Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 06 - Icy Clutches

by Icy Clutches

  "Were there any injuries?” John asked, remembering what Gideon had told him about the mandible. “To Pratt's jaw? Or Fisk's jaw, for that matter?"

  "Injuries?” Judd made chewing motions, presumably to help him remember. “Well, there was a little blood, I think. James had a split lip, a few scrapes, no more than that. Why do you ask?"

  "Go ahead,” John said. “What happened then?"

  "Somehow Audley cooled things down before anyone got killed, but Steve took himself pretty seriously, you see, and this was a real blow to his ego, his manhood, whatever. And the fact that Jocelyn truly couldn't see what all the fuss was about didn't make him any happier. Audley insisted on a truce, and Jocelyn got a fatherly lecture, too, but it was all very touchy, very uncomfortable, from then on."

  He went back to snapping his suspender strap gently, thoughtfully. “Well, when I heard yesterday that someone had apparently been murdered, I assumed...well, obviously."

  "Assumed what, Dr. Judd?"

  "Well, I can't say that I reasoned it through very carefully. I suppose I assumed there must have been another confrontation out there on the ice before the avalanche struck, and that Steve—well—killed James."

  "Why not the other way around? Pratt must have had it in for Fisk too."

  "Oh, well, I suppose so, but James was a quiet, sober sort. He knew he had that licking coming and he took it like a man. Steve was more of a brawler by nature; thin-skinned, belligerent, quarrelsome..."

  Judd's fingers drummed thoughtfully on either side of his abdomen while he searched for more adjectives. For a man who hesitated to speak ill of the dead he was pretty good at it, once he got going.

  "It doesn't sound as if you liked him too much yourself,” John said.

  The fingers stopped their tapping. “Ah, liked him myself?"

  I hit some kind of nerve there, John thought. He's thinking hard. “Did you and Fisk have a problem?"

  Judd tipped back his head and chortled. “Why should there have been a problem? He was Audley's student, not mine, and Audley was welcome to him."

  John waited for him to go on. Judd was hiding something, waffling, embroidering the facts. Something.

  "Oh, I suppose you could say I didn't care for his ways too much, but no, there was no problem, none at all. Steve and I got along just fine."

  Something.

  * * * *

  "I make no secret of it,” Anna Henckel said forthrightly. “Professor Tremaine was no friend of mine; there was little about him I respected.” She hesitated, not something she did often, John imagined. “But I am sorry he was murdered in that way."

  Did that mean she'd have preferred some other way? Dr. Henckel didn't show much in the way of grief for the dead Tremaine. No more than Judd had. She had made an impressive entrance in her “Dracula cape"—not black these days, but bottle green—a dramatic, full-length, collared cape held together at the neck by a heavy chain. She had set the staff she carried in a corner and had taken the one unpadded wooden chair in the upstairs lounge. Since then she had sat with the cape around her shoulders, stiff and distant, as restrained as Judd had been wriggly. Occasionally she took a puff from a cigarillo, held between the tips of her thumb and middle finger, European-fashion.

  "What was it about him you didn't like?” he asked.

  "Because you are a policeman is no reason to dissimulate,” Anna replied sharply.

  These weren't exactly your everyday interviews. He'd been at it only an hour and already he'd run into an “egad” and a “dissimulate.” What next?

  "I'm aware,” she went on, “that you've already talked with Walter. Do not ask me to believe he passed up the opportunity to prattle about my long-standing differences with Professor Tremaine."

  "I think maybe he did say something about it, now that you mention it,” John allowed.

  Anna studied him expressionlessly. If that was her you-sir-have-the-balls-of-a-fish look, no wonder Tremaine had wilted.

  "I'd like to hear your version,” he said.

  "It's very simple, Mr. Lau. I did not dislike him. I was...disappointed in him. As a young man he had had enormous potential; a truly original mind, capable of the highest level of synthetic thinking. He had already done great work in the 1950s. He might have become...” For a moment the aloof gray eyes gleamed, but she cut herself off with a tired wave. “However, he threw it all away."

  "To become a TV star?"

  "No, that was later. That followed, perhaps inevitably. No, he threw it away by taking the easy course, not the scientist's way. He was lazy and he was dishonest,” she said flatly. “He plagiarized the ideas of others, Mr. Lau. No, that isn't the right word. He stole the ideas of others."

  "Including yours."

  "Most definitely. In 1966 he wrote a monograph, in its time a significant contribution, in which his ‘new’ approach to the nondirectional complexities of primary-plant succession were taken directly from an unfinished paper on which I had been working for more than a year."

  "Rough."

  The lounge was warm but she pulled the collar of the cape a little closer around her. “Afterwards I made the most strenuous objections, quite publicly, and he baldly denied my accusations. That's all there was to it."

  "You never got any satisfaction?"

  One gray eyebrow rose. “Prior to last night, you mean?"

  John didn't smile. “Prior to last night."

  "Once in print he went so far as to say that it was conceivable we had gotten the same idea at the same time, but that he had simply been fortunate to publish first. Like Darwin and Wallace, you know? That was not enough for me."

  "Sorry, I know who Darwin was,” John said. “I'm afraid I never heard of Wallace."

  She smiled for the first time. Not with humor, but not with malice either. “That is precisely my point."

  "It must have been pretty hard to take."

  "Mr. Lau,” she said wearily, “if I had wanted to kill him over it, I assure you I would have done it many, many years ago, not now. Believe me, I put all this behind me when I left the hallowed halls of ivy for the far more civilized world of commerce."

  "That was when?"

  "In 1970. I've been with Amore Cosmetics ever since. I'm now their director of research and development."

  "Have you had much contact with Tremaine since then?"

  "None at all. It was a chapter in my life I was happy to close. Nothing until his publisher contacted me about this book of his."

  "You must have had to take a week's leave to come here."

  "Yes, a week's vacation."

  "Why?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Why use up a week's vacation for this if you put it behind you long ago? Why not just let him write whatever he wanted to?"

  She stared silently out the window for a moment. “Audley was incapable of perceiving his own inadequacies, Mr. Lau. I have no doubt whatever that his book would have blamed his misdirection of the expedition on others. Especially on me, as the assistant director. I couldn't allow that."

  "You think he misdirected the expedition?"

  She gave a dry bark of laughter and looked levelly at him again. “Yes, I think he misdirected the expedition. I make no secret of that either."

  "I understand you have some kind of report on that."

  "I have?” She looked genuinely puzzled.

  "You were showing it to some of the others in the bar."

  "Oh, that, yes. Not a report, but a Park Service memorandum: the results of a pro forma investigation concerned with the tragedy. Sketchy as it is, there is no doubt about Audley's culpability."

  "I'd like to see it, please."

  "As I recall, I gave the copy I have with me to Mr. Pratt. But I can tell you what it said, Mr. Lau. Simply this: They should never have been on the glacier that day. There had been increasing earth tremors, even small avalanches, and what did any of us know about ice travel? I advised against it, the Park Service advised against it. But no, he knew better.
And as a result of his obstinacy and Walter's incompetence, three young people died."

  Two, John thought. One was already dead when the avalanche hit, assuming Gideon was right. Which he was, of course.

  "Or rather two,” Anna murmured, in tune with him. “I understand someone seems to have been killed with an ice ax before the avalanche struck. Can you tell me which one it was?"

  "I don't know which one it was. I hear there was some bad feeling among the crew."

  "Oh, yes, there was considerable bad feeling."

  "Over what?"

  "Over Jocelyn Yount, primarily.” The dry, scaly corners of her mouth turned down. “She was a woman of scant discretion and few morals. To her, anything wearing trousers...surely Walter didn't fail to go into this?"

  "No, ma'am. He told me her fiancee and James Pratt fought over her, that Fisk physically attacked Pratt."

  "That is true."

  "Would you care to make a guess about what happened out there on the ice?"

  "No. Is there anything else?"

  "Dr. Henckel, you said Jocelyn Yount was the primary cause of bad feeling. Does that mean there were other causes?"

  "I see no relevance to what you are investigating, but at the end, of course, we were all somewhat irritated with Walter."

  "Why was that?"

  She eyed him. “You don't know why it was they had to go back into the field that final day, the day of the avalanche?"

  "No, ma'am."

  "Ah,” she said with a pale smile. “So Dr. Judd left a few things out of his account after all."

  "Maybe he forgot."

  Again the shadowed smile. “I don't think so."

  "Suppose you tell me then."

  She pulled the high collar closer about her neck, “Mr. Lau, our fieldwork had already been completed. We were to leave for home the next day. Our equipment was packed. And then it was found that Walter had bungled his sampling. An immediate, unscheduled field trip was required to regather the contaminated data. We had to put off our departure. Naturally, this was a source of annoyance and some bad feeling."

  John played a hunch. “Between Steve Fisk and Dr. Judd in particular?"

  If the question surprised her she didn't show it. “Yes, it was Steven who discovered Walter's slovenliness and called it to our attention. Being Steven, he was not overly charitable in his manner of doing it. Walter held his tongue at the time—what could he say?—but I imagine that—being Walter—there was some sulking and resentment later, in the privacy of his room."

  Bingo. Judd had been covering something up, all right. Dissimulating like hell.

  "You needn't look so keen, Mr. Lau. Steven may have been murdered, but Walter didn't do it. He may be a weak man, an ineffectual man, but he is not a bad man. Besides, I saw him when he was brought out, and I assure you he was in no condition to do anyone violence; his infection was very real."

  Was it? Or had he somehow faked those bites? Had he remained behind on the beach for only an hour or two, then gone sneaking after Steve Fisk, disgraced and enraged, to bury that ice ax in his skull? And now, thirty years later, had he throttled Tremaine to keep him from revealing it in his book? No, that didn't add up. How could you “sneak” across a glacier? How could Judd have managed to escape the avalanche himself and get back to the beach? And why would Tremaine have kept quiet about it all these years? For that matter—whoever had really swung that ax—why had Tremaine kept quiet? Because he'd done it himself, as Gideon had thought? Maybe, but now his own murder raised questions about that.

  John scribbled a few notes, reminders of things to look into. “You yourself weren't with them that day."

  "No. I remained at our headquarters in Gustavus."

  "The headquarters were in Gustavus? Not here?"

  "There was no ‘here.’ This lodge was not built until 1965. No, we rented a house in Gustavus, and it was there that I stayed, redoing our frequency distributions and dot maps. This was at Audley's express instruction."

  "Uh-huh.” There didn't seem to be much point in continuing in that direction. “A few minutes ago you said Jocelyn went after everything in pants. Did that include Tremaine? Were there any problems there?"

  "Females,” she said stiffly, “were not one of Audley's problems."

  John glanced up from his notebook. “Are you saying he was gay, ma'am?"

  "No, Mr. Lau,” she said quietly, looking out the window. “I have no knowledge of or interest in his sex life. I only know that women were not central to him. A woman can tell such things. I was young then myself, remember, and would have known if his attitude toward me had included anything more than—” She jerked her head angrily and ground out the stub of her cigarillo. “Why are we discussing these things? If you have no questions more pertinent than these, I would like to go now."

  "Yes, ma'am, you can go. Thanks for your cooperation."

  He watched her descend the open stairwell, erect and regal, thumping her polished wooden staff as she went. Step, thunk, step, thunk, step, thunk.

  John dropped his notebook into his shirt pocket. Deep stuff here, he thought.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 13

  * * * *

  By the time Gideon had mixed the Duco-and-acetone solution, coated the fragments, and set them out to dry, it was 12:20. He locked up the contact station and went seeking fresh air to clear the sharp fumes from his lungs. He walked out to the end of the wooden pier that began a few paces away and jutted two hundred feet into Bartlett Cove. Here and there the silver flank of a salmon would break the rippled surface of the water momentarily and disappear again, almost before the eye had registered it, leaving a small splash like an afterimage. Above, dark wisps of cloud drifted like flecks of ash under a luminous, oyster-gray cloud sheet. He leaned his elbows on the railing and stared down at the dark water.

  Murder. No mere intellectual exercise this time, no decades-old shards of bone posing a dusty forensic puzzle. Flesh-and-blood murder. So had the other been, of course, but what a difference time made. Tremaine had been alive yesterday; Gideon had talked to him. And no more than three hours afterward someone had stolen a passkey to his room and strangled him—had pressed brutal thumbs into the fragile, elderly windpipe, holding them there until Tremaine's face turned purple from the desperate need for air, and his tongue stuck out, and his mouth frothed, and his eyes popped. And the left superior cornu of his larynx snapped.

  The killer had left him lying on his back while he—or she—rummaged through the closet, looking for something of Tremaine's to make it look like a credible suicide. He had found the boots, removed the laces, wrapped them around Tremaine's neck, hoisted the body into position—that couldn't have been an easy job—and knotted the laces around the hook. Then, for a little extra verisimilitude, the overnight case—cum—gallows stool had been provided. The killer had left, perhaps immediately, perhaps waiting until late at night, through either the window or the door, locking it behind him.

  Had there been an argument? Had Tremaine threatened to reveal something that someone wanted hidden? Had someone...Still looking at the water, Gideon shook his head. Too early for answers. Too early for the questions. There was nothing to go on yet.

  Who the “someone was, was easier. The possibilities, after all, were limited. It had to have been one of the five people Tremaine was working with. Who else was there with any connection to him?

  The dark underclouds were thickening, the day growing colder. Tiny whitecaps were forming even in the protected cove. Two or three hundred feet down the wild shoreline, across a shallow, rock-strewn inlet, the breeze ruffled the neck fur of a mother bear and cub browsing choosily among the blueberry bushes. Gideon zipped his windbreaker up to his neck, but still the wind chilled him. He turned to head back and saw someone peering into the window of the contact station, face pressed against the glass, hand to his forehead to block the reflections. When the figure moved, Gideon recognized him.

  "Arthur!” he call
ed.

  Tibbett turned around. “Gideon! I was just looking for you.” He hurried to meet Gideon, his pale face doughy with misgiving. A cardboard box was clamped under one arm. “Is it definitely true? He was murdered?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  "Awful. The vultures have already begun to gather,” he said with distaste. He blew out his cheeks, walking hunch-shouldered with Gideon back toward the head of the pier. “I've just had a call from the Anchorage Daily News, wanting to know if a press conference has been scheduled yet."

  "You'll probably have to hold one eventually, Arthur. Tremaine was a nationally known figure."

  "You don't really think so!” Tibbett's head jiggled back and forth in disapproval, but beneath the surface Gideon sensed a dawning excitement; the glittering exhilaration of involvement with murdered celebrities. Gideon had seen it before, in cops, coroners, even priests. Why not an assistant park superintendent?

  They had reached the head of the pier. Arthur stopped and looked at him with mild reproof. “Owen told me about the other murder—the old one, the skull. You might have told me, you know."

  "Well, I didn't want to bother you,” Gideon said lamely. “I wasn't really positive at first."

  "But you're positive now?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know, I don't think there's ever been a murder in this park before. And now, here we are with two in two days.” He started a nervous giggle, but broke it off. “You know what I mean. Oh, I almost forgot. This is for you.” He extended the box.

  Gideon took out a white kitchen scale. “For me?” he said, confused.

  "You said you needed an accurate scale. You wanted to do some kind of regression equation on the bones."

  "Oh, yes, that's right.” He'd forgotten all about it. It had been mentioned originally only to soothe Arthur's anxieties. There was a way to use bone weights to find out whether a set of bones had come from the same person, but you needed the right bones, and Gideon didn't have them. Of course, with Owen's rangers out searching for more, there was a possibility that they'd turn up, and then a scale would come in handy. But not this scale.