Jones was a wiry wiseguy with his brown hair slicked back on a square head, and Lord a curly-headed Dick Powell type with a massive build for a little guy. Seeing us enter, they stopped their game and doffed their seamen’s hats.
Mrs. Fortescue rather grandly said, “Allow me to introduce Mr. Clarence Darrow.”
There were handshakes all around, and Darrow made our introductions as well, and informed the sailors he wasn’t here to talk in depth about the case just yet, merely to say hello.
“Boy, are we glad to see you,” Jones said. “I feel sorry for the other side!”
“It’s an honor meeting you, sir,” Lord said.
“Show them your memory book!” Mrs. Fortescue urged Jones.
“Sure thing, missus!” Jones said, and dragged out a thick scrapbook from under one of the unmade cots. “I just pasted in some more today.”
Lord and Massie were off to one side of the room, lighting up cigarettes, chatting, laughing, kidding each other. I found a chair to sit on while Leisure leaned against a bulkhead, silently shaking his head.
And Clarence Darrow was sitting on the edge of the cot next to the grinning Jones, who turned the pages of the scrapbook, already overflowing with clippings, while Mrs. Fortescue stood with hands fig-leafed before her, watching with delight as her savior and one of her servants conferred.
“I ain’t never got my name in the papers before,” the proud sailor said.
I wondered if sports star Joe Kahahawai had kept a scrapbook, too; he’d made the papers lots of times. Mostly the sports page. He’d make it again, in the coming weeks.
Then it was pretty likely to taper off.
7
You might have found the Alexander Young Hotel—a massive block-long brownstone with two six-story wings bookending a long, four-story midsection—in downtown Milwaukee or maybe Cleveland. Like so many buildings built around the turn of the century, it straddled eras—stubbornly unembellished, neither modern nor old-fashioned, the Young was a commercial hotel whose only concession to being located in paradise was a few potted palm plants and occasional halfhearted vases of colorful flowers in an otherwise no-nonsense lobby.
The reporters were waiting when we arrived midafternoon, and they swarmed us in a pack as we moved steadily toward the elevators in the company of the hotel manager. The mustached little man had met us at the curb not only to greet us, but to let C.D. and Leisure know the numbers of the suites where they would find their wives.
“I’ve spoken to my clients,” Darrow said to the reporters as we moved along, “and have heard enough to decide upon my line of defense. And that’s all I have to say about the subject at present.”
The overlapping requests for further clarification were pretty much unintelligible, but the words “unwritten law” were in there a good deal.
Darrow stopped suddenly, and the reporters tumbled into each other, like an auto pileup.
“I’m down here to defend four people,” he said, “who have been accused of a crime that I do not think is a crime.”
Then he pressed on, while the reporters—stalled momentarily by that cryptic comment—lagged behind as the old boy deftly stepped onto a waiting elevator. And Leisure and I were right there with him, while the hotel manager stayed out, holding back the press like a traffic cop.
One newshound yelled, “The Hawaiian legislature must agree with you—they’ve just made rape a capital offense.”
“And isn’t that a magnificent piece of lawmaking,” Darrow said bitterly. “Now a man committing a rape knows he’ll receive the same punishment if he goes ahead and kills his victim, too. He might as well go all the way, and get rid of the evidence!”
The elevator operator swung the door shut, and the cage began to rise.
Slumped next to me, Darrow shook his big head, the comma of gray hair flopping on his forehead. “That goddamn Lindbergh case,” he muttered.
“What about the Lindbergh case, C.D.?” I asked. I’d spent enough time on that crime to have a sort of proprietary attitude.
“It got this wave of blood thirst going among the populace. Whoever snatched that poor infant opened the door for capital punishment for kidnappers…and how many kidnap victims are going to die because of that?”
Ruby Darrow met us at the door of the suite; her smile of greeting turned immediately to one of concern.
“Clarence, you look terribly tired…you simply must get some rest.”
But Darrow would hear none of it. He invited us into the outer sitting area of the suite, where again the Hawaiian influence was niclass="underline" dark furnishings, oriental rug, pale walls with wooden trim. We might have been in a suite at the Congress on Michigan Avenue, though the seductive breeze drifting in the open windows indicated we weren’t.
“These were waiting at the desk for you,” Ruby said testily, and handed him several envelopes.
He sorted through them, as if this were his morning mail at home, tossed them on a small table by the door. Then he removed his baggy suit coat and flung it over a chair; Leisure and I took his lead and removed our suit coats, but draped them more carefully over a coffee table by a comfortable-looking sofa whose floral pattern was the only vaguely Island touch in the suite.
C.D. settled into an easy chair, put his feet up on a settee, and began making a cigarette. Leisure and I took the couch as a clearly distressed Ruby, shaking her head, disappeared off into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her, not slamming it, exactly.
“Ruby thinks I’m going to die someday,” Darrow said. “I may just fool her. George, you’ve been remarkably silent since Pearl Harbor. Might I assume you’re displeased with me?”
Leisure sat up; it was the kind of sofa you sank down into, so this took effort. “I’m your co-counsel. I’m here to assist, and follow your lead.”
“But…”
“But,” Leisure said, “taking Tommie Massie by the hand like that, and steering him into a temporary insanity plea—”
“George, we have four clients who quite obviously caused the death of Joseph Kahahawai due to their felonious conspiracy. They face a second-degree murder charge, and a reasonable argument could be made that they’re lucky the grand jury didn’t slap them with murder in the first.”
“Agreed.”
“So we have no choice: we have to prove extenuating circumstances. What extenuating circumstances avail themselves to us? Well, there’s no question that Tommie Massie’s stress-ravaged mental condition is our best, perhaps our only, recourse.”
“I certainly wouldn’t want to try to prove Mrs. Fortescue insane,” Leisure said with a smirk. “She’s about as deliberate and self-controlled an individual as I’ve ever met.”
“And those two sailors aren’t nuts,” I said. “They’re just idiots.”
Darrow nodded. “And idiocy is no defense…but temporary insanity is. All four were in agreement to commit a felony—kidnapping Kahahawai, the use of firearms to threaten and intimidate their victim…”
“No question about it,” I said, “Tommie’s the best shooter for the jury to pin its sympathy on.”
“I agree,” Leisure said, and he whapped the back of one hand rhythmically into the open palm of the other, as he made his point. “But the felony murder concept still prevails—all four are equally guilty, no matter who fired the shot.”
“No!” Darrow said. “If Tommie Massie, while temporarily insane, fired the shot, he is not guilty…and if Tommie is not guilty, then none of them are, because there is no crime! The felony evaporates and so does the concept of felony murder right along with it.”