Where There's a Will

“It was an old routine to threaten his brother with a gun?”

“You don’t understand. It was a game they played.”

“That’s some game.”

“Nobody took it seriously. He’d wave it around, and Dagmar would say, ‘Oh, put that thing away,’ and he’d put it away, and they’d all go to bed mad at each other, and the

next morning it’d be forgotten.”

“But not this time.”

Felix shook his head. “No, not this time. He would have put it away, but when he waved it in Torkel’s face, Torkel made a disgusted grab at the barrel and sort of bent Mag-nus’s arm back...and bang. The bullet—bullets, rather, although nobody knew it at the time—went through Torkel’s hand and into Magnus. Magnus dropped dead on the spot. The other two were pretty well stunned, as you can imagine.”

“Mr. Torkelsson, how do you know all this? Were you there?”

“No, only the three of them. But Dagmar told us later. Torkel, too, although he was barely coherent by the time we arrived.”

Dagmar again, thought Fukida. The only living eyewitness. Only she was no longer living.

Other than the fact that Inge and Hedwig, with Felix’s help, had loaded Magnus’s body into a pickup truck and taken it to the hay barn before they lopped off his toes and set the fire, the remainder of the story—how Torkel had been desperate to leave, how they’d gotten him to the airport, etc.—fit perfectly with what Inge and Dagmar had told him the day before.

Which hardly proved it was true, but Fukida was increasingly inclined to accept this latest retelling. The gun’s neglected condition—rusted, loaded with the wrong bullets—made the idea of an accidental killing highly believable. More than that, if there was anything self-serving about this version, he couldn’t see it. Telling the story opened them all up to a ton of legal problems, some of them criminal.

Still, there was a lot about it that didn’t compute. “Look, if it happened the way you said, if there weren’t any hitmen to worry about, what the hell was Torkel so desperate about?”

“He was desperate because he figured it would look like murder and he couldn’t face the idea of jail—or even of a trial—not at his age. Dagmar kept telling him not to do it, that if he ran he’d really look guilty.” Felix shook his head. “But you couldn’t reason with him.”

“So who came up with the idea of switching identities?”

“That was Torkel, but, you see, the idea wasn’t to switch identities, not at first. He wasn’t interested in being Mag-nus. He just wanted to make it look as if he was dead. He figured that’d make it a lot harder for the police to find him, since they wouldn’t be looking for him.”

“It wouldn’t make it any easier,” Fukida agreed.

“So we all went along with that. But then we started talking. If you people bought the story that it was Torkel’s body in the barn, you were going to want to know what happened to Magnus...for instance, where was he? And how the hell were we going to handle that? So we started throwing around ideas and the best thing we came up with—I honestly forget who came up with it first; Hedwig, maybe, or maybe it was me—was to pretty much tell the truth... with a twist. One brother got killed, the other one flew away. Only we’d reverse them.”

Fukida nodded. “Since Magnus was now Torkel, Torkel would become Magnus.”

“That’s about it.”

“I’m surprised he went for it. That’s a hell of a decision, to become somebody else. Especially your own brother.”

“Yeah, but you see, it wasn’t that cut-and-dried, Sergeant. At that point nobody was thinking about who Torkel would become. We were just thinking about the story we were going to tell the police. Anyway, all he was interested in was getting out of there and covering his tracks, so he jumped right on the idea and we all went along with that, too. After that—”

“Why?”

Felix was startled. “Uh...why?”

“Yeah, why’d you all go along? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’d all come off filthy rich if everybody thought Magnus was the last one alive?”

For the first time Felix showed a flash of anger. “In the first place, none of us are ‘filthy rich’—”

“Don’t yell. It screws up the recorder. It also irritates me.”

“I’m sorry.” He lowered his voice to what he thought was a whisper. “In the second place, Torkel wasn’t supposed to get himself killed in a plane crash. He was supposed to be back in touch with us as soon as he could. The idea was that I was going to explain things and straighten everything out with you guys and with the prosecuting attorney, and then, assuming I could get it all taken care of, he was supposed to come back and be Torkel again.” He folded his arms and glared at Fukida. “So you want to tell me how was that going to make us filthy rich? I think you know what Torkel was going to leave us—zilch.”

Fukida responded equally heatedly. “Yeah, right, but then, after he didn’t show up, and you all tossed things around some more, you figured, well, why not just leave things the way they are? I mean, it was a lot simpler than stirring everything up again, and you’d all come out of it a lot better, and who would it hurt? Except for that seamen’s home, of course.”

Felix sagged, unfolded his arms, and dropped his eyes. “I guess that’s about right,” he said wearily. “I’d want to put it a little more... positively than that, but . . . that’s about right. We acted in our own selfish interests. And we broke the law.”

We’re getting there now, Fukida thought. Maybe not quite the whole truth yet, but close, and getting closer. “Listen, Mr. Torkelsson, you might want to have a lawyer of