Who Named the Knife Page 17

  Next, Judge Town enters and we are commanded to rise.

  Brennan is trying to establish three things: first, that in 1982, the state failed to provide Maryann’s defence with information about William’s sentence in California; second, that it failed to disclose his jailhouse activities as a snitch; and third, that the state allowed William to perjure himself. Brennan says that Hioki was given an FBI rap sheet on William that was inaccurate. The reason this matters is that Hioki might have argued his case differently if he had known William’s actual sentence. Judge Au might have made his decisions differently and the jury might have weighed William’s testimony differently. If everyone had understood that William had the possibility of parole, they would have understood that he had something to gain by testifying against his wife.

  On the stand, Colleen Hirai remembers nothing so Brennan gives up on her fairly quickly and calls Jan Futa, who prosecuted Maryann in 1982 and who has been fighting off this inquisition for five years. Even waiting to be called, she stood in the hall conferring with her lawyers, black shoe tapping at the polished floor. Wearing a good suit and shoulder-length hair, she is, like all of us, twenty-three years older. The spark is gone. In a surly voice she explains that she is a lawyer in private practice, and, yes, in 1982 she was a prosecutor. But it was a long time ago, she says, eerily echoing Maryann’s words on the stand.

  When Brennan asks if she remembers the trial, she stares at him. “It was a long time ago,” she says again. As he questions her, she insists that she does not remember anything. There are many things she doesn’t remember because it’s hard to fabricate things if there is no basis of truth.

  “If I showed you these documents, would they refresh your memory?”

  “Hmm.” Leaning over. Frowning. “Well, I can’t say whether these are originals …” Futa has been given several months to review the documents. The hearing has been repeatedly delayed. What difference do any of us make in the world? What matters? Two young people were wicked and indifferent and cruel. They harmed and killed. And there is no undoing such things; there is only to recognize and then to reclaim whatever can be saved.

  Maryann’s California case was heard by a Mormon judge who was under investigation for making pornographic phone calls and needed a conviction for his own reasons. Her lawyer had never defended anyone before. There was no jury in that trial and she was not called to the stand. William was still telling her he would “take the fall” and get her clear. He had taken that mysterious bus ride to Yuma after she’d been arrested. He had gone straight to her father. Following his instructions, she had insisted that she was only driving Arauza’s car because her husband had given it to her. And the judge, who admitted that there was no evidence that she had touched the gun that killed Arauza, convicted her for being present when Arauza was killed. The felony murder conviction was Maryann’s, not William’s. But that it was only the beginning of what the jury in Hawaii did not understand.

  Now, Judge Town underlines the situation. “This is a big deal,” he says, looking sternly at the lawyers. He adds that if the state is required to remedy the situation, it may decide to reduce Maryann’s sentence.

  But Brennan draws himself up and insists that they must overturn Maryann’s conviction. Silence. I am the only spectator in the room. No reporter. No one from past or present. Judge Town is a small man with grey hair and a pink face. His voice is slightly falsetto.

  Fudo, who has the face of a predator, says Hioki obviously knew William’s sentence. He had to have known. Why not call him to refute or support …?

  The legal wrangling goes on all day. We had broken for lunch and I’d looked after Mike Brennan and his intern but gone my own way. I felt shy and covert. But in the courtroom, it was frustrating not to be able to interrupt. When Mike Brennan discussed the similar modus operandi between the California and Hawaii murders, he didn’t mention the important similarity between the Leach and Hasker crimes. Same bar, same destination, same tricks. My father would have mentioned it, I was sure, to prove that Maryann was taking directions from William, as Joe Leach had said.

  “Why bother the State of Hawaii with a proceeding that is trying to exonerate someone who was, at the very least, Your Honour, an accomplice to an extremely vicious murder?” Fudo had asked. But he did not use that argument more than once, which was interesting. The state, in 1982, had prosecuted Maryann as the shooter. It would not do to point out her role as partial accomplice now. It would look like the state had prosecuted and convicted the wrong person. “And why dredge up old bits and pieces of evidence that were fully examined to everyone’s satisfaction twenty some years ago?” After all, Fudo implied, if nothing else Maryann went along with this loser. Too bad she’s spending her sorry life in prison, but that’s what happens when you pick someone up in a bar and leave him dead next to the highway.

  Maybe. But doesn’t it matter that she had a fair trial? Doesn’t it matter that William perjured himself when he testified against her, that he was never charged with the murder, that he was the prime witness for the prosecution in spite of his history? Doesn’t it matter that her lawyer never knew that William might have exchanged false testimony for an earlier parole? Doesn’t truth, in its minutest particular, matter? Isn’t that what we are after?

  Or do we allow this conspiracy of silence?

  I had reconnected with Maryann out of guilt, but there was more to it now and the next morning I was at the courthouse in time to buy a coffee in the shop just off the lobby. The coffee was in a pot on a hot plate and the woman who took my coins was blind, which seemed at that moment to be significant. Upstairs, I saw Stephen Hioki and when I introduced myself, he said, “On the jury? Still following the case?” Perhaps he has battled enough windmills. “I don’t remember a whole lot about that trial,” he said, “but I remember my moments with Maryann. I don’t know what it was, but she was different than any other client I ever had.”

  Court was called into session. I was making notes in the old yellow notebook – the smooth yellow surface, the red spine. It was precisely when I realized that I would take it back to Hawaii, that I knew I had come this long journey with Maryann in order to finish the things left undone in my own life. There were blank pages at the back of the book. Bare lines. “The transcripts seem to indicate that I was under the impression,” Hioki was saying, “that Mr. Acker had life without parole. It seems I was interested in impeaching him because he couldn’t have been convicted of felony murder if he was sentenced to life without parole. I was sure he was lying about the convictions because I had researched the law and that sentence would not have applied to that crime.” I could see Hioki as a young man, ardent in his green pants and brown jacket. He thought William was the shooter in California, that he was lying about that on the stand because he would not have been sentenced to life without parole or otherwise. His questions had jumped around, he’d been given an inaccurate FBI rap sheet, but he had made one glaring mistake. I had read the old newspaper articles before I flew to Hawaii for this hearing and on March 24, 1982, a reporter for the Star Bulletin, Hawaii’s evening paper, had reported that William Acker did, in fact, have the possibility of parole. Did the defence lawyer not read newspapers? Could he not have called California to check on William’s sentence as that reporter must have done? An error of omission. An error of enormous consequence.

  “I may have slowed down a little these days, Your Honour,” Hioki noted, looking up at the judge, “but in those days I was relentless. I was passionate about holding the state to its burden of proof. I used up my fees before even coming to trial. There were only three witnesses to the murder and one was dead. I had to do everything in my power to show that Mr. Acker was not credible. I tried to prove his untruthfulness, to show that his version of the murder was false, that Mr. Hasker’s shirt wasn’t torn, that there were two bullets fired, not three. We had ballistics supporting our facts. Larry Hasker was shot from the back to the front at a fifteen-degree angle. But Mr. Acker said
Maryann was facing him and fired three shots. I would have been glad to have a motive for his blaming Maryann. To know that he had the possibility of parole, or to know that he was a jailhouse informant, would have helped my case!”

  No wonder William had sat in the witness stand with a smirk on his face. He had not expected it to be so easy. Even now, his lethal spirit stalked the little courtroom so that the crossfire went on for two more hours until Fudo, who was in a hurry to pick up his daughter at school, said it boiled down to two different counsels having different strategies. Not so, Brennan said, making a final, stunning argument in Maryann’s defence. “Two different strategies?” he sounded astounded. “The fact is,” he said in a gravelly voice, “that there is no evidence in the record that says Hioki did anything for strategic reasons. This is not about Mr. Hioki’s strategy. This is about the state’s obligation. They were there to do justice, to get the right person convicted. And they failed to do that. They failed because they used the testimony of a witness who repeatedly perjured himself and who did so with their knowledge. They failed because they used the testimony of a witness who repeatedly sold himself to prosecutors. They had the obligation to tell defence that their prime witness was a known informant, and that he had turned state’s evidence because he had been sentenced to life with the possibility of parole in California and was hoping to reduce his ultimate sentence.”

  Judge Town had worked with Fudo and Hioki and Jan Futa many times over the years. As he put it, “I’ve had each of you in my courtroom; we know each other well.” It was not pleasant to contemplate wrongdoing on the part of any of these colleagues. There were reputations at stake, including his own.

  48

  I spent a day retracing Maryann’s steps. It was going to be several months before Judge Town made his decision. But there I was, back in the realm of the past, so I went to the street where Maryann and William had briefly lived. The Makiki Arms is gone now, but there are still similar two-storey buildings nearby. I spent a summer in one of them when I visited my brother and his first wife in 1958. Their baby, my nephew, was six months old, and I used to push him around the neighbourhood in his stroller, feeling pleased with my newfound grown-up self. Now there are broken-down cars in the driveway and a tall building taking up most of the yard where I used to hang the diapers when we did the wash. Thurston is on a rise and I used to look down at the harbour, with its ships and the Aloha Tower. How, I wondered, would Maryann ever adapt to so much change?

  The second-floor balcony of the Makiki Arms had run across the front of the building. Underneath, on ground level, were the laundry room and the pay phone and the washing machine where William hid the gun. In front was the parking lot, where he put Larry Hasker’s car when he took him upstairs. A little later – not much later – William and Larry and Maryann came back down. Larry’s hands were tied behind his back and his shirt was riding his shoulders. Larry was saying, “Ah come on, man, are you serious?”

  William told Larry that he was.

  From Thurston and the non-existent Makiki Arms, I drove to the building where Larry Hasker once lived with his sister, Kimberly. It still looms in an ugly way over the main commercial corner near the university, and I had a beer in Puck’s Alley, where I used to go on long, warm afternoons. I thought, Is this Maryann’s past or mine?

  Before I left Hawaii in 1982, I drove completely around the island to say goodbye. It was like drowning – passing the house I used to visit in spite of a kitchen full of rats, the garbage, and the stories of a child punished in the closet. How to explain the wretched pleasure of that nasty bedroom with its tilted bureau mirror, the attraction I had once felt for the man who lived in that filthy place? Then down the road to my best friend’s house, where she lived all alone, where she was raped, where her dog was killed, where the screen porch is something she built by and for herself. Just a shack, now that I look at it, but a room of her own. And farther on to the place where both my parents sat one day, Mother saying, “Let’s have our lunch here.” My father had parked the car and we had pretended happiness. It was the last time I would see him alive.

  Up by Haleiwa, the preschool I visited when I worked in child care. The lukewarm welcome and the hot lunch. I had an office on the second floor of a Congregational church on the outskirts of Kailua. It was an agency that provided federally funded child care to low-income families, some of them local and some remnants of families like mine who had left the mainland during the 1960s. The white women were single mothers like me, divorced, living far from home. The local families were poor but intact.

  My office window overlooked a marsh that had once been part of the sea and on its edge sat the remains of an ancient heiau called Ulupo – a great level platform of stones, very potent, very carefully placed. At night I went back to my children and stared into the darkness of the garden, trying to understand the mysteries of the island, the bloodlines, the descent from gods to mortals, the antagonism against people who come from outside.

  Someday, I told myself, I’ll come back to Hawaii and drive along any street, any beach road and know that I made a difference to this place. I’ll be able to say, here’s X’s house or Y’s. The Buddhist Temple Michael and I visited that day we knew everything. The cove where we swam. And the house of the former prosecutor. The one who said, They’ll put her away.

  Instead, it was another trail entirely that I was following. Instead, I drove to the Hilton, where William and Maryann met Larry Hasker and Joe Leach. The Garden Bar is gone like so much else, but I went out and watched three or four children scraping around in the sand that covered the spot where Maryann had danced with Joe after she ordered her drink.

  Then I had a great desire to see my old house, to see what had become of it and how I would feel standing in the shade of the front-yard tree. It was a fig, with big stiff leaves. “Ours was a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house, no garage, but a covered carport,” Maryann had finally written, trying to describe her childhood home. “The kitchen, narrow and long, was at the front, with a window facing the street above the sink.” I had waited five years for that description, but everything that matters was left out – whatever it was that happened within those walls, and the child, and the reason her need to be needed was so great.

  In truth, the fig tree is gone and it was hard to imagine us there: my girls with long hair and long legs running up the street as if everything – the dolls and stuffed animals, the dog, the friends, and the grandmother – would not disappear.

  On the way to Kailua, I had gone the long way out of Waikiki. The day was beautifully clear, with the hills shouting their greens on the left side of the highway and the ocean swirling on the right. There is the expensive suburb of Black Point and then Kahala and after that I could smell the old, dry dustiness of the soil as I drove beyond houses and gardens and along the barren expanse of rocky beach that stretches to Koko Head, that startling crater that rises up on one side of Hanauma Bay. There is a legend that involves a beautiful girl who is fought over by two young men. Fearing the rivals will harm themselves, she turns herself into this crater, sacrificing her life. Her father stretches out to protect her, forming the arms of Hanauma Bay. There was Larry and William. And Maryann. Bert Bray reaching out to his child but unwilling to sell his house for her. There was another family as well, another child. The night before I’d dreamed about my mother sitting at the table I was trying to set. I was trying to do my best, but her best dishes, the family heirlooms, kept shattering in my hands.

  I drove past Koko Head. In the distance, as I curled in and out of the curves in the road, I caught glimpses of the windward side – Makapu, Lanikai, and the twin islands we once knew like friends. Then I pulled off the road, preparing myself for the sadness I’d feel at the murder site. How eerie and fugitive I felt, as if I should mark the spot with one of those Mexican crosses, or leave a sacred stone wrapped in a fresh ti leaf.

  I got out of the car as Larry and Joe had done and looked down at the bay.

 
It is different now. There are hundreds of people on the sand. There is a building. There is a ticket booth. There is an educational video and an entrance fee.

  Hard to imagine a murder. In such a place.

  Except that up near the highway, there is still the rutted road and those brambly kiawe trees. There is still a drop that hasn’t been smoothed and the spirits that stick to this place, and I could imagine Maryann and her brand-new husband spending the night in one of the hillside caves. In the morning, waking up, feeling the sunrise slippery and fast, did they swim? Did they spend the next hours with the tourists looking at fish or did they climb back up to the highway and wait for the bus to take them back to a day of planning and arguing. In her letters and conversations, Maryann never says what they did. What she says is, if you like who you are now, you have to accept your past.

  At the hearing, when Mike Brennan described the murder of Cesario Arauza to Judge Town, he said it was done “execution-style.” He said Arauza’s arms were crossed over his chest, he was lying on his back, and he had been shot in the head. “Do you think an eighteen-year-old girl is physically capable of that?” The conversation took place during a recess and I was listening, sitting on the sidelines with my notebook, more or less out of sight. Hearing Brennan’s words, I felt real surprise. He wasn’t working to overturn Maryann’s conviction because it was theoretically possible or because he had students who needed the work. Mike Brennan believed in her innocence.

  There was dismay too, which was another surprise. Because if Maryann isn’t guilty, my own guilt is worse.

  Those lost five minutes that cost her life.

  Leaving Honolulu, we took off to windward, as usual, flying over Pearl Harbor and the Aloha Tower and then I could see the palace, white in the sunlight, as if that little monarchy ever stood a chance. I’ve watched the coastline of O’ahu diminish so many times, ever farther and farther away, that from above it looks like the back of my hand, as familiar to me as fingers, knuckles, veins, and wrist. There is the sky and the light and the swallowing sea and the beautiful circular bay and who, in such a severe and archaic place, could kidnap and rob and kill?