Punchbowl’s green hills set against a blue-sky backdrop, letting in streaming sun, traffic noises, and buzzing mosquitoes.
At each and every session, white women—well-to-do white women, at that—took the majority of the public seating; this was, after all, the social event of the season. Conspicuously absent from this group was Thalia and Isabel, but they were well represented in spirit. A collective moan of mournful sympathy would emerge from the gals of the gallery each morning as the defendants trouped down the aisle to their seats behind the lawyers’ table. At particularly dramatic (or melodramatic) testimony, they would (according to what seemed called for) shed tears together, they would sigh as one, they would gasp in unison. They managed to do this without ever once eliciting the wrath of Judge Davis, a bespectacled New Englander of medium size and enormous patience.
On the other hand, they frequently received glares and even an occasional rebuke from no-nonsense prosecutor John C. Kelley, a square-shouldered block of a man, ruddy-faced, bald but for a monkish fringe of reddish hair.
Kelley hadn’t seen forty, but if finding himself pitted against the elder statesman of defense lawyers intimidated him, he didn’t show it. Nor did he seem daunted by the presence, each day, of a Navy contingent headed up by Admiral Stirling Yates himself, no less imperial in civilian clothes.
Confident, almost cocky, crisp in tropical whites, Kelley fixed his piercing blue eyes on the all-male, mixed racial bag in the jury box: six whites (including a Dane and a German), a Portuguese, two Chinese, and three of Hawaiian ancestry.
“Gentlemen,” he said, his hint of brogue lending authority to his words, “these defendants are charged with the crime of murder in the second degree.”
Kelley’s only gesture toward the defense table was a wag of the head, but the jury’s twenty-four eyes went to the four defendants, whose backs were to the rail behind which were the tables of reporters. Lord and Jones were at left, with Tommie next, and next to him, Mrs. Fortescue. All four sat rigidly, never glancing around the courtroom, eyes straight ahead, Mrs. Fortescue’s bearing as expressionlessly military as that of her lieutenant son-in-law and their two sailor accomplices.
Kelley continued with the indictment: “The Grand Jury of the First Judicial Court of the Territory of Hawaii do present that Grace Fortescue, Thomas H. Massie, Edward J. Lord, and Albert O. Jones, in the city and county of Honolulu, on the eighth day of January, 1932, through force of arms—to wit, a pistol loaded with gunpowder and a bullet…”
Next to Mrs. Fortescue sat Darrow, snarl of hair askew, his fleshy yet angular frame draped over his wooden chair as casually as his haphazardly knotted tie. A watch chain looped across the vest of a dark suit that looked a size too large for a body that wore skin that looked a size too large itself. Leisure, every bit the well-dressed Wall Street attorney, was next to Darrow, and I was next to Leisure.
“…did unlawfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought and without authority and without justification or extenuation…”
Kelley turned and, with another wag of his skinned-coconut skull, indicated—at the rail near the end of the jury box—a dark, husky, impassive rumpled-faced fellow in white shirt and dark trousers and a slender, equally dark woman in a long white Mother Hubbard, weeping into a handkerchief: the parents of Joseph Kahahawai.
“…
The pugnacious prosecutor outlined his case in less than an hour, from Tommie renting the blue Buick to Mrs. Fortescue crafting the ersatz summons, from the abduction of Joe Kahahawai in front of this very building to the kidnappers’ ill-fated attempt to dispose of the body, which had led to a high-speed chase in which the cops had been forced to fire at them to stop.
He saved the best for last: the murder itself. He piled up vividly disturbing details—bloodstained clothing, blood-streaked floorboards, a gun stuffed behind sofa cushions, spare bullets, rope with a telltale purple thread labeling it naval property, a bathtub where bloody clothes were washed, a victim who was allowed to bleed to death.
“We will show you,” Kelley said, “that there was no struggle in the house that might allow these defendants to claim self-defense. Kahahawai was a strong athlete, capable of putting up a good fight, but there is no evidence of any such fight in that house.”
Through it all, Mrs. Fortescue stared numbly forward, while Tommie seemed to be chewing at something— gum, I thought at first; his lip, I later realized. The two sailors seemed almost bored; if the gravity of all this had hit them, it didn’t show.
Kelley leaned on the jury box rail. “When Joseph Kahahawai, reporting faithfully to his probation officer, stood in the shadow of the statue of King Kamehameha, under the outstretched arm of the great Hawaiian who brought law and order to this island, the finger of doom pointed at this youthful descendant of Kamehameha’s people.”
Suddenly Kelley wheeled toward Mrs. Fortescue, who seemed mildly startled, straightening.
“That finger was pointed by Grace Fortescue,” Kelley said, and he pointed his forefinger at her as if he were on a firing squad aiming a rifle. “In today’s vernacular, she was the finger man who put Kahahawai ‘on the spot’!”
When Kelley sat down, Darrow did not rise. He remained slumped in his chair, merely uttering, “The defense will reserve its opening statement, Your Honor.”
In three methodical but fast-moving days, the scrappy Kelley built his case, brick by brick: Kahahawai’s cousin Edward Ulii, as light as Joe had been powerful, told of the abduction; Dickson, the probation officer, told of telling Mrs. Fortescue about Kahahawai’s obligation to report to him each day; Detective George Harbottle, a young, ruggedly handsome specimen who looked like Hollywood’s notion of a cop, told of the car chase and capture, and the corpse wrapped in the bloody white sheet in the backseat.
“Detective,” Kelley said, “would you mind stepping from the witness stand and identifying the parties you arrested?”
The brawny dick stepped down and touched Jones, then Lord, then Tommie on the shoulder; but when he approached Mrs. Fortescue, she rose regally and stared directly at him, chin lifted.
Harbottle didn’t touch her; he just backed away, pointing with a thumb, muttering, “This lady was driving.”
As Mrs. Fortescue took her seat, Harbottle settled himself back on the stand, and Kelley asked, “Did Lt. Massie appear to be in shock, Detective?”
Darrow, doodling on a pad, seemingly paying scant attention, said, “Calls for a conclusion, Your Honor.”
