Prologue

 

The sun rises over the rim of Haleakala Crater.  I watch from a lawn chair on the lanai of my ocean-side restaurant ten thousand feet below as dawn’s light chases the shadow across the calm Pacific waters and the horseshoe of Molokini Island to the white sand beaches of Keawakapu.

My name is Gilles Barker.  I paint portraits and imaginary landscapes with purple trees and such by trade.  I own a tavern and sell alcoholic drugs to world travelers, bar flies, and my friends by the choice of others.

I know who they are.

A full moon sits high in the bright morning sky as I await my ride to Kahului airport, legs resting across my brown leather duffle that has flown to Phoenix a hundred times before.  I study the early morning walkers as they begin their strolls, first up the beach and then back to their luxury Wailea condominiums for morning coffee with bagels or fresh croissants and a selection of cream cheese, jams, and butters.

A handsome young woman with dark auburn hair jogs by.  She smiles and waves, her hand high above her head.  I feel a sudden chill as my mind recognizes her and flashes to the Christmas seventeen years ago when I last saw Jodie Jones.  I stand to give chase before being snapped back to the reality of here and now.  I lean back in my chair and watch as she disappears around the corner of the bay.

Sometimes, as I sleep, Jodie jogs across Kamaole Beach Park or floats through my mind on a raft with sails wafting in a Pacific breeze.  Seven years ago, I saw her for an instant at a Charlie Musselwhite concert in Phoenix.  She smiled at me as Charlie cut loose on some old school harmonica blues.  She looked away.  And then she was gone.

For months after Jodie disappeared I opened my door at every knock expecting to see her standing there.  I picked up the phone’s receiver on the first ring of every call knowing I would hear her voice.  Her amnesia had been cured by an exceptionally fine doctor hidden away in an obscure thatch-roofed hospital in the Fijian island chain, or maybe it was Tahiti.  Or she had escaped from her captors when they lowered their guard and was calling me to come for her from the American ambassador’s office in Mexico City or the seedy police station in downtown Tijuana. 

As time passed, I came to accept what Jodie’s Mother knew intuitively from the first day; Jodie wasn’t coming home, not alive anyway.  My sightings diminished as the years rushed by.

I haven’t given up the hope of someday coming to know the how and why of it all.  When I think of that Christmas Day, which isn’t so often now, it replays through my mind in fast forward time, each image clear as if it had happened yesterday, but the sequence of events has become scrambled and any hidden clues to the mystery locked away seem lost.

**

An obese middle aged lady in a turquoise blue swim suit drags a sturdy metal lounger across the narrow strip of grass separating Keawakapu Beach from the edge of my lanai, a tourist from Seattle or Vancouver or maybe someplace in the mid-west where the winter sun seldom shines.

She spreads an oversized chartreuse towel across the lounger.  She massages a heavy coat of Maui Girl tanning lotion over her ivory white body in the hope of eluding the inevitable burn from the first day’s basking in the blazing Maui sun.  The saccharin sweet odor of coconut oil drifts past me, up the stairs, and out the bar’s open front door.  She reclines on the lounger in the middle of my lawn, and raises an open book above her head to shade her eyes from the Sun’s ultra violet rays.  Beads of perspiration begin to form on her forehead and across her upper lip.  It’s the beginning of another day in paradise.

**

Last week, as I thumbed through the copy of Modern Painters magazine now stuffed in the bottom of my brief case, the name of a friend from before Jodie’s disappearance popped from the page.  Mike Dent was with Jodie and me on her family’s estate the day Jodie vanished.  Maybe if we were to meet again and compare notes some clue to the mystery would suddenly become clear.  That seems unlikely, but it would be good to see Mike again, and, just maybe, talking to him would unscramble some of the pictures that muddle my mind.

To jog my memory, I dig the copy of Modern Painters from my briefcase and turn to the page of notable December events.  Yes, Mike will be in Phoenix for the opening of his show on December twenty-eighth.  I should call him when I get to town.

**

My taxi driver strolls across the restaurant’s lounge floor and down the two steps to my beachside lanai, his sandals flopping against the ceramic tile with each easy stride.  The pace of island living is right up his alley.  The time of day or the day of the week, or the month of the year for that matter, has little relevance to Ricardo Wing. 

Twenty years ago, Ricardo made his way to Maui from Miami’s gold coast when he sensed his days of running guns to Columbia and returning with boat loads of marijuana were numbered.  He could feel the temperature rising as his competitors began the process of eliminating one another, and the police, even though he had doubled their stipend, were getting edgy and not so reliable as before.  Back when Ricardo made his move to Maui most of the new arrivals were running from something.  Ricardo and I had that in common.

“Good morning Ricardo,” I say.  I glance at my watch.  Ricardo’s forty-five minutes late, but I wouldn’t have expected him any sooner.  “Right on time I see.”

He doesn’t honor my sarcasm with a reply.

Ricardo pulls up a chair next to mine and leans back with his hands clasped behind his head.  “You see that?”  He tilts forward and points at a mother whale and her calf as they breach a hundred yards from shore.

I nod.  Yes, I see it.  We’ve both seen it a thousand times before.

“If I were you, Gilles, I’d be looking for a way out of this trip of yours.  It’s cold and wet over there, you know.” 

I don’t reply. 

“I just saw something about it on the weather channel.  It looks pretty grim.”

“The weather channel?  You actually watch the weather channel?”

Ricardo acts as if he hasn’t heard me.  “I’d be surprised if they can even get you there from here if that ice storm’s half as bad as it looks.”  He slaps my knee.  “Big mistake.”  He cocks his head and looks me in the eye from around the wire rims of his mirrored aviator glasses.

“You know what I’m saying?”

I shake my head.  “I’m going to Phoenix, Ricardo, not Fargo.”  I look at my watch.  “We really must be going.”

Ricardo stands and grabs the strap of my duffle.  “Well then, let’s get your butt out of here my man.”  The sound of his sandals slapping against the ceramic tiles as he saunters up the stairs echoes through the empty lounge.  “Daylight’s burning you know.”

**

By the time I board the United 747 jet bound for Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, Jodie has disappeared, once again, into the recesses of my mind.  As we taxi to the runway, I open my issue of Modern Painters magazine to a Matthew Collings article about the Turner Prize curator’s haywire gibberish and settle myself in for the five hour flight.  Fate has more surprises than usual awaiting me in Phoenix his year.

What was it Ricardo said?  “If I were you, I’d be looking for a way out of this trip.”  Yeah, that was it.

Maybe I should have listened to Ricardo.

**

According to my friend, Kimo Kuaana, Keawakapu is the Hawaiian word for a forbidden harbor or maybe a sacred and taboo channel through the coral reefs that stretch across the bay.  The meaning is open to interpretation. 

 

 

 

PART ONE

COPS AND ROBBERS

 

“For those wishing to know if their mission on this planet is complete, there is a very simple test.  If you are alive, it isn’t.”

 

CHAPTER ONE

Jake

 

Sergeant Jake Wellaby, clad in rumpled tee shirt and striped blue boxer shorts, lay motionless on his back in the middle of his queen-sized bed.  He counted each rotation of the ceiling fan’s dusty wooden blades spinning lazily overhead while waiting for the bedside clock’s sounding of the morning’s second alarm.

Other than the movement of Jake’s eyes he was still as stone, his head propped on a single crumpled pillow, the only pillow he owned these days.  His hands sat one on top the other on his chest, cupped and motionless.  A gentle cooling breeze from the fan’s monotonous pinwheel found its way through the three day growth of ash brown stubble on his chin.

“What do you think, Jake?”  What happened?”  How did things spiral down to here?”  His mind’s voice asked too many embarrassing questions these days.

Since Wellaby had no idea I, Gilles Barker, existed, he wasn’t aware I could have answered his question if I were so inclined.  You see, I am one of those few who know the truth of it, the true reasons behind all things that occur.

“Jake, it’s not worth the worry.”  That’s what I would have told him if it had come to that.

One hundred twenty-six.  One hundred twenty-seven.  One hundred twenty-eight. 

Jake picked out a ceiling fan’s blade and spun his eyes to follow as it made its rounds.  His record count was two thousand. 

Beat that if you can, sir; I challenge you. 

Jake was spending more and more time in conversation with inanimate objects as well as the life forms that populated his mind.  Each morning of the last week Jake had been engaged in debate of recreational fishing’s pros and cons with a small mouth bass mounted on his kitchen wall. 

Jake held his watch above his head and glanced at the dial.  He had twenty minutes before he would have to face what this day had in store; he would have liked more time.

Counting the rotations of a ceiling fan’s blades couldn’t keep Jake from picking through the litter of his memories and into thoughts of what might lie ahead.  He had a feeling things wouldn’t be getting better anytime soon.

Twenty years ago, when Jake was accepted by the Phoenix Police Academy, it was his childhood dream come true.  He set goals – nothing to grand.  He made a time table for reaching each step up the ladder to ‘success’.  Gung-ho he was then.

Jake had mistakenly believed two or three years of pounding pavements and riding around in squad cars would put him well on his way to a detective‘s shield; then two years to work his way into homicide.  He would be the homicide detective flashing his shiny badge at the street cops as he arrived on a crime‘s scene.

“Lieutenant Jake Wellaby, homicide.  What do we have here, officer?”  He would be the tough, wise cracking detective who always got his man.

The sky would be the only limit for a bright guy like him.  ‘Captain’ Jake Wellaby had a good ring to it.  ‘Chief’ Jacob Wellaby wasn’t out of the question.

All of this, the plan and his idea of crime and punishment, first came from the oval screen of the black and white television in his parent’s living room.  As a boy of five, his hero was the Joe Friday character made famous by Dragnet’s Jack Webb.  ‘Just the facts, Ma’am.’  Every neighborhood kid knew Joe Friday’s line. 

Maybe he would alter the plan and become a private investigator, like Magnum and live behind the gates of a private ocean-side estate on a Hawaiian island in the middle of the Pacific.  As Jake Wellaby, P.I., he might have been sent to question me, Gilles Barker, at my home on Maui in the investigation of suspected forgeries of my paintings perpetrated at the behest of art galleries from throughout the world.  Then Jake and I would have met while sitting in deck chairs on my ocean-side lanai sipping Blue Hawaiians from chimney glasses instead of in a tangle of metal and various automobile parts in the middle of a desert oasis.

**

All Jake knew about being a cop was what he had seen in his world of make believe.  His plans were hatched from hours of watching everyone from Joe to Columbo who tracked down their men and saw to it they were properly punished for their transgressions.  Any one of his heroes could do this in an hour or two at most.  Joe Friday could do it in half the time.

Now, seven thousand and a few days since his rookie year, Jake was still passing out parking tickets and answering domestic abuse calls from neighbors and relatives of people hell bent on doing bodily harm to one another and anyone else who might wander by.  There was the five year old molested by her Uncle Bill in the basement laundry room on a stack of dirty socks and towels waiting for wash.  What was all of this about anyway? 

It seems living in proximity to other human beings can bring out the Devil in a lot of people.

**

After ten years riding around in squad cars, Jake had become Sergeant Wellaby, mostly because he had been on the job longer than the other eight candidates eligible for one of the seven spots.  He was practically a shoe in.  It wasn’t that Jake hadn’t been a good cop; he was one of the best for the first few years. 

But Jake had high expectations.  His time table for advancement through the ranks was of no more value than the piece of scratch paper he had written it on and carried in his billfold until he crumpled it into a ball no bigger than a dentine gum wrapper and tossed it out the window of his squad car years ago. 

Jake lost his focus and just kept stumbling along.  He felt the same hopeless grind of time as the guy who drove a hundred miles to spend eight hour days sweeping the same floor at a factory that, each year, made millions of identical widgets for who knew what.

Jake had a high point or two, but they were early on and seemed part of some other lifetime.  There was the commendation he earned when he found himself between an especially violent Mr. and Mrs. Jorge Rodriguez during one of their many domestic wars that sent neighbors scrambling after their phones to light up the switch board at nine-one-one.

It was one of those steaming hot summer nights at eleven when Jake and his partner, Patrick Finn, pulled their car to the curb on Phoenix’s south-west side.  The mostly Latino neighborhood was pitch black except for the flashing red light of the squad car’s strobe and the flickering ghostly blue glow from televisions in the houses lining the old brick walks.

As Jake and Patrick approached the unpainted cement block steps to the front porch, they heard the Rodriguez’s going at each other inside.  The high-pitched screech of Mrs. Rodriguez’s voice made Jake’s pituitary glands react as if he had a mouth full of sour lemons.  Jorge Rodriguez’s bellow could be heard a block away in the parking lot of the neighborhood Seven-Eleven.

“You Fucking Bitch.”

“You worthless Motherfucker; I don’t deserve this shit.  You’re a dead man, you hear me, you pointy headed dick?”  When it came to profanities, Mrs. Rodriguez had few peers.

“Kiss my royal ass.”

And so on.

Patrick knocked hard at the door.  “Police–open up.”  There was no reply; only silence.

Jake turned the knob; the latch clicked open. 

“Police – coming in.”

Jake threw the door open. 

Jorge was full of a pint of Cuervo Gold tequila and a six pack of Coronas.  He was just waiting for a chance to give somebody a pop on the jaw.  After dodging a round house hook and catching a well targeted kick to the shin, Jake managed to get a hold on Jorge.  He was fastening the cuffs on Jorge’s wrists when Mrs. Rodriguez blind sided him with a knee shattering swat with her Louisville Slugger.  Jake might have seen it coming had he known that, although Anita Rodriguez was right handed, she batted lefty.

Jake dropped to the floor like a sack of cement.  He rolled over to his side and grasped his busted knee.  He could only lie there, writhing in pain, while he watched the crazed Anita destroy her living room furniture, one swipe at a time.

“Screw you Jorge,” she shouted as she shattered the glass top of the coffee table with one mighty blow.  She took out the hall mirror with a rip of the Slugger that would have put many a major league banjo hitter to shame, the bat cutting through the air with a sharp whistle, like the swat of a Palmer four iron.  “You just wait, you son of a bitch.” 

Jake kept one hand on his pistol just in case Anita decided to give him another whacking.

This was an all new experience for Jake’s rookie partner.  Patrick’s heart pumped into overdrive as the adrenalin rush doubled his blood pressure.  When he lunged over Jake to grab Jorge, it seemed as if he were in slow motion, each stride stretching endlessly out in front of the other.  His legs had turned into giant rubber bands.

Looking in from the sidewalk through the open front door, the illumination from the bare sixty watt bulb hanging over Jake’s head had the effect of a dimmed spot light shining down onto the center of a darkened stage.  Two backup cops rolled up outside and sprinted to the house when they saw Jake writhing on the living room floor.  Patrick had Jorge in a choker hold with his night stick across Jorge’s neck when the cops burst through the rickety screen door.  They grabbed Jorge’s arms and tried to pin them behind his back.  Jorge wasn’t having any of that.

Jorge probably wouldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds with his work boots on, but he was full of tequila and in no mood to have his arms pinned anywhere.  A vein threatened to pop through the center of his forehead as he struggled against the baton held tight against his throat.  He spit out a string of Spanish obscenities and oaths of retribution between gasps for air.  None of the cops understood Spanish, but they got the gist of it okay.

It took the three of them five long minutes to get cuffs on Jorge’s wrists.  In the meantime, Anita Rodriguez took the Slugger to the living room lamps and tables.  Her long black hair whipped around her head; her breasts threatened to pop over the top of her paisley green silken dress with white polka dots that danced across her chest as she put all of her one hundred and forty -five pounds into a whack that cracked the back of Jorge’s La-Z-Boy chair.

“Not my chair!  God damn it Anita.  You’re gonna’ pay for that.”

“Oh.  I’m shaken in my boots, mister.”  And then she teed off on the thin plaster-board walls.  The cops decided it was best to let her get a few more swats in.  No need to rush Anita and risk getting creamed in the bargain.  Patrick was bent over Jake, trying to assess the damage to his shattered knee.  One of the back up cops kept an eye on Anita as she made her rounds while the other perused a headline in the sports section of the Arizona Republic that lay on the floor in the remains of the glass topped coffee table.

“The Suns just might win it this year,” he said, to no one in particular.

“Yeah, right.”

**

A half hour later, the cops had an unsteady Jorge in the squad car for his ride to the station.  They took credit for corralling him, but the tequila and beer chasers were the cause of Jorge’s demise.  Patrick hauled Jorge away while an ambulance transported Jake to Phoenix Memorial’s emergency room.

Jorge was quiet now.  His eyes narrowed and his face tightened as he listened to the hum of blood coursing through his brain with such a force all other sounds were as if heard through a cheap motel’s plasterboard walls.  Forty minutes after Patrick arrived at the jail with Jorge in tow he had him processed and in his cell.  Jorge soon passed out on a perforated metal rack suspended above the dark concrete floor by a pair of steel rods anchored into the drunk tank’s solid block wall.  

The drunk tank was filled to the brim with a sampling of every rung on Phoenix society’s ladder, except for those standing on the very top rung of course.  There were homeless winos rousted from park benches and the gutters of downtown.  There were two men in rented tuxedos with crooked snap on bow ties hanging from their collars and a few ASU students busted for drunken driving.  There was a skinny Mexican kid hanging onto the cell’s bars like a deranged chimpanzee demanding a public defender from the guards who were nowhere in sight and couldn’t have cared less anyway.  That was no problem for Jorge.  He could just as well have been sleeping on satin sheets in a suite at the Plaza hotel for all he knew.

After Patrick had Jorge situated, there was another hour and a half filling out the five pages of the incident report.  By the time he got out of the station and over to Phoenix Memorial to check on Jake, he could see the morning sky light up as the sun peaked over the Superstition Mountains.

**

Once she had worn herself out, Jake and Patrick’s backup transferred Anita to the lockup.  Both she and Jorge, as they had done many times before, refused to prefer charges against one another.  This was not police business, thank you very much.  They were back home sleeping off two nasty hangovers amidst the rubble of their livingroom at least an hour before Patrick Finn called it a day and walked out of Jake’s hospital room for the half hour drive home.

**

Jorge would have been considerably better off if the law had locked him away for good. 

Three nights after Anita whacked Jake’s knee cap with a mighty blow of the Slugger, Jorge’s brain was turned into a chopped meat omelet by a cast iron frying pan to his left temple.  He was the perfect target.  Sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, he reached toward the center for the sugar bowl.  That move put his head at just the right angle for Anita’s home run swat.  It was a piece of cake for a woman with her talents.  Jorge and Anita had been married for more than fifteen years and all of that time, up to his very last moment, he, like Jake Wellaby, had no idea the woman batted lefty.

**

After a few days in the hospital and two months in a plaster cast, Jake was good as new except for a hitch in his right knee and a duck’s waddle that crept into his stride toward the end of the days.

Jake spent a lot of time thinking about the way things might have been.  Why didn’t he take the desk job offered by the department after he had been waylaid by Anita’s bat?  Or what if, instead of becoming a cop, he had spent those years as one of the nameless cogs on a Chrysler assembly line while the union worked at pocketing his retirement fund?  He could have spent his lunch hours eating cold cuts from a lunch pale at a picnic table next to the parking lot, a parking lot full of thousands of Chrysler products and Fords and Toyotas waiting for the four o’clock whistle.

The thought didn’t seem too bad.

That would have been in the days before the Chrysler Company made it a policy only workers driving the home teams brand would be allowed to park in the main lot.  All others were relegated to the dirt field across the street since Chrysler felt it was necessary to penalize the disloyal employees who would rather buy a car from the competition and skip the employee’s meager discount than drive a piece of crap from Chrysler since a billion dollars didn’t seem to go as far as it used to when it came to stuffing managements pockets full of dough.

The alarm buzzed and Jake reached to tap the snooze button for the third time.  “One thousand two hundred and eight.  One thousand two hundred and nine.  One thousand two hundred and ten.”  Or was it one thousand one hundred and ten? 

What ever; it had been ten long years now since he had become Sergeant Wellaby and that was where he was stuck today.  He was still working traffic, breaking up fights, hauling disorderly drunks to the tank and occasionally giving an overly enthusiastic hooker a lift to the station.  And he knew this was what he would be doing on the day before he was soon scheduled to retire to the comfort of afternoons at the pub and nights nodding off in front of the telly.  He had resigned himself to his fate.  But there was a different plan in place for Jake.

**

The alarm again.

“One thousand four hundred and twelve.  One thousand four hundred and thirteen.”  The fan’s blades continued on their way as if connected to a perpetual motion machine.

Jake’s head ached from the base of his neck to the top of his skull.  Mosquitoes were busily buzzing between his ears.  He fumbled with the alarm button.  He threw the sheet back and turned toward the edge of his queen size bed.  Ghost images of the fan’s blades continued to spin on the floor in front of him.  He sat and stretched his arms out to his sides as he yawned and glanced at the fancy curlicues of the imitation brass headboard before closing his eyes and falling back to the bed.

Marcia had insisted they buy that headboard.  Jake bought it for her just ten days before she split with everything of any value he owned, except for that headboard.   She would have had it too if she hadn’t forgotten to bring a wrench for the bolts that fastened it to the bed’s frame.  Marcia had searched the closets for Jake’s tool box, but luckily for him he had loaned it to Gary Simmons, their neighbor four doors down the hall, six months before.  Gary had borrowed an assortment of knives, light bulbs, bug sprays, Jake’s hard cover copies of Vonnegut and Irving, and even a fourth of a tube of Colgate toothpaste over the years and not one single item had ever been returned, a record that holds in tact to this day.  With a friend like Gary nearby, Jake always knew his things were safely under lock and key in Gary’s closets or stacked on his book shelves.

Marcia had cleaned Jake out. She had taken everything she could get out the door.  But Jake had the headboard.  And, depending on his mood, seeing it for the first time each morning was usually the high or low point of his day.