Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

We have a match.

For once, Sergeant Fukida was motionless. His hands lay quietly on his desk, his feet flat on the floor. His Colorado Rockies cap was on his head in thinking position (backward). He was cogitating.

Dagmar wasn’t the only Torkelsson who had been a piece of work. In all his career he’d never encountered a bunch quite like this one. It was as if they had an unlimited number of versions available to answer anything they were asked. Catch them in a lie, and out popped another one, like sausages out of a sausage machine, to explain the first one away. When he and his detectives had compared notes at the end of the day yesterday, it was as if they’d all been working on completely different cases.

But today things had turned around. Obviously, the family members had compared notes, too, because early this morning Felix had called from Honolulu; they had concluded it was past time to set the record straight.

“Mm,” a skeptical Fukida had replied. He’d heard this before.

Yesterday, Felix explained, they had been in a state of shock on learning of Dagmar’s death-of Dagmar’s murder -and had been frightened and off-balance, hardly knowing what they were saying. Now they wanted to clear the air and do whatever they could to demonstrate their innocence in her murder and to help in finding her killer. They had designated him as their spokesman, and if it was all right with Fukida he would like to meet with him as soon as possible.

Would he be acting as their lawyer, Fukida wanted to know. Felix said he would not, but merely as their representative. Indeed, he hoped that, when all was known, there would be no need for a lawyer. There had been an implied question mark at the end of the sentence, to which Fukida had not responded.

“Come on over,” was all he’d said. “When can you be here?”

Two hours later, they were sitting in the most spartan of the interrogation rooms, a running tape recorder on the scarred table between them. No coffee, no soft drinks. Despite the austere surroundings and the chill in Fukida’s greeting, Felix was annoyingly self-assured and at ease, as if he were there to do a favor for a friend. Fukida had a strong sense of another load of bullshit on the way to being shoveled up.

He pressed the start button on the recorder. “All right,” he said with no preamble other than stating their names and the date for the record, “first I want to know why you all got together with her at her house yesterday morning. What it was really about,” he added as Felix opened his mouth. “I don’t want to hear the same crap about ‘moral support’ and ‘shoring her up’ that I heard yesterday. They didn’t need to fly you in from Oahu for moral support.”

Felix threw back his head and laughed, as if Fukida had told a joke. “Actually, I think it would be better if I started at the beginning.”

Fukida was stone-faced. “I think it would be better if you answered my questions.”

Felix responded with an accommodating shrug and carried on, unflustered. This, Fukida thought, was a very cool guy, probably a hell of a lawyer. “The fact is, the meeting was supposed to be about moral support, in a way-you know, let’s all stick together and keep things close to the vest-but when we got there we found out she’d already been to see you and told you some things, and then when Inge’s husband called to tell us your men had just showed up at their place with a search warrant for the old gun-”

Fukida’s interest quickened. At yesterday’s interviews, no one-including Felix-had mentioned such a call. Was he actually about to get some reliable information here?

“-everything changed. We knew that tired old story about the hitmen couldn’t stand up any more, but we couldn’t afford to let the real story come out-”

“Because of your inheritances?”

Felix showed his first sign of unease. “Yes.”

“But now you feel you can let the real story come out?”

“That’s right. Somebody murdered our aunt-I mean, this is Auntie Dagmar, for God’s sake. That changes things. It took a while to sink in, but it finally did. So did the idea that it pretty much had to be one of us.”

“I wouldn’t say-”

“Come on, Sergeant, I’m leveling with you. You can level with me.”

“Go ahead,” Fukida said. “You couldn’t afford to let the real story come out…”

“No. We wanted her to… well, to lie-to tell a new lie-all of us did. Including me. And we would back her up.”

“And that lie was…?”

“That Torkel murdered his brother Magnus.”

“That-” The puzzle pieces that Fukida had all poised and ready to press into place fell apart. “You mean that he didn’t? ”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then… who did?”

“Nobody murdered him, Sergeant. The whole thing was an accident.”

“Dammit, Torkelsson, don’t jerk me around. I’ve had it with you people. If it was an accident, what was the problem with letting it come out? Why couldn’t you… why would you…” He shook his head. “I think maybe you better start at the beginning, Counselor.”

The story Felix told took an hour and a half, and, bizarre as it was, it had a ring of authenticity to it that none of the other umpteen constantly evolving versions had ever had. And it fit the known facts.

The two elderly bachelor brothers, Felix said, had increasingly gotten on each others’ nerves over the years. Seemingly once a month they decided they’d be better off living apart, but Dagmar had always smoothed things over. The three of them had lived together for forty years, after all, and the prospect of breaking up-“divorcing,” she called it-in their seventies was just plain ridiculous. Unseemly. So they stayed.

But it wasn’t only the annoyance of constantly being in each others’ way. The two men had different philosophies of running the ranch. Magnus’s attention was focused on the bottom line, on expenses and debits and cash flow. Torkel was more the dreamer, and the older he got the more cockeyed and expensive his schemes became. On the night in question they had been quarreling throughout dinner over his grandiose plan to collect run-off water from the higher elevations of the Kohalas into a concrete-lined catch-basin, from which it would be piped by gravity-feed to a dozen reservoirs and then sent on to five hundred giant troughs placed at strategic locations on the ranch. It would have cost millions. They had consumed a few glasses of wine, as they usually did at dinner, and Torkel, pushing things, pulled out a checkbook and said he’d write a check for the digging of the catch-basin right then and there.

Infuriated, Magnus had gone to get the gun “Wait a minute,” Fukida said. “Are you telling me Magnus tried to kill Torkel for pulling out his checkbook?”

“No, no, not kill. Look, that gun had been there forever. Nobody knew it had any bullets in it. Nobody thought it worked. The clip was so rusted you couldn’t get it out.”

“So why did he get it?”

“Because that’s what he did. He’d done it before; it was an old routine.”

“It was an old routine to threaten his brother with a gun?”

“You don’t understand. It was a game they played.”

“That’s some game.”

“Nobody took it seriously. He’d wave it around, and Dagmar would say, ‘Oh, put that thing away,’ and he’d put it away, and they’d all go to bed mad at each other, and the next morning it’d be forgotten.”

“But not this time.”

Felix shook his head. “No, not this time. He would have put it away, but when he waved it in Torkel’s face, Torkel made a disgusted grab at the barrel and sort of bent Magnus’s arm back… and bang. The bullet-bullets, rather, although nobody knew it at the time-went through Torkel’s hand and into Magnus. Magnus dropped dead on the spot. The other two were pretty well stunned, as you can imagine.”