“What’s up, Gid?” Les said when he returned. “Want a lift back with me?”
“In the Red Terror? Do I look that crazy? No, I wanted to ask you something.”
Les nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much.”
“What’s going on, Les? What’s this big secret?”
Les lowered his heavy body into Gideon’s chair behind the work table. “Well, I tell you,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a new ball game now. All skeletons out of the closet”
For a few seconds he concentrated on the rubber band around his ponytail, looping it a couple of times and getting it readjusted to his satisfaction. Gideon could see that he was arranging his thoughts as well.
“The thing is,” he said, “we had a roast.”
“Come again?”
Les smiled. “No, not that kind of a roast. Like they used to have at the Friar’s Club. We had a dinner for Jasper, where everybody got up and made these smart cracks, these jokey little speeches about him. We even did this dumb little skit-I was supposed to he Jasper, if you can believe it-and they bring me this femur, which I brilliantly deduce is the remains of a murder victim, only at the end it turns out to be the remains of last night’s leg-of-lamb dinner.” He laughed easily. “Dumb.”
The smile slowly faded. “How well did you know him, Gid?”
“Not very.” Was it too late to tell Les he didn’t much like being called “Gid”? Probably so, considering he’d let it go for almost ten years now.
“You’re lucky. Among other things, the guy was not very big on what you might call self-deprecating humor, you know? We should have realized that a roast was not the greatest idea in the world.”
Les picked up a strip of unused modeling clay and began slowly rolling it between his palms. Gideon pulled up a chair and sat opposite him.
“Aside from that, he was an on-again, off-again lush, and he was already about six times more sloshed than anybody realized when the roast started. The guy had been in a fairly good mood up till then, you know, wallowing in all that obsequious veneration crap. So at first he just sat there and took it, but then he turned real hostile. I mean real hostile. And then he starts crying -slobbering, his nose running, the whole bit.” He grimaced. “Can you imagine it? Albert Evan Jasper?”
“It sounds pretty awful”
“Yeah.” Les squeezed the strand of clay into a ball and started rolling it out again, this time between his palm and the table. “Of course, when you get right down to it, all of us had a few that night. Well, not Harlow-you know Harlow and his stomach-but I know I was sozzled. I guess we were trying to get our courage up, you know? That old bastard could be pretty intimidating.”
He tossed the clay onto the table. “And the fact is, all the cracks weren’t as friendly as they might have been. Things got pretty bitter once we got into it. Everybody turned the knife. Jasper was brilliant, no doubt about that. He was even a good teacher-I learned more from him than anybody I ever knew-but he was so damn…insensitive, so mean, even to people who worshipped the ground he walked on. I’m telling you, to know him was to want to punch him out.”
“I know,” Gideon said. “I’ve seen him in action.”
“Well, it got away from us. Once things got started, a lot of bottled-up feelings came out and Jasper just couldn’t deal with it. I don’t think he’d ever been on the receiving end of shit like that. So, finally, he just blew up; I mean, he was running at the mouth, literally. And then he stomped out.” He shrugged. “Never saw him again. At least I didn’t; obviously, somebody did.”
“And that’s it?” Gideon asked. “I understand that it wasn’t very pleasant, but why all the secrecy?”
“No, that isn’t it. You see, right up until today, until half an hour ago, we all thought we were responsible for his death.”
“For his death? Why?”
“You have to remember, Gid-up till now we thought he was on that bus.”
“Yes, I know, but why-”
“Well, he wasn’t supposed to be; not originally. He was going to leave the day after, like everybody else. The first clue we had that he might be on the damn thing was when he didn’t show up around the lodge that morning. And when we checked, we found out his clothes were cleared out of his room.”
Gideon watched him pick up another lump of clay and start rolling again.
“We figured he must have been so pissed at us that he took off early, with his pal, just so he wouldn’t have to look at our faces anymore. And then we did find his remains-what we thought were his remains. You can imagine how great that made everybody feel.”
“With his pal? Salish, you mean?”
“Yeah, Salish was catching the morning bus anyway, if I remember right-he had to be back at work-and we figured Jasper just got on it with him without telling anyone.”
“Did he check out of the lodge?”
“You didn’t have to check out. It was like now; you paid for everything in advance.” He curved the strip of clay around his wrist and pressed the ends together. “Sonofabitch,” he said softly.
“Les, all that doesn’t make you responsible for his death. Maybe it’s nothing to feel good about, but it’s no reason for a-well, for a conspiracy to keep it quiet.”
“Hey, tell me about it. That’s exactly what I said-I mean, the guy was over twenty-one, he made his own decisions, right? We didn’t have anything to hide-but nobody would come right out and agree with me. I guess no one liked disagreeing with Nellie.”
“You mean Nellie was pressing to keep it a secret?”
“Pressing? Yeah, I think you could say that. Funny, the whole roast business was his idea in the first place, and then later he was the one who was so hot to keep it a secret.”
And who was still so hot to keep it a secret. “Why?” Gideon asked.
“I guess he just thought it made everybody look pretty terrible. Which it did. Besides, you know, we were all feeling rotten about it-about being the reason he got on the bus. I mean, there he was-these greasy, burned chunks of garbage on the table right in front of us. Not your basic happy time.”
“But now we know those weren’t his remains; Jasper wasn’t killed on the bus. Why would Nellie still be so eager to keep it a secret?”
“I guess he honest-to-God doesn’t buy this reconstruction thing. As far as he’s concerned, nothing’s changed.”
“I don’t know, Les. Does that make sense to you?”
“Hey, what can I tell you?” He looked uneasily at Gideon. “Personally, he was being weird about it from day one. This hush-hush crap-you know that’s not Nellie’s style. I couldn’t believe it; I was, like, what is the problem here?”
“Les, are you trying to tell me you think Nellie had-” it took an effort to get the words out “-had something to do with Jasper’s murder?”
Les’s low forehead folded into parallel creases. “Hell, no, when did I say that?” He looked as close to irritated as he ever did.
Gideon liked him the more for it. “You never did.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Les, I’m still trying to understand how that misidentification could have happened in the first place.”
“You’re trying to understand? Hell, I was there; I was part of the team-and I’m here to tell you we did it right; by the book, man. I just don’t-”
“It was basically a dental identification, is that right?”
“It was a dental identification, period. You saw what was left. If not for the dentition we’d have been lucky to come up with ‘male’ and ‘adult.’ But we had half a mandible, with the teeth and the alveolar border in reasonable shape. So we got the reports from Jasper’s dentist, matched them to what we had here, and that was it.”
“Who matched them? Was it Harlow? Did he do the analysis?”
“Well, yeah, sure, he was our odontologist, but we worked as a team; everybody got in on it. That’s the way Nellie likes to do it-hey, where is Harlow? I haven’t seen him since he got back from Nevada.”
“Neither has anybody else, as far as I know.”
Their eyes locked for a second. “No, forget it, Gid. There was no way he could have flimflammed us. I’m not talking about any tricky odontological formulas. It was completely straightforward-a simple postmortem-antemortem comparison. Jasper’s charts had a lot of fillings anybody could recognize, and a, what do you call it, an extra tooth, a supernumerary tooth in there somewhere. It was just a matter of comparing.”