Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  They glanced at each other, saying nothing (what could they say?), then got swiftly down to work, while Gideon moved off to the side with Annie and Julie to watch. Tony’s head and neck were immobilized in a plastic cradle with head and chin straps, and then he was expertly slid onto a board, strapped to it, and hauled into the back of the ambulance. Tony’s lips were moving as he was lifted, but his eyes stayed closed. The doors slammed shut, and they were gone in another explosion of dirt and gravel. When the ambulance had gotten there, most of the other visitors to the site came to gawk, but now they rapidly dispersed, murmuring among themselves. It had turned into an exciting day for them, after all.

  “Julie, would you mind driving back with Gideon?” a distracted, lip-biting Annie asked. “I want to go to the hospital to be with Tony.”

  “Of course, go ahead.”

  She started to leave, then stopped and took Gideon’s hand. “Thank you for taking care of him.”

  He smiled weakly but said nothing. In fact, everything had happened so quickly since they’d arrived that Gideon hadn’t told them what had really happened. He said nothing now, either, as he and Julie walked to the van, other than to ask her to drive.

  She looked at him curiously—he generally enjoyed driving more than she did—but got into the driver’s side and turned on the ignition. They followed the ambulance and Annie’s van down the dirt road until they came to Highway 190, where the ambulance flicked on its siren and raced south toward the hospital, with Annie closely following, like an airborne bird sheltering in the “wake” of the leader of the flock. Julie and Gideon turned north, toward Teotitlán. Only then did either of them speak.

  “It must have been pretty bad,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so . . . I don’t know . . . it’s like you’re in shock. Are you all right?”

  “Sure, I’m all right. Look, when you get to the Teotitlán turnoff, don’t take it. Let’s keep going. I need to talk to Javier about this.”

  She looked doubtfully at him. “I don’t understand. Why would Javier—”

  “Julie, it wasn’t an accident. Tony tried to kill me up there.”

  “He tried to—” She swerved rapidly to the side of the road and pulled up on the shoulder. “Did you just say what I think you said?”

  “I’m afraid so. He tried to shove me off the platform. He wound up going over the edge instead.”

  “But why? That’s crazy!”

  He spread his hands. “I don’t have a clue.”

  “My God. Tell me what happened.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I was answering one of his questions about the ball court, and I had my back to him, and I heard—I don’t know what I heard—a sob, maybe, and I’d been worried about him anyway because he’d been acting strangely.”

  “Strangely how?”

  “Tense, nervous, preoccupied . . .” He gestured at the ignition. “Could we get going again, please?”

  “Gideon, at this point, I think I’m more shaky than you are. I mean, if you hadn’t been turning around . . . if you . . .” She let out a breath. “Do you feel up to driving? I think it’d be safer.”

  “Yes, I’m okay. The adrenaline rush is over, and so is the knees-like-jelly follow-up. I’m me again.”

  “I never had the pleasure of the adrenaline rush, I’ve gone straight to the knees-like-jelly phase. When I think what might have . . . whew.”

  They switched seats, and then Gideon turned the engine on once more and edged out onto the highway.

  For the next few miles there was only silence, and then Julie picked up the conversation where they’d left it. “Okay, so you hear what sounds like a sob behind you . . .”

  “And I turn, and as I turn, here he comes at me, full speed ahead. I—well, I’m not sure what I did. I guess I sort of stepped out of the way and backhanded him—you know, a swipe with my arm to keep him off me—and over he goes, without a sound. Hit the landing on the stairs, bounced off, and fell the rest of the way down.”

  “And hit his head, obviously.”

  “I couldn’t be positive at the time, but yes, obviously.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I called Annie, and you know the rest.”

  She nodded. “How serious do you think Tony’s injuries are?”

  “Serious,” Gideon said. “Put it this way: if he’s lucky, he’ll die, because I don’t think his brain’s going to be of much use to him from now on.”

  Another quiet nod, followed by a soft sigh.

  “How are you feeling about this, Julie? I know you liked him. You must feel—”

  “What I’m feeling,” she said firmly, “is relief, enormous, overwhelming relief that you’re still here.” She reached across to put her hand on his thigh. When he covered it with his own, he could feel it trembling. He curled his fingers gently around it. “What I’m feeling,” she went on, and now the tremble was in her voice as well, “is thank God you acted the way you did, as quickly as you did. If something had happened to you . . . I can’t even . . .”

  He squeezed her hand, not trusting himself to speak, thinking for the thousandth time: How fantastically lucky I am to have her, to be loved by this beautiful, marvelous woman.

  “What I’m feeling about Tony?” She continued after a moment, in a steadier voice. “I haven’t sorted that out yet. Disbelief. Incomprehension. Bewilderment. What could he have been thinking? Was he crazy? What possible motivation could he have to do that to you?”

  “Oh, I think I know what his motivation was.”

  She looked sharply at him. “I thought you didn’t have a clue.”

  “Not to his reason, no, but to his motivation, I think so, yes.”

  “You’ll have to explain that.”

  “His motivation was to prevent my seeing that skull this afternoon. What else could it possibly be?”

  “Well—almost anything. I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with your identifying Blaze’s skeleton.”

  “I guess so, but that‘’s already done; he couldn’t do anything to change that. Also, he found out about that yesterday, at dinner. He’s had all kinds of time to cook up some more subtle, less risky way to do me in between then and now—I don’t know, poison, an accident, whatever. But he didn’t. Then at, what was it, about eight o’clock this morning, he finds out I’m going to look at the skull this afternoon, and two hours later he’s shoving me off a wall in a public place. I can hardly imagine a more desperate, clumsy, dicey way to try to kill somebody. Why was he in such a hurry?”

  “Because he had no time to plan anything fancier,” Julie said, nodding. “Because we were going into Oaxaca at noon.”

  “That’s the way I see it.”

  “Yes, you’re right, I think. But why was he so afraid of your seeing the skull?”

  “Ah, see, that”s what I meant about the reason part. That”s the part I don’t know.”

  AS usual, Marmolejo didn’t seem to be doing much of anything when they got to his office. He was standing at one of the big mullioned windows, demitasse cup and saucer in his hands, tranquilly contemplating the peaceful scene in the plaza below. As always, he had on an embroidered white guayabera worn outside crisply pressed pants. His eyes lit up when he saw Julie, for whom he had a soft spot, and they quickly embraced, with the top of Marmolejo”s head coming up to the level of her nose. He called for more coffee at once, and pastries as well, sat them down in the cozy grouping of leather armchairs in one corner of the big room, and started chattering happily about old times.

  “Javier, this isn’t exactly a social call,” Gideon said.

  Marmolejo”s eyebrows rose. “I grieve to hear it.” He waited expectantly.

  Telling him about what had happened at Yagul took five minutes. Explaining to him who Tony Gallagher was, and the whole twisted story of the Gallaghers and their Byzantine history, took half an hour, most of it provided by Julie. Corporal Vela had brought in coffee and a plate of chocolate wafers. Only Gideon, s
uddenly ravenous, had eaten any of the wafers, wolfing down four of them, when Marmolejo called a pause to ask Vela to contact the hospital in Tlacolula about Tony”s condition. The coffee had been drunk, and Vela had brought in another serving in fresh demitasse cups.

  “And so you believe this attack occurred because he was afraid of what you might find when you looked at the skull?” Marmolejo asked as he spooned in his usual two teaspoons of sugar. “There was no history of animosity between you?”

  “None. It’s got to be the skull.”

  Marmolejo stirred, tapped the tiny spoon elegantly against the cup’s rim, and laid it soundlessly down in the saucer. “And of what do you think he was frightened?”

  “We talked about that in the car,” Julie answered, giving Gideon a chance at another couple of wafers. “All we could come up with was that he was afraid that the skull would turn out to be Manolo’s—at breakfast this morning, we told him that we thought it might be.”

  “And if it was? Why should that cause him concern?”

  “Well, if he murdered Manolo—and if he killed Blaze as well—and wouldn’t it make sense that the same person killed them both?—then . . .” She shrugged.

  “Then what? Let’s say he did kill them. Why should identifying the skull as Manolo’s, if indeed it should turn out to be, bring suspicion down on Tony Gallagher in particular?”

  “We couldn’t come up with any reasonable answer for that either, Javier,” Gideon said, swallowing a slug of coffee to wash down the wafers. “We also couldn’t think of any reason for Tony to kill them in the first place. He wasn’t a betrayed husband or a jealous lover, after all; he was Blaze’s brother.”

  “I wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree altogether,” Julie said thoughtfully. “Maybe your going to look at the skull doesn’t have anything to do with what happened in Yagul. Maybe it is just an old Zapotec skull after all, and not Manolo’s.”

  “That could be,” Gideon said. “But my intuition’s sure telling me otherwise. In any case, we’ll find that out this afternoon.”

  At this point Corporal Vela came in with a sheet of paper for Marmolejo. “Gracias, Alejandro,” he said, and scanned the few typewritten lines on it. “It’s about Mr. Gallagher. The hospital says his condition is critical but has stabilized. He is in a coma designated as a five on the Glasgow scale.” He looked at Gideon. “Is this something with which you’re familiar?”

  “Yes, a little. The Glasgow Coma Scale—”

  “Wait, start at the beginning,” Julie said. “What is a coma? He was already unconscious when they took him away. When does being unconscious turn into a coma, exactly?”

  “Well, there is no ‘exactly.’ A coma is just a state of protracted unconsciousness. A boxer who’s knocked out and gets up a few seconds later wasn’t in a coma. If he’s still unconscious at the hospital an hour later, that’s a coma. If he’s still in it a month later, they usually reclassify it to ‘persistent vegetative state.’ If he’s still in it a year later—well, then he’s almost certainly never going to wake up.”

  “And this Glasgow scale of five, what does that tell us?” asked Marmolejo.

  “Not anything good, I’m afraid, as far as Tony is concerned. It’s based on a bunch of basic tests: you know, can he answer a simple question with a yes or a no? Can he move a limb or nod his head if he’s asked to? Does he react to being stuck with a pin? The scale runs from a three, I think, to a fifteen, with three being the lowest you can get.”

  “So a five,” said Marmolejo, “would not be a very good sign.”

  “A terrible sign. If I remember correctly, three to five generally means the person has probably suffered a brain injury that’s going to wind up killing him. Never going to regain consciousness.”

  “Can he live a long time like that?” Julie asked.

  “Not likely, but it happens. Comas aren’t very well understood.”

  “So,” said Marmolejo, “wherever we find our answers to our questions, they are not likely to come from Mr. Gallagher himself.”

  “I think you can count on that,” Gideon said. “Listen, Javier, I want to ask you something. You said nothing could be done about Blaze’s murder because the statute’s run out.”

  “Correct.”

  “And if this skull at the museum does turn out to be Manolo’s, the same would apply to him.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, doesn’t what happened today change things?”

  “I don’t see how. Yes, of course we will look into it, but it’s a completely separate matter.”

  “Is it? Here’s this peaceful little village, Teotitlán, that supposedly hadn’t had a homicide in umpteen years—umpteen decades—and now we find out that Blaze Gallagher, or rather, Blaze Gallagher Tendler, was killed ten years ago, only no one knew about it. And today, one day after I identify her body, and only hours before I go to look at a museum specimen that might be her lover’s skull, Tony Gallagher, Blaze’s brother, tries to murder me. And what about that mummified guy I looked at the other day—”

  Julie shook her head. “Where does he come into it? I thought he was just a drifter who happened—”

  “Who happened to be seen heading up toward the Hacienda Encantada, and who was found dead, murdered, a few months later out in the desert. That adds up to two certain murders—Blaze and the drifter—one possible murder—Manolo—and one attempted murder—me.” He had ticked them off on his fingers and now he held up his hand. “Four. Count ’em. Wouldn’t you say that’s quite a lot for this ‘peaceful’ little village? And wouldn’t you say the Hacienda connection runs rather distinctly through them all?”

  “And you think Tony was behind all of them?” Julie asked.

  “I’m not ready to go that far. I can sure tell you he was behind one of them.”

  Marmolejo had been silent for a few minutes, having gotten up and gone again to the window, where he stood looking out with his hands behind his back. “I take your point, Gideon,” he said without turning around. “I expect that we will indeed be taking another look at Blaze’s murder, but I’m afraid it will be only to see what light it might cast on the attack on you. To her, the statute of limitations must still apply. If we should discover her killer, there will be nothing we can do about it.”

  Gideon shrugged. “Good enough. I understand. What about this drifter, though? He was killed only a few months ago.”

  “Oh yes, Manuel Garcia; we’re proceeding with that, as we would have in any case. Now, however, I think we will be inquiring more deeply as to what business he had, if any, at the Hacienda. Oh, that reminds me—” He turned from the window. “I received the report of his autopsy from Mexico City this morning. Apparently, it confirms your findings in their entirety.”

  “Stabbed to death with a screwdriver?”

  He nodded. “The chief examiner telephoned me to express his appreciation to you. Neither the screwdriver impressions in the bone nor the puncture of the chest wall by a rib was anything he had ever encountered or heard of before. He said he learned much, and that it was an honor to have ‘collaborated’ with el famoso Detective de Esqueletos .”

  “Well, please let him know that I appreciate that. Did the report turn up anything new?”

  “I’ve yet to read it. It’s still on my desk. Would you like to see it?”

  “Gee, I wonder what the answer to that’s going to be,” Julie said to the ceiling.

  Gideon smiled. “sure, just for a few minutes, anyway.”

  Marmolejo went to his desk and got a thick, neatly opened envelope that he brought to Gideon. “I can show Julie around the building in the meantime, if she’d like. There are some interesting old corners that not many people get to see.”

  “I’d love it,” said Julie.

  They were hardly out of their chairs when Gideon, scanning the first page, asked with a distinct edge of excitement: “Javier, does placas y tornillos de fijación mean what I think it does?”

  “Pl
acas and tornillos are—”

  But Gideon had already flipped to the sheaf of color photographs at the back. They had removed the mummified hide of the head to expose the skull and mandible, and there were photos. “Never mind,” he said, staring hard at the very first photograph. “I’ll be damned. This whole thing gets weirder by the minute.” He looked up at them. “I don’t know what it’s all going to add up to in the end, but there’s one thing I can tell you right now. Julie, you were absolutely right. Whoever that skull at the museum belonged to, I’d be real surprised if it turns out to be Manolo’s.”

  “And why?” a frowning Marmolejo asked.

  “Because,” said Gideon, slowly tapping the photograph, “that’s who this is.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  IN the space of a few seconds, with very little help needed from Gideon, it became as obvious to them as it was to him. The placas and tornillos—plates and screws—were clearly visible in the photos of the bared mandible: three narrow, inch-long metal bands, each secured with four screws, which had been inserted to hold together the jaw that had been shattered by Carl Tendler almost thirty years ago. The two fractures themselves were long-healed, but the plates and screws remained.

  “But wait a minute,” Julie said. “Didn’t you tell Tony this morning that you’d know if the skull in the museum was Manolo’s because they wouldn’t have removed the wiring yet?”

  “Right.”

  “ ‘Yet.’ The implication being that, eventually, it’d be removed. Well, he was killed only a few months ago. Why is it still there?”

  “Oh, this isn’t the wiring. The wires would have been between his upper and lower jaws to keep them from moving. They were taken out long ago. If not, he’d have been eating his meals through a straw all these years. No, these plates are put in to keep the pieces in place while they heal—like splints or casts, only on the inside. To remove them would take another operation—two operations. So unless there’s a problem—infection, say—they stay in for good.”