Aaron Elkins - Twenty blue devils

He shook his head. “Thanks, I had some with lunch. You're Mrs. Druett?"

"You bet. Johnny's Auntie Celine."

"And I'm Maggie, John's cousin,” said the younger one, the one who had called out, frankly appraising him with sharp, black, intelligent eyes. “Well, well. The family's heard some pretty strange stories about you over the years."

Likewise, Gideon thought but didn't say. He laughed. “Well, you can't believe everything John says, you know."

Maggie swallowed the last of her coffee and stood up, a solid, thick-bodied woman with a Chinese-style, bolerolike silk jacket decorously buttoned over shoulders left bare by her pareu. She leaned over to kiss her mother on the forehead. “See you tomorrow, Mom."

"Okay, honey,” Celine said absently, “you be good now. Gideon, you know something? You looking at the only woman alive who work with John Barrymore."

"Really?” said Gideon.

"He gonna be my uncle in Pippi of the Islands. Nineteen forty-two. He drop dead right before filming start. Damn picture never got made."

"Really,” said Gideon.

"He don't believe me,” Celine said.

"It's true,” Maggie told him. “More or less. Mom was the Tahitian Shirley Temple for a while. Listen, I'm on my way back up to the plantation. How about a lift? Poppa said you were coming up for a tour."

"Sure,” said Gideon. “I was hoping for a ride. Goodbye, Mrs. Druett. Nice meeting you."

"Work with Abbott and Costello too,” Celine informed him.

"The man without a mission,” said Maggie as she got into the driver's seat of her gray Peugeot.

"Pardon?"

"Well, you were coming out to do your thing on poor Brian, weren't you? Until Poppa changed his mind?"

Gideon turned to face her more directly as she steered the car onto the highway. “Do you know what made him change it?"

She shrugged. “Nothing makes Nick Druett change his mind. He just changed it, that's all. I guess he thought it wasn't such a good idea after all."

"And what do you think?"

Not a good question. Maggie's face hardened. “What I think is that my father usually turns out to be right about most things."

But after a few moments, when she saw he wasn't going to pursue it, she softened. “All the same, I'm a little sorry we're not going through with it. It would have been nice to lay that stupid gangland business to rest once and for all. This way, there'll always be rumors."

"You don't believe them?"

"That they had him killed? Of course not.” She paused, then glanced at him, one eyebrow lifted. She was wearing carved wooden earrings shaped like conch shells. “Do you?"

Gideon replied with a shrug of his own. “What about those accidents?"

"Such as?"

"I don't remember them all. Didn't his jeep flip over? Didn't the roof of one of the sheds almost come down on him?"

Maggie clucked irritably. “Oh, for God's sake. That jeep was an antique, forty years old, and the ‘roads’ up there are more like goat tracks. It's amazing it never flipped over before."

"What about the shed?"

"That thing was rickety from the start. I was in there doing a time-management class for the foremen the evening before and after everybody left I stayed there another couple of hours doing some paperwork, but then I had to get out because the wind came up and I thought the place was going to come down on me. I mentioned it to Poppa, and he was going to have it checked, but it collapsed first and Brian just happened to be there when it did. I mean, organized crime might be pretty powerful, but I don't think they can order up a windstorm on demand."

Gideon nodded. There wasn't much to say. He agreed with her.

"We turn there,” she said. “At the mini-mall."

And mini-mall it was, the Centre Apatea, plopped down into the brush-jungle beside the highway and looking startlingly like a street-corner mall that had been shipped whole from East Los Angeles, with only the signs changed, to French and Tahitian. There was a pharmacy, a video store, a fast-food place that specialized in sugary crullers and casses-croutes- sandwiches on crusty bread-and a magasin , the island's version of a 7-Eleven. And as in L.A., this was where the local kids hung out, brown, lean youngsters in T-shirts, shorts, and turned-around baseball caps, lounging against the cars in the parking lot. As Maggie turned from the highway onto the unmarked gravel road that led toward the interior of the island, he was able to read the legend on one of the boys’ shirts: Hard Rock Cafe, Fiji.

Just on the other side of the mall a herd of brown-and-white, picture-book-pretty Guernsey cows browsed in the grass in a grove of tall, slender coconut palms, with the woolly green flanks of Mt. Iviroa beyond. To Gideon's eyes, at least, it was an unlikely sight, like some fanciful tropical collage with barnyard cow figures amusingly (and improbably) pasted on.

Once past the last of the palm trees, the car began climbing through relatively open rangeland spotted with neatly terraced fruit and vegetable orchards: mangoes, pineapples, taros, citrus.

"This is all our property,” Maggie said. “Two thousand acres. My father leases most of it to local farmers-Chinese, mostly. The coffee farm's only part of it. Here we are,” she said as they drove under a peeling stucco arch from the copra-farming days or even earlier, from cotton-picking times. The sign beside it was in both French and English.

Paradise Coffee Plantation

Home of Blue Devil Coffee

A cup of coffee-real coffee-home-browned home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils, and will exorcise them all.

Henry Ward Beecher

"Great quote,” Gideon said. “Certainly gets the salivary glands going."

"Haven't you ever seen it before? We put it on every package of Blue Devil, or don't you like Blue Devil?"

"No, I like it a lot.” But not enough to be intimately familiar with the package. Not at almost $40 a pound. When Gideon bought a bag of Paradise coffee, it was generally one of the less expensive ones like the House Blend or the Weekend Blend. And even then it was a splurge compared to almost everything else on the market. Paradise coffees didn't come cheap.

They pulled up at a rutted parking area beside a big, barn-like building with Plexiglas walls and a roof made of plates of Plexiglas and corrugated metal. “And this is the famous drying shed itself,” Maggie told him.

"It does look a little rickety,” Gideon said.

"Well, of course it does."

"Still, it's funny that it should have decided to collapse just when he was there.” Fishing. What for, he wasn't sure.

Maggie leaned her elbows on the steering wheel and looked him in the eye. “Gideon…” She hesitated, considered her words. “Frankly, those accidents were a bad spell that everyone would like to forget. We don't even like to talk about them anymore. But let me tell you something that I would never say to Nick, or, God help me, to ‘Therese. Brian wasn't the target of all those damn things that happened, he was…well, he was the cause, when you come right down to it. I'm sorry to say it, especially right now, but it's true."

Gideon frowned. “How do you mean, the cause?'

I don't mean directly,” she said, backing off a little, “not on purpose, but in a way, yes. Take the jeeps, for example- we actually bought five of them, if you can believe it; four to drive around in and one for spare parts. Old codgers from the Korean War. It was Brian's idea to get them; part of his ‘system-reengineering.’ We got them at a ridiculously low price, and he claimed it was the perfect way to get around in country like this. Maybe it was, but the damn things were old. Three of them broke down-I mean, they practically decomposed in front of us-inside of the first month, and then Brian happened to be in the last one when it finally gave up the ghost too. He drove it every day, so is there anything so surprising about that?"