Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09 (27 page)

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.”

“Where were Mrs. Fortescue and Lord when the bullet was fired?”

“They were outside. They came in when they heard the shot.”

“How did the old girl react?”

“She was scared shitless. She went over and hugged Tommie. She was fond of him.”

He told me about how it was his “stupid idea” to put the body in the bathtub; and how Thalia’s sister Helene had tossed the murder weapon into some quicksand by the beach. I asked him if he still had his scrapbook and he said, yeah, he dragged it out once in a while to prove to people he was “famous, once.”

“Funny,” he said. Shook his head. “First man I ever killed.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“Now, you mean? Same as then.”

“And how’s that?”

He shrugged. “I never shed a tear.”

And he took a slug of Scotch.

A few years later I heard Jones had died; I didn’t shed a tear, either.

Chang Apana was injured in an automobile accident later in 1932—a hit-and-run—and this finally forced him to retire from the Honolulu police, though he continued working in private security till shortly before his death in November 1934. Scores of dignitaries and the Royal Hawaiian Band gathered to send off the Island’s greatest detective; obituaries appeared all over the world, paying tribute to the “real Charlie Chan.”

In 1980, when my wife and I went to Oahu to attend the U.S.S.
Arizona
memorial dedication at Pearl Harbor, I went looking for Chang’s gravestone in the Manoa Cemetery, and found it overgrown with vines and weeds, which I cleared away from the simple marker, draping a
lei
over the stone.

Isabel died in Oahu, too, only she is buried on Long Island. She married a lawyer in 1937 who became an officer in the Navy who, ironically, was stationed at Pearl, meaning Isabel wound back up in Honolulu. She and I had stayed in touch, casually, and she wrote me a very warm, funny letter about ending up back in Honolulu, and confided that she’d taken her husband to “our beach,” but didn’t tell him its history. The letter was dated Dec. 3, 1941. I received it about a week after the Jap attack on Pearl Harbor; she was one of the civilian casualties, though her three-year-old son, whose middle name was Nathan, survived.

Now her son and I keep in touch.

Clarence Darrow never took another major case. I helped him out on a minor matter, later in ’32, but he was not able to realize his dream of returning to full-time practice. The strain of the Massie case on his health made Ruby put her foot down, though he did go, with Ruby, to Washington, D.C., to chair a review board into the NRA at FDR’s behest, a mistake on the part of the President, who had wrongly assumed the old radical would rubber-stamp any New Deal programs.

We spent time together at his apartment in Hyde Park, and Darrow continued to encourage me to leave the Chicago Police Department, and in December 1932, prompted by outside events, I took his advice and opened the A-l Detective Agency.

C.D. wrote an additional chapter that was added to his autobiography, a chapter on the Massie case, and when he showed it to me for comment, I told him, frankly, that it didn’t seem to have much to do with what really had happened.

Gentle as ever, he reminded me that he still had a responsibility to his clients, not to betray confidences or make them look bad.

“Besides,” he said, looking over his gold-rimmed reading glasses at me, “autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.”

And I told C.D. that if I ever wrote my story down, it would be exactly as it happened—only I was not a writer, and couldn’t imagine doing that.

He laughed. “With this wonderful, terrible life you’re leading, son, you’ll turn, like so many elderly men before you, to writing your memoirs, because yours is the only story you’ll have to tell, and you won’t be able to sit idly in silence and just wait for the night to come.”

He died March 13, 1938. I was with his son Paul when C.D.’s ashes were scattered to the winds over Jackson Park lagoon.

When we went to the dedication of the
Arizona
memorial, and we stood on the deck of that oddly modern white sagging structure, contemplating the lost lives of the boys below, my wife said, “It must be emotional for you, coming back here.”