oh, um, an order of vegetable spring rolls, just to keep us healthy. Better make it snappy, I don’t have much time.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Torkelsson,” said Sanford. “I’ll be right back.”
“On second thought,” Felix shouted after him, “make the martini a double! Thank you, my friend!”
Watching him is like watching a character in a play, Gideon thought. Everything he does is larger than life, a performance played to the last row in the balcony. He’d be
a knockout in a courtroom.
“I thought you wanted a clear head,” John said.
Felix shrugged. “Oh, it’ll be clear enough. It’s only legal work,” he said with one of his belly laughs, loud enough so that a woman at the next table scolded him. “Will you kindly keep it down there? We’re trying to listen to the music.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Felix responded, immediately lowering his voice. “It won’t happen again. So,” he prompted once more—and even his attempt at a whisper brought an irritated look from the next table. “What’s the verdict? Have we caught up with dear old Uncle Magnus at last?”
“It looks like it,” Gideon said and told him what they’d found: the mandible of a strongly built young woman in her mid twenties whose dentition showed that she’d apparently suffered from bulimia—
“Ha. Claudia,” whisper-shouted Felix.
—and a boot in which there were the foot bones of a man in his fifties or older, which had suffered stress fractures of a kind that suggested its owner had been a horseman.
“And Magnus,” Felix said with a nod. His martini had come and he downed a little of it, gratefully closing his eyes. “A boot with a foot in it,” he said and gave a little shiver. “That’s kind of... did you bring it back? Do you have it with you?”
“The salvage team took it back. They thought there’d be less hassle if they did it, because Security and Customs are used to them bringing in all kinds of weird things. They also have a few other things they found—a pair of glasses, a comb, I forget what else.”
“A heel—probably from the same boot—a kitschy souvenir shaped like the Big Island, and a mug with a hula dancer on it,” John said promptly. “We figured somebody
might recognize them.”
“Good idea,” Felix said.
“Does any of it sound familiar to you?”
Felix rolled the martini around his mouth while he considered. “Not really. The cup with the dancer on it, maybe. I’m not sure. There must be ten million of those around.”
“Well, some or all of it may have been the pilot’s. But the boys are dropping everything off at Axel’s when they get back,” Gideon said. “All part of the service. Maybe somebody else will see something they remember.”
When the appetizers arrived they helped themselves, with Gideon and Felix digging into the spring rolls and coconut-crusted shrimp, and John happily confining himself to the guacamole and thick, Maui-style potato chips.
“Gideon,” Felix said, “it sounds like you’ve already identified him from the bones. Why do you need the other things—the cup and all?”
“I wouldn’t say we need them. Partly, we had them sent back because they could be his last effects, and there might be some sentimental value to someone in them.”
“In a boot heel?”
“You’d be surprised. But the main thing is that on something like this, people are likely to have lingering doubts. Sometimes they don’t surface till years later. So the more confirmation we have, the better. Which brings me to the question I want to ask you: Did your uncle have anything the matter with his right foot?”
Felix looked puzzled. “Well, you just said he’d fractured—”
“No, aside from that. Anything else?”
Felix looked more puzzled. “Not that I know of. Like what?”
“Like missing a couple of toes,” John said.
Felix’s reaction went beyond theatricality. His mouth clenched, his eyes bulged, and with a resounding snort a thin double-spray of gin and vermouth exploded from his nostrils, further displeasing the party at the next table, who instantly began gathering up their drinks. In the space of five seconds, Felix’s face registered surprise, confusion, consternation, doubt, and uncertainty, more or less in that order, all while coughing. Startled, John and Gideon glanced at each other, wondering what it was they’d set off.
“Felix, are you okay?” John asked, but Felix, choking away, lowered his head and waved him silent.
A final splutter, a mopping of lips and beard, a dab at his tearing eyes, and he was ready to attempt speech again, emitting a strangled “Toes?”
“That’s right,” Gideon said. “The foot had two missing toes.”
“Yes, but are you sure—” Another brief episode of choking, during which Felix held up his hand again and downed a slug of his martini, this time managing to keep it in him. “How do you know they didn’t disappear after he died? I mean, for gosh sakes, practically everything else got carried off by the fishes, didn’t it? Couldn’t they have —”
“No, these were amputated long before. You can tell.”
“My God,” Felix breathed. He shook his head slowly back and forth, then, surprisingly, giggled. “Oh, lordy.”
