Felix sagged, unfolded his arms, and dropped his eyes. “I guess that’s about right,” he said wearily. “I’d want to put it a little more… positively than that, but… that’s about right. We acted in our own selfish interests. And we broke the law.”
We’re getting there now, Fukida thought. Maybe not quite the whole truth yet, but close, and getting closer. “Listen, Mr. Torkelsson, you might want to have a lawyer of your own here before we talk much more. I don’t want to be accused of-”
“No lawyer,” Felix said firmly. “Unless I’m under arrest.”
Fukida shook his head. “Not at the moment.”
Felix laughed and relaxed. “All right, what else do you need to know? And if there’s really any coffee in that machine, I’d appreciate some.”
“You’re a braver man than I am,” Fukida said, walking with him to the break room.
Felix put in his dollar and punched buttons-two sugars, two creams (no wonder he was able to drink the stuff)-and waited for the cup to fill with the resultant slush.
“So tell me,” Fukida said, “who came up with the idea of these mysterious hitmen? You?”
Felix laughed. “No, you.” Standing at the machine, taking short, rapid gulps of the too-hot coffee, he explained.
When Dagmar had first talked to the police about what “Magnus” had supposedly said on the telephone, she’d used the word they -“they” killed Torkel, “they” were coming after him-but it was just a figure of speech; she hadn’t meant to suggest that there was more than one person. But when the autopsy was performed and two different-caliber bullets were found in the body, the police had understandably taken the “they” seriously. With both bullets right through the heart, the leap to “professional, anonymous hitmen” had been easy and logical. Of course, the family had embraced the idea as a godsend that temporarily took the pressure off Torkel. Later, after he hadn’t been heard from again and was presumed lost, it had simply been easier all around to stick with it than to change their story. And so the police had spent months on a pointless wild goose chase.
A royal screw-up, Fukida thought, shaking his head. That was the term for it, all right.
Back in the interrogation room, he had Felix repeat the story for the recorder. “That about it?” Felix said when he’d finished.
They were both getting tired now. Fukida’s sinuses ached and Felix looked as if he might be thinking that the coffee hadn’t been such a hot idea after all.
“Almost. Let’s go back to the meeting with Dagmar the day she was killed. You said you all wanted her to lie and say Torkel murdered Magnus?”
Felix nodded. “Right.”
“I don’t get it. What was that about?”
“The wills again, the goddamn wills. See, if the truth came out-that it was an accident-then Torkel, as the last survivor, would be the one with the valid will, right? And the seamen’s home would be the big beneficiary. But if Torkel killed Magnus-murdered him-then-”
“Then Magnus’s will would be the one that counted, because you can’t inherit from someone you murder-so the money couldn’t go to Torkel in the first place, and he couldn’t leave it to the home. It’d go straight from Magnus to you.”
“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.”
TWENTY-ONE
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.