Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 12 - Where There's A Will

by Where There's A Will

  He slapped the book closed, tossed it onto the files on the crowded desk, and loomed over Fukida. “In other words, piggyback bullets!” he yelled, arms spread. “Tandem bullets! You ever hear of those before?”

  “No!” Fukida yelled back up at him.

  “Me neither,” Gideon said slowly, as John’s point sank in, “but I see where you’re going with this. You’re saying—”

  John dropped back into his chair. “Right!” he said, still shouting. “I’m saying that it’s all baloney, the whole cockamamie story. There weren’t any hitmen, there wasn’t any execution, there wasn’t any—”

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa,” Fukida interrupted. “Slow down, sport. Control yourself, breathe deeply.” He made calming motions with his hands. “Look, I’m just a simple island cop, I don’t know from piggyback bullets. You want to explain what the hell you’re talking about?”

  John made a visible, not-altogether-successful effort to contain his agitation. “I am talking,” he said with excruciatingly precise diction, “about the old Walther semi-automatic that they had in the Big House back then. It was—”

  “What big house?” Fukida asked.

  “The Big House. It’s where Inge’s dude ranch is now. Back then, it was where Torkel, Magnus, and Dagmar lived. They built it—”

  “Wait, goddammit! They had a gun right in the house?” Fukida made a disgusted gesture at the files. “I was just looking at the early interrogations. Dagmar was asked if they had one.” He poked irritably among the folders, looking for the right one to prove his assertion, but gave it up and batted them aside. “She said no, definitely not, except for some old varmint rifles that the section managers had.”

  John shrugged. “She lied. What else is new?”

  Fukida slowly shook his head. “These people.”

  “John,” Gideon said, “is this the pistol you and Felix were talking about in Waikiki? I thought it didn’t work.”

  “They said it didn’t work. Obviously, it worked, all right, only not real well. That’s exactly my point.”

  Fukida swiveled in his chair to look at Gideon. “That’s his point? What’s his point, do you know?”

  “I think so, yes,” Gideon said, and to John: “You’re saying that both of the bullets found in Magnus may have come from one gun—just the way they did in the guy that was shot in the knee. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Fukida considered, energetically cracking his gum for a few seconds before arriving at his conclusion. “Nah, I don’t think so. That’s too crazy.”

  John sighed. “Jeez, Teddy, and you used to be so sharp. Look, the Walther was an old World War II job chambered for 9mm. short bullets. Now, what do we call 9mm. shorts in the States, or wouldn’t a simple island cop know that?”

  “We call them .380 ACPs,” Fukida said slowly, and Gideon had the impression that he was starting to think that John just might be onto something after all.

  “And what were the two bullets found in Magnus’s body?”

  “Let’s see . . .” The tiny part of the tuna sandwich that was left was put aside again on its bed of waxed paper. “One of them was a .380 ACP. I forget what the other one was, but I got this hunch you’re gonna tell me it was a .32.”

  John tossed the green folder he had with him—apparently the ballistics report—onto the desk. “I am. See for yourself.”

  Fukida sat there. “Just like in your book.”

  “Just like.” He patted the book.

  “Okay,” Fukida said, “either I’m losing my mind, or you’re starting to make sense.” He paused and thought of something. “Or are you . . . ?” He reached for the ballistics report after all. “Let me see that thing.”

  There were three sheets in the folder. Fukida found what he was looking for on the second.

  “Here, listen”:

  Comparison microscopic examinations were made involving the submitted .32 and .380 ACP bullets. Based on the total dissimilarity of rifling class (the .32 was free of rifling marks; the .380 ACP was deeply and distinctively marked) and the absence of individual characteristics common to the two missiles, it is the conclusion of the examiner that the bullets were fired from different weapons.

  In the case of the .32, the absence of rifling marks suggests that the weapon was either a zip gun, a smooth-bore pistol or rifle, or a revolver, the barrel of which had been removed to prevent the imparting of such marks. In the case of the .380, the weapon was most likely a semi-automatic pistol.

  “The lab guys in Honolulu are good, Johnny,” he said, closing the folder. “You know that. If they say two different guns, I have to accept it. They don’t make that kind of mistake.”

  “Well, this time they did, but it wasn’t their fault. The rifling didn’t match, that’s true, but there was a reason. See, the .380 would have gotten grooved when it went down the barrel, just the way it was supposed to. But the .32 would have been too small for the Walther’s barrel. It just slipped on through without getting grooved.”

  Fukida leaned back and nodded. “You’ve really thought this through.”

  John was transparently pleased at the closest thing to a compliment he’d gotten from his old superior. “Thanks, Teddy. It makes sense if you think about it. Doc here doesn’t think so, though.”

  Gideon hadn’t realized his doubts were that apparent. John was getting to be as good as Julie at reading his face—a sobering thought. “No,” he said, “what you’re saying makes a whole lot of sense. I’m just wondering why the crime lab was so off-base. Why didn’t they come to the same conclusion?”

  “Simple,” John said. “First of all, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day of the week. Second, all they had to go on were the two bullets. They didn’t know about the cartridge case. It was never forwarded to Honolulu. And without that, there’s no way they’d come up with what really happened. I wouldn’t have, either.”

  “We didn’t forward—?” Fukida leaned over, snatched the folder back from John, leafed furiously through the three pages, and threw it back down with a groan. “It’s true. They never got it. I can’t believe it.” He tore off his cap and tossed it onto the desk as well.

  “Ah, these things happen,” John said kindly.

  Gideon knew that they did indeed, and a great deal more often than most people realized. Some clerk or officer down the line, reasoning that Ballistics’ job was to examine bullets and weapons, had decided, probably without giving it any conscious thought, that cartridge cases, being neither bullets nor weapons, were not to be sent on to the ballistics lab. Many an otherwise solid prosecution had fallen apart as the result of similar innocent, reasonable errors of judgment and omission.

  “Not on my watch, they don’t,” Fukida said grimly. He stood and went to the window. Leaning on the sill, he watched a white airliner lift off over the lava fields, wheel overhead, almost directly over the police station, and head for Honolulu. “You sure had it right, Johnny,” he said, shaking his head. “This whole thing has been a royal screw-up right from the get-go.”

  “But it’s not like it’s your fault, Ted,” John said. “You weren’t even on the case.”

  An awkward period of silence followed while Fukida continued to stare blindly out the window. “So,” he said quietly, “the hitmen were bullshit after all. So who killed Magnus?”

  “Gotta be Torkel,” John said. “Why else would he run? Why else would he change his identity? Besides which, the gun was in his house.”

  “It was Dagmar’s house, too,” Fukida said. “She must have known where the gun was. And anyway, couldn’t any of them—Axel, Inge, the whole bunch—have gotten to it if they wanted to?”

  “Yeah, but ‘any of them’ didn’t secretly take off in the middle of the night and run for it. ‘Any of them’ didn’t change identities with his brother. That’s not something you do—give up your whole life, give up who you are—unless you’ve got a hell of a reason for it. Nah, Torkel’s our man.”

  Gideon saw it that w
ay, too. “And the others have been covering for him ever since—to protect him.” A moment later he added: “And their inheritances.”

  “And themselves,” said Fukida. “If even half of this is true—”

  “It’s true,” John said.

  “—they committed a bookful of crimes. Add that to what they told me today—”

  “Yeah, but I wonder if any of that’s true,” John muttered.

  “Oh, yeah, some of it is, all right. They told me exactly what the accelerants were and where they were placed. It squared right down the line with the arson report.”

  “And the garlic-chopper,” Gideon added. “That fits the facts, too. A lot of other things wouldn’t have.”

  “Besides which, who could make up something like that?”

  “It looks like the only thing that slipped their minds was who actually killed Magnus,” John said wryly.

  “You don’t suppose it’s possible that they honestly didn’t know?” Gideon wondered aloud. “That Torkel hoodwinked them, too?” He looked at their expressions. “No, I guess not.”

  “Get real,” John said.

  “All right, then, isn’t it possible that Torkel and Dagmar together hoodwinked the rest of them? If the two of them came up with the hitmen story, then got on the phone to the nieces and nephews, how would any of them know any better?”

  “Well, now, that’s possible,” John said.

  “That old lady, she’s a piece of work,” Fukida said almost admiringly. “One way or another, she’s in it up to her hips. I think I’m gonna go have another talk with her tomorrow.”

  “Teddy, I was planning to talk to her tomorrow morning, too,” John said. “Can I go with you? I know her pretty well. Maybe I could help.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to—” Gideon began.

  “That was then. This is now. I’m not crazy about being jerked around either.”

  “Sure, you can come,” Fukida said. “That’d be good. You’re at the Outrigger? I’ll pick you up at a quarter to nine. I hope you weren’t thinking of coming, Gideon. I’d have to say no to that.”

  “No, sir, count me out. I’m on vacation.”

  Fukida laughed. “That’s right, screw everything up for everybody else, then opt out and say you’re on vacation. Very nice.”

  “Always happy to be of help.”

  Fukida played a quick rat-tat-tat on his thighs and reached for the phone. “Okey-doke, I’m gonna get a warrant.”

  “What for?” John said. “You don’t need a warrant to talk to—”

  “Not for Dagmar. A search warrant. For the Big House. I thought I’d see if that old Walther just might still be around.”

  “You think they’d have kept it all these years?” Gideon asked doubtfully.

  “Probably not, but it can’t hurt to look. I’m gonna send a couple of guys out right now.”

  “Right now?” John said. “You can get a warrant just like that?”

  “Watch me,” Fukida said and punched a button on his phone.

  SEVENTEEN

  “DON’T be greedy, Einar,” Dagmar said absently, watching the largest of the sea turtles nudge its fellows aside in pursuit of a fast-sinking gobbet of bran-raisin muffin. “You’ve had your share.”

  As had they all. This was an unscheduled feeding, the result of an abundance of leftovers from the pastry basket she’d ordered when that horde of nephews and nieces had unexpectedly descended on her, exuding concern for her welfare and consideration for her feelings.

  God damn them to hell.

  For once, the lovely cove and her old friends the green turtles had failed to work their magic. Her mind, far from being calmed, strummed like tightened wire with what seemed like a hundred emotions: frustration, shame, disgust with her spineless, selfish family—so strikingly different from her own generation—anger at being exploited by them, anger at being a weak old woman . . .

  At first, the meeting had gone as well as could have been expected. Of course, there had been the predictable eruptions from the weak ones—Hedwig and Axel—on hearing that she’d gone to Fukida. How could she have taken it upon herself to do such a thing? What would happen to them now? Would they all go to jail? What did this mean for their inheritances? Would everything now go to the Swedish Seamen’s Home?

  But Felix, all puffed up with noisy self-importance like the lawyer he was, had overridden and pacified them. If they thought about it for a moment, they would see that Auntie Dagmar had done nothing so terrible. Statutes of limitation made it unlikely that the police would find it worth their while to reopen the investigation or begin a new one. As to the Swedish Seamen’s Home, there was little to fear, due to the delightful legal principle known as adverse possession: Once property had been held without challenge for a prescribed period of time, the courts would frown upon the bringing of new suits. And, as fortunately happened to be the case, that period of time was almost always considered to be . . . ten years. So in order to challenge the Torkelssons’ right to their land, the Seamen’s Home would have to prove—not merely assert—intent to defraud. That they might try to do so was of course possible, but given the passage of a decade, the imponderables of proving anything in court, and the enormous hassle and legal costs of mounting such a suit, Felix would be very surprised if it were to come to anything.

  And even in the unlikely event that it did, that a suit was actually brought, then the Seamen’s Home would be up against the hoary old concept of res judicata: A thing, once settled by a competent court (as in probate), was not to be subject to future litigation . . .

  The sludgelike flow of verbiage had soothed them. Everyone had settled down. Then came the call from Keoni. Inge, who took it, came back as pale and frightened as Dagmar had ever seen her. The police had been to the Big House—were even at that moment in the house—with a search warrant: They were looking for—Inge closed her eyes as if she were wishing the reality away—a World War II model Walther PPK semi-automatic pistol.

  After the first mute shock, all hell had broken loose. Even Felix was at a loss to put a good face on the clear meaning of this development: The police had somehow concluded that the story of the unidentified assassins was a sham; that Magnus had been killed with a weapon that had been in his own home. Of course, they wouldn’t find it; the gun had been rusting in fifty feet of water off Upolu Point ever since that night. But that didn’t change the horrific implication: The police knew.

  They had all turned on Dagmar at that point, even Felix, even Inge. Why couldn’t she have left well enough alone? What had she told Fukida that could have led him to this?

  Nothing, nothing, she had bawled back at them—Inge was there, Inge knew! To her dismay, her voice had cracked and spiraled into a witch’s shriek. At that point, Felix had outshouted them all and taken control again. This was no time to panic and hurl accusations at each other. More than ever, they had to stick together, be a family. They were most certainly in serious trouble now. Their inheritances, their very freedom, were in jeopardy. Still, all was not lost. Fukida couldn’t know what had really happened, he could only suspect. There was still time to avert disaster, but they had to put on their thinking caps . . .

  It was Axel, of all people, who had come up with a plan. If Dagmar was willing to bend the truth just a little more—what little truth still remained to bend—she could save them all. If not, it was all over. Their futures, their very lives, were in her hands, in the hands of their dear Auntie Dagmar.

  No, it was impossible, she had told them. She had borne the brunt of this for too long already. She couldn’t remember what she’d told the police before, and now, with this new trumped-up story they were thrusting on her (“tweaking the facts a tiny little bit,” Axel called it), how did they expect her to keep everything straight? How could she avoid tying herself in knots? They weren’t stupid, these detectives, they were bound to see through her, and then where would everybody be? And she was sick to her soul of bending the truth and said so. But in
the end, worn out by the ceaseless prodding, by the endless self-justifications and airy reassurances, she had knuckled under to them, too old and too tired to fight any more.

  Yes, she understood how much more important it was to all of them than it was to her, but by God, it had stuck in her craw. What about her? What they were asking her to say, if she understood it correctly (and she wasn’t at all sure she did), was tantamount to admitting to the police that she’d been guilty of committing a crime, a serious crime. What would happen to her? But Felix had poohpoohed this, blandly assuring one and all that the authorities would never prosecute an eighty-two-year-old woman, an island legend, for a few transgressions committed ten years before in an effort to protect the life of her one living brother and to help her beloved family through a difficult time. Besides, there were statutes of limitation that applied, blah blah blah. No, no, nothing at all to worry about there.

  Easy for him to say.

  The last of the pastries had been thrown to the turtles now, and she abstractedly wiped her fingers on the linen napkin. The turtles, not so different from her nieces and nephews, turned and swam off the second they saw they had nothing more to get from her. She filled the cap of her flask with aquavit, drank, and refilled it. It had been a long time since she’d been really soused, but if this wasn’t a good day to get soused, she didn’t know what was. Tomorrow would be time enough to deal with her problems.

  There were a few crumbs left on the liner of the pastry basket and without knowing it she lifted them to her mouth with a moistened finger. She had lit a cigarillo earlier but had let it go out after one puff; her throat was too tight and raw to smoke. A few more tipples would take care of that.

  When she heard a footstep on the gravel path behind her she instinctively reached for her wig, but then changed her mind. The hell with it, it was far too early for the good-looking kid with her dinner, and who else did she need to put on any pretenses for? She was eighty-two years old, she had a right to be going bald if she wanted to. If whoever it was didn’t like it, that was too bad for him, he could just keep going.