Where There's a Will (31 page)

“No, I’m talking about the other murder.”

“The other…? You mean Magnus? Are you telling me Axel also-”

“No, not Magnus. Torkel. Look, I’m at the Center myself-”

“ So now Torkel was murdered, too? ” Gideon winced and held the receiver away from his ear. “You guys are driving me nuts!”

And with that, Fukida hung up, but a few seconds later he called back. “Don’t go away,” he growled. “I’m gonna want to talk to you.”

Under the stunned and recriminatory stares of his relatives and friends, a drooping, unresisting Axel Torkelsson was cuffed, read his rights, and led away by Fukida and a uniformed officer. Malani, dry-eyed but too dazed to speak, was enfolded in Hedwig’s warm, fragrant arms. People looked at one another but mostly said nothing.

After a few seconds, Felix took charge with his usual elan.

“I guess that’s it for the reception, folks,” he announced. “Thank you all for coming.”

“All right, I understand why he killed Dagmar,” Julie said. “Sergeant Fukida explained that. He was afraid she was going to break down and tell the police the truth; that is, that Torkel was not a murderer, which would have meant there was a real chance-especially once the seamen’s home found out about it-that Magnus’s will might be thrown out and Torkel’s implemented instead. Whew, do I have that right?”

“That’s the way I understand it,” John said. “Of course I’m just a simple federal cop.”

“All right. Fine. What I don’t understand is why he wanted Torkel’s plane to go down. Why would he want to kill him? ”

“Well-” Gideon began, then paused as the cocktail waitress put down their drink orders: iced tea for Julie, a Mai Tai for John, and a glass of Chardonnay for Gideon. They were in Hawaii Calls, the Outrigger’s wall-less restaurant, at a tree-shaded outdoor table in the rear, toward the beach. They clinked glasses and took their first welcome sips.

“Well,” he continued, “that’s something we don’t know for sure yet, but at a guess, it was probably pretty much the same reason. Axel must have realized that if Torkel ever did come back and explain that he wasn’t Magnus-which he was supposed to do, eventually-it would turn out the same way: goodbye, Magnus’s will, hello Torkel’s.”

“Goodbye, Little Hoaloha,” John said, “hello, nothing.”

Julie slowly shook her head. “And so he murdered two people-took away their lives because they got in the way of getting something that wasn’t really his anyway… that pleasant, harmless-looking little man.”

“Three people,” Gideon said. “Don’t forget Claudia.”

“You two ready to order dinner?” John asked restlessly. He was more than ready to change the subject.

“Sure, I guess so,” Julie said, then suddenly shuddered, the shiver running visibly down her body.

“Cold?” Gideon asked. “Do you want to move in under the roof?”

“No, it’s beautiful out here with the ocean, and the sun going down. I think I could use a pullover, though. The tan one in the closet to the right-would you mind?”

Gideon, with the pullover over one shoulder, was closing the door to their room behind him, when he heard the phone ring. On the line was Fukida.

“Hey, chief, I’m glad I caught you. Listen, have you people had dinner yet?”

“No, we were just thinking about it.”

“Great. How about if I join you?”

“Well, sure,” Gideon said, puzzled. He and John were scheduled to be deposed by Fukida the next morning at CIS. What couldn’t wait until then? And dinner? Why the sudden sociability?

“Um, fine, Ted. We’ll wait for you. We’re at Hawaii Calls, in the resort.”

Fukida heard the ambiguity in his voice and laughed, rather merrily for him. “Ah, don’t sound so worried. My wife’s in Honolulu this week. I just thought it’d be nice to have some company, and eat some decent food, too. See you in a few minutes.”

“Fine.”

“Oh, also… there’s somebody I’d like you to meet.” And with an improbable final happy chuckle he hung up.

“HE’S got something up his sleeve, that’s all I know,” Gideon said. “He was chuckling.”

“Chuckling?” John said. “There’s something wrong there. Snicker, I could see. Sneer, for sure. But chuckle? Whoa, this looks bad. I’m telling you, Teddy can be… Teddy can be…” The words trailed off. He was staring into space, apparently at nothing. “… He can be …”

“John, what is it?” Julie asked.

But John was at a loss for words in the most literal sense of the phrase. He had jumped up, knocking over his chair, and all he could do was point.

Gideon turned to see Fukida coming toward them through the restaurant with an old man wearing a captain’s hat with faded gold braid, a yellow T-shirt with some kind of logo on it, and rumpled khakis. Not much taller than Fukida, he had the look of an old rake, bearded and pony-tailed, with a black patch over one eye and a rolling limp. When they got closer, Gideon was able to read the T-shirt logo: Old Fishermen Never Die, They Just Smell That Way.

“Hello, everybody,” Fukida said, grinning.

John, still staring at the old man, found his voice again. “Mr. T! How did you… we thought you were… we were sure you were.. .”

“Well, as you can see, I’m not,” the old man said. “I’m hale and hearty and crabbier than ever. It’s nice to see you, boy.”

“And this is Gideon Oliver,” Fukida said, “the one I’ve been telling you about.”

The old man laughed delightedly. “Oh, yeah. You’ve been working on my case, I hear.”

As he got to his feet, Gideon’s mind was whirling at top speed, teeming with what seemed to be impossibilities. Who was this guy supposed to be? Could he actually be Magnus Torkelsson, whose body, after all, was never positively identified? But if so, whose burned body had been left in the hay barn? Or could it be… what was his name, Andreas, the oldest brother, who had supposedly died decades ago? But if so, what did “you’ve been working on my case” mean?

“You’re-you’re Magnus Torkelsson?” he asked, choosing the less improbable impossibility.

The old man threw a glance at Fukida and laughed, both of them looking pleased with themselves. “Magnus? No, I’m not Magnus.” He sat down at the table. “Me, I’m Torkel.”

Gideon was flabbergasted. “You can’t be Torkel. I examined your remains myself,” he said stupidly. “I identified you from your right foot. It’s in a… it’s in a box at the Kona police station.”

“Oh, so that’s where it is.” Smiling, he pulled his right cuff up above his white sock and rapped with his knuckles on the almost-flesh-colored plastic shell that substituted for his right lower leg.

He had seen the lights when the Grumman was fifty feet above the surface of the lagoon, he told them, but he hadn’t known what they were-a pair of whale-oil lanterns hung on posts at the front ends of two dugout canoes that had been night-fishing for rockfish and rays along the reef. Four men altogether, they had come from Tiku, the nearest inhabited island, and they had been flabbergasted when the plane fell without warning out of the sky and plowed itself into the water within a few hundred feet of them.

The last thing he remembered from that night was the wrenching screech of the wing shearing off as it hit the water. The next thing was waking up in a pandanus-roofed hut two, or possibly four, days later-he had never figured out their language well enough to know for sure. But what he did know for sure was that they had paddled to the downed plane before it sank. They had found the pilot dead and Torkel unconscious, with his foot caught inextricably in the twisted metal under the console. Using the tools they had brought for gutting and quartering the rays, they had taken his leg off at the knee, staunched the blood with a tourniquet made from his shirt, and taken him to Tiku.

There, with the stump bound up in pandanus leaves that had been soaked in an evil-smelling poultice, he slowly recovered, although one eye was damaged beyond repair. He remained on Tiku for five weeks, leaving with the first people to call there during his stay-a Japanese scientific team studying the effects of ocean currents on intertidal marine life. They had taken him to Tarawa, from where he’d gone first to Australia, then to Fiji, and then, a year after the plane crash, to the island of Moorea, part of French Polynesia. And there he’d stayed, living a lonely and isolated life, carving furniture and drums from the local milo and kamani woods, until he met and married a beautiful French widow, his “trophy wife” (she was seventy-one).

After that he’d given up the furniture shop, bought a boat (she was rich as well as beautiful), and set himself up in the fishing charter business, which he still worked at two or three days a week whenever he felt like it.

“And that’s about it,” he said. “The story of my life. Never for one minute did I regret leaving Hawaii and the ranch behind. The best decision I ever made.”

“Is that a heck of a story, or what?” Fukida said with a delighted, almost proprietary air. “I’ve been on some pretty strange cases, but that has to be a first.”

“It’s a first for me, too,” Gideon said slowly, still struggling to absorb what he’d just heard. “It’s the first time I ever identified a living man from his skeletal remains.” He couldn’t help laughing. “It’s probably a first for the science of forensic anthropology.”

Torkel guffawed. He was really enjoying himself. “I never would have come back either, but then I read about what happened to my sister, and I knew it just had to have something to do with what happened back then, and the will and all, and I figured I owed it to her to come back and finally straighten things out”-he sobered-“and do what I could to help the police find out who killed her.”

“And Mr. Torkelsson has been very helpful,” Fukida said. “What he said jibed right down the line with what Felix told me.”

“Were you surprised that it was Axel, Mr. Torkelsson?” Julie asked.

Torkel leaned back in his chair, lifted his cap, smoothed down his lank gray hair, and screwed the cap back on. Cap’n Jack’s Charters, it said in faded gold braid. “Not really. The boy always seemed like a little apple-polisher to me. ‘Yes, Uncle Torkel, no, uncle Torkel.’ But I never knew until today that anybody tried to kill me, though. That was some surprise.”

They hadn’t thought to order food until well into Torkel’s account, and now the waitress and a busboy showed up to remove their salads and set out the main courses. Since no one had wanted to interrupt his narrative by studying the menu, they’d all followed the waitress’s recommendation: blackened tuna in a soy-mustard dressing.

Once the luscious-smelling plates were set in front of them, however, they seemed to realize how hungry they were, so for a few minutes they simply shoveled the food in, limiting their conversation, such as it was, to little more than appreciative grunts.

“Ted,” Gideon asked when they’d slowed down a little, “what’s going to happen to the nephews and nieces?”

“Well, Axel’s gonna go away for a while,” Fukida said, chewing.

“Of course. But what about the others? Inge, and Felix, and Hedwig?”

Fukida nodded. “You mean am I going to do anything about all the fudging from ten years ago.” He laid down his fork. “I haven’t made up my mind. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances. And a lot of problems with reopening.”

Gideon looked at him, his head cocked. “Am I reading you wrong, or does that mean you’re inclined to let it go?”

“No, you’re not reading me wrong,” Fukida said and went back to his blackened tuna.

“Wait, hold it,” John said. “How can you just let it go? That’s Mr. T’s property they’re living on, and he’s sitting right here. He was declared dead by accident.”

“Not quite by accident, Johnny. He was declared dead because he went out of his way to mislead the police and everybody else to make it look as if he was dead-his own doing. I don’t really know how the courts would feel about giving him back his property now.”

“Mm. I see what you mean about extenuating circumstances,” Julie said.

“Oh, hell, it’s a moot point, anyway,” said Torkel, who had cleaned his plate as if he hadn’t eaten in two days. “I’m happy where I am, I’ve mellowed, and I have everything I want. No worries. Why would I want to be a rancher again? That was somebody else, not me.”

“But what about the seamen’s home?” Gideon asked. “You wanted them to have the money from the ranch.”

“Now that’s another funny thing. The Swedish Seamen’s Home went kaput in 1997. There aren’t enough old Swedish sailors around anymore to make it worthwhile; not indigent ones, anyhow.” He shrugged. “So, what do I care who has the property? I like those kids all right, they’re welcome to it. In my eyes, they didn’t do anything wrong.”

“See?” Fukida said. “Not much point in my resuscitating the case, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Who would benefit? No, let me get Axel put away, and I’m done with it. Seems to me I had a life before the Torkelssons, and it’d be nice to get back to it.”

John mopped up the last of the soy-mustard sauce with a roll and sat back. “So what happens now, Mr. T? What’s next for you?”

“Me?” Torkel said. “First, I’d sure like to see that box with my foot in it. I haven’t seen that foot for a long time. Then I need to arrange for Dagmar’s burial when the sergeant here releases her. And then…”

He took a deep breath, filled with contentment. “Then I’m going to go back to my beautiful Tahiti, back to my gorgeous trophy wife, going to catch some marlin and mahi-mahi when I feel like it, live in sandals and shorts, and watch the sun go down over Mount Tohiea from my patio every single night of the week, with a cold gin and tonic in my hand.”

John, Gideon, and Julie looked at each other. “Makes sense to me,” John said.