Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

“That’s it, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, but-you’re a lawyer, you tell me-would the courts really turn everything upside down and reverse a ten-year-old will?”

“Sarge, I don’t think I have to tell you about the courts. Anytime you go before a judge or a jury, you’re in a crap-shoot. You never know. My guess is that if the home didn’t bother to bring suit, things would stay the way they are. But if they did…” He raised his hands and flicked out his fingers, shooting untold possibilities into the air.

“And Dagmar wouldn’t go along with it? That’s why you think someone killed her?”

“Well, she went along with it, or said she did. But anybody could see her heart wasn’t in it. She was on the edge, she just wanted to be done with it. Whoever killed her just couldn’t risk it. That’s what I think.”

Fukida smiled crookedly. “This whole thing gets weirder and weirder,” he said slowly. “I know about cases where someone got killed to keep them from telling the police that someone else was a murderer. But killing somebody to keep them from telling that someone else wasn’t a murderer? Now that’s different.”

Felix smiled in return. “We’ve always been an innovative family,” he said, softly for him.

And that had been the end of it. Felix had hung around while the tape was transcribed for his signature and had left. Now Fukida, with the transcription in front of him, was mulling things over. He was inclined to believe what he’d been told, and it was all very interesting and explained a lot, and so on, but did it put him any closer to finding Dagmar’s murderer? All four of the nieces and nephews-he was by no means excluding Felix-would have had exactly the same motive for killing her. As to opportunity, none of them had a solid alibi for the time of the murder, but none of them needed one. She’d apparently been killed not long after the meeting at her house broke up, and any of them could have done it before heading home-they’d come and gone separately-and still have been back up in the mountains well inside of an hour. So The telephone’s buzz broke into his thoughts, which hadn’t been going anywhere anyway. “Yup?”

“Line four for you, Sergeant,” Sarah said. “It’s Ben Kaaua from Honolulu.”

“Hello, Ben, I sure hope you have something for me.”

“Well, what we have,” Kaaua said smugly, and paused for dramatic effect, “is… a… match!”

“You’re positive? You could say that in court?”

“Say it, and mean it, and prove it.”

Fukida banged his fist on the desk. “Ben, that’s fantastic. Next time I see you for lunch, I owe you one steak sandwich.”

“Hell with that, buddy. You owe me a steak dinner.”

Willie Akau stood motionless, one arm raised straight above his head, his dusty, garlanded hat in his hand, as the last of the trailer trucks was backed up, inch by inch, to the long, narrow, high-walled loading ramp that fed into the hold of the Philomena Purcell, the old Corral Line cargo ship that had been taking Hoaloha Ranch cattle-and more recently, Little Hoaloha cattle-to Vancouver for the last fifteen years. In air-conditioned comfort, no less.

At just the right moment, the hand holding the hat flashed down and the truck stopped instantly. “Okay, Somoa, open ’er up,” Willie yelled to the young paniolo standing at the ready.

Somoa hopped up onto the truck bed and tugged on the pull-chain, hand over hand. The perforated metal door clattered up, Somoa jumped out of the way, and the cattle, bawling uncertainly, but docile and cooperative, headed onto the ramp, their hooves drumming satisfyingly on the wooden floor.

“Eh-hoo! Ehhhhh-hoo! Hoo!”

Willie had been hearing that call as man and boy for going on sixty years now. Today it came from the two additional paniolos he’d stationed on either side of the ramp with pole prods to urge the cows along in case any of them needed coaxing.

But they didn’t need the poles this time, and in fact, they rarely did. They didn’t really need the eh-hoo s either. When it came down to it, they didn’t much need Willie Akau.

In the old days, it was different. The trip to the Kawaihae docks had been a wild and woolly affair then, a full-fledged, old-fashioned cattle drive from the mountains to the sea. They had to start at one in the morning to get the cows there on time. And then when you got to the docks, you had to ride horseback right into the water and swim every damn cow out to an anchored ship, one at a time, then struggle to get a belly band around the frightened animal (he’d gotten his hand broken once and his nose twice doing it) so the deckhands could haul it up in a sling. You had to know what you were doing every step of the way.

Now they just walked them onto the trucks before ever leaving the ranch, and walked them off when they got to the dock. And they started at nine, not at one.

Willie had gotten $1.50 a day on his first cattle drive-which was exactly what Somoa had plunked into the nearby vending machine to get the super-sized chocolate milk he was working on. Now Willie made damn near a hundred times that for doing about a hundred times less work.

It was getting to be retirement time, he thought with a sigh. He’d done a good job training the hands, and Somoa was more than ready to take over. It was time, all right. The Torkelssons had done right by him when it came to a pension, but he wasn’t going to live forever, and if he kept this up he’d wind up dropping dead in the saddle-or more likely at the wheel of an ATV. Not that that’d be so bad, but it’d be kind of nice to get to spend some of that pension, to kick back, do some fishing, do some traveling, do some hanging around the docks, schmoozing and drinking beer in the afternoon, like so many of the old ranch hands turned beach bums.

He watched one of them now, coming down the dock toward him with a rolling, limping gait. Sunburnt and bearded, shaggy gray hair caught in a pony tail, shapeless old captain’s hat on his head, black patch tied over one eye. Interesting-looking guy. Not a ranch hand, though. An old salt, a tough, gristly old pirate, really; nobody he remembered seeing around before.

“How you doin’, buddy?” Willie said. “Can I help you with something?”

“Oh, I expect you can, Willie,” the old man said, and his lean, leathery face split in a grin.

Willie did a double-take, then peered hard at him for a good five seconds. The Philomena Purcell did a short test-burst of its powerful foghorn, startling the cattle into a round of jostling and stamping, and bringing a chorus of eh-hoo s from the hands.

Willie heard none of it. “Oh… my… gawd…,” he said.

“You know, I bet my Uncle Jake would like that,” Julie said.

“Absolutely,” John said. “How could anybody not like a topless dashboard hula dancer that plays the Hawaiian War Chant while she jiggles?”

“I don’t know, it’s pretty hard to beat this coconut piggy bank carved into a monkey head,” Gideon said, fingering it. “I think it’s meant to be a guenon, or maybe a mangabey. One of the Cercopithecinae, at any rate.”

“Well, obviously,” John said, yawning. “Cercopithecinae, for sure.”

They were in Hilo Hattie’s in Kona. The two-day get-away to Hilo and Volcanoes National Park had done its work. They had put the Torkelsson affair behind them. The subject of Dagmar’s murder had naturally come up a few times, but only in a desultory way. Talking and surmising had led nowhere and had been depressing, and, in any case, they now understood and accepted-even John did-that it was Fukida’s baby, not theirs.

Besides that, their thoughts had naturally enough begun to turn toward home. They had seats on a Hawaiian Airlines flight the following afternoon and they had stopped in the giant store on their way back to the Outrigger, where they planned to spend their last night, to pick up presents for friends and family. The “serious” purchases had already been made-a handsome coral belt for John’s wife Marti, and a Tommy Bahama Aloha blouse for Julie’s sister. Now they were meandering down the souvenir aisles, searching for a few less formal gifts. John, done with his shopping and getting bored, called the Outrigger to see if there were any messages.