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
“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
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
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
