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 great Hawaiian who brought law and order to this island, the finger of doom pointed at this youthful descendant of Kamehameha’s people.”