Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

Dagmar turned disgustedly away from him and slipped back into her depression.

“Okay, then,” Gideon said, “the autopsy report would be the only route to go.” He looked around at them. “But are you sure you want me to do this?”

Hedwig, Inge, and Axel looked uncertain. Keoni shrugged again. Malani said yes, but then caught their hesitation. “Well, I think so. We do, don’t we? Auntie, what do you think?”

“What do I think?” Dagmar said to the porch roof. “I agree with Malani. Let it all come out. But what does it matter what I think? I’m an old lady, my day is done.” They waited for more, and after a deep sigh she went on. “What I think is, I’m tired to death of the whole thing. You people do what you want, I don’t care. I shouldn’t have bothered to come at all, I should have just… oh, the hell with it. Do what you want, I don’t care.” Finally realizing her cigarillo was out, she fumbled for a match, but Axel was up in a flash to light it for her.

Returning to his chair, he waited politely until he was sure she’d finished speaking, then he put his glass of guava juice and soda down on the worn planks beside his chair and leaned forward, looking at the floor, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. “I can’t help wondering how much we really want to get into this again. That was a terrible time, and, yes, it would be good to understand everything, but it’s in the past. Everything is all settled now. Do we really want to stir it up again? Say they shot the wrong man… that is, if it’s Magnus that was shot… well, what difference does it make now? They’re both dead, there’s nothing we or anybody else can do about it anymore.”

Hedwig and Inge were nodding their heads. “That’s so,” Inge said. “The more I think about it, the more I think maybe it’d be better to just let them rest in peace. Drop the whole thing.”

“Whoa, now, folks, let’s just wait a minute,” John said gently. “You don’t really have any choice. Things are going to get stirred up whether you want them to or not. I know this isn’t any of my business, but this is a homicide we’re talking about. You can’t let the cops go on thinking one man was murdered when it was really someone else.”

“That’s true,” Gideon said. “Even though I went out to Maravovo at your request, I have an obligation to tell the police what I found-given what it was I found.”

“Are you saying we’re going to have to bring the police into this again?” Axel asked plaintively. “More interviews, more depositions, all over again? We’re still doing late-spring round-ups, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Inge said with a sigh, “now I am sorry we started the whole thing.”

“We can take care of telling the police about it for you,” John said. “They’ll need to hear it from Doc anyway. Who handled the case? They didn’t run it out of Waimea, did they?”

“No,” Hedwig said, “some detective from Kona took it over. He was from the Investigation Division or something. Not a very nice man. Very unsimpatico.”

“That’d be the CIS, the Criminal Investigation Section,” John said. “We’ll go talk to them. I know a guy there.”

“Thank you,” Inge said. “We appreciate that.”

“But they’re almost certainly going to want to follow up with you,” Gideon told them. “This raises a lot of questions. I’m sure you can see that. I wouldn’t be surprised if they reopened the case.”

“Probably, but maybe not,” John said. “They just might want to bury the whole thing and forget about it, seeing as how they screwed up the first time. Cops are different from scientists, Doc. Sometimes the search for truth takes a back seat to covering their rear ends.”

Gideon thought about that. “Not so different, maybe.”

“Oh, bother,” Hedwig muttered. “What are we supposed to tell them? It was ten years ago. Who remembers anymore?”

“I still don’t see what difference it makes,” Axel grumbled.

“Axel, honestly,” said Malani with a shake of her head. “Of course it makes a difference. I don’t understand you people. Don’t you want to know what really happened?”

“Well, of course we want to know, Malani,” Inge said. “It’s just. .. it seems so… I don’t know, morbid.”

“To put it mildly,” Axel said.

Dagmar brusquely spoke up. “Will they want to talk to me?”

“I’d sure think so,” John told her. “I’d be surprised if they didn’t.”

A frail hand went to her forehead. She looked physically sick, Gideon thought. “I’ve lived too long,” she said vacantly. “I’m too old to go through it again.”

In the corral below them, a horse, freed from its saddle, had flopped to the ground and was scratching its back in the dirt, rolling, snuffling, raising clouds of dust. They watched one of the paniolos get it to its feet with no more than a couple of gentle clucks and a get-up motion with his arm. He was the oldest of the cowboys, a mahogany-colored Hawaiian who wore a flowered Hawaiian shirt and a ten-gallon hat with a dust-caked garland of flowers around the band. The other paniolos, younger, were in tank-tops and baseball caps, most of them worn backwards.

“The old guy,” John said to Axel, “that’s Willie Akau, isn’t it? He was foreman of my section back when I worked on the ranch.”

“That’s Willie,” Axel said. “He’s our ranch foreman now, sixty-nine years old and still going strong. And the kid rubbing down the big gray? That’s his grandson. I’m trying to keep it in the family, just like Torkel and Magnus did. Only we’re not big enough. There aren’t enough jobs for all of them. We only have five of them here.”

“I have two of our old-time paniolos at the dude ranch, too,” Inge said. “But we had to let the rest go. Sad.”

“I hired one to help out at Hui Ho’olana,” Hedwig put in. “Hogan Lekelesa, but it didn’t work out. For some reason, he just couldn’t fit in.”

“Listen, folks,” John said, as the conversation continued to stray. “There’s one other thing you probably want to be thinking about, because it might raise some trouble for you.”

“The wills,” said Keoni. “Hoo boy.”

“That’s right. I’m no expert, and neither is Doc here, but we were thinking this might mean that since Torkel died after Magnus-we think-that Magnus’s will isn’t valid, never was valid-”

“And Torkel’s will goes into effect instead?” Hedwig exclaimed. “After all this time? Would they really do that?”

“Sheesh,” Axel said, slumping in his chair. “What a mess.”

“We don’t know,” John said. “But if you want my advice, you better talk to a lawyer.”

“Felix is a lawyer,” said Inge. “What did he say?”

“It never came up. We didn’t think of it until we were on the way here.”

Gideon, more out of curiosity than anything else, was trying to figure out a way of asking what was in Torkel’s will without seeming to pry, when John, with his customary directness, saved him the trouble.

“So what did Torkel’s will say? Does anybody know?”

At which there was a lot of throat-clearing and foot-shuffling until Inge reluctantly spoke up. “Well, sure, because his will had to go through probate before Magnus’s could become effective. But we knew long before that,” she said with a shake of her head.

At a somber party on his seventieth birthday, it seemed, a melancholy Torkel, suffering from intimations of mortality, had announced that he had recently changed his will, and he felt it his duty to inform them of the new provisions, so that they wouldn’t be caught by surprise when the sad time came. Formerly, his will had been almost a carbon copy of Magnus’s, but after much earnest thought he had arrived at the conclusion that it was best for people to earn their own way in life; that large inheritances were morally corrupting. Thus, he no longer had it in mind to leave the ranch to his descendants, either in pieces, as Magnus had done, or as a whole. According to his new will, the nieces and nephews would each have gotten token, lump-sum bequests of approximately $10,000. But the great mass of the estate-the Hoaloha Ranch and its remaining assets-would have been placed in the hands of a charitable trust, the profits going to a home for indigent Swedish merchant seamen in Stockholm, with the exception that his sister Dagmar be generously provided for (even more generously than under Magnus’s will) for the rest of her life.