Who Named the Knife A Book of Murder and Memory Hardback - 2007

Excerpt

Chapter One

Murder. In such a place.

From above, from the highway, it looks like a planet must have fallen into it, the round bowl edges of this bay are so perfect. Below the surface of the water, amazing fish can be seen living their lives in the coral. This is a place where children play in the waves, where parents sit on the sand, where people float, looking down. A swimmer can pause, roll over, blink a few times, and look up at the hills that surround this blue water. The hills feel protective, a barrier between the world of invention and this place.

So it must have looked to Larry Hasker in the last minutes of his life. He had been casual with his captors. “So this is a robbery? I can’t believe it.” He got out of the car with his shirt unbuttoned, his rubber slippers moving over the rocks. Up at the cusp, above the parking lot, the terrain is rough. Even through the slippers, he must have felt the jolts of stone and brush and dirt. He had smoked a joint in the car. He was young, twenty years old, and almost relaxed. On a ridge within sight of the highway, he turned and looked down. It was past midnight in the month of June, 1978. The moon was high. It threw its reflected light on the ocean, so that the water looked like metal heated over flame. Molten. He breathed in and reached down for himself, opened his fly. Looking at water and night. The stars were there, too. And his captors.

There is no shame in dying with a shirt open or pants, dying in the act of emptying oneself. In such a place.



The girl who discovered the body was taking a walk before work, noticing the dusty smell of kiawe above the bay, the pungent smell of seaweed, the smell of a place where ocean and land meet. It was early in the morning, and when she saw a slipper lying in the brush, she was not surprised. Near any beach, such a forgotten slipper is not unusual, although this one wasn’t broken; its thong was intact. She saw the slipper and then she saw a human foot covered in flies. It was a Monday morning and nobody was there to hear, but she screamed.

So it begins with a body on the side of the road that leads from Hanauma Bay to the Kalanianaole Highway on the windward side of O’ahu—this story of murder, on the island where I lived. The body was lying twenty-five feet from that highway among rocks, thorns, and brush. The shirt was untorn. There were no scratches, no bruises, no cuts on the flesh. There were just two wounds: one on the right side of his head and one on the outside surface of a leg.

What happens in such a place, on such a beach, is quickly forgotten in any season. What happens can so easily wash away. Even above the tide line, far above it, a third bullet can get lodged in the sand, can be plucked at by birds, can be sent down the slope by a vagrant wind. A body can be ignored until it is past recognition, until its bones and teeth must be studied; it can be eaten; it can merge with the elements; it can be nosed at by wandering dogs. But this is a beach for children and families, a place to be walked along and sat upon. And what is there left of Larry Hasker here? Blood. Piss. A fragment of rubber slipper. He’d stood in the brush above the sea with its luminous sheen. One of his slippers had fallen off. He’d turned, unzipped, and zipped. Then he’d been shot.

Once in an ankle. Once in the head.

Someone, it must have been, with lousy aim.



Chapter Two

In 1978, I was living on the windward side of O’ahu with my two daughters. I was a single mother running a child-care agency for low-income families, and I must have read about the murder of Larry Hasker in the morning paper. Another syndicate killing, I must have thought.

In those days, the morning paper was stuffed in my mailbox before I got up. I had to walk across the front yard in whatever I had worn to bed and step on the sleeping grass, which stung my feet. I’d have made myself a pot of coffee and given myself until ten o’clock to get to work because it was summer and I was my own boss. I’d have sat outside on the patio of the first house I’d ever owned—a house hard-won and loved by me as no other. I’d have sat on one of the two basket chairs and read about the murder and I’d have thought about my father, who had been dead for seven years. I’d have thought about him and about my brother, who had taken me out to Hanauma Bay in the summer of 1958.

Hawaii was still a territory then, not yet the fiftieth American state, and to my vivid fourteen-year-old imagination, it was a magical place with its ancient stone temples called heiau still visible in the tall grass. Skip was stationed in the Coast Guard with his wife and their new baby. He was ten years older than I was, and by the time I could measure anything, he’d left home to study. He would not be a lawyer like our father, or drink highballs, or wear a suit. He would be an architect. He would be artistic. Maybe he took me to Hanauma to teach me courage, because we both knew the brooding temper in our Kansas house.

In those days, the bay formed its own remote reality. There were other swimmers, but not many, and Skip could dive deep with nothing but his mask on, blowing the water out when he resurfaced. The waves pushed and pulled, throwing me against the coral reef, but he told me to relax and breathe, to go with the waves. And once, we were looking down through our masks when I saw something in a crevasse where the water was not even very deep. It was a moray eel curled and ready to strike, with a cold, blank look over an open throat and murderous teeth.



When I married, I moved with my husband to Hawaii, where he had been born and raised. My mother said I had fallen in love with Philip because I wanted to go back; we had tried Massachusetts. We had started in Mexico. We had met at school and I thought we were perfectly matched, now Hawaii had changed. The landscape was full of high rises and highways. It was no longer paradise. During our second summer there, when Philip moved out, when he started another family, I stayed in Hawaii and raised our two girls. We used to go to Hanauma Bay with our snorkels and fins. I have a picture of a birthday party there, with little girls wearing paper crowns.

Now there had been a murder. And within a few days, there were sketches in the newspaper of two suspects: a man and a woman. Not the Hawaii syndicate, after all. But who were they?

Media reviews

"Subtle, never sentimental, exact and terrifying, Linda Spalding is compelled by what she sees and learns, taking the moral disturbances of popular life as her starting point as she examines the blind violence at the heart of things."
--Susanna Moore, author of The Big Girls

"The true mystery here is not about a murder but about the unforeseen sisterhood between a writer and a prisoner. It's about the mirrors we hold up to one another and the risks of accepting what we see. I salute Linda Spalding. Who Named the Knife was not an easy book to write--which is why it makes for a most compelling read, a story told with honesty and a rare vulnerability."
--James D. Houston, author of Bird of Another Heaven

"I've read dozens of courtroom dramas and probably hundred of memoirs, but Spalding's remarkable book takes both of those familiar genres, twists them together, and pulls the resulting cord so taut that you cannot possible stop reading until you reach the last, haunting sentence."
--Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Possible Pursuits

"Spading's strong, elegant prose carries the story along effortlessly... This delicate yet powerful work should find a wide readership."
--Publishers Weekly