There had been a message from Felix waiting for them: He had been delayed at a meeting on Kauai and would not be back until five. And he had to be on a red-eye flight to San Francisco later in the evening, but with any luck he would meet them for a drink at six-thirty at the House Without a Key, the open-air restaurant-bar at the Halekulani Hotel. They had showered and changed, then walked the two blocks down Kalakaua Avenue from the Royal Hawaiian to the Halekulani, both of them slightly dazed by an enjoyable sense of disjunction, of disconnect. Only a little while ago they had been on a tiny speck of land in the Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places in the world, with nothing but black flies and land crabs for company (but plenty of those). Now, later that same day, here they were on one of the most cosmopolitan boulevards to be found anywhere, fording streams of avid shoppers, tourists, and locals, seemingly of every race and sub-race on the planet. There were flip-flop-shod surfers toting boards on their heads or under their arms, perspiring, grim-faced joggers, dignified Japanese elders walking with their hands behind their backs and taking in the sights, tight clumps of nervous-looking Eastern Europeans, prim Asian ladies handing out brochures for shows and bus tours, and piratical, dissipated men with parrots and macaws on their shoulders (“What do you say, Jack, take a picture with one for ten bucks, with all four for twenty bucks?”).
The terrace at the House Without a Key, by contrast, was an oasis of taste and tranquility. When they arrived, the evening’s Hawaiian music was just getting underway. They had listened contentedly to the soft, agreeable melodies and the surf for a while, then ordered drinks—John’s Mai Tai and a Fire Rock Pale Ale from Kona for Gideon.
“Pretty romantic place,” Gideon said, taking in the scene. The musicians—a guitarist, a slack-key guitarist, a Hawaiian falsetto singer with an achingly sweet voice—and a smiling hula dancer performed on a low bandstand beneath an ancient kiawe tree, with the purple sea and the setting sun at their backs. The drinkers and diners sat at tables under a tropical sky of deepening blue-green tinged with rose. Off to the left, the unmistakable profile of Diamond Head loomed, slowly losing its folds and hollowed contours to shadow.
“It sure is,” John replied. “So what am I doing here with you?”
They settled back to watch the hula dancer, an elegant, fawnlike creature in a long flowered dress, perform a few more graceful numbers, but a part of Gideon’s mind kept turning back to Magnus Torkelsson.
“John, I’ve been thinking—”
“Uh-oh.”
“There are some things about this whole case that are starting to bother me.”
John’s arms flew out to either side. “What, now it’s not Magnus? Why do you always do this, Doc? You know what my boss says? Every time we call you in on something, no matter how simple it looks to be, by the time you get finished—”
“No, no, it’s Magnus, I’m not changing my mind on that.”
“What, then?”
“Well, something doesn’t quite compute. Something’s missing.”
“What’s missing?”
“How do they know for sure what happened to him?”
“They don’t, for sure. Isn’t that why we went out there?”
“No, I mean how do they know that he flew off in the first place? How do they know that’s what happened to him? Is it just that the plane was missing, and Magnus was missing, and the pilot was missing, so they assumed . . .”
“Oh, I see what you mean. I don’t know the answer to that, Doc. In fact I don’t know a whole lot about any of it; they don’t like to talk about it, for which you can’t exactly blame them. But I guess Magnus must have told someone before he left—I don’t know—Dagmar, probably. He probably called his sister.”
“No, if he’d done that they’d have known where he was going. But they didn’t. Remember? At dinner last night? They were trying to figure out where he was headed.”
“So? Maybe he felt safer if no one knew where he was going to be. Maybe he thought it was safer for them.”
Gideon shook his head. “Could be, but something still seems off to me. Maybe it’s just that the whole thing—I mean the murder, the disappearance, the will, the finding of the plane—it all seems too tidy, too wrapped up. No loose ends. Don’t you get that feeling?”
John thought it over, had another long swallow, and shrugged. “Nope. No loose ends is good, Doc. What do you want loose ends for?”
“Well, you’re the expert,” Gideon said, leaning back, almost but not quite convinced. “Julie thinks I’m developing a suspicious turn of mind. Maybe she’s right.”
“She is right. You gotta stop hanging around dead people. I could use another Mai Tai. You want another beer?”
BY the time Felix strode onto the terrace, the sun had dropped below the horizon, Diamond Head was a gray-black silhouette, and the lights were blinking on in the hillside houses. Jets coming into the airport a few miles away gleamed white, still lit by the vanished sun.
“Sorry I’m so late, boys! Sorry I have so little time!” His voice, marginally muted so as not to interfere with the music, was as hearty and honking as ever, but there was a hassled look around his eyes as he dropped his flight bag on the terrace, heaved a great sigh, and flopped into a chair. His linen sport coat was rumpled and limp, his trousers wrinkled. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to collect himself. “What a life,” he said under his breath—or as close to under his breath as he ever got—and then to John and Gideon: “Your rooms okay? No problems?”
They assured him, with thanks, that their rooms couldn’t have been nicer, and Gideon asked him what he wanted to drink. Also, they were thinking of getting something to eat. Did he want to order anything?
“I wish!” he said wearily. “But nothing for me, thanks, I don’t really have time to eat.” Wistfully, he eyed John’s Mai Tai. “And, unfortunately, I have a truckload of work to do on the flight, so I better keep a clear head. So,” he said, turning to Gideon. “How did it go? What’s the story?”
“Well—” Gideon began.
“Ah, what the hell, it’s been a long day.” Felix twisted in his chair and waved their waiter over. “Good evening, Sanford. May I trouble you for a martini, straight up? Gin, two olives. And while you’re at it, why don’t you bring us some pupus? One order of your coconut shrimp, an order of chips and guacamole, and, oh, um, an order of vegetable spring rolls, just to keep us healthy. Better make it snappy, I don’t have much time.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Torkelsson,” said Sanford. “I’ll be right back.”
“On second thought,” Felix shouted after him, “make the martini a double! Thank you, my friend!”
Watching him is like watching a character in a play, Gideon thought. Everything he does is larger than life, a performance played to the last row in the balcony. He’d be a knockout in a courtroom.
“I thought you wanted a clear head,” John said.
Felix shrugged. “Oh, it’ll be clear enough. It’s only legal work,” he said with one of his belly laughs, loud enough so that a woman at the next table scolded him. “Will you kindly keep it down there? We’re trying to listen to the music.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Felix responded, immediately lowering his voice. “It won’t happen again. So,” he prompted once more—and even his attempt at a whisper brought an irritated look from the next table. “What’s the verdict? Have we caught up with dear old Uncle Magnus at last?”
“It looks like it,” Gideon said and told him what they’d found: the mandible of a strongly built young woman in her mid twenties whose dentition showed that she’d apparently suffered from bulimia—
“Ha. Claudia,” whisper-shouted Felix.
—and a boot in which there were the foot bones of a man in his fifties or older, which had suffered stress fractures of a kind that suggested its owner had been a horseman.
“And Magnus,” Felix said with a nod. His martini had come and he downed a little of it, gratefully closing his eyes. “A boot with a f
oot in it,” he said and gave a little shiver. “That’s kind of . . . did you bring it back? Do you have it with you?”
“The salvage team took it back. They thought there’d be less hassle if they did it, because Security and Customs are used to them bringing in all kinds of weird things. They also have a few other things they found—a pair of glasses, a comb, I forget what else.”
“A heel—probably from the same boot—a kitschy souvenir shaped like the Big Island, and a mug with a hula dancer on it,” John said promptly. “We figured somebody might recognize them.”
“Good idea,” Felix said.
“Does any of it sound familiar to you?”
Felix rolled the martini around his mouth while he considered. “Not really. The cup with the dancer on it, maybe. I’m not sure. There must be ten million of those around.”
“Well, some or all of it may have been the pilot’s. But the boys are dropping everything off at Axel’s when they get back,” Gideon said. “All part of the service. Maybe somebody else will see something they remember.”
When the appetizers arrived they helped themselves, with Gideon and Felix digging into the spring rolls and coconut-crusted shrimp, and John happily confining himself to the guacamole and thick, Maui-style potato chips.
“Gideon,” Felix said, “it sounds like you’ve already identified him from the bones. Why do you need the other things—the cup and all?”
“I wouldn’t say we need them. Partly, we had them sent back because they could be his last effects, and there might be some sentimental value to someone in them.”
“In a boot heel?”
“You’d be surprised. But the main thing is that on something like this, people are likely to have lingering doubts. Sometimes they don’t surface till years later. So the more confirmation we have, the better. Which brings me to the question I want to ask you: Did your uncle have anything the matter with his right foot?”
Felix looked puzzled. “Well, you just said he’d fractured—”
“No, aside from that. Anything else?”
Felix looked more puzzled. “Not that I know of. Like what?”
“Like missing a couple of toes,” John said.
Felix’s reaction went beyond theatricality. His mouth clenched, his eyes bulged, and with a resounding snort a thin double-spray of gin and vermouth exploded from his nostrils, further displeasing the party at the next table, who instantly began gathering up their drinks. In the space of five seconds, Felix’s face registered surprise, confusion, consternation, doubt, and uncertainty, more or less in that order, all while coughing. Startled, John and Gideon glanced at each other, wondering what it was they’d set off.
“Felix, are you okay?” John asked, but Felix, choking away, lowered his head and waved him silent.
A final splutter, a mopping of lips and beard, a dab at his tearing eyes, and he was ready to attempt speech again, emitting a strangled “Toes?”
“That’s right,” Gideon said. “The foot had two missing toes.”
“Yes, but are you sure—” Another brief episode of choking, during which Felix held up his hand again and downed a slug of his martini, this time managing to keep it in him. “How do you know they didn’t disappear after he died? I mean, for gosh sakes, practically everything else got carried off by the fishes, didn’t it? Couldn’t they have—”
“No, these were amputated long before. You can tell.”
“My God,” Felix breathed. He shook his head slowly back and forth, then, surprisingly, giggled. “Oh, lordy.”
He was raising his glass again when John, not the most patient of men, finally exploded. “What, already? What? WHAT?”
Felix ran his tongue around his lips. “Magnus wasn’t missing any toes.”
Now it was Gideon’s turn. “What?”
“Torkel was the one with the mangled foot. He got it caught in a threshing machine back when I was a little kid. In the sixties.”
“Torkel?” cried John. “His brother Torkel?”
“Yes, of course his brother Torkel,” Felix said. “How many Torkels do you think there are around here?”
“Slow down a minute, you’ve really lost me now,” Gideon said. “I thought Torkel was the one who was shot and killed—before Magnus even took off in the plane.”
Felix nodded gravely. “That’s right. Shot, killed . . . and buried on the ranch eight years ago.”
The three men looked at each other. John put down his glass. “Or not,” he said.
EIGHT
THEY continued staring at each other, the churning of their minds almost audible. In the background the surf hissed and the gentle strains of the Hawaiian Wedding Song hung in the air. And then came the fusillade of questions, the three of them talking at once. If the skeletonized corpse in the Grumman was Torkel’s, whose bullet-riddled body had lain buried in his grave on the Big Island for the last ten years? Magnus’s? If so, what had really happened the night of the murder? If not, where was Magnus? Either way, how could everyone—family, friends, police—have mistaken someone else’s body for Torkel’s? And what had been the point of the deception, if deception there had been?
Felix had the answers to some, but not all, of the questions. “You have to understand, the body was burnt beyond recognition—”
“The body was burnt?” Gideon said, surprised.
“Beyond recognition,” Felix said, “and then some.”
“You knew that, Doc,” John said. “I told you on the drive up to the ranch.”
“No, you didn’t. You told me Torkel was shot, and the headquarters building was burned down—”
“Right, that’s what I said.”
“But you never explicitly . . . okay, never mind. If the body was burnt beyond recognition,” he asked Felix, “what made everybody so sure it was Torkel in the first place? Why couldn’t it have been Magnus? Neither one of them was around anymore.”
“Well, no, but he called Dagmar. He called her from the airport before he took off.”
“Ha,” said John, with a self-satisfied glance at Gideon. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute, who called Dagmar?”
“Magnus . . .” Felix blinked. “That is, Torkel. It must have been Torkel. But he said he was Magnus.”
“And Dagmar couldn’t tell the difference between their voices?” Gideon asked.
John heard the overlay of skepticism. “You don’t buy that, Doc?”
“Well, I’m not sure. If I got on the phone to you and tried to sound like Felix, could I fool you?”
“Of course not, but that’s because nobody sounds like Felix.”
“Nobody sounds like anybody else, to the people close to them. The distinctive characteristics of a particular voice might be indefinable, but they’re immediately recognizable.”
“What about mimics?” Felix asked. “They can be amazing.”
Gideon shrugged. “Was Torkel a mimic?”
“Well . . . who knows? But you have to remember, the two of them sounded a whole lot alike to start with.”
“That’s true,” John agreed. “They did.”
“Okay,” said Gideon. “Forget it. I was just thinking out loud. Go ahead, Felix. What’d he tell her?”
Felix frowned. “If I remember right, Magnus just said—I mean Torkel, dammit—Torkel just told her that . . . that Torkel had been killed and he had to leave for a while because he was in danger himself.”
“ ‘He’ supposedly being Magnus,” Gideon said.
Felix nodded. “And ‘his brother’ supposedly being Torkel. Hoo.”
“What else did he say?” John asked.
“I don’t really remember, John, it was ten years ago. I was just trying to give you the general idea. He probably said . . . hell, I don’t know what he probably said. Whatever it was, Dagmar took him at his word. Why wouldn’t she? She was excited, confused, she suddenly gets this panicked phone call in the middle of the night . . .”
While the sentence drifted away unfinished, the three of
them sat quietly, listening to the rhythmic murmur of the surf and hearing occasional bits of conversation—people talking about normal, everyday things: whether there was weekend laundry service at their hotel, tomorrow’s shopping schedule, the pros and cons of going to the Don Ho show at the Beachcomber. “So how’s the wire rope business these days?” floated by them as distinctly as if the speaker were at their table, along with the stifled yawn that followed it. The musicians had either taken their break or else wisely quit until they were no longer competing with Felix.
“Okay,” Gideon said, having pushed his glass around in circles for a minute or so. “That explains why Dagmar thought it was Magnus on the line. But it doesn’t explain why the police bought the idea that the burned body was Torkel’s.”
“Sure it does, Doc,” John said. “You got two brothers. One of them gets burned to a crisp—oh, sorry, Felix. The other one takes off so the same thing doesn’t happen to him. The cops know—they think they know—which one took off. So whatever pile of ashes is left after the fire—damn, sorry about that, Felix—has to be the other one.”
Gideon was unconvinced. “Look, when a body is burned up in a fire, it doesn’t completely turn to ashes or cinders. There’s always something left. Even when it’s professionally cremated at high temperature, they have to pulverize what’s left to turn it into ash, and even then a forensic specialist—”
“Gideon, you’re assuming they brought in experts, consultants,” Felix said. “They didn’t. This is not Seattle we’re talking about.” He smiled. “As far as I know, there aren’t any skeleton detectives anywhere near Waimea.”
Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 12 - Where There's A Will Page 10
