Shards (11 page)

After that day, my father and I never spoke. The odd birthday card came, usually signed by
her
, and for my twentieth birthday he had sent me a Swarovski crystal bear—Swarovski was a passion of Claire's, so I knew she picked it out, not him. Every year, I held out hope that he would call on my birthday. My mom sent him emails updating him on my whereabouts, my activities, but he never replied. He and Claire moved to Florida, but we only found that out much later. He hadn't called when I graduated from the academy. He hadn't called at all.

I hadn't seen or spoken to him since that Father's Day almost eight years ago.

“Asshole,” I yelled, not sure if I was addressing Keawe or my father.

To calm myself down I started speedballing—taking Oxycontin and mixing it with meth. I had seized the oxy on a traffic stop, and I took it to try to mellow me out, but it just made me crazier. I'm not an opiate person. Uppers are my thing. I thought I was going to die a couple of times during that weekend because my heart was beating so fast. Finally I got smart and stopped the Oxycontin, but my withdrawals were insane. I stayed home from work on Monday and was really sick. So sick I couldn't even smoke meth for a few days. But in the end I thought,
If I can get off the Oxycontin, I can quit meth any time I want.

Keawe called me on Monday. “Hey,” he said. “I didn't hear from you all weekend. Whatcha been doing?”

“It was my birthday,” I said.

“Oh shit, I forgot!” he said, and I could tell by the spontaneous way he spoke that he was telling the truth. “You must be so pissed at me, Alli. Geez, I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” I said.

“I'll make it up to you,” he said. “I'll get you a present. We'll celebrate.”

“Great,” I said.
Right
, I thought.

•  •  •

Shortly after my birthday, I made a trip home to New Mexico to see my granddad, my mother's father. He was terminally ill with lung cancer. He had been diagnosed in the late fall and had been given a choice: no chemo and he would be dead within three weeks, or chemo and the possibility of six months. We were all happy that he had chosen chemo. We were in month five now, and with no one really able to predict how long he was going to live, I knew I needed to spend some time with him in Albuquerque.

It was the first real break I had taken from work since I started at MPD.

I was high the entire time.

“I need more time, Alli,” Granddad told me as we sat in the courtyard of his house, soaking up some early April sun. He glanced across the courtyard at his studio and nodded sadly. Granddad had been a professor of architecture, but later in his life he had become a painter of some renown.

“I still have ideas for paintings I want to do. There's just not enough time.”

I didn't know what to say to that.

“Do you like your work?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I answered. “I love my work.”

“That's good. Me, I wasted too many years. In my heart I was really a painter. It's important to find out what you are in your heart.”

“I guess I'm a cop in my heart,” I said.

He nodded wisely. “I guess my granddaughter is smarter than
I am,” he teased. “Me, I wasted too much time filling my life with things I didn't want to do.”

It was painful later to think I was high during that time. I knew that this would be the last time I saw him, and I felt such shame as he told me how proud he was of me.
No
, I wanted to say.
I'm not smarter than you, Granddad. I'm a drug addict.

My shame catapulted me into extreme using. I had figured one packet of ice would last me through my whole trip to Albuquerque, but it didn't. After a few days I had to go out looking for dope.

I took my granddad's nice Subaru and drove down East Central, heading into the projects, where I clearly didn't belong. The War Zone, we called it. I found a prostitute who introduced me to a pimp who said he could get me some dope for two hundred dollars. I gave him the two hundred and he gave me a plastic baggie, but when I opened up the plastic bag, I saw that all it contained was the powder residue from crack pipes.

I was so desperate, I snorted the residue. My nose burned so badly I thought I would have to go to the ER. My right eye felt like it was going to pop out of my head.

I drove around a little bit longer, until I saw a woman smoking crack. When I asked her where she got her dope, she introduced me to her pimp, who found me some ice. It wasn't as good as the ice in Hawaii, but it got me through.

Another prostitute introduced me to a guy who gave me dope but also took me to the casino. I wasn't willing to prostitute myself for the drug—I still had money—so I just obliged him by going to the casino with him all night. In the morning I got home just before everyone was getting up. I took advantage of my mom's alcoholism. She would pass out at seven, my grandparents would go to bed at nine, and I would be out and back home in the morning before they got up.

I lost that time with Granddad. I know he would be proud that I'm sober now, but I wish I had been then. Or I could have used that time to talk to him about my addiction. He knew all about addiction.

Granddad had been sober for more than twenty years at this point, but Mimi offered him a martini one night. “I'm sure it's okay,” she said. “It can't matter now.”

“No,” he said. “I don't want to miss a single minute.”

When I left, I gave him the tweed newsboy cap I had been wearing all week. He had admired it. “I don't need it,” I told him. “You have it.” I was pleased that I could give him something, even if it was such a silly thing. He was wearing tracksuits at that time, and the last I saw him, he was wearing a purple velour tracksuit with that tweed cap, sitting at the kitchen table with a blanket on his lap.

I went home to Maui and swore off dope, vowing that Granddad would live and I would get sober. I actually stopped using briefly and started to gain some weight.

Two weeks later, I got the call that Granddad had died. I turned around and headed back to Albuquerque. The department was very understanding. I had already taken time off to visit him, and they were happy to allow me another week to go back to his funeral.

I had some sober time at the funeral. My cousin Ken was high on heroin at the funeral, but not me. I barely fit into my clothes because I was gaining so much weight.

I thought I had beat it. I was hell-bent on living in the right. I was done. I was never going to pick up again.

And I was going to stop my affair with a married man. When I went back to Maui, I planned to break it off with Keawe. I had been so upset that Keawe couldn't come to the funeral and thought,
That's it. He's not here when I need him. Ever. It's over.

But without meth I felt exhausted, tired, emotional. I felt I couldn't handle the situation with Keawe without it. In classic addict behavior, I used Granddad's funeral as an excuse to pick up.

I relapsed pretty hard while I was in Albuquerque that second time. I could only take two hundred out of the ATM every day, so I stole a thousand dollars from my mom and went and gambled. I lost it all and then the next night I stole another grand and won it all back. I spent eight hundred one night on crack and meth with a crackhead and made up some story about how the car got towed and I had to get it out of the yard and pay all these fees.

I came back to Maui after the funeral and really wasn't able to put together much clean time. Maybe a week here or there when I thought there would be a drug test. Or a couple of days. Instead of stopping using, I began to speedball and mix dope.

Things were spiraling down with Keawe, too. My behavior was more erratic. I wasn't generally a yeller, but I started having fights with him, yelling on the phone and calling him names, which is never right to do with someone you love. I made it really difficult for him, and he didn't understand what I was doing.

And then one Monday morning, I walked into a drug test. By this time, I had mapped out the pattern of the department's supposedly random testing—usually every third month, toward the end of the month. Rarely on Mondays. Around then, I would cut back on my using and drink as much water as I could, trying to flush the drug out of my system. Meth withdrawals made me extremely tired, so I would ramp up for them by taking massive quantities of every kind of legal upper. Caffeine pills, NoDoz. So far I had passed all the tests. I started to get nervous. I had been lucky and knew it was only a matter of time before my luck would run out.

This test had come sooner than I expected.

A few hours after the test, I started to hear rumors in the department
that someone had tested positive. I knew it had to be me. I figured the best thing to do was to own up, so I headed down the hall to talk to the chief. My meth paranoia convinced me that this unexpected test was orchestrated all because of me. They knew—everybody knew—and all they needed was proof.

Walking down the hallway, about to be caught, I was in some ways relieved. I would be done. No more lying, no more hiding.

“Hey, Alli.”

I turned to see Slim motioning me over to his desk.

“Did you hear?” he whispered. “Klemm tested dirty.”

“Klemm?” I asked.

Slim smirked. He had never liked Klemm. Across the room I could see the chief at Klemm's desk, motioning him to stand up. Slim and I watched the two of them walk down the hallway past us and into the chief's office. The door closed behind them and we all knew what that meant.

Klemm was one of the Wailuku patrol guys. He was into narcotics work too, and had wanted to get into vice, but he tested positive for ice that day and was forced to resign.

The same drug test that he failed, I passed. Klemm got fired, and within the month, I was promoted to vice.

One Friday morning, I got
called out of patrol to meet with Assistant Chief Patrick. Patrick was an asshole by all accounts, but he ran the vice division of the department so I had worked hard to stay on his good side.

He was smiling when I entered his office.

“Alli, come in, come in,” he said, sounding strangely jolly. “I gotta tell you, Alli, you didn't give the best panel interview—”

“I know, sir. They nailed me with some very difficult questions.” The panel had asked me the HRS number for a Schedule II drug, and I had gotten it wrong. I had walked out of the interview positive that I'd blown it.

“So your interview wasn't so hot,” Patrick said, “but you are the most qualified officer for the position. Your record speaks for itself. I wanted to meet with you personally to make sure that you accept this position.”

“Position?” I said, confused.

“Vice,” he said. “We want you. You want us?”

“Yes. Yes, sir!” It started to sink in: I was being promoted to vice.

“But I need to ask you this. How do you feel about being the only female in the division, Alli?” he asked.

It pissed me off that everyone in the department called me by my first name. They would never do that to a guy.

I tried to answer Patrick's question. “It comes with the territory,” I said. “I was the only female on Lanai. The only female in Lahaina.”

“Lahaina has Peters on patrol.”

“She's been on injury leave since I've been there,” I said.

“Right, plus she's a
tita
,” he said, using the Hawaiian term for dyke. I had met Peters once or twice; she was fairly big and masculine-looking, but I hated the label.

Patrick suddenly became very stern. “I expect a lot out of you, Alli. We've never had a girl in vice before, and you'll need to prove yourself.”

“I will,” I said. I started to launch into a long speech about how this was my dream, how I would do my department proud, how I would—but he cut me off.

“You've got two weeks left in patrol before you're assigned to me,” he said. “The staff doesn't know yet, so you'll have to keep quiet.”

“I got it, sir.”

I walked around with that secret for two weeks. Kid stuff compared to the bigger things I was concealing from my friends and colleagues. It was hardest not to tell Keawe. He had been against my applying for vice right from the start. Vice comes with a bit of prestige and a bigger paycheck, and that wasn't what he wanted for me while he was still a patrolman.

He was the first person I told when Patrick gave me clearance. As I suspected, he wasn't pleased.

“I don't think you can handle it, babe,” he said. “Patrol is one thing, but vice—those are real guys' guys. They're not gonna let you into their club so easy.”

“I'll have to make them,” I said aggressively. His negativity pissed me off. “I'll show them I can be one of the boys.”

To join vice was to move up in the department—literally. The vice office was on the second floor, above patrol, and patrolmen would rarely get to go up there. I was issued a bunch of cool vice equipment, all brand-new, and a Glock .27, smaller and more compact than patrol's Glock .22. All the vice officers and detectives used a .27, and the patrolmen were jealous. Most cops have nicknames for their weapons, and I called my new Glock Gunther.

Vice was such a creative division. You could work as hard or as little as you wanted in vice, but everyone who got promoted to the division was a workaholic like me anyway. I had to show up at the office at eight thirty to appease the brass, but after that my day was mine to plan. Total freedom. Nobody was checking up on me, so I could make my own cases.

And find places to smoke dope with greater ease.

•  •  •

Keawe was right—it was hard being a female coming into the division. Vice guys were beer-drinking, adrenaline-fueled, women-loving men. They accepted me to a certain degree, but at the same time I was always an outsider.