Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

He stood back, took one more look at the setting, straightened the silverware so that it lined up perfectly with the bottom edge of the bamboo place mat, nodded with satisfaction, checked his bowtie to make sure that it was straight, and went to find her at her cove, looking forward to bringing her back.

He hadn’t always looked forward to it. At first, he’d actively disliked her. It didn’t seem right to him that a woman-let alone a woman of that age-smelled morning and night like the inside of a bar after a hard day: booze and cigars. And the way she waited for him to offer his arm, as if she was the queen of Hungary or something. That wasn’t part of his job and he’d resented it. She hadn’t made things any better when he handed her her first bill to be signed. “Now Raymond,” she’d said (sometimes it was “Raymond,” sometimes “Steven,” once in a while “Faustino”), “let’s get something clear right at the start. I can’t be bothered with calculating percentages every time I sign for something, you understand? So you keep track of what you bring, and whenever the amount comes to four hundred dollars, you tell me and I will tip you accordingly. Is that satisfactory?”

What could he say but yes? But in his heart he simmered. Why should he have to ask for his tip? It was demeaning. More than that, he assumed it was her way of getting out of tipping him at all, in hopes that he wouldn’t have the nerve to bring it up. But he had, and two weeks later when he told her that her bill to date had been $405.24, she smiled and handed him two crisp fifty-dollar bills that she’d had all ready and waiting-over and above the automatic eighteen percent that had already been added for service.

It had blown him away. And it was in cash, that was the best part. Nothing to go into the service pool, nothing to be declared as income. It had made all the difference in the world. He still didn’t like the way her breath smelled, and he still didn’t like the way her fingers dug into his arm like hard little toothpicks, but she was good for a minimum of $200 a month, his best customer by a mile; he’d come to depend on it. More than that, he’d eventually come around to actually liking her. After you got to know her, you began to see her good side. She was generous, she was funny, she had a lot of good points.

And now he had another $400 to report; $418, actually, but nowadays he returned her generosity by regularly rounding down, something that made him feel good. Besides, he suspected that she kept a more accurate account than he did, so it was another way of staying on her good side. His money had really been due that morning, when he’d brought the pastries, but she’d had company and he didn’t like asking in front of them.

As he approached the curve that opened onto the promontory he paused to scuff his feet a bit on the gravel so that she’d have time to get that pathetic wig on, but when he rounded it he came to an abrupt stop. She wasn’t there waiting for him; something that had never happened before in all these months. There was an empty, overturned pastry basket on the ground next to the bench, and on the bench itself there was something black, silky… the wig.

His throat constricted. This wasn’t right. Something was wrong. He crossed himself without knowing it, held his breath, took two quick steps to the rim of the promontory, and looked over.

“ Oh, my God, ” he said and turned his face away, retching.

“Call for you on two,” Sarah told Fukida over the telephone.

“Who?”

“Two people on the line. Ms. Sakado, the day manager at the Mauna Kai, and a waiter named Faustino Parra-who’s a little hysterical, so be gentle with him.”

“What’s it about, do you know?”

“Something about the Torkelssons again.”

He laughed a little wildly. “Of course. What else could it be? Why did I bother asking?”

“You can handle it, boss. I have complete confidence.”

He punched the button for line two. “Sergeant Fukida,” he said, doodling horses on his note pad, “how can I help you?”

Five seconds later the doodling had stopped. The pen had been thrown down. “Jesus. We’ll be right there. Don’t let anyone within fifty yards of her.”

Arranged neatly over a low glass table on the broad, columned terrace of the Outrigger on a sunny morning, overlooking an agreeable panorama of man-made streams, waterfalls, and exquisitely tended tropical gardens, the lurid photographs seemed wildly out of place: blood and trauma and violent death.

Julie and Gideon had met John for morning coffee while John waited to be picked up by Fukida on the way to Dagmar’s house just a couple of miles up the coast. They had gotten lattes and muffins at the lobby coffee bar and carried them out to the terrace to enjoy them in the fresh air. When Fukida hadn’t shown up at 8:45, as agreed, they’d gotten seconds on the lattes. At 9:05, he arrived.

“Hey, you’re late,” John began, “I thought you were the one who always-” But the look on Fukida’s face stopped him. “What’s the matter?”

Fukida hesitated, looking at Julie. “And this lady…?”

“My wife, Julie,” Gideon said. “Julie, this is Sergeant Fukida.”

Fukida nodded a curt greeting and sat down. “Dagmar’s dead,” he said.

He was wearing a shapeless tweed jacket, trousers that almost but didn’t quite match it, and a nondescript tie. No baseball cap. He seemed diminished, like an over-aged, undernourished department store clerk.

The three of them stared at him and he quickly explained. Her body was discovered by a waiter from the Mauna Kai at five o’clock the day before, at the base of a twenty-foot cliff near her house.

John closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Ah, no.”

“The doc says death occurred somewhere between noon and four yesterday, resulting from severe injuries to the head, apparently from the fall.”

“An accident?” Gideon asked. “Or-”

That was when the photographs came out. “You two are good with pictures. You tell me.” But he held on to them, looking at Julie before laying them out. “These are pretty graphic, ma’am. You might not want to-”

“That’s all right, I’ll stay,” Julie said, which surprised Gideon. “I want to know. There was something about her,” she said to him by way of explanation. “I liked her…”

“Yeah, and if you’re married to him, I guess you’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Fukida said, fanning the photos out over the table. “So where do you get the coffee?”

They pointed him toward the coffee bar, and as he left they began going through the color photos. Fukida had apparently brought only a select few; six altogether. Gideon lifted the first one. It had been taken at the top of the promontory, an overview of the bench and the area around it.

“What is that, her wig?” Julie asked.

“Looks like it,” said John. “So we know one thing it wasn’t, anyway.”

“Right, we know it wasn’t suicide,” Gideon agreed. “People like to look nice when they kill themselves. She’d never have done it, letting strangers find her without the wig.”

“Not Auntie Dagmar, that’s for sure,” John said.

The rest were photographs of the body, going from full-body shots to close-ups of Dagmar’s bloodied head. Julie swallowed and looked away once or twice, but stuck it out. One of them had been made after unbuttoning the top two buttons of Dagmar’s blouse and pulling it down over her right shoulder.

“It seems… indecent,” Julie said. “A dignified, private old woman like that-dead, helpless-exposed to public view like a… like a…”

“It has to be done,” John said softly. “And not many people see these.”

“I know that.”