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.”