“All right,” said Tama sourly, “rub it in.” He scowled again as he thought of the two husky Tahitians who worked for Ah Ping Lii. It was they who had unloaded the coffin at Nystrom’s hillside house, and both of them unhesitatingly backed up the Chinese casket maker’s fervent declaration that his brief meeting with the Swedish banker had been entirely amicable. One of them had broken into a hideous gap-toothed smile. “He even told us to come back and see it when he’d put it beside the house and filled it up with plants.” Tama snorted in disgust as he let the cool waves of the Citroën’s air conditioner lap over him. This was far from being a brilliant sally out of the office and into the field. Perhaps he should return to his paperwork after all and leave Opuu and the other policemen in the brigade to do their job, rounding up the usual bands of disaffected young delinquents and eventually wringing a confession from one of them. That, he had reluctantly to admit, was how police work was handled in Tahiti, an island where invisible men remained the illusions of his own mind...
Invisible men. Invisible men... Ha! Tama jerked his great bulk around in the seat to lay his hand on Inspector Opuu’s shoulder. There was one last trick for a master illusionist to play before turning this case over to Opuu and his team of plodding gumshoes...
“The hospital, Opuu, there’s something I want to look at again in the emergency room.”
Later that afternoon, after Tama had returned from his usual two-hour lunch break, they sat at the police chief’s gray metal desk and studied the photocopy of the emergency room’s log for the day that Charles Nystrom had died. “Here’s Nystrom,” said Tama, stabbing the page with an enormous brown finger. “His call was booked at three thirty-eight. From noontime till three thirty-eight there are three other calls logged in. And from three thirty-eight until six o’clock that evening there are another four calls.” Tama tapped his finger against the side of his face. “All right, Opuu, so you want to do routine police work? Very well. I want you to find out...”
Although it was only seven-thirty in the morning, the sun was already well above the towering green mountains of Tahiti’s rugged interior. It beat down mercilessly on the shimmering tarmac where a shiny blue and white DC-10 jetliner was being loaded with suitcases and cargo for the nine o’clock flight to Paris. Alexandre Tama stood with Inspector Opuu in the cool shade of its broad wing and watched as a red forklift slowly raised a large metal container and carefully deposited it into the dark bowels of the enormous plane.
“Poor Nystrom,” said the chief of police as he blotted the sweat that was rolling off his face, “he got to use his fancy coffin after all.”
“So at least Ah Ping Lii is happy.” Inspector Opuu snorted sardonically. “I imagine he’s the only one in this affair who is.”
“I’m happy,” said Tama, surprised. “I arrested a murderer, didn’t I?”
Opuu snorted again. “I would have gotten him just by asking around until I found out who this Nystrom woman had been sleeping with. What made you think to check out that hospital log?”
Tama tapped his temple with an index finger and favored the inspector with one of his infuriating smiles. “Just thinking like a magician, Opuu. In every trick there’s always a stooge, or misdirection, or an invisible man. Just because the first invisible man I thought of, the cabinetmaker, was the wrong one, didn’t mean there wasn’t another. And who’s more invisible than the ambulance driver who comes to pick up a patient?”
Inspector Opuu scowled. “In other words — you were just guessing.”
Tama scowled, but halfheartedly. “Well — perhaps just a teensy bit. But then I said to myself, suppose it was the ambulance driver: he’s a flashy young Niçois with lots of teeth and curly hair, everything a young woman married to an old banker might find attractive. And once the banker’s gone, this Salvetti might get to thinking, a wealthy young widow like that isn’t going to remain alone forever. Why shouldn’t her consolation be himself? The prospects didn’t look so bright when Nystrom recovered from his heart attack, but then he saw how he might be able to arrange a murder and make it look like natural causes.”
“So he called the coffin maker and told him to deliver the coffin. Everyone would think that he’d died of shock.”
“Using a woman’s voice,” agreed Tama. “That’s easy enough to do over the phone. Then he sits around in that madhouse of an emergency room where the attendants play cards and nobody answers the phone, and waits for the phone to ring. ‘Come quickly, I’m having a baby,’ says Madame Tetuanui. ‘I’ll be right there, Monsieur Nystrom,’ he says, and logs Nystrom’s name into the book.”
“And drives in his ambulance up to Pamatai, where he smothers old Nystrom and brings the body back to the hospital. Not bad,” said Opuu admiringly as the cargo hatchway above them was slammed shut. “But would Salvetti ever have admitted it if I hadn’t found that Tetuanui woman who called in an hour later to complain that the ambulance hadn’t come yet?”
Tama shrugged. “It was a nice idea he had, but like any nice magic trick, once you know how it works everything becomes pretty obvious. Now that we know it’s him, we can prove he had been Brigitte Nystrom’s lover, we can prove he didn’t go to pick up Madame Tetuanui when she called in, we can prove—”
“—but can we prove that Brigitte Nystrom was the one who asked him to murder her husband?” asked Opuu as they moved back to the departure lounge and watched the first passengers begin to climb the boarding ramps.
Tama sighed. “Not a chance. Especially now that Salvetti is screaming that she’s the one who made him do it. No jury is going to let an obvious gigolo like that shove the blame onto a helpless woman.”
“So you think she’ll get off.”
Alexandre Tama stepped to the refreshment counter of the departure lounge and ordered two coffees and four croissants. “You’re going to try to convict a woman who’s just spent a million francs to buy a coffin for her husband’s body when she could have got a pine box for five thousand?” Tama bit into the first of the croissants and shook his massive head. “No, it’s like the old coffin trick: she’ll get out of it, and she isn’t even Houdini.”
A Fool and His Money
by William Bankier
© 1994 by William Bankier
William Bankier has held a variety of part time jobs since retiring from a career in advertising to devote more time to writing fiction. His previous occupations provided seeds for several earlier EQMM stories; in this new L.A. story, he writes of something very close to him indeed, for Mr. Bankier and his wife are currently managers of an L.A. apartment complex...
It began with pain between the eyes, sharp as a knife going in. Ken Rose could taste the red wine he had been drinking, but everything else was agony. He closed his eyes and waited for the misery to stop. When it did, he said, “That was a doozie.”
“What was?” Zora was working the crossword puzzle from the Sunday Times.
“Felt like I was stabbed in the head.”