Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

Felix looked puzzled. “Well, you just said he’d fractured-”

“No, aside from that. Anything else?”

Felix looked more puzzled. “Not that I know of. Like what?”

“Like missing a couple of toes,” John said.

Felix’s reaction went beyond theatricality. His mouth clenched, his eyes bulged, and with a resounding snort a thin double-spray of gin and vermouth exploded from his nostrils, further displeasing the party at the next table, who instantly began gathering up their drinks. In the space of five seconds, Felix’s face registered surprise, confusion, consternation, doubt, and uncertainty, more or less in that order, all while coughing. Startled, John and Gideon glanced at each other, wondering what it was they’d set off.

“Felix, are you okay?” John asked, but Felix, choking away, lowered his head and waved him silent.

A final splutter, a mopping of lips and beard, a dab at his tearing eyes, and he was ready to attempt speech again, emitting a strangled “Toes?”

“That’s right,” Gideon said. “The foot had two missing toes.”

“Yes, but are you sure-” Another brief episode of choking, during which Felix held up his hand again and downed a slug of his martini, this time managing to keep it in him. “How do you know they didn’t disappear after he died? I mean, for gosh sakes, practically everything else got carried off by the fishes, didn’t it? Couldn’t they have-”

“No, these were amputated long before. You can tell.”

“My God,” Felix breathed. He shook his head slowly back and forth, then, surprisingly, giggled. “Oh, lordy.”

He was raising his glass again when John, not the most patient of men, finally exploded. “ What, already? What? WHAT?”

Felix ran his tongue around his lips. “Magnus wasn’t missing any toes.”

Now it was Gideon’s turn. “What?”

“Torkel was the one with the mangled foot. He got it caught in a threshing machine back when I was a little kid. In the sixties.”

“ Torkel? ” cried John. “His brother Torkel?”

“Yes, of course his brother Torkel,” Felix said. “How many Torkels do you think there are around here?”

“Slow down a minute, you’ve really lost me now,” Gideon said. “I thought Torkel was the one who was shot and killed-before Magnus even took off in the plane.”

Felix nodded gravely. “That’s right. Shot, killed… and buried on the ranch eight years ago.”

The three men looked at each other. John put down his glass. “Or not,” he said.

They continued staring at each other, the churning of their minds almost audible. In the background the surf hissed and the gentle strains of the Hawaiian Wedding Song hung in the air. And then came the fusillade of questions, the three of them talking at once. If the skeletonized corpse in the Grumman was Torkel’s, whose bullet-riddled body had lain buried in his grave on the Big Island for the last ten years? Magnus’s? If so, what had really happened the night of the murder? If not, where was Magnus? Either way, how could everyone-family, friends, police-have mistaken someone else’s body for Torkel’s? And what had been the point of the deception, if deception there had been?

Felix had the answers to some, but not all, of the questions. “You have to understand, the body was burnt beyond recognition-”

“The body was burnt?” Gideon said, surprised.

“Beyond recognition,” Felix said, “and then some.”

“You knew that, Doc,” John said. “I told you on the drive up to the ranch.”

“No, you didn’t. You told me Torkel was shot, and the headquarters building was burned down-”

“Right, that’s what I said.”

“But you never explicitly… okay, never mind. If the body was burnt beyond recognition,” he asked Felix, “what made everybody so sure it was Torkel in the first place? Why couldn’t it have been Magnus? Neither one of them was around anymore.”

“Well, no, but he called Dagmar. He called her from the airport before he took off.”

“Ha,” said John, with a self-satisfied glance at Gideon. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute, who called Dagmar?”

“Magnus…” Felix blinked. “That is, Torkel. It must have been Torkel. But he said he was Magnus.”

“And Dagmar couldn’t tell the difference between their voices?” Gideon asked.

John heard the overlay of skepticism. “You don’t buy that, Doc?”

“Well, I’m not sure. If I got on the phone to you and tried to sound like Felix, could I fool you?”

“Of course not, but that’s because nobody sounds like Felix.”

“Nobody sounds like anybody else, to the people close to them. The distinctive characteristics of a particular voice might be indefinable, but they’re immediately recognizable.”

“What about mimics?” Felix asked. “They can be amazing.”

Gideon shrugged. “Was Torkel a mimic?”

“Well… who knows? But you have to remember, the two of them sounded a whole lot alike to start with.”

“That’s true,” John agreed. “They did.”

“Okay,” said Gideon. “Forget it. I was just thinking out loud. Go ahead, Felix. What’d he tell her?”

Felix frowned. “If I remember right, Magnus just said-I mean Torkel, dammit-Torkel just told her that… that Torkel had been killed and he had to leave for a while because he was in danger himself.”

“ ‘He’ supposedly being Magnus,” Gideon said.

Felix nodded. “And ‘his brother’ supposedly being Torkel. Hoo.”

“What else did he say?” John asked.

“I don’t really remember, John, it was ten years ago. I was just trying to give you the general idea. He probably said… hell, I don’t know what he probably said. Whatever it was, Dagmar took him at his word. Why wouldn’t she? She was excited, confused, she suddenly gets this panicked phone call in the middle of the night…”

While the sentence drifted away unfinished, the three of them sat quietly, listening to the rhythmic murmur of the surf and hearing occasional bits of conversation-people talking about normal, everyday things: whether there was weekend laundry service at their hotel, tomorrow’s shopping schedule, the pros and cons of going to the Don Ho show at the Beachcomber. “So how’s the wire rope business these days?” floated by them as distinctly as if the speaker were at their table, along with the stifled yawn that followed it. The musicians had either taken their break or else wisely quit until they were no longer competing with Felix.

“Okay,” Gideon said, having pushed his glass around in circles for a minute or so. “That explains why Dagmar thought it was Magnus on the line. But it doesn’t explain why the police bought the idea that the burned body was Torkel’s.”

“Sure it does, Doc,” John said. “You got two brothers. One of them gets burned to a crisp-oh, sorry, Felix. The other one takes off so the same thing doesn’t happen to him. The cops know-they think they know-which one took off. So whatever pile of ashes is left after the fire-damn, sorry about that, Felix-has to be the other one.”

Gideon was unconvinced. “Look, when a body is burned up in a fire, it doesn’t completely turn to ashes or cinders. There’s always something left. Even when it’s professionally cremated at high temperature, they have to pulverize what’s left to turn it into ash, and even then a forensic specialist-”

“Gideon, you’re assuming they brought in experts, consultants,” Felix said. “They didn’t. This is not Seattle we’re talking about.” He smiled. “As far as I know, there aren’t any skeleton detectives anywhere near Waimea.”

Gideon blew out his cheeks. “Body burned beyond recognition, supposed perps never even identified, let alone convicted, brother disappeared… boy, I tell you, I’m starting to see a few holes in this thing.”