Curses!

by Aaron Elkins

  Chapter 21

  * * * *

  "What did you say?” Marmolejo asked woodenly.

  "It's Howard Bennett."

  Marmolejo took the three-inch stub from his mouth and scowled at it as if hoping to draw strength from it. “Do you think it would be all right,” he asked mildly, “if I smoked now?"

  "Go ahead.” Earlier, Abe had asked him not to smoke around the codex, but it was gone now, and the flammable celluloid-acetone fumes had been cleared away as well.

  The inspector lit up with unusual thoroughness, taking two long pulls while he held the match to the end of the cigar. The first honest-to-God cloud of smoke Gideon had ever known to emerge from his mouth emerged. He waved the match out, put it in a little box, and slipped the box into a pocket of his guayabera.

  "That,” he said quietly, “is not possible."

  "No, it's true, all right."

  "We have had two letters from Howard Bennett,” Marmolejo said patiently, “as you and your colleagues explained to me last night. One in 1982, one last week. Someone has just been murdered with what is almost certainly his revolver, the revolver he took with him five years ago. He was—"

  "The fact that some letters were typed on his typewriter hardly proves he typed them.” As Julie had tried to tell them. “And just because a bullet came from his gun doesn't prove he pulled the trigger."

  "Of course not, but—"

  "And there hasn't been a reliable sighting of the man since this place caved in. Now we know why."

  Marmolejo grunted, about a quarter convinced.

  "Look, Inspector, there are a lot of indicators here. The size is right. So is the age; Howard was pushing fifty. The race, the big-boned build, those are right too. And then Howard was right-handed, as I remember.” He gestured at the skeleton. “So was this guy, apparently."

  Marmolejo frowned at the hand bones and seized on a specific. “How do you know? The right hand is larger than the left?"

  "As a matter of fact, no. There are ways to tell, but hand size isn't one of them. For now I'm just going by—"

  "The watch,” Marmolejo said. “Obviously, it was on his left wrist. So you conclude that a person who wears a watch on his left wrist must be right-handed?” The cigar end glowed. This was the kind of reasoning he could have confidence in. “I would conclude the same thing."

  "Right."

  "But I would not trust my conclusion absolutely. There is no law that prohibits a left-handed person from wearing his watch on his left hand."

  "Right again. It's a question of probability. But there are some shoulder-girdle measurements that should tell us about handedness for sure, and I'll do them tomorrow."

  Marmolejo drew on his cigar and made an annoyed sound at finding that it was out again. A quarter of an inch shorter than it was before, it was rolled out of the way once more into the left corner of his mouth. “Now, look, Dr. Oliver, this is all very well, but it's hardly proof. You also are Caucasian, you also are large-boned and a little over six feet tall, I think. You also are righthanded, you also are the right age—"

  "The right age?” Gideon protested. “I'm only forty-one. “

  "Close enough,” Marmolejo decided for himself. “And with it all, does it prove that this is you lying here?"

  "The age is wrong,” Gideon maintained, “and anyway, I haven't been missing since this place fell in. And...well, there is one other thing."

  Marmolejo grinned toothily at him, as if he'd known all along that Gideon was eventually going to pull a three-foot rabbit out of the hat.

  As indeed he was. But he wasn't showboating, as the inspector thought; he was following the lessons of past experience. When you're going to present something to a policeman that requires more disposition to believe than he's shown so far, it's best to lead gradually up to it, to ready him for it step by progressive step, before hitting him with the clincher. He hoped Marmolejo was prepared.

  "Did you know that Howard was a woodwind player?” he asked.

  If he was surprised by the question, the policeman's dark face didn't show it. “No, I didn't know."

  "He did, expertly. He used to play jazz clarinet with a group in a Merida nightclub every Saturday."

  "Ah. And the fact that Dr. Bennett played a woodwind, this is in some way relevant?"

  "Very. This guy"—Gideon indicated the crushed skeleton—"did too. For years."

  Marmolejo's mouth opened slightly with a faint popping noise. Fortunately the cigar stub remained pasted to his lower lip.

  "And if you put it all together,” Gideon continued, “I don't think it leaves a lot of room for coincidence. We've got a white male here, around fifty, righthanded, about six-one, who's played woodwind for ten years at least...all of which also happens to fit Howard Bennett perfectly. And since Howard was last seen right here, at just about the time this skeleton was deposited, I don't think there's much doubt—"

  Marmolejo found his voice. "How do you know he played the clarinet?” It wasn't quite a squeak, but it was as close as he was likely to come.

  Gideon made it simple. The tubercles, of course. The other time he'd come across them, as he'd finally remembered, it had been during an examination of the scant remains of a firebombing victim in Pittsburgh. The man, a clarinetist with the Pittsburgh Symphony, had been tentatively identified by the police before Gideon was shown the bones, and Gideon, knowing nothing about him, had wowed the homicide detective in charge by casually asking what woodwind instrument he'd played.

  But, really, it hadn't been a wildly difficult deduction once it occurred to him that the frequent, strong thrusting forward of the lower jaw might be connected to something other than eating. Playing a woodwind, for example. Perhaps there were also other possible causes for the tubercles, but he had yet to find one.

  Marmolejo took this with better grace and more credulity than Gideon had expected. “All right,” he conceded, “who am I to argue with the Skeleton Detective?” He made a clicking sound, tongue against teeth. “But where are our fine theories now? Who killed Ard, if Dr. Bennett didn't? Who attacked you?” He paused and laid his hand on Gideon's arm. “I don't want anyone on the crew to know this. Let them think we still believe it's Avelino Canul."

  "That makes sense."

  "And I'm afraid it would be inadvisable for anyone to leave after all,” Marmolejo added to himself. “Mr. Partridge's permission will have to be revoked. I hope he's not too disturbed about it."

  Worthy would never trust another small person, Gideon thought.

  Marmolejo stood for a while, peering down at the earth-stained skull. “Howard Bennett,” he said quietly. “Here all this time with his precious codex, killed trying to remove it by a cave-in he himself caused. I think the gods, of Tlaloc must be laughing."

  "Oh, I'm sure they're laughing,” Gideon said, then pulled his last rabbit out of the hat. “But it wasn't the cave-in that killed him. He was already dead when the roof came down."

  Marmolejo turned slowly to Gideon. “Murdered?"

  "Murdered."

  * * * *

  "How could you tell?” Julie asked. “Was he shot? With that Smith & Wesson?"

  "No,” Gideon said, “clubbed. Probably with the sledgehammer. The left side of his head was knocked in."

  "But all that rubble caved in on him. How do you know that isn't what did it?"

  "Because he was on his left side, and the damage to the rest of his body shows the debris landed on his right side. In other words, he was already lying there, in that position, when it hit."

  "Oh.” She pulled the toothpick from a quarter of the chicken-salad sandwich before her and thoughtfully sucked the pickled onion from it.

  They were on their balcony. Neither of them had been particularly hungry when he had gotten back from the site, and they had had sandwiches and milk sent up. Abe and the rest of the crew were in the restaurant, celebrating the finding of the codex with a champagne dinner insisted on and paid for by Dr. Villanueva, who had arrive
d at the Chichen Itza airstrip with several other Institute officials about an hour earlier. In the morning there would be a group breakfast, with speeches and congratulations, and then the codex would be borne in pomp to Mexico City for years of study and an eventual place of honor in the Museum of Anthropology.

  "Now wait a minute,” Julie said, having thought the matter through. “Who's to say the cave-in happened all at once? Maybe he was knocked down by a few falling pieces, and fractured his skull when his head hit the ground—and then the rest of it all fell on him. What's wrong with that?"

  "Nothing, but he didn't just fracture it. It wasn't cracked, it was caved in—a depressed fracture. There was a hole in his skull, and some of the bone fragments were actually inside.” No doubt driven into the brain to provide the immediate cause of death, he might have added, but why spoil her appetite? Or his.

  "And a fall couldn't do that?"

  "Nope. It's an axiom of the trade: When a moving head hits a fixed object hard enough, you get a crack; when a moving object hits a fixed head you get a depressed fracture. No, first he was slugged, then he fell, and then the place came down on him."

  He took a bite of his ham sandwich. “Marmolejo thinks the cave-in was an accident; that Howard came on somebody trying to take the codex and got himself killed for his trouble."

  "No, how could that be? If Howard was the one with the gun and the crowbar, how come he's the one who wound up dead?"

  Gideon shrugged. “I doubt if he would have shot a crew member or even pointed the gun at him. Not unless he found him right in the act of taking the codex. He would have assumed there was some other reason for him to be there. It was outsiders he was worried about."

  Julie shook her head. “It's so hard to believe. How could a member of the crew bring himself—"

  "For two million dollars? People can bring themselves to do a lot of things for that."

  He took a long swallow of milk. “Anyway, Marmolejo figures that whoever was on the other end of the sledge hit one of the props without meaning to. Howard and the codex fell down the steps, and five tons of rubble landed on top of them. That's his theory."

  "And what's yours?"

  "I think he's right. An eight-pound sledge can get away from you when you're using it in a fight, and with the supports already weakened it wouldn't have taken much to bring the whole place down."

  He tossed a sandwich end onto his plate. “You know what I keep wondering about? That ‘return to the scene of the crime’ in Stan Ard's notebook. What was he talking about? Whose return?"

  "Howard's, obviously."

  "You think whoever's behind this had Ard fooled too?"

  "Sure.” She put down her sandwich and leaned forward. “To tell the truth, I never did put much faith in Inspector Marmolejo's idea about the killer just passing by and casually shooting him. Did Stan strike you as the kind of person who'd be outside working at seven in the morning? My guess is the killer made an appointment with him to lure him out there—” She smiled crookedly. “Gideon, is this what your cases sound like when you're working on them? As if you're reading lines, in a particularly dumb movie?"

  "Yup. Go ahead. “To lure him out there..."

  "...so that he could shoot Stan, but first get him to write something that would seem to incriminate Howard."

  "Like what?"

  "Like what he did write. It worked, didn't it? Maybe he out-and-out told Stan that Howard had been seen around, hoping he'd write that—which would really have confused us. But—"

  "But Stan, who never passed up the opportunity for a cliche, came up with ‘return to the scene of the crime.’ And I suppose the killer thought he'd better settle for that, shot him, and got out of there.” Gideon nodded slowly. “You just might be right, Julie."

  He put his feet up on the low table, crossed his legs at the ankles, and stared out at the twilit foliage. “Ah, that poor bastard Howard; he dies saving the codex, and the whole world winds up blaming him for stealing it. Thanks to someone who went to a lot of trouble to make us think just that."

  "But why? That's what bugs me. I mean, I understand why somebody would do that in 1982: if everyone thought the codex was gone, nobody would bother to dig for it, and the killer could come back later on and get it. Fine. But why now?"

  "Why what now?"

  "Why bother to make it look as if Howard were still alive almost six years later? Especially in the middle of a dig that was bound to turn up his body sooner or later? And the codex too."

  Gideon held up his hand. “Julie, Marmolejo and I went round and round for over an hour on this stuff, and we didn't get anywhere."

  Julie brushed this aside. “Well, of course not. You didn't have the benefit of my brilliant insights. After all, who was the one who said all along that the codex was down there?"

  "The same person,” Gideon pointed out, “who said all along that Howard Bennett was behind everything that was going on."

  "That,” Julie said, “was unworthy of you.” She rubbed her hands together. “Come on, Skeleton Detective, let's order up some brandy and get this thing figured out. We're on a roll here."

  Gideon smiled and got up to go to the telephone.

  "Right, that's just what this case needs: a little cognac and a little cogitation."

  * * * *

  From the outset Gideon knew that it wasn't going to be much of a day. There had been a little too much cognac the night before, and maybe a little too much cogitation too. Abe had joined them at about ten o'clock, and they had stayed up talking until one-thirty; then Gideon and Julie had overslept this morning. That was what had started him off in a grumpy frame of mind, eliminating as it did their usual slow, luxurious introduction to the day: fifteen or twenty dreamy, voluptuous minutes in each other's arms, drifting and dozing, nuzzling and stroking, slipping sweetly in and out of sleep until the warmth of the morning began to flow in their veins.

  It was Julie who had to run off first, to the ceremonial staff breakfast with the people from the Institute. Gideon, with an hour before he was due to meet Marmolejo at the site, stayed in bed by himself for fifteen minutes (it wasn't the same) before snapping fully awake with the frustrating feeling of having dropped a stitch, of having been on the verge of figuring it all out if only he could have continued whatever train of thought had been going along almost independently in his mind. For a few moments more he lay still, trying to recapture it. Something about Howard, something Howard had said...but whatever it was, it melted into tantalizing wisps and evaporated before he could get hold of it.

  He got up, yawning, ordered coffee and a couple of croissants from room service, and breakfasted while he shaved. His mind was still humming with the problems they had raised the night before. Once again it had been all questions, no answers.

  Foremost, of course, was the question of who had killed Howard. The logical best guess, although it had been hard to take it seriously, was Worthy. He had been alone at the site with Howard that night. And it was only Worthy's word that Howard had taken the gun and crowbar and gone up to the temple. Maybe it had been Worthy who had taken the weapons and then tossed the crowbar on the ground near the path to make it look as if Howard had escaped that way. Worthy could easily enough have tried to steal the codex and wound up murdering Howard and accidentally triggering the cave-in when he was discovered.

  But so could everyone else, and that was the problem. TlaIoc was less than a twenty-minute walk from the Mayaland. Any of them could have doubled back from the hotel after Howard had dismissed them. Certainly, Gideon was in no position to know; he had slept for an hour after dinner, getting ready for the night watch.

  And what about the old question that had been nagging at them in one form or another since the first day, when they discovered the surreptitious digging in the stairwell: Why had the killer waited until now to come back for the codex, when it would have been so much easier and safer last year, or the year before, or the year before that? Why—

  It was a reli
ef to hear a tap on the door. That would be the officer who would walk with him to the site. Despite the removal of the codex, which was surely at the root of it all, Marmolejo had not relaxed security. Last night no one had camped out on the balcony, but two policemen had wandered the grounds and hallways. And this morning Gideon was under strict instructions to wait for his escort before going to the site.

  "Un momento." he called, toweling the last of the shaving cream from his throat and taking a final gulp of coffee. On the way to the door, one more question struck him; odd that it hadn't occurred to him until now. He stopped at the writing desk and pulled his copy of the curse out of the center drawer. He ran his finger down it until he found what he wanted.

  Fifth, the beast that turns men to stone will come among them from the Underworld.

  He smiled faintly, Making that one come true would take some doing. Even if there weren't cops crawling all over the place.

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  Chapter 22

  * * * *

  The hot weather had returned. That was one more thing wrong with the day. Gideon glanced at his watch as they arrived at the site; 7:55 and already the air was like glue. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose. Under a lead-gray sky Tlaloc had the festering, derelict look of an abandoned garbage dump. The combination lock on the gate had been changed, but a guard materialized from behind the West Group to let them in. Inspector Marmolejo was already in the temple, he told them.

  "Will you tell the inspector I'll be along in a minute?” Gideon asked his escort in Spanish. “I need to get a few things from the shed."

  Against one wall of the work shed's storage area was a framework of wooden storage bins, doored and latched, but without locks, in which crew members kept whatever personal effects they liked. Gideon's was in the middle row on the right, and in it he kept his tools, tables, field guides, and osteological atlases, his thick, tattered old copy of Morris's Human Anatomy that had been around since graduate school, a glossier, rarely used copy of Gray's Anatomy, a poncho, a jacket for cool weather which he had wishfully bought when he arrived but had yet to wear, and a few fruits and sweets for snacking.