Damned in Paradise

Turning right off Kalakaua into the hotel driveway, I was swept into lushly green, blossom-dabbed, meticulously landscaped grounds along a palm-lined gentle curve of asphalt that wound around to the Pink Palace’s porte cochere, where my rubbernecking damn near ran me smack into one of the massive pillars at the entry way.

The doorman, a Japanese, wore a fancier white uniform and cap than Admiral Stirling. When he leaned his smooth round face in, I asked him where the parking lot was, and he told me they’d park “the vehicle” for me.

I left the motor running, grabbed my bag out of the back, took the claim stub (imagine giving an automobile to somebody like you were checking your damn hat!), tipped the doorman a nickel, and headed inside. A Chinese bellboy in an oriental outfit tried to take my bag as I bounded up the steps, but I waved him off; I only had so many nickels.

The lobby was cool and open, with doorless doorways letting in lovely weather, chirping birds, whispering surf.

The massive walls with their looming archways and the high ceiling with its chandeliers dwarfed the potted palms and fancy lamps and wicker furnishings, not to mention the people, who seemed mostly to be staff. There were enough bellboys—some in those oriental pajamas, others in crisp traditional red jacket and white pants, all in racial shades of yellow and brown—to put together a football team; and room enough to play, without stepping off the Persian carpet.

But there were damn few guests. In fact, as I moved to the registration desk at left, I was the only guest around at the moment. As I was signing in, a honeymooning couple in tennis togs strolled by arm in arm. But that was about it.

Even the fancy lobby shops—display windows showing off jade and silk and high fashions, for the moneyed man or woman—were populated only by salesclerks.

An elevator operator took me up to the fourth floor, where I found a room so spacious and beautifully appointed, it made my cabin on the Malolo look like my one-room flat back home. More wicker furniture, ferns and flowers, shuttered windows, and a balcony that looked out on the ocean….

It was late afternoon, and the sunbathers and swimmers were mostly indoors; a spirited game of surfboard polo was under way, but that was all. No outrigger canoes in sight; no surf-riding dogs.

The day was winding down and I was, frankly, exhausted. I dropped the sort of immense window shade that was the only thing separating the balcony from the room itself, and adjusted the shutters till the room was as dark as I could get it, stripped to my shorts, and flopped on the bed.

Ringing awoke me.

I turned on the bedside lamp. Blinking, I looked at the telephone on the nightstand and it looked back at me, and rang again. I lifted the receiver, only half-awake.

“’Llo.”

“Nate? Isabel.”

“Hi. What time is it?”

“Eight-something.”

“Eight-something at night?”

“Yes, eight-something at night. Did I wake you? Were you napping?”

“Yeah. That old man Clarence Darrow wore me the hell out. Where are you? Here in the hotel?”

“No,” she said, and there was disappointment in her voice. “I’m still at Thalia’s. She’s not moving out to Pearl Harbor till tomorrow, so I’m staying with her, tonight.”

“Too bad—I could use the company. I seem to have this whole barn to myself.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. I hear business at the Royal Hawaiian is terrible since the Crash.”

I sat up. “Listen, I’d like to talk to Thalia again—without C.D. and Leisure around. There’s hardly anybody at this damn joint—maybe you and she could come around for breakfast. I don’t think there’ll be too many gawkers.”

“Let me ask her,” Isabel said. She was gone for a minute or so, then came back: “Thalia would love to get away. What time?”

“How about nine? Just a second, let me look at this…” There was an information card on the nightstand with room service and other restaurant info. “We’ll meet at the Surf Porch. Just ask at the desk and they’ll shoo you in the right direction.”

“This sounds delightful, Nathan. See you tomorrow. Love you.”

“Back at ya.”

I rolled out of bed. I stretched, yawned loudly. I was hungry; maybe I’d put my pants on and go down and charge a great big fancy meal to my room. That was one way to stretch fifty bucks a week expenses.

Yanking the cord, I lifted the big window shade and let the night air roll in off the balcony. Then I wandered out there in my shorts and socks to drink in the night. The sky was purple and scattered with stars; the moon, full and almost golden, cast glimmering highlights on the ebony ocean. Diamond Head was a slumbering silhouette, barely discernible. I drew in the sea breeze, basked in the beauty of the breakers rolling in.

“Please excuse intrusion,” a quiet voice said.

I damn near fell off the balcony.

“Did not wish to disturb you.” He was seated in a wicker chair, to the left, back away from the ledge of the balcony, a skinny little Chinese guy in a white suit with a black bow tie, a Panama hat in his lap.

I stepped forward, fists balled. “What the hell are you doing in my room?”

He stood; he was no more than five foot. He bowed.

“Took liberty of waiting for you to wake up.”

His head had a skull-like appearance, accentuated by his high forehead and wispy, thinning graying hair. His nose was thinly hawkish, his mouth a wide narrow line over a spade-like jaw; but his most striking feature was his eyes: deeply socketed, bright and alert, and the right one had a nasty scar above and below it, the entire socket discolored, like an eye patch of flesh. Knife scar, I’d wager, and he was lucky he didn’t lose the eye.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Detective First Grade Chang Apana. Care to see badge?”

“No thanks,” I said, letting out a half-laugh, half-sigh. “It would take Charlie Chan to sneak in here and not wake me. Any special reason you dropped by unannounced?”

“Roundabout way often shortest path to correct destination.”

“Who said that? Confucius?”

He shook his head, no. “Derr Biggers.”

Whoever that was.

I asked, “You mind if I put on my pants?”

“By all means. You mind if I smoke?”

We sat on the balcony in wicker chairs. As we spoke, he chain-smoked. That wasn’t a very Charlie Chan-like thing to do; and, as I recalled, the fictional detective was roly-poly. But maybe Chang Apana and his storybook counterpart had other things in common.

“What are you doing here, Detective Apana?”

“You’re working with famous lawyer—Clarence Darrow. On Massie case.”

“That’s right. But I haven’t even started poking around yet. How did you know…?”

“Chief of police showed me paperwork giving you permission to carry weapon and investigate, here. You’re Chicago policeman?”

“That’s right. I took a leave of absence to help Mr. Darrow out. We’re old friends.”

A tiny smile tickled the line of a mouth. “You’re not old at all, Mr. Heller. I have been detective for thirty-seven years.”

That surprised me, but looking at the crevices on that skeletal mug, I could believe it.

“You still haven’t told me what brings you here, Detective Apana.”

“Please. Call me Apana, or Chang. I am here to offer aid and information to brother officer.”

“Well, then, why don’t you call me Nate, Chang. Why do you want to help me? Where do you stand on the Massie case, anyway?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Depends which case. Tommie Massie and his mother-in-law and sailors, law is clear. Man they kidnapped was killed.”

“It’s not quite that simple….”

“Not simple at all. Heavy cloud hangs over this island, Nate. Will we be stripped of self-government? Will dream of statehood burst like bubble? Outcome of trial will determine these things…and yet these things have nothing to do with law, or justice.”

“Where do you stand on the other case? The Ala Moana rape case?”

“I stand in embarrassment.”

“Why?”

“Because department I serve for thirty-seven years have disgraced self in committing many blunders. Example—Inspector McIntosh arrest five boys because they were involved in another ‘assault’ same night…. That assault was minor auto mishap and scuffle. Not rape. But McIntosh arrest them on this basis, then he build his case. This is same inspector who drives suspect’s car to scene of crime to examine tire tracks, and wipes out tracks in process.”

“Yeah, I read about that in the trial transcript. That does take the cake.”

“Cake taken by Thalia Massie when her memory makes remarkable improvement. Night she was attacked, she tell police she leave Ala Wai Inn between twelve-thirty and one A.M. Later, when Inspector McIntosh cannot make this work with suspects’ strong alibis, Mrs. Massie change time to eleven-thirty. Night she was attacked, she tell police she can’t identify rapists, too dark. Tell police also she didn’t see license plate number. Later, memory miraculously improve on all counts.”

“You think Kahahawai and the others are innocent?”

He shrugged. “Unlike Inspector Mclntosh, Chang Apana prefer making mind up after investigation complete. ‘Mind is like parachute, only function when open.’” He withdrew a card from his suit jacket pocket and handed it to me. “If you wish my aid, call me at headquarters, or at my home on Punchbowl Hill.”

“Why would you want to help the defense in this case?”

“Perhaps I only wish to help a brother officer from the great city of Chicago. Perhaps fame of Clarence Darrow has reached these shores. Clarence Darrow, who is defender of men regardless of shade of skin.”

“My understanding was, you weren’t directly involved in this case.”

The wide thin line of his mouth curved into a glorious smile. “No. Chang Apana nears retirement. He is grand old man of department. Sits at his desk and tells his stories—but he also hears stories. Stories of drunken Navy officer the night of rape picked up near Massie house with fly open. Stories of Mrs. Massie telling Navy officer not to worry, everything be all right. Stories of how the police had to fire gunshots at Mrs. Fortescue’s car before it pull over. Stories of Lt. Massie’s pride when body of Kahahawai is found in back of car…”

He stood.

“Should you wish to talk to officers who witnessed these events, Chang Apana can arrange. Should you wish to discover the truth, Chang Apana can open doors.”

I stood. “I just may take you up on that, Chang.”

He bowed again, and placed the Panama on his head; its turned-up brim seemed ridiculously wide, like an oversize soup bowl. A smile tickled the wide straight line that was his mouth.

“Welcome to Paradise,” Chang said, and went out as quietly as he must have come in.

8

The next morning, on the Surf Porch of the Royal Hawaiian, I sat at a wicker table, sipping pineapple juice, awaiting my guests for breakfast, enjoying the cooler-than-yesterday’s breeze. Off to the left, Diamond Head was a slumbering green and brown crocodile. Beyond a handful of palms watching, leaning, and a narrow band of white beach bereft of bathers, the shimmer of ocean was a gray-blue interrupted occasionally by the lazy roll of whitecaps. The overcast sky seemed more blue and white than gray, low-slung clouds hugging the horizon, making the gentle graduations of blue so subtle it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the sky began.

Just as the coolness and the overcast had nixed most beach activity this morning, the Surf Porch itself was lightly attended. Maybe a third of the canopied swinging chairs along the back wall were in use by the well-to-do few who were sharing this palatial hotel with a certain Chicago representative of the hoi polloi. I seemed to be the only one on the porch who wasn’t in white; in my brown suit, I felt like a poor relation hoping to worm into the will of a wealthy invalid uncle I was visiting at a very chic sanitarium.

“Excuse please,” the waitress said. A lovely Japanese girl in a colorful floral pattern kimono, she bore a pitcher of pineapple juice and wanted to know if I wanted more.

“No thanks,” I said. I didn’t really like that bitter stuff; I’d accepted the first glass just out of civility, not wanting to insult the Island beverage or anything. She was about to depart when I stopped her: “Say, you could bring me some coffee?”

“Cream? Sugar?”

“Black, honey,” I said, and grinned.

She smiled a little and floated off.

All the waitresses here wore kimonos—like the wenches who wore them, each garment was as lovely, delicate, and different as a snowflake; these little geishas were so attentive, it stopped just short of driving you batty. Maybe that was because the help at the Royal Hawaiian—Oriental and Polynesian, to a man (and woman)—seemed to outnumber the patrons.

I glanced back at the archway entry, to see if my guests were here; after a moment, as if I’d willed it, there they were, eyes searching for, and finding, me.

Waving them over, I admired all three women as they crossed the porch—Thalia Massie, pudgy but pretty in a navy blue frock with big white buttons, the lenses of her sunglasses like two big black buttons in counterpoint under the shade of the brim of her white-banded navy chapeau; Isabel, her face glowing in a hatless haze of blond hair, fetching in a white frock with red polka dots that lifted nicely around her knees as the breeze caught the wispy fabric, and which she only half-heartedly pushed down; and finally, a surprise visitor, Thalia’s Japanese maid, Beatrice, as slender and daintily pretty as any of the kimono girls serving us, but wearing a white short-sleeved blouse and ankle-length dark skirt, her jaunty white cuff-brim turban a pleasant contrast with her bobbed black hair, a small white clutch purse in one hand.

None of the guests, rocking in their porch chairs, enjoying the study in blues and grays before them, gave an inkling of reaction to the celebrity who had just entered, though a few of the males sneaked a peek at the three pretty girls.

I rose, gestured toward the three chairs—I’d only been expecting Thalia and Isabel, but this was a table for four, luckily—and Thalia held up a hand, stopping her two companions from sitting just yet. Not till she’d gotten something straight.

“We’ll be going to my new quarters at Pearl Harbor, from here,” Thalia said in her low husky near-monotone, “and my maid Beatrice is accompanying me. I hope you don’t mind my bringing her along, Mr. Heller. I believe in treating servants like people.”

“Damn white of ya,” I said, smiling at Beatrice, whose mouth didn’t return the smile, though her eyes did; and I gestured again, for all of them to sit, and, finally, they did.

The geisha brought my coffee, and filled Thalia and Isabel’s coffee cups; Beatrice had turned hers over. Then the kimono cutie stayed around to take our breakfast order. I went for the fluffy eggs with bacon while Isabel and Thalia decided to share a big fruit plate. The waitress seemed confused as to whether to take Beatrice’s order, and Beatrice wasn’t helping by sitting there as mute and expressionless as Diamond Head itself.

“Are you having anything?” I asked her.

“No thank you,” she said. “I’m just along.”

“You mean like a dog?”

This immediately made everybody uncomfortable, except me, of course.

“Well, if you expect me to feed you under the table,” I said, “forget about it. You don’t like coffee? Get her some, what? Juice? Tea?”

“Tea,” Beatrice said softly. Her eyes were smiling again.

“And why don’t you bring us a basket of goodies we can all share,” I suggested to the waitress. “You know, muffins and what-have-you.”

“Pineapple muffins?” the geisha asked.

“Anything without pineapple,” I said with a wince.

That seemed to amuse all the women, and I sipped my coffee and said, “I’m glad you girls could make it this morning.”

“I’m going to stop by the desk,” Isabel said, beaming, “and see about my suite.”

“I talked to C.D. this morning,” I said. “It’s all arranged. They have a key waiting for you.”

“Swell,” she said, hands folded, smile dimpling that sweet face. It was pretty clear I had a date tonight. A hot one.

“It’s lovely here,” Thalia commented, rather distantly, the black lenses of her sunglasses looking out on the blues and grays and whites of that vista whose horizon you had to work to make out. Wind whipped the arcs of her dark blonde hair.

“Would you like to wait till after breakfast?” I asked.

She turned the big black eyes of her glasses my way; the rest of her face held no more expression than they did. “Wait till after breakfast for what?”

“Well, I need to ask you some things. Didn’t Isabel mention the reason for my invitation?”

A single eyebrow arched above a black lens. “You and Mr. Darrow already questioned me, yesterday.”

I nodded. “And he’ll question you again, and again, as will Mr. Leisure. And they’ll have their agenda, and I have mine.”

“And what, Mr. Heller,” she asked crisply, “is yours?”

Isabel, the breeze making her headful of blonde curls seem to shimmer, frowned in concern and touched her cousin’s wrist. “Don’t be mad at Nate. He’s trying to help.”

“She’s right,” I said. “But I’m not a lawyer, I’m an investigator. And it’s my job to go over details, looking for the places where the prosecution can make hay.”

Thalia shifted in her wicker chair; the surf was whispering and her monotone barely rose above it. “I don’t understand. This trial isn’t about me. It’s about Tommie, and Mother…”

She’d said much the same thing to Darrow.

I sipped my coffee. “This case begins and ends with you, Thalia…may I call you Thalia? And please call me Nate, or Nathan, whichever you prefer.”

She said nothing; her baby face remained as blank as the black lenses. Isabel seemed uneasy. Beatrice had long ago disappeared into herself; she was just along.

Thalia took a deep breath. “Mr. Heller…Nate. Surely you can understand that I’m not anxious to go into court and tell this story again. I hope that’s not the road you and Mr. Darrow intend to go down.”

“Oh but it is. It’s the only way a jury can be made to understand what motivated your husband.”

She leaned forward; it was getting eerie, staring into those black circles. “Wasn’t the Ala Moana trial enough? You know, many women hesitate to report a case of assault because of the awful publicity and the ordeal of a trial. But I felt it was my duty to protect other women and girls….”

Isabel patted her cousin’s hand again. “You did the right thing, Thalo.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t bear to think that some other girl might have to go through what I did,” she said, “at the hands of those brutes. From a personal standpoint, the punishment of these creatures was secondary to just getting them off the street—only the ordeal of that trial didn’t accomplish that, did it?”

“My investigation may,” I said.

She cocked her head. “How do you mean?”

I shrugged. “If I can gather enough new evidence, they’ll be put away.”

Her laugh was throaty and humorless. “Oh, wonderful! Another trial, after this one! When will this end? No one who hasn’t undergone such an experience can possibly imagine the strain upon not just the victim, but their family….”

“Isn’t that why we’re here?” I suggested.

“I would imagine you’re here because of money,” she snapped.

“Thalo!” Isabel said.

“I know,” she said resignedly, and sighed. “I know. Your Nate is only trying to help. Well, if going to court again, and testifying as to the details of that terrible night, will help my family…and save other girls from similar horrifying experiences…then I feel the end will justify the means.”

I might have pointed out that the end justifying the means was the kind of thinking that got her hubby and mumsy in such hot water; but since she seemed to have just talked herself into cooperating with me, I let it pass.

“Good,” I said. “Now—I was up late last night…” I took out my notebook, thumbing to the right page. “…going over the court transcripts and various statements you made…. Please understand that I’m only asking questions that the prosecution is likely to bring up.”

“Go ahead, Mr. Heller.” She forced a smile. “Nate.”

“Normally,” I said, “a witness’s recollections decrease geometrically with the passage of time. But your memory, about this unfortunate event, seems only to improve.”

Her mouth twitched, as if it were trying to decide whether to frown or smile; it did neither. “My recollection of the ‘unfortunate event’ is all too clear, I’m afraid. I suppose you’re referring to the statements I made that night, or rather in the early morning hours that followed….”

“Yes,” I said. “You were questioned by an Inspector Jardine, also a cop named Furtado, and of course Inspector Mclntosh, within hours of the assault. And several other cops, as well. You even spoke to the nurse at the emergency hospital, a Nurse Fawcett….”

“That’s right. What of it?”

“Well, you told these various cops, and Nurse Fawcett, that you couldn’t identify your assailants. That it was too dark. But you thought that maybe you could identify them by voice.”

Thalia said nothing; her Kewpie doll mouth was pursed as if to blow me a kiss. Somehow I didn’t think she had that in mind.

“Yet now your recollections include physical descriptions of the assailants, down to the clothes they were wearing.”

“I’m telling the truth, Mr. Heller. As I recall it now.”

“Make it Nate.” I took another sip of the coffee; it was a strong, bitter brew. “You also said, initially, that you were convinced the boys were Hawaiian, as opposed to Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, or whatever. You said you recognized the way they spoke as Hawaiian.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “They were all colored, weren’t they?”

“But only Kahahawai and Ahakuelo were Hawaiian, and two of the boys were Japanese and the last one Chinese.”

Another throaty laugh. “And you can tell the difference?”

“In Chicago we know the difference between a Jap and a Chinaman, sure.”

I was watching Beatrice out of the corner of an eye, and she didn’t flinch at my racial crudity.

“Is that right?” Thalia said. “Does that hold true even when you’re being raped?”

Isabel looked very uncomfortable. She clearly didn’t like the way this was going.

I leaned in. “Thalia—Mrs. Massie—I’m playing a sort of devil’s advocate here, okay? Looking for the weak spots that the prosecution can kill us with. If you have any explanations besides knee-jerk defensive smartass remarks, I’d appreciate hearing them.”

Now Isabel leaned in—frowning. “Nate—that’s a little forward, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t go to finishing school,” I said. “I went to school on the West Side of Chicago where first graders carry knives and pistols. So you’ll have to pardon my lack of social graces…but when you’re in a jam, I’m the kind of roughneck you want to have around. And, Mrs. Massie—Thalia—you’re in a hell of a jam, or anyway, your husband and mother are. They can do twenty to life on this rap.”

There was silence—silence but for the chirping of caged birds out in the nearby lobby, and the gentle but ceaseless surge of the surf on the shore.

Thalia Massie, the black lenses of her glasses fixed upon me, said, “Ask your questions.”

I sighed; flipped a notebook page.

“In the hours after the rape,” I said, “you went through your story six times, and you consistently said you hadn’t been able to make out the license plate number of the car. You said as much to four different police investigators, and a doctor and a nurse.”

She shrugged.

“Then,” I said, “in Inspector Mcintosh’s office at police headquarters, on your seventh pass at the story, it suddenly came to you.”

“Actually,” she said, chin lifted, “I got it wrong by one number.”

“Horace Ida’s car was 58-895, you said it was 58-805. Close enough. Missing one number makes it more believable, somehow. But there are those who say you may have heard that number in the examining room at Queens Hospital.”

“Not true.”

My eyebrows went up. “A police car with its radio on, full blast, was parked right outside the windows of the examining room. An officer testified that he heard an alarm for car 58-895, in possible connection with your assault, broadcast three times.”

“I never heard it.”

I sat forward. “You do realize that the only reason that car was really being sought was its involvement in a minor accident and scuffle earlier that evening, which had also been classified an assault?”

“I’m aware of that, now.”

“You also said, on the night of the assault, that you thought the car you’d been pulled into was an old Ford or Dodge or maybe Chevrolet touring car, with a canvas top, an old ripped rag top that made a flapping noise as they drove you along?”

Another shrug. “I don’t remember saying that. I know it came up at the trial, but I don’t remember it.”

And then sometimes her memory wasn’t so hot.

“Thalia, Horace Ida’s car…actually, it was his sister’s car, I guess…. Anyway, Ida’s car was a 1929 Model A Phaeton. A fairly new car, and its rag top wasn’t torn. Yet you identified it.”

“It was the car, or one just like it. I knew it when I saw it.”

Breakfast arrived, our geisha accompanying a waiter who was delivering it on a well-arranged tray, and Thalia smiled faintly and said, “Is that all? Do you mind if we eat in peace?”

“Sure,” I said.

There was quite a bit of awkward silence as I dug into my eggs and bacon, and the two girls picked at a lavish plate of pineapples, grapes, papaya, figs, persimmons, bananas, cubed melon, and more. They small-talked as if I weren’t there, discussing (among other things) how Thalia’s father the major was recuperating from his illness, and how nice it was that Mrs. Fortescue’s mother—vacationing in Spain—had sent a supportive wire to her daughter.

“Grandmother said she was so convinced of Mother’s innocence,” Thalia said, “there was no need to come, really.”

We were all having a second (or in Thalia’s case, third) cup of coffee when I started in again.

“What can you tell me about Lt. Jimmy Bradford?”

“What do you want to know?” Thalia was holding her coffee cup in patrician style—pinkie extended. “He’s Tommie’s friend. Probably his best friend.”

“What was he doing stumbling around your neighborhood, the night of the rape, drunk and with his fly open?”

“Nathan!” Isabel blurted, her eyes wide and hurt.

“I would imagine,” Thalia said, “having had rather too much to drink, he found a bush to relieve himself behind.”

“Relieve himself in what way?”

“I won’t dignify that with a response.”

“Why did you say to him that everything would be all right, just before the cops hauled him in for questioning?”

“He was cleared,” she said. “Tommie vouched for him. Tommie had been with him every second all evening.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Nate,” Isabel said, “I’m getting very perturbed with you….”

Perturbed. That was how rich people got pissed off.

I said to Thalia, “If you don’t want to answer the question—”

“He’s a friend,” she said. “I was reassuring him.”

She had just been beaten and raped by a bunch of wild-eyed natives, and she’s reassuring him.

“I think this charming breakfast has lasted quite long enough,” Thalia said, bringing her napkin up from her lap to the table, pushing her chair back.

“Please don’t go,” I said. “Not until we talk about the most crucial matter of all.”

“And what would that be?”

“The time discrepancy.”

Another flinch of the mouth. “There is no time discrepancy.”

“I’m afraid there is. The activities of the five rapists are fairly well charted—we know, for example, that at thirty-seven minutes past midnight, they were involved in the accident and scuffle that made them candidates for suspicion in the first place.”

“I left the Ala Wai Inn at eleven thirty-five, Mr. Heller.”

“That’s a pretty exact time. Did you look at your watch?”

“I wasn’t wearing a watch, but some friends of mine left the dance at eleven-thirty and I left about five minutes after they did. My friend told me later that she had looked at her watch and it’d been eleven-thirty when they left.”

“But your statement that night said you left between half past midnight and one.”

“I must have been mistaken.”

“And if you did leave between half past midnight and one, those boys didn’t have time to get from the intersection of North King Street and Dillingham Boulevard, where the minor accident and scuffle took place…”

“I told you,” she said, rising, “I must have been mistaken, at first.”

“Your memory improved, you mean.”

She whipped the sunglasses off; her grayish-blue eyes, normally protuberant, were tight and narrow. “Mr. Heller, when I was questioned that night, in those early morning hours, I was in a state of shock, and later, under sedation. Is it any wonder that I saw things more clearly, later on? Isabel—come along. Beatrice.”

And Thalia moved away from the table, as Isabel gave me a withering look—two parts disgust, one part disappointment—and Beatrice followed. I noticed the maid had left her little purse behind and I started to say something, but she signaled me not to with the slightest shake of the head.

When they were gone, I sat there wondering, waiting for Beatrice to tell her mistress that she had to go fetch something she’d forgotten.

And soon she was back, picking up the purse and whispering, “I have tonight off. Meet me at Waikiki Park at eight-thirty.”

Then she was gone.

Well. Hotcha.

Looked like even with Isabel mad at me, I still had a date tonight.

9

The gentle rustle of palms and the exotic fragrance of night-blooming cereus gave way to the insistent honk of auto horns and the pungent aroma of chop suey as quietly residential Kalakaua Avenue turned suddenly, noisily, commercial. And even the star-flung black velvet sky and its golden moon were eclipsed by the glittering gaudy lights of Waikiki Amusement Park, engulfing the corner of Kalakaua and John Ena Road like a bright spreading rash.

Signs directed me to turn left on Ena for entry into the parking lot; across the way were shack-like businesses catering to the amusement park overflow, cheap cafes, a beauty parlor, a barbershop. Locals, kanakas and haoles alike, were walking along in the yellow glow of street-lamps, couples strolling the sidewalk hand in hand, drinking bottles of pop, nibbling sandwiches, licking ice cream cones; just a block or two down was the beach. A few native girls in their teens and twenties, looking both absurd and sexy in flapperish attire, were trolling for sailors and soldier boys; this was the sort of typically sleazy but seemingly safe area you might expect to find outside any amusement park.

I wheeled Mrs. Fortescue’s Durant roadster into the pretty nearly filled lot, in the shadow of a roller coaster, Ferris wheel, and motorcycle death loop. The music here wasn’t the Royal Hawaiian’s lazy steel guitar and ukulele mix designed to lull rich tourists away from their money: it was the familiar all-American song of the midway—bells dinging and kids screaming and the calliope call of a carousel. And this tune, too, was designed to part a fool from his money.

She was waiting around front, at the arcaded entrance on Kalakaua, just under the A of the looming white bulb waikiki park sign, leaning against an archway pillar, a cigarette poised in fingers whose nails were painted blood red. The white blouse and long dark skirt were gone, replaced by a clingy bare-armed tight-in-the-bodice knee-length Japanese silk dress, white with startling red blossoms that seemed to burst on the fabric; her shapely legs were bare above white sandals out of which peeked the red-painted nails of her toes; her mouth was lip-rouged the same bright red as the flowers on the dress; and a real red blossom was snugged in her ebony hair, just over her left ear. Only her white clutch purse remained of this morning’s mundane wardrobe.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, and her smile set her face aglow. “Nice see you.”

“Nice see you,” I said. “That dress is almost as pretty as you are.”

“I didn’t know if you show up,” she said.

“I never stand up pretty girls who ask me out.”

She drew on the cigarette, emitted a perfect round smoke ring from a perfect round kiss of a mouth. Then, smiling just a little, she said, “You flirting with me, Mr. Heller?”

“It’s Nate,” I said. “And with the way you look in that dress, any man with a pulse would flirt with you.”

She liked that. She gestured with her hand holding the cigarette. “You want smoke?”

“Naw. Might stunt my growth.”

“Don’t you got your full growth, Nate?”

“Not yet. But stick around.”

The white flash of her smile outshone the flickering lights and neons of Waikiki Park. I offered her my arm and she tossed her cigarette in a sparking arc, then snuggled awfully close for a first date. Was Thalia Massie’s little maid attracted by my he-man charms, or was she tricking on the side?

I wanted desperately to think that this curvy little chop-stick cutie was irresistibly attracted to me; I hated to think she might be a hooker who knew a horny mainlander when she saw one. I was certainly irresistibly attracted to her—the intoxicating scent of her (was it perfume, or the flower in her hair?), the way the pencil-eraser tips of the full little handfuls of her breasts poked at the silk of her dress (it was just cool enough to inspire that), and of course the lure of the unfamiliar, the allure of the Far East, the unspoken promise of forbidden pleasures and unspeakable delights….

We didn’t say much, for a while. Just strolled arm in arm through a crowd of mostly locals, a yellow woman on the arm of a white man no big deal in this melting pot. Other than the racial hodgepodge, this could have been the midway of the Illinois State Fair—very little of the park seemed uniquely Hawaiian. The merry-go-round with its seahorse mounts, the giant clapboard Noah’s ark with its gangway up to a petting zoo, had vague ocean ties; and there was an ersatz Island flavor to the hula dolls and paper leis and toy ukuleles the shooting galleries offered up for marksmanship. But mostly this was the same world of sawdust and sideshows that any American would recognize as foreign only in the sense that it transcended the ordinary humdrum of life.

We had cotton candy—shared a big pink wad of it, actually—as she guided me toward a sprawling two-story clapboard shed.

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“What?”

“No bugs. No gnats or skeeters, no nothin’.”

She shrugged. “They leave when swamp drained.”

“What swamp?”

“Swamp where Waikiki is now.”

“Waikiki used to be a swamp?”

She nodded. “Go down to Ala Wai Canal, you wanna find some bugs.”

“No, that’s okay….”

“Years ago, they drain Waikiki to make room for more sugarcane. All the swamps and ponds, all the little farmers and fisherman, gone. The beach and all this tourist trade, that was just happy accident.”

“Like the bugs that left.”

She nodded. “No snakes in Hawaii, either. Not even down at Ala Wai.”

“They got driven out, too?”

“No. They never here.”

I gave her a little smirk. “No serpents in Eden? I find that hard to believe.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Just human kind. They everywhere.”

She had a point. The building we were heading to was jumping with music and kids. The closer we approached, the more the night throbbed with a very American jazz band version of “Charley, My Boy”—with the strum of a guitar and some steel guitar thrown in, to make it nominally Hawaiian style. Kids yellow, white, and brown stood out front and along the side of the clapboard pavilion, sharing snorts of hooch from flasks, catching smokes and smooches. I was definitely overdressed in my suit and tie—the boys wore silk shirts and blue jeans, the girls cotton sweaters and short skirts.

I paid at the door (35 cents admission, but couples got in for half a buck), got a ticket stub in return, and we squeezed past the packed dance floor and found a table for two. Up on an open stage, the band—the Happy Farmers (according to the logo on the bass drum head), Hawaiians in shirts almost as loud as their music—had segued into a slow tune, “Moonlight and Roses.” The sight of these couples—here a yellow boy with a white girl, there a brown girl with a white boy, locked together in sweaty embrace under a rotating mirrored ball catching flickering lights of red and blue and green—would have given a Ku Klux Klan member apoplexy.

“You want a Coke?” I asked her.

She nodded eagerly.

I went off to a bar that served soft drinks and snacks, got us two sweaty cold bottles of Coke and a couple glasses, and returned to my beautiful Oriental flower, who was zealously chewing gum.

Sitting, I sneaked my flask of rum from my pocket and asked her, “Can we get away with this?”

“Sure,” she said, pouring Coke into her glass. “You think Elks don’t like their oke?”

Oke, I gathered, was Hawaiian for white mule.

I poured some rum into her glass of Coke. “This is an Elks Club?”

She stuck her gum under the table. “Naw. But local fraternal orders, they take turn sponsoring dances. It was Eagles, that night.”

By “that night” she meant the night Thalia Massie was assaulted.

“This is the joint where the rapists went dancing,” I said, making myself my own rum and Coke, “before they snatched Thalia.”

She looked at me carefully. “You really think that?”

I slipped my flask away. “What do you mean?”

“Why do you think I ask you here?”

“My blue eyes?”

She didn’t smile at that. “You were giving Mrs. Massie hard time today.”

“That’s my job.”

“Giving her hard time?”

I shook my head, no. “Trying to shake the truth out of her.”

“You think she lying?”

“No.”

“You think she telling truth?”

“No.”

She frowned. “What, then?”

“I don’t think anything—yet. I’m just starting to sort through things. I’m a detective. That’s what I do.”

“You haven’t made mind up?”

“No. But somebody did do something to your boss lady. I mean, she didn’t break her own jaw. She didn’t rape herself.”

She thought about that. Sipped her drink. “Crimes like that don’t happen here. Violence—it not Hawaiian. They a gentle race. Tame like dog or cat in house.”

“Well, only two of these dogs were Hawaiians. One cat was Japanese.”

Something flickered in her eyes, like a fire that momentarily flared up. “Two are Hawaiian. The Chinese boy, he half-Hawaiian. This not a crime that make sense, here. Rape.”

“Why not?”

“Because girls here…” She shrugged. “…you don’t have to force them.”

“You mean, all you have to do is buy ’em a Coke? Maybe put a little rum in it? And you’re home free?”

That made her smile, a little; like I’d tickled her feet.

But then, like the flare-up in her eyes, it disappeared. “No, Nate. That not it…hard to explain to mainlander.”

“I’m a quick learner.”

“Before missionaries come, this friendly place. Even now, only rape you hear of is…what do you call it when the girl is underage?”

“Statutory rape?”

She nodded. “Young girls give in to older boys, then parents find out, or baby is on way…then you hear about ‘rape.’ Colored man forcing himself—on a white woman? Not happen here.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I said. “Besides, are you telling me the racial line doesn’t get crossed under the sheets?” I nodded toward the polyglot parade of lust out on the dance floor. “What’s that, a mirage?”

“It get crossed,” she said. “Beach boys—Hawaiian boys who teach surf at hotel beach? Their pupils usually female tourists, sometimes lonely Navy wives…but this sex is, what’s word?”

“Consenting.”

She nodded.

“Is that what you think? Your boss lady had a fling with a beach boy and it got out of hand? And she concocted a story that—”

“Didn’t say that. You must…you must think I’m terrible.”

“I think you’re a livin’ doll.”

She avoided my fond gaze. “But terrible person. Traitor to employer.”

I shrugged my eyebrows, sipped my spiked Coke. “I don’t think a rich person paying a servant a few bucks a week buys any great sort of loyalty. If it did, guys like me couldn’t ever get the dirt on anybody.”

“You honest man.”

I almost choked on the Coke. “What?”

“You say what you think. You don’t hide nothing.”

Often I hid everything, but I said, “That’s right.”

“Will you dance with me?”

“Sure.”

The Happy Farmers had just begun “Love Letters in the Sand,” and the steel guitar was pretty heavy on this one, and as I held Beatrice near to me, the fragrance of the flower in her hair made me giddy—or was it the rum?

“I thought you might not come,” she said, “because of Miss Bell.”

“We’re just friends, Isabel and me.”

“She told her cousin you sweethearts.”

“That’s an, uh…exaggeration. We just met on the ship. Besides, she’s mad at me.”

“Because you hard on Mrs. Massie today.”

“That’s right.”

I held her close.

“Nate.”

“Yes.”

“You at your full growth now?”

“Damn near.”

The next tune was fast. I adjusted my trousers, as best as possible, and we headed back to the table. But before we sat, Beatrice said, “You have a car?”

“Of course.”

“We can’t go my place. I live with my mother and two sister and two brother. Over Kapalama way.”

“I’m at the Royal Hawaiian.”

“No. Not there. Miss Bell might see.”

Good point.

She touched my hand. Softly, slyly, she said, “I know place where couples go. Down beach road. To park?”

“Lead the way,” I said.

Soon we were pulling out of the Waikiki Park parking lot.

“See that barbershop?” she asked, pointing across the way to the line of dingy shops. “See that saimin wagon?”

I glanced: a somewhat ramshackle two-story building (living quarters above) was given over to a barbershop with a traditional pole and a window that said ENA ROAD BARBERSHOP; through the window could be seen a woman barber snipping at a white male customer’s locks; next door, in the direction of the beach, was a vacant lot with a food cart (SUKIYAKI DINNER, SAIMIN, HOT DOGS) and some picnic tables scattered around, couples eating noodles out of bowls; a few cars were parked up on the lot, getting served by white-aproned Orientals, drive-in style.

“That where Mrs. Massie seen by witnesses,” Beatrice said. “Walking along with white man trailing after.”

“And that,” I said, nodding toward the big white two-story Store—GROCERIES—COLD DRINKS AND TOBACCO—that sat just ahead, on the corner of Hobron Lane and Ena, “is the building that obscured the witnesses’ view, when Thalia was grabbed.”

“If that true,” Beatrice asked, “what happen to the white man following after? Did he disappear around that corner?”

I looked over at her. “Beatrice—what’s your stake in this, anyway?”

“Before he die last year, my father work at the same cannery as Shorty’s father,” she said.

“Shorty?”

“Shimitsu Ida. Horace Ida. Turn here.”

“Huh?”

“Turn right. If you still wanna go lovers’ lane.”

I still wanted to go to lovers’ lane. Just as I was turning onto the beach road, the landscape of Ena Road had shifted somewhat: the eating joints and other small shops gave way to bungalows—little more than wooden shacks—and two-story ramshackle apartment houses clustered together.

She noticed my giving the area the once-over. “Bachelor officer from Fort De Russey rent those.”

I snorted a laugh. “You’d think they’d want something nicer.”

“Out of the way, for taking native girl. Close to the beach where they can meet female tourist. And Navy wife. Only not all officer are bachelor, hear tell.”

As we headed down the beach road, the landscape again shifted; we were on a narrow blacktop, and right now we were the only car on it. The road was in some disrepair, rather bumpy, its coral underlayer glowing white in the moonlight. Though the ocean was nearby—you could hear and smell and sense it but not see it—we might have been driving through a desert, what with the algarroba thickets and scrubby underbrush and wild cactus. No palms, here—the closest things were the telephone poles lining this sorry roadway.

“They use to fight,” she said suddenly.

“Who did?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Massie.”

“Like how?”

“He swear at her and tell her to shut up. Sometimes she walk out.”

I frowned. “Do you know what these fights were about?”

“She didn’t like it here. She was bored. She drink too much. He tell her to stop, he said she drive his friends away. She has sharp tongue, Mrs. Massie.”

“How long did you work for them?”

“Over two year.”

“Then you didn’t come aboard after Mrs. Fortescue moved out, to help with the housekeeping?”

“No. I was there when Mother Fortescue moved in.”

“How did she and Thalia get along?”

“They didn’t. She use to scold Mrs. Massie for not doing more housework, more cooking, for sleeping too much.”

“That’s why Mrs. Fortescue moved to her own bungalow?”

Beatrice nodded. “And the fights between Mr. and Mrs. Massie. They disturb Mother Fortescue. Here—pull in, here.”

We’d come maybe a mile and a half. A small lane led into a clearing, and I turned the nose of the Durant in; my headlights picked up the cement foundations of a torn-down building poking through weeds. Scattered rubbish, broken bottles, cigarette stubs, and the tracks of tires designated this as a makeout spot.

I cut the engine, and the lights. The moon was full enough to allow us to see each other plainly. The red of her lips and the flowers on her dress were muted in the moonlight. I was staring at her, part of me just admiring her, another part trying to figure her out; she looked away.

“What else do you know, Beatrice?” I asked. “What do you know that troubles you so much you sought me out?”

Her head swiveled on her neck and she turned her dark steady eyes on me. Without inflection, as matter of fact as a bored clerk behind a store counter, she said, “I know that Mrs. Massie was seeing other man.”

“What other man?”

“Some officer. When Mr. Massie was away, he would come. At first, once a week. Then in May last year, he come oftener. He stay all week, when Mr. Massie was away on submarine duty.”

I let some air out. Behind us, lurking behind the brush, the ocean was crashing on a reef. “This sounds pretty brazen, Beatrice.”

“They don’t kiss or touch in front of me. They sleep in separate rooms—at least, they start night and begin morning, in separate rooms.”

“Still pretty bold…”

“They would go swimming at Waikiki, go picnic at Kailua, Nanakuli Beach. Sometimes she would stay away, two, three days—take sheets, pillow slips, towels, and nightclothes.”

“Who was this officer?”

“Lt. Bradford.”

Jimmy Bradford. The guy stumbling around with his fly open; the guy Thalia made assurances to before she was taken to the emergency room….

“You never came forward,” I said.

Her brow tightened. “And I’m ashamed. I need this job. My mother is widow with five kids. I’m just one generation away from coolie labor, Nate. I couldn’t risk…”

I moved closer to her. Touched her face. “You got nothing to be ashamed of, honey.”

“You don’t know what it’s like. My father came from Hiroshima, too many people, too many poor people. Here in cane fields, on plantation, my father make nine dollars a month plus food. To him that was big step up. He made more at cannery, but eighteen-hour day for so many year, kill him.”

I stroked her hair. “Honey, I grew up on Maxwell Street. I’m a slum kid, myself. But every generation has it a little easier—your kids’ll go to college. Wait and see.”

“You’re a funny one.”

“How so?”

“Selfish but sweet.”

“Sweet, huh?” I ran my hand from her hair down onto the coolness of her bare arm. “Then why don’t we quit talking about all this depressing malarky and find something better to do….”

I kissed her. She put herself into it, and gave a very nice kiss, though it was pretty much standard issue; I mean, the secrets of the Orient didn’t open up to me, even if her mouth did and our tongues danced the hootchie-koo. Still, it was doing the trick, all right—I was getting my full growth again.

I was leaning in, for another kiss, when she said, “You know where we are, Nate?”

“Sure—lovers’ lane.”

“That’s right. Ala Moana.”

And I started to kiss her, then pulled away.

“Shit,” I said. “Pardon my French…. This is where it happened. This is where it happened!”

She nodded. “This is old Animal Quarantine Station.”

I drew away, looking out the windshield at the weeds and rubble and cement slabs. “Where Thalia says she was taken…and raped….”

She nodded again. “Wanna get out? Look around?”

I was torn between the two great needs of my life: the yearning between my legs, and the curiosity between my ears.

And the damn curiosity won.

“Yeah, let’s get out for a second.”

I got out on my side, and came around and opened the door for her.

“See those bushes over there?” she asked. “That’s where she say they drag her.”

And I turned and stared at the darkness of the thicket, as if it could tell me something; but the moonlight didn’t hit the thicket, and there was nothing to see.

But I could hear something.

Someone.

“There’s somebody else here,” I whispered, holding a protective arm in front of her. “Get in the car!”

More than one someone—I could hear them moving, crunching the weeds underfoot, and I hadn’t brought my damn gun! Who would have thought I’d need a goddamn nine-millimeter Browning to go on a goddamn date with a geisha girl housemaid?

Then one by one they emerged from the darkness—four faces, belonging to four men, sullen faces that looked white in the moonlight, but they weren’t white faces, oh no.

They were the faces of the four men, the surviving four, who had brought Thalia Massie to this place to rape and beat her.

And as they advanced toward me like an army of the Island undead, I reached for the handle of my car door, only to feel it slip from my grasp.

The car was pulling out of this lovers’ lane, without me.

From the window as she drove, hands with blood-red nails clutching the wheel, Beatrice called out, “I’ve done what you ask. Now leave me out!”

And somehow I didn’t think she was talking to me.

10

As I backed away, they encircled me, four skulking boys in denim slacks and untucked silk shirts; the shirts were of various dark colors, which had helped them blend into the darkness of the underbrush as they waited. But as I moved backward into the moonlit clearing, and they moved in lockstep with me, four Islanders dancing with the only white mainlander at the colored cotillion, blossoms emerged on the dark blue and dark green and deep purple shirts, flowers of yellow, of ivory, of red, strangely festive apparel for this brooding bunch of savages to have worn on this mission of entrapment.

I stopped, then wheeled within the circle, not liking having any of them behind me. From the pictures in the files I knew them: David Takai, lean as a knife blade, dark-complected, his flat features riding an elongated oval face, sharp bright eyes shining like polished black stones, black hair slicked back; Henry Chang, short, solidly built, eyes bright with resentment, curly hair sitting like an unruly cap atop a smooth, narrow face whose expression seemed on the verge of either tears or rage; Ben Ahakuelo, broad-shouldered boxer, light complected, matinee-idol handsome in part due to heavy eyebrows over dark sad eyes; and Horace Ida, who was a surprise to me, as the photo had shown only the round pudgy face with its slits for eyes and an unruly black shock of pompadour—I was not prepared for that fat-kid puss to sit atop a short, wiry, lean, powerful frame, nor for those eyes to burn with such intelligence, such alertness, such seriousness.

“What the hell do you want with me?” I asked. I did my best to sound indignant, as opposed to scared shitless.

For several moments, the only response came from the nearby surf crashing on the reef, and the rustle of leaves shaking in the wind. Like me. Ida looked over at Ahakuelo, as if seeking for a prompt; but the broad-shouldered mournful-eyed boxer said nothing.

Finally Ida said, “Just wanna talk.” He was facing me now, as I did my slow turn within their circle.

I planted my feet. “Are you the spokesman?”

Ida shrugged. I took that for “yes.”

“If you wanted to talk,” I said, “you should’ve just stopped by my hotel.”

Ida grunted a laugh. “We draw reporters and coppers like shit draws flies. You think Ala Moana boys can go waltzing into Royal Hawaiian?”

Henry Chang was smirking; the expressions of the other two remained grimly blank. These four—with the late Kahahawai—were of course the so-called “Ala Moana boys,” named for this lonely stretch of ruined blacktop along which their crime was supposedly committed.

“Besides,” Ida said with a little shrug, “how we know you pay attention? Here you pay attention.”

He had a point.

“What do you fellas want from me?”

“If we want to fuck you up, we could, right?”

I started turning in a circle again; my hands balled into tight fists. “It might cost you more than you think….”

Now Henry Chang spoke, only it was more of a bark: “But we could, right, haole?”

“Yeah,” I admitted; my stomach was jumping—the first guy who hit me in the stomach was getting a cotton candy facial. “Yeah, I think the four of you got me sufficiently outnumbered. What do you say we go one at time, just to be sporting?”

Ida slapped his chest and the thump echoed in the night. “You hear our side, okay?”

“Huh?”

His voice was so quiet, the sound of the breakers on the reef almost drowned it out. “We not gonna fuck you up. We ain’t gangsters like haole papers say. We just want you hear our side.”

Tentative relief trickled through me. “I, uh, don’t mind talkin’ to you boys—but isn’t there someplace a little less cozy…?”

“Yeah.” Ida nodded, smiled, and there was something unsettling about the smile. “I know a good place. We take you for a ride….”

To a guy from Chicago, that phrase had a certain unhappy resonance.

But I couldn’t see trying to make a break for it; at least one of these guys, brawny Ahakuelo, was a top athlete, a boxing champ and a star of the local variety of football, which was played barefoot. What were my odds of outrunning him?

Besides, I was feeling increasingly not in danger. Melodramatic as this stunt may have been, luring me by way of an Oriental siren to this weed patch in the boonies between Waikiki and Honolulu, this didn’t seem to be about harming me. Scaring me, yes. Harming me—maybe not….

Ida was gesturing around him. “This is where Massie woman say we bring her and screw her and beat on her.”

Henry Chang said bitterly, “You think I got to force a woman? You think Benny here gotta force a woman?”

What was I going to do, disagree?

“This doesn’t seem like too tough a town to get laid in,” I granted them.

“We can kill you,” Ida said. “We can beat shit outa you. But we ain’t gonna.” He turned to Takai. “Mack, get the car.”

The lean Japanese nodded and headed out of the clearing onto the blacktop.

Ida said, “You know what the cops do? When they not find my tire tracks here, they bring my car out and drive it around and make tracks. But they not get away with it.”

“I heard,” I said. “But I also heard you’ve got supporters in the department.”

Ida nodded and so did Ahakuelo; Chang was studying me with apparent hatred.

“Lemme tell you how far that help go,” Ida said. “That just means when some cop is doin’ things to frame us, another cop warn us.”

Nearby, an auto motor started up. In a few moments, headlights came slicing into the clearing as Takai pulled up and, leaving the engine running, hopped out of the tan Ford Phaeton, its top down.

“The infamous car,” I said.

“Come for ride,” Ida said.

Soon our little group had piled into the Phaeton, Takai, Chang, and Ahakuelo in back, Ida behind the wheel in front with me in the rider’s seat.

“We didn’t rape on that woman,” Ida said over the gentle rumble of the well-tuned Model A engine. We were tooling down Ala Moana smoothly, but for the occasional pothole.

“Why don’t you tell me about that night, Horace?”

“My friends call me Shorty,” he said.

So we were pals now?

“Fine, Shorty,” I said. I turned my head to look back at the three unfriendly faces in the backseat. “You guys call me Nate.”

Takai pointed to himself. “They call me Mack.” He pointed to dour Henry Chang. “He’s Eau.” It sounded like he was saying, “He’s you.” But I figured it out after a second.

Ahakuelo said, “Call me Benny.”

And I’ll be damned if he didn’t extend his hand. I reached around and shook with him. No similar offer came from the others.

“That Saturday night last September,” Ida said, “I was just fooling around. Go to Mochizuki Tea House, no action. Try a Filipino speak over in Tin Can Alley, run into Mack and Benny. Some beer, some talk.”

The lights of Honolulu were up ahead, and the nearly jungle-like area was thinning out. The ocean was visible at left, endless black glimmering gold, stretching to a purple starry sky overseen by a golden moon.

“Benny knew about a wedding luau we could crash,” Ida said.

Behind me Benny said, “We weren’t invited but the son of the host, Doc Correa, he’s a friend of mine.”

“We had beer, some roast pig. We run into Eau and Joe Kahahawai at the luau. Then things got kinda slow, and somebody say, how ’bout we go to dance at Waikiki Park?”

We were passing by a Hooverville, a city of shacks fashioned from flattened tin cans, scrap sheet metal, crates and boxes…nothing uniquely Hawaiian about this squatter’s town, except that it was oceanfront property.

“We get to dance at eleven-thirty. We don’t wanna pay for tickets ’cause we know at midnight, it pau, over. So we bum a couple ticket stubs off some friends who was leaving the dance, and Joe and Eau take the stubs and go in, I wait in parkin’ lot.”

Ahakuelo said, “Plenty of witnesses saw us in there.”

“Yeah,” David Chang said, “like that wahine you slapped on the ass.”

Takai laughed. “Glad he did! That way she remember him.”

Chang said bitterly, “She remembered you were drunk.”

“Kulikuli,” Ahakuelo snapped at Chang with a scowl.

The landscape along Ala Moana had a marshy look, now; I had a hunch I could find those mosquitoes here that had been driven out of Waikiki.

“It does sound like a lot of drinking was going on that night,” I said. “How much did you boys have?”

“Benny hit the oke a little hard,” Ida admitted. “Joe, too. Rest of us, couple beers. Joe and Eau run into Benny and Mack at dance, then after while, Joe come out to parking lot and pass off a ticket stub to me. I go inside a while, and he wait in lot.”

To the left were tiny wharves where small boats were tied, mostly fishing boats, distinctive low-slung sampans, with a few sleek yachts interspersed, looking as out of place as white tie and tails at a country hoedown.

“Midnight,” Ida said, “dance over, stand around lot talkin’ to people maybe five minutes—then we pile in the Ford and go back to the luau.”

“How long were you there?”

“Ten minutes maybe. Somebody was playing music in the house, but no action, it was pau. They was singing ‘Memories.’ They was outa beer. Benny wanna go home, he have football practice next day, so I drop him off and he head home, over on Frog Lane.”

The buildings of Honolulu up ahead, the ships and lights of the harbor over at left, were distinct before us now.

“You must’ve had that little fender-scraper with that white woman,” I said, “along about then.”

“I show you where it happen,” Ida nodded, turning to the right onto Sheridan Street, the first opportunity to turn onto any street in some time.

Soon we were turning left onto King Street, a magnificent old plantation on the right, glimpsed through shrubs, foliage, a stone-and-wire fence, and the spreading branches of palms protecting it and its grounds from the tourists frequenting the Coconut Hut, a tacky grass-shack souvenir shop directly opposite—its sign boasting “A BIT OF OLD-TIME OLD HAWAII IN THE HEART OF HONOLULU.”

Before long, courtesy of the least likely tour guides Oahu might have provided, I was getting my first glimpse at the heart of Hawaiian government. Ida slowed down so I could have a nice look. At right was the Iolani Palace, set back far enough from the street to look like a dollhouse in the moonlight. A boxy Victorian affair with towers on the corners and in the middle (both front and rear) and plenty of gingerbread trim, almost ridiculously grandiose on its manicured grounds with its palm tree sentinels, the palace was a building that tried very hard not to look Hawaiian.

And across from the palace, on my left, was the Judiciary Building, another quaint monstrosity with balustraded balconies, Grecian pillars, and a central clock tower. Several schools of architecture seemed to be doing battle, none a winner, yet there was a comic-opera grandness about it.

In front of the building, on a stone pedestal, stood a golden statue of a native warrior, a spear in hand, a feathered cloak about him, his build powerful, his features proud.

“King Kamehameha,” Ida said. “Kinda looks like Joe.”

Joe Kahahawai, he meant; his murdered friend.

“Joe was proud he look like Kamehameha. Almost as proud of that big toe he kick football with…. That’s where they kidnap him.”

Yes it was: when Kahahawai had approached the courthouse that morning last January to report to his probation officer, he had walked in the shadow of the statue of the Island monarch he resembled into the false summons and waiting arms of Tommie Massie and company. There, next door to the Judiciary Building, across a side street, was the modern structure of the post office, where Mrs. Fortescue had parked, and watched, and waited.

We drove through downtown Honolulu—within spitting distance of the Alexander Young Hotel—and had I wanted to call out for help or jump out, I could easily have done it. I wasn’t quite sure why these boys wanted me to hear “their side” of it; but I didn’t think I was in danger, and besides, I wanted to hear their side of it….

Beyond the downtown, in a working-class residential neighborhood, Ida pulled over to the curb, leaving the engine thrumming. We were at the arterial intersection of King and Liliha streets, with Dillingham Boulevard curving off to the left, toward Pearl Harbor.

Ida was pointing over toward Liliha, at the stop sign. “I just dropped Eau off, and pull out on King when this big damn Hudson come roarin’ down King, headin’ toward town, goin’ like hell. I yank the wheel around and we both slow down and just touch fenders.”

“A little haole guy was driving,” Henry Chang said, “but it was his big fat wahine mama that cussed us.”

Ida said, “She yell out the window, ‘Look the hell where you’re goin’!’ And I yell back, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ “Ahakuelo said, softly, some regret in his voice, “It make Joe mad, seein’ that white man with that big-mouth kanaka gal. Big Joe jump out and yell, ‘Get that damn haole out here, and I’ll give him what’s coming to him.’”

“But the little guy stay behind the wheel,” Ida said. “He look real scared. The big fat mama didn’t—she got outa the car, damn big woman, almost tall as Joe. She come over cussin’, smellin’ of oke, drunk as hell. We all jump outa the car but she and Joe already at each other. She grab Joe by the throat and scratch him and Joe shove her offa him, and she fall on the runnin’ board of her car. Big fat wildcat, we had enough of that, even Joe, and we scramble back in car and drive off like hell, laughin’ about it.”

“Only it was no laughing matter,” I said, “after she went to the cops, and reported it as an assault.”

Ida’s expression was confused, frustrated. “She hit Joe.”

“And Joe hit her.” I decided to risk the following: “I hear he punched her in the face—like Thalia Massie got punched in the face.”

Behind me, Henry Chang snarled, “Haole pi’ lau!”

Which I didn’t imagine was a term of endearment.

Ida looked at me, eyes steady. “He just push her, on side of head. If Joe punch her in face, are you kidding? He woulda break her damn jaw!”

I said nothing. I didn’t have to: Ida suddenly realized what he’d said, swallowed thickly, and put the Phaeton in gear and, with care, pulled back out onto King, heading back toward town. Before long he took a left on Nuuanu Street.

Ida didn’t say anything for a while; maybe he was wondering how different his life—and Joe Kahahawai’s—might have been if that little fender-bender with Agnes and Homer Peeples (that was the couple’s name) hadn’t seen epithets escalate into rough stuff.

Finally I asked, “Why did you lie, Shorty?”

He gave me a quick, startled glance. “What?”

“You lied to the cops, when they came around and rousted you out of bed, in the early morning hours after the rape.”

He was stopping, just beyond a lush park, where Nuuanu Street forked, a road off to the right labeled Pacific Heights.

“I didn’t know any haole woman got attack,” Ida said. “All I know was Joe hit that fat wahine bitch, and I didn’t wanna get mixed up in it.”

“So you told the cops you didn’t go out that night. And that you loaned the car to some Hawaiian pal of yours—a pal you knew by sight but not by name?”

Ida nodded glumly; his smirk had no humor in it. “Not very good lie, huh?”

“One of the worst I ever heard,” I said cheerfully.

“I told truth later same night….”

“Sure, after they grilled you—but you got off to a bad start with that whopper.” When the first thing out of a suspect’s mouth is a lie, a cop never believes another word.

“That cop McIntosh, he drag me into his office where Mrs. Massie sit, face banged up, and say to me in front of her, ‘Now look at your beautiful work!’ Then he ask her if I am attacker!”

Christ, talk about prompting—why didn’t Mcintosh just stencil the word rapist on the poor bastard’s shirt? What happened to the standard practice of placing a suspect like Ida in a lineup?

“But she didn’t identify me,” Ida said. “Next afternoon, Sunday, coppers take Mack, Eau, Big Joe, and me to Massie house in Manoa Valley.”

“Why in hell?” I asked.

“So she could identify us.”

Not a lineup downtown where the real suspects were intermingled with bogus ones, under the watchful eye of the DA’s office—but home delivery of the coppers’ prime suspects!

“Sunday, cops ain’t picked Benny up yet,” Ida was saying. “So Benny, he wasn’t there. Funny thing, Mrs. Massie said to Big Joe—‘Don’t they call you Ben?’ But she say she recognize Eau and Joe. She don’t pick me out. Don’t even know me from the night before at police headquarters.”

For several miles now, we’d been gliding along the valley road with fabulous estates on either side, their lavish gardens lorded over by royal palms. It was as if we were passing through an immense open-air nursery.

“They take Mrs. Massie back to hospital,” Ida said, “later that same afternoon. And Benny, cops pick him up at the football field, where he practice, and take him to hospital and ask Mrs. Massie if he is one of attackers.”

From the backseat, Ahakuelo’s voice reeked frustration. “She said didn’t know me!”

Even with the cops tying these boys in red ribbons and depositing them in her lap, Thalia Massie had failed to identify them during that crucial forty-eight-hour period after the crime. Only later did she come to know them down to their shoe size.

“We innocent men,” Ida said proudly, as the Phaeton seemed to float past a cemetery.

“Maybe you did get railroaded on this one,” I said. “But don’t kid a kidder: your pal Joe was convicted on a robbery charge…” I looked over my shoulder and directed my next comment to Ahakuelo, who seemed to have warmed to me some; Henry Chang was still glowering. “And Benny, you and Eau here did time on a rape charge.”

“Attempted rape!” Chang spat.

“Sorry. That makes all the difference….”

“We got parole,” Ahakuelo said, “and the charge got dropped down to ‘fornication with a minor.’ I was eighteen, Eau just a kid, too—we was at a party and there was lots of oke, lots of fucking.”

“Some of the girls was under sixteen,” Ida further explained.

So the prior rape charges against Ahakuelo and Chang, which had produced such indignation on Admiral Stirling’s part, were statutory rape busts?

“And Joe wasn’t convicted on no robbery beef, either,” Ida was saying.

“He wasn’t?”

Ida shook his head, no; we were passing by another park—according to a wooden sign, Queen Emma Park. “Joe loaned some money to this friend of his, Toyoko Fukunaga. Fukunaga owe Joe this money too long, and wouldn’t pay. After time, Big Joe shake the cash outa Fukunaga, and Fukunaga file a complaint. They have trial, but jury can’t make up their mind.”

These guys seemed to inspire hung juries.

“DA say they skip ’nother trial if Joe plead guilty on assault and battery,” Ida continued. “He do thirty days.”

So Big Joe Kahahawai’s criminal record consisted of a disagreement between him and a friend over a debt.

A rambling country club clubhouse marked the spot where the streetcar line ended, and private residences began to thin out to nothing as the valley road began to wind. Ida took a fork to the right, about a mile past the country club, and we sailed along the bank of a stream, briefly, before the road plunged into a tunnel of trees, shutting out the moonlight.

I was getting uneasy again. “Where are you taking me, Shorty?”

“We see Pali,” he said, as if that meant anything to me.

The eucalyptus-tree forest gave way to sheer ridges of stone, and the sides of the valley seemed to gradually close in on us as we climbed. My ears were popping. The air had turned chill, the wind kicking up.

“Gettin’ a little cold, isn’t it?” I asked. “You wanna put the top up on this buggy?”

Ida shook his head no. “Pali might rip canvas top right off.”

What was Pali, a goddamn Cyclops?

“Who the hell is Pali?” I growled.

“Pali is cliff,” Ida said, “where Kamehameha and warriors drive Kalanikupule’s warriors back over edge. Long drop.”

From the backseat came Henry Chang’s helpful voice: “Two-thousand-foot drop, haole”

“It’s thoughtful of you fellas to try to make me feel at home,” I said. “But maybe any more sight-seeing oughta wait till daylight…”

We had rounded a final curve and now a breathtaking panorama stretched out before us; the golden glow of the moon had been replaced by silver, and it was with this gleaming paintbrush that the greens and blues of the vista were touched, muted into an unreality like that of a hand-painted postcard, mountains, cliffs, bays, strands of coral, ivory endless sea under a starry black-blue dome. God, it was lovely. Christ, it was far down.

And shit, the wind! It was a cold howling gale up here, whipping hair, flapping clothing, flapping skin, it was a goddamn hurricane, formed, I supposed, by wind funneling through the ridges of these cliffs. My body was immediately overtaken by a flu-like chill.

“Get off car!” Ida yelled at me. These guys seemed to say “off” where a normal person would say “out”; but somehow it didn’t seem like the time for a semantic discussion.

And we all piled out, that nasty air current making fluttering human semaphore signals out of all our clothing, the dark flowered silk shirts flying like the absurd flags of several silly nations. My tie was a waggling tattletale tongue.

Suddenly Henry Chang was on one side of me, and Benny Ahakuelo on the other, and each gripped me just above either elbow. Ida was facing me, his pudgy face set in a stern fearsome mask, his black hair waving, whipping. David Takai stood just behind him, his slicked-back hair having more success against the wind than the rest of us, his flat face blank, dark stone eyes unreadable.

“Last December,” Ida shouted, “big buncha sailors grab me, haul my ass up here, wanna make me confess I rape that white woman.”

Ida began unbuttoning the shirt even as the silk flapped around his hands.

I glanced out at the view: rolling hills, the even lines of a pineapple plantation, cattle fields, rice paddies, banana-tree groves, and the seas striking, curling, foaming over the distant reef. All of it, silver in the moonlight. Lovely. I wondered how lovely it would look as I was windmilling through the air on my way to the rocks two thousand feet below.

Or was Henry Chang exaggerating? Was it only fifteen hundred feet?

Ida had the shirt off and he handed the fluttering garment to Takahi, who was attending him like a servant. Was Ida freeing himself up to administer me a beating? And I would have to take it; the other three could hold onto me and I’d just have to fucking take it….

But now, in the ivory bath of the moonlight, Ida’s surprisingly lean body revealed streaks of white scars, a sea of them, slashing his flesh, and he turned like a model showing off a new frock, and revealed a back that was even more brutally striped with welts that had graduated to scar tissue. He had been brutally whipped—front and back.

Then Ida wheeled, and he came very close to me, as Henry Chang and Benny Ahakuelo held me. Yelling to be heard over the gale, he said, “They work me over pretty good, whaddya think?”

“Not bad,” I managed.

“And I not confess. Bleed like hell, pass out after while, but goddamn, not confess! Nothin’ to confess!”

Chin high, his proud point made, Ida held his hand out to his attendant Takai and took back his flapping garment, got it on, and buttoned up, despite the wind.

“You tell Clarence Darrow,” Ida said. “You tell him we innocent men. Joe was innocent, too. You tell him he’s on wrong side of courtroom. Wrong side!”

“I’ll tell him,” I said. No smart talk or disagreement from these quarters: Henry Chang and Ahakuelo were still holding onto me; I was still seconds away from being a flung rag doll bouncing my way down to a rocky death.

“He supposed to help little people!” Ida shouted indignantly. “He supposed to be colored man’s defender! Not rich goddamn murderers! You tell him we wanna talk to him. We want his ear! You tell him!”

I nodded numbly.

And then they dragged me back into the car and took off.

It was a six-, seven-mile drive, but not another word was spoken, not until they dropped me by my car in the Waikiki Park parking lot, where Beatrice was sitting on the running board, her legs stretched out; she was smoking, a bunch of butts scattered on the gravel near her pretty red-painted toenails. When she saw us pull in, she got to her feet, tossed me the keys without a word or expression, and climbed in the front seat with Ida, where I’d been sitting.

“Tell Darrow,” Ida said.

And the Phaeton was gone.

11

Clarence Darrow, wrapped in a white towel like a plump Gandhi, his comma of gray hair turned into wispy exclamation marks by the wind, his smile as gleeful as a kid Christmas morning, was seated in the outrigger canoe, positioned midway, like ballast, two berry-brown beach boys in front of him, three behind. They paddled the boat and their joyful passenger over an easy crest of surf as news photographers on the beach—invaders in suit and tie amongst the swimming-attired tourists—snapped pictures.

One of Darrow’s tanned escorts—the one paddling right at the front of the boat—was the king of the beach boys himself: Duke Kahanamoku, a “boy” in his early forties. An infectious white smile flashed in the long dark handsome face, and sinewy muscles rippled as the Duke stroked the water.

“Took Tarzan to beat him,” Clarence Crabbe said.

We were sitting under a beach umbrella at a little white table on the sand with the pink castle of the Royal Hawaiian looming beautifully behind us. The young Olympic hopeful looked like a bronze god in his black trunks with matching athletic T-shirt. I was in tourist mode—white slacks with sandals and one of those colorful silk shirts like my kidnappers of the night before had worn: a red print with yellow and black parrots, short-sleeve and sporty and loud enough to attract attention back in Chicago’s Bronzeville. This wardrobe—which also included a wide-brimmed Panama hat and round-lensed sunglasses that turned the world a soothing green—was courtesy of various shops in the hotel, and charged to my room. If there’s anything a detective knows how to find, it’s ways to pad an expense account.

Crabbe had called this morning; I didn’t place him at first, but when he offered to buy us lunch with his silver dollar, it came to me: the kid who dived from the Malolo deck! We’d had lunch on the lanai (that’s “porch” for you mainlanders) outside the hotel lounge, the Coconut Grove, only I didn’t let him pay for the tab, which the buck wouldn’t have covered, anyway—I signed it to my room.

Now we were spending the early part of the afternoon watching Darrow caper on the beach for the press, giving them plenty of frivolous photos and the occasional questionable tidbit (“There is no racial problem whatsoever in Hawaii”), while along the way paying the Royal Hawaiian back for my room with the publicity his famous presence attracted.

“Huh?” I asked, in response to Crabbe’s statement about Tarzan beating Duke Kahanamoku.

“Johnny Weismuller,” Crabbe explained. He was watching Kahanamoku wistfully. “He’s the guy who finally took Duke’s title away, as world’s fastest swimmer. In Paris, in ’24.”

“And ’32’s gonna be your year?”

“That’s the plan.”

Though the Royal Hawaiian was way under capacity, its beachfront was aswarm with sunbathers, swimmers, and would-be surf riders. Here and there, a muscular Hawaiian in a bathing suit was attending a female—either conducting a friendly class in surfing, or sitting on the beach beside her, rubbing coconut oil on pale flesh.

“These beach boys,” I said to Crabbe, “do they work here?”

“Some do. But all the beaches in Hawaii are public—the boys can come and go as they like. Hey, I used to be one of them.”

“A haole like you?”

He flashed me a grin as white as Kahanamoku’s. “You’re picking up on the lingo, Nate. Yeah, there are a few white boys out there hustling surfing lessons.”

“And hustling the women?”

His grin turned sly. “Since I never pay for sex, I make a general of policy of not charging for it, either.”

“But some beach boys do charge for their stud services?”

He shrugged. “It’s a point of pride. Say, what’s Clarence Darrow foolin’ around with Duke and the boys for? Shouldn’t he be waist-deep in the case?”

Right now Darrow was ankle-deep in surf. Kahanamoku was helping Darrow out of the boat and onto the sand, the reporters and photographers scuttling in like crabs, snapping shots, hurling questions.

“He is working on the case,” I said. “On the public relations front, anyway—not to mention race relations. Hanging out with Duke Kahanamoku, he’s sending a message that he doesn’t think all the beach boys are rapists.”

“Those Ala Moana defendants,” Crabbe said, “aren’t beach boys. Just typical restless Honolulu kids, drifting through life.”

He said this with a certain sympathy.

“Guys in their late teens, early twenties,” I said, “are restless everywhere, not just Hawaii.”

“Yeah, but a lot of kids here are really adrift. All these different races tossed together here, their cultures, their traditions, in tatters.”

“Then you don’t think the Ala Moana boys are ‘gangsters’?”

“No, and I don’t think they’re rapists, either.”

“Why’s that?”

Crabbe sighed. The cool wind was cutting through the warmth of the afternoon, making his dark blond hair dance; handsome damn kid—if he wasn’t so affable, I’d have hated his guts.

His gaze was steady. “There’s an old Island saying—‘Hawaiians will talk.’ But the cops couldn’t get anything out of the boys.”

“So what? Lots of suspects in all kinds of cases keep their traps shut.”

He shook his head. “Not Hawaiian suspects. If the cops and their billy clubs and blacksnake whips didn’t get the story out of ’em, oke and curious friends and relatives would. And the word would spread across the Island like the surf rolling over that beach.”

“And it hasn’t?”

“Nope. Why do you think support among the colored population is so overwhelmingly on the side of the ‘rapists’? Besides, you don’t have to rape a woman on Oahu. There’s too much good stuff ready for the asking.”

Maybe if you looked like this kid, there was.

“That area Thalia Massie was walking along when she got grabbed,” I said, “was a red-light district. Maybe Horace Ida and his pals were riding along and mistook her for a chippie and decided to tear off a free piece.”

He thought about that. “That’s the best case anybody’s made for the prosecution so far. That’s certainly the way it could’ ve happened. But not by the Ala Moana boys.”

“Why?”

“Because Hawaiians will talk! Word around town, among the colored population, is it was another gang of boys. How many dozen convertibles full of Island boys looking for a party d’you suppose are prowling around on a given Saturday night?”

This kid would’ve made a good lawyer. Maybe after he got this Olympic stuff out of his system, he’d finish up law school.

“You got the time, Nate?”

I checked my watch. I told him it was getting close to two.

He stood; his musculature had the same sinewy rippling quality as the Duke’s. “Guess I better scoot. I’m supposed to be over at the Natatorium by two.”

“The what?”

“Natatorium. It’s a saltwater pool over near Diamond Head. It’s where I’m training.”

“Good luck to you,” I said and offered my hand.

He shook it and was gathering his towel to go when I asked casually, “Why’d you wanna have lunch with me today, Buster?”

That was his nickname, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what he told me on the pier after the Malolo docked?

Must’ve been, because he answered, “Why, I just wanted to repay your kindness on the ship the other day—”

“You ever met any of the Ala Moana boys?”

He blinked. “Yeah, uh…I knew Joe Kahahawai. I know Benny Ahakuelo, too.”

“Local athletes, like you.”

“Yeah.” Now he gave me an embarrassed grin. “And you caught me at it—trying to put in a good word for my friends, without letting you know they are my friends….”

“I’m a detective. They pay me for catching people at things.”

“I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to mislead you—”

“Don’t apologize for trying to help out your friends. Listen, Buster—you didn’t tell me any lies, did you?”

“No. Just that one little sin of omission….”

I grinned at him. “That makes you a hell of a lot more reliable than most people I talk to. Thanks for the information. Good luck in Los Angeles.”

That was the upcoming Olympics site.

“Thanks, Nate.” He flashed another embarrassed grin, waved, and was gone.

Darrow was moving up onto the beach. Duke Kahanamoku was heading back out with his pals in the outrigger, probably to duck the reporters. Before, the sound of Darrow’s voice had been muffled in the gentle roar of the waves and the happy chatter of the sunbathers and swimmers, running in and out of the surf, or sprawled on the white sand on towels to broil like lobsters. But now, as C.D. and the reporters moved toward the hotel and the row of tables with beach umbrellas, where we sat, I could pretty well make out what they were saying….

“Worried you’re gonna get a racially mixed jury, Judge?” one reporter asked. The newshounds tended to call Darrow “Judge,” even though he’d never been one; it was a way to kid and compliment him at the same time.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt we’ll have a racially mixed jury, and no misgivings about it, either. I would embrace that as an opportunity in establishing a bridge between white and brown and yellow.”

“I don’t think you can use the same tactics you usually use, Judge,” another reporter chimed in. “If the court tells a Hawaiian jury that shooting a man is against the law, and the jury thinks your clients did the shooting, well that’s all there is to it: they’ll find ’em guilty.”

“That’s the damned trouble with trials,” Darrow growled. “Everybody thinks about the law and nobody thinks about people! Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, that’s all for today….”

Darrow answered a few parting questions as the reporters and their photographers slowly withdrew, and he sent me a tiny glance that said “Stick around” as he went to the table down a ways from me, where Ruby, Mrs. Leisure, and Isabel were sitting. He joined them and began chatting amiably.

No doubt in anticipation of possible press pictures, Mrs. Darrow’s pleasantly stout frame was decked out in a sporty white-trimmed blue dress and hat, Mrs. Leisure attractively casual in belted beach pajamas—beige blouse and blue trousers—and blindingly blond Isabel a knockout in her white skirt with blue polka dots and a matching hat; her blouse was actually the nicely filled upper half of her white swimming suit. Isabel wasn’t speaking to me, but I intended to mend that fence—when I got around to it.

George Leisure wasn’t present—somebody had to prepare for the coming court case.

“Excuse me, suh.”

The voice was mellow, male, not quite a drawl, but nonetheless touched by Southern inflection.

I turned. Straw fedora in hand, his white linen suit immaculate, a pleasant-featured man in his thirties, his brown hair touched lightly with gray at the temples, sharp eyes under lazy lids behind wire-framed glasses, half-bowed to me. His manner was almost courtly.

“You are Nathan Hellah?”

“Yes,” I said, somewhat warily; despite the cordial, civilized bearing, this guy could after all be a reporter.

“Mr. Darrow requested ah speak with you. I’m Lt. Commander John E. Porter. I’ve been assigned by Admiral Stirlin’ to be at Mr. Darrow’s disposal. May ah sit down?”

Half-standing, I gestured to the chair Crabbe had vacated. “Of course, Doctor. C.D.’s mentioned you. You two seem to have hit it off.”

“Clarence is easy to like.” He placed his hat on the little table as he sat. “And it’s an honor bein’ associated with such a great man.”

“I notice you’re out of uniform, Doctor.”

“Since ah’m spendin’ so much time, bein’ Mr. Darrow’s personal physician, Admiral Stirlin’ decided it might not be wise.”

Might not be the best press relations, at that, Mr. Darrow being seen in the ongoing company of a naval officer.

“If we’re going to discuss the case, Doctor,” I said, “do you mind if I take notes?”

“Not at all.”

But before turning to a fresh page in my little notebook, I was first checking to see if a memory the doctor’s name had jogged was correct: yes. Here he was in my notes from the Alton interview with Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie Massie: Porter was the doctor who, before the first trial, had advised Tommie to take Thalia and leave the Island.

“What’s your normal duty, Doctor?”

“I’m a gynecologist, Mr. Hellah, assigned to the care of dependent wives.”

“Gynecologist—isn’t that a doc that gets paid by women to look at what they won’t show just any ol’ man?”

“Quaintly but accurately put, yes.”

“So you were Thalia’s doctor, before the rape? For female problems?”

“Yes, suh, and general health concerns. And after the incident, Admiral Stirlin’ asked to look after Lt. Massie, as well, suh.”

This pleasant-looking professional man had tight, troubled eyes. It was the look of somebody who knew things he’d rather not.

“I attended Mrs. Massie the night of the incident, as well. I can give you the details if you like, suh.”

I noticed he never quite used the word “rape.”

“Please,” I said.

He didn’t have to consult his notes: “I found a double fracture of the lower jaw so severe her jaw had been displaced and her upper and lower jaws could not meet. Three molars on the right side of her jaw were in such proximity to the fracture, extraction was necessary. Both her upper and lower lips were swollen, discolored, and her nose was swollen. I also found small cuts and bruises about her body.”

“All of this supports Thalia’s story that she was beaten and raped, wouldn’t you say, Doctor?”

The raising of one eyebrow was barely perceptible; his gentle Southern-tinged voice was hardly audible above the rolling surf and beach noise.

“Mistah Hellah, that is the fact. However, it is also a fact that her clothes were not torn, nor was there any trace of semen on her dress or undah-garments. And my examination of her pelvic area indicated no abrasions or contusions. She had douched when she arrived home, which could be the reason there was no indication that she had been raped.”

I sat forward. “Is there some doubt that she was raped at all?”

“Let us say that there is no doubt she was beaten. Her jaw will probably never be the same; it will always have a little lump, there. And there is certainly nothin’ to indicate she was not raped. She is a married woman, Mistah Hellah, and her vagina, uh, opens quite a bit.”

“In other words, you could drive a truck in there and not leave any tire tracks.”

His eyes widened behind the wire frames. “I might not have put it quite so…colorfully…but ah believe you have grasped my point.”

“Why did you advise Lt. Massie to take his wife and leave the Island?”

That surprised him. “I wasn’t aware you were aware of that, Mistah Hellah. I did so advise the lieutenant. I even offered to go to Admiral Stirlin’ and advise a transfer on grounds that he and Mrs. Massie’s health was sufferin’. I felt the publicity would be harmful to both the Navy and the Massies, and ah could see no useful purpose bein’ served by that trial.”

“No useful purpose in putting some vicious rapists away? If Mrs. Massie was raped—and your examination neither confirmed nor ruled that out—she and her husband might quite naturally want to see justice done.”

His expression was dismayed, but then as the eyes behind the wire frames studied me, his face blossomed into a knowing smile. “You’re goin’ fishin’, aren’t you, Mistah Hellah?”

I grinned back at him. “They do that around these parts, I understand. Look, Doctor—Darrow asked you to talk to me, and you obviously want to share some things with me. What is it that’s creasing your patrician brow?”

Now he sat forward; and his voice was so hushed I had to work to filter out the beach noise and discern the troubled words in his tranquil tone.

“I mentioned ah attended Mrs. Massie as her physician, prior to this incident. Only because Mrs. Massie’s attorney has requested ah share this knowledge with you am ah doin’ so, and then only reluctantly.”

“As Mr. Darrow’s paid and licensed investigator,” I said, “I’m bound by the same client confidentiality code as he is. And as you are.”

Dr. Porter sighed, swallowed, spoke. “Mrs. Massie had a preexisting condition when ah first began attendin’ her—preeclampsia, which manifests itself through hemorrhages in the liver and kidneys. Left unattended, eclampsia is often fatal. The symptoms are rapid weight gain, high blood pressure…and secondary hemorrhages in the retinas.”

“The eyes, you mean?”

“That is correct, suh. This generally leads either to blindness or at least badly impaired vision.”

My grunt was sort of a laugh—an amazed laugh. “Are you saying Thalia Massie is blind as a bat?”

“No. No. But her…visual acuity is drastically reduced. Specifically, her eyesight has been impaired by preeclamptic toxemia. She is particularly impaired in low-light situations.”

“Like at night. In the dark.”

“Precisely.”

“Christ. She identified these guys, and she’s fucking blind?”

“You are overstating, suh. Somewhat. There is a question whether she could recognize these people in the dark, since she practically couldn’t see in the daytime.”

“Jesus. You testified in the first trial, didn’t you?”

“Yes, suh.”

“But not to this.”

“No, suh. I would have had ah been asked—but ah was not questioned on this subject.”

And as a loyal naval officer, under Admiral Stirling’s thumb, the chance of Porter volunteering this information was unlikely, to say the least. But now that Joseph Kahahawai had been killed, Porter’s conscience was clearly bothering him.

“There is somethin’ else, Mistah Hellah.”

Wasn’t this bombshell enough?

“After ah performed a curettage, my analysis of the uterine scrapings did not indicate pregnancy.”

I blinked. “You mean, Thalia didn’t get pregnant by her rapists?”

“Or by anyone—despite what she said on the witness stand.”

And to her attorneys and their investigator.

“You might find it illuminatin’, as well, to know that the figures Admiral Stirlin’ and others have consistently provided to the press, regardin’ the high incidence of rape in Hawaii, are grossly inflated.”

I nodded. “I’d kind of come to that conclusion on my own, Doc. They’re mostly statutory rapes, right?”

“Yes, what the law refers to as ‘carnal abuse of a minor.’ With the exception of Mrs. Massie, the only rape of a white woman here in the past year is an unfortunate incident involvin’ an escaped prisoner.”

I thumbed through my notebook; hadn’t Mrs. Fortescue mentioned something abut this? Yes.

“Daniel Lyman,” I said.

“That is correct, suh,” Porter said. “And ah believe this miscreant is still at large, further inflamin’ public indignation.”

“Well, I certainly appreciate you sharing this information with me, Dr. Porter.”

“I only hope ah’m not required to take the stand in this second trial. If ah have to get up and tell everything ah know, it’d be awful—it’d make monkeys out of everybody.”

A familiar raspy voice to one side of us said: “No fear of that, Dr. Porter.”

Darrow, his potbelly like a beach ball he was hiding under the top of his black bathing costume, pulled up a third chair and sat.

“In the first place,” Darrow said, “I’ve already suffered through one ‘monkey’ trial. In the second, I would never dream of calling you to the witness stand—you’re one of the two honest physicians I’ve ever met.”

I said to Porter, “And how many honest lawyers do you know, Doc?”

Porter’s only response was a little smile.

We kept our voices down; the continuing beach noise created privacy in this crowd.

Darrow asked, “Can I assume you’ve filled my young friend in on what you know, Doctor?”

Porter nodded.

Darrow fixed his gray gaze on me as he jerked a thumb toward Porter. “John here has provided some remarkable insights not only into the Ala Moana case, but the psychology of the various racial groups on Oahu. I’d imagine we’d be hard pressed to find another naval officer with the doctor’s intimate knowledge of Hawaii’s social strata.”

“You flatter me, Clarence,” Porter said.

Darrow turned his gaze on the doctor. “Now I must risk insulting you, John, because I need to ask you to withdraw from this little gathering—I need a few moments alone with my investigator.”

Porter rose, and in one graceful gesture swept his straw fedora from the table even as he gave a little half-bow. “I’ll be in the Coconut Grove, Clarence, enjoyin’ an iced tea.”

“Be sure to ask for sugar,” I told him. “It’s not automatic in this part of the world.”

Porter snugged on his hat and smiled. “Whereas a slice of pineapple, rather than lemon, is. These Island customs are curious. Good afternoon, Mistah Hellah.”

And Porter strolled inside.

“After hearing the doc’s story,” I asked, “have you changed your opinion about Thalia?”

Darrow’s smile was a wavy crease in his rumpled face. “I still find her a clever girl.”

“You just don’t believe her story.”

A grand shrug. “It’s not important that I believe her; it’s important that her mother and her husband believed her.”

On the phone, I had told Darrow about my encounter last night with Horace Ida and company.

He leaned back in his chair, folded his hands on his round tummy. “You weren’t the only one that spent some time yesterday with Island luminaries. Know who Walter Dillingham is?”

“Somebody important enough around town to get a street named after him.”

“That’s his father’s street. Walter Dillingham is the president of a dozen companies, an officer or board member of a dozen or so more. He had me for luncheon yesterday at his home on Pacific Heights. Speaking for not only himself but the entire so-called haole elite, Dillingham expressed his belief in the guilt of the Ala Moana boys.”

“So what?”

“So,” Darrow drawled, “if all those important rich white people think those boys are guilty, I figure there’s a damn good chance they aren’t.”

I nodded, relieved by Darrow’s line of thinking. “It’s starting to seem possible, maybe even probable, that those boys—including Joe Kahahawai, the man our clients murdered—didn’t abduct and attack Thalia Massie.”

His smile turned crooked. “I ascertain that those young fellows were apparently fairly convincing in last evening’s melodrama…but the fact remains, on the way to making their point, they did kidnap you.”

“Granted. But they had their reasons, and it sure got my attention. Are you going to see them? They desperately want to talk to you.”

He shook his shaggy head no. “Conflict of interest. Perhaps after Mrs. Fortescue, Lt. Massie, and the sailor boys are free, I might be able to meet with them—until then, simply not possible.”

“What if they grab me again?”

He grunted a laugh. “Those sweet innocent boys? Perish the thought.”

“Look, they’re Island roughnecks, slum kids, but I don’t think they’re rapists, and I don’t think you do, either, C.D. Hell, these damn police used identification methods abandoned half a century ago by any civilized police department.”

His expression turned mock curious. “When and where was it you encountered a civilized police department? I don’t remember ever having the pleasure.”

“You know what I mean. Three times, they dragged the defendants in front of Thalia, as good as telling her, ‘These are the parties we suspect, and we want you to ID ’em.’”

He was shaking his head, no. “The issue is not whether Joe Kahahawai was innocent or guilty. The real point to consider is that our clients believed Kahahawai attacked Thalia. They committed an illegal, violent act but are justified by the purity of their purpose.”

“Are you kidding?”

The gray gaze was steady. “No. I believe in taking into account cause and effect, not succumbing to hatred, fear, and revenge.”

“You mean the way Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie did?”

He twitched a frown. “I was referring to our court system.”

“Then do you want me to stop looking into the attack on Thalia?”

His eyes flared. “No! Just because our clients didn’t know the truth when they committed this act doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know the truth when we set out to defend them. If Joe Kahahawai was guilty, that is helpful to us. Our moral ground is higher, our case is stronger.”

“So I’m to keep at it.”

A slow nod. “You’re to keep at it.”

“What if I find out Kahahawai was innocent?”

One eyebrow flicked up. “Then we hope to hell the prosecution doesn’t know as much as we do…. In a few days, jury selection begins.”

“And then the fun.”

Now a little smile. “And then the fun. Speaking of which, I bear unhappy tidings from Miss Bell.”

“Yeah?”

He put on a sad mask. “It seems she has the nastiest little sunburn. Isn’t that tragic? She was wondering if you would meet her at her room at three o’clock, to rub lotion on her poor red skin.”

“I think I could manage. How is it she’s willing to associate with me again?”

His hand gesture was a flippant flip. “I explained that your job is, in part, to play devil’s advocate for me; that you are in fact helping poor dear Thalia, not hindering her.”

I laughed, once. “You know, I knew sooner or later it would come to this, C.D.”

“What’s that, son?”

I scooted my chair back in the sand, and stood. “You pleading my case.”

And I padded into the Royal Hawaiian, mind spinning with thoughts of Dr. Porter’s revelations, but other parts of me anticipating a reunion with Miss Bell.

I was no beach boy, but I knew all about applying suntan lotion to the shoulders of a beautiful woman.

12

Set back a ways from Kalakaua Avenue, the former tourist hotel turned nightclub that was the Ala Wai Inn sat perched on the rocky shore of the fetid drainage canal whose name it had taken. Spotlights nestling in palm trees called attention to the two-story white frame trimmed black and brown would-be pagoda, its occasional octagonal windows glowing yellow in the night like jack-o’-lantern eyes.

“It’s a roadhouse posing as a Jap tearoom,” I said, tooling Mrs. Fortescue’s sporty Durant down the drive.

“Looks like fun to me,” Isabel said next to me, puffing prettily on a Camel. She’d gone hatless this evening, the better to show off her new hairdo courtesy of the Royal Hawaiian beauty shop; it was shorter and curlier, a cap of platinum curls, vaguely reminiscent of Harpo Marx but one hell of a lot sexier.

I pulled the roadster into a packed parking lot and invented a place next to a grass-shack toolshed. We were nestled in pretty snug, and Isabel had to slide over and get out on my side. I helped. She was a bundle of curves draped in Chanel, and smelled much better than that swampy drainage ditch nearby.

She was in my arms, then, and we kissed, another of her smoky, deep kisses, her tongue tickling my tonsils. We’d spent much of the last couple days (except for when I was tracking down witnesses to talk to) patching up our romance. Very little discussion of our differences was involved.

Her crêpe de chine dress had sideways blue and white stripes, as if she were standing in the slanting shadows of Venetian blinds. It was slinky and would have looked vampy, but she was a little too nicely rounded for that.

Hand in hand, we walked to the brightly lighted entry-way of the Ala Wai, pausing as Isabel crushed her Camel out under her high heel on the cinders. I must have looked pretty jaunty in my Panama hat, untucked red silk shirt with the parrots, and lightweight tan trousers. Or like a complete fool.

“So this is where Thalo’s trouble began,” Isabel said.

“Guess so,” I said, but I was starting to think Thalia Massie’s troubles had begun a lot earlier than that Saturday night last September. Which was why I was here. There were, after all, nicer places in Waikiki I could have taken the lovely Miss Bell dining and dancing.

As we stepped inside the smoky, dimly lighted joint, with its phony bamboo-and-hibiscus decor, a swarthy, stocky fellow in an orange shirt with flowers on it that made my parrots pale came forward with the ready smile and appraising eye of the doorkeeper he was.

“Evening, folks,” he said over the steel-guitar-dominated music, and the giddy chatter of customers. “Little crowded. Dine tonight, or jus’ dance?”

“Just dance,” I said.

He winked. “Sol Hoopii Trio tonight. Those boys keep it hoppin’.” He gestured with his hand toward the circular dance floor. “Some booths lef’ in back.”

“Is the Olds party here?”

“Ah yes. I get a girl show you.”

He called over a Japanese cutie in a kimono affair that, unlike the geisha garb of the waitresses at the Royal Hawaiian, was cut in front to show some leg. She was pretty, and pretty sweaty, tendrils of her piled-up black hair snaking loose; she had an order pad in hand, a pencil tucked behind her ear.

“Olds party,” the doorkeeper told her.

She blew hair away from her face, and grunted, “This way,” swaying off.

The doorkeeper grinned and pointed to himself with a thumb. “Need anything, jus’ ask for Joe—Joe Freitas!”

And we followed our sullen leggy geisha along the edge of the jammed dance floor. That the dance floor opened onto the terrace meant only that the mugginess and buggy, fishy odor of the canal could wend its way in to intermingle with the tobacco smoke, greasy food smells, and perspiration odor.

Two tiers of teakwood-lattice booths circled the dance floor but stopped at the terrace wall, making a sort of horseshoe; the upper tier extended out a few feet, making the floor-level booths cozier. Dark booths they were, each lighted by a single candle, deep booths that were damn near alcoves, lending privacy to conversations and assignations.

The Sol Hoopii Trio had a tiny stage to one side of the open terrace; they wore pink shirts and matching trousers with red cummerbunds and leis—three guitars, one of them a steel played in a lap, one of the guitar players singing into a microphone. No drummer, but the dancers didn’t mind—those guitarists were laying down a jazzy beat behind the falsetto gibberish.

With the exception of the Sol Hoopii Trio and other hired help, the Ala Wai Inn was conspicuously white this evening. White faces, white linen suits on many of the men, only the dresses of the white women to splash a little color around.

The geisha showed us to the booth where Lt. Francis Olds, in white linen, sat with a cute plump green-eyed redhead in a blue dress with white polka dots.

“Good evening, Pop,” I said to the lieutenant. “Don’t get up—we’ll slide in.”

And we did, Isabel getting in first, Olds scooching around the square table, closer to the redhead.

“This is Doris, the little woman,” Olds said, gesturing to the redhead’s generous bosom, making his description seem less than apt. “Doris, this is Nate Heller, the detective who works for Mr. Darrow I was telling you about.”

“Pleased to meetcha,” she said. She was chewing gum, but it wasn’t off-putting; it just made her seem enthusiastic, like the flirty green eyes she was flashing at me.

Olds didn’t have to introduce Doris to Isabel, because with the Olds’ baby-sitting Thalia at their home on that ammo-depot island out at Pearl, Isabel had been a frequent visitor.

“Thanks for helping me out,” I said to Olds.

“Not a problem,” Olds said. “Anything to help Thalia. She’s on the Alton tonight, by the way, playing bridge with Tommie, Mrs. Fortescue, and either Lord or Jones, Jones I think.”

Honey, we’re having the conspirators over for cards!

Brother.

I had told Olds out at Pearl Harbor yesterday that I needed to talk to a number of Tommie’s fellow officers, but that I hated to do it under Admiral Stirling’s nose. Was there somewhere more informal, where I might be able to get looser, straighter answers out of them?

He had suggested stopping by the Ala Wai on Saturday night.

“Why Saturday?” I’d asked him.

“Saturday night is Navy Night at the Ala Wai. Kanaka locals know to stay away. So do enlisted men. Strictly junior officers and their wives, out dancing and dining and drinking. They can’t afford the dining rooms at the Royal Hawaiian or Moana, you know, where the upper ranks go. But the food at the Ala Wai is passable and affordable, the music’s loud, the lights are low. What else would a Navy man ask?”

Olds had agreed to meet me and introduce me to some of his—and Tommie’s—friends. The way flasks of liquor and local moonshine were passed around freely, he assured me, I’d find my subjects well lubricated and talkative.

“Besides,” Olds had said, “if you’re going to question them about the night Thalia was raped, what better place to talk to them than the place where they spent that very evening?”

He’d had a point, but now that I was here, I wasn’t so sure it’d been a good idea. The loud music, the crowded dance floor, the smoky heat…none of it seemed all that conducive to conducting interviews, even informal ones.

The level of activity here was just this side of frantic: on the dance floor, there was continual cutting in during songs and swapping of partners at the end of them; men and women (seldom couples) were table-hopping, the laughter shrill and drunken. The smudgy shadows of couples necking could be seen in booths and corners, and there was fairly bold pawing going on, on the dance floor.

“You sailor boys sure know how to have a good time,” I said.

“A lot of us go way back.”

“You’re the oldest one here, Pop—and you ain’t thirty. How the hell far back can they go?”

Olds shrugged. “Annapolis. Every Saturday night at the Ala Wai is like a damn class reunion, Nate. You gotta understand something, about sub duty…you risk your life every day down there, crowded into those unventilated cramped metal coffins. Any second you can sink to the bottom, no warning, no hope of rescue. Hardship like that breeds loyalty among men, forges friendships deeper than family.” He shook his head. “Hard to explain to a civilian.”

“Like it’s hard to explain why Jones and Lord helped Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie snatch Joe Kahahawai?”

Olds looked at me like he wasn’t sure whose side I was on; of course, neither was I.

“Something like that,” he said.

“Is Bradford here?”

“That’s him, there.” Olds nodded toward the dance floor. “With the little blonde. That’s Red Rigby’s wife.”

Dark-haired, slender, blandly handsome, Lt. Jimmy Bradford was doing the Charleston with a good-looking blonde. He was grinning at her and she was grinning back.

“You guys ever dance with your own wives?”

Olds grinned. “Maybe on our anniversaries.”

“Is that why, that night, Tommie didn’t notice Thalia was missing till one A.M., when the party was shutting down and it was time to go home?”

A disappointed frown creased his friendly face. “That’s not fair, Nate.”

“I’m just trying to make sense out of this. Thalia and Tommie come to Navy night for the weekly party, Thalia claims she leaves at eleven-thirty, and it’s an hour and a half later before Tommie notices his lifemate is gone.”

“He noticed a lot earlier than that.”

“When did he notice, Pop?”

Olds shrugged; he didn’t look at me. “After that little fuss.”

“What little fuss?”

Doris chimed in, giggly: “When Thalia got slap-happy.”

“Zip it,” Olds snapped at her, shooting daggers.

But I pressed. “What do you mean, Doris? What are you talking about?”

Doris, wincing with hurt feelings, shook her head no and gulped at her oke-spiked glass of Coke.

“Pop,” I said quietly, “if you don’t level with me, I can’t help Tommie.”

He sighed, shrugged. “Thalia just had a little argument with somebody and went storming off. Nobody I know of remembers seeing her after that—it was maybe eleven-thirty, eleven-thirty-five at the time.”

“Argument with who?”

“Lt. Stockdale. Ray Stockdale.”

“Is he here? That’s one guy I’d really like to talk to.”

Olds shook his head, no. “I don’t think so. At least I haven’t seen him.”

I glanced at Doris and she looked away. She was chewing her gum listlessly now.

“But there’s plenty of guys who are here,” Olds said brightly, “who’ll be willing to talk to you, once I vouch for you.”

“Why don’t you take me around, then?”

“Sure. Doris, you keep Miss Bell outa trouble, okay?”

I said to Isabel, “Don’t fall in love with some sailor while I’m gone, baby.”

Her Kewpie mouth pursed in a mocking little smile. She was lighting up another Camel. “Ditch a girl in a joint like this, big boy, you take your chances.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You take your chances just stepping inside a joint like this.”

I blew her a kiss and she blew me one back, and no sooner had we departed the booth than a pair of officers in white linen mufti sauntered over, and in a flash, Olds’s wife and my date were out on the dance floor fighting for their honor.

“They don’t waste much time here,” I commented.

“It’s a friendly place,” Olds allowed.

And by way of proof, over the next hour, he introduced me to half a dozen friendly brother officers of Tommie Massie’s, all of whom spoke highly of Thalia. Smoking cigarettes and cigars, drinking bootleg hootch, arms slung around giggling women who might or might not be their wives, they slouched against the bar or sat in booths or leaned against walls, glad to cooperate with Clarence Darrow’s man. Phrases recurred, and because of the circumstances, I took no notes, and even later that night, looking back on it, I found the youthful submariners in white linen mufti blurring into one indistinguishable mass of high marks for Thalia (“nice kid,” “sweet girl,” “kinda quiet but a swell gal,” “she’s crazy about Tommie”) and scorn for the rapists (“all them niggers should be shot”).

Finally I told Olds I had all the info I needed, and sent my chaperone back to the booth. I’d told him I needed to take a leak, which was true enough. What I didn’t tell him was that I’d seen Jimmy Bradford slipping into the men’s room a moment or two before.

Soon I was sidling up to the urinal next to Bradford and we were both pissing as I said, “Don’t forget to button up, after you’re done.”

He frowned at me in confused irritation. “What?”

“That’s what got you in trouble with the cops, isn’t it? Walking around with your fly open, the night Thalia Massie was assaulted?”

The frown turned into a sneer. “Who the hell are you, mister?”

“Nate Heller. I’m Clarence Darrow’s investigator. I’d offer to shake hands, but…”

He finished before I did, and I joined him at the sink, waiting for him to finish washing up so I could have my turn.

He looked at me in the streaky mirror; his features may have been bland, but the blue eyes were sharp—and he didn’t seem as drunk as his brother officers. “What do you want?”

Looking back at him in the mirror, I shrugged, smiled a little. “I want to talk to you about the case.”

He used a paper hand towel. “I had nothing to do with the killing of Kahahawai.”

“Nobody said you did. I want to talk to you about what happened to Thalia Massie last September.”

He frowned. “What does that have to do with the case Darrow’s trying?”

“Well, it does seem just the slightest little bit connected, since it’s the goddamn murder motive. But maybe you don’t want to help.”

He turned and looked at me; his eyes narrowed, like he was aiming a rifle at me. “Of course I’ll talk to you,” he said. “Anything to help Tommie and his wife.”

“Good.” I stepped up to the sink and washed my hands. “Why don’t we take some air?”

He nodded, and we exited the john and went out past the stocky doorkeeper into the warm night; the air this close to the drainage canal seemed muggy, and there was no sign of the trade-wind breeze that made the Hawaiian heat so bearable. He leaned against a Model A and fished a pack of Chesterfields from his pocket. He shook out a smoke, then held the pack toward me.

“Want one?”

“No thanks,” I said. “It’s the only bad habit I haven’t acquired.”

He lighted up with a match. “You know, all you had to do was ask. I’m willing to help. You didn’t have to crack wise.”

I shrugged, leaned against a parked Hupmobile coupe, facing him. “I left four messages for you at Pearl—two with your captain, two with your wife. You never returned my calls. I figured maybe you were ducking me, Lieutenant.”

“I’m just busy,” he said, waving out the match.

“Is that why you didn’t testify at the Ala Moana trial?”

He blew out smoke. “Nobody asked me to testify. Besides, I was on sub duty.”

“Did somebody arrange that?”

The eyes tightened again. “What are you getting at, pal?”

“Nothing. Just, when I went over the court transcripts, you seemed like a pretty important witness to turn into the little man who wasn’t there.”

“I’ve cooperated right down the line. Tommie’s my best friend. I’d do anything for him.”

“You mean, like sleep with his wife?”

He pitched the cigarette and lurched forward, grabbing me by my parrot shirt. He was close enough I could tell it was bourbon he’d been drinking; couldn’t make out the brand, though, but definitely not home brew.

“You got a filthy mouth, Heller.”

I looked down toward his clenched fists clutching my shirt. “That’s silk. It damages easily.”

He blinked and let go. Backed off. “It’s a dirty damn lie. Thalia is a—”

“Nice girl. She loves Tommie. Quiet, though. Yeah, I heard the story. You guys all got it down pat—that’s probably why none of you were called at the first trial.”

“What are you talking about?”

“DAs don’t like it when groups of witnesses use identical language; they’re afraid some smart defense lawyer will crack through the hooey and get at the truth—like how you submariners pass your wives around like other guys pass around a ciggie or a bottle.”

He was sneering again. “You’re a cocky son of a bitch, aren’t you? You really want your teeth handed to you, don’t you?”

“You want to try, Jimmy? Or do you only break women’s jaws?”

He blinked. “Is that what you think? You think I hit Thalia…?”

“Lovers’ quarrel turns ugly—a girl needs somebody to blame. Who better than a bunch of ‘niggers’?”

His face was reddening. “You’re crazy—there was nothing between Thalia and me.

“I have witnesses that place you in Thalia’s house, last May, when her husband was away, on sub duty. Witnesses who say you also went on overnight trips to the beach.”

He was shaking his head, no, violently, no. “That’s just small filthy minds talking. Thalia and my wife Jane and Tommie and I, we’re close friends, that’s all. It was completely innocent.”

“Separate bedrooms, you mean? Now tell me about how Santa Claus is a real guy.”

“Go to hell! My wife went back home, last May, to Michigan, to take care of her sick mama. I was alone, Thalia was alone…lonely. I kept her company. Out of friendship to both her and Tommie.”

“Oh, I believe this. This sounds real likely.”

“I don’t give a damn what you believe! There was nothing between Thalia and me except friendship. And if I didn’t want to help her and Tommie, I wouldn’t be putting up with this horseshit interrogation!”

“Okay,” I said calmly, patting the air with my hands. “Okay. Then let’s just back up a few steps. Tell me what happened that night. The night Thalia was assaulted.”

He let out a sigh, then shrugged. “It was just another Navy Night at the Ala Wai. Dancing, drinking, laughing. Husbands and wives do tend to split up on Navy Night, go their separate ways—nothing wrong with that. We’re not swapping wives! It’s just a damn party.”

“Okay. Did you see Thalia leave?”

“No.”

“Did you leave yourself, at any time?”

“No.”

“Well, you eventually did leave….”

Another shrug. “Party lasted longer than usual. I even slipped a couple bucks to the orchestra to play past midnight, we were having so much fun. I took off my shoes and danced. Everybody stood around and clapped in rhythm and…”

“Everybody saw you, you mean.”

Another rifle-aim narrowing of the eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you might have slipped out, then slipped back, and made yourself conspicuously seen, to build an alibi.”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

“What were you doing walking outside Thalia’s house with your fly unbuttoned, Jimmy?”

“I was a little drunk. I took a piss in the bushes. Some cops came along and I got smart with ’em and they hauled me in.”

“That’s how you became a suspect in the rape.”

He scowled. “It was just a stupid mix-up. Tommie told ’em he’d been with me all night. Thalia vouched for me, too.”

“What were you doing there? You don’t live next door to the Massies or anything.”

“Tommie and me left the Ala Wai around one o’clock; when he couldn’t find Thalia, he assumed she’d gone on to the Rigbys—it was kind of an after-party tradition to go over to Red’s for a nightcap and scrambled eggs, and when Tommie called home from the Ala Wai and got no answer, he figured Thalia must’ve caught a ride over there. Tommie drove us over to the Rigbys, but there was no Thalia. So Tommie called home again—and this time she was there, and that’s when she told him about the…you know.”

“The rape.”

“Right. Tommie rushed out and took off in his Ford, and then I started gettin’ worried…. I’d only heard his half of the phone conversation, but it was clear something was terribly wrong at home. So I walked over.”

“And stopped to take a piss along the way.”

“Yeah. And forgot to button my fly, and that’s how the stupid mix-up with the cops happened.”

“I see. Do you know anything about Thalia having an argument with Lt. Stockdale?”

He shrugged. “I was just on the fringe of that. It was nothing special.”

“What was it about?”

“I don’t really know. When people are drinking, they don’t need an excuse to bicker.”

“I guess they don’t.”

We stood staring at each other. The muffled sound of the band and the gaiety within the Ala Wai mingled with the call of birds and the rustle of trees; these sounds, which neither of us had noticed while we were talking, seemed suddenly deafening.

Finally he asked, “Is that all?”

I nodded. “Thanks for the information.”

His smile was nervous. “Look, uh…sorry I grabbed your shirt. I know you’re just doing your job.”

“Forget it. I was provoking you.”

“You admit that?”

I nodded. “I’ve been getting canned stories from everybody I talked to here, tonight. I had to find a way to cut through the bullshit, so I gave you the needle.” I held out my hand. “No hard feelings?”

He took it; we shook.

“No hard feelings,” he said.

I smiled at him, and he smiled back, but I didn’t mean it, and neither did he. This bastard had been fucking Thalia Massie, and we both knew it.

We wandered back inside together, and split off faster than the marrieds around this joint did. I went over and buttonholed the stocky doorkeeper, Joe Freitas.

“You wouldn’t happen to know Lt. Stockdale, would you, Joe?” I was asking this question over the edge of a shiny half-dollar.

Joe snatched the half-buck and jerked a thumb upward. “Booth upstairs. Tall good-lookin’ fella. Short curly yella hair.”

Stockdale was, as the doorkeeper had promised, a blond-haired bruiser, ruggedly handsome; he had a flask and two glasses, an ashtray with two burning cigarettes, and a skinny but pretty brunette he was nuzzling. Both he and his lady friend were tipsier than a three-legged table.

“Sure, I’ll talk to you!” he exploded, good-naturedly drunk. “Sit yourself down. This is Betty. She’s Bill Ransom’s wife—except for tonight.” And he let out a horse laugh and Betty’s giggle evolved into an unladylike snort.

I slid into the booth. “I hear the night Thalia Massie was assaulted, you and she had a little run-in.”

“Hey, first off,” he said, overcompensating with his enunciation in an effort to be soberly serious, “I’m as against niggers raping white women as the next guy.”

“That’s an admirable view.”

“Just because Thalia Massie is a lousy stuck-up slut is no reason niggers should go around raping her. That character, Joe Ka-ha-what’s-it? I’da shot that black bastard myself, if they’d invited me to the party. Tommie Massie is my pal.”

“What happened that night, Ray? Between you and Thalia, I mean.”

He shrugged. “We was eatin’, and me and the wife and another coupla couples.” He gestured vaguely off to the right. “Over in one of the private dinin’ rooms. Thalia come stumblin’ in, drunk as skunk, uninvited.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Nobody liked Thalia, snooty little bitch. Little Miss Sassiety Butter-Wouldn’t-Fucking-Melt-in-Her-Pussy.”

Ah yes. As Olds had said, you make special friends on submarine duty.

“She come waltzin’ in here, and we just ignore her. She wasn’t invited! And she just stands there with her goddamn nose in the air, and clears her throat and says, ‘Don’t you know a lady’s entered the room.’ I says, ‘I don’t see any.’ About then, Jimmy Bradford comes in, lookin’ for her I guess…they used to be kind of an item, y’know. Anyway, pouty little bitch says, ‘You’re no gentleman, Lt. Stockdale,’ and Bradford says, ‘Take it easy, baby, this is a public place.’ But Miss Sassiety Bitch struts up and sticks her chin in my face and says, ‘I don’t care! You’re no gentleman, Lt. Stockdale, talkin’ to me like that!’ I says, ‘Well, Thalia, who gives a shit what a lousy slut like you thinks, anyway.’ Which is when she slapped me.”

“Slapped you….”

This hadn’t been in the transcript material I’d been provided! No wonder Doris Olds had referred to Thalia as “slap-happy.”

“Yeah.” He touched his jaw. “She whaled me a good one.”

“Then what happened?”

He shrugged. “She stormed outa there. Good thing, too. I’da kicked her fat ass, if she hadn’t, and the other fellas hadn’t been holding me back. I was well and truly pissed off. Then, I guess somebody went looking for Tommie, to tell him what happened. He come looking for her, but she was long gone, o’ course.”

“When was this?”

“I dunno. Eleven-thirty, maybe.”

I thanked Stockdale and left him to his guzzling and nuzzling, and searched out the doorkeeper again.

“Joe, did you hear anything about a fuss upstairs involving Mrs. Massie, the night of the assault?”

“She slap some sailor, I hear.”

“Did you see her leave? I mean, did she come flying down the stairs and go rushing out?”

Joe shook his head, no. “That was a busy night. I was showin’ people to their seats, not always watchin’ the door.”

“You didn’t see her leave, sometime between eleven-thirty and midnight?”

“No…but I did see somethin’ else.”

“What?”

His smile was friendly but his eyes were mercenary. “I’m tryin’ to remember, boss.”

I dug out a dollar for him. “Does this jog it?”

“Comin’ back to me, boss. I remember her, that girl in the green dress. When her party come in that night, it was the first big party to arrive, and she walk ahead of others, with her head bent over. I thought maybe she was mad at somebody, or maybe drunk already.”

“That’s not worth a buck, Joe. Keep trying.”

“Okay. But I think maybe this is worth two dollars.”

“Try me and see.”

“Oh-kay. I remember seein’ her standin’ by the doorway about midnight, little after, maybe. She was talkin’ to Sammy.”

That perked me up. “Who’s Sammy?”

“Sammy’s worth two dollars, easy.”

“Two bucks it is. Who’s Sammy, Joe?”

“He’s a music boy.”

“What?”

“Hawaiian boy, he play music with Joe Crawford’s band, over on Maui. But when he’s home, on Oahu, he like to come over to the Ala Wai, and listen to the music, here. We always got good music here, boss.”

“What were Sammy and Mrs. Massie talking about?”

“I couldn’t hear ’em.” He shrugged. “Not even for ’nother dollar.”

“Were they friendly?”

“She seem a little worked up.”

“Arguing, then?”

“No. Jus’ talkin’, boss.”

“Has Sammy been back since?”

“Sure. Now an’ then, once in while.”

“Lately?”

“Not sure.”

“Look—this is where you can reach me.” I got out my notebook, jotted down my name and the Royal Hawaiian’s phone number, tore off the paper. “If Sammy shows up, no matter what time of day, Monday through Sunday—you call me. There’s a fin in it for you—and I don’t mean a shark, get me?”

Grinning, he snatched the slip of paper from my hands like it was the five-spot. “Got you, boss.”

The rest of the evening I spent dancing with Isabel to the syrupy but rhythmic music of the Sol Hoopii Trio.

And when we went out to the car, hand in hand, she said, “Did you find anything out?”

“Nothing particularly useful,” I said.

It was a lie, of course, but I didn’t feel like being the only guy who went to the Ala Wai Inn tonight who didn’t get laid.

13

In a land redolent of exotic blossoms, the second floor of the old Kapiolani Building at King and Alakea streets offered a mingling of pungent cockroach-repelling creosote and stale tobacco smoke. It was not an unfamiliar bouquet. I was, after all, a Chicago copper, and this was, after all, the temporary headquarters of the Honolulu Police. The central station house at Bethel and Merchant was getting a facelift, Chang Apana had explained.

They’d moved a few things in to turn this place into headquarters—the big open room you entered had a high counter for the desk sergeant to shuffle reports behind, a handful of desks against one wall with blue-uniformed cops talking to citizens at them, a few file cabinets, a scattering of straight-back chairs. Ceiling fans whirred lazily, throwing shadows, rustling papers.

The desk sergeant told me the assembly room of the detective bureau was on the second floor. At the top of the stairs, I found Chang Apana in another big open room. The mid-morning sun was filtering in through high windows, giving a golden glaze to greenish plaster walls and hardwood floor; like a lethargic cook beating eggs, ceiling fans stirred the air. At one end, an area was set up with chairs and a blackboard for roll call, and some glassed-off offices were along the right wall. Otherwise, it was desks and one central table where cops could gather for a conference or to just shoot the bull.

At that table—which had an oddly decorative top, a dragon fashioned from black and white dominoes and mahjongg tiles—sat Chang Apana, again in white linen and black bow tie, and a swarthy hawk-faced character who was either a cop or a hood. Under the ridge of a snap-brim that would have done George Raft proud, keen dark eyes tracked me as I approached. His suit was brown and rumpled, his tie red and snug, and he wasn’t as small as Chang, but he wouldn’t have met the Chicago PD’s height requirement, or the mob’s for that matter.

They were smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. This wasn’t exactly a bustling squadroom. Only about a third of the desks were filled, and anybody who wasn’t seated wasn’t in a hurry. There was no more sense of urgency here than on the beach at the Royal Hawaiian.

On second thought, there was more urgency at the beach: that surfboard polo could get pretty intense.

Chang stood politely and, half a beat later, so did the other guy. Smiling like a skull, Chang half-bowed; his companion didn’t.

“Detective Nate Heller, Chicago police,” Chang said, with a gesture to his hawk-faced friend, “Detective John Jardine, Honolulu police.”

We shook hands; the guy had a firm grip but he didn’t overplay it. He was studying me with the cold unblinking eyes of a cop assessing a murder suspect.

Chang called a secretary over—a round-faced Hawaiian girl with a nice shape under her businesslike blouse and skirt—and instructed her to bring me some coffee. How did I want it? Chang wondered. Black, I said. She nodded and went after it.

“Whose side are you on, Detective Heller?” Jardine asked.

I pulled out a chair and sat. “Why, same as any cop—my own.”

A tiny grin flashed in the dark face. He sat, and then Chang did, too.

“This is quite a table.” I gestured to the black and white domino-mah-jongg mosaic.

“It’s Detective Apana’s handiwork,” Jardine said.

I arched an eyebrow Chang’s way. “A carpenter and a great detective?”

“I did not make table,” Chang said, lighting up a fresh cigarette. “But I provide makings.”

“This is all stuff Chang confiscated in Chinatown gambling raids,” Jardine said, with a nod toward the black and white dragon. “Like to see Charlie Chan go wading into that crowd.”

“Detective Jardine is too generous with praise,” Chang said. But he obviously was eating it up.

The secretary brought me the coffee. I thanked her and we exchanged smiles and I watched the hula sway of her hips as she wandered back to her desk, efficient but in no hurry. Hawaii was the most distracting damn place.

“So, Detective Jardine,” I said, “whose side are you on? Besides your own…in the Massie case, I mean.”

His mouth twitched; his hawkish face remained otherwise blank, though his eyes were sharp as needles. “I do my job. Gather evidence. Report what I see. It’s not up to me who gets prosecuted.”

“Would you have prosecuted the Ala Moana boys?”

Another twitch. He exhaled smoke. “Not without a better case.”

I sipped my coffee; it was hot and bitter and good. “Do you think they did it?”

A shrug. A deep suck-in on the cigarette. “I don’t know. There are some pretty persistent rumors floating around town that another gang was roving around that night.”

“Any leads on who they might be?”

Jardine shook his head, no. “But then we didn’t pursue any.”

Frowning thoughtfully, Chang said, “Something puzzling. There is saying on Islands—‘Hawaiians will talk.’”

“So I hear,” I said. “But nobody’s even whispering about who this second gang might be. What do you make of that?”

Jardine shrugged again, taking a sip of his coffee. “Maybe there is no second gang.”

Chang lifted a forefinger. “Confucius say, ‘Silence big sister of wisdom.’”

“You mean, anybody who knows who this second gang is,” I said, “is smart enough to keep quiet about it.”

“What happened to ‘Hawaiians will talk’?” Jardine asked grouchily.

I lifted a forefinger. “Capone say, ‘Bullet in head little brother of big mouth.’”

That made Chang smile. Smoke from the cigarette between his fingers drifted up like a question mark before his skeletal, knife-scarred face.

“Well,” Jardine said, “somebody took Thalia Massie to the old Animal Quarantine Station. I don’t know who it was or what they did to her, but she was there.”

“How do you know?”

“We found things of hers.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering, “some beads.”

I had dismissed this, knowing how easily they could have been planted.

“A string of jade-colored beads,” Jardine said, “and some Parrot matches and Lucky Strike cigarettes Mrs. Massie identified as hers.”

“Her purse was found, too, wasn’t it?”

“A green leather purse, yes, but not by us. The Bellingers, the couple that Mrs. Massie flagged down for a ride after it happened, found the purse on the road, later, when they were on their way home.”

I sipped my coffee, said casually, “Weren’t you one of the first detectives to talk to Thalia? Weren’t you there that night, at the house in Manoa Valley?”

Jardine nodded. “She didn’t want to get medical attention, refused to go to the hospital, really put her foot down. Of course, I knew in a rape case how important a pelvic examination was. But she wouldn’t hear of it. Finally I convinced her husband, and he convinced her.”

“What sort of shape was Tommie in?”

“Pretty well in his cups.”

Chang said, “Tell Detective Heller about Lt. Bradford.”

Jardine frowned. “You read too much into that, Chang.”

“Tell him.”

I knew Bradford’s version of the “mix-up,” but was eager to hear the cops’ side. Strangely, Jardine seemed hesitant to get into this.

“Lt. Massie corroborated Bradford’s story,” Jardine said. “Bradford spent the evening at the Ala Wai Inn in Massie’s company. He’s not a suspect in the rape and beating.”

“But you did arrest him that night,” I said.

Jardine nodded. “For mopery. He was drunk, he had his fly open, he told us to go to hell when we pulled alongside him.”

“That gets you more than arrested in Chicago,” I said.

Jardine was stabbing his cigarette out in an ashtray that sat on one of the dragon’s limbs. “He told us we should leave him alone, he was an officer with the Shore Patrol. We told him if he was in the Shore Patrol he should know better than to give another cop a hard time.”

“Tell him,” Chang said.

Jardine sighed. “When I brought Mrs. Massie out to drive her to the hospital, Bradford was being shown to a patrol wagon. They spoke. I heard her say to him, ‘Don’t worry, Jack—it’s going to be all right.’ It was…it was like she was comforting him.”

Chang looked at me with both eyebrows raised. The ceiling fans whirred above us. Jardine might have been a cigar-store Indian in a fedora, he was sitting there so motionless, so expressionless.

“Is there anything else about the case,” I asked, “you can share with me?”

Jardine shook his head, no. “I got pulled off the investigation, when Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu broke out of Oahu, New Year’s Eve.”

Chang Apana’s tone was almost scolding. “How can prisoner break out of cage with no door?”

“What d’you mean?” I asked.

Chang said, “Most guards in Oahu prison, like most prisoners, are Hawaiians. Big on honor system. You in jail but have urgent business on outside, just ask for pass. You want to know how murderer Lyman and thief Kaikapu ‘broke out’? Chang will tell you: guards send them out to get big supply of okolehao for prison New Year’s Eve party.”

This reminded me of Cook County jail, who let the likes of the bootlegging Druggan brothers in and out at will, and neither the jailers nor the Druggans were Hawaiians.

“But the trustees didn’t bother to come back,” I said.

“Once they got out,” Jardine said, “they decided to split up and take their chances on their own. We caught Kaikapu the next day.”

“But Lyman’s still at large.”

Jardine’s mouth twitched again. “The bastard mugged a couple out parking, tied the guy up to a fence with fishing line, raped the woman, took a buck and a quarter out of her purse, and then drove her home.”

“Thoughtful fella.”

“And he’s been leading us a goddamn merry chase ever since.”

“You’re still on the case?”

Jardine sipped his coffee. “Sort of.”

“What does that mean?”

Jardine dug in his pocket for a pack of Lucky Strikes—presumably not the ones found at the crime scene. “The governor appointed Major Ross to head up a Territorial Police Force.”

“Just to track this jailbird down?”

“No.” He lighted up the Lucky, exhaled smoke through his nose, echoing the dragon on the table. “We’re in the middle of a departmental shake-up here, most of it due to the screwups in the Massie case. Heads are rolling daily. This Territorial Force is supposed to pick up the slack.”

“Who are these temporary coppers?”

“Major Ross has a group he’s picked from his National Guard members plus some Federal Prohibition Agents and a few American Legion volunteers.”

Funny. Joe Kahahawai had served in the National Guard under Major Ross; it had been Mrs. Fortescue’s fake summons from Ross that summoned Big Joe to his death.

Jardine continued, “I’m liaison between Major Ross’s group and the PD.”

I grunted a laugh. “Only all the king’s horses and all the king’s men haven’t found this raping murderer.”

Jardine nodded. “But we’ll get him.”

“Any sightings? Any other crimes?”

“Enough sightings to believe Lyman hasn’t left the Island. No more rapes, no major thefts credited to him. He’s gone way underground. Probably in the hills.”

“Well, if you’re off the Massie case, does that mean I can’t ask you to chase down a lead for me?”

Jardine’s eyes flashed. “Not at all. What’d you come up with?”

I sat forward and smiled just a little. “Are you aware that right before she went out the Ala Wai door, Thalia had a little chat with a kanaka?”

Jardine frowned in interest. “New one on me. Where you’d get this?”

“I’m a detective.”

That amused Chang; at least, he smiled a little.

“His name’s Sammy,” I went on, “and he’s some kind of musician with a band on Maui.” I got out my little notepad and read off the name: “Joe Crawford’s band. Are there any coppers on Maui you can check with?”

Jardine was nodding, getting out his own notebook to write down the names.

“Excuse me,” a male voice intoned from behind us; it was deep and rang with authority.

The big man standing in the doorway of one of the glassed-in offices behind Jardine had the leanly muscular frame of a football linebacker and the pleasant, patient smile of a parish priest. Angularly handsome, kindly features rode a bucket skull, Brylcreemed black hair touched at the temples with gray. Whereas most of the detectives wandering through the Detective Bureau were Hawaiian, their ill-fitting wrinkled Western suits looking like costumes they were uneasily wearing, this guy was strictly Anglo-Saxon, and his dark brown suit looked neat and natural.

Both Chang and Jardine scooted their chairs back and stood, and I followed their lead.

“Inspector McIntosh,” Chang said, “may I introduce honorable guest from Chicago Police, Nate Heller.”

Never losing the kindly smile, he ambled over to me, held out his hand, as he said, “You’ve wandered off your beat.”

We shook; his grip was surprisingly soft, though his hand was like a catcher’s mitt.

“I do that from time to time,” I said. “Actually, Clarence Darrow is an old family friend. He’s come out of retirement for this case and doesn’t have an investigator on staff anymore, so I’m helping him out.”

“I’ll bet Mr. Darrow had to pull some strings to arrange that.”

“He knows how. I’m pleased to meet you, Inspector. I mentioned to Detective Apana that I hoped to speak with you.”

“Chang said as much. Isn’t the trial getting under way? I’d figure you to be at Mr. Darrow’s side.”

“Jury selection began Monday. I’m still doing leg work till the trial proper begins.”

“Ah.” He gestured like a gracious host. “Why don’t you step into my office, Detective Heller.” He cast his benignly beaming face upon Chang and Jardine. “I’ll speak to our guest privately.”

The two detectives nodded and sat back down.

Moments later, door shut behind us, I was taking the seat across from McIntosh’s big desk; other than filing cabinets, the oversized cubicle was bare: no photos or diplomas on the wall, only a few personal items on the desk to tide its occupant over till these temporary quarters were behind him.

McIntosh settled his rangy frame into the wooden swivel chair behind the desk and sat nervously rubbing his forefinger against one graying temple as we spoke.

“I wanted to speak to you one on one,” McIntosh said. “Chang Apana is a living legend around here, and Jardine is one of our best, most dogged investigators. But they’re Chinese and Portuguese, respectively, and I wanted to be able to level with you.”

“What does their race have to do with anything?”

The patient smile widened condescendingly; the lids of the world-weary, worried eyes went to half-mast. “Everything in Honolulu has to do with race, Detective Heller.”

“Well, then…how, specifically, in this instance? We have more than one race in Chicago, by the way. I’ve seen colored people before.”

“I didn’t mean to patronize. But even the sharpest detective from the biggest city force is going to find himself, well, frankly, in over his head in these waters.”

“Maybe you can toss me a life buoy.”

He chuckled mildly, even as he continued rubbing his temple nervously. “Let’s start with the Honolulu Police Department. We’re under terrible political pressure right now, and are in the midst of a reorganization. Our authority is being chipped away at, with this Territorial Force under Major Ross. And do you know why?”

“I have a hunch, but I don’t really want to seem impertinent.”

“Speak frankly.”

“It would seem you screwed up the Massie case.”

He swallowed; rubbed his forehead. “Race and politics, Detective Heller. Some years ago, white and Hawaiian political factions here threw in together, to keep the Japs and Chinese from dominating local government. Part of the deal was, the whites tossed lesser governmental jobs to Hawaiians. There are two hundred and eighty men on the force, Detective Heller—and two hundred and forty of them are Hawaiian, or of mixed Hawaiian blood.”

“What’s the difference, as long as they’re good men.”

McIntosh nodded, bringing his hands before him, folding them prayerfully. “Most of them are good men—they’re just not good cops. For most patrolmen and even detectives, no other qualification is needed but Hawaiian blood. Oh, and an eighth grade education.”

“Isn’t there any kind of testing, training…”

“Certainly. Cops here are trained to be able to give tourists directions. They have to be able to spell the names of the outer islands, and recommend points of interest.”

“Are they cops or tour guides?”

McIntosh’s mouth flinched. “I don’t like to bad-mouth my men, Detective Heller. Some of them—like Chang and Jardine—could rival any cops you could find anywhere. My point is that there are political pressures on this Island that undermine the department’s performance.”

“And how would you rank your performance on the Massie case?” I purposely used “your” ambiguously.

“Under the circumstances, we performed well; there was the blunder at the Quarantine Station, with the tire tracks, that simply can’t be excused. But there was pressure to prosecute, even though the case was weak.”

“You admit it’s weak?”

“We needed more time, we weren’t ready for trial. There were too many damn chinks in the government’s case that hadn’t been filled.”

I presumed he didn’t mean “chinks” in a racial sense, but it was an interesting choice of words.

“All we had was Thalia Massie’s story,” he said, ticking items off on his fingers. “Then the supporting story of Eugenio Batungbacal that he’d seen a woman dragged into a car at about twelve-fifteen. Then, Mrs. Massie’s identification of the suspects, and her recollection of the license number. Plus the discovery of her necklace and other items at the crime scene, and then there’s the police records of Ahakuelo and Kahahawai.”

“Every one of those points is, to some degree, vulnerable,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers. “Thalia could be lying, witnesses other than Batungbacal seem to contradict him, Thalia originally said she couldn’t identify the assailants or remember the license plate, finding Thalia’s beads and such at the scene doesn’t place the suspects there, and Ahakuelo and Kahahawai’s ‘records’ are minimal at best.”

“Do you expect me to disagree? But I will say this, the fact that Mrs. Massie initially said she couldn’t identify them—when she was half-hysterical, in shock, or under sedation—bothers me not in the least. Those boys did it, all right.”

That sat me up straight. “You really believe that?”

The world-weary eyes tightened. “Absolutely. Look at it this way—when we picked Ida up, he lied through his teeth. He said he hadn’t driven that car when in fact he’d been out all night in it. Then, without prompting, Ida blurted out that he hadn’t attacked the white woman—before anybody had told him about the Massie rape!”

I frowned in thought. “So how in hell did he know about a white woman being attacked?”

“Precisely. Belated or not, Mrs. Massie did identify four of the five boys, and she came up with that license number, just one little digit off. I don’t know how you do it in Chicago, Detective Heller, but in Honolulu, once a man lies to me twice, I don’t have to take his damn word for anything.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“No, those are guilty boys. We just didn’t have proper time to build a case.” He sighed, smiled tightly. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No. No, you’ve been generous with your time.”

“I’ve instructed Detective Apana to make himself available to you as needed. While we are technically on the side of the prosecution in the Fortescue case, we have great admiration for Mr. Darrow and a certain sympathy for his clients.”

“Thank you.”

We shook hands again, and I found my way back to Chang and Jardine, who stood as I approached. McIntosh was shut back inside his office.

“Doesn’t surprise me the inspector wanted to talk to you privately,” Jardine said glumly.

“Oh?”

“There’s a faction of the force—Hawaiian and Portuguese, mostly…and I’m Portuguese myself—who were suspected of leaking information to the defense, in the first trial. And to the Japanese-English newspaper, the Hochi, which was sympathetic to the Ala Moana boys.”

“I see.”

The dark eyes under the brim of the George Raft fedora were mournful. “Just disappoints me the inspector doesn’t trust me.”

“He spoke highly of you, Inspector Jardine.”

“Good to hear. You need any backup, Chang knows where to find me.”

We shook hands again, and Jardine sauntered over to a desk and got to some paperwork.

Chang, who was on his way home to his wife and eight kids on Punchbowl Hill, walked me downstairs and out onto King Street, where a balmy breeze kissed us hello.

“McIntosh seems like a good man,” I said.

“Good man,” Chang agreed. He snugged on his Panama. “Poor detective.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He arrested Ala Moana boys on hunch, then stubbornly stuck with it.”

“He says Ida lied to him. That Ida blurted out something about not attacking the ‘white woman.’”

“Ida lied to protect self over other, minor assault when he and friends bump bumpers with kanaka gal and haole husband. And Ida was in station house, when he said that about not attacking white woman. He could easy have heard about Mrs. Massie by then…station was jumping with the news.”

“I see.”

Chang laughed humorlessly. “McIntosh is like carpenter who build straw house on sand: first strong wind bring disaster.”

“Who said that?” I asked.

“I did,” Chang said, and he tipped his Panama and went his way.

14

The Sunday evening before the first day of the trial, Isabel and I piled into Mrs. Fortescue’s Durant roadster with the top down, Isabel’s short Harlow hair fluttering as we drove out along the cliffs of Diamond Head, winding up the slopes past a lighthouse, pulling over to the edge of the cliff, stopping, getting out, crossing the lava rock alongside the road to stand hand in hand watching the surf beat against the coral reef below. Bronze fishermen with bare chests, long trousers, and shoes (the reefs were sharp, jagged) were down in the water with hand nets and three-pronged spears, now and then hauling in shimmering slithering catches, silver, red, blue fish, some solid, others striped, eels and squirming squid, too. As we watched this native ritual dance against the expanse of amethyst ocean and white breakers, the red setting sun began tinting the waves pink, until the sun slipped over the horizon and purple night fell like an enormous shadow over the sea, the moon a stingy sliver now, the stars more generous but the darkness intimidating, Isabel clutching my hand tight, glad she wasn’t alone, and suddenly blossoms of orange light burst below, then began flittering about, like giant fireflies. They were fishing by torchlight down there, now.

Back in the blue roadster, rather intoxicated by this lovely dark night, we began down the other side of the rise, gliding by expensive beach houses and estates; coming down, you could see the swimming pools of the rich cut out of the lava and coral rock above sea level, kept filled, washed clean, by the high tide. Scrub brush gave way to exotic foliage and coconut palms on the Kahala Road as we skimmed past more fancy beach houses, until we reached the entry of the Waialae Golf Club, which was under the Royal Hawaiian’s control and open to hotel guests.

This time of evening, the eighteen-hole golf course was of no interest; we parked and went into a clubhouse smothered in palms and tropical shrubbery and were served an Italian supper on a spacious lanai on the edge of the ocean. Isabel was wearing a blue-on-white polka-dot beach ensemble; with her jaunty little matching cap, you’d never guess her blouse was the upper part of her white swimsuit. I had my trunks on under my tan linen trousers; my second acquisition of an aloha shirt (as the loud silk shirts were locally baptized) got a few looks even in this determinedly casual touristy crowd. This time it was dark blue with white and red blossoms. Maybe I’d start a trend.

After supper, we lounged on deck-style chairs on the lanai in the light of Japanese lanterns, sipping a fruity punch that was greatly improved by the rum from my hip flask (my supplier was a Japanese bellboy at the Royal Hawaiian to whom I’d made it clear the local home brew wasn’t good enough, and damned if he didn’t come up with Bacardi).

Isabel said, “We haven’t talked about the case.”

And we hadn’t, at least hardly at all; my devil’s advocacy only seemed to rile her. We’d been spending the evenings together, and then the nights, with her scurrying back to her room across the hall at dawn and me meeting her a few hours later downstairs for breakfast. She had rented a little Ford coupe and, each day, drove to Pearl Harbor to spend the day with Thalia and company, at the Oldses’ and/or on the Alton.

But the evenings were devoted to dining and dancing and strolling along the white sand while palms swayed and ukuleles thrummed before retiring to my room, screwing our brains out on the bed in the breeze blowing in from the balcony. It was a honeymoon I could never afford with a woman who would never have me, in real life.

Fortunately, this wasn’t real life: it was Waikiki.

“What do you want to know about the case?” I asked, knowing the exchange that followed might cost me my conjugal rights for the evening.

“How do you think it’s going to go?”

“Well…C.D. has a racially mixed jury. That was probably inevitable, considering the makeup of the population. He’s got his work cut out for him.”

“They didn’t mean to kill that brute.”

“They meant to kidnap him. And when the cops turned on their siren, Mrs. Fortescue kept right on going. The coppers had to fire two shots out the window at the buggy, before the old girl finally pulled over.”

Her heart-shaped face was a delicate mask, as pretty and blank as a porcelain doll’s. “We’re going to be heading up the same road, you know. For our moonlight swim?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said, lying. I’d meant to get out here and have a look all along. The plan (whether devised by Mrs. Fortescue, Tommie, or one of the sailor boys had never been established) had been to drive Kahahawai’s body out to Hanauma Bay and dispose of it in something called, colorfully, sinisterly, the Blowhole.

“They were foolish, weren’t they, Nate?”

“Not foolish, Isabel. Goddamn stupid. Arrogant.”

She turned her delicate features toward the ocean. “Now I remember why I stopped asking you about the case.”

“They killed a man, Isabel. I’m trying to help them get off, but I’ll be damned if I know why.”

She turned back to me, her eyes smiling, her Kewpie-bow mouth blowing me a kiss as she said: “I know why.”

“You do?”

A little nod. “It’s because Mr. Darrow wants you to.”

“It’s because I’m being paid to do it.”

“That’s not it at all. I’ve heard you two talking. You’re hardly getting anything out of this; just your regular police salary and some expenses.”

I touched her downy arm. “There are a few dividends.”

That made the Kewpie lips purse into a little smile. “You look up to him, don’t you, Nate? You admire him.”

“He’s a devious old bastard.”

“Maybe that’s what you want to be when you grow up.”

I frowned at her. “What made you so smart all of a sudden?”

“How is it you know him, a famous man like Clarence Darrow?”

“A nonentity like me, you mean?”

“Don’t be mean. Answer the question.”

I shrugged. “He and my father were friends.”

“Was your father an attorney?”

“Hell no! He was an old union guy who ran a bookstore on the West Side. They traveled in the same radical circles. Darrow used to come in to buy books on politics and philosophy.”

She was looking at me as if for the first time. “So you’ve known Mr. Darrow since you were a kid?”

“Yeah. Worked in his office as a runner when I was going to college.”

“How much college do you have?”

“Started at the University of Chicago, had some problems, finished up a two-year degree at a junior college.”

“Were you going to be a lawyer?”

“That was never my dream.”

Her eyes smiled again. “What was your dream, Nate?”

“Who says I had a dream?”

“You have a lot of dreams. A lot of ambitions.”

“I don’t remember telling you about ’em.”

“I can just tell. What was your dream? What is your dream?”

I blurted it: “To be a detective.”

She smiled, cocked her head. “You made it.”

“Not really. Not really. You about ready to get out of here? Catch that swim up the roadway?”

“Sure.” She gathered her things and we headed for the parking lot, where she started in again.

“You’ve been looking into what happened to Thalo, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Have you found anything helpful to Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie, in your search?”

“No.”

I opened the rider’s-side door on the Durant, shut her in, and that was all the conversation for a while. We were soon tooling along the edge of the club links. Before long we were passing groves of coconut palms and papaya orchards, truck gardens, chicken ranches, a campground, a large modern dairy. Then we wound through more coconut groves along the foot of the hills, at our left a looming black crater, at our right a cliff—Koko Head—projecting out into the sea. A sign at a fork in the road promised us the Blowhole if we took the dirt road to the left; I braved it.

Isabel started back in, working her voice above the rumble of the engine, the bump of the tires on hard dirt, and the top-down wind. “Surely you don’t think Thalo is lying about what happened to her.”

“Something happened to her that night last September. Something violent. Like she said to Tommie on the phone—something awful. I’m just not sure what.”

“You think those terrible colored boys are innocent?”

“I think they’re not guilty. There’s a difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“They may have done it; they’re roughnecks and borderline disreputable characters. ‘Innocent’ is a moral term. ‘Not guilty’ is the legal term, and that’s what they are: there just isn’t enough evidence to convict them.”

“But that was why Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue had to try to get a confession!”

I didn’t feel like pressing the point. But in almost two weeks of trying, I’d certainly come up with nothing to give Darrow even the most dubious moral high ground for his clients to occupy. Having talked to every major witness in the Ala Moana case over the past two weeks, I had accumulated nothing but doubts about Thalia, her story, and her identification of Horace Ida, Joseph Kahahawai, and the rest.

Young, personable George Goeas, a cashier with Dillingham Insurance in Honolulu, had taken his wife to the dance at Waikiki Amusement Park that night. About ten minutes past midnight, he and the missus crossed the street to John Ena Road, and drove down to the saimin stand for a snack of noodles. A young woman in a green dress, her head lowered, walked by.

“She seemed to be under the influence of liquor,” Goeas told me. “About a yard and a half from her, we saw a white guy following directly in back of her. He kept trailing after her for maybe twenty-five yards…. The way she held her head down, and him working to catch up with her, I kinda thought maybe they’d had a lovers’ quarrel or something. Then they walked out of view, a store blocking the way.”

“What did the guy trailing her look like?”

“Like I said, white. Five feet nine, hundred and sixty-five pounds maybe, medium build. Trim appearance. Looked like a soldier to me.”

Or a sailor?

“What was he wearing?”

“White shirt. Dark trousers. Maybe blue, maybe brown, I’m not sure.”

Mrs. Goeas had a better eye for fashion detail. She gave a precise description of the dress Thalia had been wearing, right down to a small bow in back, and described her as, “Mumbling to herself, swaying as she walked, I would even say stumbling.”

I met with Alice Aramaki, a tiny, pleasant girl of perhaps twenty, in the barbershop on John Ena Road, opposite the amusement park. Alice was one of Honolulu’s many Japanese lady barbers; her father owned the shop and she lived upstairs. She had seen a white woman in a green dress walk past her store at a quarter past midnight.

“What color hair did this woman have?”

“She was dark blond hair.”

“Anybody walking near her at the time?”

“A man was walking. He was a white man.”

“How was she walking, this woman in the green dress?”

“Hanging her head down. Walking slowly.”

“What did the white man wear?”

“No hat. White shirt. Dark pants.”

A group of men from various walks of life—a local politician, a greengrocer, two partners in a building supply company—had gone to the dance at the amusement park that night. They were headed down John Ena Road toward the beach at about twelve-fifteen when one of them, former city supervisor James Low, spotted “a woman in a blue or maybe green dress walking like a drunken person.” A man was trailing after her, but Low wasn’t sure of the man’s race. The woman and man seemed to be heading toward a car parked at the curb.

As Low and his friends drove on by, some girls on the street called out to Low, and he spoke out the window to them, while his friends saw something that caught their attention.

The driver, Eugenio Batungbacal, said, “I see about four or five men with one girl, two mens holding the woman with hands and one is following. They look like they force the woman on their car.”

He meant “in” the car—the odd Island usage of “on.”

“She looked like she was drunk,” he continued, “because two mens hold her arms and she tried to get away.”

“What did this girl look like? Was she white?”

“I don’t know, ’cause she is not facing to me. If she is facing to me, I tell you whether she is nigger or white or Portuguese.”

“What color dress was she wearing?”

“I don’t know. Long dress, though.”

“Like an evening gown?”

“Like that.”

But others in the same car hadn’t perceived this as a struggle. I asked Charles Cheng, greengrocer, if he wasn’t alarmed by what he’d seen.

“No, I thought they were just a bunch of friends.”

“You didn’t get excited when these guys were dragging a girl into their car?”

“No. I thought she was drunk and they were helping her.”

None of them heard screams or saw a punch thrown.

Still, this conformed to some degree to Thalia’s story—except that another carload (this one of guys and gals) at about the same time put Horace Ida and his pals elsewhere. According to Tatsumi Matsumoto—his friends called him “Tuts”—Ida’s car had followed his out of the amusement park.

The story—which included one of the boys from Tuts’s car jumping over onto Ida’s bumper and riding for a while, talking, even tossing Ahakeulo some matches—was confirmed by the other boy and two girls in the car, and it put the suspects at Beretania and Fort streets at around twelve-fifteen.

Husky Tuts—a former college football star who was financially independent, having inherited his father’s estate—hung around the sporting scene, hobnobbed with athletes and gamblers, and was friendly with Benny Ahakeulo. It was possible he and his friends were helping cover up for Benny.

But I didn’t think so. Tuts was affable and open and unrehearsed, telling his story, and the two girls were just flighty young Hawaiian gals who lacked the details a more contrived story would have contained.

“Did you see your friend Benny earlier, at Waikiki Park, Tuts? At the dance?”

“I did more than see him. We both went up to the same girl and asked her to dance.”

“Who won?”

Tuts smirked. “She turned us both down.”

Middle-aged salt-of-the-earth George Clark, an office manager with the Honolulu Construction and Draining Co., and his matronly missus, had been playing bridge all evening with the Bellingers, from their neighborhood; half an hour or so after midnight, they all set out to Waikiki in one car for a late-night snack. On their way to the Kewalo Inn on Ala Moana, just past the Hooverville squatters’ shacks, the car’s headlights caught the frantic form of a woman in a green dress, flagging them down.

It was Thalia, of course, who (once ascertaining that these were white people) begged for a ride home. Her hair was disheveled, her face bruised, her lips swollen.

“She was about our daughter’s age,” Clark told me, “and I guess we kind of felt for the girl. But she had a funny attitude.”

“How so?” I asked him.

“She seemed angry, not upset, kind of…indignant. Not tears. It was more like, how could anyone dare do such a thing to her.”

“What did she say had been done to her?”

“She said a gang of Hawaiian hoodlums had grabbed her, pulled her into their car, robbed and beat her, and tossed her back out again.”

“She didn’t say anything about sexual assault?”

“Nothing. And she only wanted a ride home. She was adamant about no hospital, no police. Just get her home. Her husband would take care of her, she said.”

Mrs. Clark made an interesting addition to her husband’s observations: “We all noticed her evening gown seemed undamaged. Later, George and I read about five boys…assaulting her…and we both wondered how her gown could be in such good condition.”

At the lookout, I parked the car just off the dirt road and, hand in hand, Isabel and I moved to the edge of the cliff and, prompted by the sound of crashing surf and whooshing air, peered down at the fabled Blowhole, a shelf of rock extending like the deck of a ship into the sea, silvery gray in the modest moonlight, white breakers rolling up over it. The opening toward the front of the ridge of rock looked small from up here, but it had to be three or four feet in diameter. Nothing happened for a while; then finally several waves surged in with increasing force and, like the whale blowhole for which it was named, the rocky spout geysered water, trapped in the cave below and propelled out in fountains of foam, streams of spray, twenty or thirty feet high.

Isabel held on tightly to my arm. “Oh, Nate—it’s breathtaking…so lovely….”

I didn’t say anything. Its beauty hadn’t occurred to me; what had was how you could walk right out on that shelf and, between geysers, drop something into the cave below. Something or someone.

Over to our right was a tiny bay within high shelves of rock, a small pocket of beach beckoning us. Towels tucked under our arms, we went looking for a footpath, found it, and, hand in hand, with me in the lead, made our way down the steep, rocky slope, treading gingerly in our sandals, laughing nervously at each misstep.

Finally we were down on the pale sand, between high walls of rock, a tiny private beach at the foot of the vast ocean. We spread beach towels, and I stripped to my trunks as she shed her polka-dot skirt and jacket down to her form-fitting white suit. Pale as her flesh was, in the glow of the muted moonlight, she might have been nude, the wind rustling her boyishly short blond hair. The only sound was the lazy surf rolling in and the wind surfing through foliage above.

She stretched out on her towel, her slender, rounded body airbrushed by moonlight. I sat on my towel, next to her; she was drinking in the beauty of the night, I was drinking in hers.

Finally she noticed my eyes on her and then she settled her gaze on me. She propped herself up on an elbow; at this angle, her cleavage was delightful.

“Mind if I pry some more?” she asked innocently.

“You can try.”

“I can understand your admiration for Mr. Darrow. I understand family ties. But this is more than that.”

“I don’t get you.”

“He’s taken you under his wing. Why?”

“I’m cheap help.”

She shook her head, no, and the blond hair shimmered. “No. Look at Mr. Leisure. He’s a top Wall Street attorney, and I get the feeling he’s working for peanuts, too.”

“Your point being?”

“Clarence Darrow can finagle just about anybody into helping him out. It’s like the President asking you for help, or Ronald Colman asking you to dance.”

“I wouldn’t care to dance with Ronald Colman, thanks.”

“Why you, Nate?”

I looked out at the ocean; the little beach had small rock formations here and there that the gentle surge of surf splashed over idly.

“Let’s go for a swim,” I said.

She touched my arm, gently. “Why you?”

“Why do you care?”

“I care about you. We’re sleeping together, aren’t we?”

“How exclusive a list is that?”

She grinned, chin wrinkling. “You’re not going to get out of it by making me mad. Like the gangsters in the movies say—spill.”

She looked so cute, her eyes taking on an oddly violet cast in the non-light, that I felt a sudden surge of genuine affection for the girl wash over me in a tide of emotion.

“It’s because of my father.”

“Your father.”

“He and Darrow were friends.”

“You’ve said that.”

“My father didn’t want me to be a cop. Neither does Darrow.”

“Why not?”

“Darrow’s an old radical, like my father. He hates the police.”

“Your father?”

“Darrow.”

She frowned, trying to sort it out. “Your father doesn’t hate the police?”

“Hell, he hated them worse than Darrow.”

“Is your father dead, Nate?”

I nodded. “Year, year and a half now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nothing for you to be sorry about.”

“So Mr. Darrow wants you to quit the police force and work for him. As his investigator.”

“Something along those lines.”

She squinted in thought. “So it’s all right, being a detective…as long as you’re not a policeman.”

“That’s it.”

“I don’t get it. What’s the difference?”

“The cops represent a lot of bad things to people like Darrow and my father. The government abusing citizens. Graft, corruption…”

“Aren’t there any honest cops?”

“Not in Chicago. Anyway…not Nate Heller.”

“What did you do, Nate?”

“I killed my father.”

Alarm widened her eyes. “What?”

“You know that gun you asked me about the other night? That automatic on the dresser?”

“Yes….”

“That’s what I used.”

“You’re scaring me, Nate….”

I swallowed. “I’m sorry. Look, I did something that disappointed my father. I told lies in court and took money to get a promotion, then I used the money trying to help him out…his store was in trouble. Shit.”

Her mouth was trembling, her eyes wide not with alarm but dismay. “He killed himself.”

I didn’t say anything.

“With…with your gun?”

I nodded.

“And you…and that’s the gun you carry? You still carry?”

I nodded again.

“But, why…?”

I shrugged. “I figure it’s the closest thing to a conscience I’ll ever have.”

She stroked my cheek; she looked like she was going to cry. “Oh, Nate…. Don’t do that to yourself….”

“It’s all right. It helps remind me not to do certain things. Nobody should carry a gun lightly. Mine’s just a little heavier than most people’s.”

She clutched me, held me in her arms like a baby she was comforting; but I was fine. I wasn’t crying or anything. I felt okay. Nate Heller didn’t cry in front of women. In private, deep into a sleepless night, awakened from a too-real dream of me finding my father slumped over that table again, well, that’s my goddamn business, isn’t it?

Taking my hand, she led me across the sand into the surf and we let the soothingly warm water wash up around our ankles, then let it up to our waists, and she dove in and began swimming out. I dove after her, cutting through water as comfy as a well-heated bath.

She swam freestyle with balletic grace; rich kids get plenty of practice swimming. But so do poor ones, at least those with access to Lake Michigan, and I knifed my way alongside her, catching up, and thirty feet out or so we stopped, treading water together, smiling, laughing, kissing. We were buffeted gently by the tide, and I was just about to say we’d better swim back in when something seemed to yank at our feet.

I lurched toward Isabel, clutching her around the midsection, as the undertow sucked us down under, way under, in a funnel of cold water, fourteen feet or more, flinging us around like rag dolls, but I held onto her, I wasn’t giving her up and the riptide tossed us around in our desperate embrace, until finally, after seven or eight seconds that seemed a lifetime, a wave thundering up from the ocean’s floor deposited us on the shore, and I dragged her onto the beach and onto dry sand, before that wave could withdraw and pull us back out to sea, and down again into the undertow.

We huddled on one towel, teeth chattering, hugging each other, breathing fast and deep; we stayed that way for what seemed a long time, watching an incredibly beautiful wave crash onto the shore, reminding us how close we’d just come to dying.

Then her mouth was on mine and she was clawing off her swimsuit as desperately as we’d fought the riptide, and I was out of my suit and on top and inside of her, the slippery velvet of her mingling with grating sand, driving myself into her, her knees lifted, accepting me with little groans that escalated into cries echoing off the ridges around us, heels of my hands digging wedges in the sand as I watched her closed eyes and her open mouth and the quivering globes of her heaving breasts as those puffy aureoles tightened and wrinkled with vein-pulsing passion, and then we were both sending cries careening off the canyon-like walls, drowning out the roar of the surf, before collapsing into each other’s arms, and sharing tiny kisses, murmuring vows of undying love that in a few moments we’d both regret.

She was the first to have regrets. She trotted back out into where the water came to her knees and she crouched there, to wash herself out, her fear of the tide overriden by another fear. When she trotted back, and got back into her suit, she sat on her towel and gathered her arms about her, trying to disappear into herself.

“I’m cold,” she said. “We should go.”

We both got quickly dressed, and this time she led the way up the rocky footpath to where our car was parked near the Blowhole overlook.

As we drove back, she said nothing for the longest time. She was staring into the night with an expression that wasn’t quite morose, more…afraid.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

Her smile was forced and her glance at me was so momentary it hardly qualified. “Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just…nothing.”

“What, Isabel?”

“That’s the first time…you didn’t use something.”

“We were all caught up in it, baby. We damn near died out there. We got worked up. Who could blame us?”

“I’m not blaming anybody,” she said reproachfully.

“It won’t happen again. I’ll buy a bushel of Sheiks.”

“What if I get pregnant?”

“People try for years and don’t make babies. Don’t worry about it.”

“All it takes is once.”

We were gliding by fancy beach homes again; I pulled over in the mouth of a driveway. I left the motor running as I reached over and touched her hand.

“Hey. Nothing’s going to happen.”

She looked away. Pulled her hand away.

“You think I wouldn’t make an honest woman of you, if it came to that?”

She turned and looked sharply at me. “I can’t marry you.”

Then it hit me.

“Oh. Oh yeah. My last name is Heller. Good Christian girl like you can’t go around marrying Jews. Just fucking them.”

She began to cry. “How can you be so cruel?”

“Don’t worry,” I said, putting the car into gear. “You can always tell ’em I raped you.”

And I did what I should have done earlier: pulled out.

15

Was I the only one it struck odd? That the scene of the crime, or at least the scene where the crime began, was also the site of the trial?

Every morning of the proceedings, the quaintly neoclassical Judiciary Building, outside of which Joe Kahahawai had received his bogus summons, was guarded by a phalanx of dusky police in blue serge uniforms insanely un-suited for the sweltering heat. The baroque building itself was roped and sawhorsed off, helping the cops keep back crowds about two-thirds kanaka and one-third haole; whether it was the heat or the cops, the potentially volatile racial mix never ignited. These were gawkers attracted not by controversy or politics but good old-fashioned tabloid murder.

Only seventy-five seats inside were available for the general public, and these precious pews had the colored servants of the kamaaina elite camping outside the courthouse overnight to save their bosses a spot, while Navy wives (accustomed to early rising) showed up in the early morning hours, with camp stools, sandwiches, and thermoses of coffee. Still others—out-of-work kanakas, and there were plenty of those—planned to sell their seats for the going rate of twenty-five bucks a shot.

Each morning, the scream of sirens scattered birds in banyans and stirred the curious crowd as a caravan of motorcycle police leading and following two cars (two defendants per car, under Navy guard) made its delivery from Pearl Harbor. The two seamen rode together—Jones and Lord, short, burly, uncomfortable in suits and ties, tough little kids playing dress-up—cigarettes drooping from nervously smiling lips as they emerged from the Navy vehicle into the waiting custody of uniformed cops, who escorted them into the courthouse. Tommie, dapper in his suit and tie, made a slight, sad-looking escort for his patrician mother-in-law (in a succession of dark tasteful frocks and matching tam turbans), who seemed at once aloof and weary. Like Joe Kahahawai’s golden ghost, the statue of King Kamehameha took all this in, unamused.

Every day, everyone who went inside—from defendant to spectator, from reporter to Clarence Darrow himself (and the judge, too)—got patted down for weapons by cops. Next, they passed by an adjacent courtroom that had been turned into a bustling pressroom—desks, telephones, typewriters, telegraph lines, accommodating a dozen or more reporters from as far away as London—before entering the small courtroom with its dark plaster walls and darker woodwork, lazily churning ceiling fans, and open windows looking out on whispering palms and the Punchbowl’s green hills set against a blue-sky backdrop, letting in streaming sun, traffic noises, and buzzing mosquitoes.

At each and every session, white women—well-to-do white women, at that—took the majority of the public seating; this was, after all, the social event of the season. Conspicuously absent from this group was Thalia and Isabel, but they were well represented in spirit. A collective moan of mournful sympathy would emerge from the gals of the gallery each morning as the defendants trouped down the aisle to their seats behind the lawyers’ table. At particularly dramatic (or melodramatic) testimony, they would (according to what seemed called for) shed tears together, they would sigh as one, they would gasp in unison. They managed to do this without ever once eliciting the wrath of Judge Davis, a bespectacled New Englander of medium size and enormous patience.

On the other hand, they frequently received glares and even an occasional rebuke from no-nonsense prosecutor John C. Kelley, a square-shouldered block of a man, ruddy-faced, bald but for a monkish fringe of reddish hair.

Kelley hadn’t seen forty, but if finding himself pitted against the elder statesman of defense lawyers intimidated him, he didn’t show it. Nor did he seem daunted by the presence, each day, of a Navy contingent headed up by Admiral Stirling Yates himself, no less imperial in civilian clothes.

Confident, almost cocky, crisp in tropical whites, Kelley fixed his piercing blue eyes on the all-male, mixed racial bag in the jury box: six whites (including a Dane and a German), a Portuguese, two Chinese, and three of Hawaiian ancestry.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his hint of brogue lending authority to his words, “these defendants are charged with the crime of murder in the second degree.”

Kelley’s only gesture toward the defense table was a wag of the head, but the jury’s twenty-four eyes went to the four defendants, whose backs were to the rail behind which were the tables of reporters. Lord and Jones were at left, with Tommie next, and next to him, Mrs. Fortescue. All four sat rigidly, never glancing around the courtroom, eyes straight ahead, Mrs. Fortescue’s bearing as expressionlessly military as that of her lieutenant son-in-law and their two sailor accomplices.

Kelley continued with the indictment: “The Grand Jury of the First Judicial Court of the Territory of Hawaii do present that Grace Fortescue, Thomas H. Massie, Edward J. Lord, and Albert O. Jones, in the city and county of Honolulu, on the eighth day of January, 1932, through force of arms—to wit, a pistol loaded with gunpowder and a bullet…”

Next to Mrs. Fortescue sat Darrow, snarl of hair askew, his fleshy yet angular frame draped over his wooden chair as casually as his haphazardly knotted tie. A watch chain looped across the vest of a dark suit that looked a size too large for a body that wore skin that looked a size too large itself. Leisure, every bit the well-dressed Wall Street attorney, was next to Darrow, and I was next to Leisure.

“…did unlawfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought and without authority and without justification or extenuation…”

Kelley turned and, with another wag of his skinned-coconut skull, indicated—at the rail near the end of the jury box—a dark, husky, impassive rumpled-faced fellow in white shirt and dark trousers and a slender, equally dark woman in a long white Mother Hubbard, weeping into a handkerchief: the parents of Joseph Kahahawai.

“…murdered Joseph Kahahawai, Jr., a human being….”

The pugnacious prosecutor outlined his case in less than an hour, from Tommie renting the blue Buick to Mrs. Fortescue crafting the ersatz summons, from the abduction of Joe Kahahawai in front of this very building to the kidnappers’ ill-fated attempt to dispose of the body, which had led to a high-speed chase in which the cops had been forced to fire at them to stop.

He saved the best for last: the murder itself. He piled up vividly disturbing details—bloodstained clothing, blood-streaked floorboards, a gun stuffed behind sofa cushions, spare bullets, rope with a telltale purple thread labeling it naval property, a bathtub where bloody clothes were washed, a victim who was allowed to bleed to death.

“We will show you,” Kelley said, “that there was no struggle in the house that might allow these defendants to claim self-defense. Kahahawai was a strong athlete, capable of putting up a good fight, but there is no evidence of any such fight in that house.”

Through it all, Mrs. Fortescue stared numbly forward, while Tommie seemed to be chewing at something—gum, I thought at first; his lip, I later realized. The two sailors seemed almost bored; if the gravity of all this had hit them, it didn’t show.

Kelley leaned on the jury box rail. “When Joseph Kahahawai, reporting faithfully to his probation officer, stood in the shadow of the statue of King Kamehameha, under the outstretched arm of the great Hawaiian who brought law and order to this island, the finger of doom pointed at this youthful descendant of Kamehameha’s people.”

Suddenly Kelley wheeled toward Mrs. Fortescue, who seemed mildly startled, straightening.

“That finger was pointed by Grace Fortescue,” Kelley said, and he pointed his forefinger at her as if he were on a firing squad aiming a rifle. “In today’s vernacular, she was the finger man who put Kahahawai ‘on the spot’!”

When Kelley sat down, Darrow did not rise. He remained slumped in his chair, merely uttering, “The defense will reserve its opening statement, Your Honor.”

In three methodical but fast-moving days, the scrappy Kelley built his case, brick by brick: Kahahawai’s cousin Edward Ulii, as light as Joe had been powerful, told of the abduction; Dickson, the probation officer, told of telling Mrs. Fortescue about Kahahawai’s obligation to report to him each day; Detective George Harbottle, a young, ruggedly handsome specimen who looked like Hollywood’s notion of a cop, told of the car chase and capture, and the corpse wrapped in the bloody white sheet in the backseat.

“Detective,” Kelley said, “would you mind stepping from the witness stand and identifying the parties you arrested?”

The brawny dick stepped down and touched Jones, then Lord, then Tommie on the shoulder; but when he approached Mrs. Fortescue, she rose regally and stared directly at him, chin lifted.

Harbottle didn’t touch her; he just backed away, pointing with a thumb, muttering, “This lady was driving.”

As Mrs. Fortescue took her seat, Harbottle settled himself back on the stand, and Kelley asked, “Did Lt. Massie appear to be in shock, Detective?”