A Taint in the Blood

7

After a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs, Kate found the pay phone at the Hogg Brothers and called Charlotte. Charlotte didn’t want to talk on the phone-who knew why-so Kate got directions and hopped in the car. Mutt looked at her, tail wagging expectantly, and Kate unfolded the napkin holding the rest of her bacon. “Don’t tell me I never sacrifice for you,” she told her.

Charlotte lived in a big house, of course, on Hillside, naturally, as high up as you could go and not be in Chugach State Park, it went without saying. Kate had been on Hillside before, and that she had not been carted back down in an ambulance wasn’t the fault of the person she had come to see. Her attitude increased with the altitude, and by the time she was knocking at Charlotte’s door, she had formulated an entire scenario about Charlotte Bannister Muravieff and her life and times.

Charlotte destroyed the first stereotype by answering her own door, and the second by answering it dressed in ragged gray sweats, although she was as meticulously made up as she had been when she had come to see Kate in the Park. “Please come in,” she said, standing back and motioning to Kate.

“Where did you stay?” Kate said. “I never thought to ask.”

“Where did I stay where?” Charlotte asked.

“In the Park. When you came to see me.”

Charlotte’s brow cleared. “Oh, I didn’t stay. I drove on home.”

It was sixty miles of pitted gravel just to Ahtna, and another three hundred highway miles to Anchorage, and Charlotte had left Kate’s homestead at sunset. “Did you drive there that day from Anchorage?”

“Of course.”

Kate never understood why anyone would choose to drive instead of fly, and Charlotte had to have enough money to charter her own plane. The rich really were different.

She followed Charlotte into about the biggest living room she’d ever seen, filled with light from the bank of southwest-facing windows that filled one wall. The floors were wood, the walls invisible beneath a layer of paintings, not prints, all by local artists of the very first rank, and the furniture a rich teal leather that looked as comfortable as it did classy. There were a few sheepskin rugs tossed here and there, an entertainment center with a shelf full of CDs and DVDs, and a wall full of books. There went the third stereotype-that the rich don’t read. It annoyed Kate. She wanted Charlotte to be a part of the Great Washed, the ones with more money than brains, the ones who inherited and thus never had to scramble around for the rent, the ones who said “Let them eat cake” without ever having been short of bread. In Kate’s mind, Charlotte belonged to that group of people who put twenty-four-karat-gold faucets in their bathrooms, who embraced prenuptial agreements and liposuction as sacrosanct and who regarded taxes as something someone else paid.

However, she, Kate Shugak, had an unimpeachable work ethic, and she, Kate Shugak, would fulfill her contract, thereby separating an exemplar of the Great Washed from some of that lovely, filthy lucre by that most legitimate of means, work for hire, a concept of which the Great Washed had no working- pardon the expression-knowledge.

Suffused with a righteous sense of superiority, she sat down on the indicated chair and said without preamble, “Your mother fired me.”

Charlotte looked a little startled, but she rallied. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Thank you,” Kate said, inclining her head a regal inch or thereabouts, “no. I went to see your mother yesterday, and she was not enthusiastic about you reopening her case. Let me repeat: She fired me.”

“She can’t fire you,” Charlotte said, “she didn’t hire you.”

“Yeah, well, as I told you from the outset, this whole endeavor is a long shot at best. Victoria not talking to me is not shortening the odds.”

“I told you she wouldn’t,” a voice said.

Kate looked around and saw another woman standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs. She was pudgy in form and pugnacious in manner, with a short mop of tight gray curls and a jaw like a bulldog. She wore an elegant three-piece suit, charcoal with a faint pinstripe, the hem of the skirt hitting directly at midknee. The cream-colored blouse was tied beneath her chin in a soft bow. Her eyes were brown, and they narrowed as they stared at Kate.

“Kate Shugak, allow me to introduce to you to Emily Gessner.”

Emily strode forward, the very high heels of her very narrow Italian shoes making a strong staccato statement against the wood floor. Kate saw Charlotte wince.

“Kate,” Emily said, and went to stand in back of Charlotte, placing one hand on her shoulder.

“Emily,” Kate said.

“Emily’s my attorney,” Charlotte said.

Emily rolled her eyes. “And her partner,” she said.

“You’re an attorney, too?” Kate said to Charlotte.

Emily huffed out an impatient sigh. “That’s life partner.”

She didn’t add “you moron,” but Kate could tell the temptation was almost too great to resist. “Congratulations,” Kate said.

Emily, prepared for shock and disgust, blinked a little. Pressing her advantage, Kate said, “What did you tell Charlotte?”

Emily rallied. “I told her Victoria wouldn’t talk to you.”

“You know her?”

Emily shrugged. “We’ve never met, but Charlotte’s told me a lot.”

“What kind of law do you practice?” Kate said.

“Criminal.”

“Are you a litigator?”

Emily’s smile showed all her teeth. For a moment she looked like Mutt in a bad mood.

“And in your professional opinion, do I have a hope in hell of getting Victoria a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

Emily opened her mouth to reply, but Charlotte beat her to it. “It doesn’t matter what Emily thinks. It’s what I want that matters.”

Kate sighed. “Look, Charlotte-”

“You don’t have to talk to my mother,” Charlotte said. “What about the witnesses who testified at the trial?”

“Most of them testified for the prosecution,” Kate said.

“Then most of them were lying,” Charlotte said.

Kate thought over the list of witnesses she had compiled from the trial transcript. “You realize who some of these people are?”

“What,” Emily said, “you afraid of rocking the establishment boat?”

“No,” Kate said, “I’m making sure Charlotte isn’t.”

“I want my mother out of jail,” Charlotte said flatly. “There is no way she’d try to kill my brothers. She didn’t do it, and now she’s dying, and I won’t let her die in there.”

“I have to say that Victoria didn’t look all that ill to me,” Kate said.

With jerky movements, Charlotte rose and walked over to a desk to extract a file. She almost threw it at Kate.

Kate opened it up. It was a medical report confirming Victoria’s cancer.

“They’ll let me take her out for the operation, but she’s going to have to go through chemo and radiation and she’s going to require some long-term care, and even then those toadies down at the hospital don’t think she has much of a chance. I don’t care how much it costs or whose toes you step on, I want her out of that place as soon as possible. Are you out of money yet? I can get my checkbook.” She half-rose.

“I’ve barely cashed the first check, Charlotte.”

Charlotte settled back onto the couch, sitting at its extreme edge, her back rigidly straight. Emily suddenly looked less pugnacious and more worried. “Charlotte-” Emily said.

“I want her out,” Charlotte said without looking around at her partner.

Emily met Kate’s eyes. “All right, Charlotte, we’ll get her out. Won’t we, Kate?”

“Based on the trial transcript and the police report, I don’t think we’re going to be able to prove that she didn’t do it,” Kate said, “So, Charlotte, if your mom didn’t do it, who did?”

Charlotte slumped, her face dropping into her hands. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice muffled. “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that question over and over again? Who sets out to murder two teenage boys? And why only the boys? Why not me, too?”

“Were you always supposed to go with your mother that day?”

“Yes, it was a fund-raiser for Mr. Stafford, and Mom always helped Uncle Erland when he put one of those on.”

“Too cheap to pay for catering,” Emily said to Kate.

Charlotte reddened but didn’t deny it. “It had been planned for a month.”

“And everyone knew you’d be there.”

“Yes. Mom paid me. It was part of my allowance to do stuff like that.” She paused. “And I liked doing it. It’s what I do now.”

Kate looked at Emily. “Cater,” Emily said. “At least now her uncle has to pay her for it.”

“Where is your surviving brother?”

“Oliver? He lives here in town.”

“Is he in the book?”

“He’s my partner,” Emily said.

Kate looked at her, brow raised.

Emily rolled her eyes. “My law partner,” she said.

“He’s an attorney?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said.

“A criminal attorney?” Kate said.

“Yes.”

Kate climbed into the Subaru and thought for a moment. It was a little past 10:00 a.m. Emily had promised to make an appointment for Kate to speak to Oliver, but that probably wouldn’t pan out today. Emily had wanted Kate’s cell phone number, and Kate had to admit that it would have been handy to have had one.

She could go home and make a start on the list of names and phone numbers Brendan had given her.

Instead, she drove to Bean’s Cafe, a warehouse on Third Avenue that had been converted into a soup kitchen, and inquired after Luba Hardt. A slender dark-haired woman with a calm, pretty face knew the name and told her that Luba had been in the previous Monday for lunch. The bad news was Luba looked like she was living on the street. The good news was Luba didn’t look like she’d been strung out on anything. “She mention a location?”

“Who are you?” the woman said.

“I’m from Niniltna, Luba’s village,” Kate said. “Her family heard I was coming to Anchorage and asked me to look around for her.”

“What family?”

“Billy Mike.”

The woman’s face cleared. “Sure, I know Billy. Heap big chief.”

Kate smiled. “You know him, all right. But about Luba?”

The woman shook her head. “I’m sorry. If they find a safe place to stay, they don’t usually talk about it, for fear someone is going to hear and move in on them.”

On the way out, Kate examined the faces of the people standing around, smoking and talking, all waiting for the doors to open for lunch. More than half of them were Alaska Native, mostly Aleut and Athabascan and Yupiq, from the looks of them, with maybe a few Inupiaq thrown in. Kate had an urge to cram them all into the back of the car and truck them out to Merrill and put them on planes back to their villages.

One familiar face popped out at her and she halted. “Kurt?” she said, disbelieving.

After some argument, she bundled him into the car and took him to the Bone. A redheaded waitress in a crisp white apron with a name tag that read heidi pinned to it bustled up and gave them their pick of booths.

“My treat,” Kate said, and Kurt ordered as much deep-fried chicken as you could fit in one basket. She drank coffee while he ate. He sat back when he was done and looked around like it hadn’t quite registered where he was until then. Heidi brought him coffee and smiled blindingly down at him, and he watched her walk away with appreciation, although Kate couldn’t be sure whether it was Heidi or the fried chicken that inspired it.

Kate looked out the window. The Subaru was parked right in front. Mutt was nowhere to be seen. Probably draped over the backseat, snoozing. Kate owed her a good run.

Mutt had greeted Kurt with enthusiasm, which gave Kate pause. Mutt’s built-in bullshit detector was second only to her own. Kate might have to readjust her ideas about Kurt. “So,” she said. “Kurt.”

He braced himself, both hands curled around his cup of coffee. “Kate.”

“What are you doing in town?”

He shrugged. “What you told me to do.” She looked blank, and he said, “Look for a legitimate job in Anchorage if I couldn’t find one in Niniltna.”

“That was only two days ago,” she said. “I didn’t mean you had to do something immediately.”

He shrugged again. “You confiscated my bank account.” He didn’t sound accusatory, merely factual. “Fishing’s over, and I never was much of a trapper, and anyway, Dan O’Brien’s got the Park pretty much locked up for trapping, at least for this year. Didn’t have a dime to get me through a winter in the Bush. Figured I’d give Anchorage a try.” His smile was wan. “Bigger selection of women in town anyway.”

“And first thing you wind up at Bean’s?”

He nodded. “For lunch. Sometimes people come down there looking for day labor. I figured it was worth a shot. Plus, I really don’t have any money.”

“Have you signed up at Job Service?”

He nodded. “I went straight there from Merrill.”

“And?”

“They’re not hopeful. The seasonal work’s just about over for the year, and I don’t know Microsoft Word, whatever the hell that is.” He drank coffee. “I’ll check with contractors, see if anyone’s got anything going. I hammer a pretty straight nail.”

She felt guilty, although she shouldn’t have, and she knew it. He’d been poaching bears, and endangering a species while he was at it. He’d been violating the wanton-waste law by taking only the bladders, leaving the meat and the pelt for carrion, a Class A misdemeanor. By statute, he could have been fined $2,500 and jailed for a week, no suspension or reduction in sentence allowed. Not to mention the thirteen hundred dollars he’d be ordered to pay as restitution to the state for the unlawful taking of a grizzly bear. Some people were just too dumb to live.

The question was, Was Kurt one of them? She regarded him over the rim of her coffee cup, thinking about Mutt’s greeting. “Have you got a place to stay?”

“Yeah. Buddy of mine’s got a house in Spenard. He’s letting me sleep on his floor until I get on my feet.”

Spoke well for a man that he had friends, especially solvent friends. She made up her mind and put down the cup. “I’ve got a job for you,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m on another job myself, but while I’m here, Billy Mike wants me to look for Luba Hardt. That’s what I was doing down at Bean’s.”

He reddened. She pretended not to notice. “Take a day or two, find her for me. I’ll pay you, what, eight bucks an hour, plus those expenses incurred on the job for which you provide a receipt.”

“Why eight bucks?”

Her turn to shrug. “Rounded up from minimum wage. You want the job?”

“Ten bucks an hour.”

She thought of the check she’d deposited in her account the day before. “Nine,” she said. She was willing to go to ten, but she wasn’t going to say so. Kurt had taken the easy way out from high school on. Kate wasn’t going to help perpetuate his stereotype if she could help it. Let him work for his pay, starting with bargaining for an hourly wage. And she could always give him a bonus if he did good.

He looked irresolute. “How do I find her?”

“Beats the hell out of me. She was a drinking buddy of yours in Niniltna, so chances are you’ll know better than I do where to find her in Anchorage.” He reddened again, and Kate relented enough to say, “Bean’s told me she was there for lunch on Monday.”

“So I should hang out there and wait for her to show up again?”

“I was thinking you could be a little more proactive than that, Kurt,” Kate said dryly. “Ask around. I know she has friends in town, and I know you do, too.”

“Nine dollars an hour,” he said.

She scribbled the phone number of the town house on a napkin. “Call me when you find her. Remember to keep track of your hours as well as your receipts.” She pulled out a wad of cash, counted out five hundred dollars, shoved it and the check in his direction, and stood up. “You can start with this one.”

She’d called Axenia before she left the house that morning and left a message on her cousin’s answering machine. She checked Jack’s answering machine from a pay phone and found no response.

Fine, she’d earned some personal time. She drove out to Costco and spent an hour loading up two carts with dry and canned goods, and made arrangements to have them palleted and sent to a warehouse in Ahtna that shipped into the Park. There was a woman at a kiosk selling cell phones, and Kate lingered in front of it, reading the literature and asking questions long enough for the woman to become a little impatient. In the end, the two rebates tipped the balance (she would actually make fifty dollars on the purchase) and Kate walked back to the car with a brand-new phone, which probably wouldn’t work from the Park. “Money corrupts,” she told Mutt severely, “and too much money corrupts absolutely.”

Mutt raised one bored eyebrow. Mutt wasn’t into shopping.

She drove to Twice Told Tales and spent another, much more halcyon hour browsing through the store, the resulting pile large enough to require three boxes. Kate, reaching for a book on a high shelf, couldn’t hold back a small moan. “Are you all right?” Rachel said.

“I’m fine. Sore is all. Must have overdone the exercise yesterday,” Kate said blandly, and if Rachel saw the little smile on her face, she was tactful enough not to say so.

The total due made Kate wince and Rachel smile. Kate paid extra to have most of the books mailed book rate to her post office box in Niniltna, keeping out half a dozen to read while she was in town, including two biographies, one of Shakespeare and one of Douglas Bader, the legless flying ace of World War II. Kate’s reading habits were nothing if not eclectic.

Rachel tipped her off to a good antique store and Kate returned home just after four o’clock, the gloating owner of five Wagner cast-iron skillets, each one a different size, and one glass lid that didn’t fit any of them. The cast-iron pots and pans she had inherited from her parents had been lost in the fire, and she was determined to replace them all. Apart from the sentiment, she didn’t really know how to cook in anything else.

The car Jim had parked in the drive yesterday evening was gone. Good.

She smiled to herself and went upstairs to change the sheets. When she was done, she stood for a moment looking down at the bed.

Everything she’d demanded of him, he had given. She remembered some of what he’d given and felt a wave of heat begin deep and low and spread up and out. She looked down and saw that her nipples had beaded against the fabric of her T-shirt, and she laughed out loud. The man had talent. More than that, he had consideration, not to mention courage. Most men would have been afraid to give that much. Too many men were afraid of strong women. Too many men were afraid of her.

Jim didn’t get it yet, but he was a smart man and he would eventually. In the meantime, she didn’t mind torturing him a little. She wondered how long it would take him to find an excuse to come back. Probably he had enough strength of will to stay away for a day or two, and there was always the job, which could call him away at any moment. As long as people kept misbehaving on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News, they were both in business.

Which reminded her of her own job. She looked at her watch. It was 4:30 p.m. Her stomach growled. Intensive shopping burned up bacon and eggs fast, and she’d missed lunch. Still, her body felt tender in various places, and she delayed dinner to run a hot bath. Showers were all very well, but a hot bath was good for what ailed you.

She crawled in and closed her eyes, dozing until the water cooled. One of the great things about coming to Anchorage was having a hot bath at Jack’s, all over wet, submerged up to her nostrils like a hippopotamus, her hair spreading out around her head in a floating fan.

But she had an honest-to-god bathroom in the Park now, two of them, in fact, and one even had its own tub. The realization made her a little wistful. Who was it who had said that joy was sharper when it was conditional? Oh, right. That renowned American philosopher Travis McGee, although in a much different context. Regardless, he was right. Life was made precious by the prospect of death. Baths in Anchorage had been made precious by the lack of baths in the Park. No more.

She ran more hot water into the tub and inched back down into it with a voluptuous groan. She remembered feeling like this when she and Jack had been apart for a long time, exhausted and aching in every muscle and very pleased with herself.

She thought about that. She had slept with Jim Chopin in the same bed in which she had spent many nights with Jack Morgan. She felt no shame, no sense of betrayal; in fact, if she listened closely, she thought she might hear Jack applauding, although the voyeuristic implications of that weren’t very attractive.

“I miss you, you son of a bitch,” she said out loud. “But I’m moving on.” A lone tear slid down her cheek, and she let herself slip beneath the water, allowing the curative power of heat to melt away, at least for a while, her aches and pains and guilt at being so vibrantly alive beneath sun, moon, and stars when Jack was so cold and so dead in the dark, dank ground.

She toweled off her melancholy and slipped into a pair of clean underwear and another of Jack’s blue plaid flannel shirts, of which he appeared to have had approximately two dozen, rolling the sleeves up to her elbow. Thick gray socks completed her ensemble, and she surveyed the result in the mirror, not without satisfaction. Who knew this outfit could be so seductive? Besides, high sixties or not, Anchorage was heading into fall, termination dust would be on the mountains with the next hard rain, and the nights were beginning to tend toward chilly.

She went back downstairs, opened the two-inch-thick New York strip she’d bought at City Market, dredged it in olive oil, and rolled it in a combination of herbs and garlic powder. She turned the oven on, set it for 350 degrees, put the steak in, and set the timer for an hour. A bunch of spinach in a pot with a few tablespoons of water at the bottom of it for when the steak came out of the oven and dinner would be served.

She curled up on the living room sofa with the telephone and the witness list Brendan had given her. Reminding herself to find a way of thanking him that didn’t include actual coitus, she dialed the first name on the list.

She hung up the phone when the timer went off an hour later. The steak was perfect, done to a pale pink on the inside, the oil having crisped the herbs to a nice crust. The spinach went limp five minutes after she turned on the burner and she tossed it with some red wine vinegar. She sat down at the table with a glass of apple juice and ate slowly, relishing every mouthful, as she reviewed the phone calls.

There were twenty names on Brendan’s list. Kate suspected the round number was due to Brendan’s decision to stop, rather than to the actual number of witnesses. Eight of the names were marked “Deceased” and a date of death was noted beside each, and many of the voices Kate spoke to were definitely older.

“It was all so long ago,” one woman had said fretfully. “I can barely remember what I was doing last month, let alone thirty years ago.”

“I’m headed out of town indefinitely,” one man had told her before hanging up.

“Kate Shugak?” a determinedly sultry voice had said. “Ekaterina’s grand-daughter? Your grandmother and I were very good friends; we sat on several boards together. How lovely to speak to you, dear. Perhaps you’d like to come over for dinner one evening while you’re in town. My husband would love to meet you. He’s done some work for the Raven Corporation. He’s an attorney, you know.”

One woman hung up on her. Kate checked the name for future reference. Another said strongly, “I still can’t believe Victoria could do something so horrible as to kill her own child. I don’t even want to think about it, much less describe it all over again to some stranger,” and then she hung up. Kate checked that name, too. Memories strong enough to provide either reaction were worth further investigation.

One man had said sharply, “Does Erland know about this?”

Erland was Victoria’s brother. “I don’t know, sir. I’ve been retained by his niece, Charlotte.”

There was a moment of electric silence. “What the hell does she think she’s playing at? Erland is not going to be happy about this.”

And then he hung up on her.

Kate remembered Victoria’s anger at her appearance and wondered if Charlotte had told anyone in her family what she was doing.

The phone rang as she was finishing dinner. It was Emily. “Can you come down to our offices at four-thirty P.M.?”

“Tomorrow?” Kate said, eyes going to the clock.

“Yes. Oliver has said he can see you for half an hour.”

“I’ll be there,” Kate said.

Emily gave her the address and Kate hung up.