Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

“Come on, Doc,” John said, “there’s no such thing as a homicide case without some holes in it, you know that. It’s never cut-and-dried. The cops can never put every single piece together. You go with the preponderance of the evidence. Isn’t that what you were telling me on the atoll?”

“This is different,” Gideon said. “In this case they didn’t even know who got killed. What else did they get wrong?”

“Now hold your horses just one minute,” Felix said heatedly. “You’re not suggesting Torkel killed Magnus, are you? Because that would be-”

“No, of course not,” Gideon said, surprised by the question.

“Damn it, Gideon, Torkel wouldn’t have known how to fire a gun. They didn’t even own a gun. Not a handgun, anyway.”

“Well, no, that’s not completely true,” John said. “There was a gun in the house. At least there used to be.”

“There was?” Felix seemed honestly surprised.

“It was Andreas’s, from the Second World War. Torkel got it out for me once when he was showing me around the place. A classic; one of the early Walther PPKs, made back in the forties. Probably worth a fair amount of money.”

“But that was an antique. You couldn’t shoot that thing.”

“Didn’t say you could,” John said.

“Look, I just get the impression that you two are trying to make it sound like my uncle was some kind of monster, like he killed his own brother-”

As people at nearby tables looked around, John raised his palms in a shushing gesture. “Take it easy, Felix.”

“Felix, nobody’s implying that,” Gideon said. But now he was wondering just what kind of nerve he’d hit.

“Okay, okay,” Felix said tightly. “Sorry.”

“After all,” Gideon said, “at this point we don’t even know for sure that Magnus is dead, do we?”

Felix’s tension held for another moment, then slackened. Another belly laugh, but a quiet one, rumbled out of him. “Well, if he’s not, who’d we bury in that grave?”

At which point they realized they had come full circle, back to the question they’d started with. “Damn, I better go,” Felix said, jumping up. “I can’t miss my plane. Sorry I got a little excited there. Look, you two. The others know more about this than I do. You’ll be talking to them tomorrow, when you get back to the ranch. See what they have to say.”

“You won’t be there?” John asked.

“No way. I won’t be back until Sunday night.” He glanced at his watch. “But I think I’ll give Inge a call from the airport, if that’s okay with you; let her know what you’ve found, kind of break it to her gently. She can tell the others. I mean, this is going to be kind of a shock. I think it might be better if it came from one of the family. Is that all right with you, Gideon, or did you want to be the one.. .?”

“No, go ahead. I’d just as soon they got it from you. I can fill them in on whatever details they want.”

“Good. And thanks for the good work, both of you. Go ahead and splurge on dinner. Get the crab-crusted mahi-mahi; can’t be beat. I’ve already taken care of the check.”

When Felix had gone, Gideon sat there, slowly shaking his head. “Unbelievable. What have you gotten me into here?”

John grinned at him. “Hey, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the guy who wanted a few loose ends?”

GIDEON had stayed at the Royal Hawaiian before, with Julie on their third anniversary. Their favorite part of the day had been sunrise, when they would go down and pick up a cup of wonderfully fragrant Kona coffee-not a blend, but the pure, pungent stuff-at the hotel’s coffee bar the moment it opened at six A.M. and carry it a few steps to the pristine beach. There were no crowds yet, no smells of lotions and oil and mustard, no grizzled, wizened, once-and-always beach boys hawking rides in outrigger-canoes. Their only company was a few strollers, usually of “a certain age,” carrying their shoes and quietly meandering hand in hand along the surf line, and one or two treasure-hunters, heads down, utterly absorbed, prowling the beach with their metal-detectors in hopes of buried gold. And of course the ragged, ever-present line of surfers (did they ever come in, even at night?) bobbing hopefully a few hundred yards out, endlessly waiting for the big one.

The weather had been cool, even a little chilly, at that time of day, the sand pure and sweet-smelling-the big hotels swept and raked their beachfronts clean every night-and the act of sitting quietly on the firm, fresh, damp surface with cardboard cups of steaming coffee while the first rays of the sun lit up, first the upper stories of the big hotels, then Diamond Head, and finally the blue Pacific, seemed to cleanse the mind of its clutter and get it ready to take on another day.

That was what Gideon had in mind for the morning after the meeting with Felix (he was stared at in amazement when he suggested, not with any real expectation, that John join him), but when he awoke at five-thirty there was a steady drizzle wafting down, so instead he had his coffee in the open-air coffee bar itself, dopey with sleep, in a pink chair beside a pink wall covered with black-and-white photographs of laughing Golden Age luminaries who had once stayed there: tiny Shirley Temple greeting admirers with her usual bubbly aplomb in front of a surfboard with “Aloha, Captain Shirley” on it; Esther Williams; William Powell; Carol Lombard; an uncomfortable-looking Bing Crosby getting soaked in an outrigger; Spencer Tracy signing autographs on the beach; an aged Duke Kahanomoku showing an attentive young Joe DiMaggio how to use a paddle.

The coffee, strong and hot, got his wits going, and although they immediately turned to the Torkelsson mess, he wasn’t able to make any more sense of it than they’d been able to do over dinner the night before. The most reasonable explanation seemed to be that Torkel had taken on Magnus’s identity as part of his effort to stay alive. If the killers and the rest of the world were under the impression that it was Torkel they had killed and Magnus who had escaped, it would be the non-existent Magnus they would be hunting.

Reasonable, yes, but subjected to a little thoughtful scrutiny during their walk back to the Royal Hawaiian- they had returned along the beach, nearly deserted now and softly illuminated by the tiki lanterns of the beachfront hotels-the scenario had begun to come apart at the seams, or at least to spring a few leaks.

How likely was it, Gideon had asked, that the killers wouldn’t be aware of which of the brothers they’d shot? And if they were, what good would it do Torkel to run around pretending to be Magnus? Even if they weren’t, why would they be hunting whichever brother had escaped? Surely, murdering one of them, chasing the other one off the island, and burning down the ranch headquarters had made their point for them. After all, as John knew better than he did, organizations bent on retribution-especially organizations that chose to hire hitmen-didn’t go around expending time and effort to assassinate people if it didn’t serve a utilitarian, usually monetary, end.

John had had some answers ready for him. What the killers thought or didn’t think, knew or didn’t know, was beside the point. The only thing that counted was what had been in Torkel’s mind, and Torkel very likely had been scared witless, understandably so, and had done the first and most obvious thing that came to mind: make them think he was dead, and run for it. Possibly, after a few days he would have thought things through and come to a different conclusion, but he hadn’t had a few days. From all they could tell, it appeared that his plane had gone down that same night, only a few hours after leaving the Big Island.