Where There's a Will (26 page)

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.

So deeply was she mired in resentment and recrimination that his presence didn’t register again until she sensed it just behind her. Her neck prickled. He was standing too close. She didn’t like that, didn’t like anyone looking right down at the top of her scalp. She should have slipped the wig on, damn it.

He was so close now that she felt his belt buckle brush against the back of her head. Repulsed, she pulled angrily to one side to get away from him. “Now see here-”

But when his hand clamped on her shoulder from behind like some terrible talon, the air went out of her, as much from astonishment as pain. What… what…

Too quickly for her to absorb, his other hand closed on her wrist, and she was somehow no longer in contact with the earth, but flopping wildly in the air, dropping like a stone toward the sharp, black rocks that rimmed the cove. She goggled at them, and then at the cloudless blue sky as she tumbled, mouth open, eyes wide with incomprehension.

What… what…

The needle-sharp bisection of the North Kohala lowlands into parched lava fields and huge, lavish coastal resorts is stunning. On one side of the coast highway is a brown, dusty, lifeless plain of a’a lava. On the other is the lushest landscape that can be imagined: thick, soft grass, palm trees, frangipani, jacaranda, glorious masses of wonderfully fragrant blossoms-red, orange, white, purple. Two people could walk along the border, practically hand in hand, for miles, with one in a moist, green land of tropical plants, bright colors, and verdant lawns all the way, and the other never leaving a blasted, barren moonscape of jagged, dun-colored rocks.

Taking the turnoff for the Outrigger and the other Waikoloa area resorts, John, Julie, and Gideon turned abruptly from the latter into the former, heading down a broad, curving parkway lined with lush trees and redolent with every sweet smell of the tropics.

“I’ve been thinking…” Julie began.

“Uh-oh,” John said. He’d been in one of his funks ever since the session with Fukida, and this was as close as he’d come to a coherent sentence in a while. They’d picked up Julie, had a late lunch at the Greek restaurant, and headed back to the hotel, all without any notable input from him.

Gideon looked over his shoulder at him. “John, do you know that whenever anybody says, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ you say, ‘uh-oh’?”

“Not anybody. Mostly just you two.” He laughed and sat himself up straighter in the back seat, signs that he was ready to rejoin the world. As his funks went, it had been a long one.

“What have you been thinking, Julie?” Gideon asked.

“Well, you know how you keep wondering why they let you get involved with this thing in the first place? I think I know.”

That surprised him. “Why?”

“Well, who exactly asked you to go out to that atoll?”

“They all asked him,” John said.

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed.

“No, that’s not what you said when you first told me about it. You said Malani asked you.”

We did? Gideon thought.

“Umm…” said John, thinking.

“Yes, you did. You said she was the one that called the salvage company, and when she came back from talking to them, she said-”

“She said they didn’t know how to handle skeletons,” Gideon remembered, “and she volunteered me.”

“That’s right, and why wouldn’t she? From what Inge and Dagmar said, she didn’t know anything about the cover-up. She didn’t know there was anything to hide.”

“That’s a good point, but look, they all agreed to it, no objections. Why would they do that? Felix even put us up in Honolulu.”

“What choice did they have?” Julie countered. “Think about it. How would it have looked if they said no you couldn’t, after the salvage company said they wanted you and you said you would?”

“But how could they not have worried that I’d find out it was Torkel in that plane? You’d think they’d have come up with some excuse, any excuse, to keep me from-”

A snort of laughter came from the back seat. “They didn’t worry because you told them there was nothing to worry about.”

“ I told them?”

“You said-and I pretty much quote-that with any luck you could maybe tell the age, the sex, the race, and, um…”

“The approximate height,” Gideon supplied. “All of which would have fitted Magnus as much as it did Torkel. I think you’ve hit on it, Julie. Malani didn’t know she was putting her foot in it-”

“Or Torkel’s foot,” John said, throwing up his hands. “Sorry.”

“-but when she did, the others went along with it because they thought they were safe. Good thinking, Julie. That’d explain it.”

“Amazing,” John said. “She wasn’t even there and she remembers it better than we do.”

“Thank you,” Julie said happily. “Shall I go on?”

“There’s more?”

“Oh, yes. Who was it that got you to look at the autopsy report after you got back from the atoll?”

John and Gideon looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “Malani?” they both offered.

She nodded crisply. “Yes. And I was there for that one.”

“You’re right,” Gideon said, thinking back to the gathering on Axel’s porch. “Malani was the one who forced the issue… again.”

“That’s right, she was,” John said. “Malani’s like that. If she gets an idea in her head, she doesn’t hang back.”

“But this time the others did,” Gideon said. “Remember? Hedwig wanted to put me in a lotus leaf instead, and Axel didn’t want to stir things up, and Inge wanted to let him rest in peace-”

“But then the two of you convinced them they’d better have you do it, right?” Julie said. “So it was like the first time. How could they say no without making it obvious they were covering something up-even if they thought you might find out about the ring?”

“Ah, ah!” John exclaimed; he was completely back in form now. “But they didn’t think we were going to find out about the ring. The ring wasn’t in the autopsy report, it was in the case files! And as far as they knew, we weren’t going to be looking at the case files!”

Gideon slowly nodded. “It all makes sense.”

Julie tapped her mouth, covering a yawn of mock boredom. “Anything else I can help you boys with, you just let me know. Oh, look, here’s the Outrigger. Swimming pool, here I come. And I’m for another moratorium through tonight. Tomorrow is another day.”

“Me too,” Gideon said.

John raised his hand. “Count me in. Enough is enough.”

Faustino Parra arranged the place-setting the way the old lady liked it on windless days like this: on the round, glass-topped table at the foot of her terrace, with the Spanish-tile fountain behind her and the big blue Pacific spread out in front of her. He removed three of the four chairs-they made her feel lonely, she said-and opened the zipper of the thermal carton a couple of inches more so that her dinner wouldn’t continue to baste in its own juices. Oyster stew, grilled moonfish with black-olive polenta and shiitake mushrooms, and, in a separate cooler bag, a half-bottle of Sauvignon blanc and a macadamia-nut torte topped with currants, whipped cream, and toasted coconut for desert. For a woman who couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds, she could certainly put the stuff away, he thought respectfully. Not that a lot of it didn’t go to the turtles, of course.

He stood back, took one more look at the setting, straightened the silverware so that it lined up perfectly with the bottom edge of the bamboo place mat, nodded with satisfaction, checked his bowtie to make sure that it was straight, and went to find her at her cove, looking forward to bringing her back.

He hadn’t always looked forward to it. At first, he’d actively disliked her. It didn’t seem right to him that a woman-let alone a woman of that age-smelled morning and night like the inside of a bar after a hard day: booze and cigars. And the way she waited for him to offer his arm, as if she was the queen of Hungary or something. That wasn’t part of his job and he’d resented it. She hadn’t made things any better when he handed her her first bill to be signed. “Now Raymond,” she’d said (sometimes it was “Raymond,” sometimes “Steven,” once in a while “Faustino”), “let’s get something clear right at the start. I can’t be bothered with calculating percentages every time I sign for something, you understand? So you keep track of what you bring, and whenever the amount comes to four hundred dollars, you tell me and I will tip you accordingly. Is that satisfactory?”

What could he say but yes? But in his heart he simmered. Why should he have to ask for his tip? It was demeaning. More than that, he assumed it was her way of getting out of tipping him at all, in hopes that he wouldn’t have the nerve to bring it up. But he had, and two weeks later when he told her that her bill to date had been $405.24, she smiled and handed him two crisp fifty-dollar bills that she’d had all ready and waiting-over and above the automatic eighteen percent that had already been added for service.

It had blown him away. And it was in cash, that was the best part. Nothing to go into the service pool, nothing to be declared as income. It had made all the difference in the world. He still didn’t like the way her breath smelled, and he still didn’t like the way her fingers dug into his arm like hard little toothpicks, but she was good for a minimum of $200 a month, his best customer by a mile; he’d come to depend on it. More than that, he’d eventually come around to actually liking her. After you got to know her, you began to see her good side. She was generous, she was funny, she had a lot of good points.