“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.”