Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

They were at two pulled-together square tables near the back wall: Julie, Liz Petra, Rudy Walker, Victor Waldo, Donald Pinckney, and Donald’s man-eating wife, Cheryl, who looked bored, bony, and exotic in a flared white pantsuit that appeared to have come from the cleaners’ five minutes before. The barmaid was in the act of taking orders, probably for their second round. Only Joey and Kozlov weren’t there.

“Hi, all.” Gideon asked the barmaid for a pint of best bitter and pulled up a chair between Julie and Victor, well out of Cheryl’s range.

“Oh, Gideon, hi, sweetheart,” Julie said. “How did it go today? I was just telling everybody about the bone.”

“A human bone, I understand?” Donald said. “A tibia?” He was wearing another button on his shirt: I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables.

“Partial tibia of an adult male,” Gideon said, “with signs of dismembering at the distal end.”

“Signs of dismembering?” Victor echoed. “What would be the ‘signs’ of dismembering?”

And so he had to go through it again. His explanation was met with more interest than he might have expected, except from Cheryl, who, still nursing her earlier drink-a straight-up martini-was exchanging lingering, supposedly covert glances with a husky bodybuilder-type in a muscle shirt a couple of tables away. An olive on a toothpick slipped suggestively between her lips and out again.

“And do they have any idea to whom it might belong?” asked Donald, resolutely avoiding taking notice of his wife’s goings-on.

“As of now, no. No unsolved murders, no records of any missing people it could belong to. No theories as to whose it is. Still, it’s somebody’s. Mike introduced me to a dog-handler on St. Agnes, and tomorrow we’ll go up to Halangy Point and see if we can find any more pieces. If we do, Mike said he’d find me a place at the police station where I can go over them.”

“‘Mike’?” said Julie, her eyebrows going up. “My goodness, you did get along better with him today, didn’t you?”

“Robb was right,” Gideon said. “He’s actually a pretty decent guy.”

The barmaid came with their drinks: ginger beer for Victor; white wine for Julie, Liz, Rudy, and Donald; another martini (with three olives on the toothpick) for Cheryl; and Gideon’s ale in the time-honored dimpled glass tankard.

“Murdered and dismembered,” Liz said thoughtfully after taking her first sip. “You don’t suppose… I wonder… Well, no, never mind. It’s a silly idea.”

This naturally prompted interest all around, and she was prevailed upon-it didn’t take much prevailing-to continue. “Do you remember the last time we were all in this pub?” she asked. “Well, everybody but you and Gideon, Julie.” She waited, slowly rotating her wineglass on the scarred table, but no one came up with an answer.

“It was the final night, after Edgar gave that talk at Methodist Hall, remember? The one where he got into it with that Pete Williams guy, that writer who hung around all week.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cheryl said, her first contribution. “Edgar was livid. Deservedly so, if you ask me. That reporter was vicious.”

Her attention seemed to have returned to the conversation, but she was paying no attention whatsoever to Gideon. She wasn’t even working at not paying him attention. It was simply as if he weren’t there. She’s written me off as a dud, he thought, not certain whether he ought to be relieved or offended. A moment’s consideration told him he was relieved. I am getting old, he thought.

“That reporter treated him in exactly the way he deserved,” Rudy said to Cheryl. “Edgar had it all coming to him, and then some.” He muttered on a little more, but all Gideon was able to hear was “… arrogant, condescending…”

Rudy and Villarreal had not gotten along, Gideon remembered Julie telling him. “If you think Donald and Joey get under each others’ skin, you should have seen Edgar and Rudy,” she’d said. Apparently their views on the American wilderness-“open it up to everyone and everything,” according to Rudy, and “shut it down to everyone and everything,” according to Villarreal-were too much at odds for them to stomach one another, and potshots and barbs had flown between them all week long, with Rudy doing most of the needling. But Villarreal had been possessed of a ready, caustic wit, Julie had said, and, generally speaking, Rudy had gotten the worst of it.

There had been a time, Gideon thought sadly, when Rudy had had a sharp and ready wit, too.

“Whether he had it coming to him or not is not the point,” Liz said now, gathering steam. “The point is that he said he wanted to kill him, do you remember? He said it right in front of us. Twice, if I remember right. Well, who’s to say…”

“Liz!” Julie exclaimed. “You’re not serious. You’re suggesting Edgar actually did kill him? I mean… murder?”

“That’s just what I’m suggesting.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Rudy said, but it was hard to tell if he was serious.

There followed a general chorus of doubt and incredulity. Gideon, silent, reflected that, as cheerful and kindly as Liz was, getting her back up was obviously not a good idea, even if you went out and got eaten by a bear afterward.

And she stuck to her guns. “I am serious. Hear me out now. Has anybody heard anything about Williams since that night?” She stared challengingly at each of them in turn, and everyone admitted that they hadn’t.

“Don’t look at me,” Gideon said. “I never heard of him at all until the day before yesterday.”

“All right,” Liz said. “Nobody’s heard of him since then. Has anyone heard anything about the book he was working on? Has it come out? We all keep up with the environmental literature, we’d certainly have read about it. A book like that, it would have made a splash.”

No, they allowed, they hadn’t heard news of the book. Still…

“Cheryl, let me have your BlackBerry,” Donald said to his wife.

“What for?”

“Just let me have it.”

“Jesus,” she sighed, digging it out of her purse. This was definitely not a marriage made in heaven, Gideon thought.

Donald took the device. “It should be easy enough to settle. We’ll Google him and see if he turns up.”

“Google a name like ‘Pete Williams’?” Rudy said. “You’ll get a million hits.”

Donald frowned. “That’s a point. Does anybody know where he’s from?”

“London,” said Liz. “But that’s not much help either. Does anybody remember the name of the book? No? Well, does anybody know the names of any of his other books?”

“There weren’t any other books. This was his first one,” Victor said.

“You mean he wasn’t a professional writer?” Donald asked. “I assumed-”

“He published a few magazine articles,” Victor said, putting down his ginger beer, “but he was… What was he?… An auto mechanic.”

“An auto mechanic?” Donald said, deeply aggrieved. “I gave him hours of my time!”

“Yes, he worked in a garage,” said Victor, “but he was a student at one of the colleges. He’d been working on that book of his in his spare time for years. We got to talking about it when he interviewed me. He asked me for advice on publishing, and I gave him some suggestions for-”

“ Movers and Shakers of the Earth,” Cheryl said. “That was the name of it.”

“That’s it,” Donald agreed. Using his pinky he punched it in on the tiny keyboard and waited. “Yes, it’s-no, it’s nothing. It was a chapter in a book by Alistair Cooke, that’s all. But it’s not a book title on its own.” His serious expression as he looked up at the others suggested he’d discovered something of significance. “It never came out, and it’s not scheduled to come out in the foreseeable future.”