Skull Duggery (28 page)

If these were the guy’s come-on exhibits, Gideon thought, it was no wonder he doesn’t seem to be getting much in the way of visitors. Beside the door was a sign in English and Spanish that informed visitors that the entrance fee was thirty pesos and instructed them to ring the bell. Gideon did, and the door swung open to reveal a vestibule in which the man they’d seen yesterday sat at an old office desk, clacking away at a many-carboned document on an ancient, upright, manual Remington typewriter. Sr. Henry Castellanos-Jones, said the nameplate at the front of the desk.

“Yes?” he said, not pleased to be interrupted. He was wearing the same rusty suit, the same narrow black tie that he’d worn yesterday. Even sitting down, he had the suit jacket tightly buttoned.

“I’d like to see the museum.”

“It’s thirty pesos. I have no change.”

“That’s fine.” Seeing no receptacle, he laid the bills on the desk.

“Would you like me to give you a tour? The fee is two hundred pesos.”

“No thanks, I’d just like to wander, if that’s all right.”

“The choice is yours, but a tour would add a great deal to your visit.”

“No thanks.”

The man’s thin lips turned down. “Very well. Please start in the room to your left, the drawing room, and continue around. That is the established pattern for the traffic flow.” He returned his attention to his typing.

Gideon did as he was told, although he could see from the empty rooms ahead that traffic flow wasn’t going to be a problem. The place was much as Sandoval had led him to expect, reeking of mildew and mold, probably from the old upholstered furniture and grungy carpets that appeared to be leftovers from the last person to reside there. The plastered walls were cracked and dirty, the ceilings water-stained and sagging. Lit mostly with low-wattage Tiffany-style lamps in various shades of brown, it was like walking around under a mushroom. Or inside a mausoleum.

Most of the exhibits, and there were many, were on dark, Victorian-era tables or in glass-fronted bookcases, and whatever else Gideon might say about them, he was ready to admit that it was the most eclectic and idiosyncratic museum he’d ever been in. The shrunken heads (actually, goatskin fakes) that Sandoval had told him about were there, and the Aztec stone knives (knockoffs, and poorly done at that) as well. There was also the withered brown arm and hand of “The Assassin Pedro Mendoza, Who Killed Beloved Governor Ocampo in 1901.” This event rated an entire display case for itself. Along with the arm was the governor’s ruffled shirt, complete with holes and blood, and the dagger that did the deed.

In general, though, the exhibits were more pedestrian, if no less odd: a “letter cancellation machine made in 1848, in use until 4/4/1911”; a “metal hamburger mold, circa 1931”; an “1860 Ashley Archimedean Eggbeater.” If there was a pattern to the displays, Gideon couldn’t make it out. The eggbeater shared a case with a “Czechoslovakian machine pistol from the Great War.” The hamburger mold was housed with a porthole from a sunken ship and a “crystal ball used in crystal-gazing, late 1800s.”

His quarry was in a glass-fronted case in the second room he came to, the former dining room, on a shelf shared with a baby shark in a Mason jar and a three-masted schooner made of matchsticks. It was only the skull-no mandible-and it rested in a saucer filled with straw. The legend beside it said “sacrificed Zapotec princess,

1,000 years old.” Gideon had to kneel to look it in the eye, so to speak, and even when he did, there wasn’t much he could tell about it. It was male, not female-the supraorbital ridges and robust mastoid processes told him that much. There were streaks of green, blue, and red color here and there, probably the remnants of the colored candles that had once been mounted on its crown. The teeth, nestled in the straw, couldn’t be seen. Was it really old enough to be Zapotec? That he couldn’t tell.

There was a huge, irregular hole in the left side of the skull, involving parts of the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal bones. He was certain that this “open defect,” as it was called in the bland jargon of forensic science, was postmortem. Bone is pretty much the same color through and through, so if it had been inflicted at the time of death its edges would have been the same color as the rest of the skull. But the edges of this “defect” were distinctly paler than the rest of the skull, indicating that the bone had been exposed to the elements for some time before the break occurred and the defect had nothing to do with the cause of death.

He returned to the desk out front, where the man was now struggling with another set of copies, trying to get the dog-eared carbons to go around the roller.

“Excuse me. You have a skull in the old dining room-”

“The Zapotec princess,” he said without looking up.

“Yes. I wonder if it would be possible to take it out of the case. I’d like very much to have a closer look.”

“No, no, no, no, no. It’s against the rules.”

“It’s not merely out of curiosity. I’m an anthropology professor-”

“Rules are rules. If I let you break them, then I’d have to let everyone break them, wouldn’t I? And then where would we all be? Where would it end?”

“I understand your point-”

The man looked up suddenly from his task. “Unless of course, you’re interested in purchasing it?”

Gideon stared at him. “It’s for sale?”

“Not ordinarily, no, of course not. But you, you’re an anthropologist, a professional person. That puts an entirely new cast on things, you see.”

No, Gideon didn’t see, but having gone to all this trouble, he did want to have a better look at the skull. “Yes, I see that. Well, yes, I might very well be interested in purchasing it.”

“In that case,” said Mr. Castellanos-Jones, springing rabbitlike from his chair, “let us make haste. Time is money.”

He grabbed a ring of keys from his desk, led Gideon to the case, and removed the skull with its saucer, laying them gently down on the only free corner of the ponderous, thick-legged dining table. “What do you think?”

“Hard to say,” Gideon said, rotating it to see all sides.

“I can let you have it for one hundred American dollars, which is a professional-courtesy price, in that you are an anthropologist…”

“Mmm…” Gideon was absorbed in his examination. When it had been in its case, he hadn’t been able to see the rear portion of the skull, but now he could, and he had revised his earlier opinion. The hole had been inflicted after death, yes, but in a way, it probably was related to the cause of death. Extending onto the occipital bone-clear through the occipital bone-from the rearmost margin of the hole was a deep cleft-not a fracture, but a cleft -that had been hacked into the living bone. Ancient or modern, whoever this was had had his life ended by a wicked blow with something like an ax or a machete. And he guessed that the cleft had weakened the bone around it and possibly contributed to the later breakage.

“I see that the, er, imperfection concerns you,” Castellanos-Jones said. “Yes, I had forgotten about that. Taking it into consideration, I can let you have it at a discount of, ah, umm, twenty-five percent? Seventy-five dollars, all told.”

Gideon had turned it over and was now studying what was left of the teeth. They were in terrible shape, most of them rotted to nub-bins, some to the size of corn kernels. That was probably what had led Dr. Ybarra, the medico legista, to declare that the skull was Pre-Hispanic. Nowadays, you only saw teeth like these in archaeological specimens, among peoples whose diets had consisted largely of stone-ground grains. Pulverizing corn between a mano and a metate, or between a stone mortar and pestle, also produced minute fragments of pulverized stone, and it was these fragments that could grind down tooth enamel, bringing on decay and gum disease, and turning the dentition into wreckage like this.

Ybarra had been right, he decided; this was not a modern skull. There was no conceivable connection to Tony. Reluctantly, he concluded that it had all been a wild goose chase. Whatever the reason Tony had tried to kill him, it had nothing to do with this “Zapotec princess.”

“I should probably mention,” said Castellanos-Jones, “that several other parties, one of them a prominent educational institution, have shown interest in this specimen. It may very well be gone by next week.”

“Well, yes,” Gideon said, placing the skull back in its saucer, “but I’m afraid I don’t-” He stopped in mid-sentence, his forehead wrinkled, the image of the rotted teeth still in his mind. Wait a minute…

“Opportunity missed is opportunity lost, you know. And opportunity seldom knocks twice. Why, whatever is the matter? Are you all right, professor?”

Gideon was staring so hard, so fixedly, at the skull that he had alarmed Castellanos-Jones. With staggering suddenness and mind-bending simplicity, everything had clicked into place. Why Blaze had been killed thirty years ago, why Manolo had been killed a few months ago, why he himself had damn near been killed yesterday. There were details missing, yes, but the overall picture had leapt into focus as crisply as if he’d turned the knob on a pair of binoculars. It was almost too crazy to be true, and yet…

“Yes, I’m okay,” Gideon said. “Would a check be all right? I don’t have seventy-five dollars with me.”

“A check will be fine.” He paused, Smiling, with his hands neatly folded at his waist, like an old-fashioned department store floor-walker. “Would you like that wrapped?”AN hour later Gideon pulled up in the parking lot of the Hacienda Encantada. He had tried calling Marmolejo, but Corporal Vela had answered, telling him that the colonel was in Teotitlan, at the Hacienda Encantada. That suited Gideon perfectly, and it was with building excitement that he climbed out of the van, carefully cradling the skull (he had declined Castellanos-Jones’s offer to wrap it) in the palm of one hand, thumb lodged in the foramen magnum, the conveniently thumb-sized opening in the base for the entry of the spinal cord, and his other arm holding it protectively against his body the way a runner holds a football.

He saw Marmolejo at once. He was sitting at one of the larger tables on the terrace with Jamie, Annie, Carl, and Julie. Spread out in front of them were mugs of coffee and plates of mid-afternoon pastries: turrones, sweet rolls, and galletas (sugar, anise, and cinnamon cookies), the aromas of which made his mouth water.

“I see Dorotea’s back,” he said, approaching the table.

“Oh yeah,” Annie answered. “Back and happy as a clam-well, as happy as she gets. She has no problem working for Josefa.” She tilted her chin at the skull. “Who’s your friend?”

“Ah, my friend, yes,” Gideon said. “Well, that’s an interesting story. But I don’t want to interrupt-”

“There’s nothing to interrupt,” Marmolejo said. “I was simply partaking of the generous hospitality offered. Our business for the day is finished. Unfortunately, I fear we’ve come no closer to enlightenment.”

“Oh, I think that with the help of my friend here-” He patted the skull. “-I might be able to provide a little of that.” He pulled out a chair, sat, and set the skull on the table in front of him.

“Ouch,” Carl said, looking at the jagged hole in the side. “Looks like somebody whacked him.”

“Yes. With an ax or something like it.”

Annie turned the skull to face her. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”

Gideon smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

“Ooh, that sounds mysterious. What’s it mean?”

Julie was eyeing him. “You look awfully pleased with yourself.”

“Well, I think I have a surprise for you.”

“Oh Lord, another surprise,” Jamie said. “I don’t know if we can handle another surprise.”

“What is it, Gideon?” Marmolejo asked. “Is that the skull from the museum?”

“That it is.”

“And is it an ancient Zapotec skull?”

“That it is not.”

A couple of beats passed, and then Julie said. “And are you planning to tell us what it is anytime soon?”

“Well…”

With a sigh, Marmolejo addressed the others. “You see how we have to tease it out of him, how he lets it out one tantalizing morsel at a time? It’s always this way. I believe he’s doing it primarily for my benefit. Professor Oliver finds happiness in baffling the mind of the simple, hardworking policeman.”

“Hey, this is pretty grim stuff I do,” Gideon said. “I have to find happiness where I can.”

“Well, you better tell us pretty soon,” Julie warned, “or I guarantee you’re not going to be happy very long.”

Gideon laughed, but whatever they might think, he was not merely grandstanding, or at least not only grandstanding. What he had to tell them was going to knock them for a loop in any case-especially Annie, Jamie, and Carl-but he wanted to prepare them, to present it in the right way, and not simply dump it in their laps.

“Okay,” he said, “but first let me make sure I have my facts straight. Tony came back and took over the Hacienda in 1979, is that right?”

“Right,” Carl and Jamie said together, and then Carl added, “But it wasn’t the Hacienda then. It was still a horse ranch.”

“Okay. And he would have been how old at the time? Mid-twenties somewhere?”

“Twenty-five,” said Jamie. He was born in 1954.”

“Fine. And when he left home as a kid, he was how old?”

“Somebody tell me what this has to do with the price of tea in China,” Annie grumbled.

“He was sixteen,” Jamie said. “I was six or seven.”

“So that was in 1970.”

Jamie thought for a moment. “Yes. Sixty-nine or seventy.”

“All right, that’s what I thought. Let me get on with it then.”

“God be praised,” Marmolejo murmured, pleasantly enough.

“The reason this skull was thought to be very old,” Gideon said, “was the condition of the teeth.” He tipped it back for them to see the blackened, tarnished, cracked remnants of the dentition.

Annie winced. “Yuck, it hurts just to look at that.”