Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

“No, they also think we lied to protect our inheritances. Well, not you, because you got the same under both wills, but-”

“Yes, all right. So, do you think they’ll simply drop it now? It’s only a question of time until they ferret out what really happened. Isn’t it better to come out with it voluntarily, than to be caught in one lie after another, like rats in a trap?”

“But you’re not saying you’d tell them…?”

“Everything? Of course not. I may be getting a bit senile, but I’m not crazy yet.”

“I see,” Inge said reflectively. It just could be that Dagmar had the right idea. The old lady might be getting frail, but not in the head. Still, there were problems. She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Auntie, there may be criminal charges involved. And… what about our inheritances? We could lose them.”

“Pooh, I don’t believe that for a minute. Not after so much time. There are statutes about such things. Felix can straighten out any problems.”

That was what Inge believed, too, but it was good to hear Dagmar say it. “But how will it look?”

“It will look as if everything possible was done to protect my dear brother and your dear uncle from the vicious assassins that threatened his life, even if the law did happen to be slightly violated in a technical sense. People will understand.”

Not so technical, Inge thought, and yet, the more Dagmar talked, the more convinced she became that this was the best course. People would understand. “The rest of the family, though-they might not like it,” she said. “This affects all of us.”

“Then they’ll have to lump it, won’t they?” Dagmar said cheerfully. Sensing Inge’s incipient agreement and satisfied with the way the conversation was going, she finally took a bite of the roll, smacked her lips, and licked butter from her fingers. “Now, Inge, dear, I imagine you’d like to argue with me about it for a while. Will fifteen minutes do? If it’s going to be longer, I’ll want another cup of coffee.”

“I’m not going to argue,” Inge said, laughing. “You have my complete support. Would you like me to be with you, or do you want to see him alone?”

“Suit yourself, dear,” Dagmar said. Her sharp gray eyes glinted happily from their parchmentlike folds of skin. She no longer looked frail. She was, as always, looking forward to stirring things up.

Sergeant Fukida was in no mood to be trifled with. His annual mock-orange pollen allergy attack, late this year, had finally caught up with him as he’d gotten home from work the previous day, smiting him with itchy, runny eyes, headache, sinus congestion, achy joints, and all-around misery. With Chiyoko staying at their daughter’s on Oahu overnight, he’d had to fend for himself, which meant not only an absence of much-needed wifely care and sympathy, but a pathetic, solitary dinner of scrambled eggs over rice, representing the extreme limit of his culinary virtuosity. He’d taken a couple of allergy tablets at eight and gone to bed, another two at midnight, and two more at three A.M. when a stuffed nose had strangled him out of sleep. He’d awakened to the alarm at seven with a vicious antihistamine hangover and nasal passages that felt as if they’d been cleaned out with a paint-scraper.

Headachy, dull-brained, and generally mad at the world, he’d driven to work on a breakfast of microwave-warmed, leftover scrambled eggs and rice and three cups of tea. His plan was to tell Sarah, “No visitors, no phone calls,” to barricade himself in his cubicle, and to spend the day on paperwork, of which he had plenty to catch up on, sleeping through lunch, if at all possible. This was not a day on which he should be expected to deal with living, speaking human beings. Fortunately, there were no appointments or meetings on his calendar.

His plan did not work.

“Morning, Sarge, couple of ladies waiting in there to see you,” was Sarah’s gratingly cheery greeting. “They were sitting in the lobby when I got here.”

He stifled a groan. “To see me in particular, or anybody?” he asked, but without any real hope.

“Sorry,” Sarah said with a grin. “To see you. I checked with the lieutenant, and he said it’s you, all right.”

“You know what it’s about?”

“The Torkelsson thing.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have come to work,” he said bitterly. “My head is in no condition to deal with the Torkelsson thing.”

“Do you want me to-”

“No,” he said, drawing himself up and looking for the first time into the opening to his cubicle. He could just see a pair of black-pant-clad legs, the feet of which barely touched the floor. “I’ll deal with it.”

“Brave sergeant,” Sarah said. “Good sergeant.”

HE disliked them right off the bat. The old woman sat as if she owned the place, barely turning her head to cast a beady, disapproving eye on him as he entered his own office. The younger one, in jeans and Western shirt, sprawled in his other visitor’s chair like a man, legs akimbo, one booted ankle on the other knee. He didn’t much care for that either.

“We’ve been waiting some time,” the old woman told him.

Tough. He squeezed around the desk, took his seat, and looked at them inquiringly, his expression neutral.

“I am Dagmar Torkelsson,” the old lady said. “This is my niece, Inge Torkelsson Nakoa. Do you know who we are?”

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“You are familiar with the Torkelsson matter of some years ago?”

Fukida nodded.

“Excellent. We are here to correct certain misapprehensions that the police may have in regard to those events.”

You are here, Fukida thought, because Lau and Oliver had gone about their “discreet” inquiries like a couple of bulls in a china shop, rattling the teeth of the entire Torkelsson establishment. They were now aware that the lies they had told ten years ago had caught up with them, and unless he was mistaken he was about to hear some bogus, newly concocted version of events that would supposedly explain away the old contradictions and ambiguities. A little more fancy dancing by the doyenne of the clan to once again boggle the minds of the credible, gullible, Hawaii County PD. Well, let’em try. Irritable as he was, he was genuinely curious to see what they’d come up with. His headache, he found, had receded. He rearranged himself more comfortably in his chair and pulled a pad and pen to within easy reach.

“Misapprehensions?” he said.

The niece, Inge, spoke for the first time, doing her best to look helpful and remorseful. “You see, we weren’t entirely truthful before.”

No! Really? he thought but didn’t say. “In what way would that be, Mrs. Nakoa?”

After the briefest of glances between the two women, it was Dagmar who picked up the ball. “The fact is that we-all of us-have been aware from the beginning that the body in the hay barn was not that of my brother Torkel.”

He tried not to show his surprise, but an outright, unforced admission of this central, critical fact was not what he’d been expecting. What game were they playing? He felt himself suddenly off-balance. His headache stabbed at him again. “You were-?”

“Young man,” Dagmar said harshly, “will you kindly stop that wiggling? It makes it difficult to concentrate.”

“Wiggling?”

She made a series of irritated gestures toward the ballpoint pen that he was inarguably clicking open and shut, toward his tapping foot, toward the base of his chair, which creaked with every little bobbing movement of his body. Angrily, he made himself be still, but who the hell did this old It was time, he decided, to retake the initiative. “Do you also happen to be aware of who chopped off two of his toes to make us think he was Torkel?” he asked brutally.