Curses!

by Aaron Elkins

  "If it's still wet,” he'd once told the FBI's John Lau, “call somebody else, will you?” Not that the FBI always obliged.

  Stan Ard's head was still wet, and while Gideon didn't react the way he had the first time he'd been called in to look at a corpse with a massive cranial wound (he'd thrown up into a stainless-steel sink in San Francisco's Hall of Justice, scandalizing the medical examiner's staff), his stomach did turn queasily over.

  "Well, I'm not a pathologist or a medical doctor, you know, Dr. Plumm. I'm an anthropologist. I don't really—"

  "But you're the Skeleton Detective,” Plumm replied, as if that said it all. “I've never been called upon to do this before, you see—to be the physician on the scene of a murder—and of course it's terrifically exciting, but I—well, there are more police on their way from Merida, and they've asked for my report, but I'm afraid I may have missed something that would be terribly obvious to someone with experience. I was hoping you might point out any oversights."

  He looked hopefully at Gideon with his mild, friendly eyes. His mustache was so meticulously trimmed it might have been two strips of white felt, neatly pasted on. “I should hate to look like a fool before the police."

  Gideon relented. “I'd be glad to help if I can, Doctor."

  Plumm relaxed visibly. “Well. I've made an examination, of course, although I thought I shouldn't touch anything before the police arrive. That's the proper drill, isn't it?"

  "Right."

  "Right, then. Of course, with a wound like that there was no question of resuscitation. The man's dead as mutton.” He winced. “Oh, I am sorry. He was a friend of yours, wasn't he?"

  "An acquaintance. I barely knew him."

  Gideon made himself look at Ard again. Nowadays it wasn't so much the gore, the simple physical nastiness, that made his insides twist. Despite himself, he'd seen enough to get past that. But not enough to do what a seasoned homicide investigator could do: look at murder victims and see nothing but clues, diagnostic indicators, evidential data. For bones, yes; for bodies, no. To Gideon, the overwhelming fact, the only fact for the first few moments, was always that of murder itself; of willful, blood-soaked violence; of one person's actually doing this to another; of the terrible penetrability of skin, the brittleness of bone. It was always pathetic, always sordid, always horrible.

  But Plumm had more experience of human penetrability, if not of murder. For him Ard was just another case, but of more than usual interest. “Well,” he said, and rubbed his dry, clean hands together, let me tell you what I've come up with, and you tell me where I've gone wrong, how's that?"

  "That's fine,” Gideon said, “but I'm sure you haven't gone wrong."

  Overhead a helicopter was clattering its way toward the Chichen Itza landing pad. Plumm peered up at it. “The police."

  Together they knelt at the side of the body.

  "No toque," growled the guard.

  "Gracias, senor, Comprendemos," Plumm replied politely. “Now,” he said, all business, “he must have been killed very shortly before he was found.” He pointed to Ard's poor, beefy, flaccid fingers. “There's no sign of rigor yet. There's no lividity yet, either, and the blood is still quite liquid. Of course, Lord knows evaporation takes forever in this climate, but I feel reasonably safe in saying he hasn't been dead more than two hours. More likely only one."

  He looked at Gideon. “Er, what do you think?"

  "You're the expert, but it sounds right to me."

  Plumm permitted himself a little gratified quirk of the lips. “Well, then, let's get on to the cause of death. Not much doubt as to that, is there, even if no one seems to have heard the report. A gunshot wound to the head."

  No, there wasn't much doubt as to that. Ard's forehead had literally exploded. Just below the hairline there was a dreadful, ragged wound nearly in the shape of a star, with curling petals of flesh peeling outward from its red center.

  Gideon turned his eyes away with a shudder. Maybe he'd never get used to this.

  "Now,” Plumm said with a mixture of reticence and enthusiasm, “what we seem to have here is an exit wound. Classic stellate pattern. The entrance must be in the back of the head, probably near the occiput, where we can't see it. But you can see that quite a bit of blood has soaked into the ground under his neck."

  He peeked at Gideon from under a neat white eyebrow. “How am I doing, Professor?"

  "Makes sense to me."

  Plumm's pink cheeks shone with pleasure. “May I give you my, er, reconstruction of events?"

  Gideon nodded. “I'd like to hear it."

  "Well, at first I was misled by the subcutaneous hemorrhaging in the orbits.” He pointed to Ard's eyes. The upper lids were blue, swollen sacks, as dark and shiny as little plastic trash bags. “I assumed he'd been confronted here on the path and there'd been a terrific fight; hence the black eyes. But"—he waved at the surrounding ground—"there's no sign at all of a struggle, at least none that I can see. And no other facial damage of the sort you'd expect, although it's impossible to say for sure until he's been cleaned up. So I had to conclude there was no fight, and the orbital hemorrhaging happened when his head hit the ground. He must have struck it quite hard. Does that sound plausible?"

  "I guess so,” Gideon said slowly, but something was bothering him now. He made himself look at the bullet wound again, at the curving, yellow plate of frontal bone that was visible through the thickening blood. There was something odd...

  "Now, as to what did happen,” Plumm was saying. “I think it's fairly clear. From those marks on the ground you can see where the chair had been standing, and that its back was only a few feet from the fence. He was obviously sitting there and—Do you mind if we stand up? My joints aren't what they were."

  Neither were Gideon's. They both rose, snapping and creaking. Plumm rubbed the small of his back. Gideon massaged his ribs.

  "At any rate,” Plumm went on, “inasmuch as he was shot in the back of the head, his killer had to have been on the other side of the fence. That would seem to suggest—although hardly prove—that it was an outsider; that is, not a fellow-guest at the hotel, but someone who wished to conceal his presence here.

  "I understand,” Gideon said.

  After a moment, Plumm continued. “But you know, this raises several intriguing questions: The murderer must have been lying in wait, probably in those bushes. How could he know that Ard would accommodate him by coming this way, sitting down right here? How—"

  Hurrying footsteps scraped on the flagstone walk behind them. The young police officer stiffened, and Gideon and Plumm turned. Marmolejo, accompanied by two men in civilian clothes lugging a two-handled metal trunk between them, was rounding a curve in the path.

  The homicide scene-of-the-crime crew of the Yucatecan State Judicial Police had arrived.

  * * * *

  One of the civilians immediately began taking pictures with an old-fashioned press camera. The other snapped open the metal case and began selecting his tweezers, brushes, and powders. Marmolejo stood looking impassively at the body for a long time, rolling his dead cigar from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue. He looked sidewise at Gideon. “And what might you be doing here, may I ask? Not that I'm anything but delighted to see you."

  Plumm replied, “I specifically asked him to assist me. I thought—he's a world-famous homicide authority, you see. Er, Dr. Oliver here is"—Gideon cringed; he knew what was coming.—"the Skeleton Detective."

  "Mm,” replied Marmolejo. He held out his hand to Plumm. “I'm Inspector Marmolejo, Doctor. What can you tell us?"

  With a nervous look at Gideon, the physician began a hesitant, near-verbatim repetition of his analysis, gaining confidence as Marmolejo listened intently, head down, staring hard at the body.

  "Thank you,” Marmolejo said at the conclusion. “That's very helpful."

  "Would you like me to put my, er, findings in a written report? I'd be delighted, if it would be of service."

&nbs
p; "Very good. The sooner the better. Could you write it now? Officer Hernandez will give you a form."

  When the excited Plumm had gone off, Marmolejo remained where he was, studying Ard. One of the two men in civilian clothes was now sketching in a pad; the other was on his knees, burrowing beetlelike under the fallen leaves, and now and again putting invisible things in plastic envelopes or paper sacks that he handed to the uniformed officer.

  Gideon waited until he was sure that Plumm was out of earshot. “Uh, Inspector, this really isn't my field—"

  "Very true, very true."

  He was decidedly less warm than usual, and Gideon couldn't blame him. World-famous experts were well and good in their place, but who really liked them horning in uninvited? Or even invited?

  "Still,” Gideon said carefully, “there are some things I'd like to point out."

  "Dr. Oliver, I'm going to be very busy here for a while, so perhaps you would be good enough to put your conclusions in a report too? I'll look forward to reading it.” His expression didn't suggest much enthusiasm over the prospect. He was looking at Gideon with his eyebrows lifted and his eyelids lowered, almost closed. His long mouth was turned down, with the cigar deep in one corner. “Will that be satisfactory?"

  Gideon was being dismissed, and none too subtly.

  "Look, Inspector,” he snapped, “you don't have to worry about satisfying me. You want to do it all by yourself, do it all by yourself. The hell with it."

  Before Marmolejo could respond he had turned and walked—strode, he hoped—away down the path.

  He was thoroughly embarrassed before he'd gone ten steps. Was this the way world-famous authorities acted? Since when did the Skeleton Detective resort to childish snits when his vanity was pricked?

  No, he would repent and humbly—well, dispassionately—submit the report that Marmolejo had asked for. The fact that the inspector happened to be irritable this morning was no reason for Gideon to shirk what was, in a sense, a duty.

  Because, except for the time of death, Dr. Plumm had gotten it all wrong. Every bit of it.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 17

  * * * *

  It wasn't that Javier Marmolejo didn't like Gideon Oliver. Far from it. Oliver was a very likeable man. In 1982, when the naive, semihysterical norteamericanos had threatened to turn the Tlaloc investigation into a farce, it had been his good-humored common sense that had saved the day. More than once, too, but of course he hadn't been el detective de equalities then, and that was the difference.

  He was, as Dr. Plumm had pointed out, a famous forensic expert now, not just another harmless anthropologist fooling around in the old cities, and Marmolejo had little patience with famous forensic experts. Oh, he'd learned at the academy about all the wonderful assistance they could provide, these pathologists and toxicologists, anthropologists and odontologists, and he had even seen them prove useful once or twice. All right, more than once or twice. But more often than not, things were more confusing when they got through than when they'd started. Especially with homicides. If someone gave him the choice, he'd throw them all out and make them earn an honest living in the universities.

  For Marmolejo, like most policemen, knew that murders didn't get solved in laboratories or under microscopes. When they got solved at all, they solved themselves. The killer confessed or inadvertently pointed the finger at himself, or else one of his friends crawled out from under a rock and did it for him.

  It wasn't “clues” that solved murders, it was informants. And the way to flush the bastards out was with old-fashioned police work—methodical, repetitive, and hard on the seat of the pants.

  He leaned forward in the thronelike old swivel chair he'd inherited from Colonel Ornelas in 1984, when the crooked old voluptuary had taken the money and run, only days before the well-deserved purge would have caught up with him. With his small brown hands clasped on his lap, Marmolejo looked down at the gleaming wooden desk in front of him.

  Inspector Marmolejo was an extremely tidy man. He took pride in the appearance of his desk. There were no notes, or reminders, or lists of telephone numbers slipped under the desk's thick glass top. And on the glass itself, no stacks of files, no manuals, no piles of unread reports. Nothing but whatever he was thinking about at the moment. And at this moment there were two handwritten sheets of business-size Hotel Mayaland stationery perfectly aligned with the front edge of the desk.

  He sighed, worked the unlit cigar a little deeper into the corner of his mouth, and slid the sheets closer to him. Gideon Oliver again. A memorandum. He read it for the second time.

  To: Inspector Marmolejo

  From: Gideon Oliver

  Subject: Stanley Ard—Circumstances of Death

  I'm afraid Dr. Plumm made a few understandable errors in his analysis of the shooting. This by no means reflects on his general competence, but only on his unfamiliarity with homicides.

  Here are my own conclusions:

  1. The wound in Ard's forehead is not an exit wound but an entrance wound. Although a gaping hole like this is usually caused by a slug's wobble on the way out, it can also happen once in a while in the case of a contact entrance wound—that is, when the gun is held against the skin as it's fired. What happens is that the muzzle gases have no chance to dissipate in the air, and instead expand immediately under the skin. And when there is bone directly under the skin—the skull, for instance—the gases are forced back against the underside of the skin with great force, often bursting through it and producing a jagged, stellate wound easily confused with an exit wound. (However, laboratory examination of the surrounding skin will usually show some powder residue and burning.)

  Sometimes some of the gases make it through the bone to the inside of the skull and expand there, blowing out the weakest parts of the cranium, which are the supraorbital plates, and filling the upper eyelids with blood. Almost certainly, this is what caused Ard's black eyes.

  As you know, this is not a typical situation. I misinterpreted it myself until I caught a glimpse of the bone beneath, and saw that the hole in the skull itself was an unmistakable entrance wound—small, round, and neat, with the outer table of the bone quite intact around the rim.

  2. If what I'm saying is correct, the interpretation of what happened has to be modified:

  a) Ard was shot from in front, not from behind.

  b) The killer was not lying in wait outside the fence, but on the hotel grounds with Ard. There's no reason to think he'd been trying to keep his presence here a secret from Ard or anyone else.

  c) Because the wound is a contact wound, requiring the killer to have been within arm's length, the killer may well have been someone Ard knew; very possibly someone he was friendly with.

  I'm sure you and your staff have reached these conclusions on your own by now, but I thought it would be best to submit something for the record. As to what it all adds up to, that's your job. If I can be of any help, I'd be glad to.

  If not, that's fine too.

  Marmolejo smiled thinly. Prickly, this Oliver. Well, at least you could understand what he wrote; not like some of them.

  He slid the sheets away with a grunt of annoyance. Whoever heard of this expansion-of-gas thing? This was Marmolejo's eighteenth homicide, and he'd never run into it before. And they'd certainly never mentioned it at the academy. As a result he'd initially accepted Plumm's findings. So had Dr. Lopez, the police pathologist, when he'd finally arrived. But that afternoon, after the autopsy, Lopez changed his tune.

  That's what made the whole thing so irritating. Oliver was right every step of the way.

  He stood and walked to the big window. Immediately below was Merida's colonial Plaza Mayor, a manicured island of greenery lapped on all four sides by the sluggish downtown traffic, most of which seemed to consist of extremely noisy, extremely smelly old trucks and buses.

  After the police department clean-up, there had been a scramble for the best of the newly available offices in the
Palacio de Gobierno, and to Marmolejo's surprise the heaviest fighting had been for the inside rooms, the ones overlooking the quiet courtyard with its modernistic murals chronicling the rise of the Mexican spirit. No one battled him for the colonel's roomy, old-fashioned office on the outside of the building; too much traffic noise, too much traffic stink. But Marmolejo liked the traffic. It stimulated his mind, made him alert and receptive. He'd had enough rustic peace and quiet back in Tzakol to last him for the rest of his life. He even liked the stink from the trucks, as long as it didn't get too bad.

  And he could happily get along without the modernistic murals chronicling the rise of the Mexican spirit.

  He walked back to the desk, put the memorandum in the to-be-filed box, pulled a fuzzily photocopied sheet out of a drawer, and stared impassively at it. The Curse of Tlaloc. He laid his finger alongside a now-familiar sentence in the middle of the page.

  Fourth, the one called Xecotcavach will pierce their skulls so that their brains spill onto the earth.

  Marmolejo didn't believe in curses. Not exactly. He didn't believe that Xecotcavach had come up from the Underworld and pierced Ard's skull. No, that had been a twentieth-century human being with a twentieth-century gun. Nor did he think that it had been Tucumbalam who had personally slipped a little something into the crew's food, or some other Mayan god who'd said “ow” (with a gringo accent) when Oliver hit him in the stomach.

  Perhaps Emma Byers, who was writing a book on the curse, and with whom he'd spent thirty bizarre minutes the day before, really believed all these things, but not Marmolejo. Not precisely. What Marmolejo did believe—and what he had learned to keep to himself—was that there were a lot of things in this world that nobody could explain. Not the professors, not the doctors, not the priests. And definitely not Javier Marmolejo.

  He couldn't explain the Evil Eye, but he had seen it work. Oh, he had seen it work. And he couldn't explain how it was that his uncle Fano, who had been given up on by the doctors and carried home to die in Tzakol, had not died after all. The family had brought in a curer who had propitiated the winds, given Fano an amulet of wood from the tancazche tree, and called upon Ix Chel, the goddess of health, to help him. And he had recovered. That very night he had stood up on his feet for the first time in weeks, and he had lived. All right, for six or seven months only, but still...