Where There's a Will

A snort of laughter came from the back seat. “They didn’t worry because you told them there was nothing to worry about.”

“I told them?”

“You said—and I pretty much quote—that with any luck you could maybe tell the age, the sex, the race, and, um...”

“The approximate height,” Gideon supplied. “All of which would have fitted Magnus as much as it did Torkel. I think you’ve hit on it, Julie. Malani didn’t know she was putting her foot in it—”

“Or Torkel’s foot,” John said, throwing up his hands. “Sorry.”

“—but when she did, the others went along with it because they thought they were safe. Good thinking, Julie. That’d explain it.”

“Amazing,” John said. “She wasn’t even there and she remembers it better than we do.”

“Thank you,” Julie said happily. “Shall I go on?”

“There’s more?”

“Oh, yes. Who was it that got you to look at the autopsy report after you got back from the atoll?”

John and Gideon looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “Malani?” they both offered.

She nodded crisply. “Yes. And I was there for that one.”

“You’re right,” Gideon said, thinking back to the gathering on Axel’s porch. “Malani was the one who forced the issue...again.”

“That’s right, she was,” John said. “Malani’s like that. If she gets an idea in her head, she doesn’t hang back.”

“But this time the others did,” Gideon said. “Remember? Hedwig wanted to put me in a lotus leaf instead, and Axel didn’t want to stir things up, and Inge wanted to let him rest in peace—”

“But then the two of you convinced them they’d better have you do it, right?” Julie said. “So it was like the first time. How could they say no without making it obvious they were covering something up—even if they thought you might find out about the ring?”

“Ah, ah!” John exclaimed; he was completely back in form now. “But they didn’t think we were going to find out about the ring. The ring wasn’t in the autopsy report, it was in the case files! And as far as they knew, we weren’t going to be looking at the case files!”

Gideon slowly nodded. “It all makes sense.”

Julie tapped her mouth, covering a yawn of mock boredom. “Anything else I can help you boys with, you just let me know. Oh, look, here’s the Outrigger. Swimming pool, here I come. And I’m for another moratorium through tonight. Tomorrow is another day.”

“Me too,” Gideon said.

John raised his hand. “Count me in. Enough is enough.”

FAUSTINO Parra arranged the place-setting the way the old lady liked it on windless days like this: on the round, glass-topped table at the foot of her terrace, with the Spanish-tile fountain behind her and the big blue Pacific spread out in front of her. He removed three of the four chairs—they made her feel lonely, she said—and opened the zipper of the thermal carton a couple of inches more so that her dinner wouldn’t continue to baste in its own juices. Oyster stew, grilled moonfish with black-olive polenta and shiitake mushrooms, and, in a separate cooler bag, a half-bottle of Sauvignon blanc and a macadamia-nut torte topped with currants, whipped cream, and toasted coconut for desert. For a woman who couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds, she could certainly put the stuff away, he thought respectfully. Not that a lot of it didn’t go to the turtles, of course.

He stood back, took one more look at the setting, straightened the silverware so that it lined up perfectly with the bottom edge of the bamboo place mat, nodded with satisfaction, checked his bowtie to make sure that it was straight, and went to find her at her cove, looking forward to bringing her back.

He hadn’t always looked forward to it. At first, he’d actively disliked her. It didn’t seem right to him that a woman—let alone a woman of that age—smelled morning and night like the inside of a bar after a hard day: booze and cigars. And the way she waited for him to offer his arm, as if she was the queen of Hungary or something. That wasn’t part of his job and he’d resented it. She hadn’t made things any better when he handed her her first bill to be signed. “Now Raymond,” she’d said (sometimes it was “Raymond,” sometimes “Steven,” once in a while “Faustino”), “let’s get something clear right at the start. I can’t be bothered with calculating percentages every time I sign for something, you understand? So you keep track of what you bring, and whenever the amount comes to four hundred dollars, you tell me and I will tip you accordingly. Is that satisfactory?”

What could he say but yes? But in his heart he simmered. Why should he have to ask for his tip? It was demeaning. More than that, he assumed it was her way of getting out of tipping him at all, in hopes that he wouldn’t have the nerve to bring it up. But he had, and two weeks later when he told her that her bill to date had been $405.24, she smiled and handed him two crisp fifty-dollar bills that she’d had all ready and waiting—over and above the automatic eighteen percent that had already been added for service.

It had blown him away. And it was in cash, that was the best part. Nothing to go into the service pool, nothing to be declared as income. It had made all the difference in the world. He still didn’t like the way her breath smelled, and he still didn’t like the way her fingers dug into his arm like hard little toothpicks, but she was good for a minimum of $200 a month, his best customer by a mile; he’d come to depend on it. More than that, he’d eventually come around to actually liking her. After you got to know her, you began to see her good side. She was generous, she was funny, she had a lot of good points.

And now he had another $400 to report; $418, actually, but nowadays he returned her generosity by regularly rounding down, something that made him feel good. Besides, he suspected that she kept a more accurate account than he did, so it was another way of staying on her good side. His money had really been due that morning, when he’d brought the pastries, but she’d had company and he didn’t like asking in front of them.

As he approached the curve that opened onto the promontory he paused to scuff his feet a bit on the gravel so that she’d have time to get that pathetic wig on, but when he rounded it he came to an abrupt stop. She wasn’t there waiting for him; something that had never happened before in all these months. There was an empty,