Twenty Blue Devils

by Aaron Elkins

  "Suits me,” said Maggie.

  Rudy held up his hands, palms forward. “Hallelujah and amen to that."

  Nelson stared out the window and grumped an inaudible response.

  Nick eyed John. “You too? Can we talk about something else for a while?"

  John threw in the towel. “Okay. As long as it's not coffee."

  "Fair enough.” Nick settled comfortably back. “Ah, I always look forward to seeing that lovely bride of yours. You really lucked out there, old son."

  "I'm not gonna argue with that,” John said.

  Nick laughed fondly. “It's always a treat seeing what she comes up with for dinner. What's it going to be this time, do you think—boiled tofu, maybe?"

  "Don't laugh,” John said grimly.

  "Oh, come on, you guys,” Maggie said generously, “it's not going to be as bad as all that."

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  Chapter 6

  * * * *

  That depended on who was asked. Dinner was rice cakes topped with pecan-garbanzo paste, grilled-eggplant-and-feta-cheese salad, and spicy squash-and-orzo stew, all of it perfectly cooked and beautifully served, but still, from John's point of view, rice cakes, eggplant, and squash.

  Rudy uncomplainingly if inattentively consumed whatever was put before him, as he usually did. John sometimes wondered if all that coffee-tasting had burned out his taste buds and immunized them against anything else. Excepting wine, of course. Nelson, whose French-born wife had taught him to like creamed dishes and elegant sauces, picked at his food and filled up on mango-pumpkin bread and apple-fig chutney. Only Maggie ate with any enthusiasm, but then John had once, with his own ears, heard her say that the happiest she got when it came to food was when she sat down to a steaming plate of organic brown rice and poached carrots.

  Nick, like John, ate moderately and with an occasional polite murmur of appreciation, but John knew his secret. Whenever Nick knew he was coming to dinner at the Lam’ he first fortified himself with a four-course restaurant lunch, usually of prime rib and butter-drenched baked potato. (On company-dinner nights, John did exactly the same, except that he usually made it T-bone steak and butter-drenched baked potato.)

  One of Marti's missions in life was to stamp out what she thought of as junk food (which included nearly everything John loved), and most of her menus, John swore, came from TV cooking shows hosted by onetime gourmet chefs who had suffered heart attacks, seen the light, and were now fanatical preachers of low-fat, sodium-free living. Fortunately for the happy state of their marriage, Marti's job as a nutritionist kept her at the Virginia Mason Clinic until late in the afternoon, zestfully dishing up fatless, saltless recipes to hapless patients unable to defend themselves, and Marti and John themselves had to eat out most evenings.

  But once a week or so, there was an unavoidable meal like this, which John, grateful for Marti's many other virtues, considered a small price to pay. The fact that wine, not on her list of forbidden matter, flowed freely made it all the easier. This evening's had been brought by Rudy, three different California Cabernets, to be drunk (naturally) in a meticulously prescribed order.

  By the time the third bottle was opened, Nick, the natural and uncontested focus of family gatherings, was in high gear with reminiscences of his days as a young soldier in the South Pacific—he had illegally joined up at sixteen—during World War II.

  "Then there was this miserable, no-name island in the Solomons,” he was saying expansively, hands clasped behind his neck, “all of about half a mile square, but, God, did the Japanese put up a fight.” He shook his head, remembering, and after half a moment went off on a slightly different tack.

  "We used to do a lot of gambling, you know? Poker, craps...I mean, what else was there to spend your money on? And I had this natural talent I didn't even know I had. I don't have it anymore, but I had it then. Well, a lot of money used to change hands and a few people won big, including me. I had over ten thousand bucks at one point. Well, with everything going on, you'd have to be crazy to carry all that money on you in one place. So we used to split it up and give it to ‘carriers'—these would-be buddies who'd keep it on them for you for fifty bucks a day. So—"

  His blue eyes swung around the table. “Did I ever tell you this story?"

  Maggie laughed affectionately. “Once or twice."

  "You never let that stop you before,” John said, pouring him some more wine. Everybody enjoyed hearing Nick tell his stories. Even Nelson was wearing his pinched smile.

  "Well, I haven't heard it,” Marti said.

  Which was all the convincing Nick needed. “So. This one morning I've got maybe three thousand dollars on me, and another seven thousand split between two carriers, and my unit's out on patrol, and suddenly everything around us is splintering with machine gun bullets. We all jump into the trees and most of us make it, but I see one guy hit in the leg and pinned down behind this tree trunk. Well, I panicked because this is the guy with four thousand dollars of my money. So I make a run for it under fire, I get to him, and I actually make it back with him with my heart in my mouth, and the first thing he says is: ‘You gotta go back. They got Julio too.’ What are you laughing at, John?"

  "I'm out ahead of you, that's all."

  Marti was grinning too. “So am I, I think. Go ahead, Uncle Nick."

  "Okay, you're right: Julio is the other sonofabitch with my winnings. Isn't that something? Two guys get hit, and they're both carrying my money. I practically had a heart attack. Anyway, back I go—by now I have some covering fire—and somehow I get him out of there too. Both of them."

  "Holy moley,” Marti said.

  "Wait for the punch line,” John instructed her.

  "And not only that,” said Nick, who was too good a storyteller to let anyone throw his rhythm off, “but the lieutenant, who didn't know his ass—well, he didn't have a clue, period—he couldn't believe it. He said it was the bravest thing he ever saw. He put me up for the Distinguished Service Cross, and damned if I didn't get it!"

  The telephone chirped just as he got the last words out, and with Marti sitting there laughing helplessly John got up and went to the wall phone in the kitchen.

  "Hel—"

  "John, it's Brenda."

  Her tone snuffed out the last of his own chuckle. “What's wrong?"

  "I just got off the phone with Therese. It's Brian. He's dead."

  * * * *

  His body had been found three days earlier on the mountainous, barely populated island of Raiatea, where he'd gone for his annual camping trip. A pair of backpacking New Zealanders had smelled something unpleasant and had discovered him in a thicket at the foot of a rugged, two-hundred-foot bluff near the base of Mt. Tefatua. According to the police, some of his camping gear had been found on the plateau atop the bluff. Apparently, the police said, he had gotten too near the edge, something that inexperienced hikers were likely to do in the loose, rocky volcanic soil. And, like others before him over the years, he had unfortunately fallen to his death.

  "But Brian wasn't an inexperienced hiker,” John murmured.

  "No, John, I don't believe this was an accident. If you put everything together—sixteen months ago he almost gets killed when the shed blows down; a few months after that he almost gets killed when the jeep turns over. And now he does finally get killed—because he doesn't know you weren't supposed to get near the edge of a cliff? It's just too much. I mean, forget the computer breaking down and the beans burning up and all that stuff. Just think about what's been happening to Brian. Growing coffee isn't that dangerous. Nick hasn't been having any accidents, Maggie hasn't been having any accidents, Nelson hasn't been having any accidents...I think someone's been trying to kill Brian, and now they finally did."

  John heard her out, his head lowered. Behind him in the dining room Nick was on another story. John could hear Marti's unrestrained chortling, Maggie's bluff horse laugh, Nelson's dry whinny. Warm sounds, family sounds.

  "John? S
ay something."

  "I admit,” he said slowly. “It makes you think."

  "What should we do?"

  "Do you know if there's been an autopsy? Has a competent pathologist been over the body?"

  An arid laugh came from the receiver. “What, on Raiatea?"

  "All right, on Tahiti. Isn't that where the government offices are? There must be somebody—"

  "No, it's too late. For one thing, his body was out there for a week or more and...well, you can imagine..."

  "Oh, Christ. Brenda, how is Therese taking this?"

  Therese, as heartbreakingly lovely as she was, had nevertheless been unhappy as a girl, insecure and bumbling—until Brian Scott had come into her life. Then she'd bloomed like some fantastic tropical flower. John had seen them together when she brought him to Hawaii to meet the contingent of the family that lived there, and to say that she had stars in her eyes when she looked at him would have been putting it mildly. And Brian, the protective John had been pleased to see, had been just as moonstruck with her.

  That had been five years ago, and the periodic reports that he got from Nick and the others suggested that little had changed.

  "She just sounded numb,” Brenda said. “Hollow. And listen, she's already had him buried, up in the old plantation cemetery. I don't think she'd go along with having him dug up, if that's what you're thinking; not Therese."

  "He's already buried? Why so fast?"

  "Why wouldn't she bury him right away? You know, it's summertime there now; it's getting pretty warm. There must have been a pretty strong...well, smell."

  Abruptly, something went out of him. He slumped heavily onto a stool at the kitchen counter, bent his head, and passed his hand wearily over his eyes.

  Brian Galen Scott, thirty-eight, boyish and bright and handsome and happy, father of a pair of picture-book-perfect four-year-old twins, warmly accepted son-in-law of Nick Druett, fast-rising operations manager and all-around whiz kid at the Paradise Coffee plantation.

  Brian, the man with everything to live for.

  "Yeah,” he said gruffly, “but you'd think she'd have some kind of service so the rest of the family—"

  "She's going to have a memorial service after everybody gets back. You don't need the body to have a service."

  "No, I suppose you don't. Brenda, what took her so long to call? You said they found him three days ago."

  "Yes, the poor kid's just been sitting on this by herself all this time. She just couldn't face telling anybody, especially Nick. Or Aunt Celine for that matter.” Celine was Therese's and Maggie's—mother, Nick's wife. “She's not home either. She's on a shopping trip to Sydney. I promised to call her myself right after I hang up with you. As for telling Nick, I'm afraid that's going to be your job, little brother. And I think he's going to take it hard."

  When John replaced the receiver he looked over his shoulder into the dining room. Nick was well into another familiar escapade, this one about the time he'd been sailing in coastal island waters on a pitch-black night (why, he never explained) and had run sharply aground on something. When he tried to pole himself off it, he couldn't reach anything under the boat to push off against. But the boat stayed stuck. Bewildered, he waited for daylight, and when morning came he found that he'd unwittingly sailed sixty feet into a cave and was caught, not by anything in the water, but by the cave's roof He was, as he was about to conclude,

  "...the only sailor in the history of the world who ever got grounded by the top of his mast."

  John, smiling in spite of himself—these would be the evening's last smiles—waited for Nick to finish the story, waited for the explosion of laughter, and walked slowly back into the dining room.

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  Chapter 7

  * * * *

  Nick took it hard, all right. One of his aching disappointments in life had been his failure to father a son. There were Maggie and Therese, of course, and indeed he loved them fiercely—especially Therese—but girls weren't boys, and Nick was simply the kind of man who needed a son. When Therese was a little girl Celine had delivered two stillborn babies, both boys, about a year apart, and after that they hadn't had the heart to try again.

  And then, a little more than twenty years later, along had come Brian Galen Scott, MBA, operations whiz, and all-around wholesome young man. Therese had brought him to dinner one night, explaining that she had met him during two otherwise ill-fated years as a business major at Bennington College in Vermont, where Nick had sent her mainly because both his sister and Maggie had gone there too. Brian had been a thirty-year-old teaching assistant, and they had gone out once or twice, but it had never come to anything at the time. But two years later, now the business manager of a computer firm in Michigan, Brian had come to the South Seas on a three-week vacation package, had looked up Therese, and well, there he was.

  And there he stayed. During that first dinner, Nick had naturally enough talked about the problems of coffee-growing, and Brian, nervous and anxious to please, had prattled on, man-to-man, about the principles of work flow and systems engineering; maybe a little too man-to-man from Nick's point of view, especially coming from a silver-spoon-in-the-mouth kid who made no bones about not knowing a coffee bean from a garbanzo bean.

  But Nick, a fair-minded man on most subjects, mulled over Brian's ideas for a day or two and then invited him to spend an afternoon seeing the farm and discussing the specifics of coffee-processing. This time he liked what he heard, and before Brian's three weeks were up he had offered him a job, at fifty percent over his current salary, as the operations manager—a position that hadn't even been in existence before. Brian had taken him up on it on the spot.

  From Nick's point of view it had worked out wonderfully. Brian had caught on with astonishing speed. And he had fallen in love not only with Therese but with Tahiti and the coffee business as well. His ideas on automation, computerization, and “organizational reengineering,” although they got some opposition—in particular from Maggie—had put the plantation firmly on its feet. It was Brian who had come up with the ideas that had made the Seattle-area mastery a viable operation. From there, as Nick enjoyed saying, it was history.

  There was another angle too. Nick got to keep Therese, on whom he doted, nearby. He had seen the handwriting on the wall that first night and had known it wasn't going to be long before he lost her. This way, his baby girl stayed within reach—his “wedding” present would he a house in Papara, two miles from his own—and he got himself a fire-breathing production genius to boot. That Brian turned out to be a loving, protective husband to Therese and a responsible parent to the twins who came along later was frosting on the cake.

  Almost like having a son.

  And now it was all ended, done. "No!" he whispered when John broke the news. Then his face went grayish yellow, his big body seemed to fall in on itself, and he sat, staring at nothing, like a witless hulk, while John gave them what details he had.

  "And that's it,” John said. “That's all I know."

  It was Marti who broke the queasy silence by pushing back her chair. “I'll put up some coffee,” she said quietly and went to the kitchen.

  "Tea for me,” Rudy called automatically after her, then looked embarrassed.

  "We'll have to arrange the funeral,” Nick said thickly after another long interval. He cleared his throat and visibly gathered himself together. “Nelson, will you see about getting us on a plane in the morning?"

  "He's already been buried,” John told them. “In the plantation cemetery."

  Maggie—tough, brassy Maggie—suddenly turned brick-red and sobbed like a man, an explosive, gasping, painful yawp that caught everyone by surprise; Maggie too, from the looks of it.

  Now everybody was embarrassed. “Oh, hell,” she said roughly, scrubbing at her eyes with a napkin while she got herself under control again. “It's only...he was so keen on being buried in that stupid old cemetery. I mean, we used to joke about it, didn't we? And now...n
ow... Oh, God, Therese must be...” She trailed off as the tears welled up again, and dabbed at her nose with a tissue she'd found somewhere.

  Marti came back with the coffee and tea and handed them around. In silence they sipped mechanically or simply stared at their cups.

  After a while John spoke, looking down at his hands. “I want to be frank. After everything else that's been happening out there, I think we have to consider, well, that it may not have been an accident."

  Nick looked up dully, angrily, as if he didn't comprehend.

  Rudy, more nonplussed than John had ever seen him before, opened his mouth so suddenly that his lips popped. “Not an— you don't mean...they wouldn't really—they wouldn't—"

  "Rudy, don't be dumb,” Nick said with uncharacteristic harshness. “What the hell would the Mob have against Brian? He wasn't even around back then."

  "Yes, but didn't John just say—"

  "I don't care what John said. If they have a beef with anybody, it's me—not Brian."

  "Now let's wait just a minute here,” Nelson said. “Rudy may very well have a valid point."

  "How the hell—” Nick began.

  "Who prepared the new affidavit?” Nelson asked. “Would someone care to tell me that? Who did all the work?"

  "Ah, that's ridiculous,” Nick said.

  "What do you mean, new affidavit?” John asked. “Now what are you talking about?"

  But Nelson backed off. “Well, I'm not really suggesting that it had anything to do with—"

  "What new affidavit?” John repeated.

  It was Maggie who explained. When the gangsters’ retrial had come up four years before, Nick had been asked by the U.S. attorney's office to make a new deposition to include some elements that hadn't been in the first one. Nick was eager to comply (over Nelson's objections), but was having a hard time finding the data he needed. People had died, firms had gone out of business, old records were impossible to locate. After three frustrating weeks of letters and telephone calls, he still didn't have the vital pieces. That was when Brian, who had been trying to introduce things like computers, modems, and e-mail to his still-reluctant father-in-law, had put together the needed information as a demonstration of what the new online technology could do. It had taken him two and a half hours.