“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.”
“It is.”
“I mean, you serving in the Pacific, and all.”
A natural assumption, on her part: I’d been a Marine. Guadalcanal.
I said, “It’s other memories.”
“What other memories?”
“I was here before the war.”
“Really?”
“Didn’t I ever mention it? The case with Clarence Darrow?”
She smiled skeptically. “You knew Clarence Darrow?”
“Sure. Didn’t you ever wonder why it took so long for Hawaii to become a state?”
So I took her around, in our rental car, and gave her a tour no tour guide could have given her. The Pali was still there, of course, and the Blowhole; and the beach nearby, which my wife was excited to see.
“It’s the From Here to Eternity beach!” she said. “Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr! That’s where they made passionate love…”
And it was, too.
But so much was gone. Waikiki was ugly high-rise hotels, cheap souvenir shops, and hordes of Japanese tourists. The Royal Hawaiian (where we stayed) seemed largely unchanged, but dwarfed by its colorless skyscraper neighbors, and a shopping center squatted on the original entrance off Kalakaua Avenue.
The mauka (mountain) side of Ala Moana Boulevard was now littered with office buildings, shopping centers, and pastel apartment houses. On the seaward side, a public park with coral pathways and bathhouses lined the beach shore. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t turn any of this into the Ala Moana of the old Animal Quarantine Station and squattersville and thickets leading to the ocean.