Where there's a will

TWENTY

Unlike the West Hawaii police station in Kona, the headquarters of HPD-the Honolulu Police Department-are on a busy street in the heart of downtown. There is not a garbage dump or compost heap in sight. The building itself is large, handsome, and imposing: a white, four-story structure with banks of concrete steps leading up to the pillared entrance, thirty-foot palm trees at the corners, and a gleaming red-tiled roof. The lobby buzzes with activity and purpose, as in any big-city police department.

But two floors below the lobby, on Level B-2, where the Scientific Investigation Section-the only police crime lab in the Hawaiian Islands-is quartered, you wouldn’t be aware of any of this. There, white-coated criminalists, in their brightly lit but windowless quarters, go quietly about their work, bent over microscopes, spectrographs, and computer screens.

One such, Benjamin Kaaua, stared fixedly at the screen of his fingerprint-comparator, on which two magnified images were projected side by side. On the left was a print-not a fingerprint, but a greatly enlarged print from the base of the thumb of a left-handed leather glove-lifted from the face of a watch on the wrist of the old woman that had been killed. On the right was an equally enlarged image of a small portion of the same area from one of the four left-handed leather gloves that Fukida had obtained from two of the suspects in the case. The image on the left was steady. The one on the right changed as Kaaua periodically moved the card on the focusing platform below the screen. On the card were twelve tiny photographs of different parts of the glove’s surface. This was the second of three such cards for this glove, and he was now on the last of its twelve images. A similar process on the three cards for the other three gloves had produced nothing. Altogether, he had been on the machine for two hours without a break. The final image on the card didn’t match either, and the card was pulled from under its clip and set to the side.

Before inserting the last one, Kaaua stood up to get the blood flowing to his legs again, stretched, and walked around the table, working his head from side to side and squeezing his eyes shut. Time for a break, really, but with one card to go he was eager to finish up.

What he was doing-what criminalists spent most of their time doing-was applying the First Law of Criminalistics: No two objects in the universe are exactly alike. Even mass-produced objects or things made in a mold, while they might be extremely similar when new, would quickly become different. No two things ever wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever tear, or break, or get used, or rust, or get nicked in exactly the same way.

The leather of any cowhide glove, coming as it did from the skin of an animal, was different from every other cowhide glove that had ever been made or would ever be made. And once it had been used, there would be flexure creases, tension lines, wear-furrows, and scuffs that would make it even more observably unique.

So if this glove was indeed the same one that had left the print at the crime scene, there would be a visible match somewhere on the final card.

In theory.

The original print, the one from the watch face, was unusually clear, barely smudged, not at all the usual fuzzy smear. And Fukida, thanks to the course he’d taken at the FBI Academy, had known enough to look for it, and to realize it might be important when he saw it. He’d done a good job of lifting it, too, using superglue and dye stain. He’d lifted another print from the back of the bench Dagmar Torkelsson had been sitting on, but it was too indistinct for comparison.

Kaaua took his stool again, wrapped his feet around the base, rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses, refocused on the final card’s first photo, and caught his breath. To be sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, he increased the magnification all the way up to twenty-seven times, then way down to three so he could look at a wider area. He flicked off the light and hummed happily to himself.

We have a match.

For once, Sergeant Fukida was motionless. His hands lay quietly on his desk, his feet flat on the floor. His Colorado Rockies cap was on his head in thinking position (backward). He was cogitating.

Dagmar wasn’t the only Torkelsson who had been a piece of work. In all his career he’d never encountered a bunch quite like this one. It was as if they had an unlimited number of versions available to answer anything they were asked. Catch them in a lie, and out popped another one, like sausages out of a sausage machine, to explain the first one away. When he and his detectives had compared notes at the end of the day yesterday, it was as if they’d all been working on completely different cases.

But today things had turned around. Obviously, the family members had compared notes, too, because early this morning Felix had called from Honolulu; they had concluded it was past time to set the record straight.

“Mm,” a skeptical Fukida had replied. He’d heard this before.

Yesterday, Felix explained, they had been in a state of shock on learning of Dagmar’s death-of Dagmar’s murder -and had been frightened and off-balance, hardly knowing what they were saying. Now they wanted to clear the air and do whatever they could to demonstrate their innocence in her murder and to help in finding her killer. They had designated him as their spokesman, and if it was all right with Fukida he would like to meet with him as soon as possible.

Would he be acting as their lawyer, Fukida wanted to know. Felix said he would not, but merely as their representative. Indeed, he hoped that, when all was known, there would be no need for a lawyer. There had been an implied question mark at the end of the sentence, to which Fukida had not responded.

“Come on over,” was all he’d said. “When can you be here?”

Two hours later, they were sitting in the most spartan of the interrogation rooms, a running tape recorder on the scarred table between them. No coffee, no soft drinks. Despite the austere surroundings and the chill in Fukida’s greeting, Felix was annoyingly self-assured and at ease, as if he were there to do a favor for a friend. Fukida had a strong sense of another load of bullshit on the way to being shoveled up.

He pressed the start button on the recorder. “All right,” he said with no preamble other than stating their names and the date for the record, “first I want to know why you all got together with her at her house yesterday morning. What it was really about,” he added as Felix opened his mouth. “I don’t want to hear the same crap about ‘moral support’ and ‘shoring her up’ that I heard yesterday. They didn’t need to fly you in from Oahu for moral support.”

Felix threw back his head and laughed, as if Fukida had told a joke. “Actually, I think it would be better if I started at the beginning.”

Fukida was stone-faced. “I think it would be better if you answered my questions.”

Felix responded with an accommodating shrug and carried on, unflustered. This, Fukida thought, was a very cool guy, probably a hell of a lawyer. “The fact is, the meeting was supposed to be about moral support, in a way-you know, let’s all stick together and keep things close to the vest-but when we got there we found out she’d already been to see you and told you some things, and then when Inge’s husband called to tell us your men had just showed up at their place with a search warrant for the old gun-”

Fukida’s interest quickened. At yesterday’s interviews, no one-including Felix-had mentioned such a call. Was he actually about to get some reliable information here?

“-everything changed. We knew that tired old story about the hitmen couldn’t stand up any more, but we couldn’t afford to let the real story come out-”

“Because of your inheritances?”

Felix showed his first sign of unease. “Yes.”

“But now you feel you can let the real story come out?”

“That’s right. Somebody murdered our aunt-I mean, this is Auntie Dagmar, for God’s sake. That changes things. It took a while to sink in, but it finally did. So did the idea that it pretty much had to be one of us.”

“I wouldn’t say-”

“Come on, Sergeant, I’m leveling with you. You can level with me.”

“Go ahead,” Fukida said. “You couldn’t afford to let the real story come out…”

“No. We wanted her to… well, to lie-to tell a new lie-all of us did. Including me. And we would back her up.”

“And that lie was…?”

“That Torkel murdered his brother Magnus.”

“That-” The puzzle pieces that Fukida had all poised and ready to press into place fell apart. “You mean that he didn’t? ”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then… who did?”

“Nobody murdered him, Sergeant. The whole thing was an accident.”

“Dammit, Torkelsson, don’t jerk me around. I’ve had it with you people. If it was an accident, what was the problem with letting it come out? Why couldn’t you… why would you…” He shook his head. “I think maybe you better start at the beginning, Counselor.”

The story Felix told took an hour and a half, and, bizarre as it was, it had a ring of authenticity to it that none of the other umpteen constantly evolving versions had ever had. And it fit the known facts.

The two elderly bachelor brothers, Felix said, had increasingly gotten on each others’ nerves over the years. Seemingly once a month they decided they’d be better off living apart, but Dagmar had always smoothed things over. The three of them had lived together for forty years, after all, and the prospect of breaking up-“divorcing,” she called it-in their seventies was just plain ridiculous. Unseemly. So they stayed.

But it wasn’t only the annoyance of constantly being in each others’ way. The two men had different philosophies of running the ranch. Magnus’s attention was focused on the bottom line, on expenses and debits and cash flow. Torkel was more the dreamer, and the older he got the more cockeyed and expensive his schemes became. On the night in question they had been quarreling throughout dinner over his grandiose plan to collect run-off water from the higher elevations of the Kohalas into a concrete-lined catch-basin, from which it would be piped by gravity-feed to a dozen reservoirs and then sent on to five hundred giant troughs placed at strategic locations on the ranch. It would have cost millions. They had consumed a few glasses of wine, as they usually did at dinner, and Torkel, pushing things, pulled out a checkbook and said he’d write a check for the digging of the catch-basin right then and there.

Infuriated, Magnus had gone to get the gun “Wait a minute,” Fukida said. “Are you telling me Magnus tried to kill Torkel for pulling out his checkbook?”

“No, no, not kill. Look, that gun had been there forever. Nobody knew it had any bullets in it. Nobody thought it worked. The clip was so rusted you couldn’t get it out.”

“So why did he get it?”

“Because that’s what he did. He’d done it before; it was an old routine.”

“It was an old routine to threaten his brother with a gun?”

“You don’t understand. It was a game they played.”

“That’s some game.”

“Nobody took it seriously. He’d wave it around, and Dagmar would say, ‘Oh, put that thing away,’ and he’d put it away, and they’d all go to bed mad at each other, and the next morning it’d be forgotten.”

“But not this time.”

Felix shook his head. “No, not this time. He would have put it away, but when he waved it in Torkel’s face, Torkel made a disgusted grab at the barrel and sort of bent Magnus’s arm back… and bang. The bullet-bullets, rather, although nobody knew it at the time-went through Torkel’s hand and into Magnus. Magnus dropped dead on the spot. The other two were pretty well stunned, as you can imagine.”

“Mr. Torkelsson, how do you know all this? Were you there?”

“No, only the three of them. But Dagmar told us later. Torkel, too, although he was barely coherent by the time we arrived.”

Dagmar again, thought Fukida. The only living eyewitness. Only she was no longer living.

Other than the fact that Inge and Hedwig, with Felix’s help, had loaded Magnus’s body into a pickup truck and taken it to the hay barn before they lopped off his toes and set the fire, the remainder of the story-how Torkel had been desperate to leave, how they’d gotten him to the airport, etc.-fit perfectly with what Inge and Dagmar had told him the day before.

Which hardly proved it was true, but Fukida was increasingly inclined to accept this latest retelling. The gun’s neglected condition-rusted, loaded with the wrong bullets-made the idea of an accidental killing highly believable. More than that, if there was anything self-serving about this version, he couldn’t see it. Telling the story opened them all up to a ton of legal problems, some of them criminal.

Still, there was a lot about it that didn’t compute. “Look, if it happened the way you said, if there weren’t any hitmen to worry about, what the hell was Torkel so desperate about?”

“He was desperate because he figured it would look like murder and he couldn’t face the idea of jail-or even of a trial-not at his age. Dagmar kept telling him not to do it, that if he ran he’d really look guilty.” Felix shook his head. “But you couldn’t reason with him.”

“So who came up with the idea of switching identities?”

“That was Torkel, but, you see, the idea wasn’t to switch identities, not at first. He wasn’t interested in being Magnus. He just wanted to make it look as if he was dead. He figured that’d make it a lot harder for the police to find him, since they wouldn’t be looking for him.”

“It wouldn’t make it any easier,” Fukida agreed.

“So we all went along with that. But then we started talking. If you people bought the story that it was Torkel’s body in the barn, you were going to want to know what happened to Magnus… for instance, where was he? And how the hell were we going to handle that? So we started throwing around ideas and the best thing we came up with-I honestly forget who came up with it first; Hedwig, maybe, or maybe it was me-was to pretty much tell the truth… with a twist. One brother got killed, the other one flew away. Only we’d reverse them.”

Fukida nodded. “Since Magnus was now Torkel, Torkel would become Magnus.”

“That’s about it.”

“I’m surprised he went for it. That’s a hell of a decision, to become somebody else. Especially your own brother.”

“Yeah, but you see, it wasn’t that cut-and-dried, Sergeant. At that point nobody was thinking about who Torkel would become. We were just thinking about the story we were going to tell the police. Anyway, all he was interested in was getting out of there and covering his tracks, so he jumped right on the idea and we all went along with that, too. After that-”

“Why?”

Felix was startled. “Uh… why?”

“Yeah, why’d you all go along? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’d all come off filthy rich if everybody thought Magnus was the last one alive?”

For the first time Felix showed a flash of anger. “In the first place, none of us are ‘filthy rich’-”

“Don’t yell. It screws up the recorder. It also irritates me.”

“I’m sorry.” He lowered his voice to what he thought was a whisper. “In the second place, Torkel wasn’t supposed to get himself killed in a plane crash. He was supposed to be back in touch with us as soon as he could. The idea was that I was going to explain things and straighten everything out with you guys and with the prosecuting attorney, and then, assuming I could get it all taken care of, he was supposed to come back and be Torkel again.” He folded his arms and glared at Fukida. “So you want to tell me how was that going to make us filthy rich? I think you know what Torkel was going to leave us-zilch.”

Fukida responded equally heatedly. “Yeah, right, but then, after he didn’t show up, and you all tossed things around some more, you figured, well, why not just leave things the way they are? I mean, it was a lot simpler than stirring everything up again, and you’d all come out of it a lot better, and who would it hurt? Except for that seamen’s home, of course.”

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.”