Phoenix
I'm reviewing the Schedule C filing when my father's number comes through.
It's seven in the morning and I've been at my desk since five-thirty, which has become the rhythm of the last three weeks. The cascade analysis sits open on my left monitor and the board member files on my right. There’s a legal pad with twelve questions in the middle.
I've been working through them since Monday, half of them are answered and half of them are resulting in new questions.
Nathan is somewhere in the building. I heard him come in at six but the floor outside my office is empty and gray in the early light.
"Come by the house," my father says. "There's going to be someone here at ten."
I wait for more. He doesn't give it.
"Who?" I ask.
"I'll tell you when you get here."
I look at all of the work on my desk and say, "I'll be there at nine.”
The drive takes forty minutes in early morning traffic and I spend it not thinking about what I already suspect.
I run through the board member situation instead—the retired CFO from Chicago, the real estate developer from Dallas, the narrow angle that Nathan identified in Schedule C of the Harwick operating agreement.
We have a meeting with the Chicago board member on Thursday.
If it goes well, we move on the Schedule C provision before Richard understands what we're doing.
If it doesn't go well, we're back to the supermajority problem and sixty-two million sitting frozen while Richard waits for us to call.
We haven't called.
Three weeks of silence. Richard's note in my desk drawer, face-down, the handwriting steady and unhurried.
Every day we don't respond is a day he wonders what we know.
That's what my father said and I believed it for the first two weeks and I'm starting to believe it less now, because Richard Hale spent thirty years being patient and two weeks of silence is nothing to a man like that.
I pull through my parents’ gates at eight fifty-three and park in the circular drive.
My father is at the south wall when I come through the gate, his back to the drive, coffee in hand, looking at the roses. He doesn't turn when he hears my car. I cross the garden toward him.
"Hawaii State Police," he says. "Cold case division."
I look at the side of his face. He's still watching the roses.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
"I'll explain tonight." He turns the coffee cup in his hands. "This morning I need you in the room and I need you to say nothing unless our lawyer tells you to."
I want to know more. What is Dad even talking about? I’m tired of getting the clean version of every disaster. But when I ask him to elaborate, he shuts me down.
I look at the wall behind him. At the house. At the study window where in forty minutes a detective will sit across from my father and ask about something I don't have a name for yet.
My father has a past. I know the broad strokes.
He grew up in Charlestown, in the bad part of town.
He had some sort of jewelry operation. He changed his name in high school to put distance between himself and what happened.
I know Richard Hale came from the same place.
These are all the things that Dad has managed to move on from but where do Hawaii and this detective fit in?
Cold case division means something that didn't get resolved. A file that sat in a cabinet somewhere for years while other cases moved to the front and this one collected dust, and then someone pulled it back out. Someone decided it was worth a plane ticket from Honolulu to Los Angeles.
People don't fly from Hawaii for nothing.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
My father looks at the roses. "Finish your coffee."
That's not an answer. That's the absence of one, which, with my father, amounts to the same thing.
I drink the coffee. I know it’s very good yet I can’t really taste it.
Detective Raymond Kahale is from the Hawaii State Police, cold case division, and he looks exactly like a man who has spent twenty years reopening investigations that other people stopped caring about.
He’s in his mid-fifties, compact, and dressed in a gray suit that fits well.
He sets a legal pad on the desk, then a recorder, positioning it between himself and my father with the ease of someone who has done this so many times he doesn't think about where things go anymore.
I sit in the chair to the right of my father's desk. Our lawyer, David Park, sits to the left. The study smells like the coffee nobody is drinking, three cups going cold on the side table.
Kahale opens his legal pad and uncaps his pen and looks at my father with the patience of a man who has learned that silence does more work than questions.
"Mr. Crawford, how long have you lived in the Los Angeles area?"
"Thirty-one years," my father says.
"And before that?"
"Hawaii. Maui, primarily. Seven years."
"What brought you to Hawaii originally?"
"Business opportunities. I was building the early stages of what became the Crawford Group. Hawaii was a good base at the time."
Kahale writes something down.
"During your time in Maui, did you have occasion to interact with the local business community there? Other entrepreneurs, investors, that sort of thing?"
David Park shifts slightly in his chair but says nothing. My father looks at Kahale. "I interacted with a range of people. It was a small business community."
"Did you know a man named Carl Metz?"
There it is. The room goes very still—not visibly, not in any way a camera would catch, but I feel it.
"I knew the name," my father says.
"In what capacity?"
David Park leans forward. "Mr. Crawford had business interests in Hawaii during that period. He's happy to speak in general terms about that context."
Kahale's eyes stay on my father. "General terms are fine for now."
"He ran operations out of Maui," my father says. "I was aware of him. We weren't close."
"Were you acquainted?"
"We met. Once or twice."
"In what context?"
"Business from before I built the Crawford Group. I've been open about that history in previous investigations."
Kahale nods slowly, turning a page on his legal pad. "Mr. Crawford, Carl Metz was found dead in his home in Kihei. The original investigation ruled it a homicide. The case went cold two years later. We've reopened it."
"I saw that in the news," my father says.
"Where were you on March 14th, 2011?"
"I'd need to check my records. David?"
David Park opens his briefcase. He has the records.
"Mr. Crawford was in Los Angeles on that date," David says, sliding a page across the desk. "He attended a board meeting at Crawford Group headquarters. There are six witnesses and a recorded minutes document."
Kahale takes the page. Reads it. Makes a note.
"Did you have any contact with Metz in the weeks before his death?"
"Not that I recall."
"Phone calls? Emails?"
"No."
"Did you have any knowledge of who might have wanted to harm Mr. Metz?"
My father looks at Kahale steadily. "Carl Metz ran criminal operations out of Maui for twenty years. I imagine the list of people who wanted to harm him was substantial."
Kahale almost smiles. "Fair point." He writes something down.
"Mr. Crawford, I want to be direct with you.
This is a preliminary conversation. You're not being charged with anything.
We're speaking with a number of people who had contact with Metz during that period.
" He closes his legal pad. "I may need to speak with you again. "
"Of course," my father says. "David will coordinate scheduling."
Kahale stands. He takes his recorder off the desk and puts it in his jacket pocket with the same deliberateness he brought to placing it there. He looks around the study once—the books, the photograph on the wall—and then he thanks us for our time and David walks him out.
My father and I sit in the study and listen to their footsteps walk down the hall. The front door. A car starting in the circular drive.
My father picks up his coffee and drinks it cold.
"The alibi holds," I say. It’s not a question.
"Yes."
"David prepared it before today."
"Yes."
I look at the study door, still open, the hallway beyond empty. "You knew this was coming."
"I suspected it was possible," he says. "When Richard's position became clear, I considered what evidence he might have and what uses he might make of it." He sets the cup down. "This is one option."
I look at my father across the desk. Sixty-two years old, straight-backed, the white shirt barely creased despite the hour and the morning he just had.
"Come back tonight," he says. "After dinner. We'll talk."
I spend the afternoon at the office, not working. I sit at my desk and look at the cascade analysis and the board member files and don't read any of it. Nathan brings me three things that need decisions and I make all three without remembering any of them afterward.
At five I call Jade.
"How was your day?" she asks. It's what she asks when she already knows the answer and is giving me the opening to say it.
"Long," I say. "I'll be home late. Don't wait up."
A pause. "Phoenix."
"I'll tell you when I'm headed back. I promise."
She's quiet for a moment. "Okay," she says, and I hear in it everything she's not asking, all the questions she's learned to hold until I'm ready to hand them over.
I hang up and sit in my office until the city outside goes from gold, to gray, to dark. Then I drive back to my parents’ house.
The housekeeper lets me in without comment. The house is quieter than this morning. Dinner is done, the kitchen dark, Mom’s light is on in the sitting room down the hall. She looks up when I pass the doorway and gives me a brief hi before going back to her book.
My father is in the study with one lamp on.