Damned in Paradise

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