Shards (7 page)

What the hell was I doing?

I had never wanted to be messing around with anyone I worked with. Sure, I had gotten hit on left and right in the department. All the female recruits get hit on. But at the beginning of recruit school, Sergeant Kainoa sat me down and told me, “The best way to get through this is to do it without a guy.” He was basically telling me not to sleep around like so many of the girls did. I had consciously avoided being labeled a slut all this time, and now I had slept with Keawe.

I didn't see him for another three weeks, but we talked almost every day, and I found myself thinking about him way too much. As my days on Lanai wound to a close, I started to get nervous. There would be no way to avoid Keawe once I was back on Maui full-time. MPD was such a small department, more like a family than an employer. It had its politics and bad apples, but the people that made up the department were like no other. Keawe and I were part of the same family—we were going to see each other all the time.

Shortly before I left Lanai for good, I was heading out the door to the station one day and called to Mo as usual. He didn't come. I found him on the couch asleep and tried to awaken him.

“Mo,” I said. “Come on, boy.” It took me half an hour to coax him into my car. There was no way I could pick him up, so he had to get in on his own. He seemed to be in incredible pain, and I drove him immediately to the vet.

“He has cancer,” the vet told me after running some tests. “It's late stage. Has he been sick for a while?”

“I've had him less than a year,” I said. “I don't know. I was told he was in mourning for his previous owner, and that was why he wasn't eating.”

She nodded. “I think he's been sick all this time,” she said, and then repeated, “It's very late stage.”

“How late?”

I didn't need to hear the answer. We had to put Mo down that day.

Mo had become important to me in such a short time, and I was devastated. I called my mom in tears and she spent a long time consoling me. Then I called Keawe.

“I'm really sorry,” he said. “I wish I was there to hold you. But in a week, you'll be here, and I'll be able to help.”

I stayed home from work the day Mo died, and the next day Sergeant Ruben called me into his office.

“I want you to put the Lea case out of your mind,” he said. “Start with a clean slate back in Maui. These things happen and they aren't pretty, but we have to do our jobs.”

Lea was the last thing I wanted to talk about with him. I changed the subject.

“I'm just pissed I'm leaving you with Cordiello,” I told him.

“You can't make it personal,” Ruben said. “There's always another dirtbag following in his footsteps.”

Ruben was good at turning a blind eye to the ice that was coming and going on Lanai, but he was right about Cordiello. I was smart enough to know that catching one dealer wasn't going to end the ice epidemic. After my year on Lanai, I was ready to move to a new town, a bigger town, and find out who the players were.

•  •  •

“Woo hoo, we're getting the narcotics girl,” Officer Keanu said when I walked into the Lahaina station my first day back. He was grinning ear to ear, probably already planning to throw his work in my direction. Keanu was a bit lazy, never following up, never doing his paperwork. A broke, and everybody knew it. It was funny, but things at MPD operated outside of racial stereotypes. The islands were such a melting pot of Asians, Polynesians, haoles, that you almost never ran into issues of race at MPD. It all boiled down to work ethic. Ripper or broke.

“Officer Moore. Welcome back to civilization.”

Keawe's voice. I froze. I hadn't expected to see him so soon.

I forced myself to turn around. With Keanu's eyes on me, I felt I was facing a test.

“Thank you,” I said, as casually as possible. “Surprised to see you here. I thought you worked Wailuku.”

“Do,” he said, “but something brought me to Lahaina this morning.”

“Damn you,” I said later, when he showed up at my apartment. “You could have given me some warning. No one can know anything happened between us, you understand?
No one.
”

“I know that,” he said, handing me a bouquet of flowers. “I'm sorry. I couldn't resist. These are for you.”

I took the flowers and smelled them. He stepped into my apartment and closed the door.

“Is this how it's going to be now?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, before he kissed me. “This is how it's going to be.”

•  •  •

Keawe: my best friend, and now my lover.

At first, it was perfect. We spent a lot of time working together during the day, and he would always let me know if he was coming
over that night. I put in four or five hours of overtime each day, so I normally didn't get home until ten o'clock. If he was free, we had a couple of awesome hours together. In the morning, I would go to work again without worrying about someone at home whining because I didn't pay enough attention to him. For a workaholic, the arrangement was ideal.

We were obsessed with each other. Whenever he left my apartment to go home, he would call me the minute he got into his car and talk to me all the way home, until the garage door went up at his house. I loved every single thing about him—the boyish dimples at the sides of his mouth, the way his smooth forehead creased when he wanted to say the right thing, his tendency to start singing “Moloka'i Slide” and other Hawaiiana at the oddest moments. He told me he loved me almost right from the start.

Keawe also taught me a lot about work in those early months—how to talk myself out of a situation instead of fighting my way out, how to listen to people first before reacting. He was so steady, so reassuring. Keawe embodied everything I loved about Hawaiian men. He was strong, intelligent, so compassionate, a family man, a good dad, close to his parents. Solid, and not a heavy drinker, which was rare for a Hawaiian cop.

I only dreaded the weekends, which for Keawe meant “family time,” and for me meant forty-eight hours without him. I started to work more and more on the weekends so that even the chief was telling me to go home. I either wanted to be at work or with Keawe. Those were the only two ways I wanted to spend my time.

Late one Saturday afternoon on an extra shift, I was working a UEMV (unauthorized entry of a motor vehicle) case on Hanakao'o Beach on the edge of Lahaina. A tourist's car had been burgled and I was just wrapping up, checking the car for fingerprints, when an SUV pulled into the parking lot and parked next to us.

Keawe's SUV.

He got out of the car with his family and walked over to me casually. “Hi, Alli,” he said. “What case you working?”

Behind him I could see his wife with their children. I was seeing Keawe's kids for the first time. They were so tiny! They wore adorable swimsuits and carried their beach gear, laughing and giggling, excited to be coming to the beach.

Why are you talking to me?
I wanted to say to Keawe.
I hate you.

His wife, Colleen, came over to say hello too. She was tall, very thin and pretty, with long straight brown hair. She held the little girl in her arms as she reached out to shake my hand while Keawe introduced us.

“Sorry,” she said, “I've got to get Sacha into her swim diaper.” She carried the girl back to the car.

A
diaper
. This is a baby, I realized.

I watched Keawe's family as they walked away from me and headed across the street to the beach. I wrapped up my case quickly and got back into my patrol car, where shame dropped like a curtain around me. I fought tears as I struggled to put the key in the ignition.

I wanted the affair to end. How could I do what I was doing to such a wonderful family? Three little children. One of them a baby. I was doing exactly what my dad had done.

When I got home, I wrote Keawe a long breakup letter and left it in his locker at work the next morning. He did not say anything to me about the letter, and I did my best to avoid him, but a couple of days later when I was driving home from work, he lit me up in his patrol car. Pulled me over.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked him. “Jesus!”

He handed me back the letter I had written. “I'm not ready to get this,” he said.

“Keawe, I can't be that woman. I can't do this to your family.”

He cut me off. “We'll work it out,” he said. “We'll work it out. We'll be together, I promise.”

I didn't really believe him. Something had changed for me that day on the beach. Before, I had thought of his family as separate from our relationship, as an extra in his life; I had fooled myself into thinking that
I
was his life. But he had a life—
I
was the extra.

In the four months since I had returned to Maui, I had wondered who would be my Pete Cordiello here, that guy I couldn't pin down, that guy I pursued in some sort of crazy quest. Now I understood that it wouldn't be a criminal this time, a small-time narcotics dealer or big-time drug trafficker. It would be a gorgeous Hawaiian man with a family he loved and a mistress he was obsessed with, and no reason at all to arrange his life any differently.

In Hawaii, the most prestigious
private schools are the Kamehameha Schools. Founded in 1887 by one of the last descendants of King Kamehameha, they have a nine-billion-dollar endowment and are among the richest private schools in the country. Tuition is modest, so families don't have to be rich to go there, but you can only get in if you're Hawaiian. You actually have to prove your ancestry when you apply for admission. The schools promote Hawaiian values, and every Hawaiian wants his kids to go there. Keawe was no exception. The Kamehameha Schools, he told me, were the reason he couldn't leave his wife.

“The boys are three,” he explained to me one night. “They'll be old enough to apply in a year, and Sacha the year after. We just have to wait until they're in, babe, and then we can be together. If they come from a divorced home, more than likely they're not going to get in.”

He had been especially attentive since the day at Hanakao'o Beach. He didn't want to lose me—I got that—but he couldn't make a commitment either, and I refused to wait for some goddamned school admissions process to determine the outcome of our affair.

“I can't wait that long,” I said. “It's . . . horrible. It's . . .”

“I know,” he said, caressing my neck. “You know I want to be with you.”

“But I picture you with her all the time. How do you, how can you—?” Of course I was talking about sex. I couldn't bear to think of him cheating on me with his wife.

“There's nothing left between us,” Keawe said. “She's a great person and a really good mom, but I'm just not in love with her anymore. We've been married for seven years. It happens.”

I wanted to believe him, of course, but I hated more than anything the idea of being the other woman. Like my dad's slutty secretary. I didn't want to be that person. God, how I didn't want to be that person.

I would never have asked Keawe to leave his wife for me. I was the product of divorce, and I couldn't bear the thought of doing that to someone else's children. We made an agreement that once the kids got into Kamehameha, he would ask Colleen for a separation.

I longed to be with him now. I wanted to be able to go out to dinner with him, or go to the movies. I wanted to hold his hand while we walked down the street. I wanted a real boyfriend. I didn't want to spend all of our time together in my apartment with the drapes closed, lying to everyone.

But that's exactly how it was.

•  •  •

It had been eight months since I started my affair with Keawe, and still no one knew about it. Around this time, I learned that another female cop, Dina Johnson, was having an affair with my old recruit school instructor, Sergeant Mankell. I barely knew Dina—she was on Alpha Watch and I was on Bravo—but sometimes we passed each other in the locker room and chatted. She was big on inviting me out to the bars, but I never went. She was my age, African-American, very pretty. Originally from Chicago, she had moved to Maui with her family fresh out of high school and was as in love with the island as I was. We had that in common.

When I found out Dina was having an affair with Ed Mankell, I thought back to the wonderful letter he had written me when I graduated from recruit school, and it made me a little sad. A little disappointed in Sergeant Mankell. He had young children too, just like Keawe.

Dina kept pushing a friendship, so one day I took her up on her offer to go out for drinks. I never did anything but work or hang out with Keawe, and it felt strange to sit in a bar with a girl my age.
A girl in her twenties should have lots of friends
, I thought.

Dina liked to drink, and I watched her slam down a couple of beers while I had a soda. This was exactly why I didn't like to socialize with other cops.

“You know about me and Ed?” she asked, after beer number three.

“I heard.”

“It sucks,” she said. “I'm an idiot, I know. It's just—”

“Me too,” I said.

“What? You? The perfect Officer Moore?”

“Not so perfect,” I said.

“Who is it?” she asked.

I took a deep breath. I wanted someone to know. “Keawe,” I said.

She nodded. “I can see it.”

“I hate it,” I said.

“I know. You love him, but you hate it.”

It made me feel slightly better to have shared this with Dina. I made her promise not to tell a soul, but later Keawe found out that she had told Mankell.

So much for making a girlfriend.

•  •  •

To avoid thinking about Keawe, I threw myself into work. Now that I was back in Maui, there were bigger players, bigger cases. Even though I was still on patrol, I started to build up a base of confidential informants, CIs. I wasn't technically supposed to be doing that yet, but I found it really useful in my narcotics work. I was gradually discovering that operating by the book wasn't always the best strategy for me.