Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “Gracias, mamacita,” Tony said, brightening and snatching one of the bars off the plate before she could get it to the table. “Ah, turrones , my favorites! Still warm too.”

  “What isn’t your favorite?” Dorotea said in Spanish and stomped back to the dining room with the empty platter.

  “Dorotea’s personality doesn’t change much, does it?” Julie said, smiling.

  “Heart of gold,” said Tony, chomping away. “Best cook in Mexico. Wait till you try these.” He shoved the plate at them.

  Indeed, they were luscious. Feather light, but moist and chewy at the same time, and subtly sweetened with honey, they ranked right up there with the best confections he’d ever tasted. And that coffee! He was beginning to see why Tony and the others so willingly put up with the woman’s crabbiness.

  “What did Jamie mean,” he asked after a couple of blissful swallows, “about Manolo talking weirdly? Did he have some kind of impediment?”

  “Not before Carl gave him one,” Tony said, laughing. “Busted his jaw in two places.”

  “Carl hit him?” Julie exclaimed. “It’s hard to imagine that. He’s always so in control, so calm.”

  As if to illustrate her point, a smiling, serene Carl, looking handsome and very much at home on horseback, was heading slowly out through the corral gate, followed by a line of devoted, mounted females. Like a gaggle of imprinted ducklings scurrying after mama, Gideon thought. Well, maybe not quite.

  “Not when his wife is screwing around on him, I guess, pardon the language,” Tony said. “I guess he did feel bad about it, though. He paid for getting the guy’s jaw wired.”

  Another turrón slid down Tony’s gullet, and then another, the last of them. (“You guys weren’t gonna eat this, were you?”) He finished his coffee, pulled over the one Dorotea had brought out for Jamie, and started happily on it as well.

  “And Blaze was never heard from again?” Julie asked. “She never even wanted to hear about her daughter?”

  “Nope, never.”

  “She just up and left with her boyfriend? No note, no anything?”

  “No nothing,” Tony said. “I mean, I hadn’t got here yet—I didn’t show up until a couple of days later—so all I know is what everybody tells me. Blaze used to go into Oaxaca for lessons once a week, and she’d stay overnight—Wednesday, I think, and come back on Thursday. So one week she leaves for her lesson as usual—this is, like, one day after this creep Manolo gets kicked off the ranch by Carl—only she doesn’t show up the next morning the way she always does. And that happens to be Thursday, the morning Jamie brings back the payroll from Tlacolula. So Jamie gets in the van with a suitcase full of cash as usual, and starts driving back here, and as soon as he gets to a deserted stretch of road, Manolo jumps up and sticks a gun in his ear—he was hiding on the floor in back—grabs the cash, and drives off in the van, leaving the poor kid standing out in the desert, shaking like a leaf. I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it, even though there’s no way it’s his fault. He had to bum a ride on a manure wagon to get back.”

  “And then?” Gideon asked.

  “There isn’t any ‘and then.’ Good-bye Manolo, good-bye Blaze, good-bye payroll. End of story. Hey, look who’s here!”

  Jamie and a broadly smiling Annie were coming across the terrace toward them.

  “How the hell did you guys get back so fast?” Tony said, getting up and holding his arms open for Annie, who responded with her own enthusiastic hug.

  “Tony, it’s so good to see you. I’m so glad I didn’t miss you!”

  There were a few minutes of chatter, mostly to explain that Annie had caught an earlier flight than expected and had taken a taxi to Teotitlán rather than wait for Jamie. The taxi had pulled into the Hacienda’s parking lot just as Jamie was starting out for the airport in one of the vans.

  “What happened to the turrones?” Jamie asked. “What happened to my coffee? I saw Dorotea bring it all out. I was gone, what, ten minutes, and it’s all gone?” He shook his head. “Never mind, if I put my mind to it, I think I can figure it out.”

  Tony hunched his shoulders. “I was hungry.”

  “Turrones?” Annie said. “Did I miss turrones?” She was back on her feet and headed for the kitchen. “Maybe she made a few more.”

  Smiling, Tony watched her go. “One thing we got in this family, we got healthy appetites,” he said approvingly, then called after her. “Hey, bring out whatever she’s got in there. We could use some more coffee too!”

  “What kind of lessons was she taking?” Julie asked Tony.

  “Huh?”

  “You said Blaze went into Oaxaca for lessons every week. I was just wondering what she was taking.”

  “Oh hell, I don’t know. I think it was some kind of—”

  “Dance,” Jamie said. “Blaze’d been taking ballet lessons since she was nine. She was really serious about it too; practiced three solid hours every morning, seven days a week, even right after Annie was born. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t believe it when she actually—”

  It had taken all this time since the word “dance” for Gideon to find his voice. “She was a ballet dancer?” he croaked.

  Jamie looked at him, puzzled. “That’s right, a good one. We all expected her—”

  “How many teeth did she have?”

  Now everybody looked confused, including Julie.

  “How many teeth?” Jamie echoed with a hollow laugh. “I have no idea.”

  “Tony, do you know?”

  “No, how the hell would I know how many teeth she had?” Like the others, he’d been thrown off by Gideon’s sudden intensity. “What’s this with teeth?”

  “How many teeth do you have?”

  “How many—I don’t know, how many teeth does anybody have?”

  “Mind if I peek?”

  Tony looked at him peculiarly, then shrugged. “What the hell, help yourself.” He opened his mouth and Gideon peered in.

  “No, they’re all there. Damn,” he added softly.

  “Damn?” Tony echoed. “What do you mean, damn? Why shouldn’t I have all my teeth?”

  A thoughtful look had settled over Jamie’s face while this was going on. Gideon could see that his tongue was poking at his teeth.

  “What about you, Jamie? Are you missing any?”

  “Well yes, it’s odd that you should ask. Four of my teeth never did come in. I forget which ones. Not the important ones; the second somethings.”

  “Premolars,” Gideon said. “Bicuspids.”

  “That’s it, bicuspids. But what in the world—”

  “I don’t have all mine either,” Annie said, having arrived with a plate bearing a few more turrones. “Mine never came in either. It runs in the family. Doesn’t really cause any problems, though. Who needs bicuspids? Why are we talking about teeth, anyway?”

  Gideon sighed. “I have some news for you, folks.” Boy, did he have some news. He looked up at Annie. “Annie,” he said gently, “maybe you’d better sit down.”

  FIFTEEN

  HE couldn’t blame them for refusing to accept it at first. He was having a hard time accepting it himself, and he was new to the story of Blaze’s abandoning her child and running off with Manolo to Juárez, or whatever it was. He’d never heard of either of them before last Sunday, three days ago. But these others—Jamie, Tony, Annie—they had lived with the tale for almost twenty years; it was established family history by now, validated by time and by retelling. Besides that, they all remembered the policía ministerial’s onerous investigation, only a year earlier, of the “little girl’s” skeleton that had been discovered in the mine.

  And now, just because Gideon Oliver, after a few hours’ perfunctory work, without instruments or laboratory facilities of any kind, concludes that the police pathology experts from Mexico City were dead wrong, that the “little girl” was actually a big girl, they were supposed to accept it as proven fact? And even more unimaginable, that out of all the unide
ntified skeletons in Mexico it could possibly be, it was that of their own Blaze? They were supposed to swallow that as well?

  With all due respect, other than Julie they did not; not at first. But slowly he explained, and slowly they came around; first Tony, then Jamie, and finally, most reluctantly, Annie. The probability of a nineteen- or twenty-year-old woman, who happened to be a ballet dancer and who shared a rare genetic condition of missing teeth with Annie and Jamie and who had been found in this remote, barely populated region only a few miles from the Hacienda Encantada and for whom no identification had ever been made and who had been killed at about the right time—the probability of such a person’s being anybody but Blaze Gallagher Tendler was simply too implausible for them to hold on to in the face of Gideon’s coherent exposition.

  The fresh turrones lay untouched and cooling on the table throughout. Once it had all sunk in, Tony was the first to speak. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying she never ran away with that guy? You’re saying she was murdered? There’s no doubt about that?”

  “None. Her face—” He had almost forgotten for a moment that he was talking to Blaze’s two brothers and—especially—to her daughter. “None,” he said.

  “How was she killed?” Annie asked dully.

  “Blunt-force trauma.” Gideon hoped she’d let it go at that and was relieved when she merely nodded and looked down at her hands. He wouldn’t have looked forward to telling her that her young mother’s beautiful face had been pulped with something along the lines of a baseball bat.

  “So he actually killed her,” an incredulous Jamie said. “Manolo?”

  “Who the hell else?” Tony said bitterly. “The sonofabitch. Robbing the frigging payroll and taking her away from Carl wasn’t enough payback for him.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “And all this time we thought . . .”

  “No,” Annie said dully, “Manolo wouldn’t have killed her. Why would Manolo have killed her?”

  “Hey, honey,” Tony said kindly, “maybe this is something it’s not so good for you to be talking about right now. This is kind of a shock to everybody, you most of all. You sure you don’t want to go unpack or something, get your head clear? We can talk about it later.”

  “Forget it,” she said stonily. “I’m staying. So why would Manolo have wanted to kill my mother?”

  Jamie answered diffidently. “Well, so he could have that sixteen thousand dollars all to himself; he could have lived on that for five years. Or maybe it was just to get back at your father, I don’t know. But my point is, once he had the money, why would he want to take her with him? You can’t seriously think he was in love with her?”

  Julie shook her head. “But even so, as Annie said, why would he want to kill her? He could just as easily have taken off with the money without murdering anyone.”

  “Could be he just didn’t want to leave any loose ends behind,” Tony suggested. “She must have known about his plans, about where he was going. She could have put the police on his tail.”

  “So he could have changed his plans and gone someplace else, anywhere he wanted,” Julie persisted. “Sixteen thousand dollars—he must have felt like a rich man. So why go out of his way to kill her? Why would he risk a murder charge hanging over his head, instead of a simple robbery? Besides, if he was worried about the police hunting him down, he’d have killed you too, Jamie. Right then and there, on the road, it would have been the easiest thing in the world. You were the only eyewitness, the only one who could identify him for sure as the person who robbed you.”

  Jamie’s eyes widened slightly and his Adam’s apple jigged up and down. “Yes, you’re right,” he said in a hushed voice. “That’s certainly true.”

  “What do you think, Gid?” Tony asked. “You know more about this kind of stuff than any of the rest of us. You got an opinion?”

  “I don’t see that knowing something about bones gives my opinion any more weight than anyone else’s, but on the face of it, Manolo would probably be at the top of my list.”

  “What about you, Tony?” Jamie asked. “What’s your theory?”

  “I don’t have a theory. How could I? I wasn’t around until a couple of days later and I hardly know anything about Blaze other than what I’ve heard here. The last time I saw her she was, like, fourteen. But don’t worry, the police will come up with plenty of theories.”

  “The police,” Jamie groaned, rolling his eyes. “God help us, do you mean to tell me the police have to be involved in this? After all these years?”

  “I don’t see any choice,” Gideon said. “I have to tell Colonel Marmolejo about it, and he’ll certainly put somebody on it. I’m seeing him later today, so it won’t be long.”

  Jamie frowned. “Damn. That’s terrible.”

  Annie flared angrily up. “Terrible? What the hell is the matter with you, Jamie? Don’t you want to see whoever did it caught? Don’t you want to see him punished?”

  Jamie was shocked. “Well yes, of course I do, Annie, how can you even ask that? I just hate to see this terrible old business dragged out in public again after all this time. Besides, I’m afraid . . . you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. Tell me. Afraid of what?”

  “Well . . .” he fidgeted in his chair. “The police are going to ask a whole lot of questions, and the first one is going to be: who had any reason to want her dead? Am I right, Gideon?”

  “Maybe not the first, but it won’t be very far down the line.”

  “All right, then,” Jamie said, addressing all of them, “and who is the person that had the most reason to hate Blaze, to be out-of-his mind enraged at her?”

  Brows were knit in thought for a fraction of a second, and then Tony abruptly exploded. “For Christ’s sake, are you honestly suggesting that Carl . . . that Carl murdered his own wife? I don’t believe this!” He was halfway out of his chair. His blotchy red face, thrust out at his brother, had blotched and purpled even more; his nose was flaming.

  Predictably, Jamie quailed. His hands came up as if to ward off the assault. “No, Tony, come on, give me a break, I’m not accusing Carl of anything. Of course not! Why is everyone picking on me? I’m just saying what the police are bound to think. I’m just saying we have to be very careful what we say to them, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” Tony sat back down. His color subsided. “Sorry, Jaime, I didn’t mean to fly off the handle. You’re right, we better give this some thought.”

  “Look, folks,” Gideon said, “this is your affair and I don’t want to interfere, but I’ve been involved with a lot of police investigations, and my advice is not to try to protect Carl or anyone else; in fact, not to ‘try’ to do anything. Just answer their questions as truthfully as you can. Otherwise, you’ll wind up making trouble for yourselves and for Carl.”

  “Yeah, but you’re talking about American police,” said Tony. “Down here it doesn’t work the same, trust me.”

  “Well, I know you know more about that than I do—”

  “Do I ever,” Tony said with a harsh laugh.

  “—but if Colonel Marmolejo is involved in it, I think you can count on decent treatment. And don’t try conning the guy—trust me on that.”

  Tony smiled, keeping his thoughts to himself.

  “Speaking of Carl . . .” Julie said, gesturing with her chin toward the corral gate, through which Carl was leading the straggling line of ladies back from their short ride.

  “Whew,” Jamie said. “Who’s going to tell him about this?”

  “I’ll do it,” Tony said, grim-faced, beginning to push himself up.

  “Uh-uh,” Annie said, putting a hand on his arm to keep him in his chair. “I will.”

  They watched her go down the stone steps to the corral, watched her go up to Carl as he dismounted, and saw Carl’s tanned, lined face go through a parade of expressions that would have been comic under other circumstances: pleasure at seeing his daughter—she’d been away three days—followed by frowning concentrati
on, then disbelief, then denial, then anger, and then something like despair, all in the space of ten seconds, all without having let go of the reins. Then he closed his eyes and turned away from his daughter, leaning his face against his horse’s neck. Annie, looking stricken, began to stretch a hand toward him, but pulled it back.

  “I think I better go down there too,” Tony said.

  Jamie grabbed his cane and got up with him. “Me too. The poor guy, can you imagine?”

  When they’d gone, Julie said with just a trace of irony: “No one’s ever going to be able to say that you don’t know how to stir things up, Dr. Oliver.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do, not say anything? Just let them keep thinking she ran off with the guy and never bothered to come back?”

  “Of course not. Why are you angry?”

  He blinked. “Am I angry?”

  “Yes. Well, a little.”

  He shrugged. “I guess I am, a little. I think maybe it’s more guilt than anger. I know you’re going to tell me I’m being silly, but I feel bad about digging up something like that when nobody asked me to, and especially about dumping it in their laps that way—plop. I should have been a little more sensitive about the way I broke the news.”

  “You’re right, I’m going to tell you you’re being silly. You did fine,” Julie said staunchly. “You were as surprised as they were, so it just popped out. You know, when they think about it a little more, they may come to see it as good news.”

  He gave a short laugh. “I don’t see how.”

  “Maybe good isn’t the right word, but what I mean is, now Annie isn’t left believing that her mother totally abandoned her, never bothering to get in touch again or find out anything about her in almost twenty years.”

  “That’s a point.”

  “And Carl . . . now he knows that Blaze never did run off from him.”

  “He knows she intended to.”

  “Does he? Now I’m starting to wonder about that too. Did she tell him she was leaving him? Did she leave a note? As far as I know, she didn’t do either. So how do we know for sure that the story about her running away with Manolo has anything to it? How do we know that she had anything to do with the robbery at all?”