Aaron Elkins: Twenty blue devils

It was only when the spectacular display began to dim a few minutes later that John spoke.

"I've been thinking about Brian."

"Mm.” Gideon was still off somewhere behind the mountains of Moorea.

"I made some phone calls about him this afternoon."

"Phone calls,” repeated Gideon, watching the last of the colors fade quickly to rose and then to mauve.

"Yeah, come on, wake up, will you? I was trying to do your work for you."

"My work?” Gideon echoed, but he had drifted back to the real world now. He picked up his wine glass to take a sip but found it empty.

"I was trying to see if I could find out about his face and that weird tibia of his."

"Fibula."

"Fibula,” John allowed good-humoredly. “So I looked up his doctor to see what he had to say."

"Good idea, I should have done it myself. What did he say?"

"Nothing. There wasn't any doctor. Brian didn't have one, he never went for checkups or anything like that."

"He broke his arm, he must have gone somewhere."

"To the emergency room at the hospital. And that's where he went back to have it looked after.” His meaningful look implied that this was somehow significant.

Gideon frowned back at him. “Well, that's interesting, but I don't-"

"So then I tried his dentist-you know, maybe he'd know something about the damage to his face?"

"And?"

"Guess."

It took a moment for Gideon to see where he was heading. “No dentist?"

"No dentist."

"You're telling me that in five years he never once went to a dentist, never once had his teeth checked?"

"Not exactly. He went to this old Frenchman, about ninety, a real old-fashioned dentist who lives way down in Vairao on Tahiti Iti, who treats the natives around there. Officially, he's been retired for thirty years so he's not supposed to, but the authorities look the other way. And that's who Brian used."

"Even so, some of that maxillary damage must have shown up on his dental X rays-"

"What dental X rays? I told you, this guy's old-fashioned. And he only saw Brian three times. He says he never noticed a thing, Brian had real nice teeth, good healthy enamel."

"No doctor, no dentist,” Gideon said thoughtfully. He had his legs drawn up now, his arms around his knees. “Why didn't you mention it before?"

"I didn't think it was worth talking about-I mean, it didn't get me anywhere, did it?” His face was hard to see in the oncoming night, but he seemed to be studying the wake of the boat, now a curving double trail, phosphorescent in the dimness. “But I tell you, Doc, the more I think about it, the funnier it gets. It's almost as if…"

Almost as if Brian had been purposefully and persistently trying to render himself nonexistent as far as any kind of paper trail was concerned. There were no doctor's records, no dentist's records. There were no employment or income forms because Brian's shares in Paradise were in Therese's name. There was no marriage certificate because he and Therese had never married. There was no passport or travel documentation because he had never left French Polynesia after taking that “honeymoon” trip to Hawaii with Therese five years earlier, in all this time Raiatea had been as far as he'd ever gotten from the island of Tahiti.

"That's all true,” Gideon said slowly. “He even tried not to leave a record when he died. No church service, no ceremony, no public cemetery, just a hole in the ground in a jungle graveyard."

"Yup. And don't forget that nobody at Bennington or at that outfit in Michigan that he was supposed to be working for ever heard of him either. I'm starting to think there's a whole lot we don't know about Brian Scott."

"Do we even know his name was really Brian Scott?” Gideon said.

John shook his head. “At this point I don't know what we know. I'm gonna get on the horn to the States tomorrow and see what I can find out. In the meantime, I know exactly what I need to do right now."

"Which is?"

John got to his feet and brushed himself off. “I need to get me a Boom-Boom on the rocks."

"I agree with you,” Julie said into the telephone when Gideon had finished his rendering of the day's events. “Somehow or other this is connected with Brian's murder too."

"Tell that to John."

"But what I don't understand,” Julie said, “is why everybody's simply taking this Rudy character at his word."

"You mean,” Gideon said, using his shoulder to wedge the telephone against his ear while he poured himself a glass of chocolate milk from the cottage's mini-refrigerator, “that he may not have been telling the whole truth?"

"I mean,” she said, “how do you know that his whole story isn't trumped up? How do you know-this is just for example-that he wasn't the one who was fooling around with the books or whatever it was, and that Tari didn't find out what he was doing, and that Rudy didn't kill him to keep him quiet, and then trump up this story about Tari going berserk?"

Gideon swallowed half a glass of milk. He hadn't followed John's example with the Boom-Booms but his three glasses of wine followed by a Japanese dinner heavy with soy sauce had made him thirsty. “Well, I suppose it's possible, but it's a little unlikely."

In the first place, he explained, it was pretty well established that Tari was the one who was doing the fooling around with the finances. Nick and Nelson agreed with Rudy on that. Besides, if Rudy had been inclined that way he was in a position to have started years ago, but there was no indication of any such hanky-panky before Brian's death and Rudy's subsequent promotion. Besides that, according to John, Tari had recently been showing increasing signs of tension and anxiety.

In addition, Rudy's story of what had happened in the cabin had been strictly borne out by the police examination of the scene. There was a smudge of blood and a few hairs-graying like Rudy's, not black like Tari's-on the wall where Tari had been pummeling him. Also some more blood and hair- black like Tari's, not graying like Rudy's-on the edge of the hearth where Tari had hit his head on the way down. And the angle of the bullet hole in his temple-slightly upward, slightly backward-was consistent with Rudy's having grabbed Tari's gun hand and pushed it up, forcing a bent elbow, so that the guy fired up and back into his own head.

"Oh,” said Julie. “Well, you didn't tell me all that.” He heard her stifle a yawn. “This is certainly a wonderful conversation to be having before going to bed. Almost as calming as the eleven o'clock news."

"Well, you asked me-"

"I know I did. Just for a minute, though, I couldn't help thinking how nice it must be to be able to say ‘What did you do today, dear?’ to your husband and hear about something pleasant, like pretty flowers or little babies."

"You should have married a botanist, I guess. Or an obstetrician."

"Oh well, live and learn,” Julie said. “Maybe next time."

Generally speaking, Gideon was a good sleeper, not given to nocturnal (or diurnal) worry or obsessive angst. But in his mid-twenties he had gone through a long patch of insomnia, lying awake deep into the small hours and fretting about the way his dissertation was going (or not going), or about his father's failing health, or simply about the way the world was going to hell in a handbasket even back then. Then, somewhere, he had read about Napoleon's method for putting himself soundly and restoratively to sleep at night no matter how anxious the circumstances. The great man would picture in his mind a multidrawered cabinet and then assign each of the matters that were worrying him to a separate drawer. in his mind's eye he would then glance briefly at the contents of each drawer and slam them firmly shut one after the other. When the last drawer was closed he would be asleep, or so he claimed.