We drove through downtown Honolulu—within spitting distance of the Alexander Young Hotel—and had I wanted to call out for help or jump out, I could easily have done it. I wasn’t quite sure why these boys wanted me to hear “their side” of it; but I didn’t think I was in danger, and besides, I wanted to hear their side of it….
Beyond the downtown, in a working-class residential neighborhood, Ida pulled over to the curb, leaving the engine thrumming. We were at the arterial intersection of King and Liliha streets, with Dillingham Boulevard curving off to the left, toward Pearl Harbor.
Ida was pointing over toward Liliha, at the stop sign. “I just dropped Eau off, and pull out on King when this big damn Hudson come roarin’ down King, headin’ toward town, goin’ like hell. I yank the wheel around and we both slow down and just touch fenders.”
“A little haole guy was driving,” Henry Chang said, “but it was his big fat wahine mama that cussed us.”
Ida said, “She yell out the window, ‘Look the hell where you’re goin’!’ And I yell back, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ “Ahakuelo said, softly, some regret in his voice, “It make Joe mad, seein’ that white man with that big-mouth kanaka gal. Big Joe jump out and yell, ‘Get that damn haole out here, and I’ll give him what’s coming to him.’”
“But the little guy stay behind the wheel,” Ida said. “He look real scared. The big fat mama didn’t—she got outa the car, damn big woman, almost tall as Joe. She come over cussin’, smellin’ of oke, drunk as hell. We all jump outa the car but she and Joe already at each other. She grab Joe by the throat and scratch him and Joe shove her offa him, and she fall on the runnin’ board of her car. Big fat wildcat, we had enough of that, even Joe, and we scramble back in car and drive off like hell, laughin’ about it.”
“Only it was no laughing matter,” I said, “after she went to the cops, and reported it as an assault.”
Ida’s expression was confused, frustrated. “She hit Joe.”
“And Joe hit her.” I decided to risk the following: “I hear he punched her in the face—like Thalia Massie got punched in the face.”
Behind me, Henry Chang snarled, “Haole pi’ lau!”
Which I didn’t imagine was a term of endearment.
Ida looked at me, eyes steady. “He just push her, on side of head. If Joe punch her in face, are you kidding? He woulda break her damn jaw!”
I said nothing. I didn’t have to: Ida suddenly realized what he’d said, swallowed thickly, and put the Phaeton in gear and, with care, pulled back out onto King, heading back toward town. Before long he took a left on Nuuanu Street.
Ida didn’t say anything for a while; maybe he was wondering how different his life—and Joe Kahahawai’s—might have been if that little fender-bender with Agnes and Homer Peeples (that was the couple’s name) hadn’t seen epithets escalate into rough stuff.
Finally I asked, “Why did you lie, Shorty?”
He gave me a quick, startled glance. “What?”
“You lied to the cops, when they came around and rousted you out of bed, in the early morning hours after the rape.”
He was stopping, just beyond a lush park, where Nuuanu Street forked, a road off to the right labeled Pacific Heights.
“I didn’t know any haole woman got attack,” Ida said. “All I know was Joe hit that fat wahine bitch, and I didn’t wanna get mixed up in it.”
“So you told the cops you didn’t go out that night. And that you loaned the car to some Hawaiian pal of yours—a pal you knew by sight but not by name?”
Ida nodded glumly; his smirk had no humor in it. “Not very good lie, huh?”
“One of the worst I ever heard,” I said cheerfully.
“I told truth later same night….”
“Sure, after they grilled you—but you got off to a bad start with that whopper.” When the first thing out of a suspect’s mouth is a lie, a cop never believes another word.
“That cop McIntosh, he drag me into his office where Mrs. Massie sit, face banged up, and say to me in front of her, ‘Now look at your beautiful work!’ Then he ask her if I am attacker!”
Christ, talk about prompting—why didn’t Mcintosh just stencil the word rapist on the poor bastard’s shirt? What happened to the standard practice of placing a suspect like Ida in a lineup?
“But she didn’t identify me,” Ida said. “Next afternoon, Sunday, coppers take Mack, Eau, Big Joe, and me to Massie house in Manoa Valley.”
“Why in hell?” I asked.
“So she could identify us.”
Not a lineup downtown where the real suspects were intermingled with bogus ones, under the watchful eye of the DA’s office—but home delivery of the coppers’ prime suspects!
“Sunday, cops ain’t picked Benny up yet,” Ida was saying. “So Benny, he wasn’t there. Funny thing, Mrs. Massie said to Big Joe—‘Don’t they call you Ben?’ But she say she recognize Eau and Joe. She don’t pick me out. Don’t even know me from the night before at police headquarters.”
For several miles now, we’d been gliding along the valley road with fabulous estates on either side, their lavish gardens lorded over by royal palms. It was as if we were passing through an immense open-air nursery.
“They take Mrs. Massie back to hospital,” Ida said, “later that same afternoon. And Benny, cops pick him up at the football field, where he practice, and take him to hospital and ask Mrs. Massie if he is one of attackers.”
From the backseat, Ahakuelo’s voice reeked frustration. “She said didn’t know me!”
Even with the cops tying these boys in red ribbons and depositing them in her lap, Thalia Massie had failed to identify them during that crucial forty-eight-hour period after the crime. Only later did she come to know them down to their shoe size.
“We innocent men,” Ida said proudly, as the Phaeton seemed to float past a cemetery.
“Maybe you did get railroaded on this one,” I said. “But don’t kid a kidder: your pal Joe was convicted on a robbery charge…” I looked over my shoulder and directed my next comment to Ahakuelo, who seemed to have warmed to me some; Henry Chang was still glowering. “And Benny, you and Eau here did time on a rape charge.”
“Attempted rape!” Chang spat.
“Sorry. That makes all the difference….”
“We got parole,” Ahakuelo said, “and the charge got dropped down to ‘fornication with a minor.’ I was eighteen, Eau just a kid, too—we was at a party and there was lots of oke, lots of fucking.”
“Some of the girls was under sixteen,” Ida further explained.
So the prior rape charges against Ahakuelo and Chang, which had produced such indignation on Admiral Stirling’s part, were statutory rape busts?
“And Joe wasn’t convicted on no robbery beef, either,” Ida was saying.
“He wasn’t?”
Ida shook his head, no; we were passing by another park—according to a wooden sign, Queen Emma Park. “Joe loaned some money to this friend of his, Toyoko Fukunaga. Fukunaga owe Joe this money too long, and wouldn’t pay. After time, Big Joe shake the cash outa Fukunaga, and Fukunaga file a complaint. They have trial, but jury can’t make up their mind.”
These guys seemed to inspire hung juries.
“DA say they skip ’nother trial if Joe plead guilty on assault and battery,” Ida continued. “He do thirty days.”
So Big Joe Kahahawai’s criminal record consisted of a disagreement between him and a friend over a debt.
A rambling country club clubhouse marked the spot where the streetcar line ended, and private residences began to thin out to nothing as the valley road began to wind. Ida took a fork to the right, about a mile past the country club, and we sailed along the bank of a stream, briefly, before the road plunged into a tunnel of trees, shutting out the moonlight.
I was getting uneasy again. “Where are you taking me, Shorty?”
“We see Pali,” he said, as if that meant anything to me.
The eucalyptus-t
ree forest gave way to sheer ridges of stone, and the sides of the valley seemed to gradually close in on us as we climbed. My ears were popping. The air had turned chill, the wind kicking up.
“Gettin’ a little cold, isn’t it?” I asked. “You wanna put the top up on this buggy?”
Ida shook his head no. “Pali might rip canvas top right off.”
What was Pali, a goddamn Cyclops?
“Who the hell is Pali?” I growled.
“Pali is cliff,” Ida said, “where Kamehameha and warriors drive Kalanikupule’s warriors back over edge. Long drop.”
From the backseat came Henry Chang’s helpful voice: “Two-thousand-foot drop, haole”
“It’s thoughtful of you fellas to try to make me feel at home,” I said. “But maybe any more sight-seeing oughta wait till daylight…”
We had rounded a final curve and now a breathtaking panorama stretched out before us; the golden glow of the moon had been replaced by silver, and it was with this gleaming paintbrush that the greens and blues of the vista were touched, muted into an unreality like that of a hand-painted postcard, mountains, cliffs, bays, strands of coral, ivory endless sea under a starry black-blue dome. God, it was lovely. Christ, it was far down.
And shit, the wind! It was a cold howling gale up here, whipping hair, flapping clothing, flapping skin, it was a goddamn hurricane, formed, I supposed, by wind funneling through the ridges of these cliffs. My body was immediately overtaken by a flu-like chill.
“Get off car!” Ida yelled at me. These guys seemed to say “off” where a normal person would say “out”; but somehow it didn’t seem like the time for a semantic discussion.
And we all piled out, that nasty air current making fluttering human semaphore signals out of all our clothing, the dark flowered silk shirts flying like the absurd flags of several silly nations. My tie was a waggling tattletale tongue.
Suddenly Henry Chang was on one side of me, and Benny Ahakuelo on the other, and each gripped me just above either elbow. Ida was facing me, his pudgy face set in a stern fearsome mask, his black hair waving, whipping. David Takai stood just behind him, his slicked-back hair having more success against the wind than the rest of us, his flat face blank, dark stone eyes unreadable.
“Last December,” Ida shouted, “big buncha sailors grab me, haul my ass up here, wanna make me confess I rape that white woman.”
Ida began unbuttoning the shirt even as the silk flapped around his hands.
I glanced out at the view: rolling hills, the even lines of a pineapple plantation, cattle fields, rice paddies, banana-tree groves, and the seas striking, curling, foaming over the distant reef. All of it, silver in the moonlight. Lovely. I wondered how lovely it would look as I was windmilling through the air on my way to the rocks two thousand feet below.
Or was Henry Chang exaggerating? Was it only fifteen hundred feet?
Ida had the shirt off and he handed the fluttering garment to Takahi, who was attending him like a servant. Was Ida freeing himself up to administer me a beating? And I would have to take it; the other three could hold onto me and I’d just have to fucking take it….
But now, in the ivory bath of the moonlight, Ida’s surprisingly lean body revealed streaks of white scars, a sea of them, slashing his flesh, and he turned like a model showing off a new frock, and revealed a back that was even more brutally striped with welts that had graduated to scar tissue. He had been brutally whipped—front and back.
Then Ida wheeled, and he came very close to me, as Henry Chang and Benny Ahakuelo held me. Yelling to be heard over the gale, he said, “They work me over pretty good, whaddya think?”
“Not bad,” I managed.
“And I not confess. Bleed like hell, pass out after while, but goddamn, not confess! Nothin’ to confess!”
Chin high, his proud point made, Ida held his hand out to his attendant Takai and took back his flapping garment, got it on, and buttoned up, despite the wind.
“You tell Clarence Darrow,” Ida said. “You tell him we innocent men. Joe was innocent, too. You tell him he’s on wrong side of courtroom. Wrong side!”
“I’ll tell him,” I said. No smart talk or disagreement from these quarters: Henry Chang and Ahakuelo were still holding onto me; I was still seconds away from being a flung rag doll bouncing my way down to a rocky death.
“He supposed to help little people!” Ida shouted indignantly. “He supposed to be colored man’s defender! Not rich goddamn murderers! You tell him we wanna talk to him. We want his ear! You tell him!”
I nodded numbly.
And then they dragged me back into the car and took off.
It was a six-, seven-mile drive, but not another word was spoken, not until they dropped me by my car in the Waikiki Park parking lot, where Beatrice was sitting on the running board, her legs stretched out; she was smoking, a bunch of butts scattered on the gravel near her pretty red-painted toenails. When she saw us pull in, she got to her feet, tossed me the keys without a word or expression, and climbed in the front seat with Ida, where I’d been sitting.
“Tell Darrow,” Ida said.
And the Phaeton was gone.
11
Clarence Darrow, wrapped in a white towel like a plump Gandhi, his comma of gray hair turned into wispy exclamation marks by the wind, his smile as gleeful as a kid Christmas morning, was seated in the outrigger canoe, positioned midway, like ballast, two berry-brown beach boys in front of him, three behind. They paddled the boat and their joyful passenger over an easy crest of surf as news photographers on the beach—invaders in suit and tie amongst the swimming-attired tourists—snapped pictures.
One of Darrow’s tanned escorts—the one paddling right at the front of the boat—was the king of the beach boys himself: Duke Kahanamoku, a “boy” in his early forties. An infectious white smile flashed in the long dark handsome face, and sinewy muscles rippled as the Duke stroked the water.
“Took Tarzan to beat him,” Clarence Crabbe said.
We were sitting under a beach umbrella at a little white table on the sand with the pink castle of the Royal Hawaiian looming beautifully behind us. The young Olympic hopeful looked like a bronze god in his black trunks with matching athletic T-shirt. I was in tourist mode—white slacks with sandals and one of those colorful silk shirts like my kidnappers of the night before had worn: a red print with yellow and black parrots, short-sleeve and sporty and loud enough to attract attention back in Chicago’s Bronzeville. This wardrobe—which also included a wide-brimmed Panama hat and round-lensed sunglasses that turned the world a soothing green—was courtesy of various shops in the hotel, and charged to my room. If there’s anything a detective knows how to find, it’s ways to pad an expense account.
Crabbe had called this morning; I didn’t place him at first, but when he offered to buy us lunch with his silver dollar, it came to me: the kid who dived from the Malolo deck! We’d had lunch on the lanai (that’s “porch” for you mainlanders) outside the hotel lounge, the Coconut Grove, only I didn’t let him pay for the tab, which the buck wouldn’t have covered, anyway—I signed it to my room.
Now we were spending the early part of the afternoon watching Darrow caper on the beach for the press, giving them plenty of frivolous photos and the occasional questionable tidbit (“There is no racial problem whatsoever in Hawaii”), while along the way paying the Royal Hawaiian back for my room with the publicity his famous presence attracted.
“Huh?” I asked, in response to Crabbe’s statement about Tarzan beating Duke Kahanamoku.
“Johnny Weismuller,” Crabbe explained. He was watching Kahanamoku wistfully. “He’s the guy who finally took Duke’s title away, as world’s fastest swimmer. In Paris, in ’24.”
“And ’32’s gonna be your year?”
“That’s the plan.”
Though the Royal Hawaiian was way under capacity, its beachfront was aswarm with sunbathers, swimmers, and would-be surf riders. Here and there, a muscular Hawaiian in a bathing suit was
attending a female—either conducting a friendly class in surfing, or sitting on the beach beside her, rubbing coconut oil on pale flesh.
“These beach boys,” I said to Crabbe, “do they work here?”
“Some do. But all the beaches in Hawaii are public—the boys can come and go as they like. Hey, I used to be one of them.”
“A haole like you?”
He flashed me a grin as white as Kahanamoku’s. “You’re picking up on the lingo, Nate. Yeah, there are a few white boys out there hustling surfing lessons.”
“And hustling the women?”
His grin turned sly. “Since I never pay for sex, I make a general of policy of not charging for it, either.”
“But some beach boys do charge for their stud services?”
He shrugged. “It’s a point of pride. Say, what’s Clarence Darrow foolin’ around with Duke and the boys for? Shouldn’t he be waist-deep in the case?”
Right now Darrow was ankle-deep in surf. Kahanamoku was helping Darrow out of the boat and onto the sand, the reporters and photographers scuttling in like crabs, snapping shots, hurling questions.
“He is working on the case,” I said. “On the public relations front, anyway—not to mention race relations. Hanging out with Duke Kahanamoku, he’s sending a message that he doesn’t think all the beach boys are rapists.”
“Those Ala Moana defendants,” Crabbe said, “aren’t beach boys. Just typical restless Honolulu kids, drifting through life.”
He said this with a certain sympathy.
“Guys in their late teens, early twenties,” I said, “are restless everywhere, not just Hawaii.”
“Yeah, but a lot of kids here are really adrift. All these different races tossed together here, their cultures, their traditions, in tatters.”
“Then you don’t think the Ala Moana boys are ‘gangsters’?”
“No, and I don’t think they’re rapists, either.”
“Why’s that?”
Crabbe sighed. The cool wind was cutting through the warmth of the afternoon, making his dark blond hair dance; handsome damn kid—if he wasn’t so affable, I’d have hated his guts.
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