Damned in Paradise

Leisure frowned. “Seven months after the fact?”

“Then call it a state of detachment. It’s her way of dealing with tragedy, protecting herself; she’s erected a kind of wall. But she spoke the truth. I can always tell when a client’s lying to me.”

“Two things bother me,” I said.

Darrow’s brow furrowed. “What would those be?”

“She kept describing herself as ‘dazed,’ and painted a nightmarish picture…convincingly.”

Darrow was nodding sagely.

“But for a woman in a daze,” I said, “she noted a hell of a lot of details. She gave us everything but the laundry marks on their damn clothes.”

“Perhaps the awful event is frozen in her memory,” Darrow offered.

“Perhaps.”

Leisure asked, “What’s the other thing that bothered you, Nate?”

“It’s probably nothing. But she talked about her mother taking over the housekeeping for her…”

“Yes,” Leisure said.

“And that when she got back on her feet, the place was suddenly too small for them, and Thalia could handle the housekeeping herself again, so her mother moved out.”

Darrow was listening intently.

“Only in the meantime,” I continued, “housekeeper Thalia’s taken on a full-time maid.”

“If there’s room for the maid,” Leisure said, raising an eyebrow, “why not room for Mom?”

I shrugged. “I just think relations between Thalia and her mother may be a little strained. Isabel told me Thalia practically raised herself, that her mother was never around. I don’t think they were ever close.”

“Yet the mother faces a murder charge,” Darrow said, savoring the irony, “for defending her daughter’s honor.”

“Yeah, funny, isn’t it? Let’s say they don’t get along—can’t be under the same roof together—then why does Mother Fortescue go out on this limb for her little girl?”

“Maybe she was defending the family name,” Leisure suggested.

“Or maybe Mrs. Fortescue feels guilty about neglecting her kid,” I said, “and cooked up a hell of a way to finally make it up to the girl.”

“Mother and daughter needn’t love each other,” Darrow said patiently, as if instructing children, “for a mother’s instincts to take hold. Among many species, the mother forgets herself, in protecting the life of her offspring. It’s purely biological.”

At Pearl Harbor Junction, our limousine bore straight ahead, pulling up to the entrance to the naval station, an innocuous white-picket gate between fieldstone posts in a mesh-wire fence that couldn’t have kept out a troop of Campfire Girls. Our driver checked in with the Marine MP there, who checked us off on a clipboard, and gave us admittance into a surprisingly shabby facility.

Not that the Navy Yard didn’t have its impressive points. Like the immense battleship bed of the cement pit labeled DRYDOCK—14TH NAVAL DISTRICT; or the coaling station with wharf, railroad, and hoisting towers. Or Ford Island (as our driver identified it), with its seaplane station and battery of ungainly planes.

But the wooden shacks labeled, variously, GYRO SHOP, ELECTRICAL SHOP, MESS HALL, DIESEL SHOP looked more like a rundown summer camp than a military base. Sheet-iron shelters housing sailors’ automobiles had a cheap, temporary look; and the submarine base, with what should have been a grand array, was a couple dozen tiny subs at a wobbly wooden network of finger piers.

The fleet was definitely not in. No great warships loomed in the harbor. The only ship in sight was the Alton, perpetually stuck in the mud, aboard which our clients were in custody.

But our first stop was at the base headquarters, another unassuming white building, if better maintained. Our young Navy chauffeur was still our guide, and he led Darrow, Leisure, and me into a large waiting room. Venetian blinds on the many windows were letting in slashes of sunlight as men in white bustled in and out with paperwork; the chauffeur checked us in with the reception desk. We had barely sat down when an attache pushed open a door and summoned us with, “Mr. Darrow? The admiral will see you now.”

The office was spacious, its paneling light brown, masculine, touched here and there with an award or a plaque or a framed photograph; one wall, at our left as we entered, was taken up almost entirely by a map of the Pacific. Behind the admiral was a wall of windows with more blinds, but these were shut tight, letting no sun in at all; an American flag stood at ease, to the admiral’s right. His mahogany desk, appropriately enough, was as big as a boat, and it was shipshape: pens, papers, personal items, arranged as neatly as if prepared for inspection.

The admiral was shipshape, too—a narrow blade of a man in his late fifties, standing behind the desk with one fist on a hip. In his white uniform with its high collar, epaulets, brass buttons, and campaign ribbons, he looked as perfectly groomed as a waiter in a really high-class joint.

Pouches of skin slanting over grayish-blue eyes gave him a relaxed expression that I doubted; his weathered countenance was otherwise rather dour: prominent nose, long upper lip, lantern jaw. He was smiling. I doubted the smile, too.

“Mr. Darrow, I can’t tell you how pleased I am,” the admiral said in a mellow voice gently touched by the South, “that Mrs. Fortescue took my advice and acquired your good services.”

Second Navy man today who’d taken credit for that.

“Admiral Stirling,” Darrow said, shaking the hand his host extended, “I want to thank you for your hospitality and help. May I introduce my staff?”