Where There's a Will (27 page)

And now he had another $400 to report; $418, actually, but nowadays he returned her generosity by regularly rounding down, something that made him feel good. Besides, he suspected that she kept a more accurate account than he did, so it was another way of staying on her good side. His money had really been due that morning, when he’d brought the pastries, but she’d had company and he didn’t like asking in front of them.

As he approached the curve that opened onto the promontory he paused to scuff his feet a bit on the gravel so that she’d have time to get that pathetic wig on, but when he rounded it he came to an abrupt stop. She wasn’t there waiting for him; something that had never happened before in all these months. There was an empty, overturned pastry basket on the ground next to the bench, and on the bench itself there was something black, silky… the wig.

His throat constricted. This wasn’t right. Something was wrong. He crossed himself without knowing it, held his breath, took two quick steps to the rim of the promontory, and looked over.

“ Oh, my God, ” he said and turned his face away, retching.

“Call for you on two,” Sarah told Fukida over the telephone.

“Who?”

“Two people on the line. Ms. Sakado, the day manager at the Mauna Kai, and a waiter named Faustino Parra-who’s a little hysterical, so be gentle with him.”

“What’s it about, do you know?”

“Something about the Torkelssons again.”

He laughed a little wildly. “Of course. What else could it be? Why did I bother asking?”

“You can handle it, boss. I have complete confidence.”

He punched the button for line two. “Sergeant Fukida,” he said, doodling horses on his note pad, “how can I help you?”

Five seconds later the doodling had stopped. The pen had been thrown down. “Jesus. We’ll be right there. Don’t let anyone within fifty yards of her.”

Arranged neatly over a low glass table on the broad, columned terrace of the Outrigger on a sunny morning, overlooking an agreeable panorama of man-made streams, waterfalls, and exquisitely tended tropical gardens, the lurid photographs seemed wildly out of place: blood and trauma and violent death.

Julie and Gideon had met John for morning coffee while John waited to be picked up by Fukida on the way to Dagmar’s house just a couple of miles up the coast. They had gotten lattes and muffins at the lobby coffee bar and carried them out to the terrace to enjoy them in the fresh air. When Fukida hadn’t shown up at 8:45, as agreed, they’d gotten seconds on the lattes. At 9:05, he arrived.

“Hey, you’re late,” John began, “I thought you were the one who always-” But the look on Fukida’s face stopped him. “What’s the matter?”

Fukida hesitated, looking at Julie. “And this lady…?”

“My wife, Julie,” Gideon said. “Julie, this is Sergeant Fukida.”

Fukida nodded a curt greeting and sat down. “Dagmar’s dead,” he said.

He was wearing a shapeless tweed jacket, trousers that almost but didn’t quite match it, and a nondescript tie. No baseball cap. He seemed diminished, like an over-aged, undernourished department store clerk.

The three of them stared at him and he quickly explained. Her body was discovered by a waiter from the Mauna Kai at five o’clock the day before, at the base of a twenty-foot cliff near her house.

John closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Ah, no.”

“The doc says death occurred somewhere between noon and four yesterday, resulting from severe injuries to the head, apparently from the fall.”

“An accident?” Gideon asked. “Or-”

That was when the photographs came out. “You two are good with pictures. You tell me.” But he held on to them, looking at Julie before laying them out. “These are pretty graphic, ma’am. You might not want to-”

“That’s all right, I’ll stay,” Julie said, which surprised Gideon. “I want to know. There was something about her,” she said to him by way of explanation. “I liked her…”

“Yeah, and if you’re married to him, I guess you’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Fukida said, fanning the photos out over the table. “So where do you get the coffee?”

They pointed him toward the coffee bar, and as he left they began going through the color photos. Fukida had apparently brought only a select few; six altogether. Gideon lifted the first one. It had been taken at the top of the promontory, an overview of the bench and the area around it.

“What is that, her wig?” Julie asked.

“Looks like it,” said John. “So we know one thing it wasn’t, anyway.”

“Right, we know it wasn’t suicide,” Gideon agreed. “People like to look nice when they kill themselves. She’d never have done it, letting strangers find her without the wig.”

“Not Auntie Dagmar, that’s for sure,” John said.

The rest were photographs of the body, going from full-body shots to close-ups of Dagmar’s bloodied head. Julie swallowed and looked away once or twice, but stuck it out. One of them had been made after unbuttoning the top two buttons of Dagmar’s blouse and pulling it down over her right shoulder.

“It seems… indecent,” Julie said. “A dignified, private old woman like that-dead, helpless-exposed to public view like a… like a…”

“It has to be done,” John said softly. “And not many people see these.”

“I know that.”

“Ah, look at this,” Gideon said. He tapped the area just to the right of her bared neck, where even Dagmar’s scrawny trapezius muscle created a triangular cushion of flesh above the collar bone. “These three blueish spots… you can hardly see two of them… that’s extravasated blood just under the skin.”

“Would that be ‘bruises’ in English?” Julie asked.

“Yes, bruises.”

“Fingermarks,” John said.

Gideon nodded. He poured a little coffee onto a napkin, wet his index finger, middle finger, and ring finger with it, and grasped the edge of the table, his thumb underneath, pinching hard. When he lifted his hand, there was a curving row of three spots on the glass, to all intents and purposes exactly like the bruises on Dagmar’s shoulder.

“Somebody grabbed her from behind-hard-maybe while she was sitting on the bench.” He gently placed his fingers on Julie’s shoulder to illustrate, his thumb in back.

She shivered. “And pushed her over the edge?”

“Looks like it.”

“So what’s the verdict?” Fukida asked, coming back with his cardboard cup of coffee; the four-dollar vente size.

“Murder,” John said. “You agree?”

“Sure, no question about it. Also-and this you probably can’t tell from the pictures-she was laying a good four feet from the base of the cliff. No way did she just fall off, or even jump. Somebody shoved her, good and hard.”

“Or threw her,” Julie said. “How hard would it have been? She’s nothing but skin and bones.”

“That’s true, too.”

“Fingerprints?” John asked.

“No.”

“Did you check the bench? The paint might have been soft from being out in the sun, there might-”

“Johnny, for Christ’s sake! Of course I checked the bench. We dusted everything. Give me a little credit, will you?”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, whoever did it wore gloves.”

“How can you know that?” Julie asked.

“We picked up some glove-leather impressions. One on her watch, one, maybe two, on the bench.”

“Glove smears,” John said. “That’s not gonna do you much good.”

Fukida shrugged. “Yeah, well.”

“What about suspects?” Gideon asked, handing back the photos.

“Oh, yeah, suspects, we got suspects.” He sucked coffee through the opening in the lid, made a face, and twisted the lid off to get a healthy mouthful. Gideon could smell the sprinkling of chocolate on top. “The kid that found her, the waiter, he was there earlier, too, delivering pastries to her at about one-”

“One?” John interrupted. “Wait a minute, that means the noon end of the TOD range is wrong. It had to be after that.”

Fukida put a finger to his temple and looked archly at him. “Whoa, not too much gets by this guy.”

“Duh,” John said, not taking offense.

“And the kid told us she had company. Guess who.”

“Inge?” Gideon answered on the spur of the moment.

“Hedwig?” John offered. “Axel?”

“Right, right, and right. Also Felix the Cat, all the way from sunny Waikiki. The whole sorry bunch of them.”

“Felix?” John repeated. “Must have been important to bring him over. Do you know what it was about?”

“No. The kid says he didn’t hear anything, but they looked like they weren’t having any fun. He thought they were fighting about something and shut up when he came in. He said Dagmar looked really upset.”

“What do you think it was about?”

“What do you think it was about?”

“I think they were having a strategy session,” John said bluntly. “Figuring out where they go from here, coming up with whatever new cockamamie story they were going to befuddle you guys with.”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“And so those are your suspects?” Gideon asked. “The nieces and nephews?”

“Who else? Last people to see her alive… fighting about something… all kinds of nasty, threatening things popping on the old case… sure, they’re my prime suspects, you bet. Well, and the two spouses, too-Malani and what’s his name, Keoni. They’ve got a stake in this, too. My guess at this point is that one of them-who knows, maybe more than one of them-wanted to make absolutely sure she never told anyone what really happened.”

“Yes,” Julie said nodding, “I remember, the other day when we were all talking on Axel’s porch, she looked really depressed, really tired. She talked about being ready for it all to come out.”

“Well, there you go.” Fukida was impatiently twirling the cup lid on the table, leaving little rings of foam. He was ready to leave. “Well…”

“And at this point, we think the real story is that Magnus was murdered by Torkel?” Gideon suggested.

“That… or by one of the nephews-or nieces.”

John looked hard at him. “Are you serious about that, Teddy?”

“I’m serious about it as a possibility, yeah, you bet.” Fukida tipped the cup all the way up to finish his coffee, sucking up the last of the foam, and stood. “Everybody’s being interrogated today, this morning. I’m on my way to talk to Inge now, and I’ve got two of my detectives going to see Axel and Hedwig.”

“What about Felix?”

“Honolulu PD is helping out there. We gave them a list of questions. I want everybody talked to at about the same time so they can’t compare notes ahead of time.”

“That’s good,” John said.

“I’m glad you approve.” Fukida paused before leaving, leaning on the back of his chair. “I’m not asking you along, Johnny. You’ve done great, but I think maybe it’s time for you to step out of this.”

“You’re not gonna get any argument from me on that. If I never see any of that lousy bunch again, it’ll be too soon.”

When Fukida had gone, the three of them sat looking out over the gardens toward the sea. “What awful news,” Julie said, following which there was a long silence.

“I have to get away from here,” John said, still staring out to sea. “I just don’t want to hang around here anymore.”

“You’re ready to go home?” Julie asked sympathetically.

“Not if I can help it, not while Meathead is still loose. But my sister Brenda wants us all to come down to Hilo. You guys interested?”

“That’s your sister who’s a park ranger?” Julie asked. “I’d love to meet her.”

“Right, at Volcanoes. You two would have a lot in common. So I’ve been thinking-”

“Uh-oh,” Gideon said.

John responded with a fleeting smile. “-that we could head down south today, maybe get rooms at Volcano House for a couple of nights-it’ll be a whole lot cheaper than the Outrigger, I can tell you that. We could go up into Hilo for dinner with Brenda and her family tonight, and then maybe tomorrow Brenda could show us around the park. What do you say?”

“Sounds good,” said Gideon.

“I’d love it,” Julie said.

It was a view that the pony-tailed old man in the gold-braided captain’s hat never got tired of-that, as far as he knew, no one had ever gotten tired of: the island of Tahiti, rearing up before him in the morning, the upper slopes of its green mountains and hanging valleys glowing like fire, the heavy mists that had clung to the bottoms of the deep ravines all night slowly separating into feathery tendrils as the sun hit them, the sky itself still a pellucid aquamarine, not the pale blue it would turn later on. Behind him, nine miles away across the Sea of the Moon, was the even more lushly exotic island of Moorea, where he lived and from which he’d just motored.

God, what a place.

With a sigh of self-satisfaction, he slowly steered Cap’n Jack’s Reward, a converted fifty-foot Danish fishing trawler, through the ships anchored in Papeete Harbor and then, edging it forward and back as deftly as if it were a twelve-foot dinghy, slipped it into its space along the concrete bulkhead that edged the long waterfront quay. Good. Done.

Nine-thirty, according to the clock on the cabin wall. That left him over an hour before the day’s clients, six Hemingway wannabe’s referred to him by Tahiti Nights Travel Agency (for the usual fifteen percent), showed up to spend a manly day on the high seas in pursuit of marlin and mahi-mahi. He just hoped nobody threw up on his beautiful, newly stained but not yet polyurethaned teak deck.

“Mornin’, Cap’n Jack, toss me a rope, I’ll tie you up.”

Teoni, waiting for him on the quay, was his one-man crew; reliable, competent, and unfailingly good-humored, even with problem customers-of whom there were many. Cap’n Jack had often wondered what it was about deep-sea fishing that brought out the worst in so many men. In Teoni’s opinion it was the result of the temporary absence of the civilizing influence of women, and Cap’n Jack thought it was as good a theory as any.