"What did you think?" Alison asked.
"What did I know? Anyway, time flew by. I got nervous; I thought maybe
I would never do anything but drive a cab. I got a job managing a
tennis club on the other side of the pali--a good job--a house, a
truck, a pool in which Kate could learn to swim, acres for her to run
around in.
"Sally operated the snack bar; Kate went to kindergarten. Mornings, I
walked into Kailua to drink coffee and write."
"Just like this morning," Alison said.
"Yes. I was trying to understand Honolulu . . . as though it could be
grasped and set, presented, like a pearl." Joe sipped his whiskey. "I
became friendly with a regular at the Rob Roy Coffee Shop, an
ex-machinist who had fled Chicago to start over in Hawaii. 'You gotta
meet Mike,' he told me one day. 'You guys would get along.' I asked him
about Mike. 'Mike's the cat burglar. You know, the one they're always
writing about in the paper."'
"I didn't want any trouble with the law, but, as usual with me,
curiosity won out. Several nights later Mike and I were seated at a
table in Crazy Horse, a topless bar that catered to Marines. He was
short and stocky, intense. After a couple of beers, I said, 'So, I
heard you were the cat burglar. That right?'.
"'Guess so,' he said. I asked him how that had happened.
"'It's so damned easy,' he said. He had been adopted by a well-to-do
couple. The relationship hadn't worked out as they had hoped. He told
me about robbing Aku over and over. Aku was a radio personality. Mike
said he couldn't stand him. Mike had never been caught, even though the
cops, by this time, knew. The island is small; word gets around.
"'One time,' Mike said, 'I was going along an upstairs hallway and I
looked through a door: a little girl was sitting up in bed watching me.
I didn't want to scare her--you know how they are, big eyes and all--so
I went in and sat on her bed. I told her not to worry; I was just doing
my job, looking for things at night. I told her that her job was to get
a good sleep, have good dreams, and be ready to have a great day when
she woke up. She settled back down and smiled, you know . . . I patted
the bed and left. Some kind of bird let go with a giant scrawk, and I
got the hell out of there, down over the lanai in back.'
"'You're not going to believe this, Mike,' I said. I told him about the
six foot bird cage in the atrium of that Kahala beach house and the
little girl who stuck to her story."