by Aaron Elkins
Infuriated, Magnus had gone to get the gun—
“Wait a minute,” Fukida said. “Are you telling me Magnus tried to kill Torkel for pulling out his checkbook?”
“No, no, not kill. Look, that gun had been there forever. Nobody knew it had any bullets in it. Nobody thought it worked. The clip was so rusted you couldn’t get it out.”
“So why did he get it?”
“Because that’s what he did. He’d done it before; it was an old routine.”
“It was an old routine to threaten his brother with a gun?”
“You don’t understand. It was a game they played.”
“That’s some game.”
“Nobody took it seriously. He’d wave it around, and Dagmar would say, ‘Oh, put that thing away,’ and he’d put it away, and they’d all go to bed mad at each other, and the next morning it’d be forgotten.”
“But not this time.”
Felix shook his head. “No, not this time. He would have put it away, but when he waved it in Torkel’s face, Torkel made a disgusted grab at the barrel and sort of bent Magnus’s arm back . . . and bang. The bullet—bullets, rather, although nobody knew it at the time—went through Torkel’s hand and into Magnus. Magnus dropped dead on the spot. The other two were pretty well stunned, as you can imagine.”
“Mr. Torkelsson, how do you know all this? Were you there?”
“No, only the three of them. But Dagmar told us later. Torkel, too, although he was barely coherent by the time we arrived.”
Dagmar again, thought Fukida. The only living eyewitness. Only she was no longer living.
Other than the fact that Inge and Hedwig, with Felix’s help, had loaded Magnus’s body into a pickup truck and taken it to the hay barn before they lopped off his toes and set the fire, the remainder of the story—how Torkel had been desperate to leave, how they’d gotten him to the airport, etc.—fit perfectly with what Inge and Dagmar had told him the day before.
Which hardly proved it was true, but Fukida was increasingly inclined to accept this latest retelling. The gun’s neglected condition—rusted, loaded with the wrong bullets—made the idea of an accidental killing highly believable. More than that, if there was anything self-serving about this version, he couldn’t see it. Telling the story opened them all up to a ton of legal problems, some of them criminal.
Still, there was a lot about it that didn’t compute. “Look, if it happened the way you said, if there weren’t any hitmen to worry about, what the hell was Torkel so desperate about?”
“He was desperate because he figured it would look like murder and he couldn’t face the idea of jail—or even of a trial—not at his age. Dagmar kept telling him not to do it, that if he ran he’d really look guilty.” Felix shook his head. “But you couldn’t reason with him.”
“So who came up with the idea of switching identities?”
“That was Torkel, but, you see, the idea wasn’t to switch identities, not at first. He wasn’t interested in being Magnus. He just wanted to make it look as if he was dead. He figured that’d make it a lot harder for the police to find him, since they wouldn’t be looking for him.”
“It wouldn’t make it any easier,” Fukida agreed.
“So we all went along with that. But then we started talking. If you people bought the story that it was Torkel’s body in the barn, you were going to want to know what happened to Magnus . . . for instance, where was he? And how the hell were we going to handle that? So we started throwing around ideas and the best thing we came up with—I honestly forget who came up with it first; Hedwig, maybe, or maybe it was me—was to pretty much tell the truth . . . with a twist. One brother got killed, the other one flew away. Only we’d reverse them.”
Fukida nodded. “Since Magnus was now Torkel, Torkel would become Magnus.”
“That’s about it.”
“I’m surprised he went for it. That’s a hell of a decision, to become somebody else. Especially your own brother.”
“Yeah, but you see, it wasn’t that cut-and-dried, Sergeant. At that point nobody was thinking about who Torkel would become. We were just thinking about the story we were going to tell the police. Anyway, all he was interested in was getting out of there and covering his tracks, so he jumped right on the idea and we all went along with that, too. After that—”
“Why?”
Felix was startled. “Uh . . . why?”
“Yeah, why’d you all go along? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’d all come off filthy rich if everybody thought Magnus was the last one alive?”
For the first time Felix showed a flash of anger. “In the first place, none of us are ‘filthy rich’—”
“Don’t yell. It screws up the recorder. It also irritates me.”
“I’m sorry.” He lowered his voice to what he thought was a whisper. “In the second place, Torkel wasn’t supposed to get himself killed in a plane crash. He was supposed to be back in touch with us as soon as he could. The idea was that I was going to explain things and straighten everything out with you guys and with the prosecuting attorney, and then, assuming I could get it all taken care of, he was supposed to come back and be Torkel again.” He folded his arms and glared at Fukida. “So you want to tell me how was that going to make us filthy rich? I think you know what Torkel was going to leave us—zilch.”
Fukida responded equally heatedly. “Yeah, right, but then, after he didn’t show up, and you all tossed things around some more, you figured, well, why not just leave things the way they are? I mean, it was a lot simpler than stirring everything up again, and you’d all come out of it a lot better, and who would it hurt? Except for that seamen’s home, of course.”
Felix sagged, unfolded his arms, and dropped his eyes. “I guess that’s about right,” he said wearily. “I’d want to put it a little more . . . positively than that, but . . . that’s about right. We acted in our own selfish interests. And we broke the law.”
We’re getting there now, Fukida thought. Maybe not quite the whole truth yet, but close, and getting closer. “Listen, Mr. Torkelsson, you might want to have a lawyer of your own here before we talk much more. I don’t want to be accused of—”
“No lawyer,” Felix said firmly. “Unless I’m under arrest.”
Fukida shook his head. “Not at the moment.”
Felix laughed and relaxed. “All right, what else do you need to know? And if there’s really any coffee in that machine, I’d appreciate some.”
“You’re a braver man than I am,” Fukida said, walking with him to the break room.
Felix put in his dollar and punched buttons—two sugars, two creams (no wonder he was able to drink the stuff)—and waited for the cup to fill with the resultant slush.
“So tell me,” Fukida said, “who came up with the idea of these mysterious hitmen? You?”
Felix laughed. “No, you.” Standing at the machine, taking short, rapid gulps of the too-hot coffee, he explained.
When Dagmar had first talked to the police about what “Magnus” had supposedly said on the telephone, she’d used the word they—“they” killed Torkel, “they” were coming after him—but it was just a figure of speech; she hadn’t meant to suggest that there was more than one person. But when the autopsy was performed and two different-caliber bullets were found in the body, the police had understandably taken the “they” seriously. With both bullets right through the heart, the leap to “professional, anonymous hitmen” had been easy and logical. Of course, the family had embraced the idea as a godsend that temporarily took the pressure off Torkel. Later, after he hadn’t been heard from again and was presumed lost, it had simply been easier all around to stick with it than to change their story. And so the police had spent months on a pointless wild goose chase.
A royal screw-up, Fukida thought, shaking his head. That was the term for it, all right.
Back in the interrogation room, he had Felix repeat the story for the recorder. “That about it?” Felix
said when he’d finished.
They were both getting tired now. Fukida’s sinuses ached and Felix looked as if he might be thinking that the coffee hadn’t been such a hot idea after all.
“Almost. Let’s go back to the meeting with Dagmar the day she was killed. You said you all wanted her to lie and say Torkel murdered Magnus?”
Felix nodded. “Right.”
“I don’t get it. What was that about?”
“The wills again, the goddamn wills. See, if the truth came out—that it was an accident—then Torkel, as the last survivor, would be the one with the valid will, right? And the seamen’s home would be the big beneficiary. But if Torkel killed Magnus—murdered him—then—”
“Then Magnus’s will would be the one that counted, because you can’t inherit from someone you murder—so the money couldn’t go to Torkel in the first place, and he couldn’t leave it to the home. It’d go straight from Magnus to you.”
“That’s it, I’m afraid.”
“Yeah, but—you’re a lawyer, you tell me—would the courts really turn everything upside down and reverse a ten-year-old will?”
“Sarge, I don’t think I have to tell you about the courts. Anytime you go before a judge or a jury, you’re in a crap-shoot. You never know. My guess is that if the home didn’t bother to bring suit, things would stay the way they are. But if they did . . .” He raised his hands and flicked out his fingers, shooting untold possibilities into the air.
“And Dagmar wouldn’t go along with it? That’s why you think someone killed her?”
“Well, she went along with it, or said she did. But anybody could see her heart wasn’t in it. She was on the edge, she just wanted to be done with it. Whoever killed her just couldn’t risk it. That’s what I think.”
Fukida smiled crookedly. “This whole thing gets weirder and weirder,” he said slowly. “I know about cases where someone got killed to keep them from telling the police that someone else was a murderer. But killing somebody to keep them from telling that someone else wasn’t a murderer? Now that’s different.”
Felix smiled in return. “We’ve always been an innovative family,” he said, softly for him.
AND that had been the end of it. Felix had hung around while the tape was transcribed for his signature and had left. Now Fukida, with the transcription in front of him, was mulling things over. He was inclined to believe what he’d been told, and it was all very interesting and explained a lot, and so on, but did it put him any closer to finding Dagmar’s murderer? All four of the nieces and nephews—he was by no means excluding Felix—would have had exactly the same motive for killing her. As to opportunity, none of them had a solid alibi for the time of the murder, but none of them needed one. She’d apparently been killed not long after the meeting at her house broke up, and any of them could have done it before heading home—they’d come and gone separately—and still have been back up in the mountains well inside of an hour. So—
The telephone’s buzz broke into his thoughts, which hadn’t been going anywhere anyway. “Yup?”
“Line four for you, Sergeant,” Sarah said. “It’s Ben Kaaua from Honolulu.”
“Hello, Ben, I sure hope you have something for me.”
“Well, what we have,” Kaaua said smugly, and paused for dramatic effect, “is . . . a . . . match!”
“You’re positive? You could say that in court?”
“Say it, and mean it, and prove it.”
Fukida banged his fist on the desk. “Ben, that’s fantastic. Next time I see you for lunch, I owe you one steak sandwich.”
“Hell with that, buddy. You owe me a steak dinner.”
TWENTY-ONE
WILLIE Akau stood motionless, one arm raised straight above his head, his dusty, garlanded hat in his hand, as the last of the trailer trucks was backed up, inch by inch, to the long, narrow, high-walled loading ramp that fed into the hold of the Philomena Purcell, the old Corral Line cargo ship that had been taking Hoaloha Ranch cattle—and more recently, Little Hoaloha cattle—to Vancouver for the last fifteen years. In air-conditioned comfort, no less.
At just the right moment, the hand holding the hat flashed down and the truck stopped instantly. “Okay, Somoa, open ’er up,” Willie yelled to the young paniolo standing at the ready.
Somoa hopped up onto the truck bed and tugged on the pull-chain, hand over hand. The perforated metal door clattered up, Somoa jumped out of the way, and the cattle, bawling uncertainly, but docile and cooperative, headed onto the ramp, their hooves drumming satisfyingly on the wooden floor.
“Eh-hoo! Ehhhhh-hoo! Hoo!”
Willie had been hearing that call as man and boy for going on sixty years now. Today it came from the two additional paniolos he’d stationed on either side of the ramp with pole prods to urge the cows along in case any of them needed coaxing.
But they didn’t need the poles this time, and in fact, they rarely did. They didn’t really need the eh-hoos either. When it came down to it, they didn’t much need Willie Akau.
In the old days, it was different. The trip to the Kawaihae docks had been a wild and woolly affair then, a full-fledged, old-fashioned cattle drive from the mountains to the sea. They had to start at one in the morning to get the cows there on time. And then when you got to the docks, you had to ride horseback right into the water and swim every damn cow out to an anchored ship, one at a time, then struggle to get a belly band around the frightened animal (he’d gotten his hand broken once and his nose twice doing it) so the deckhands could haul it up in a sling. You had to know what you were doing every step of the way.
Now they just walked them onto the trucks before ever leaving the ranch, and walked them off when they got to the dock. And they started at nine, not at one.
Willie had gotten $1.50 a day on his first cattle drive—which was exactly what Somoa had plunked into the nearby vending machine to get the super-sized chocolate milk he was working on. Now Willie made damn near a hundred times that for doing about a hundred times less work.
It was getting to be retirement time, he thought with a sigh. He’d done a good job training the hands, and Somoa was more than ready to take over. It was time, all right. The Torkelssons had done right by him when it came to a pension, but he wasn’t going to live forever, and if he kept this up he’d wind up dropping dead in the saddle—or more likely at the wheel of an ATV. Not that that’d be so bad, but it’d be kind of nice to get to spend some of that pension, to kick back, do some fishing, do some traveling, do some hanging around the docks, schmoozing and drinking beer in the afternoon, like so many of the old ranch hands turned beach bums.
He watched one of them now, coming down the dock toward him with a rolling, limping gait. Sunburnt and bearded, shaggy gray hair caught in a pony tail, shapeless old captain’s hat on his head, black patch tied over one eye. Interesting-looking guy. Not a ranch hand, though. An old salt, a tough, gristly old pirate, really; nobody he remembered seeing around before.
“How you doin’, buddy?” Willie said. “Can I help you with something?”
“Oh, I expect you can, Willie,” the old man said, and his lean, leathery face split in a grin.
Willie did a double-take, then peered hard at him for a good five seconds. The Philomena Purcell did a short test-burst of its powerful foghorn, startling the cattle into a round of jostling and stamping, and bringing a chorus of eh-hoos from the hands.
Willie heard none of it. “Oh . . . my . . . gawd . . . ,” he said.
“YOU know, I bet my Uncle Jake would like that,” Julie said.
“Absolutely,” John said. “How could anybody not like a topless dashboard hula dancer that plays the Hawaiian War Chant while she jiggles?”
“I don’t know, it’s pretty hard to beat this coconut piggy bank carved into a monkey head,” Gideon said, fingering it. “I think it’s meant to be a guenon, or maybe a mangabey. One of the Cercopithecinae, at any rate.”
“Well, obviously,” John said, yawning. “Cercop
ithecinae, for sure.”
They were in Hilo Hattie’s in Kona. The two-day get-away to Hilo and Volcanoes National Park had done its work. They had put the Torkelsson affair behind them. The subject of Dagmar’s murder had naturally come up a few times, but only in a desultory way. Talking and surmising had led nowhere and had been depressing, and, in any case, they now understood and accepted—even John did—that it was Fukida’s baby, not theirs.
Besides that, their thoughts had naturally enough begun to turn toward home. They had seats on a Hawaiian Airlines flight the following afternoon and they had stopped in the giant store on their way back to the Outrigger, where they planned to spend their last night, to pick up presents for friends and family. The “serious” purchases had already been made—a handsome coral belt for John’s wife Marti, and a Tommy Bahama Aloha blouse for Julie’s sister. Now they were meandering down the souvenir aisles, searching for a few less formal gifts. John, done with his shopping and getting bored, called the Outrigger to see if there were any messages.
“Call from Inge,” he told them when he’d hung up and they were in the checkout line. “We’re invited to a memorial reception for Dagmar. Casual dress. Just family and close friends.”
