The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

SIREN SONG A KATE SHUGAK SHORT STORY by Dana Stabenow

THE WITNESS TESTIFIED in a calm, level voice, responding fully to the defense attorney’s questions but making deliberate, unhurried eye contact with the jury. Each jury member would meet her eyes briefly and then swivel their heads to look at the three defendants. The woman in the witness chair could have been any one of them, twenty years on.

The defendants were Pauline, Laura, and Linda Akulurak, ages sixteen, fifteen, and twelve, respectively. They were on trial for murder in the first degree, for the killing of their pimp, Dupré Thomas Jefferson, age twenty-eight, aka Da Prez, aka John Smith a time or two. He’d had a record going back to the age of nine, beginning in grade school in Los Angeles and migrating up the west coast of North America with him through Portland and Seattle and, lastly, Anchorage. He’d been tall and handsome, with a good deal of charm he had put to use in running a stable of prostitutes.

Jefferson dead was not quite as handsome as Jefferson alive, as the bullet that had taken his life had entered the back of his head at close range and had blown off the top of his skull. He had been asleep in his own bed at the time. The murder weapon was a.357 Magnum Smith & Wesson, found next to the body with one round fired. The method had the hallmarks of a gang hit, but the prints of all three defendants had been found on the weapon, along with the prints of the deceased. The defendants’ hands had been tested for gunshot residue, with inconclusive results.

The prosecution had rested the day before with an air of relief. The defense had recalled the investigating officer that morning, extracting without difficulty more evidence over time of many of Jefferson’s — the defense here coughed deprecatingly — family in the house at McKinley and Alder, as well as evidence of many more sets of smudged and partial prints not belonging to the defendants on the weapon. By the time the defense had excused the officer, opportunity had been extended to fifteen people, or more, if you included Da Prez’s friends, which were few, rivals, which were many, and enemies, which were legion.

The defendants followed the officer to the stand. Pauline, the eldest, was a knockout, smooth brown skin over high flat cheekbones, tilted almond eyes a deep, velvety brown, thick black hair that hung to her waist in a smooth, shining cape. She wore a dark blue shirtwaist dress with a button-down collar and long sleeves, sheer stockings, black flats, small gold hoop earrings, and the merest touch of mascara. The jury, nine of them men, watched the top button of her dress with unblinking fascination.

Laura, the middle child, wore a sequined jean jacket over a Justin Bieber T-shirt, a short pink skirt, black-and-white striped tights reminiscent of the Cat in the Hat, and yellow patent leather wedges with four-inch cork heels. Her black hair, as long and lustrous as her older sister’s, was caught up in a ponytail at the side of her head with a large powder blue plastic flower on the clasp, and she wore hot pink glitter polish on her fingernails. This time, the nine men on the jury wore indulgent smiles. For that matter, so did the three women.

Linda, the baby, favored J. Crew, a polar bear tee over cargo pants and a pair of hot pink canvas high-tops with hot pink lights in the heels that blinked hotly and pinkly with every step. Her hair, as thick and as black as her sisters’, was cut in a Dutch boy, with a line of bangs falling into her eyes. A Barbie doll dressed to match was clutched in one arm. This time, all twelve members of the jury looked angry, and they weren’t alone. The rumble of sympathetic outrage from the packed courtroom had the judge raising his gavel to a menacing angle until it subsided.

Pauline’s testimony was unemotional, factual, almost dry, but by now everyone knew how many times she had told their story, and if anything the lack of feeling engendered more pity rather than less. When the defense attorney asked her why she and her sisters had run away to Anchorage, she told him, sparing no detail of the sexual abuse visited on all three of them by their stepfather. When the defense attorney asked her why they had turned to prostitution, she said, “Why should we give it away for free? We had enough of that at home.” When the defense attorney asked her if she or her sisters had killed Da Prez, she said, “He was nice to us. We were warm and dry, and we had clean clothes. He watched out for us. Why would we kill him?”

Laura tossed her ponytail a lot. When the defense attorney asked her if she’d killed Da Prez, she said in what looked like honest indignation, “No! He was nice to us. He took us to the movies.” Tears welled up in the big brown eyes she turned on the judge. “You’re not going to let them send us back to him, are you?” The judge very nearly betrayed himself by putting out a comforting hand, and pulled it back just in time.

Linda spoke steadfastly to her Barbie doll. When the defense attorney asked her in the gentlest possible voice why she and her sisters had moved in with Jefferson, she said simply, “We were hungry. And it was cold outside.” When asked if she or her sisters had shot him, she only shook her head, her little girl hands smoothing Barbie’s blond curls.

The last witness for the defense was the woman testifying now, a Native Alaskan like the defendants, and from their own place, an enormous wilderness north and east of Anchorage, a place of isolated villages, few roads, and a population vastly outnumbered by the resident wildlife. Yes, she knew the girls’ family. Yes, she knew the girls’ parents. She told of the girls’ father, drowned while fishing in Alaganik Bay six years before, and of their mother, dead in childbirth three years before. Yes, she knew the girls’ stepfather, in whose custody the three girls had spent the two and a half years prior to running away, and related a litany of offenses in a list longer than the Domesday Book. When asked why such a person remained in charge of minor children, she made such an obvious effort not to cast an accusing look at the judge that everyone looked at him anyway. His expression was not reminiscent of pride in his profession.

The jury wasn’t out for fifteen minutes, and they came back in with a unanimous verdict of not guilty. The courtroom burst into applause. A smile spread across the judge’s face. He didn’t bother gaveling them into silence.

DFYS swept down onto the girls and enfolded them in a warm, bureaucratic embrace. The press snapped photos and updated their blogs on their smartphones. The president of a local bank posed with the girls and a very large check, which represented the donations of thousands of Alaskans, alerted to the plight of the orphans by continuous and excruciatingly detailed news coverage, including graphic details, sociological commentary, and many heartwarming photographs of the girls in their new foster home with loving and thoroughly vetted foster parents, in their new schools, and guest-judging the largest cabbage at the last Alaska State Fair.

Unnoticed, their character witness slid through the crowd to the door, where a husky-wolf mix with ears big enough to cast their own Bat-Signal waited. Next to the dog was the prosecuting attorney.

The closing doors dimmed but did not obliterate the joyous noise inside the courtroom.

“Well, Kate?” said the big man with the red hair and the food-spotted tie.

“Well what, Brendan?” she said.

He looked at the double doors that led into the courtroom. “Justice done?”

For a man who had just lost a major trial in the first segment of every television news show that evening, he looked remarkably pleased with himself.

“WHAT A CIRCUS,” Kate said. It was difficult to make herself heard over the din. “Who leaked?”

“I don’t know,” Brendan said, his face grim. He led the way through the horde of journalists, Kate following in his wake, speaking no further word until they were safe behind the door of his office. They sat and regarded each other glumly. “We’ll have to try them now,” he said.

Kate could not hide her dismay. “Even the twelve-year-old?”

“Come on, Kate. Maybe even especially the twelve-year-old. The NRA has everyone in Juneau by the balls, and you know their tagline as well as I do. Guns don’t kill people, people do. The Brady Law didn’t change that, it just ratcheted up the decibel level. They fixed it so we have to try almost anyone of almost any age who uses a firearm in the commission of a crime, and this is murder.”

She thought, but didn’t say, that there was a dedicated lack of enthusiasm to the prosecution’s entire case. Nevertheless, Brendan was right. The district attorney’s office was now firmly caught between the Scylla of public opinion and the Charybdis of political necessity, and they were going to have to trim their sails very ably indeed not to end up drowned in one or eaten alive by the other.

“BELIEVE IT OR NOT, he wasn’t that bad a guy,” Brendan said. “We hauled him in a couple of times for assaults on johns who beat up on his girls. He protected them, avenged them when he couldn’t, fed them, kept them in clean clothes, even had a GP check them out once a month. Signed the older ones up with Family Planning, if you can believe that. Paid for their abortions at a legitimate clinic. Bought condoms by the case at Costco and taught his girls how to use them.”

“Even the twelve-year-old?” Kate said.

Brendan raised a hand, palm out. “I know, and you’re right. I’m just saying. Da Prez wasn’t the worst pimp on the street, not by a long shot.”

She couldn’t argue with him. Over the past year too many Alaska Native girls, runaways from abusive family situations in Bush villages, said abuse almost invariably fueled by alcohol, had wound up on the street in Anchorage. On average, one in three of them was recruited into prostitution, and once they had been groomed, most pimps regarded them strictly as a cash-producing asset all too easily replaced by the next kid off the plane.

Brendan sighed. “The kids land in Anchorage, and they’re cold and they’re hungry and they’re lonely, and they’re hanging out at the Dimond Mall begging for change, and somebody rolls up in a Hummer and promises them the moon. Hard to turn that down.”

The FBI’s Anchorage office had recently taken a task force into the Bush to warn the elders of the trend. “They came to Niniltna,” Kate said. “The whole village turned out at the gym for their presentation.”

“It’s not like people in the villages haven’t noticed their children have been disappearing.” Brendan’s mouth twisted. “And it’s not like most of them don’t know why.” He looked up. “You know the Akuluraks?”

“Knew of them,” she said. “Obviously didn’t know enough.”

“Come on, Kate. You can’t be there for everyone.”

Her bleak expression was answer enough.

“THEY’RE FROM NINILTNA?” Brendan snatched up the phone. “Get Jim Chopin at the Niniltna trooper post for me, pronto.”

THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD HOUSE was ranch style, built on a slab with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Green patches of moss grew on the roof, but the blue paint on the siding was only just beginning to peel, and the grass was freshly mowed.

Inside, the fixtures and furniture were worn but clean. The living room had a large flat-screen television and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with DVDs, including every Disney film since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There were X-Men and World of Warcraft posters on the walls, a small Lucite box full of makeup on the coffee table, and a Barbie doll on the footrest of a recliner, her blond hair spilling over the edge. There were shoes and boots in a pile by the front door and coats, hats, and mittens tossed on chairs. Doors could be glimpsed down a hallway. Behind one of the doors someone was snoring.

Two girls sat close to each other on the couch, looking up at a third who sat on the coffee table, facing them. The.357 dwarfed her right hand, but she held it competently, the butt in a firm clasp, finger outside the guard, safety on, the barrel pointed down and away. “I know it’s been rough,” she said. “But we all agreed it was the only way.”

The little one, Linda, nodded, her expression very serious. It was Laura, the middle child, who said, hesitantly, “Can’t we just run away?”

“We talked about that, Linda.” Pauline nodded toward the hallway. “We don’t have any money, and you know he won’t let us go until men don’t want us anymore.” She picked up the remote and clicked on the television and flicked the channel to a local news show. The couple on-screen were attractive without being glamorous, and the woman, a brunette with long hair, had a motherly look to her. “I’ve been watching all the local news stations. I think this is the one.”

This time Linda squirmed. “Do we really have to tell them?” she said in a small voice.

“Yes,” Pauline said.

“Everything?” Linda said. She stared at her shoes. “Everything he made us do?”

“Everything Rod made us do, too?” Laura said, picking at her sparkly blue fingernail polish.

“Yes,” Pauline said. She muted the sound and nodded at the screen. “There’s a thing called sweeps week coming up. It measures how many people are watching every channel. It means the TV stations need lots of people to watch so they can charge more money for commercials. So they run stories they think people will watch the most.”

“And you think they’ll watch us?” Laura said.

“We’ll make them watch us,” Pauline said.

“And people will give us money?”

“Yes. We’ll get a grown-up to start us a bank account, and we’ll say we have no money, and everyone will send us some.”

“And we’ll get a real mother and father?” Linda said, still looking at her shoes.

Pauline’s eyes softened. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?” Laura said. “Are you sure they won’t make us go back to the village? Go back to …”

“I’m sure,” Pauline said. “But only if we tell them everything. The grown-ups will make someone take us, and” — she nodded at the screen — “those people will make everyone pay attention so they give us to someone good.” She put down the remote and picked up a yellow sticky note and held it out to Laura. “Here’s the number. In case it isn’t on the screen when … you know.”

“No,” Linda said, looking up. “It should be me. I should call. I’m the littlest. They’ll feel sorriest for me.”

Pauline’s eyes met Laura’s. “All right,” she said, and handed her sister the phone. “Don’t forget, leave the TV on until they come.”

She rose to her feet, the.357 held firmly at her side, and walked on steady legs down the hall.

“THEY FOUND THE AKULURAK GIRLS?” Kate said, her expression lightening. “God, that’s great, Auntie Balasha will be so relieved, I can’t wait to …” Her voice trailed away.

“It’s not so great,” Jim said, scratching behind Mutt’s ears. Mutt’s tongue lolled out of her mouth, her eyes half closed in an expression of blissful idiocy. “Brendan says they killed their pimp.”

“Their pimp?” Kate said. And then she said, “They killed him?”

“That’s not the worst of it, Kate,” he said. “Believe it or not. They say that asshole Rod Jimmieskin has been molesting them ever since their mother died. They say that’s why they ran off.”

“ISN’T THE GANG executioner’s weapon of choice usually a.22?” Kate said.

“Yeah,” Brendan said, “but the girls said the.357 was always right there on the nightstand.” He paused. “He trained the three of them on it, you know.”

“So they said.” On camera, on every channel, in every television studio in the state.

“Took them all out to the firing range. Taught them how to sight in, fire, reload. How to clean it when they came home.”

“I wonder whose idea that was,” Kate said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s kind of funny he didn’t take any of his other girls out on the firing range to practice with his personal weapon.”

“The sisters were living with him,” Brendan said. “His other girls had their own places. And he was engaged in a business that was not what you might call low risk. He wanted them to be able to protect themselves, is what they’re saying. That’s how their attorney is going to explain away the GSR. They’d been to the range the day before.”

“It is a problem,” Kate agreed.

He totally missed the irony. “He probably wanted them to be able to protect him, if it came to that.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Kate said. She read down through the case file. “Why did they call the station? Why not 911?”

“They said the television was on and the number was on the bottom of the screen.”

“Was it?”

Brendan nodded. “We looked at a tape of the news. KKAK runs a daily feature where they invite viewers to call or e-mail comments. They run the number and the address at the bottom of the screen through the whole feature. Linda said it was the first number she saw after they heard the gunshot.”

“Why did she call?”

“She was closest to the phone.”

Kate was silent for a moment. “They didn’t even run. They just sat there and waited for the cops to show. Why didn’t they run?”

He gave her a quizzical look. “Aren’t you testifying as a character witness for the defense, Kate?”

“NOTHING PERSONAL, KATE, but you look kinda grubby,” Brendan said. He sniffed. “You smell kinda grubby, too.”

“Like, no showers at the mall, man,” she said, pouring coffee into a foam cup.

His eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. The mall?”

She sat across from him. “Yeah, man, like, you know, the mall.”

He took a deep breath and let it out. “The Dimond Mall?”

“That’d be the one.” She sipped, winced, and sipped again.

“Where Da Prez picked up the Akulurak sisters.”

“Where they say he did. Funny thing.”

“What?”

“Not one of the kids I talked to remembered seeing the girls there.”

He digested this in silence for a moment. “Not the most reliable witnesses, mall rats.”

She drank more coffee. “So I spent the better part of the last five days hanging out there, Brendan. Talked to a lot of kids, and a couple of their pimps while I was at it. One of whom offered me a job, by the way. Said some of his clients liked ’em a little long in the tooth. Kinda perverted, but, hey, he had a business, he provided product for a price, whaddya gonna do.”

“Is he still living?”

“Barely.” She leaned forward, empty cup dangling from one hand. “The thing is, Brendan, they’ve all seen the Akulurak sisters on television by now. And none of them remember seeing them at the mall. Where the sisters say they hung out for a week, fighting for leftover pizza out of Round Table’s Dumpster, before Da Prez came along and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”

“Doesn’t prove anything one way or another.” He looked at her, puzzled. “Kate, they are already caught. They’re going on trial for murder on Monday. Why pick holes in their story now? What’s the point?”

She looked down at the dog, who leaned against her knee and gazed up at her with big yellow eyes. “You said he was a relatively good guy, for a pimp.”

“And you said he was still a pimp.”

She shrugged. “It’s just interesting that fresh out of the village, first time in the big city, and the girls wind up with him.”

“No,” he said, “not really. It’s what he does. Did. He had a farm team of girls from the villages, stashed in his house and a couple of duplexes. He had a Web site, Kate. He advertised them on the Internet as Thai and Vietnamese.”

“The cops had him inside for a while about six months ago,” she said. She produced a piece of paper from the hip pocket of her jeans.

He took it. It was a printout of a year-old story from the local Anchorage newspaper about an arrest for assault in the first degree made by one Dupré Thomas Jefferson, aka Da Prez. The victim was one Charles Louis Carson. Jefferson claimed he had simply been defending one Loretta Igushik, street name Sweetness. Igushik, Jefferson said, was a friend whom Carson had allegedly severely beaten in the course of a lovers’ quarrel.

Brendan said, “You mean about Carson being Senator Carson’s son?”

“Read down.”

He read some more. “You mean the quote from the unnamed source in the investigation saying at least Da Prez made sure the johns didn’t mistreat his girls?”

She stood up and hit the trash can dead center with the cup. “Swish, score, two points, big team, two points.” She looked at Brendan. “Did I mention, Brendan, that the Suulutaq Mine donated a satellite dish to the Niniltna School? And a computer for every desk in every room in the building? These days, school kids in Niniltna could log on to the International Space Station if they wanted to.”

“WELL, KATE?” said the big man with the red hair and the food-spotted tie.

“Well what, Brendan?” Kate said.

He looked at the double doors that led into the courtroom. “Justice done?”

He was looking at the doors as if he could see through them, as if the three girls were still in sight. “Brendan,” she said, “you noticed there was a majority of men on the jury, right?”

He was still watching the doors. “Huh?”

“You didn’t even use up all of your peremptory challenges. Didn’t you think it might be better to have a balance of the sexes on a jury for a case like this one? On a jury you wanted to swing your way?”

“Yeah,” he said, unheeding. “Men. Jury. Sure.”

“Yeah,” she said. “What I thought. Brendan, look at me.”

She had to say it again before he turned his head. “You want to sleep with Pauline,” she said.

He blushed and looked furtive.

“Don’t despair, you aren’t alone,” she said. “Every man on the jury felt the same way. So did the judge. And you all wanted to adopt Laura, and you all wanted to pick up your lance and mount your destrier and slay anyone who laid a hand on Linda. I’d bet large on every man who watched any of this on television feeling the same way. Barring that, I guess you can all write checks.”

His blush subsided. “So what if we did?”

“I’m just trying to answer your question,” she said.

Irresistibly, his attention returned to the doors. To them he said, “What question?”

“Was justice done,” she said, and looked at Mutt standing next to her, ears up, yellow gaze flicking between them. For a four-footed mammal with incisors of that size, justice was pretty much summed up in a “Hurt me or mine, I eat you” ethos. Come to that, the Akulurak sisters weren’t that long out of the Alaskan Bush themselves.

“What?” Brendan said.

“Never mind,” Kate said.

Her words were lost in the din when the doors opened and the Akulurak sisters walked out at the head of what had all the appearances of a parade. It included most of the members of the jury.

Kate’s eyes met Pauline’s over the crowd as it swept by. Pauline, hand in hand with her sisters, paused for one infinitesimal moment, just long enough for Kate to get the uncomfortable feeling that she could read Pauline’s mind.

What else was I supposed to do? Let Rod keep on fucking me and Laura until Linda got old enough for him? It wasn’t like we got any help, from you or anybody else. We did what we had to do to get out, and then we did what we had to do to stay out. So, yeah, we chose Prez, and we killed Prez, and we lied and said somebody busted into the house and did it, and I made sure there was enough evidence that at least I would be tried, and I made sure every single filthy thing that bastard Rod and that bastard Prez made us do was in people’s faces every minute of every day. Now we’ve got a safe place to stay and a quarter of a million dollars in a bank account, and we’re good until I’m old enough to keep house for all three of us. You got a problem with any of that?

The parade swept by, still in thrall to the siren song of the three girls at its head.

Maybe Kate didn’t have a problem with it. Maybe it was justice, of some kind.

“Come on, Mutt,” she said. “Let’s go home.”