by Aaron Elkins
John sighed. “Jesus, Doc, you can really be irritating sometimes, you know that? I know you’re a professor and all, so you can’t help it, but it’d be nice if once in a while there was something you didn’t know more about than anybody else. Could you try that sometime? Just as a change of pace?”
“Look, the fact is, I didn’t know anything about it before, but once I knew I was coming up here, naturally I took a little time and read up on it. I read Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery, Dawes’ history of the islands, Brennan’s books on the early Parker ranch—”
“Naturally.” John was shaking his head. “You’re the only guy I know who treats a vacation like a Ph.D. research project. Pathetic.”
“Well, it was interesting,” Gideon said defensively. “And it wasn’t as if I read every word. I was just skimming.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Anyway, I was really asking about your friend. Axel Torkelsson doesn’t exactly sound like the name of a guy who runs a cattle ranch in Hawaii. How did that come about?”
“He inherited it from his uncle a few years ago. Magnus Torkelsson. There were nieces and nephews; they all got a piece of the old ranch from old Magnus.”
Gideon laughed. “Okay, then, let me rephrase the question. How does a guy named Magnus Torkelsson come to be running a big cattle ranch in Hawaii?”
“Well, actually, that’s a long story,” John said. “But something new just came up on it—”
“Go ahead and tell me the long story. I’m at your mercy, and I don’t have anything else to do.”
In the early fifties, John told him, Magnus Torkelsson, along with his equally adventurous brothers Torkel and Andreas, had jumped ship off Kona, from a Swedish freighter that was picking up a shipment of beef cattle from the Parker Ranch, which was then the only cattle ranch of any size in Hawaii. Being quick learners, knowing a good thing when they saw it, and taking an immediate liking to the rolling Kohala hills, which reminded them of the Smaland highlands of their childhood, they used the nest egg they’d been building up to buy two hundred cattle from the Parkers and eight hundred acres from nearby landowners. In their thirties at the time, they called their ranch Hoaloha—“Beloved Friend” in Hawaiian—and their combination of hard work, dedication, and penny-pinching good sense turned it into a money-making proposition after relatively few years. By the time they died, the Hoaloha encompassed over thirty thousand acres and ran a herd of fifteen thousand cattle, mostly Herefords, but also Holsteins, Durhams, Charolais, even a few Angus and Brahmas—
“Well, see, there’s something you know more about than I do,” Gideon said. “If you asked me ten seconds ago to name five breeds of cattle, I don’t think I could have done it. I’m not sure I could do it now.”
“Well, remember,” John said, pleased, “I roomed with Axel at college and he used to talk about this stuff a lot. And I still see him every few years. And then I spent a couple of summer vacations working on the ranch.”
“No, I didn’t know that. So you must know quite a bit about ranching, then.”
“Well, I wouldn’t . . . that is, I’m not any kind of . . . well, yeah.” And then, as he often did with little or no reason, he burst into laughter. John had a wonderfully infectious laugh that crinkled up the skin around his eyes, made his eyes themselves gleam, and rarely failed to make Gideon laugh along with him, as he did now.
“They brought over their sister Dagmar a couple of years after they got here,” John went on, “and all four of them worked like dogs to make the ranch go. Andreas, the oldest one, he died before I met any of them, but I got to know old Torkel and Magnus and the rest of them pretty well. Real well, in fact.”
They had climbed to two thousand feet—never a switchback, just one long, steady rise along the flank of the range—and while John nodded to himself, remembering, Gideon gratefully took in the prospect around them. The afternoon shadows had lengthened, adding texture and depth to the rolling countryside. Trees were still sparse, but the duns and ochres of the lowlands had given way to green, healthy pasturelands. The temperature had gotten more comfortable still, and there were veils of mist in some of the hollows and around some of the peaks—if you could call these lovely, rounded, hummocky rises “peaks.” Over his right shoulder, he could look back down the slope and see the coastline all the way to Kona, as John had said. The whole scene was very beautiful. It surprised him that he’d zipped through it a few years ago, hardly noticing it.
John surfaced and went on. “The two brothers were kind of crotchety by then. You know, two old bachelors, living in the same house together with their old-maid sister, always carping at each other; not real easy to get along with, but they loved the ranch, they ran a tight ship—Jesus, did they—and somehow they kept it all together, until . . .”
He was still smiling, remembering days long past, but now he sobered. The smile faded. “Until Torkel got murdered—”
Gideon stared at him. “Murdered?”
“—and Magnus disappeared.”
“He disappeared?”
“Took off into the night in the ranch plane, never to be heard from again.”
“You mean they never found out what happened to him?”
“Not until just this week, as a matter of fact. Tuesday. A couple of skin-divers found the plane. Axel was telling me about it. It crashed in the lagoon of some rinky-dink island in the Pacific. They think he never got where he was going, that it went down the night he left.”
“Was there anything in it? Any remains, I mean?”
John nodded. “Yeah, some bones, apparently.”
“Are the Torkelssons having them brought back?”
“I don’t know. They’re gonna talk about it today—they get together for dinner once a month or so to hassle out any problems—and figure out what they want to do. Why, you want to volunteer your services?”
“Sure, if they want someone to look the bones over, see if maybe there’s something to confirm it really is Magnus. You know people appreciate that kind of closure.”
“They do, yeah, but my impression is they just want to put it all behind them. My guess is that if they bring the remains back they’ll just want to bury them. That’ll be all the closure they need.”
“Huh. Well, go on back to the story. What was it all about? Did Magnus kill his brother? Is that why he ran?”
“No, no, no. I wasn’t around anymore by then, but from everything anybody knows, it was some kind of vengeance thing . . . you know, retribution, payback.”
“For what?”
John shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. All they know is somebody shot Torkel to death and burned down the main ranch building. They tried to get Magnus too, but he managed to get away, make it to the airport, and take off. That’s it.”
“And nobody knows who did it?”
“Nope. There were plenty of candidates, more than they knew what to do with. See, these old guys weren’t that easy to get along with, and they drove a hard bargain besides. Shrewd, you know? There were a lot of people with grudges. Lemme see . . . oh, there was a neighboring ranch, part of a consortium, that wanted right-of-way access for a water line. When Torkel and Magnus said no way, the place went bust, wound up having to sell for next to nothing. And who do you think bought it? The Torkelssons, of course, who immediately laid in a water pipeline.”
“That would have gone down hard,” Gideon said.
“You’re not kidding. And then there were some kind of famous cattle negotiations in Honolulu, where they supposedly aced out one of the big Kauai ranching syndicates. There were threats against them on record, there was even—”
“But nobody was ever convicted?”
“Nobody was ever indicted. The cops never even brought charges. There just wasn’t any evidence, Doc. Nothing to tie anybody to it. Remember, they burned the place down. That doesn’t make the job any easier.”
Gideon leaned back in his seat and thought it over. “John,” he said with a shake of his h
ead, “I have to say . . .”
John glanced at him. “What?”
“Well, you have a case where one brother is murdered and the other one takes off. You have to wonder—”
“You have to wonder if Magnus didn’t kill Torkel.”
“Well, don’t you?”
“Sure, and naturally that was where the cops looked first, but that angle petered out inside of a couple of days. For one thing, the autopsy on Torkel showed that they did him in classic gangland execution style. Two shooters, the whole bit. This wasn’t just one ticked-off old geezer killing his geezer brother.”
“You mean, hired killers.”
“Exactly. A professional hit all the way, very smooth.”
“But why couldn’t Magnus have been the one who hired them?”
“No way. He was too cheap.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously, what kind of sense does it make? If he wanted to have his brother killed, he’d have had it done when he wasn’t around, when he had some kind of alibi, over in Honolulu or something, wouldn’t he?”
“That’s a point,” Gideon said. “He sure wouldn’t have done it this way, putting himself right in the middle of it.”
“Another thing, too,” John pointed out. “No motive. None at all. Also, if he arranged for a couple of hitmen to do it, why would he run? No, he’s not the one who killed his brother.”
“Okay, that I can buy, but if these killers were after him, why didn’t he just go to the police for help? Why leave everything—his family, his ranch—and run for his life?”
“Well, all I can tell you is, that’s what people do when hitmen are on their tail. And between you and me, it’s a pretty good idea. Besides, the Waimea PD would be in way over their heads on something like this. They probably get, like, one homicide every ten years, and then it’s just some out-of-his-skull meth-head.”
“Then why not go to the state police in Honolulu? Or the FBI?”
“Look, people do funny things when they’re scared; you know that. Anyway, that was the last time anybody ever saw him. Or heard anything about him, until this week.”
They had reached the outskirts of Waimea now, a pretty little 1950s Western town with feed and grain stores, and stores that sold farm equipment, and rugged-looking men in Stetsons, and even a little white church with a wooden belfry. The only thing that told you you weren’t in Kansas or South Dakota were the tropical red and blue tin roofs. That and the impossibly lush green hills in which the town nestled.
“Let’s stop for a bite,” John said. “You hungry?”
“Sure,” said Gideon, whose salivary glands started working at the mention of food. “I guess I forgot about lunch.”
“Forgot about lunch!” John said incredulously. “Jesus, you’re worse than I thought.”
They turned into Opelo Plaza, a neatly maintained corner strip mall on the main street, and pulled up before Aioli’s, a simple, white frame building with blue awnings on either side of the screen door and a giant painted garlic clove above it.
“I admit, it looks kind of like a health food place—but it’s good,” John explained.
They ordered sandwiches at the counter—grilled chicken and avocado for Gideon, grilled mahi-mahi for John—and sat in rattan chairs at a bare table under slowly turning ceiling fans. Everything was spotless. The red glazed tile floor looked as if it had been cleaned thirty seconds ago. The clientele was about fifty-fifty native-Hawaiian and Haole.
While they ate, John went on with the story. Once the family had gotten over its shock at the loss of its patriarch-brothers, another kind of shock took over. They realized that the future of the wealthy ranch and its holdings was now on hold. Because the two men had reciprocal mutual-beneficiary wills, in which the brothers left virtually everything to each other, it was only when the last living brother died that the inheritance could pass on to the next generation. So, for the seven years it took for the Third Circuit Court to formally conclude that Magnus was really dead and gone, the ranch was managed under receivership and the bulk of the Hoaloha fortune remained in limbo, while the would-be inheritors chafed. All except Dagmar, who got an identical lion’s share of the liquid assets under both wills, and who soon pulled up stakes and retired to the seclusion and beauty of Hulopo’e Beach Estates on the Kohala Coast.
But the seven years finally came to an end. Three years ago Magnus had been declared legally dead and his will had gone through probate and been executed. For all intents and purposes the great Hoaloha Ranch no longer existed. The thirty-thousand-acre property was cut up and divided between the brothers’ nephews and nieces. Even after selling off part of their assets—cattle, art works—to pay the death taxes, each of them wound up with a good-sized chunk of land.
“Wait a minute,” Gideon said. “These would have been Andreas’s kids? The brother that died before? And your friend Axel was one of them?”
“Right. Axel and his brother and his two sisters. Axel’s the only one who’s running his property as a ranch.”
“The Little Hoaloha.”
“Yup, if you can call eleven thousand acres little. But the rest of them all had different ideas. You interested enough to know the details, or am I boring you?”
“No, you’re not boring me. I’ll let you know when you are.”
“Well, there’s Inge, Axel’s sister. She turned hers into a yuppie dude ranch, and from what I hear it’s doing okay. Then there’s his sister, Hedwig. She . . . what?”
“You rolled your eyes when you said ‘Hedwig.’ I wondered what that meant.”
“I did? Ah, Hedwig’s all right, I guess, if you can stand . . . well, you’ll see. Anyway, she runs hers as a wellness center.”
“She’s a doctor?”
“Um . . . no.”
“A therapist?”
“Um . . . no, I wouldn’t say that. She’s into, like, karmic power massage, and, um, past-life regression, and—”
“Okay, I get the picture,” Gideon said, charitably resisting the urge to roll his own eyes. “And then there’s one more, right?”
“Felix. He’s a lawyer. He lives in Honolulu.”
“He didn’t inherit a piece of the ranch?”
“Oh, yeah, he got the smallest piece . . . only a couple of hundred acres, with no buildings, no water, no decent grazing land, nothing like that—but it includes a quarter-mile of prime, white-sand oceanfront up above Kawaihae. It’s probably worth more than all the rest put together, and he’s selling it to some Swiss chain that develops these super-upscale communities. Felix’s pretty sharp about that kind of thing—he’s a land-use attorney—and he’s gonna be one rich Torkelsson.”
“Interesting family,” Gideon said. “Unusual.”
“And you’re gonna meet every last one of them in a few hours.”
“I am?”
“Yup. We’re invited to dinner.”
“That’s nice of them, but—I don’t know, didn’t you say they’d be talking about what to do about Magnus’s remains? I’d be a complete outsider at something like that. Maybe I could just—”
“Don’t worry about it. They meet once a month anyway to hassle out any problems, and they get that stuff out of the way early. By the time we show up, they’ll have their family matters settled and everybody’ll be pretty well into the schnapps. You’ll enjoy it, you’ll see. Anything you ever heard about these ‘dour’ Swedes, forget it. And you wouldn’t want to miss the dinner. Best steaks you ever had; from prime ranch cattle.”
Leaving Aioli’s, they headed back east and John turned the truck north on Highway 250, at the edge of town. They were soon back in open country and climbing again. Now occasional straggling lines of chestnut-brown cattle, heads lowered to the grass, could be seen.
“Herefords,” John said. “You can always tell from the white faces. In case you wanted to know. If they were Jerseys they’d be brown all over.”
“Thank you, I always wondered about that. So you said tonight’s st
eaks would be from ranch cattle. Dinner’s at the ranch, then? At Axel’s?”
“No. That’s where we’re staying, but the family dinners are always at Inge’s—at the dude ranch. She closes it to paying customers for the day. See, Inge and Hedwig are the only ones with professional cooks—because of their businesses—and naturally nobody wants to have it at Hedwig’s, so it’s always at Inge’s. Felix flies in from Honolulu, Dagmar hires a limo to drive her up from the coast, and—here we are. This is Axel’s and Malani’s place. Home for the next week. Open the gate, would you?”
Gideon jumped out, pulled open the unlocked swinging gate in the barbed wire fence, and closed it once the truck was through. The only indication of where they were were the neatly stenciled words on the mailbox mounted on the gatepost: Torkelsson. Mile 12.2, Kohala Mtn. Road. Once he was back in, John followed a dirt track between the hills toward a rambling, much-weathered, white frame house a quarter-mile off, with porches all around and six or seven smaller outbuildings trailing away to the rear.
“It’s one of the old section managers’ houses,” John said. “They built them in separate units back then: cook house, bath house, laundry house, bunk house—I spent a few nights in the old bunk house myself. Murder going out to the privy on a cold night.”
Gideon frowned. “And we’re staying . . . where?”
“Don’t worry, we’re in the main house. Indoor plumbing.” He laughed. “Jeez, Doc, what a weenie you are. I always thought anthropologists slept out on rocks when they had to, and ate bugs and snakes. Till I met you.”
“I happen to love eating bugs and snakes. I was thinking of Julie.”
“Yeah, right.” John pulled the car into the dusty parking area beside the porch and turned off the ignition. “Okay, let’s go find’em. Knowing Axel, he’ll be right where I left him.”
The interior of the house was just what the exterior suggested: roomy, worn, simply built of wooden planks in serious need of re-painting, simply furnished with wood-frame furniture, and filled with the dusty, unidentifiable smells of old, well-lived-in houses. The living room had a massive, soot-blackened lava-stone fireplace topped by a mantel jammed with antique brown and blue bottles, dusty glass fishing floats, oddly shaped pebbles, and other knickknacks that must once have meant something to someone. The plank walls had yellowing pictures of Swedish and Hawaiian royalty on them—mostly unframed, cut from newspapers and books, and held up with tacks—along with fading family photographs and a couple of old school pennants: the University of Hawaii and the University of California-Davis. This was a room—a house—that had never been “decorated.” It had grown—or, better, evolved—by accretion, by slow accumulation. All the same, it looked right for the house of a rancher; an honest, straightforward kind of place, utterly without pretensions.
