In Manoa Valley, the bungalow where Thalia and Tommie had lived was in fine shape; it looked cozier than ever. I wondered if the current residents knew its history. The house where Joe Kahahawai had died was there, too—the shabbiest house on an otherwise gentrified block, the only structure gone to seed, the only overgrown yard with a dead car in it….
“Jesus,” I said, sitting across the way in the rental car. “It’s like the rotting tooth in the neighborhood’s smile.”
“That’s not a bad line,” my wife said. “You want me to write it down?”
“Why?”
“For when you write the Massie story.”
“Who says I’m going to write it?”
But she’d seen the stacks of handwritten pages in the study in our condo in Boca Raton; she knew, one by one, I was recording my cases.
“Well,” she said, getting out her checkbook, using a deposit slip to jot down the line, “you’ll thank me for doing this, later.”
Thank you, sweetheart.
Because I did use it, didn’t I? And I did write the Massie story, colored by imagination and dream.
It was either that or sit idly in silence and just wait for the night to come.
I OWE THEM ONE
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material.
Most of the characters in this novel are real and appear with their true names. Jimmy Bradford and Ray Stockdale are fictional characters with real-life counterparts. Dr. Joseph Bowers is a composite of two prosecution psychiatric witnesses. Isabel Bell is a fictional character, whose moral support for her cousin is suggested by that of the various real members of the Bell family and of Thalia’s teenage sister, Helene. Nate Heller’s “date” with Beatrice Nakamura is fanciful; most of the damning information Thalia Massie’s maid gives Heller is based on interviews she gave to the Pinkerton operatives who in June 1932 undertook a confidential investigation into the case at Governor Judd’s behest. A good deal of what Heller uncovers in this novel parallels this actual investigation.
The Pinkerton investigators and Nate Heller came to similar conclusions, although the notion that Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu may have been among Thalia Massie’s actual attackers is my own and, to my knowledge, new to this book.
The only major shifting of time in this novel pertains to the capture of Daniel Lyman, which took place earlier than its climactic placement, here (although Lyman did elude authorities for an embarrassingly long time). The participation in that capture by my fictional detective Nathan Heller (and real-life detective Chang Apana) is fanciful.
Devotees of the Massie case will note that I have omitted or greatly downplayed some individuals with significant secondary roles in the case. To deal substantially with every police officer, lawyer, and judge involved with both the Ala Moana case and the Massie murder trial would have been a burden to both author and readers. Clarence Darrow and George Leisure, for example, were backed up by local Honolulu lawyers (already attached to the Fortescue/Massie defense and mentioned in passing, here) and by a Navy attorney (who does make a brief appearance in the novel). While other members of the Honolulu Police Department are mentioned in passing, John Jardine—who did play a major role in the Ala Moana investigation—represents the plainclothes cops who worked the case, just as Inspector Mclntosh (also a key player) represents the hierarchy of the department. While I stand behind my depiction of Admiral Stirling Yates, I must admit that others in the Navy Department—notably, Rear Admiral William V. Pratt and Admiral George T. Pettengill—shared similar racist, uninformed, antidemocratic views of Hawaii; in fact, Stirling often seemed the voice of reason compared to Pratt, then Acting Secretary of the Navy.
My longtime research associate George Hagenauer—a valued collaborator on the Heller “memoirs”—again dug out newspaper and magazine material, and spent many hours with me trying to figure out what really might have happened to Thalia Massie on September 12, 1931. In particular, George’s enthusiasm and feel for Clarence Darrow led the way not only to key research information about the twentieth century’s foremost criminal lawyer, but provided me with a basis for my characterization of Nate Heller’s surrogate father.
Among the books consulted in regard to Darrow were Irving Stone’s seminal Clarence Darrow for the Defense (1941) and Darrow’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1932). Stone’s glowing portrayal would seem the source of such romanticized versions of Darrow as those found in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (and the play and film that followed) and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play Inherit the Wind (and its film version). For the purposes of this novel, Stone’s account of the Massie case proved overly brief and surprisingly inaccurate. Darrow’s is one of the most enjoyable autobiographies I’ve ever read, though it is almost absurdly sketchy about the facts of his life (and his famous cases), with an emphasis on his philosophy.
Two later Darrow biographies—Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel (1980), Arthur and Lila Weinberg, and Darrow: A Biography (1979), Kevin Tierney—are both worthwhile. Rebel suffers from hero worship of its subject and is, again, brief and inaccurate where the Massie case is concerned (Arthur Weinberg also edited an excellent annotated collection of Darrow’s closing arguments, Attorney for the Damned, 1957, which provided a basis for Darrow’s summation here). The Tierney book is a more objective study, the closest thing to a “warts-and-all” treatment of Darrow, with a solid Massie chapter. Perhaps the frankest, most illuminating Darrow book to date is Geoffrey Cowan’s The People vs. Clarence Darrow (1993), which raises fascinating questions about the great attorney’s ethics and beliefs in focusing on his 1912 bribery/jury tampering trial.
Having ascertained that Chang Apana had not yet retired from the Honolulu Police at the time of the Massie case, I was determined to have Nate Heller meet the “real” Charlie Chan. The indefatigable Lynn Myers took on the key assignment of searching out background material on Apana, who is frequently mentioned in discussions of the Chan movies and/or novels, but about whom I hadn’t found anything substantial. Lynn did: an extremely good, in-depth 1982 article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin by Susan Yim, “In Search of Chan,” detailing the successful efforts of a Chan fan, Gilbert Martines, to learn the truth about the real detective who provided inspiration to author Earl Derr Biggers for his famous Honolulu-based Chinese sleuth. Lynn also found, among other Apana materials, an obituary that filled in gaps the Yim article did not.
The only liberty I took with Chang was to ignore the suggestion in Yim’s article that the detective, while fluent in several languages, spoke a badly broken pidgin English; I felt this would get in the way of the characterization. Chang Apana’s aphorisms are largely drawn from Derr Biggers’s novels (some are of my own invention) and reflect the real Apana’s pride in having been Chan’s prototype. Incidentally, the blacksnake whip was indeed Chang Apana’s tool of choice. In addition to rereading several of Derr Biggers’s novels, I drew upon Otto Penzler’s Chan article in his entertaining The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters and Other Good Guys (1977), as well as Charlie Chan at the Movies (1989), Ken Hanke. Very helpful was the only Chan movie shot on location in Honolulu—The Black Camel (1931)—which includes scenes shot at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Material on Chang Apana (and John Jardine) was also culled from Detective Jardine: Crimes in Honolulu (1984), John Jardine with Edward Rohrbough and Bob Krauss, which has an excellent chapter on the Massie case from the police point of view.