CHAPTER 14

   “What secret?” Miranda asked when she was sure the door had clicked closed behind Nellie and John.

“Yes—” Gideon chimed in, and caught himself. In the second that Miranda’s face had been turned toward the door he had caught a furtive, flickering play of glances between the others. Of caution? Guilt? Concealment? What was going on here? What did they all know that he and Miranda—and John—didn’t? Why had Nellie jumped all over Leland about it? What was the connection to Jasper?

Gideon was suddenly struck with the odd, unwelcome feeling that he didn’t know any of these people very well; hardly at all, in fact. He’d been associating with them off and on for years, but how much of what he thought about them was real and how much had he constructed to fit his notions of what they ought to be like? Affable, laid-back Les with his DR BONES Porsche; droll, dry, harmless Leland —

“Forget it, Miranda,” Callie said, “you don’t want to know.”

“Me not want to know a secret? Somebody’s kidding. Gideon, are you in on this?”

He shook his head.

“Good, at least I don’t feel so left out. Now is anybody going to spill the beans or not?”

“Ah, what the hell—” Les began amiably.

Leland cut him off. “Why don’t you ask the great Dr. Hobert,” he said curtly to Miranda, “since he’s the one who seems to feel so passionately about it.”

For a moment Les looked as if he were going to continue anyway, but he shrugged and let it pass. In Les’s view, Gideon knew—or thought he knew—there wasn’t very much that was worth hassling about.

“All right,” Miranda said, unoffended, “I’ll ask Nellie. Well, if we’re going to have a chance to get a bite before the round table, we’d better get going. Leland and Callie are driving with me, Gideon. There’s room for you if you want.”

“No, thanks, I’ll find my own way. If I’m a few minutes late, tell Harlow to get started without me.”

“Begin without the Skeleton Detective?” Leland said. “Somehow it hardly seems worth the doing.” With the return of his horn-rims, he hadn’t taken long to become the old Leland again.

Gideon held Les unobtrusively back as the others left. “Give me a minute to stow the skull in the evidence room. I’ll be right back.”

“What’s up, Gid?” Les said when he returned. “Want a lift back with me?”

“In the Red Terror? Do I look that crazy? No, I wanted to ask you something.”

Les nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much.”

“What’s going on, Les? What’s this big secret?”

Les lowered his heavy body into Gideon’s chair behind the work table. “Well, I tell you,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a new ball game now. All skeletons out of the closet”

For a few seconds he concentrated on the rubber band around his ponytail, looping it a couple of times and getting it readjusted to his satisfaction. Gideon could see that he was arranging his thoughts as well.

“The thing is,” he said, “we had a roast.”

“Come again?”

Les smiled. “No, not that kind of a roast. Like they used to have at the Friar’s Club. We had a dinner for Jasper, where everybody got up and made these smart cracks, these jokey little speeches about him. We even did this dumb little skit—I was supposed to he Jasper, if you can believe it—and they bring me this femur, which I brilliantly deduce is the remains of a murder victim, only at the end it turns out to be the remains of last night’s leg-of-lamb dinner.” He laughed easily. “Dumb.”

The smile slowly faded. “How well did you know him, Gid?”

“Not very.” Was it too late to tell Les he didn’t much like being called “Gid”? Probably so, considering he’d let it go for almost ten years now.

“You’re lucky. Among other things, the guy was not very big on what you might call self-deprecating humor, you know? We should have realized that a roast was not the greatest idea in the world.”

Les picked up a strip of unused modeling clay and began slowly rolling it between his palms. Gideon pulled up a chair and sat opposite him.

“Aside from that, he was an on-again, off-again lush, and he was already about six times more sloshed than anybody realized when the roast started. The guy had been in a fairly good mood up till then, you know, wallowing in all that obsequious veneration crap. So at first he just sat there and took it, but then he turned real hostile. I mean real hostile. And then he starts crying—slobbering, his nose running, the whole bit.” He grimaced. “Can you imagine it? Albert Evan Jasper?”

“It sounds pretty awful”

“Yeah.” Les squeezed the strand of clay into a ball and started rolling it out again, this time between his palm and the table. “Of course, when you get right down to it, all of us had a few that night. Well, not Harlow—you know Harlow and his stomach—but I know I was sozzled. I guess we were trying to get our courage up, you know? That old bastard could be pretty intimidating.”

He tossed the clay onto the table. “And the fact is, all the cracks weren’t as friendly as they might have been. Things got pretty bitter once we got into it. Everybody turned the knife. Jasper was brilliant, no doubt about that. He was even a good teacher—I learned more from him than anybody I ever knew—but he was so damn…insensitive, so mean, even to people who worshipped the ground he walked on. I’m telling you, to know him was to want to punch him out.”

“I know,” Gideon said. “I’ve seen him in action.”

“Well, it got away from us. Once things got started, a lot of bottled-up feelings came out and Jasper just couldn’t deal with it. I don’t think he’d ever been on the receiving end of shit like that. So, finally, he just blew up; I mean, he was running at the mouth, literally. And then he stomped out.” He shrugged. “Never saw him again. At least I didn’t; obviously, somebody did.”

“And that’s it?” Gideon asked. “I understand that it wasn’t very pleasant, but why all the secrecy?”

“No, that isn’t it. You see, right up until today, until half an hour ago, we all thought we were responsible for his death.”

“For his death? Why?”

“You have to remember, Gid—up till now we thought he was on that bus.”

“Yes, I know, but why—”

“Well, he wasn’t supposed to be; not originally. He was going to leave the day after, like everybody else. The first clue we had that he might be on the damn thing was when he didn’t show up around the lodge that morning. And when we checked, we found out his clothes were cleared out of his room.”

Gideon watched him pick up another lump of clay and start rolling again.

“We figured he must have been so pissed at us that he took off early, with his pal, just so he wouldn’t have to look at our faces anymore. And then we did find his remains—what we thought were his remains. You can imagine how great that made everybody feel.”

“With his pal? Salish, you mean?”

“Yeah, Salish was catching the morning bus anyway, if I remember right—he had to be back at work—and we figured Jasper just got on it with him without telling anyone.”

“Did he check out of the lodge?”

“You didn’t have to check out. It was like now; you paid for everything in advance.” He curved the strip of clay around his wrist and pressed the ends together. “Sonofabitch,” he said softly.

“Les, all that doesn’t make you responsible for his death. Maybe it’s nothing to feel good about, but it’s no reason for a—well, for a conspiracy to keep it quiet.”

“Hey, tell me about it. That’s exactly what I said—I mean, the guy was over twenty-one, he made his own decisions, right? We didn’t have anything to hide—but nobody would come right out and agree with me. I guess no one liked disagreeing with Nellie.”

“You mean Nellie was pressing to keep it a secret?”

“Pressing? Yeah, I think you could say that. Funny, the whole roast business was his idea in the first place, and then later he was the one who was so hot to keep it a secret.”

And who was still so hot to keep it a secret. “Why?” Gideon asked.

“I guess he just thought it made everybody look pretty terrible. Which it did. Besides, you know, we were all feeling rotten about it—about being the reason he got on the bus. I mean, there he was—these greasy, burned chunks of garbage on the table right in front of us. Not your basic happy time.”

“But now we know those weren’t his remains; Jasper wasn’t killed on the bus. Why would Nellie still be so eager to keep it a secret?”

“I guess he honest-to-God doesn’t buy this reconstruction thing. As far as he’s concerned, nothing’s changed.”

“I don’t know, Les. Does that make sense to you?”

“Hey, what can I tell you?” He looked uneasily at Gideon. “Personally, he was being weird about it from day one. This hush-hush crap—you know that’s not Nellie’s style. I couldn’t believe it; I was, like, what is the problem here?”

“Les, are you trying to tell me you think Nellie had—” it took an effort to get the words out “—had something to do with Jasper’s murder?”

Les’s low forehead folded into parallel creases. “Hell, no, when did I say that?” He looked as close to irritated as he ever did.

Gideon liked him the more for it. “You never did.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Les, I’m still trying to understand how that misidentification could have happened in the first place.”

“You’re trying to understand? Hell, I was there; I was part of the team—and I’m here to tell you we did it right; by the book, man. I just don’t—”

“It was basically a dental identification, is that right?”

“It was a dental identification, period. You saw what was left. If not for the dentition we’d have been lucky to come up with ‘male’ and ‘adult.’ But we had half a mandible, with the teeth and the alveolar border in reasonable shape. So we got the reports from Jasper’s dentist, matched them to what we had here, and that was it.”

“Who matched them? Was it Harlow? Did he do the analysis?”

“Well, yeah, sure, he was our odontologist, but we worked as a team; everybody got in on it. That’s the way Nellie likes to do it—hey, where is Harlow? I haven’t seen him since he got back from Nevada.”

“Neither has anybody else, as far as I know.”

Their eyes locked for a second. “No, forget it, Gid. There was no way he could have flimflammed us. I’m not talking about any tricky odontological formulas. It was completely straightforward—a simple postmortem-antemortem comparison. Jasper’s charts had a lot of fillings anybody could recognize, and a, what do you call it, an extra tooth, a supernumerary tooth in there somewhere. It was just a matter of comparing.”

Gideon frowned. “A supernumerary tooth…”

There was, he was certain, no extra tooth in the clay-covered mandible now in its wooden cubbyhole in the evidence room; the mandible that had so startlingly transformed itself from Salish’s to Jasper’s less than an hour before. A first faint glimmer of illumination showed itself, an indication of just how they had come to make so freakish an error a decade ago. Except that, if he was right, there wasn’t any error. They had been flimflammed, all right. With a vengeance.

Les backed off. “Well, I wouldn’t swear to a supernumerary tooth. I’ve looked at a lot of skulls since then. But whatever there was, you didn’t have to be an odontologist to see there was a match.”

“And you personally compared the charts to the remains yourself? You saw that they matched? You didn’t just take Harlow’s word for it?”

“Of course I compared them. We all did.” He tilted his head, pulled on an earlobe. “Well, I think we did. Who remembers now? But, look, that mandible was right there in front of us the whole time. Anybody who felt like it could check it against the charts anytime he wanted. Harlow or anybody else would have been out of his mind to try to fudge anything.”

Not if it had been done the way Gideon thought it had. It was becoming clearer, but there were still some fuzzy edges, some pieces that didn’t fit. “Let me ask you this, Les. How positive are you those records were really Jasper’s?”

“What kind of question is that? About as positive as you can be. We found out who his dentist was, Harlow got in touch with him for the charts—you know the drill—and back they came, just like for anybody else. Well, except for the x-rays.”

Ah. Gideon’s eyes narrowed. “What about the x-rays?”

“There weren’t any. Jasper was scared of them.” He laughed. “Weird when you think about it. Here’s the number-one bone expert in the country—”

“How do you know he was scared of them?”

Les shrugged. He was beginning to tire of the conversation, or perhaps to wonder what they were talking about. “I don’t know. It wasn’t any secret.”

“I never heard about it.”

“So? What does it matter now?” Les yawned and shook himself, bearlike, the undulation seeming to roll slowly up his big torso under the skin. He took off the clay bracelet and dropped it on the table. “I guess head for—oh, hey I remember. Harlow told us. When he contacted the dentist. The guy told him Jasper was scared to death of x-rays. Okay? Satisfied?”

With a gratifying clunk, the last piece dropped tidily into place. Gideon leaned back in the chair.

“Satisfied,” he said.