Honolulu (39 page)

“Is that what they think Joe did to somebody?” she asked.

“Yes. But I do not believe Joe Kahahawai did this thing.”

“Neither do I,” Grace said.

There was silence for a moment, then Harold spoke up. “Mama? Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Harry.”

In the same sober tone Harry asked, “Do we have to eat stinky old garlic at every meal?”

Grace looked like she wanted to drop a plate on his head, but I just laughed.

“Well …” I said thoughtfully, “I believe I know what your father’s answer to that will be. But I might be able to convince him to make his kimchi with less garlic, and to serve it only at lunch and supper, not breakfast. What do you say to that?”

“It’s a deal,” Harold said quickly.

I went downstairs and informed Jae-sun that henceforth we would be making our kimchi with half the usual amount of garlic.

“What! We’ll barely be able to taste it!” he objected. “I’ll do no such thing!”

“And we will not be serving it at breakfast, at least not to them.”

“But a meal without kimchi is not a meal!”

“Would you rather the other children call them names?”

Jae-sun frowned. “No, but …”

“They are not Korean, yobo,” I said gently, “they are Korean-American. They can be Korean at supper; let them be American at breakfast.”

He sighed and muttered darkly to himself, his usual signal of acquiescence.

Even when I tried to banish the “Ala Moana case” from my thoughts, I found I had to confront it-as on Thursday, when I went to work at Mrs. Quigley’s. She and her daughter were as overwrought over the case as most haoles, and it distressed me to hear them refer to Joe and the others, whom they did not even know, as “gangsters,” “hoodlums,” and “degenerates,” parroting words they had read in the newspapers.

I put on my best Korean mask of dispassion and focused on my sewing. But toward the end of the day Mrs. Quigley came up to me and suggested, “Jin, dear, why don’t you go home a little early? I’ll pay you for the entire day, of course, but it worries me to think of you out after dark-now that we know how dangerous these streets really are.”

“I have never encountered any trouble,” I replied mildly.

“Well, let’s keep it that way. Humor an old worrywart, would you?”

It was hard to be annoyed at someone who seemed so genuinely concerned for my welfare. I thanked her and left, but later, as I walked home from the streetcar stop, I had to ask myself: If Joe and his friends didn’t do this thing, who did? And were the beasts who did it still out there? For the first time I understood how much better it must be for people like Mrs. Quigley to believe that the men responsible had been apprehended and were not still at large, threatening their daughters’ safety. Had it been anyone but Joe who was charged with this crime, I might well have wanted to believe it myself.

The next day I received a visit from Esther, who had just come from a bail hearing at which a bond of thirty-five hundred dollars-an impossible sumhad been set for each defendant. Even though a bail bondsman required only a ten percent deposit, three hundred and fifty dollars was no small amount either, and at first only Horace Ida’s family was able to come up with enough cash to secure his release. Eventually the bail was reduced to two thousand-but even two hundred dollars proved difficult for Esther to raise. She asked for help from her friends-not an easy thing for such a proud woman to do-and in addition to giving as much as our household could afford, I approached my own friends, as well as sympathetic customers of the tailor shop. Jade Moon donated five dollars, more than anyone else I knew. Wise Pearl’s farm was barely eking out a living for her family, but she still managed to scrape up a dollar for the bail fund, as did Beauty and Shizu. Many of my customers could only contribute fifty, sixty, or seventy cents to the cause … but they did so out of a growing conviction on the part of many in Palama that this case was looking, as one man put it, “like a goddamned haole frame-up.”

In the seventeen years I had lived in Hawai’i, I had heard neighborhood boys occasionally taunt white boys with cries of “Pilau haole!”-“You stink, white boy!” But I had never seen this long-simmering resentment of haoles laid quite so bare, like a raw nerve suddenly exposed by a knife cut.

It took nearly a month for Esther to raise bail and Joe was the last of the five to be released. That night a quiet celebration was held at the Anitos’ home, which our family attended. When Joe saw me, he immediately came over and hugged me, and the first words out of his mouth were, “I didn’t do it, Aunt Jin.”

“I believe you, Joe.”

“I don’t know why this lady says I did-why we did. We never went down Ala Moana that night.” He shook his head. “After Shorty and Mack and the others got released, Captain McIntosh tells me, `They’re gonna leave you here to rot, Joe. What do you owe them? Tell me what really happened and things’ll go easier for you.’ I looked at him and said, `We didn’t do it. I had a roughhouse with that Hawaiian lady, but we didn’t do anything to any haole woman.”’

“McIntosh is a horse’s ass,” someone said behind me. I turned and Joe introduced me to Eddie Ross, a one-time Honolulu police officer, whose sympathies were clearly not with the department. “Joe, if you hadn’t cuffed Agnes Peeples, McIntosh would’ve had to find some other poor saps to railroad,” he told us. “Minute he heard about you boys, he decided, `That’s it, we got our men,’ and to hell with anything that suggested otherwise. Just like the Fukunaga case. If those marked bills hadn’t turned up, McIntosh would’ve had poor Henry Kaisan swinging from a gallows, and if the facts didn’t fit, he’d have made ‘em fit. The Navy wants someone caught, tried, and convicted-pretty much anybody’ll do. You boys just came along and happened to fit the bill.”

I nodded. “‘Carve the peg by looking at the hole.’ ” Eddie looked at me blankly and I explained, “An old Korean saying. It means, Do things to fit the circumstances.”

Joe looked more sad than angry. “You know the worst part, Aunt Jin?”

“What, Joe?”

“They kicked me out of the National Guard,” he said softly. “I was prouder of being a guardsman than anything else in my life.”

The hurt in his eyes was the hurt of the young boy I had met on the beach at Iwilei, taunted by his friends for being a kua’aina.

The first day of the trial saw Honolulu oppressed by a spell of hot, windless Kona weather. Argument over the case in Honolulu was just as heated, with most haoles believing the prosecution’s case, and most nonwhites, the defendants’. Hundreds of otherwise sane people stood in line for long, sweltering hours at the Territorial Courts Building for the chance to watch the first day of testimony in the First Circuit Court of Hawai’i. I admit, I was one of them.

Esther, Pascual, and Joseph Sr. were shown to seats up front, and I was lucky to get a seat in the back of the courtroom along with a handful of other “locals.” The largest portion of spectator seats was occupied by what appeared to be every starched, blue-nosed society lady in the city of Honolulu: the front of the courtroom was a field of wide-brimmed white hats bobbing like lilies on the water. Dressed in their Sunday finest, these women exuded a gaiety and excitement that seemed quite out of place in such grim circumstances.

I was startled and dismayed to see that one of them, sitting in the third row, was Mrs. Quigley.

The atmosphere in the courtroom was suffocating. Some women had the foresight to bring fans, while men fanned themselves with their hats, as District Attorney Griffith Wight made his opening statement. I was quickly infuriated by his characterization of Joe and the other defendants as little more than hoodlums.

Then Wight called his first witness: Thalia Massie, the victim of the alleged assault. She entered the courtroom supported by one of the prosecution attorneys and by a tall, slender, steely-eyed woman in her forties-her mother, Mrs. Grace Fortescue. This was my first glimpse of the woman around whom so much accusation and gossip had swirled these past two months. She was of average height, in her late twenties, with an oval face, dimpled chin, and a short bob of light brown hair. She was sedately dressed in a dark suit with a white collar.

After a few introductory questions, District Attorney Wight asked, “Mrs. Massie, where were you shortly after eleven-thirty P.m. the evening of September twelfth?”

“I was at the dance at the Ala Wai inn,” she replied in something of a monotone, “and I left shortly after eleven-thirty.”

She went on to tell of how she had walked down Kalakaua Avenue and turned on John Ena Road-at which point an automobile drove up beside her and two men jumped out of it. One of them punched her in the jaw; the other dragged her into the backseat of the automobile.

“Would you be able to identify these two men?” Wight asked.

She pointed without hesitation to Joe and Henry.

“I tried to talk with them, but every time I did Kahahawai hit me. I offered them money if they would let me go.” In a soft but steady voice she told how she was taken someplace off Ala Moana Boulevard, to a clearing between trees where she was dragged out of the car by Chang and Kahahawai. Chang then proceeded to violate her, though “I struggled as hard as I could.”

“After that, Kahahawai assaulted me,” she continued, her voice trembling slightly. “He knocked me in the jaw. I started to pray and that made him angry and he hit me very hard. I cried out, `You’ve knocked my teeth out,’ and he told me to shut up. I asked him please not to hit me anymore.”

As riveting as her story was, I knew for certain now that Mrs. Massie was either lying or terribly, horribly mistaken. Joe, like his parents, was a devout Catholic-he would no sooner hit a woman for praying than he would rape her.

She went on to describe her further violations-“from four to six times”-by Chang, Kahahawai, Ahakuelo, and Horace Ida. Eventually, she said, one of her attackers “helped me to sit up. He pointed to something and said, `The road’s over there,’ then they all ran off and got away, and I turned around and saw the car”-the license-plate number of which she claimed to partially memorize.

She then stumbled up to Ala Moana Boulevard, where she flagged down a passing car and begged them to take her home.

The courtroom was silent as she related all this; everyone in it appeared transfixed by her tragic and seemingly heartfelt story. As the prosecutor finished his questioning, I sat wondering: Had Mrs. Massie been assaulted by an illicit lover, as was rumored? Perhaps by Lieutenant Massie himself, when he learned of the affair? Or had she truly been attacked by a gang of local youths, and somehow convinced herself that these five boys were they?

After a lunch recess, Mrs. Massie returned to the stand for crossexamination by defense attorney Bill Heen, as impressive a lawyer as he had been a judge. He showed tact and respect as he began questioning Mrs. Massie, then cut to the heart of the matter: “Do you remember saying to the police officers on this night when you returned to your home that you thought these boys who assaulted you were Hawaiian?”

“I remember telling the people who brought me home that,” she replied evenly. “I don’t remember what I said to the police.”

“Do you remember making a statement to the effect that you were unable to identify any of these boys because it was too dark?”

“No, I don’t remember making any such statement.”

“Do you remember stating, upon being questioned, that you couldn’t identify the car-that you weren’t sure what kind of car it was?”

“I didn’t think about the car. Mr. McIntosh asked about it.”

“Do you recall being asked whether you knew the number of the car and you said no?”

“Nobody asked me until Mr. McIntosh did. I didn’t think of the number until Mr. McIntosh asked me,” she finished lamely.

By the end of the day it was apparent that there was much that Mrs. Massie did not remember, and yet much that she remembered in conveniently full detail.

I tried to return for the next day’s session, but thanks to the kama’aina ladies and Navy wives who had come to show their support for Mrs. Massie, there was not a seat to be had and I was turned away at the door. Many of these women had servants stand in queue for them in the miserable heat; then minutes before the courtroom doors opened at eight-thirty, the society ladies stepped into line, fresh as the morning dew, and took all the best seats. It was frustrating, but from this point on I was not able to witness another day of the trial. All I could do was read about the events in the papers-though their accounts were notably pro-prosecution-and occasionally visit Esther for a more accurate account of the day’s testimony.

I also did my best to raise her spirits. She was afraid for Joe, of courseafraid that the jury would be carried away by the kind of mass hysteria that had sent Myles Fukunaga to the gallows. But she was also mortified to walk into that courtroom every day, feeling so many eyes upon her, seeing the spectators ogling her son with fear and repulsion. She had raised this boy to the best of her ability, under difficult circumstances, instilling in him a love of God while trying to shield him from the corrupting influence of a city she now wished she had never come to. And now to think that all these people believed she had raised a brutal rapist, a monster … She cried nearly every day of the trial, and all I could do was to assure her that those of us who knew Joe knew the truth, and soon everyone else would.

Indeed, it sounded as if Bill Heen and his co-counsels were doing an excellent job of undercutting, if not obliterating, the prosecution’s case. They called on a series of police officers who testified as how Chief McIntosh had not only failed to have the crime scene sealed off, a car he was riding in actually erased what were supposed to be the assailants’ incriminating tire tracks. One officer testified that he had seen McIntosh coach Mrs. Massie into identifying Benny. And most damning, it came out that the license number of Horace Ida’s car had been broadcast over police radio, and that Mrs. Massie had in all likelihood overheard it while at the emergency hospital-after which she suddenly, miraculously, “remembered” it.