Who Named the Knife Read online

  “I killed someone. I was doing drugs at the time. I probably wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

  “You didn’t set out to kill him,” Maryann puts in. “And he was one mean son of a bitch.”

  We laugh. Susie is dying to ask, so I do it for her.

  Maryann says, “She shot him to stop him from hurting her. Then she ran to the backyard and hid in the dog house while he drove off.”

  “And then what?”

  Valere sniffs, “He drove around the block.”

  Maryann says, “And died.”

  “Where did you shoot him?” Susie manages.

  “Through both lungs and the heart.” Valere is small and fine-featured. She wears her grey hair in a short cut and looks athletic in prison clothes. I liked her. Susie liked her. Anyone would. At this point in time, she’s served eighteen years. “I’m lucky to have been here,” she actually says. “It’s given me time to look at myself and figure out what went wrong.” She says when she gets out she won’t have much life left. “My people die early. I might make it to sixty-five.” Her eyes seem very large, very open wide.

  It’s hard to explain the intensity of these visits. They’re like nothing else. Absorb and absorb and absorb. A new baby being brought to his mother. The mother in her prison garb reaching out for him. The waiting room, where we become like hostages, held in another kind of cell. We can’t leave. We can’t get out. We wait and watch each other and in little bits and pieces we have one two three more reasons for our hearts to break. Alone, it is almost more than I can bear. With Susie, I can enjoy seeing Maryann teased by her roommate when she doesn’t speak up about her life. “Oh go on, Maryann, say it like it is. You’re always so repressed!” Inmate Day Labor has been closed for a while and Maryann is working as a clerk in the mental ward. “It’s peaceful,” she says, although one woman hears voices that tell her to throw her lunch away and another woman believes she’s being followed so she sits in the office with Maryann and cries. The mental patients don’t mix with the other prisoners. Life on the yard would be too hard for them, according to Maryann. “We have to get jobs. We have to take care of ourselves! There are rules. A lot of stress.” Even in prison there are prisons.

  And what about the little cat, Nermal?

  Maryann says he is locked up in Sheron’s bathroom, where he has been since he was taken away by her. The bathroom was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but he has been kept in there for one reason or another. A window needs to be fixed. Or it’s the heating or the air conditioning or the other cats. It begins to seem that Nermal exchanged a large prison for a much smaller one. Night. Stars through a window. A lock on the door. To Maryann, it is too familiar and she doesn’t want to talk about it. Finally, though, after a lot of thought, after months of deliberating, she and Valere have signed on as support providers in the puppy program, which means they have one or another dog with them for part of each day. “It’s fabulous!” There will be letters and phone calls now full of news about the dogs, especially about a Golden Retriever named Jesse. “I think I’m in love,” Maryann says. “And this time he’s worth it.”

  I tell her that I talk to her lawyer every few weeks. “He sounds good. Really smart. He basically thinks Stephen Hioki did everything he had to do. I mean, had to do. But he also says Hioki should have investigated William for himself and not depended on the state to provide him with his information. That was crucial. The other thing he says is that Hioki should have fought harder for a deal. For you. He should have gone to the prosecutors and said, Hey look, your boy took a lie detector test and failed it and we’d like to give one to our client and make a deal for her.” I decide not to tell her something else Mike Brennan had said, which was that Maryann had been in “a weird space” when she was arrested. “I don’t know if this was still happening in Hawaii, but in California she was, you know, in contact with William for quite a while after she was arrested and she wouldn’t co-operate in any deal against him.”

  I said to him, “It’s called love.”

  I say to Maryann, “You never told me he failed a lie detector test.”

  Maryann says, “I forgot.”

  “I’ve got a friend in Hawaii helping me do some research,” I announce. “You know, one thing’s interesting. In 1982, Charles Marsland was DA. He ran on a law-and-order campaign, lock up the criminals and throw away the key because his nineteen-year-old son had been murdered on Waimanalo Beach back in 1975. He was working at Infinity Disco in Waikiki and Marsland thought he’d heard something that got him killed, got him dragged off at 4:30 in the morning and shot in the head at the beach. Maybe he thought Larry Hasker was killed by the same gang. I think Jan Futa was under orders to get a conviction or lose her job.”

  Valere’s nodding, as if she’s sure Maryann was framed, but Maryann shrugs and smiles at a woman who killed her mother and refuses to see her children or grandchildren, refuses to ask for parole because she doesn’t want to be a burden to them. It was a mercy killing, but there you are. And there is the young mother who is cuddling the baby and then stands up when the COs announce a car in the parking lot with its lights on. “I’ll go fix it!” she volunteers and everyone, all of us in the visiting room, are able to laugh as one big happy-for-a-moment family. For a moment or longer, we are joined by this horrible joke. In fact, there is a good deal of joy all around, even as I see a woman circling the room with her husband, circling, circling, as if they are both trapped on one of those wheels that rodents have in their cages. Even if, outside, the rain pours down and only some of us will be leaving at eight o’clock.

  Later, in the darkness of the airport parking lot, Susie closes her eyes for a minute. “I want to thank you for bringing me down here,” she says. “I feel blessed by those two women.”

  I say I think I know what she means.

  “What happened to William? What did he get out of it?”

  “Mike Brennan says he didn’t get much. If he’d been really smart he’d have had an attorney for the Arauza case instead of trying to do it himself. He’d have had someone who could make a really good deal for him. He’d already testified in twelve cases and they owed him big-time. But Brennan says William was still stupid back then. Meaning maybe he’s not any more. Anyway, he got nothing for all his testimonies except being moved out of California and having some tattoos removed that made him look like he was in the Paramount gang, which he never was. Paramount is where he’s from, and Brennan says these guys go into prison and they get tattoos to make them look like they’re protected. Then they get moved to another prison where that’s the wrong gang. So that’s what he got for betraying the girl he married. He got his tattoos taken off.”

  Susie says tiredly, “And so forth.” Having lived in California all her life, this is a piece of it she’s never seen. Then she asks, “Is Brennan any good?”

  “He filed a Writ of Habeas Corpus the same week I first wrote to her. I thought something would happen. It’s maddening. I don’t know how she can stand all the waiting. Also she can’t call him because of something about the USC phone system. So she never knows what’s going on. So she calls me after I call him.”

  “She’s amazing,” Susie says.

  “I’m starting to think everyone should have a prisoner,” I tell her.

  A few days later. I tell Maryann on the phone how tired we were. How we sat in the airport parking lot trying to remember all the things we’d talked about and how we had finally just climbed out of the car and onto the plane. Maryann laughs. “Oh it’s the same thing in here. We’re always completely wiped out after a visiting day. You want to go straight to bed and put your head under the pillow.” She says, “But don’t ever think it doesn’t mean a lot to us. Did I ever tell you about the time Doug – my biological – and his wife came to see me for a seventy-two-hour visit? They brought one of their kids, Shawn, and it was great, really, but I was so nervous going into it. I’d met them all before, but seventy-two hours is a long time. And do you know
what?” she sounds almost childlike as the words tumble out. “I had gone through so much with Mom and finally she’d given me the adoption papers and then when I set up the visit I was worried about telling them. But Mom said, ‘Well maybe we’ll come on down there,’ which was crazy, but the visit with Doug and Pat and Shawn was Monday through Thursday and Thursday was a normal visiting day back then. And my parents did come and it was wonderful. Maybe one of the best days of my life. Can you imagine how extremely wrung out I was afterward? They were all here together and we spent hours like that just laughing and thanking each other. Even in a place like this you can have good memories.” She adds that Doug has had a stroke and can no longer visit or speak on the phone.

  46

  Then I called Joe Leach. It was easy enough to find him on the Internet. He was living in California, not too many miles from Maryann. I said I was on the jury in the Maryann Acker murder trial and for a minute he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then he said, Oh, it was so long ago. He said he’d seen an article in the L.A. Times a few years ago, but he didn’t really think about it any more. The article was about L.A. County’s jailhouse informant scandal and William was featured prominently.

  “She’s still in prison,” I said.

  And he said, “Well, I hope so.”

  It wasn’t what I expected after reading his testimony. On the stand he had said, “I couldn’t tell what she was feeling inside,” and I had taken that for a sign that he realized she might have been acting under duress, might have been scared, might have been stupid or passive. On the stand, he portrayed William as wild and unpredictable and frightening. I’d assumed that the prosecutor had not asked further questions because she did not want to expose his doubts and I’d assumed that Hioki was not doing a good job of cross-examining.

  It’s possible that the years have hardened Joe Leach.

  It’s possible that I don’t want to know what he would have said if they’d let him say it. His captors had taken his camera and pawned it. But when the L.A. police confiscated William’s small bag, it had a roll of film inside with twenty-four photographs taken with Maryann’s Christmas Instamatic. What were they? I can only guess. A child playing with an inflatable tube on a beach. A row of palm trees reaching like toothpicks for the sky. A slim girl wearing a blue bikini holding her hands in front of her face as if to ward off the painfulness of a flash. Where are the photographs? I ask Maryann, and she says she has no idea. “They were confiscated.” I imagine a picture of William. He’s standing in the Western store at Ala Moana, trying on a hat. It’s a Stetson, very dark, and he’s smiling under it. He’s wearing jeans and a cream-coloured button-down shirt. His hair, under the hat, is brown and slightly wavy. He has sideburns, black shoes, and the look of a desert creature caught in strong headlights. The rest of the pictures? There are three of them, all blurry, of a mongoose standing up on his hind feet. “Oh look, he’s posing for us,” Maryann had chirped on the night they had stayed in a cave at the bay.

  William must have had good memories of this place where he’d come with his other wife and her child, where he’d felt normal for two or three hours as he put on a mask and went out in the ocean to look at the fish. He didn’t know how to swim, but he managed to move around in the water, holding on to the reef. You have to be raised to swim and he was the farthest thing from raised that way. What he had was smarts. What he had was his shitty life, but he’d survived and now he was back here where he’d dreamed about with a new wife and things were working out or they eventually would when he got past the emotional side of his feelings about what happened during the private hours of his life. So when they close up the park maybe they’d just stick around since there was no reason to go anyplace except maybe to eat and sooner or later they’d have to get some cash one way or another. It was private out here between the water and the hills and whatever happens won’t be no big deal to nobody.

  Not Joe Leach. Not Larry Hasker, who is sitting in the Garden Bar two weeks later at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. He’s looking for someone called Red when he notices a man with a certain look. It takes a good eye to see this look and Larry has a good eye. “See a guy with a red beard come through here?” he asks William. It’s a starter. But William doesn’t bite. He’s sitting alone on a bench outside the bar on the open lanai.

  Hasker enters the bar. It’s after ten and Red’s late, or maybe Red doesn’t exist. Maybe it is all a way to catch William. He notices a tall blond. Pretty girl! Offers her a drink. She walks to a table as if she knows where she’s going. Soft hair. Says her name is Carole. “You from around here?”

  “Not really.” She has a slow kind of voice.

  So he guesses. “Not quite Southern.”

  She covers her eyes as if it’s a game. “I’m thinking you’re not local either.” Local. This is the word William is always pushing her to say. He won’t bother with this guy if he’s from here.

  The drinks arrive. Hers is a margarita. She sips at it.

  “Want to dance?”

  But she sees William giving her the signal. “Can you wait for me just a sec? My brother. He’s keeping an eye on me.”

  Outside, William says, “What’s the deal?” and a minute later, Hasker and William are sitting together at the table. Hasker talks about Red and William smiles. The music is loud. William is snapping his fingers and Maryann leans against Hasker. “So how long have you been out here?”

  Hasker feels Maryann’s nearness, smells the pleasantness of her hair.

  William says, “We’re going to a disco. Meet a guy about a music deal.”

  “You’re in music. I figured. Like I’ve got friends in that world.” Hasker asks what disco they’re going to and says maybe he’ll meet up with them later.

  First there was the nice returned missionary and then there was this. He just moved in. He advanced on Maryann’s heart and mind and house and they started to drink and have sex and he was always talking too fast; it all happened too fast. His hands and mouth were all over her. He was living in the place she kept so clean. He made her look at him. Listen to the music he liked. Drink beer. Iron a crease in his jeans. He was almost thirty. She’d been buried in her clean, stupid, sheltered life. He got fired for smoking in the back of the warehouse, but they were getting married; they were going someplace. They drank. They went to bed. He got a job pumping gas. He got fired again. In bed he was too fast, but it was understandable and they did it everyplace on the floor in bed in the car. They drank. They called her parents. He managed it. She was tired from getting up and he’d bother her. He’d call her at work. He’d say get me some money I’ll meet you outside. He’d say get me some money I’m taking your car. He’d say get me some money I’m leaving you. Her parents should have locked her up. He’d tell her to cash a cheque and have money ready when he came by in her car. She couldn’t concentrate. So she quit her job and got another one at a little restaurant in the mall, but he’d stand outside and watch and when he was watching she forgot who she was. It’s hard to believe how she disappeared, but she’d known him a month and they were husband and wife. She had a duty and in Hawaii, when they got off the plane, didn’t he know his way, didn’t he know where he was? He called himself Spirit and she was supposed to carry his knife, which was like a seal, like something more meaningful than the wedding because he thought God did not exist and maybe He didn’t but maybe He did and if she had him back the way he was when he slid up against her those first few days, she wouldn’t care because he made her feel so sure when he did that, when he slid and pushed up against her. Sure of herself.

  At 2:00 a.m. it’s deserted out at Hanuama Bay. The moon is there behind clouds and the stars are reflected in dark, living water. A picture can be made of the sleeping fish, the coral reef, everything alive but asleep, and William tells Larry to get out of the car. There is the sound of water beating against land. Think of it. William was afraid she would go to the police. You could tease God and fool your parents and go home afterward
s, but this was different. To know that you were living your life.

  47

  I had thought of the end of this story as an afternoon on the old courthouse steps, Maryann’s long blue muumuu starched by the trade winds as she stands looking out at the mountains, finally free. Mike Brennan is talking to the intern he’s brought along from California. The two of them are tall and serious amid the various locals who mingle around the courthouse, many of whom are about to make their own pleas. Yes, Maryann is a dream we have dreamed, but instead of coming out of the old courthouse with victory dripping off of us like earned perspiration, we are going into a new circuit court building, wondering if we have identified each other accurately.

  Mike Brennan looks assured, uncompromising, and as smart as I want him to be. Maryann has told me she feels good in his presence and I do too, although, when I speak to him in the hallway, when I slide in behind him as he steps into the courtroom, I have to pretend that I’m filling a necessary place, bearing witness because Maryann isn’t here.

  We’ve entered a panelled room without windows. There is the echo of thunder. The lawyers are saying. “This doesn’t happen. I can’t remember when …” and I think, Not since March of 1982. There was thunder then too.

  Twenty-three years. Even without windows, I can feel the courtroom darken as the other team pulls out its heavy files. Someone named Fudo is going to represent Jan Futa and Colleen Hirai, who was dismissed as the first prosecutor in Maryann’s trial. Could she have questioned the ethics of what the state was willing to do to win?

  Doesn’t matter. They’ll put her away.

  While Fudo and his assistant arrange papers on their table, another man comes in, tall, good-looking, salt-and-peppery Japanese. He has a familiar jutting chin and high cheekbones like a spoon with sharp edges. This must be Stephen Hioki, since he offers his help to Mike Brennan and then takes his leave.