Under Radar (20 page)

If I had died and, after ten years in limbo, awoke bodiless at this hotel, spirit witness to my children's new life, wouldn't I look upon their new father and fortune as a gift?

Let me see if this is good or bad.

Tom slept that night at a Little League field, in the dugout along the third-base line. He still had fifty dollars.

He walked back to the hotel and sat at the foot of a banyan tree on the other side of the path from the hotel, where he could see the lagoon pool.

He prayed for guidance. He needed a simple vision, a small plan, a tiny idea, nothing larger than a postage stamp, really, from which to begin his trip back to his daughters. This is a meditation. I will relax my eyes and make no distinction between the metal bands around the palm trees, the light on the eyelashes of the waitress bringing that plate of onion rings to those nanny-attended children, the Hawaiian tenor with the high sweet voice on the bar's sound system, and the woman using her room key as a bookmark before she takes to the water.

Tom walked past the woman's shoes and stopped to tie his laces. He grabbed her key and moved back to the banyan tree, where he waited.

The woman returned from the pool, and Tom followed her back to her room. He rode with her in the elevator to the ninth floor of the west tower. When she turned right, he followed and then walked ahead of her, listening to her steps. She came to her room, W914. She opened the book for the key and swore.

She knocked on the door, and there was no answer.

She returned to the lobby.

Tom used the key to open her door and went into the room.

There was a camera on the desk, loaded with film. He put the camera on a shelf and set the timer, then took
a picture of himself. He finished the roll by taking pictures of the room, the clothes, the safe, the shoes, and then, when the film rewound, put the film in his pocket and left the room.

He had been in the room for three minutes.

His daughters were at the pool again. He hadn't yet seen Rosalie.

Three men sat together under the awnings of a cabana. Tom sat nearby, listening for a name. One said to another, “Bill, you don't know. You just don't know.”

When Bill left, Tom followed him to his room in the central tower, C1200, a suite overlooking the water. Tom went down to the health club, called the hotel operator on a house phone, and said, “Hi, this is Todd at the spa. I have an appointment here for Bill something-or-other in C1200, but he's late. Could you spell me the last name?”

Bill Delantash.

Tom then went to one of the cafés near the pool and sat at the counter. The waiter recognized Tom because he had been hovering in the area for two days. Tom ordered a sandwich and signed for it using the name. He filled in the room number, C1200.

He slept again in the dugout at the Little League field.

In the clothing store, he charged two shirts to Bill Delantash, and a bathing suit, and a hotel robe. With the hotel robe, it was now safe for him to sit on a chaise by the pool. The men were still there, still in the cabana.

Rosalie and the girls passed him on their way into the ocean. He took his time and went to the beach, where Rosalie and the girls stood in the water up to their waists. The girls faced the ocean, and Rosalie completed the triangle, facing the hotel. Her eyes skimmed over Tom. He felt her disregard for him, another single man at the beach watching her sexy daughters, his gaze an attack on their beauty. He wanted to say hello, to unmask himself right there, tell her the truth about himself, about his travels. He wanted to forgive Rosalie her rage at him, absolve her of the time she wasted hating him, he wanted to let her know that absolution would mean permission to know that her pain needed no excuse, only that the pain had long passed its profit. She would have the right to bring him forward into the world and make him confess his sins again, without the guarantee of her reprieve. She could say No. What then? If he begged her once in public to forgive him, and she said No, and then he gathered another audience, distinguished citizens all, their friends and family, and begged her again for mercy, and she said No, and then he found another court of opinion and recited all of his sins, all of his offenses, all of the ways that he knew his actions had defamed his family, ruined his daughters, shattered the vessels of the world in which they lived, and Rosalie, upon hearing his humble agonized plea for release from his punishment, yet one more time coldly said No, well then, would the sin be upon her shoulders? And so he forgave her that sin now and wished the reciprocal turn from her.

Which did no good, of course, since the dialogue was all in his head, while Rosalie looked through him to the hotel, in expectation, Tom guessed, for her husband (yes, her husband, there was the gold band on her fourth finger), due any minute now for their late-afternoon swim in the ocean.

Tom withdrew from the beach. The curse of his journey, his powerful face, forced him to hide. If he stayed for too long, his singular beauty would stay with Rosalie, and were she to see him again, suspicion of the truth, that he was following her, would cause her alarm.

From the promontory in front of the next hotel, obscured by bushes, Tom watched Rosalie's husband run into the ocean and grab her. They kissed. His daughters splashed water on the two of them, and then Rosalie's husband returned the splashes. The new husband and the daughters then swam together away from the beach. The reef, a long way off the shore, kept the waves from breaking closely, and the three swam safely, lazily, joking.

There was nothing to interpret.

Tom returned to the dugout to sleep. He sat up for the night, marveling at life's parade of dilemmas, this infinite battalion of choice and consequence.

If I … then she … then they …

If I … then he … then she … then they …

The next morning, Tom was in the lobby early. Already a fixture in the hotel, he was careful not to stay for long in any one zone, and to make few demands on services, eating lightly. Rosalie's new husband crossed the
lobby and chatted with the people working at the front desk. When he passed, Tom asked a bellman, “Is that the manager?”

“He's Mr. Cohen, the owner.”

“John Cohen?”

“David.”

“Ah,” said Tom.

Tom called to make an appointment to see him in two days. He explained to Mr. David Cohen's secretary that he was calling from Los Angeles, that he was with a film production company and wanted to talk about using the hotel as a location for a movie. The secretary asked if he would speak instead to one of Mr. Cohen's managers, but Tom allowed that he would need only a few minutes of Mr. Cohen's time, after which he would approach the manager, but since Mr. Cohen would have to approve this anyway, could he at least explore with Mr. Cohen the possibility of using the hotel as a location. “I only need five minutes.”

She put him on the schedule.

For the next two days, Tom avoided the hotel and Lahaina, anyplace where Mr. David Cohen might see him. He left the film of the room he had invaded to be developed by the hotel's photo store.

On the day of the meeting, he showered at a public beach, dressed in the bathroom, and walked to the hotel. Along the way he bought a portfolio case at a stationery store for twelve dollars. He put the photographs inside,
along with the receipts for everything he'd charged at the hotel.

The hotel's administration offices were on the second floor of the west tower. Tom introduced himself as Lyle Monaster. He was kept waiting for half an hour, which he expected, and then admitted to David Cohen's office.

Cohen greeted him with the affable expectation of a busy man. The office was quiet. The room had the restrained pastels of the lobby. There were photographs on the wall, an exhibition of Cohen's life, with a suite of pictures taken with Rosalie and the girls, starting, Tom estimated, two years after he went to prison.

“David Cohen.”

“Lyle Monaster,” said Tom.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you.”

“You're from Hollywood.”

“No.”

“I was told you want to use the Palace as a location for a movie.”

“Let me show you something.” Tom laid out everything from his new portfolio, the photographs of the hotel room and all of the receipts.

Cohen looked first at the receipts and then the photographs. He reacted calmly. Of course Tom's manner and face belonged to a man deserving respect, but still, he had just dealt a puzzle.

“Lyle,” said Cohen, “I think you're trying to help me.”

“I'm trying to show you something.”

“You're from the security company.”

“No. I work alone,” said Tom.

“Tell me what all of this means.”

Tom thought of Jan Dodge's last words to him, about the fairy tales and the precious objects that have meaning only as each solves a problem in the story.

“These are pictures of a room I broke into using a stolen key. These are receipts for meals and clothes that I charged to someone's room. I haven't stayed here. I just walked in from the beach.”

“Why did you do this?”

“It's my business.”

“You're not telling me everything.”

“No.”

Cohen called his secretary. “What do I have next?”

She listed his appointments.

“Call them and reschedule. Tell them I'm sorry. Don't explain.” When he finished with his secretary, he asked Tom, “Now what?”

“Your security is excellent. The amount of money you'd have to spend to prevent this kind of theft is more than you would lose without my help.”

“But what about the cost to public relations?”

“Well, that's always the problem, isn't it?”

“And you're still not telling me who you really are.”

“Why do you suspect me?”

“I don't,” said Cohen. “Actually, I feel very close to you.”

“I'm glad for that.”

“I don't believe what you're telling me about yourself, but I trust you. Why?”

“I don't know.”

“But you know what I'm talking about, don't you, Lyle?”

“I think so.”

“What is it about you? People tell you everything, don't they?”

“Some do.”

“More than some.”

“You've committed a crime, haven't you?”

“I don't know how to answer that question.”

“Yes, you do. Tell me the truth.”

“I'm here to prevent crime.”

“Crime that's too small for me to bother pursuing but enough to hire you to stop it, yes? You didn't learn about this kind of crime in a book, did you?”

“I studied.”

“You studied on the job. And you've been in jail.”

“How does it show?”

“You're as clean as a nun. That's how I know. Men out of prison are often beautifully clean.”

“Were you in jail?”

“Close enough. I'll ask you again. Have you ever committed a crime?”

Tom said nothing, not to hide the truth but to give Cohen a taste of unsettling silence.

“Never mind,” said Cohen, “I see that you want me to go first. Fine, then. Here's my story. I used to be a doctor. Not many people know this. This was fifteen years ago. I had finished my residency, in orthopedics. Someone approached me and asked if I wanted to make a lot of money quickly. I asked him how he dared to approach me this way, and he said that I was the type who said yes. He described the situation to me, and it made sense. So I said yes, because I knew that just to be chosen by this man meant that I was already guilty.

“He set me up as one piece of a large insurance fraud. None of us—and we were doctors and lawyers—knew the full extent of the crime, we all knew a few others in the conspiracy, but only the leader, the man who selected us, had the whole picture.”

“And your wife, did she know?” Tom nodded to the wall of pictures.

“I wasn't married then.”

“Does she know now?”

“Yes, she knows everything. I told her everything.”

“Were you arrested?”

“God, no.”

“You said you'd come close to jail.”

“If I'd been arrested, I would have been convicted. That's close. But I wasn't arrested. I prospered. I made millions. Not then, but from the investments. The man who organized this made it a condition of the conspiracy
that we stop after we had reached a certain amount of money. When that milestone passed, the thing ended. None of us could carry on alone, because none of us knew how all of it worked. My job was to provide reports of broken bones. Someone else filed claims with insurance companies. I never even knew which insurance companies were paying. I think he was working with someone inside a company. Any of us might have attempted a crime like this, but none of us had the nerve to do more than our small part. Now you know.”

“What is it about the photographs I took and the meals I stole that made you want to tell me your story?”

“I don't know. I just did. I felt that if I hadn't, you'd have found out anyway.”

“So you carry the guilt.”

“For a long time, my bad feelings about what I'd done overwhelmed me. Not the terrible paranoia of being arrested. The statute of limitations has passed, and the organizer died.”

“He died?”

“He had a bad heart. He came to see me, I referred him to a specialist.”

“So now you're free.”

“Not really. I'm not a doctor anymore. I couldn't practice medicine after the scam wrapped up. I tried, but having used my art for crime, I couldn't retrieve it for its original purpose. I couldn't trust myself with my patients, with the choices I had to make, to help them. I didn't believe my diagnoses. I was acting the
part of the doctor. I was trained in surgery, but I couldn't make the incision.”

“How long after this stopped did you quit?”

“It was a few years. By then, some investments I made started to grow. The market was good in those days. I looked for a business, one thing led to another, and I bought a few hotels. Now I have ten. This is the flagship. We lived around the country for a while, but now we're here, my family and I. I give a lot to charity,” said Cohen. “This doesn't atone for my crimes, not completely, but it helps.”