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

by Where There's A Will

  He managed not to flinch, but only barely. From the corner of his eye he could see Julie, with a terror-stricken expression on her face, silently signaling him NO!

  “Thank you very much, but—”

  “No, don’t thank me. It’s just my way of thanking you for what you’ve done for us.”

  “Without charge, no doubt,” Inge said dryly.

  Hedwig speared her with a look. “Funny.”

  Inasmuch as Inge’s facilities were overflowing with a group of happy would-be cowboys from an Indonesian businessmen’s association, they were meeting on the wide, covered back porch of Axel’s and Malani’s house. From where they sat, they overlooked peeling, red-painted stables and a split-rail-enclosed corral in which three or four wiry paniolos, in from the range for the day, were leisurely unsaddling and grooming their horses.

  Beyond them, moist, green hills rolled one after another to the horizon, with occasional small clumps of cattle—roaming black dots—visible here and there on the slopes. Other than Felix, who was still on the mainland, they were all there to hear Gideon’s report from Maravovo, mostly sitting in a semi-circle in old wicker armchairs, some white and some green, none of which had seen a fresh coat of paint in a decade: Dagmar, Hedwig, Keoni and Inge—sitting on the porch railing, swinging one booted foot—and Axel and Malani. Julie, who had been invited by both Malani and Axel to come, and who was curious, but who was a little reluctant about being one outsider too many, had moved her chair a few feet back from the others, so as to be out of the general flow of conversation.

  As he’d said he would, Felix had telephoned Inge the night before with the bizarre news about Torkel; Inge had informed the others, and for the last twenty minutes they had been tossing around the same questions that Gideon and John had already been through, and they had arrived at the same answers and non-answers. There was little new information to emerge, beyond confirmation that Dagmar had indeed received a telephone call, purportedly from Magnus, in which he’d said that “Torkel” had been killed, and that he had to leave for a while and was flying out in the Grumman, but would be back in touch soon. Which was pretty much what Felix had told them the previous evening.

  As to what exactly had been said during the telephone call, Dagmar was the only one who would have had direct knowledge, but the information about Torkel and/or the reopening of these old wounds had very obviously taken a toll on her. Gideon had assumed that if anyone was going to contest the notion that it had actually been Torkel, not Magnus, on the telephone that night, it would have been Dagmar herself, but she accepted it with no more than a seemingly unconcerned shrug. Yes, it was possible. It was all so long ago that she barely remembered. And what exactly had he said? Another weary shrug—it was too long ago. It was all in the police report somewhere. What difference did it make now?

  Gideon had never seen anyone age more in two days. She was like a ghost of herself, passive, uncertain, and deeply, deeply depressed. Her cigarillo had gone out after a couple of minutes and had never been relit. The feistiness, the agile wit, even the barbed petulance, were completely gone.

  The foot bones from the plane were now in a covered shoe box beside Gideon’s chair. Only Keoni and Inge had shown any interest in seeing them. The others had shaken their heads and turned away.

  “That’s really a nice offer, Hedwig,” Gideon said now, “but actually I’d be happy to see what I could do about confirming Magnus’s identity. Only . . .” He hesitated.

  “Only what?” Malani asked.

  “I don’t know how much I could come up with from the autopsy report. A pathologist looks for different things than I do. It’d be better—if you really want to go ahead with this—if we had the remains exhumed.”

  “But he was all burned up,” Inge said. She had come straight from a Paniolo Chuck Wagon Cookout with her Indonesians and was still in full Old West regalia: big red bandana around her neck, scarred, creaking leather chaps, and snakeskin boots with clinking spurs.

  “I realize that,” said Gideon, “but there’s bound to be some skeletal material left. There might be something helpful.”

  “No, you’re not following. There is no skeletal material. There’s nothing.”

  “But . . . I thought he was buried.”

  “So did I,” John said, equally surprised.

  “Well, he is buried,” Inge said, “but there’s nothing but a little box of ashes. He was cremated.”

  “Cremated, after he was burned?” John exclaimed.

  “They wanted to make sure he was really, really dead,” Keoni explained.

  Inge glared at him. “It was in his will.”

  Keoni shrugged. “A likely story.”

  The old Dagmar suddenly emerged. “Damn your smart mouth,” she snapped. “Why don’t you be quiet until you have something worth saying?”

  Keoni, obviously used to this kind of treatment, grinned and raised his hands in surrender. “Yes, oh great queen.”

  Dagmar turned disgustedly away from him and slipped back into her depression.

  “Okay, then,” Gideon said, “the autopsy report would be the only route to go.” He looked around at them. “But are you sure you want me to do this?”

  Hedwig, Inge, and Axel looked uncertain. Keoni shrugged again. Malani said yes, but then caught their hesitation. “Well, I think so. We do, don’t we? Auntie, what do you think?”

  “What do I think?” Dagmar said to the porch roof. “I agree with Malani. Let it all come out. But what does it matter what I think? I’m an old lady, my day is done.” They waited for more, and after a deep sigh she went on. “What I think is, I’m tired to death of the whole thing. You people do what you want, I don’t care. I shouldn’t have bothered to come at all, I should have just . . . oh, the hell with it. Do what you want, I don’t care.” Finally realizing her cigarillo was out, she fumbled for a match, but Axel was up in a flash to light it for her.

  Returning to his chair, he waited politely until he was sure she’d finished speaking, then he put his glass of guava juice and soda down on the worn planks beside his chair and leaned forward, looking at the floor, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. “I can’t help wondering how much we really want to get into this again. That was a terrible time, and, yes, it would be good to understand everything, but it’s in the past. Everything is all settled now. Do we really want to stir it up again? Say they shot the wrong man . . . that is, if it’s Magnus that was shot . . . well, what difference does it make now? They’re both dead, there’s nothing we or anybody else can do about it anymore.”

  Hedwig and Inge were nodding their heads. “That’s so,” Inge said. “The more I think about it, the more I think maybe it’d be better to just let them rest in peace. Drop the whole thing.”

  “Whoa, now, folks, let’s just wait a minute,” John said gently. “You don’t really have any choice. Things are going to get stirred up whether you want them to or not. I know this isn’t any of my business, but this is a homicide we’re talking about. You can’t let the cops go on thinking one man was murdered when it was really someone else.”

  “That’s true,” Gideon said. “Even though I went out to Maravovo at your request, I have an obligation to tell the police what I found—given what it was I found.”

  “Are you saying we’re going to have to bring the police into this again?” Axel asked plaintively. “More interviews, more depositions, all over again? We’re still doing late-spring round-ups, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Inge said with a sigh, “now I am sorry we started the whole thing.”

  “We can take care of telling the police about it for you,” John said. “They’ll need to hear it from Doc anyway. Who handled the case? They didn’t run it out of Waimea, did they?”

  “No,” Hedwig said, “some detective from Kona took it over. He was from the Investigation Division or something. Not a very nice man. Very unsimpatico.”

  “That’d be the CIS, the Criminal Investigation
Section,” John said. “We’ll go talk to them. I know a guy there.”

  “Thank you,” Inge said. “We appreciate that.”

  “But they’re almost certainly going to want to follow up with you,” Gideon told them. “This raises a lot of questions. I’m sure you can see that. I wouldn’t be surprised if they reopened the case.”

  “Probably, but maybe not,” John said. “They just might want to bury the whole thing and forget about it, seeing as how they screwed up the first time. Cops are different from scientists, Doc. Sometimes the search for truth takes a back seat to covering their rear ends.”

  Gideon thought about that. “Not so different, maybe.”

  “Oh, bother,” Hedwig muttered. “What are we supposed to tell them? It was ten years ago. Who remembers anymore?”

  “I still don’t see what difference it makes,” Axel grumbled.

  “Axel, honestly,” said Malani with a shake of her head. “Of course it makes a difference. I don’t understand you people. Don’t you want to know what really happened?”

  “Well, of course we want to know, Malani,” Inge said. “It’s just . . . it seems so . . . I don’t know, morbid.”

  “To put it mildly,” Axel said.

  Dagmar brusquely spoke up. “Will they want to talk to me?”

  “I’d sure think so,” John told her. “I’d be surprised if they didn’t.”

  A frail hand went to her forehead. She looked physically sick, Gideon thought. “I’ve lived too long,” she said vacantly. “I’m too old to go through it again.”

  In the corral below them, a horse, freed from its saddle, had flopped to the ground and was scratching its back in the dirt, rolling, snuffling, raising clouds of dust. They watched one of the paniolos get it to its feet with no more than a couple of gentle clucks and a get-up motion with his arm. He was the oldest of the cowboys, a mahogany-colored Hawaiian who wore a flowered Hawaiian shirt and a ten-gallon hat with a dust-caked garland of flowers around the band. The other paniolos, younger, were in tank-tops and baseball caps, most of them worn backwards.

  “The old guy,” John said to Axel, “that’s Willie Akau, isn’t it? He was foreman of my section back when I worked on the ranch.”

  “That’s Willie,” Axel said. “He’s our ranch foreman now, sixty-nine years old and still going strong. And the kid rubbing down the big gray? That’s his grandson. I’m trying to keep it in the family, just like Torkel and Magnus did. Only we’re not big enough. There aren’t enough jobs for all of them. We only have five of them here.”

  “I have two of our old-time paniolos at the dude ranch, too,” Inge said. “But we had to let the rest go. Sad.”

  “I hired one to help out at Hui Ho’olana,” Hedwig put in. “Hogan Lekelesa, but it didn’t work out. For some reason, he just couldn’t fit in.”

  “Listen, folks,” John said, as the conversation continued to stray. “There’s one other thing you probably want to be thinking about, because it might raise some trouble for you.”

  “The wills,” said Keoni. “Hoo boy.”

  “That’s right. I’m no expert, and neither is Doc here, but we were thinking this might mean that since Torkel died after Magnus—we think—that Magnus’s will isn’t valid, never was valid—”

  “And Torkel’s will goes into effect instead?” Hedwig exclaimed. “After all this time? Would they really do that?”

  “Sheesh,” Axel said, slumping in his chair. “What a mess.”

  “We don’t know,” John said. “But if you want my advice, you better talk to a lawyer.”

  “Felix is a lawyer,” said Inge. “What did he say?”

  “It never came up. We didn’t think of it until we were on the way here.”

  Gideon, more out of curiosity than anything else, was trying to figure out a way of asking what was in Torkel’s will without seeming to pry, when John, with his customary directness, saved him the trouble.

  “So what did Torkel’s will say? Does anybody know?”

  At which there was a lot of throat-clearing and foot-shuffling until Inge reluctantly spoke up. “Well, sure, because his will had to go through probate before Magnus’s could become effective. But we knew long before that,” she said with a shake of her head.

  At a somber party on his seventieth birthday, it seemed, a melancholy Torkel, suffering from intimations of mortality, had announced that he had recently changed his will, and he felt it his duty to inform them of the new provisions, so that they wouldn’t be caught by surprise when the sad time came. Formerly, his will had been almost a carbon copy of Magnus’s, but after much earnest thought he had arrived at the conclusion that it was best for people to earn their own way in life; that large inheritances were morally corrupting. Thus, he no longer had it in mind to leave the ranch to his descendants, either in pieces, as Magnus had done, or as a whole. According to his new will, the nieces and nephews would each have gotten token, lump-sum bequests of approximately $10,000. But the great mass of the estate—the Hoaloha Ranch and its remaining assets—would have been placed in the hands of a charitable trust, the profits going to a home for indigent Swedish merchant seamen in Stockholm, with the exception that his sister Dagmar be generously provided for (even more generously than under Magnus’s will) for the rest of her life.

  In other words, Gideon thought, if Magnus’s will were to be invalidated now, and Torkel’s will executed in its place, Hedwig, Inge, Axel, and Felix would lose everything. No wonder they were looking a little hangdog.

  “Well, now, wait a minute,” Inge said, “it may not be an issue at all. Gideon, let’s say you look at the autopsy photographs or whatever, and you’re not able to say for sure whether it is or isn’t Magnus.”

  “Which is highly probable,” Gideon said.

  “So in that case, it wouldn’t be proven that Magnus died before Torkel—or after him, or anything. Wouldn’t that mean that Magnus’s will would stand as it is? There’d be no concrete basis for going over to Torkel’s will.”

  “Beats me,” Gideon said. “That’s way out of my line.”

  “Well, I tell you,” Keoni said knowledgeably, “I’ve had a little experience with wills, and the way I think it’s going to play out is that it’ll all depend on whether the Seamen’s Home wants to take us to court over it. They might not.”

  “They’d have to hear about it first,” Inge said grimly, then laughed to show she was joking. “But the thing is, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Felix gets back home tomorrow, doesn’t he? We’ll see what he says. In the meantime, let’s see what Gideon turns up or doesn’t turn up when he looks at the report.”

  Everyone appeared to agree with this.

  Gideon looked at his watch. “It’s four-fifteen. A little late to start with the police today. Let’s wait till tomorrow.”

  That seemed to end the discussion. People were getting to their feet when Gideon exclaimed: “Oh, I almost forgot. The Ocean Quest people were going to drop off another box here. Did they ever do that? I mean, besides the foot bones.”

  “Yes, they did,” Axel said. “We were out when they came, but they left them with Kilia—our housekeeper. It’s on the kitchen counter. What is all that junk, anyway?”

  When Gideon explained that it contained what might well be Torkel’s last effects and the family showed interest, Malani went to get it. A minute later she was back. “No, it’s not there,” she said to Axel. “I wonder if she put it away somewhere when she cleaned up this morning.”

  “Probably—you know Kilia and her clean countertops. We can ask her when she comes in tomorrow.”

  As they broke up, John approached Keoni. “So Keoni . . . how does a Haole show his racial tolerance?”

  Keoni grinned at him. “Hee, hee. By dating a Canadian.”

  GIDEON, Julie, and John had a quiet dinner—steak again—at the ranch house with Axel and Malani, during which, by mutual but unvoiced consent, no one talked about Torkel, Magnus, or the wills. They did, however, briefly di
scuss Dagmar.

  “Is she all right?” John asked. “She looked like absolute hell.”

  “She sure did,” Axel agreed. “Well, we’ve been raking up some pretty painful memories, but she’ll be all right. You know what a tough old bird she is.”

  “She also went in for her annual lube and oil change this afternoon,” Malani said, then laughed at the puzzled expressions on her guest’s faces. “That’s what she calls her annual physical at Kona Hospital. She stays overnight, and she’s always worried before she goes in . . . you wouldn’t think she was a hypochondriac, would you, but she is. But she always comes out with flying colors. She’ll make it to a hundred, you’ll see.”

  “Knock on wood,” Axel said and demonstrated on the table top.

  The rest of the dinner conversation was devoted to Axel’s ranting about a letter to West Hawaii Today in which a local environmental group had complained about pollution of the land due to cattle manure.

  “You should never, never confuse human waste with animal waste,” he fumed. “Cattle manure is not your everyday, ordinary crap, and cow droppings are not cat droppings. Cattle manure is nothing more nor less than a dilute multi-nutrient fertilizer filled with micro- and macro-nutrients that improve the soil—nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium. Not only that, it has physical advantages. It improves carbon exchange capacity, it increases water filtration, it does all kinds of beneficial things. Now, of course, I admit that the smell can sometimes be a little—”

  “What charming subjects we talk about at dinner,” Malani mused.

  Julie laughed. “At my house it’s skeletons and exit wounds.”

  “It is?” She thought about it. “Well, all things considered, I think I’d rather eat at your house.”

  That was the high point of the meal, and breakfast the next morning was much the same, with no talk of what was really on everyone’s minds. But afterward, when Malani and Axel left to attend to ranch affairs, John, Gideon, and Julie went out onto the porch. Breakfast had been a heavy affair of sourdough pancakes, thick-sliced bacon, potatoes, fresh pineapple and mangos, and pot after pot of thick coffee, and it felt good to stand out in the fresh morning air, looking out over the morning-mist-cloaked hills, feeling the dew on their faces and listening to the hollow, distant lowing of cattle they couldn’t see.