Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09 (9 page)

“And what,” Darrow asked, “was Tommie’s reaction?”

“At first he was enthusiastic—he’d spoken to Major Ross of this newly formed Territorial Police, and to several others, who gave him the same impression I had gotten—that without a confession, there would be no second trial, certainly no conviction. But then he wavered—how, he wondered, might we manage to get the native into our car? I wasn’t sure myself, quite frankly—but I said, ‘Can’t we display at least as much cunning as these Orientals?’ And then I remembered Seaman Jones.”

“Jones?” Darrow asked.

“One of the two enlisted men we’re defending,” Leisure prompted.

“Ah yes. Please continue, Mrs. Fortescue.”

“In December, this young enlisted man, Jones, had been assigned to act as a sort of bodyguard to Thalia, my daughter Helene, and myself, while Tommie was away on sea duty. When Tommie returned, young Jones remained in the neighborhood as one of the armed sentries who patrolled Manoa Valley.”

Part of Admiral Stirling’s efforts to protect Navy personnel and their families against the “hoodlum element” roaming suburban streets.

“Jones became friendly with your family?” I asked.

“Oh yes. When he was guarding us, he’d often provide a fourth for bridge; when he was patrolling, he’d stop in for coffee. Occasionally we’d provide a couch or a chair for him to take a nap. Such a sweet, colorful boy with his tales of adventures in the Far East.”

“So you enlisted his aid in your plan?” I asked.

“I merely reminded Tommie,” she continued, “that Jones had often said he wanted to help us, in any way. I knew we could trust this boy. I suggested to Tommie that he confide in Jones, seek his ideas, his assistance.”

“Go on, Mrs. Fortescue,” Darrow said kindly.

“Well, the next morning I continued exploring the lay of the land, as it were. I parked in front of the Judiciary Building on King Street, at eight o’clock, and watched the hands of the clock creep to ten. I would open my purse, to peek in at the clipping of Kahahawai I had pinned, there. I wanted to make sure I would recognize him. Much as it disgusted me, I sat studying that brutal, repulsive black face. But at ten-thirty, there had been no sign of him, and I was forced to leave.”

“How so?” Darrow wondered.

She shrugged. “I was expecting guests for a little luncheon party.”

Darrow, Leisure, and I exchanged glances.

“My little Japanese maid wasn’t up to making the preparations all by her lonesome, so I gave up my vigil, for the moment, and—”

“Excuse me.” The voice was male—soft, Southern, unassuming.

We turned our attention to the doorway to the adjacent cabin, where Lt. Thomas Massie stood in shirtsleeves, hands in the pockets of his blue civilian trousers in a pose that should have seemed casual but only looked awkward.

Short, slender, dark-haired, Massie might normally have seemed boyishly handsome, but his oval face—with its high forehead, long sharp nose, and pointed chin—showed signs of strain. His tiny eyes were dark-circled, his complexion prisoner pallid, his cheeks sunken. And his mouth was a thin tight line.

He was twenty-seven years old and looked easily ten years older.

We rose and he came over to us, introduced himself, and Darrow made our introductions; we shook hands. Massie’s grip was firm, but his hand was small, like a child’s.

He took a seat at the table. “I am embarrassed,” he said, “sleepin’ through my first meetin’ with my counsel.”

Darrow said, “I instructed Mrs. Fortescue not to wake you, Lieutenant.”

“Tommie. Please call me Tommie. Just because we’re Navy doesn’t mean we have to stand on ceremony.”

“That’s good to hear,” Darrow said, “because we need, all of us, to be friends. To trust each other, confide in one another. And, Tommie, I let you sleep because I thought it best to hear Mrs. Fortescue’s version of this incident.”

“Judgin’ by what I overheard,” Tommie said, “you’re pretty well into it.”

“We’re up to the afternoon before,” I said.

“That was when I brought Jones and Lord around to the house on Kolowalu Street.” Massie’s speech was an odd mixture of clipped and casual, his staccato delivery at odds with his Southern inflection.

“Lord is the other enlisted man?” Darrow asked Leisure, and Leisure nodded.

“Out at the base that mornin’, while Mrs. Fortescue was stakin’ out the courthouse,” Massie said, “I called Jones over…he’s a machinist’s mate, we were involved in athletics on the base—I used to be a runner, and I offered my services helpin’ him train the baseball team? Anyway, I called Jones over and said I’d heard Kahahawai was ready to crack. And Jones said, ‘But he just needs a little help, right?’ Kinda winked at me as he said it. I said that was so; was he willin’ to help? He thought it over for a second, then he said, ‘I sure as hell am.’ If you’ll excuse the language, Mrs. Fortescue, that is what he said.”

Mrs. Fortescue nodded regally, her smile benign.

“I asked Jones if he knew of anyone else who might help, somebody we could count on. And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s go up to the gym’…that was on the third floor of the barracks? ‘Let’s go up to the gym, I’ll introduce you to Eddie Lord. He’s all right. If you think he’s all right, too, well, hell—we’ll bring ’im along!’ Sorry about the language.”

“I’m the wife of a military man, Tommie,” Mrs. Fortescue said with a ladylike laugh. “I’m not easily shocked.”

“Lord was in the ring,” Massie continued, “sparrin’ with another gob. A strappin’ specimen for a lightweight; you could see right away he could handle himself. Lord—that’s Fireman First Class Edward Lord? Jones called him over, and we chatted a little bit. He seemed like a regular guy.”

“Did you fill Lord in, on the spot?” I asked.

“No. I talked to Jones first, said, ‘Can he be trusted?’ And Jones said, ‘Eddie and me was shipmates for five years.’ That was all I needed to know. Jones said he’d fill Lord in, and we arranged to meet at Mrs. Fortescue’s, no earlier than three.”

“After my luncheon,” Mrs. Fortescue explained.

“We stopped in town, at the YMCA,” Massie said, “and changed into civilian clothes. Then we drove to Kolowalu Street, where we introduced Mrs. Fortescue to Eddie Lord, and she told us of this idea she had to use a false warrant from Major Ross, to lure Kahahawai into the car.”

“My little Japanese maid was still in the kitchen,” Mrs. Fortescue said, “so I paid her her weekly wages a day early, and gave her the next day off. And then I suggested to Tommie and his boys that we drive down to the courthouse.”

“To case the joint,” Massie said, with a wry little smile. It would have seemed flippant if his eyes hadn’t been so haunted.

“That night,” Mrs. Fortescue said, “I sent my daughter Helene to Thalia’s, to spend the night, and we reviewed our plans, the four of us. Kahahawai would be brought to my house. We would get a confession from him. We would make him sign it, and take it to the police.”

“What if the police dismissed the confession as coerced?” I asked. “Nothing came of it when those Navy boys grabbed Horace Ida.”

“Then we’d take it to the newspapers,” Massie said. “They’d surely print it, and at least that way these damned rumors about my wife’s honor would be put to rest.”

“Who rented the blue Buick?” Leisure asked.

“Jones and Lord,” Massie said. “I went on home, and they returned to Mrs. Fortescue’s, where they slept in the livin’ room, on the couch, on the floor. So we’d be ready to go, bright and early.”

“And the two guns?” Leisure asked.

“The .45 was mine,” Massie said. “The .32 Colt was Lord’s…it’s missing. I don’t know what became of it.”

Kahahawai had been killed with a .32.

I asked, “You prepared the fake summons, Mrs. Fortescue?”

She gestured gracefully again. “Yes, and I would have preferred to use a typewriter on the warrant, but the machine was at Thalia’s. So I hand-printed it—‘Territorial Police, Major Ross Commanding, Summons to Appear—Kahahawai, Joe’…putting his last name first made it seem more official. Tommie provided a gold seal from a diploma of his…”

“Chemical warfare,” Massie said, “at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. The diploma wasn’t of any use to me, so I just snipped off the gold seal and Mrs. Fortescue glued it on the paper.”

Mrs. Fortescue sipped her coffee, then said thoughtfully, “But the piece of paper still looked…insufficient somehow. Lying on my desk was that morning’s paper…I spied a paragraph that seemed about the right size, clipped it, and pasted it on the warrant. It looked better.”

Leisure asked, “Were you aware of the implicit irony in the words of that clipping?”

“No,” she said with a faint smile. “It was an accident of fate, the philosophical nature of that paragraph…but those words have been so widely quoted, I can reel them off to you now, if you like: ‘Life is a mysterious and exciting affair and anything can be a thrill if you know how to look for it, and what to do with opportunity when it comes.’”

Darrow, Leisure and I exchanged glances again.

“The next mornin’,” Massie said with a grim smile, “we all had a laugh over it, at breakfast.”

Leisure asked, “You ate breakfast before you went out on your…mission?”

“I cooked up some eggs for the sailors,” Mrs. Fortescue said, “but they didn’t seem to have any appetite. All they wanted was coffee. I suggested we leave, so we’d be at the courthouse by eight o’clock.”

“We were wearing civilian clothes,” Massie explained, “and I had a chauffeur’s cap and dark glasses on, as a disguise. I gave Lord the .45—he was going to watch the back entrance—and he and Jones and I got in the rented Buick and drove to the courthouse. Mrs. Fortescue followed in her roadster.”

“I parked in front of the courthouse,” she said. “Why not? I had nothing to conceal. Tommie parked in front of the post office, nearby; the two sailors got out, Tommie staying behind the wheel of the parked sedan. I left my car and gave Jones the picture of the native I’d cut from the paper; he already had the sham summons. Jones went to the main entrance, to await our man, and I returned to my car. Mrs. Whitmore noticed me and stopped and we had a friendly little chat.”

“Perhaps a minute after Mrs. Whitmore went inside,” Massie said, picking it up, “we saw two natives crossin’ the courthouse grounds. One of them was a little guy, but the other one was big, heavy—Kahahawai, wearin’ a blue shirt and a brown cap. I pulled up the sedan alongside the curb just as Lord was approachin’ the two natives. He showed Kahahawai the summons, and Kahahawai wanted the other fella to come along, but Jones grabs him and says, ‘Just you,’ and shoves Kahahawai in back of the car. Jones got in after him and we headed out King Street, toward Waikiki.”

“I saw Lord coming around the side of the courthouse,” Mrs. Fortescue said. “The sedan was already out of sight when I picked him up and…”

“Excuse me for interrupting,” Darrow said. “But I need to back things up a tad, to ask Tommie here a few pertinent questions.”

Why was Darrow cutting in, just when it was getting good? Just when we were about to find out what had happened behind the closed doors of the house on Kolowalu Street that resulted in Joseph Kahahawai’s demise, courtesy of a .32 slug under the left nipple?

“Your mother-in-law indicates,” Darrow was saying to Massie, “that you suffered a mental strain due not only to the heinous crime committed upon your sweet wife, but to these foul rumors flying about.”

Massie didn’t understand this interruption, either. There was confusion in his voice as he said, “Yes, sir.”

“Did you seek any medical help? For your restlessness, your insomnia…”

“I talked to several doctors, who seemed concerned about my physical state.”

“And your mental state?”

“Well, I was advised by Dr. Porter to take Thalia and leave the islands, for both our sakes…but I was adamant that my wife’s honor be cleared, and that flight from this island would be seen as an admission that these slanders were of substance….”

Darrow, behind a tent of his hands, was nodding, eyes narrowed.

“If I might continue,” Massie said, clearly wanting to get on with his story and get it out of the way, “we arrived at the house on Kolowalu Street and—”

“Details, at this point, won’t be necessary,” Darrow said, with a wave of the hand.

I looked at Leisure and he looked back at me; I wonder which of us had the more startled expression.

“Why bother, right now, with the sordid particulars—I think we all know what happened within that house,” Darrow said. “I think it’s obvious whose hand held the weapon that took Joseph Kahahawai’s life.”

“It is?” Massie said, with a puzzled frown.

“Well, it can’t be this lovely lady,” Darrow said with a gracious gesture. “She is too refined, too dignified, too much a picture of motherhood touched by tragedy. And it could not have been either of those two sailor boys, because after all, that would be murder, plain and simple, wouldn’t it?”

“It would?” Massie asked.

“It most certainly would. We’re very fortunate that neither of them pulled the trigger, because you, as an officer, enlisting their aid, well, that would amount to incitement.”

Mrs. Fortescue wasn’t following any of this. Massie, however, had turned even paler. Whiter than milk, though not nearly so healthy.

Darrow was smiling, but it was a smile that frowned. “Only one person could possibly have pulled that trigger—the man with the motive, the man whose wife’s good name had been defiled even as had she herself been so woefully defiled.”

Massie squinted. “What…what do you think happened in that house?”

“What I would imagine happened,” Darrow said, “was that Joseph Kahahawai, confronted by the righteousness of the man he had wronged, blurted a confession, and in so doing, sparked an inevitable reaction from that righteous wronged man, in fact provoked an insane act…”

“You’re not suggesting I construct a story…” Massie began.

Darrow’s eyes flared. “Certainly not! If you don’t remember shooting Kahahawai, in fact if everything is a sort of haze, that would only make sense, under these circumstances.”

Darrow clapped his hands together, and we all jumped a little.

“Well, now,” he said, “I certainly don’t mean to put words in your mouth…. Why don’t we come back to the events within that house, at a later date…tomorrow, let’s say, after you’ve had a chance to collect your thoughts…and perhaps speak with Mrs. Fortescue, and your two sailor friends, and compare your recollections—not to come up with a unified story, of course, but rather to see if, among you, your collective memory might be jogged.”