by Aaron Elkins
Why they would have asked Gideon to look at the remains in the plane was still an unanswered question, but that didn’t change the rest of it.
“And if it’s all true,” a glum-looking John mused, “then they’re guilty of collusion to commit fraud for monetary gain.”
“Even your friend Axel?” Gideon asked after a moment.
John rubbed his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair. “Whew, that’s pretty hard to believe.” But the cop in him came through. “I’m not ruling it out, though.”
“They did more than that,” Fukida said. He held out a pack of spearmint gum. When they shook their heads, he folded over two sticks, inserted them into his mouth, chawed them down to a single manageable bolus, and continued. “If they knew all along that Torkel got away and they’ve been covering for him all this time, then they’ve participated in”—he began counting off on his fingers—“one, falsification of public records; two, providing false information to the police; three, identity theft. And if Torkel set the fire and they knew about it and didn’t say anything, then there’s insurance fraud, too. And if they knowingly accepted property that should have gone to the Seamen’s Home, that’s not just fraud, that’s theft.”
“This is really getting ugly,” John mumbled. “Are you going to reopen the case?”
There followed a period of gum-cracking, band-snapping, and general chair-jiggling while Fukida thought it through. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked.
John shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so.”
“Well, so would I. I’ll have to talk to the lieut
enant, but I don’t think there’s much doubt. At least it’s worth stirring things up. Maybe not a full-scale, official investigation at this point, no, but a look. Really sit down with the files, re-interview these characters . . .”
“What about the statutes of limitation?” Gideon asked. “With ten years gone by, are any of those things still prosecutable?”
“Who knows?” Fukida brushed the question aside and leaned forward in his chair. “I don’t give a damn about fraud or identity theft, not from ten years ago. But if those people helped Torkel switch identities—if they knowingly participated in that faked ID—thereby misleading the police, then they just might be criminally responsible, at least as accessories after the fact, to Magnus’s murder. That’s worth looking at—and no statute of limitation to worry about.”
“Murder?” John exploded. “Come on, Teddy, get real. You’re stretching the hell out of—”
Fukida out-yelled him—not an easy thing to do. “They are also criminally responsible for making the Kona CIS look like a bunch of incompetent assholes, and laughing about it all the way to the bank!” The declaration was shouted into a vault of silence. The hum of conversation from other cubicles and desks had stopped entirely. Everyone was listening in. Everyone could hardly help it, Gideon thought.
John lowered his voice to a hiss. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it, Teddy? They made you look like idiots, and now you want to get back at them.”
Fukida glared at him, opened his mouth to shout some more, changed his mind, and settled back, shaking his head. After a second he sat up straight again, snorted, and angrily flung his cap into a corner. “I don’t understand you, Lau. You walk in here uninvited, you rake up all kinds of dirty laundry, you tell me we got this wrong and that wrong, you raise a million questions . . . and then when I tell you, well, maybe there’s something to it and we ought to reopen, you climb all over me. What do you want? Do you want us to investigate? Or do you want us to drop it?”
John had calmed down while Fukida spoke. He looked about as miserable as his open, cheerful face would permit. “Yes,” he said. “And yes.”
A beat passed before Fukida spoke. “What is that, zen? I don’t get it.”
Gideon did. It was what had been bothering John all day; the conflict between human being and lawman. By coming to Fukida, he felt, understandably enough, as if he were betraying his friends. But as a cop himself, he couldn’t bring himself to pretend that all the equivocations, misrepresentations, omissions, and generally dubious behavior on the part of this family he’d known so long had never occurred.
“I have an idea,” Gideon said. “For all we know, we’re blowing things up way out of proportion. Basically, we’re operating without facts. Maybe they didn’t do anything illegal. Maybe we’re seeing things all wrong. I know it looks bad, but maybe there’s a simple explanation for everything that we haven’t thought of.”
John’s and Fukida’s faces showed that they believed this about as much as he did, but that they were willing to listen.
“So what I suggest, before you go barreling in in any kind of official way, Sergeant, is that you let us poke around a little more. Discreetly, of course.”
“Like how?”
“Well, like the two of us—John and I—going back and having a chat with Axel. Informally. We were going to do that anyway, before we decided to come back here. Bring up some of these same questions and see what he has to say.”
Fukida was shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for civilians—”
“Who you calling a civilian?” John demanded. “And who dug up this stuff for you in the first place? Where would you be if not for us? Exactly where you were ten years ago—fat and happy and way out on a limb you didn’t even know you were on.”
“That’s the truth,” Fukida grumbled. “Happy, that’s for sure. Okay, I won’t do anything for a couple days. Go talk to Axel. Don’t shake things up, though. Be discreet, you know?”
John put a hand to his heart. “Discretion is my middle name.”
“THIS is good,” John said as they headed to the truck. “I trust Axel. He’ll level with us.”
“I hope so.”
John climbed in and buckled the seat belt. “Especially if we nudge him a little,” he said under his breath.
THIRTEEN
THE old man didn’t look up as John and Gideon climbed the steps of the front porch. He was moving slowly along on his knees, his mouth full of nails, hammering down the warped ends of the porch floorboards.
“Hey, Willie,” John said. “I see they got you doing handyman jobs now, huh?”
“Got me doing everything,” the old man muttered through the nails, still not looking up. “What else is new? You name it, I do it.”
Then something about John’s voice got his attention. He looked up, tipped back his curling, sweat-stained, flower-garlanded hat, spat the nails into his hand, and grinned. His good-natured face was as weathered, and almost as dark as the unpainted wood of the porch.
“What do you know, it’s Johnny Lau, the kid that could never get enough to eat. You done growing yet?”
“I sure hope so,” John said. “It’s not easy finding shoes this big. How’s it going, boss?”
“Not bad. Fine.” He got to his feet, wincing a little as his knees straightened. A short, stubby man in old jeans and ancient, scuffed work boots. “You know, I saw you out here on the porch yesterday. Thought it was you. So how come you didn’t say hello?”
“Well, you know,” John said.
“Yeah, right. I’m Willie Akau,” he said to Gideon. “Foreman here. I’m the guy that taught Johnny everything he knows. All the important stuff, anyway.”
“Truer than you think,” John said. “Willie, we’re looking for Axel. Is he inside?”
“Naw, he’s out at Paddock Number Four with the rest of ’em.”
“They branding?”
“Branding, castrating, inoculating, the whole bit. Springtime, you know? Tell you what, I’m about done here and I want to see how they’re doing anyway. Lemme get one of them Japanese quarter horses, and we’ll go out and have a look.”
“Japanese quarter horses?” a puzzled John echoed. “What’re they?”
Willie grinned at him. “Things have changed since you worked here, brudda. A Japanese quarter horse—that’s what we call a Honda ATV.”
/> “ATV? What, you paniolos don’t ride horses anymore?”
“Sure we do, most of the time. I was thinking about your friend. He don’t look like no horseman to me.”
Gideon laughed. “You’re right about that.” A few years earlier, in Oregon, he’d been thrown from a horse, fallen down a hillside, suffered a concussion, and almost gotten squashed flat when the terrified horse came within inches of rolling over him. Since then he’d been leery of getting on one again.
“Looks like some kind of professor or something.”
“Right again.” Good God, he thought, has it come to that? Have I started looking like a professor? “How can you tell?”
“It’s your aura,” John said. “Okay, Willie, let’s get going.”
“I’ll get the ATV. You better sit in back, Professor. Easier to hold onto the roll bar back there.”
THE ATV that Willie came back with wasn’t a Honda, but a yellow, six-wheel-drive Argo equipped with caterpillar tracks; a cross between a beach buggy and a topless mini-tank, with room for six.
“Thought you’d be more comfortable in this monster, Professor. Safer, you know? Make sure you hold on tight to that bar now.”
Muttering, Gideon got into the back as instructed but determinedly refused to grasp the roll bar, twice coming perilously close to tumbling out as a result. But once they got off the dirt trails and onto the grass-cushioned, rolling hills the ride smoothed out, and they made it to the paddock without incident. Willie went into the pipe-fenced corral to join his paniolos. Gideon and John stayed outside, leaning on the fence with Axel.
From his reading, and from what John had told him, Gideon expected—and hoped for—a colorful scene, with whooping paniolos roping the calves and throwing them, rodeo style, for the branding. But ranching, as he kept hearing, had changed. All it took was a little quiet clucking and nudging for the horsemen to urge the five or six dozen calves, one at a time, up a ramp and into the “squeeze box,” a narrow, ten-foot-long wooden enclosure in which, Axel explained, they were inoculated against blackleg, branded with the Little Hoaloha “LH,” had their ears notched for tags, and, if they were bulls, painlessly castrated—the method involved a rubber band that would cut off blood supply to the testes over the next few weeks; not a knife or a set of pincers, as in the old days. And everything was under the supervision of a veterinarian who was in there with them; another change from the old days.
There was no terrified baying or bellowing from the squeeze box. After a minute or two, the calf would simply emerge from the other end, snorting and shaking its head, but looking more offended than hurt or frightened. And in would come the next one.
“We don’t castrate them all,” Axel said. “A few of them are just vasectomized and kept around as teasers.”
“Teasers?” Gideon said.
“We use them to determine when a cow is ready to be inseminated. See, the stud fees for good bulls are pretty scary, so we don’t send for the big guys until we know the cows are willing to go along with it. Well, no cow will let a bull mount her except when she’s in heat, so the way we know one of them is ready is when we see one of our vasectomized bulls mount her and go to work. That’s why we call them teasers.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” John said. “Uh, Axel, we need to talk to you.”
“Sure,” Axel said, his eyes on the paniolos. “Go ahead, shoot. Willie!” he called. “The one that just came out. Take a look at that foreleg, would you? There’s something the matter with it.”
“No, let’s go somewhere where you can pay attention,” John said. “This is important.”
The sudden change in tone made Axel blink. “All right. The tack shed.”
They went to a tin-roofed, rough-hewn lean-to with ropes and rawhide straps hanging from the ceiling and the walls, and tools, sacks, and old saddle gear draped over racks, lying on work benches, or strewn about the dirt floor. The leather items were cracked and dusty, as if the shed hadn’t been used as a workplace for years. Axel pulled three banged-up folding metal chairs from a stack that had been stored against one wall.
“Never mind the chairs, Axel,” John said.
But Axel set them out anyway. There was something dogged in the way he did it, as if he sensed that nothing good was coming and he was trying to head it off as long as he could.
“What’s the problem, John?” he asked when they’d sat down, the three of them facing each other somewhat awkwardly, three pairs of denimed knees almost touching. “Did you see the autopsy report?” He looked at Gideon. “Was it Magnus?”
“That I can’t say for sure,” Gideon answered. “It’s impossible to tell from—”
“What we can say for sure,” John cut in, eager to get started nudging, “is that, whoever it was, somebody chopped off two of his toes.”
Axel was satisfactorily nudged. His face twisted in a grimace. “Somebody chopped off his toes—you mean on purpose?”
“I don’t figure it was by accident.”
“No, well, of course not. I mean . . . Jesus, that’s horrible, that’s disgusting! Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Gideon said. “That’s what made the autopsy doctor so positive he was Torkel.”
“But who would . . . who would—”
“We’re assuming it was Torkel,” John said.
“Ah, no, that’s crazy, that’s—”
“We’re also assuming it was Torkel who left his own ring on the body.”
“What are you—” Axel began with a vehement shake of his head, but stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth open. “The ring!”
“So you did know about the ring?”
“Yes, sure, everybody knew about it.” He took off his black-rimmed glasses and gnawed on the temple piece, thinking hard. Without them, his face was oddly blank and defenseless. He didn’t have eyelashes, Gideon noticed. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right. Torkel must have left it there to fool everybody. Oh, this is too weird!”
“How come nobody mentioned it when we came back from Maravovo and said the body in the plane was Torkel?”
“Mentioned what?”
John sighed. “The ring, Axel.”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess we forgot about it. It was ten years ago.”
“Did you?” John asked, sounding more like a policeman with every word. “You’re telling me that every single one of you forgot there’d been a ring?”
Axel thrust out his unforgivable chin. “Well, I sure did.”
“You, I can believe,” John said, relaxing enough to let a smile come through. “You were probably thinking about all those macro-nutrients in manure at the time. But the others . . .” What was left of the smile slowly vanished. “Something’s wrong, Axel. It didn’t happen the way everybody said. People haven’t leveled with us, and I don’t think they leveled with the police either. I’m hoping you’ll—”
Axel abruptly shoved his chair back and jumped up, raising a cloud of flour-like dust from the floor. “John, you’re . . . you’re pushing me.” He stamped around in tight little circles, whapping his hat—a blue tennis hat with the names of the Hawaiian islands on the band; the kind every ABC store carried—against his jeans. Dust flew with every whap. “I mean, I appreciate that you’re concerned, and I certainly appreciate what you’ve done, Gideon, but . . . look, no offense, but I really can’t see how any of this is your business, either of you. I don’t see why you’re so damn interested in this, and I don’t like it that you’re trying to get me to say something against my own family. I don’t know what Torkel did or didn’t do, but I can tell you that nobody here, nobody in this family, did anything wrong!”
He had let most of it out in one breath, his voice rising to a squeak, and now he gulped air, staring down at them, pop-eyed and agitated. There were tears in his eyes.
“Sit down, Axel,” John said calmly.
“I mean . . . it’s just that . . . you come here, you act like—”
“Sit down, Axel.�
��
“Well, I’m just—” Axel sat.
“Put your glasses back on.”
He knuckled at the corners of his eyes, sniffled, and put on his glasses.
John put a hand on his knee, an extraordinary gesture for him. “Axel, listen to me. You’re my friend, you have been for a lot of years. But more than that, your family has meant a lot to me. Torkel and Magnus especially, those guys really straightened me out, they taught me to . . . well, to grow up. The second best thing that ever happened to me was when Magnus fired me my first day on the job because I didn’t show up on time. The best thing was when Torkel hired me back. And Dagmar—she bailed me out of trouble a hundred times. She was the first one that told me I ought to go into police work, did you know that?”
“Of course I know all that,” Axel said uncomfortably, “and it’s not that I don’t—”
“So sure I’m interested. There’s trouble on the way, Axel, and if there’s some way I can help, I want to do it. We’ve just come from a long talk with a sergeant at CIS. He says—”
Axel’s jaw dropped. “The police? You told them all this?”
“Yes, we did. Fukida wants to reopen the case—”
Axel’s hand flew to his forehead. “Oh, mercy.”
“—but he’s not going to get on it for a couple of days. We said we wanted to talk to you first, and he said okay. So if you know something you haven’t told us—or didn’t tell the police back then—now’s the time to do it, trust me. You’re a lot better off—you’re all a lot better off—if you come forward with it now than if you make Fukida dig it out on his own. I know this guy, Axel. You don’t want to tangle with him. This is one hard-nosed sonofabitch, and he’s already ticked off.”
Axel had listened intently, growing mulish and frightened-looking. “But I don’t know anything! There isn’t anything to know!”
“We think there is,” John said. “For example, we think that Torkel was the one who set the fire, too.”
