Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09

by Damned in Paradise (v5. 0)

  “Mind if I pry some more?” she asked innocently.

  “You can try.”

  “I can understand your admiration for Mr. Darrow. I understand family ties. But this is more than that.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “He’s taken you under his wing. Why?”

  “I’m cheap help.”

  She shook her head, no, and the blond hair shimmered. “No. Look at Mr. Leisure. He’s a top Wall Street attorney, and I get the feeling he’s working for peanuts, too.”

  “Your point being?”

  “Clarence Darrow can finagle just about anybody into helping him out. It’s like the President asking you for help, or Ronald Colman asking you to dance.”

  “I wouldn’t care to dance with Ronald Colman, thanks.”

  “Why you, Nate?”

  I looked out at the ocean; the little beach had small rock formations here and there that the gentle surge of surf splashed over idly.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” I said.

  She touched my arm, gently. “Why you?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I care about you. We’re sleeping together, aren’t we?”

  “How exclusive a list is that?”

  She grinned, chin wrinkling. “You’re not going to get out of it by making me mad. Like the gangsters in the movies say—spill.”

  She looked so cute, her eyes taking on an oddly violet cast in the non-light, that I felt a sudden surge of genuine affection for the girl wash over me in a tide of emotion.

  “It’s because of my father.”

  “Your father.”

  “He and Darrow were friends.”

  “You’ve said that.”

  “My father didn’t want me to be a cop. Neither does Darrow.”

  “Why not?”

  “Darrow’s an old radical, like my father. He hates the police.”

  “Your father?”

  “Darrow.”

  She frowned, trying to sort it out. “Your father doesn’t hate the police?”

  “Hell, he hated them worse than Darrow.”

  “Is your father dead, Nate?”

  I nodded. “Year, year and a half now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing for you to be sorry about.”

  “So Mr. Darrow wants you to quit the police force and work for him. As his investigator.”

  “Something along those lines.”

  She squinted in thought. “So it’s all right, being a detective…as long as you’re not a policeman.”

  “That’s it.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the difference?”

  “The cops represent a lot of bad things to people like Darrow and my father. The government abusing citizens. Graft, corruption…”

  “Aren’t there any honest cops?”

  “Not in Chicago. Anyway…not Nate Heller.”

  “What did you do, Nate?”

  “I killed my father.”

  Alarm widened her eyes. “What?”

  “You know that gun you asked me about the other night? That automatic on the dresser?”

  “Yes….”

  “That’s what I used.”

  “You’re scaring me, Nate….”

  I swallowed. “I’m sorry. Look, I did something that disappointed my father. I told lies in court and took money to get a promotion, then I used the money trying to help him out…his store was in trouble. Shit.”

  Her mouth was trembling, her eyes wide not with alarm but dismay. “He killed himself.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “With…with your gun?”

  I nodded.

  “And you…and that’s the gun you carry? You still carry?”

  I nodded again.

  “But, why…?”

  I shrugged. “I figure it’s the closest thing to a conscience I’ll ever have.”

  She stroked my cheek; she looked like she was going to cry. “Oh, Nate…. Don’t do that to yourself….”

  “It’s all right. It helps remind me not to do certain things. Nobody should carry a gun lightly. Mine’s just a little heavier than most people’s.”

  She clutched me, held me in her arms like a baby she was comforting; but I was fine. I wasn’t crying or anything. I felt okay. Nate Heller didn’t cry in front of women. In private, deep into a sleepless night, awakened from a too-real dream of me finding my father slumped over that table again, well, that’s my goddamn business, isn’t it?

  Taking my hand, she led me across the sand into the surf and we let the soothingly warm water wash up around our ankles, then let it up to our waists, and she dove in and began swimming out. I dove after her, cutting through water as comfy as a well-heated bath.

  She swam freestyle with balletic grace; rich kids get plenty of practice swimming. But so do poor ones, at least those with access to Lake Michigan, and I knifed my way alongside her, catching up, and thirty feet out or so we stopped, treading water together, smiling, laughing, kissing. We were buffeted gently by the tide, and I was just about to say we’d better swim back in when something seemed to yank at our feet.

  I lurched toward Isabel, clutching her around the midsection, as the undertow sucked us down under, way under, in a funnel of cold water, fourteen feet or more, flinging us around like rag dolls, but I held onto her, I wasn’t giving her up and the riptide tossed us around in our desperate embrace, until finally, after seven or eight seconds that seemed a lifetime, a wave thundering up from the ocean’s floor deposited us on the shore, and I dragged her onto the beach and onto dry sand, before that wave could withdraw and pull us back out to sea, and down again into the undertow.

  We huddled on one towel, teeth chattering, hugging each other, breathing fast and deep; we stayed that way for what seemed a long time, watching an incredibly beautiful wave crash onto the shore, reminding us how close we’d just come to dying.

  Then her mouth was on mine and she was clawing off her swimsuit as desperately as we’d fought the riptide, and I was out of my suit and on top and inside of her, the slippery velvet of her mingling with grating sand, driving myself into her, her knees lifted, accepting me with little groans that escalated into cries echoing off the ridges around us, heels of my hands digging wedges in the sand as I watched her closed eyes and her open mouth and the quivering globes of her heaving breasts as those puffy aureoles tightened and wrinkled with vein-pulsing passion, and then we were both sending cries careening off the canyon-like walls, drowning out the roar of the surf, before collapsing into each other’s arms, and sharing tiny kisses, murmuring vows of undying love that in a few moments we’d both regret.

  She was the first to have regrets. She trotted back out into where the water came to her knees and she crouched there, to wash herself out, her fear of the tide overriden by another fear. When she trotted back, and got back into her suit, she sat on her towel and gathered her arms about her, trying to disappear into herself.

  “I’m cold,” she said. “We should go.”

  We both got quickly dressed, and this time she led the way up the rocky footpath to where our car was parked near the Blowhole overlook.

  As we drove back, she said nothing for the longest time. She was staring into the night with an expression that wasn’t quite morose, more…afraid.

  “What’s wrong, baby?”

  Her smile was forced and her glance at me was so momentary it hardly qualified. “Nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just…nothing.”

  “What, Isabel?”

  “That’s the first time…you didn’t use something.”

  “We were all caught up in it, baby. We damn near died out there. We got worked up. Who could blame us?”

  “I’m not blaming anybody,” she said reproachfully.

  “It won’t happen again. I’ll buy a bushel of Sheiks.”

  “What if I get pregnant?”

  “People try for years and don’t make babies. Don’t worry abo
ut it.”

  “All it takes is once.”

  We were gliding by fancy beach homes again; I pulled over in the mouth of a driveway. I left the motor running as I reached over and touched her hand.

  “Hey. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  She looked away. Pulled her hand away.

  “You think I wouldn’t make an honest woman of you, if it came to that?”

  She turned and looked sharply at me. “I can’t marry you.”

  Then it hit me.

  “Oh. Oh yeah. My last name is Heller. Good Christian girl like you can’t go around marrying Jews. Just fucking them.”

  She began to cry. “How can you be so cruel?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, putting the car into gear. “You can always tell ’em I raped you.”

  And I did what I should have done earlier: pulled out.

  15

  Was I the only one it struck odd? That the scene of the crime, or at least the scene where the crime began, was also the site of the trial?

  Every morning of the proceedings, the quaintly neoclassical Judiciary Building, outside of which Joe Kahahawai had received his bogus summons, was guarded by a phalanx of dusky police in blue serge uniforms insanely un-suited for the sweltering heat. The baroque building itself was roped and sawhorsed off, helping the cops keep back crowds about two-thirds kanaka and one-third haole; whether it was the heat or the cops, the potentially volatile racial mix never ignited. These were gawkers attracted not by controversy or politics but good old-fashioned tabloid murder.

  Only seventy-five seats inside were available for the general public, and these precious pews had the colored servants of the kamaaina elite camping outside the courthouse overnight to save their bosses a spot, while Navy wives (accustomed to early rising) showed up in the early morning hours, with camp stools, sandwiches, and thermoses of coffee. Still others—out-of-work kanakas, and there were plenty of those—planned to sell their seats for the going rate of twenty-five bucks a shot.

  Each morning, the scream of sirens scattered birds in banyans and stirred the curious crowd as a caravan of motorcycle police leading and following two cars (two defendants per car, under Navy guard) made its delivery from Pearl Harbor. The two seamen rode together—Jones and Lord, short, burly, uncomfortable in suits and ties, tough little kids playing dress-up—cigarettes drooping from nervously smiling lips as they emerged from the Navy vehicle into the waiting custody of uniformed cops, who escorted them into the courthouse. Tommie, dapper in his suit and tie, made a slight, sad-looking escort for his patrician mother-in-law (in a succession of dark tasteful frocks and matching tam turbans), who seemed at once aloof and weary. Like Joe Kahahawai’s golden ghost, the statue of King Kamehameha took all this in, unamused.

  Every day, everyone who went inside—from defendant to spectator, from reporter to Clarence Darrow himself (and the judge, too)—got patted down for weapons by cops. Next, they passed by an adjacent courtroom that had been turned into a bustling pressroom—desks, telephones, typewriters, telegraph lines, accommodating a dozen or more reporters from as far away as London—before entering the small courtroom with its dark plaster walls and darker woodwork, lazily churning ceiling fans, and open windows looking out on whispering palms and the Punchbowl’s green hills set against a blue-sky backdrop, letting in streaming sun, traffic noises, and buzzing mosquitoes.

  At each and every session, white women—well-to-do white women, at that—took the majority of the public seating; this was, after all, the social event of the season. Conspicuously absent from this group was Thalia and Isabel, but they were well represented in spirit. A collective moan of mournful sympathy would emerge from the gals of the gallery each morning as the defendants trouped down the aisle to their seats behind the lawyers’ table. At particularly dramatic (or melodramatic) testimony, they would (according to what seemed called for) shed tears together, they would sigh as one, they would gasp in unison. They managed to do this without ever once eliciting the wrath of Judge Davis, a bespectacled New Englander of medium size and enormous patience.

  On the other hand, they frequently received glares and even an occasional rebuke from no-nonsense prosecutor John C. Kelley, a square-shouldered block of a man, ruddy-faced, bald but for a monkish fringe of reddish hair.

  Kelley hadn’t seen forty, but if finding himself pitted against the elder statesman of defense lawyers intimidated him, he didn’t show it. Nor did he seem daunted by the presence, each day, of a Navy contingent headed up by Admiral Stirling Yates himself, no less imperial in civilian clothes.

  Confident, almost cocky, crisp in tropical whites, Kelley fixed his piercing blue eyes on the all-male, mixed racial bag in the jury box: six whites (including a Dane and a German), a Portuguese, two Chinese, and three of Hawaiian ancestry.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, his hint of brogue lending authority to his words, “these defendants are charged with the crime of murder in the second degree.”

  Kelley’s only gesture toward the defense table was a wag of the head, but the jury’s twenty-four eyes went to the four defendants, whose backs were to the rail behind which were the tables of reporters. Lord and Jones were at left, with Tommie next, and next to him, Mrs. Fortescue. All four sat rigidly, never glancing around the courtroom, eyes straight ahead, Mrs. Fortescue’s bearing as expressionlessly military as that of her lieutenant son-in-law and their two sailor accomplices.

  Kelley continued with the indictment: “The Grand Jury of the First Judicial Court of the Territory of Hawaii do present that Grace Fortescue, Thomas H. Massie, Edward J. Lord, and Albert O. Jones, in the city and county of Honolulu, on the eighth day of January, 1932, through force of arms—to wit, a pistol loaded with gunpowder and a bullet…”

  Next to Mrs. Fortescue sat Darrow, snarl of hair askew, his fleshy yet angular frame draped over his wooden chair as casually as his haphazardly knotted tie. A watch chain looped across the vest of a dark suit that looked a size too large for a body that wore skin that looked a size too large itself. Leisure, every bit the well-dressed Wall Street attorney, was next to Darrow, and I was next to Leisure.

  “…did unlawfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought and without authority and without justification or extenuation…”

  Kelley turned and, with another wag of his skinned-coconut skull, indicated—at the rail near the end of the jury box—a dark, husky, impassive rumpled-faced fellow in white shirt and dark trousers and a slender, equally dark woman in a long white Mother Hubbard, weeping into a handkerchief: the parents of Joseph Kahahawai.

  “…murdered Joseph Kahahawai, Jr., a human being….”

  The pugnacious prosecutor outlined his case in less than an hour, from Tommie renting the blue Buick to Mrs. Fortescue crafting the ersatz summons, from the abduction of Joe Kahahawai in front of this very building to the kidnappers’ ill-fated attempt to dispose of the body, which had led to a high-speed chase in which the cops had been forced to fire at them to stop.

  He saved the best for last: the murder itself. He piled up vividly disturbing details—bloodstained clothing, blood-streaked floorboards, a gun stuffed behind sofa cushions, spare bullets, rope with a telltale purple thread labeling it naval property, a bathtub where bloody clothes were washed, a victim who was allowed to bleed to death.

  “We will show you,” Kelley said, “that there was no struggle in the house that might allow these defendants to claim self-defense. Kahahawai was a strong athlete, capable of putting up a good fight, but there is no evidence of any such fight in that house.”

  Through it all, Mrs. Fortescue stared numbly forward, while Tommie seemed to be chewing at something—gum, I thought at first; his lip, I later realized. The two sailors seemed almost bored; if the gravity of all this had hit them, it didn’t show.

  Kelley leaned on the jury box rail. “When Joseph Kahahawai, reporting faithfully to his probation officer, stood in the shadow of the statue of King Kamehameha, under the outstretched arm of the gr
eat Hawaiian who brought law and order to this island, the finger of doom pointed at this youthful descendant of Kamehameha’s people.”

  Suddenly Kelley wheeled toward Mrs. Fortescue, who seemed mildly startled, straightening.

  “That finger was pointed by Grace Fortescue,” Kelley said, and he pointed his forefinger at her as if he were on a firing squad aiming a rifle. “In today’s vernacular, she was the finger man who put Kahahawai ‘on the spot’!”

  When Kelley sat down, Darrow did not rise. He remained slumped in his chair, merely uttering, “The defense will reserve its opening statement, Your Honor.”

  In three methodical but fast-moving days, the scrappy Kelley built his case, brick by brick: Kahahawai’s cousin Edward Ulii, as light as Joe had been powerful, told of the abduction; Dickson, the probation officer, told of telling Mrs. Fortescue about Kahahawai’s obligation to report to him each day; Detective George Harbottle, a young, ruggedly handsome specimen who looked like Hollywood’s notion of a cop, told of the car chase and capture, and the corpse wrapped in the bloody white sheet in the backseat.

  “Detective,” Kelley said, “would you mind stepping from the witness stand and identifying the parties you arrested?”

  The brawny dick stepped down and touched Jones, then Lord, then Tommie on the shoulder; but when he approached Mrs. Fortescue, she rose regally and stared directly at him, chin lifted.

  Harbottle didn’t touch her; he just backed away, pointing with a thumb, muttering, “This lady was driving.”

  As Mrs. Fortescue took her seat, Harbottle settled himself back on the stand, and Kelley asked, “Did Lt. Massie appear to be in shock, Detective?”

  Darrow, doodling on a pad, seemingly paying scant attention, said, “Calls for a conclusion, Your Honor.”

  Kelley turned toward the judge with a patently placating smile. “Your Honor, as a police officer, Detective Harbottle has been called to the scene of many crimes, many accidents. His opinion as to the state of mind of—”

  Darrow raised his eyes and his voice. “The detective hasn’t been called as an expert in human behavior, Your Honor.”

  Judge Davis, his expression blank as the Sphinx, said, “Sustained.”