Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

A Coffin for a Banker by Hayford Peirce

© 1994 by Hayford Peirce

For a taste of the exotic, San Francisco writer Hayford Peirce takes us to Tahiti where his detective, Chief of Police Alexandre Tama, who first appeared in the 1985 anthology The Ethnic Detectives, plies his trade. Mr. Peirce himself lived in Tahiti for more than twenty years and conveys wonderfully the flavor of the island...

Even on an island of notably stout trenchermen, Alexandre Tama, commissaire de police, was justly celebrated for both his appetite and his girth. He and his family had just returned to Tahiti from a month’s vacation in France, the chief of police wedged into two adjacent economy-class seats that had been specially configured by the accommodating French airline for his oversized figure. Tama was always glad to return home, for while French cuisine was of course the finest in the world, he had a single reproach to make of it: it was never served in sufficient quantities.

Now, the second evening of his return to duty, he was pleased to find himself at a traditional Tahitian feast on a gaily decorated covered terrace where a childhood friend was celebrating his recent promotion to minister of education for French Polynesia, that far-flung archipelago in the South Pacific of which Papeete on the island of Tahiti is the capital.

Bright green fronds of coconut palms had been spread along the top of the long table and bottles of red and white wine alternated with red and orange soda pop and quarts of Hinano beer. Great platters of marinated raw fish passed from guest to guest, along with thick slices of purple taro and French bread, three kinds of cooked bananas and plantains, diced chicken in spinach and coconut cream, fish that had been baked, fried, and boiled, and, finally, crispy pieces of an entire pig from an underground oven. Three elderly Tahitian women in bright orange muumuus sat at one end of the table strumming traditional island songs on guitars and homemade ukuleles.

The gargantuan chief of police mopped the sweat from his broad mahogany-colored forehead. A gaudy red napkin was tucked into the snowy white shirt that billowed across the enormous mound of his rotund belly and a glass of chilled red wine perched precariously on the slope of the napkin. “—and that,” he concluded to a roar of appreciative laughter from around the table, “is how your chief of police solved the mystery of the three missing coconut trees!”

He raised the glass of wine to his lips and downed its contents in a single triumphant swallow. His face contorted and he gulped convulsively, as if in distress. His great shovel-like hand reached to his mouth and to his astonishment pulled a dark red rose from its interior. As the guests along the table gaped, he pulled forth a second rose and then a third, and finally an entire bouquet. Shaking his head in bewilderment, he handed the flowers to the flabbergasted Tahitian woman on his left. “I knew there was something peculiar about the bouquet of that wine,” he muttered with a perfectly straight face.

The thirty dinner guests groaned loudly and Tama’s diminutive Tahitian wife sighed in resignation. While she and the three children had spent two days in Disneyland and Universal Studios during their two-day stopover in Los Angeles, her husband had deserted them for the Magic Castle in Hollywood and the shops that catered to professional magicians. An extra suitcase had been purchased to accommodate the latest additions to his collection of magical paraphernalia. If only he could find some less tiresome hobby such as playing pétanque in the garden on Sunday afternoons like all the other policemen in Tahiti...

“If you think that’s funny,” said the new minister of education in his loudest public-speaking voice, “wait till you hear this story! I got it this morning from the head of the lycée — his wife’s a friend of the woman involved and it’s absolutely true. A real Tahitian story, just wait till you hear it!”

“Hrmph!” If stories were being told, Alexandre Tama preferred to be the center of attention, but it was not his party after all, so after pulling a lighted cigar from the ear of the startled French architect to his right he sat back politely to listen to the minister. Halfway through the story he began to chuckle along with the rest of the table, and at its sudden startling denouement he uttered a bark of harsh laughter mixed with shock. He shook his great head. For once his boyhood friend the minister had been absolutely precise in what he said: this really was a Tahitian story.

But as the tempo of the music quickened and the more physically agile at the table jumped up to dance away some of their heavy dinner in the crowded living room, the chief of police began to puff increasingly thoughtfully at his long thick cigar...

The next day he summoned his aide and chauffeur, Inspector Opuu, to his utilitarian air-conditioned office in the police station next to the Palace of Justice. Inspector Opuu had been born in the searing dry heat of a Tuamotu atoll and was as lean and leathery as Alexandre Tama was round and smooth. He was dressed neatly in dark blue pants with a light blue shirt and this morning had tucked the small white bud of a tiare Tahiti into the long black hair over his right ear. Tama waved him to a folding metal chair on the other side of his plain metal desk and settled back in his own enormous custom-made chair of shiny tau wood. “Have you heard about this Swede?” he asked in the clear accent of the Loire Valley that he had acquired in his youth at the University of Angers.

Inspector Opuu frowned. “There was some bizarre story...”

“Extremely bizarre,” agreed Tama drily. “Now this is how it was told to me...”

Charles Nystrom was a retired Swedish banker who was tall and thin and looked older than his fifty-eight years. He apparently had no family in Sweden and upon his retirement had come to Tahiti along with his French wife, Brigitte, who was thirty years his junior and as pert and saucy as Nystrom was dry and withered. They rented an expensive villa in the hills of Pamatai just behind town, with a fine view of the harbor and the jagged outline of the island of Moorea on the horizon.

At first Charles Nystrom spent most of his time at home, content to lie in the sun beside the sparkling blue pool, while his gay young Parisian wife was making a wide circle of acquaintances and spending a considerable part of each day lunching and shopping in town with her new female friends. Charles Nystrom’s only apparent interest was bridge. Eventually he joined a bridge club and began to play first in the weekend tournaments, then in their Wednesday afternoon and evening matches.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, about a year after the Nystroms’ arrival in the territory, that the frail Swede suddenly felt ill at the bridge table. He carefully excused himself and drove slowly back to his isolated home in the steep green hills. It was midafternoon, and as usual the Tahitian maid and gardener had both left soon after lunch. Rather to Charles Nystrom’s surprise, his wife’s shiny silver Mercedes coupe was in the garage, for he knew that normally she spent her Wednesday afternoons in town. He was even more surprised when he walked into their bright airy bedroom with its broad French windows opening onto the pool and found his handsome young wife in bed with another man.

As in all the best bedroom farces, the man in question made a dive for his clothes and leapt past the gaping cuckold to disappear with a flash of naked flesh into the poolside hibiscus bushes, while the startled wife cowered behind a hastily drawn-up sheet. Where the scene diverged from farce, however, was in the strangled noise that Charles Nystrom uttered just before clutching his chest and collapsing to the bedroom’s tiled floor with a massive heart attack.

An ambulance was summoned and the unconscious Swede was transported to the hospital, where he lay for four days in the intensive-care ward. At last his tearful wife was told that no hope remained and that she should see to the funeral arrangements. Charles Nystrom had once expressed his wish to be interred in his family plot in the forests near Borlange, and his guilt-stricken wife — soon now to be a wealthy widow — determined that his remains would be transported to Sweden in the most imposing casket available.

In a narrow dark valley not far from the hospital, she found the Chinese woodworker who slapped together most of the cheap pine coffins used for burials in Tahiti as well as building the hermetically sealed steel containers in which the international airlines required that all coffins be enclosed for shipment. Here she contracted for a coffin such as the delighted artisan had not constructed in years: a noble casket of gleaming African ironwood, lined with the finest of velvet and satin and incorporating all the massive silver angels and fittings that he had long ago given up any hope of selling. Hardly daring to breathe, he scrupulously calculated the overall cost and presented the grieving widow-to-be with the estimate. Brigitte Nystrom nodded tearfully and dashed back to her silver coupe. Whistling cheerfully, the Chinese craftsman summoned his two Tahitian assistants and carefully set to work.

The casket was finished in the final hour before dawn and as if in response, the dying Swede’s heart fluttered tremulously once, twice, and then settled down to a steady, powerful rhythm. The doctor who visited him at nine o’clock was astonished to find him still alive and was even more astonished when his patient was discharged from the hospital four weeks later, thin and pale, but alert and eager to return to the bright sunlight of his home in the hills.

His chastened wife Brigitte had kept a faithful bedside vigil during the long weeks in the hospital; now she welcomed him home with all the love and tenderness that had first captivated the middle-aged banker. His color returned and under her careful ministrations he daily waxed in strength. Friends were encouraged to visit, and by the end of two months the happy couple had organized an afternoon bridge party. It was, apparently, a near tragedy that had nevertheless had a happy ending.

Three months after Charles Nystrom’s discharge from the hospital, the chimes to the front door of his home rang softly one afternoon. The retired banker opened the door and frowned in puzzlement. A battered gray pickup truck was in his driveway, while a small Chinese in dark shorts stood by the doorway, an envelope in his hand.

“Good day, monsieur,” said the Chinese. “I’ve come to deliver your coffin.” He smiled politely and gestured to indicate a large steel container to one side of the doorway. “And inside...” He opened the container to proudly reveal a gleaming casket of dark red wood with a number of shiny angels and fittings. While Charles Nystrom’s eyes widened in shock, the Chinese extended the envelope. “And here, monsieur, are the costs...”

Alexandre Tama pinched the end of his nose and scowled darkly. “A beautiful Tahitian story, Opuu, except for one thing.”

Inspector Opuu nodded. “Yes. Except for—”

“The fact that this wretched Swede dropped dead of a heart attack upon being given the bill for his own coffin!” The commissaire de police sat back in his tau-wood chair with an enormous sigh. “I suppose that this time he really is dead?”

“We had a paper from the hospital saying he was, along with a request from the airline for permission to transport the coffin through town and out to the airport.”

“I see,” said Tama, swiveling around in his chair to look out of his second-floor window at the grass courtyard of the Palace of Justice. “As Tahitian stories go, it’s an awfully good one. Too good, really...” He turned around again so that his great belly scraped against the edge of his desk. “And he only died three days ago?” He cocked his head at his desk calendar. “There’s no direct flight for Europe until the day after tomorrow — I suppose that’s the one the coffin will be on?”

Inspector Opuu nodded.

The chief of police glanced at the bright sunlight that flooded the grassy courtyard below his window, then surged to his feet with a surprisingly graceful motion. “Confound it, Opuu, I didn’t become a policeman to shuffle papers back and forth across my desk like every other pension-hungry bureaucrat on this island of functionaries! That wretched Swede dropped dead here in town, in Pamatai. That’s our jurisdiction, not the gendarmes’. Go get the car: a policeman should be a policeman, not a miserable paper-pusher!”

Alexandre Tama pulled himself from the front seat of the long black Citroen with the aid of a stout metal tube that had been welded to the top of the car’s fender and stepped gingerly through the sawdust and scraps of wood that littered the tiny courtyard in front of Ah Ping Lii’s woodworking concern in the Titioro Valley. It was housed in a dilapidated building of sheet metal, and the ear-splitting sound of a band saw vied with the deafening percussion of something galvanized being beaten by a Tahitian with a large hammer.

A small, sallow Chinese with lank black hair and wearing a tattered brown bathing suit came out from the depths of the workshop, a chisel in one hand, a mallet in the other. “Monsieur le commissaire,” he said, extending his right wrist for Tama to shake.

“My assistant, Inspector Opuu,” grunted Tama, running his eyes over the cramped atelier. “So this is where you make the coffins. Tell me about this superdeluxe casket you made for the Swede.”

The craftsman’s eyes widened in alarm. “Is... is there something wrong with it?”

Tama snorted explosively while Inspector Opuu snickered sardonically. “Wrong with it? Aside from using it to drum up business by killing your clients, what would be wrong with it?”

“Killing... killing my clients?” The shiny black eyes grew wider yet. “I... I don’t understand.”

“Well? Isn’t that what happened? You delivered this million-franc casket to a customer who had been inconsiderate enough not to need your services, and when he saw your bill he was kind enough to drop dead at your feet after all.” Tama leaned forward as much as the bulk of his stomach would allow and glared balefully at the trembling Chinese. “And then what did you do?”

“But... but... that isn’t at all what happened! He... he called me and told me to deliver it. So I delivered it the next day and—”

“Wait!” interrupted Tama sharply. “He called you and told you to deliver it? Charles Nystrom himself?”

“Well... I think so. He said... No, wait! Maybe it was his wife... It was a woman, I think... Yes.” The Chinese bobbed his head up and down decisively. “It was his wife, the woman who ordered the casket. She telephoned and told me to deliver it to Pamatai the next afternoon.”

Tama nodded sceptically. “And then?”

The coffin maker shrugged in bewilderment. “I delivered it. Monsieur Nystrom came to the door, told me to put the casket in the garage and that he’d send me a check.”

“He told you to put it in the garage? He didn’t clutch his chest and fall down dead at your feet?”

“No, of course not! He was a little surprised to see the casket, but then he laughed and said he would fill it up with champagne bottles and float it in his pool at his next party.” The Chinese shook his head at the inscrutability of the mysterious West.

“Hrmph!” grumbled Tama as he climbed into the front seat of the black Citroen sedan. He turned the air conditioner to high and pulled an enormous red bandanna from his pants to dab at the sweat that was beading his forehead. “According to him, our dying Swede was in perfect health and practically dancing a jig around his own coffin when he left. What do you think, Opuu?”

The wiry inspector was busy at the wheel of the Citroen, guiding the car down the narrow road that wound through the Valley of Titioro, and it was a moment before he replied. “I think before we go any further we better see the people at the hospital. The next thing we know, this dead man will be playing center-forward for the Bordeaux Girondins.”

“For his sake let’s hope so.” The chief of police shook his head with an air of somber disappointment. “I told you this story was too good to be true!”

But Nystrom was dead. That was settled as soon as they reached the hospital. The smiling Tahitian woman in records had a large red and white hibiscus tucked into her glossy black chignon and was nearly as round as Alexandre Tama. She quickly found the file for Charles Nystrom and let the chief of police study it. “He’s dead all right,” muttered Tama, “cardiac arrest.” He glanced at the file again. “Let’s stroll over to the emergency ward.”

The emergency ward was on the far side of the modem four-story hospital, and there they found four orderlies and ambulance drivers playing cards while a nurse and the supervisor stood behind them and offered loud advice. A telephone jangled noisily but went unanswered until at last it stopped ringing. The players around the table glanced up at Tama and Opuu without interest and returned to their game.

“Hrmph!” trumpeted Tama and there was instant silence in the large airy room that nevertheless smelled overwhelmingly of ether. “Now then! Who’s in charge of this kindergarten?” He glared angrily at the tall, thin Chinese woman who appeared to be the supervisor and pulled his credentials from his pocket. His face was grim. Six inhabitants of his bailiwick who didn’t recognize their chief of police! Intolerable! “Or should I say: who was in charge of this playpen until such time as I speak to the head of the hospital!”

“Please, monsieur,” said the supervisor, “what can we do for you?”

“That’s better,” grumbled Tama, perching himself precariously on a small metal chair. “This Swede who died of a heart attack up in Pamatai a few days ago: tell me about it.”

But there was little to tell. The supervisor opened the daily logbook and turned the pages back. “There,” she said, pointing at a penciled entry. “At fifteen thirty-eight Monsieur Nystrom called to say he was having an attack and would we send an ambulance.”

“And who took the call?”

“I did, monsieur,” said a good-looking young man in a white smock. His curly hair was glossy black and his skin as golden brown as that of the Tahitian attendants, but his accent was clearly from the south of France, probably Nice. “I remember because I was the duty driver that afternoon, and as soon as I hung up, I got the ambulance and went to get him.”

“I see. And when you got there?”

“There was a car in the garage but no answer at the door. After a while I walked around the side of the house and came out by the pool. All the doors to the house were open, and when I looked in the living room there he was, lying on the couch.”

“He was dead?”

“I thought so at first, but he was still breathing very faintly. I got him on the gurney and into the ambulance, but by the time we got back to the hospital he was already dead.”

“You tried to reanimate him?” he asked the supervisor.

“Yes, sir. But it was hopeless.”

“Hrmph.” Alexandre Tama stroked his chin pensively. He turned back to the ambulance driver. “And did you see this famous coffin of his?”

The young Frenchman’s eyebrows lifted in bewilderment. “Coffin, monsieur? What coffin is that?”

The chief of police had already surged to his feet. “Never mind. Where’s the doctor who certified this death? There is a doctor somewhere in this madhouse, I presume?”

Dr. Baudchon was on detached duty from his required military service with the French army. He was tall and young, robustly handsome, and spoke rapidly through clenched teeth with the nearly impenetrable accent of Toulouse. The long corridor outside his office was filled with two dozen or more Tahitians with a variety of bandages and wailing children. Standing behind his desk, Dr. Baudchon ran his hands through his dark brown hair in a harassed manner and blinked at them through thick tortoiseshell glasses. “The Swede? The one who had the heart attack a couple of months ago? Of course I remember him. A miracle he lived. Nothing to do with us — just a miracle.”

“That I can certainly believe,” agreed Tama drily. “And when you saw him again a few days ago?”

Dr. Baudchon shrugged impatiently. “Dead. I remembered his medical history; I did an examination — all the visible symptoms of a heart attack. I signed the certificate and—”

“You didn’t do an autopsy?”

The young Frenchman stared at Tama in astonishment. “An autopsy — here in...?” He waved his hand expressively to indicate the chaos that awaited him beyond the closed door of his office. “Why on earth would we do an autopsy?”

“It was nip and tuck with the procureur,” reported Tama to Inspector Opuu as he returned from the Palace of Justice, “but he finally agreed. He’ll order an autopsy.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised,” said Opuu. “There isn’t much to go on.”

Tama nodded. “I had to promise to show him my vanishing-coffin trick before he’d go along.”

The inspector rolled his eyes lugubriously, for he had long since tired of his boss’s endless series of childish tricks. “Threatened him, more likely! Can you really do the vanishing coffin?”

“With the procureur’s wife inside? Wouldn’t he love it!”

Alexandre Tama had never had a taste for thin blond popa’a women, and as he eyed Brigitte Nystrom, the widow of the deceased Swedish banker, he wondered what anyone, even a dried-up old stick of a bridge player thirty years her senior, found so attractive about her. Her limp blond hair was dull and matted, and her brown eyes protruded slightly. Others may have considered her tall and svelte; to Tama she was tall and skinny and rabbity, with hunched-over shoulders and breasts that were too large for what was sure to be a scrawny chest. She wore a plain white dress with a gold locket at her neck, a gold watch on one wrist, and a heavy gold bracelet on the other.

Bright sunlight poured into the spacious living room through sliding glass doors that opened onto a covered terrace and a sparkling blue pool. The jagged outline of Moorea could be seen on the horizon beyond a neatly trimmed hedge of aito pine. She licked her lips nervously while Tama and Opuu seated themselves on the same pale blue divan of her living room where presumably Charles Nystrom had writhed in his death throes; she herself sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair with her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. There was nothing about her of the pert and saucy Parisian Tama had expected to find.

The news that her late husband had been smothered instead of dying of a heart attack broke what little composure she had possessed. She had fallen back in her chair and sobbed noisily while Tama looked on coolly, asking himself if she could be as fine an actress as all that. Finally he shrugged. Who could tell what women really thought, especially popa’a women? Inspector Opuu offered a tissue and a glass of water. Her sobbing stopped and the interrogation began.

They quickly learned that her husband had never been married previously, and that their own marriage had taken place in Lyon, where Brigitte Giraud-Roux had been the receptionist at a celebrated two-star inn, Le Père Grisou.

“Ah,” said Tama, brightening. “Their salmon in sorrel sauce — a masterpiece! So you worked there, well, well! But what this means is that under French law you inherit the entire estate.”

“I... I suppose.” Brigitte Nystrom looked down at her hands and blinked rapidly.

“It’s substantial, I imagine.”

The widow shrugged helplessly.

Tama scowled in exasperation. This mouselike blonde had no spirit at all! It was hard to imagine her smothering anybody, even the most helpless of invalids. And yet... and yet: she undeniably had a motive, and, according to the gossip, this whole sad story had begun by her cuckolding her husband with a younger man. Perhaps her husband was about to divorce her; they had a marriage contract that separated their property; in the case of a divorce Brigitte Nystrom would receive nothing at all of her husband’s wealth — the prospect of that might have impelled her to sudden reckless action...

But another half an hour of questioning left him no farther along. She denied that she and her husband were on the point of breaking up, and tearfully but adamantly refused to name her former lover, declaring that the episode had been a one-time madness for which she would now be punished the rest of her life. Tama snorted in disbelief, but was unable to shake her resolve. A rabbit with backbone, he told himself disgustedly.

She indignantly denied calling the Chinese cabinetmaker and ordering the delivery of the casket to their home in the hills. And the day of her husband’s death she had driven to town to join three other women, all of them French, for a day’s excursion to a waterfall on the other side of the island. Charles Nystrom was in good health when she left, dead at the hospital when she returned. Inspector Opuu carefully took down the names of the other women and they took their leave, letting themselves out the front door while Brigitte Nystrom sobbed silently in the living room.

The maid and the gardener, middle-aged Tahitians who came up the mountain road by scooter six mornings a week, had not yet left for the day. Tama and Opuu questioned them in Tahitian in the shade of a broad flame tree bursting with bright red flowers. Both of them declared that Madame had been a faithful and loving wife ever since the poor monsieur had returned from the hospital and that Monsieur was apparently radiantly happy. Certainly they had never seen them quarreling, or any evidence of a lover.

“Hrmph,” muttered Tama as they looked into the garage, which housed only a gray Renault and a silver Mercedes coupé, “not even the coffin’s there. Came back to get it when he really died, I suppose.” His lips tightened. “Well, Opuu, you can check out Madame’s alibi, but I’m afraid it’s going to stand up.” He mopped his head with his bandanna. “And if she didn’t smother him, who did?”

Inspector Opuu shrugged. He pointed at the lush green hillside that surrounded the house. “Look at all of this, no neighbors at all. Anyone could have driven in, or even walked in through the bushes, without being seen. You saw all those sliding glass doors: the house is probably open all day long. A couple of Tahitians skulking through the hills, looking for a bottle of whiskey or a stereo set to pinch. Nystrom was taking a nap, woke up, surprised them, they panicked—”

“Hrmph! In the middle of the afternoon they were doing this?”

The inspector shrugged again. “Then who else? The Chinese who brought the coffin?”

“Ha!” cried Tama happily, “the invisible man! The stooge in the audience that nobody notices! He brought the coffin, he unloaded it there by the door. Charles Nystrom comes to the door, is shown his own coffin, handed a bill for a million francs! What would you do, Opuu?”

“Me?”

“You’d yell and scream and wave your hands, that’s what you’d do,” amplified Tama with relish. “The nerve of this guy! You’d tell him to scram! You’d grab him by the collar, you’d start shaking him, he’d resist, he’d knock you down, he’d grab a pillow, he’d...” Tama’s eyes flashed with excitement. “Well, you can imagine the rest of it. Excellent, Opuu, excellent! We’ll make a detective of you yet!”

“Have it your own way,” grumbled the inspector as they walked back to the Citroen, “but you’ll see: this case isn’t like any of your fancy magic tricks, it’s just a couple of Tahitian kids prowling through the bushes, maybe a voyeur looking for naked women by the pool who—”

“Opuu, Opuu, Opuu,” sighed the chief of police as the Citroen sagged under his sudden enormous weight. “Leave me my illusions, will you? What little fun there is in police work you’re always trying to take away.”

“Fun, ha!” The inspector snorted lugubriously. “I suppose you want to go see this coffin maker again.”

“I do.”

“Oui, mon général. And after that — I’ll start rounding up all the voyous in town.”

“Ha!” chortled Inspector Opuu forty minutes later as the Citroen pulled away from Ah Ping Lii’s noisy workshop in the dark, dank Titioro Valley. “How’s that for an illusionist’s trick? You forgot that one little Chinese cabinetmaker doesn’t haul 300-kilo coffins around all by himself, he’s got his own stooges in the audience!”

“All right,” said Tama sourly, “rub it in.” He scowled again as he thought of the two husky Tahitians who worked for Ah Ping Lii. It was they who had unloaded the coffin at Nystrom’s hillside house, and both of them unhesitatingly backed up the Chinese casket maker’s fervent declaration that his brief meeting with the Swedish banker had been entirely amicable. One of them had broken into a hideous gap-toothed smile. “He even told us to come back and see it when he’d put it beside the house and filled it up with plants.” Tama snorted in disgust as he let the cool waves of the Citroën’s air conditioner lap over him. This was far from being a brilliant sally out of the office and into the field. Perhaps he should return to his paperwork after all and leave Opuu and the other policemen in the brigade to do their job, rounding up the usual bands of disaffected young delinquents and eventually wringing a confession from one of them. That, he had reluctantly to admit, was how police work was handled in Tahiti, an island where invisible men remained the illusions of his own mind...

Invisible men. Invisible men... Ha! Tama jerked his great bulk around in the seat to lay his hand on Inspector Opuu’s shoulder. There was one last trick for a master illusionist to play before turning this case over to Opuu and his team of plodding gumshoes...

“The hospital, Opuu, there’s something I want to look at again in the emergency room.”

Later that afternoon, after Tama had returned from his usual two-hour lunch break, they sat at the police chief’s gray metal desk and studied the photocopy of the emergency room’s log for the day that Charles Nystrom had died. “Here’s Nystrom,” said Tama, stabbing the page with an enormous brown finger. “His call was booked at three thirty-eight. From noontime till three thirty-eight there are three other calls logged in. And from three thirty-eight until six o’clock that evening there are another four calls.” Tama tapped his finger against the side of his face. “All right, Opuu, so you want to do routine police work? Very well. I want you to find out...”

Although it was only seven-thirty in the morning, the sun was already well above the towering green mountains of Tahiti’s rugged interior. It beat down mercilessly on the shimmering tarmac where a shiny blue and white DC-10 jetliner was being loaded with suitcases and cargo for the nine o’clock flight to Paris. Alexandre Tama stood with Inspector Opuu in the cool shade of its broad wing and watched as a red forklift slowly raised a large metal container and carefully deposited it into the dark bowels of the enormous plane.

“Poor Nystrom,” said the chief of police as he blotted the sweat that was rolling off his face, “he got to use his fancy coffin after all.”

“So at least Ah Ping Lii is happy.” Inspector Opuu snorted sardonically. “I imagine he’s the only one in this affair who is.”

“I’m happy,” said Tama, surprised. “I arrested a murderer, didn’t I?”

Opuu snorted again. “I would have gotten him just by asking around until I found out who this Nystrom woman had been sleeping with. What made you think to check out that hospital log?”

Tama tapped his temple with an index finger and favored the inspector with one of his infuriating smiles. “Just thinking like a magician, Opuu. In every trick there’s always a stooge, or misdirection, or an invisible man. Just because the first invisible man I thought of, the cabinetmaker, was the wrong one, didn’t mean there wasn’t another. And who’s more invisible than the ambulance driver who comes to pick up a patient?”

Inspector Opuu scowled. “In other words — you were just guessing.”

Tama scowled, but halfheartedly. “Well — perhaps just a teensy bit. But then I said to myself, suppose it was the ambulance driver: he’s a flashy young Niçois with lots of teeth and curly hair, everything a young woman married to an old banker might find attractive. And once the banker’s gone, this Salvetti might get to thinking, a wealthy young widow like that isn’t going to remain alone forever. Why shouldn’t her consolation be himself? The prospects didn’t look so bright when Nystrom recovered from his heart attack, but then he saw how he might be able to arrange a murder and make it look like natural causes.”

“So he called the coffin maker and told him to deliver the coffin. Everyone would think that he’d died of shock.”

“Using a woman’s voice,” agreed Tama. “That’s easy enough to do over the phone. Then he sits around in that madhouse of an emergency room where the attendants play cards and nobody answers the phone, and waits for the phone to ring. ‘Come quickly, I’m having a baby,’ says Madame Tetuanui. ‘I’ll be right there, Monsieur Nystrom,’ he says, and logs Nystrom’s name into the book.”

“And drives in his ambulance up to Pamatai, where he smothers old Nystrom and brings the body back to the hospital. Not bad,” said Opuu admiringly as the cargo hatchway above them was slammed shut. “But would Salvetti ever have admitted it if I hadn’t found that Tetuanui woman who called in an hour later to complain that the ambulance hadn’t come yet?”

Tama shrugged. “It was a nice idea he had, but like any nice magic trick, once you know how it works everything becomes pretty obvious. Now that we know it’s him, we can prove he had been Brigitte Nystrom’s lover, we can prove he didn’t go to pick up Madame Tetuanui when she called in, we can prove—”

“—but can we prove that Brigitte Nystrom was the one who asked him to murder her husband?” asked Opuu as they moved back to the departure lounge and watched the first passengers begin to climb the boarding ramps.

Tama sighed. “Not a chance. Especially now that Salvetti is screaming that she’s the one who made him do it. No jury is going to let an obvious gigolo like that shove the blame onto a helpless woman.”

“So you think she’ll get off.”

Alexandre Tama stepped to the refreshment counter of the departure lounge and ordered two coffees and four croissants. “You’re going to try to convict a woman who’s just spent a million francs to buy a coffin for her husband’s body when she could have got a pine box for five thousand?” Tama bit into the first of the croissants and shook his massive head. “No, it’s like the old coffin trick: she’ll get out of it, and she isn’t even Houdini.”