by Aaron Elkins
A brief exchange of glances with John showed him that the big Hawaiian’s thoughts were running in much the same groove. Despite all the professions of astonishment, one of the stupefied expressions in that goggling half circle of anthropologists was a sham. One of them—at least one of them—hadn’t been in the least surprised to find out that Jasper’s end had come via garrote, not highway disaster. It was Callie whom Gideon naturally found himself studying hardest, but she seemed as genuinely confounded as anyone else. Which didn’t mean much when he thought about it.
But, he realized, it wasn’t necessarily someone in the room. Where was Harlow Pollard? John had contacted or left messages with everyone about being there. Why had Harlow failed to show up? Harlow…
“Preposterous,” Nellie croaked abruptly, breaking a second lengthy silence. His face, waxy only a moment before, was flooding with a dull red—visibly, from the neck up, like a pitcher being filled. “It can’t be Albert and everyone here damn well knows it!” He stared challengingly at them.
They didn’t look as if they knew it, Gideon thought, and no wonder. Preposterous as it might seem, no one could seriously doubt whose skull was propped on the table in front of them.
Except Nellie. “Gideon—if this is some—some joke…?” he began, half angrily, half hopefully.
“There’s no joke, Nellie.”
But in a way there was. It was on him, and Jasper himself was playing it, so to speak. Here Gideon had made the damn thing, and he’d known Jasper. He’d spent going-on twelve hours bent over that skull, memorizing every groove and irregularity; he’d somehow gotten just about everything right in the modeling process—which was amazing in itself—and still, in the end, it was a colossal blunder. He hadn’t come close to recognizing who it was and probably never would have, if not for Miranda’s sharp eye. Yet now, with just a few swift, superficial changes, there, beyond any possibility of doubt, was Jasper gazing at them through those bland, prosthetic eyes—or did they look just a little more amused than they had before? Surely this was a situation the old man would have relished.
“But how could we have screwed it up so royally?” Callie murmured from a faraway daze—Real? Concocted? Who knew any more?—”We were so positive it was Jasper. We had the teeth, remember?” she asked abstractedly, and then her eyes cleared, her voice firmed. “We had the damn dental report! There was never any question about it.”
“Of course there wasn’t,” Nellie said, heartened. “We were right.”
“I don’t think so, Nellie,” Gideon said quietly. “I don’t know how you all could have made a mistake like this, but there can’t be any doubt about this being Jasper’s skull. Coincidences like this don’t happen.”
Les laughed. “This is fantastic. The guy that was in that drawer for all those years, the guy we all looked at so solemnly in that museum case, the guy somebody stole out of that museum case, wasn’t Jasper all along. Can you believe it?”
“This is not funny,” Leland snapped. “It’s horrible. We have to try to—to make some sense out of this.”
“Nosir,” Les said. “Yessir.”
Leland turned on him in a shrill little spasm of outrage.
“You—you nitwit! Don’t you see what this means? Albert was murdered! We—we—“
“Goddamn it, Albert was not murdered!” Nellie interrupted hotly. “I don’t care who this…this fucking thing looks like, it isn’t Albert!” He banged the table so hard with his fist that the reconstruction tottered and would have fallen if John hadn’t caught it.
Gideon looked at him with surprise. Histrionics were Callie’s department, not Nellie’s. Nellie could be a little touchy on occasion, but in all the time Gideon had known him, this was the first time he’d ever heard him use profanity, the first time he’d heard him shout in anger at anyone. It was true that Nellie had been closer than any of the others to Jasper, so that today’s unsettling events would have had to be deeply disturbing to him, but all the same—
Leland swallowed, his naked eyes blinking. “Excuse me, Dr. Hobert,” he said stiffly, “but I beg to differ. And there’s something else too…” He quailed momentarily under Nellie’s ferocious scowl, but then drew himself up, darted his tongue at each corner of his mustache, and continued. “Don’t you think it’s high time this—this absurd secret we’ve all been keeping so religiously—”
“No, God damn you, I don’t!” The arteries at Nellie’s temples were bulging, something else Gideon hadn’t seen before. As if aware of them, Nellie massaged them, one hand on each side, and blew out a long breath.
“Leland, I’m truly sorry. I don’t have any call yelling at you or anyone else. Look, everyone, it’s easy enough to settle this. I’ll go over to the ME’s office and get Albert’s file right now. Everything’s in there, and I’m sure it’ll refresh our memories. We did a good job, you’ll see; a careful, professional job. Our identification of Albert is incontrovertible.”
“This is pretty incontrovertible too,” Les said, pointing at the reconstruction. “Now that I look at it, it even has that nasty smirk we all remember so well.”
Nellie summoned up a frail smile. “You’ll see,” he said again. “Just wait here, I’ll be right back. It’s just over on Greenwood Avenue.”
“I don’t think we can,” Miranda said. “Harlow’s odontology round table comes on at three back at the lodge, and most of us are on it.”
“Odontology round table?” Callie echoed with a laugh. “At a time like this, we’re supposed to worry about an odontology round table?”
“I think so, yes,” Miranda said simply. “A lot of the people here have paid their own way. I think we owe them the best we can give them.”
“Miranda’s right,” Nellie said. “You all go on back to the lodge. I’ll see you there later. I’ve got my own car.”
“I think I’ll go along to the ME with you,” John said, his first words in a while. “I’d like to see that file too.”
There was a fractional pause. “Well, I’m bringing it back.”
“I know,” John said pleasantly, “but I need to talk to Dr. Tilton anyway. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”
Nellie began to say something, then changed his mind. “Thank you, John.”
As Nellie bustled to the door, John spoke to Gideon. “Meet you back here.” He leaned closer. “Probably be a good idea if you didn’t leave anybody alone with that skull.”
Gideon nodded. “You better believe it.”
CHAPTER 14
“What secret?” Miranda asked when she was sure the door had clicked closed behind Nellie and John.
“Yes—” Gideon chimed in, and caught himself. In the second that Miranda’s face had been turned toward the door he had caught a furtive, flickering play of glances between the others. Of caution? Guilt? Concealment? What was going on here? What did they all know that he and Miranda—and John—didn’t? Why had Nellie jumped all over Leland about it? What was the connection to Jasper?
Gideon was suddenly struck with the odd, unwelcome feeling that he didn’t know any of these people very well; hardly at all, in fact. He’d been associating with them off and on for years, but how much of what he thought about them was real and how much had he constructed to fit his notions of what they ought to be like? Affable, laid-back Les with his DR BONES Porsche; droll, dry, harmless Leland —
“Forget it, Miranda,” Callie said, “you don’t want to know.”
“Me not want to know a secret? Somebody’s kidding. Gideon, are you in on this?”
He shook his head.
“Good, at least I don’t feel so left out. Now is anybody going to spill the beans or not?”
“Ah, what the hell—” Les began amiably.
Leland cut him off. “Why don’t you ask the great Dr. Hobert,” he said curtly to Miranda, “since he’s the one who seems to feel so passionately about it.”
For a moment Les looked as if he were going to continue anyway, but he shrugged and let it pass. In Les
’s view, Gideon knew—or thought he knew—there wasn’t very much that was worth hassling about.
“All right,” Miranda said, unoffended, “I’ll ask Nellie. Well, if we’re going to have a chance to get a bite before the round table, we’d better get going. Leland and Callie are driving with me, Gideon. There’s room for you if you want.”
“No, thanks, I’ll find my own way. If I’m a few minutes late, tell Harlow to get started without me.”
“Begin without the Skeleton Detective?” Leland said. “Somehow it hardly seems worth the doing.” With the return of his horn-rims, he hadn’t taken long to become the old Leland again.
Gideon held Les unobtrusively back as the others left. “Give me a minute to stow the skull in the evidence room. I’ll be right back.”
“What’s up, Gid?” Les said when he returned. “Want a lift back with me?”
“In the Red Terror? Do I look that crazy? No, I wanted to ask you something.”
Les nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much.”
“What’s going on, Les? What’s this big secret?”
Les lowered his heavy body into Gideon’s chair behind the work table. “Well, I tell you,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a new ball game now. All skeletons out of the closet”
For a few seconds he concentrated on the rubber band around his ponytail, looping it a couple of times and getting it readjusted to his satisfaction. Gideon could see that he was arranging his thoughts as well.
“The thing is,” he said, “we had a roast.”
“Come again?”
Les smiled. “No, not that kind of a roast. Like they used to have at the Friar’s Club. We had a dinner for Jasper, where everybody got up and made these smart cracks, these jokey little speeches about him. We even did this dumb little skit—I was supposed to he Jasper, if you can believe it—and they bring me this femur, which I brilliantly deduce is the remains of a murder victim, only at the end it turns out to be the remains of last night’s leg-of-lamb dinner.” He laughed easily. “Dumb.”
The smile slowly faded. “How well did you know him, Gid?”
“Not very.” Was it too late to tell Les he didn’t much like being called “Gid”? Probably so, considering he’d let it go for almost ten years now.
“You’re lucky. Among other things, the guy was not very big on what you might call self-deprecating humor, you know? We should have realized that a roast was not the greatest idea in the world.”
Les picked up a strip of unused modeling clay and began slowly rolling it between his palms. Gideon pulled up a chair and sat opposite him.
“Aside from that, he was an on-again, off-again lush, and he was already about six times more sloshed than anybody realized when the roast started. The guy had been in a fairly good mood up till then, you know, wallowing in all that obsequious veneration crap. So at first he just sat there and took it, but then he turned real hostile. I mean real hostile. And then he starts crying—slobbering, his nose running, the whole bit.” He grimaced. “Can you imagine it? Albert Evan Jasper?”
“It sounds pretty awful”
“Yeah.” Les squeezed the strand of clay into a ball and started rolling it out again, this time between his palm and the table. “Of course, when you get right down to it, all of us had a few that night. Well, not Harlow—you know Harlow and his stomach—but I know I was sozzled. I guess we were trying to get our courage up, you know? That old bastard could be pretty intimidating.”
He tossed the clay onto the table. “And the fact is, all the cracks weren’t as friendly as they might have been. Things got pretty bitter once we got into it. Everybody turned the knife. Jasper was brilliant, no doubt about that. He was even a good teacher—I learned more from him than anybody I ever knew—but he was so damn…insensitive, so mean, even to people who worshipped the ground he walked on. I’m telling you, to know him was to want to punch him out.”
“I know,” Gideon said. “I’ve seen him in action.”
“Well, it got away from us. Once things got started, a lot of bottled-up feelings came out and Jasper just couldn’t deal with it. I don’t think he’d ever been on the receiving end of shit like that. So, finally, he just blew up; I mean, he was running at the mouth, literally. And then he stomped out.” He shrugged. “Never saw him again. At least I didn’t; obviously, somebody did.”
“And that’s it?” Gideon asked. “I understand that it wasn’t very pleasant, but why all the secrecy?”
“No, that isn’t it. You see, right up until today, until half an hour ago, we all thought we were responsible for his death.”
“For his death? Why?”
“You have to remember, Gid—up till now we thought he was on that bus.”
“Yes, I know, but why—”
“Well, he wasn’t supposed to be; not originally. He was going to leave the day after, like everybody else. The first clue we had that he might be on the damn thing was when he didn’t show up around the lodge that morning. And when we checked, we found out his clothes were cleared out of his room.”
Gideon watched him pick up another lump of clay and start rolling again.
“We figured he must have been so pissed at us that he took off early, with his pal, just so he wouldn’t have to look at our faces anymore. And then we did find his remains—what we thought were his remains. You can imagine how great that made everybody feel.”
“With his pal? Salish, you mean?”
“Yeah, Salish was catching the morning bus anyway, if I remember right—he had to be back at work—and we figured Jasper just got on it with him without telling anyone.”
“Did he check out of the lodge?”
“You didn’t have to check out. It was like now; you paid for everything in advance.” He curved the strip of clay around his wrist and pressed the ends together. “Sonofabitch,” he said softly.
“Les, all that doesn’t make you responsible for his death. Maybe it’s nothing to feel good about, but it’s no reason for a—well, for a conspiracy to keep it quiet.”
“Hey, tell me about it. That’s exactly what I said—I mean, the guy was over twenty-one, he made his own decisions, right? We didn’t have anything to hide—but nobody would come right out and agree with me. I guess no one liked disagreeing with Nellie.”
“You mean Nellie was pressing to keep it a secret?”
“Pressing? Yeah, I think you could say that. Funny, the whole roast business was his idea in the first place, and then later he was the one who was so hot to keep it a secret.”
And who was still so hot to keep it a secret. “Why?” Gideon asked.
“I guess he just thought it made everybody look pretty terrible. Which it did. Besides, you know, we were all feeling rotten about it—about being the reason he got on the bus. I mean, there he was—these greasy, burned chunks of garbage on the table right in front of us. Not your basic happy time.”
“But now we know those weren’t his remains; Jasper wasn’t killed on the bus. Why would Nellie still be so eager to keep it a secret?”
“I guess he honest-to-God doesn’t buy this reconstruction thing. As far as he’s concerned, nothing’s changed.”
“I don’t know, Les. Does that make sense to you?”
“Hey, what can I tell you?” He looked uneasily at Gideon. “Personally, he was being weird about it from day one. This hush-hush crap—you know that’s not Nellie’s style. I couldn’t believe it; I was, like, what is the problem here?”
“Les, are you trying to tell me you think Nellie had—” it took an effort to get the words out “—had something to do with Jasper’s murder?”
Les’s low forehead folded into parallel creases. “Hell, no, when did I say that?” He looked as close to irritated as he ever did.
Gideon liked him the more for it. “You never did.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Les, I’m still trying to understand how that misidentification could have happened in the first place.”
“You�
�re trying to understand? Hell, I was there; I was part of the team—and I’m here to tell you we did it right; by the book, man. I just don’t—”
“It was basically a dental identification, is that right?”
“It was a dental identification, period. You saw what was left. If not for the dentition we’d have been lucky to come up with ‘male’ and ‘adult.’ But we had half a mandible, with the teeth and the alveolar border in reasonable shape. So we got the reports from Jasper’s dentist, matched them to what we had here, and that was it.”
“Who matched them? Was it Harlow? Did he do the analysis?”
“Well, yeah, sure, he was our odontologist, but we worked as a team; everybody got in on it. That’s the way Nellie likes to do it—hey, where is Harlow? I haven’t seen him since he got back from Nevada.”
“Neither has anybody else, as far as I know.”
Their eyes locked for a second. “No, forget it, Gid. There was no way he could have flimflammed us. I’m not talking about any tricky odontological formulas. It was completely straightforward—a simple postmortem-antemortem comparison. Jasper’s charts had a lot of fillings anybody could recognize, and a, what do you call it, an extra tooth, a supernumerary tooth in there somewhere. It was just a matter of comparing.”
Gideon frowned. “A supernumerary tooth…”
There was, he was certain, no extra tooth in the clay-covered mandible now in its wooden cubbyhole in the evidence room; the mandible that had so startlingly transformed itself from Salish’s to Jasper’s less than an hour before. A first faint glimmer of illumination showed itself, an indication of just how they had come to make so freakish an error a decade ago. Except that, if he was right, there wasn’t any error. They had been flimflammed, all right. With a vengeance.
Les backed off. “Well, I wouldn’t swear to a supernumerary tooth. I’ve looked at a lot of skulls since then. But whatever there was, you didn’t have to be an odontologist to see there was a match.”