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 two 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.”