Uneasy Relations (27 page)

“Julie, the possibility never arose! Gunderson wasn’t the greatest excavator in the world, but he
was
— we thought he was — a reputable archaeologist. Of long standing. The possibility of, of—” He could hardly bring himself to say it. “—of
fraud
would never have crossed anybody’s mind.”

“Uh-huh. Because the science of archaeology relies on the integrity of its practitioners.”

He sighed. “That’s about it,” he said miserably. “Let’s get a bite. I forgot all about lunch.”

They walked the few blocks to Main Street more or less mentally chewing their cuds and found a palm-shaded patio table at Latino’s Classic American Diner, which, despite its name, featured an eclectic menu of European, Chinese, Tex-Mex, and Moroccan foods. Another cruise ship was in port and the streets were again mobbed, but, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the restaurant was relatively uncrowded. Julie, who wasn’t hungry, asked for an iced tea. Gideon ordered a chicken BLT on ciabatta bread and a Coke.

“So,” Julie said, “why was Ivan killed? Why was anybody killed? Why were you attacked?”

“Well, there, all we’ve got is surmise, but the most probable scenario is—”

“—That someone else besides Ivan knew the find was faked, and was desperate to keep anyone
else
from finding out.”

“Yes, that’s the way I see it. If you start with the first person killed, Sheila, the fact that she had those two matching vertebrae from the two different sites makes it clear that she’d found out about it. And she was going to expose it at the conference. I mean, why would she have brought them with her to Gibraltar except to use them as Exhibit A?”

“But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t the killer have gotten rid of them? Apparently he got rid of the paper she was going to present and any notes she might have had. Why leave the vertebrae? They were her proof positive. Wouldn’t he have taken them too?”

Gideon spread his hands. “My guess is that he didn’t know about them. Remember, Sheila played things pretty close to the vest, according to everyone. She was probably saving them to make a big splash at her talk. Which they would have; a huge splash.”

“But obviously she told
someone
, or she’d still be alive.”

“Well, yes; told, or implied, or insinuated — anyway, enough to scare him into killing her.”

“Or her,” Julie amended. “So the question is, who would Sheila have told?”

“For which I don’t have an answer, do you?”

“No, it could have been any of them.” She paused while the waiter set down their orders. “And what about what happened to you? Was that on account of that newspaper article? Someone was afraid you’d found out too? That you really
had
something that was going to leave Piltdown in the dust?”

“Looks like it.”

“Which it would have, I gather.”

“And still will, when it gets out.”

“And poor Ivan himself was murdered because
he
was going to give a speech the next day.”

“Uh-huh,” Gideon managed around a heavenly mouthful of bread, chicken, bacon, tomato, and mayonnaise.

She paused to sugar her iced tea and have a first sip. “But wait a minute,” she said thoughtfully, “we talked about this before. Ivan must have given plenty of other speeches over the years. Why would someone think he would choose to reveal it now?”

“I doubt if anyone thought he would
choose
to reveal it, but now—”

She finished the sentence for him. “Now someone was afraid he was might reveal it inadvertently — because of that Guadalcanal slip.”

“I think so.” He put down the sandwich. “If only I’d realized what it was about at the time, I might have been able to prevent—”

“No, you couldn’t have. There was no conceivable way you could have known what that ‘Guadalcanal’ meant. How could anyone?”

“You’re right, I know,” he said with a sigh. “Still, I can’t help thinking that if I’d been a little quicker on the uptake—”

“Now you stop that right now,” she said firmly. “Eat your sandwich. Don’t be so hard on yourself. If somebody had told you then — what was it, four days ago? — what you’ve just finished telling me, would you have believed it?”

“Not in a million years.”

“You know,” she said, while he returned to chewing away, “this pretty much settles it. It
has
to be one of our people, someone who was right there in the dining room that night — someone who heard Ivan get confused over Gibraltar and Guadalcanal.”

“That’s right. Rowley, Audrey, Buck, Adrian, Corbin, Pru — the very same people, by the way, who were around last night, when George brought those two vertebrae to the table. One of them obviously recognized what they were, what they represented, and rifled our room hunting for it. Which,” he added with a smile, “we still wouldn’t know about if old eagle-eye here hadn’t spotted a jacket hung backward.”

“Rowley, Audrey, Buck, Adrian, Corbin, Pru,” she recited. “So who had the motive? Which of them would benefit most from keeping the fake a secret?”

“Hey, you’re thinking like a cop now — that’s exactly what Fausto asked me.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said it was a pretty good motive for all of them, every last one.” He dabbed mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth and explained.

For each of them, the fact that there was no Gibraltar Woman, no First Family, would be a hideous blow to their reputations and even to their livelihoods. Adrian and Corbin probably had the most to lose. They had written the standard academic books on the First Family, and they had supervised the dig itself; there was no way they could come out of this without looking like bunglers and — worse than bunglers in the minds of fellow scientists — dupes. Or maybe it was Rowley that had the most to lose; he hadn’t been involved in the dig
per se
, but his precious museum was founded on its supposed findings, and his new book, the book he’d been working on for three years, was now worse than meaningless. Audrey—

“That does look good,” she said, indicating his sandwich. “How about cutting me off some?”

“It is good. Want one of your own?”

“No, I’d rather have a piece of yours.”

He sliced off a quarter for her and went back to his rundown.

Audrey, heretofore esteemed for her expertise and acumen, would be ridiculed as another dupe, and, considering her long record of caustic remarks about others, there were plenty of colleagues just waiting for the chance to do it. Buck had had nothing whatever to do with Gibraltar Point, but his devotion to Audrey couldn’t be missed, and who knew what lengths he might go to in order to protect her? Pru probably had the least to worry about. True, she was the person who had actually dug up the remains, but in her case there were extenuating factors; namely, the depredations of a rampant bulldozer before she ever got there. On the other hand, extenuating factors were probably not going to entirely get her off the hook. There was no getting around the fact that she had personally excavated the sham “First Family” and had never had a clue that there was anything wrong. She would go down as one more dupe. Maybe not a world-class dupe like the others, but a dupe all the same.

Between them, they had finished the sandwich. Gideon ordered coffee and Julie got a refill on her iced tea. She pulled slowly at the straw with a contemplative scowl.

“What?” Gideon said.

“Well, I was just thinking . . . what about
your
reputation? You were the senior author of the paper that started the whole thing, after all — I mean, the thing about Gibraltar Boy being a hybrid, and all.”

He put down his cup. This was something that hadn’t occurred to him. “I think I’ll come out of it all right,” he said, not as confidently as he might have liked. “Remember, we went out of our way
not
to call him a hybrid. Other people did that. We just described him as accurately as we could. What
does
bother me a little is that we didn’t spot the fact that the two sets of remains came from two different sites over a hundred miles apart — different soils, different weathering patterns. We did say — I hope we said — something about them differing more than one would anticipate for bodies that had been buried together — in their color, in their preservation, and so on — but when you’re dealing with bones twenty-five millennia old, you expect that kind of variation, so I don’t think anybody’s going to fault us for not making something of it.”

“Uh-huh, I see,” Julie said. “Extenuating factors, is that it?”

He laughed. “Hmm, you think maybe you’re looking at one more dupe, after all?”

“Oh, I doubt it, but I wouldn’t worry about it anyway. If they frog march you out of anthropology, you’ve got your other career all ready and waiting for you.”

“I do? What career would that be?”

“Writing ‘stunning exposés’ for Lester Rizzo and Javelin Press, of course. Which reminds me—” She drained her tea. “The Javelin reception starts at five. We’d better get started if you want to go.”

“I don’t.”

“But you have to. Lester is your editor, and you’re one of their star authors; he’s going to want to show you off. You have to make an appearance. Besides, Rowley would be crushed if you weren’t there.”

“You’re right, as always,” Gideon said, getting up reluctantly. “Let’s go, then. Oh, by the way, we’re not supposed to mention any of this to any of the others — orders from Fausto.”

Julie responded with a snappy salute. “Yes, sir. Will do . . .
sir
!”

THE
Paleoanthropological Society cocktail reception-
cum
-book launch party had gotten off to an early start. The Eliott Hotel’s rooftop terrace, bathed in mellow, late-afternoon sunshine, was hopping by the time they got there, with knots of attendees chattering away on the wide patio surrounding the outdoor swimming pool. Most had a drink in one hand and a plastic plate piled with food in the other. Those that didn’t were either in line at one of the two portable bars, or gathered around food tables near each end of the pool. At one, a blonde woman in a tall white chef’s toque carved slices off a giant hunk of roast beef. At the other, an ice swan, dripping wings outstretched, hung over dozens of plates of quintessential ye olde English appetizers: sausage rolls, Scotch eggs, potted cheese toast triangles, miniature Cornish pasties. Waistcoated, bowtied waiters threaded their way smoothly through the crowd with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres. And in an out-of-the-way corner of the terrace a tuxedoed quartet, sans amplification, was unobtrusively, almost apologetically, tinkling out Boccherini’s Minuet in C.

“You do have to hand it to Lester,” Julie said as they came through the doors from the elevator. “He throws a heck of a party.”

“Seems a bit understated for Lester,” said Gideon. “I mean, Boccherini? I was expecting a fully staged
Phantom of the Opera
. Or if he wanted classical music, a symphony orchestra and full chorus doing Beethoven’s Ninth at the least.”

“Well, you know Lester.
Understated
is his middle name.”

“Right. Get you something to drink?”

“A white wine would be nice.”

On the way to the nearest of the bars, Gideon almost bumped into a Prada-Gucci-Ferragamo-clad Fausto smoothly gliding among the fashion-clueless academics like a sleek shark in a school of flounders. He was one of the few without a glass in his hand.

“Wow,” Gideon said. “I didn’t know you were a dignitary. I’m impressed.”

“Commish gave it a pass,” Fausto said with a shrug. “Officially, I’m here representing him. Personally, I wanted to come, kind of look around, check on the people.” With a hand on Gideon’s arm, he steered him to the fringe of the crowd, near a giant poster of Rowley’s bright blue book cover with its long-winded title:
Uneasy Relations: Humans and Neanderthals at the Dawn of History: Implications for Today’s World
. Under it was a table laden with copies to be given to the attendees as gifts.

“Listen, Gideon, remember when we were talking about licenses for explosives? Well, I did a little poking around and came up with something pretty interesting.”

As Fausto had told him earlier, there were only two construction companies in Gibraltar that had explosives licenses. He had spoken with the owners of both and one of them, the owner of G. Barrows & Sons Demolition and Excavation, had admitted reluctantly that they were missing — they were pretty sure they were missing — they thought they
might
be missing — twenty-two sticks of gelignite from their stores. In any case, their records couldn’t account for them. They hadn’t reported the disappearance as the law required, because at first they were sure they’d just misplaced them. Then, as time passed and they didn’t find them, they’d been worried about having waited so long to report the loss — there would be fines involved — so that they had just let it go and hoped it would never come back to bite them. And after all, it had been two years, hadn’t it, and nobody had blown anything up yet, at least not in Gibraltar.

“Two years?” Gideon said. “So this would have been in . . . ?”

“The fall of 2005, from an excavation job they were doing out at Catalan Bay, on the other side of the Rock.”

“And Sheila was killed in September of 2005,” Gideon said, nodding. “So it fits. Now the question is—”

“Here,” said Julie, thrusting a Scotch and soda into his hand. “Since you weren’t going to get me one, I did it myself. And I got one for you. Hi, Fausto.”

“Sorry about that, Julie,” Gideon said, taking the drink. “Fausto and I were just—”

“Gideon! Hey, my man, glad to see you here!”

And there was Lester Rizzo in the flesh, all six feet four of him, energetically pumping Gideon’s right hand and looking his normal ebullient, slightly insane, and painfully overstuffed self. It wasn’t simply that he was overweight (which he was), but that he seemed positively overinflated, as if, if you stuck him with a pin, there’d be this
whoosh
, and off he’d go, careening crazily through the air, banging into walls and furniture.

“Lester, a wonderful reception,” Gideon said, wrenching his crushed hand back. “You know Julie, and this is Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor.”