Twenty blue devils

Chapter 25

"Sorry, I just don't buy it,” Gideon said with a shake of his head. “I just feel there has to be more to it than that."

"Interconnected monkey business?” John said, munching peanuts. John too had heard Abe discourse on the subject.

"That's right. There's too much going on, John. Brian's murder figures in here somewhere."

John scooped up another handful of nuts from a bowl on the bar and popped some into his mouth. “What happened to that other law you're always spouting off about-the one about how you're not supposed to make anything more complicated than it has to be?"

"Occam's razor, the law of parsimony,” Gideon said “Economy of assumptions. Choose the simplest explanation that's consistent with the data."

"Right, makes sense, so why go out of your way to assume there's some mysterious connection to Brian when you don't have to?"

Gideon sipped from his glass of Chablis. “Then what's your explanation?"

"Of what? When Brian got killed Tari figured that was his chance to get away with a little skimming, but he got greedy-or stupid-he got caught with his hand in the till, he panicked-and he wound up dead. What's to explain?"

"Brian's getting murdered, for starters."

John sighed. “As far as we know, that's an unrelated issue, Doc. Let's not make things any harder than they are. You know what my boss says about you?"

"Yes, I know,” Gideon said sourly.

John waggled his fingers to call for another Hinano. “Economy of assumptions, I like that. Uh-oh, watch out, here she goes again."

The bartender, one of a pair of Junoesque Tahitians in floral tiaras, bright pareus, and bare feet, used a hammer to whack a mounted pair of cymbals at the center of the circular bar.

"BOOM-BOOM!” she bellowed as the reverberations died away.

"That's three times in three minutes,” Gideon said, his head ringing. “Maybe we ought to move away from the bar. What do you say to the terrace?"

"Amen,” said John, picking up his glass.

After the wild scene in Nick's office they had not managed to get together again until almost five in the afternoon. They had gone to the Shangri-La's bar to talk things out undisturbed, only to find the place jammed. Thursday, it seemed, was half-price-happy-hour day, and the bar was packed with locals, mostly couples consisting of merry, matronly, spreading Tahitian women and their lean, aging French husbands, lined, taciturn men who smoked their cigarettes down to quarter-inch stubs and concentrated on getting quietly sloshed.

The specialty drink of the day, at only 100 French Pacific francs, was Boom-Booms, every order of which was accompanied by a ceremonial clash of cymbals and the full-throated cry of “Boom-Boom!” Out of curiosity Gideon had asked one of the bartenders what went into one and listened appalled as he was told: light rum, dark rum, brandy, vodka, curacao, mango juice, papaya juice, passion fruit juice. And a sprinkling of grated chocolate on top.

"Wow, not bad for a buck,” John had murmured, but although he had wavered perceptibly for a few moments he had sensibly stuck with beer.

The atmosphere on the terrace was more pleasant by far. An afternoon rain squall, still visible to the west, had swept through a few minutes before, bringing out the perfume of a hundred different kinds of flowers and leaving the slate paving stones shimmering with reflections from the sky.

"All right,” Gideon said as they sat themselves at an umbrellaed table, “how do we know that Tari didn't get greedy before Brian died? How do we know it wasn't Tari who killed him to get him out of the way? Or maybe Tari was already skimming, and Brian caught on to him, and Tari murdered him to keep him from telling."

"No good,” John said. “If Brian found out something like that, how could Tari afford to wait until he went off on his vacation? He would have had to kill him right away, before he had a chance to tell anybody else. The way he tried to do with Rudy."

"That's true,” Gideon said. “How is Rudy, by the way?'

"A little shell-shocked, but not too bad. They're keeping him in the hospital overnight to play it safe. I dropped in on him for a while. All he wants to do now is get out of here and go back to Whidbey Island where it's nice and quiet."

"You can't blame him for that."

"No.” He moved his bottle of Hinano from place to place on the table, leaving interlocking rings of moisture. “Listen, there's something else I want to say about Tari. This is a guy I got to know pretty well over the years, and I always thought he was okay. Yeah, I can see him, you know, yielding to temptation and maybe skimming a little off the top, I can see him panicking when he got caught, I can see him flying off the handle, I can even see him losing it altogether and trying to blow Rudy away-but cold-blooded, premeditated murder? Uh-uh, I just don't see him sneaking up on Brian and slitting his throat."

After a few seconds he added: “Let alone being in on all those other goofy ‘accidents.’ It just wasn't his style, the poor bastard."

"You're probably right” Gideon sipped his wine and watched the gray, slanting threads of the retreating squall roil a patch of ocean, heading for Moorea. “Besides, we know he wasn't in on those accidents. Not the one with the jeep, anyway."

John frowned. “How do we ‘know'?"

"Because he wouldn't have been dumb enough to be right there in the jeep with Brian when it went over the side. He almost got killed himself."

"That's a good point, Doc. I forgot all about that."

"Afternoon, gents.” It was Dean Parks, convivial host. “Thought I'd let you know the Leaky Tiki 's about to embark on the evening sunset cruise. All aboard that's going aboard. Real peaceful-like, why don't you give it a try?"

John and Gideon looked at each other. “Why not?"

Peaceful the Leaky Tiki wasn't. Essentially an awninged platform mounted on two large outrigger shells, it included a bar that continued to dispense Boom-Booms (happily, without the cymbals), and although the Frenchmen merely sank into a deeper gloom, their wives got louder and more talkative, and a contingent of soused Chileans chimed in with a jolly medley of South American songs of death, betrayal, and revenge.

Still, Gideon and John found a relatively quiet place at the rear, sitting at the edge of the platform with their legs dangling, their feet not quite touching the water. From there, with their backs to the others, they sat looking out on a scene so gorgeous that it drowned out the hubbub behind them. They were putt-putting slowly through the lagoon in water that varied, depending on its depth, from bright, pure yellow to green, to aquamarine, to vivid, almost purple indigo. When they looked down they could see schools of small striped fish, yellow and purple and red, wheeling in a body through the clear water. And always in the distance, the strange, moonscape-silhouette of Moorea, with the sun abruptly disappearing behind the tallest peaks so that an incredibly colored sunset suddenly flared as if someone had just flung open the door to a colossal blast furnace.

It was only when the spectacular display began to dim a few minutes later that John spoke.

"I've been thinking about Brian."

"Mm.” Gideon was still off somewhere behind the mountains of Moorea.

"I made some phone calls about him this afternoon."

"Phone calls,” repeated Gideon, watching the last of the colors fade quickly to rose and then to mauve.

"Yeah, come on, wake up, will you? I was trying to do your work for you."

"My work?” Gideon echoed, but he had drifted back to the real world now. He picked up his wine glass to take a sip but found it empty.

"I was trying to see if I could find out about his face and that weird tibia of his."

"Fibula."

"Fibula,” John allowed good-humoredly. “So I looked up his doctor to see what he had to say."

"Good idea, I should have done it myself. What did he say?"

"Nothing. There wasn't any doctor. Brian didn't have one, he never went for checkups or anything like that."

"He broke his arm, he must have gone somewhere."

"To the emergency room at the hospital. And that's where he went back to have it looked after.” His meaningful look implied that this was somehow significant.

Gideon frowned back at him. “Well, that's interesting, but I don't-"

"So then I tried his dentist-you know, maybe he'd know something about the damage to his face?"

"And?"

"Guess."

It took a moment for Gideon to see where he was heading. “No dentist?"

"No dentist."

"You're telling me that in five years he never once went to a dentist, never once had his teeth checked?"

"Not exactly. He went to this old Frenchman, about ninety, a real old-fashioned dentist who lives way down in Vairao on Tahiti Iti, who treats the natives around there. Officially, he's been retired for thirty years so he's not supposed to, but the authorities look the other way. And that's who Brian used."

"Even so, some of that maxillary damage must have shown up on his dental X rays-"

"What dental X rays? I told you, this guy's old-fashioned. And he only saw Brian three times. He says he never noticed a thing, Brian had real nice teeth, good healthy enamel."

"No doctor, no dentist,” Gideon said thoughtfully. He had his legs drawn up now, his arms around his knees. “Why didn't you mention it before?"

"I didn't think it was worth talking about-I mean, it didn't get me anywhere, did it?” His face was hard to see in the oncoming night, but he seemed to be studying the wake of the boat, now a curving double trail, phosphorescent in the dimness. “But I tell you, Doc, the more I think about it, the funnier it gets. It's almost as if…"

Almost as if Brian had been purposefully and persistently trying to render himself nonexistent as far as any kind of paper trail was concerned. There were no doctor's records, no dentist's records. There were no employment or income forms because Brian's shares in Paradise were in Therese's name. There was no marriage certificate because he and Therese had never married. There was no passport or travel documentation because he had never left French Polynesia after taking that “honeymoon” trip to Hawaii with Therese five years earlier, in all this time Raiatea had been as far as he'd ever gotten from the island of Tahiti.

"That's all true,” Gideon said slowly. “He even tried not to leave a record when he died. No church service, no ceremony, no public cemetery, just a hole in the ground in a jungle graveyard."

"Yup. And don't forget that nobody at Bennington or at that outfit in Michigan that he was supposed to be working for ever heard of him either. I'm starting to think there's a whole lot we don't know about Brian Scott."

"Do we even know his name was really Brian Scott?” Gideon said.

John shook his head. “At this point I don't know what we know. I'm gonna get on the horn to the States tomorrow and see what I can find out. In the meantime, I know exactly what I need to do right now."

"Which is?"

John got to his feet and brushed himself off. “I need to get me a Boom-Boom on the rocks."

"I agree with you,” Julie said into the telephone when Gideon had finished his rendering of the day's events. “Somehow or other this is connected with Brian's murder too."

"Tell that to John."

"But what I don't understand,” Julie said, “is why everybody's simply taking this Rudy character at his word."

"You mean,” Gideon said, using his shoulder to wedge the telephone against his ear while he poured himself a glass of chocolate milk from the cottage's mini-refrigerator, “that he may not have been telling the whole truth?"

"I mean,” she said, “how do you know that his whole story isn't trumped up? How do you know-this is just for example-that he wasn't the one who was fooling around with the books or whatever it was, and that Tari didn't find out what he was doing, and that Rudy didn't kill him to keep him quiet, and then trump up this story about Tari going berserk?"

Gideon swallowed half a glass of milk. He hadn't followed John's example with the Boom-Booms but his three glasses of wine followed by a Japanese dinner heavy with soy sauce had made him thirsty. “Well, I suppose it's possible, but it's a little unlikely."

In the first place, he explained, it was pretty well established that Tari was the one who was doing the fooling around with the finances. Nick and Nelson agreed with Rudy on that. Besides, if Rudy had been inclined that way he was in a position to have started years ago, but there was no indication of any such hanky-panky before Brian's death and Rudy's subsequent promotion. Besides that, according to John, Tari had recently been showing increasing signs of tension and anxiety.

In addition, Rudy's story of what had happened in the cabin had been strictly borne out by the police examination of the scene. There was a smudge of blood and a few hairs-graying like Rudy's, not black like Tari's-on the wall where Tari had been pummeling him. Also some more blood and hair- black like Tari's, not graying like Rudy's-on the edge of the hearth where Tari had hit his head on the way down. And the angle of the bullet hole in his temple-slightly upward, slightly backward-was consistent with Rudy's having grabbed Tari's gun hand and pushed it up, forcing a bent elbow, so that the guy fired up and back into his own head.

"Oh,” said Julie. “Well, you didn't tell me all that.” He heard her stifle a yawn. “This is certainly a wonderful conversation to be having before going to bed. Almost as calming as the eleven o'clock news."

"Well, you asked me-"

"I know I did. Just for a minute, though, I couldn't help thinking how nice it must be to be able to say ‘What did you do today, dear?’ to your husband and hear about something pleasant, like pretty flowers or little babies."

"You should have married a botanist, I guess. Or an obstetrician."

"Oh well, live and learn,” Julie said. “Maybe next time."

Generally speaking, Gideon was a good sleeper, not given to nocturnal (or diurnal) worry or obsessive angst. But in his mid-twenties he had gone through a long patch of insomnia, lying awake deep into the small hours and fretting about the way his dissertation was going (or not going), or about his father's failing health, or simply about the way the world was going to hell in a handbasket even back then. Then, somewhere, he had read about Napoleon's method for putting himself soundly and restoratively to sleep at night no matter how anxious the circumstances. The great man would picture in his mind a multidrawered cabinet and then assign each of the matters that were worrying him to a separate drawer. in his mind's eye he would then glance briefly at the contents of each drawer and slam them firmly shut one after the other. When the last drawer was closed he would be asleep, or so he claimed.

The idea had appealed to Gideon and since then, on those few occasions when his mind refused to turn itself off at bedtime he had been constructing cabinets of his own, stuffing whatever was niggling away at him into the drawers and shutting them away for the night. The technique had worked too, although he wasn't as good a cabinetmaker as Napoleon; once in a while one of the drawers would pop open on its own, so to speak, bringing him awake at four or five in the morning in what seemed to be mid-thought, as if his mind had jump-started on its own, with or without his permission. He would lie there in the darkness, galvanized and yet dopey with sleep at the same time, feeling like an unwelcome observer, holding his breath and afraid to move for fear the fragile chain of logic would turn to vapor and disappear if his mind found out he was watching it.

Usually, that was exactly what it did, but every now and then, if things went right, the chain would hold; where there had been nothing but half-formed questions before, he would see at least the outlines of answers; where there had been only confusion and ambiguity, patterns would emerge.

So it was on this night. At 4:38 A.M. by the glowing display on the clock-radio beside his bed, his eyelids flicked open on their own. His mind was already whirring along in high gear.

At 4:51 he jumped out of bed. “Oh, wow,” he whispered to himself.