Twenty Blue Devils (6 page)

Almost like having a son.

And now it was all ended, done.
"No!"
he whispered when John broke the news. Then his face went grayish yellow, his big body seemed to fall in on itself, and he sat, staring at nothing, like a witless hulk, while John gave them what details he had.

"And that's it,” John said. “That's all I know."

It was Marti who broke the queasy silence by pushing back her chair. “I'll put up some coffee,” she said quietly and went to the kitchen.

"Tea for me,” Rudy called automatically after her, then looked embarrassed.

"We'll have to arrange the funeral,” Nick said thickly after another long interval. He cleared his throat and visibly gathered himself together. “Nelson, will you see about getting us on a plane in the morning?"

"He's already been buried,” John told them. “In the plantation cemetery."

Maggie—tough, brassy Maggie—suddenly turned brick-red and sobbed like a man, an explosive, gasping, painful yawp that caught everyone by surprise; Maggie too, from the looks of it.

Now everybody was embarrassed. “Oh, hell,” she said roughly, scrubbing at her eyes with a napkin while she got herself under control again. “It's only...he was so keen on being buried in that stupid old cemetery. I mean, we used to joke about it, didn't we? And now...now... Oh, God, Therese must be...” She trailed off as the tears welled up again, and dabbed at her nose with a tissue she'd found somewhere.

Marti came back with the coffee and tea and handed them around. In silence they sipped mechanically or simply stared at their cups.

After a while John spoke, looking down at his hands. “I want to be frank. After everything else that's been happening out there, I think we have to consider, well, that it may not have been an accident."

Nick looked up dully, angrily, as if he didn't comprehend.

Rudy, more nonplussed than John had ever seen him before, opened his mouth so suddenly that his lips popped. “Not an— you don't mean...they wouldn't really—they wouldn't—"

"Rudy, don't be dumb,” Nick said with uncharacteristic harshness. “What the hell would the Mob have against
Brian?
He wasn't even around back then."

"Yes, but didn't John just say—"

"I don't care what John said. If they have a beef with anybody, it's me—not Brian."

"Now let's wait just a minute here,” Nelson said. “Rudy may very well have a valid point."

"How the hell—” Nick began.

"Who prepared the
new
affidavit?” Nelson asked. “Would someone care to tell me that? Who did all the work?"

"Ah, that's ridiculous,” Nick said.

"What do you mean, new affidavit?” John asked. “Now what are you talking about?"

But Nelson backed off. “Well, I'm not really suggesting that it had anything to do with—"

"What new affidavit?” John repeated.

It was Maggie who explained. When the gangsters’ retrial had come up four years before, Nick had been asked by the U.S. attorney's office to make a new deposition to include some elements that hadn't been in the first one. Nick was eager to comply (over Nelson's objections), but was having a hard time finding the data he needed. People had died, firms had gone out of business, old records were impossible to locate. After three frustrating weeks of letters and telephone calls, he still didn't have the vital pieces. That was when Brian, who had been trying to introduce things like computers, modems, and e-mail to his still-reluctant father-in-law, had put together the needed information as a demonstration of what the new online technology could do. It had taken him two and a half hours.

Nick had been bowled over, converted on the spot. The Paradise plantation's changeover to the new technology had begun the next week. And the preparation of the affidavit had been turned over to Brian, lock, stock, and barrel. Nick hadn't done much more than sign it when it was finished. And it had been that affidavit more than anything else, so they understood, that had sunk the notorious three G-men all over again.

"Yeah, but if Nick was the one who signed it,” John pointed out, “how would they even know Brian had anything to do with it?"

"I'm not arguing the point, John,” Nelson said. “I just thought it ought to be mentioned. You're the one who said you think there's something fishy."

Another leaden silence dropped onto them. Cups clicked in saucers. Chairs creaked.

"I'll tell you what I think,” John said at last. “I think we ought to have his body exhumed and then get it examined by somebody who knows what he's doing. Then let's see where we are."

"Oh, my Lord, that's horrible!” said Maggie. “It'd just about kill Therese."

"It wouldn't kill her,” John said patiently. “If somebody murdered Brian, she'd want to know."

"So would we all,” Nick said; his first words in a long time.

"But if he was out there in the heat for a week, there's not going to be much left, John. Some bones, maybe."

"I know. It'd take a forensic anthropologist."

Nelson snorted. “Of which there are dozens in Papeete."

"I was thinking of bringing somebody in from the States."

"You know somebody?” Nick asked.

"Yeah, I do. The best there is."

Nick took a while to reply. He sat rotating his cup in its saucer and staring down at its untouched contents: Tahitian Blue Devil, the highest-priced coffee in the world, bar none. At last he looked up and spoke.

"Do it,” he said softly.

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High in the ink-black sky over the South Pacific, sprawled at his ease in a roomy Air New Zealand first-class seat, with a first-class meal of duckling with orange sauce comfortably inside him and a stemmed crystal glass of Courvoisier at his elbow, Gideon Oliver was having second thoughts.

He didn't like exhumations. And not merely on aesthetic grounds; that went without saying. More important, exhumations were traumatic experiences for family and friends; especially for family. Digging a corpse out of its grave for a belated postmortem was a sure way to rip open the wounds that had begun to heal when the body was laid down in the first place. And that never failed to make him uncomfortable.

Besides, he had a hard-to-shake conviction that it was all going to be in aid of nothing. The string of accidents Brian Scott had gotten caught in might make one wonder, but accidents did frequently happen. In strings. And what credible reason was there to think they weren't accidents? Would anyone in his right mind try to murder someone by knocking down a shed in a windstorm?

On top of that, John's faith in Gideon's ability to find signs of murder, if murder there was, was flattering but overblown.

There were a lot of things that could kill you without leaving a road map on the skeleton. Most things, actually. The chances were good he would come away from the analysis shaking his head, with nothing to say one way or the other about the cause of death. Or let's say that there were indications that it had been due to a fall, which seemed the most likely thing he would find; a fractured skull or pelvis or some crushed vertebrae. Fine, but what would that prove about murder or the absence of it?

And on top of
that
he and John were on their way to a foreign country with the sole and express purpose of second-guessing its official law enforcement authorities. This, he had learned long ago, was unlikely to be a rewarding experience.

And finally, on top of everything else—or maybe underlying everything else—he was going to be away from Julie for almost a week and already he missed her

John, untroubled by morbid doubts, was stretched out in the seat next to him, headphones on, contentedly watching the end of the new James Bond movie on the screen. As the closing credits began to roll, he took off the headphones and smiled at Gideon. “Good show. You should have watched."

"I've been thinking."

"Worrying,” John said. “Okay, what's bothering you now?"

"A lot. How did you talk me into this anyhow?"

But they both knew the answer to that. John had called and asked him on the previous Wednesday, the day after the news about Brian's death had come. Gideon had promptly ticked off his reservations and John had listened patiently.

When Gideon had finished, John had finally spoken.

"I'm asking you as a favor, Doc,” he said simply. “This is my family."

That had been enough; he and John were old, good friends. They had worked on a lot of cases together and had been in some difficult situations together. They had saved each other's lives.

"I can't get away till the end of next week,” Gideon had grumbled for form's sake. “I have a seminar I can't palm off on anybody else."

"Is that gonna hurt the bones? A week or two one way or the other?"

No, Gideon had admitted, it wasn't likely to hurt the bones. Speaking personally, the older the better, as far as he was concerned. He would have preferred them about ten thousand years older, in fact, brown and dry and clean. Still, the air of Oceania was notoriously warm and humid, and a week or ten days out-of-doors there might already have done a pretty good job of getting down to the bare bones of things, so to speak. And the additional time in the ground wouldn't hurt either. Or so he hoped.

Well, then, there wasn't any problem, John had pointed out. Moreover, Nick Druett had offered to pay Gideon's top consulting fees (Gideon had refused) and to fly them out first-class, put them up at the Shangri-La, a nearby beach resort, and pick up all expenses (Gideon had accepted).

The flight attendant came down the darkened aisle with the cognac bottle, paused attentively beside them, and at their nods topped off the glasses. The flight had left Los Angeles forty-five minutes late and the attendant, apparently taking personal responsibility for the delay, had been extraordinarily solicitous of the few first-class passengers ever since.

"Ahh.” John resettled himself luxuriously, sipped from the brandy glass, and smacked his lips. “Does this beat the hell out of government travel, or what? Listen, I've been doing a little digging. I found out some interesting stuff."

Gideon turned toward him.

"Remember I told you Nick wasn't the only guy to file a deposition with the U.S. attorney at that first kickback trial? Two other growers had the guts to do it too?"

Gideon nodded.

"Well, one was from Java, the other one was from the Kona Coast. And they're both out of business now. The Hawaiian guy died falling mysteriously out of a hotel window in Honolulu and what used to be his coffee farm is now the King Kamehameha Shopping Village. The Javanese guy just threw in the towel after three fires on his farm. The place is up for sale.” He raised his eyebrows.

"And you think the Mob's behind it all?” Gideon asked.

The question made him feel faintly ridiculous. Most of the six or seven forensic cases he took on in a typical year were everyday, garden-variety murders, sordid and simple: the prostitute's body dragged out into the woods and hurriedly covered with leaves and dirt; the drug dealer cut down in some deserted, filthy house and left where he fell; the victim of revenge or jealousy or domestic rage tossed into the Dumpster in a black plastic garbage bag—or in three or four plastic bags. Only once had he been involved with organized crime, and then from a distance. “The Mob” was something melodramatic and unreal, a million miles away from his everyday professorly concerns with Pleistocene Man and hominid locomotion.

Besides, could anyone be expected to take seriously three guys named Nutso, Zorro, and Nate the Schlepper?

John shrugged. “I just think it's interesting. Something to be considered."

"All right, tell me this: Here was Brian on this ten-day camping trip on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. How would Nutso and the boys know where to find him? How would
anybody
know where to find him?"

"Good question,” John said amiably as he finished his brandy.

The attendant, as sensitive to every movement of his charges as an auctioneer watching for bidding signals, was back with the cognac bottle. Gideon shook his head; John accepted a refill.

"You know,” Gideon said after a few minutes of near-dozing, “now that I think about it, I think I remember reading about that kickback case. Didn't one of their goons turn state's evidence? Bingo...Bongo..."

"Klingo Bozzuto,” John said, laughing. “They called him that because one of the bosses thought he looked like a Klingon.” Reflectively, he rolled some brandy around his mouth. “He did too, sort of. But he wasn't a goon, exactly, he was a Mob accountant. Way handier for state's evidence than some gorilla who could barely write his name."

"Are you serious? An accountant named Klingo Bozzuto?"

"Yeah, it'd look great on a business card, wouldn't it?
Klingo Bozzuto, CPA: a name you can trust."

"Well, tell me this. What happened to old Klingo? Did the bad guys go after him? Because if they didn't bother with the guy who broke the case—their own stooge—I don't see them hunting down your cousin."

"No, they didn't go after him,” John said.

"All right, then—"

"They didn't go after him because they couldn't. The Bureau got him into a witness protection program. That was part of the deal. Changed his name, resettled him in the Midwest somewhere, and found him some kind of job with the railroads. As far as I know, he's still at it."

"Mm,” Gideon said.

"Listen, Doc,” John said earnestly, “I'm not saying the Mob had anything to do with this. How would I know? I just don't want to rule anything out. Right now, all I want is for you to look at what there is. After you see Brian's body we'll worry about who did what to who."

And that was another thing that was bothering Gideon. “If it
is
Brian,” he said, knowing it would set John off.

It did. John's eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “Doc, he had his wallet on him His watch was lying a few feet away, busted. His wife identified it. Only about six people live on the goddamn island, who else could it be?"

They had been through this more than once, and Gideon was no more convinced than he'd been before. “But his wife didn't identify
him
,” he pointed out.