Damned in Paradise

“Sure. Look out at the ocean. That’s forever, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Forever enough.”

We made love in my cabin morning, noon, and night. I can picture her right now, the smooth contours of her flesh, the supple curves of her body, the small firm breasts, eyes closed, mouth open, lost in ecstasy, washed ivory in moonlight, from a porthole, on a beach.

But I never kidded myself. It was, quite literally, a shipboard romance, and I was telling her what she wanted to hear. Back home, I wasn’t good enough for her. But on this steamer, I was the suave detective on his way home from a distant tropical isle, where I’d been engaged successfully to solve a dastardly crime perpetrated against a lovely innocent white woman by evil dark men.

And a guy like that deserves to get laid.

On February 13, 1933, Prosecutor John Kelley appeared in Judge Davis’s court and moved for no prosecution in the case of the Territory vs. Horace Ida, Ben Ahakuelo, Henry Chang, and David Takai. The judge passed the motion. Sufficient time had passed for the public, both in Hawaii and on the mainland, to greet the shelving of the case with indifference.

This was as close to vindication as the Ala Moana boys ever got, but they did receive the blessing of fading into the obscurity of Island life. Ida became a storekeeper; Ben Ahakuelo a member of a rural fire department on the windward side of Oahu; the others, I understand, drifted into various routine pursuits.

Of course, exoneration of a sort came to them, by way of Thalia Massie, who did enter the limelight from time to time, now and then—most prominently when, two years to the day of Joseph Kahahawai’s murder, she traveled to Reno to divorce Tommie. The evening her divorce became final, Thalia swallowed poison in a nightclub.

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