Damned in Paradise

Darrow, doodling on a pad, seemingly paying scant attention, said, “Calls for a conclusion, Your Honor.”

Kelley turned toward the judge with a patently placating smile. “Your Honor, as a police officer, Detective Harbottle has been called to the scene of many crimes, many accidents. His opinion as to the state of mind of—”

Darrow raised his eyes and his voice. “The detective hasn’t been called as an expert in human behavior, Your Honor.”

Judge Davis, his expression blank as the Sphinx, said, “Sustained.”

“Detective Harbottle,” Kelley said, leaning on the witness chair, “did Lt. Massie speak to you, after you arrested him and the others along the roadside?”

“In a roundabout way, yes, sir.”

“What do you mean, ‘in a roundabout way,’ Detective?”

“Well, Patrolman Bond came over to me and said, ‘Good work, kid,’ you know, congratulating me on the arrest. But Lt. Massie, who was sitting in back of the radio patrol car, thought the comment was meant for him—”

With weary patience Darrow called out, “The witness doesn’t know what Lt. Massie was thinking, Your Honor.”

“The comment about what Lt. Massie was thinking will be stricken,” the judge informed the court stenographer.

Kelley said, “What did Lt. Massie say?”

Harbottle shrugged. “He said, ‘Thank you,’ and raised his hands like this…” Harbottle lifted his clasped hands and shook them in the end-of-the-game gesture of victory common to boxers and other athletes.

Kelley smiled nastily at the jury. “Thank you, Detective. That will be all. Your witness.”

Darrow didn’t rise as he smiled up at the detective. “When my associate Mr. Heller spoke with you, on Thursday last, didn’t you describe Lt. Massie’s demeanor as follows: ‘Very stern, sitting straight up, just staring straight ahead, never saying a word.’ Do you recall that?”

“I do,” Harbottle admitted.

“What was Mrs. Fortescue doing at that time?”

“Sitting on a rock alongside the road.”

“What was her demeanor?”

Kelley rose and arched an eyebrow. “I hope counsel isn’t asking this witness for expert testimony on human behavior.”

Darrow’s smile was grandfatherly. “I’ll rephrase—was she talkative? Was she smiling and chatty and gay?”

“She was staring straight ahead,” Harbottle said. “In a kind of daze. Silent as the rock she was sitting on.”

Darrow nodded sagely. “No further questions.”

With the exception of such occasional skirmishes, Darrow continued to pay little apparent heed to Kelley and his case; he mostly declined cross-examining Kelley’s witnesses, allowing Leisure to ask a few questions now and then. Darrow had never denied the crime; cross-examining would only prolong such prosecution theatrics as waving before the jury the bloody garments found in a wet bundle in the rental Buick.

The latter display, however, in conjunction with the testimony of one of the patrolmen who found them, elicited tears from Mrs. Kahahawai, sending Darrow to his feet.

“With all due respect to this fine lady,” Darrow said, “I must request that she be removed from the courtroom on the grounds that her emotion might sway the jury.”

The judge shook his head, no. “She has a right to be present, Mr. Darrow.”

Kelley’s parade of witnesses continued: the garage clerk who rented Tommie the Buick; the hardware store counterman who sold a revolver to Mrs. Fortescue and an automatic to Jones; the neighbor who heard “an explosion” coming from Mrs. Fortescue’s house at 9:00 A.M. January 8; Detective Bills, in whose expert opinion the coil of rope around the dead man’s body came from the submarine base; County Coroner Dr. Faus, who established that the path of the bullet through Kahahawai’s heart had been diagonal, at an angle indicating the victim was lunging defensively forward when he was shot; Inspector McIntosh, who reported that Jones “acted drunk” when apprehended at the Fortescue bungalow, but “seemed quite sober” when questioned at the station house; other cops who, searching the bungalow, found Mrs. Fortescue’s purse with Kahahawai’s picture tucked inside, Tommie’s automatic under a sofa cushion, Kahahawai’s cap, two pearl buttons in the bathroom from Kahahawai’s undershorts, and a spare box of .32 shells wrapped up in the fake summons (these Jones had kept stuffed under his shirt!).

The fake summons, of course, made for effective courtroom reading by Kelley.

“‘Life is a mysterious and exciting affair,’” the prosecutor said, reading from the document itself, “‘and anything can be a thrill if you know how to look for it and what to do with opportunity when it comes.’”

A lot of people thought of Darrow as a great showman, but I have to admit, Prosecutor John C. Kelley could have taught Barnum and Bailey a trick or two: he displayed a huge full-color anatomical chart of a male torso with the bullet path in red; he exhibited glossy photos of bloodstains in the bungalow; he passed out bloody towels, bloody clothes to the jury for them to personally handle; and the bloody sheet; and the rope, and a glittering array of bullets and cartridge shells.

Through all this, Darrow slumped in his chair and doodled and played with his pencil, occasionally objecting, almost never cross-examining. Mrs. Fortescue remained aloof, impassive, but Tommie began biting his nails.

Kelley’s last witness was inevitable: Esther Kahahawai, Joe’s mother, coming back to haunt Darrow for his objection to her presence.

As the dark, thin, frail gray-haired woman in the Mother Hubbard approached the stand, Darrow arose and raised his hands gently, blocking the way, turning to the judge.

“We will concede everything this witness has to say,” he said gravely. “We will stipulate that she is the mother of Joseph Kahahawai, that she saw him that morning when he left—anything….”

Kelley was on his feet. “There are two mothers in this courtroom, Your Honor. One is a defendant, but the other has no defense—her son is dead. We think both these women should be allowed to testify.”

“Withdrawn,” Darrow said, softly; he smiled with sympathy at Mrs. Kahahawai and removed himself from her path, taking his place.

Her voice was low, difficult to hear, but no one in the courtroom missed a word. She wept into her handkerchief almost continuously during her testimony; many of the spectators—even the white wealthy women whose sympathy was with the defendants—wept along with her.

“Yes, that was his shirt,” she said, as Kelley somberly showed her the bloody clothing. “And those, his socks. And his dungarees…yes. Yes. I just washed them, and sewed the buttons on.”

“Was Joe in good health that morning when he left you?”

“Yes.”

“When did you see him again?”

“Saturday. At…at the undertaker’s.”

“That was the body of your son Joseph?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kahahawai. No further questions.”

Darrow’s voice was barely audible: “No questions, Your Honor.”

Sobs echoed in the courtroom as Kelley, in an almost courtly fashion, led her down from the stand.

Darrow leaned over to me, his stringy locks tumbling carelessly, and whispered: “I guess we had that coming. The sympathy can’t be all on one side.”

He looked very old to me at that moment; tired and old.

Kelley looked fresh as a daisy. He was prancing toward the prosecution table, talking as he went: “The prosecution rests, Your Honor.”

The court recessed for lunch, and as usual, Darrow, Leisure, his clients, and I went over to the Alexander Young. C.D., accompanied by Ruby, passed up luncheon for a nap in his room, while the rest of us took the elevator to the roof garden restaurant. No one expected our clients to make a break for it, and we had arranged for the grand old man of the department, Chang Apana, to have the honor of being the nominal police guard.

Because of Chang’s presence, conversation was kept superficial and nothing related to the case was discussed. Leisure’s wife joined us, as usual, and the couple talked amongst themselves. Neither Tommie nor Mrs. Fortescue said much of anything, having finally fallen into a morose understanding of the gravity of their situation.

But Jones and Lord, smoking, laughing, were a cheerful pair of imbeciles. Curly-haired Lord didn’t say much, but square-headed Jones was a cocky, chatty son of a bitch.

“You see the shape on that girl reporter from New York?” he asked me.

“It got my attention,” I admitted, nibbling at my bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich.

“I think she likes me.” He was cutting his minute steak eagerly. “She’s always wanting to talk to me.”

“You don’t think being a defendant in a murder trial could have something to do with it?”

“She’s got four of us to choose from, don’t she? And it’s me she flashes her peepers at, ain’t it?”

“Good point.”

“Did you see that little Chinese girl over by the wall, on the left? She’s a doll. And there’s some good-looking American girls in that courtroom, believe you me.”

This bastard was a bigger lecher than I was.

I looked at him with a tiny smile. “You mind a little advice, Deacon?”

“Not at all, Nate.”

“I saw you ogling those gals. Smiling at them. I don’t think smiles are all that appropriate in a situation like the one you’re in.”

He shrugged, spearing a chunk of O’Brien potato. “I don’t see the harm. Don’t I want people to know I’m a nice guy?”

Chang Apana, seated next to me picking at a small bowl of chow chow, said quietly, so only I would hear, “Owner of face cannot always see nose.”

After recess, Darrow led our contingent down the aisle, court resumed, and America’s most famous trial lawyer, in a wrinkled, baggy double-breasted white linen jacket, rose and addressed the bench.

“I waive my opening statement, Your Honor,” Darrow said, a rasp underlining the deceptive casualness of his drawl.

A ripple of disappointment rolled over the gallery at being denied their first extended sampling of the Darrow courtroom oratory.

“…And call my first witness, Lt. Thomas Massie.”

The disappointment disappeared in a rush of excitement as Tommie popped to his feet, jack-in-the-box style, and strode quickly to the stand, where he almost shouted his oath to tell the truth.

Tommie wore a dark blue suit with a light tan tie, an ensemble suggested by Darrow to seem vaguely naval, slightly military. The sharp features of his boyish face had fixed into a tight expression that fell somewhere between scowl and pout.

In a manner that may have been intended to relax the obviously tense Tommie, and lull the jury, Darrow began an unhurried journey through Tommie’s early years—born, Winchester, Kentucky; military school; Naval Academy; marriage on graduation day to sixteen-year-old Thalia Fortescue. On through his naval duties—the U.S.S. Lexington, the sub base at New London, Connecticut, his two years of further sub duty out of Pearl Harbor.

Then, in the same soothing, casual tone, Darrow said, “Do you remember going to a dance last September?”

“How could I forget it?” Tommie said.

Kelley was already on his feet.

“Where was that party?” Darrow asked.

“The Ala Wai Inn,” Tommie said. “My wife didn’t feel like goin’, but I persuaded her to.”

Kelley was standing before the bench, now. “Your Honor, I don’t intend to interrupt with constant objections,” he said quietly, earnestly, “but I feel entitled to know the relevance of this testimony.”

Darrow had drifted to the bench too, and Kelley turned to the old boy and asked, point blank, “Is it your intention to go into the Ala Moana case?”

“I do so intend.”

“Then, Your Honor, the prosecution should be informed at this time if one of the defendants will make an insanity plea—in which case, we will not oppose this testimony.”

“We do intend,” Darrow said, “to raise the question of insanity in relation to the one who fired the pistol.”

Kelley frowned and bit off the words: “Is a plea of insanity to be offered in behalf of Lt. Massie?”

Darrow smiled. “I don’t think it’s necessary at this time to single out any particular person.”

Kelley was shaking his head, no. “Unless the prosecution is informed that a plea of insanity is to be made on Lt. Massie’s behalf, I will object to any further testimony along these lines, by this witness.”

Darrow made a gesture with two open hands as if he were holding a hymnal. “Your Honor, Mr. Kelley in his opening statements linked all the defendants together as equally guilty. Now he wishes me to separate them for his convenience.”

The judge, pondering this, looked first from one attorney to the other, like a man watching a tennis match.

“It is common knowledge, Your Honor,” Kelley said, “that the defense has imported prominent psychiatrists from the mainland.” The prosecutor gestured first to Tommie, then to the other three defendants. “The prosecution has the right to know which of these four Mr. Darrow will claim insane.”

“I’ll gladly tell you,” Darrow said.

Kelley glared at him. “Which of them, then?”

Darrow beamed. “The one who shot the pistol.”

Kelley’s face was reddening. “The prosecution has the right to know the person for whom this insanity plea is to be made so that our alienists may also examine this individual.”

“These alienists of yours,” Darrow said, “would appear as rebuttal witnesses, of course.”

“Of course,” Kelley said.

“Now I’m a stranger here in your lovely land, Mr. Kelley, but if my rudimentary understanding of procedure in Hawaii is correct, I’m under no obligation to submit my clients to examination by rebuttal witnesses.”

“Your Honor, this is outrageous. I object to this line of questioning on grounds of relevance.”

“Now,” Darrow said, as if Kelley’s words were harmless gnats flitting about, “if the prosecution wishes to seat its alienist experts as spectators in the gallery, I’d certainly have no objection.”

Why would he? Any opinion they might offer on the witness stand would be followed by the obvious, and devastating, defense query: “Doctor, have you examined the accused?”

Next to me Leisure was smiling. This was his handiwork, but Darrow’s delivery was priceless.

“Your objection is overruled, Mr. Kelley,” Judge Davis said. “You may continue questioning along these lines, Mr. Darrow.”

And he did. Probing gently, Darrow withdrew from Tommie his tale of the Ala Wai Inn party and his search for his wife, as the party wound down; how he’d finally reached Thalia by phone to hear her cry, “Come home at once! Something awful has happened!” And in excruciating detail, Tommie told of Thalia’s description to him of the injuries and indignities she’d endured.

“She said Kahahawai had beaten her more than anyone,” Tommie said. “She said when Kahahawai assaulted her, she prayed for mercy and his answer was to hit her in the jaw.”

At the defense table, Mrs. Fortescue’s stoic, noble mask began to quiver; tears rolled down her flushed cheeks, unattended, as her son-in-law described her daughter’s suffering.

“She said over and over again,” Tommie was saying, “why hadn’t the men just killed her? She wished they’d killed her.”

Many of the women in the gallery were weeping now; sobbing.

“The followin’ day,” Tommie said, “when she was in the hospital, the police brought in the four assailants.”

Kelley, remaining seated, said quietly, “Your Honor, I object to the use of the word ‘assailants.’”

Darrow turned to Kelley, shrugged, said, “‘Alleged assailants,’ then. Or suppose we call them four men?”

“She said these four men were the ones,” Tommie said, lips twisting as if he were tasting something foul. “I said, ‘Don’t let there be any doubt about it,’ and she said, ‘Don’t you think if there were any doubt I could never draw another easy breath?’”

This slice of melodrama seemed a little ripe to me; I didn’t know how the rest of the room was taking it, but to me Tommie’s Little Theater background was showing. And in trying too hard, he had introduced, at least vaguely, Thalia Massie’s possible doubts about the identity of Ida and company.

Darrow steered Tommie gently back on course, drawing from him a description of the faithful days and nights he’d spent at the hospital and at home, nursing his beloved bride back to health. Tommie described nightmares of Thalia’s from which she awoke screaming, “Kahahawai is here!”

“Could you ever get the incident out of your mind?” Darrow asked.

“Never! And then the rumors started…vile…rotten! We were gettin’ a divorce, I’d found my wife in bed with a fellow officer, I’d beaten her myself, a crowd of naval officers assaulted her, she wasn’t assaulted at all…every stupid foul variation you could imagine. It got to where I couldn’t stand crowds, couldn’t look people in the face. I couldn’t sleep, I would get up and pace the floor and all I could see was the picture of my wife’s crushed face…. I felt so miserable I wanted to take a knife and cut my brain out of my head!”

Considering what Tommie had just said, Darrow’s next question seemed almost comical. “Did you consult a doctor?”

“Yes, but I was more concerned with what a lawyer thought. I was advised that the best way to stop these vicious rumors was to get a signed confession from one of the…four men. I’d heard Kahahawai was gettin’ ready to crack, and spoke to my mother-in-law…”

“Other than these rumors,” Darrow asked gently, “did anything else prey upon your mind?”

“Y-yes. We knew an operation was necessary to…prevent pregnancy.”

This was dangerous ground. I knew that Darrow knew Thalia had not been pregnant; I wasn’t sure if Tommie knew, and God only knew if Kelley knew….

Yet Darrow pressed on: “Were you sure she was pregnant?”

“There could be no doubt.”

Kelley was going through some papers; did he have the medical report signed by Darrow’s friend Dr. Porter?

But still Darrow continued: “Could the pregnancy have been due to you?”

“No. It couldn’t have been.”

“Was it done, the operation?”

“Yes. I took her to the hospital and Dr. Porter performed it. This…this had a strange effect on my mind.”

And Tommie began to weep.

Kelley wasn’t making a move; if he did have the card, he’d decided not to play it. It was clear Tommie believed Thalia had been pregnant; he wasn’t that good an actor.

“It’s getting late in the day, Your Honor,” Darrow said sorrowfully. “Might I request an adjournment until tomorrow?”

The judge accepted Darrow’s suggestion with no objection from Kelley. Mrs. Fortescue bolted from the defense table to guide her son-in-law off the stand. With her arm around the child-man’s shoulder, the tall woman walked up the aisle of a courtroom filled with teary-eyed haole women as Chang Apana led Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue and the two gobs to their Shore Patrol escorts.

At the next session, as Tommie again took the stand, Darrow faced the judge and dropped a bombshell that blew Kelley immediately to his feet.

“Your Honor,” Darrow said, a thumb in one of his suspenders, “there seems to be a little misunderstanding between the prosecutor and myself and I’d like to set it right. We are willing to state that Lt. Massie held the gun that fired the fatal shot.”

A tidal wave of reaction rolled over the gallery and the judge gaveled the courtroom to silence.

Darrow continued, as if he hadn’t noticed the stir he’d caused: “Now, Lieutenant, if we can get back to these rumors that had been plaguing you and your wife…”

Kelley said in a machine-gun burst of words: “Even with this admission, Your Honor, this line of questioning involving the Ala Moana case is admissible only under a plea of insanity, and even so, any information supplied to Lt. Massie by his wife and others in reference to that case is hearsay and should be stricken from the record.”

“Your Honor,” Darrow said patiently, “we expect the evidence to show that this defendant was insane. I did not say that he would testify that he killed the deceased. We will show that the gun was in his hand when the shot was fired…but whether Lt. Massie knew what he was doing at the time is another question.”

Judge Davis thought about that, then said, “Mr. Kelley, it appears that the defense is relying on the defense of insanity and that the witness now on the stand fired the fatal shot. This opens the door for testimony bearing on the defendant’s state of mind.”

“My objection has been met, Your Honor,” Kelley said. “However, we feel we’re entitled at this time to know the type of insanity Lt. Massie is alleged to have been laboring under when he fired the shot.”

Darrow said, “Come now, Mr. Kelley, surely you’re aware that even leading experts use different terminology for identical psychological disorders. Your Honor, may I resume my examination of the witness?”

“You may,” the judge said.

Kelley, seeming for the first time flustered, returned to his seat.

Darrow patiently took Tommie through the formation of the abduction plot, from discussions with his mother-in-law to his first meetings with Jones and Lord.

“Was the purpose of your plan to kill the deceased?”

“Certainly not!”

Finally Darrow had reached the point in Tommie’s story where, back on the Alton in that first interview, C.D. had refused to let his client continue.

Now, here in court, I would finally hear the “true” story.

“I drove to Mrs. Fortescue’s house, up into the garage,” Tommie said. “When I got inside, in the kitchen, I took Jones’s gun from the counter.”

“That was a .32?”

Tommie was almost motionless, and machine precise as he testified. “A .32, yes sir. And I called out and said, ‘All right, come in—Major Ross is in here.’ Kahahawai still believed he was on his way to see the major. I took off my dark glasses and gloves—the chauffeur apparel—and then we were all in the livin’ room, Kahahawai sittin’ down in a chair. Mrs. Fortescue and Lord came in. Stood nearby as I went over and confronted Kahahawai. I had the gun in my hand.”

“And where was Jones?”

“Mrs. Fortescue told him to wait outside and see that we weren’t disturbed. I pulled back the slide of the gun and let it click in place—I wanted to scare him. I said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ He said, ‘I think so.’ I said, ‘You did your lyin’ in the courtroom but you’re going to tell the whole truth now.’ He looked nervous, tremblin’. He said, ‘I don’t know nothin’.’ I asked him where he was on the night of September twelfth and he said the Waikiki dance. I asked him when he left the dance and he said he didn’t know, he was drunk. I said, ‘Where did you pick up the woman?’ He said, ‘We didn’t have no woman.’ I told him he’d better tell the truth. Who kicked her? ‘Nobody kicked her.’ I said, ‘Tell me how you drove home,’ and he rattled off a bunch of streets and I don’t know their names but I let him go on awhile, then I said, ‘You were a prizefighter once, weren’t you?’ And he nodded, and I said, ‘Well that explains how you knew where to hit a woman one blow and break her jaw.’ He looked really nervous now, he wet his lips, he was squirmin’ and I said, ‘All right, if you’re not goin’ to talk, we’ll make you talk. You know what happened to Ida out at Pali?’ He didn’t say, but he was nervous, tremblin’. I said, ‘Well, what he got was nothin’ to what you’re going to get if you don’t tell the whole story, right now.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know nothin’,’ and I said, ‘Okay, Lord, go out and get the boys. After we work him over, he’ll talk all right.’ Kahahawai started to rise up and I pushed him back down and said, ‘Ida talked and told plenty on you. Those men out there, they’re comin’ in and beat you to ribbons.’”

Tommie’s voice began to quaver.

“Kahahawai was tremblin’ in his chair,” Tommie said, “and I said, ‘Last chance to talk—you know your gang was there!’ And he must’ve been more afraid of a beatin’ than the gun I was holdin’ on him, ‘cause he blurted it out: ‘Yeah, we done it!’”

Darrow paused to let the courtroom savor the moment. Finally he asked: “And then?”

“That’s the last I remember. Oh, I remember the picture that came into my mind, of my wife’s crushed face after he assaulted her and she prayed for mercy and he answered her with a blow that broke her jaw.”

“You had the gun in your hand as you were talking to him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you remember what you did?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know what became of the gun?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know what became of you?”

“N…no, sir.”

Tommie swallowed hard; he seemed to be holding back tears.

Darrow stood before the jury box, arms folded, shoulders hunched. He gave his client a few moments to compose himself, then said, “Do you remember anything of the flight to the mountains?”

“No, sir.”

“What’s the first thing you recall?”

“Sittin’ in a car on a country road. A bunch of people were comin’ up to us, sayin’ something about a body.”

“Do you remember being taken to the police station?”

“Not clearly.”

Darrow sighed, nodded. He went over and patted Tommie on the arm, then ambled toward the defense table, saying, “Take the witness, sir.”

Kelley rose and said, “Are you proud of your Southern heritage, Lt. Massie?”

Darrow almost jumped to his feet. “Objection! Immaterial, and intended to imply racial bias.”

“Your Honor,” Kelley said, “if the defense can explore the defendant’s state of mind, surely the prosecution has the same privilege.”

“You may do so,” the judge said, “but not with that question—it is misleading as it presupposes all Southerners are bigots.”

Kelley moved in close to Tommie. “Do you remember Mrs. Fortescue telling a reporter that you and she ‘bungled the job’?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did Joseph Kahahawai seem frightened?”

“Yes.”

“Did he plead for mercy?”

“No.”

“Did he put up a fight?”

“No.”

Kelley began to pace slowly up and down in front of the jury box. “Later, did Mrs. Fortescue or Jones or Lord, did any of them tell you how you behaved, or what you did, after the shot was fired?”

“Mrs. Fortescue said I just stood there and wouldn’t talk. She took me into the kitchen and tried to get me to take a drink, but I wouldn’t.”

“What did Jones say about what you’d done?”

“He wasn’t very complimentary.”

“Really?” Kelley’s tone was boldly arch. “Why? Because you only shot Kahahawai once?”

“No. He said I acted like a damn fool.”

Kelley feigned shock. “An enlisted man spoke to you in such a fashion?”

“Yes—and I resented it.”

Kelley sighed. Paced. Then he turned back to Tommie and said, “Did any of your fellow conspirators tell you why they took you along on the ride to Koko Head?”

“Yes…Mrs. Fortescue said she wanted me to get some fresh air.”

Kelley rolled his eyes and waved dismissively at Tommie. “This witness is excused.”

Tommie stepped off the stand and walked with head high over to the defense table, where Darrow smiled at him and nodded as if he’d done a wonderful job. Some of it had been pretty good, but the little-boy business about resenting his enlisted-man accomplice’s remark, and the lame notion that he’d been along on the corpse-disposal run to get some “fresh air,” were not shining moments.

In fact, Darrow would need to follow up with something remarkable to make the jury forget those lapses.

“The defense calls Thalia Massie,” Darrow said.

16

When the courtroom doors opened, Thalia Massie stood framed there as flashbulbs popped in the corridor, the packed gallery turning its collective head toward the surprisingly tall, astonishingly young-looking woman in the black crepe suit. Judge Davis didn’t bother banging his gavel to silence the stirring, the whispering; he allowed it to run its course as Thalia moved down the aisle in an awkward slouch, her slightly pudgy, pale, pretty face framed by fawn-colored hair, her protuberant blue-gray eyes cast downward, advancing in the uncertain manner that witnesses had reported of her as she walked along John Ena Road one night last September.

Her husband met her as she moved between the defense and prosecution tables; she paused as Tommie took and squeezed her hand. A murmur of approval rose from the mostly female, predominantly white spectators; I caught Admiral Stirling (seated with a woman I assumed to be his wife) casting his approving gaze on the noble couple as they exchanged brief, brave smiles.

But even smiling, Thalia had an oddly glazed, expressionless look, the vaguely wistful cast of someone mildly drugged.

She approached the stand stoopingly and was fumbling toward the chair when the judge reminded her there was an oath to take. She straightened momentarily, raising her hand, swearing to tell the truth, then settled down into the seat, knees together, hands in her lap, shoulders slouched, a posture at once prim and reminiscent of a naughty little girl sent to sit in the corner.

Darrow, his demeanor at its most grandfatherly, approached the witness stand and leaned against one arm. He pleasantly, calmly elicited from her the mandatory points of identification: her name, Thalia Fortescue Massie; her age, 21; age at the time of her marriage, 16, to Lt. Massie on Thanksgiving Day, 1927; they had no children; she would say they were happy, yes.

Thalia’s voice was a low, drawling near-monotone, nearly as expressionless as her face; but she was not emotionless: she twisted a handkerchief nervously in her hands as she answered.

“Do you remember going with your husband to the Ala Wai Inn on a certain night last September?”

“Yes. We went to a dance.”

“Did you have anything to drink?”

“Half of a highball. I don’t much care for liquor.”

“When did you leave the dance?”

“About eleven-thirty-five at night.”

“And where were you going?”

“I planned to walk around the corner and back.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I was tired and bored.”

“Where was Tommie?”

“When I saw him last he was dancing.”

“And where did you go?”

“I started walking toward Waikiki Beach.”

“I see. And tell me, where were you when something…unusual happened?”

Kelley was on his feet. “Once again, Your Honor, we are not here to retry the Ala Moana case. I must object to this line of questioning.”

Darrow’s smile was a mixture of benevolence and condescension. “Your Honor, all of this has bearing on Lt. Massie’s state of mind.”

Kelley was shaking his head, no. “What happened to this witness has no direct bearing on the sanity issue—the only pertinent question, Your Honor, is what she told her husband.”

A hissing arose from the gallery. The judge slammed his gavel twice, and frightened the snake into silence.

“Mr. Darrow,” Judge Davis said, “you will confine your questions to what Mrs. Massie told her husband, and what he told her.”

“Very well, Your Honor. Mrs. Massie, when did you next see Tommie? After you left the Inn?”

“About one o’clock in the morning. I’d finally reached my own home, and Lt. Massie telephoned me and I said, ‘Please come home right away, because something awful…’”

But that’s as far as she got. She buried her face in her hands, and her sobs echoed in the chamber. There was nothing Little Theater about it: this was real agony, and sent the ladies of the gallery dipping for their hankies in their purses.

Darrow’s expression was cheerless, but I knew within that sunken old breast, he was jumping for joy. Thalia’s cold-fish demeanor had transformed into the open sorrow of a wronged young woman.

Down from me at the table, Mrs. Fortescue, who’d been watching her daughter, eyes bright, chin up, reached for the sweating pitcher of ice water on the defense table and poured a glass. She pushed it down to Leisure, who nodded and rose, taking the glass up to Thalia. Leisure stayed up there, with Darrow, waiting for their witness to compose herself; it took a couple minutes.

Then Leisure took his seat, and Darrow resumed his questioning.

“What did you tell Tommie when he came home?”

“He asked me what happened. I…I didn’t want to tell him because it was so terrible….”

But she had told him, and now she told the jury, in all its awful detail, how she’d been beaten and raped, how Kahahawai had broken her jaw, how she’d not been allowed to pray, how one after another, they had assaulted her.

“I said, ‘You will knock my teeth out!’ He said, ‘What do I care, shut up, you…’ He called me something filthy. And the others stood around and laughed—”

“Your Honor,” Kelley said, sighing, not rising, “I don’t want to be interjecting constant objections, but she’s only allowed to say what she told her husband. That was your ruling.”

Darrow turned toward Kelley with startling swiftness for such an old man, and his tone was hard and low. “This is hardly the time to be making objections.”

Kelley’s voice had equal edge: “I haven’t been making enough of them!”

“Mr. Darrow,” the judge began, “confine yourself to…”

But Thalia took that cue to break down again. Judge Davis and everyone else waited for her sobs to subside, and then Darrow patiently led her through a recital of how she’d identified her attackers at the hospital, and how “wonderful” and “attentive” Tommie had been to her during her recovery.

“He took such good care of me,” she said, lips quivering. “He never complained about how often I woke him at night.”

“Did you notice any change in your husband’s behavior?”

“Oh yes. He never wanted to go out—the rumors bothered him so—and he didn’t sleep, he’d pace up and down the living room smoking cigarettes. He barely ate. He got so thin.”

“Did you know what he and your mother and the two sailors were planning?”

“No. Absolutely not. Once or twice Tommie said it would be wonderful to get a confession. I mean, it was always worrying him. I wanted him to forget about it, but he couldn’t.”

“On the day Joseph Kahahawai died, how did you learn what had happened?”

“Seaman Jones came to my door around ten o’clock.”

“Before or after the killing?”

“After! He came in and said all excitedly, ‘Here, take this,’ and gave me a gun, ‘Kahahawai has been killed!’ I asked him where Tommie was and he said he’d sent Tommie off with Mother in the car.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He asked me for a drink. I fixed him a highball. He drank it and said, ‘That’s not enough,’ so I filled his glass again. He was as pale as a ghost.”

So was she.

The tears of the witness and those of the gallery had ebbed; the emotional tenor had finally evened out. It was a good stopping place, and Darrow dismissed the witness.

“Your Honor,” Darrow said, “may I suggest we recess for the day, and not subject this witness to cross-examination at this time?”

Kelley was already approaching the witness stand. “Your Honor, I just have a few questions.”

“We’ll proceed,” the judge said.

Thalia shifted in her seat as Kelley moved in; her body seemed to stiffen, and her face took on a defiant cast, her mouth taking on a faint, defensive smirk. Darrow, taking his seat at the defense table, smiled at her, nodding his support, but I knew the old boy was worried: I could see the tightness around his eyes.

“Mrs. Massie, do you remember Captain Mclntosh and some other police coming to your house?”

“Yes.” Her tone was snippy.

“Did a telephone call come in that was answered by Jones?”

“No.” The smirk turned into a sneer.

Before our very eyes, the noble wronged wife was transmuting herself into an angry, bitchy child.

“Are you quite sure, Mrs. Massie?” Kelley stayed coldly polite.

She shifted stiffly in the chair. “Yes.”

“Well, perhaps you answered it and Jones asked who was calling.”

“No.”

“Who is Leo Pace?”

“Lt. Pace is commander of the S-34.”

“Your husband’s submarine commander.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember Jones going to the telephone and saying, ‘Leo—you’ve got to help Massie cover this up. Help us all cover this up.’ Words to that effect.”

“No! Jones would never address an officer by his first name.”

“Didn’t Jones refer to your husband as ‘Massie’ in front of the police?”

“He didn’t dare do it in my presence!”

I looked down at Darrow; his eyes were closed. This was as bad as Tommie’s similar remark about resenting familiarity from the enlisted man who helped him pull a kidnapping.

“Mrs. Massie, didn’t you instruct your maid, Beatrice Nakamura, to tell the police that Jones came over to your house not at ten, but at eight?”

“No.”

“Really. I can call Miss Nakamura to the stand, if you wish, Mrs. Massie.”

“That’s not what I told her.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her to say that he arrived a little after she came to work.”

“And when is that?”

“Eight-thirty.”

Thalia was displaying her remarkable ability to shift time; this was, after all, the same girl who had left the Ala Wai Inn at, variously, midnight, twelve-thirty, one o’clock, and (finally, at the cops’ request to fit the needs of their case) eleven-thirty-five.

“What became of the gun Jones handed you?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s missing? Someone stole it from your house, do you think?”

“I don’t know what became of it.”

Kelley gave the jury a knowing smile, then turned back to the witness.

“You have testified, Mrs. Massie, that your husband was always kind and considerate to you—that you never quarreled.”

“That is so.”

“As a married man myself, I must compliment you. Marriages without conflict are rare. You’re to be congratulated.”

As he said this, Kelley was walking to the prosecution table, where his assistant handed him a document; Kelley perused the paper, smiled to himself, then ambled back to the witness stand.

“Did you ever have a psychopathic examination at the University of Hawaii, Mrs. Massie?”

“I did,” she said, eyes tightening.

“Is this your handwriting?” Kelley handed her the sheet of paper, casually.

Thalia’s pale face reddened. She was not flushed or blushing, but blazing with anger. “This is a confidential document! A private matter!” She waved the sheet at him. “Where did you get this?”

“I’m here to ask questions, Mrs. Massie, not answer. Now, is that your handwriting?”

The low monotone was replaced by a shrill screech. “I refuse to answer! This is a privileged communication between doctor and patient! You have no right to bring it into open court like this….”

“Is the man who administered this questionnaire a doctor?”

“Yes, he is!”

“Isn’t he just a professor?”

But Thalia said no more. Her chin raised, her eyes defiant, she began to tear the document down the middle. Kelley’s eyes widened, but he said nothing, standing with folded arms, his mouth open in something that might have been a smile, as the petulant witness continued ripping the sheet up, tearing it to shreds. Then, with a flip of the wrist, she tossed the pieces to one side and they drifted like snowflakes as applause rang from the gallery and a few women cheered, whistled.

Judge Davis banged his gavel so hard the handle snapped. The courtroom was quiet. And while Thalia’s white-women cheering section admired this display, the jury was sitting in stony silence.

Thalia, not yet dismissed from testimony, bolted from the stand and ran behind the defense table into the waiting arms of Tommie.

Kelley, savoring the moment, stood looking down at the scattered snowflakes of the confidential document.

“Thank you, Mrs. Massie,” he said. “Thank you for at last revealing your true colors.”

Darrow rose, waving an arm. “Strike that from the record!”

Judge Davis, frowning, the broken gavel still in hand, said, “It will be stricken. Mr. Kelley, the court finds your language objectionable.”

But there was no contempt citing, though perhaps there might have been, had Thalia not taken center stage with one remark to the husband in whose arms she was enfolded, spoken in a way that would have reached the last row of the Little Theater.

“What right had he to say I don’t love you?” she sobbed. “Everyone knows that I love you!”

Darrow closed his eyes. His client’s wife had just revealed the contents of the document she’d destroyed.

Meanwhile, as Mrs. Fortescue looked on while dabbing her eyes with a hanky, Tommie was kissing Thalia, a lover’s clinch that would have made a perfect romantic finish for a movie, only this courtroom drama wasn’t over yet.

The next day Darrow closed his case with his two psychiatric experts imported from California, Dr. Thomas J. Orbison and Dr. Edward H. Williams, celebrated veterans of the Winnie Ruth Judd trial.

Orbison, ruddy, graying, portly, with wire-frame glasses and a hearing aid, described Tommie Massie’s insanity as “delirium with ambulatory automatism.”

Darrow grinned at the jury, raised his eyebrows, then turned back to his expert. “Translate it for those of us who didn’t go to medical school, Doctor.”

“Automatism is a state of impaired consciousness causing the victim to behave in an automatic or reflexive manner. In Lt. Massie’s case, this was caused by psychological strain.”

“In layman’s terms, Doctor.”

Orbison had a twitch of a nervous smile that damn near traveled to the corner of his left eye. “Lt. Massie was walking about in a daze, unaware of what was happening around him.”

“You mentioned a ‘psychological strain,’ Doctor, that triggered this response. What was that?”

“When Kahahawai said, ‘We done it,’ it was as if a mental bomb had exploded in Lt. Massie’s mind, inducing shock amnesia.”

“He was insane just prior to, and after, the shooting?”

Orbison nodded and twitched his smile. “He became insane the moment he heard Kahahawai’s last words.”

Darrow said, “Thank you, Doctor. Your witness.”

Kelley came quickly up, asking his first question on the move: “Isn’t it possible a man might go through such ‘psychological strain’ and in a fit of anger kill a man and know it?”

The nervous smile twitched again. “The condition you call ‘anger’ would be anger with a delirium that is defined as insanity.”

“You think it’s improbable that Lt. Massie killed Kahahawai in a fit of anger?”

“Yes—because all of Lt. Massie’s plans led up to getting a confession, and he killed the very person necessary to achieve this goal. This was an irrational, insane act.”

“He was experiencing ‘shock amnesia’?”

“That is correct.”

“Are you aware, Doctor, that amnesia is not a legal insanity defense?”

Another twitch smile. “The amnesia aspect is not what labels Lt. Massie legally insane. The lieutenant was seized by an uncontrollable impulse when he was confronted by direct and final proof that Kahahawai was the man who assaulted his wife.”

“I see. I see.” Kelley gestured toward the defense table. “Well, Doctor, is Massie sane now?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Ah,” Kelley said, as if relieved. “Just a one-killing man, then. That’s all, Doctor.”

Darrow’s second expert, Dr. Williams, tall, lean, stoic, his gray Van Dyke lending him a Freudish air of authority, basically concurred with Orbison, though he added a chemical slant to their shared diagnosis.

“The protracted worry Lt. Massie endured, the rumors on the street that troubled and frustrated him so, might bring out an actively irrational condition, resulting in pouring a secretion into the blood. Strong emotions can have an important effect on the suprarenal glands.”

Darrow gestured toward the defense table. “Has Lt. Massie regained his sanity?”

“Quite fully.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Your witness, Mr. Kelley.”

Kelley strode forward. “Would you say it is possible that Massie might be telling a lie—that is, malingering in his testimony?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Isn’t it usual in cases of this sort for the defendant to simulate insanity and then hire expert witnesses who can testify in support of this pose?”

Williams frowned and turned toward the judge. “Your Honor, must I answer so disrespectful a question?”

“Withdrawn, Your Honor,” Kelley said with a disgusted sigh. “No further questions.”

Darrow rested his case, and Kelley—who had moments before sarcastically derided expert psychiatric testimony—called his own alienist, Dr. Joseph Bowers of Stanford University, by way of rebuttal. Bowers had testified for the prosecution in the Judd case; old home week.

The bearded, middle-aged, scholarly Bowers spoke for over an hour, showing off an encyclopedic grasp of the trial testimony thus far, detailing his study of Tommie’s background, declaring, “Nothing in Lt. Massie’s record indicates he was subject to states of delirium or memory loss—in my opinion, he was quite sane at the time of the killing.”

Kelley was nodding. “What else has led you to this diagnosis, Doctor?”

Bowers had a habit of turning to face the jury as he gave his answers; with his air of professorial expertise, this was quite effective. “Well, I can’t actually provide a diagnosis,” he said, “because the defense has denied me access to the defendant.”

Darrow growled, “I object to the witness’s manner. Why doesn’t he face forward in the chair like any other witness? If he’s going to address the jury, he might as well get up and make a speech to them. This is not the impartial attitude that—”

Bowers exploded; perhaps it was an uncontrollable impulse. “Do you mean to insinuate that I am not honest, sir? Well, I resent it!”

Darrow, hunkering over the table like a grizzly bear over a garbage can, grumbled: “Resent it, then.”

“Please continue, Doctor,” Kelley said, playing the voice of reason.

“Lt. Massie and these other three individuals,” Bowers said, “knowing the consequences, took deliberate steps toward self-protection. They acted in a spirit of vengeance characteristic of persons who feel they’ve not obtained justice by legal means. Such individuals measure their acts, and consider the nature of and consequences of those acts. The steps of this plan were securing an automobile, wearing gloves and goggles, carrying guns, taking steps for disposal of the body, and so on.”

Kelley was nodding. “Thank you, Doctor. That’s all.”

Darrow, remaining seated, asked only one question: “Doctor, may I assume you’re being handsomely paid for coming down here and giving your testimony?”

“I expect to be paid,” Bowers said testily.

“That is all.”

Kelley, on his way back to his table, turned and said, “Prosecution rests, Your Honor.”

“Summations begin tomorrow,” Judge Davis said, and banged with his new gavel. “Court is adjourned.”

And the next day summations did begin, but it was the second team up first, with Leisure making the case for the unwritten law (“You gentlemen of the jury must decide whether a man whose wife has been ravished, and who kills the man who did it, must spend his life behind dark prison walls, all because the shock proved too great for his mind”), and Kelley’s tall young assistant Barry Ulrich lashing out against lynch law (“You cannot make Hawaii safe against rape by licensing murder!”).

So it was on the following day, with police radio cars parked in front of the Judiciary Building, machine gun-toting patrolmen posted to stave off rumored native uprisings, in a courtroom strung with wire and microphones to broadcast to the mainland what might be the Great Defender’s last great oratory, the gallery packed even tighter than usual with Admiral Stirling and Walter Dillingham and other luminaries noticeably present, that Clarence Darrow rose from his chair behind the defense table where room had been made for his friend Dr. Porter, his wife Ruby, as well as Thalia Massie, seated holding hands with her husband, and shambled toward the jury. His suit was dark, baggy. His gray hair streamed haphazardly down his forehead. Fans hummed overhead. Palms rustled. Birds called. Traffic coursed by.

“Gentlemen, this case illustrates the working of human destiny more than any other case I’ve handled. It illustrates the effect of sorrow and mishap on human minds and lives, it shows us how weak and powerless human beings are in the hands of relentless powers.”

He stood before the jury box as he spoke, his bony frame planted.

“Eight months ago Mrs. Fortescue was in Washington, well respected. Eight months ago Thomas Massie had worked himself up to the rank of lieutenant in the Navy, respected, courageous, intelligent. Eight months ago his attractive wife was known and respected and admired by the community. Eight months ago Massie and his wife went to a dance, young, happy. Today, they are in a criminal court and you twelve men are asked to send them to prison for life.”

He began to slowly pace before them.

“We contend that for months Lt. Massie’s mind had been affected by grief, sorrow, trouble, day after day, week after week, month after month. What do you think would have happened to any one of you, under the same condition? What if your wife were dragged into the bushes, and raped by four or five men?”

He paused, leaned against the rail of the box. “Thalia Massie was left on that lonely road in pain and agony and suffering. Her husband hears from her bruised lips a story as terrible, as cruel, as any I’ve heard—isn’t that enough to unsettle any man’s mind?”

He turned and walked toward the defense table; stood before Tommie and Thalia and said, “There have been people who have spread around in this community vile slanders. They concocted these strange, slanderous stories, and what effect did they have on this young husband? Going back and forth, nursing his wife, working all day, attending her at night. He lost sleep. He lost hope.”

Darrow turned back to the jury as he gestured with an open hand toward Tommie. “Our insane asylums are filled with men and women who had less cause for insanity than he had!”

He ambled back to them, hands in the pockets of his baggy pants. “In time, five men were indicted for the crime. Tommie was in the courtroom during the trial of the assailants. A strange circumstance indeed that the jury disagreed in that case. I don’t know why, I don’t see why, but the jury did their work and they disagreed. Months passed, and still this case was not retried.”

He again gestured toward the defense table, this time indicating Mrs. Fortescue. “Here is the mother. They wired to her and she came. Poems and rhymes have been written about mothers, but I want to call your attention to something more basic than that: Nature. I don’t care whether it’s a human mother, a mother of beasts or birds of the air, they are all alike. To them there is one all-important thing and that is a child that they carried in their womb.”

Now he gestured with both hands at the stiffly noble Mrs. Fortescue.

“She acted as every mother acts, she felt as your mothers have felt. Everything else is forgotten in the emotion that carries her back to the time..,” and now he motioned to Thalia, “…when this woman was a little baby in her arms whom she bore and she loved.”

The sound of rustling handkerchiefs indicated tears were again flowing among the ladies of the gallery.

Darrow looked from face to face among the jurymen. “Life comes from the devotion of mothers, of husbands, loves of men and women, that’s where life comes from. Without this love, this devotion, the world would be desolate and cold and take its lonely course around the sun alone!” He leaned against the rail again. “This mother took a trip of five thousand miles, over land and sea, to her child. And here she is now, in this courtroom, waiting to go to the penitentiary.”

He rocked back on his heels and his voice rose to a near shout: “Gentlemen, if this husband and this mother and these faithful boys go to the penitentiary, it won’t be the first time that such a structure has been sanctified by its inmates. When people come to your beautiful islands, one of the first places they will wish to see is the prison where the mother and the husband are confined, to marvel at the injustice and cruelty of men and pity the inmates and blame Fate for the persecution and sorrow that has followed this family.”

Now his voice became gentle again as he began to pace before them. “Gentlemen, it was bad enough that the wife was raped. That vile stories circulated, causing great anxiety and agony in this young couple. All this is bad enough. But now you are asked to separate them, to send the husband for the rest of his life to prison.”

His voice began to rise in timbre, gradually, and now he faced the gallery and the members of the press, saying, “There is, somewhere deep in the feelings and instincts of all men, a yearning for justice, an idea of what is right and what is wrong, of what is fair, and this came before the first law was written and will abide before the last law is dead.”

Again he moved to the defense table; he stopped before Tommie. “Poor young man. He began to think of vindicating his wife from this slander. It was enough she’d been abused by these…men. Now she had been abused by talk.” His eyes traveled back to the jury and his voice was reasonableness itself: “He wanted to get a confession. To get somebody imprisoned? For revenge? No—that did not concern him. He was concerned with the girl.” And now Darrow looked affectionately at Thalia. “The girl he had taken in marriage when she was sixteen. Sweet sixteen….”

He returned to Mrs. Fortescue, made a sweeping gesture, saying, “The mother, too, believed it necessary to get a confession. The last thing they wanted to do was shoot or kill. They formed a plan to take Kahahawai to their house and have him confess. They never thought of it as illegal…it was the ends they thought of, not the means.”

Now he positioned himself before Jones and Lord. “And these two common seamen, are they bad? There are some human virtues that are unfortunately not common: loyalty, devotion. They were loyal when a shipmate asked for help. Was that bad?”

He swiveled and pointed a finger at a random male face in the crowd. “If you needed a friend to help you out of a scrape, would you wait outside a prayer meeting Wednesday night…I guess that’s the right night…”

There was a murmur of laughter at this wry uncertainty from the country’s most famous agnostic.

“Or would you take one of these sailors? They did not want to kill, they made no plan to kill. And the house where they took Kahahawai was not a good place to kill—one family thirty feet away, another house twenty-five feet away. A lovely place to kill someone, isn’t it?”

Solemnly he faced Mr. and Mrs. Kahahawai, in their usual spot in the front. “I would do nothing to add to the sorrow of the mother and father of the boy. They have human feelings. I have, too.” Wheeling toward the jury, he pointed a finger that was not quite accusing. “I want you to have human feelings. Any man without human feelings is without life!”

Sighing, he began prowling before the bench. He seemed almost to be talking to himself. “I haven’t always had the highest opinion of the average human being. Man is none too great at best. He is moved by everything that reaches him. Tommie has told you that there was no intention of killing.”

His voice climbed again.

“But when Kahahawai said, ‘Yeah, we done it!’, everything was blotted out! Here was the man who had ruined his wife.” Again he pointed at the jury. “If you can put yourself in his place, if you can think of his raped wife, of his months of mental anguish, if you can confront the unjust, cruel fate that unrolled before him, then you can judge…but only then.”

His voice was barely audible as he said, “Tommie saw the picture of his wife, pleading, injured, raped—and he shot. Had any preparations been made to get this body out? What would you have done with a dead man on your hands? You would want to protect yourselves! What is the first instinct? Flight. To the mountains, to the sea, anywhere but where they were.”

A humorless laugh rumbled in the sunken chest as he walked, hands in pockets again. “This isn’t the conduct of someone who had thought out a definite plan. It is the hasty, half-coordinated instinct of one surprised in a situation. As for Tommie, gradually he came back to consciousness, realizing where he was. Where is the mystery in a man cracking after six or eight months of worry?”

Darrow returned to a position directly in front of the jury box. “This was a hard, cruel, fateful episode in the lives of these poor people. Is it possible that anyone could think of heaping more sorrows on their devoted heads, to increase their burden and add to their agony? Can anyone say that these are the type of people on whom prison gates should close? Have they ever stolen, forged, assaulted, raped?”

He slammed a fist into an open hand. “They are here because of what happened to them! Take these poor pursued, suffering people into your care, as you would have them take you if you were in their place. Take them not with anger, but with understanding. Aren’t we all human beings? What we do is affected by things around us; we’re more made than we make.”

With a sigh, he strolled to where he could get a view of the green hills out a courtroom window. Almost wistfully, damn near prayerfully, he said, “I have looked at this Island, which is a new country to me. I’ve never had any prejudice against any race on earth. To me these questions of race must be solved by understanding—not by force.”

One last time he positioned himself before the defendants, gesturing from Tommie to Mrs. Fortescue and finally to the quasi-defendant, Thalia herself. “I want you to help this family. You hold in your hands not only the fate but the life of these people. What is there for them if you pronounce a sentence of doom on them?”

And he plodded, clearly exhausted from his effort, to the rail of the jury box, where he leaned and said, softly, gently, “You are a people to heal, not destroy. I place this in your hands asking you to be kind and considerate, both to the living and the dead.”

Eyes brimming with tears, Darrow walked slowly to his chair and sank into it. He was not the only one crying in the courtroom. I was a little teary-eyed myself—not for Massie or Mrs. Fortescue or those idiot gobs: but for the great attorney who may well have just delivered his last closing argument.

Kelley, however, was unimpressed.

“I stand before you for the law,” he said, “opposed to those who have violated the law…and opposed to those—like defense counsel, who has distinguished himself during his long career by disparaging the law—who would ask you to violate the law.”

Kelley paced before the jury, but more quickly than Darrow; his businesslike summation was quicker, too.

“You have heard an argument of passion, not reason,” Kelley said, “a plea of sympathy, not insanity! Judge on the facts and the law, gentlemen.”

Point by point, he took Darrow on: no evidence had been presented that Massie had fired the fatal shot (“He couldn’t hide behind the skirts of his mother-in-law, and he couldn’t put the blame on the enlisted men he inveigled into his scheme—so he took the blame”); he reminded the jury how Darrow had sought to remove Mrs. Kahahawai from the courtroom because of the unfair sympathy she might invoke, then himself put Thalia Massie on the stand in a “mawkish display”; he dismissed the insanity defense and the experts who supported it as a last refuge of rich guilty defendants; and he reminded the jury that had these four not formed a conspiracy to commit the felony of kidnapping, Joseph Kahahawai “would be alive today.”

“Are you going to follow the law of Hawaii, or the argument of Darrow? The same presumption of innocence that clothes these defendants clothes Kahahawai and went down with him to his grave. He went to his grave, in the eyes of the law, an innocent man. These conspirators have removed by their violent act the possibility that he will ever be anything other than an innocent man, regardless of whether or not the other Ala Moana defendants are retried and found guilty.”

Mrs. Fortescue’s impassive mask tightened into a frown; it had not occurred to her that she had helped transform Joe Kahahawai into an eternally innocent man.

“You and I know something Darrow does not,” Kelley said chummily, in one of the few instances when he leaned against the jury rail in the fashion Darrow had done, “and that is that no Hawaiian would say, ‘We done it.’ Kahahawai might have said, ‘We do it,’ or ‘We been do it,’ but never ‘We done it.’ There is no past tense in the Hawaiian language, and they don’t use that vernacular so common on the mainland.”

Now it was Kelley’s turn to stand before Kahahawai’s parents. “Mr. Darrow speaks of mother love. He singled out ‘the mother’ in this courtroom. Well, there’s another mother in this courtroom. Has Mrs. Fortescue lost her daughter? Has Massie lost his wife? They’re both here in the single person of Thalia Massie. But where is Joseph Kahahawai?”

Kelley wandered over to the defense table and panned a cold gaze across Lord, Jones, Massie.

“These men are military men, trained to kill…but they are also trained in the ways of first aid. When Kahahawai was shot, what attempt did they make to save his life? None! They let him bleed to death while they began trying to save their own skins. And where was the dying statement of a man about to meet his Maker with such a burden? I expected that in their defense by this high-powered attorney we would learn that as Kahahawai lay dying, he told what had happened.”

Now Kelley fixed his gaze on Darrow, who sat with bowed head. “In the Loeb and Leopold case…”

Darrow looked sharply up.

“…Darrow said he hated killing, regardless of how it was done, by men or by the state. But now he comes before you and says a killing is justified. That it is not murder.”

Darrow bowed his head again.

“Well,” Kelley continued, “if Lt. Massie had taken his gun and mowed these men down in the hospital the night his wife identified them, he’d at least have had the understanding of the community however unlawful that act might be. But instead he waited months, and dragged in these enlisted men…though they too are free and voluntary parties to the act, and are fully responsible. A killing is a killing, Mr. Darrow, and under these circumstances, it is clearly murder!”

Kelley moved quickly to the jury box and pounded a fist on the rail. “Hawaii is on trial, gentlemen! Is there to be one law for strangers and another for us? Are strangers to come here and take the law in their own hands? Are you going to give Lt. Massie leave to walk out and into the loving arms of the Navy? They’ll give him a medal! They’ll make him an admiral. Chief of Staff! He and Admiral Stirling are of the same mind—they both believe in lynch law.”

Kelley pointed at the flag behind the bench.

“As long as the American flag flies on these shores—without an admiral’s pennant over it—you must regard the constitution and the law. You have taken an oath to uphold it, gentlemen. Do your duty uninfluenced by either sympathy or the influence of admirals. As General Smedley Butler, the pride of the Marines, has said: ‘To hell with the admirals!’”

I couldn’t resist turning to get a glimpse at Stirling in the audience; his face was white with rage.

On this bold note, Kelley took his seat, and the judge began his instructions to the jury, pointing out the distinctions between the possible verdicts of murder in the second degree and manslaughter.

The defendants were to be held in the Young Hotel until the verdict came down; there was a palpable sense of relief among them as Chang Apana accompanied them out of court. Isabel, who hadn’t spoken to me since our moonlight swim, smiled at me as she accompanied Thalia and Tommie out; what was that about? Ruby was waiting in the aisle as Darrow pulled me off to one side.

“That was a fine summation, C.D.”

“Mine or Kelley’s?”

“Both, actually.”

“You need to get back to work.”

“Why in hell? The case is over. It’s time to go back to Chicago.”

He shook his head, no, and the unruly hair bounced. “Not at all. We’ve just begun the battle.” He smiled slyly. “Now, I’m going to howl indignantly when it happens and cry twenty kinds of injustice and bluster like a schoolyard bully, acting as surprised as hell my clients weren’t found not guilty…but Nate, we’re going to be lucky to pull manslaughter out of this.”

“You think so? Your closing was brilliant—”

Looking around to make sure no one—not even Ruby—could hear, he laid a hand on my shoulder and whispered: “I’ll be going after pardons from the governor, and the mainland press and politicians will put the pressure on, and that’ll help me…but once and for all, I need to know the truth about that goddamn rape.”

“C.D., how can you be sure your clients won’t get off?”

He chuckled. “I knew they wouldn’t the minute I saw those dark faces on that jury. I’ve been pleading this case to the press ever since. That’s the only place this case can be won. Now, you come have some supper with us over at the Young—but then get your ass back on the job, son!”

Who was I to argue with Clarence Darrow?

17

Chang Apana had offered to open doors, and he’d already done that for me with the local cops, in spades. Now I asked him to accompany me into the part of town where tourists seldom ventured, particularly white ones.

He was reluctant, but I pressed.

“This rumor about a second gang of boys,” I said, “there must be somebody out there who can pin names on ’em. And I’m not going to find the answer on the beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian.”

“Okay, but day only,” he cautioned. “Chang not as young as he used to be. And dark night on waterfront not always friendly to white face.”

“Fine. Lead on.”

On River Street, facing the docks along the Nuanuu Stream, sat shabby storefronts—pawnshops, saimin cafes, and, predominantly, herb dens whose shelves overflowed with glass jars and reed baskets of such exotic commodities as dried seaweed, ginger root, shark fins, and seahorse skeletons.

The conversations between Chang and the shopkeepers were in Cantonese, and I understood nothing—except how feared and respected this wizened little man with the scarred skull face was in the toughest section of town.

“Fu Manchu in there was three times your size and a third your age,” I said, jerking a thumb back toward the musty-smelling hole we’d just exited.

“If strength were all,” Chang said, “tiger would not fear scorpion.”

“What stinger do you have in your tail?”

He walked quickly; I had much longer legs, but keeping up with him was a trick.

“They remember Chang from years ago. I make name running down gamblers, raiding opium dens. They not see me ’round here in long time, now I show up when they know police looking to remove black eye of Massie case.”

“And they’re not anxious to be the brunt of a new crackdown designed to restore the department’s reputation.”

“Correct. So I would think they would be anxious to help Chang Apana.”

“Then why aren’t we getting anything?”

He shrugged as he walked. “Nothing to get. Everyone hears rumor about second gang. Nobody hears name.”

We spent the better part of two days prowling a maze of dark alleyways, crooked paths, and narrow lanes, street after unpaved street where if I were to outstretch my arms I could touch a wall on either side. I never quite got used to the sickly-sweet stench of the nearby pineapple canneries that merged here with the salty odor of the marshlands below the city. And the sagging balconies and rickety wooden stairs of tenements made the Maxwell Street ghetto of my childhood seem like Hyde Park.

Chang questioned various whores, pimps, and assorted hardcases, sometimes in Hawaiian, sometimes in Cantonese, occasionally in Japanese, in neighborhoods with names that were a little too vivid for comfort: Blood Town, Tin Can Alley, Hell’s Half Acre. In Aala Park, Chang questioned rummies and hip-pocket bootleggers; but in Mosquito Flats, a disturbingly pretty, disturbingly young-looking prostitute in a red silk slit-up-the-sides dress told him something that made his eyes flash.

He grabbed her by the arm, tight, and spat Cantonese at her. Scared as hell, she squealed a stream of Cantonese back at him—but she seemed only to be repeating what she’d said before, louder.

And I thought I’d made out two English words: “Lie man!”

Now Chang was really walking fast. Something was bothering him.

“What did she say? What’s going on, Chang?”

“Nothing. Crazy talk.”

“What did she say? Did she give you a name?”

“Dead end.”

“What? Chang, did I hear her call you a liar?”

But he wouldn’t say any more about it, and the sun was going down, so it was time for the haole from Chicago to head to friendlier territory. We walked to our cars, parked on Beretania Street, and Chang paused at his Model T.

“So sorry I was of so small help,” Chang said.

“We going to pick up tomorrow where we left off?”

“No. Nowhere else to ask.”

“Hey, we haven’t even tried the residential neighborhoods yet.”

A rabbit warren of slum housing nearby included the home of the late Joe Kahahawai.

“With respect,” Chang said, “I decline offer further assistance.”

And the little man got in his car and rumbled off.

“What the hell,” I said to nobody.

Before I drove all the way back to Waikiki, I used a pay phone and checked with Leisure at the Alexander Young.

“Any word?” I asked.

“Glad you called,” he said. “We were just leaving for the courthouse. There’s a verdict.”

“Christ! How long did it take, anyway?”

“Fifty hours. Two hours ago, the judge asked the jury if they felt they could reach a verdict…we all thought we were headed to a hung-jury mistrial, like the Ala Moana case…but they said they could. And they did. See you over there?”

“See you over there.”

Darrow was right: it was manslaughter.

When the court clerk read the verdict, Thalia stood up, next to her husband, as if she were one of the defendants upon whom judgment was being pronounced. All four were declared equally guilty, but with “leniency recommended.”

The defendants took it stoically: a thin smile traced Mrs. Fortescue’s lips, and Tommie stood erect, Lord too, though Jones was nibbling at his fingernails. Thalia, on the other hand, went completely out of control, weeping and wailing.

Over Thalia’s sobs, the judge set sentencing for a week later, and prosecutor Kelley agreed to allow the prisoners to be kept in the Navy’s custody, on the Alton, until that time. The judge thanked and dismissed the jurors.

Thalia’s wailing continued, but Tommie said to her, surprisingly harshly, “Get ahold of yourself!” And she quieted down.

The public was filing out, but the reporters were swarming forward. Perhaps knowing he was under their watchful eye, Darrow went over to Kelley, shook the prosecutor’s hand, and said, “Congratulations.” Patient as a pallbearer, Chang Apana was waiting to escort the defendants to the Shore Patrol, and allowed Lord and Jones to shake hands with Kelley and proclaim no hard feelings.

Tommie held his hand out to Kelley. “If I ever had anything against you—”

Kelley, shaking Tommie’s hand, interrupted, saying, “I’ve never had anything personally against you, or your wife.”

Thalia snapped, “Oh really? Then you ought to look up the difference between ‘prosecution’ and ‘persecution.’”

The reporters were grinning as they jotted down this juicy exchange.

Tommie was again quieting Thalia down, whispering to her. She folded her arms, looked away, poutily.

“Mrs. Fortescue!” a reporter called. “What’s your reaction to the verdict?”

Her chin was, as usual, high; and there was a quaver in her voice, undercutting the casualness she affected: “I expected it. American womanhood means nothing in Honolulu, even to white people.”

Another reporter asked Tommie the same question.

“I’m not afraid of punishment,” he said, an arm around the sulky Thalia. “The Navy is behind us to a man.”

“Go Navy!” Jones said.

Lord nodded and said the same thing, shaking a fist in the air. You know what? I think I would rather pick my backup out of the crowd at a Wednesday night prayer meeting.

Another reporter called out: “How about you, Mr. Darrow? What’s your reaction?”

“Well,” Darrow said, gathering his briefcase and other things off the defense table, “I’m not a Navy man, but this does bring to mind a certain phrase: ‘We have not yet begun to fight.’”

“You beat the second-degree murder rap,” the reporter reminded him.

“The verdict is a stunning travesty on justice and on human nature,” he said, working up some steam. “I’m shocked and outraged. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

And as Chang Apana lead Darrow’s clients into the waiting arms of the Shore Patrol, C.D. turned and winked at me, before trundling out, along the way filling the ears of the reporters with more expressions of his surprise and disappointment at this gross miscarriage of justice.

I caught up with Chang in front of the courthouse. Flashbulbs were lighting up the night as the defendants were piled into two Navy cars; Thalia was allowed to ride back to Pearl with Tommie.

“Chang!”

The little cop in the Panama hat turned and cast his poker-faced gaze my way.

“What was that about this afternoon?” I asked him.

“I owe you apology, Nate.”

“You owe me an explanation.”

People were lingering in front of the courthouse. Kelley and Darrow had been buttonholed by reporters, and we were in the midst of a chattering crowd, mostly haole, mostly unhappy.

“This is no place to talk,” Chang said. “At later time.”

And he slipped away from me, into the crowd, stepping into a patrol car that pulled away from the curb, leaving me just another unhappy haole in the crowd.

That evening, I kept an appointment at Lau Yee Ching’s at Kuhio and Kalakaua Avenue, a sprawling, spotless pagoda palace that put any Chinese restaurant back home to shame. The beaming host, in black silk pajamas and slippers, asked if I had a reservation; I gave the name of the party I was joining and his face turned grave before he nodded and handed me over to a good-looking geisha.

The geisha, whose oval face was as lovely and expressionless as the white-painted women in the Chinese tapestries along the walls, was expecting me.

She was Horace Ida’s sister.

“My brother is innocent,” she whispered, and that was all either of us said as she led me through a fairly busy dining room that seemed more or less equally divided between tourists and locals, to a private dining alcove where her brother was waiting.

Then the geisha was gone, closing a door on us.

“Victory dinner, Shorty?” I asked, sitting across from him at a table that could have sat eight.

“We didn’t win anything today,” Ida said sourly. “That guy Kelley will prosecute us next.”

“Sure this place is safe? It’s hopping.”

A steaming plate of almond chop suey was on the linen-covered table; a bowl of rice, too; and a little pot of tea. Ida had already served himself and was digging in. There was a place setting waiting for me—silverware, not chopsticks like Ida was using.

“Reporters don’t bother tail me here,” he said, shrugging. “They know my sis works at Lau Yee’s, I eat here all the time, on the cuff.”

“Your sister sleeping with the owner?”

He glared at me; pointed with a chopstick. “She not that kinda girl. I don’t like that kinda talk. Her boss believes in us.”

“Us?”

“Ala Moana boys. Lotta Chinese and Hawaiian merchants put up dough for our defense, you know.”

“That’s the rumor I heard. Of course, this is an island full of rumors.”

This meeting was my idea; I had let him pick the place, as long as it wasn’t the damn Pali. I’d wanted somewhere public, but not too public. Neither one of us wanted to be seen together, particularly by the press. Officially, we were in opposing camps.

“Rumors like the story that you fellas got blamed for what some other carload of boys did,” I said. “It’s all over the Island…but nobody seems to know who these invisible men are.”

Ida, mouth full of almond chop suey, chuckled. “If I know who really do it, you think I wouldn’t say?”

“Maybe. Of course, back where I come from, it isn’t honorable to rat guys out.”

He looked up from his food with spaniel eyes. “If I knew…if I hear anything, I’d say.”

“I believe you. Of course, maybe they don’t exist; maybe the second gang is nothing but a rumor.”

“Somebody attack on that white woman, and it wasn’t us.”

I leaned forward. “Then, Shorty—you and your friends, you need to beat the bushes for me. I’m an outsider, I can only do so much.”

He frowned. “Why do you want to help? Why don’t you go home now? You and Clarence Darrow who is too big a shot to meet with us.”

The chop suey was delicious; best I ever had. “I’m here on his behalf. I believe if Darrow is convinced of your innocence, he’ll help you.”

“Help how?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I know he’s dealing with the governor for his clients; he might do the same for you.”

Ida snorted. “Why?”

“Maybe he agrees with you. Maybe he thinks he was on the wrong side of the courtroom in this one.”

Ida thought about it. “What can I do? What can we do?”

“I know the Island’s crawling with rumors, but I need leads, and I need leads with substance.”

“There is one rumor,” Ida said, frowning thoughtfully, “that does not go away. I hear it over and over.”

“What’s that?”

“That Thalia Massie have kanaka boyfriend.”

“A beach boy.”

He shrugged, ate some rice. “Maybe a beach boy.”

“I don’t suppose he has a name.”

“No. Sometimes I hear he’s a beach boy. More times I hear he’s a music boy.”

The doorman at the Ala Wai Inn said Thalia had talked to a music boy before she went out in the night.

And the music boy had a name—Sammy.

“Thanks for dinner, Shorty.” I rose from the table, touched a napkin to my lips.

“That all you gonna eat?”

“I got enough,” I said.

The dark, stocky doorman at the Ala Wai was wearing the orange shirt with flowers on it again. He didn’t recognize me at first; maybe that’s because I wasn’t in my parrots-on-red silk number, though I did dress up my brown suit with a blue tie with yellow blossoms I’d bought in the Royal Hawaiian gift shop.

I held up a five-dollar bill, and that he recognized.

“We talked about Thalia Massie,” I reminded him, working my voice up over the tremolo of the George Ku Trio’s steel guitar. “This is the fin you were gonna get if that music boy, Sammy, showed up….”

“But he hasn’t, boss.”

I put the five-spot away and fished out a ten. Held it up. “Has he been here for a sawbuck?”

A rueful half-smile formed on his moon face. He shook his head, saying, “Even a double sawbuck can’t make him here when he never was.”

“Tell ya what, Joe—that’s what you will get…a double sawbuck…if you call me when you see him. You still got my name and number?”

He nodded, patted his pocket. “Got it right here, boss. You at the Royal Hawaiian.”

“Good. Good man.”

“He may show, anytime.”

I frowned. “Why’s that?”

“I seen another guy here from Joe Crawford’s band. So they must be takin’ a break from that Maui gig.”

His use of “gig”—a term I’d heard jazz players in Chicago use—reminded me how small the world was getting.

“Any of Crawford’s music boys here tonight?”

He shook his head, no. “But one of those commanders you was here with last time is.”

“Commanders?”

He grinned. “I call ’em all ‘Commander.’ They get a kick of that, those Navy officers.”

“You know which ‘commander’ is here tonight?”

“Let me look.” He had a clipboard hanging from a teakwood lattice. “Sure. Bradford. Lt. Jimmy Bradford.”

I thought for a second. “Joe, are the private dining rooms in use upstairs?”

“No. Earlier tonight, not now.”

“Where’s ‘Commander’ Bradford sitting?”

Joe pointed, and I moved through a haze of smoke past the Chinese woodwork of booths and the press of couples on the dance floor, weaving through the mostly kanaka crowd until I found Bradford, casual in white mufti but no tie, seated in a booth off the dance floor. He was with a woman whose name I didn’t recall but, from my previous visit to the Ala Wai, remembered as the wife of another officer. She was brunette and pleasantly plump and half in the bag.

“Good evening, Lieutenant,” I said.

Hollowly handsome Bradford, a drink in one hand, a smoke in the other, looked up; his face went from blank to annoyed to falsely affable. “Heller. Uh, Judy, this is Nate Heller, he was Clarence Darrow’s investigator.”

Pretty, pretty drunk Judy smiled and bobbled her head at me.

“Actually,” I said, “I still am.”

“You’re still what?” Bradford asked.

“Darrow’s investigator. Sentencing isn’t for a week; we’re tying up some loose ends before going to the governor for clemency.”

Bradford was nodding. “Slide in. Join us.”

I stayed where I was. “Actually, I wondered if I could have a word with you, in private.”

“Sure.” He shrugged, grinned, nodded out toward the packed dance floor where couples were clinched, swaying to the soothing three-part harmonies and seductive rhythms of the George Ku Trio. “But where would we do that, exactly?”

“I need to get a look at the private dining room upstairs, where Thalia crashed the Stockdale party. Maybe you could point it out, and we could use that for a private chat.”

He shrugged. “Okay. If you think it’d be helpful to the cause.”

“I think it would.”

He leaned forward and touched the brunette’s hand, which was tight around her glass. “Can you take care of yourself for a couple minutes, hon?” he asked.

She smiled and said something unintelligible that passed for “yes,” and then Bradford and I were wending our way through the crowd at the edge of the dance floor, heading for the front of the club. There were stairs to the mezzanine on either side; Bradford, carrying his drink in a water glass, was in the lead as we wandered toward the right.

“Don’t get the wrong idea about Judy,” Bradford said, looking back with a sickly grin. “Her husband Bob’s out on sub duty and she’s kinda lonely, needed some company.”

“I won’t.”

He frowned in confusion. “Won’t what?”

“Get the wrong idea.”

Up the stairs, past a few booths where couples cuddled and kissed and laughed and smoked and sipped their spiked Cokes, we came to the first of several small dining alcoves, not unlike the one at Lau Yee Ching’s where I’d spoken earlier with Horace Ida.

“Which one was the Stockdale party in?” I asked him.

Bradford nodded toward the middle one, and I gestured like a gracious usher toward the door; he stepped inside, and I followed, shutting the door behind us.

The walls were pink and bare but for, at left, a small plaque of a gold dragon on a black background; straight ahead, a window looked out on the parking lot; a cheap version of a Chinese chandelier was centered over a small banquet table.

“This is where Thalia was,” I said, “when you came looking for her.”

“I wasn’t looking for her.” He shrugged, sipped his drink. “She was just here already when I stuck my head in. I was, you know, socializing, goin’ around the club, table-hoppin’.”

“I think you’d noticed what a bad mood Thalia was in,” I said. “And how drunk she was getting.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You were concerned about her behavior. You were aware, that ever since you dropped her…I assume you dropped her, as opposed to her dropping you, but that is just an assumption…that she’d gotten involved with a rougher breed of boyfriend.”

He took a step toward me. “You’re supposed to be helping Tommie Massie.”

“You’re the one supposed to be his friend. I’m not the one who was fucking Thalia.”

He took a swing at me—in fairness, I should point out he might have been a little drunk—but I ducked it easily and threw a hard right hand into the pit of his stomach. He doubled over, reflexively tossing his water glass—it shattered against the left wall, splashing the dragon—and went down on all fours and crawled around like a dog, retching. What he puked up was mostly beer, but some kind of supper was in there, too, and it made an immediate awful stink.

I went over and opened the window; a breeze wafted in some fresh air. “What was it about, Jimmy? Did you want Thalia to dump her native musician boyfriend, and come back to you? Or did you just want her to be more discreet?”

He was still on all fours. “You fucker. I’ll kill you, you fucker…”

I walked over to him. “You know, Jimmy, I don’t really care about your love life, or your sense of naval decorum. So whether you were dogging after Thalia’s heels to get back in her pants, or just to settle her back down, I don’t really give a rat’s ass.”

He glared up at me, clutching his stomach, breathing hard. “Fuh…fuck you.”

I kicked him in the side and he howled; nobody out there heard it: too much booze and laughter and George Ku Trio.

“You trailed after her, Jimmy. It’s time you told the truth. What did you see?”

Then he was up off the floor, tackling me, knocking me backward into the hard wood table, scattering chairs, and I had my back on the table, like I was something being served up and Bradford leapt on top of me, and his hands found my neck and he started to squeeze, fingernails digging into my flesh, and his reddening face looking down at me would make you think he was the one getting choked to death.

I tried to knee him in the nuts, but he’d anticipated that with the twist of his body, so I dug the nine-millimeter out from under my arm and shoved the nose into his neck and his eyes opened wide and the red drained out of his face and I didn’t have to tell him to let go. He just did, getting off me, backing off, but I was getting up, too, and the snout of the automatic never left the place in his throat where it was making a painful dimple.

Now we were standing facing each other, only his head was raised, his eyes looking down at me and at the gun in his neck.

I eased up the pressure, took half a step back, and he gasped a sigh of relief right before I smacked him alongside the head with the barrel of the automatic. He went down on one knee, moaning, damn near sobbing. I’d torn a nasty gash on his cheek that would heal into a scar that would remind him of me every time he fucking shaved.

“Now, I’m not a trained killing machine like you, Lieutenant,” I said. “I’m just a slum kid from Chicago who’s paid to bring in pickpockets and other lowlife thieves, and I’ve had to learn my killing the hard way, in the street. Are you ready to tell me what happened that night, or would you prefer to retire on a disability pension after I shoot off your goddamn kneecap?”

He sat on the floor. Breathing hard. He looked like he was about an inch away from weeping. I pulled one of the chairs over that had got scattered, and sat and didn’t train the gun on him, just held it casually in my hand.

“I…I wasn’t interested in Thalia anymore. She’s kind of a…” He swallowed and pointed to his temple. “…She’s not all there, you know? After I broke off with her…you’re right, it was me that broke off with her…she started to flaunt her loose behavior, runnin’ around with this beach boy—they call him Sammy, he was here at the Ala Wai that night, did you know that?”

“Yes. Does Sammy have a last name?”

“Not that I know of. Anyway, people were talking about her sleeping around with colored trash, and when Ray Stockdale called her a slut and she slapped him, I knew things were really getting out of hand.”

“So you followed her.”

“Not right away. A couple people stopped me, to talk. So she was out the door by the time I got down there, but I saw her, tagged after her. She was moving quickly, not wanting to see me or talk to me, keeping out in front.”

“You followed her down John Ena Road.”

“Past Waikiki Park, yes. She was pissed off, wouldn’t talk to me…. Frankly, I think this whole business with Sammy was her wanting to get back at me, to make me jealous.”

He didn’t look like much of a prize to me, not with blood on his face and puke on his white linen suit coat.

“She was almost running, and got herself so that she was up a good ways ahead of me, and some guys in a touring car pulled up…”

“A Ford Phaeton?”

He shook his head, no, shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t notice. Couldn’t swear to it. To be honest with ya, I was a little drunk myself. I did notice the ragtop being torn, flapping. Anyway, these guys, these niggers, how many I couldn’t say, two or more, cruise along by Thalia and one of ’em yells something to her out the window. I don’t know what exactly, you know how those colored guys are—‘Hey, baby, wanna go to a party.’ I think one of them said, ‘Hey, Clara Bow, want some oke?’ That sort of thing.”

“How did Thalia react?”

“Well…you gotta understand, I’d been lecturing her, as we walked along, about how she was gonna get herself in trouble, hangin’ out with this rough crowd, I mean, she was screwing this nigger Sammy, can you believe it? So I think, maybe just to show me, she said, ‘Sounds like fun’ or some such. I don’t know what she said.”

“But she sounded willing.”

“Yeah. They probably thought she was a hooker. That’s sort of a red light district along there, y’know.”

“I know. Go on, Jimmy.”

“Anyway, she looked back at me and you know what she did? Stuck her tongue out at me. Like a little girl. What an immature bratty cunt she is. So the car pulls along the curb, and two or three niggers get out, and Thalia’s kinda woozy from drinkin’ too much, and they’re kinda guidin’ her toward the car, and I just threw up my arms, said to hell with her, and turned back around.”

I sat forward. “Was it the Ala Moana boys, Jimmy? Was it Horace Ida, Joe Kahahawai…?”

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

He winced. “Maybe. Hell, I don’t know, I didn’t notice, they’re a bunch of fuckin’ niggers! How the hell was I supposed to tell ’em apart?”

“So you just walked off.”

“Yeah. I…and, uh…yeah, just walked off.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You were going to say something else, Jimmy. Finish your story.”

“It’s finished.”

I stood up, looked down at him, the nine-millimeter in hand, not so casually now. “What else did you see? You saw a struggle, didn’t you?”

“No! No, not…not exactly.”

I kicked his shoe. “What, Jimmy?”

“I heard her kinda…I dunno, squeal or maybe scream.”

“And you looked back, and what did you see?”

“They were kinda…draggin’ her into the car. It was like, you know, she maybe changed her mind. Maybe she was just doin’ it for show, saying yes to those boys, to get back at me, and once I turned around and walked off, she tried to brush the niggers off maybe…and they weren’t takin’ no for an answer.”

“They dragged her in the car and drove off. And what did you do about it, Jimmy?”

We both knew the answer. We both knew he hadn’t gone back and reported seeing an abduction, not to Tommie or the cops or anybody.

But I asked him again, anyway: “What did you do, Jimmy?”

He swallowed. “Nothing. Not a damn thing. I figured…she was an immature little bitch and a nasty little slut and the hell with her! Let her…let her get what she deserved.”

“Is that what she got, Jimmy?”

He began to weep.

“Suppose ol’ Joe Kahahawai got what he deserved, Jimmy?” I grunted a laugh. “You know what I think? Sooner or later we all do.”

“Don’t…don’t…don’t tell anybody.”

“Do my best,” I said, putting the nine-millimeter back in its holster, almost feeling sorry for the bastard. Almost.

That’s where and how I left him—sitting on the floor, crying into his hands, sniffling, swallowing snot.

Getting back out into the smoky air of the noisy, boozy club felt damn near cleansing.

18

The aftermath of the trial, in Honolulu, was surprisingly uneventful. The chief of police doubled the foot patrol and armed his squad cars with machine guns and tear gas, in case of unrest; who the chief expected to riot was never exactly clear, as the kanaka population was fairly content with the manslaughter verdict, and the haoles weren’t likely to rise up against themselves. Admiral Stirling made noises about “henceforth viewing Hawaii as foreign soil,” and a group of Navy wives announced a boycott of firms employing members of the jury. That was about it.

But back home, a tropical hurricane was pummeling the Capitol dome. Letters, wires, petitions, and long-distance calls bombarded Congress and President Hoover with outrage over the verdict, stirred by the Hearst papers running day-after-day front-page boxed editorials demanding that the Massie defendants be brought home and “given the protection American citizens should be properly entitled to.”

“We have it on good authority,” Leisure told me, “that Governor Judd received a bipartisan petition from both houses of Congress, pleading for the freeing of the defendants. One hundred thirty-some signatures.”

We were seated at a small round table amid the indoor palms of the Coconut Grove Bar at the Royal Hawaiian; it was midafternoon and not very busy, more red-jacketed Oriental waiters than guests.

“If Capitol Hill wants a pardon for our clients,” I said, sipping a Coke I’d spiked from my flask of rum, “why don’t they get Hoover to do it?”

Leisure, casual in a blue open-neck silk shirt, sipped his iced tea and smiled lazily; either this case, or the balmy climate, seemed to have sapped his endless energy. “The President doesn’t have the legal authority, Nate, to issue pardons in territories.”

“So it’s up to the governor.”

Leisure nodded. “Meanwhile, back in the hallowed halls, senators and representatives are stumbling over each other in a rush to introduce bills proposing pardons…not to mention a revival of interest in the effort to place Hawaii under military rule.”

“C.D.’s got the governor in a tight spot.”

“Judd’s not easily pushed around,” Leisure said, raising an eyebrow. “In our first meeting, he spoke of not being blackmailed by the irresponsible, sensationalistic mainland newspapers.”

“Hearst? Sensationalistic? Irresponsible? Perish the thought.” I sipped my rum and Coke. “You said ‘first’ meeting.”

“We meet again tomorrow evening. Darrow’s hoping you’ll have something for him on the Ala Moana case before then.”

I hadn’t told Darrow or Leisure about Bradford’s story; I was still hoping to lay hands on Sammy, first.

“Tell C.D. I’ll meet him for lunch tomorrow at the Young. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

I caught a glimpse of blond hair out of the corner of my eye, and glanced toward the entryway where Isabel, in a summery white dress with a navy belt and navy cloche cap, stood looking around for somebody. It must have been me, because when her eyes traveled my way, they stopped and her pretty face blossomed into a smile that made her prettier still, and she came quickly over.

“I thought you two weren’t an item anymore,” Leisure whispered.

“Me too,” I admitted.

“I was just leaving,” Leisure said, with a half-grin, standing, giving Isabel a courtly nod. “Miss Bell. You’re looking alluring, as always.”

“I hope I’m not chasing you off,” she said.

“No, no. I have to meet Mr. Darrow in just a few minutes.”

Her expression turned serious. “You’re going to keep Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue out of jail, aren’t you?”

“The effort’s under way,” he said. “We’re even including the sailor boys in the bargain.”

She clasped her hands in concern. “I meant them, too, of course.”

“Of course,” he said, nodded again, and was off.

I got up and pulled a chair out for her; her lovely heart-shaped face, perfectly framed by the short blond curls, beamed up at me. Her Chanel Number Five drifted up like an Island breeze and tickled my nostrils. The image of her face, eyes closed, mouth open, caught up in ecstasy on the beach, flashed through my mind.

We still hadn’t spoken since that night.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said, as I sat back down.

“No, I’ve been working.”

“I wanted you to know something.”

“Oh, really? What’s that?”

Her smile was girlish, almost gleeful; she leaned in, touched my hand, whispered: “My friend is visiting.”

“What friend?”

“You know—my friend. The one that comes every month.”

“Oh. That friend.”

So she wasn’t pregnant by the Jewboy after all.

“I’m sure you’re relieved,” she said.

“I’m sure you are.”

Her smile disappeared; her eyes drifted down. “I…I said some cruel things.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Awfully cruel things.”

“Yeah, well so did I.”

She looked into my eyes and hers were tearful. “I forgive you. Do you forgive me?”

She was a stupid silly girl, and a bigot, to boot. But she was very pretty and under that summery white dress were two of the most perfect female breasts it had been my privilege in my imperfect male life to encounter.

“Of course you’re forgiven,” I said.

“Are you busy?”

“Not this minute.”

“We could go upstairs to your room, or my room…”

“Won’t that be awkward, with your ‘friend’ still visiting?”

She allowed her Kewpie lips to part a little wider than necessary for speaking purposes, then she licked them with the pinkest damn tongue and said, “There are all kinds of ways for a boy and girl to have fun.”

“Yowsah,” I said.

An Oriental waiter was drifting our way.

“You want something to drink, or eat, before we go up?” I asked her.

She shook her head, no, giving me a lovely lascivious look. “If we want something, there’s always room service.”

The waiter stopped next to me and I said, “Just the check, please.”

“Uh, Mr. Heller…Chinese gentleman waiting to see you in lobby.”

It was Chang Apana, standing with Panama in hand, looking mournful and very tiny next to a towering potted palm. I sent Isabel on up to her room, figuring this wouldn’t take long.

“Have news,” he said, bowing. “Shall we seek privacy?”

We found a table on the Coconut Grove lanai, which faced the manicured hotel grounds, flung with palms, bursting with blossoms; but most of the guests preferred the ocean view of the Surf Porch. Chang and I were alone but for a table of women playing bridge, well down from us.

“Detective Jardine asked me to report,” Chang said, “that Joe Crawford’s band on Maui no longer counts Sammy among its members.”

I frowned. “What became of Sammy?”

“Maui police did us courtesy of making inquiry. Sammy, who seems to lack last name, is no longer in the Islands.”

“Where is he?”

“Thought to be in California. Los Angeles. We have just contacted Los Angeles police. Too early for results.”

“Damn. That was my only good lead on this possible second gang….”

Chang sighed, lowered his gaze. “Not so. There is other lead.”

“What?”

He was shaking his head slowly. “I feel shame for withholding information from brother officer.”

“Come on, Chang—spill, already. That hooker in Mosquito Flats told you something! What was it?”

He sighed again. “Please understand, Nate. Rape of white woman in Hawaii, exception not rule. No matter what mainland papers say, no matter what Admiral Stirling says, rare thing in Hawaii.”

“What’s your point?”

“Point is, only other rape of white woman by colored man in recent memory is this prisoner Jardine been seeking.”

“Yeah, the jailbird who was let out New Year’s Eve to get oke and never came back.”

Chang was nodding. “White woman he raped, he grab her at lovers’ lane…off Ala Moana.”

I sat up. “Not at the old Animal Quarantine Station?”

“No. But very nearby. Modus operandi all too familiar.”

“Are you saying this guy might be a viable suspect in the Ala Moana case?” I shifted in my wicker chair, smirked. “Well, hell—surely you guys checked this out long ago! Where in God’s name was the bastard the night Thalia was attacked?”

“We did check,” Chang said, “and he was in prison. Serving murder sentence.”

“Oh. Well, that’s a pretty good alibi….”

“Bad alibi like fish,” Chang said distastefully. “Not stand test of time.” He leaned forward, lifted a gently lecturing forefinger, squinted until his eyes completely disappeared. “If murdering rapist can walk out of jail on New Year’s Eve, why not do same on twelfth of September?”

“Shit,” I said. “Is Oahu Prison really as casual as all that?”

He was nodding again. “Yes. Warden Lane—recently replaced—sent convicts out working on municipal projects ’round Honolulu. Is said any prisoner who not return from work assignments by six P.M. get locked out of jail, and lose dinner privilege.”

“That’s some strict warden.”

Again he lowered his eyes. “Such laxity at prison well known by Honolulu police. I am ashamed for shoddy police work by my department, not following so obvious a lead. Of course, jailers at Oahu Prison, when questioned, lied to cover their own misdeeds.”

“But they turned around and let the bastard out again on New Year’s Eve! If they knew he most likely raped Thalia, why would they—”

Chang’s eyes were knife-point sharp. “To allow him to really escape, and take his guilt with him. Remember—prisoners usually returned when given temporary release. But Lyman did not.”

“Lyman,” I said. “That’s what that hooker at Mosquito Flats said to you!”

He nodded gravely. “Please accept apology. Harlot’s words hit this old man hard as brick.”

“It’s okay,” I shrugged. “You think I haven’t seen some pretty lousy things going on, in the Chicago PD? Lousy enough to make me ashamed to be part of it?”

In fact, I’d done a few.

So quietly it was barely audible over the rustle of fronds, he said, “Rumor say Lyman still in Islands.”

“How do you know he hasn’t gone to the mainland, like Sammy?”

Chang shook his head, no. “Is somewhere in these Islands, still. People help him hide, they protect him, because they fear him. He is one big mean bastard and they don’t cross him.”

“Where do we start? It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“Needle in haystack give away hiding place when fat man sit down.” He dug in his pocket. “Meet Daniel Lyman.”

Chang handed me a mug shot of Lyman—blank-eyed, pockmarked, bulbous-nosed, shovel-jawed, a face designed for wanted circulars.

My laugh had no humor in it. “Well, we need to sit on the son of a bitch as soon as possible—and how likely is that, when Jardine and Major Ross and the entire goddamn Hawaiian National Guard haven’t got the job done, in how long? Four months?”

The skull-faced little man smiled. “But you forget one thing, Nate—the main reason they not find him yet.”

“What’s that?”

“Chang Apana hasn’t looked for him.”

The Ala Wai Inn was its usual smoky self, and the music its usual syrupy mixture of steel guitar and tight harmonies. The George Ku Trio was finishing its engagement tonight, according to a poster tacked next to the door, outside. Inside, my doorman friend Joe Frietas said he was sorry, he hadn’t seen Sammy yet.

“I know,” I told him.

Chang Apana was at my side; he hadn’t taken off his Panama or said a word since we’d entered the club. But for such a small man, Chang’s presence seemed to loom large with Joe, who clearly recognized him, and was obviously nervous.

Now Chang spoke: “Sammy on mainland.”

Joe grinned, nodded, and delivered a belated greeting: “You honor Ala Wai with presence. Detective Apana.”

“Pleasure mine,” Chang said, nodding back.

“Joe,” I said, “you seen any of Joe Crawford’s other music boys lately?”

He frowned at me, worried. “You’re not gonna bust up another dinin’ room, are ya, Mr. Heller?”

“I paid for the damage, didn’t I?” I slipped a five-spot out of my pocket, held it up casually. “Have you seen anybody?”

He cocked his head. “Other night, you talkin’ more than a fin, boss….”

“Sammy was worth a sawbuck,” I said. “This is what I figure a friend of Sammy’s is worth.”

Chang stepped forward and snatched the five-dollar bill from my hand; it startled me, and Joe, too. The frown on Chang’s scarred-skull puss wasn’t pretty. He shoved his face up into the doorman’s. “No money. Just talk.”

Joe backed away from the little Chinaman, holding his hands up, palms out, as if surrendering. Comical, seeing a burly guy who was at least in part the bouncer of the joint backing off from this lightweight bundle of bones.

“H-h-h-ey, boss, I’m happy to help out. There’s a guy, friend of Sammy’s, he’s here right now…”

Chang and I exchanged glances.

“…you should talk to him, half-French, half-Tahitian—I’ll point ya there. I like helpin’ police.”

“Thank you,” Chang said, handing the five-spot back to me. “Name?”

The guy’s name, or anyway what they called him, was Tahiti. Frail, rail-thin, in a blue aloha shirt (yellow and white blossoms) and tan trousers his toothpick legs swam in, he was up next to the bandstand, by himself, swaying to the music, singing along, smiling, a glass in one hand, cigarette dangling from sensual, feminine lips. I made him twenty, twenty-two. His dark narrow face with its prominent cheekbones was almost pretty, his eyes dark, large, half-lidded, his eyebrows heavy and dark, his eyelashes long and dark and curling. When I approached he smiled at me, as if expecting me to ask him to dance.

“They call you Tahiti?”

“That’s me,” he said, sucked on the cigarette, and blew smoke to one side. “And what’s your name, handsome?”

That’s when he saw Chang. The lids of his eyes rolled up like windowshades, and he swallowed audibly.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, backing away.

“Out on terrace,” Chang said.

Tahiti swallowed again and nodded.

The dance floor opened directly onto grass that led to the rocky shore of the fetid canal. On really busy nights at the Ala Wai, couples spilled out onto this terrace. Tonight wasn’t that busy, and only a few couples were out here holding hands, looking at the slice of moon reflecting on the shimmering surface of the smelly craphole of a canal.

The George Ku Trio went on break just as we were wandering out, so there was no music to talk over. Chang took Tahiti by the arm and led him to a wood-slat table near the thatched fence that separated the club from its residential neighbor. We were tucked beside a small palm and near where the grass stopped and the rocks began their fast slope to the lapping water.

“Nice night for swim,” Chang said pleasantly.

“I don’t know anything,” the boy said.

“You don’t know anything?” I asked. “Not anything at all? Not even your name?”

“Philip Kemp,” he said.

“You know a guy named Sammy, Phil?”

He looked upward, shook his head, sucked on his cigarette again, looked down, shook his head some more. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it….”

“Knew what?” Chang asked.

“Trouble, Sammy was always trouble, too much booze, too many girls….” Then wistfully he added: “But he plays steel guitar like a dream.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “He took off for the mainland, didn’t he, Phil?”

“I don’t like that name. Call me Tahiti, ya mind? That’s what I like my friends to call me.”

Hand still on his shoulder, I nodded toward his glass. “What you got there, Tahiti?”

“Little Coke. Little oke.”

“Try this on.” I removed my hand from his shoulder and took my flask from my pocket and filled his glass almost to the brim. “Take a sip.”

He did. His eyes widened. He half-smiled. “Hey! Smooth stuff.”

“Bacardi. Genuine article.”

“Nice. Look—fellas…gentlemen…Detective Apana, we ain’t met but I see you around. All I know about Sammy I told you already.”

“No,” Chang said, and he grabbed Tahiti’s wrist, the one attached to the hand holding a cigarette. Chang tightened and Tahiti’s fingers sprang open and the cigarette went tumbling, spitting orange ashes in the darkness.

“It got too hot for Sammy,” I said, “didn’t it? And he took a run-out powder to the City of Angels.”

Chang let go of the wrist.

Tahiti, breathing hard, his eyes damp, nodded.

“So we agree on that much,” I said. “But what I need to know is, what made the Islands too hot for Sammy?”

“He was afraid,” Tahiti said. “We were…talking in a hotel room, back on Maui…this was in January…he had a gun, a revolver. He was afraid this friend of his would hurt him.”

“Hurt him?” I asked.

“Kill him.”

“What friend?”

“I can’t say. I’m afraid, too.”

“Lyman,” Chang said.

Tahiti’s eyes popped again. “You know?”

“What did Sammy tell you?” I asked. “What did Sammy know about Daniel Lyman?”

Tahiti covered his face with a hand. “Lyman’s a nasty one. He’d kill me, too. I can’t tell you.”

“We can talk at headquarters,” Chang said.

The dark eyes flashed. “Right, with billy clubs and blacksnakes! Look, I’ll tell you what Sammy told me…but don’t ask me where Lyman is. I won’t tell you. No matter what you do.”

I glanced at Chang and Chang glanced back: interesting choice of words on Tahiti’s part—he seemed to be saying he knew where Lyman was….

“Fine,” I said. “What did Sammy tell you?”

“It’s something…big.”

“We know.”

The pretty eyes narrowed, lashes fluttering. “You know who was peeling Sammy’s banana?”

I nodded. “Thalia Massie.”

“You do know…”

“Yes. And Sammy was here at the Ala Wai the night Thalia Massie was supposedly attacked.”

And the sensual mouth twitched. “No supposedly about it.”

He seemed to want prompting, so I gave it to him: “Tell us, Tahiti.”

“Sammy said she was a little drunk, tipsy. She came up to him, he was standing up by the door, and she said she was gonna get some air, you know, take a little walk in the moonlight. She told Sammy he could join her, but he should wait a little while, be discreet, you know. They were gonna go to one of those rent-by-the-hour rooms down by Fort De Russey that the soldiers use to bang their Island sweeties. Well, Sammy was waiting, being discreet, only first he saw this Navy officer that used to be Thalia’s back-door man…I don’t know whether she threw him over or he threw her over…but anyway, Sammy knew this officer had a history with her, and when the guy took off after her, Sammy got, well, jealous, I guess.”

“Did Sammy have any words with the officer?” I asked. “Try to stop him or—”

“Naw. Sammy was too smart, or too cowardly or too something, to do that. He kinda followed along after the officer a good ways, till the officer caught up with Thalia, only he didn’t exactly catch up. The officer sorta trailed behind her; they were arguing, lovers’ quarrel kinda thing. So Sammy figures maybe he’ll just say hell with it and butt out when he sees a ragtop cruise by with some guys in it, some guys Sammy knows, or thinks he knows.”

“Did he know them or didn’t he?”

“He knew ’em, but he thought it must be somebody else till he got a close look and, sure enough, it was his buddies, two wild guys who was supposed to be in prison.”

Chang said, “Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu.”

Tahiti nodded. “Those two are pilikia, bad trouble. But Sammy used to go drinking with ’em, chasing women, they was his buddies, but they were supposed to be in Oahu Prison, Lyman for killing a guy in a robbery, and Kaikapu, he was a thief, too. Anyway, when Sammy realized it was them, he knew his haole wahine was in trouble. They was driving by whistling at her, saying things, like, you know, ‘Wanna come for a ride, honey?’ and ‘Do you like bananas and cream, baby?’”

Sure were a lot of bananas ripening that September night.

He was getting his cigarettes, a pack of Camels, out of his front shirt pocket. “Anybody got a match?”

Chang found one for him, then took the opportunity to light up a cigarette himself. Tahiti drew smoke into his lungs in greedy gulps, like a guy on the desert getting his first drink in days. He blew the smoke out in a stream that dissipated in the gentle breeze. He was shaking a little. I let him calm down. Chang, eyes locked on our witness, sucked his smoke like a kid drinking a thick malt through a straw.

“How did Thalia react to this attention?” I asked.

“Like she liked it,” Tahiti said. “She talked right back to them, ‘Sure! Anytime, boys!,’ stuff like that. She was acting like a whore and that wasn’t smart ’cause that’s a street where the chippies strut their stuff, y’know?”

“What did the officer do?”

“Nothing. Sammy thought the way she was acting musta made her officer boyfriend mad or jealous or something, ’cause he turned around and headed back the other way.”

“Did he run smack into Sammy?”

Tahiti shook his head, no. “He didn’t notice Sammy. Sammy musta been just another native on the sidewalk to him. This is along where there’s a saimin shack and all sorts of shops, food and barber and all, and it’s not like nobody was around.”

“What did Sammy do?”

“He followed along and he came up and said, ‘Hey, Bull, come on, leave her alone.’”

“Which one was named Bull? Lyman or Kaikapu?”

Tahiti shrugged. “Any of ’em. There was a third guy in the ragtop that Sammy didn’t know, some Filipino. See, in the Islands, ‘Bull’ is a name like ‘Mac’ or ‘Joe’ or ‘Bud’ or ‘Hey you.’ Get me?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know what Sammy did, but he went up and tried to help her, talk to her, talk his friends out of picking her up. And I think she started getting scared, changing her mind about getting in with these guys, if she ever meant to. Maybe she was just flirting to make her officer mad, that’s what Sammy thought; or maybe she was just drunk. Hell, I don’t know, I wasn’t there….”

“Keep going,” I said, patting his shoulder. “You’re doing fine.”

Hand shaking, he drew in smoke in several gasps, exhaled it like a man breathing his last. “Anyway, Sammy said they shoved him away and grabbed her and pulled her into the car and drove off. And that’s it.”

“That’s all Sammy saw? All Sammy did?”

“Yeah—except when Lyman and Kaikapu busted out, or anyway walked out, of prison on New Year’s Eve, and their two-man crime wave started, Sammy got nervous, real nervous. He never came back to Oahu after that. Like I said, on Maui, he was packing a gun. He’d do his gigs with Joe Crawford’s band, then he’d hole up in a hotel room. He was relieved when Kaikapu got picked up and put back inside, but it was Lyman he was really scared of. When the cops couldn’t catch Lyman…” He gave Chang an apprehensive look. “…no offense, Detective…”

“None taken,” Chang said.

“…Anyway, Sammy finally caught a boat to the mainland, and that’s it.”

The George Ku Trio, back from their break, began playing again, the muffled strains of steel guitar and falsetto harmonies echoing off the water.

“That’s everything I know,” Tahiti said. “I hope I helped you fellas. You don’t have to pay me or anything. I just wanna be a good citizen.”

“Where’s Lyman?” Chang said. His voice was quiet, but you could cut yourself on the edge in it.

“I don’t know. Why would I know?”

“You know where Lyman is,” Chang said. “You said you did.”

“I didn’t say…”

I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder and squeezed; not hard—friendly, almost affectionate. “Detective Apana is right. You said you wouldn’t tell us where he is, no matter what we did. That means you know where he is.”

“No, no, you fellas misunderstood me…”

“Where is Lyman?” Chang asked again.

“I don’t know, I swear on my mama’s grave, I don’t even know the bastard…”

I drew my hand away from his shoulder. “I can get you money, Tahiti. Maybe as much as five hundred bucks.”

That caught his attention. His dark eyes glittered, but his full feminine lips were quivering.

“Money doesn’t do you any good in the graveyard,” he said.

That sounded like something Chang would say.

“Where is Lyman?” Chang asked.

“No,” he said, and gulped at his cigarette. “No.”

Faster than a blink, Chang slapped the cigarette out of Tahiti’s hand; it sailed into the water and made a sizzling sound.

“Next time I ask,” Chang said, “will be in back room at station house.”

Tahiti covered his face with both hands; he was trembling, maybe weeping.

“If he finds out I told you,” he said, “he’ll kill me.”

And then he told us.

19

In the paltry moonlight, the squattersville along Ala Moana Boulevard looked like the shantytowns back home, with a few notable differences.

The squattersvilles in Chicago—like the one at Harrison and Canal—really were little cities within the city, miniture communities populated by down-on-their luck families, mom-pop-and-the-kids, raggedy but proud in shacks that were rather systematically arranged along “streets,” pathways carved from the dirt, with bushes and trees planted around proud shabby dwellings, to dress up the flat barren landscape; fires burned in trash cans, day and night, fending off the cold part of the year and mosquitoes the rest.

The Ala Moana squattersville had bushes and trees, too, but wild palms and thickets of brush dictated the careless sprawl of the shacks assembled from tar paper, dried palm fronds, flattened tin cans, scraps of corrugated metal, scraps of lumber, packing crates, chicken wire, and what have you. No trash can fires, here—even the coolest night didn’t require it, and the Island’s meager mosquito population was down at the nearby city dump, or along the marshier patches along the Ala Wai.

Chang Apana and I sat in his Model T alongside the road; a number of other cars were parked ahead of us, which struck me as absurd. What kind of squattersville had residents who could afford a Ford?

Of course, I had it all wrong….

“Native families build this village,” Chang said. “But couple years back, city make us chase them out.”

I could hear the surf rolling in, but couldn’t see the ocean; it was obscured by a thicket across the way.

“Why didn’t you tear it down, clean this area up?”

Chang shrugged. “Not job of police.”

“Whose job is it, then?”

“Nobody ever decided.”

“Who lives here now?”

“No one. But these shacks shelter bootleggers and pimps and whores, gives them place to do business.”

I understood. This was one of those areas of the city where the cops cast a benignly neglectful eye, either for graft or out of just plain common sense. This was, after all, a town that lived on tourist trade and military money; and you had to let your patrons get drunk and get laid or they’d go somewhere else on vacation or liberty.

“Well, if Tahiti can be believed,” I said, “somebody lives here.”

Chang nodded.

Tahiti, who regularly bought his oke at the squattersville, told us he’d seen Lyman several times, on the fringes of the camp, over the last week or so. The boy, shocked to see Lyman there, had gingerly asked his bootlegger about the notorious escapee; he’d been told Lyman was pimping for some hapa-haole girls (half-white, half-whatever), building a bankroll to smuggle himself off the Island. Having spent the last several months staying one step ahead of Major Ross’s territorial police, hiding all over Oahu, sheltered by criminal cronies, shifting between hideouts in the hills, in the small towns, and in Honolulu’s slum neighborhoods (the very ones Chang and I had recently combed), Lyman was getting ready to make his move.

So was I.

We had discussed contacting Jardine and, through him, Major Ross, to launch a full-scale raid of the squattersville. But we decided first to determine if Lyman was really there; even then, if we could bring him down with just the two of us, so much the better. No chance of him slipping away in the hubbub.

Besides, people got hurt in raids; people even got killed. I needed him alive.

“I stay in shadows,” Chang said. “Somebody might know me.”

Hell, so far everybody had known him.

“Good idea,” I said, getting out of the car. “I don’t want to get made as a cop.”

“When you need me,” he said, “you will see me.”

I went in alone—just me and the nine-millimeter under my arm. I was in the brown suit with my red aloha shirt—the one with the parrots—wandering down the twisting paths, around trees, past shacks, my shoes crunching bits of glass and candy wrappers and other refuse. The street lamps of this haphazard city were shafts of bamboo stuck in the ground, torches that glowed in the night like fat fireflies, painting the landscape—and the faces of those inhabiting it—a muted hellish orange.

I had no problem blending in—the squattersville clientele was a mixed group, the haoles including venturesome tourists and civvy-wearing soldiers (no sailors tonight, thanks to Admiral Stirling canceling liberty), plus working-class kanakas from the canneries and cane fields; and, of course, youths in their late teens and twenties—restless colored kids of the Horace Ida/Joe Kahahawai ilk, and collegians both white and colored, any male with a thirst or a hard-on that needed attention. A steady stream was coming and going—so to speak.

The hookers, leaning in the doorways of their hovels, were a melting pot of the Pacific: Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, and mixtures thereof, painfully young girls barefoot in silk tropical-print sarongs, shoulders bare, legs bare from the knee down, beads dangling from necks and arms, blood-red mouths dangling cigarettes in doll-like faces with eyes as dead as doll’s eyes, too.

With Lyman’s mug shot in mind, I furtively scrutinized the faces of the kanaka pimps and bootleggers, roughnecks in loose shirts and trousers, hands lost in pockets, hands that could emerge with money or reefers or guns or knives; men with dark eyes in dark faces, round faces, oval faces, square faces, every kind of face but a smiling one.

For a place where sin was for sale, there was a startling absence of joy here.

Up ahead was a central area, or as close to one as the randomly laid out village had; a gentle fog of smoke rose from a shallow stone barbecue pit where a coffeepot nestled among glowing orange coals. Nearby, cigarettes drooping from their lips, a pair of Polynesian pimps played cards at a small wooden table not designed for that purpose; they had to hunker over it, particularly the taller of the two, a broad-shouldered bearded brute in a dirty white shirt and dungarees. The other cardplayer, a wispy-mustached pig in a yellow and orange aloha shirt, had more chins than the Honolulu phone book.

I got out of the way of a couple haole college kids who were heading home (or somewhere) with two jugs of oke, and I almost bumped into somebody. I turned, and it was a Chinese girl with a cherubic face and a flicker of life in her eyes.

She asked, “Wan’ trip ’round world, han’some?”

Second time tonight somebody called me that; unfortunately, the male who called me that had sounded more sincere.

I leaned in so close I could have kissed her. Instead, I whispered, “You want to make five bucks?”

The red-rouged mouth smiled; the teeth were yellow, or maybe it was just the bamboo-torch light. She was drenched in perfume and it wasn’t Chanel Number Five, but it had its own cheap allure. She was maybe sixteen—sweet sixteen, as Darrow had said of Thalia. The angel face was framed by twin scythe blades of shiny black hair.

“Step inside, han’some,” she said.

That time she sounded like she meant it.

As she was about to duck inside her hut, I stopped her with a hand on her arm, easily; her flesh was cool, smooth. “I don’t want what you think.”

She frowned. “No tie me up. Not even for five buck.”

“No,” I said, and laughed once. “I just want a little information.”

“Jus’ wan’ talk?”

“Just want talk,” I said softly. “I hear there’s a kanaka who needs a boat to the mainland, no questions asked.”

She shrugged. “Lot kanaka wan’ go mainland. Don’ you wan’ go ’round world, han’some?”

Very softly, I said, “His name’s Daniel Lyman.”

She frowned again, thinking. Now she whispered: “Five buck, I tell you where Dan Ly Man is?”

I nodded.

“No tell ’im who tol’ you?”

I nodded again.

“He got temper like lolo dog.” She shook a finger in my face. “No tell him.”

“No tell him,” I said.

“I tell you where. I not point. You let me go inside, then you go see Dan Ly Man.”

“Fine. Where the hell is he?”

“Where hell five buck?”

I gave her a fin.

She pulled the hem of her sarong up and slipped the five-spot into a garter that held a wad of greenbacks. She smiled as she saw me taking a gander at the white of her thigh.

“You like Anna Mae bank?” she asked.

“Sure do. Kinda wish I had time to make another deposit.”

She laughed tinklingly and slipped her arms around my neck and whispered in my ear. “You got more dollar? We go inside, you talk Dan Ly Man later. Make you happy.”

I pushed her away, gently. Kissed my forefinger and touched the tip of her nose. Her cute nose. “Save your money, honey. Go to the mainland and find one man to make happy.”

The life in her eyes pulsed; her smile was a half-smile, but it was genuine. “Someday I do that, han’some.” Then she whispered, barely audibly: “Beard man.” And she nodded her head toward the two pimps playing gin.

Then she slipped inside the hovel.

The full-face beard had been enough, added to the dim, otherworldly torch lighting, to keep me from recognizing him. But as I wandered over to the barbecue pit, I could see it was him, clearly enough; the deep pockmarks even showed under the nubby beard.

And those were the blank eyes of Daniel Lyman, all right. And the many-times-broken lump of a nose.

I drifted over, stopping by the barbecue pit, very near where they were playing.

I spoke to the fat one: “What’s in the pot? Tea or coffee?”

The fat one looked up from his hand of cards with the disdain of a Michelangelo interrupted at his sculpting. “Coffee,” he grunted.

“Is it up for grabs?” I asked pleasantly.

Lyman, not looking up from his cards, said, “Take it.”

“Thanks.”

I reached for the pot, gripped it by its ebony handle.

Casually, I said, “I hear somebody’s looking for a boat to the mainland.”

Neither Lyman nor the fat guy said anything. They didn’t react at all.

Some tin cups were balanced along the stones; I selected one that seemed relatively clean—no floating cigarette butts or anything.

“I can provide that,” I said, “no questions asked. Private boat. Rich man’s yacht. Comfortable quarters, not down with the boiler room boys.”

“Gin,” the fat man chortled.

“Fuck you,” Lyman said, and gathered in the cards and shuffled.

“You’re Lyman, aren’t you?” I said, slowly filling the tin cup with steaming coffee.

Lyman looked up at me; his face had an ugly nobility, a primitive strength, like the carved stone visage of some Hawaiian god. The kind villages sacrificed maidens to, to keep him from getting pissed off.

“No names,” he said. He kept shuffling the cards.

I set the coffeepot on the stones that edged the pit. Tried to sip my cup, but it was too hot.

I said, “Tell me what you can afford. Maybe we can do some business.”

“I don’t know you,” Lyman said. His dark eyes picked up the orangish glow of the torchlight and the coals in the pit, and seemed themselves to glow, like a goddamn demon’s. “I don’t do business with stranger.”

That’s when I threw the cup of coffee in his face.

He howled and got clumsily to his feet, overturning the table, cards scattering, and the fat man, quicker than he had any right to be, pulled a knife from somewhere, with a blade you could carve a canoe out of a tree with, and I grabbed the coffeepot and splashed the fat bastard in his face, too.

It wasn’t scalding, but it got their attention, or rather it averted it, the knife fumbling from the fat man’s grasp, while I drew my nine-millimeter. By the time Lyman had wiped the coffee from his face and eyes, I had the gun trained on him.

“I’m not interested in you, Fatso,” I said. “Lyman, come with me.”

“Fuck you, cop,” Lyman said.

“Oh, did you want sugar with that? I’m sorry. We’ll get you some downtown.”

He was facing a gun, an automatic, the kind of weapon that can kill you right now, and he had every reason to be afraid, and I had every reason to feel smug, only feeling smug is always dangerous when you’re facing down the likes of Daniel Lyman, who wasn’t afraid at all and came barreling at me so fast, so suddenly, I didn’t think to shoot till he was on top of me and then the shot only tore a place along his shirt, cutting through the cloth and a little of him, only, shit, it was me going backward into that barbecue pit, and I had the presence of mind to clutch him like a lover and squeeze and roll and we hit not the coals but the stones, which was good, but we hit them hard, or I did, my back did, which wasn’t good, pain sending a white lightning bolt through my brain.

We rolled together, locked in an embrace, onto the ground and his shoulder dug into my forearm and I felt the fingers of my hand pop open and the gun jump out. Then I was pinned under him, and when I looked up into the contorted bearded orange-cast face hovering above me, the only thing I could hit it with was my forehead, and I did, hitting him in the mouth, and I heard him grunt in pain as teeth snapped, and he let go of me and I was squirming out from under him when the same massive fist that had no doubt broken Thalia Massie’s jaw slammed into mine.

This time there was no lightning bolt, but a flash of red followed by black, and consciousness left me, just momentarily, but long enough for Lyman to get up and off of me. Groggily, touching my jaw—unbroken jaw—I got to my feet and could see him cutting down a pathway between shacks, toward the road, I thought.

Meanwhile, the fat man was bending to pick up my nine-millimeter. He had it in his hand when I kicked him in the ass, hard enough to score a field goal, sending my gun flying again and him hurtling toward, and into, the barbecue pit, where he did a screeching scrambling dance, yow yow yow yow yow, sending orange sparks flying as he got himself out of there.

Where was my goddamn gun?

I didn’t see it, and hell, it couldn’t have gone far, only if

I took the time to look for it, Lyman might get away. I had to go after him, right now, unarmed or not, and he didn’t seem to have a weapon on him, so what the hell—this was why I came to the luau, wasn’t it?

I trotted down the path Lyman had taken, stopping at a crossroads, not seeing my quarry anywhere. Had he ducked into a shack? The way the shacks were nestled in and around thickets and trees made for a maze of pathways. Squattersville seemed suddenly a ghost town—whether at the sound of a gunshot, its inhabitants had hidden inside the shacks, or had scattered into the woods or the street, I couldn’t say.

Not daring to move too quickly, knowing Lyman could leap at me from any shadowy doorway, I moved cautiously if not slowly, and damned if I didn’t find myself back at the central area, at the barbecue pit. No sign of Lyman here, of course. Or his fat friend, either.

I was about to set off down another path when from the convergent paths that joined here, one by one, figures emerged. None was Lyman, but they were just as menacing: three dark men, pimps, bootleggers, the city council among this roughneck rabble perhaps, the men whose domain I had invaded.

Each had something in his hand—one a gleaming knife, another a blackjack, yet another a billy club. No unseemly repetition—variety…

A fourth man stepped into sight and it was Lyman. He had yet another weapon, a gun—not mine, his own, a revolver.

So he hadn’t made a break for it—he’d got reinforcements, got himself armed.

And come back for me.

Lyman had an awful grin; it would have been awful even without the holes I’d put in it with my forehead.

“You make mistake, cop,” Lyman said, “comin’ alone.”

The crack that split the air sounded like a gunshot, and the agonized cry that followed it might have been a bullet-wounded man’s; but it was something else entirely.

It was a blacksnake whip in the deft hands of a little old Chinaman in a white suit. His knife-scarred face looked ghostly and ghastly in the hell-fire glow, his lips pulled back over his teeth in a grimacing smile as he moved nimbly among them, sending the leather tongue stingingly after each man, tearing clothing and flesh, moving in a circular fashion like a lion tamer in a cage full of beasts, with speed, with grace, and red slashes of blood appeared on the front of this one, on the back of that one, even down the face of another of these much-larger-than-he men he was flaying, their shrieks as long and jagged as their wounds and just as terrible.

Lyman had got his taste of lash across his shirt, shearing it angularly, and his revolver had flown from his hand reflexively. But unlike the other men, who had fallen to their knees in pain and tears, Lyman again took off down a path.

I took off after him.

This time he was headed for the road, for Ala Moana Boulevard where now only a few cars were parked, Chang’s among them; none of them must’ve been Lyman’s, because he headed straight across the road, into the thicket, and I was right behind him, as we both went into and through the undergrowth, snapping branches, shearing leaves, crunching twigs, and then we both burst through the brush, onto the beach, no white sand here, just a short rocky slope to an ocean that stretched in an endless ice blue shimmer, the tiny moon slice throwing silver highlights.

He probably figured he could follow the beach to nearby Kewalo Basin, where the sampans were docked, where he could find some kind of boat and elude capture once more.

Not tonight.

I tackled him and we both sailed toward the water, then plunged into its warm embrace, separating as we hit. We both got our footing on the sandy, rocky floor beneath us, water to our waists, but he was still in pain from that bloody gash on his chest and I slammed my fist into his bearded face with everything I had, hoping to hell I would break his jaw.

The blow sent him reeling back, and he fell backward into and under the water with a hell of a splash. I jumped after him, found him under there, breathing hard as I held the bastard under. When I felt him go limp, I hauled him by the arm and back of his shirt, up onto the shore, making no effort at all to protect him from the rocks I was dragging him over.

When I walked him through the thicket, he was like a man sleepwalking, guided largely by my steering him with my hand clutching a wad of the hair on the back of his head. We emerged, Lyman barely conscious as I guided him along, and I escorted him across the street, toward the handful of parked cars.

From the other side of them, where he’d been crouching, the fat man popped up like an unfriendly jack-in-the-box—with my gun in his hand….

“Haole pi’lau,” the fat man snarled, raising the automatic toward me.

The crack of the blacksnake was followed by the howl of the fat man, who would have one hell of a scar down his back for the rest of his life. My gun went sailing out of his hand and I caught it perfectly, with one hand, as if it were an act we’d both long rehearsed.

I tossed Lyman against the running board of the nearest parked car. He collapsed there, breathing hard, head hanging, shoulders hunched.

The fat man was running down the road, toward Honolulu, and Chang was out in the street, cracking the whip after him, not landing a blow but lending the runner further motivation.

I was soaking wet, exhausted, breathing hard, throbbing with pain, and exhilarated as hell.

Chang was smiling as he approached me; with an agile flip of his wrist, he caused the long tail of the whip to curl up in a circle, which he grasped.

“Shall we take suspect in?” he asked pleasantly.

“I don’t think that’s the way Charlie Chan would do it,” I said, nodding to the coiled-up whip.

“Hell with Charlie Chan,” he said.

And, blacksnake tucked under his arm, he snapped the cuffs on the groggy Lyman.

20

The following afternoon, Prosecutor John Kelley joined Clarence Darrow, George Leisure, and me in the outer sitting room of the Darrow suite. Kelley, in the same white linen suit he’d worn so frequently in court, was pacing. His ruddy face was redder than usual, his blue eyes darting.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t like it the least damn little bit.”

“John, please sit,” Darrow said gently, magnanimously gesturing to a place on the tropical-pattern sofa next to Leisure and me. Darrow, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, was sprawled in his easy chair, feet up on the settee, as casual and relaxed as Kelley was tightly coiled.

With a massive sigh, Kelley lowered himself to the sofa cushion, but didn’t sink back in like Leisure and me, rather sitting forward, hands clasped tightly between his open legs. “These people killed a man, an innocent man, we now know, and you expect me to go along with some slap on the damn wrist?”

Wind was whispering through the open windows, rustling the filmy curtains, as if speaking secrets we could almost hear, nearly make out.

“There comes a time when every reasonable man has to cut his losses,” Darrow said. “I prefer not to argue the point again, but my misguided clients truly believed they were dealing with one of the guilty parties. What pleasing choice do any of us have in this matter? Knowing what you now know, you can’t in good conscience retry the Ala Moana defendants. But you can’t exonerate them either, not without delivering a devastating blow to an already crippled police department and the local and territorial government it represents.”

“Mr. Kelley,” I said, “I’m as frustrated as you are. I risked my…life bringing Lyman in. But you’ve spoken to Inspector McIntosh, and the chief of police. You know the reality of this as well we do.”

The reality was that even under all-night, back-room station house questioning, Lyman and Kaikapu had denied any involvement in the Thalia Massie abduction/attack. Further, prison records indicated they were present and accounted for on September 12 of last year; the prison officials and guards who could expose that lie would be setting themselves up for a stay on the wrong side of the bars in their own facility.

And even if these obstacles could be overcome, prosecuting two new defendants for the Thalia Massie abduction/attack—defendants who had walked out of Oahu Prison twice to commit rape and other crimes—would almost certainly result in a storm of embarrassment and ridicule that the beleaguered local government could scarcely afford.

“Of course,” Darrow said, “both these individuals are serving life sentences…so, in a sense, justice has already been served.”

Kelley’s mouth was moving, as if he were muttering, but nothing was coming out.

“The only way you’ll get them to talk,” I said, “is to offer them immunity and a deal for shorter time.”

“Promise them parole,” Kelley said bitterly, shaking his head, “for confessing to the most notorious crime in the history of the Territory? It’s scandalous.”

“No,” Darrow said, lifting a gently lecturing forefinger. “Going forward with a full investigation and a prosecution would be scandalous. No one would emerge a victor. My clients would be disgraced, Thalia Massie might as well sew a scarlet letter on her breast, and you would just about guarantee Hawaii losing self-government and see the reins handed over to the racist likes of Admiral Stirling.”

Kelley had his head in his hands. “Christ Almighty.” He looked up; now his face was very pale. “You’re meeting with the governor tonight?”

“Yes.”

“What does he know?”

Darrow raised his eyebrows, set them back down. “To my knowledge, nothing about Lyman and Kaikapu. That’s up to your office and the police department, should you think this is information Governor Judd need be privy to.” He shrugged elaborately. “Though, you know…I would assume the governor has enough on his mind, at present, knowing that if he doesn’t release my clients, he’ll be remembered as the governor who brought martial law to Hawaii, by provoking the United States Congress, and financial ruin to local businesses, by alienating the United States Navy.”

Kelley snorted, sneered. “You’d prefer that he be remembered as the governor who ignored law and order, and arbitrarily freed four people convicted of killing an innocent man.”

Weariness passed over Darrow’s face in a wave; then he blinked a few times slowly, and a smile came to his lips at about the speed it takes for a glacier to form.

“I prefer to put this suffering behind us. Two of the three men who assaulted Thalia Massie are in prison on life sentences; a possible unidentified third party has fled to parts unknown. Those innocent Ala Moana boys have seen their number diminished by one, and their lives turned inside out and upside down. My clients have been held in custody for months, and have lost their dignity and their privacy and have, goddamnit sir, suffered enough. So, I would dare say, have these fair islands.” He slammed a fist on the arm of the easy chair, and a frown turned the kindly face into a mass of angry wrinkles. “Enough, sir! I say enough.”

Kelley swallowed, nodded, let go another sigh, said, “What precisely do you propose?”

“George,” Darrow said to Leisure, “would you show Mr. Kelley that document you prepared?”

Leisure sat forward and removed a sheet of paper from the briefcase at his feet. Handed the document to Kelley, who read it.

“You’re not asking the governor for a pardon,” Kelley said. He looked up at Darrow. “You’re asking him to commute the sentence….”

Darrow nodded slowly. “A pardon can be viewed as a reversal of the jury’s decision…while commuting the sentence is a fine way for the Territory of Hawaii to save face. After all, the felony stays on the record, the crime is not officially condoned in any way. Prison time, in this instance, would serve no rehabilitative purpose…. Does anyone really believe Tommie Massie and Grace Fortescue are dangers to society? And, remember, the jury did recommend leniency.”

Kelley seemed somewhat overwhelmed by all this. He sounded almost confused as he said, “Sentence hasn’t even been handed down yet….”

“We’d like it to be, tomorrow.”

The prosecutor frowned in surprise. “It’s not scheduled till Friday….”

Darrow cocked his head, raised one eyebrow. “If we move it up, we get less press attention.”

Kelley shrugged facially, then gestured with the document. “Commuted to what? Time served?”

Darrow shrugged. “Whatever. As long they’re allowed to leave Honolulu.”

“I’m going to be expected to prosecute the Ala Moana boys, you know. I certainly have no desire to, particularly knowing what I do about Lyman and Kaikapu.”

Darrow’s smile turned sly. “You won’t be able to prosecute without your complaining witness.”

Sitting so far forward, he seemed about to tumble off the sofa, Kelley said, “So you’ll advise Thalia to leave the Islands?”

Darrow looked at his pocket watch. “I will. In fact, I’m expecting her in just a very few minutes…. Would you care to stay to pay your respects?”

Kelley, twitching a smile, rose. “I think I’ll pass on that morbid pleasure, gentlemen…. Don’t get up, I can see myself out.” He went to Darrow and extended his hand; the two men shook hands as Kelley said, “I won’t stand in your way on this. You can expect my cooperation…as long as you make sure Thalia Massie is off this island as soon as possible.”

Darrow nodded gravely, then lifted a gesturing hand. “Understand, I’ll be making some public statements at odds with our private agreement. I’ll be outraged that my clients have been denied the full pardon they so rightfully deserve…that sort of malarkey.”

Kelley chuckled. “Well, you can expect me to bray like a mule about taking the Ala Moana boys to trial…. Of course some people will suggest that, having prosecuted Joseph Kahahawai’s killers, I in good conscience should step down. You know what I may do? I might suggest to the press that the man to prosecute that case is the man who so eloquently defended the wronged family: Clarence Darrow.”

A smile tickled Darrow’s lips. “You wouldn’t…”

Kelley was at the door. “I may be seized by an uncontrollable impulse.”

And he was gone.

Darrow was chuckling. “I like that Irishman. Hell of a prosecutor.”

Leisure folded his arms and leaned back. “He wasn’t happy, but I believe he will cooperate.”

Darrow began to make a cigarette. “He’s a man of his word. He’ll cooperate. And I don’t believe any of us are happy.” He looked up. “Nate, do you feel gypped out of the glory of nabbing the man who raped Thalia Massie?”

“No,” I said. “I had the pleasure of knocking some of his teeth out, even if I didn’t quite manage to break his goddamn jaw.”

Leisure was laughing softly, shaking his head. “Where’d you find this roughneck, C.D.?”

“On the West Side of Chicago,” Darrow said as his slightly shaking hands did a nice job of dropping tobacco into the curve of cigarette paper. “That’s where America turns out some of its best roughnecks.”

A knock at the door brought Ruby Darrow out of the bedroom; she was straightening her hair, smoothing her matronly gray dress, saying, “Let me get that, dear.”

It was Thalia, of course, and she was accompanied by Isabel. Thalia wore a navy blue frock with white trim, Isabel the blue-and-white-striped crepe de chine from the Ala Wai, both in cloche hats, carrying clutch purses, two stylish, attractive, modern young women; but they also wore a cloak of unhappiness. Thalia seemed jittery, Isabel weary. They stepped inside, Thalia first, digging in her purse.

Darrow, lighting his cigarette, got to his feet, and so did Leisure and I. Thalia was moving toward us, handing a stack of telegrams toward Darrow.

“You simply must see these, Mr. Darrow,” she said. “Such wonderful support from people all over the United States…”

“Thank you, dear.” He took them and said to his wife, “Would you put these with the others, Ruby? Thank you.”

Ruby took the telegrams and Darrow turned to Leisure and said, “George, would you mind accompanying Mrs. Darrow and Miss Bell for some refreshments in the lobby? I recommend the pineapple parfait.”

Leisure frowned. “You don’t want me here when you speak to—”

“Mr. Heller and I have a few details to discuss with Mrs. Massie that I think would be best served by…a limited audience.”

Leisure seemed vaguely hurt, but he knew his place, and his job, and took Ruby by the arm and led her to the door. Isabel looked at me with an expression that mingled curiosity and concern; we never had connected last night.

I threw her a smile and that seemed to console her, and then Leisure and his two charges were gone, and Darrow was gesturing to the sofa for Thalia to sit.

“My dear, there are several things we need to…chat about. Please make yourself comfortable.”

She sat on the sofa, her slightly bulging eyes darting from Darrow to me, as I sat next to her, but not right next to her, giving her plenty of space.

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Please don’t tell me you think Tommie and Mother are actually going to have to serve any…prison time.”

“I think we can avoid that,” Darrow said, “with your help.”

Relief softened her expression and she sighed and said, “I’ll do anything. Anything.”

“Good. Does my cigarette bother you, dear?”

She shook her head, no.

“Fine, then. Here’s what I need to ask of you…”

“Anything.”

“…I need you to leave Hawaii, with the rest of us, once I’ve worked things out with the governor.”

Her eyes tightened. “What do you mean?”

“There will be public pressure, here in Honolulu, and from back home, to retry those boys you accused. I need you to spare yourself the pain of going through this yet again, testifying for a third time; I need you to go back to the mainland and never return to these shores.”

She smiled, but it was a smile of astonishment. “You can’t be saying this. You can’t be saying that I should turn my back on what was done to me. That I let those terrible black creatures get away with what was done to me!”

He was shaking his head somberly, no. “There must not be a second Ala Moana trial, dear.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong…there must be. Otherwise, you’re sentencing me to a lifetime of gossip and humiliation, putting my word, my reputation, in doubt forever.”

Darrow’s expression turned sorrowful. He drew in on his cigarette, and when he exhaled smoke, it was a sigh of smoke, and he nodded, reluctantly, toward me.

I nodded back, and took a manila envelope off the coffee table before us and removed the Oahu Prison mug shots of Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu. I handed her the photos.

Puzzled, she looked at them, shrugged, tossed them back on the table, and said, “Is this supposed to mean something to me? Who are they?”

I glanced at Darrow and he sighed again, nodded again.

I said, “These are two of the three men who abducted you.”

Her puzzlement turned to perplexity, with irritation working at the edges of her mouth and eyes. “Why are you saying this? Kahahawai and Ida and the others, they’re the ones, you know they’re the ones—”

“The ones you accused,” I said. “But those two…” And I indicated the mug shots on the table. “…are the ones who really grabbed you.”

“You’re insane. Insane! Mr. Darrow, must I listen to this insanity?”

Darrow only nodded, poker-faced.

I said, “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and figure you were confused as to how many of them there were in the car…which is only natural, considering that your preeclampsia impairs your eyesight in low-light conditions.”

Her eyes bugged with alarm; the blood drained from her face, turning her Kabuki white.

“Yes, dear,” Darrow said softly, compassionately, “we know about your condition. Did you think our mutual friend Dr. Porter would keep that from me?”

“Oh, how could he?” she asked. Desperation mingled with despair in her voice. “That was privileged communication, between doctor and patient….”

“Sorry, Thalia—this time there’s nothing for you to tear up,” I said. “These are facts you can’t discard.”

She covered her mouth. “I think…I think I’m going to be ill.”

Darrow glared at me; he’d warned me not to be too rough on the girl.

“If you need the bathroom, dear…” he began.

“No.” She removed her hand from her mouth; folded her hands in her lap. Her features drew tight, became a blank mask. “No.”

“We also know there was no pregnancy,” Darrow said. “But that doesn’t make your fear of pregnancy any less real….”

She said nothing. She was almost frozen—almost: her eyes moved from Darrow to me, as we talked.

“Mrs. Massie—Thalia,” I said, “what I’m about to tell you, only Mr. Darrow and myself are privy to.”

She nodded toward Darrow, but said to me: “He’s not my lawyer, he’s Tommie’s lawyer. I don’t want to go any further with this unless this conversation is privileged.”

“Fair enough, dear,” Darrow said. “As my client’s spouse, the privilege of privacy due to him extends to you. This discussion is entirely an extension of Tommie’s case.”

Now she looked at Darrow and nodded toward me. “What about him?”

“He’s my investigator. He’s bound by the same pledge of privacy.”

She thought about that, nodded, said, “Then we can continue.”

“Fine, dear. Let’s allow Mr. Heller to tell us what he’s discovered in his investigating these past several weeks.”

Her cow-eyed gaze fell coldly, contemptuously my way.

I said, “You’d been having an affair with Lt. Bradford, while your husband was away on duty. For whatever reason, it went bust, and, on the rebound, you began having a fling with a music boy named Sammy.”

Her lips were trembling; she had her chin up, though, the way her mother had in court.

“You didn’t want to go to the Ala Wai that night,” I continued, “because you knew Bradford would be there and also knew the place was one of Sammy’s favorite hangouts. And being with your husband in the proximity of two lovers, past and present, could be…awkward.”

She made a throaty sound that was almost a laugh. “You’re guessing. These are just more stupid rumors, more silly scurrilous stories…”

“No. You were seen talking with Sammy right before you walked out of the Ala Wai into the night—right after you slapped Lt. Stockdale for calling you a…well, for insulting you. You see, Sammy wasn’t discreet, Thalia. He told friends in his crowd about his affair with you…and he told them what he saw.”

“Nobody saw anything,” she snapped, but her eyes weren’t sure.

“Sammy saw Bradford follow you, and he followed along behind Bradford while you two were arguing. Sammy also saw the carload of cruising kanakas pull along the curb and give you the wolf whistle…saw and heard you egg ’em on, too, probably to make Bradford jealous. Well, Bradford took off, and when Sammy saw who these boys were…” I tapped the photos of Lyman and Kaikapu. “…he knew you were in a jam. These were mean, nasty, low-down criminal boys. Sammy rushed up, tried to help you, got shoved away. That’s part of the story you never mentioned, isn’t it, Thalia? Sammy’s presence. You couldn’t include him, could you? Not without your fling with a colored boy getting out. Couldn’t mention Bradford, either—that very night, when the police had arrested him, you assured him that you wouldn’t involve him, told him not to worry.”

Her mouth and chin trembled; her eyes were shining wetly. “I was abducted. I was beaten. I was raped.”

I shrugged. “Maybe you were raped…”

“Maybe!” She lurched toward me, on the couch, flew at me with her fists raised, ready to pummel me, but I clutched her wrists and her face was inches from mine, emotions passing across her face in waves: rage, shame, despair….

I felt the fight go out of her and released her.

She backed away, and said, almost gasped, “I…I…am going to be sick.”

And she ran to the bathroom and slammed the door. The sound of her retching made Darrow shiver. I was having trouble feeling sorry for her.

“You’re too harsh with her,” he whispered, raising a hand. “Try to remember she’s in hell.”

“Joe Kahahawai’s in the ground,” I reminded him. “And you don’t believe in hell, remember?”

“Oh, I believe in hell, Nate. It’s right here on Earth…and she’s in it. Go easy.”

“There’s a good chance the reason she got her jaw broken,” I said, “was she wouldn’t come across for those guys. Because of things Sammy said to ’em when he tried to intervene, Lyman and Kaikapu probably realized they had hold of a Navy wife, not a hooker or some loose lady. So they roughed her up, snatched her purse, and dumped her ass out.”

“Or they may have raped her.”

“They may have,” I granted.

The sound of the toilet flushing announced Thalia’s imminent return.

“We need her as an ally,” Darrow reminded me.

I nodded and drew in a breath as the bathroom door opened and she walked slowly toward us, head down, shoulders stooped, as if shame were weighing her down.

She took her place on the sofa but sat as far away from me as she could.

“I was raped,” she said quietly, both pride and a tremor in her voice. “By Joe Kahahawai and Horace Ida and those others…” She pointed to the pictures on the table. “…not by them.”

“According to Sammy,” I said, “it was Lyman and Kaikapu who dragged you in the ragtop. There was another boy along, but nobody has a name for him; a Filipino kid.”

“Where…where is Sammy?”

“In Los Angeles.”

“But you talked to him?”

“How I got this information isn’t important.”

“What is,” Darrow interjected, “is that if Nate here could dig it out, so could somebody else. There’s been a reorganization among the police, and a second Ala Moana trial would mean a new, full-scale investigation. The governor is talking about bringing in the FBI.”

She frowned, swallowed.

“Thalia,” I said, “it’s not your fault some incompetent cops put the wrong boys on a platter and served ’em up to you. They practically forced you to ID Ida and the rest.”

Her eyes were narrowed; she was thinking. Darrow was smiling at me—I was finally going easier. But I didn’t want to. I knew there was another strong possible reason for Thalia identifying the wrong boys: Sammy may have told her not to ID Lyman and Kaikapu, because it would put both their lives in danger.

But she had to finger somebody to protect her good name, her honor as the wife of a naval officer, her stature as a member of a prominent family. Maybe she figured the Ala Moana boys would never be convicted; but as rumors began to fly, she desperately needed to sacrifice these innocent boys (just “niggers,” after all) at the altar of her reputation and her marriage.

That’s what I wanted to throw in her face.

Instead, I said, “Protect yourself. Leave the Island. The Navy’ll give Tommie stateside duty, you can bet on that. Put this ugly nonsense behind you.”

Darrow leaned forward and patted her folded hands. “He’s right, dear. It’s time…time to go home.”

She began to nod. Then she let out a huge sigh, stood, smoothed out her dress, and said, “All right. If it’s best for Tommie and Mother.”

He stood, nodding sagely, pressing her hands in his. “It is, dear. Why subject yourself to a needless ordeal? Now, I must warn you, there will no doubt be a summons issued for you to appear as complaining witness in a new Ala Moana trial. Prosecutor Kelley needs to do that to save face….”

“He’s an awful man.”

“He’s cooperating with me, dear, and that’s all that matters. I’ll be saying things for appearance sake, too, but it’ll be bluster and show. Understand? What the public hears, and what’s really going on, are two different affairs.”

I’d have to pass that one on to Chang Apana; anyway, it was a concept Thalia Massie, of all people, ought to grasp.

I was on my feet, too. Forcing a smile for her.

She fixed those bulgy eyes on me. “No one knows what you’ve discovered, Mr. Heller? Just you and Mr. Darrow? Not even Mr. Leisure?”

“No one,” I said.

“You won’t tell Isabel…”

“No.”

“I don’t want Tommie to hear these lies.”

“They aren’t…”

Out of her sight, Darrow was waving at me not to finish.

“…anything anybody’s going to hear but you.”

She smiled, drew in a breath, and said, “Well, then—I think I’ll go down and join Isabel and Mrs. Darrow and Mr. Leisure. I could use some tea to settle my stomach.”

Darrow took her arm, showed her to the door, small-talking with her along the way, soothing her, smoothing a wrinkled feather or two, and then she was gone.

Slowly, Darrow turned to me and said, “Thank you, Nate. Now we can do what’s right for our clients.”

“What about doing something for the poor bastards that bitch wrongly accused?”

He came over and settled a hand on my shoulder. “Now, now—don’t judge Thalia too harshly. She was the first victim in this affair, and she’s suffering still.”

“What about the Ala Moana boys?”

He shuffled back to his easy chair, settled back in, putting his feet back up, folding his hands across his ample belly. “We’re going to see to it, with Thalia’s help, that those boys aren’t put through a second trial.”

I sat across from him, where Thalia had been sitting. “Their supporters are demanding complete exoneration. You’ve seen the papers—the colored population here, egged on by Princess What’s-Her-Name, thinks the Ala Moana boys deserve to be freed of this stigma.” I gestured to the pictures of Lyman and Kaikapu. “Sure, the real bad guys are already doing long, hard time, and that’s peachy; but to the public, Horace Ida and his pals’ve been branded rapists.”

“In due time, the case will be officially dropped, over insufficient evidence.” He shrugged. “There’s no way you can undo something like this, not entirely. In the eyes of the white population, both here and at home, yes, the Ala Moana boys will remain forever rapists. To the various ethnic groups on this island, these boys are heroes, tragic heroes perhaps, but heroes nonetheless—and Joseph Kahahawai a martyred hero.”

“I suppose.”

He grunted a humorless laugh. “What do you think, Nate?” He nodded toward the photos of Lyman and Kaikapu. “Your informed opinion—did they rape her? Or just rob her and thrash and throttle her?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “and I don’t care.”

Darrow shook his head, smiled sadly. “Don’t get hardened so soon in life, son. That poor girl went for a moonlight walk and came back damaged for life….”

“Joe Kahahawai went for a morning ride and never came back at all.”

Darrow nodded, slowly; his eyes were moist. “You must learn to reserve the lion’s share of your pity for the living, Nate—the dead have ceased their suffering.”

“What about Horace Ida and his buddies? They’re alive—with that one little exception. Are you going to meet with them, now, finally?”

A pained frown creased his brow. “You know I can’t do that. You know I can’t ever do that.”

It was time for his afternoon nap, and I left him there, and that was the last time I suggested he meet with Ida and the others.

There is a rumor, however—unsubstantiated but persistent to this day—that the old boy and the Ala Moana defendants sat together for dinner in a private alcove at Lau Yee Ching’s; and that the only word spoken of the case, at this unique and singular meeting, was C.D. raising his teacup of oke in a toast to an empty chair at the table.

21

Even in Hawaii, mornings in May came no more beautiful. Sunlight glanced through the fronds of palms and a sublimely sultry breeze riffled lesser leaves as reporters—who the night before had been given the news that the sentencing had been moved up two days—milled about the sidewalk. The only hitch in this perfect day was some grumbling from a surprisingly modest crowd of gawkers, annoyed over Governor Judd’s order banning the public from the courtroom; only those involved in, or reporting, the case would be allowed inside.

It was nearly ten, and I’d been here since nine, accompanying Darrow and Leisure; the old boy had met Kelley here and together they had disappeared into Judge Davis’s chambers, and hadn’t been seen since. Leisure was already at the defense table inside. I was leaning against the base of the King Kamehameha statue, just enjoying the day. Soon enough I’d be back in Chicago, watching spring get bullied aside by a sweltering summer.

Four Navy cars drew up to the sidewalk, armed Marine guards in the first and last, Tommie and Thalia and Mrs. Fortescue in the second, Jones and Lord in the third. Chang Apana met them, and escorted them through the swarming reporters, who were hurling questions that went unanswered.

For defendants in a murder case, they seemed curiously calm, even cheery. The Massie contingent was smiling, not bravely, just smiling; Thalia had traded in her dark colors for a stylish baby blue outfit with matching turban, while Mrs. Fortescue wore dignified black, though trimmed with a gay striped scarf. Tommie looked dapper in a new suit with a gray tie, and Lord and Jones also wore suits and ties; the sailors were laughing, smoking cigarettes.

The fix, after all, was in.

I wandered in and joined Leisure at the defense table. The ceiling-fan whir seemed louder than usual, probably because what had seemed a tiny courtroom when packed with people now felt cavernous, with the spectators limited to that one table of press.

Soon a beaming Darrow and glum Kelley emerged from a door near the bench, their session in the judge’s chambers complete; the lawyers took their positions at their respective tables. Judge Davis entered and took the bench. The clerk called the court to order, and the bailiff called out, “Albert Orrin Jones, stand up.”

Jones did.

Judge Davis said, “In accordance with the verdict of manslaughter returned against you in this case, I hereby sentence you to the term prescribed by law, not more than ten years’ imprisonment at hard labor in Oahu Prison. Is there anything you wish to say?”

“No, Your Honor.”

Jones was grinning. Not the usual response to such a sentence. Darrow seemed suddenly uncomfortable: it would have been nice if this seagoing dolt had had the decency to put on a poker face.

The same sentence was passed on the other defendants, who at least didn’t smile through it, even if they did seem unnaturally calm in the face of ten years’ hard labor.

Kelley rose, smoothed out his white linen suit and said, “Prosecution moves for a writ of mittimus.”

Judge Davis said, “Motion granted, Mr. Kelley, but before turning these defendants over to their warden, I want the bailiffs to clear the courtroom of all except counsel and defendants.”

Now it was the press who were grumbling as the bailiffs herded them out, where they joined other gawkers in the corridor.

As the reporters were leaving, a tall, rather commanding figure moved down the aisle; though he wore a brown suit with a cheerful yellow tie, there was something immediately military about his bearing, this hawkishly handsome man with hard, amused eyes.

“That’s Major Ross,” Leisure said.

I had to smile as I watched the judge issue the writ turning the defendants over to the man whose name Mrs. Fortescue had forged on the summons that had lured Joe Kahahawai into “custody.”

Ross led the defendants out of the courtroom, with Darrow, Leisure, and me close behind. Kelley didn’t come along—my last glimpse had him half-seated on the edge of the prosecution table, arms folded, a sardonic half-smile eloquently expressing his opinion of the proceedings.

In the corridor, the press and a few friends and relatives of the defendants (Isabel among them) joined the parade as we streamed into the streaming sunshine. Passing the statue of King Kamehameha, the group paused for traffic at the curb where Joe Kahahawai had been abducted.

Then Major Ross led the way, across King Street, through an open gate and up the wide walk past manicured grounds, like the Pied Piper leading his rats, on up the steps of the grandly, ridiculously rococo Iolani Palace. The major led the group past the massive throne room with its hanging tapestries, gilt chairs, and framed pompous portraits of Polynesians in European royal drag, and soon the press and other camp followers were deposited in a waiting room, while the rest of us headed up a wide staircase to a large hall, off of which were governmental offices—including the governor’s.

I was walking alongside Jones, who was grinning like a goon (he’d had the decency to discard his cigarette, at least), glancing up at the high ceiling and elaborate woodworking.

“This is a swell jail,” the sailor said. “A lot better than your pal Al Capone’s. Wonder how he’s doin’? I hear they took him to the Atlanta pen the other day by special train.”

“He should’ve had your lawyer,” I said.

The major showed us into the spacious, red-carpeted office where Governor Judd—a pleasant-looking fellow with an oval face and black-rimmed round-lensed glasses—rose politely behind his formidable mahogany desk. He gestured to chairs that had been arranged. We were expected.

“Please sit,” the governor said, and we did. When everyone was settled, Judd sat back down, folding his hands; he seemed more like a justice of the peace than a governor. He said, respectfully, “Mr. Darrow, I understand you have a petition you would like me to hear.”

“I do, sir,” Darrow said. He held out a hand and Leisure, beside him, filled it with a scroll. To me this formality was a little ridiculous, but it fit the surroundings.

“The undersigned defendants,” Darrow read, “in the matter of the Territory of Hawaii versus Grace Fortescue et. al., and their attorneys, do hereby respectfully pray that your Excellency, in the exercise of the power of executive clemency in you vested, and further in view of the recommendation of the jury in said matter, do commute the sentences heretofore pronounced in said matter.”

Darrow rose, stepped forward, and handed the scroll to the governor. The old boy sat down while the governor—who damn well knew every word of the document—held it and read it and pretended to ponder it awhile. Who was he trying to kid?

Finally, Judd said, “Acting upon this petition, and upon the recommendation by the jury of leniency, the sentence of ten years at hard labor is hereby commuted to one hour, to be served in custody of Major Ross.”

Mrs. Fortescue bolted to her feet and clasped her hands like a maiden in a melodrama. “This is the happiest day of my life, Your Excellency. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Then Judd was subjected to a round of pump-handle handshakes, including Lord and Jones, who said, “Thanks, Guv! You’re okay!”

Eyes tight behind the round lenses, Judd was clearly uncomfortable, if not ashamed of himself, and after some mindless chitchat (Tommie: “I only wish I could be in Kentucky to see the smile on my mother’s face when she hears this!”), Judd checked his watch.

“We’ll, uh, have that hour begin with the approximate time you left Pearl Harbor this morning, which means…well, your time is up. Good luck to you all.”

Before long, our little group (minus the governor) was posing for the press photogs on a balcony of the palace. When the press found out I wasn’t one of the attorneys, just a lowly investigator, I was asked to step outside of the already crowded grouping. That was fine with me, and I stood smiling to myself at the absurdity of these group portraits; it was as if the class honor students had been gathered in all their self-congratulatory glory, not some convicted murderers and their lawyers and the woman who had inspired the crime.

Darrow was smiling, but there was something weary and forced about it. Major Ross seemed frankly amused. Only George Leisure, arms folded, staring into the distance, seemed to have second thoughts. Playing second chair to the great Clarence Darrow had been an education for him, but maybe he hadn’t got quite the schooling he expected.

Grace Fortescue was flittering and fluttering around, social butterfly that she was, making one silly comment after another. “I will be ever so glad to get back to the United States,” she told a reporter from the Honolulu Advertiser, who did her the courtesy of not reminding her she was already standing on American soil.

But her silliness stopped when a reporter asked her if she would ever come back, under more normal, pleasant circumstances, to enjoy the beauty of the Islands.

The repressed bitterness and anger poured out, as she almost snarled, “When I leave here I will never come back, not as long as I live!”

Then she launched into a trembling-voiced speech of her hope that the “trouble” she’d suffered would result in making Honolulu “a safer place for women.”

Isabel had found her way into this madness, and she grasped my arm and bubbled, “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“I can hardly keep from jumping up and down.”

She pretended to frown. “You’re a grump. I know something that will improve your attitude.”

“What’s that?”

“My friend is gone.”

“What friend?”

“You know—my friend, that friend.”

“Oh? Oh! Well. Want to go back to the hotel and, uh, go swimming or something?”

“Or something,” she said, and hugged my arm.

If she wanted to celebrate this wonderful victory, I was her guy. After all, the job was done, we weren’t sailing for a couple of days, and I didn’t even have a suntan yet.

Not that I planned to get much of a tan pursuing the “or something” Isabel had in mind.

First to leave, with the Navy’s blessing, were the sailors. Deacon Jones and Eddie Lord retained their ranks (Admiral Stirling publicly stated, “We refuse to consider legal either the trial or the conviction”) and were taken by destroyer to San Francisco for routing to the Atlantic Coast via the Panama Canal, where they were transferred to the submarine Bass.

The Navy also smuggled Thalia (and Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue and Isabel) aboard the Malolo via a minesweeper that pulled up along the cargo hold. The summons Kelley had issued for Thalia to appear as complaining witness may have been only for show, but the coppers didn’t know that, and several made a determined effort to serve her.

When Darrow, Leisure, their wives, and I arrived at the dock for a noon sailing, we were pleasantly accosted by Island girls who draped us with leis; and the Royal Hawaiian Band played its traditional “Aloha Oe” as we walked up the gangplank to head for our respective staterooms.

In the corridor, on my way to my cabin, I came upon a shouting match between a plainclothes Hawaiian copper with a round dark face and a shovel-jawed Navy captain in full uniform.

The cop was waving his summons at the captain, who blocked a stateroom door that was apparently the Massies’.

“You can’t give me orders!” the cop was saying.

“Say ‘sir’ when you speak to me,” the naval captain snapped.

The Hawaiian tried to shove the captain aside, and the captain shoved him back, saying, “Don’t lay your hands on me!”

“Don’t lay your hands on me!”

I was wondering if it was my responsibility to try to break up this childish nonsense, when a familiar voice behind me called out: “Detective Mookini! Noble effort goes past reason. Treat captain with respect!”

Then Chang Apana, Panama in hand, was at my side.

“You could always use that blacksnake,” I said, “if they won’t listen.”

Chang smiled gently. “They listen.”

Miraculously, the two men were sheepishly shaking hands, acknowledging that each was only trying to do his job.

“Mookini!” Chang called, and the round-faced cop, two heads taller than Chang, almost ran to him, stood with head bowed. “Too late to dig well when house is on fire. Go back to headquarters.”

“Yes, Detective Apana.”

And the copper and his summons went away.

The captain said, “Thank you, sir.”

Chang nodded.

The stateroom door opened and Tommie poked his head out. “Is everything all right, Captain Wortman?”

“Shipshape, Lieutenant.”

Tommie thanked him, nodded to me, and ducked back inside.

Chang walked me to my cabin.

I said, “Did you come aboard just to make sure that summons didn’t get served?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps I come to say aloha to a friend.”

We shook hands, then we chatted for a while about that big family of his on Punchbowl Hill, and how he had no intention of ever retiring, and finally the “all ashore” call came and he bowed and started back down the corridor, snugging his Panama back on.

“No parting words of wisdom, Chang?”

The little man looked back at me; his eyes damn near twinkled, even the one surrounded by discolored knife-scarred tissue.

“Advice at end of case like medicine at dead man’s funeral,” he said, tipped his Panama, and was gone.

On the second night of the voyage home, leaning against the rail of the Malolo in my white dinner jacket, gazing at the silver shimmer of ocean, my arm around Isabel Bell, her blond wind-stirred hair whispering against my cheek as she snuggled to me, I tried to imagine myself back chasing pickpockets at LaSalle Street Station. I couldn’t quite picture it; but reality would catch up with me, soon enough. It always did.

“I heard you and Mr. Darrow talking,” Isabel said, “about you going to work for him.”

Our entire party—Tommie and Thalia, Mrs. Fortescue, Ruby and C.D., the Leisures, Isabel, and I—took meals together at one table in the ship’s dining room. One big happy family, even though Thalia hadn’t yet spoken to me. Or I to her, for that matter.

I said, “I’m hoping to work for C.D. full-time.”

“You’d leave the police department?”

“Yes.”

She snuggled closer. “That would be nice.”

“You approve of that?”

“Sure. I mean…that’s romantic. Important.”

“What is?”

“Being Clarence Darrow’s chief investigator.”

I didn’t pursue it, but I think she was trying to talk herself into thinking I might be somebody she could consider seeing, back home, at journey’s end, on solid ground. She was kidding herself, of course. I was still a working-class joe, and a working-class Jew, and only under the special circumstances of a shipboard romance could I ever measure up to social standards.

“Why is Thalo mad at you?” she asked.

“Is she?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“I don’t pay much attention to her. I got my eyes on a certain cousin of hers.”

She squeezed my arm. “Silly. Did something happen back there I don’t know about?”

“Back where?”

“Hawaii! I shouldn’t say this, but…I think she and Tommie are squabbling.”

I shrugged. “After what they been through, bound to be a little tension.”

“They’re in the cabin next to me.”

“And?”

“And I thought I heard things breaking. Like things were being thrown?”

“Ah. Wedded bliss.”

“Don’t you think two people could be happy? Forever, together?”

“Sure. Look out at the ocean. That’s forever, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Forever enough.”

We made love in my cabin morning, noon, and night. I can picture her right now, the smooth contours of her flesh, the supple curves of her body, the small firm breasts, eyes closed, mouth open, lost in ecstasy, washed ivory in moonlight, from a porthole, on a beach.

But I never kidded myself. It was, quite literally, a shipboard romance, and I was telling her what she wanted to hear. Back home, I wasn’t good enough for her. But on this steamer, I was the suave detective on his way home from a distant tropical isle, where I’d been engaged successfully to solve a dastardly crime perpetrated against a lovely innocent white woman by evil dark men.

And a guy like that deserves to get laid.

On February 13, 1933, Prosecutor John Kelley appeared in Judge Davis’s court and moved for no prosecution in the case of the Territory vs. Horace Ida, Ben Ahakuelo, Henry Chang, and David Takai. The judge passed the motion. Sufficient time had passed for the public, both in Hawaii and on the mainland, to greet the shelving of the case with indifference.

This was as close to vindication as the Ala Moana boys ever got, but they did receive the blessing of fading into the obscurity of Island life. Ida became a storekeeper; Ben Ahakuelo a member of a rural fire department on the windward side of Oahu; the others, I understand, drifted into various routine pursuits.

Of course, exoneration of a sort came to them, by way of Thalia Massie, who did enter the limelight from time to time, now and then—most prominently when, two years to the day of Joseph Kahahawai’s murder, she traveled to Reno to divorce Tommie. The evening her divorce became final, Thalia swallowed poison in a nightclub.

This suicide attempt proved unsuccessful, and a month later, on the liner Roma bound for Italy, she slashed her wrists in the tub in her cabin. Her screams while doing so, however, alerted help and this attempt also failed.

I felt bad, when I read the accounts in the Chicago papers; Darrow had been right: Thalia Massie lived in a personally crafted hell, and she was having no luck getting out of it.

Now and then, from time to time, the twentieth century’s most famous rape victim turned up in the press: in 1951, she attacked a pregnant woman, her landlady, who sued her for ten thousand dollars; in 1953, she enrolled as a forty-three-year-old student at the University of Arizona; the same year, she eloped to Mexico to marry a twenty-one-year-old student; two years later she again divorced.

Finally, in July of 1963, in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she had moved to be closer to her mother (they lived separately, however), Thalia escaped her personal hell. Her mother found her dead on the bathroom floor of her apartment, bottles of barbiturates scattered about her.

Tommie Massie, like the Ala Moana boys, enjoyed the blessing of a notoriety-free private life. He married Florence Storms in Seattle in 1937; in 1940, he left the Navy. He and his wife moved to San Diego, where they lived quietly and happily as Tommie pursued a successful civilian career.

Mrs. Fortescue outlived her daughter, but she is gone now, as so many of them are: Clarence “Buster” Crabbe, who never returned to law school after Olympic fame led to Hollywood B-movie stardom; New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who resigned in disgrace (Darrow did not defend him); Detective John Jardine, whose reputation as a tough, honest cop eventually rivaled Chang Apana’s; Duke Kahanamoku, whose Hollywood ventures were not as successful as fellow Olympian Buster Crabbe’s, but who wound up a successful nightclub owner; Major Ross, who took over Oahu Prison and brought discipline to the institution, starting with placing Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu in well-deserved solitary confinement.

Admiral Stirling, John Kelley, and George Leisure also long ago said aloha to this life.

What became of the officers and sailors—Bradford, Stockdale, Olds, Dr. Porter, and the rest—I have no idea. Last I heard, Eddie Lord was still alive; had a well-paying, respectable job but was something of a loner, living in an apartment over a suburban bar and grill, spending his time glued to a television set.

Other than Darrow, Jones was the only principal player in the farce I ever ran into again. Completely by chance, we wound up side by side at the bar in the Palmer House in the summer of ’64. I didn’t recognize him—not that he’d changed that much, a little grayer, a little heavier, but who wasn’t?

What I guess I didn’t expect was to find Deacon Jones wearing a tailored suit and a conservative striped tie—even if the double Scotch he was collecting from the bartender did make sense.

“Don’t I know you?” he asked, gruffly affable.

I still hadn’t made him. “Do you?” To the bartender I said, “Rum and Coke.”

“Aren’t you Heller? Nat? Nate!”

I smiled and sipped my drink. “Guess you do know me. I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to place—”

He thrust out a hand. “Albert Jones—Machinist’s Mate. Last time I saw you was in the Iolani Palace, when I was gettin’ sprung.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said, and shook hands with him, and laughed, once. “Deacon Jones. You look damn respectable.”

“Executive at a bank back in Massachusetts, if you can believe it.”

“Barely.”

“Come on! Let’s find a booth and catch each other the hell up. Shit! Imagine, runnin’ into Clarence Darrow’s detective, after all these years.”

We found a booth, and we talked; he was in town for a bankers’ convention. I, of course, was still living and working in Chicago, my A-l Detective Agency flourishing. These days, sometimes I felt more like an executive than a detective, myself.

We both got a little drunk. He said the last time he’d seen his friend Eddie Lord was in ’43 on the submarine Scorpion; thought about him often, though. We discussed Thalia Massie, who was recently dead, and Jones admitted he didn’t have a very high opinion of her.

“Her personality was zero,” he said. “She didn’t have the personality of your big toe. She didn’t have a good-lookin’ leg, ankle, or calf.”

“Well, you must’ve liked Tommie.”

“Massie was all man, all officer. He was a little scared, you know, when we snatched that boy, but put yourself in the lieutenant’s place—really high-class academic training, that upper-class background. Of course, he’d feel nervous—we were breakin’ the law!”

“How about ol’ Joe Kahahawai? Was he nervous?”

Jones chugged some Scotch, chortled. “He was damn near scared white. Look at it this way—suppose you and me are sitting here and we got a nigger sitting right there and I got a gun. Sure as shit he’s gonna be scared, right? Unless he’s a goddamn fool, and this guy was no fool.”

“Did he really confess?”

“Hell no. Tell you the truth, pal…he wasn’t all that goddamn scared. After while he started gettin’ his nerve back—you could almost see the fear kinda changin’ into this overbearing attitude. Maybe he was thinkin’ about what he could do if he ever got one of us alone.”

“You didn’t hate the guy, did you? Kahahawai, I mean?”

“Hell no! I don’t hate anybody. Besides, hate’s an expression of fear and I didn’t fear that black bastard. I had no use for him—but I wasn’t afraid of him.”

“So Tommie was questioning him, but he didn’t confess. Deacon…what the hell really happened in that house?”

Jones shrugged. It was strange, seeing this well-dressed banker drink himself back into a salty seaman spouting racist bile. “Massie asked him somethin’, and the nigger lunged at him.”

“What happened then?”

He shrugged again. “I shot the bastard.”

“You shot him?”

“Goddamn right I did. Right under the left nipple. He went over backwards and that’s all she wrote.”

“Did you even know what you were doing?”

“Hell yes I knew what I was doing. Of course, I knew right away this thing had got completely away from us. We were in a pack of trouble and we knew it.”