Where There's a Will

then Diamond Head, and finally the blue Pacific, seemed to cleanse the mind of its clutter and get it ready to take on another day.

That was what Gideon had in mind for the morning after the meeting with Felix (he was stared at in amazement when he suggested, not with any real expectation, that John join him), but when he awoke at five- thirty there was a steady drizzle wafting down, so instead he had his coffee in the open-air coffee bar itself, dopey with sleep, in a pink chair beside a pink wall covered with black-and-white photographs of laughing Golden Age luminaries who had once stayed there: tiny Shirley Temple greeting admirers with her usual bubbly aplomb in front of a surfboard with “Aloha, Captain Shirley” on it; Esther Williams; William Powell; Carol Lombard; an uncomfortable-looking Bing Crosby getting soaked in an outrigger; Spencer Tracy signing autographs on the beach; an aged Duke Kahanomoku showing an attentive young Joe DiMaggio how to use a paddle.

The coffee, strong and hot, got his wits going, and although they immediately turned to the Torkelsson mess, he wasn’t able to make any more sense of it than they’d been able to do over dinner the night before. The most reasonable explanation seemed to be that Torkel had taken on Magnus’s identity as part of his effort to stay alive. If the killers and the rest of the world were under the impression that it was Torkel they had killed and Magnus who had escaped, it would be the non-existent Magnus they would be hunting.

Reasonable, yes, but subjected to a little thoughtful scrutiny during their walk back to the Royal Hawaiian— they had returned along the beach, nearly deserted now and softly illuminated by the tiki lanterns of the beachfront hotels—the scenario had begun to come apart at the seams, or at least to spring a few leaks.

How likely was it, Gideon had asked, that the killers wouldn’t be aware of which of the brothers they’d shot? And if they were, what good would it do Torkel to run around pretending to be Magnus? Even if they weren’t, why would they be hunting whichever brother had escaped? Surely, murdering one of them, chasing the other one off the island, and burning down the ranch headquarters had made their point for them. After all, as John knew better than he did, organizations bent on retribution—especially organizations that chose to hire hitmen—didn’t go around expending time and effort to assassinate people if it didn’t serve a utilitarian, usually monetary, end.

John had had some answers ready for him. What the killers thought or didn’t think, knew or didn’t know, was beside the point. The only thing that counted was what had been in Torkel’s mind, and Torkel very likely had been scared witless, understandably so, and had done the first and most obvious thing that came to mind: make them think he was dead, and run for it. Possibly, after a few days he would have thought things through and come to a different conclusion, but he hadn’t had a few days. From all they could tell, it appeared that his plane had gone down that same night, only a few hours after leaving the Big Island.

Gideon had had one more critical question: Why would he have lied to Dagmar, his own sister, claiming to be Magnus?

For that one, John had no ready answers. But both men knew that a complex case with no unanswered questions was a rare bird indeed. They all had inconsistencies, implausibilities that couldn’t be explained. That didn’t mean you couldn’t resolve the case. You went, as they kept telling each other, with the preponderance of the evidence, and all the evidence here told the same story: Torkel had fled Hawaii, and he had done it pretending to be his brother. His motive was less demonstrable, but ninety percent certain nonetheless: to escape what he believed to be his own imminent murder.

Ninety percent certain to John, in any case. Gideon would have put it at seventy. Those loose ends again.

When the rain had shredded away into trailing wisps and moved out to sea, and the first hint of bronze appeared on the upper slopes of Diamond Head, Gideon took a second cup of coffee out to the beach to think things through a little more. But as it had in the past, the combination of sparkling salt air, sea breeze, and irresistible, world-renewing freshness wiped his mind happily clean of murder, deception, and other nastinesses, turning it toward happier thoughts of Julie, who was now well on her way, only a few hours from Honolulu.

It wasn’t until he sat down for an early lunch/late breakfast with John at Cheeseburger in Paradise—“The best restaurant in Waikiki, bar none,” according to John—that they got to talking about the Torkelssons again.

“John, let me ask you something. You said that the murder was a classic professional-type hit, correct?”

John rolled his eyes. “You’re not gonna leave this alone, are you?”

“Well, what does that mean exactly—a classic gangland execution? A couple of shots to the back of the head, close-range?”

But the focus of John’s attention was elsewhere. His eyes glowed at the sight of his “Five-Napkin Special,” a monumental hamburger thickly lathered with two kinds of melted cheese and engulfed in glutinous Thousand Island dressing, which was reverentially placed before him by a waitress in a fake grass skirt worn over denim shorts. Beside the hamburger and its accompanying mound of french fries, Gideon’s order of three scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and the ever-present spear of fresh pineapple looked like the day’s diet plate.

Gideon let him get a few bites down and repeated the question.

“Sure, that’s one way,” John said, “but in this case he was shot in the chest. I don’t know about the range.” He bit into the burger.

“So what’s so classic about that?”

“First of all, there were two shooters involved.” John mopped his chin with the first of the stack of paper napkins that had come with his meal. “You don’t get that in your everyday run-of-the-mill amateur homicide.”

“That’s another thing. How do they know how many shooters there were?”

“They know because there were bullets from two different guns in him.”

“Ah.” Gideon ate scrambled eggs and toast for a while. “So why couldn’t it have been one guy with two guns?”

“One guy with...is that supposed to be a serious suggestion? This killer carries two different caliber handguns, like Wyatt Earp or somebody, and shoots him once with each one?”

“It’s possible.”

“Yeah, it’s also possible that I’m going to leave the rest of this hamburger over.”

“But not likely.”

“No.”