Damned in Paradise

DAMNED IN PARADISE

A Nathan Heller Novel

The Memoirs of Nathan Heller

True Detective

True Crime

The Million-Dollar Wound

Neon Mirage

Stolen Away

Carnal Hours

Blood and Thunder

Damned in Paradise

Flying Blind

Majic Man

Angel in Black

Chicago Confidential

Bye Bye Baby

Chicago Lightning (short stories)

Triple Play (novellas)

DAMNED IN PARADISE

A Nathan Heller Novel

MAX ALLAN COLLINS

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright ©2011 Max Allan Collins

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by AmazonEncore

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN: 978-1-61218-100-4

To Michael Cornelison—whose friendship isn’t just an act

Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

“What the public wants in the way of books on crime is detective stories that appeal to the passions. The public has so long been taught to hate and judge that it seems hopeless to try to teach them any sane and humane ideas of conduct and reasoning.”

—Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life

“Tongue often hang man quicker than rope.”

—Charlie Chan

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

I OWE THEM ONE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

1

Poised at the rail of the steamship Malolo like an Arrow shirt ad come to life, the handsome devil in black tie and white dinner jacket gazed contentedly at the endless shimmer of silver ocean under an art moderne slice of moon.

Occasionally a mist of spray would kiss the rugged planes of his face; occasionally he’d receive an even better kiss from the stunning young society deb snuggled at his arm. She had Harlow’s hair and a bathing beauty’s body, nicely evident under the deep blue skin of her evening gown; the cool trade winds on this warm night perked the buds of her breasts under the sheen of satin. Stars winking above were echoed by diamonds at the supple curve of her throat and on one slender wrist.

She was Isabel Bell, a name that rang twice, a niece of Alexander Graham Bell—meaning she had the kind of money that could travel long distance.

He might have been a wealthy young man from the East Coast; one of the four hundred, maybe—old family, old money. With those cruel good looks he might have belonged to some other element of Cafe Society—a stage or screen actor, perhaps, or a debonair sportsman.

Or a playwright, a man’s man who had chopped down trees and fought bulls and ridden tramp steamers and come back worldly wise beyond his years, penning a Pulitzer prize-winning effort about man’s inhumanity to man, and he would be damned if he would allow those Hollywood infidels to destroy his masterpiece. Not him, an American grassroots genius who had earned the right to hobnob with the elite—even to snuggle and, rumor has it, sneak into the stateroom of a certain Isabel Bell after hours, for some high-society intermingling.

Or perhaps he was a suave detective on his way to a distant tropical isle, having been engaged to solve a dastardly crime perpetrated against some lovely innocent white woman by evil dark men.

Of the hooey you’ve just endured, the closest thing to the truth is, believe it or not (to quote an American grassroots genius named Ripley), the last.

The “handsome devil” at the rail with the frail was only me—Nathan Heller, scion of Maxwell Street, on leave from the Chicago Police Department, on the most unusual assignment a member of that city’s pickpocket detail had ever stumbled into. The crisp white jacket—like the steamship ticket that had cost just a little bit less than my yearly salary—had been provided me by an unlikely patron saint who also resided in Chicago.

The shapely Miss Bell I’d managed to pick up on my own devices. She was under no illusions as to my social standing, but seemed to have a certain fascination for my tawdry line of work. And I was, after all, twenty-seven years old and a handsome devil.

So the real lowdown is…Isabel was slumming—and me?

Damned if I wasn’t on my way to paradise.

Several weeks before, an unexpected phone call from an old family friend had taken me away from a job that already had me way the hell off my Chicago beat. In the early stages of the investigation into the kidnapping of the twenty-month-old son of aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, the involvement of Chicago gangsters was strongly suspected; Al Capone, recently incarcerated for income tax evasion, was making suspicious noises about the snatch from his Cook County jail cell.

So for most of March 1932, I acted as liaison between the Chicago PD and the New Jersey State Police (and Colonel Lindbergh himself), working various aspects of the case in New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C.

But by early April, my initial involvement in that frustrating episode (about which I have written at length in a previous memoir) had started to wind down. When a phone call to the Lindbergh estate summoned me for luncheon at Sardi’s, a restaurant in the heart of midtown Manhattan’s theatrical district, I was relieved to be taking a break from a frustrating, heartbreaking dead end of a case.

I left my fedora with the redheaded doll at the hat check stand, and was led by a red-jacketed waiter through a high-ceilinged, open-beamed room that was lent a surprising intimacy by its soft lighting, warmly masculine paneling, and walls arrayed with vivid, full-color celebrity caricatures.

Some of the caricatures were alive. Over to one side, George Jessel—in the company of a blonde chorine—was pronouncing a eulogy over the remains of a lamb chop. Walter Winchell was holding court in one of the reddish-orange booths, his mouth machine-gunning remarks to a packed table of rapt listeners, mostly attractive young women. Barbara Stanwyck, her light brown hair boyishly bobbed, delicately pretty yet projecting the same strength in private as on the screen, was in a tête-à-tête over drinks with a balding older gent who was probably an agent or producer or something. Jack Dempsey—didn’t he have his own restaurant?—was wooing a cutie over cutlets.

But the most vivid living caricature in the room came not from Broadway or Hollywood, or the worlds of press or sport, rather from a distant prairie way station called Chicago. His back to the wall, he sat on the inside of a half-circle booth whose white linen tablecloth was set not just for him, but for two expected guests.

Even seated, he was an impressive figure, a big bucket-skulled broad-shouldered train wreck of a man in an unmade bed of a gray suit, his loose excuse of a bow tie dangling like an absurd noose; his hair was gray, too—what there was of it, combed in transparent disguise over his baldpate, a thick forelock straying like a comma down over his right eye, punctuating a craggy, deeply grooved face characterized by razor-keen gray eyes and Apache cheekbones.

Clarence Darrow was buttering a roll. There was nothing methodical about it; strictly slapdash. The seventy-four-year-old household word of an attorney glanced up at me with an impish smile and, though we had not spoken since my father’s funeral over a year ago, said as casually as if I’d seen him this morning, “You’ll forgive my not rising. My legs aren’t what they once were, and I’m preparing this exhibit for my esophagus.”

“If Ruby saw that,” I said, referring to his doting wife and self-proclaimed manager, “she’d object.”

“Overruled,” he smiled, and he chomped down the roll.

The room was a din of clattering china and silverware and raging egos. The perfect place for an intimate conversation.

Sliding in next to him, I nodded toward the place setting opposite me. “We expecting a third?”

Darrow nodded his shaggy head. “Fella named George S. Leisure. Wall Street attorney, Harvard grad. He’s a law partner of Wild Bill Donovan’s.”

“Ah,” I said. “So that’s how you knew where to find me.”

Donovan, a Congressional Medal of Honor-winning war hero, was a pal of Lindbergh’s and had been involved on the fringes of our efforts to locate the stolen child.

“Donovan’s firm was recommended to me,” Darrow said, talking with his mouthful of roll open, “when Dudley Malone had to bow out.”

As slick as Darrow was rumpled, Malone was almost as famous a trial attorney as Clarence himself, and had worked at his side on a number of cases, including the Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee, in which Darrow had made a monkey of William Jennings Bryan, further cementing the national fame he’d gained by defending the teenage “Thrill Killers” Loeb and Leopold back home in Chicago.

“Bow out of what?” I asked.

“Little case I’m considering.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting back into harness, C.D. Didn’t you retire? Again?”

“I know you confine your reading material to dime novels and Sherlock Holmes,” Darrow said, slyly wry, “so I would imagine you missed it, when it made the newspapers…but there was a little incident on Wall Street, a while back.”

I grunted. “I heard you got hit pretty hard in the Crash. But I thought you were writing now…. And aren’t you a hot ticket on the lecture circuit?”

He grunted back at me; his was more eloquent than mine. “This so-called depression has dwindled even those meager avenues of revenue. Absurd, publishing an autobiography in an age when only a mystery story has a chance to be a bestseller.”

“You’ve been involved in more than your share of real-life mystery stories, C.D.”

“I have no interest in distorting the facts of my life and my work into any such popular fiction.” He began buttering another roll; he looked at it, not me, but the half-smile that began digging a deeper groove in his left cheek was all mine. “Anyway, son, there’s more to life than money. I would have hoped you’d have learned that by now.”

“I learned a long time ago,” I said, reaching for a roll myself, “that for a man who despises capitalism, you have a more than grudging admiration for a dollar.”

“True,” he acknowledged, and chomped off another bite of buttered roll. “I’m like all humans—weak. Flawed.”

“You’re a true victim of your environment, C.D.,” I said, “not to mention heredity.”

He laughed, once. “You know what I like about you, son? You’ve got wit. And nerve. And brains. Not that those items will ease your suffering to any noticeable degree, in this sorry state of existence that burdens us so.”

C.D. had the most cheerfully bleak outlook on life I’d ever encountered.

“This isn’t about money at all,” he insisted. He squinted one eye, conspiratorially. “But don’t tell Ruby I said so—I have her convinced that our financial plight is the sole stimulus behind my stirring from self-imposed hibernation.”

“What’s really behind it?”

His shrug was grandiose. “Boredom. Loafing as an ideal is one thing; as a practice it’s quite something else. Four years of freedom from work may sound attractive. But think of four years of monotony. Four years of stagnation.” And now a grandiose sigh. “I’m tired, son—tired of resting.”

I studied him as if he were a key exhibit in a trial that could go either way.

“If you’re talking to lawyers the likes of Malone and Donovan,” I said, “this ‘little case’ must be pretty big.”

The gray eyes twinkled; he was like an immense wrinkled elf. “Big enough to shoulder that little Lindbergh matter you’ve been looking into off to the side of page one.”

I felt a chill, and it wasn’t from the ceiling fans.

Leaning forward, I said, “You’re kidding, right?…Not the Massie case?”

The half-smile blossomed into full bloom; he looked different than I remembered him from my childhood: that upper plate was a lot more perfect than his real teeth had been.

“I’ve never been to Honolulu,” he said, as if we were discussing the merits of a travel brochure and not a notorious criminal case. “Never been to that part of the Pacific. I hear it has unusual charm.”

From what I’d read, there was nothing charming about the Massie case: Thalia Massie, the wife of a naval lieutenant stationed at Pearl Harbor, had been abducted and raped; she had identified five “natives” as the assailants, and the men were arrested—but the trial resulted in a hung jury.

Thalia Massie’s mother—a Mrs. Fortescue, something of a society matron—had, with her son-in-law Thomas Massie’s assistance, engineered the kidnapping of one of the alleged assailants, hoping to make him confess; but he had been killed while in their “custody,” shot to death, and now Mrs. Fortescue, Lt. Thomas Massie, and two sailors they’d recruited to help them on their misadventure were to stand trial on a murder charge.

The Lindbergh kidnapping had indeed been edged out of the tabloid limelight by the cocktail of sex, violence, and racial turmoil that was the Massie case. The Hearst papers were reporting a rate of forty rapes against white women per year in Hawaii, and painted a picture of a “deplorable” situation in America’s “Garden of the Pacific.” Good citizens all around the nation were abuzz about the stories of bands of native degenerates who waited in the bushes to leap out and ravage white women. Editorials were calling for stern official measures to curb these sex crimes; headlines cried out of MELTING POT PERIL and labeled Hawaii a SEETHING CRATER OF RADICAL HATE. News stories out of Washington reported talk of martial law coming from Congress and the White House.

In short, the perfect case for Clarence Darrow’s comeback.

Shaking my head, I said, “Defending the rich again, C.D.? Shame on you.”

A chuckle shook his sunken chest. “Your father would be disappointed in me.”

“He didn’t mind when you represented Loeb and Leopold.”

“Of course not. He was an anti-capital punishment man himself.”

With one exception, I thought.

His smile was gone now. He was gazing into a sweating water glass as if it were a window on the past. “Your father never forgave me for supplementing my efforts on behalf of coal miners, anarchists, Negroes, and unionists with clients of…dubious distinction.”

“Gangsters and grafters, you mean.”

He raised an eyebrow, sighed. “A hard man, your father. Moral to a fault. No one could live up to his exacting standards. Not even himself.”

“But the Massie case…if what I’ve read is even close to true, you’d be a natural for the other side.”

A frown creased the craggy face. “Don’t insult me, son. The case does not exist in which Clarence Darrow would stand for the prosecution.”

But if one did, it would be the Massie case.

I asked, “How are your friends at the NAACP going to—”

“I have friends in organizations,” he said curtly, glibly, “but no organization is my friend.”

“Swell. But isn’t this Mrs. Fortescue…is that her name?”

Darrow nodded.

“Isn’t this Mrs. Fortescue from Kentucky or Virginia or something?”

“Kentucky.”

“And she orchestrates a kidnapping that results in the fatal shooting of a colored man who raped her daughter? Doesn’t that put the Great Friend of the Colored Man square on the side of lynch law…?”

“That’s uncalled for,” he rasped. The gray eyes were flaring. “I have given more of my time, and money, to the Negro cause than any other white man you, or anyone, could name. Don’t question my convictions on the race issue.”

Darrow was getting touchy in his old age; he’d always been testy.

“Aren’t you raising the question yourself, C.D., just by taking this defense?”

He sighed, shook his big bucket head, the gray comma over his eye quivering. “What you fail to grasp, Nathan, is that I don’t blame those who have been embittered by race prejudice. Bigotry is something that’s bred into a man.”

“I know, I remember. I heard you lecture often enough, when I was a kid. And back then it sounded pretty good to me—‘No one deserves blame, no one deserves credit.’ But me, I like to pretend I have some control over my life.”

“Nothing wrong with pretending, son. It’s healthy for a child’s imagination.” He waved a red-jacketed waiter over. “Would you tell Mother Sardi that Mr. Darrow would like two cups of her special coffee?”

“Yes sir,” the waiter nodded, with a knowing smile.

Then Darrow turned his attention back to me. “When I was first approached with this matter…frankly…I did turn it down because of the racial issue—but not out of moral indignation.”

“What, then?”

He shrugged; not so grandiosely, this time. “I was afraid that if my clients expected me to argue on their behalf by invoking the supposed inferiority of the colored races, they would be…disappointed. I let my prospective clients know that I would not allow myself to argue a position in court that was at variance with what I felt, and what I had stood for, over all these years.”

“What was their response?”

Another little shrug. “They wrote me that they thought I was right in my position on the race question, and that they wanted me to maintain that attitude in court. And that, furthermore, complete control over their defense would be mine; I would call all the shots.” And yet another little shrug. “What could I do? I took the case.”

The waiter brought over two cups of steaming black coffee. Darrow smacked his lips and snatched his cup right off the waiter’s tray. I sipped mine; it had something in it, and I don’t mean cream or sugar.

“Brother,” I whispered, and tried not to cough. “What did they spike that with?”

“Something brewed up last night in a bathtub in Hell’s Kitchen, no doubt.”

Funny thing about Darrow: I didn’t remember ever seeing him take a drink, before Prohibition. Back in the days of the Biology Club, the “study group” Darrow and my father belonged to, jugs of wine would be passed around and Darrow always waved them off. Liked keeping a clear head, he said.

Once the government told him he couldn’t have a drink, he couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

I took another sip, a more delicate one this time. “So—where does a Chicago cop fit in with your Hawaiian case?”

“You’re on leave of absence, aren’t you?”

“Not really. On assignment is more like it.”

His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I can get you on leave of absence. I still have a few friends at City Hall….”

That was an understatement. He’d defended crooked politicos in both Mayor Thompson’s and current Mayor Cermak’s administrations, and plenty of administrations before that.

“I thought you hated detectives,” I said. “You’ve done your own legwork, ever since…”

I let it hang. Back in 1912, Darrow had nearly been convicted of bribery on the evidence of a private dick he’d hired to (if the dick’s testimony could be believed) buy off jury members. Many of Darrow’s leftist pals had dumped him, thinking he might have plea-bargained his anarchist defendants out to soften the blow of the inevitable bribery trial.

My father was one of the few friends who had stuck by him.

Ever since that time, Darrow was widely known to do most, if not all, of his own investigative work. He liked talking to witnesses and suspects himself, gathering evidence, gathering facts. He had a near-photographic memory and could interrogate casually, conversationally, without taking notes, before or after the fact.

“I told you,” Darrow said gently, “my legs aren’t what they used to be. Neither is this, I’m afraid….” And he tapped his noggin with a forefinger. “I’m afraid that, out on the street, my mind might not click with the old vigor.”

“You’re looking for a leg man.”

“More. A detective.” He leaned forward. “You deserve better than a life on the…” And he spoke the words like bitter obscenities. “…police department. You deserve a better destiny than that shabby circle can give you…. When you were a boy you wanted to be a ‘Private Consulting Detective,’ like Nick Carter or your precious Sherlock.”

“I make out all right on the force,” I said, trying not to sound as defensive as I felt. “I’m the youngest guy who ever made plainclothes….”

And I let that hang.

We both knew how I’d managed my quick promotion: I’d lied on the witness stand to let a Capone-selected patsy take the rap for the Jake Lingle shooting.

“I’m not a judge,” Darrow said gently. “I defend. Let me be your defender. Let me parole you from a life sentence of empty corruption.”

I swallowed. That eloquent son of a bitch. I said, “How?”

“Walk away from that graft-ridden pesthole of a department. Your father hated that you took that job.”

“He hated me for it.”

He shook his head, no, no, no. “No, I don’t believe that, not for a second. He loved his son, but hated this bad choice his son made.”

I gave him a nasty smirk. “Oh, but C.D.—I didn’t make that choice, it chose me, remember? Environment and heredity ganged up on me and made me do it.”

The smile he bestowed on me in return was plainly patronizing. “Ridicule me, if you like, son…but what you say has truth in it. Outside forces do shape our ‘destiny.’ So, all right, then—prove me wrong—make a choice.” He leaned forward and there was fire and urgency in the gray eyes. “This case, this Massie matter, it’s no isolated instance. My lovely Ruby doesn’t know it yet, but her husband is getting back in the game.”

I blinked. “You’re going back into full-time practice?”

He nodded slowly.

“Criminal and radical law?”

He continued to nod.

“You’re saying you would take me on as your full-time investigator?”

And still nodding.

“But C.D.—you’re going to be seventy-five before the month is out.”

“Thanks for remembering, son.”

“No offense, but even Clarence Darrow can’t live forever…”

“Perhaps not. But two or three years of working as Clarence Darrow’s ace investigator would be a splendid foundation for either a private practice, or a similar relationship with another top attorney…wouldn’t you say, son?”

I had thought about leaving the department and putting out a private shingle; I had thought about it more than I dared tell Darrow. The stigma of how I’d got my detective’s shield was like a mark of Cain, even in a corrupt cesspool like the Chicago PD; especially, there…. Every time I turned around some dirty cop assumed I was like him, and could be trusted to cover some shit up, or would jump at a chance to go in on some lousy scam or another….

“I still have an obligation to Colonel Lindbergh,” I said.

“And I’m a week away from leaving for Honolulu. You have time to think it over.”

“What does it pay?”

“A fair question.” He gestured with an open hand. “For this initial assignment, what I had in mind was making sure the PD kept you on salary during your leave of absence. Look at it as a vacation with pay.”

“As opposed to looking at it as you getting my services for free.”

“I thought we’d agreed that money wasn’t everything.”

Then Darrow settled back, and his eyes shifted. I turned to look at what he was looking at, and saw that the same waiter who had led me over was now guiding our awaited guest to Mr. Darrow’s booth: a tall, slender gent in a dark blue suit that would have cost me a month’s pay, and a lighter blue about-a-week’s-salary tie. His eyes were like cuts in an oblong face dominated by a strong nose and a wide thin mouth that exploded into a winning smile upon seeing Darrow.

Who half-rose to meet our distinguished, enthusiastic guest and his eagerly extended hand; the old boy seemed vaguely amused as the younger man worked his arm like a water pump.

“Glad you could make it, Mr. Leisure,” Darrow said quietly.

“You know,” Leisure said, grinning, shaking his head, “I thought this might be a practical joke.”

“What? Sit down, please, sit down.”

Leisure, who had not yet acknowledged my presence, or my existence for that matter, slid into the booth opposite me.

“Well, when you called this morning,” Leisure said, “saying you were Clarence Darrow, and wanting to meet me at Sardi’s for lunch, I…frankly, my friends know what an admirer of yours I am. They’ve heard me say how ‘one of these days’ I’m going to get back to Chicago—I attended the University of Chicago as an undergrad, you know—and how I was going to look you up and talk with you, the greatest man in my chosen profession, one on one.”

“I’m flattered,” Darrow said. “This is Nathan Heller. His late father ran a radical bookshop on the West Side, near where I used to live. I’m sort of an eccentric uncle to Nate, I’m afraid.”

“He used to be an eccentric rich uncle,” I said, “till the Crash.”

Leisure, clearly embarrassed, half-stood and reached his hand across the booth to shake my hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude, Mr. Heller. I’m…it’s just…well, frankly, I’m a huge fan of Mr. Darrow’s.”

“Careful,” I said. “C.D.’ll hit you up for the check—even if he did invite you.”

“I’d be glad to pay,” Leisure said.

“Nonsense,” Darrow said. “Let’s order, and then we can talk….”

He waved the waiter back over. It was amusing to see how flustered this urbane Wall Street attorney was around his idol. And somehow I had a hunch, even if Darrow was picking up the check, this was one lunch Leisure was going to pay for….

“I’m about to try a case in Honolulu,” Darrow said, picking at his plate of broiled kidneys, Irish bacon, and boiled Brussels sprouts. The Sardi’s menu was an unlikely combination of English dishes and Italian; I was having the spaghetti and so was Leisure, though he was barely touching it.

“As a matter of fact,” Darrow continued, “I’m trying to convince Nate to come along as my investigator…. He’s out here working on the Lindbergh case, you know.”

“Really,” Leisure said, suddenly impressed. “Tragic goddamn affair. Are you a private operative, then?”

“Chicago PD,” I explained. “Liaison with Colonel Lindbergh. Because of the Capone linkup.”

“Ah,” Leisure said, nodding. The Chicago gangland aspect of the case had been widely publicized.

“I’m hoping Nate will take a leave of absence for a month and work with us,” Darrow said.

Leisure’s narrow eyes narrowed further; but what little could be seen of them gleamed at the possible meanings of the word “us.”

“At any rate,” Darrow continued, “I’m about to try this case in Honolulu, and I understand you successfully handled the Castle family’s litigation there last year.”

“That’s right.” Leisure was clearly pleased, and a little amazed, by Darrow’s knowledge of his work.

Chewing a bite of kidney, Darrow said, “Well, I’ve never tried a case there, and I thought perhaps you’d be willing to talk to me, tell me something of the nature of the procedure in that jurisdiction.”

“Why, I’d be more than happy to…”

“Clarence!”

The eyes of this jaded, celebrity-strewn eatery were turned upon the jaunty little figure, sharply attired in gray pinstripes with gray and red tie and matching gray spats, who was striding through the room like he owned the place.

He didn’t, but did—for the time being, anyway—own the town: he was Jimmy Walker, a sharp-featured Damon Runyon character who happened to be mayor.

“What a nice surprise!” Darrow again half-stood, and shook Walker’s hand. “Can you join us, Jim?”

“Maybe just dessert,” Walker said.

Big-shot Wall Street lawyer or not, Leisure was looking at this casual encounter between the mayor of New York and the country’s most celebrated criminal lawyer with wide-eyed awe. I was impressed by how cocky and cool Walker was when everybody knew he was currently under investigation for incompetence and graft.

A waiter had already brought a chair over for Hizzoner, and Darrow made introductions. Mentioning my connection with the Lindbergh matter caught Walker’s attention and the mayor was full of questions about the case, and about Colonel Lindbergh. When it came to Lindy, the mayor seemed as starstruck as Leisure over Darrow.

All talk of Hawaii and lawyering got sidetracked, while we talked Lindbergh and ate cheesecake.

“This graveyard ransom drop,” Walker was saying. “It was a complete hoax?”

“I’m not at liberty to divulge certain aspects of the case, Your Honor,” I said, “but, frankly—between us boys—it doesn’t look good.”

Walker shook his head, gravely. “I feel for Slim,” he said, meaning Lindbergh. “Celebrity ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, kids, lemme tell ya.”

“Short of getting a table without a reservation,” Darrow said, “I can’t think of a single advantage.”

“There’s one helluvan idea,” Walker chimed. “Why don’t we catch the matinee over at the Music Box? Of Thee I Sing—hottest ticket in town—but I’ll betcha a buncha celebrities can wangle seats!”

Darrow turned solicitously to Leisure. “Could you get away for the afternoon, George?”

“Certainly,” Leisure said.

So in the company of the dapper little mayor—who left his limo and driver at the curb on West 44th, proceeding with no retinue other than Darrow, Leisure, and myself—we cut down Shubert Alley over to the Music Box on West 45th.

This was my first Broadway show, but I’d seen snazzier productions on Randolph Street. It was a silly musical comedy about a presidential race; there were some nice-looking girls, and Victor Moore was funny as a dippy Vice President. Nonetheless, mediocre as it was, it remains one of the most memorable shows I ever attended—though that had nothing to do with what went on, onstage.

The mayor, like a glorified usher, had led us to our seats in the front of the orchestra, and a ripple had gone through the audience that turned into a near roar. Walker grinned and waved at the crowd, but it wasn’t him the audience was reacting to, even though the orchestra was graciously playing the theme song Walker had penned himself (“Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”).

The fuss was over Darrow—he’d been recognized.

Soon the old boy was swamped with autograph-seeking admirers (Walker seemed mildly miffed by the lack of attention), and this went on till the lights dimmed and the overture began.

I was sitting next to Darrow who was sitting next to Leisure who was sitting next to the mayor. Throughout the entire play—which I understand was a Pulitzer prize-winner by George Gershwin, though I couldn’t hum you a song from it if you put a gun to my head—Darrow sat whispering to Leisure. Their sotto voce dialogue continued through intermission to the finale, as Darrow filled the young lawyer in on the facts of the Massie case, as well as his theories and plans concerning same….

Mayor Walker ducked out before the final curtain call, and as we were walking out onto West 45th Street, where a cool spring breeze nipped at us, Darrow was saying, “You know, George, I’ve been retired from practice some time now, and haven’t been regularly engaged in courtroom work for several years…”

“There’s no better man for this job.”

“Well, thank you, George, but I’m afraid I’m getting on in years…” Darrow stopped, flat-footedly, as if he had suddenly run out of gas. “Frankly, I would be very pleased to have a younger man accompany me on this trip. I wonder…would it be possible for you to go to Honolulu with me?”

“I would be honored and thrilled,” Leisure blurted.

“Of course, I have to warn you that the fee involved will not be great. In fact, I can promise you little more than your expenses…and the experience of a lifetime.”

“I see…”

“Will you be my associate counsel, sir?”

Leisure thrust his hand out. “With pleasure!”

The two men shook hands. Leisure said he would need to inform his partners, and Darrow requested that Leisure—and his wife, if he so desired—join him in Chicago within a week, to make final preparations; they would talk on the phone in a day or so, so that Darrow could book passage.

Back in Sardi’s, at another booth, with Leisure on his way home, Darrow and I had coffee again—unspiked, this time.

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“It was a good show,” Darrow said.

“It was a good show, all right, and I’m not talking about Of Thee I Sing, baby. Not a moment of which you witnessed, by the way.”

Darrow just sipped his coffee, smiling.

“How much was Dudley Malone going to soak you as co-counsel?” I asked him.

“Ten grand,” Darrow admitted.

“And you got one of the top lawyers on Wall Street to do the job for you, free.”

“Not free. Expenses, and probably a modest fee. And priceless experience.”

“He’s not exactly a damn law clerk, C.D.” I shook my head, laughed. “And how’d you manage getting the mayor to drop by?”

“Are you suggesting that was prearranged?”

“Playin’ Walker for a sucker, aren’t you, C.D.? I bet that poor bastard thinks if he gets on your good side, you’ll defend His Honor at the inquiry into his administration.”

Darrow shrugged. Definitely not a grandiose shrug.

“Does Gentleman Jimmy know you’re going to be in Hawaii when he comes under the gun?”

“The mayor of New York stops by for cheesecake and a pleasant social afternoon of theater,” Darrow said, “and you make a conspiracy out of it.”

“How much are you getting?”

“For what?”

“For what do you think—the Massie defense.”

He thought about ducking the question, but he knew enough not to lie to me. I was a detective; I would find out, anyway.

The piercing gray eyes had turned placid as he said, casually, “Thirty thousand—but I have to pay my own expenses.”

I laughed for a while. Then I slid out of the booth. “Tell you what, C.D. See if you can swing that leave of absence for me, and I’ll think about it. But I want a hundred bucks a week, on top of my copper’s pay.”

“Fifty,” he said.

“Seventy-five and full expenses.”

“Fifty and full expenses.”

“I thought you were the friend of the working man!”

“I am, and we are both trapped in a bad, unfair system, stranded on this speck of mud, floating in an endless sky. Fifty and full expenses is as high as I’ll go.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “After all, you can’t help yourself—heredity and environment have conspired to turn you into a stingy, greedy old bastard.”

He tried to look hurt. “I picked up the check, didn’t I?”

And then he winked at me.

2

On the train, as our four-thousand-mile journey got under way, I did my best to sleep through the two and a half days from Chicago to San Francisco. My tour of duty on the Lindbergh case had left me wrung out like a rag, and some of the reporters tagging along after Darrow (they were aboard for the duration, steamship tickets and all) had got wind of what I’d been working on, which made me more popular with the press than I cared to be.

“This is like a damn campaign special,” I told Leisure in the club car of the Golden Gate, where I sneaked rum from a flask into both our empty coffee cups.

Leisure’s wife, Anne—an attractive brunette in her thirties—sat with Ruby Darrow, playing canasta at a table nearby. Ruby, auburn-haired, vivacious, was full-figured but not matronly, a young-looking fifty-some years of age.

“I know,” Leisure said, nodding his thanks for my contribution to his cup, “and at every whistle-stop there’s another horde of reporters waiting.”

I smiled a little. “But you notice C.D. hasn’t given them a thing on the Massie case.”

Omaha was a case in point. Changing trains there, out on the platform, the old boy had been swarmed by reporters hurling questions about the Massie affair; hot words and phrases—“rape,” “murder,” “lynch law,” “honor slaying”—peppered the air like buckshot.

Darrow had turned his piercing gray-eyed gaze loose on the crowd, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and said with a gash of a smile, “Imagine that—a notorious ‘wet’ like me, stranded temporarily in the heart of ‘dry’ country. Nobody to talk to but upstanding moral folk.”

Several of the newshounds took the bait, and goading questions about Darrow’s anti-Prohibition stance overlapped each other till he stilled them with a raised palm.

“Is there a man here who’s never taken a drink?”

The gaggle of reporters grinned at him and each other, but not a man would admit to it.

“Well, then, what’s your problem?” Darrow growled. “Don’t you want anybody else to have any damn fun?”

And he’d got on the train.

As I sipped my rum from the coffee cup, Leisure was frowning; this was our second day of rail travel and he seemed uneasy.

“Trouble is,” Leisure said, “Mr. Darrow hasn’t said anything to me about the Massie case, either. I get the feeling everything he knows about our clients, and their situation, he whispered to me back at the Music Box theater.”

“You probably hit that dead center.”

“I mean, he clearly has his wits about him—look at the way he finesses these reporters—but he is an old man, and…”

“You wish he were more concerned about preparation.”

“Frankly, Nate—yes.”

“George, get used to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“C.D. flies by the seat of his pants. You know him by his reputation. I’ve seen him in action, lots of times in debate situations, a few times in court.”

“He’s brilliant in court—I’ve read his summations…”

“His summations are brilliant—and mostly pitched right off the top of his head.”

“That’s ridiculous…how could anyone…”

“Search me. The words just come tumbling out of the old boy. But you might as well brace yourself: he won’t develop his defense strategy until he’s seen the prosecution in action. He waits for them to make mistakes, and goes from there.”

“That’s goddamn dangerous.”

“That’s goddamn Clarence Darrow.”

I had never seen San Francisco before, and once I’d arrived, I still hadn’t: the city’s legendary fog was in full sway that afternoon, as the train pulled into the Ferry Building station where the foot of Market Street met the Embarcadero.

Despite the fog, or perhaps aided by its mystery, the looming luxury liners docked at the pier were a breathtaking sight, even for a jaded Chicago boy. Against an aural backdrop of clanking massive chains, groaning pulleys, gruffly shouting stevedores, and a bellowing mournful foghorn came the towering apparitions of a steamship city. Emerging from the mist were the red-and-white regalia of a French liner, the billowing flags of an Italian ship, and most of all the pebbled white hull of the Malolo, only one of its twin funnels, bearing the Matson Line “M,” vaguely visible.

Nearly six hundred feet long, eighty-some feet wide, the Malolo was a hungry whale welcoming wealthy Mr. and Mrs. Jonahs up into its innards. Trooping up its gangway they came, the best-dressed damn tourists you ever saw, tuxes and top hats, gowns and furs, often followed by entourages of servants and companions. Mostly older than a kid like me, but a few of them were in my age range if not my social circle; some were honeymooners, though not necessarily married. The Smart Set. Smart enough to still be rich, post-’29, anyway.

At the dock, just before we boarded, a pasty-faced navy lieutenant in crisp dress blues came up to Darrow and saluted; it amused the old boy. In fact, it amused all of us, the Leisures, Ruby and Clarence, and me, clustered together in defense from the fog.

“At ease, sailor,” Darrow said. “I’d imagine you’d be Lt. Johnson?”

“Yes, sir. I arrived from Honolulu on the Malolo this morning, sir.” The young lieutenant handed Darrow a legal file, one of those cardboard expanding jobs, tied tight in front; the lieutenant’s manner was so grave the thing might have contained military secrets. “I trust these documents will satisfy your requirements.”

“I’m sure they will, son. You don’t look old enough to be either a sailor or a lawyer.”

“Well, I’m both, sir.”

“Good for you.”

“Admiral Stirling sends his regards.”

Darrow nodded. “I’ll thank him for these, and give him my own regards, personally, in a few days.”

“Very good, sir.” Lt. Johnson returned the nod and disappeared into the fog.

“Something pertaining to the case?” Leisure ventured, hope dancing in his eyes.

Darrow said, matter of factly, “Transcript of the rape trial, the Ala Moana trial, they call it. Also some affidavits from our clients.”

Leisure grinned. “Splendid!”

“You have more faith in documents than I do, George,” Darrow said. “We’ll have to size our clients up, face to face, to know whether we’re in the clover, or in the soup. Speaking of which, let’s get out of this pea soup and into the lap of luxury.”

Darrow and Ruby went up the gangway first, with the Leisures and me following.

“Why’s everybody dressed to the nines?” I asked Leisure.

“So they won’t have to change,” Leisure said. “Formal dress at dinner, almost immediately after we board.”

I winced. “Formal dress?”

“Didn’t bring your tux along, Nate?”

“No. But I brought both my ties.”

Soon we were up on deck, lined along the rail, but no one was seeing us off, and if anyone had, they’d have been shadows lost in the fog. No bon voyage, here. So I took my leave of the Darrow party and got a steward’s help in finding my quarters.

In my cabin—Number 47, right across from First Class, where the grown-ups were staying—I found formal attire awaiting me on a hanger—white jacket, black tie, white shirt, black trousers, even a cummerbund and, tucked in a pocket, cuff links. Clarence Darrow had provided; he may not have been a fiend for preparation, but the absolutely necessary arrangements got made.

As if by magic, my bag had beaten me aboard: it was already on a luggage rack just inside the door. The cabin itself would suffice, particularly since it was larger than my one-room apartment back at the Hotel Adams, with considerably classier furnishings: bamboo bed, bamboo writing table and chair, cut flowers in a vase on the bamboo nightstand. The lighting had a soft, golden, nightclub aura, courtesy deco fixtures that echoed the leaf design of the green and black carpet, and the windows—that is, the portholes—had half-shutters. Unlike the Hotel Adams, where I shared facilities with other “guests,” I had a bathroom to myself, tub and all.

So what the hell, I took a bath; with luck, no one would notice one was missing.

The ship cast off as I was bathing—there was a lurch that sent my bathwater sloshing—and then the engines settled into a steady throb and I just soaped and soaked as the ship and I enjoyed friendly waters.

Before long, wearing formal attire for the first time in my young roughneck life, I went wandering smoothly down a wide stairway into a movie set of a dining room, a vast hall of glossy veneers, chrome trim, deep-pile carpeting and over six hundred wealthy passengers. Plus one pauper. I informed the maître d’ I was with the Darrow party, and he put me in the charge of a red-jacketed waiter, who bid me follow him.

None of the Haves seemed to notice a Have-not was strolling in disguise amongst them, as they sat chatting and chewing at elegant round tables whose white linen tablecloths were arrayed with fine china, crystal, and gleaming silverware.

I leaned in and whispered in Clarence Darrow’s ear: “You look like the head waiter at the Ptomaine Hilton.”

Darrow craned his big shaggy head around. “You look like a bouncer at the best bordello in Cicero.”

Ruby said, “Clarence, please!” But it was, as usual, a good-natured scold. She was in a white-patterned navy silk dress with a cloth corsage and a navy felt hat with a dip brim; nice as she looked, she was underdressed for the room. The Darrows shopped at Sears.

Leisure, looking dapper in his own white jacket and black tie, half-stood as I took my place at the table; his wife looked lovely in a black chiffon frock with a Spanish-lace bodice, her hat a matching tam turban with jaunty bow. The Leisures shopped Fifth Avenue.

I still shopped at Maxwell Street, but old habits are hard to break.

The two attractive lawyers’ wives were no competition, however, for the newest member of our party, a woman-child with a heart-shaped face blessed with china-blue eyes, button nose, and Clara Bow Kewpie lips, haloed by a haze of blond, near-shoulder-length waves.

For a fraction of an instant, and a quick intake of breath, I thought she was nude: the satin gown encasing her high-breasted slender form was a pale pink, damn near the shade of her bare arms, its halter neck coming to a point at the ruby brooch at the hollow of her throat.

Best of all, the chair awaiting me was next to this vision of youthful pulchritude.

Ruby, her mouth twitching with amusement at my open admiration for the girl, said, “Isabel Bell, this is Nathan Heller—my husband’s investigator.”

“Charmed I’m sure,” she said. She didn’t look at me.

Isabel Bell was studying a menu whose cover depicted a slender island beauty with blossoms in her hair; the glowing airbrushed blues and yellows and oranges were a dreamy promise of the Polynesian paradise presumably awaiting us at Oahu.

Darrow said, “Miss Bell is Thalia Massie’s cousin. I’ve invited her to join our little group—she’s on her way to lend her cousin some moral support.”

“That’s swell of you,” I said cheerfully to this beauty who had not yet deigned to cast her baby blues upon me. “Are you and Mrs. Massie close?”

“Langouste Cardinal,” she said, still gazing at the menu. “That sounds yummy.”

I took a look at the menu. “I was hoping for lobster, on a fancy barge like this.”

“Langouste is lobster, silly,” she said, finally looking at me.

“I know,” I said. “I just wanted to get your attention.”

And now I had it. Whether she’d been pretending not to notice the best-looking (and one of the few) unattached males in the room, I can’t say; but those big blue eyes, and long natural fluttery lashes, were suddenly locked on yours truly.

“Very close,” she said.

“Huh?”

With a snippy sigh, she turned her attention back on the menu. “Thalo and I, we’re very close…. That’s her nickname, Thalo. We practically grew up together. She’s my dearest friend.”

“You must be torn up about all this.”

“It’s been simply dreadful. Ooooo…coconut ice cream! That ought to get us in a tropical mood.”

I could have written her off right then as a trivial shallow little creature. But because she was probably no older than twenty, and a product of her heredity and environment, I decided to cut her some slack. Her pretty puss and swell shape had nothing to do with it. Or everything. One of the two.

“Actually,” I said, “Hawaii isn’t really tropical.”

She looked at me again; she may have been shallow, but those blue eyes were deep enough to dive into. “What is it, then?” she challenged.

“Well, while the Hawaiian Islands do lie between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, they simply aren’t sultry or hot. There’s always a breeze.”

Darrow said, “Mr. Heller is right. A land of no sunstroke, no heat prostration—just trade winds sweeping in continuously from the Pacific.”

“From the northeast, more or less,” I added sagely.

“This is my first trip to the Islands,” she admitted, as if ashamed.

“Mine, too.”

She blinked, cocked her head back. “Then what makes you so darn knowledgeable?”

“The National Geographic.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“What do you think, sister?” I asked.

There were smiles all around the table—except from Miss Bell. In fact, she didn’t speak to me again through dinner; but I had a feeling she was interested. Cute stuck-up kids love it when you needle them…unless they’re completely hopeless and humorless. In which case, even a pretty puss and swell shape wouldn’t make it worth the trouble.

We were halfway through our coconut ice cream when Leisure—who’d seemed distracted throughout the endless sumptuous courses of dinner—asked Darrow, “When you’ve had a good look at those transcripts and affidavits, could I have some time with them?”

“Take ’em tonight,” Darrow said, waving offhandedly.

“Stop by my stateroom, take ’em away, and pore over ’em to your heart’s content.”

“I’d like a look at them myself,” I said.

“You can have ’em after George,” Darrow said magnanimously. “I love to be surrounded by well-informed people.” He turned to his wife, next to him. “They’ve a full orchestra and a nightclub, dear…and there’s no Prohibition at sea. A fully appointed bar awaits us.” He patted her hand and she smiled patiently at him. “What a wonderful, decadent place this is. You up for some dancing?”

We all were.

The ship’s cocktail lounge—the size of which redefined the meaning of the phrase—was a streamlined moderne nightclub ruled by indirect lighting and chrome trim; with its cylindrical barstools and sleek decorative touches, we might have been on the Matson Line’s first spaceship.

The dance floor was a glossy black mirror so well polished, remaining upright was a challenge, let alone exhibiting any terpsichorean grace. The orchestra had an ersatz Crosby, and, as I danced with Ruby Darrow, he was singing Russ Columbo’s tune “Love Letters in the Sand” while a ukulele laid in the main accompaniment.

“They seem determined to get us in the island mood, don’t they?” I asked.

“When are you going to ask Miss Bell to dance? She’s the prettiest girl here, you know.”

“You’re the prettiest girl here…. I might get around to it.”

“You’ve danced with me three times, and Mrs. Leisure four.”

“Mrs. Leisure’s pretty cute. The way her husband’s all caught up in this case, maybe I can make some time.”

“You’ve always been a bad boy, Nathan,” Ruby said affectionately.

“Or maybe I’m just playing hard to get,” I said, glancing over at Miss Bell, who was dancing with Darrow, who was windmilling her around and occasionally stepping on her feet. She was wincing with pain and boredom.

I felt sorry for her, so when they played “I Surrender, Dear,” with the would-be Crosby warbling the lyrics, I asked her to dance.

She said, “No thank you.”

She was sitting at our table, but everyone else was out on the dance floor; I sat next to her.

“You think I’m Jewish, don’t you?”

“What?”

“The name Heller sounds Jewish to you. I don’t mind. I’m used to people with closed minds.”

“Who says I have a closed mind?” She turned her pouty gaze out on the dance floor. “Are you?”

“What?”

“Of the Jewish persuasion?”

“They don’t really persuade you. It’s not an option. It comes with the birth certificate.”

“You are Jewish.”

“Only technically.”

She frowned at me. “How can you be ‘technically’ Jewish?”

“My mother was Irish Catholic. That’s where I got this Mick mug. My father was an apostate Jew.”

“An apost…what?”

“My great-grandfather, back in Vienna, saw Jew killing Jew—over their supposed religious differences—and, well, he got disgusted. Judaism hasn’t been seen in my family since.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s true. I even eat pork. I’ll do it tomorrow. You can watch.”

“You’re a funny person.”

“Do you want to dance or not? Or did Darrow crush your little piggies?”

Finally she smiled; a full, honest, open smile, and she had wonderful perfect white teeth, and dimples you could’ve hidden dimes in.

It was the kind of moment that can make you fall in love forever—or for at least as long as an ocean voyage.

“I’d love to dance…Nathan, is it?”

“It’s Nate…Isabel….”

We danced to the rest of “I Surrender, Dear,” then snuggled close on “Little White Lies.” We left in the middle of “Three Little Words” to get some air out on the afterdeck. We leaned against the rail near a suspended lifeboat. The fog of San Francisco was long gone; the stars were like bits of morning peeking through holes punctured in a deep blue night.

“It’s cool,” she said. “Almost cold.”

The thrum of the engines, the lapping of the ocean against the luxury liner cutting through it, made us speak up a little. Just a little.

“Take my jacket,” I said.

“No…I’d rather just snuggle.”

“Be my guest.”

I slipped my arm around her and drew her close; her bare arm did feel cold, gooseflesh tickling my fingers. Her perfume tickled my nose.

“You smell good,” I said.

“Chanel,” she said.

“What number?”

“Number Five. You’ve been around, haven’t you?”

“I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.”

She laughed a little; it had a musical sound. “I can’t help liking you.”

“Why fight it? Do you do anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, go to school, or…do rich girls like you ever work?”

“Of course we work! If we want to.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t want to…. But maybe I’ll have to, someday. I’m not so rich, you know. We got hit hard in the Crash.”

“I didn’t feel a thing.”

She flashed me a quick frown. “Don’t be smug. It’s not a joke, people jumping out of windows.”

“I know it isn’t. How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Are you in school?”

“I might go to college. I wasn’t planning to, but…”

“What happened?”

“I was engaged to this boy.”

“You were?”

“He met someone else.”

“Not someone prettier. That wouldn’t be possible.”

Her eyes studied the dark water. “He went to Europe. Met her on the Queen Mary.”

“Ah. Shipboard romance.”

“Maybe it started that way. He’s engaged to her, now.”

“I know an excellent way for you to get back at him.”

“How’s that?”

And when her head was tilted up to look at me while she asked that question, I kissed her. It started out gentle and sweet, but then it got hot and deep, and when we parted, we were both damn near panting. I leaned over the rail and caught my breath and watched whitecaps rolling over the inky sea.

“You kissed fellas before,” I noted.

“Once or twice,” she said, and she kissed me again.

Her stateroom was just across the hall from mine, but as we paused there, I took a moment from us pawing each other and said breathlessly, “I gotta get something from my room.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You know…something.”

“What…Sheiks?” She swatted the air. “I have some in my train case.”

I guess you’ve guessed by now she wasn’t a virgin. But she wasn’t all that experienced, either; she seemed surprised when, after a while, deep inside of her, I rolled with her, moving her around and up on top. I had a feeling her former fiancé had been strictly a missionary position sort of guy.

But she soon got the swing of it, and was liking riding rather than being ridden. Her eyes were half-hooded, as if she were tipsy with desire, her body washed with ivory from the porthole, the shadows of the half-open shutters making an exquisite pattern on the smooth planes of her body as she leaned forward, hips grinding, breasts swaying. Those breasts, lovely, perfectly conical, not big, not small, were peaked with large, swollen aureoles, like those of an adolescent girl just entering puberty. She was well out of puberty, however, and the smooth warmth of her around me, the movie star loveliness of her hovering over me, turned me tipsy, too….

She slipped out of bed, and into the bathroom while I plucked a tissue from the nightstand to dispose of the lambskin armor she’d provided me. Two or three minutes later, she returned, and slipped the compact curves of her flawless young body into her undergarment, a creamy little teddy, got herself a Camel from her purse on a bamboo chair, and lighted the ciggie up with a tiny silver lighter.

“You want a tailor-made?” she asked.

“No. It’s one bad habit I haven’t got around to.”

“We used to roll ’em, back at girls’ school.” She inhaled, exhaled, the blue smoke drifting like vapor. “You got anything to nip at?”

“There’s a flask in my jacket pocket…no, the other pocket.”

Cigarette dangling from the Kewpie mouth, she unscrewed the cap on the silver flask and had a jolt. “Ah! Demon rum. Want some?”

“Sure. Bring it back to bed with you.”

And she did, passing me the flask as she eased under the covers next to me.

“You must think I’m terribly wicked,” she said. “Just a little tramp.”

I sipped the rum. “I certainly won’t respect you in the morning.”

She knew I was kidding, but she asked anyway, “You won’t?”

“Not some little trollop who sleeps with the first good-lookin’ kike who comes along.”

She yelped a laugh, and grabbed a pillow and hit me with it; I protected the flask so as not to spill any of its precious contents.

“You’re an awful person!”

“Better you figure that out now than later.”

She put her pillow back in place, and snuggled against me, again. “I suppose you think we’ll be doing this every night of the trip.”

“I have nothing else planned.”

“I’m really normally a very good girl.”

“Good, hell. You’re great.”

“You want me to hit you again?” she asked, reaching for the pillow. But she left it in its place, and settled back against it and me and said, “You just pushed the right button, that’s all.”

I slipped a hand over one silk-covered bosom and touched a forefinger to a puffy nipple ever so gently. “Hope to shout…”

“Awful person,” she said, and blew out smoke, and French-kissed me. It was a smoky, rum-tinged kiss, but nice. And memorable. Funny how much this rich little good girl kissed like some of the poor little nasty girls I’d run across.

“Poor Thalo,” she sighed, taking the flask from me.

“What?”

“Sex relations can be so wonderful. So much fun.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

She swigged, wiped her mouth with a hand. “To have it ruined…by some awful greasy native beasts.” She shuddered. “Just to think of it makes me want to run and hide….”

“What was she like?”

“Thalo?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean, growing up together?”

“Yeah. Docile, quiet…?”

“Thalo! Not hardly! You think it’s a bowl of cherries, being rich. But you more or less have to raise yourself. Not that I’m complaining. Those days at Bayport, they were something….”

“Bayport?”

“It’s a little community on the South Shore of Long Island. Thalo’s parents have a summer home there. It’s like a park, really—that big house, lake, woods…. We used to go bareback riding…and I do mean bare.”

“No parents around to object to such shenanigans?”

Another swig. “They were gone most of the time—social functions, foreign jaunts. The house was run by the Filipino domestics, who Thalo didn’t have to answer to. Glorious days, really.”

“You went to school together, too?”

“Yes—Hillside in Norwalk, then, later, National Cathedral, in Washington. Strict schools, but summers were madcap; we ran wild. Lived in our bathing suits all summer.”

She handed me the flask and got out of bed; a lovely thing in that teddy, completely unselfconscious in her near nudity.

“We had this old Ford,” she said, fishing another smoke from her purse, “that we painted up with all sorts of colors and crazy sayings. Rode around with our feet and legs hanging out of the car. Tore around, regular little speed demons.”

“Never got picked up? Never lost your license?”

She lighted up the new ciggie. “Oh, we didn’t have licenses. We weren’t old enough.”

Soon she was back in bed with me, the orange eye of her cigarette staring in the darkness.

“I shouldn’t say this, but…she used to love it.”

“Love what?”

“It. You know—it! Doing it? Boys from our set, visiting their own parents, they’d come to that big house…we had the run of the place…come midnight we’d go skinny-dipping in the lake….”

“With the boys?”

“Not with the gardener! I don’t think Tommie…nothing.”

“What?”

“It’s just…I shouldn’t say.”

“Something about her husband?” I asked, passing her the flask.

She took another slug, then said, “I haven’t seen Thalo since she and Tommie were stationed at Pearl Harbor almost two years ago. I don’t have a right to say anything about it.”

“About what?”

“I…don’t think he could satisfy her.”

“In what way?”

“In whatever way you think. He’s so…ordinary, dull, unexciting. She’s a romantic, fun-loving girl, but her letters to me…. She was bored with being a Navy wife. He was off on submarine duty all the time, she was lonely…no fun. No attention. And now this.”

“It’s nice of you to go to her side in this dark hour.”

“She’s my best friend,” Isabel said, and took another slug of rum from my flask. “And anyway, I’ve never been to Hawaii before.”

She fell asleep in my arms; I removed the glowing cigarette stub from her fingers, crushed it out in a glass ashtray on the nightstand, placed my flask there, and allowed the motion of the ship, plowing its way through the Pacific, to lull me.

But I didn’t go to sleep for a long time. I kept thinking about Thalo and Isabel, fun-loving girls skinny-dipping with boys.

And how Thalia Massie’s dull husband had helped kill a man to preserve his wife’s honor.

3

I leaned against the starboard rail with Isabel on one side of me, and Leisure on the other. Mrs. Leisure was next to her husband, and the Darrows were just down the rail from her, as our little group peered across deep blue waters. A balmy breeze ruffled hair, rustled dresses, fussed with neckties; the sky was as blue as Isabel’s eyes, the clouds as white as her teeth. She was a foolish girl, but I would love her forever, or at least till we docked.

“Look!” Isabel cried; it was a cry that would have made sense, a hundred and fifty years ago, when spying land meant fresh water and supplies and the first solid ground in weeks or even months.

But at the end of a modern four-and-a-half-day ocean voyage, it was just plain silly—so why did my heart leap at the sight of an indistinct land mass, dancing in and out from the morning clouds? Gradually revealing itself, growing larger and larger on the horizon, was the windward shore of Oahu, and as the Malolo rounded the point, we got a gander at a cracked gray mountain.

“Koko Head,” seasoned traveler Leisure informed us.

Maybe so, but it was a head with no more natural growth than a bald old man—a disappointing, and inaccurate, envoy of the island, as very soon the grayness of Koko dipped into a valley of luxuriant green foliage, including the expected gently waving palms and occasional flower-blossom splashes of color.

“There’s Diamond Head!” Queen Isabel squealed, pointing, as if informing Columbus of the New World.

“I see you’ve read the National Geographic, too,” I said, but I didn’t even get a rise out of her. Her blue eyes were wide and her smile that of a kid with a nickel viewing a well-stocked penny candy counter; she was even jumping up and down a little.

And Diamond Head was a magnificent sight, all right, even if a city kid like me wasn’t about to tip as much to my society page cutie-pie. After all, I came from the town that invented the skyscraper, and some paltry seven-or eight-hundred-foot natural wonder wasn’t about to earn oooh’s and ahhh’s from a hardboiled boyo like me.

So why was I staring goofy-eyed, like a hypnotist’s watch was waving in front of my mug? What was the magic of this long-dead crater? Why did its shape demand study, call out for a metaphor? Why did I see Diamond Head as a crouching beast, its gray fur furrowed, its blunted sphinx head lifted ever so gently, paws extended into the ocean, a regal, wary sentinel to an ancient land?

“See that small depression, on the ledge of the crater?” Leisure asked, though he was really instructing.

“Near the peak there?” I offered. Beneath the lower, greening slopes of the volcano nestled a lushness of trees and a scattering of residences that were pretty lush themselves.

“Exactly. The natives say an enormous diamond once perched there, snatched away by an angry god.”

“Maybe they couldn’t find a virgin to sacrifice,” I said. “Scarce commodity, even back then.”

That got me a nudge from Isabel. I wasn’t sure she’d been listening.

As the natural barrier of the volcanic sentry gradually drew away, the supple white curve of Waikiki Beach began revealing itself.

“That’s the Moana Hotel,” Leisure said, “oldest on the island.”

It was a big white Beaux Arts beach house got out of hand, with a wing on either end bookending the main building; a massive banyan tree and a pavilion fronted the hotel’s stretch of beach. Beyond this turn-of-the-century colonial sprawl was an explosion of startling pink in the form of a massive stucco Spanish-Moorish structure, a cross between a castle and a mission, spires and cupolas lording it over landscaped grounds aswarm with ferns and palms.

“The Royal Hawaiian Hotel,” Leisure said. “Also known as the Pink Palace.”

“Hot dog,” I said.

“Why so chipper?” Isabel wondered.

“That’s where I’m staying. The Royal Hawaiian….”

“I’ll be with Thalo, in her little bungalow in Manoa Valley,” Isabel said glumly. “She says it’s no bigger than the gardener’s cottage back at Bayport.”

“Well, the posher crowd stays at that pink flophouse, there. Drop by anytime. Feel free.”

Leisure was looking at me through those ever-narrowed eyes; he wore a mild frown, and whispered, “You’re staying at the Royal Hawaiian?”

“That’s what C.D. said.”

“Funny,” he said, still sotto voce. “He told me the party’s lodgings are at the Alexander Young. Anne wasn’t any too thrilled.”

“What’s wrong with the Young?”

“Nothing, really. A sound choice. Downtown, close to the courthouse. More of a commercial hotel.”

“I’m pretty sure he said Royal Hawaiian,” I shrugged. “Want me to ask him?”

“No! No….”

Waikiki Beach appeared to be a narrow strip of sand, rather than the endless expanse I’d imagined; but room enough for dabs and smidgens of bathing suit and beach umbrella color to paint the shore, as bathers bobbed in the water nearby. A few hundred yards out, occasional bronze figures would rise out of the water like apparitions: surf riders, gliding in, in a spray of white, shooting toward the beach, occasionally kneeling to paddle up some extra speed, mostly just standing on their boards as casually as if they were waiting for a trolley. Was that a dog riding with one of them?

“Could that be as easy as it looks?” I asked Leisure.

“No,” he said. “They call it the Sport of Kings. Get crowned by one of those heavy boards, and you’ll know why.”

Sharing the surf, but keeping their distance from its riders, were several long, narrow canoes, painted black, trimmed yellow, warlike-looking hulls supported by spidery extensions to one side (“outrigger canoes,” according to Leisure). The four-man crews were paddling in precision, stroking through the water with narrow-handled fat-bladed paddles.

Just to the left of the Pink Palace was a cluster of beach homes and summer hotels; then the low-slung severe structures of a military installation peeked out among palms; in the fore was an incongruous water playground of floats, diving platforms, and chutes, in use at this very moment by sunners and swimmers.

“Fort De Russey,” Leisure pointed out. “The Army dredged the coral and came up with the best stretch of beach in town. Civilians are always welcome.”

“Not always.”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t that near where Thalia Massie was abducted?”

Leisure’s tour guide spiel suddenly stalled. He nodded gravely. Then he said, “Best not to forget why we’re here.”

“Hey, don’t let me spoil the party. I’m eatin’ up this sunshine and ocean spray, too.” I nodded toward the dazzling coastline. “But you know how sometimes a girl looks gorgeous from a distance? Then when you get close up—pockmarks and bad teeth.”

A shrill siren split the air, the sort of breathy whistle that might announce a shift change at a factory, or an air raid.

“What the hell…”

Leisure nodded toward the shore. “We’re being greeted—and announced. That’s the Aloha Tower’s siren, letting locals know it’s a ‘steamer day.’”

A clock tower did indeed loom above the harbor, like a beacon, ten stories’ worth of sleek white art deco spire, topped by an American flag. Not everyone on this ship was aware they were visiting a United States territory; I’d even overheard the ship’s purser being approached by one well-to-do imbecile wanting to exchange his U.S. currency for “Hawaiian money.”

When the whistle let up, Leisure said, “Can you see the word above the clock face?”

“No.”

“There’s actually a clock face on all four sides, and the word aloha is over each one. It means hello—and good-bye.”

“Who’s idea was that? Groucho Marx?”

The ship was slowing down; then it came to a stop, as several small launches drew up alongside it.

“What’s this about?” I asked Leisure.

The attorney shrugged. “Harbor pilot, health officers, customs officials, reps from various hotels booking rooms for any passengers that didn’t plan ahead. It’ll be at least another forty-five minutes before we dock.”

The mainland reporters who had traveled with us had long since given up on getting anything out of Darrow (other than anti-Prohibition spiels); but a small rabid pack of local newshounds, who had just clambered aboard, sniffed us out at the rail.

They wore straw fedoras and white shirts with no jackets, pads and pencils in hand, bright eyes and expectant white smiles in tanned faces. At first I thought they were natives, but on closer look, I could see they were white men, darkened by the sun.

“Mr. Darrow! Mr. Darrow!” were among the few words that could be culled from their overlapping questions. “Massie” and “Fortescue” were two more words I made out; also “rape” and “murder.” The rest was noise, a press conference in the Tower of Babel.

“Gentlemen!” Darrow said, in a courtroom-quieting fashion. He had stepped away from our little group, turning his back on the view of Honolulu’s white buildings peeking around the Aloha Tower. “I’ll make a brief statement, and then you will leave Mrs. Darrow and me to make our preparations to disembark.”

They quieted.

“I would like you kind gentlemen to do me the small favor of informing the citizens of Honolulu that I am here to defend my clients, not white supremacy. I have no intention of conducting this trial on a basis of race. Race prejudice is as abhorrent to me as the fanatics who practice it.”

“What will be the basis, then?” a reporter blurted. “The ‘unwritten law’ of a husband defending a wife’s honor?”

A smirk creased his face. “I have trouble enough keeping up with the laws that’ve been written down. Altogether too many of ’em, don’t you think, gentlemen? People can’t be expected to obey ’em all, when there’s such a surplus. In fact, I think the imminent removal of a certain law—I believe it’s known as the Volstead Act—is a case in point.”

Another reporter took the bait. “What do you think will be accomplished by the repeal of Prohibition?”

“I think it will be easier to get a drink,” Darrow said soberly.

One of the reporters, who hadn’t been taken in by Darrow’s shift of subject, hollered out, “Do you expect Mrs. Fortescue to be acquitted?”

He chuckled silently. “When did you last see an intelligent, handsome woman refused alimony, let alone convicted of murder? No more on this subject, gentlemen.”

And he turned his back to them, settling in next to Mrs. Darrow at the rail.

But a reporter tried again, anyway. “Are you aware your autobiography has been selling like hotcakes here in Honolulu? Looks like the locals are checking up on you, Mr. Darrow. Any comment?”

Darrow arched an eyebrow as he glanced back in mock surprise. “It’s still on sale here, is it? I would’ve thought it would be sold out by now!”

For perhaps ninety seconds they hurled more questions at his back, but the old boy ignored them, and the pack of hounds moved on.

Soon the ship had gotten under way again, shifting its nose toward the harbor, slowly making its way to the dock; from the starboard side, we had a fine view of the city, and it was bigger than I expected, and more contemporary—not exactly a scattering of grass huts. White modern buildings were clustered beneath green slopes dotted with homes, all against an unlikely backdrop of majestic mountains. It was as if a twentieth-century city had been dropped by mistake, from a plane perhaps, onto an exotic primordial isle.

Down the rail from us, other passengers were squealing and laughing; something more than just the scenic view was getting their attention. Isabel, noticing this, glanced at me, and I nodded, and we moved quickly down there to see what was going on.

Finding another place at the rail, we saw brown-skinned boys down below in the drink, treading water; others were diving off the approaching pier to join this floating assemblage. Silver coins flew through the air, flipped and pitched from passengers down from us a ways, the metal catching the sun and winking, then plinking into the amazingly clear blue water. You could actually see the coins tumbling down. Then the white soles of feet pointed skyward as the boys dived for the nickels and dimes.

Somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

It was a good-looking college kid we’d met in the Malolo’s indoor swimming pool the other day. In a setting fit for a Roman orgy, rife with Pompeian Etruscan columns and mosaic tile, the sharp-featured handsome kid had been swimming with quick authority and caught my—and Isabel’s—attention.

He must’ve seen us watching him, because he had finally come over and struck up a conversation. He wanted to meet Darrow, who was sitting on a marble bench nearby, fully clothed, watching pretty girls swim (Ruby was off with the Leisures someplace). The affable kid, toweling off his tanned muscular frame, had introduced himself to Darrow as a fellow Clarence and a prelaw student in California. He’d grown up on a pineapple plantation on Oahu and was taking a semester off to spend some time at home.

“With a name like Clarence you’ll never need a nickname,” Darrow had told him.

“Oh, I’ve got a nickname, and it’s sillier than Clarence,” the good-natured kid said.

And he had told us, and it was a silly nickname all right, and we’d all had a laugh over it, though we’d never run into the kid on the ship again—he wasn’t traveling first-class. Now here he was, interrupting my view of native boys diving for nickels.

“Would you do me a favor?” he asked. “I can’t ask any of these stuffy rich people, and you seem like a regular guy.”

“Sure.” If I’d said no, I’d have been denying being a “regular guy.”

And the son of a bitch began taking off his clothes.

Isabel had noticed, by now, and was smiling with pleasure as the damn Adonis stripped to red swim trunks.

“Be a pal and keep these for me,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you up on the dock.”

And he thrust the bundle of shirt, pants, shoes, and socks into my arms, stepping out onto the deck just behind the passengers ogling the native divers.

“Who’s got a silver dollar?” he called.

Faces turned toward him.

“I’ll dive from the deck,” he said, “for a silver dollar!”

“Here!” a mustached fellow called, digging into his pocket and holding up the silver coin; the sun caught it and a reflection lanced off it.

And I’ll be damned if this kid didn’t climb over the rail, and position himself, yelling “Now!” following the pitched coin into the deep blue waters, in a high perfect dive that cleaved the water with the assurance of God parting the Red Sea.

Before long, he emerged with a toss of wet dark hair and a happy, infectious grin, holding the coin up as he bobbed there. The sun caught it again, and both the smile and the coin dazzled his audience on deck, who began to applaud and cheer. Isabel put two fingers in her mouth and let loose a whistle the Aloha Tower might have envied.

Then he stroked off toward the pier as our boat continued making its way there.

“Wasn’t that the damnedest thing,” I said.

“What a man,” Isabel sighed.

“Thanks,” I said, and we grinned at each other, going arm in arm after the rest of our party.

When the ship slipped gracefully into Pier 9, a mob was waiting; a band in white uniforms performed syrupy renditions of Hawaiian tunes while colored streamers and confetti were hurled, and shapely dark hula girls in grass skirts and floral-print brassieres swayed, their slender necks bedecked with wreaths of brightly colored flowers. The citizens who’d come to greet us were less a melting pot than a list of racial ingredients: Japanese, Chinese, Polynesian, Portuguese, and Caucasian faces were among the locals on hand to greet the tourists they depended on for their livelihoods.

As we walked across the gangway into this mad merriment, I had to wonder if there wasn’t an undercurrent of hysteria at this particular “steamer day,” an edge provided by the tension and turmoil of the most controversial criminal matter that had ever faced the Islands.

Just as Darrow stepped onto the cement of the pier, an attractive native woman in a loose dress, the tropical version of the Mother Hubbard known as a muumuu, transferred one of the half-dozen flower garlands she was wearing from her neck to Darrow’s. The battery of press photogs lying in wait—one of whom had no doubt put the woman (who was a seller of the things) up to it—jockeyed for position to record Darrow’s chagrin for posterity.

But C.D. wasn’t having any.

“Hold off there!” he said, shifting the wreath to his wife’s neck. “You’re not catching me wearing those jingle bells—I’ll look like a damned decorated hat rack.”

“Lei, mister?” the native woman asked me cheerfully.

“No thanks,” I said. Then to Isabel: “They don’t waste any time here, do they?”

“That’s what those flowers are called, silly,” she said. “A lei.”

“Really?” I asked innocently, and then she knew I was teasing her. And joining the ranks of every mainlander male who ever set foot on Oahu, in making that particular pun.

Darrow was leading the way through the crowd—the old boy seemed to know what he was doing and where he was going. I still had that kid’s clothes tucked under my arm, and was looking around for him. His head popped up above the throng, and I held up till he angled through, still in his trunks but pretty well dried off, now. The climate, though pleasant, was warm enough to be his towel.

“Thanks!” he grinned, taking his stuff from me.

“Hell of a dive, for a dollar.”

That great grin flashed. “When I was a kid, I was right in there with the other beach boys, divin’ for nickels. Gotta raise the ante a little, when ya get older. Where you staying? I’ll drop by and use the buck to buy you lunch.”

“I think the Royal Hawaiian.”

“A buck doesn’t go far there, but I know some people on the staff—maybe they’ll cut me some slack. Heller, isn’t it? Nate?”

I said it was as we shook hands, and he tossed me a “See ya,” and disappeared back into the crowd.

Leisure leaned in and said, “You know who that is?”

“Some crazy college kid. Buster, he said they call him.”

“That’s Clarence Crabbe. Hawaii’s great white hope in the Olympics comin’ up this summer. He took two bronze medals in ’28, at Amsterdam.”

“Diving?”

“Swimming.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “No kiddin’.”

A Navy driver was waiting for us at the curb; his seven-passenger black Lincoln limousine could have handled all of us, but Darrow sent Ruby and Mrs. Leisure on to the hotel, on foot; it was easy walking distance, and our baggage would be delivered. Isabel (looking lovely in a lei I’d bought her) started to go with the two women, and Darrow stopped her, gently.

“Come with us, dear,” he said, “won’t you?”

“All right,” Isabel said.

So we all got in the back of the limo, where Isabel and I sat facing Darrow and Leisure; everyone but Darrow was confused.

“I thought we were staying at the Royal Hawaiian,” I said.

“You’re staying there, son,” Darrow said, as the limo rolled smoothly into traffic. How odd it seemed for this city to be such a…city. Buses and streetcars and traffic cops, with only the predominance of various shades of brown and yellow faces to let you know this wasn’t Miami or San Diego.

“Why’s Nate staying at the Royal Hawaiian?” Leisure wondered, just a slight touch of cranky jealousy in his tone.

“For two reasons,” Darrow said. “First, I want to keep our investigator away from reporters, keep him off the firing line. They’ll only bother him about the Lindbergh business, for one thing, and I want him someplace where he can invite various witnesses and others involved in the case, for a friendly conversation over lunch or fruit punch, without the prying eyes of the press.”

Leisure was nodding; jealous or not, it made sense.

“It won’t hurt,” Darrow continued, “to have an opulent setting to entice the cooperation of these individuals. Also, I can sneak off there myself, if I need to confer with someone, away from journalistic meddlers.”

“Despite all the lawyerly bypaths you just took,” I said, “that’s just one reason. You said two.”

“Oh. Well, the other reason is, I was offered a free suite at the Royal Hawaiian, and this was a way to take advantage of that invitation.”

And he beamed at me, proud of himself.

“So the taxpayers of Chicago pay for my services,” I said, “and the Royal Hawaiian provides my lodging. You couldn’t afford not to bring me along, could you, C.D.?”

“Not hardly. Mind if I smoke, dear?”

“No,” Isabel said. “But where are we going?”

“I was just wondering that myself,” Leisure said. He still wasn’t used to Darrow’s offhand way of doing things.

“Why, taking you to your lodgings, child,” Darrow said grandly to the girl, as his steady old hands emptied tobacco from a pouch into a curl of cigarette paper.

“I’m staying with my cousin Thalia,” she said.

“Yes,” Darrow said. “She’s expecting us.”

4

The Navy limousine slipped into the stream of leisurely traffic on King Street; the Oriental and Polynesian drivers of Oahu, and even the Caucasians for that matter, seemed more cautious, less hurried than mainlanders. Or maybe the seductive warm climate with its constant cool breeze encouraged a tempo that to a contemporary Chicagoan seemed more appropriate for horse carts and carriages.

Nonetheless, Honolulu remained resolutely modern. There were trolley cars, not rickshaws, and on side streets, frame houses were in evidence, not a native hut in sight. The stark modern lines of white office buildings were softened by the soothing greenery of palms and exotic flora, and once we’d left the clustered heart of the business district, the urban landscape was calmed by occasional stretches of park or by a school or a church or some official-looking building resplendent on verdant manicured grounds.

Coca-Cola signs, Standard Oil pumps, drugstore window posters advertising Old Gold Cigarettes were a reminder that this was America, all right, despite the coconut trees and foreign faces.

Soon we were climbing into an area that Leisure labeled Manoa Valley, and that our youthful Navy chauffeur further identified as “The Valley of Sunshine and Tears.”

“There’s a legend,” the driver said in a husky voice, turning his head to us but keeping an eye on the road, “that in olden days, a maiden who lived in this valley met with tragedy. Lies were told about her virtue, and it made her man jealous, and all involved came to a bad end.”

“Such stories often turn out thus,” Darrow said gravely.

Right now we were moving through a silk-stocking district, spacious near-mansions with beautifully maintained gardens and spacious golf-course-perfect lawns. We were on the incline that was well-shaded Punahou Street, and the college of that name was off to our right, up-to-date buildings on lavish royal palm-flung grounds.

“Somebody has money,” I said.

Leisure nodded toward a stately mansion that might well have been an estate outside London. “This is old white money—they call them kaimaaina haoles…missionaries, Yankee traders, and their descendants. We’re talking second-and third-generation, now. You’ve heard of the ‘Big Five’?”

“Isn’t that a college football conference?”

Leisure’s narrow lips pursed a smile. “Hawaii’s Big Five are the plantation, shipping, and merchandising companies that own these islands. Matson Lines money, Liberty House, which is the local version of Sears…”

“The white man came to Hawaii,” Darrow intoned suddenly, as if from a pulpit, “and urged the simple natives to turn their eyes upward to God…but when the natives looked down to earth again, their goddamn land was gone.”

We rose into the upper portion of Manoa Valley, where the estates gave way to a network of shady lanes and a concentration of cottages and bungalows. Though we were on a steep gradient, the boundaries of the valley were steeper still—mountainous slopes providing a dark blue backdrop; it was as if this were a stadium scooped from the earth by nature, and we were down on the Big Five’s playing field.

I posed a question to the driver. “How far are we from Pearl Harbor?”

“A good half an hour, sir.”

“Is it common for a Navy officer to live this far from the base?”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said. “In fact, quite a few Navy officers live in Manoa Valley—Army as well. Lt. Massie and a number of other younger officers live within close proximity of one another, sir.”

“Oh. That’s nice. Then they can get together, socialize…”

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir,” the driver said, strangely curt.

Had I touched a nerve?

Number 2850 on the narrow slope of Kahawai Street was a precious white Tudor-style bungalow, its gabled roofs decorated with vertical and diagonal slashes of brown trim, and large brown-striped canvas awnings so determined to keep out the sun that they almost hid the windows. Though the yard was tiny, foliage was plentiful, well-trimmed boxcar-shaped hedges hugging the little house, several oriental trees like absurdly large bushes providing sheltering green. I wasn’t sure whether the effect was one of coziness or concealment.

There was a driveway, where the Navy driver pulled in; the street was too narrow to park along. Soon, Isabel and I, heads craned back, were standing in the street, admiring the way the mountains provided a misty green backdrop to the little house.

The Navy chauffeur was helping Darrow out of the backseat as the sound of a screen door closing announced a lanky guy of about thirty, in white shirt with sleeves rolled back and crisp canary trousers, legs knifing as he rushed out to greet us. His brown hair was rather thin, but his smile was generous; he was bestowing it on Darrow, who was standing in the drive next to Leisure.

“Pleased to meet you, sir—I’m Lt. Francis Olds, but my friends call me Pop. I’d be honored if you’d pay me that compliment.”

The enthusiastic Olds was extending a hand, which Darrow took, shook, saying, “Much as I’d like to please you, Lieutenant, I’m afraid I couldn’t quite bring myself to that. This suit I’m wearing is older than you.”

“Well,” the lieutenant said, folding his arms, grinning, “at thirty, I’m the old man around here—Tommie and the rest, they’re just a buncha fresh-faced kids barely outta college.”

Darrow’s gray eyes narrowed. “You’re a friend of Lt. Massie’s?”

“I’m sorry! I haven’t explained myself. I run the Ammunition Depot, out at Pearl. My wife and I have been taking turns keeping Thalia company, making sure the press and any curiosity-seekers don’t bother her here, during the day. We post armed guards at night.”

Darrow frowned. “The situation’s that severe?”

He nodded. “There have been bomb threats. Word of gangs of Japs and native trash driving around Manoa Valley in their junker cars…. You know, I’m afraid you have me to blame for your involvement in this, Mr. Darrow.”

“How is that, Lieutenant?”

The lieutenant pointed at himself with a thumb. “I’m the one brought up your name. I’m the one encouraged Mrs. Fortescue to hit up her rich friends on the mainland for the dough it would take to get a really top lawyer. And I knew you were the only man for this case.”

Wry amusement creased Darrow’s face. “You have excellent judgment, young man.”

“And, well…I’m also running the fund-raising drive, at the base, to raise your fee to cover Lord and Jones.”

“Who?”

“The two enlisted men you’re defending!”

The accomplices to Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie Massie in the killing of Joseph Kahahawai. I didn’t think C.D. had spent much time going over those transcripts and statements back on the Malolo. Leisure was wincing.

“Well, then,” Darrow said, with no apology for forgetting the names of two of the clients he’d come thousands of miles to defend, “I guess I will have to capitulate to your request…Pop.”

Darrow introduced Isabel, Leisure, and myself to Pop Olds, who greeted us warmly, glad to see anybody who was part of the great Darrow’s team. He walked us behind the hedge to the front door.

“We’re friends of the Massies,” he explained. “My wife and I were in a play with Thalia and Tommie, at the local Little Theater.” He grinned shyly. “Actually, Thalia and I are the hams…. I arranged walk-ons for our spouses so we could all spend some time together.”

So Thalia Massie was an actress; I’d have to keep that in mind.

Darrow was laying a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. “I’m grateful for your attentiveness to Mrs. Massie, Pop…but I have to ask you a courtesy.”

“Anything, Mr. Darrow.”

“Wait out here while I speak to Mrs. Massie. I view her as a client in this case, and wish to limit the audience for the painful memories I must go probing after.”

Olds seemed a little disappointed to be left out, but he said, “Certainly, sir—certainly. I’ll just catch a few smokes out here….”

A maid in a brown uniform with white apron met us as we stepped inside; she was Japanese, petite, quietly pretty, without an ounce of makeup, her shiny black hair in a Louise Brooks bob.

“Miss Massie resting,” she said, lowering her head respectfully. She was addressing Darrow, who stood at the head of our group, crowding into the little living room. “But she ask I wake her when you arrive.”

And she went quickly off.

The place was pretty impersonal; my guess was they’d rented the bungalow furnished—with the possible exception of a new-looking walnut veener console radio-phonograph in one corner. This was dark, functional, middle-class nicked-up stuff whose point of origin was probably Sears—or, rather, Liberty House. They’d dressed it up a little—the wine-color mohair davenport and matching armchair had antimacassars; the occasional tables had doilies but almost no knickknacks.

On one table were a few family photos, including a wedding portrait of a very young, pasty-faced couple, the pretty bride slightly taller than the fetus of a groom, whose formal naval attire seemed sizes too big for him; another photo, in an ornate silver frame, depicted an attractive, long-faced matron with frozen eyes and a long string of pearls.

A painting over the stuffed horsehair couch depicted the sun setting over Diamond Head, but the frame was ornate European, and nothing else in the room was remotely Hawaiian, not even the faded pink floral wallpaper, or the well-worn oriental rug on the hardwood floor.

From the living room, through a wide archway, was a dining room with more dark nondescript furnishings; I could catch a white glimpse of the kitchen, the next room over. The bedroom must have been off the dining room, to the right, because that’s the way the pretty bride in the wedding portrait—Thalia Massie—came in.

She wore black—black dress, black beaded necklace, black sideways turban—as if in stylish mourning for her normal life that had died late last summer. Blades of blondish-brown hair arced around the round smooth contours of her oval face; the faint outline of a scar touched her left cheek, near her mouth, trailing to the jawline. She looked quite a bit like Isabel, the same cupid’s-bow mouth, small well-formed nose and big blue eyes, but Thalia’s were what unkind people in the Midwest call cow’s eyes—wide-set and protuberant.

Still, the overall effect was a pretty girl, and with a nice shape, too—a little pudgy, perhaps. And her shoulders were stooped—she was rather tall, but it took you a while to realize it. Had she always had that uncertain gait? She almost shuffled in, as if in a perpetual state of embarrassment. Or shame.

And yet those clear eyes met us all directly, blinking only rarely, the result being a languid, remote expression.

Isabel rushed forward and took her cousin in her arms, gushing words of sympathy; but as they embraced, Thalia Massie looked blankly at me over Isabel’s shoulder. Thalia patted Isabel’s back as if her cousin were the one who needed comforting.

“I should have come sooner,” Isabel said.

Thalia twitched her a smile in response as Isabel took her cousin’s hand, and the two girls stood there side by side, Isabel looking like Thalia’s blonder sister.

Darrow stepped forward with a fatherly smile and clasped one of Thalia’s hands in both of his big paws; Isabel receded, giving Thalia center stage.

“My dear, I’m Clarence Darrow,” he said, as if there were any doubt, “and I’ve come here to help you and your family.”

“I’m very grateful.” Her smile seemed halfhearted; her voice low, throaty, but barely inflected. She was twenty-one—married at sixteen, according to what I’d read on the Malolo—but I’d have guessed her at least twenty-five.

Darrow introduced Leisure (“my distinguished co-counsel”) and me (“my investigator—he’s just returned from working with Colonel Lindbergh”), and Thalia granted us nods. Then Darrow led her to the couch under the Diamond Head painting. Isabel sat next to her, close to her, taking Thalia’s hand supportively.

Leisure drew the couch’s matching armchair around for Darrow, so that he was facing Thalia. I found a caneback wing chair—by the way, was a more uncomfortable chair ever invented?—and pulled it to one side of Darrow. Leisure preferred to stand; arms folded, he watched the unfolding scene through those all-seeing narrowed eyes of his.

Thalia drew her hand away from Isabel’s, doing so with a little smile, but her cousin’s hand-holding clearly made her uncomfortable. She folded her hands primly in her lap and looked at Darrow with the big languid eyes. There was weariness in her gaze, and distaste in her tone.

“I’m more than willing to talk to you, of course,” Thalia said. “I will do anything to help Tommie and Mother. But I hope it won’t be necessary to…dredge up all that other unpleasantness.”

Darrow sat forward in the chair; his smile, and tone, remained fatherly. “Would that I could spare you, child. But if we’re to defend—”

“This is a different case,” Thalia said, almost snippily. “Those rapists aren’t on trial and, for that matter, neither am I. This is about what Tommie and Mother and those sailors did.”

The smile turned regretful. “Unfortunately, dear, the two cannot be separated. What they did flowed out of what was done to you…. And without an understanding of what happened to you, a jury would view what your husband and mother did as, simply…murder.”

Her forehead furrowed in irritation, but the eyes remained wide. “Who’s better aware of that than I? But you were provided transcripts of what I said in court. Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” Darrow said firmly. “My staff and I need to hear these words from your own lips. We need to ask our own questions. There’s no stenographer, here, though Mr. Heller will take some notes.”

I took that prompt to get out my notepad and pencil.

“And,” Darrow continued, pointing at her gently, “you need to be prepared, young lady—because it’s very likely you’ll be taking the witness stand to tell your story yet again.”

Her sigh was a rasp from her chest, and she looked toward a side wall, away from Isabel, who was watching her with sympathy but also confusion. Finally Thalia turned her head back to Darrow.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I do want to help. Please ask your questions.”

But her face remained an oval mask, devoid of emotion, marked only by that white line of scar down her jaw.

Darrow leaned forward and patted her hand. “Thank you, dear. Now, I’ll try to make this as painless as possible. Let’s begin with the party. You didn’t want to be there, I understand?”

The cow eyes went half-hooded. “When these Navy men get together, they drink too much, and embarrass themselves, and their wives—though the women drink too much, too. And I didn’t really care for that tawdry place, anyway.”

“The Ala Wai Inn, you mean?” I asked.

She glanced at me noncommittally. “That’s right. Loud music, frantic dancing, bootleg liquor…I found it in poor taste and depressing, to be quite frank about it. Every Saturday night at the Ala Wai is ‘Navy Night’—the managegment give the Navy boys the run of the place, and it can get wild.”

“Did it that night?” I asked. “Get wild?”

She shrugged a little. “Not really. Just dreary. Boring.”

“Then why did you go?” I asked.

“I only went because Tommie and Jimmy…Lt. Bradford…and another officer had made a reservation for a table for their wives and themselves, and how would it look if Tommie went alone? But once I got there, it didn’t take long for me to get tired of all that nonsense.”

Darrow asked, “What time did you leave, dear?”

“Shortly after 11:30. But I wasn’t leaving, really. I just decided to go for a walk and get some air.”

“Was someone with you?”

“No. I was alone. I walked along Kalakaua Avenue and crossed the canal and I turned down John Ena Road, walked a block or so down, toward the beach.”

“How far did you walk?”

“To a spot within, oh, twenty feet of where the road turns into Fort De Russey. I was just going to walk a little ways down the road, then turn back and stroll back to the Ala Wai Inn.”

“Just getting some air,” Darrow said, nodding.

“That’s correct.”

“What happened then, dear? I’m sorry, but I have to ask.”

She began twisting her fingers in her lap, as if she were trying to pull them off; her gaze drew inward, and glazed over.

“A car drove up behind me and stopped, a Ford touring car. Two men got out and grabbed me and dragged me toward it. I was struggling, and the one called Joe Kahahawai hit me in the face, in the jaw. Hard.”

Next to her, Isabel gasped, drew a hand to her mouth.

But Thalia remained emotionless. “The other one, Henry Chang, placed his hand over my mouth and pulled me into the backseat. I begged them to let me go, but every time I spoke, Kahahawai hit me. Chang hit me, too.”

“Was the car still parked,” I asked, “or was it moving?”

“Moving,” she said. “As soon as they dragged me in there, they pulled away; there were two or three other boys in the front seat.”

“What nationality?” I asked.

“Hawaiians, I thought at the time. Later, I learned they were a mixed-race group.”

According to the materials I’d read, the motley crew of young island gangsters included Joe Kahahawai and Ben Ahakuelo, pure-blooded Hawaiians; Horace Ida and David Takai, Japanese; and Henry Chang, Chinese-Hawaiian.

“Go on, dear,” Darrow said.

“I offered them money, I told them my husband would give them money if they would let me go. I said I had some money with me they could have. I had my purse, and I said, ‘Take my pocketbook!’ One of them in the front seat, Ahakuelo, turned around and said, ‘Take the pocketbook,’ and Chang took it from me. I got a good look at this Ben Ahakuelo—he turned around several times and grinned at me. He had a gold tooth, a big filling about here.” She opened her mouth and pointed.

“How far did they take you?” I asked.

“I don’t really know. I know they were driving along Ala Moana Road, heading towards town. Maybe two or three blocks. They drove the car into the underbrush on the righthand side of the road, and Kahahawai and Chang dragged me out and away from the car and into the bushes and then Chang assaulted me….”

Thalia said all this as calmly, and detachedly, as if she were reading off a laundry list; but Isabel, next to her, was biting her fist and tears were streaming down her face, streaking her makeup.

“I tried to get away, but I couldn’t. They hit me so many times, so hard, I was dazed. I couldn’t imagine that this was happening to me! I didn’t know people were capable of such things…. Chang hit me, and the others were hovering around, holding my arms.”

Isabel gasped.

Thalia didn’t seem to notice. “Then the others…did it to me. I was assaulted five or six times—Kahahawai went last. I started to pray, and that made him angry and he hit me very hard. I cried out, ‘You’ll knock my teeth out,’ and he said, ‘What do I care? Shut up!’ I asked him please not to hit me anymore.”

Isabel, covering her mouth, got up and ran from the room.

“There were five men,” I said. “You think you may have been assaulted as many as six times?”

“I lost count, but I think Chang assaulted me twice. I remember he was standing near me, and he said, ‘I want to go again.’ That was all right with the others, but one of them said, ‘Hurry up, we have to go back out Kalihi way.’”

“They spoke in English?” I asked.

“To me, they did; sometimes they talked to each other in some foreign language. They said a lot of filthy things to me, in English, which I don’t care to repeat.”

“Certainly, dear,” Darrow said. “But you heard them call each other by name?”

“Yes, well, I heard the name Bull used, and I heard the name Joe. I heard another name—it might have been Billy or Benny, and I heard the name Shorty.”

“You must have got a good look at them,” I said.

She nodded. “Kahahawai had on a short-sleeved polo shirt, blue trousers. Ahakuelo, blue trousers, blue shirt. Horace Ida, dark trousers, leather coat. And Chang—I think Chang had on dark trousers.”

This was the kind of witness a cop dreams of.

“Now, dear, after they’d had their vicious way with you,” Darrow said, “what happened next?”

“One helped me to sit up, Chang I think. He said, ‘The road’s over there,’ then they bolted for their car, got into it, and drove away. That’s when I turned around and saw the car.”

I asked, “Which way was it facing?”

“The back of the car was toward me. The car’s headlights, taillights, were switched on.”

“And that’s when you saw the license plate?”

“Yes. I noticed the number. I thought it was 58-805, but I guess I was off a digit.”

The actual license, belonging to Horace Ida’s sister’s Ford touring car, was 58-895. Easy mistake, considering what she’d been through, confusing a 9 with a 0.

Darrow said, “Dear, what did you do after the attack?”

“I was very much dazed. I wandered around in the bushes and finally came to the Ala Moana. I saw a car coming from Waikiki and ran toward the car, waving my arms. The car stopped. I ran to it, half blind from their headlights, and asked the people in it if they were white. They said yes, and I told them what had happened to me and asked them to take me home. They wanted to take me to the police station, but I asked them to bring me here, which they did.”

Darrow asked, “What did you do when you got home?”

“I took off my clothes and douched.”

No one said anything for several long moments.

Then, gently, Darrow asked, “Did this procedure prove…successful?”

“No. A couple of weeks later I found I was pregnant.”

“I’m very sorry, dear. I understand your physician performed a curettage, and eliminated the, uh, problem?”

“Yes, he did.”

Isabel, on shaky legs, reentered the room; she smiled embarrassedly and sat on the couch, giving Thalia plenty of room.

Darrow said, “Returning to that terrible night…when did you next see your husband?”

“About one o’clock in the morning,” Thalia said. “He called me from a friend’s, looking for me, and I told him, ‘Please come home right away, something awful has happened.’”

“When your husband returned home, did you tell him what these men had done to you?”

“Not at first. I couldn’t. It was too awful, too horrible. But he sat with me on this couch and kept asking. He knew something was terribly wrong. Even though I’d cleaned myself up, my face was all bruised and puffy; my nose was bleeding. He begged me to tell him.”

“And you did?”

She nodded. “I told him everything—how they’d raped me. How Kahahawai broke my jaw when I tried to pray. How all of them attacked me….”

“I understand your husband called the police, took you to the hospital…”

“Yes. Eventually I identified four of the five boys, who’d been picked up on another assault that same night.”

Darrow gently inquired about the ordeal that had followed, the weeks of medical treatment (teeth pulled, jaw wired shut), the “travesty” of the trial of the five rapists that had resulted in a hung jury, the flurry of press interest, the racial unrest manifested by several incidents between Navy personnel and local island youth.

“The worst part was the rumors,” she said hollowly. “I heard Tommie hadn’t believed me and was getting a divorce. That I was assaulted by a naval officer and that Tommie found him in my room and beat him and then beat me up…all kinds of vile, nasty rumors.”

“How did your husband withstand these pressures, dear?”

“I told him not to worry about these rumors, but he couldn’t sleep and he got so very thin. Then I would wake up at night, screaming, and he would be right there, soothing me. He was so wonderful. But I was worried.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t sleep, he had rings around his eyes, he’d get up at night and walk up and down the living room, smoking cigarettes.”

“And your mother—all of this was very difficult for her, obviously.”

“Yes. When she arrived from Bayport, in response to the first cablegram that I’d been injured, she didn’t even know about the…true nature of what had happened to me. She was outraged, indignant, vowed to do whatever it took to help.”

“How did that help manifest itself, dear?”

“Well, at first, she took over the household duties—Tommie had been acting as both housekeeper and my nurse, in addition to his normal naval duties.”

“But that wasn’t all she did, was it?”

“No. Mother was relentless in urging both Admiral Stirling and the local civil authorities to see that my attackers were brought to trial, and punished.”

“She wasn’t living with you,” I said, “when…”

“No,” she interrupted. “No. When I got up and around, and was feeling better, this little house was just too small for all of us. My younger sister, Helene, was with her…Helene’s since gone back to Long Island, to be with my father, who was too ill to travel here…and Mother rented a place of her own.”

Leisure spoke, for the first time since the interrogation had begun. “Did you have any part in the abduction of Joseph Kahahawai, Mrs. Massie?”

Thalia looked at him sharply. “None! The first I knew anything of it was when Seaman Jones came to my door, the morning of the incident.”

“Before or after the killing?” I asked.

“After! He rushed in and handed me a gun and said, ‘Here, take this—Kahahawai has been killed.’ And I said, ‘Where’s Tommie?’ And he said he’d sent Tommie off with Mother to…to dispose of the body.”

And she just sat there impassively, with no more expression on her face than a bisque baby’s.

“Then what did this seaman do?” Darrow asked.

“He asked me to make him a drink, a highball. And I did.”

“A man had been killed, Mrs. Massie,” I said. “By your husband and your mother.”

“I’m sorry the man was shot,” she said, and shrugged. “But it was no more than he deserved.”

Then she apologized for her “earlier rudeness” and asked if we’d like anything to drink. Her maid had made a pitcher of iced tea, if anyone was interested.

“Beatrice!” she called.

And the pretty, efficient little maid came in with a pitcher of tea with floating lemons and a tray of glasses.

“You know,” Thalia said, “I sometimes wonder why they didn’t just kill me—it would have been so much easier for all concerned, in the long run…. I hope you like your tea sweetened, in the Southern style.”

5

Isabel needed some fresh air, so we stepped outside while Darrow chatted with Thalia Massie—nothing directly to do with the case, just small talk about naval life at Pearl and her experiences taking courses at the University of Hawaii, even garnering recommendations from her about restaurants in Honolulu. Darrow liked to make his clients feel comfortable with him, think of him as a friend.

And while Thalia wasn’t exactly a client, her role in this case was crucial. Darrow was turning on his charm, his warmth, on this apparently cold-blooded girl.

“How’s Thalo doing?” Pop Olds asked. The lieutenant was sitting on the steps of the front stoop, several ground-out cigarette butts on the sidewalk nearby.

“All right I think,” I said. “Hard to tell—she’s a very self-contained young woman.”

Olds got to his feet, shook his head. “Hard on her, out here. She gets pretty lonely.”

“Isn’t she spending any time with her husband?” I asked. “I understand he and the others are in custody of the Navy, not the local coppers. Can’t she get access to him?”

“Oh, yes,” Olds said. “That part of it’s fine, anyway. Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue and the two sailors are on the U.S.S. Alton.”

I frowned. “What, out at sea?”

He chuckled. “No. It’s an old warship stuck in the mud in the harbor. It’s used as temporary living quarters for transient personnel.”

“I don’t think this is healthy,” I said, “her being stuck out here in seclusion. She puts up a hell of a front, but…”

Isabel hugged my arm. “Maybe she’ll be better with me around.”

“Maybe. The last thing we need is our chief witness committing suicide.”

Isabel drew in a fast breath. “Suicide…”

“I’ve had some experience in that area,” I said. “She needs some company. Some companionship.”

“Well,” Olds said thoughtfully, “the ammunition depot’s located on a little island in the middle of the harbor, and that’s where my quarters are. My wife and I have one of the few houses on base.”

“Do you have room for Thalia?” I asked.

“Certainly. I’m not sure we could accommodate Miss Bell, here, as well….”

I patted Isabel’s hand. “I think Mr. Darrow could arrange housing for Miss Bell at the Royal Hawaiian.”

Isabel kept her face troubled, but she was hugging my arm enthusiastically now. “Well,” she said, trying to sound disappointed, “I really would like to be at Thalo’s side, through this…”

“You’d be welcome at Pearl, anytime,” Olds said. “You could spend every day with your cousin, if you like. You’d just have to find someplace else to sleep.”

“We can manage that,” I said with a straight face. “I’ll run this idea past Mr. Darrow, and let you know before we leave.”

Darrow was delighted by the suggestion, and Thalia liked the idea, too. Pop Olds said he’d put the plan in motion—Admiral Stirling was sure to give his okay—but for the time being, Isabel would stay behind with Thalia. This was where Isabel’s belongings were being delivered.

She walked me to the limo, where the Navy driver was helping Darrow back in. The breeze was wafting her lovely haze of blond hair. Her arm in mine, she pulled me down, leaned in, her lips almost touching my ear.

“I can’t decide whether you’re wonderful or terrible,” she whispered.

“No one can,” I whispered back. “That’s my charm.”

In the limousine, I said, “Where to now, C.D.?”

“Pearl Harbor,” he said, “to meet our clients.”

“Might I make a suggestion?”

Darrow looked toward Leisure, who was sitting beside me in the roomy back of the limo. “You’ve probably noticed, George, this boy is not shy about making his thoughts known.”

Leisure gave me a sideways smile. “I’ve noticed that. And I respect it. We three have a considerable challenge ahead, and I don’t believe we should hold anything back.”

“Agreed,” Darrow said. “What’s your suggestion, Nate?”

“Let’s make a slight detour. Mrs. Fortescue’s rented bungalow is only a few blocks from here. We probably won’t be able to get in, but let’s at least have a look at the outside of it.”

Less than three blocks away, just one house off the East Manoa Road intersection, on Kolowalu Street, was a nondescript, even dingy little white frame number, a charmless cottage set back amid some scroungy trees with untended hedges along the side. With its intersecting pitched roofs, it was like a parody of the Massies’ little dream house. The yard was slightly overgrown, making it a mild eyesore in this modestly residential section.

No question about it: if you had to pick a house on this street where a murder might have happened, this was the place.

The Navy driver parked the limo across the way, and we got out, crossed the quiet street, and had a look around.

Darrow, hands on hips, was studying the bungalow like a doctor looks at an X-ray. He stood ankle-deep in the gently riffling grass, like an oversize lawn ornament.

“Wonder if it’s been rented out yet,” Leisure said.

“Sure doesn’t look like it,” I said. “Unless Bela Lugosi moved in…. But I’ll find a neighbor to ask.”

The haole housewife next door stopped her vacuuming to come to the door. She was an attractive brunette in a blue housedress, hair pinned up under an island-print kerchief; she thought I was cute, too. She wiped some perspiration from her upper lip and answered my questions.

No, it hadn’t been rented, the place was still empty. The real estate agent was starting to show it, though. They’d left a key with her, if I was interested….

I came back grinning, my prize dangling from a key chain.

Soon we were inside the little place, and it was little: only four rooms and bath—living room, kitchen, two small bedrooms. More rental furniture, but of a lower quality than at the Massies’; not a framed picture on the walls, not a knickknack in sight. No radio, no phonograph. Dusty as hell, and only the crusty dried remains of two fried eggs in a skillet on the stove, and a place setting for two at the kitchen table, indicated anyone had ever lived here at all.

The rust-colored outline of bloodstains in the master bedroom indicated somebody had died here, however. Odd-shaped stains on the wooden floor, like maps of unchartered islands…

The bathroom was spotless—including the tub where the body of Joseph Kahahawai had been dumped for cleaning and wrapping purposes.

“Mrs. Fortescue didn’t live here,” Leisure said from the bathroom doorway as I studied the gleaming bathtub.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She just stayed here. Like you stay in a hotel room. I don’t think there’s anything for us to learn in this place.”

“Do you see anything useful, son?” Darrow asked me, from the cramped hall.

“No. But I smell something.”

Darrow’s brow furrowed in curiosity. Leisure was studying me, too.

“Death,” I said, answering the question in their eyes. “A man was murdered here.”

“Let’s not use that word, son—‘murder.’”

“Executed, then. Hey, I’m all for getting our clients off. But, gentlemen—let’s never forget the smell of this place. How it makes your goddamn skin crawl.”

“Nate’s right,” Leisure said. “This is no vacation. A man died, here.”

“Point well taken,” Darrow said, his voice hushed, somber.

The seven-mile stretch that separated Honolulu from the naval base at Pearl Harbor was a well-paved boulevard bordered by walls of deep red sugarcane stalks on either side. The breeze rustled the cane field, making shimmering music.

“I like Thalia,” Darrow said, after a long interval of silence. “She’s a clever, attractive, unassuming young woman.”

“She’s awfully unemotional,” Leisure said.

“She’s still in a state of shock,” Darrow said dismissively.

Leisure frowned. “Seven months after the fact?”

“Then call it a state of detachment. It’s her way of dealing with tragedy, protecting herself; she’s erected a kind of wall. But she spoke the truth. I can always tell when a client’s lying to me.”

“Two things bother me,” I said.

Darrow’s brow furrowed. “What would those be?”

“She kept describing herself as ‘dazed,’ and painted a nightmarish picture…convincingly.”

Darrow was nodding sagely.

“But for a woman in a daze,” I said, “she noted a hell of a lot of details. She gave us everything but the laundry marks on their damn clothes.”

“Perhaps the awful event is frozen in her memory,” Darrow offered.

“Perhaps.”

Leisure asked, “What’s the other thing that bothered you, Nate?”

“It’s probably nothing. But she talked about her mother taking over the housekeeping for her…”

“Yes,” Leisure said.

“And that when she got back on her feet, the place was suddenly too small for them, and Thalia could handle the housekeeping herself again, so her mother moved out.”

Darrow was listening intently.

“Only in the meantime,” I continued, “housekeeper Thalia’s taken on a full-time maid.”

“If there’s room for the maid,” Leisure said, raising an eyebrow, “why not room for Mom?”

I shrugged. “I just think relations between Thalia and her mother may be a little strained. Isabel told me Thalia practically raised herself, that her mother was never around. I don’t think they were ever close.”

“Yet the mother faces a murder charge,” Darrow said, savoring the irony, “for defending her daughter’s honor.”

“Yeah, funny, isn’t it? Let’s say they don’t get along—can’t be under the same roof together—then why does Mother Fortescue go out on this limb for her little girl?”

“Maybe she was defending the family name,” Leisure suggested.

“Or maybe Mrs. Fortescue feels guilty about neglecting her kid,” I said, “and cooked up a hell of a way to finally make it up to the girl.”

“Mother and daughter needn’t love each other,” Darrow said patiently, as if instructing children, “for a mother’s instincts to take hold. Among many species, the mother forgets herself, in protecting the life of her offspring. It’s purely biological.”

At Pearl Harbor Junction, our limousine bore straight ahead, pulling up to the entrance to the naval station, an innocuous white-picket gate between fieldstone posts in a mesh-wire fence that couldn’t have kept out a troop of Campfire Girls. Our driver checked in with the Marine MP there, who checked us off on a clipboard, and gave us admittance into a surprisingly shabby facility.

Not that the Navy Yard didn’t have its impressive points. Like the immense battleship bed of the cement pit labeled DRYDOCK—14TH NAVAL DISTRICT; or the coaling station with wharf, railroad, and hoisting towers. Or Ford Island (as our driver identified it), with its seaplane station and battery of ungainly planes.

But the wooden shacks labeled, variously, GYRO SHOP, ELECTRICAL SHOP, MESS HALL, DIESEL SHOP looked more like a rundown summer camp than a military base. Sheet-iron shelters housing sailors’ automobiles had a cheap, temporary look; and the submarine base, with what should have been a grand array, was a couple dozen tiny subs at a wobbly wooden network of finger piers.

The fleet was definitely not in. No great warships loomed in the harbor. The only ship in sight was the Alton, perpetually stuck in the mud, aboard which our clients were in custody.

But our first stop was at the base headquarters, another unassuming white building, if better maintained. Our young Navy chauffeur was still our guide, and he led Darrow, Leisure, and me into a large waiting room. Venetian blinds on the many windows were letting in slashes of sunlight as men in white bustled in and out with paperwork; the chauffeur checked us in with the reception desk. We had barely sat down when an attaché pushed open a door and summoned us with, “Mr. Darrow? The admiral will see you now.”

The office was spacious, its paneling light brown, masculine, touched here and there with an award or a plaque or a framed photograph; one wall, at our left as we entered, was taken up almost entirely by a map of the Pacific. Behind the admiral was a wall of windows with more blinds, but these were shut tight, letting no sun in at all; an American flag stood at ease, to the admiral’s right. His mahogany desk, appropriately enough, was as big as a boat, and it was shipshape: pens, papers, personal items, arranged as neatly as if prepared for inspection.

The admiral was shipshape, too—a narrow blade of a man in his late fifties, standing behind the desk with one fist on a hip. In his white uniform with its high collar, epaulets, brass buttons, and campaign ribbons, he looked as perfectly groomed as a waiter in a really high-class joint.

Pouches of skin slanting over grayish-blue eyes gave him a relaxed expression that I doubted; his weathered countenance was otherwise rather dour: prominent nose, long upper lip, lantern jaw. He was smiling. I doubted the smile, too.

“Mr. Darrow, I can’t tell you how pleased I am,” the admiral said in a mellow voice gently touched by the South, “that Mrs. Fortescue took my advice and acquired your good services.”

Second Navy man today who’d taken credit for that.

“Admiral Stirling,” Darrow said, shaking the hand his host extended, “I want to thank you for your hospitality and help. May I introduce my staff?”

Leisure and I shook hands with Admiral Yates Stirling, exchanged acknowledgments, and at the admiral’s signal took the three chairs opposite his desk. One of them, a leather padded captain’s chair, was clearly meant for Darrow, and he took it grandly.

The admiral sat, leaning back in his swivel chair, hands resting on the arms.

“You will have the full cooperation of my men and myself,” Stirling said. “Full access to your clients, of course, twenty-four hours a day.”

Darrow crossed his legs. “Your dedication to your people is commendable, Admiral. And I appreciate you giving us your time, this afternoon.”

“It’s my pleasure,” the admiral said. “I think you’ll find that, despite the grim nature of your mission, these beautiful islands have much to commend them.”

“We couldn’t have asked for a lovelier day for our arrival,” Darrow said.

“Merely a typical Hawaiian day, Mr. Darrow—the sort of day so magnificent it’s almost enough to make one forget the existence of certain sordid people permitted to exist on these heavenly shores by a too-trusting Providence…. If you’d like to smoke, gentlemen, please go right ahead.”

The admiral was filling an ivory meerschaum with tobacco from a wooden humidor with an anchor carved on it; he didn’t drop a flake of stray tobacco on the spotless desk.

“I imagine you refer,” Darrow said, as he began casually building a cigarette, “to Mrs. Massie’s five assailants.”

“They’re only a symptom of the disease, sir.” Stirling was lighting up the pipe with a kitchen match. He puffed at it, got it going, like a tugboat’s smokestack. Then he leaned back in the chair and spoke reflectively.

“When I first visited Hawaii, well before the turn of the century, long before I dreamed a naval command here would be mine, these beautiful gems of the Pacific were ruled over by a dusky Hawaiian queen. Since then, a once-proud Polynesian race has been displaced by Orientals, coming from the coolie class chiefly, the lowest caste in the Orient. That picturesque simple Hawaiian civilization has well nigh passed away, never to return….”

I knew racial rot like this was anathema to Darrow; but I also knew he needed to stay on the admiral’s good side. Still, I knew he wouldn’t let this pass….

“Yes, it is a pity,” Darrow said as he lighted his cigarette from a matchbook, neither sarcasm nor recrimination in his tone, “that so many waves of cheap yellow labor were brought in to work on the white man’s plantations.”

The admiral only nodded, puffed at his pipe solemnly. “The large number of people of alien blood in these islands is a matter of grave concern to the government; nearly half the population here is Japanese!”

“Is that a fact.”

“Even factoring in our twenty thousand military personnel, Caucasians number barely over ten percent. The dangers of such a polyglot population are obvious.”

“I should say they are,” Darrow said. “Now. Admiral…”

“Hawaii is of prime strategic importance—she must be made invulnerable from attack, or an enemy would have a sword to the throat of our Pacific coast. And that’s why, strange as it may seem, this unfortunate Massie affair may provide an unexpected blessing.”

Suddenly Darrow was interested in Stirling’s racist editorializing. “In what way, Admiral?”

“Well, as I’ve already made clear, I’m no advocate of the melting pot experiment. I’ve been lobbying for some time that the U.S. needs to limit suffrage in Hawaii. I’ve long expressed my firm belief that the controlling government here should be under the jurisdiction of the Navy, and Army.”

“The reports in the mainland press,” Darrow said gently, “of women unsafe on your streets at night, that a hoodlum element here is holding Honolulu in its grip…these have opened the door to Washington considering martial law?”

The mildest frown grazed the admiral’s face. “That may yet happen, though I take no pleasure in the fact, Mr. Darrow. Until this affair, I’d always had congenial and cordial relations with Governor Judd…. We’ve often gone out in a mutual friend’s motor sampan, to different parts of the islands, for deep-sea fishing.”

Wasn’t that just peachy.

“But,” the admiral was saying, “it is the irresponsibility of the Territorial government, and the corruption, and incompetence, of the local police, that transformed the Massie case from a mere crime into a major tragedy.”

“Admiral,” I said, risking a question, “do you mind telling us how you think that happened?”

“Yes,” Leisure said, “we’ve made ourselves familiar with the facts of the case, but we’re burdened with an outsider’s point of view.”

The admiral was shaking his head; smoke curled out of his pipe in corkscrew fashion. “It’s hard to describe how hard the news hit this base…that a gang of half-breed hoodlums on the Ala Moana had ravaged one of our younger set. Thalia Massie is a friend of my daughter’s, you know—Mrs. Massie is a demure, attractive, quiet-spoken, sweet young woman.”

“We’ve met with her,” Darrow said, nodding. “I concur with your assessment, sir.”

His pipe in hand waved a curl of smoke in the air. “Imagine thousands of young officers, sailors and marines, on the naval base, in ships, who as American youth had been taught to hold the honor of their women sacred.”

Well, I knew more than a few sailors on leave in Chicago who hadn’t held the honor of women so very goddamn sacred….

“My first inclination,” he continued, his eyes hard under the pouches, “was to seize the brutes and string them up on trees. But…I set that impulse aside, to give the authorities a chance to carry out the law.”

Darrow seemed about to say something; he seemed about to burst, and the admiral’s endorsement of lynch law wasn’t something he was likely to let ride, even when he needed to….

So I jumped in with, “You gotta give the local coppers some credit, Admiral Stirling—they sure picked those hoods up in a hell of a hurry.”

“That was a kindly Providence,” the admiral said. “Were the particulars of their capture in the materials you were provided?”

Darrow glanced at me; he didn’t know.

“No,” I said. “Just that the assailants had been involved in another assault, earlier that night. Was that another rape?”

The admiral shook his head, no. His pipe had gone out. He relighted it as he said, “About forty-five minutes past midnight, only about an hour and a quarter after Mrs. Massie left that nightclub, an automobile with four or five dark-skinned youths bumped bumpers with a car driven by a white man and his kanaka wife.”

“Kanaka?” I asked.

“Hawaiian,” the admiral said, waving out his kitchen match. “Interracial couples are, unfortunately, all too common here. At any rate, one of the dark men got out of the car, saying, ‘Let me at that damn white man!’ But the woman, apparently a husky Island gal, jumped out and confronted the bully. Smacked him a few times, and he scurried away, and he and the other cowards drove off. But the woman got their license number and reported the collision at once to the police. By three o’clock that morning, the five hoodlums who’d been the occupants of that car were rounded up and placed under arrest.”

“Sounds like pretty good police work to me,” I said.

“There are a number of competent officers on the force,” the admiral admitted. “Perhaps you’ve heard of Chang Apana—he’s something of a local celebrity. The fictional Chinese detective Charlie Chan was based on him.”

“Really,” I said. I’d read several Chan serials in The Saturday Evening Post; and there was a pretty good talkie with Warner Oland, the title of which escaped me, which I’d seen last year, at the Oriental. Appropriately enough.

“Unfortunately, Chang Apana is approaching retirement age,” the admiral said, “and his involvement in the Massie case was minimal. But could even his judgment be less than suspect?”

I couldn’t hold back a smile. “You mean, even Charlie Chan can’t be trusted?”

The admiral lifted an eyebrow. “He’s Chinese. His sympathies might well be with the colored defendants. And the vast majority of policemen are Hawaiian, or have Hawaiian blood—there’s a longstanding patronage system giving such individuals an inside track on police jobs.”

If I was supposed to get indignant about police patronage, the admiral was telling the wrong boy: how did he think I got my job on the Chicago PD?

“The Honolulu police department,” the admiral was saying, “is divided against itself in the Massie matter. During the six long weeks it took Mrs. Massie to recover to the point where she could undergo the rigors of a trial, many officers were said to be making reports to the defense attorneys, instead of the DA’s office!”

Darrow gave me a sideways glance that all but said, Where can I find some coppers like that back home?

“And,” continued the admiral, “those hoodlums had the best legal minds in the Territory—William Heen, a Territorial senator and former circuit judge, and William Pittman, brother of U.S. Senator Kay Pittman.”

I asked, “How could a bunch of kid gangsters afford top talent like that?”

The admiral sighed. “Two of the five culprits were of pure Hawaiian blood, so it was no surprise the acknowledged head of their race, Princess Abby Kawananakoa, gave them financial support. After all, her own son is a hoodlum beach boy, in Oahu Prison on a second-degree murder charge.”

“So a defense fund was raised?” Darrow asked.

“Yes. And, keep in mind, both Hawaiian defendants were professional athletes, and local gate-receipt attractions. Managers of sporting contests helped finance the defense as well.”

“Two of the assailants were sports heroes?” I asked. “But you’ve been saying they were hoodlums…”

“They are,” the admiral said crisply, teeth tight around the stem of his pipe. “Ben Ahakuelo is a popular local boxer—he also was convicted with his crony Chang on an attempted rape charge in 1929…. Governor Judd paroled him so he could represent the Territory at the National Amateur Boxing Championship at Madison Square Garden last year. The late Joseph Kahahawai was a football star—and a convicted felon…he did thirty days on a first-degree robbery charge in 1930.”

“What about the other two boys?” Darrow asked.

“They had no criminal records,” the admiral said with a shrug, “but they were known as bad characters by the police, with no visible means of support. And all five were soon out on bail, thanks to Princess Abby and the defense fund. Ahakuelo and Kahahawai continued playing football each Sunday, their names emblazoned in headlines on the sports pages of our Honolulu papers….” He sighed, shook his head. “In spite of the discipline I maintain on this base, I half-expected to find those savages swinging by the neck from trees up Nuuana Valley or at the Pali.”

“And of course,” Darrow said gravely, “one of the defendants was seized and beaten by Navy men….”

The admiral nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. Horace Ida, severely so, and I believe that the discipline our men were under prevented more drastic action being taken upon him. They were trying to obtain a confession…”

Darrow asked, “Did they succeed?”

“Rumor is, yes…but the duress involved would negate it. By the way, I allowed Ida to be brought around, to have a look at the sailors on liberty that night, and he was able to make no identification.”

Not surprising. You know what they say—all white boys look alike.

The admiral continued, “And this wasn’t the only clash between Navy men and the hoodlum element….”

“How badly did things get out of hand?” Leisure asked.

“Well, to give security to the isolated naval people in Manoa Valley and the other suburbs, I established more foot patrols of sailors, and established Navy radio cars in districts where Navy families lived.”

“Why weren’t the cops doing that?” I asked.

“All I can tell you is that this was done at the request of the mayor and the sheriff. And the pressure I’ve brought to bear has resulted in a major shake-up of the force, finally…a new chief of police, practically the entire department put on a year’s probation.”

“How did you manage that?” I asked, impressed.

The admiral’s smile was tiny but bespoke large smugness. “There is certain…leverage the Navy has been able to apply.”

“What kind of leverage?” Darrow wondered.

The admiral’s eyes damn near twinkled. “We have, from time to time during this unfortunate affair, cancelled shore leave. When the fleet is in, gentlemen, income for many businesses in Honolulu is up. By withholding that from the community, well…you can imagine the results.”

“You obviously tried to exert a positive influence on this case from the beginning,” Darrow said. Even I couldn’t detect the sarcasm.

The admiral’s pouchy eyes tightened. “This degenerate sex criminal Kahahawai would be alive today, if Governor Judd and the attorney general had listened to me.”

Darrow frowned thoughtfully. “How so?”

“After the trial ended in a hung jury, I suggested they keep those rapists locked up, until a second trial could be held. But they insisted it was illegal to raise bail above what an individual could pay. It would violate their civil rights, don’t you know. You see, by accident of birth, these creatures are technically ‘Americans’…. Well—I suppose you gentlemen are anxious to meet with your clients.”

“With your kind permission,” Darrow said, rising. “By the way, Admiral—how did you manage to keep our clients under your benign influence?”

“You mean, why aren’t they in jail?” He allowed himself a broader smile. “Cristy, the trial judge, had no stomach for the responsibility of what might happen to Mrs. Fortescue and the others, what with threats of terrorism and mob violence. I suggested the judge swear one of my officers in as a special officer of the civil court, to supervise their confinement aboard the Alton. And I promised to produce the defendants wherever and whenever the Territory might need them.”

“Nicely handled,” Darrow said, meaning it.

The admiral was standing now, but he stayed back behind his desk. “You know, Mr. Darrow, in the trial against those hoodlum rapists, the jury deliberated for ninety-seven hours…. Deadlocked at seven for not guilty, five for guilty. The exact proportion of yellow and brown to white members of the jury. You will undoubtedly face a polyglot jury in this case, as well….”

“There will be no hung jury in this trial,” Darrow predicted.

“You’re up against Prosecutor John C. Kelley—he’s a young firebrand. He’ll attack ferociously…”

“And I’ll counterattack with an olive branch,” Darrow said. “I’m here to heal the breach that’s opened between the races in these garden islands, sir. Not to gouge open that gaping wound further.”

And we left the admiral to ponder Darrow’s words.

6

Our limo driver remained our chaperon as we were led to that obsolete, decommissioned, rundown old cruiser sitting high and dry on a mudflat in Pearl Harbor, the U.S.S. Alton. The driver turned us over to the two armed Marine sentries at the mouth of the seventy-five-foot gangplank that separated the ship and the shore. One of the sentries escorted us aboard, leading the way as we danced across to the rickety wooden gangplanks tune.

Above this screaky melody, Leisure managed to be heard, whispering to Darrow, “The admiral gives quite a ringing endorsement of lynch law, wouldn’t you say?”

But if racial champion Darrow was expected to provide a biting condemnation of Stirling (now that our host was absent), he disappointed. Well, he disappointed Leisure. I knew C.D. well enough to have predicted he’d say something like: “Admiral Stirling is a Navy man, and a Southerner, and his statements are naturally prejudiced.”

Which is exactly what he said.

Our Marine escort led us to the top deck. “The Alton’s used as a general mess hall,” he said over the echo of our feet on metal, “and Officers’ Club.”

He led us into a wardroom, in the stern of the ship, saying, “Mrs. Fortescue and Lt. Massie are staying in the captain’s cabin, just through here.”

We were moving past a large mess table where a number of officers watched us with curiosity, several obviously recognizing Darrow as he shambled by. The interior of the ship, at least judging by this mess hall, was nothing like its sorry exterior: the walls were mahogany paneled, with framed oil paintings of admirals, display cases of trophies, and shining silver ornamentation.

Darrow asked, “The captain was so kind as to vacate his quarters for my clients?”

“No, sir—Captain Wortman lives in Honolulu with his wife. This stateroom is usually reserved for visiting admirals.”

Or very special guests, like defendants in murder trials.

Our escort knocked at the door, saying, “Mrs. Fortescue? Your guests are here.”

“Show them in,” a cultured, Southern, feminine voice responded.

The Marine opened the door and Darrow stepped in first, followed by Leisure and myself. The door clanged shut behind us, as if a reminder we’d entered a jail cell of sorts; but what a hell of a jail cell this was.

Mahogany paneled, spacious, with a big round mahogany table at the center of the room, this might have been a first-class cabin on the Malolo—dark attractive furnishings including wardrobe, chest of drawers, a single bed. Here and there, colorful Hawaiian flowers in vases and bowls gave a woman’s touch to these resolutely male quarters.

And greeting us like an elegant hostess was Mrs. Grace (née Granville) Fortescue, her hand extended to Darrow as if she expected him to kiss it.

So he did.

“What a pleasure and honor it is to meet you, Mr. Darrow,” she said.

Her Southern accent was as refined as she was: tall, slim, Grace Fortescue might have been hostessing a tea in her cherry-colored suit and jaunty matching hat, pearls looped around her rather long, slender, somewhat créped neck, single matching pearls dangling from her earlobes. Her dark blond hair (the same color as Thalia’s) was cut short, in a youthful, stylish bob, and she might have been as young as forty, or as old as (approaching) sixty—it was hard to say; but she was definitely at that age where a woman is no longer pretty but handsome, and despite her bright eyes (the same light blue as Isabel’s), there was no discounting a certain drawn, weary look to these finely carved features. There were lines in this haughty face etched by recent events.

Darrow introduced Leisure, and Mrs. Fortescue warmly offered him her hand—although he merely clasped it, not kissed it—and then Darrow turned to me and said, “And this is the young man we discussed, on the telephone.”

“The young detective Evalyn recommended!” she said with a lovely smile.

“Nathan Heller,” Darrow said, nodding, as I took the hand Mrs. Fortescue offered. I didn’t kiss it either.

“Evalyn?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

“Evalyn Walsh McLean,” she explained. “She’s one of my dearest friends. In fact, if I may be frank…”

“You’re definitely among friends, Mrs. Fortescue,” Darrow intoned with a smile.

“…Mrs. McLean is helping finance my defense. Without Evalyn’s help—and Eva Stotesbury’s—I honestly don’t know where I’d be.”

“You didn’t tell me…” I began to Darrow.

Darrow shrugged. “Didn’t seem pertinent.”

Here I’d thought the idea to use me on this case had been purely C.D.’s. In Washington, D.C., recently, I’d encountered Evalyn McLean—whose (estranged) husband owned the Washington Post, and who herself owned the Hope Diamond; Evalyn had been involved by a scam artist—knowing of her sympathy for Colonel Lindbergh (Evalyn having lost a child by tragedy herself)—in one of the numerous dead-end ransom schemes that plagued that case.

Evalyn was a very attractive older woman, and we’d hit it off famously. So famously, it had apparently gotten around….

“Evalyn suggested I inquire of Mr. Darrow if he was acquainted with you,” Mrs. Fortescue said, “seeing as how you’re both Chicagoans and in a criminal line of work.”

That was the best description of the common ground between lawyers and cops I’d ever heard: a criminal line of work.

“And imagine my surprise and delight,” she continued, “when Mr. Darrow said he’d known you since you were a lad.”

I wasn’t sure I’d ever been a “lad,” and I just kind of gave her a glazed smile. One thing about working with Clarence Darrow: the surprises just kept coming.

“Tommie is resting,” she said, gesturing to a closed door. “Should I wake him?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Darrow said, “just yet.”

“Please sit down,” she said. “Would you gentlemen like some coffee, or perhaps tea?”

We settled on coffee, and she went to the door and called out, “Oh, steward!”

A mess hall sailor approached her and she asked him to fetch four cups of coffee with sugar and cream. He responded with a nod, and she shut the door. We all half-stood as she took her place at the round table.

“Now, Mrs. Fortescue,” Darrow began, getting his shipwreck of a self settled in his chair, “my associate, young Mr. Heller here, is going to take some notes. He’s not a stenographer, mind you—just some informal jotting down of this and that, to back up this feeble old memory. No objection?”

She beamed at me, fluttering her lashes. “That would be just fine.”

I wondered how much her friend Mrs. Walsh had told her about me.

“And just how are you bearing up, Mrs. Fortescue?” Darrow asked gently.

“Now that the worst is over,” she said, “I feel more at ease than I have in months. My mind is at peace. I’m satisfied.”

“Satisfied?” Leisure asked.

“Satisfied,” she said stiffly, sitting the same way, “that in our efforts to obtain a confession from that brute, we weren’t breaking the law, but attempting to aid it. I’ve slept better since the day of the murder than I have for a long time.”

A frown had tightened Darrow’s face on the word “murder,” but now he affected a benign, almost saintly smile as he patted her hand. “We’ll not be using that word ‘murder,’ Mrs. Fortescue. Not amongst ourselves, and certainly not to anyone with the press.”

“You must have read that interview in the New York Times,” she said, putting a hand to her chest, her expression mildly distressed. “I’m afraid I was indiscreet.”

His smile was lenient, but his eyes firm. “You were. I don’t mean that unkindly…but you were. No more talk of ‘murder.’ Or of your only regret being that you ‘bungled the job.’”

“That did look…clumsy in print, didn’t it?” she asked, but it was an admission, not a question.

“Are you really sleeping better now?” I asked her. “Pardon me for saying so, ma’am, but I would think the stress of this situation would have to take its toll.”

She raised her chin, nobly. “It’s much better with everything all out in the open. They suppressed my daughter’s name, in the first case, but that only made it worse. Rumors ran rampant. People would stare at her poor bruised cheek, and whisper and wonder.” Her face tightened, pinched; suddenly she looked sixty. “Lying gossip, filthy stories—a campaign calculated to drive my child out of Honolulu, or short of that, defame her character, and prejudice jurors if she dared to prosecute a second time. Not long before the…what shall I call the murder, Mr. Darrow?”

This time his smile was a twitch. “Let’s use the word ‘incident,’ shall we?”

She nodded. “Not long before the…incident…a few days, I think…I went to Judge Steadman—he’d been very kind to us, during the trial. I told him I feared for my daughter’s life. Not only were those five rapists running wild and free, this escaped criminal Lyman was reported to be in Moana Valley.”

“Who?” Darrow asked.

“Daniel Lyman,” Leisure said. “A murderer and rapist who walked out of Oahu Prison with a burglar pal of his on a New Year’s Eve pass. They’ve since ravished two more women, one of them white, and committed numerous robberies. The partner was captured but Lyman’s still at large. It’s been a major embarrassment to the Honolulu police.”

“But a boon to Admiral Stirling,” I said, “in his efforts to shake out the department.”

Darrow nodded, as if he knew what we were talking about. To Leisure he posed: “Was this in the materials Lt. Johnson provided us, before we boarded the Malolo?”

Leisure nodded.

I turned to our client. “Mrs. Fortescue, were you afraid this Lyman might attack your daughter…?”

“No,” she said, with a bitter little smile, “but he would have made a convenient scapegoat, had she been found dead, would he not? And without Thalia, there is no case against those five defendants.” She frowned to herself. “Four defendants, now.”

Darrow leaned forward, brow furrowed. “Tell me—how did your son-in-law hold up under all of this pressure?”

She glanced toward the closed door behind which Lt. Massie napped. She lowered her voice to a whisper and said, melodramatically: “As much as I feared for Thalia’s life, I feared for Tommie’s sanity.”

Darrow arched an eyebrow. “His sanity, dear?”

“I feared he couldn’t withstand the strain—he’d become sullen, he wasn’t sleeping or eating well, he became uncharacteristically withdrawn….”

A knock at the door interrupted, and Mrs. Fortescue imperiously called, “Come!” and a galley gob came in with a silver tray bearing cups of coffee, a creamer, and a bowl of cube sugar.

As the sailor served us, I sat studying this proud, rather dignified society matron and tried to picture her masterminding the kidnapping of a brutal Hawaiian rapist. I could picture her serving hors d’oeuvres; I could picture her playing bridge. I could even picture her, just barely, inside that dusty bungalow on Kolowalu Street.

But picture her party to guns and blood and naked dead natives in bathtubs? I couldn’t form the image.

“You had no intention of taking a life,” Darrow said ever so gently, “did you, dear?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, and sipped her coffee, pinkie poised genteelly. “My upbringing is Southern, but I assure you, I am no believer in lynch law. I cannot state that too emphatically. My upbringing, my family traditions, early religious training, make the taking of another’s life repugnant to me. Like you, sir, I am opposed to capital punishment.”

Darrow was nodding, smiling. He liked the sound of this. I didn’t know if he bought any of it, but he liked the sound.

“Then exactly how did this happen?” I asked.

“Incrementally,” she said. “As you probably know, after the first trial ended in a hung jury, the five defendants were required to report to the Judiciary Building every morning. I think it may have been Judge Steadman’s hope that they would violate his edict, and he could issue orders for their imprisonment…but they were reporting regularly.”

“Who told you this?” I asked.

“Judge Steadman himself. I was also friendly with the clerk of the court, Mrs. Whitmore. She was the one, I’m afraid, who planted the seed.”

“The seed?” Leisure asked.

“Mrs. Whitmore’s the one who told me the second trial was being delayed indefinitely. The district attorney’s office was afraid of another hung jury—and after another mistrial, the accused could not be tried again—those beasts would go free! The prosecution, Mrs. Whitmore said, had made such a mess of things in the first trial, it was going to be impossible to bring about a conviction unless one of the defendants confessed.”

“So you decided,” I said, “to get a confession yourself.”

She gestured with a flowing hand, as if she were explaining why it had been necessary to postpone this afternoon’s flute recital, and substitute a string quartet.

“I had no sudden inspiration, Mr. Heller,” she said. “The notion emerged gradually, like a ship from the fog. I asked Mrs. Whitmore if the five men were still reporting to the courthouse, and she said they were. She mentioned that the big Hawaiian reported every morning.”

“By ‘the big Hawaiian,’” Leisure said, “she meant Joseph Kahahawai?”

Mrs. Fortescue nodded, once. “I lay awake that night thinking about what the clerk of court had said.”

“And the ship,” I said, “emerged from the fog.”

“With remarkable clarity,” she said. “The next day I went around to see Mrs. Whitmore again. I told her I’d heard a rumor that two of the accused rapists had been arrested, over at Hilo, for stealing a motor. She said she doubted that, but checked with the probation officer, a Mr. Dickson, who came out and spoke to me, assuring me that Kahahawai had just been in that morning. I asked, don’t they all come in together? And he told me, no, one at a time, and at specific hours—he couldn’t have them dropping in on him at just any old odd time,”

“So you established the basic time that Kahahawai reported in to his probation officer,” I said.

“Yes. Then I went to the office of the Star-Bulletin to get copies of newspapers with Kahahawai’s picture. I began studying his features in a clipping I carried with me. That evening, I spoke with Tommie about my idea. He admitted to me he’d had similar notions. And he’d heard a rumor that Kahahawai had confessed the rape to his stepfather! I suggested perhaps we might inveigle the brute into a car on some false pretense, whisk him to my home, and frighten him into confessing.”

“And what,” Darrow asked, “was Tommie’s reaction?”

“At first he was enthusiastic—he’d spoken to Major Ross of this newly formed Territorial Police, and to several others, who gave him the same impression I had gotten—that without a confession, there would be no second trial, certainly no conviction. But then he wavered—how, he wondered, might we manage to get the native into our car? I wasn’t sure myself, quite frankly—but I said, ‘Can’t we display at least as much cunning as these Orientals?’ And then I remembered Seaman Jones.”

“Jones?” Darrow asked.

“One of the two enlisted men we’re defending,” Leisure prompted.

“Ah yes. Please continue, Mrs. Fortescue.”

“In December, this young enlisted man, Jones, had been assigned to act as a sort of bodyguard to Thalia, my daughter Helene, and myself, while Tommie was away on sea duty. When Tommie returned, young Jones remained in the neighborhood as one of the armed sentries who patrolled Manoa Valley.”

Part of Admiral Stirling’s efforts to protect Navy personnel and their families against the “hoodlum element” roaming suburban streets.

“Jones became friendly with your family?” I asked.

“Oh yes. When he was guarding us, he’d often provide a fourth for bridge; when he was patrolling, he’d stop in for coffee. Occasionally we’d provide a couch or a chair for him to take a nap. Such a sweet, colorful boy with his tales of adventures in the Far East.”

“So you enlisted his aid in your plan?” I asked.

“I merely reminded Tommie,” she continued, “that Jones had often said he wanted to help us, in any way. I knew we could trust this boy. I suggested to Tommie that he confide in Jones, seek his ideas, his assistance.”

“Go on, Mrs. Fortescue,” Darrow said kindly.

“Well, the next morning I continued exploring the lay of the land, as it were. I parked in front of the Judiciary Building on King Street, at eight o’clock, and watched the hands of the clock creep to ten. I would open my purse, to peek in at the clipping of Kahahawai I had pinned, there. I wanted to make sure I would recognize him. Much as it disgusted me, I sat studying that brutal, repulsive black face. But at ten-thirty, there had been no sign of him, and I was forced to leave.”

“How so?” Darrow wondered.

She shrugged. “I was expecting guests for a little luncheon party.”

Darrow, Leisure, and I exchanged glances.

“My little Japanese maid wasn’t up to making the preparations all by her lonesome, so I gave up my vigil, for the moment, and—”

“Excuse me.” The voice was male—soft, Southern, unassuming.

We turned our attention to the doorway to the adjacent cabin, where Lt. Thomas Massie stood in shirtsleeves, hands in the pockets of his blue civilian trousers in a pose that should have seemed casual but only looked awkward.

Short, slender, dark-haired, Massie might normally have seemed boyishly handsome, but his oval face—with its high forehead, long sharp nose, and pointed chin—showed signs of strain. His tiny eyes were dark-circled, his complexion prisoner pallid, his cheeks sunken. And his mouth was a thin tight line.

He was twenty-seven years old and looked easily ten years older.

We rose and he came over to us, introduced himself, and Darrow made our introductions; we shook hands. Massie’s grip was firm, but his hand was small, like a child’s.

He took a seat at the table. “I am embarrassed,” he said, “sleepin’ through my first meetin’ with my counsel.”

Darrow said, “I instructed Mrs. Fortescue not to wake you, Lieutenant.”

“Tommie. Please call me Tommie. Just because we’re Navy doesn’t mean we have to stand on ceremony.”

“That’s good to hear,” Darrow said, “because we need, all of us, to be friends. To trust each other, confide in one another. And, Tommie, I let you sleep because I thought it best to hear Mrs. Fortescue’s version of this incident.”

“Judgin’ by what I overheard,” Tommie said, “you’re pretty well into it.”

“We’re up to the afternoon before,” I said.

“That was when I brought Jones and Lord around to the house on Kolowalu Street.” Massie’s speech was an odd mixture of clipped and casual, his staccato delivery at odds with his Southern inflection.

“Lord is the other enlisted man?” Darrow asked Leisure, and Leisure nodded.

“Out at the base that mornin’, while Mrs. Fortescue was stakin’ out the courthouse,” Massie said, “I called Jones over…he’s a machinist’s mate, we were involved in athletics on the base—I used to be a runner, and I offered my services helpin’ him train the baseball team? Anyway, I called Jones over and said I’d heard Kahahawai was ready to crack. And Jones said, ‘But he just needs a little help, right?’ Kinda winked at me as he said it. I said that was so; was he willin’ to help? He thought it over for a second, then he said, ‘I sure as hell am.’ If you’ll excuse the language, Mrs. Fortescue, that is what he said.”

Mrs. Fortescue nodded regally, her smile benign.

“I asked Jones if he knew of anyone else who might help, somebody we could count on. And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s go up to the gym’…that was on the third floor of the barracks? ‘Let’s go up to the gym, I’ll introduce you to Eddie Lord. He’s all right. If you think he’s all right, too, well, hell—we’ll bring ’im along!’ Sorry about the language.”

“I’m the wife of a military man, Tommie,” Mrs. Fortescue said with a ladylike laugh. “I’m not easily shocked.”

“Lord was in the ring,” Massie continued, “sparrin’ with another gob. A strappin’ specimen for a lightweight; you could see right away he could handle himself. Lord—that’s Fireman First Class Edward Lord? Jones called him over, and we chatted a little bit. He seemed like a regular guy.”

“Did you fill Lord in, on the spot?” I asked.

“No. I talked to Jones first, said, ‘Can he be trusted?’ And Jones said, ‘Eddie and me was shipmates for five years.’ That was all I needed to know. Jones said he’d fill Lord in, and we arranged to meet at Mrs. Fortescue’s, no earlier than three.”

“After my luncheon,” Mrs. Fortescue explained.

“We stopped in town, at the YMCA,” Massie said, “and changed into civilian clothes. Then we drove to Kolowalu Street, where we introduced Mrs. Fortescue to Eddie Lord, and she told us of this idea she had to use a false warrant from Major Ross, to lure Kahahawai into the car.”

“My little Japanese maid was still in the kitchen,” Mrs. Fortescue said, “so I paid her her weekly wages a day early, and gave her the next day off. And then I suggested to Tommie and his boys that we drive down to the courthouse.”

“To case the joint,” Massie said, with a wry little smile. It would have seemed flippant if his eyes hadn’t been so haunted.

“That night,” Mrs. Fortescue said, “I sent my daughter Helene to Thalia’s, to spend the night, and we reviewed our plans, the four of us. Kahahawai would be brought to my house. We would get a confession from him. We would make him sign it, and take it to the police.”

“What if the police dismissed the confession as coerced?” I asked. “Nothing came of it when those Navy boys grabbed Horace Ida.”

“Then we’d take it to the newspapers,” Massie said. “They’d surely print it, and at least that way these damned rumors about my wife’s honor would be put to rest.”

“Who rented the blue Buick?” Leisure asked.

“Jones and Lord,” Massie said. “I went on home, and they returned to Mrs. Fortescue’s, where they slept in the livin’ room, on the couch, on the floor. So we’d be ready to go, bright and early.”

“And the two guns?” Leisure asked.

“The .45 was mine,” Massie said. “The .32 Colt was Lord’s…it’s missing. I don’t know what became of it.”

Kahahawai had been killed with a .32.

I asked, “You prepared the fake summons, Mrs. Fortescue?”

She gestured gracefully again. “Yes, and I would have preferred to use a typewriter on the warrant, but the machine was at Thalia’s. So I hand-printed it—‘Territorial Police, Major Ross Commanding, Summons to Appear—Kahahawai, Joe’…putting his last name first made it seem more official. Tommie provided a gold seal from a diploma of his…”

“Chemical warfare,” Massie said, “at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. The diploma wasn’t of any use to me, so I just snipped off the gold seal and Mrs. Fortescue glued it on the paper.”

Mrs. Fortescue sipped her coffee, then said thoughtfully, “But the piece of paper still looked…insufficient somehow. Lying on my desk was that morning’s paper…I spied a paragraph that seemed about the right size, clipped it, and pasted it on the warrant. It looked better.”

Leisure asked, “Were you aware of the implicit irony in the words of that clipping?”

“No,” she said with a faint smile. “It was an accident of fate, the philosophical nature of that paragraph…but those words have been so widely quoted, I can reel them off to you now, if you like: ‘Life is a mysterious and exciting affair and anything can be a thrill if you know how to look for it, and what to do with opportunity when it comes.’”

Darrow, Leisure and I exchanged glances again.

“The next mornin’,” Massie said with a grim smile, “we all had a laugh over it, at breakfast.”

Leisure asked, “You ate breakfast before you went out on your…mission?”

“I cooked up some eggs for the sailors,” Mrs. Fortescue said, “but they didn’t seem to have any appetite. All they wanted was coffee. I suggested we leave, so we’d be at the courthouse by eight o’clock.”

“We were wearing civilian clothes,” Massie explained, “and I had a chauffeur’s cap and dark glasses on, as a disguise. I gave Lord the .45—he was going to watch the back entrance—and he and Jones and I got in the rented Buick and drove to the courthouse. Mrs. Fortescue followed in her roadster.”

“I parked in front of the courthouse,” she said. “Why not? I had nothing to conceal. Tommie parked in front of the post office, nearby; the two sailors got out, Tommie staying behind the wheel of the parked sedan. I left my car and gave Jones the picture of the native I’d cut from the paper; he already had the sham summons. Jones went to the main entrance, to await our man, and I returned to my car. Mrs. Whitmore noticed me and stopped and we had a friendly little chat.”

“Perhaps a minute after Mrs. Whitmore went inside,” Massie said, picking it up, “we saw two natives crossin’ the courthouse grounds. One of them was a little guy, but the other one was big, heavy—Kahahawai, wearin’ a blue shirt and a brown cap. I pulled up the sedan alongside the curb just as Lord was approachin’ the two natives. He showed Kahahawai the summons, and Kahahawai wanted the other fella to come along, but Jones grabs him and says, ‘Just you,’ and shoves Kahahawai in back of the car. Jones got in after him and we headed out King Street, toward Waikiki.”

“I saw Lord coming around the side of the courthouse,” Mrs. Fortescue said. “The sedan was already out of sight when I picked him up and…”

“Excuse me for interrupting,” Darrow said. “But I need to back things up a tad, to ask Tommie here a few pertinent questions.”

Why was Darrow cutting in, just when it was getting good? Just when we were about to find out what had happened behind the closed doors of the house on Kolowalu Street that resulted in Joseph Kahahawai’s demise, courtesy of a .32 slug under the left nipple?

“Your mother-in-law indicates,” Darrow was saying to Massie, “that you suffered a mental strain due not only to the heinous crime committed upon your sweet wife, but to these foul rumors flying about.”

Massie didn’t understand this interruption, either. There was confusion in his voice as he said, “Yes, sir.”

“Did you seek any medical help? For your restlessness, your insomnia…”

“I talked to several doctors, who seemed concerned about my physical state.”

“And your mental state?”

“Well, I was advised by Dr. Porter to take Thalia and leave the islands, for both our sakes…but I was adamant that my wife’s honor be cleared, and that flight from this island would be seen as an admission that these slanders were of substance….”

Darrow, behind a tent of his hands, was nodding, eyes narrowed.

“If I might continue,” Massie said, clearly wanting to get on with his story and get it out of the way, “we arrived at the house on Kolowalu Street and—”

“Details, at this point, won’t be necessary,” Darrow said, with a wave of the hand.

I looked at Leisure and he looked back at me; I wonder which of us had the more startled expression.

“Why bother, right now, with the sordid particulars—I think we all know what happened within that house,” Darrow said. “I think it’s obvious whose hand held the weapon that took Joseph Kahahawai’s life.”

“It is?” Massie said, with a puzzled frown.

“Well, it can’t be this lovely lady,” Darrow said with a gracious gesture. “She is too refined, too dignified, too much a picture of motherhood touched by tragedy. And it could not have been either of those two sailor boys, because after all, that would be murder, plain and simple, wouldn’t it?”

“It would?” Massie asked.

“It most certainly would. We’re very fortunate that neither of them pulled the trigger, because you, as an officer, enlisting their aid, well, that would amount to incitement.”

Mrs. Fortescue wasn’t following any of this. Massie, however, had turned even paler. Whiter than milk, though not nearly so healthy.

Darrow was smiling, but it was a smile that frowned. “Only one person could possibly have pulled that trigger—the man with the motive, the man whose wife’s good name had been defiled even as had she herself been so woefully defiled.”

Massie squinted. “What…what do you think happened in that house?”

“What I would imagine happened,” Darrow said, “was that Joseph Kahahawai, confronted by the righteousness of the man he had wronged, blurted a confession, and in so doing, sparked an inevitable reaction from that righteous wronged man, in fact provoked an insane act…”

“You’re not suggesting I construct a story…” Massie began.

Darrow’s eyes flared. “Certainly not! If you don’t remember shooting Kahahawai, in fact if everything is a sort of haze, that would only make sense, under these circumstances.”

Darrow clapped his hands together, and we all jumped a little.

“Well, now,” he said, “I certainly don’t mean to put words in your mouth…. Why don’t we come back to the events within that house, at a later date…tomorrow, let’s say, after you’ve had a chance to collect your thoughts…and perhaps speak with Mrs. Fortescue, and your two sailor friends, and compare your recollections—not to come up with a unified story, of course, but rather to see if, among you, your collective memory might be jogged.”

Massie was nodding. Mrs. Fortescue was quietly smiling; she got it—now, she got it.

“Now,” Darrow said, rising, “let’s go meet those sailor boys, shall we? Let’s just get acquainted. I don’t think I’ll want to question them about the incident…not just yet. Then perhaps we can have a bite of late lunch in the mess hall, Mrs. Fortescue, and if you’re up to it, you can relate your adventures with the police.”

Those “adventures,” of course, had to do with the attempt the conspirators had made to dump Kahahawai’s sheet-wrapped naked body; they’d been caught by the cops with the corpse in the backseat of the rental Buick on the way to Hanauma Bay.

It seemed the other native, the “little guy” who’d been walking across the Judiciary Building grounds with Joe Kahahawai when the fake summons was served, was Joe’s cousin Edward Ulii, who had been suspicious about Joe getting shoved into that Buick, and immediately reported it as a possible abduction. When a radio car spotted the Buick speeding toward Koko Head, shades drawn, Mrs. Fortescue’s jig was up.

“I’d be delighted, Mr. Darrow,” Mrs. Fortescue said.

And soon we were walking along the old gun deck of the cruiser, past empty weapon ports; up ahead Darrow was walking along with his arm around Mrs. Fortescue, Massie following like a puppy.

“This may be the most straightforward case of felony murder I ever encountered,” Leisure whispered to me. “Premeditation all the way…”

I let out a short laugh. “Why do you think C.D. pulled that temporary insanity rabbit out of his hat?”

“I have to admit I was shocked,” Leisure said, shaking his head. “He stopped just short of suborning perjury. I’ve never witnessed a more blatant display of questionable ethics in my career.”

“Come to Chicago,” I advised. “We got plenty more where that came from.”

“You’re not offended?”

“Hardly.” I nodded up toward Massie and his mother-in-law as they walked with Darrow. “Do you think those two misguided souls deserve life in prison?”

“They probably deserve a good thrashing, but…no.”

“Neither does C.D. He’s just doing what it takes to give them the best goddamn defense he can muster.”

We followed echoing laughter to where Jones and Lord were playing a spirited round of Ping-Pong in a room that could have handled ten times as many cots as the two unmade ones on its either side. No guard was watching them. Both were short, muscular, good-looking gobs in their early twenties.

Jones was a wiry wiseguy with his brown hair slicked back on a square head, and Lord a curly-headed Dick Powell type with a massive build for a little guy. Seeing us enter, they stopped their game and doffed their seamen’s hats.

Mrs. Fortescue rather grandly said, “Allow me to introduce Mr. Clarence Darrow.”

There were handshakes all around, and Darrow made our introductions as well, and informed the sailors he wasn’t here to talk in depth about the case just yet, merely to say hello.

“Boy, are we glad to see you,” Jones said. “I feel sorry for the other side!”

“It’s an honor meeting you, sir,” Lord said.

“Show them your memory book!” Mrs. Fortescue urged Jones.

“Sure thing, missus!” Jones said, and dragged out a thick scrapbook from under one of the unmade cots. “I just pasted in some more today.”

Lord and Massie were off to one side of the room, lighting up cigarettes, chatting, laughing, kidding each other. I found a chair to sit on while Leisure leaned against a bulkhead, silently shaking his head.

And Clarence Darrow was sitting on the edge of the cot next to the grinning Jones, who turned the pages of the scrapbook, already overflowing with clippings, while Mrs. Fortescue stood with hands fig-leafed before her, watching with delight as her savior and one of her servants conferred.

“I ain’t never got my name in the papers before,” the proud sailor said.

I wondered if sports star Joe Kahahawai had kept a scrapbook, too; he’d made the papers lots of times. Mostly the sports page. He’d make it again, in the coming weeks.

Then it was pretty likely to taper off.

7

You might have found the Alexander Young Hotel—a massive block-long brownstone with two six-story wings bookending a long, four-story midsection—in downtown Milwaukee or maybe Cleveland. Like so many buildings built around the turn of the century, it straddled eras—stubbornly unembellished, neither modern nor old-fashioned, the Young was a commercial hotel whose only concession to being located in paradise was a few potted palm plants and occasional halfhearted vases of colorful flowers in an otherwise no-nonsense lobby.

The reporters were waiting when we arrived midafternoon, and they swarmed us in a pack as we moved steadily toward the elevators in the company of the hotel manager. The mustached little man had met us at the curb not only to greet us, but to let C.D. and Leisure know the numbers of the suites where they would find their wives.

“I’ve spoken to my clients,” Darrow said to the reporters as we moved along, “and have heard enough to decide upon my line of defense. And that’s all I have to say about the subject at present.”

The overlapping requests for further clarification were pretty much unintelligible, but the words “unwritten law” were in there a good deal.

Darrow stopped suddenly, and the reporters tumbled into each other, like an auto pileup.

“I’m down here to defend four people,” he said, “who have been accused of a crime that I do not think is a crime.”

Then he pressed on, while the reporters—stalled momentarily by that cryptic comment—lagged behind as the old boy deftly stepped onto a waiting elevator. And Leisure and I were right there with him, while the hotel manager stayed out, holding back the press like a traffic cop.

One newshound yelled, “The Hawaiian legislature must agree with you—they’ve just made rape a capital offense.”

“And isn’t that a magnificent piece of lawmaking,” Darrow said bitterly. “Now a man committing a rape knows he’ll receive the same punishment if he goes ahead and kills his victim, too. He might as well go all the way, and get rid of the evidence!”

The elevator operator swung the door shut, and the cage began to rise.

Slumped next to me, Darrow shook his big head, the comma of gray hair flopping on his forehead. “That goddamn Lindbergh case,” he muttered.

“What about the Lindbergh case, C.D.?” I asked. I’d spent enough time on that crime to have a sort of proprietary attitude.

“It got this wave of blood thirst going among the populace. Whoever snatched that poor infant opened the door for capital punishment for kidnappers…and how many kidnap victims are going to die because of that?”

Ruby Darrow met us at the door of the suite; her smile of greeting turned immediately to one of concern.

“Clarence, you look terribly tired…you simply must get some rest.”

But Darrow would hear none of it. He invited us into the outer sitting area of the suite, where again the Hawaiian influence was nil: dark furnishings, oriental rug, pale walls with wooden trim. We might have been in a suite at the Congress on Michigan Avenue, though the seductive breeze drifting in the open windows indicated we weren’t.

“These were waiting at the desk for you,” Ruby said testily, and handed him several envelopes.

He sorted through them, as if this were his morning mail at home, tossed them on a small table by the door. Then he removed his baggy suit coat and flung it over a chair; Leisure and I took his lead and removed our suit coats, but draped them more carefully over a coffee table by a comfortable-looking sofa whose floral pattern was the only vaguely Island touch in the suite.

C.D. settled into an easy chair, put his feet up on a settee, and began making a cigarette. Leisure and I took the couch as a clearly distressed Ruby, shaking her head, disappeared off into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her, not slamming it, exactly.

“Ruby thinks I’m going to die someday,” Darrow said. “I may just fool her. George, you’ve been remarkably silent since Pearl Harbor. Might I assume you’re displeased with me?”

Leisure sat up; it was the kind of sofa you sank down into, so this took effort. “I’m your co-counsel. I’m here to assist, and follow your lead.”

“But…”

“But,” Leisure said, “taking Tommie Massie by the hand like that, and steering him into a temporary insanity plea—”

“George, we have four clients who quite obviously caused the death of Joseph Kahahawai due to their felonious conspiracy. They face a second-degree murder charge, and a reasonable argument could be made that they’re lucky the grand jury didn’t slap them with murder in the first.”

“Agreed.”

“So we have no choice: we have to prove extenuating circumstances. What extenuating circumstances avail themselves to us? Well, there’s no question that Tommie Massie’s stress-ravaged mental condition is our best, perhaps our only, recourse.”

“I certainly wouldn’t want to try to prove Mrs. Fortescue insane,” Leisure said with a smirk. “She’s about as deliberate and self-controlled an individual as I’ve ever met.”

“And those two sailors aren’t nuts,” I said. “They’re just idiots.”

Darrow nodded. “And idiocy is no defense…but temporary insanity is. All four were in agreement to commit a felony—kidnapping Kahahawai, the use of firearms to threaten and intimidate their victim…”

“No question about it,” I said, “Tommie’s the best shooter for the jury to pin its sympathy on.”

“I agree,” Leisure said, and he whapped the back of one hand rhythmically into the open palm of the other, as he made his point. “But the felony murder concept still prevails—all four are equally guilty, no matter who fired the shot.”

“No!” Darrow said. “If Tommie Massie, while temporarily insane, fired the shot, he is not guilty…and if Tommie is not guilty, then none of them are, because there is no crime! The felony evaporates and so does the concept of felony murder right along with it.”

Leisure’s eyes were open wide; then he sighed and began nodding. “Obviously these clumsy fools had no intention of murdering Kahahawai.”

“They’re as much victims in this as Kahahawai,” Darrow said gravely.

“I wouldn’t go quite that far, C.D.,” I said. “Mrs. Fortescue and the boys aren’t in the ground.”

The only sound in the room was the gentle whir of a ceiling fan.

“I have misgivings myself,” Darrow admitted, sighing heavily. “After all, I’ve never employed the insanity defense….”

“Sure you did, C.D.,” I said. Was his memory completely gone? How could he forget his most famous trial?

“Loeb and Leopold, you mean?” He smiled patiently, shook his head, no. “I pleaded those boys guilty, and merely used insanity as a mitigating circumstance, in seeking the judge’s mercy. No, this is a full-blown insanity defense, and we’re going to need experts in the field of psychiatry.”

Leisure nodded. “I agree. Any ideas?”

Darrow gazed at the ceiling fan’s blades. “Did you follow the Winnie Ruth Judd trial?”

“Certainly,” Leisure said. “Who didn’t?”

“Those alienists who testified on behalf of Mrs. Judd made a hell of a good case that she had to be crazy to have dismembered those two gals, and stuffed ’em in that trunk.”

Leisure was nodding. “Williams and Orbison. But Mrs. Judd was convicted…”

“Yes,” Darrow said with a winning smile, “but I wasn’t defending her. I was impressed by their testimony; will you track them down by telephone, George?”

“Certainly, but I doubt they take charity cases….”

“Establish their availability and fee. When I confer privately with Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie, tomorrow, I’ll let them know how important bringing in alienists is to their defense. They’ll find the money, amongst their rich friends. Could you start on that right now?”

Leisure nodded and stood. “I’ll call from my own suite; Anne’s probably wondering what’s become of me.”

“Be back by four-thirty, if you can, George. We’re meeting with those local fellows for further briefing.”

Darrow was referring to Montgomery Winn and Frank Thompson, the Honolulu attorneys who had handled the case before Darrow came aboard. Winn had prepared much of the material we’d looked at on the Malolo.

With Leisure gone, Darrow said, “I think we may have offended George’s delicate legal sensibilities.”

“Tough finding out your hero has feet of clay,” I said.

“Is that what I have?”

“Up to about the knees.”

He let out a horse laugh. Then he sat forward, putting his cigarette out in an ashtray on the small table by his chair; he rested his hands on his thighs and gazed at me sleepily.

“Let’s get down to it, son,” he said. “I’m going to be making a lot of noise, with the press boys, about how it doesn’t matter whether Joe Kahahawai and his cohorts were really guilty of raping Thalia Massie or not. That it doesn’t matter a ding-dong diddly damn whether it was some other carload of Island hoodlums, or Thalia Massie’s overactive imagination, or Admiral Stirling and the entire Pacific fleet. What matters is that Tommie Massie and Mrs. Fortescue and those two sailor boys believed Kahahawai to be one of her attackers…the brute who broke that poor girl’s jaw and wouldn’t let her pray. And I will be trumpeting from Honolulu to doomsday that we are not, and will not, retry the Ala Moana case in that courtroom.”

“That’s what you’ll be saying to the press.”

“Right. And it’s a boxcar of bullshit. Oh, in a technical legal sense, it’s sound enough, but what we really need to free our clients is proof that they killed the right man. It gives them moral authority for this immoral, senseless act they perpetrated.”

“Which is where I come in.”

He narrowed his eyes, nodded slyly. “Exactly. This rape case, this so-called Ala Moana case, I want you to dig into it. Interview the witnesses, naval personnel, local officials, the goddamn man on the street if you have to.” He thrust out his arm and his finger pointed right at me; it was like having a lightning bolt almost hit you. “If you can find new evidence of the guilt of those rapists—and I believe Thalia Massie, I believe her, based upon her words and her demeanor and, if nothing else, that goddamned license plate number that she missed by only a single goddamned digit—then we can make a hero out of the sorry human unit that is Thomas Massie. And we can spring ’em all!”

I was sitting forward, loosely clasped hands draped between my open knees. “What do we do with this new evidence, should I find it?”

He winked. “Leave that to me. I’ll make sure the jury hears about it, and the papers. Of course, I will in this trial be retrying the Ala Moana case, because it speaks to the motivation and the mental condition of Tommie Massie. No prosecutor can keep that out of the record…. Now—I’m going into court tomorrow morning, and I’m going to ask for a week to prepare my case; the judge’ll give it to me, too.”

“Of course he will. You’re Clarence Darrow.”

“And that’s about all the consideration I expect my fame to get me in this case, but I’ll damn well take it. Then I expect it’ll take a good week to select a jury…I intend to make sure it does.”

“So you’ll buy me two weeks.”

He nodded. “I would expect, during the trial, you’ll be at my side, at my table. That’s where I’ll want you, and need you, not running around chasing girls down some snow white beach.”

“Is that how you figure I’ll spend my time?”

“Some of it. Of course, you’ve already landed this Bell girl. Fine-looking young woman. You bagged that filly the first night aboard ship, didn’t you?”

“Admitting that wouldn’t be gentlemanly.”

He tilted his head; his eyes had a nostalgic cast. “Does she look as good out of a bathing suit as she does in one, son?”

“Better.”

Darrow sighed with pleasure at the thought of that, then hauled his weary body to its feet; quite a process, sort of like reassembling himself. He was fishing for something in his baggy pants pocket as he motioned for me to rise, and I did, and he walked me to the door. He slipped his arm around my shoulder. With his other hand, he pressed some keys in my palm.

“There’s a car waiting for you in the hotel garage. Mrs. Fortescue’s provided it.”

“Any special car, or do I just start trying keys in ignitions?”

“A blue Durant roadster. It’ll get you in the mood of the case: it’s her own car, the one she drove to the courthouse the day they snatched Kahahawai.”

I grunted a laugh. “At least it isn’t the car they hauled that poor bastard’s body in.”

He moved away to pluck one of the envelopes off the table by the door. “This is for you, too, son—it’s your temporary private investigator’s license, and permission to carry a firearm in the Territory of Hawaii.”

“What the hell,” I said, having a look at the document, signed by the chief of police. “I’m legal.”

He patted my shoulder. “I’ll be holed up here, mostly, working with George. Check in with me by phone and we’ll meet every day or so. Now, I want you to stay away from this hotel—I don’t want the reporters getting after you.” He dug in his pocket. “Here’s some expense money….”

I took the five tens he was offering, and said, “Whose idea was it, hiring me? Yours or Evalyn Walsh McLean’s?”

“Does it matter where a great notion first rears its head?”

“Don’t tell me she’s paying my expense money….”

He touched his caved-in chest with splayed fingers. “Now that injures me, it really does. You know I dote upon you—as if you were my own son!”

“Is having me around costing you anything?”

“Certainly, Nate. That was my pocket you saw me reach into, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know whose money you dug out.”

His gray eyes were impish. “Why, your money, Nate. Your money, now.”

I grunted another laugh. “I’d put you under oath, but what difference would it make?”

“What do you mean?”

“What good’s it do, having an agnostic swear on a Bible?”

He was chuckling over that as he closed the door behind me.

The top was down (and I left it down) on the Durant, a two-tone blue number with wire wheels that was surprisingly sporty for a society matron like Grace Fortescue, even if she was an accomplice to murder. The buggy handled nicely and the three-and-a-half-mile drive from Honolulu to Waikiki—straight down King Street, right on Kalakaua Avenue—was a pleasant combination of palm-shaded drive, strolling locals, and budding commerce. I tossed my fedora on the floor on the rider’s side, because the motor-stirred breeze would have sent it sailing, and it felt good, getting my hair mussed. The steady stream of traffic was divided by a clanging trolley, and halted occasionally by Polynesian traffic cops with stop-go signs—no traffic lights in Honolulu, though they had street-lamps. Pretty soon the coral-pink stucco spires of the Royal Hawaiian began emerging up over the trees, like a mirage playing peek-a-boo.