Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

“But that hardly means-”

“No, of course it doesn’t. But it’s not something that I feel I can keep from him. He has to know.”

“Well, you’re the expert,” she said unconvinced, “but – oh, wait a minute, I just thought of something. There must be other people we’re not even thinking of, archeologist types who live here. I mean, we know Rowley because he hangs around with us, but what about other archaeologists, maybe people who work at the museum, people we don’t know about? They would have been here back when Sheila was killed too

… oh, no, wait a minute, that doesn’t fly because they could have killed Ivan any time these last five years. Why wait till now?”

“Because-”

“Because he wasn’t giving a speech,” she supplied, and then promptly supplied the countering argument as well. “But surely, he must have made some presentations in five years. He was obviously a cultural bigwig here. Although-” She pursed her lips, mulling everything over. “I don’t know, what do you think?”

“I think this is making my neck ache.” He tipped up his glass, drained the whisky, and smacked his lips. “It’s six thirty, dinnertime. Let’s go down and have a look at the cast of suspects.”

INDEED, the entire cast was assembled and waiting, Rowley having joined them this evening. The group had been put in the main dining room tonight, a big, handsome space with buttercup yellow walls, a long row of tall, arched windows looking out on the bay, and a rousing, thirty-foot mural of Nelson’s great victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, full of smoke and cannon flashes, covering most of the rear wall. The burgundy-vested, bowtied waiters, all of whom appeared to be Spanish, couldn’t have been too crazy about looking at that every time they went back through the swinging doors to the kitchen, but if it bothered them they didn’t show it.

When Julie and Gideon arrived, two of the waiters were just going around the table delivering appetizer and salad orders. After they’d finished, one of them took the newcomers’ orders. Julie asked for bouillabaisse and chicken piccata; Gideon went for the “Taste of Morocco” menu, ordering a roasted tomato and onion salad, followed by lamb stew.

As they’d expected, the rambling conversation around the table was about Ivan Gunderson. Who could have killed him? Why? And how could the police even tell he’d been murdered, anyway? Weren’t his house, his body, reduced to ashes?

This last question was directed at Gideon, the only certified, bona fide forensic practitioner in the group. Gideon looked up from his plate and chewed while coming up with a way to evade answering the question – without quite lying, if he could help it. Nobody here knew that he’d been to the morgue that morning and had himself been the one who had made the homicide determination. Nobody here knew that Sheila’s death was now reopened as a subject of investigation, let alone that he, Gideon, had also been the instrument of that. There was a lot they didn’t know, and it seemed to him an excellent idea to keep it that way.

He swallowed the mouthful of honey-sweetened lamb, prune, and almond. “Well, you know, arson investigators are pretty good at that. They look for the starting point of the fire, the use of accelerants, and so on.”

“Accelerants?” Rowley said. “You mean fuels? My goodness, the place was full to the brim with inflammables – glues, solvents, cleaners. It’s a wonder the whole peninsula didn’t go up in smoke.”

“Those pots he was gluing,” Audrey said somberly. “I can’t get them out of my mind. I simply cannot make myself imagine Ivan spending his days, hour after hour, meaninglessly gluing pots together. ” A brief, somber laugh. “And then regluing them when you brought them back to him.”

Gideon went back to eating, relieved that the subject had moved on.

“I keep thinking of him too,” Adrian said with a rumbling sigh. “Of the man he once was; so witty, so… nimble – and then of how he was on that last night…” He shook his head. “Iwo Jima Boy, Okinawa Boy, whatever it was. So very sad.”

He trickled a little Irish whiskey into his coffee and screwed the cap back onto the flask. It occurred to Gideon that Adrian’s flask never seemed to empty. He never had to upend it, but merely to tip it a bit. A magic flask; now, how did he do that? Did he carry a second flask to top up the first?

“It was Guadalcanal Boy,” said Corbin sadly.

There was only the clinking of silverware against china for a few moments, and then Buck spoke. “You want to hear something that’s really weird?” Buck was normally so quiet when he was around them that all heads turned in his direction. “He was never there. At Guadalcanal. I have a Marine buddy, a retired lieutenant colonel, who fought at Guad. He has a Web site that lists the survivors, every last one. No Gunderson. I checked with him, and he double-checked, and he says it’s so. Gunderson was in the Pacific, all right, at Tarawa – which was bad enough – but not at Guad. Now how do you figure that?”

It was a moot question, but for Adrian there were no moot questions. “One of the prominent features of dementia senilis, you see, Buck,” he began kindly, “is a loss, sometimes only intermittent, of the ability to distinguish between-”

He was interrupted by the appearance of George, one of the competent, agreeable reception desk clerks, carrying a small, neatly folded, brown paper bag. “Oh, I thought I’d find you here, Dr. Oliver. This was left for you a few minutes ago. I took the liberty of bringing it in to you rather than saving it for you at the desk. The lady said she thought it might be important.” He put the bag on the table in front of Gideon.

“Thanks, George.” Curious, he opened it without thinking and began to take out the object inside, but the instant he saw what it was, even before it was all the way out of the bag, he caught his breath, dropped it back in, and rolled up the top; casually, he hoped.

But not quickly enough. “What was that thing?” Audrey demanded.

“I have no idea,” he said with a shrug. (He considered the possibility of an apathetic yawn as well, but discarded it as lacking subtlety.) “Probably a present from an admirer – somebody who was at the lecture.”

“It was a vertebra, wasn’t it?” Audrey persisted. “Two vertebrae. Were they human?”

“Looked like it.”

“People send you human vertebrae as presents?”

“You should see the kinds of things people send him,” Julie said.

But no one had ever sent him anything quite like this before, and he wasn’t about to let the rest of the table in on it. His large hand now lay protectively over it. He could barely make himself sit still until he could give it a more careful going-over in private. Already he was beginning to think he must have been mistaken in what the quick glance he’d had at it had told him. But if he was right…

“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering after-dinner coffee and drinks to be served in the bar this evening,” Adrian said, observing that people were beginning to stir. “I thought it would be more comfortable. Shall we go?” As they got up he gestured jocularly at the bag. “Don’t forget your bones.”

“As a matter of fact, I think I’ll drop them off upstairs so I don’t leave them somewhere. Wouldn’t want to shock anybody who happened to pick them up.”

Gideon’s chances of forgetting and leaving them somewhere were about as likely as his forgetting his ears and leaving them somewhere, but he didn’t like the interested looks the bag was getting. While the others shuffled slowly into the Barbary Bar, he retrieved his key from reception (room keys were attached, not to the metal or wooden tags most European hotels used, but to happy little “Barbary ape” plush dolls; another whimsical touch, like the lollipops and the rubber ducks), and punched the elevator button for the second floor,