The Price of Doing Business by James C. Clar

The Price of Doing Business by James C. Clar

Honolulu, 1942

That morning it was hot enough to fry a haole in a cheap Panama hat. The ceiling fan in my office over a pawn shop on Hotel Street was spinning like a drunken sailor on R&R. Damn thing wasn’t making much progress but it sure was making a lot of noise. The air on the island still tasted like fire after Pearl Harbor. The smoke and ash clung to the palms like ghosts that refused to move on to the next world. I had my feet up on my desk and was trying to look thoughtful. That’s when she walked in.

White hair, late-sixties in a beige, tailored linen suit. She wore a green jade necklace, and she had steel in her eyes.

“You are, I take it, Eddie O’Brien.” she stated. Her expression suggested she was spitting out something that tasted foul.

“Well, now, that depends on whose asking.”

“You must test quite highly for insolence, young man.”

“So I’ve been told.” I put my feet down and went around my desk and pulled out a chair.

She looked the chair over before sitting down, like it was something that might bite.

She settled in across from me.

“My name is Margaret Dalton. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

Indeed, I had. The Daltons were an old sugar family with old sugar money. She was the baron’s widow turned society matriarch.

“I want you to look into someone,” she said as she drew a photograph from her clutch and slid it across the desk.

The kid in the picture was early to mid-twenties. Clean shaven and with a jaw you could split coconuts with … that’s if you wanted to split coconuts, of course. He also had the kind of prep-school sneer only money could buy. He’d be the type who never heard the word no until you beat him over the head with it.

“What’s he supposed to have done?” I asked as I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from her toward the slatted window blinds. The sun was slicing the room into zebra stripes.

“His name is Richard Ames and he assaulted my granddaughter, Louise. She told me everything. She wanted him to stop and he wouldn’t. I reached out to my contacts in the Navy and the territorial government. They told me that Ames was “protected” and that there was nothing they could do. They spoke to him, or so they say, and that was the end of it so far as they were concerned.”

I put my cigarette out in the ashtray and lit another. It was shaping up to be that kind of a morning.

“And you want me to do … what?”

Margaret Dalton gave me a look that made the temperature in the room drop twenty degrees. Imagine a meat locker. She placed an envelope on my desk that was thick enough to use as doorstop in a hurricane. I didn’t need to ask what was inside. I let it sit there.

“I want him ruined. Quietly,” Dalton stated matter-of-factly.

“Louise is pregnant and I emphatically don’t want that young man anywhere around my granddaughter ever again.”

I gave the photo another gander. Ames looked smug. For guys like him, war was just a game, an adventure, or a hustle.

I put the envelope and the picture in my desk drawer and locked it.

“I’ll dig around, Mrs. Dalton. See what’s what. But I’m not making any promises. If things don’t go the way you like, you can have your money back – minus expenses, of course. But I should warn you, once you start down this road, there’s often no turning back.”

Margaret Dalton stood. She reached down and drew an elegant, manicured finger across the top of my desk leaving a streak in the dust. She stared for a moment at what she had harvested.

“Young man,” she said as she turned to leave, “things always go my way. As for the ‘road’ you mention, my family drew the map before you were born.”

Ames was attached to a “liaison detail” working out of FRUPAC, Fleet Radio Unit Pacific in a place called the dungeon out near Pearl Harbor. Intelligence work, had to be. That would account for his being untouchable. That’s all I could get, for a start.

I spread some of Mrs. Dalton’s sugar money around. God knows she had enough to spare. Dinner with a Navy nurse I knew. No reason not to mix business with pleasure. Drinks with a motor pool sergeant. They both knew ‘Dickie Ames and didn’t like him much. According to them, the kid didn’t seem to have any real duties. Spent most of his time breezing through town with a different girl almost every night and a smirk that made you think he knew lots of things you didn’t. The more I learned about Richard Ames, the less I liked him too.

It took me a couple of days and enough bourbon to float a battleship, but I had an idea. If the Navy was reluctant to touch Ames, I’d have to fix it so they had no choice. It would take some doing, but it could be done.

I broke into Ames’ place one night when he was out on the town with one of his dates. He lived in civilian quarters in Makalapa. I banked on his arrogance. That he’d figure it OK to bring a few things home with him. Things that maybe shouldn’t be out of the office. He didn’t disappoint. I grabbed an assortment that looked promising, snapped pictures of a few others. Now all I had to do was make it look like he was shopping it to the Japs.

I knew a guy named Hani, a local. Black market. Nothing got bought or sold on the island that he didn’t know about – gas, guns, nylons, drugs, intel. If anything shady needed to be done, he was your guy … for the right price. Discretion guaranteed. He had a reputation to maintain, after all. Hani was sharp and, despite the fact that he had lost a hand in a personal “dispute” a decade or so ago, he was still as dangerous as a broken bottle in a bar fight.

We met at Smitty’s down the block from my office the next afternoon. I handed over the photograph from Mrs. Dalton along with what I had gleaned from Ames’ place. Over a couple of beers, told Hani what I needed.

“Listen,” I said. “I want the kid discredited. I want him to have a bad smell. I want him pushing papers someplace lonely and remote. I don’t want him sent to Leavenworth or hanged.”

Hani gave me a look that said, “I get it … but no promises.” No promises. I should have that stenciled to the frosted glass of my office door, right below my name!

I spent the next few days sitting in my office, watching the ceiling fan and practicing my foot-dangling. I checked in with Mrs. Dalton, told her I was making progress. She wanted to know what kind of progress. I told it was the kind she was better off not knowing about. She didn’t like that much. I have such a way with people sometimes.

I met Hani again. This time we took a turn around Ala Moana Park. He gave me a folder. I liked what I saw. I pointed to a picture of Richard Ames with a pretty young Japanese-American woman at a tiki bar somewhere in Waikiki.

“Who’s the girl?”

“Her name is Alice Harada,” Hani replied.

“She’s on a watch list. Naval Intelligence has been tracking her for months. They haven’t been able to get anything concrete on her. This time, they just might. But you need to act fast.” Hani winked.

“How did you get her together with little ‘Dickie?”

“Don’t ask me questions like that, O’Brien,” Hani said with just enough menace that I got the point.

“Far as I know,” he said with another wink, “they’ve never actually met.”

I took the whole kit and caboodle to a contact I had with the Navy, Lt. David Sykes. He didn’t like me much but our paths had crossed a few times when our cases sort of ‘intersected’.

“Ames is dirty,” I said.

“Sure looks that way, don’t it” Sykes muttered as he flipped through the folder.

“We’ll bring him in.”

And that should have been that. But, of course, it wasn’t.

Next morning, two men in a big, unmarked black car the size of an aircraft carrier took me for a little ride. Neither man was in uniform but, then, they wouldn’t have been now would they?

They took me out to Pearl. To a room the size of a baseball field. No windows. I sat down at a scarred oak table. I lit a cigarette and waited. The fluorescent lights hummed like a nest of hornets. Nice place for a little chat.

After what seemed like a year-and-a-half, Sykes walked in. He didn’t sit. He slid the folder I had given him yesterday across the table.

“So tell me, O’Brien,” Sykes began. “How did you get all this? And put that thing out, would you.” He pointed to my cigarette.

There wasn’t an ash tray so I ground the butt on the table. From the looks of it, lots of other people had done the same thing.

“Good old-fashioned legwork, David.”

Sykes leaned forward, both hands on the table in front of him. I was expecting a frown, or a sneer … but he smiled.

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” I asked with as much false nonchalance and bravado as I could muster.

“Richard Ames is ONI. Deep cover. We’ve had him in place for over a year.”

“That’s not possible. He’s just a prep-school kid with an attitude and a taste for the fast life.”

Sykes went to the door and opened it. One of my chauffeurs handed him another folder. Sykes closed the door again. He tossed the second file on the table.

“Have a look.”

It was Ames’ file, the real one. Half of it was blacked out. The half that wasn’t read like a spy novel: dead drops in Chinatown, coded transmissions and intercepts, asset flips. You name it. I closed it and looked up.

“So, the kid really is a spy?”

“He is now,” Sykes chuckled, “thanks to you. Eddie, my old friend, never kid a kidder. That file you gave me yesterday is all bullshit and you know it. Still, it’s just what the doctor ordered.”

It took me a few seconds but then the light came on. I understood.

“You can’t be serious,” I croaked. “Ames is a double agent?”

Sykes moved back and leaned against the opposite wall. He was smiling again. He looked like a house cat that had finally cornered a canary.

“Sometimes you’re smarter than you look, O’Brien. We’ve had suspicions about Ames for a while. Could never get anything on him. Now you’ve concocted something we can use.”

“But, like you said,” I stammered, “it’s all a lie. It’ll never hold up in court or in a military tribunal.”

“Who said anything about a tribunal? It’s enough to justify what needs to be done. That’s all that matters, right? There’s a war on, remember? You’ve done your country a great service, O’Brien. A grateful nation salutes you.”

This time, Sykes laughed out loud. He turned and walked out of the room.

I got a nice quiet ride back to my office. The two guys in the car with me never said a word.

Once inside, I poured myself a drink and lit a cigarette. I turned the fan on and threw open a window. From the harbor a few blocks south of me, I could hear the steam whistle of a liner maneuvering its way into port.

I called Mrs. Margaret Dalton.

“Well?” She asked. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

“It’s done,” I said.

“You’re sure that Richard Ames will not be bothering Louise again?”

“You can take that to the bank,” I said.

“Young man, has anyone ever talked to you about your tone?”

“More times than you can imagine, ma’am.”

Mrs. Margaret Dalton exhaled as though the entire island exhaled with her. She hung up. I never heard from her again. Unless you count the check that arrived in the mail a few days later. It had several zeros before the decimal point. I tore it up into little pieces and flushed it down the toilet.

Later that same day, there was an interesting item in the Star-Bulletin. A US Navy liaison officer by the name of Richard Ames was found dead in a cane field outside Wahiawa. A bullet wound to the head. Officially, it was being ruled a suicide. Unofficially, you could call it tidying up, plugging a leak. I wondered what Margaret Dalton would call it?

I drove into Waikiki. Sat under the banyan tree at the Moana and had a few drinks, smoked a few cigarettes. The ocean glittered like pieces of broken blue glass. Service men and their women sunbathed on the beach between sawhorses, sandbags and barbed wire. A sailor and a pretty girl in a yellow dress walked by holding hands. No one seemed too worried about the war.

Why should they? Not while Eddie O’Brien was on the job, no siree! I built a lie and walked headfirst into the truth, more or less. I doused a kid who was already on fire with kerosene. Did Richard Ames get what was coming to him? Probably. Did that make me feel any better about it?

Still, in my line of work, that was the price of doing business. With the war on – and human nature being what it was – I figured business would be booming.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright James C. Clar 2025