing said. “Really, really scared. I figured someone must be on to me. I went completely nuts. I demanded to know what she knew. I threatened her, told her I’d tell Kai about her and Ralph. About Shimazu and his friends. Told her Shimazu gave Ralph copies of the photos.”
“Photos?”
“You didn’t find them?”
“No,” Kawika said. “No, we never found photos. We never knew they existed.”
“They existed, all right. Ralph showed them to me. I told Joan I’d seen them.”
“So you—?”
“So I … I got a little out of control. A lot out of control, actually. I wanted to force her to tell me what she knew. I’d always wanted to, uh, have her, I guess. And now I was really angry, really scared—like I said, I just sort of went crazy. And the awful part was this: it turned out Joan didn’t know who killed Ralph, or why.”
“You’re right, she didn’t,” said Kawika. But that wasn’t the awful part.
“I still don’t know,” Cushing said. “Do you?”
“Well, you pleaded to it in court,” Kawika replied. “Rocco’s confession fingers you directly. You owned the murder weapon. Captain Tanaka says you did it. He’s my boss, and the case is closed.” That’s what’s true, Kawika thought. The whys don’t matter.
Flying home to Hilo, Kawika took a window seat so he could gaze down at Kaho‘olawe, an intensely colored long rock with yellow grass set in a white-capped, blue-green sea. Empty, the island seemed lonely and definitely bare—yet perhaps not barren, not forever.
A few months later, Kawika saw a death notice in the paper: Frank Kimaio’s. On the printed page, Kimaio’s name looked somehow unfamiliar. Kawika had seen it many times on his computer screen and in his reports. He’d never seen it in newspaper type. Kawika opened the Kohala phone directory and looked at Kimaio’s name in type again. Still something odd about it. Kawika booted up his office computer and did a search for the name Kimaio. Nothing.
That night, Kawika awoke violently. He was thinking hard. Thinking about his own name: Kawika, a transliteration of David. Thinking about Keanu Reeves being named for Uncle Keanu, about telling Ku‘ulei that perhaps the uncle’s real name was Dean. And he remembered Carolyn dismissing Mele Kawena Smith: “I bet she was born ‘Mary Devine.’” Kawika pulled on some clothes, drove to the station, and searched again, this time for Frank Dimaio, not Frank Kimaio.
And there it was on the screen: lots of hits on the name Frank Dimaio. A century earlier, it turned out, Frank Dimaio had been the Pinkerton detective who traveled to Argentina and traced Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to their ranch in remotest Patagonia. By finding them, Dimaio destroyed their refuge, forced them out, and eventually they were hunted down and killed in Bolivia. Dimaio had devoted himself to avenging the lawmen who’d died at their outlaw hands. In transforming himself and choosing a new name, Frank Carlson—despite misspelling “Kawika” when typing Rocco’s confession and mispronouncing Ka‘ū—hadn’t made a Hawaiian linguistic error after all.
Kawika drove home and slept with troubled dreams.
In the wakeful world, the world beyond dreams, the last words very nearly belonged to Leonard Cohen. One night, after he’d finished cleaning up, Dr. Terrence Smith headed for the door of the makeshift mortuary at his hospital. As he reached to turn off the light, he sang softly to himself:
And quiet is the thought of you,
The file on you complete,
Except what we forgot to do
A thousand kisses deep.
He stopped abruptly, remembering something. He walked back to a cooler where he stored specimens. He rummaged a bit and retrieved a small bag. Crossing the room, he lifted the lid of a container marked “Biohazard—Medical Waste” and dropped the bag inside. Then he switched off the light as he left. The little bag, which he’d tossed in the trash with a satisfying plop, contained two testicles—the last earthly remains of Ralph Fortunato.
In pace requiescat.
That was nearly the end of it, but not quite. In pace requiescat—“rest in peace,” Poe’s final words in “The Cask of Amontillado”—weren’t the only valedictory words Kawika pondered that winter. His mother, separated from her son by half an ocean and worried about his well-being, sent him a quotation from her favorite writer, John Fowles. It had always meant a lot to her, she said, and she thought it apt:
Life is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice.
He thought long about this. As if to confirm its wisdom—another riddle, another opportunity to guess it—the real meaning of In pace requiescat finally yielded itself to him. It is not the dead who need a benediction, he realized: they rest in peace no matter what. It is we the living who must find peace. The dead do not demand we make human sacrifices of ourselves. That is their benediction to us.
Eventually, Kawika allowed himself to hear that benediction. Eventually, he let life inhabit new faces and gathered the dice for another throw—and, he promised himself, for another and another, if need be.
So it was that one day Kawika decided to call Tommy—his own Waimea cop, his partner. “Tommy,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s get Terry and my
