“I can. I was talking to Fausto about it. We were all just about to make speeches, presentations.”
“Speeches? Mmm…” She thought it over. “Sounds pretty tenuous to me, frankly. Aren’t there lots of people here for the Society meetings who are giving speeches?” She shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know, Gideon…”
“It was your idea, Julie. You were the one who suggested someone was trying to stop me from making a speech. I just applied it more generally.”
“My idea? Oh, well, then, on sober reconsideration, I have to say I think it has a lot going for it.”
“So do I, and the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense. Sheila’s notes had been taken, and Ivan’s, if he had any, would have been burned up in the fire, if they weren’t also taken. Someone must have been afraid of what they might contain.”
“One problem – nobody stole your notes.”
“Nobody could. I didn’t have any. And consider my case a little further. In the twenty-four hours before my speech, somebody tried to kill me twice. An average of once every twelve hours. Now it’s been given, and I don’t have another one to make, and, heck, nobody’s been trying to kill me for days. Well, almost days.”
“Knock on wood,” she said, searching for something wooden to knock on but having to settle for the glass- topped table. “But yes, I think you must be right. I hope you’re right.” She reached over to graze the back of his hand with her fingers. “It would mean you’re not in danger now.”
“The crucial question is,” Gideon mused, “what could any of us have possibly said – what did the killer think we might have been going to say – that was so earth-shaking it was worth murder?”
“No, the crucial question is, just who thought it was worth murder? ”
Gideon sipped his drink and slowly nodded. “Got a point there, pardner.”
Julie took a stab at her own question. “Well, for starters, as far-fetched as it may seem, we know it has to be one of the people staying here at the Rock; one of our own group. Except, of course, for Rowley and Pru.”
“Why are we excluding them?”
She turned to look at him. “We talked about this before, don’t you remember? It was Pru and Rowley who kept you from getting killed.”
“Me, yes. But that doesn’t mean – not that I believe it, you understand – that they had nothing to do with Sheila and with Ivan.”
She stared at him. “Hold on a minute. What happened to all those interconnected subsets? The law of interconnected monkey business-”
“Is not infallible. It’s not a law, it’s a model, a guide. Everything doesn’t always connect that neatly.”
“But surely you don’t-”
“I’m just saying it’s possible, Julie, not probable. Fausto’s going to be running the investigation. I wouldn’t want to see him rule out anybody at this stage. If you remember, Pru had some pretty harsh things to say about Sheila at the testimonial dinner.”
“But that hardly means-”
“No, of course it doesn’t. But it’s not something that I feel I can keep from him. He has to know.”
“Well, you’re the expert,” she said unconvinced, “but – oh, wait a minute, I just thought of something. There must be other people we’re not even thinking of, archeologist types who live here. I mean, we know Rowley because he hangs around with us, but what about other archaeologists, maybe people who work at the museum, people we don’t know about? They would have been here back when Sheila was killed too
… oh, no, wait a minute, that doesn’t fly because they could have killed Ivan any time these last five years. Why wait till now?”
“Because-”
“Because he wasn’t giving a speech,” she supplied, and then promptly supplied the countering argument as well. “But surely, he must have made some presentations in five years. He was obviously a cultural bigwig here. Although-” She pursed her lips, mulling everything over. “I don’t know, what do you think?”
“I think this is making my neck ache.” He tipped up his glass, drained the whisky, and smacked his lips. “It’s six thirty, dinnertime. Let’s go down and have a look at the cast of suspects.”
INDEED, the entire cast was assembled and waiting, Rowley having joined them this evening. The group had been put in the main dining room tonight, a big, handsome space with buttercup yellow walls, a long row of tall, arched windows looking out on the bay, and a rousing, thirty-foot mural of Nelson’s great victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, full of smoke and cannon flashes, covering most of the rear wall. The burgundy-vested, bowtied waiters, all of whom appeared to be Spanish, couldn’t have been too crazy about looking at that every time they went back through the swinging doors to the kitchen, but if it bothered them they didn’t show it.
When Julie and Gideon arrived, two of the waiters were just going around the table delivering appetizer and salad orders. After they’d finished, one of them took the newcomers’ orders. Julie asked for bouillabaisse and chicken piccata; Gideon went for the “Taste of Morocco” menu, ordering a roasted tomato and onion salad, followed by lamb stew.
As they’d expected, the rambling conversation around the table was about Ivan Gunderson. Who could have killed him? Why? And how could the police even tell he’d been murdered, anyway? Weren’t his house, his body, reduced to ashes?
This last question was directed at Gideon, the only certified, bona fide forensic practitioner in the group. Gideon looked up from his plate and chewed while coming up with a way to evade answering the question – without quite lying, if he could help it. Nobody here knew that he’d been to the morgue that morning and had himself been the one who had made the homicide determination. Nobody here knew that Sheila’s death was now reopened as a subject of investigation, let alone that he, Gideon, had also been the instrument of that. There was a lot they didn’t know, and it seemed to him an excellent idea to keep it that way.
He swallowed the mouthful of honey-sweetened lamb, prune, and almond. “Well, you know, arson investigators are pretty good at that. They look for the starting point of the fire, the use of accelerants, and so on.”
“Accelerants?” Rowley said. “You mean fuels? My goodness, the place was full to the brim with inflammables – glues, solvents, cleaners. It’s a wonder the whole peninsula didn’t go up in smoke.”
“Those pots he was gluing,” Audrey said somberly. “I can’t get them out of my mind. I simply cannot make myself imagine Ivan spending his days, hour after hour, meaninglessly gluing pots together. ” A brief, somber laugh. “And then regluing them when you brought them back to him.”
Gideon went back to eating, relieved that the subject had moved on.
“I keep thinking of him too,” Adrian said with a rumbling sigh. “Of the man he once was; so witty, so… nimble – and then of how he was on that last night…” He shook his head. “Iwo Jima Boy, Okinawa Boy, whatever it was. So very sad.”
He trickled a little Irish whiskey into his coffee and screwed the cap back onto the flask. It occurred to Gideon that Adrian’s flask never seemed to empty. He never had to upend it, but merely to tip it a bit. A magic flask; now, how did he do that? Did he carry a second flask to top up the first?
“It was Guadalcanal Boy,” said Corbin sadly.
There was only the clinking of silverware against china for a few moments, and then Buck spoke. “You want to hear something that’s really weird?” Buck was normally so quiet when he was around them that all heads turned in his direction. “He was never there. At Guadalcanal. I have a Marine buddy, a retired lieutenant colonel, who fought at Guad. He has a Web site that lists the survivors, every last one. No Gunderson. I checked with him, and he double-checked, and he says it’s so. Gunderson was in the Pacific, all right, at Tarawa – which was bad enough – but not at Guad. Now how do you figure that?”
It was a moot question, but for Adrian there were no moot questions. “One of the prominent features of dementia senilis, you see, Buck,” he began kindly, “is a loss, sometimes only intermittent, of the ability to distinguish between-”
He was interrupted by the appearance of George, one of the competent, agreeable reception desk clerks, carrying a small, neatly folded, brown paper bag. “Oh, I thought I’d find you here, Dr. Oliver. This was left for you a few minutes ago. I took the liberty of bringing it in to you rather than saving it for you at the desk. The lady said she thought it might be important.” He put the bag on the table in front of Gideon.
“Thanks, George.” Curious, he opened it without thinking and began to take out the object inside, but the
