Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Is it a necklace? What adorable beads," she said, popping the lid of the box. "Are they jade? I love them! I want to put them on right now."

Her words, each of them, seemed directed at Rose, who watched mournfully as Amo fumbled with the clasp while Chip simply stared.

"I want beads, Mummy," Rose said, watching the necklace being fastened on Madam Ma. "Daddy will get them for me."

She began to cry, and as she was led out, kicking the floor, Madam Ma screeched, "How did you know it was exactly what I wanted?" and clutched her neck.

"Look, darling," Madam Ma called out to Rose.

"I'd rather sit in the dark alone than look at a butt-head like you," Rose said.

After all that, it seemed strange the next day that Chip should take me aside and say, "Mother wants to go grocery shopping. Will you give her a ride? I don't trust her with that creep Amo."

Wasn't Amo supposed to be his friend? Anyway, I took Madam Ma to Holiday Mart. "You push," she said, shoving a shopping cart in my direction. Chip had said "grocery shopping," but Madam Ma kept slipping other items into the cart — chocolates, sherry, macadamia nuts, cognac — saying, "I'm a bad girl. I am very naughty."

Perhaps Rose was no different, with her chair, her table, her storybook, her special soup spoon, her binkie, her demands. "Daddy! Mummy! Wake up! I'm hungry. My bear is hungry. I have a cold shoulder.

I want someone to watch television with me!"

"There's no ice in this drink!"

Who was that? It might have been Rose, but it was Madam Ma, demanding her special glass and her own table — the one with the view of people entering the lanai. She refused to read a newspaper that had been handled by anyone else. "Get me a fresh one!" With a little-girl pursing of lips, she complained about Chip — poor Chip, who, it seemed, could do nothing right.

But after Chip murdered his lover, Madam Ma stopped complaining about my daughter's indiscretions.

At first I found it sad that visitors to Hawaii snapped pictures with cheap cameras of each other smiling, or of things I saw every day: the palms on Magic Island, the big banyan in the park, the rack of surfboards at the beach, and sometimes the battered monkeypod tree at our entrance. Sometimes it wasn't pictures but old, soft white people from the mainland walking sorrowfully with their heads down and stooping to pick up broken shells and junk coral. But in time they ceased to be sad. Those white old folks weren't sorrowful; they were a lesson to me to look harder.

What I noticed had nothing to do with Hawaii. It was my daughter and her tetchy moods. Whenever something was going wrong, she seemed to sense it beforehand. Her little friends got screechy too, in the same way, when they were with her at tense times in the hotel. Bright, high-strung children seemed to me keenly receptive to whispers of trouble, which reached them as a whine of gossip that traveled at a frequency different from broader and more vulgar murmurs and gave them a kind of clairvoyance. So new to the earth, Rose lived close to the ground.

She had been very cranky lately. What had she heard?

"Nothing!" she said, and was so exasperated by my question she began to cry.

"I can't do anything with her," Sweetie said. "She's wired."

Wired was the precise word. Madam Ma had been in and out looking haunted, and Rose, who often followed her, staring at her powdered face and smiling so as to get the woman to show her false teeth, now avoided her. Madam Ma, who had made a habit of complaining about Rose, now ignored her and just seemed numb and clumsily furtive. What had she done? What had she seen? Where was Chip? I suspected something serious. I had seen Madam Ma's tantrums, I had listened to her rants. But this was the first I had known of her silence, and it terrified me. I would not have seen it without Rose's detecting it first.

Guilt shows clearest on the faces of older people, whose skin is so full of detail. There is a certain face that an aged woman has when she is stricken and heavily made up. Intending to look like a doll, she ends up looking like a corpse — the lipless cheese-white face, rouge splotches on the sunken cheeks, bony teeth, blank eyes, sparse hair, the sort of mask you see propped up in coffins. From across the room Madam Ma turned this face on Rose, and Rose was out the door. It was a face with guilt showing in all its contours.

There was also a twang of truth, a dying vibration in the air that only little Rose sensed. Her instinct was not to give me information but to protect me. She said she didn't want me to be Madam Ma's friend anymore, which was odd, because when the news got out, it was Chip who had the problem, not his mother.

"Chip's in big trouble," Sweetie said. She had heard the gossip in the kitchen, where it had been gathered in the Paradise Lost bar. "You know his Portugee friend. .?"

"Amo Ferretti."

"He wen mucky."

In times of the most solemn emotion, Hawaiians slipped into Pidgin English, gabbling sententiously, and though they found this lingo more neighborly — more tragic for its realism — it just made me smile and say, Oh, cut it out. But Sweetie found bad news more bearable in Pidgin.

Soon after, in Paradise Lost, I saw Captain Yuji of the Honolulu Police Department and got the story from him.

"This Chip business is the strangest case I ever handled so far. More worse than the Hotel Street pickup."

"What was that all about?"

"Woman cruising Hotel Street looking for a lesbian goes into a bar and picks up this woman. Only it's her husband, dressed up in women's clothes. Their car is stopped on suspicion and it gets into the newspaper. The man is a state rep. Big disgrace. They went to the mainland."

As always, the word "mainland" sounded to me like "Planet Earth."

"Maybe that's what Chip should do."

Captain Yuji looked serious and said, "Chip's in jail." I must have reacted sharply to this, because he grew stern again and added, "It's real bad. One of these gay things. They never know when to stop. It's okay maybe when some gay guy is decorating your house or doing your wife's nails, but when a gay guy commits murder it's a mess."

This perhaps explained Rose's mood, and it certainly explained the hollow-eyed somnambulism of Madam Ma.

"How did they solve the crime?"

"That's the interesting part."

The argument between Chip and his lover had begun at the hotel, apparently, and continued at Chip's apartment in Harbor Tower. Amo had fled when Chip got violent. Chip searched for him in the gay bars in Waikiki and then found him in Kailua, where he was hiding in his bungalow with his wife and two children. Amo's life had been complicated, but until that night it had worked. He had not lived steadily with Chip, but as Chip's lover he had shuttled back and forth between Harbor Tower and his own place in Kailua.

"Amo is my time-share lover," Chip used to say.

Madam Ma had encouraged them. They joined her at Sunday brunch on the lanai, cadaverous Ma, hairy Amo, smooth Chip, a comic threesome always somewhat overdressed for the heat — the men in plantation hats, long-sleeved shirts, white shoes, and kukui-nut leis. Buddy Hamstra loved them for the atmosphere he said they gave the hotel, especially when they were drinking, and sloshed — which was often — and "Lush Life" was being played in the lounge, Hawaiianized by Trey and his band, Sub-Dude.

The night of the attack, Amo had cowered with his wife, but Chip confronted him, screaming. Perhaps (so Captain Yuji conjectured) not wishing for his secret — what secret? — to be divulged, Amo hurried out the back door. Chip heard his lover drive away and gave chase.

On this small island the only continuous road was on the coast, so the only escape for Amo was to drive west in a circle along the shore, Kamehameha Highway. It was eleven at night, very few cars were on the road, and as the road was narrow and curving, it was easy for Chip to shadow him. For five miles or so he kept Amo's red taillights in view, but passing the Crouching Lion Inn, Amo's car grazed the guardrail on the cliff side and sped up and out of sight as it approached Kahana Bay.