“Was before,” Frawley said. “We not giving you chronological sequence. Like Makaha—he lived in the nice hotel there for a long time—luxury, writing checks. He had a big life.”

“What about his family?” Olive said. “A wife?”

“You gotta ask Max.”

“He had one?”

“Maybe still has one,” Frawley said.

“Plenny wahine,” Fonoti said. “The wahine like him.”

“Because of his money?”

“Because he’s a good guy,” Frawley said in a stern correcting tone.

In that mood, Frawley was the dominant CPA again, his pen tapping a ledger, niggling at a detail, not the fat man in the dirty T-shirt but an authority figure, strict and forbidding. Olive was reminded that the man he had been was the man he was now, in spite of torn clothes and sweaty arms and tangled hair. He still saw the world in terms of “receivables” and “passive income” and “evidential matter.” Beneath the dirt and sweat and cracked fingernails, a certified public accountant.

“I wish Max was here now, so I wouldn’t have to explain. You’d see, you’d know.” Frawley hitched in his seat as though suddenly finding the car too small for his body, his knees jammed against the glove box. “Past couple of years he came, he went. But never mind—good guy, pono guy.”

Back on the highway, in traffic, halted behind a bus picking up passengers, Olive said, “Where do you think he is now?”

Frawley folded his arms and frowned and did not look at her. He said, “I think I showed you enough. Pull over here at the stop, after the bus go.”

“What about the rest?”

“Max can show you the rest.”

In the backseat, Sharkey began to stammer, half-formed words like urgent breaths failing in his throat.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Olive said, hesitating, then pulling forward and parking at the forward end of the bus stop.

A berm at the roadside formed the edge of a dune, and when Olive switched off the engine, killing the fan, they sat in heat and glare. Even with the windows open the car was hot. Just ahead, beside the berm, an old woman trawled through a trash barrel, selecting soda cans, while two boys on dirt bikes seemed animated by having something to watch—the car of gabbing people, pretty haole woman at the wheel. A shirtless man wearing a wool hat and surf shorts lay on the sandy berm, his body perfectly still, only his toes twitching, tickling the air.

“Not a lot of time,” Frawley said mimicking Olive’s English accent, smacking his lips, fingering a cigarette, preparing to light it. “You know we say, ‘Try wait’?”

Sharkey said, “What she means is—”