Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  There were yells and screams. Jim went past in a streak of blue and gold, nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson drawn and ready. Dandy was right behind him with a .357 in his hand. Old Sam pulled out a Colt .45 that Kate knew for a fact had come over the Chilkoot Trail in 1898 and waved it around and from the floor it looked like someone had rolled out a cannon. Auntie Vi had a .38 and Auntie Balasha a palm-sized automatic that looked like it should have been tucked into a bra. Other weapons were flourished, although nobody seemed to be all that sure which way to point them. Every second person in the crowd was armed, which on a night when everyone would be going home late at a time of year when the bears were still up, in a state where a permit for carrying a concealed weapon was easy to come by, was not very surprising. Kate picked herself up to see Jim disarming the man she had spotted, who was carrying a handgun she didn’t recognize.

  “Are you okay?” Jim said to Kate.

  “Yeah. What is that?”

  He looked down at the gun. “A Glock. Automatic, ten rounds in the clip. Good thing you spotted him. He could have done some damage.”

  “Who is he?”

  “No ID.”

  “I told you to stay home,” Parka Man said to Anne. “But you wouldn’t listen, you godless whore.”

  “Anybody got any duct tape?” Jim said, snapping on the cuffs.

  “In my truck,” Old Sam said, “on my way.”

  “Anne!” Darlene cried, and pushed Kate out of the way so roughly that she lost her balance and came down hard on her right elbow. Kate bit back a curse.

  Darlene didn’t notice, helping Anne to her feet. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I—yes, I’m fine, Darlene, don’t fuss.” She winced.

  “What? Where are you hurt? Show me!”

  “I’m just a little bruised, I think.”

  Darlene rounded furiously on Kate. “I hired you to protect Anne. You failed. You’re fired.”

  “That’s okay,” Kate said, “you’re under arrest.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject, Kate! I said you’re fired and I meant it!”

  “Kate,” Jim said.

  “For the murders of Jeff Hosford and Paula Pawlowski,” Kate said. “Not to mention intent to murder me.”

  “Kate,” Jim said again.

  “Darlene’s maiden name is Turner. Darlene Turner Shelikof.”

  The name meant nothing to him. It did to Pete Heiman, who had come up to stand behind Jim. “Turner like the bank?”

  “Yeah. And Turner like the dance hall girl down to the Northern Light, who got murdered back in April 1915.”

  There was an electric silence. Darlene’s face turned an ugly red and without warning she launched herself at Kate, shrieking, “No! Don’t—no, it’s not true, it’s not true!” She came kicking and punching and caught Kate a good clip on her right elbow. Kate saw a little red herself and snapped out a hand to hook a finger in Darlene’s mouth, twisting her cheek hard between finger and thumb. Darlene screamed. Kate pulled her to her knees, and she went down without hesitation. Kate, elbow smarting, kept her there until Old Sam got back with the duct tape.

  “No, Darlene!” Anne cried as they taped her wrists together. “Not you, no, you couldn’t have done it!”

  Darlene smiled, or at least tried to, all the fight gone out of her. “It seems I may have, Anne.”

  “Don’t hurt her,” Anne said, sagging against the wall. “Please don’t hurt her.”

  Jim muscled Darlene and Parka Man out of the gym, which was now filled with the wondering murmur of the crowd. Pete Heiman looked around at the avidly listening crowd and said, “Gee, thanks, Kate.”

  At that moment two sets of cheerleaders cartwheeled out into the middle of the floor, followed by two teams of basketball players, and the crowd moved on to more important things.

  “Explain yourself,” Jim said.

  They were back in the conference room of the Niniltna Native Association. Darlene was huddled in a chair. Billy Mike and Anne Gordaoff were also present, Billy by virtue of having loaned them the room and Anne because she had insisted. Jim, no fool, knew he was facing down a woman who might one day be voting on the budget for the Alaska Department of Public Safety, so he let her.

  Parka Man was handcuffed to the toilet in the men’s room. He had displayed a tendency to drool when he yelled, so Jim hadn’t gagged him with duct tape for fear he might drown in his own spit. Now and then they could hear him through the air vent, bellowing something about being a tool of God and how the spawn of Satan were interfering with his mission.

  Kate folded her hands on the table in front of her, and forbore to look at Darlene, at the red fading to a bruise where Kate had snagged her like a spawning salmon. She didn’t like Darlene, she never had, but she’d known her a long time and they’d gone to school together, and, well, there was just something indecent about a strong woman being brought low. That Kate had been the one to bring her low didn’t help.

  On the other hand, Darlene had committed murder. She had committed grievous bodily harm upon Kate’s own person. Kate began to feel better, and took a moment to collect her thoughts.

  A Styrofoam cup full of coffee, heavily creamed, appeared at her elbow. She looked up, surprised. “Thanks, Jim.”

  He served Billy, too; Anne, pale and tight-lipped, waved him aside.

  “Darlene Shelikof hired Paula Pawlowski to do research for Anne Gordaoff’s campaign.” She sipped the coffee; it went down hot and strong and sweet. “What she didn’t know was that Paula Pawlowski was a writer as well as a researcher. Darlene told her to look up things about Peter Heiman that Anne Gordaoff could use in her campaign for Pete’s office. Moreover, she told Paula to research Anne’s family history, too, in case Pete had somebody doing the same thing, so the Gordaoff campaign wouldn’t be blind-sided by any dirt the other side dug up.”

  Anne looked at Darlene, who looked at no one.

  “I had dinner with Paula Pawlowski in Ahtna before she died. She loved research. She said it was addictive; you couldn’t stop once you’d started. Plus she was writing a novel about Alaska, part of which took place during the Gold Rush, and both Anne’s and Peter’s families have roots in the Gold Rush.”

  She looked at Jim. “Along the way she found out other stuff, too, like Jeff Hosford was working for a law firm connected to Pete Heiman’s campaign, and on instruction from Anne Seese, a partner in that firm who has been sleeping with Pete Heiman since before statehood, he had wooed Erin Gordaoff with a view toward getting a toehold with Anne. That succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams; he took up the post of fund-raiser.” She looked at Anne. “How’d he do, Anne?”

  Anne, looking sick and angry, said, “My daughter’s fiancé was good enough for me.”

  Kate shook her head. “So okay, at first we didn’t know who the hell killed Jeff Hosford. We knew anyone working with Eddie P. had to be bent, but there was no evidence and no witnesses.

  “His murder probably would never have been solved if Paula Pawlowski hadn’t been killed, with the same caliber bullet as Hosford. Although the ME didn’t recover enough bullet to make a solid match, I was pretty sure the same gun had done both killings. What I couldn’t figure out was, why the hell would anyone want to kill Paula? Jeff Hosford worked for Eddie P. and by definition anyone who works for Eddie P. is bent like a paper clip, but Paula Pawlowski?”

  Kate drank coffee. “Paula was a researcher, for crying out loud. And a grant writer. She dated a history teacher, who was heartbroken to hear of her death. She didn’t have any money or any possessions worth stealing, other than a laptop and some notebooks.” She looked at Darlene. “It was an accident, wasn’t it, Darlene? When she came in from Fairbanks, she told you what she’d found when you saw her at the dinner. You didn’t let on how dangerous you thought it was until you went out there in the middle of the night and tried to take the evidence from her at gunpoint. She fought you, though, didn’t she? And the gun went off and either you got scared and ran, or
the bear Gordy Boothe heard when he brought Paula home showed up and ran you off, and you didn’t have enough presence of mind to grab up the laptop on the way.”

  Kate looked at Jim. “The jails aren’t filled with smart people, are they, Jim?”

  “We found the laptop hidden on a shelf behind some books,” Jim said. “Looked like that was where she always put it when she wasn’t working on it. The notes were one shelf down.”

  Kate looked back at Darlene. “So the following day I go out to Paula’s trailer looking for something that could have got her killed. You came, too, still looking for that laptop, and you coldcocked me.”

  She dared Jim with a glare to add anything to her story. Mutt was sitting next to him, head on his knee, and she whined a little when his hand tightened in her ruff, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “So what could be so important that someone would be willing to kill for, not once but twice?” Kate looked back at Anne. “Paula was working for you, Anne. She told me she didn’t have any family, and her life was mostly her work. It had to be either the book, or you.” She drank coffee. “It turned out to be both.”

  Anne cast another anxious glance at Darlene, who had curled into as near a fetal position as she could get in her chair. “Look, Kate, I know you want to help, and I appreciate the work you’ve done, but—”

  Kate sliced her right hand in a sideways gesture, and there was something in it that made Anne shut up.

  This was what Kate hated most about politicians, the inability to recognize things as they really were instead of how they wanted them to be. “Let’s start with the book,” she said. She sat back and put her feet up on the shining red-gold surface of the teak table, ignoring Billy’s scowl.

  “It’s a pretty good book. I’ve read it, what she got done before she was murdered, in a file we recovered from Paula’s computer. Well, the most recent draft anyway. It’s all about a woman born in France in 1875 who is basically sold into slavery when she is fourteen because her parents are too poor to feed her. She falls into the hands of a gambler and a pimp in Paris, and he brings her to Seattle in 1897 when news of the Klondike strike gets out. There he has the bad judgment to try to win passage money by cheating at five-card draw, and is shot dead at the table.”

  Jim watched her, blue eyes steady and unwavering. Everyone else was silent, even Darlene, although Kate with a swift glance from beneath her lashes saw that she was still curled up, staring at nothing.

  “Our heroine decides that the only way she can make a living is by practicing the only trade she was ever taught, and at that time there was no better place to practice it than the Klondike. So she works the saloons and the dance halls of Seattle for her passage, sails for Dyea, hikes the Chilkoot Trail, and winds up in Dawson City, where on Christmas Eve of 1897 she auctions herself off to the highest-bidding miner from the stage of the Double Eagle Saloon for thirty thousand dollars.”

  Darlene began moaning again. Kate looked at her and said, “Jesus Christ, Darlene. It was a hundred years ago. She hiked up over the goddamn Chilkoot Trail, she rode the Bennett Rapids, she could have been killed half a dozen times over, all in search of a better life for herself. What is wrong with that? So what if she earned a living on her back. What else was there available to her? She’d been sold into slavery when she was barely into adolescence.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jim said. “We talking about a character in a book, here, or we talking about a real person?”

  Kate looked at Anne Gordaoff, and waited.

  It was Anne’s turn to fold her hands on the table and look fixedly at them. “I think we’re talking about my great-grandmother. Aren’t we?” She glanced at Kate.

  “You tell us.”

  “I don’t know that much about her. She died before I was born.”

  “She was murdered before you were born, you mean.”

  Anne nodded.

  “Murdered?” Jim said.

  “Murdered,” Kate said. “Back in April 1915. I’ve read the inquest, or that part of it that Paula managed to unearth and scan into her computer. She used it as a model for the inquest in her book.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Jim said, “but what has any of this got to do with the murder of Paula Pawlowski?”

  “Everything,” Kate said, and looked again at Anne. “I thought you did it at first,” she said.

  “What!” Anne raised a white face.

  “I’ve heard you talk interminably on the stump about the importance of family. I’ve seen you ignore your husband’s constant infidelities, even with your own campaign manager. I watched Hosford with your daughter for one day. He just wasn’t that good an actor, and since he was really working for Pete Heiman anyway I’m betting he was equally lousy at raising campaign funds, but you kept him on staff anyway, because he was Erin’s fiancé and that made him family. I’ve heard you say that discipline was the most important gift we can give our children, and then I run a make on your boy Tom, and I see he’s wrecked a car once a year for every year he’s been driving, and I discover you’re still buying his cars and paying his insurance. Your family’s a mess, Anne, but they are your family, and you’ve stuck by them no matter what.” Kate paused.

  “So when Paula was found murdered, and when I found out that she was writing a novel loosely based on the life of your great-grandmother, one of the all-time great good-time girls, I wondered what you would do to keep that a secret. How far would you go? Would you murder?”

  “No!” Anne said, red-faced, angry.

  “Sometimes you go too far, Kate,” Billy said.

  “No” Kate agreed, “but I had help in thinking so. Didn’t I, Darlene?”

  Darlene, laying the groundwork for a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, remained curled in her chair staring at nothing.

  “What do you mean by that, Kate?” Jim said.

  “That last threatening letter, PAY UP OR ELL TELL. And then the discovery of the ream of paper and the envelopes in Paula Pawlowski’s trailer. Darlene was trying to make it look like Paula was blackmailing Anne.”

  “Thus presenting us with a motive for murder,” Jim said. “Very neat.”

  “Very.”

  There was silence in the room.

  “But why?” Anne burst out. She got up and went to kneel in front of Darlene. “Why, Darlene? Did you think my great-grandmother working down to the Northern Light would kill my chance to win?”

  Darlene didn’t answer.

  “It’s not your great-grandmother she was worrying about,” Kate said.

  “Who then?” Anne demanded.

  Kate looked at Darlene. “Her great-grandfather. I think he killed your great-grandmother.”

  “What!”

  Kate watched Darlene, who had winced and shuddered. “No no no,” she muttered in a constant murmur, “no no no, it’s not true, it’s not, no no no.”

  “Did you know your grandmother was murdered?”

  Anne shook her head. “Nobody’s ever talked about it one way or the other. I found out she worked at the Northern Light from some old health records I found up at the clinic, ones left over from when Kanuyaq Copper was still in operation. They had a whole ledger keeping records of the treatments they prescribed to the good-time girls down at the Light. My great-grandmother’s name was one of them.”

  “Where is it? The ledger?”

  Anne flushed. “I burned it.”

  “That’s a shame,” Kate said. “Not a crime, I don’t think, but a shame to burn something so representative of a time and place. Niniltna was the good-time town for the miners up at the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and Mill. Four miles down the road, they could spend a few hours a week away from the noise and the rock dust, with all the booze and broads they could want. Paula’s research turned up records of more than a hundred working girls in Niniltna at one time.”

  “Darlene?” Anne said.

  Darlene didn’t move.

  “So yes,” Kate said, “your great-grandmother was murde
red. I think she was very, very good at her profession. I think her clientele was varied and ranged up and down the social scale, to include some of the more prominent movers and shakers of Niniltna in 1915. Remember, it was a town of fifteen hundred then, a positive metropolis by Alaskan Bush standards. They had hot and cold running water, a telephone system, central heating, all the modern conveniences. And of course a court system, with a resident judge, and a federal marshal, and a chief of police. And a district attorney.” She looked at Jim. “And they were all buddies with a banker from Fairbanks named Matthew Turner.”

  “Turner of the Last Frontier Bank Turners?”

  “The same.”

  “You’re kidding,” Billy said.

  “The very same. According to Paula’s notes, Matthew Turner owned a bank in Dawson for a while, and then followed the stampeders to Nome, where he opened up a saloon. Angel Beecham worked for him there, so they had something of a history.”

  “What makes you think he killed her?”

  “Okay, a lot of this is guesswork on my part, pieced together from Paula’s notes, and I admit filled in with other bits from her book. But the one really damning piece of evidence Paula dug up was a marriage certificate. In 1907, Matthew Turner married one Leonie Angelique Josephine Beauchamp Halvorsen. Angelique Beauchamp. Angel Beecham.”

  “He married her?”

  “It says so in the Fairbanks city records. Celebrated the twenty-second of September. Said ceremony performed by Judge Joseph D. Brittain. Two years before Brittain was transferred to Niniltna, and five years before Brittain conducted the inquest into Angel Beecham’s murder.”

  “A Turner married a prostitute?” Billy Mike couldn’t get over it.

  “Those gals married up a lot. And into some of Alaska’s finest families, too, didn’t they, Anne?” Her smile was thin, and Billy and Jim, both listening with varying degrees of reluctant fascination, winced at it “Handy, having a judge in your pocket.”

  “When was she killed?”

  “April 1915.”