Damned in Paradise

by Max Allan Collins

  Back in the blue roadster, rather intoxicated by this lovely dark night, we began down the other side of the rise, gliding by expensive beach houses and estates; coming down, you could see the swimming pools of the rich cut out of the lava and coral rock above sea level, kept filled, washed clean, by the high tide. Scrub brush gave way to exotic foliage and coconut palms on the Kahala Road as we skimmed past more fancy beach houses, until we reached the entry of the Waialae Golf Club, which was under the Royal Hawaiian’s control and open to hotel guests.

  This time of evening, the eighteen-hole golf course was of no interest; we parked and went into a clubhouse smothered in palms and tropical shrubbery and were served an Italian supper on a spacious lanai on the edge of the ocean. Isabel was wearing a blue-on-white polka-dot beach ensemble; with her jaunty little matching cap, you’d never guess her blouse was the upper part of her white swimsuit. I had my trunks on under my tan linen trousers; my second acquisition of an aloha shirt (as the loud silk shirts were locally baptized) got a few looks even in this determinedly casual touristy crowd. This time it was dark blue with white and red blossoms. Maybe I’d start a trend.

  After supper, we lounged on deck-style chairs on the lanai in the light of Japanese lanterns, sipping a fruity punch that was greatly improved by the rum from my hip flask (my supplier was a Japanese bellboy at the Royal Hawaiian to whom I’d made it clear the local home brew wasn’t good enough, and damned if he didn’t come up with Bacardi).

  Isabel said, “We haven’t talked about the case.”

  And we hadn’t, at least hardly at all; my devil’s advocacy only seemed to rile her. We’d been spending the evenings together, and then the nights, with her scurrying back to her room across the hall at dawn and me meeting her a few hours later downstairs for breakfast. She had rented a little Ford coupe and, each day, drove to Pearl Harbor to spend the day with Thalia and company, at the Oldses’ and/or on the Alton.

  But the evenings were devoted to dining and dancing and strolling along the white sand while palms swayed and ukuleles thrummed before retiring to my room, screwing our brains out on the bed in the breeze blowing in from the balcony. It was a honeymoon I could never afford with a woman who would never have me, in real life.

  Fortunately, this wasn’t real life: it was Waikiki.

  “What do you want to know about the case?” I asked, knowing the exchange that followed might cost me my conjugal rights for the evening.

  “How do you think it’s going to go?”

  “Well…C.D. has a racially mixed jury. That was probably inevitable, considering the makeup of the population. He’s got his work cut out for him.”

  “They didn’t mean to kill that brute.”

  “They meant to kidnap him. And when the cops turned on their siren, Mrs. Fortescue kept right on going. The coppers had to fire two shots out the window at the buggy, before the old girl finally pulled over.”

  Her heart-shaped face was a delicate mask, as pretty and blank as a porcelain doll’s. “We’re going to be heading up the same road, you know. For our moonlight swim?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said, lying. I’d meant to get out here and have a look all along. The plan (whether devised by Mrs. Fortescue, Tommie, or one of the sailor boys had never been established) had been to drive Kahahawai’s body out to Hanauma Bay and dispose of it in something called, colorfully, sinisterly, the Blowhole.

  “They were foolish, weren’t they, Nate?”

  “Not foolish, Isabel. Goddamn stupid. Arrogant.”

  She turned her delicate features toward the ocean. “Now I remember why I stopped asking you about the case.”

  “They killed a man, Isabel. I’m trying to help them get off, but I’ll be damned if I know why.”

  She turned back to me, her eyes smiling, her Kewpie-bow mouth blowing me a kiss as she said: “I know why.”

  “You do?”

  A little nod. “It’s because Mr. Darrow wants you to.”

  “It’s because I’m being paid to do it.”

  “That’s not it at all. I’ve heard you two talking. You’re hardly getting anything out of this; just your regular police salary and some expenses.”

  I touched her downy arm. “There are a few dividends.”

  That made the Kewpie lips purse into a little smile. “You look up to him, don’t you, Nate? You admire him.”

  “He’s a devious old bastard.”

  “Maybe that’s what you want to be when you grow up.”

  I frowned at her. “What made you so smart all of a sudden?”

  “How is it you know him, a famous man like Clarence Darrow?”

  “A nonentity like me, you mean?”

  “Don’t be mean. Answer the question.”

  I shrugged. “He and my father were friends.”

  “Was your father an attorney?”

  “Hell no! He was an old union guy who ran a bookstore on the West Side. They traveled in the same radical circles. Darrow used to come in to buy books on politics and philosophy.”

  She was looking at me as if for the first time. “So you’ve known Mr. Darrow since you were a kid?”

  “Yeah. Worked in his office as a runner when I was going to college.”

  “How much college do you have?”

  “Started at the University of Chicago, had some problems, finished up a two-year degree at a junior college.”

  “Were you going to be a lawyer?”

  “That was never my dream.”

  Her eyes smiled again. “What was your dream, Nate?”

  “Who says I had a dream?”

  “You have a lot of dreams. A lot of ambitions.”

  “I don’t remember telling you about ’em.”

  “I can just tell. What was your dream? What is your dream?”

  I blurted it: “To be a detective.”

  She smiled, cocked her head. “You made it.”

  “Not really. Not really. You about ready to get out of here? Catch that swim up the roadway?”

  “Sure.” She gathered her things and we headed for the parking lot, where she started in again.

  “You’ve been looking into what happened to Thalo, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you found anything helpful to Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie, in your search?”

  “No.”

  I opened the rider’s-side door on the Durant, shut her in, and that was all the conversation for a while. We were soon tooling along the edge of the club links. Before long we were passing groves of coconut palms and papaya orchards, truck gardens, chicken ranches, a campground, a large modern dairy. Then we wound through more coconut groves along the foot of the hills, at our left a looming black crater, at our right a cliff—Koko Head—projecting out into the sea. A sign at a fork in the road promised us the Blowhole if we took the dirt road to the left; I braved it.

  Isabel started back in, working her voice above the rumble of the engine, the bump of the tires on hard dirt, and the top-down wind. “Surely you don’t think Thalo is lying about what happened to her.”

  “Something happened to her that night last September. Something violent. Like she said to Tommie on the phone—something awful. I’m just not sure what.”

  “You think those terrible colored boys are innocent?”

  “I think they’re not guilty. There’s a difference.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They may have done it; they’re roughnecks and borderline disreputable characters. ‘Innocent’ is a moral term. ‘Not guilty’ is the legal term, and that’s what they are: there just isn’t enough evidence to convict them.”

  “But that was why Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue had to try to get a confession!”

  I didn’t feel like pressing the point. But in almost two weeks of trying, I’d certainly come up with nothing to give Darrow even the most dubious moral high ground for his clients to occupy. Having talked to every major witness in the Ala Moana case over the past t
wo weeks, I had accumulated nothing but doubts about Thalia, her story, and her identification of Horace Ida, Joseph Kahahawai, and the rest.

  Young, personable George Goeas, a cashier with Dillingham Insurance in Honolulu, had taken his wife to the dance at Waikiki Amusement Park that night. About ten minutes past midnight, he and the missus crossed the street to John Ena Road, and drove down to the saimin stand for a snack of noodles. A young woman in a green dress, her head lowered, walked by.

  “She seemed to be under the influence of liquor,” Goeas told me. “About a yard and a half from her, we saw a white guy following directly in back of her. He kept trailing after her for maybe twenty-five yards…. The way she held her head down, and him working to catch up with her, I kinda thought maybe they’d had a lovers’ quarrel or something. Then they walked out of view, a store blocking the way.”

  “What did the guy trailing her look like?”

  “Like I said, white. Five feet nine, hundred and sixty-five pounds maybe, medium build. Trim appearance. Looked like a soldier to me.”

  Or a sailor?

  “What was he wearing?”

  “White shirt. Dark trousers. Maybe blue, maybe brown, I’m not sure.”

  Mrs. Goeas had a better eye for fashion detail. She gave a precise description of the dress Thalia had been wearing, right down to a small bow in back, and described her as, “Mumbling to herself, swaying as she walked, I would even say stumbling.”

  I met with Alice Aramaki, a tiny, pleasant girl of perhaps twenty, in the barbershop on John Ena Road, opposite the amusement park. Alice was one of Honolulu’s many Japanese lady barbers; her father owned the shop and she lived upstairs. She had seen a white woman in a green dress walk past her store at a quarter past midnight.

  “What color hair did this woman have?”

  “She was dark blond hair.”

  “Anybody walking near her at the time?”

  “A man was walking. He was a white man.”

  “How was she walking, this woman in the green dress?”

  “Hanging her head down. Walking slowly.”

  “What did the white man wear?”

  “No hat. White shirt. Dark pants.”

  A group of men from various walks of life—a local politician, a greengrocer, two partners in a building supply company—had gone to the dance at the amusement park that night. They were headed down John Ena Road toward the beach at about twelve-fifteen when one of them, former city supervisor James Low, spotted “a woman in a blue or maybe green dress walking like a drunken person.” A man was trailing after her, but Low wasn’t sure of the man’s race. The woman and man seemed to be heading toward a car parked at the curb.

  As Low and his friends drove on by, some girls on the street called out to Low, and he spoke out the window to them, while his friends saw something that caught their attention.

  The driver, Eugenio Batungbacal, said, “I see about four or five men with one girl, two mens holding the woman with hands and one is following. They look like they force the woman on their car.”

  He meant “in” the car—the odd Island usage of “on.”

  “She looked like she was drunk,” he continued, “because two mens hold her arms and she tried to get away.”

  “What did this girl look like? Was she white?”

  “I don’t know, ’cause she is not facing to me. If she is facing to me, I tell you whether she is nigger or white or Portuguese.”

  “What color dress was she wearing?”

  “I don’t know. Long dress, though.”

  “Like an evening gown?”

  “Like that.”

  But others in the same car hadn’t perceived this as a struggle. I asked Charles Cheng, greengrocer, if he wasn’t alarmed by what he’d seen.

  “No, I thought they were just a bunch of friends.”

  “You didn’t get excited when these guys were dragging a girl into their car?”

  “No. I thought she was drunk and they were helping her.”

  None of them heard screams or saw a punch thrown.

  Still, this conformed to some degree to Thalia’s story—except that another carload (this one of guys and gals) at about the same time put Horace Ida and his pals elsewhere. According to Tatsumi Matsumoto—his friends called him “Tuts”—Ida’s car had followed his out of the amusement park.

  The story—which included one of the boys from Tuts’s car jumping over onto Ida’s bumper and riding for a while, talking, even tossing Ahakeulo some matches—was confirmed by the other boy and two girls in the car, and it put the suspects at Beretania and Fort streets at around twelve-fifteen.

  Husky Tuts—a former college football star who was financially independent, having inherited his father’s estate—hung around the sporting scene, hobnobbed with athletes and gamblers, and was friendly with Benny Ahakeulo. It was possible he and his friends were helping cover up for Benny.

  But I didn’t think so. Tuts was affable and open and unrehearsed, telling his story, and the two girls were just flighty young Hawaiian gals who lacked the details a more contrived story would have contained.

  “Did you see your friend Benny earlier, at Waikiki Park, Tuts? At the dance?”

  “I did more than see him. We both went up to the same girl and asked her to dance.”

  “Who won?”

  Tuts smirked. “She turned us both down.”

  Middle-aged salt-of-the-earth George Clark, an office manager with the Honolulu Construction and Draining Co., and his matronly missus, had been playing bridge all evening with the Bellingers, from their neighborhood; half an hour or so after midnight, they all set out to Waikiki in one car for a late-night snack. On their way to the Kewalo Inn on Ala Moana, just past the Hooverville squatters’ shacks, the car’s headlights caught the frantic form of a woman in a green dress, flagging them down.

  It was Thalia, of course, who (once ascertaining that these were white people) begged for a ride home. Her hair was disheveled, her face bruised, her lips swollen.

  “She was about our daughter’s age,” Clark told me, “and I guess we kind of felt for the girl. But she had a funny attitude.”

  “How so?” I asked him.

  “She seemed angry, not upset, kind of…indignant. Not tears. It was more like, how could anyone dare do such a thing to her.”

  “What did she say had been done to her?”

  “She said a gang of Hawaiian hoodlums had grabbed her, pulled her into their car, robbed and beat her, and tossed her back out again.”

  “She didn’t say anything about sexual assault?”

  “Nothing. And she only wanted a ride home. She was adamant about no hospital, no police. Just get her home. Her husband would take care of her, she said.”

  Mrs. Clark made an interesting addition to her husband’s observations: “We all noticed her evening gown seemed undamaged. Later, George and I read about five boys…assaulting her…and we both wondered how her gown could be in such good condition.”

  At the lookout, I parked the car just off the dirt road and, hand in hand, Isabel and I moved to the edge of the cliff and, prompted by the sound of crashing surf and whooshing air, peered down at the fabled Blowhole, a shelf of rock extending like the deck of a ship into the sea, silvery gray in the modest moonlight, white breakers rolling up over it. The opening toward the front of the ridge of rock looked small from up here, but it had to be three or four feet in diameter. Nothing happened for a while; then finally several waves surged in with increasing force and, like the whale blowhole for which it was named, the rocky spout geysered water, trapped in the cave below and propelled out in fountains of foam, streams of spray, twenty or thirty feet high.

  Isabel held on tightly to my arm. “Oh, Nate—it’s breathtaking…so lovely….”

  I didn’t say anything. Its beauty hadn’t occurred to me; what had was how you could walk right out on that shelf and, between geysers, drop something into the cave below. Something or someone.

  Over to
our right was a tiny bay within high shelves of rock, a small pocket of beach beckoning us. Towels tucked under our arms, we went looking for a footpath, found it, and, hand in hand, with me in the lead, made our way down the steep, rocky slope, treading gingerly in our sandals, laughing nervously at each misstep.

  Finally we were down on the pale sand, between high walls of rock, a tiny private beach at the foot of the vast ocean. We spread beach towels, and I stripped to my trunks as she shed her polka-dot skirt and jacket down to her form-fitting white suit. Pale as her flesh was, in the glow of the muted moonlight, she might have been nude, the wind rustling her boyishly short blond hair. The only sound was the lazy surf rolling in and the wind surfing through foliage above.

  She stretched out on her towel, her slender, rounded body airbrushed by moonlight. I sat on my towel, next to her; she was drinking in the beauty of the night, I was drinking in hers.

  Finally she noticed my eyes on her and then she settled her gaze on me. She propped herself up on an elbow; at this angle, her cleavage was delightful.

  “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.