Damned in Paradise

“Only it was no laughing matter,” I said, “after she went to the cops, and reported it as an assault.”

Ida’s expression was confused, frustrated. “She hit Joe.”

“And Joe hit her.” I decided to risk the following: “I hear he punched her in the face—like Thalia Massie got punched in the face.”

Behind me, Henry Chang snarled, “Haole pi’ lau!”

Which I didn’t imagine was a term of endearment.

Ida looked at me, eyes steady. “He just push her, on side of head. If Joe punch her in face, are you kidding? He woulda break her damn jaw!”

I said nothing. I didn’t have to: Ida suddenly realized what he’d said, swallowed thickly, and put the Phaeton in gear and, with care, pulled back out onto King, heading back toward town. Before long he took a left on Nuuanu Street.

Ida didn’t say anything for a while; maybe he was wondering how different his life—and Joe Kahahawai’s— might have been if that little fender-bender with Agnes and Homer Peeples (that was the couple’s name) hadn’t seen epithets escalate into rough stuff.

Finally I asked, “Why did you lie, Shorty?”

He gave me a quick, startled glance. “What?”

“You lied to the cops, when they came around and rousted you out of bed, in the early morning hours after the rape.”

He was stopping, just beyond a lush park, where Nuuanu Street forked, a road off to the right labeled Pacific Heights.

“I didn’t know any haole woman got attack,” Ida said. “All I know was Joe hit that fat wahine bitch, and I didn’t wanna get mixed up in it.”

“So you told the cops you didn’t go out that night. And that you loaned the car to some Hawaiian pal of yours —a pal you knew by sight but not by name?”

Ida nodded glumly; his smirk had no humor in it. “Not very good lie, huh?”

“One of the worst I ever heard,” I said cheerfully.

“I told truth later same night….”

“Sure, after they grilled you—but you got off to a bad start with that whopper.” When the first thing out of a suspect’s mouth is a lie, a cop never believes another word.

“That cop McIntosh, he drag me into his office where Mrs. Massie sit, face banged up, and say to me in front of her, ‘Now look at your beautiful work!’ Then he ask her if I am attacker!”

Christ, talk about prompting—why didn’t Mcintosh just stencil the word rapist on the poor bastard’s shirt? What happened to the standard practice of placing a suspect like Ida in a lineup?

“But she didn’t identify me,” Ida said. “Next afternoon, Sunday, coppers take Mack, Eau, Big Joe, and me to Massie house in Manoa Valley.”

“Why in hell?” I asked.

“So she could identify us.”

Not a lineup downtown where the real suspects were intermingled with bogus ones, under the watchful eye of the DA’s office—but home delivery of the coppers’ prime suspects!

“Sunday, cops ain’t picked Benny up yet,” Ida was saying. “So Benny, he wasn’t there. Funny thing, Mrs. Massie said to Big Joe—‘Don’t they call you Ben?’ But she say she recognize Eau and Joe. She don’t pick me out. Don’t even know me from the night before at police headquarters.”

For several miles now, we’d been gliding along the valley road with fabulous estates on either side, their lavish gardens lorded over by royal palms. It was as if we were passing through an immense open-air nursery.

“They take Mrs. Massie back to hospital,” Ida said, “later that same afternoon. And Benny, cops pick him up at the football field, where he practice, and take him to hospital and ask Mrs. Massie if he is one of attackers.”

From the backseat, Ahakuelo’s voice reeked frustration. “She said didn’t know me!”

Even with the cops tying these boys in red ribbons and depositing them in her lap, Thalia Massie had failed to identify them during that crucial forty-eight-hour period after the crime. Only later did she come to know them down to their shoe size.

“We innocent men,” Ida said proudly, as the Phaeton seemed to float past a cemetery.

“Maybe you did get railroaded on this one,” I said. “But don’t kid a kidder: your pal Joe was convicted on a robbery charge…” I looked over my shoulder and directed my next comment to Ahakuelo, who seemed to have warmed to me some; Henry Chang was still glowering. “And Benny, you and Eau here did time on a rape charge.”

“Attempted rape!” Chang spat.

“Sorry. That makes all the difference….”

“We got parole,” Ahakuelo said, “and the charge got dropped down to ‘fornication with a minor.’ I was eighteen, Eau just a kid, too—we was at a party and there was lots of oke, lots of fucking.”

“Some of the girls was under sixteen,” Ida further explained.

So the prior rape charges against Ahakuelo and Chang, which had produced such indignation on Admiral Stirling’s part, were statutory rape busts?