Damned in Paradise

“I am, and we are both trapped in a bad, unfair system, stranded on this speck of mud, floating in an endless sky. Fifty and full expenses is as high as I’ll go.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “After all, you can’t help yourself—heredity and environment have conspired to turn you into a stingy, greedy old bastard.”

He tried to look hurt. “I picked up the check, didn’t I?”

And then he winked at me.

2

On the train, as our four-thousand-mile journey got under way, I did my best to sleep through the two and a half days from Chicago to San Francisco. My tour of duty on the Lindbergh case had left me wrung out like a rag, and some of the reporters tagging along after Darrow (they were aboard for the duration, steamship tickets and all) had got wind of what I’d been working on, which made me more popular with the press than I cared to be.

“This is like a damn campaign special,” I told Leisure in the club car of the Golden Gate, where I sneaked rum from a flask into both our empty coffee cups.

Leisure’s wife, Anne—an attractive brunette in her thirties—sat with Ruby Darrow, playing canasta at a table nearby. Ruby, auburn-haired, vivacious, was full-figured but not matronly, a young-looking fifty-some years of age.

“I know,” Leisure said, nodding his thanks for my contribution to his cup, “and at every whistle-stop there’s another horde of reporters waiting.”

I smiled a little. “But you notice C.D. hasn’t given them a thing on the Massie case.”

Omaha was a case in point. Changing trains there, out on the platform, the old boy had been swarmed by reporters hurling questions about the Massie affair; hot words and phrases—“rape,” “murder,” “lynch law,” “honor slaying”—peppered the air like buckshot.

Darrow had turned his piercing gray-eyed gaze loose on the crowd, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and said with a gash of a smile, “Imagine that—a notorious ‘wet’ like me, stranded temporarily in the heart of ‘dry’ country. Nobody to talk to but upstanding moral folk.”

Several of the newshounds took the bait, and goading questions about Darrow’s anti-Prohibition stance overlapped each other till he stilled them with a raised palm.

“Is there a man here who’s never taken a drink?”

The gaggle of reporters grinned at him and each other, but not a man would admit to it.

“Well, then, what’s your problem?” Darrow growled. “Don’t you want anybody else to have any damn fun?”

And he’d got on the train.

As I sipped my rum from the coffee cup, Leisure was frowning; this was our second day of rail travel and he seemed uneasy.

“Trouble is,” Leisure said, “Mr. Darrow hasn’t said anything to me about the Massie case, either. I get the feeling everything he knows about our clients, and their situation, he whispered to me back at the Music Box theater.”

“You probably hit that dead center.”

“I mean, he clearly has his wits about him—look at the way he finesses these reporters—but he is an old man, and…”

“You wish he were more concerned about preparation.”

“Frankly, Nate—yes.”

“George, get used to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“C.D. flies by the seat of his pants. You know him by his reputation. I’ve seen him in action, lots of times in debate situations, a few times in court.”

“He’s brilliant in court—I’ve read his summations…”

“His summations are brilliant—and mostly pitched right off the top of his head.”

“That’s ridiculous…how could anyone…”

“Search me. The words just come tumbling out of the old boy. But you might as well brace yourself: he won’t develop his defense strategy until he’s seen the prosecution in action. He waits for them to make mistakes, and goes from there.”

“That’s goddamn dangerous.”

“That’s goddamn Clarence Darrow.”

I had never seen San Francisco before, and once I’d arrived, I still hadn’t: the city’s legendary fog was in full sway that afternoon, as the train pulled into the Ferry Building station where the foot of Market Street met the Embarcadero.

Despite the fog, or perhaps aided by its mystery, the looming luxury liners docked at the pier were a breathtaking sight, even for a jaded Chicago boy. Against an aural backdrop of clanking massive chains, groaning pulleys, gruffly shouting stevedores, and a bellowing mournful foghorn came the towering apparitions of a steamship city. Emerging from the mist were the red-and-white regalia of a French liner, the billowing flags of an Italian ship, and most of all the pebbled white hull of the Malolo, only one of its twin funnels, bearing the Matson Line “M,” vaguely visible.

Nearly six hundred feet long, eighty-some feet wide, the Malolo was a hungry whale welcoming wealthy Mr. and Mrs. Jonahs up into its innards. Trooping up its gangway they came, the best-dressed damn tourists you ever saw, tuxes and top hats, gowns and furs, often followed by entourages of servants and companions. Mostly older than a kid like me, but a few of them were in my age range if not my social circle; some