Damned in Paradise

by Max Allan Collins

  “That’s not what I told her.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her to say that he arrived a little after she came to work.”

  “And when is that?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  Thalia was displaying her remarkable ability to shift time; this was, after all, the same girl who had left the Ala Wai Inn at, variously, midnight, twelve-thirty, one o’clock, and (finally, at the cops’ request to fit the needs of their case) eleven-thirty-five.

  “What became of the gun Jones handed you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s missing? Someone stole it from your house, do you think?”

  “I don’t know what became of it.”

  Kelley gave the jury a knowing smile, then turned back to the witness.

  “You have testified, Mrs. Massie, that your husband was always kind and considerate to you—that you never quarreled.”

  “That is so.”

  “As a married man myself, I must compliment you. Marriages without conflict are rare. You’re to be congratulated.”

  As he said this, Kelley was walking to the prosecution table, where his assistant handed him a document; Kelley perused the paper, smiled to himself, then ambled back to the witness stand.

  “Did you ever have a psychopathic examination at the University of Hawaii, Mrs. Massie?”

  “I did,” she said, eyes tightening.

  “Is this your handwriting?” Kelley handed her the sheet of paper, casually.

  Thalia’s pale face reddened. She was not flushed or blushing, but blazing with anger. “This is a confidential document! A private matter!” She waved the sheet at him. “Where did you get this?”

  “I’m here to ask questions, Mrs. Massie, not answer. Now, is that your handwriting?”

  The low monotone was replaced by a shrill screech. “I refuse to answer! This is a privileged communication between doctor and patient! You have no right to bring it into open court like this….”

  “Is the man who administered this questionnaire a doctor?”

  “Yes, he is!”

  “Isn’t he just a professor?”

  But Thalia said no more. Her chin raised, her eyes defiant, she began to tear the document down the middle. Kelley’s eyes widened, but he said nothing, standing with folded arms, his mouth open in something that might have been a smile, as the petulant witness continued ripping the sheet up, tearing it to shreds. Then, with a flip of the wrist, she tossed the pieces to one side and they drifted like snowflakes as applause rang from the gallery and a few women cheered, whistled.

  Judge Davis banged his gavel so hard the handle snapped. The courtroom was quiet. And while Thalia’s white-women cheering section admired this display, the jury was sitting in stony silence.

  Thalia, not yet dismissed from testimony, bolted from the stand and ran behind the defense table into the waiting arms of Tommie.

  Kelley, savoring the moment, stood looking down at the scattered snowflakes of the confidential document.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Massie,” he said. “Thank you for at last revealing your true colors.”

  Darrow rose, waving an arm. “Strike that from the record!”

  Judge Davis, frowning, the broken gavel still in hand, said, “It will be stricken. Mr. Kelley, the court finds your language objectionable.”

  But there was no contempt citing, though perhaps there might have been, had Thalia not taken center stage with one remark to the husband in whose arms she was enfolded, spoken in a way that would have reached the last row of the Little Theater.

  “What right had he to say I don’t love you?” she sobbed. “Everyone knows that I love you!”

  Darrow closed his eyes. His client’s wife had just revealed the contents of the document she’d destroyed.

  Meanwhile, as Mrs. Fortescue looked on while dabbing her eyes with a hanky, Tommie was kissing Thalia, a lover’s clinch that would have made a perfect romantic finish for a movie, only this courtroom drama wasn’t over yet.

  The next day Darrow closed his case with his two psychiatric experts imported from California, Dr. Thomas J. Orbison and Dr. Edward H. Williams, celebrated veterans of the Winnie Ruth Judd trial.

  Orbison, ruddy, graying, portly, with wire-frame glasses and a hearing aid, described Tommie Massie’s insanity as “delirium with ambulatory automatism.”

  Darrow grinned at the jury, raised his eyebrows, then turned back to his expert. “Translate it for those of us who didn’t go to medical school, Doctor.”

  “Automatism is a state of impaired consciousness causing the victim to behave in an automatic or reflexive manner. In Lt. Massie’s case, this was caused by psychological strain.”

  “In layman’s terms, Doctor.”

  Orbison had a twitch of a nervous smile that damn near traveled to the corner of his left eye. “Lt. Massie was walking about in a daze, unaware of what was happening around him.”

  “You mentioned a ‘psychological strain,’ Doctor, that triggered this response. What was that?”

  “When Kahahawai said, ‘We done it,’ it was as if a mental bomb had exploded in Lt. Massie’s mind, inducing shock amnesia.”

  “He was insane just prior to, and after, the shooting?”

  Orbison nodded and twitched his smile. “He became insane the moment he heard Kahahawai’s last words.”

  Darrow said, “Thank you, Doctor. Your witness.”

  Kelley came quickly up, asking his first question on the move: “Isn’t it possible a man might go through such ‘psychological strain’ and in a fit of anger kill a man and know it?”

  The nervous smile twitched again. “The condition you call ‘anger’ would be anger with a delirium that is defined as insanity.”

  “You think it’s improbable that Lt. Massie killed Kahahawai in a fit of anger?”

  “Yes—because all of Lt. Massie’s plans led up to getting a confession, and he killed the very person necessary to achieve this goal. This was an irrational, insane act.”

  “He was experiencing ‘shock amnesia’?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Are you aware, Doctor, that amnesia is not a legal insanity defense?”

  Another twitch smile. “The amnesia aspect is not what labels Lt. Massie legally insane. The lieutenant was seized by an uncontrollable impulse when he was confronted by direct and final proof that Kahahawai was the man who assaulted his wife.”

  “I see. I see.” Kelley gestured toward the defense table. “Well, Doctor, is Massie sane now?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Ah,” Kelley said, as if relieved. “Just a one-killing man, then. That’s all, Doctor.”

  Darrow’s second expert, Dr. Williams, tall, lean, stoic, his gray Van Dyke lending him a Freudish air of authority, basically concurred with Orbison, though he added a chemical slant to their shared diagnosis.

  “The protracted worry Lt. Massie endured, the rumors on the street that troubled and frustrated him so, might bring out an actively irrational condition, resulting in pouring a secretion into the blood. Strong emotions can have an important effect on the suprarenal glands.”

  Darrow gestured toward the defense table. “Has Lt. Massie regained his sanity?”

  “Quite fully.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. Your witness, Mr. Kelley.”

  Kelley strode forward. “Would you say it is possible that Massie might be telling a lie—that is, malingering in his testimony?”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Isn’t it usual in cases of this sort for the defendant to simulate insanity and then hire expert witnesses who can testify in support of this pose?”

  Williams frowned and turned toward the judge. “Your Honor, must I answer so disrespectful a question?”

  “Withdrawn, Your Honor,” Kelley said with a disgusted sigh. “No further questions.”

  Darrow rested his case, and Kelley—who had moments before sarcastically derided expert
psychiatric testimony—called his own alienist, Dr. Joseph Bowers of Stanford University, by way of rebuttal. Bowers had testified for the prosecution in the Judd case; old home week.

  The bearded, middle-aged, scholarly Bowers spoke for over an hour, showing off an encyclopedic grasp of the trial testimony thus far, detailing his study of Tommie’s background, declaring, “Nothing in Lt. Massie’s record indicates he was subject to states of delirium or memory loss—in my opinion, he was quite sane at the time of the killing.”

  Kelley was nodding. “What else has led you to this diagnosis, Doctor?”

  Bowers had a habit of turning to face the jury as he gave his answers; with his air of professorial expertise, this was quite effective. “Well, I can’t actually provide a diagnosis,” he said, “because the defense has denied me access to the defendant.”

  Darrow growled, “I object to the witness’s manner. Why doesn’t he face forward in the chair like any other witness? If he’s going to address the jury, he might as well get up and make a speech to them. This is not the impartial attitude that—”

  Bowers exploded; perhaps it was an uncontrollable impulse. “Do you mean to insinuate that I am not honest, sir? Well, I resent it!”

  Darrow, hunkering over the table like a grizzly bear over a garbage can, grumbled: “Resent it, then.”

  “Please continue, Doctor,” Kelley said, playing the voice of reason.

  “Lt. Massie and these other three individuals,” Bowers said, “knowing the consequences, took deliberate steps toward self-protection. They acted in a spirit of vengeance characteristic of persons who feel they’ve not obtained justice by legal means. Such individuals measure their acts, and consider the nature of and consequences of those acts. The steps of this plan were securing an automobile, wearing gloves and goggles, carrying guns, taking steps for disposal of the body, and so on.”

  Kelley was nodding. “Thank you, Doctor. That’s all.”

  Darrow, remaining seated, asked only one question: “Doctor, may I assume you’re being handsomely paid for coming down here and giving your testimony?”

  “I expect to be paid,” Bowers said testily.

  “That is all.”

  Kelley, on his way back to his table, turned and said, “Prosecution rests, Your Honor.”

  “Summations begin tomorrow,” Judge Davis said, and banged with his new gavel. “Court is adjourned.”

  And the next day summations did begin, but it was the second team up first, with Leisure making the case for the unwritten law (“You gentlemen of the jury must decide whether a man whose wife has been ravished, and who kills the man who did it, must spend his life behind dark prison walls, all because the shock proved too great for his mind”), and Kelley’s tall young assistant Barry Ulrich lashing out against lynch law (“You cannot make Hawaii safe against rape by licensing murder!”).

  So it was on the following day, with police radio cars parked in front of the Judiciary Building, machine gun-toting patrolmen posted to stave off rumored native uprisings, in a courtroom strung with wire and microphones to broadcast to the mainland what might be the Great Defender’s last great oratory, the gallery packed even tighter than usual with Admiral Stirling and Walter Dillingham and other luminaries noticeably present, that Clarence Darrow rose from his chair behind the defense table where room had been made for his friend Dr. Porter, his wife Ruby, as well as Thalia Massie, seated holding hands with her husband, and shambled toward the jury. His suit was dark, baggy. His gray hair streamed haphazardly down his forehead. Fans hummed overhead. Palms rustled. Birds called. Traffic coursed by.

  “Gentlemen, this case illustrates the working of human destiny more than any other case I’ve handled. It illustrates the effect of sorrow and mishap on human minds and lives, it shows us how weak and powerless human beings are in the hands of relentless powers.”

  He stood before the jury box as he spoke, his bony frame planted.

  “Eight months ago Mrs. Fortescue was in Washington, well respected. Eight months ago Thomas Massie had worked himself up to the rank of lieutenant in the Navy, respected, courageous, intelligent. Eight months ago his attractive wife was known and respected and admired by the community. Eight months ago Massie and his wife went to a dance, young, happy. Today, they are in a criminal court and you twelve men are asked to send them to prison for life.”

  He began to slowly pace before them.

  “We contend that for months Lt. Massie’s mind had been affected by grief, sorrow, trouble, day after day, week after week, month after month. What do you think would have happened to any one of you, under the same condition? What if your wife were dragged into the bushes, and raped by four or five men?”

  He paused, leaned against the rail of the box. “Thalia Massie was left on that lonely road in pain and agony and suffering. Her husband hears from her bruised lips a story as terrible, as cruel, as any I’ve heard—isn’t that enough to unsettle any man’s mind?”

  He turned and walked toward the defense table; stood before Tommie and Thalia and said, “There have been people who have spread around in this community vile slanders. They concocted these strange, slanderous stories, and what effect did they have on this young husband? Going back and forth, nursing his wife, working all day, attending her at night. He lost sleep. He lost hope.”

  Darrow turned back to the jury as he gestured with an open hand toward Tommie. “Our insane asylums are filled with men and women who had less cause for insanity than he had!”

  He ambled back to them, hands in the pockets of his baggy pants. “In time, five men were indicted for the crime. Tommie was in the courtroom during the trial of the assailants. A strange circumstance indeed that the jury disagreed in that case. I don’t know why, I don’t see why, but the jury did their work and they disagreed. Months passed, and still this case was not retried.”

  He again gestured toward the defense table, this time indicating Mrs. Fortescue. “Here is the mother. They wired to her and she came. Poems and rhymes have been written about mothers, but I want to call your attention to something more basic than that: Nature. I don’t care whether it’s a human mother, a mother of beasts or birds of the air, they are all alike. To them there is one all-important thing and that is a child that they carried in their womb.”

  Now he gestured with both hands at the stiffly noble Mrs. Fortescue.

  “She acted as every mother acts, she felt as your mothers have felt. Everything else is forgotten in the emotion that carries her back to the time..,” and now he motioned to Thalia, “…when this woman was a little baby in her arms whom she bore and she loved.”

  The sound of rustling handkerchiefs indicated tears were again flowing among the ladies of the gallery.

  Darrow looked from face to face among the jurymen. “Life comes from the devotion of mothers, of husbands, loves of men and women, that’s where life comes from. Without this love, this devotion, the world would be desolate and cold and take its lonely course around the sun alone!” He leaned against the rail again. “This mother took a trip of five thousand miles, over land and sea, to her child. And here she is now, in this courtroom, waiting to go to the penitentiary.”

  He rocked back on his heels and his voice rose to a near shout: “Gentlemen, if this husband and this mother and these faithful boys go to the penitentiary, it won’t be the first time that such a structure has been sanctified by its inmates. When people come to your beautiful islands, one of the first places they will wish to see is the prison where the mother and the husband are confined, to marvel at the injustice and cruelty of men and pity the inmates and blame Fate for the persecution and sorrow that has followed this family.”

  Now his voice became gentle again as he began to pace before them. “Gentlemen, it was bad enough that the wife was raped. That vile stories circulated, causing great anxiety and agony in this young couple. All this is bad enough. But now you are asked to separate them, to send the husband for the rest of his life to prison.”


  His voice began to rise in timbre, gradually, and now he faced the gallery and the members of the press, saying, “There is, somewhere deep in the feelings and instincts of all men, a yearning for justice, an idea of what is right and what is wrong, of what is fair, and this came before the first law was written and will abide before the last law is dead.”

  Again he moved to the defense table; he stopped before Tommie. “Poor young man. He began to think of vindicating his wife from this slander. It was enough she’d been abused by these…men. Now she had been abused by talk.” His eyes traveled back to the jury and his voice was reasonableness itself: “He wanted to get a confession. To get somebody imprisoned? For revenge? No—that did not concern him. He was concerned with the girl.” And now Darrow looked affectionately at Thalia. “The girl he had taken in marriage when she was sixteen. Sweet sixteen….”

  He returned to Mrs. Fortescue, made a sweeping gesture, saying, “The mother, too, believed it necessary to get a confession. The last thing they wanted to do was shoot or kill. They formed a plan to take Kahahawai to their house and have him confess. They never thought of it as illegal…it was the ends they thought of, not the means.”

  Now he positioned himself before Jones and Lord. “And these two common seamen, are they bad? There are some human virtues that are unfortunately not common: loyalty, devotion. They were loyal when a shipmate asked for help. Was that bad?”

  He swiveled and pointed a finger at a random male face in the crowd. “If you needed a friend to help you out of a scrape, would you wait outside a prayer meeting Wednesday night…I guess that’s the right night…”

  There was a murmur of laughter at this wry uncertainty from the country’s most famous agnostic.

  “Or would you take one of these sailors? They did not want to kill, they made no plan to kill. And the house where they took Kahahawai was not a good place to kill—one family thirty feet away, another house twenty-five feet away. A lovely place to kill someone, isn’t it?”

  Solemnly he faced Mr. and Mrs. Kahahawai, in their usual spot in the front. “I would do nothing to add to the sorrow of the mother and father of the boy. They have human feelings. I have, too.” Wheeling toward the jury, he pointed a finger that was not quite accusing. “I want you to have human feelings. Any man without human feelings is without life!”