Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09 (17 page)

McIntosh settled his rangy frame into the wooden swivel chair behind the desk and sat nervously rubbing his forefinger against one graying temple as we spoke.

“I wanted to speak to you one on one,” McIntosh said. “Chang Apana is a living legend around here, and Jardine is one of our best, most dogged investigators. But they’re Chinese and Portuguese, respectively, and I wanted to be able to level with you.”

“What does their race have to do with anything?”

The patient smile widened condescendingly; the lids of the world-weary, worried eyes went to half-mast. “Everything in Honolulu has to do with race, Detective Heller.”

“Well, then…how, specifically, in this instance? We have more than one race in Chicago, by the way. I’ve seen colored people before.”

“I didn’t mean to patronize. But even the sharpest detective from the biggest city force is going to find himself, well, frankly, in over his head in these waters.”

“Maybe you can toss me a life buoy.”

He chuckled mildly, even as he continued rubbing his temple nervously. “Let’s start with the Honolulu Police Department. We’re under terrible political pressure right now, and are in the midst of a reorganization. Our authority is being chipped away at, with this Territorial Force under Major Ross. And do you know why?”

“I have a hunch, but I don’t really want to seem impertinent.”

“Speak frankly.”

“It would seem you screwed up the Massie case.”

He swallowed; rubbed his forehead. “Race and politics, Detective Heller. Some years ago, white and Hawaiian political factions here threw in together, to keep the Japs and Chinese from dominating local government. Part of the deal was, the whites tossed lesser governmental jobs to Hawaiians. There are two hundred and eighty men on the force, Detective Heller—and two hundred and forty of them are Hawaiian, or of mixed Hawaiian blood.”

“What’s the difference, as long as they’re good men.”

McIntosh nodded, bringing his hands before him, folding them prayerfully. “Most of them
are
good men—they’re just not good cops. For most patrolmen and even detectives, no other qualification is needed but Hawaiian blood. Oh, and an eighth grade education.”

“Isn’t there any kind of testing, training…”

“Certainly. Cops here are trained to be able to give tourists directions. They have to be able to spell the names of the outer islands, and recommend points of interest.”

“Are they cops or tour guides?”

McIntosh’s mouth flinched. “I don’t like to bad-mouth my men, Detective Heller. Some of them—like Chang and Jardine—could rival any cops you could find anywhere. My point is that there are political pressures on this Island that undermine the department’s performance.”

“And how would you rank your performance on the Massie case?” I purposely used “your” ambiguously.

“Under the circumstances, we performed well; there was the blunder at the Quarantine Station, with the tire tracks, that simply can’t be excused. But there was pressure to prosecute, even though the case was weak.”

“You admit it’s weak?”

“We needed more time, we weren’t ready for trial. There were too many damn chinks in the government’s case that hadn’t been filled.”

I presumed he didn’t mean “chinks” in a racial sense, but it was an interesting choice of words.

“All we had was Thalia Massie’s story,” he said, ticking items off on his fingers. “Then the supporting story of Eugenio Batungbacal that he’d seen a woman dragged into a car at about twelve-fifteen. Then, Mrs. Massie’s identification of the suspects, and her recollection of the license number. Plus the discovery of her necklace and other items at the crime scene, and then there’s the police records of Ahakuelo and Kahahawai.”

“Every one of those points is, to some degree, vulnerable,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers. “Thalia could be lying, witnesses other than Batungbacal seem to contradict him, Thalia originally said she couldn’t identify the assailants or remember the license plate, finding Thalia’s beads and such at the scene doesn’t place the suspects there, and Ahakuelo and Kahahawai’s ‘records’ are minimal at best.”

“Do you expect me to disagree? But I will say this, the fact that Mrs. Massie initially said she couldn’t identify them—when she was half-hysterical, in shock, or under sedation—bothers me not in the least. Those boys did it, all right.”

That sat me up straight. “You really believe that?”

The world-weary eyes tightened. “Absolutely. Look at it this way—when we picked Ida up, he lied through his teeth. He said he hadn’t driven that car when in fact he’d been out all night in it. Then, without prompting, Ida blurted out that he hadn’t attacked the white woman—
before anybody had told him about the Massie rape
!”

I frowned in thought. “So how in hell did he know about a white woman being attacked?”

“Precisely. Belated or not, Mrs. Massie did identify four of the five boys, and she came up with that license number, just one little digit off. I don’t know how you do it in Chicago, Detective Heller, but in Honolulu, once a man lies to me twice, I don’t have to take his damn word for anything.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“No, those are guilty boys. We just didn’t have proper time to build a case.” He sighed, smiled tightly. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No. No, you’ve been generous with your time.”

“I’ve instructed Detective Apana to make himself available to you as needed. While we are technically on the side of the prosecution in the Fortescue case, we have great admiration for Mr. Darrow and a certain sympathy for his clients.”

“Thank you.”

We shook hands again, and I found my way back to Chang and Jardine, who stood as I approached. McIntosh was shut back inside his office.

“Doesn’t surprise me the inspector wanted to talk to you privately,” Jardine said glumly.

“Oh?”

“There’s a faction of the force—Hawaiian and Portuguese, mostly…and I’m Portuguese myself—who were suspected of leaking information to the defense, in the first trial. And to the Japanese-English newspaper, the
Hochi,
which was sympathetic to the Ala Moana boys.”

“I see.”

The dark eyes under the brim of the George Raft fedora were mournful. “Just disappoints me the inspector doesn’t trust me.”

“He spoke highly of you, Inspector Jardine.”

“Good to hear. You need any backup, Chang knows where to find me.”

We shook hands again, and Jardine sauntered over to a desk and got to some paperwork.

Chang, who was on his way home to his wife and eight kids on Punchbowl Hill, walked me downstairs and out onto King Street, where a balmy breeze kissed us hello.

“McIntosh seems like a good man,” I said.

“Good man,” Chang agreed. He snugged on his Panama. “Poor detective.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He arrested Ala Moana boys on hunch, then stubbornly stuck with it.”

“He says Ida lied to him. That Ida blurted out something about not attacking the ‘white woman.’”

“Ida lied to protect self over
other,
minor assault when he and friends bump bumpers with
kanaka
gal and
haole
husband. And Ida was in station house, when he said that about not attacking white woman. He could easy have heard about Mrs. Massie by then…station was jumping with the news.”

“I see.”

Chang laughed humorlessly. “McIntosh is like carpenter who build straw house on sand: first strong wind bring disaster.”

“Who said that?” I asked.

“I did,” Chang said, and he tipped his Panama and went his way.

The Sunday evening before the first day of the trial, Isabel and I piled into Mrs. Fortescue’s Durant roadster with the top down, Isabel’s short Harlow hair fluttering as we drove out along the cliffs of Diamond Head, winding up the slopes past a lighthouse, pulling over to the edge of the cliff, stopping, getting out, crossing the lava rock alongside the road to stand hand in hand watching the surf beat against the coral reef below. Bronze fishermen with bare chests, long trousers, and shoes (the reefs were sharp, jagged) were down in the water with hand nets and three-pronged spears, now and then hauling in shimmering slithering catches, silver, red, blue fish, some solid, others striped, eels and squirming squid, too. As we watched this native ritual dance against the expanse of amethyst ocean and white breakers, the red setting sun began tinting the waves pink, until the sun slipped over the horizon and purple night fell like an enormous shadow over the sea, the moon a stingy sliver now, the stars more generous but the darkness intimidating, Isabel clutching my hand tight, glad she wasn’t alone, and suddenly blossoms of orange light burst below, then began flittering about, like giant fireflies. They were fishing by torchlight down there, now.

Back in the blue roadster, rather intoxicated by this lovely dark night, we began down the other side of the rise, gliding by expensive beach houses and estates; coming down, you could see the swimming pools of the rich cut out of the lava and coral rock above sea level, kept filled, washed clean, by the high tide. Scrub brush gave way to exotic foliage and coconut palms on the Kahala Road as we skimmed past more fancy beach houses, until we reached the entry of the Waialae Golf Club, which was under the Royal Hawaiian’s control and open to hotel guests.

This time of evening, the eighteen-hole golf course was of no interest; we parked and went into a clubhouse smothered in palms and tropical shrubbery and were served an Italian supper on a spacious
lanai
on the edge of the ocean. Isabel was wearing a blue-on-white polka-dot beach ensemble; with her jaunty little matching cap, you’d never guess her blouse was the upper part of her white swimsuit. I had my trunks on under my tan linen trousers; my second acquisition of an aloha shirt (as the loud silk shirts were locally baptized) got a few looks even in this determinedly casual touristy crowd. This time it was dark blue with white and red blossoms. Maybe I’d start a trend.

After supper, we lounged on deck-style chairs on the
lanai
in the light of Japanese lanterns, sipping a fruity punch that was greatly improved by the rum from my hip flask (my supplier was a Japanese bellboy at the Royal Hawaiian to whom I’d made it clear the local home brew wasn’t good enough, and damned if he didn’t come up with Bacardi).

Isabel said, “We haven’t talked about the case.”

And we hadn’t, at least hardly at all; my devil’s advocacy only seemed to rile her. We’d been spending the evenings together, and then the nights, with her scurrying back to her room across the hall at dawn and me meeting her a few hours later downstairs for breakfast. She had rented a little Ford coupe and, each day, drove to Pearl Harbor to spend the day with Thalia and company, at the Oldses’ and/or on the
Alton.

But the evenings were devoted to dining and dancing and strolling along the white sand while palms swayed and ukuleles thrummed before retiring to my room, screwing our brains out on the bed in the breeze blowing in from the balcony. It was a honeymoon I could never afford with a woman who would never have me, in real life.

Fortunately, this wasn’t real life: it was Waikiki.

“What do you want to know about the case?” I asked, knowing the exchange that followed might cost me my conjugal rights for the evening.

“How do
you
think it’s going to go?”

“Well…C.D. has a racially mixed jury. That was probably inevitable, considering the makeup of the population. He’s got his work cut out for him.”

“They didn’t mean to kill that brute.”

“They meant to kidnap him. And when the cops turned on their siren, Mrs. Fortescue kept right on going. The coppers had to fire two shots out the window at the buggy, before the old girl finally pulled over.”

Her heart-shaped face was a delicate mask, as pretty and blank as a porcelain doll’s. “We’re going to be heading up the same road, you know. For our moonlight swim?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said, lying. I’d meant to get out here and have a look all along. The plan (whether devised by Mrs. Fortescue, Tommie, or one of the sailor boys had never been established) had been to drive Kahahawai’s body out to Hanauma Bay and dispose of it in something called, colorfully, sinisterly, the Blowhole.

“They were foolish, weren’t they, Nate?”

“Not foolish, Isabel. Goddamn stupid. Arrogant.”

She turned her delicate features toward the ocean. “Now I remember why I stopped asking you about the case.”

“They killed a man, Isabel. I’m trying to help them get off, but I’ll be damned if I know why.”

She turned back to me, her eyes smiling, her Kewpie-bow mouth blowing me a kiss as she said: “I know why.”

“You do?”

A little nod. “It’s because Mr. Darrow wants you to.”

“It’s because I’m being paid to do it.”

“That’s not it at all. I’ve heard you two talking. You’re hardly getting anything out of this; just your regular police salary and some expenses.”

I touched her downy arm. “There
are
a few dividends.”

That made the Kewpie lips purse into a little smile. “You look up to him, don’t you, Nate? You admire him.”

“He’s a devious old bastard.”

“Maybe that’s what you want to be when you grow up.”

I frowned at her. “What made you so smart all of a sudden?”

“How is it you know him, a famous man like Clarence Darrow?”

“A nonentity like me, you mean?”

“Don’t be mean. Answer the question.”

I shrugged. “He and my father were friends.”

“Was your father an attorney?”

“Hell no! He was an old union guy who ran a bookstore on the West Side. They traveled in the same radical circles. Darrow used to come in to buy books on politics and philosophy.”

She was looking at me as if for the first time. “So you’ve known Mr. Darrow since you were a kid?”

“Yeah. Worked in his office as a runner when I was going to college.”

“How much college do you have?”

“Started at the University of Chicago, had some problems, finished up a two-year degree at a junior college.”

“Were you going to be a lawyer?”

“That was never my dream.”

Her eyes smiled again. “What was your dream, Nate?”

“Who says I had a dream?”

“You have a lot of dreams. A lot of ambitions.”

“I don’t remember telling you about ’em.”

“I can just tell. What was your dream? What
is
your dream?”

I blurted it: “To be a detective.”

She smiled, cocked her head. “You made it.”

“Not really. Not really. You about ready to get out of here? Catch that swim up the roadway?”

“Sure.” She gathered her things and we headed for the parking lot, where she started in again.

“You’ve been looking into what happened to Thalo, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Have you found anything helpful to Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie, in your search?”

“No.”

I opened the rider’s-side door on the Durant, shut her in, and that was all the conversation for a while. We were soon tooling along the edge of the club links. Before long we were passing groves of coconut palms and papaya orchards, truck gardens, chicken ranches, a campground, a large modern dairy. Then we wound through more coconut groves along the foot of the hills, at our left a looming black crater, at our right a cliff—Koko Head—projecting out into the sea. A sign at a fork in the road promised us the Blowhole if we took the dirt road to the left; I braved it.

Isabel started back in, working her voice above the rumble of the engine, the bump of the tires on hard dirt, and the top-down wind. “Surely you don’t think Thalo is lying about what happened to her.”

“Something happened to her that night last September. Something violent. Like she said to Tommie on the phone—something awful. I’m just not sure what.”

“You think those terrible colored boys are innocent?”

“I think they’re not guilty. There’s a difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“They may have done it; they’re roughnecks and borderline disreputable characters. ‘Innocent’ is a moral term. ‘Not guilty’ is the legal term, and that’s what they are: there just isn’t enough evidence to convict them.”

“But that was why Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue had to try to get a confession!”

I didn’t feel like pressing the point. But in almost two weeks of trying, I’d certainly come up with nothing to give Darrow even the most dubious moral high ground for his clients to occupy. Having talked to every major witness in the Ala Moana case over the past two weeks, I had accumulated nothing but doubts about Thalia, her story, and her identification of Horace Ida, Joseph Kahahawai, and the rest.

Young, personable George Goeas, a cashier with Dillingham Insurance in Honolulu, had taken his wife to the dance at Waikiki Amusement Park that night. About ten minutes past midnight, he and the missus crossed the street to John Ena Road, and drove down to the
saimin
stand for a snack of noodles. A young woman in a green dress, her head lowered, walked by.

“She seemed to be under the influence of liquor,” Goeas told me. “About a yard and a half from her, we saw a white guy following directly in back of her. He kept trailing after her for maybe twenty-five yards…. The way she held her head down, and him working to catch up with her, I kinda thought maybe they’d had a lovers’ quarrel or something. Then they walked out of view, a store blocking the way.”

“What did the guy trailing her look like?”

“Like I said, white. Five feet nine, hundred and sixty-five pounds maybe, medium build. Trim appearance. Looked like a soldier to me.”

Or a sailor?

“What was he wearing?”

“White shirt. Dark trousers. Maybe blue, maybe brown, I’m not sure.”

Mrs. Goeas had a better eye for fashion detail. She gave a precise description of the dress Thalia had been wearing, right down to a small bow in back, and described her as, “Mumbling to herself, swaying as she walked, I would even say stumbling.”

I met with Alice Aramaki, a tiny, pleasant girl of perhaps twenty, in the barbershop on John Ena Road, opposite the amusement park. Alice was one of Honolulu’s many Japanese lady barbers; her father owned the shop and she lived upstairs. She had seen a white woman in a green dress walk past her store at a quarter past midnight.

“What color hair did this woman have?”

“She was dark blond hair.”

“Anybody walking near her at the time?”

“A man was walking. He was a white man.”

“How was she walking, this woman in the green dress?”

“Hanging her head down. Walking slowly.”

“What did the white man wear?”

“No hat. White shirt. Dark pants.”

A group of men from various walks of life—a local politician, a greengrocer, two partners in a building supply company—had gone to the dance at the amusement park that night. They were headed down John Ena Road toward the beach at about twelve-fifteen when one of them, former city supervisor James Low, spotted “a woman in a blue or maybe green dress walking like a drunken person.” A man was trailing after her, but Low wasn’t sure of the man’s race. The woman and man seemed to be heading toward a car parked at the curb.

As Low and his friends drove on by, some girls on the street called out to Low, and he spoke out the window to them, while his friends saw something that caught their attention.

The driver, Eugenio Batungbacal, said, “I see about four or five men with one girl, two mens holding the woman with hands and one is following. They look like they force the woman on their car.”

He meant “in” the car—the odd Island usage of “on.”

“She looked like she was drunk,” he continued, “because two mens hold her arms and she tried to get away.”

“What did this girl look like? Was she white?”

“I don’t know, ’cause she is not facing to me. If she is facing to me, I tell you whether she is nigger or white or Portuguese.”

“What color dress was she wearing?”

“I don’t know. Long dress, though.”

“Like an evening gown?”

“Like that.”

But others in the same car hadn’t perceived this as a struggle. I asked Charles Cheng, greengrocer, if he wasn’t alarmed by what he’d seen.

“No, I thought they were just a bunch of friends.”

“You didn’t get excited when these guys were dragging a girl into their car?”

“No. I thought she was drunk and they were helping her.”

None of them heard screams or saw a punch thrown.

Still, this conformed to some degree to Thalia’s story—except that another carload (this one of guys and gals) at about the same time put Horace Ida and his pals elsewhere. According to Tatsumi Matsumoto—his friends called him “Tuts”—Ida’s car had followed his out of the amusement park.

The story—which included one of the boys from Tuts’s car jumping over onto Ida’s bumper and riding for a while, talking, even tossing Ahakeulo some matches—was confirmed by the other boy and two girls in the car, and it put the suspects at Beretania and Fort streets at around twelve-fifteen.

Husky Tuts—a former college football star who was financially independent, having inherited his father’s estate—hung around the sporting scene, hobnobbed with athletes and gamblers, and was friendly with Benny Ahakeulo. It was possible he and his friends were helping cover up for Benny.

But I didn’t think so. Tuts was affable and open and unrehearsed, telling his story, and the two girls were just flighty young Hawaiian gals who lacked the details a more contrived story would have contained.

“Did you see your friend Benny earlier, at Waikiki Park, Tuts? At the dance?”