This suicide attempt proved unsuccessful, and a month later, on the liner Roma bound for Italy, she slashed her wrists in the tub in her cabin. Her screams while doing so, however, alerted help and this attempt also failed.
I felt bad, when I read the accounts in the Chicago papers; Darrow had been right: Thalia Massie lived in a personally crafted hell, and she was having no luck getting out of it.
Now and then, from time to time, the twentieth century’s most famous rape victim turned up in the press: in 1951, she attacked a pregnant woman, her landlady, who sued her for ten thousand dollars; in 1953, she enrolled as a forty-three-year-old student at the University of Arizona; the same year, she eloped to Mexico to marry a twenty-one-year-old student; two years later she again divorced.
Finally, in July of 1963, in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she had moved to be closer to her mother (they lived separately, however), Thalia escaped her personal hell. Her mother found her dead on the bathroom floor of her apartment, bottles of barbiturates scattered about her.
Tommie Massie, like the Ala Moana boys, enjoyed the blessing of a notoriety-free private life. He married Florence Storms in Seattle in 1937; in 1940, he left the Navy. He and his wife moved to San Diego, where they lived quietly and happily as Tommie pursued a successful civilian career.
Mrs. Fortescue outlived her daughter, but she is gone now, as so many of them are: Clarence “Buster” Crabbe, who never returned to law school after Olympic fame led to Hollywood B-movie stardom; New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who resigned in disgrace (Darrow did not defend him); Detective John Jardine, whose reputation as a tough, honest cop eventually rivaled Chang Apana’s; Duke Kahanamoku, whose Hollywood ventures were not as successful as fellow Olympian Buster Crabbe’s, but who wound up a successful nightclub owner; Major Ross, who took over Oahu Prison and brought discipline to the institution, starting with placing Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu in well-deserved solitary confinement.
Admiral Stirling, John Kelley, and George Leisure also long ago said aloha to this life.
What became of the officers and sailors—Bradford, Stockdale, Olds, Dr. Porter, and the rest—I have no idea. Last I heard, Eddie Lord was still alive; had a well-paying, respectable job but was something of a loner, living in an apartment over a suburban bar and grill, spending his time glued to a television set.
Other than Darrow, Jones was the only principal player in the farce I ever ran into again. Completely by chance, we wound up side by side at the bar in the Palmer House in the summer of ’64. I didn’t recognize him—not that he’d changed that much, a little grayer, a little heavier, but who wasn’t?
What I guess I didn’t expect was to find Deacon Jones wearing a tailored suit and a conservative striped tie—even if the double Scotch he was collecting from the bartender did make sense.
“Don’t I know you?” he asked, gruffly affable.
I still hadn’t made him. “Do you?” To the bartender I said, “Rum and Coke.”
“Aren’t you Heller? Nat? Nate!”
I smiled and sipped my drink. “Guess you do know me. I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to place—”
He thrust out a hand. “Albert Jones—Machinist’s Mate. Last time I saw you was in the Iolani Palace, when I was gettin’ sprung.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said, and shook hands with him, and laughed, once. “Deacon Jones. You look damn respectable.”
“Executive at a bank back in Massachusetts, if you can believe it.”
“Barely.”
“Come on! Let’s find a booth and catch each other the hell up. Shit! Imagine, runnin’ into Clarence Darrow’s detective, after all these years.”
We found a booth, and we talked; he was in town for a bankers’ convention. I, of course, was still living and working in Chicago, my A-l Detective Agency flourishing. These days, sometimes I felt more like an executive than a detective, myself.
We both got a little drunk. He said the last time he’d seen his friend Eddie Lord was in ’43 on the submarine Scorpion; thought about him often, though. We discussed Thalia Massie, who was recently dead, and Jones admitted he didn’t have a very high opinion of her.
“Her personality was zero,” he said. “She didn’t have the personality of your big toe. She didn’t have a good-lookin’ leg, ankle, or calf.”
“Well, you must’ve liked Tommie.”
“Massie was all man, all officer. He was a little scared, you know, when we snatched that boy, but put yourself in the lieutenant’s place—really high-class academic training, that upper-class background. Of course, he’d feel nervous—we were breakin’ the law!”
“How about ol’ Joe Kahahawai? Was he nervous?”
Jones chugged some Scotch, chortled. “He was damn near scared white. Look at it this way—suppose you and me are sitting here and we got a nigger sitting right there and I got a gun. Sure as shit he’s gonna be scared, right? Unless he’s a goddamn fool, and this guy was no fool.”
“Did he really confess?”
“Hell no. Tell you the truth, pal…he wasn’t all that goddamn scared. After while he started gettin’ his nerve back—you could almost see the fear kinda changin’ into this overbearing attitude. Maybe he was thinkin’ about what he could do if he ever got one of us alone.”
“You didn’t hate the guy, did you? Kahahawai, I mean?”
“Hell no! I don’t hate anybody. Besides, hate’s an expression of fear and I didn’t fear that black bastard. I had no use for him—but I wasn’t afraid of him.”
“So Tommie was questioning him, but he didn’t confess. Deacon…what the hell really happened in that house?”
Jones shrugged. It was strange, seeing this well-dressed banker drink himself back into a salty seaman spouting racist bile. “Massie asked him somethin’, and the nigger lunged at him.”
“What happened then?”
He shrugged again. “I shot the bastard.”
“You shot him?”
“Goddamn right I did. Right under the left nipple. He went over backwards and that’s all she wrote.”
“Did you even know what you were doing?”
“Hell yes I knew what I was doing. Of course, I knew right away this thing had got completely away from us. We were in a pack of trouble and we knew it.”
“Where were Mrs. Fortescue and Lord when the bullet was fired?”
“They were outside. They came in when they heard the shot.”
“How did the old girl react?”
“She was scared shitless. She went over and hugged Tommie. She was fond of him.”
He told me about how it was his “stupid idea” to put the body in the bathtub; and how Thalia’s sister Helene had tossed the murder weapon into some quicksand by the beach. I asked him if he still had his scrapbook and he said, yeah, he dragged it out once in a while to prove to people he was “famous, once.”
“Funny,” he said. Shook his head. “First man I ever killed.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“Now, you mean? Same as then.”
“And how’s that?”
He shrugged. “I never shed a tear.”
And he took a slug of Scotch.
A few years later I heard Jones had died; I didn’t shed a tear, either.
Chang Apana was injured in an automobile accident later in 1932—a hit-and-run—and this finally forced him to retire from the Honolulu police, though he continued working in private security till shortly before his death in November 1934. Scores of dignitaries and the Royal Hawaiian Band gathered to send off the Island’s greatest detective; obituaries appeared all over the world, paying tribute to the “real Charlie Chan.”
In 1980, when my wife and I went to Oahu to attend the U.S.S. Arizona memorial dedication at Pearl Harbor, I went looking for Chang’s gravestone in the Manoa Cemetery, and found it overgrown with vines and weeds, which I cleared away from the simple marker, draping a lei over the stone.
Isabel died in Oahu, too, only she is buried
on Long Island. She married a lawyer in 1937 who became an officer in the Navy who, ironically, was stationed at Pearl, meaning Isabel wound back up in Honolulu. She and I had stayed in touch, casually, and she wrote me a very warm, funny letter about ending up back in Honolulu, and confided that she’d taken her husband to “our beach,” but didn’t tell him its history. The letter was dated Dec. 3, 1941. I received it about a week after the Jap attack on Pearl Harbor; she was one of the civilian casualties, though her three-year-old son, whose middle name was Nathan, survived.
Now her son and I keep in touch.
Clarence Darrow never took another major case. I helped him out on a minor matter, later in ’32, but he was not able to realize his dream of returning to full-time practice. The strain of the Massie case on his health made Ruby put her foot down, though he did go, with Ruby, to Washington, D.C., to chair a review board into the NRA at FDR’s behest, a mistake on the part of the President, who had wrongly assumed the old radical would rubber-stamp any New Deal programs.
We spent time together at his apartment in Hyde Park, and Darrow continued to encourage me to leave the Chicago Police Department, and in December 1932, prompted by outside events, I took his advice and opened the A-l Detective Agency.
C.D. wrote an additional chapter that was added to his autobiography, a chapter on the Massie case, and when he showed it to me for comment, I told him, frankly, that it didn’t seem to have much to do with what really had happened.
Gentle as ever, he reminded me that he still had a responsibility to his clients, not to betray confidences or make them look bad.
“Besides,” he said, looking over his gold-rimmed reading glasses at me, “autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.”
And I told C.D. that if I ever wrote my story down, it would be exactly as it happened—only I was not a writer, and couldn’t imagine doing that.
He laughed. “With this wonderful, terrible life you’re leading, son, you’ll turn, like so many elderly men before you, to writing your memoirs, because yours is the only story you’ll have to tell, and you won’t be able to sit idly in silence and just wait for the night to come.”
He died March 13, 1938. I was with his son Paul when C.D.’s ashes were scattered to the winds over Jackson Park lagoon.
When we went to the dedication of the Arizona memorial, and we stood on the deck of that oddly modern white sagging structure, contemplating the lost lives of the boys below, my wife said, “It must be emotional for you, coming back here.”
“It is.”
“I mean, you serving in the Pacific, and all.”
A natural assumption, on her part: I’d been a Marine. Guadalcanal.
I said, “It’s other memories.”
“What other memories?”
“I was here before the war.”
“Really?”
“Didn’t I ever mention it? The case with Clarence Darrow?”
She smiled skeptically. “You knew Clarence Darrow?”
“Sure. Didn’t you ever wonder why it took so long for Hawaii to become a state?”
So I took her around, in our rental car, and gave her a tour no tour guide could have given her. The Pali was still there, of course, and the Blowhole; and the beach nearby, which my wife was excited to see.
“It’s the From Here to Eternity beach!” she said. “Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr! That’s where they made passionate love…”
And it was, too.
But so much was gone. Waikiki was ugly high-rise hotels, cheap souvenir shops, and hordes of Japanese tourists. The Royal Hawaiian (where we stayed) seemed largely unchanged, but dwarfed by its colorless skyscraper neighbors, and a shopping center squatted on the original entrance off Kalakaua Avenue.
The mauka (mountain) side of Ala Moana Boulevard was now littered with office buildings, shopping centers, and pastel apartment houses. On the seaward side, a public park with coral pathways and bathhouses lined the beach shore. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t turn any of this into the Ala Moana of the old Animal Quarantine Station and squattersville and thickets leading to the ocean.
In Manoa Valley, the bungalow where Thalia and Tommie had lived was in fine shape; it looked cozier than ever. I wondered if the current residents knew its history. The house where Joe Kahahawai had died was there, too—the shabbiest house on an otherwise gentrified block, the only structure gone to seed, the only overgrown yard with a dead car in it….
“Jesus,” I said, sitting across the way in the rental car. “It’s like the rotting tooth in the neighborhood’s smile.”
“That’s not a bad line,” my wife said. “You want me to write it down?”
“Why?”
“For when you write the Massie story.”
“Who says I’m going to write it?”
But she’d seen the stacks of handwritten pages in the study in our condo in Boca Raton; she knew, one by one, I was recording my cases.
“Well,” she said, getting out her checkbook, using a deposit slip to jot down the line, “you’ll thank me for doing this, later.”
Thank you, sweetheart.
Because I did use it, didn’t I? And I did write the Massie story, colored by imagination and dream.
It was either that or sit idly in silence and just wait for the night to come.
I OWE THEM ONE
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material.
Most of the characters in this novel are real and appear with their true names. Jimmy Bradford and Ray Stockdale are fictional characters with real-life counterparts. Dr. Joseph Bowers is a composite of two prosecution psychiatric witnesses. Isabel Bell is a fictional character, whose moral support for her cousin is suggested by that of the various real members of the Bell family and of Thalia’s teenage sister, Helene. Nate Heller’s “date” with Beatrice Nakamura is fanciful; most of the damning information Thalia Massie’s maid gives Heller is based on interviews she gave to the Pinkerton operatives who in June 1932 undertook a confidential investigation into the case at Governor Judd’s behest. A good deal of what Heller uncovers in this novel parallels this actual investigation.
The Pinkerton investigators and Nate Heller came to similar conclusions, although the notion that Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu may have been among Thalia Massie’s actual attackers is my own and, to my knowledge, new to this book.
The only major shifting of time in this novel pertains to the capture of Daniel Lyman, which took place earlier than its climactic placement, here (although Lyman did elude authorities for an embarrassingly long time). The participation in that capture by my fictional detective Nathan Heller (and real-life detective Chang Apana) is fanciful.
Devotees of the Massie case will note that I have omitted or greatly downplayed some individuals with significant secondary roles in the case. To deal substantially with every police officer, lawyer, and judge involved with both the Ala Moana case and the Massie murder trial would have been a burden to both author and readers. Clarence Darrow and George Leisure, for example, were backed up by local Honolulu lawyers (already attached to the Fortescue/Massie defense and mentioned in passing, here) and by a Navy attorney (who does make a brief appearance in the novel). While other members of the Honolulu Police Department are mentioned in passing, John Jardine—who did play a major role in the Ala Moana investigation—represents the plainclothes cops who worked the case, just as Inspector Mclntosh (also a key player) represents the hierarchy of the department. While I stand behind my depiction of Admiral Stirling Yates, I must admit that others in the Navy Department—notably, Rear Admiral William V. Pratt and Admiral George T. Pettengill—shared similar racist, uninformed, antidemocratic views of Hawaii; in fact, Stirling often seemed the voice of
reason compared to Pratt, then Acting Secretary of the Navy.
My longtime research associate George Hagenauer—a valued collaborator on the Heller “memoirs”—again dug out newspaper and magazine material, and spent many hours with me trying to figure out what really might have happened to Thalia Massie on September 12, 1931. In particular, George’s enthusiasm and feel for Clarence Darrow led the way not only to key research information about the twentieth century’s foremost criminal lawyer, but provided me with a basis for my characterization of Nate Heller’s surrogate father.
Among the books consulted in regard to Darrow were Irving Stone’s seminal Clarence Darrow for the Defense (1941) and Darrow’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1932). Stone’s glowing portrayal would seem the source of such romanticized versions of Darrow as those found in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (and the play and film that followed) and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play Inherit the Wind (and its film version). For the purposes of this novel, Stone’s account of the Massie case proved overly brief and surprisingly inaccurate. Darrow’s is one of the most enjoyable autobiographies I’ve ever read, though it is almost absurdly sketchy about the facts of his life (and his famous cases), with an emphasis on his philosophy.
Two later Darrow biographies—Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel (1980), Arthur and Lila Weinberg, and Darrow: A Biography (1979), Kevin Tierney—are both worthwhile. Rebel suffers from hero worship of its subject and is, again, brief and inaccurate where the Massie case is concerned (Arthur Weinberg also edited an excellent annotated collection of Darrow’s closing arguments, Attorney for the Damned, 1957, which provided a basis for Darrow’s summation here). The Tierney book is a more objective study, the closest thing to a “warts-and-all” treatment of Darrow, with a solid Massie chapter. Perhaps the frankest, most illuminating Darrow book to date is Geoffrey Cowan’s The People vs. Clarence Darrow (1993), which raises fascinating questions about the great attorney’s ethics and beliefs in focusing on his 1912 bribery/jury tampering trial.
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