Aaron Elkins - Murder In The Queen's armes

Leon lunged forward in his chair, his clenched fists coming down hard on the table. "Gideon, please! I n-n-never meant to go this far-I’m begging you…!"

"It’s got to be done, Leon."

"But what w-will happen to me?"

"I don’t know. When we’re done here, I’m going to go down and see Nate. I want him to know first, and we’ll see where he wants to take it from there." Assuming, of course, that he was sober enough to make any sense of it.

Leon dropped his head and massaged his eyes hard. "Oh, God," he whispered, "I can’t believe this is happening."

Paradoxically, Gideon was sorry for this intelligent, articulate, advantaged young man, now reduced to twitching and stuttering, who had cold-bloodedly and deceitfully tried to ruin his gullible professor. Nate’s career, it now seemed, might be salvaged, but Leon, with all his bright promise, was through in anthropology. An episode like this would never be forgiven. Nor should it, Gideon reminded himself sternly.

"Who else was in on this?" he asked on a hunch. Professor Hall-Waddington had mentioned an American student "slouching about" Pummy’s case, and that didn’t sound like the quick, graceful Leon.

"What?" Leon asked dully, his face still pale, his eyelid still drooping.

"Was anyone else involved?"

Leon sighed again. "Uh… no."

"I understand the ‘no.’ What does the ‘uh’ mean?"

Leon said nothing.

"Come on, Leon. Who else?"

Leon finally had his eyelid under control. "Randy Alexander," he said, not looking at Gideon.

Randy. Gideon didn’t know if he was surprised or not, or if it made sense or not. On the whole, he thought it did. If nothing else, it forged that missing link, that connection Abe had foreseen, between the Poundbury affair and the murder. But beyond that, Gideon was almost as much in the dark as ever. Just what was the connection? Had Randy been killed because he’d threatened to expose the hoax? Had he in fact threatened to expose it? Had he gotten cold feet, and then tried to lie his way out of it before he got into trouble, first with Frawley and then with Gideon?

Gideon made a slight head-shaking motion. The more he found out, the less clear-if that were possible- everything became. "Why was Randy in on it?" he asked. "The same reason you were?"

"Randy? No, he just did it for a lark, for the fun of it. I talked him into it. It was easy."

That fit in with what Gideon knew about Randy. "Leon," he said, "this throws a new light on Randy’s murder."

"His murder! I don’t-you don’t th-th-think I had anything to do with that? Jesus…" His voice petered out in a plaintive squeak.

"I’m not sure. Did you?"

"No!" Leon said. "I swear! I’m telling you the truth. How can y-y-y-you th-th-th…" In his frustration, he hammered on the table with his fist. This was no simple, frightened stammer, Gideon saw, but a profound speech impediment, hidden before, but now surfacing under pressure.

"All right, Leon, all right, but there’s a connection; I’m sure of that. Whether you know what it is I don’t know."

"I don’t. You’ve got to buh-buh-believe me!"

"Okay, calm down. That’s up to the inspector to look into, anyway."

"You have to tell him about it?"

"You better believe it."

Leon twisted restlessly in his chair, then jumped up and walked to the other end of the table, picking up a couple of as-yet-unglued pottery shards and aimlessly pressing them together while he stared out the window. Gideon could see he was trying to pull himself together as well, and he let him take his time. Leon’s surprising collapse into stuttering panic had unnerved Gideon, had made him feel unaccustomedly mean.

After a long time Leon spoke in a subdued, calm voice. "I’d like to be the one Nate hears it from."

Gideon hesitated, but the idea appealed to his sense of justice, or possibly of poetic justice. "All right. But I want to be there."

"Can I do it tomorrow morning?"

"No, I think it had better be today. This evening," he amended. That would give Nate a chance to sober up. "And the others are going to have to be told too. We’ll call a meeting after dinner, say seven o’clock, and get Nate there. You can tell everyone at once."

With his back still to Gideon, he nodded stiffly. "God!" he said with muffled fervor.

"I’ll tell them if you don’t want to," Gideon said.

Leon shook his head. "No, let me, please. Really, it isn’t the way you think it is-not exactly. You’ll see."

"All right. But I still have a few more questions-"

"One more favor?" Leon interrupted. "Can I answer them tonight? I promise I’ll be there, and I promise to answer everything. I give you my word. I just…I need to psych myself up. But right now, I…I mean I can hardly stand to hear myself talk."

Gideon felt much the same. "Okay, Leon," he said after a moment’s hesitation. "Tonight."

"Thank you. You won’t regret it. Would I be pushing my luck if I asked you not to tell anyone about it before then?"

"Why not?"

Leon shrugged, turning the brown ceramic fragments over and over. "I guess it just feels right for me to… to ’fess up on my own." He smiled weakly. "And right after the meeting I’ll go to the police station with you. Or tomorrow morning if they’re not open. Please."

For the third time Gideon hesitated, and for the third time he acquiesced, this time against what he knew to be his better judgment. He knew why he was doing it too. At the back of his mind was an image of Randy asking for his help on the misty hillside and Gideon stiffly putting him off-and a second image of Randy the next time he saw him, on the mortuary table. Irrational as it might be, Gideon found it hard to be adamant with Leon.

"All right," he said. "I’ll keep it between us. But only until seven p.m. If you’re not there right on the button, then I tell them.’

"Fair enough. But I’ll be there. And thanks."

At the door, Gideon stopped Leon by placing a hand on his sleeve. "Leon, there’s something I don’t understand."

Leon turned mutely toward him.

"Why a Polos wrapper, of all things? Didn’t it occur to you someone might connect it with you?"

Leon’s smile, if it could be called that, reminded Gideon of the stiffened rictus sometimes encountered on a corpse. "I never meant him to find the damn thing. It was an accident, can you believe it?"

"I still don’t understand."

Leon sighed. "Look, Randy and I spent a whole night up there, getting the skull in the ground just right, you know? Then the next afternoon we were going to check it out again just to make sure it looked all right-no footprints or trowel marks, that kind of thing. And then we were going to leave some junk around to catch Nate’s eye-an old pop bottle, a milk carton-"

"So why the Polos?"

Leon made an impatient little clicking noise with his teeth. "I told you-it was just an accident. I must have dropped the thing there while I was working on the skull. I would have found it the next day when I checked things over, but Nate found it first-absolutely by accident."

He laughed wonderingly. "Still, it added up to the same thing, didn’t it? Nate found the skull and went off the deep end. Everything went just the way it was supposed to, until…" His eyes, which had been fixed on the floor, rose to meet Gideon’s. "Ah," he said softly, "what the hell. I guess I’ve got it coming." His eyes remained locked on Gideon’s. "But I didn’t kill anyone."

As soon as he walked with Leon back out to the dig and then took Abe aside, Gideon regretted his promise.

"You want to have an all-hands meeting at seven o’clock, but the reason is a secret?" There was real surprise in the old man’s voice. "From me, it’s a secret?"

"Well, it’s just…"