by Aaron Elkins
Shirley stared at Anna, angry and off balance. “What are you talking about? You're crazy!” She turned back to Tremaine. “Hey, what's going on here? What are you trying to do?"
"I'm not trying to do anything, Miz Yount—"
"Will you call me Shirley, for Christ's sake?” Her increase in self-assertion over the last several days had not made her personality any the more attractive.
"—Shirley, except to tell the story as I saw it unfold. Sometimes, I'm afraid, it's necessary to put aside our personal feelings in the interest—"
"My sister was not amoral, Jack! My s—"
"The hell she wasn't!"
This ringing corroboration came, amazingly, from Elliott Fisk—Elliott, who had been eleven in 1960.
Shirley rounded on him, her face reddening. “What the hell do you know about it, you little turd?"
"I know what I know,” Fisk said mysteriously, uncowed by Shirley's toothy hostility. “I know she was ruining my uncle's life."
"She was ruining Steve's life? Ha-HAH! Really! Jesus!"
"Oh, yes?” Fisk's thin voice rose spitefully. “Oh, yes? Well, I hate to tell you this—Miz Yount—but it's all in his diary. All the one-night stands she had with anybody who—"
"What are you talking about? What are you talking about?” Shirley tore her big glasses off and jabbed them at Fisk. “You listen to me, you slimy, sick-minded...slimy..."
"That's enough now,” Tremaine said, employing a trick he had of relaxing his vocal cords so that his voice seemed to swell. His voice of authority. “Organlike,” Television Radio Age had once called it. “I fully understand,” he said, tempering command with compassion. “In a difficult situation like this our emotions sometimes—"
He stopped with Fisk's words still echoing in his mind. He looked directly at the dentist.
"Ah, diary?"
"Well, journal."
"Journal? Steven kept a journal?” Why had Tremaine not known of this?
"To the last morning of his life,” Fisk said, with every appearance of satisfaction. “They found it in his room back in Gustavus. It went to my father with the rest of his things.” He paused to study Tremaine's face and smiled meanly. “I didn't think you knew about it. Oh, it's just filled with information. On all sorts of things."
Tremaine shifted his feet. Just what was being driven at here? He didn't care for this journal business at all. Or the tone of Fisk's voice. Or that smirk.
"And you've seen this journal?” he asked.
Fisk wordlessly held up a flat blue-bound notebook.
"I think we better get a few things straight here.” This from Shirley, who had gotten her second wind. “First, I'm not going to sit still while my sister gets bad-mouthed by anybody.” She glowered at Tremaine, at Fisk, at Anna. “Second,” and here the baleful gaze returned to impale Fisk again, “Jocelyn didn't ruin Steve's life; it was the other way around. From the day she was stupid enough to fall in love with that pretentious, self-righteous creep—"
"Oh, now, just a—just a minute.” Fisk, blinking rapidly, pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. “I won't have this. When your sister met Steve she was just a lousy waitress, and you know it. Had she even finished college? Was she headed anywhere? It was Steve who—"
"Now, now,” began Tremaine, organlike. “I believe we're getting off the sub—"
"Ha-HAH!” It was not a sound that even Tremaine could talk through.
"It was Steve who what?” Shirley cried. “Who told her that the great Steven Fisk couldn't waste his time on a lousy waitress? Who made her finish up her stupid degree and then go to graduate school on top of it? So she was killing herself taking classes full time and still working in a goddamn Chinese restaurant, humping dishes every night to support herself, while he sat around on his ass, on a scholarship? Tell me, did he ever try to help her out—"
"This is ridiculous!” Fisk burst out, his arms spread. By now they were making their cases to the rest of the group, as if pleading before a jury. “Somebody tell me, is there supposed to be something wrong with motivating a person to go back to school? I mean, here's somebody who was a waitress since she was fifteen, right? No motivation, no drive. She drops out of college after three years and goes back to being a waitress. What kind of life was she headed for? But then she meets Steve—"
"Just what the hell is wrong with being a waitress?” Shirley interrupted, her coarse cheeks pink. “I want to know. She was happy, she didn't want to be a scientist—a botanist, for Christ's sake—"
At a movement near the top of the stairs to the right of the fireplace, Tremaine turned his head. “Ah, Dr. Oliver,” he said hurriedly. “Thank you for coming."
Gideon hesitated. “Uh, if this isn't a good time..."
"No, no, come in. We were just waiting for you. There's a chair over there for you.” He smiled. “Try not to trip over Dr. Judd's legs."
* * * *
Gideon came in reluctantly, feeling like an intruder. He'd inadvertently overheard the argument and had been in the act of trying to back inconspicuously down the stairs when Tremaine had spotted him.
He was welcomed by the botanist with smooth assurance and introduced all around. Chairs scraped on the wooden floor as the six people rearranged themselves to fit him into the semicircle in front of the hearth. The movement seemed to clear the air. Eyes shifted to the large paper bag he'd brought with him and placed on one of the low, round side tables.
"I'm afraid I don't have very much to tell you,” he said. Briefly he went over as much as he and Owen had agreed they should know.
"The bones you found yesterday are almost certainly from the 1960 survey party. What we have are the near-complete skeleton of a right foot, a segment of a jawbone, and part of a right femur—a thigh bone."
"We know what ‘femur’ means,” Elliott Fisk grumbled.
"They belong to one or more males in their mid-twenties,” Gideon went on. “That's about all I can tell right now."
"And did you find any more today?” Tremaine asked.
"Yes,” Gideon said offhandedly. “Part of a cranium."
He watched Tremaine, who brushed impassively at a bit of lint on his crisply pressed trousers.
"Males?” Shirley asked. “Then there aren't any...any remains of my sister?"
He shook his head. “I'm sorry, no. Everything so far seems to be male. The rangers will be doing some more searching near Tirku in the next few days; they might turn up some more.” They would be doing it by themselves. His only pair of heavy shoes would take a week to dry.
He waited for more questions. They watched him noncommittally. Where was the “burning interest” Tremaine had talked about? Or was it Tremaine himself who was so eager to know exactly what he'd found out? He glanced at him again, but Tremaine merely returned the look with a faint, meaningless smile.
Gideon fidgeted in his chair. He was uncomfortable with the residue of tension still in the atmosphere, uncomfortable with the macabre situation he found himself in—talking so matter-of-factly to next of kin about their relatives’ mandibles and crania. And uncomfortable with his role in things so far. He had, in effect, practically accused Tremaine of murder, but Tremaine knew nothing about it. A secret accusation. Gideon was anxious for things to be out on the table. Tomorrow, he hoped; maybe even this evening. But that would be up to Owen.
It was Gerald Pratt who broke the silence. He pointed with the stem of his pipe at the paper bag Gideon had brought. “What's in the sack?"
"These are some items of clothing and equipment we found today. The chief park ranger asked me to show them to you to see if you could identify them."
Pratt put the pipe back in his mouth, leaned back, and crossed one skinny, sharp-shinned leg over the other, “Well, let ‘er rip."
"By all means,” said Tremaine. Was it Gideon's imagination, or did he suddenly look shifty?
The bag rustled noisily while Gideon got it open, and now for the first time they all showed what seemed to be g
enuine curiosity, if not quite “burning” interest. The ragged strip of plaid cloth was not recognized by anyone, although Walter Judd thought that Jocelyn Yount might have had such a shirt. But neither Anna nor Tremaine was willing to confirm this, and after a minute Judd began doubting it too, finally talking himself out of the notion. Gideon put the material back in the sack.
"Shouldn't that be kept in a plastic bag?” Fisk asked disapprovingly.
"Not while it's wet. Putting it in a plastic bag is the last thing you'd want to do."
Fisk's lips compressed. He wasn't so sure about that.
Gideon took the eyeglass frames from the sack and laid them on the table where they could be seen. They were from an inexpensive pair of sunglasses, in the wraparound style that had been popular in the sixties, and had now been twisted back into an approximation of their original shape. “Ban-Sun” was stamped on the inside of one of the aluminum temple pieces.
"You know, that looks familiar,” Judd said, tapping his lower lip with a finger.
"Everything looks familiar to you,” Anna said. “Maybe you should go back to sleep."
Judd chuckled as happily as if she'd complimented him. “No, now wait, just wait a minute.” He appealed to Tremaine. “Don't you remember one of those boys wearing a pair like that? I think it was James Pratt. I'm almost sure it was. Or was it Steve?"
Tremaine frowned. “I do remember something..."
"Were they—” Gerald Pratt's voice caught in his throat. He swallowed. “With orange lenses?” he asked Judd. “Jimmy always said to wear orange sunglasses. Said they filtered the ultraviolet rays or something."
"You know, I think that's right,” Judd said slowly.
Tremaine snapped his fingers. “By God, you are right. I remember now. Wraparound orange sunglasses; ugly things.” He looked at Gideon. “You think these might be James's?"
Gideon didn't answer. With his tongue between his teeth, he was busy probing with a ballpoint pen at the collapsed browpiece of the glasses, a thin, straight band of metal folded into a U-shaped trough and then crimped to hold the missing plastic lens. After a few seconds he managed to get the point between the crimped edges and push out onto his palm the tiny, shiny particle that had caught his eye. He looked at it briefly, then turned his hand over so that it dropped onto the white Formica surface of the little table in front of him. A scrap of broken plastic no bigger than a fingernail paring. Gleaming. Transparent.
Tangerine-colored.
A murmur went around the group, a soft “ah” of appreciation.
"Those Jimmy's then?” Pratt asked huskily. He had gotten out of his chair to come tentatively closer.
"It looks as if they are,” Gideon said gently. He held the frames out to him on the palm of his hand.
Pratt pulled momentarily back as if they might sting him, then came forward again, taking them gingerly from Gideon, turning them over, staring at them, trying to find God knows what. The muscles in his throat worked.
"Just turned twenty-five,” he said thickly. “My baby brother, you know."
Abruptly he thrust the frames back at Gideon. With his other hand he stuck his pipe into his mouth and took two quick, furious puffs, blowing out rather than sucking in. Glowing sparks of tobacco popped from the metal bowl.
"Would I get to keep ‘em?” he asked. “After you people've finished with ‘em?"
"I think so,” Gideon said. Empathy had made his own throat tight. “I can't see why not."
"Good, then.” He wiped the back of his hand across his nose, shrugged, and went back to his chair, chewing on the pipe. The shoulders of his bright blue coveralls hunched slackly away from his body as he sat down, as if he had shrunk inside them.
"Well, then,” Gideon said into the awkward silence, “one more thing."
As soon as he took the broken ice ax from the sack, Anna spoke out sharply.
"It's one of ours. An Alpiner."
Judd nodded gravely. “Right you are. I remember."
"Were they all exactly the same?” Gideon asked. “Is there any way to distinguish one from another?"
"After thirty years,” Tremaine snapped, “you expect us to remember who wrapped red tape around the handle and who used yellow? Not that there's any tape left on this one. Really, is there some purpose to this?"
"I'm just trying to come up with anything that might be useful in identifying the remains. If we knew for sure whose ice ax that was, it could help."
"Well, it seems as if you'll have to figure it out on your own,” Tremaine said impatiently. He closed the loose-leaf binder in front of him, tucked it under his arm, and stood up with the brittle agility of a man who worked hard at aging gracefully. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Oliver. And now, if there's nothing else, the fire is dead, the Icebreaker Lounge is open for business, and I, for one, am in dire need of the comfort of a Rob Roy.” With a nod he was gone, his rich voice seeming to hang in the air behind him.
Tremaine's voice was all his own. Like the larger-than-life stars of Hollywood's golden era—Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne—he had created a way of speaking that was to be found in no one else on the planet. Lush but nasal, British but American, elegant but intimate.
About what you'd expect, was Gideon's grumpy and uncharitable thought, if you crossed John Gielgud with W. C. Fields.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 8
* * * *
"Five-squad. Lau."
"Mr. Lau? The SAC would like to see you, please."
With his shoulder hunched to prop the telephone receiver against his ear, John continued to fill out a quarterly progress report. Christ, the bureau put you through a lot of paperwork. Which was saying something, coming from a man who had put in four years in the NATO Security Directorate.
"Now?” he said, writing.
"Well, no, naturally not,” Charlie Appletree's secretary purred, “not if you have something more important to do."
"Yeah, well, you see, my paper clips have gotten kind of tangled up and I was counting on separating them this afternoon. And you know how the telephone cord gets all twisted around itself? I was planning—"
Melva switched to her gravel voice, one of many, “All right, Lau. Get your ass up here right now.” Melva was a buxom, apple-cheeked woman in her fifties who had been Appletree's secretary for twenty-two years. Sassing whoever she pleased was one of her undisputed perks. “Or do you want me to come down there and drag you up by the—"
"No, ma'am,” John said. “Right away, ma'am."
Smiling, he headed for the stairwell and climbed to the seventh floor. Appletree's office was an airy, properly impressive corner room in various shades of tan, with two big windows looking down rain-wet Madison Street toward the Seattle waterfront. There was a slate-gray sliver of Puget Sound visible between the buildings if you leaned in the right direction and looked hard. The other two windows, the ones overlooking the enormous peeling painting of Canadian geese in flight on the side of the old Warshall's sporting-goods building, and beyond that the tacky storefronts of First Avenue, were discreetly shuttered by beige venetian blinds.
The huge kidney-shaped desk—a table really, with no drawers—held a blotter, a small vase of fresh daisies, a picture of Appletree's wife and children, and a pen-and-pencil set on a marble base. There wasn't a paper on the oiled walnut top and there never was, a fact that always impressed visitors. John, however, was aware that the inconspicuous door to the left of the desk did not open into a small room with a cot, as was popularly believed, but into a comfortable office with an old desk that was every bit as cluttered as John's was. This big room, with its American flag, its wall-mounted FBI seal, and its authoritative serenity, was strictly for guests; a reception room, so to speak.
Appletree was at the desk speaking into a dictating machine, his jacket off, immaculate white shirtsleeves turned back onto hairless forearms in wide, crisply perfect folds. When John came in he gestured toward the grouping of upholstered chairs
around a coffee table in the corner.
Atop the table was a small, dark-brown bust with a lean, long-nosed head. On his first visit to the office, John, nervously looking for something to talk about, had picked it up and examined it.
"You're looking at my hero,” Appletree had said. “Know who it is?"
"Lincoln? Before he had a beard?"
"Machiavelli."
John still didn't know whether it was or it wasn't. He'd found a picture of Machiavelli somewhere and concluded that Appletree might have been telling the truth.
The SAC came over to join him and fell into one of the chairs, rubbing the top of his crew cut with the flat of his hand. It sounded like a scrubbing brush on tile.
"Well, your pal did it again."
"My pal?” Not that he couldn't sense what was coming. “Oliver. He screwed things up again."
"In one day?"
Appletree put his hands in his pockets, stretched out his legs, and leaned the back of his head against the high back of his chair, looking up at the ceiling. “Amazing, isn't it."
"What do you mean, screwed up?"
"As in ‘complicated.'” He tilted his head back to level and looked at John. “He says those bones show evidence of homicide."
John stared at him. “Murder by avalanche?"
"Murder by pickax. Ice ax, rather. You have any idea what an ice ax is?"
John shook his head. “So then the bones aren't from those scientists who got caught in the avalanche?"
"Wrong. They are."
"I don't get it."
"Join the crowd, John."
Melva came in holding a mug in each hand: tea for the SAC and coffee for John.
"So glad you were able to make it, Mr. Lau,” she said pleasantly.
"I believe John takes cream, Melva,” Appletree said, “and sugar too. Right, John?"
It was like Appletree to remember that kind of personal detail, even with seventy agents working for him. John smiled. The SAC probably kept a file on everyone in that little office next door and reviewed it before anybody came in.