Where There's a Will (13 page)

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 foot 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.

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.”

Gideon blew out his cheeks. “Body burned beyond recognition, supposed perps never even identified, let alone convicted, brother disappeared… boy, I tell you, I’m starting to see a few holes in this thing.”

“Come on, Doc,” John said, “there’s no such thing as a homicide case without some holes in it, you know that. It’s never cut-and-dried. The cops can never put every single piece together. You go with the preponderance of the evidence. Isn’t that what you were telling me on the atoll?”

“This is different,” Gideon said. “In this case they didn’t even know who got killed. What else did they get wrong?”

“Now hold your horses just one minute,” Felix said heatedly. “You’re not suggesting Torkel killed Magnus, are you? Because that would be-”

“No, of course not,” Gideon said, surprised by the question.

“Damn it, Gideon, Torkel wouldn’t have known how to fire a gun. They didn’t even own a gun. Not a handgun, anyway.”

“Well, no, that’s not completely true,” John said. “There was a gun in the house. At least there used to be.”

“There was?” Felix seemed honestly surprised.

“It was Andreas’s, from the Second World War. Torkel got it out for me once when he was showing me around the place. A classic; one of the early Walther PPKs, made back in the forties. Probably worth a fair amount of money.”

“But that was an antique. You couldn’t shoot that thing.”

“Didn’t say you could,” John said.

“Look, I just get the impression that you two are trying to make it sound like my uncle was some kind of monster, like he killed his own brother-”

As people at nearby tables looked around, John raised his palms in a shushing gesture. “Take it easy, Felix.”

“Felix, nobody’s implying that,” Gideon said. But now he was wondering just what kind of nerve he’d hit.

“Okay, okay,” Felix said tightly. “Sorry.”

“After all,” Gideon said, “at this point we don’t even know for sure that Magnus is dead, do we?”

Felix’s tension held for another moment, then slackened. Another belly laugh, but a quiet one, rumbled out of him. “Well, if he’s not, who’d we bury in that grave?”

At which point they realized they had come full circle, back to the question they’d started with. “Damn, I better go,” Felix said, jumping up. “I can’t miss my plane. Sorry I got a little excited there. Look, you two. The others know more about this than I do. You’ll be talking to them tomorrow, when you get back to the ranch. See what they have to say.”

“You won’t be there?” John asked.

“No way. I won’t be back until Sunday night.” He glanced at his watch. “But I think I’ll give Inge a call from the airport, if that’s okay with you; let her know what you’ve found, kind of break it to her gently. She can tell the others. I mean, this is going to be kind of a shock. I think it might be better if it came from one of the family. Is that all right with you, Gideon, or did you want to be the one.. .?”

“No, go ahead. I’d just as soon they got it from you. I can fill them in on whatever details they want.”

“Good. And thanks for the good work, both of you. Go ahead and splurge on dinner. Get the crab-crusted mahi-mahi; can’t be beat. I’ve already taken care of the check.”

When Felix had gone, Gideon sat there, slowly shaking his head. “Unbelievable. What have you gotten me into here?”