Aaron Elkins: Little Tiny Teeth

Gideon spoke in Spanish. “Chato, the other day, the first day of the cruise, when we were all meeting each other, you were there, standing on the side.”

“Yes,” Chato said warily.

“And when Cisco got introduced as the White Shaman, you laughed and called him something else.”

“I mean nothing bad, senor, I only joke with my friends, I very-”

“No, I realize that. I just need to know what you called him.”

Chato licked his lips and looked to his pals for help, but they gaped blankly back at him.

“You’re not in any trouble, my friend; there’s nothing to worry about. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I called him… everybody calls him… the White Milkman.”

“Ah, that’s what I thought,” Gideon said with satisfaction. “And why was he called the White Milkman?”

“What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?” Gideon heard Phil ask John.

Chato’s explanation, a torrent of overexcited pidgin Spanish-English, was too much for Gideon, and he had to ask Phil to translate. Phil listened, nodding, then explained:

Cisco had been labeled the White Milkman by many of the locals in Iquitos in sarcastic reaction to his self-aggrandizing references to himself as the White Shaman. Cisco’s knowledge of authentic shamanism, it seemed, was held in low repute by those who “Fine, fine, but why do they call him a milkman, specifically?”

“Because that’s what he is. Well, not the kind who delivers milk – there’s no such animal in Iquitos, because apparently nobody drinks it – but there’s this little dairy farm nearby that makes cheese, the one and only Amazonian dairy farm they ever heard of, and sometimes he worked there, taking care of the cows, milking them, feeding them-”

“What do they mean, ‘little’? How big is ‘little’? How many cows?”

“Gideon, what the hell does this have to do with anything?”

“Just ask them, Phil.”

Phil shrugged and asked. “Maybe a dozen, they say. Maybe less. Little.” Another shrug. “Which proves?”

“Which suggests that it wasn’t big enough to make milking machines worthwhile. The cows would have been milked by hand, the old-fashioned way.”

“Which proves?” This time it was John.

“Plenty. In fact, that about settles it.” He went back to where the bones lay, picked up the skull, and gazed with extreme attentiveness into the face that was no longer there.

“‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio,’” Phil intoned as the crewmen, increasingly uneasy, quietly went back to the ship.

With a half smile, Gideon slowly looked up. “I did know him, Phil. So did you two.”

Phil and John stared mutely at him.

“It’s Cisco,” he said quietly.

The crushed cervical vertebrae, he explained, were part of a syndrome known to forensic anthropologists as “milker’s neck.”

When a cow was milked by hand, the milker sat on a low stool beside it and leaned his head at a somewhat awkward angle against the animal’s flank while he reached underneath to do the milking. So far, no problem. But a cow does not stand perfectly still while being milked. It shuffles its feet. It shifts its weight. And when it shifts its considerable mass sideways against the milker, he is more or less pinned between the cow and the stool… with his neck sharply bent – that is, flexed. When this happens, the vertebral column can “give” at its most stressed point, the junction of neck and torso, where the flexion occurs. In other words, the already flexed neck is hyperflexed, and pressure is focused on the lowest two cervical vertebrae, C-6 and C-7. The result – by no means always, but often enough – is a crushing of their cervical bodies.

“Like these,” he finished, holding the two vertebrae up again for their inspection. “Remember Cisco’s headaches? And the way he held his head, kind of on the side? Well, you’re looking at the reason.”

John looked at them with a puzzled frown. “Yeah, sure, well, that’s all great stuff, Doc, but how could it be Cisco? It can’t be. This guy here was killed in the middle of setting the fire. That would have been yesterday afternoon some time. Cisco was still on the boat yesterday afternoon. He didn’t jump off till almost two this morning.”

“Did he? Maggie wasn’t that positive it was him. And I’d say that what we’ve got here pretty strongly suggests it wasn’t.”

“Well, if it wasn’t Cisco, who was it?” Phil asked. “I mean, whoever did it jumped ship, right? So he should be missing. But who’s missing? Everybody’s still there.” He paused, his eyebrows lifted. “Well, everybody but Scofield, of course.”

This thought occupied them for a few seconds of concentrated reflection, but none of them could find a way of making sense of it.

“Maybe it was another crewman,” Phil suggested. “We need to check with Vargas and find out if one of them is gone. Let’s get back to the boat.”

But Gideon was now in full professional throttle, more interested in dead bones than in live conundrums. “Whoever it was then, this is Cisco now, and the interesting question is-”

“Are we really that sure?” Phil asked. “Okay, I buy the milker’s neck thing, that’s interesting, but couldn’t there be other milkmen?”

“Phil’s right,” John said. “Even if that’s the only dairy anywhere around here – which we don’t know for a fact – there must have been other people doing the milking too, since Cisco only worked there once in a while. You have to milk cows every day, you can’t just do it when you feel like it.”

“And what’s the likelihood of running into two cow-milkers on this trip?” Gideon said. “But forget about the milker’s neck thing for a minute.” He bent to put down the vertebrae and pick up the skull. “What about this gold-foil work? How do you explain that? With Cisco, it’s easy. He would have lived in the Boston area when he was at Harvard thirty years ago. Plenty of good dentists – and in the seventies gold foils would still have been popular. How many other Amazonian dairy workers would have this kind of work in their mouths?”

“Okay, that part of it makes sense,” Phil said. “We’re not about to argue forensics with you. But the timing doesn’t. There’s no way Cisco would have been able to get here in time to set the fire.”

“Well, let’s think about that,” Gideon said. “Tell me, when was the last time anybody saw him for sure?”

“That would have been yesterday afternoon, as far as I know,” John answered after a moment’s thought. “Remember? He called off the trek and went back to his cabin. And he didn’t show up for dinner.”

“And he wasn’t up on the roof later on,” Phil added. “I remember, Tim looked kind of let down because his buddy didn’t show up. He was wondering if anybody knew where he was. Nobody did.”

“Right. So if no one saw him all that time, nobody can say for sure he was in his cabin – or even still on the boat. How do we know he didn’t just take off into the jungle while we were still moored? That would have been well before the fire.”

“And do what?” asked Phil. “Shoot right up here and get himself killed?”

“Why not?”

“Nah, Doc, you’re not thinking,” John said. “That hike in the jungle broiled your brains a little. Now look: when Cisco called off yesterday’s trek and disappeared on us, it was maybe three in the afternoon, right?”

“Right.”

“And the fire here at the warehouse happened around five o’clock, two hours later.”

“Right.”

“And the Adelita got going again yesterday at what time?”

“Just after dinner, a little after six,” Gideon said. “We were still having coffee.”