Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

“We don’t castrate them all,” Axel said. “A few of them are just vasectomized and kept around as teasers.”

“Teasers?” Gideon said.

“We use them to determine when a cow is ready to be inseminated. See, the stud fees for good bulls are pretty scary, so we don’t send for the big guys until we know the cows are willing to go along with it. Well, no cow will let a bull mount her except when she’s in heat, so the way we know one of them is ready is when we see one of our vasectomized bulls mount her and go to work. That’s why we call them teasers.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” John said. “Uh, Axel, we need to talk to you.”

“Sure,” Axel said, his eyes on the paniolos. “Go ahead, shoot. Willie!” he called. “The one that just came out. Take a look at that foreleg, would you? There’s something the matter with it.”

“No, let’s go somewhere where you can pay attention,” John said. “This is important.”

The sudden change in tone made Axel blink. “All right. The tack shed.”

They went to a tin-roofed, rough-hewn lean-to with ropes and rawhide straps hanging from the ceiling and the walls, and tools, sacks, and old saddle gear draped over racks, lying on work benches, or strewn about the dirt floor. The leather items were cracked and dusty, as if the shed hadn’t been used as a workplace for years. Axel pulled three banged-up folding metal chairs from a stack that had been stored against one wall.

“Never mind the chairs, Axel,” John said.

But Axel set them out anyway. There was something dogged in the way he did it, as if he sensed that nothing good was coming and he was trying to head it off as long as he could.

“What’s the problem, John?” he asked when they’d sat down, the three of them facing each other somewhat awkwardly, three pairs of denimed knees almost touching. “Did you see the autopsy report?” He looked at Gideon. “Was it Magnus?”

“That I can’t say for sure,” Gideon answered. “It’s impossible to tell from-”

“What we can say for sure,” John cut in, eager to get started nudging, “is that, whoever it was, somebody chopped off two of his toes.”

Axel was satisfactorily nudged. His face twisted in a grimace. “Somebody chopped off his toes -you mean on purpose?”

“I don’t figure it was by accident.”

“No, well, of course not. I mean… Jesus, that’s horrible, that’s disgusting! Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Gideon said. “That’s what made the autopsy doctor so positive he was Torkel.”

“But who would… who would-”

“We’re assuming it was Torkel,” John said.

“Ah, no, that’s crazy, that’s-”

“We’re also assuming it was Torkel who left his own ring on the body.”

“What are you-” Axel began with a vehement shake of his head, but stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth open. “The ring!”

“So you did know about the ring?”

“Yes, sure, everybody knew about it.” He took off his black-rimmed glasses and gnawed on the temple piece, thinking hard. Without them, his face was oddly blank and defenseless. He didn’t have eyelashes, Gideon noticed. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right. Torkel must have left it there to fool everybody. Oh, this is too weird!”

“How come nobody mentioned it when we came back from Maravovo and said the body in the plane was Torkel?”

“Mentioned what?”

John sighed. “The ring, Axel.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess we forgot about it. It was ten years ago.”

“Did you?” John asked, sounding more like a policeman with every word. “You’re telling me that every single one of you forgot there’d been a ring?”

Axel thrust out his unforgivable chin. “Well, I sure did.”

“You, I can believe,” John said, relaxing enough to let a smile come through. “You were probably thinking about all those macro-nutrients in manure at the time. But the others…” What was left of the smile slowly vanished. “Something’s wrong, Axel. It didn’t happen the way everybody said. People haven’t leveled with us, and I don’t think they leveled with the police either. I’m hoping you’ll-”

Axel abruptly shoved his chair back and jumped up, raising a cloud of flour-like dust from the floor. “John, you’re… you’re pushing me.” He stamped around in tight little circles, whapping his hat-a blue tennis hat with the names of the Hawaiian islands on the band; the kind every ABC store carried-against his jeans. Dust flew with every whap. “I mean, I appreciate that you’re concerned, and I certainly appreciate what you’ve done, Gideon, but… look, no offense, but I really can’t see how any of this is your business, either of you. I don’t see why you’re so damn interested in this, and I don’t like it that you’re trying to get me to say something against my own family. I don’t know what Torkel did or didn’t do, but I can tell you that nobody here, nobody in this family, did anything wrong!”

He had let most of it out in one breath, his voice rising to a squeak, and now he gulped air, staring down at them, pop-eyed and agitated. There were tears in his eyes.

“Sit down, Axel,” John said calmly.

“I mean… it’s just that… you come here, you act like-”

“Sit down, Axel.”

“Well, I’m just-” Axel sat.

“Put your glasses back on.”

He knuckled at the corners of his eyes, sniffled, and put on his glasses.

John put a hand on his knee, an extraordinary gesture for him. “Axel, listen to me. You’re my friend, you have been for a lot of years. But more than that, your family has meant a lot to me. Torkel and Magnus especially, those guys really straightened me out, they taught me to… well, to grow up. The second best thing that ever happened to me was when Magnus fired me my first day on the job because I didn’t show up on time. The best thing was when Torkel hired me back. And Dagmar-she bailed me out of trouble a hundred times. She was the first one that told me I ought to go into police work, did you know that?”

“Of course I know all that,” Axel said uncomfortably, “and it’s not that I don’t-”

“So sure I’m interested. There’s trouble on the way, Axel, and if there’s some way I can help, I want to do it. We’ve just come from a long talk with a sergeant at CIS. He says-”

Axel’s jaw dropped. “The police? You told them all this?”

“Yes, we did. Fukida wants to reopen the case-”

Axel’s hand flew to his forehead. “Oh, mercy.”

“-but he’s not going to get on it for a couple of days. We said we wanted to talk to you first, and he said okay. So if you know something you haven’t told us-or didn’t tell the police back then-now’s the time to do it, trust me. You’re a lot better off-you’re all a lot better off-if you come forward with it now than if you make Fukida dig it out on his own. I know this guy, Axel. You don’t want to tangle with him. This is one hard-nosed sonofabitch, and he’s already ticked off.”

Axel had listened intently, growing mulish and frightened-looking. “But I don’t know anything! There isn’t anything to know!”

“We think there is,” John said. “For example, we think that Torkel was the one who set the fire, too.”

“You mean, to get away? To cover up the… the switch?”

Gideon thought he was going to deny it, to argue, but after a moment he nodded jerkily. “Okay. Okay, I see where you’re going with this. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s possible, I don’t know. I mean, how would I know? But I still don’t understand why the police would want to get involved after all this time. What difference does it make now?”

“Oh, I can tell you why it makes a difference,” John said impassively. “It makes a difference because a scam was perpetrated ten years ago, and the result of that scam was that you, your brother Felix, your sister Hedwig, and your sister Inge”-he was speaking very slowly now, emphasizing each word-“all inherited big, valuable chunks of land that shouldn’t have gone to you. If the truth’d been known about who really died first, it wouldn’t have happened that way. Torkel’s will would be the surviving one, and you’d each have come out with a few thousand bucks apiece, period. And the seamen’s home would be the one that was rolling in dough.”