Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “Sure, you bet,” Sandoval said expansively. “I’m glad to help.” He could hardly believe he was getting out of it so easily. “I do it for you right this minute.”

  But it wasn’t quite as easy as that. “He don’t have it anymore,” Sandoval said as he hung up. “Beto, he sold the skull to another guy.”

  “Oh boy,” Gideon said softly.

  “No, no, you can still see it anyways. This other guy, he runs a museum in Oaxaca, in the city. Beto says he’s got it in a glass case, all cleaned up.”

  “Great. And what about the rest of the skeleton, is that in the museum too?”

  “No, Beto don’t remember what happened to that. He thinks maybe he threw it out.”

  Gideon sighed. still, the skull was the critical element in what he hoped to find out. “Do you know where I can find the museum?”

  Sandoval did. The Museo de Curiosidades was located only four blocks from the Zócalo, on Calle las Casas. He had been there once with one of his young nephews who had a ten-year-old’s taste for the bizarre. The boy had heard about the place and couldn’t wait to see it, and Sandoval had taken him there for his tenth birthday.

  “It’s a pretty weird place, Gideon,” he said, shaking his head. “You know, shrunken heads, baby mummies, Aztec knives, that kind of stuff. It’s in this rundown old casa, all dark and smelly. Checho, he loved it, but to me it gave the creeps.”

  “Sounds like my kind of place,” Gideon said. “I’ll stop in tomorrow morning.”

  “No, it’s only open in the afternoon, from noon till four, I think. The guy that runs it, he’s a little strange.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “THEY’RE not going to investigate it? They’re not going to do anything at all?”

  It was the first time Gideon had seen Carl show anything that might qualify as emotion, and he was showing plenty of it. He had risen from his chair and was leaning tensely forward, hands on the table, eyes blazing. An artery pulsed at each pale temple.

  Gideon had arrived late for the family dinner, served this evening not in Tony’s quarters, but out on the dining terrace. The feminist professors had gone home, and the only other diners were a Canadian family of three and a lone Albuquerque gallery owner who had come to Teotitlán to buy weavings for his shop. The four guests were sitting inside, so the Gallagher clan had the darkening terrace all to themselves and were already well into dinner when Gideon got there. A buffet had been set up and they all waited politely while he helped himself to a couple of wedges from a clayuda—a crisp, pizza-sized, wood-oven-blackened tortilla topped with beans, sausage, and cole slaw—shrimp enchiladas slathered in now-tepid mole sauce, and a longneck brown bottle of Cerveza Montejo.

  However, he could sense their impatience to hear the upshot of his meeting with Marmolejo, and he’d barely sat down next to Julie and taken his first bite of clayuda before the barrage of questions erupted. What did the colonel have to say about Blaze? How did he act? What did he think? Where would he go from here? Would the police be coming to Teotitlán to get depositions or would they all be required to go into Oaxaca? When would the investigation begin?

  Gideon managed to down a couple of swallows of beans and sausage and a single swig of beer, then held up his hand to cut them off. It would, he thought, be best to go right to the hard facts. There would be no investigation, he told them in so many words. Blaze had disappeared twenty-nine years before. The statute of limitations had expired fifteen years ago.

  That had taken a few seconds to sink in, and then Carl had exploded. “They can’t get away with this,” he was yelling now. “I don’t give a . . . I don’t care about any goddamn statute of limitations, I’m not just going to let this lie. There has to be somebody else to talk to.”

  But he didn’t look as if he really believed it and neither did anyone else. All the air seemed to go out of him and he flopped limply back down. Annie, sitting beside him, covered her father’s hand with her own. Others picked mutely at their food.

  “Maybe it’s for the best,” Jamie said quietly.

  “I know somebody in the policía ministerial,” Preciosa offered in her smooth, queenly manner. She was wearing a flowing, loose, long-sleeved blouse of black silk that made the movements of her arms and veined, long-fingered hands more sinuous and elegant than ever.

  Carl looked hopefully at her. “Who?”

  Josefa snorted. “Always she knows ‘somebody,’ this one,” the old woman muttered to no one in particular.

  “Somebody important,” Preciosa said with barely a contemptuous glance at Josefa. “Somebody with more power than this Marmolejo person, somebody with whom I can say I have a certain amount of influence.”

  Tony looked at her admiringly. “She always knows somebody,” he said with a totally different implication than Josefa’s. “Who do you know, honey?”

  “His name is Colonel Archuleta, a very old friend of my family, very high in the police, very powerful. Maybe you’ve heard of him. I will speak personally with him.”

  Archuleta, Gideon remembered after a moment’s thought, was the corrupt, high-ranking cop Marmolejo had booted out. “I’m afraid your friend’s not there anymore,” he said. “Colonel Marmolejo has replaced him.”

  “Ah.” Preciosa gave him a thin-lipped smile, but the look in her turquoise-shadowed eyes told him he had not made a friend of her. Looking at her, he realized with a kind of awe that her rings, and there were at least as many as she’d been wearing the other night, were not the same ones. Those had been set with amethysts to match her purple eye shadow. These were all jade and turquoise, to set off tonight’s blue-green eye shadow. Did the woman have a different set of jewelry for every shade of eye coloring? Did she actually take them with her when she traveled?

  “Hey, maybe we could get a private eye to look into it,” Tony said. “Preciosa, honey, you know any investigadores privados?’

  “As it happens, amorcito—”

  “Ah no,” Tony interrupted with a sudden wave of his hand. “What are we doing? What could a private eye find out now? Where would he even start? Why do we want to shake everything up again, upset everybody? What would be the point?”

  “The point?” Carl cried. “The point? How about justice?”

  “Carl, if the police can’t act,” Jamie said reasonably, “how are you going to get justice? What are you going to do, take the law into your own hands?”

  Carl glowered down at his plate. “How about finding out what really happened? Doesn’t anybody care about that?”

  Annie, her hand still on his, said, “We all care, Pop, but they’re right. It’s too late, too much water under the bridge. Let it go.”

  Carl jerked his head in frustration. “Just drop it? Never know who did this terrible thing, or why, or exactly what happened? I mean, sure, Blaze had problems, she wasn’t perfect, but you know, she was barely twenty years old, just a kid, really. She was your mother, Annie. To just let it lie without doing anything at all, as if it never happened . . .”

  Gideon hadn’t yet mentioned his plans to look at the skull in the museum and was unsure whether or not he should. Identifying the skeleton as Blaze’s had wound up providing more hurt than help, as far as he could see, and he wasn’t sure how this would turn out. Still, he thought he owed them the information.

  “Well, actually,” he said hesitantly, “I am looking into it a little more, or at least there might be a connection.”

  Six pairs of eyes swiveled in his direction.

  “There was an old Zapotec skull found in the same mine some years ago. Anybody familiar with that?”

  Head shakes all around, except from Josefa, who was concentrating on picking her teeth.

  “And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t really ancient, that maybe it was modern.” He told them about his conversation with Sandoval and how he’d learned it was now in the Museo de Curiosidades in Oaxaca. “I thought I’d go look at it tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I don’t understand,” Annie
said. “What does that have to do with my mother’s death?”

  “I don’t know that it does. For all I know, it really is a thousand-year-old skull. But if it’s modern, then we have the skeletal remains of two people found in the same mine. If this one shows signs of violence too, the possibility increases that they were killed at the same time.”

  “That’s true,” Tony said. “They don’t get that many murders around here. Hell, till you showed up, I thought they didn’t get any.”

  “All right, let’s say this one does show that there was a second murder,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “Let’s say it even seems to have happened at the same time. What would that mean? Where could you take it from there?”

  He didn’t really have a good answer. The truth of it was that he wouldn’t be able to take it anywhere. There was that statute of limitations to contend with, and besides that, he would be leaving in a couple of days. The truth of it was that he was doing it for no deeper reason than curiosity. But of course he couldn’t say that. And if he told them he was motivated at least in part by wondering if it might be Manolo, there would be a new round of incredulous questions—Manolo! Why would it be Manolo? How could it be Manolo?—that he didn’t feel up to contending with. By now he was deeply sorry that he’d brought the subject up at all.

  “Well, you never know, it might turn up something,” he said lamely.

  It was as anticlimactic as it deserved to be, and he could sense the energy going out of the atmosphere again. After a few seconds Carl sighed and spoke quietly. “I want her . . . her remains back. I don’t want her lying in a box in some warehouse.”

  “Gideon, couldn’t you arrange that?” Julie asked.

  “Of course,” Gideon said. “I’ll talk to Javier.”

  “OHO,” Julie said when the others had left. “I gather you don’t think it was such a blind guess on my part after all, about Manolo’s getting killed too? That’s why you want to look at the skull, isn’t it?”

  “Well—” Gideon began from the buffet table, where he was pouring coffee.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Well, on having given your idea some thought,” he said, “I’m willing to upgrade it from blind guess to unverified supposition. Or, what the hell, even reasonable supposition, how’s that?” He came back with two fresh mugs and sat down.

  “Oh, that’s big of you.”

  “I’m going to go to Oaxaca to look at it tomorrow afternoon. Think you’ll be free? The skull business shouldn’t take up that much time.”

  “I think I will, yes. Jamie says another couple of hours should wrap things up, so I should be done by then. And I’d love to go into town. We can have lunch, and I can look for presents for people while you do your skull thing. Maybe we can stop in and say hello to Javier.”

  The Oaxacan night had come on by now, warm and fragrant.

  Only along the tops of the hills on the horizon was there any remaining red glow from the sunset. Pockets of lights shimmered on the distant hillsides across the valley; tiny communities that were unseen in the daylight. From the village below came waves of radio music and laughing conversation—dinnertime at Samburguesas?—and from the opposite direction, off somewhere in the barren hills that rose immediately behind the Hacienda, they could hear the predators of the night at their work: the hollow, periodic hoo-hoo-hoo of an owl, the screee of a nighthawk, the woofing howls of a band of coyotes.

  “Gideon,” Julie said, sipping at the steaming coffee, both hands around the mug, “does it seem odd to you that no one except Carl wants to pursue it? That they’re all content to just—well, to just forget about it?”

  “Actually . . . no.”

  “But you’ve always said that what the families in cases like this want more than anything else is closure. Why don’t these people want it?”

  “But really, they’ve gotten it. They got it today, as much as they can reasonably expect to ever get. They don’t have to wonder about Blaze anymore. They don’t have to wonder if she’ll ever show up again. They know she didn’t run off with Manolo, they know she was killed and left in the mine. And now they’ll get her body back. That’s closure. Who killed her, and why—that’s unlikely ever to come out now, and they know it. They’re better off putting it behind them.”

  The coyotes’ howling turned into increasingly excited barking, then frantic yawping, then, slowly subsiding, into silence. They’d run down their prey. They were feeding. Straining his ears, he imagined he could hear them tearing bone and flesh, and greedily wolfing down gobbets, and snapping at each other.

  Julie shivered. “It’s getting cold. Let’s go in.”

  EIGHTEEN

  THEY were on the terrace again early the following morning, taking in the cool, fresh air and just finishing working their way through one of Dorotea’s breakfasts—hibiscus juice, cubed melon and papaya, a tender, perfectly cooked vegetable frittata, and toast, jam, and coffee—when Tony appeared, rumpled, yawning, and scratching at the stubble on his cheeks.

  “Okay if I join you?” he asked, having already plopped heavily into a spare chair.

  “Sure,” Julie said. “Where’s Preciosa?”

  Tony snorted. “Preciosa’s not exactly what you’d call a morning person. Hey, mamacita,” he called in Spanish toward the open window of the kitchen, “the big boss is here and he’s hungry. How about some breakfast?”

  “I see you, I see you,” was the mumbled reply. “It’s coming, it’s coming.”

  “Coffee first.”

  “You’ll get it when you get it.”

  “What a sweetheart,” he said, grinning. “Not a grouchy bone in her body. So, Gideon, you like it here? Having a good time?”

  “A great time, Tony, and the Hacienda’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah, but are you finding anything to do for fun, aside from looking at bones? It’s not like there’re a million things to do around here.”

  “Well, true, but that’s not such a bad thing. This morning I was thinking about spending some time at one of the archaeological sites.”

  “Oh yeah? Gonna go up to Monte Albán?”

  “No, I’ve been there before, and anyway, I didn’t want to make a long drive. I thought I’d just go down to Yagul. It’s the closest one.”

  “Yagul? You know, it’s funny. It’s like fifteen miles down the road, but even though I grew up right here where we’re sitting, I’ve never been there myself. When I was a kid, I wasn’t interested, and after I came back . . . well, I just never got around to it. It’s like how New Yorkers are always telling you they never got around to going to the Statue of Liberty. But one of these days . . .”

  “Well, why don’t you come with me? I don’t expect to stay very long, maybe a couple of hours. We’d be back by noon at the latest.”

  Tony looked as if he was considering it, but then he shook his head. “No, I better not. I got all kinds of stuff to do around the place. If I don’t finish finally rewiring the meeting room on this trip . . .” He rolled his eyes, signifying Gideon knew not what. “What the hell. Ah, hey Maribel, that’s my girl,” he said with a grin as one of Dorotea’s young nieces came out with a full breakfast on a tray and set it out on the table for him. A slight movement of Tony’s hand along with an incipient little flinch and a stifled giggle from Maribel suggested that a slap on the bottom would have been administered had Julie not been there.

  “So, Julie,” he said after a swallow of coffee, a fond look after Maribel, and a sigh of pleasure over either or both, “what about you? How’s it going? They’re not working you too hard, are they?”

  “Not at all, Tony. It’s been fun. I have some things to finish up with Jamie this morning, and I think that’ll be it. At noon I’m going into Oaxaca with Gideon.”

  “Oh yeah, to look at an old skull, huh? Whoa, that sure sounds like a ton of fun.”

  “Well, I have a hunch I might get a good meal out of him too, if I play my cards right.”

  Tony arranged his plates to his liki
ng with surprisingly meticulous care: juice and melon on the left, frittata in the center, coffee and toast on the right; plates then nudged until they were all equally spaced. Then he was ready to eat. “Hey, Gideon, tell me something,” he said as he buttered the toast. “I’ve been thinking about that skull. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I don’t get it. What’s the point of looking at it? Where’s it gonna get you?”

  Gideon was fresher this morning, and it was something he didn’t mind talking about, especially since it was only to Tony and not to Carl and the others. “It was something Julie said yesterday. She was wondering if it might be Manolo.”

  Tony’s eyebrows went up. “Manolo? The guy Blaze . . . ? You think somebody killed them both? Jesus Christ, where did that come from?”

  “It was just a thought,” Julie said. “Nobody ever did find out for sure what happened to him, and there was a lot of money involved.

  Down here, it would have been a fortune. I couldn’t help wondering if maybe somebody killed the two of them for it.”

  “Yeah, but . . . look,” he said, slathering jam on the toast, “let’s say for the sake of argument somebody really did kill them both. How would you know it’s him? Wouldn’t you need to know what he looked like?”

  “It’d help, but it’s not strictly necessary.”

  “I suppose you could ask Carl or Jamie; they’d probably remember, but don’t forget, it’s been thirty years. Me, I can’t help you out there, I never even saw the guy. Missed him by a couple of days.”

  “I don’t really need to know what he looked like, Tony.”

  Chewing away at his frittata, Tony frowned. “So how . . . ?”

  “Easy. I just look for maxillomandibular fixation paraphernalia.”

  The chewing stopped. “Maxillo . . . ?”

  “I look to see if his face is held together with pins and wires and plates.”

  “ Ohhh, I get you. Yeah, good point. Carl busted his jaw for him, didn’t he?”

  “Right. And since he was never seen again, he was probably killed—if he was killed—within a few days of having it fixed, so they wouldn’t have taken out the wiring yet.”