Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 12 - Where There's A Will

by Where There's A Will

  Gideon blew out his cheeks. “Body burned beyond recognition, supposed perps never even identified, let alone convicted, brother disappeared . . . boy, I tell you, I’m starting to see a few holes in this thing.”

  “Come on, Doc,” John said, “there’s no such thing as a homicide case without some holes in it, you know that. It’s never cut-and-dried. The cops can never put every single piece together. You go with the preponderance of the evidence. Isn’t that what you were telling me on the atoll?”

  “This is different,” Gideon said. “In this case they didn’t even know who got killed. What else did they get wrong?”

  “Now hold your horses just one minute,” Felix said heatedly. “You’re not suggesting Torkel killed Magnus, are you? Because that would be—”

  “No, of course not,” Gideon said, surprised by the question.

  “Damn it, Gideon, Torkel wouldn’t have known how to fire a gun. They didn’t even own a gun. Not a handgun, anyway.”

  “Well, no, that’s not completely true,” John said. “There was a gun in the house. At least there used to be.”

  “There was?” Felix seemed honestly surprised.

  “It was Andreas’s, from the Second World War. Torkel got it out for me once when he was showing me around the place. A classic; one of the early Walther PPKs, made back in the forties. Probably worth a fair amount of money.”

  “But that was an antique. You couldn’t shoot that thing.”

  “Didn’t say you could,” John said.

  “Look, I just get the impression that you two are trying to make it sound like my uncle was some kind of monster, like he killed his own brother—”

  As people at nearby tables looked around, John raised his palms in a shushing gesture. “Take it easy, Felix.”

  “Felix, nobody’s implying that,” Gideon said. But now he was wondering just what kind of nerve he’d hit.

  “Okay, okay,” Felix said tightly. “Sorry.”

  “After all,” Gideon said, “at this point we don’t even know for sure that Magnus is dead, do we?”

  Felix’s tension held for another moment, then slackened. Another belly laugh, but a quiet one, rumbled out of him. “Well, if he’s not, who’d we bury in that grave?”

  At which point they realized they had come full circle, back to the question they’d started with. “Damn, I better go,” Felix said, jumping up. “I can’t miss my plane. Sorry I got a little excited there. Look, you two. The others know more about this than I do. You’ll be talking to them tomorrow, when you get back to the ranch. See what they have to say.”

  “You won’t be there?” John asked.

  “No way. I won’t be back until Sunday night.” He glanced at his watch. “But I think I’ll give Inge a call from the airport, if that’s okay with you; let her know what you’ve found, kind of break it to her gently. She can tell the others. I mean, this is going to be kind of a shock. I think it might be better if it came from one of the family. Is that all right with you, Gideon, or did you want to be the one . . . ?”

  “No, go ahead. I’d just as soon they got it from you. I can fill them in on whatever details they want.”

  “Good. And thanks for the good work, both of you. Go ahead and splurge on dinner. Get the crab-crusted mahi-mahi; can’t be beat. I’ve already taken care of the check.”

  When Felix had gone, Gideon sat there, slowly shaking his head. “Unbelievable. What have you gotten me into here?”

  John grinned at him. “Hey, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the guy who wanted a few loose ends?”

  GIDEON had stayed at the Royal Hawaiian before, with Julie on their third anniversary. Their favorite part of the day had been sunrise, when they would go down and pick up a cup of wonderfully fragrant Kona coffee—not a blend, but the pure, pungent stuff—at the hotel’s coffee bar the moment it opened at six A.M. and carry it a few steps to the pristine beach. There were no crowds yet, no smells of lotions and oil and mustard, no grizzled, wizened, once-and-always beach boys hawking rides in outrigger-canoes. Their only company was a few strollers, usually of “a certain age,” carrying their shoes and quietly meandering hand in hand along the surf line, and one or two treasure-hunters, heads down, utterly absorbed, prowling the beach with their metal-detectors in hopes of buried gold. And of course the ragged, ever-present line of surfers (did they ever come in, even at night?) bobbing hopefully a few hundred yards out, endlessly waiting for the big one.

  The weather had been cool, even a little chilly, at that time of day, the sand pure and sweet-smelling—the big hotels swept and raked their beachfronts clean every night—and the act of sitting quietly on the firm, fresh, damp surface with cardboard cups of steaming coffee while the first rays of the sun lit up, first the upper stories of the big hotels, then Diamond Head, and finally the blue Pacific, seemed to cleanse the mind of its clutter and get it ready to take on another day.

  That was what Gideon had in mind for the morning after the meeting with Felix (he was stared at in amazement when he suggested, not with any real expectation, that John join him), but when he awoke at five-thirty there was a steady drizzle wafting down, so instead he had his coffee in the open-air coffee bar itself, dopey with sleep, in a pink chair beside a pink wall covered with black-and-white photographs of laughing Golden Age luminaries who had once stayed there: tiny Shirley Temple greeting admirers with her usual bubbly aplomb in front of a surfboard with “Aloha, Captain Shirley” on it; Esther Williams; William Powell; Carol Lombard; an uncomfortable-looking Bing Crosby getting soaked in an outrigger; Spencer Tracy signing autographs on the beach; an aged Duke Kahanomoku showing an attentive young Joe DiMaggio how to use a paddle.

  The coffee, strong and hot, got his wits going, and although they immediately turned to the Torkelsson mess, he wasn’t able to make any more sense of it than they’d been able to do over dinner the night before. The most reasonable explanation seemed to be that Torkel had taken on Magnus’s identity as part of his effort to stay alive. If the killers and the rest of the world were under the impression that it was Torkel they had killed and Magnus who had escaped, it would be the non-existent Magnus they would be hunting.

  Reasonable, yes, but subjected to a little thoughtful scrutiny during their walk back to the Royal Hawaiian— they had returned along the beach, nearly deserted now and softly illuminated by the tiki lanterns of the beachfront hotels—the scenario had begun to come apart at the seams, or at least to spring a few leaks.

  How likely was it, Gideon had asked, that the killers wouldn’t be aware of which of the brothers they’d shot? And if they were, what good would it do Torkel to run around pretending to be Magnus? Even if they weren’t, why would they be hunting whichever brother had escaped? Surely, murdering one of them, chasing the other one off the island, and burning down the ranch headquarters had made their point for them. After all, as John knew better than he did, organizations bent on retribution—especially organizations that chose to hire hitmen—didn’t go around expending time and effort to assassinate people if it didn’t serve a utilitarian, usually monetary, end.

  John had had some answers ready for him. What the killers thought or didn’t think, knew or didn’t know, was beside the point. The only thing that counted was what had been in Torkel’s mind, and Torkel very likely had been scared witless, understandably so, and had done the first and most obvious thing that came to mind: make them think he was dead, and run for it. Possibly, after a few days he would have thought things through and come to a different conclusion, but he hadn’t had a few days. From all they could tell, it appeared that his plane had gone down that same night, only a few hours after leaving the Big Island.

  Gideon had had one more critical question: Why would he have lied to Dagmar, his own sister, claiming to be Magnus?

  For that one, John had no ready answers. But both men knew that a complex case with no unanswered questions was a rare bird indeed. They all had inconsistencies, implausibilities that couldn’
t be explained. That didn’t mean you couldn’t resolve the case. You went, as they kept telling each other, with the preponderance of the evidence, and all the evidence here told the same story: Torkel had fled Hawaii, and he had done it pretending to be his brother. His motive was less demonstrable, but ninety percent certain nonetheless: to escape what he believed to be his own imminent murder.

  Ninety percent certain to John, in any case. Gideon would have put it at seventy. Those loose ends again.

  When the rain had shredded away into trailing wisps and moved out to sea, and the first hint of bronze appeared on the upper slopes of Diamond Head, Gideon took a second cup of coffee out to the beach to think things through a little more. But as it had in the past, the combination of sparkling salt air, sea breeze, and irresistible, world-renewing freshness wiped his mind happily clean of murder, deception, and other nastinesses, turning it toward happier thoughts of Julie, who was now well on her way, only a few hours from Honolulu.

  It wasn’t until he sat down for an early lunch/late breakfast with John at Cheeseburger in Paradise—“The best restaurant in Waikiki, bar none,” according to John—that they got to talking about the Torkelssons again.

  “John, let me ask you something. You said that the murder was a classic professional-type hit, correct?”

  John rolled his eyes. “You’re not gonna leave this alone, are you?”

  “Well, what does that mean exactly—a classic gangland execution? A couple of shots to the back of the head, close-range?”

  But the focus of John’s attention was elsewhere. His eyes glowed at the sight of his “Five-Napkin Special,” a monumental hamburger thickly lathered with two kinds of melted cheese and engulfed in glutinous Thousand Island dressing, which was reverentially placed before him by a waitress in a fake grass skirt worn over denim shorts. Beside the hamburger and its accompanying mound of french fries, Gideon’s order of three scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and the ever-present spear of fresh pineapple looked like the day’s diet plate.

  Gideon let him get a few bites down and repeated the question.

  “Sure, that’s one way,” John said, “but in this case he was shot in the chest. I don’t know about the range.” He bit into the burger.

  “So what’s so classic about that?”

  “First of all, there were two shooters involved.” John mopped his chin with the first of the stack of paper napkins that had come with his meal. “You don’t get that in your everyday run-of-the-mill amateur homicide.”

  “That’s another thing. How do they know how many shooters there were?”

  “They know because there were bullets from two different guns in him.”

  “Ah.” Gideon ate scrambled eggs and toast for a while. “So why couldn’t it have been one guy with two guns?”

  “One guy with . . . is that supposed to be a serious suggestion? This killer carries two different caliber handguns, like Wyatt Earp or somebody, and shoots him once with each one?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Yeah, it’s also possible that I’m going to leave the rest of this hamburger over.”

  “But not likely.”

  “No.”

  “Well, okay, two hitmen. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, the place was burned to the ground with everything in it—machinery, heavy equipment, supplies. That goes along with the retribution scenario, too.”

  “So the police knew for sure it was arson?”

  John nodded until he got a mouthful of food down and could speak again. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they did. There was kerosene or gasoline or something splashed all over the place.” John put down the hamburger and wiped his grease-smeared fingers. The neat stack of clean napkins was becoming rapidly smaller, the pile of crumpled ones growing. “Doc, what’s up with you, why all the questions? If you got another one of your theories about what ‘really’ happened, I don’t think I want to hear it.”

  “Just asking,” Gideon said thoughtfully. And for once it was true. More or less.

  THEY met Julie’s flight from Seattle at Honolulu International, something she hadn’t expected, and her transparently delighted expression on seeing Gideon went to his heart like a shaft of sunlight. How lucky I am—the thought rolled through him, and not for the first time—how lucky I am that this terrific woman should be so happy to see ME.

  Julie was Gideon’s second wife. His first, Nora, had been killed in an automobile accident nine years before, plunging him into a year of stonelike apathy. He had loved Nora with all his heart—although it was starting to seem like a long time ago now—and had thought himself incapable of ever feeling anything like it again. It was something he hadn’t even wanted. And then, when his guard was down, or rather non-existent, out of nowhere had come this pretty, black-haired park ranger, Julie Tendler, brimming with wit and sparkle and intelligence. She had brought him back to life; he had actually fallen in love again, deeply and totally. They had been married now for seven years (astonishing thought!), and when it occurred to him occasionally how accidental their coming together had been, how very easily they might have missed each other and never met, how improbable that they should both have been unattached at that moment, he would have knocked on the nearest wood, were he not a professor of anthropology and above such things.

  “But what are you doing in Honolulu?” she asked when she’d gotten over her surprise and they’d finished embracing. “I thought you two were going to meet me in Kona.”

  “That’s a long story,” said John.

  They started their explanation on the bus to the inter-island terminal, but it wasn’t until they were ten minutes into the flight to Kona that they finished, with John having done most of the talking. When he was done, she sat there nodding her head and smiling in a manner that suggested some long-held theory had just been confirmed yet again.

  “Amazing. This must be a record, Gideon. Not even two full days into a Hawaiian vacation and you’re already knee-deep in bone fragments and mistaken identities. Usually, you wait a little longer. I have no idea how you do it.”

  “You want to know what I think?” John said from across the aisle. “I think he brings it on himself.”

  “Hey, they asked me, remember?” Gideon said. “What was I supposed to say?”

  “My guess is,” John went on, “that it’s his aura. Julie, did you know he had an aura? On the astral plane?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Julie said.

  When the flight attendant brought the drink cart around, John and Gideon got coffee, Julie a bottle of water.

  “John, do you happen to know what was in Torkel’s will?” she said, breaking the seal and unscrewing the cap. “That is, how he divided the ranch, or if he divided it at all?”

  “Torkel? No idea,” said John. “These guys were kind of like two peas in a pod, so it was probably the same as Magnus’s . . .” He paused, frowning. “But I’m just guessing, I don’t really know. Why?”

  “Well, if the person in the plane was really Torkel and not Magnus—am I getting the names straight?—and the one who was shot and buried back on Hawaii was really Magnus . . . whew . . . then that means that Magnus must have died first and Torkel must have died last.”

  “That’d be true,” said Gideon, who saw where she was heading.

  “All right, then. With these reciprocal wills that John was talking about, wouldn’t that mean that Torkel’s will was the one that really should have gone into effect? Since he was the last one alive?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” John said slowly. “Technically, Magnus would have left everything to Torkel—for what it looks like turned out to be only a few hours, till Torkel went down in the plane. And when that happened—”

  “Torkel’s will would have become the operational one,” Julie said. “So does that mean that Magnus’s will is going to be invalidated now?”

  “Beats me,” said John. “Good question.”

  “Beats me, too,” said Gideon. “But the thin
g is, there’s no proof that the one in the grave is Magnus.”

  “Who else could it be?” asked Julie.

  “I have no idea. It probably is Magnus, but I doubt if ‘probably’ is going to be enough to get the question of wills reopened. Not after all this time.”

  “What if you looked at the body? Couldn’t you tell?”

  “You mean examine it? Get it exhumed?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, maybe, but who knows what condition it’s in? It was burned, remember, and it’s been eight years. That’s a long time.”

  “It’s been eight years since Torkel died, too, and you identified him. From one foot.”

  “Yes, but . . .” Gideon grimaced. “I hate exhumations. They open up old wounds, bring a lot of pain to the family. Besides, nobody’s asked me.”

  “Oh, they’ll ask you,” John said brightly, and to Julie: “It’s his aura.”

  NINE

  “IT seems to me,” Malani said, “that we could settle the question for good by having Gideon look at the autopsy report. He was able to tell that the body in the plane was Torkel’s; he might well be able to confirm that the body found at the fire was Magnus’s.” She smiled sweetly at him. “Isn’t that right, Gideon?”

  “I don’t think Gideon came to Hawaii to spend his time looking at bodies,” Hedwig said before he could answer. “He’s gone more than enough out of his way to help us already. Let the man relax.” She turned to him with the self-complacent expression of a potentate about to bestow a precious gift. “Gideon, I have some space tomorrow afternoon. How would you like an oiled lotus-leaf body wrap?” She threw a similarly magnanimous look at Julie. “You and your beautiful bride both?”

  “Both of us in the same lotus leaf? Wouldn’t that be a little uncomfortable?” he said in a weak attempt at a joke.

  Hedwig laughed, but it was obvious that it had gone right by her. She pressed on. “And if you wanted to stay overnight, we could do Lapa’au colon cleanses for the two of you. They’re sensational, you’ve never felt anything like it. What do you say?”