“Was your father an attorney?”
“Hell no! He was an old union guy who ran a bookstore on the West Side. They traveled in the same radical circles. Darrow used to come in to buy books on politics and philosophy.”
She was looking at me as if for the first time. “So you’ve known Mr. Darrow since you were a kid?”
“Yeah. Worked in his office as a runner when I was going to college.”
“How much college do you have?”
“Started at the University of Chicago, had some problems, finished up a two-year degree at a junior college.”
“Were you going to be a lawyer?”
“That was never my dream.”
Her eyes smiled again. “What was your dream, Nate?”
“Who says I had a dream?”
“You have a lot of dreams. A lot of ambitions.”
“I don’t remember telling you about ’em.”
“I can just tell. What was your dream? What
I blurted it: “To be a detective.”
She smiled, cocked her head. “You made it.”
“Not really. Not really. You about ready to get out of here? Catch that swim up the roadway?”
“Sure.” She gathered her things and we headed for the parking lot, where she started in again.
“You’ve been looking into what happened to Thalo, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Have you found anything helpful to Mrs. Fortescue and Tommie, in your search?”
“No.”
I opened the rider’s-side door on the Durant, shut her in, and that was all the conversation for a while. We were soon tooling along the edge of the club links. Before long we were passing groves of coconut palms and papaya orchards, truck gardens, chicken ranches, a campground, a large modern dairy. Then we wound through more coconut groves along the foot of the hills, at our left a looming black crater, at our right a cliff—Koko Head— projecting out into the sea. A sign at a fork in the road promised us the Blowhole if we took the dirt road to the left; I braved it.
Isabel started back in, working her voice above the rumble of the engine, the bump of the tires on hard dirt, and the top-down wind. “Surely you don’t think Thalo is lying about what happened to her.”
“Something happened to her that night last September. Something violent. Like she said to Tommie on the phone—something awful. I’m just not sure what.”
“You think those terrible colored boys are innocent?”
“I think they’re not guilty. There’s a difference.”
“What do you mean?”
“They may have done it; they’re roughnecks and borderline disreputable characters. ‘Innocent’ is a moral term. ‘Not guilty’ is the legal term, and that’s what they are: there just isn’t enough evidence to convict them.”
“But that was why Tommie and Mrs. Fortescue had to try to get a confession!”
I didn’t feel like pressing the point. But in almost two weeks of trying, I’d certainly come up with nothing to give Darrow even the most dubious moral high ground for his clients to occupy. Having talked to every major witness in the Ala Moana case over the past two weeks, I had accumulated nothing but doubts about Thalia, her story, and her identification of Horace Ida, Joseph Kahahawai, and the rest.
Young, personable George Goeas, a cashier with Dillingham Insurance in Honolulu, had taken his wife to the dance at Waikiki Amusement Park that night. About ten minutes past midnight, he and the missus crossed the street to John Ena Road, and drove down to the
“She seemed to be under the influence of liquor,” Goeas told me. “About a yard and a half from her, we saw a white guy following directly in back of her. He kept trailing after her for maybe twenty-five yards…. The way she held her head down, and him working to catch up with her, I kinda thought maybe they’d had a lovers’ quarrel or something. Then they walked out of view, a store blocking the way.”
“What did the guy trailing her look like?”
“Like I said, white. Five feet nine, hundred and sixty-five pounds maybe, medium build. Trim appearance. Looked like a soldier to me.”
Or a sailor?
“What was he wearing?”
“White shirt. Dark trousers. Maybe blue, maybe brown, I’m not sure.”
Mrs. Goeas had a better eye for fashion detail. She gave a precise description of the dress Thalia had been wearing, right down to a small bow in back, and described her as, “Mumbling to herself, swaying as she walked, I would even say stumbling.”
I met with Alice Aramaki, a tiny, pleasant girl of perhaps twenty, in the barbershop on John Ena Road, opposite
