Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  He sat down beside her. “So somebody really did try to kill me.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No. But I can’t help being astonished.”

  “The difference being?”

  “There’s an old story, supposedly about Noah Webster, the dictionary guy, in which Webster’s wife catches him in some hankypanky with the maid. ‘Mr. Webster, I am surprised!’ she says. ‘No, my dear,’ says Webster, ‘I am surprised. You are astonished.’ However, I’ve also seen it attributed to Samuel Johnson, and even Winston Churchill, so the provenance is dubious, to say the least.”

  “See?” she said, laughing. “You’re in no danger of losing your Trivial Pursuit title belt.” She turned serious. “But I know what you mean: maybe it doesn’t surprise you, but you still find it hard to believe. ”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yes, me too.” She reflected for a moment and stood up with a sigh. “Anyway, Fausto wants you to come in and get fingerprinted so they can start working out whose prints are on the lamp. I told him I’d drop you off at the police station on the way back to the hotel.”

  “Do you know where the police station is?”

  “I saw it yesterday while I was wandering around on my own. A great old red-brick building with Gothic arches, very Victorian . . . easy to imagine Inspector Lestrade coming out of it on his way to meet with Sherlock Holmes.”

  She waited a few seconds for him to get up as well, but he was lost in his thoughts, frowning, staring at nothing.

  “Gideon? Are you there? Shall we go?”

  He finally stood up. “Definitely. I wanted to talk to Fausto too. There’s something funny about that landslide.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “But something.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE Victorian building downtown turned out to be merely a substation with a sergeant in charge. DCI Sotomayor was to be found at police headquarters, which were situated on Rosia Road, about a mile north of town. Following the instructions they were given, Julie located Rosia Road, which angled away from Main Street and ran down toward the waterfront. “I think it’s that building over there,” she said, pulling to a stop.

  “You mean the one with the all the police cars out front and that big sign over the entrance that says ‘Royal Gibraltar Police Headquarters? ’ Hmm, you just might have something there.”

  “Very funny. Don’t be tedious.”

  Laughing, he leaned over to kiss her. “We can’t be more than half a mile from the hotel. I’ll walk back. Think about where you want to have dinner.”

  “Let’s just have it in the hotel with the others,” Julie said. “I think it would be good to know what’s going on. Also,” she added with a smile, “I’m more comfortable when we have them all in sight.”

  “Okay, see you back there in an hour or less.”

  Getting out of the car, he found himself in an area of old buildings, mostly housing salty-sounding businesses: ship chandleries, nautical charts, marine hardware and coatings. The rusted street sign on the wall beside him told him that the alley at whose head he was standing was called South Dockyard Approach, and it led down behind him, predictably enough, to a sprawling dry-dock operation. The two-story police headquarters building in front of him, like others nearby, was made of big, gray, rough-cut stone blocks. Above the Royal Gibraltar Police Department sign was an older one that said New Mole House, which suggested that the building had originally had something to do with the docks; possibly, he thought, it had been the customs house. He guessed it dated from the early 1800s. (Later he was to learn that he was a century off. It had been built in 1904 as an office of the Ministry of Defense.)

  The front entrance had been constructed as a porte cochere, an arched opening big enough to admit a large horse-drawn vehicle. A handsome gate of metal grillwork closed off the inner courtyard, a tranquil Spanish-style patio with ornamental cactuses and palms, enclosed by four white-stuccoed, balconied walls. Within the entry-way vestibule, what had been the old gatekeeper’s stall was now a little office with a desk, behind which sat a sat a smiling, crisply dressed young policeman, his starched white shirt and blue tie immaculate, his blue tunic draped with perfect symmetry over the back of his chair.

  “How may I be of service, sir?”

  “My name is Gideon Oliver,” Gideon told him through the grated window. “Chief Inspector Sotomayor—”

  “Oh, yes, sir, you’re to be fingerprinted and then escorted to the chief inspector’s office.” He made a brief telephone call, then produced a visitors badge, which was given to Gideon to be hung around his neck. No more than twenty seconds after he’d replaced the phone, another constable appeared at the gate, unlatched it, and took Gideon to a booking room where he had his fingerprints rolled by a female constable, also white-shirted and blue-tied, who absentmindedly hummed throughout the task. It took him a moment to recognize the tune: “It’s a Small World, After All.”

  “I understand you’re some sort of scientific detective,” she said, finishing up.

  “Yes, you could say that.”

  “What do you detect?”

  He pursed his lips, put his thumb and middle finger to his forehead, and put on a detecting expression. “Tell me, been to Walt Disney World lately?”

  Her jaw dropped. “That’s amazing. Disneyland, actually. In Paris. Just last week. But how did you know?”

  “Ah, we’re not permitted to divulge our techniques.”

  His fingertips cleansed with a waterless cleaner, he was taken down a corridor to Fausto’s office, which was on the ground floor, overlooking the courtyard. He was expecting something expensively furnished—carpeting, framed prints and posters, modern sculpture— to go along with Fausto’s flashy, expensive taste in cars and clothes, but instead he found the Universal Cop’s Office: linoleum flooring; scarred, unmatched furniture, most of it metal; walls completely bare of decoration unless you counted charts, bulletin boards covered with overlapping notes and memos, and maps with pins stuck in them; shelves filled with codes and procedure manuals; desk neat and almost bare. And no sculpture at all, modern or otherwise.

  “Pull up a chair,” Fausto said. He too was in shirtsleeves (in his case, silver-gray silk, shot through with pale gold stripes), the French cuffs of which had been turned back in two meticulous, clean-lined folds. His tie, diagonally striped in soft pastels, was, as always a perfect match.

  “Fausto, where do you get your clothes, anyway?”

  “Shirts from Prada, suits from Armani, ties Ferragamo. Why, you want to dress like me?”

  “Are you kidding? I couldn’t afford it.”

  “Sure, you could. I get them over the Internet. Doesn’t cost as much as you think.”

  “Even so, I’m a professor; I’d never get away with looking like a Mafia drug lord.”

  “You’re right,” Fausto agreed, preening a little. “It takes a cop to do that.”

  Gideon took the offered chair. “So tell me about the lamp.”

  “Not much to tell. They found the cord fabric and the wiring had both definitely been filed down—”

  “To make it look as if they’d just frayed.”

  “Unless you can come up with a better reason. They were even able to tell me what he used.” He glanced at an open writing pad on his desk. “A steel bastard-cut half-round file, probably the eight- or ten-inch variety.”

  “Oh? Is that any help? I mean, is that an unusual kind of file?”

  “I was hoping the same thing, but nope, it’s just a file; find ’em in any DIY outfit.”

  “So where do you go from here?”

  “First order of business is to try and match the prints on the lamp. We got four sets, okay? We already identified three of them, guys who had a legitimate reason for handling it—that guy Derek, and two of his crew. That leaves one unidentified set. If yours match it, then we got pretty much bupkis. If they don’t—well, I’m not sure what we h
ave, but it’s a place to start. Get prints from some of your pals, to begin with.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gideon said vaguely. With two-thirds of his mind, he was still trying to put his finger on whatever it was that had been bothering him about the landslide.

  “Listen, Gideon, are you sure it wouldn’t be better if you had a little protection? There’s no shame in it. I mean, now that we know for sure somebody messed with the lamp, that changes things, you know?”

  Gideon waved him off and told him about Julie’s hypothesis: the attacks on him had been motivated by fears about what he might be going to say—to “reveal”—in his lecture. But now the lecture was over and done. Everybody knew there was nothing to reveal.

  “You agree with that?”

  “Yes, I do,” Gideon said. “I still have no clue as to what they thought I was going to say, but I do believe that’s what it was about, yes. And if you notice, nobody’s tried to kill me since.”

  “Yeah, a whole twenty-four hours now.”

  “Closer to twenty-eight. Fausto, what about Ivan? Are you getting anywhere with that?”

  “Just getting started, trying to nail down the basic facts. We did a few preliminary interviews, just short ones, with the director at the museum, Rowley what’s-his-name—Boyd—and with some of your friends at the hotel. Well the one with the old fat guy, Vanderwater, that one wasn’t so short; pretty hard to have a short interview with him. That guy can really talk. But then I know Vanderwater, I should have set aside more time.”

  “How do you know Adrian?” Gideon asked.

  “From the Sheila Chan thing. I did some of the interviewing when she disappeared—mostly, the same people who are back now.”

  “I don’t understand. You said there was nothing suspicious about it. Why were you interviewing people?”

  “Because the whole thing started as a misper, so—”

  “As a what?”

  “A missing person case. Britspeak. Nobody knew where she was for two days before we figured out to look at the cave-in to see if she was there. And she was.”

  “Oh.”

  Gideon could feel the gears of his mind engage again and almost, but not quite, mesh. Sheila Chan . . . missing for two days . . . what was it about that that wasn’t right, that didn’t fit? She had been on his mind ever since the visit to the cave and now he felt he was on the very edge of catching hold of whatever it was that was eluding him. It was almost as if a snap of his fingers might flick it into focus. He snapped his fingers. Twice. The thought, if it was a thought, stayed out of range.

  “Anyway, back at the ranch,” Fausto said, looking at him curiously, “apparently this Rowley guy got him out of there about eight o’clock because his mind was wandering a little.”

  So, obviously, was Gideon’s. With an effort he concentrated on what Fausto was saying. “That much is true enough. Except that it was wandering a lot, not a little. By the time Rowley got him out of there it was back on Guadalcanal in World War Two.”

  “Okay, so he gets him home to his cottage a little before nine, offers to make a pot of tea for him but gets turned down—Gunderson says wants to go to bed—and Boyd goes home himself. Gunderson, he says, was in an ‘excited, confused state of mind.’ Now, we know the fire started around four A.M., give or take twenty minutes, so that means the attack happened sometime between nine and four. Obviously. ”

  “Probably a lot closer to four, wouldn’t you think?” Gideon said. “I don’t see his killer hanging around for five or six hours after smashing his skull in before starting the fire. What about motive, Fausto? Getting anywhere there?”

  “Nah, to hear them tell it, they all loved the old guy. Everybody loved the old guy.”

  “Well, everybody I know did,” Gideon said, “including me. Maybe it was a stranger—you know, a robbery gone wrong?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Pretty unlikely, I admit, but was there any sign of forced entry?”

  Fausto laughed his rat-a-tat laugh. “Are you kidding? Maybe if any of the doors were still standing we’d know. The damn place burned to the ground. All those solvents.”

  “Right, I forgot.”

  The telephone on the desk chirped. Fausto punched a button and picked it up. “Anything?” He listened for a couple of seconds. “Shit. Thanks anyway, Rosie.”

  He hung up, grumbling. “The prints on the lamp. They’re yours, all right. So . . . no leads there after all.”

  “Too bad,” Gideon said, but his mind was off on its own again. The attempts on his life seemed long ago and trivial, hardly worth bothering about; comic-opera stuff, involving, as they did, broken-down old lamps and theories about homicidal monkeys. It was Sheila Chan that was eating at him. Something didn’t fit about Sheila, or the cave-in, or both, and it was maddeningly, frustratingly, dancing around just out of reach. If he could only . . .

  Fausto had returned to Ivan. “Boyd was able to give us a bunch of contacts that might turn up something. Gunderson’s solicitor, his housekeeper . . .”

  Whatever was nagging at him necessarily had to be in the context of either what Fausto had told him during lunch at the Angry Friar the day before, or what he’d heard from Pru and Corbin at the testimonial dinner the night before that—because that was all he’d ever heard about the cave-in and Sheila; that was his entire context, but it had been enough to set his antennae quivering when he saw the actual site, the actual dirt of the landslide. Both conversations together couldn’t have totaled more than fifteen minutes. How hard could fifteen minutes be to reconstruct? Start with Fausto. Fausto had told them—Julie and Gideon—that he had been on the scene when she’d been dug out, that she’d been much crushed in the slide, that the maggots found on her indicated a time of death two to three days earlier, that some passengers on the Morocco ferry had seen—

  “The maggots!” he cried, practically jumping out of his chair.

  Fausto, caught in mid-sentence, blinked. “The what?”

  “The maggots, the maggots!” Gideon repeated, and this time he did jump out of his chair, waving his arms and striding excitedly around the room. “The maggots!” he exclaimed yet again. “How could I miss it? Where was my mind?” He whacked himself in the forehead, much as Kazimir Figlewski had that morning, but harder than he’d meant to. “Ow!”

  Fausto calmly watched this extraordinary performance from his chair. “So are you planning to let me in on this brainstorm anytime soon?”

  Gideon returned to the desk and leaned over it, supporting himself with both hands. “Fausto, she was murdered,” he said intently. “She—”

  Fausto threw up his hands. “Oh, hey, give me a break, will you? Give it a rest already. We got this great record of one murder every five years, and you show up, and in one day you’re telling me about two murders that we never noticed? What, I don’t have enough on my plate? I’m telling you, if you’d been around these last five years I’d have had a homicide every other day. I mean, what is it with you? Every time you look at somebody dead, you—”

  “Fausto, shut up and listen. She was not killed in the landslide. She was already dead when it happened. The cave-in was a cover. Like the fire was a cover for Ivan.”

  “You see? Right there—that’s what I mean,” Fausto said with a pained expression. “For you, any time there’s a—” He sighed. “Okay, all right, I know you’re gonna turn out to be right. Just give me a minute to get used to it. I’m just, what do you call it, venting.” He sat there shaking his head, then laughed, a mixture of incredulity and amusement, and followed it with one more sigh. “All right, I think I can stand it now. Let’s hear it. Tell me, why was she not killed in the cave-in?”

  EIGHTEEN

  SHE wasn’t killed in the cave-in, Gideon explained, because if she’d been killed in the cave-in there wouldn’t have been any maggots.

  “No maggots,” Fausto said dully. “Uh-huh.”

  “No maggots,” Gideon repeated. “Look, maggots are the larvae of flies—”

/>   “I know that.”

  “—which hatch from the eggs that the flies lay on dead things—”

  “I know, I know. Jesus, Gideon, tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Well, what you obviously don’t know is that flies do not lay eggs on dead things when they’re covered by three, or four, or five feet of earth. You don’t find maggots on people buried by landslides. How would the flies reach them?” He waited for that to sink in.

  “Oh. I never thought of that,” Fausto said quietly.

  “Well, why should you? But I should have thought of it the minute . . . damn, how could I miss that?” He raised his hand for another crack at his own forehead, but thought better of it.

  Fausto scowled up at him. “So this means . . . ?”

  “This means that Sheila Chan spent some time aboveground between the time she died and the time the cave-in buried her.”

  “You mean she laid around dead for two days? Those maggots were two days old.”

  “No, no, no. Just long enough for the flies to get to her and lay their eggs. Once they did that in the open air, where they could get to her, the maggots would be able to survive underground.”

  “How long would that take? For the flies to get to her and lay their eggs?”

  “No way to tell, but not very long. Maybe five minutes. In a climate like this, almost certainly inside of a couple of hours.”

  “So you’re saying she was killed somewhere else,” Fausto mused, “then brought out to the cave, and buried under the cave-in?”

  “Not necessarily.” Gideon dropped into his chair again, quieter and more reflective now. “Corbin and Pru told me she’d been hanging around the site even though she wasn’t supposed to.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Okay. I think we can assume everybody knew it, so my guess would be that someone got to her right there, that she was killed right where she was found, and then they triggered the cave-in to cover her. That’d be a lot simpler and lot safer than carting a dead body around in a car.”