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

by Where There's A Will

  So deeply was she mired in resentment and recrimination that his presence didn’t register again until she sensed it just behind her. Her neck prickled. He was standing too close. She didn’t like that, didn’t like anyone looking right down at the top of her scalp. She should have slipped the wig on, damn it.

  He was so close now that she felt his belt buckle brush against the back of her head. Repulsed, she pulled angrily to one side to get away from him. “Now see here—”

  But when his hand clamped on her shoulder from behind like some terrible talon, the air went out of her, as much from astonishment as pain. What . . . what . . .

  Too quickly for her to absorb, his other hand closed on her wrist, and she was somehow no longer in contact with the earth, but flopping wildly in the air, dropping like a stone toward the sharp, black rocks that rimmed the cove. She goggled at them, and then at the cloudless blue sky as she tumbled, mouth open, eyes wide with incomprehension.

  What ... what ...

  EIGHTEEN

  THE needle-sharp bisection of the North Kohala lowlands into parched lava fields and huge, lavish coastal resorts is stunning. On one side of the coast highway is a brown, dusty, lifeless plain of a’a lava. On the other is the lushest landscape that can be imagined: thick, soft grass, palm trees, frangipani, jacaranda, glorious masses of wonderfully fragrant blossoms—red, orange, white, purple. Two people could walk along the border, practically hand in hand, for miles, with one in a moist, green land of tropical plants, bright colors, and verdant lawns all the way, and the other never leaving a blasted, barren moonscape of jagged, dun-colored rocks.

  Taking the turnoff for the Outrigger and the other Waikoloa area resorts, John, Julie, and Gideon turned abruptly from the latter into the former, heading down a broad, curving parkway lined with lush trees and redolent with every sweet smell of the tropics.

  “I’ve been thinking . . .” Julie began.

  “Uh-oh,” John said. He’d been in one of his funks ever since the session with Fukida, and this was as close as he’d come to a coherent sentence in a while. They’d picked up Julie, had a late lunch at the Greek restaurant, and headed back to the hotel, all without any notable input from him.

  Gideon looked over his shoulder at him. “John, do you know that whenever anybody says, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ you say, ‘uh-oh’?”

  “Not anybody. Mostly just you two.” He laughed and sat himself up straighter in the back seat, signs that he was ready to rejoin the world. As his funks went, it had been a long one.

  “What have you been thinking, Julie?” Gideon asked.

  “Well, you know how you keep wondering why they let you get involved with this thing in the first place? I think I know.”

  That surprised him. “Why?”

  “Well, who exactly asked you to go out to that atoll?”

  “They all asked him,” John said.

  “That’s right,” Gideon agreed.

  “No, that’s not what you said when you first told me about it. You said Malani asked you.”

  We did? Gideon thought.

  “Umm . . .” said John, thinking.

  “Yes, you did. You said she was the one that called the salvage company, and when she came back from talking to them, she said—”

  “She said they didn’t know how to handle skeletons,” Gideon remembered, “and she volunteered me.”

  “That’s right, and why wouldn’t she? From what Inge and Dagmar said, she didn’t know anything about the cover-up. She didn’t know there was anything to hide.”

  “That’s a good point, but look, they all agreed to it, no objections. Why would they do that? Felix even put us up in Honolulu.”

  “What choice did they have?” Julie countered. “Think about it. How would it have looked if they said no you couldn’t, after the salvage company said they wanted you and you said you would?”

  “But how could they not have worried that I’d find out it was Torkel in that plane? You’d think they’d have come up with some excuse, any excuse, to keep me from—”

  A snort of laughter came from the back seat. “They didn’t worry because you told them there was nothing to worry about.”

  “I told them?”

  “You said—and I pretty much quote—that with any luck you could maybe tell the age, the sex, the race, and, um . . .”

  “The approximate height,” Gideon supplied. “All of which would have fitted Magnus as much as it did Torkel. I think you’ve hit on it, Julie. Malani didn’t know she was putting her foot in it—”

  “Or Torkel’s foot,” John said, throwing up his hands. “Sorry.”

  “—but when she did, the others went along with it because they thought they were safe. Good thinking, Julie. That’d explain it.”

  “Amazing,” John said. “She wasn’t even there and she remembers it better than we do.”

  “Thank you,” Julie said happily. “Shall I go on?”

  “There’s more?”

  “Oh, yes. Who was it that got you to look at the autopsy report after you got back from the atoll?”

  John and Gideon looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “Malani?” they both offered.

  She nodded crisply. “Yes. And I was there for that one.”

  “You’re right,” Gideon said, thinking back to the gathering on Axel’s porch. “Malani was the one who forced the issue . . . again.”

  “That’s right, she was,” John said. “Malani’s like that. If she gets an idea in her head, she doesn’t hang back.”

  “But this time the others did,” Gideon said. “Remember? Hedwig wanted to put me in a lotus leaf instead, and Axel didn’t want to stir things up, and Inge wanted to let him rest in peace—”

  “But then the two of you convinced them they’d better have you do it, right?” Julie said. “So it was like the first time. How could they say no without making it obvious they were covering something up—even if they thought you might find out about the ring?”

  “Ah, ah!” John exclaimed; he was completely back in form now. “But they didn’t think we were going to find out about the ring. The ring wasn’t in the autopsy report, it was in the case files! And as far as they knew, we weren’t going to be looking at the case files!”

  Gideon slowly nodded. “It all makes sense.”

  Julie tapped her mouth, covering a yawn of mock boredom. “Anything else I can help you boys with, you just let me know. Oh, look, here’s the Outrigger. Swimming pool, here I come. And I’m for another moratorium through tonight. Tomorrow is another day.”

  “Me too,” Gideon said.

  John raised his hand. “Count me in. Enough is enough.”

  FAUSTINO Parra arranged the place-setting the way the old lady liked it on windless days like this: on the round, glass-topped table at the foot of her terrace, with the Spanish-tile fountain behind her and the big blue Pacific spread out in front of her. He removed three of the four chairs—they made her feel lonely, she said—and opened the zipper of the thermal carton a couple of inches more so that her dinner wouldn’t continue to baste in its own juices. Oyster stew, grilled moonfish with black-olive polenta and shiitake mushrooms, and, in a separate cooler bag, a half-bottle of Sauvignon blanc and a macadamia-nut torte topped with currants, whipped cream, and toasted coconut for desert. For a woman who couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds, she could certainly put the stuff away, he thought respectfully. Not that a lot of it didn’t go to the turtles, of course.

  He stood back, took one more look at the setting, straightened the silverware so that it lined up perfectly with the bottom edge of the bamboo place mat, nodded with satisfaction, checked his bowtie to make sure that it was straight, and went to find her at her cove, looking forward to bringing her back.

  He hadn’t always looked forward to it. At first, he’d actively disliked her. It didn’t seem right to him that a woman—let alone a woman of that age—smelled morning and night like the inside of a bar after a hard day: booze and cigars
. And the way she waited for him to offer his arm, as if she was the queen of Hungary or something. That wasn’t part of his job and he’d resented it. She hadn’t made things any better when he handed her her first bill to be signed. “Now Raymond,” she’d said (sometimes it was “Raymond,” sometimes “Steven,” once in a while “Faustino”), “let’s get something clear right at the start. I can’t be bothered with calculating percentages every time I sign for something, you understand? So you keep track of what you bring, and whenever the amount comes to four hundred dollars, you tell me and I will tip you accordingly. Is that satisfactory?”

  What could he say but yes? But in his heart he simmered. Why should he have to ask for his tip? It was demeaning. More than that, he assumed it was her way of getting out of tipping him at all, in hopes that he wouldn’t have the nerve to bring it up. But he had, and two weeks later when he told her that her bill to date had been $405.24, she smiled and handed him two crisp fifty-dollar bills that she’d had all ready and waiting—over and above the automatic eighteen percent that had already been added for service.

  It had blown him away. And it was in cash, that was the best part. Nothing to go into the service pool, nothing to be declared as income. It had made all the difference in the world. He still didn’t like the way her breath smelled, and he still didn’t like the way her fingers dug into his arm like hard little toothpicks, but she was good for a minimum of $200 a month, his best customer by a mile; he’d come to depend on it. More than that, he’d eventually come around to actually liking her. After you got to know her, you began to see her good side. She was generous, she was funny, she had a lot of good points.

  And now he had another $400 to report; $418, actually, but nowadays he returned her generosity by regularly rounding down, something that made him feel good. Besides, he suspected that she kept a more accurate account than he did, so it was another way of staying on her good side. His money had really been due that morning, when he’d brought the pastries, but she’d had company and he didn’t like asking in front of them.

  As he approached the curve that opened onto the promontory he paused to scuff his feet a bit on the gravel so that she’d have time to get that pathetic wig on, but when he rounded it he came to an abrupt stop. She wasn’t there waiting for him; something that had never happened before in all these months. There was an empty, overturned pastry basket on the ground next to the bench, and on the bench itself there was something black, silky . . . the wig.

  His throat constricted. This wasn’t right. Something was wrong. He crossed himself without knowing it, held his breath, took two quick steps to the rim of the promontory, and looked over.

  “Oh, my God,” he said and turned his face away, retching.

  “CALL for you on two,” Sarah told Fukida over the telephone.

  “Who?”

  “Two people on the line. Ms. Sakado, the day manager at the Mauna Kai, and a waiter named Faustino Parra—who’s a little hysterical, so be gentle with him.”

  “What’s it about, do you know?”

  “Something about the Torkelssons again.”

  He laughed a little wildly. “Of course. What else could it be? Why did I bother asking?”

  “You can handle it, boss. I have complete confidence.”

  He punched the button for line two. “Sergeant Fukida,” he said, doodling horses on his note pad, “how can I help you?”

  Five seconds later the doodling had stopped. The pen had been thrown down. “Jesus. We’ll be right there. Don’t let anyone within fifty yards of her.”

  ARRANGED neatly over a low glass table on the broad, columned terrace of the Outrigger on a sunny morning, overlooking an agreeable panorama of man-made streams, waterfalls, and exquisitely tended tropical gardens, the lurid photographs seemed wildly out of place: blood and trauma and violent death.

  Julie and Gideon had met John for morning coffee while John waited to be picked up by Fukida on the way to Dagmar’s house just a couple of miles up the coast. They had gotten lattés and muffins at the lobby coffee bar and carried them out to the terrace to enjoy them in the fresh air. When Fukida hadn’t shown up at 8:45, as agreed, they’d gotten seconds on the lattés. At 9:05, he arrived.

  “Hey, you’re late,” John began, “I thought you were the one who always—” But the look on Fukida’s face stopped him. “What’s the matter?”

  Fukida hesitated, looking at Julie. “And this lady . . . ?”

  “My wife, Julie,” Gideon said. “Julie, this is Sergeant Fukida.”

  Fukida nodded a curt greeting and sat down. “Dagmar’s dead,” he said.

  He was wearing a shapeless tweed jacket, trousers that almost but didn’t quite match it, and a nondescript tie. No baseball cap. He seemed diminished, like an over-aged, undernourished department store clerk.

  The three of them stared at him and he quickly explained. Her body was discovered by a waiter from the Mauna Kai at five o’clock the day before, at the base of a twenty-foot cliff near her house.

  John closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Ah, no.”

  “The doc says death occurred somewhere between noon and four yesterday, resulting from severe injuries to the head, apparently from the fall.”

  “An accident?” Gideon asked. “Or—”

  That was when the photographs came out. “You two are good with pictures. You tell me.” But he held on to them, looking at Julie before laying them out. “These are pretty graphic, ma’am. You might not want to—”

  “That’s all right, I’ll stay,” Julie said, which surprised Gideon. “I want to know. There was something about her,” she said to him by way of explanation. “I liked her. . . .”

  “Yeah, and if you’re married to him, I guess you’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Fukida said, fanning the photos out over the table. “So where do you get the coffee?”

  They pointed him toward the coffee bar, and as he left they began going through the color photos. Fukida had apparently brought only a select few; six altogether. Gideon lifted the first one. It had been taken at the top of the promontory, an overview of the bench and the area around it.

  “What is that, her wig?” Julie asked.

  “Looks like it,” said John. “So we know one thing it wasn’t, anyway.”

  “Right, we know it wasn’t suicide,” Gideon agreed. “People like to look nice when they kill themselves. She’d never have done it, letting strangers find her without the wig.”

  “Not Auntie Dagmar, that’s for sure,” John said.

  The rest were photographs of the body, going from full-body shots to close-ups of Dagmar’s bloodied head. Julie swallowed and looked away once or twice, but stuck it out. One of them had been made after unbuttoning the top two buttons of Dagmar’s blouse and pulling it down over her right shoulder.

  “It seems . . . indecent,” Julie said. “A dignified, private old woman like that—dead, helpless—exposed to public view like a . . . like a . . .”

  “It has to be done,” John said softly. “And not many people see these.”

  “I know that.”

  “Ah, look at this,” Gideon said. He tapped the area just to the right of her bared neck, where even Dagmar’s scrawny trapezius muscle created a triangular cushion of flesh above the collar bone. “These three blueish spots . . . you can hardly see two of them . . . that’s extravasated blood just under the skin.”

  “Would that be ‘bruises’ in English?” Julie asked.

  “Yes, bruises.”

  “Fingermarks,” John said.

  Gideon nodded. He poured a little coffee onto a napkin, wet his index finger, middle finger, and ring finger with it, and grasped the edge of the table, his thumb underneath, pinching hard. When he lifted his hand, there was a curving row of three spots on the glass, to all intents and purposes exactly like the bruises on Dagmar’s shoulder.

  “Somebody grabbed her from behind—hard—maybe while she was sitting on the bench.” He gently placed his fingers on
Julie’s shoulder to illustrate, his thumb in back.

  She shivered. “And pushed her over the edge?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “So what’s the verdict?” Fukida asked, coming back with his cardboard cup of coffee; the four-dollar vente size.

  “Murder,” John said. “You agree?”

  “Sure, no question about it. Also—and this you probably can’t tell from the pictures—she was laying a good four feet from the base of the cliff. No way did she just fall off, or even jump. Somebody shoved her, good and hard.”

  “Or threw her,” Julie said. “How hard would it have been? She’s nothing but skin and bones.”

  “That’s true, too.”

  “Fingerprints?” John asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you check the bench? The paint might have been soft from being out in the sun, there might—”

  “Johnny, for Christ’s sake! Of course I checked the bench. We dusted everything. Give me a little credit, will you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, whoever did it wore gloves.”

  “How can you know that?” Julie asked.

  “We picked up some glove-leather impressions. One on her watch, one, maybe two, on the bench.”

  “Glove smears,” John said. “That’s not gonna do you much good.”

  Fukida shrugged. “Yeah, well.”

  “What about suspects?” Gideon asked, handing back the photos.

  “Oh, yeah, suspects, we got suspects.” He sucked coffee through the opening in the lid, made a face, and twisted the lid off to get a healthy mouthful. Gideon could smell the sprinkling of chocolate on top. “The kid that found her, the waiter, he was there earlier, too, delivering pastries to her at about one—”

  “One?” John interrupted. “Wait a minute, that means the noon end of the TOD range is wrong. It had to be after that.”

  Fukida put a finger to his temple and looked archly at him. “Whoa, not too much gets by this guy.”