The Edge of Honor (70 page)

Jackson grinned. “Like that gun-deck justice stuff, now, do we?”

” ‘We,’ Chief?”

Jackson laughed out loud and then shook his head.

“Yes, sir, I hear you. But then they would know we’re aware of them as a drug organization. We should probably not confirm that right now.”

“Yeah, that’s true. Okay. We’ll do what we can for Warren. But here’s another thing—Martinez told me he thinks there might be two kingpins, based on something Garlic said.”

“Yeah, he’s run that by me, too. The druggies don’t operate that way, though. There’s one guy—just one guy who runs the show.”

Brian stifled a yawn. “But suppose Garlic was lying.

Suppose there is just one guy but that it isn’t Bullet.

Suppose Bullet works for the one guy and everyone else works for Bullet.”

“Everything we’ve got so far points at Bullet. There’s nothing pointing to a second guy, Mr. Holcomb. I think we gotta concentrate on where the evidence is leading.”

Brian yawned. “Okay, Chief. I have to concentrate on saving my young ass from the XO’s are. You go catch Mr. Bullet Wilson.”

When Jackson returned to his office, he found Radarman First Class Rockheart sitting in one of the chairs, filling out a divisional inspection report.

“Yo, Chief.”

“Yeah, morning, Rocky. What’s happening.”

“Not shit, Chief. Just doing some MAA paperwork.

You look like you died and just woke up.”

Jackson shook his head wearily and sat down.

“I tell you, this drug shit has me coming and going.”

“Yeah, well, we got three—no, I guess it’s four in the past month. That has to be some progress.”

“Users, Rocky. Users. Not the guys I really want.”

“Any ideas on that score, Chief?”

Jackson eyed Rocky for a minute. He hadn’t brought any of his MAAs into the investigation up to this point— only Chief Martinez. But maybe it was time. And hell, this was Rockheart.

“Lock that door, RD One. Let me tell you about it.”

When he was finished, Rocky was staring at the deck.

“Bullet,” he said. “Hell, I know the guy, or thought I did. He seemed to be upstanding people among the first class. Shit.”

“Yeah, shit. My problem is, I don’t have one shred of real evidence on Bullet, much less on any second guy.”

“What would you consider real evidence, Sheriff?”

“Drugs or money, or, hopefully, both. Especially some of that marked money I put in circulation before Subic.

Oh, and a witness or three. And a signed confession would be nice—shit, you know.”

Rocky grunted but then was silent for a few moments.

The Sheriff was locked on Bullet. The trick was to keep him there.

Jackson sighed and turned to the paperwork on his desk, and Rocky finished his own report, which he turned over to the chief. He got up to leave.

“That’s all close-hold stuff, Rocky,” Jackson warned over his shoulder.

“Absolutely, Chief. But I’m glad you told me. Maybe I can come up with something—who knows? Another pair of eyes, right?”

“Evidence, RD One. What I need is evidence.”

San Diego Maddy awoke from a dreamless sleep to the sounds of someone ringing the front door bell. She lay on her stomach, trying to focus her mind, to understand what that noise was. The bedroom was fully dark. All of her muscles were stiff with fatigue. The bell rang again. She lifted her head and looked at her watch, struggling to see the radium dial.

Eight-thirty. Day or night? The windows were dark. Night. The bell rang again. She felt across the bed for Autrey, but he was gone. Gone. She sat up then, quickly enough to make her head spin for a few seconds.

She turned on the bedside light. Gone. No clothes. Just gone. Damn. She took a deep breath, then focused on the insistent bell.

“Just a minute,” she called through the bedroom doorway.

Her voice was weak. She cleared her throat and said it again, louder.

She swung out of bed and shoved her hair from her face. She went into the bathroom, got a nightgown and her bathrobe. Maddy looked at herself in the mirror. Hope to hell this isn’t one of the wives, she thought.

There wasn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t be able to recognize the symptoms of what kind of weekend this had been. She washed her face with a cold washcloth and then went through the apartment, turning on some lights and wishing she could just go back to the bathroom and ruminate for a while. She peered through the peephole.

Oh my God. Mrs. Huntington. She stepped back from the door, ran her hands through her hair once more, gave up, took another deep breath, and unlocked the door. The captain’s wife gave her a five-second long, studied look before speaking.

“Well, Maddy. I’m glad to find you’re all right. May I come in?”

Maddy wasn’t sure what to say. If Mrs. Huntington could see that she was all right, why did she have to come in? Don’t be an idiot, girl. This is the captain’s wife. She wants to come in so that she can give you a lecture about your evil ways. She stood aside.

“Yes, of course, although I’m not very presentable. I was asleep.”

Mrs. Huntington paused in the doorway. “Are you alone, Maddy?”

Ah, there we are. “Yes, Mrs. Huntington. I am.” She looked straight at the other woman. “Now.”

Mrs. Huntington smiled, and Maddy was slightly embarrassed to see that it was not a bitchy meow smile.

Mrs. Huntington walked past her and went over to the sofa, where she sat down, placing her purse and a jacket on the table. She was wearing slacks, a long-sleeved blouse, with a scarf at her neck, and penny loafers.

Maddy stood there in her bathrobe feeling as rumpled as she undoubtedly looked. Mrs. Huntington looked at her.

“Why don’t you go freshen up, dear. Freshen up and wake up a little.

Tell me, if I go out there in the kitchen, would I find some coffee makings? I could use a cup and so could you, I think. Yes? Good. Go right ahead. Take your time, get yourself together. I know that my visit is probably a little unsettling, but we do need to talk. I’ll find what I need out there, so go on now.”

Like a chastened teenager, Maddy left the room. When she returned twenty minutes later, she was showered, dressed in slacks and a sweater herself, and fully awake.

And a little worried. The captain’s wife walking into her little love nest. The only thing worse would have been if Autrey had answered the door.

Mrs. Huntington had two cups of coffee on the living room table, along with a small pitcher of milk and the sugar bowl. There were even napkins and spoons. Maddy gave a tentative smile and sat down, not really knowing how to proceed. Over Mrs. Huntington’s shoulder, she suddenly focused on Brian’s picture, and the room tilted.

She waited for Mrs. Huntington, who smiled and passed her a cup of coffee. She then looked around the room.

“This is a nice apartment, Maddy. And a lovely location, right across from Balboa Park.”

“Yes, we like it,” Maddy said. “It seems to be secure, and I can play tennis every day, too.” How inane, she thought.

This visit is sure as hell not about tennis.

Mrs. Huntington sipped some coffee and then put the cup down, sat back, crossed her legs, and smiled again.

Damn woman was full of smiles.

“Maddy,” she began, “I have sensed that our wardroom wives’ organization is more than a little foreign to your experience. I know you and Brian are new to Hood, and that you are relatively new to Navy married life.

And it’s not that I think you don’t like us; I suspect it’s more a matter of lifestyle. Most of our wives do not have jobs and have a houseful of kids to chase after. You have a full-time job and no children. Most of our wives have college degrees, but the objective for many of them was always the Mrs. degree. You have a professional business education from a first-rate school, and you’re on a career track with the Bank of America. As I said, I think it’s cultural—our worlds impinge on each other because of your husband’s career and his assignment to this ship, whereas otherwise, I don’t think you and I would ever cross paths.”

It was Maddy’s turn to sit back, cross her legs, and wait to see where this was going.

“Yes?” she said, with a coolness she did not feel.

“Over the past few weeks, you’ve regretted several invitations, some of them spur-of-the-moment, some of them more along the line of our regular wives’ functions.

I decided to see if we’ve managed to offend you, or if perhaps you were depressed and just holing up here.

Sometimes that happens, especially to women who are new to these awful deployments and who have less of a family focus than our girls with children do. I called several times this weekend, and when you didn’t answer, I decided to check it out.”

“I see. Well, there’s certainly been no offense, Mrs. Huntington.

Everyone’s been very nice and I’ve met some lovely people, but you’re right: I have a full day in the office, and I have to pursue a vigorous sport daily or my body blows up like a balloon. The deployment … well, the deployment is just there, I guess. I hate every minute of it, and most of the time I try just to stay busy enough so that I don’t get irretrievably down about it. In a way, being with the wives makes that harder. Maybe it’s because I look at them and see the future. But no, I’m not mad at anybody, and I’m no more depressed than I should be, I suppose.”

Mrs. Huntington studied her coffee cup for a minute.

Maddy waited, really curious now. Mrs. Huntington appeared to make up her mind about something.

“Maddy,” she said. “There is, of course, always another possibility why we’re not seeing much of you. And that is you’ve found a way to make up for the fact that your husband is gone for seven months. Taken up with another man, or men, for that matter. Now—” She put up her hand as if to stifle any comment from Maddy.

“Now, on one level, that’s none of my business, and none of our business, if you follow me. I know the times have changed a lot from when Warren and I were coming up in the Navy, and perhaps these sorts of arrangements are more—I almost hate to use the word, but more— common.”

Maddy almost laughed. This woman should hear herself.

Why doesn’t she just come right out and say it?

“And the more I think about it, a young woman with your face and figure, two salaries, and thus the money for expensive clothes and your own car, the more I think about it, the more I think this latter possibility is closer to the mark. Yes, I think it is.”

Mrs. Huntington looked around the apartment as if to corroborate her conclusion. Maddy wondered what the apartment would tell her. She sighed but held her tongue.

Mrs. Huntington was smiling again.

“You’ve got that ‘give her enough rope, she’ll soon hang herself’ look on your face, dear. Please, relax. I’m not here to brand a scarlet letter on your forehead.”

“Then why are you here, Mrs. Huntington?”

“I’m here, I guess, to give you some advice. Let me tell you a little story. I’ll give you my advice and then I promise I’ll leave and hope we can still be friends. The story goes like this: Warren was the executive officer in a destroyer back about eight years ago, which, of course, made me the XO’s wife. As I’m sure you’ve figured out, the captain’s wife and the XO’s wife have a fairly traditional division of labor when it comes to the wardroom wives. They share the mentoring duties, and they share being the hostess for when the wives get together, especially during deployment, and they share the duty for taking calls in the night when someone’s wife gets into a pickle. They sort of share the same coordinated partnership that the CO and the XO share on the ship, only, because we’re wives, there’s not the distinction of rank. Wives who wear their husband’s rank tend to be kind of ridiculous, anyway, so that’s not really important.”

Maddy sat back with her coffee and listened.

“One of the problems we wrestled with in that wardroom was the Supply officer’s wife. She was very pretty and very vivacious, and a dedicated party girl. The ship went off to WESTPAC and Shirley went off to town with her red dress on. She was not very discreet, and soon all the wardroom wives had their tongues aflutter. Then Shirley found out that we had all found out, and then we indulged in a mutual shunning exercise.

“Halfway through the cruise, the captain’s wife got a phone call in the middle of the night—with deployed ships, it’s always in the middle of the night—and was told that the ship had been in an ASW screen exercise and had managed to collide with another destroyer, and that there was very serious damage and nine people known dead or injured, but worse, twelve others were missing.

Now when you’ve been around the Navy for a while, you know that missing at sea is almost always the same as dead. Nature of the beast, I guess.

Well, she called me, and between us we called the rest of the wives.

Naturally, she being the CO’s wife, we gathered at her place. Except for Shirley, of course, because we weren’t speaking to Shirley, because she was being such a ‘shameless hussy.”

“The problem was, of course, that Shirley’s husband turned out to be one of the missing, the only officer, in fact, who was missing. We didn’t know that when we first made the calls. Around about morning, we were given the list of names by the base chaplain, and suddenly we knew somebody was going to have to start speaking to Shirley again. Well, the captain’s wife and I were elected, so to speak, and we went with the chaplain to Shirley’s house. We got there about eight in the morning, and, poor Shirley, she had a gentleman caller, as my mother used to say.

He actually came to the door. He was Navy, and when he saw two distraught wives and a chaplain, he knew instantly what we were there for. But Shirley did not; she had to be told.”

Mrs. Huntington paused, her face grim in the memory of that morning.

“And I will never forget the look on her face, beyond the shock, beyond the beginnings of grief, the look that echoed the unspoken question on her lips, which asked, And what was I doing when my husband went over the side in the night? I don’t think Shirley was ever the same again after that morning. Oh, of course we told her that her husband was missing, that nothing was confirmed yet, and that they were searching, but women who’ve lost a mate seem to become clairvoyant at times like that and they see right through those charades. She knew.