Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “No, no, no, no, no. It’s against the rules.”

  “It’s not merely out of curiosity. I’m an anthropology professor—”

  “Rules are rules. If I let you break them, then I’d have to let everyone break them, wouldn’t I? And then where would we all be? Where would it end?”

  “I understand your point—”

  The man looked up suddenly from his task. “Unless of course, you’re interested in purchasing it?”

  Gideon stared at him. “It’s for sale?”

  “Not ordinarily, no, of course not. But you, you’re an anthropologist, a professional person. That puts an entirely new cast on things, you see.”

  No, Gideon didn’t see, but having gone to all this trouble, he did want to have a better look at the skull. “Yes, I see that. Well, yes, I might very well be interested in purchasing it.”

  “In that case,” said Mr. Castellanos-Jones, springing rabbitlike from his chair, “let us make haste. Time is money.”

  He grabbed a ring of keys from his desk, led Gideon to the case, and removed the skull with its saucer, laying them gently down on the only free corner of the ponderous, thick-legged dining table. “What do you think?”

  “Hard to say,” Gideon said, rotating it to see all sides.

  “I can let you have it for one hundred American dollars, which is a professional-courtesy price, in that you are an anthropologist. . . .”

  “Mmm . . .” Gideon was absorbed in his examination. When it had been in its case, he hadn’t been able to see the rear portion of the skull, but now he could, and he had revised his earlier opinion. The hole had been inflicted after death, yes, but in a way, it probably was related to the cause of death. Extending onto the occipital bone—clear through the occipital bone—from the rearmost margin of the hole was a deep cleft—not a fracture, but a cleft—that had been hacked into the living bone. Ancient or modern, whoever this was had had his life ended by a wicked blow with something like an ax or a machete. And he guessed that the cleft had weakened the bone around it and possibly contributed to the later breakage.

  “I see that the, er, imperfection concerns you,” Castellanos-Jones said. “Yes, I had forgotten about that. Taking it into consideration, I can let you have it at a discount of, ah, umm, twenty-five percent? Seventy-five dollars, all told.”

  Gideon had turned it over and was now studying what was left of the teeth. They were in terrible shape, most of them rotted to nub-bins, some to the size of corn kernels. That was probably what had led Dr. Ybarra, the médico legista, to declare that the skull was Pre-Hispanic. Nowadays, you only saw teeth like these in archaeological specimens, among peoples whose diets had consisted largely of stone-ground grains. Pulverizing corn between a mano and a metate, or between a stone mortar and pestle, also produced minute fragments of pulverized stone, and it was these fragments that could grind down tooth enamel, bringing on decay and gum disease, and turning the dentition into wreckage like this.

  Ybarra had been right, he decided; this was not a modern skull. There was no conceivable connection to Tony. Reluctantly, he concluded that it had all been a wild goose chase. Whatever the reason Tony had tried to kill him, it had nothing to do with this “Zapotec princess.”

  “I should probably mention,” said Castellanos-Jones, “that several other parties, one of them a prominent educational institution, have shown interest in this specimen. It may very well be gone by next week.”

  “Well, yes,” Gideon said, placing the skull back in its saucer, “but I’m afraid I don’t—” He stopped in mid-sentence, his forehead wrinkled, the image of the rotted teeth still in his mind. Wait a minute. . . .

  “Opportunity missed is opportunity lost, you know. And opportunity seldom knocks twice. Why, whatever is the matter? Are you all right, professor?”

  Gideon was staring so hard, so fixedly, at the skull that he had alarmed Castellanos-Jones. With staggering suddenness and mind-bending simplicity, everything had clicked into place. Why Blaze had been killed thirty years ago, why Manolo had been killed a few months ago, why he himself had damn near been killed yesterday. There were details missing, yes, but the overall picture had leapt into focus as crisply as if he’d turned the knob on a pair of binoculars. It was almost too crazy to be true, and yet . . .

  “Yes, I’m okay,” Gideon said. “Would a check be all right? I don’t have seventy-five dollars with me.”

  “A check will be fine.” He paused, Smiling, with his hands neatly folded at his waist, like an old-fashioned department store floor-walker. “Would you like that wrapped?”

  AN hour later Gideon pulled up in the parking lot of the Hacienda Encantada. He had tried calling Marmolejo, but Corporal Vela had answered, telling him that the colonel was in Teotitlán, at the Hacienda Encantada. That suited Gideon perfectly, and it was with building excitement that he climbed out of the van, carefully cradling the skull (he had declined Castellanos-Jones’s offer to wrap it) in the palm of one hand, thumb lodged in the foramen magnum, the conveniently thumb-sized opening in the base for the entry of the spinal cord, and his other arm holding it protectively against his body the way a runner holds a football.

  He saw Marmolejo at once. He was sitting at one of the larger tables on the terrace with Jamie, Annie, Carl, and Julie. Spread out in front of them were mugs of coffee and plates of mid-afternoon pastries: turrones, sweet rolls, and galletas (sugar, anise, and cinnamon cookies), the aromas of which made his mouth water.

  “I see Dorotea’s back,” he said, approaching the table.

  “Oh yeah,” Annie answered. “Back and happy as a clam—well, as happy as she gets. She has no problem working for Josefa.” She tilted her chin at the skull. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Ah, my friend, yes,” Gideon said. “Well, that’s an interesting story. But I don’t want to interrupt—”

  “There’s nothing to interrupt,” Marmolejo said. “I was simply partaking of the generous hospitality offered. Our business for the day is finished. Unfortunately, I fear we’ve come no closer to enlightenment.”

  “Oh, I think that with the help of my friend here—” He patted the skull. “—I might be able to provide a little of that.” He pulled out a chair, sat, and set the skull on the table in front of him.

  “Ouch,” Carl said, looking at the jagged hole in the side. “Looks like somebody whacked him.”

  “Yes. With an ax or something like it.”

  Annie turned the skull to face her. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”

  Gideon smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Ooh, that sounds mysterious. What’s it mean?”

  Julie was eyeing him. “You look awfully pleased with yourself.”

  “Well, I think I have a surprise for you.”

  “Oh Lord, another surprise,” Jamie said. “I don’t know if we can handle another surprise.”

  “What is it, Gideon?” Marmolejo asked. “Is that the skull from the museum?”

  “That it is.”

  “And is it an ancient Zapotec skull?”

  “That it is not.”

  A couple of beats passed, and then Julie said. “And are you planning to tell us what it is anytime soon?”

  “Well . . .”

  With a sigh, Marmolejo addressed the others. “You see how we have to tease it out of him, how he lets it out one tantalizing morsel at a time? It’s always this way. I believe he’s doing it primarily for my benefit. Professor Oliver finds happiness in baffling the mind of the simple, hardworking policeman.”

  “Hey, this is pretty grim stuff I do,” Gideon said. “I have to find happiness where I can.”

  “Well, you better tell us pretty soon,” Julie warned, “or I guarantee you’re not going to be happy very long.”

  Gideon laughed, but whatever they might think, he was not merely grandstanding, or at least not only grandstanding. What he had to tell them was going to knock them for a loop in any case—especially Annie, Jamie, and Carl—but he wante
d to prepare them, to present it in the right way, and not simply dump it in their laps.

  “Okay,” he said, “but first let me make sure I have my facts straight. Tony came back and took over the Hacienda in 1979, is that right?”

  “Right,” Carl and Jamie said together, and then Carl added, “But it wasn’t the Hacienda then. It was still a horse ranch.”

  “Okay. And he would have been how old at the time? Mid-twenties somewhere?”

  “Twenty-five,” said Jamie. He was born in 1954.”

  “Fine. And when he left home as a kid, he was how old?”

  “Somebody tell me what this has to do with the price of tea in China,” Annie grumbled.

  “He was sixteen,” Jamie said. “I was six or seven.”

  “So that was in 1970.”

  Jamie thought for a moment. “Yes. Sixty-nine or seventy.”

  “All right, that’s what I thought. Let me get on with it then.”

  “God be praised,” Marmolejo murmured, pleasantly enough.

  “The reason this skull was thought to be very old,” Gideon said, “was the condition of the teeth.” He tipped it back for them to see the blackened, tarnished, cracked remnants of the dentition.

  Annie winced. “Yuck, it hurts just to look at that.”

  “Believe me, it would have hurt more if you had them in your mouth. Now, until fairly recently, the only times you saw teeth like these were in people whose diet included a lot of stone-ground foods. So Dr. Ybarra, the local forensic examiner at the time, concluded reasonably enough that that’s what it was.”

  “But,” said Carl.

  “Yes, but. Nowadays—for the last few decades—there’s been another likely explanation for something like this, especially if you find it in a young person, and this guy is fairly young. And that is an addiction to methamphetamine, which is what we’ve got here; one hell of a case of ‘meth mouth.’ ”

  Meth mouth, he explained, went along with heavy methamphetamine use. There were plenty of reasons for it. First, the caustic, acidic mix of the drug itself corroded tooth enamel and gum tissue. It also decreased the production of saliva, which made things even worse because saliva both neutralized acids and inhibited the growth of cavity-causing bacteria. Also, the resulting thirst that went along with “dry mouth” often resulted in the consumption of sugary drinks that did their own nasty damage. Add to that the near constant teeth-grinding that was part of the addiction (this was the reason that meth addicts were called “tweakers”) and the result was a toxic stew that could turn the teeth into horrors that looked just like what they had in front of them. Meth mouth. “Well, okay, but how can you be sure that’s really what it is, and not an ancient skull?” Jamie asked. “I mean, if they look the same.”

  “Well, they don’t look exactly the same, Gideon said. “With meth mouth, you get a distinctive pattern of cavities that aren’t related to ordinary wear: on the buccal sides of the teeth, for example, and also between the anterior—”

  “I think I see where Gideon’s going with this,” Carl said, frowning down at his coffee mug. “The other night, remember, Tony was talking about how he used to have a pal who had a worse problem with meth than he did—”

  “Huicho something,” Jamie said.

  “And how they got into trouble,” Carl continued. “ A whole lot of trouble was the way he put it.” He put a hand on the skull. “Is this him? Huicho? Is that where you’re going?”

  “No, it’s not Huicho,” Gideon said. “You’re close, but not quite there. Look at the teeth again.” He held the skull completely upside down for them. “Count them.”

  “Fourteen,” Jamie said after a few seconds, and others murmured their agreement.

  “But if he had them all, there’d be sixteen,” Julie said. “And another sixteen in the lower jaw.”

  “Right. He’s missing two teeth from his upper jaw. And if we had his mandible, I’d be guessing there were another two missing from that.”

  At that an almost visible current of uneasiness passed around the table. They had some dawning sense of where he was going, but couldn’t quite see it clearly yet. Or couldn’t believe it.

  “Gideon, are you saying . . .” Julie said slowly, then gazed quizzically at him. “What are you saying?”

  “The missing teeth are the second premolars. They appear to be congenitally missing. This, as you know, is an extremely rare condition . . . that happens to run in the Gallagher family. Blaze—Tony’s sister—had it. Annie—Blaze’s daughter—you have it. Jamie—Tony’s brother—you have it. Only Tony, or rather the man you’ve been calling Tony for thirty years—didn’t have it. But this man—” He tapped the skull. “He did.”

  For a long time they just sat there and stared at him, stared at the skull. None of them could bring themselves to say it, so finally Gideon said it for them.

  “This,” he said, his hand resting on the skull, “is Tony Gallagher.”

  “No, that’s impossible,” Jamie said with a nervous little laugh. “This is not Tony.”

  “This is Tony,” Gideon said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  HE gave it a little more time to sink in and then continued. “The missing premolars alone would have been enough to convince me—I mean, the chances of a man with that particular syndrome turning up in the vicinity of this particular little village, who wasn’t a Gallagher relation, are minuscule to say the least. But throw that in with the methamphetamine addiction—which your ‘Tony’ didn’t show any signs of—and then throw that in with the fact that Blaze was murdered, and that Manolo was murdered, and that—”

  “Manolo was murdered?” Annie screeched. “What . . . how . . . ?”

  Gideon had forgotten that they didn’t yet know that part of it. “Okay, forget Manolo, I’ll explain about that later, but there’s also the fact that this guy here didn’t just die; he was murdered too, and his skull was found within a few hundred yards of Blaze’s, and those happen to be the only murders—literally, the only three murders—that have happened around here in the last fifty years, so—”

  “No, Gideon, I just can’t buy this,” Carl said. “Look, I’ve been here on the Hacienda for almost forty years. I was here before Tony came back. And there is no doubt in my mind that the Tony who died yesterday was the same Tony who came back and took over in 1979. Believe me.”

  “I do believe you,” Gideon said. “But you see, I don’t think he was really Tony in 1979 any more than he was Tony yesterday.”

  “But . . . no, but . . .”

  “Carl’s right,” Jamie insisted, his face flushed. “Look, Tony was my big brother. When I was growing up he looked out for me; I loved him. Are you saying I didn’t know my own brother?”

  “Look at it this way, Jamie. When Tony—the guy we’ve been calling Tony—came back here in 1979 he was a grown man. You hadn’t seen him in almost ten years, right? He’d been only sixteen then. Do you really think you’d know one way or the other whether the man who showed up then was really the same teenager that had left back then . . . when you were just six years old?”

  “Well—okay, maybe not, but my father certainly would have recognized his own—” His face fell. “No, dad had died a little while before.”

  “And I’d never seen Tony before he showed up in 1979,” Carl added thoughtfully.

  “And I was one year old in 1979,” Annie said, no less soberly.

  The three of them were beginning to accept it even though they didn’t want to, but then Jamie perked up. “Wait, wait, wait—Blaze was older than me; she was only a year younger than Tony. There’s no way some stranger could come in and make her believe he was her brother. He’d never get away with it.”

  “But Blaze never saw him. She was already gone when he got here,” Gideon gently pointed out. “She was dead by then, although as far as everybody knew, she’d run off with Manolo.”

  “Sure,” Jamie said, “but he wouldn’t have known that. How could he take the chance . . .” The air went ou
t of him. He sagged back in his chair. “Oh. He killed her?”

  Gideon nodded. “That’s the way I see it. She was the only one left who could know for sure that he wasn’t really Tony. Well, Tony himself—the real Tony—would have known too, of course. So he got rid of them both, walked in in his place, took over, and was Tony Gallagher for the next thirty years.”

  “And the reason he tried to kill you,” Julie said, “was to prevent you from finding out . . . well, what you found out—that he wasn’t who he said he was.”

  Gideon nodded. “It fits, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. I see.” Jamie said miserably.

  Annie flung her hands in the air. “Then who the hell was the guy whose hand I was just holding in the hospital? The guy that’s been Tony for the last thirty years?”

  “Annie,” Gideon said earnestly, “I do not have a clue.”

  “Nor do I,” said Marmolejo, who had been silent and ruminative for some time. “But I believe I know who can provide the answer. Where can I find the woman Josefa?”

  “Josefa?” Annie said. “She’s probably in the Casa del Mayordomo, in her room. But what makes you think she would know anything? She’s just—”

  “It was Josefa to whom this man willed your beautiful Hacienda, and not his brother, or his brother-in-law, or his niece, or the wife to whom he left everything else. Don’t you find this curious?”

  “Well, she’s supposed to be some kind of distant aunt on my mother’s side,” Jamie said.

  “Perhaps that’s it,” he said, rising and pocketing the little tape recorder that had been on the table, “but I expect there’s something more to it than that.”

  BY the time Marmolejo returned half an hour later, considerable inroads had been made into the pastries, and Dorotea had come out with another pot of coffee. Gideon had explained about the drifter’s being Manolo and answered, or tried to answer, a host of questions, but the overall mood was still one of dazed befuddlement.

  Colonel Marmolejo, looking well satisfied with himself, took his former chair, daintily ate a cinnamon cookie, ate another cinnamon cookie, and poured himself some coffee.