Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  Clapper said it again but with a steelier edge: “Sit . . . down . . . Senator.”

  “This is scandalous, libelous,” Rafe said, practically shouting. “Oh, you want me to stay, do you? Then you’ll have to arrest me!” He started for the door.

  “I’d suggest you do that, Mike,” Gideon said quickly.

  Kendry moved to the doorway so that he was now partially blocking it.

  “Arrest Senator Carlisle,” Clapper told him.

  Kendry hesitated, unsure of whether this was some kind of playacting he’d been watching or if Clapper was serious, but Clapper’s granitelike face cleared up what doubts he had. He stepped directly in front of Rafe.

  “Sir, you are not obliged to say anything—”

  “You have no idea what kind of trouble you’re getting yourself into,” Rafe said between clenched teeth, looking directly at Clapper.

  “—unless you wish to do so—”

  “Start packing now, Mike. You’re through here.”

  “—but what you say may be put into writing and given in evidence—”

  “And as for you,” Rafe fumed at Gideon, “‘despicable’ doesn’t even begin to . . . ah, the hell with you all.” He turned and started his march down the corridor without waiting for Kendry, who had to hurry to catch up.

  Clapper sat looking at Gideon for a long, long minute. When he finally spoke, it was more of a deep, slow rumble than speech, but extremely distinct all the same. “I have just now arrested a sitting senator—for murder—on your say-so.” His heavy brow lowered. “You want to tell me why? And for your sake as well as mine, it better be good.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Gideon found John and Julie at the wildlife park, finishing their lunch on the terrace of the Café Dodo. Their plates had been shoved to one side, and John had a cup of coffee in front of him. Julie had coffee too and was working at a gooey slice of what looked like banana cream pie with a layer of toffee or chocolate at the bottom.

  “About time, Doc,” John said. “Afraid we gave up on you. Have something to eat, though. Hey, have you ever seen a Montserrat whistling frog?”

  “Nope, never seen one,” Gideon said. “That’s the one with the distensible internal subgular vocal sac, isn’t it?”

  John fell back in his chair. “Jesus Christ,” he said. Julie just laughed.

  Gideon pulled up a chair of his own. “Sorry to be late, folks. There was some . . . stuff that happened.”

  “Uh-oh,” Julie said, laying her fork down. “I don’t like the sound of that. What ‘stuff,’ Gideon?”

  “Rafe’s in custody. He killed Abbott.”

  Not surprisingly, they were speechless, or nearly so. “How . . . ?”

  “What . . . ?”

  They didn’t yet know about Jouvet’s revelation, so he started with that. It took longer to explain than he thought it would, and by the time he finished, he was tired and depressed. What a mess the whole thing was.

  “So . . . Rafe was really a Skinner, not a Carlisle,” John said, trying to summarize, “and he didn’t know about it until this morning?”

  “No, he knew about it the day before yesterday. I’m the one who told him.”

  “You told him?” Julie exclaimed. “But you didn’t know about it yourself until—”

  “Look, it’s been a rugged day so far. I really need some sustenance. Let me get something to eat first.”

  “Get the quiche Lorraine,” said Julie.

  “Get the hot roast beef panini,” said John.

  He went instead for a double slice of the banana cream pie, the name of which turned out to be banoffee pie (from the words banana and toffee, the server was quick to inform him). And milk rather than coffee.

  Julie was concerned. “Cream pie for lunch? This thing has got you really feeling down, hasn’t it?”

  “I don’t feel good about it,” Gideon said, after which they gave him enough time to consume most of the first slice before they took up where they’d left off.

  “You told him he wasn’t really Howard Carlisle’s grandson?” Julie said more explicitly.

  “Yep. Well, he learned it from me, yes.” The rest of that first slice of pie and all of the second had lost their allure. He moved them aside.

  “Aw, no, wait a minute,” John said. “You didn’t know about it the day before yesterday yourself. You just found out this morning too, or am I missing something here?”

  There was a round of delighted children’s laughter from some of the other tables. The Dodo’s terrace directly overlooked the park’s “Discovery Desert,” home to its meerkat colony, and several of the little creatures had popped out of their burrow to stand at rigid attention, three of them, all in a row like little toy soldiers, on the lookout for whatever dangerous predators might be lurking nearby. That there hadn’t been a single predator in all the years they’d lived here counted not a whit. As always the behavior charmed onlookers. Even Julie and John turned to look and smile.

  Gideon took advantage of the break to marshal his thoughts and decide where to begin.

  “You ever hear of syndactyly?”

  Julie hadn’t. John thought it meant too many fingers.

  “No, fused fingers, webbed fingers, a hereditary condition. And when I saw Rafe at the States Building the other day, we were looking at a portrait of Howard Carlisle, his grandfather, and it came out, thanks to brilliant me, that Carlisle had a case of it, which was news to Rafe, who doesn’t have the condition. But Abbott Skinner did, which is pretty good evidence that it was Abbott who was Carlisle’s descendant, and not Rafe. Rafe clicked to it immediately, even if I didn’t. That put Rafe’s inheritance—which was most of his wealth—in jeopardy, and so . . . Abbott had to go.”

  “Back up a little, Gideon,” said Julie. “How do you know Abbott had it? You never met him.”

  “Right, and Rafe wanted to keep it that way. That’s why Abbott had to be gotten rid of that same night—before I had a chance to meet with him in the morning. And he was.”

  Julie repeated her question. “So how do you know Abbott did have it?”

  “I didn’t until a couple of hours ago. We were at the mortuary. I peeked under the sheet. The second and third fingers on his left hand are fused.”

  “But Rafe must have known that all along,” John said. “Why would he set up a meeting with him where you could see . . . oh, yeah, he didn’t know that it was hereditary, that it ran in the Carlisle line. He didn’t realize that until—”

  “Until I pointed it out to him,” Gideon said dejectedly. “That twenty minutes or so at the States Building—that changed everything. That got Abbott killed. Damn.”

  “Well, what are you looking so depressed about?” John said. “You didn’t kill him, Rafe did. Jesus, you look like your dog died.”

  “I’m just tired of the whole thing, that’s all. It’s been a lousy morning. First the scene with Rafe, and then I had to go through it all with Mike, and here I am doing it again.”

  He knew that was only part of it, and Julie, so sensitive to his every expression, his very posture, the set of his head, the slope of his shoulders, knew it too. “You feel guilty about it, don’t you?” she said softly, placing her hand on the back of his. “You shouldn’t. John’s right: if you knew Rafe was a murderer, of course you had to tell Mike.”

  Gideon nodded. “I know that. That’s not really what’s bothering me.” He moved his hand so that it covered Julie’s, rather than the other way around. “I feel . . . well, sure, guilty, but I also feel responsible.”

  “Responsible!” John blurted. “Gimme a break, will you? There’s only one person responsible and—”

  “Let me put it this way. Do you really think that if I’d never shown up in Jersey, Abbott would be dead and Rafe would be a killer?”

  “Well, nobody can know—”

  “Come on, you know it wouldn’t have happened, not ever. I feel as if I was part of some entrapment scheme. I provided the motivation, I created the opportu
nity, the reason for him to be killed. If I hadn’t come here, if I hadn’t seen that picture of Carlisle, if I hadn’t opened my big mouth about syndactyly and how it ran in families, if—”

  “If Rafe hadn’t asked you to come,” Julie said sharply. “That’s what brought you here. You didn’t offer to look at those bones and pry into his affairs, he practically begged you to do it.”

  “She’s right, Doc,” said John. “It’s not entrapment if you never intended to trap anybody. And you didn’t.”

  “I know, but . . . aw, hell.”

  “And do you remember what Rafe said the first day we were here?” Julie asked. “In the bar at the hotel?”

  No, he didn’t, and neither did John.

  “His toast: ‘Let the chips fall where they may.’ Rafe set all this in motion all by himself. And the chips fell where they did. And here’s another quote, this one from a famous anthropologist I know: ‘I just say what I find.’ Well, you did.”

  “Yes, that’s all true, but . . . well, there we were last night at his house, a convivial dinner—”

  “Doc,” John said flatly. “Tell me. How’d he look to you last night? Like he felt guilty?”

  “Rafe? Not at all. He was happy, he was obviously enjoying the evening, he—”

  “Well, if he was ‘obviously’ happy one lousy day after shoving Abbott off a cliff, if he didn’t feel guilty about anything, then why the hell should you?”

  That stopped him. Gideon smiled. “You’re actually making me feel better, you two.” The banoffee pie had begun to look good again. He loaded the last of the first slice onto his fork and moved the second into position.

  “While we’re on the subject,” Julie said, “why do you suppose Rafe asked you to get into it in the first place if he . . . oh, that’s right, he didn’t know there was anything fishy going on, family-wise. He just wanted to know what happened in 1964.”

  “Right. It was that few minutes at the States Building, that picture of Carlisle, that changed everything.”

  “So you think he stole the coffin van too?” Julie asked. “He was afraid George had syndactyly and you’d find it?”

  “Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.”

  “I wonder where he put it. Hiding a van and a coffin and a corpse for very long on an island this size would take some doing. Even in his garage, it’d be bound to be seen sometime.”

  “I suppose,” said Gideon, who was still focused on the bigger picture. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? At one he’s talking to Abbott, convincing him to allow me to see George’s body and arranging a time for me to meet Abbott. Two hours later he’s realizing that he can’t let any of that happen, and so . . .” He said aloud what he’d said to himself a few minutes earlier. “What a mess.”

  He was down to the crust of the second slice now, and he was already regretting it. Should have stopped after one. He reached for his glass and drank down a cool, creamy, welcome slug of milk. I wonder if this came from Rafe’s cows, he thought.

  “So what now?” John said.

  Gideon thought for a moment. “How about showing me that Montserrat whistling frog?”

  They saw the Montserrat whistling frog (which had no interest in whistling for them), they saw the Andean bears, they sat in on a behind-the-scenes “Animal Encounter” with the Sulawesi crested macaques, and they watched a baby orangutan climb all over its slow, patient father, who only occasionally swatted it off with a huge hand. The baby obviously thought it was part of the game (perhaps it was) and came running eagerly back for more.

  After that, they did what a lot of other people were doing: they flaked out on one of the neatly mowed lawn areas for a midday siesta of sorts, not quite sleeping, but lying back, propped on an elbow or against a tree trunk, and chatting or eating ice cream or, most likely, just enjoying watching bulbous wads of dense cumulonimbus clouds shaping themselves into towering white stacks against a cobalt-blue sky. More rain was on the way, but no hurry, not for a while yet.

  Gideon found his mind drifting back to murder, not the one that had happened two days ago but the two that had happened fifty years ago. He was more at a loss than ever in trying even to approximate just what it was that had happened that day in 1964. Not the motives that drove it or the background that led to it or the results that resulted from it, but simply, literally, what had happened.

  He knew, with reasonable certainty, that the two men had been killed on the same day (because they’d disappeared on the same day, and by the following morning “George’s” body had been found, and “Roddy” was not to be seen again until they hauled those pitiful few remnants out of the nearby tar pit five years later). And he knew, with reasonable certainty, that “George” had been killed first because it was “Roddy”—with reasonable certainty (it was “Roddy’s” gun, after all)—who had killed him. With the recent appearance of Jouvet’s statement, “Roddy’s” motive for doing so had become one of the few undeniably distinct threads in this whole bloody intergenerational birthright tangle.

  Beyond that (and the nearly identical thread of Rafe’s own nearly identical motive, all these years later) everything was foggy. Who killed “Roddy”? Had it been Peltier? Someone else nobody knew about? Had the two murders been part of a single violent falling-out between the two or maybe the three of them, or had “Roddy” been murdered later, perhaps hours later? He’d been killed by being struck with a rock or something like it (even this was, again, only a reasonable certainty, because how could Gideon know for sure that the cracked and repaired cranial fragment represented his only injury?). But assuming that it was the cause of death, why had “Roddy” not used, in his own defense, the revolver later discovered in the hedge? Only one bullet had been fired, and that was resting in “George’s” hip at the time. Had “Roddy” been caught by surprise, attacked from behind? No, because it was the forwardmost part of the parietal, and thus the forward, upper part of the head, that had been struck—a pretty unlikely place for someone standing behind you to brain you with a rock or with anything else.

  He was troubled too, and had been obscurely troubled from the start, with the notion that two different murderers were involved: “Roddy” (as he was then called), who had killed “George,” and then Peltier (or someone else) who had killed “Roddy.” And yet, what other possibility was there? Somebody had killed “Roddy,” and it certainly hadn’t been “George.”

  There was no end to it. The questions sprouted questions that sprouted questions. Too many unknowns, too many possibilities. That’s it, I give up, he thought, and lay all the way back on the cool grass, fingers linked behind his neck, emptying his mind, watching the clouds, inhaling and trying to separate the aromas in the air: the musky, gamey smells from the nearby gorilla enclosure, the odors of sunscreen and insect repellent, cologne, mowed grass, congealing vanilla ice cream. After a while he gave that up too and just watched the building cloud pillars. He was two-thirds asleep, comfortable and drifting, when the breakthrough came. He sat up.

  “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate,” he said.

  John and Julie, who had been lazily chatting, stopped and looked wordlessly at him, until Julie said, “Occam’s razor?”

  He nodded. “‘Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.’”

  “The law of parsimony,” said John. “And you are telling us this, why?”

  Gideon pulled himself closer to them. This was not something for the ears of the many kids scrambling about. “I’ve been knocking myself out—well, everybody has—trying to figure out who killed whom back in 1964.”

  “I thought that there was general agreement that it was Peltier,” Julie said.

  “Peltier or possibly someone else, but—well, two murders by two different people—but that just didn’t sound convincing to me. Too many entities.”

  “So what’s your theory?” John asked. “You don’t think it was Peltier?”

  “It’s not quite a theory, just a hypothesis. But I realized that
we don’t absolutely need Peltier. We can account for what happened without him.”

  “Who, then? One of the people they screwed?”

  “No, nobody. We don’t need anyone at all beyond—” Two fingers came up alongside each ear, but with a head-jerk of exasperation, he brought them down again. “Do I really have to go through that routine every time I say their names? How about this: Whenever I say just Roddy or George—no air quotes—I’m not talking about the names they were born with, I’m talking about the names they lived by from the time they were two years old, the names they thought were their real names, right up until the day Jouvet let the cat out of the bag, all right? That’ll make things simpler.”

  This was fine with John and Julie. “You were saying?” Julie said. “‘We don’t need anyone beyond . . .’?’’

  “Anyone beyond Roddy and George themselves to account for their deaths.”

  John thought about that. “I don’t see how, Doc. Roddy killed George, we’re pretty sure of that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then it couldn’t have been George who killed Roddy. Or are you saying that he did kill Roddy, whacking him in the head with a rock, or maybe the gun itself, but Roddy didn’t lose consciousness right away and shot him before he died himself?”

  “That’s a possibility, yes.”

  “No, no, no, wait,” Julie put in. “If they killed each other, then what was George’s body doing back on his own property and Roddy’s doing in the pond? Shouldn’t they have been found together?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” John said, “and also . . . okay, all right, we’ll shut up, and you tell us your theory—pardon me, your hypothesis.”

  “All right, remember what Jouvet said? He finally told George that he—not Roddy—was Howard Carlisle’s son, and that he had an excellent basis for challenging Roddy’s inheritance—the dairy and whatever else had come down to him.”

  Nods from Julie and John.

  “Okay, now imagine this: George walks over to see Roddy—they lived practically next door, right?—to tell him he wants his fair share, some kind of settlement. They argue, maybe they fight. Roddy goes into his house to get the gun, which, if you remember, is right next to the door. Maybe he means to frighten George, or maybe to kill him—”