Frozen Sun

by Stan Jones

  Whereupon Officers Tedrow and Amundsen advised subject to leave Aurora Bingo or be arrested for trespass and for assaulting Noyuk with the dauber. In response to which subject had—with a fine impartiality, Active thought—advised Tedrow and Amundsen to go out behind Aurora Bingo and give each other blow jobs, but had, in fact, left the premises and was last seen proceeding north along C Street.

  No mug shot and no arrest, which explained why there was no court system file on the dauber-jabbing.

  “Can you make any sense out of this?” Active pushed the file over to Dennis, who scanned it quickly, already having caught most of it over Active’s shoulder. Dennis scratched his cheek and frowned. “I don’t know why you’d get banned for memorizing bingo cards.”

  “Maybe you can cheat that way?”

  Dennis shook his head. “I don’t see how. The little balls just pop out of the cage at random. Memorizing the cards wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Well, what’s a dauber, then?”

  “You don’t know what a dauber is? Don’t they have bingo in Chukchi?”

  “Of course. It’s a religion in the Bush, like basketball. But I never go, except to drop Lucy’s grandmother off once in a while.”

  Dennis’s eyes lit up and Active knew instantly he had made a tactical blunder by mentioning Lucy Generous to Dennis, to whom he had previously said nothing about his social life in village. It was too late now, and Dennis dragged the story out of him, not every detail but enough for Dennis to fill in the blanks and eventually demand, with an air of triumph, “So you’re saying this Lucy does keep, like, a hair dryer and a couple of bras at your place?”

  Active nodded, feeling obscurely embarrassed by something he knew shouldn’t embarrass him at all, something perfectly normal and natural. Well, at least Dennis hadn’t coaxed out anything about the fight over Grace Palmer, Active was thinking when Dennis asked, “Got a picture of her?”

  He pulled out his wallet and showed Dennis the little snapshot Lucy had given him the day she asked for one of himself. He had been reluctant to take hers or give his own, it was another step down some road he didn’t know or trust, but he had gone along because … why did he go along? He didn’t know.

  “Nice,” Dennis said. “Very nice.”

  Active took the picture and studied it. Lucy did look very nice. Bundled up in a parka, big wolf ruff like a sunburst thrown back on her shoulders, soft winter daylight bathing her face, smiling eyes, smiling lips.

  “Yep, I’d hang onto her,” Dennis said. “She looks much better than Grace Palmer does now.”

  He knew Dennis was referring to the last mug shot, the shot of the bloated, gap-toothed Grace Palmer, but his eyes involuntarily fell to the Miss North World Shot, uncovered again as they had worked through the files.

  “Mind your own business,” he said as lightly as he could. “Just tell me what the hell a dauber is.”

  “It’s this kind of felt-tip thingie they mark their bingo cards with.” Dennis made dotting motions with an imaginary dauber. “You know, I-twenty seven, O-sixty-nine. When the daubs line up right, a diamond or an X or whatever you have to make for that game, you got yourself a Bingo.”

  “Sounds challenging.”

  “Oh, yeah, very. Why do you think drunks and street people can play it?”

  “A dauber doesn’t sound like much of a weapon, though.”

  “Maybe that’s why the bingo runner let her off the hook.”

  Active checked the date of the bingo file, the last trace of Amazing Grace Palmer in the records of the Anchorage Police Department. “Pretty cold trail. This file’s over three years old.”

  “Yep, but there’s always Ludovic,” Dennis said.

  “Who’s Ludovic?”

  Dennis stood. “Follow me. The files will be OK here for a while.”

  He led the way down the hall to an open area with a half-dozen computers in it. Women in civilian clothes—records clerks, Active guessed—were hunched over two of them.

  “All right if we use one of your terminals, Karla?” Dennis asked the older of the women.

  Karla didn’t look up from her screen. She just put a Kleenex to her nose and sneezed. “Fuckig hay fever. I hate it when trees fuck.”

  Then she waved a hand vaguely at one of the vacant machines. “Go ahead,” she muttered. “They’re all workig todight.”

  Dennis sat at one of the terminals and logged on. “You don’t have Ludovic in Chukchi?”

  “Never heard of him,” Active peered over Dennis’s shoulder as a dense text menu came up. “Or it. I guess the Troopers are too cheap, or too broke. What is it?”

  Dennis typed something at the bottom of the screen, and another screen came up with fields for last name, first name, middle name. “Ludovic is this nerd downtown who buys tapes of every public record the state creates. Somehow he merges it all into one huge database. Driver’s license, hunting license, court cases, Oil Dividend applications, if it’s not confidential by law, Ludovic’s got it.”

  Active whistled softly. “Big Brother, huh?”

  “Absolutely. We tried to compile something like this, the ACLU would be all over us. But Ludovic’s the private sector, so he can get away with it, which means we can get at it by paying his fee, and the good old ACLU can’t do a damned thing about it.” Dennis as he talked had typed in “PALMER, GRACE.”

  “That oughta do it.” Dennis pressed ENTER and the screen blanked for a few seconds, then blinked and scrolled out several lines of data.

  Now it was Dennis’s turn to whistle. “She doesn’t leave much of a trail. Never had a driver’s license apparently, never hunted or fished, just the court cases we already looked at and Oil Dividend applications up till four years ago.”

  “None after that?”

  “She probably stopped applying when her dividends were seized to pay for the windows she smashed.”

  “Of course. Can we pull up the last application?”

  Dennis nodded, pressed a key, and a summary came up with Grace Palmer’s name on it, followed by an address and room number on East 16th Avenue. “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, rough neighborhood, all right.”

  “Especially that address, “ Dennis said. “The Creekview Apartment. It’s a flophouse the street people use when they get a few bucks or the weather gets real cold. Even if they don’t live there, the owner will let ‘em get their dividend check there and then cash it for them, minus a hundred bucks for his trouble.”

  “Maybe we ought to have a talk with him.”

  “Yeah, probably.” Dennis pressed a key and the printer beside the terminal whirred to life. “I could pay him a visit while I’m on patrol tomorrow, show him the picture, see if he’s heard from her lately.”

  Active pulled the Oil Dividend information from the printer. He nudged Dennis. “See this? Looks like she had a couple roommates that applied at the same time.”

  Dennis nodded. “Maybe. Or maybe they were all just paying the hundred bucks to get their dividends there. They may not even have known each other.”

  Active studied the names. “Shaneesha Prather, Angelina Ramos. Ever run across them?”

  Dennis took the paper and sounded the names to himself. “Don’t think so.”

  “Should we look them up?”

  “We could, but they’re not gonna be any easier to find than your beauty queen. You know how it is with these people off Four Street. “

  Active shrugged. “Yeah. I’ll just throw it in the file, I guess.”

  They walked back to the interview room and Active squared the files into a neat stack, then slipped the Oil Dividend printout into the last folder, the one from Grace Palmer’s visits to Aurora Bingo. “All right if I keep these a few days?”

  “Sure, just don’t lose ‘em. I had to sign for them.”

  They went back down the hall and out past the watch window, where Active smiled his thanks to the dispatch officer and surrendered his visitor badge. Then they stepped into the spring sun, s
till just above the snow peaks across Cook Inlet to the west of Anchorage.

  “You want to come by the house?” Dennis asked. “Francie would love to see you. And the girls, you wouldn’t believe how big they are now. I remember when I could …”

  He held out one big dark hand and cupped it as if cradling a kitten, then shook his head.

  “Thanks, but I better get over to the folks’ place. I don’t check in pretty soon, Carmen will be calling your people out to look for me.”

  They were stopped now at Active’s rental car.

  “How about tomorrow night? Come over for a quick dinner, then play some hockey? We’ve got a game at six and somebody’s sure to turn up missing or get a busted lip or something. Anchorage’s Finest can always use another player.”

  “I’ll pass,” Active said. “I think I’ll drop in at Aurora Bingo and see if I can find Edward Noyuk. According to your files, he was the last person we know of to see Grace Palmer, ah, ah, to see her.”

  Dennis looked at him oddly, and Active guessed he had noticed the hesitation. He wondered if Dennis had figured out that what he had almost said was, “last person to see Grace Palmer alive.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Aurora Bingo took up a long, low storefront on the north side of Northern Lights Boulevard. The windows glinted in the slanting evening sun as Active pulled in a little after seven the next day. That no doubt explained the plastic blackout curtains over the glass, that and the fear of reminding players they were whiling away the precious summer daylight on bingo and Rippies.

  As he parked and locked the rental, Active tried to remember what had been in the building before Aurora Bingo. Some kind of weird Alaskan department store. Muskeg Outfitters, that was it. The Muskeg had sold a little of everything, from ladies’ underwear to the big white inflatable bunny boots men would buy when they hired on for the winter with a North Slope seismic crew. The Muskeg had been the official dealer for Cub Scout merchandise, so young Nathan Active had been marched in once a year by his adoptive mother to be fitted out with a new uniform.

  The Muskeg was long gone, now, wiped out as Anchorage fattened up on oil money and the big stores—Fred Meyer, Wal-Mart, Costco—heard the news and moved in. But what was the Muskeg slogan that had been on the radio a hundred times a day when he was a kid? He shook his head, unable to remember it.

  He went in and paused just inside the door to survey the big room. Off to his left was a small stage with the caller’s booth where bingo balls churned around in a Plexiglas cage. Whenever one whooshed out the top, the number would pop up on television monitors scattered around the big room and then a scrawny little long-haired Native guy, an Eskimo, Active thought, would call it out over the public-address system.

  The players sat at long tables on the floor in front of the stage, daubing away at paper sheets with—Active looked over the shoulder of the nearest player to count—with six bingo cards printed on each sheet. Occasionally, one would raise a hand to draw a runner over and buy more sheets.

  The faces were mostly dark like his own, or darker—Native, Asian, Hispanic or black. And the players had another thing in common: working-class clothes. Aurora Bingo was a sea of jeans, khakis, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and sweatpants; baseball caps and cowboy boots and sneakers; tattoos on the men, big hair on a lot of the women, and here and there an aana in the traditional calico summer parka called an atikluk.

  A Plexiglas partition divided the big room into two parts. The section Active was in, nearest the door, took up about two-thirds of the space. He studied the layout for a few moments before he understood the purpose: His section was filled with smoke and smokers; a sign on the partition declared the other a “Smoke Free Bingo Zone.”

  The back wall was taken up by a concession stand where pretzels and hot dogs baked under heat lamps, and by a counter where two women sold bingo sheets. In between were the restrooms, and a little booth where two more women sold Rippies, the little cardboard strips that peeled apart to show slot-machine symbols and paid off accordingly. The Rippie business looked pretty slow at the moment, though, what with the players all hunched over their bingo sheets in fierce concentration as the balls rolled out of the cage and the caller sounded the numbers.

  He walked to the counter at the back of the room and waited until one of the women was free. She was Asian, maybe Filipino, he thought. “Is that by any chance Edward Noyuk up there?” He pointed at the caller in the booth.

  The Filipina laughed. “Yeah, but around here we call him Special Ed.”

  “Special Ed? Why’s that?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. That’s just what he goes by.”

  “How long till the intermission?

  She looked at her watch. “Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “How much for a sheet?”

  “Just one sheet? Fifty cents.”

  He nodded and pushed a dollar bill across the counter. She pushed back two quarters in change.

  “What color you want?” She pointed at the stacks of sheets on the counter. Each stack was printed in a different background color: brown, red, green and several others he couldn’t name, probably mauve and puce and teal and other indeterminate hues understood only by women and interior decorators.

  “Well, what do you recommend?”

  She stared at him and shook her head, looking irritated. “Each game is a different color. See?” She handed him a printed list of the games for the current session. “They’re on number five now. That’s the olive game. Then number six is the Red Game and then there’s intermission.”

  “All right, red, then.”

  She peeled a sheet off the red stack, placed it in front of him, and put the list of games on top of it. “You need a dauber?” She held up a green bottle about the thickness of a garden hose. “It’s a dollar-fifty.”

  He pulled out another bill and added it to the quarters still lying on the counter. She put the dauber on the list of games and raked in the dollar-fifty.

  Active nodded, thanked her, collected his bingo gear and walked towards the booth, planning to watch Special Ed in action. But as he got close, he realized the smoke rising from the players like a valley of fumaroles was too thick. He walked around the end of the partition into the smoke-free zone and found a seat near one of the calico-clad aanas just as someone in the smoking section cried “Bingo!” A runner left the booth to check the winner’s card against the display screens around the room.

  The old lady was round-shouldered with age, gray hair sticking out in all directions. She sat next to an obese young Native woman in Anchorage clothes, probably a granddaughter, Active judged, and it was clear from the aana’s calico and their features that they were Eskimo. But they didn’t look Inupiat and the language the old lady spoke to the granddaughter as they readied their sheets for the Red Game didn’t sound like Inupiaq. He decided they must be Yup’ik, the branch of the Eskimo family tree that occupied the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, south of Chukchi and the other Inupiat parts of Alaska. They had four sheets apiece, he noticed, making him feel rather inadequate about his single sheet.

  He uncapped his dauber and tested it on the back of his red sheet. It left a nickel-sized blob of green, and he figured he was ready for his first bingo game as the first ball popped out of the cage and Special Ed called out “O-seventy-four, O-seventy-four.”

  Only one of the six cards on his sheet had an O-seventy-four, in the upper right corner, so he put a green blob there and waited for the next number. The old lady growled something in Yu’pik to the granddaughter and he looked up to see the aana glaring at him.

  The granddaughter shook her head, shrank down inside a hooded white sweatshirt, and stared at her bingo sheets. The old lady spat tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup sitting near her own sheets and repeated the growl. This time she apparently elbowed the girl, because the granddaughter jumped and said, “Ouch” and leaned toward Active, face aflame.

  “My grandmother told me to tell you, you do
n’t mark the corners and don’t you know anything?” The girl returned her eyes to her bingo sheets. “I’m sorry, but my grandmother is very old-fashioned.”

  Active studied his own sheet, and the nearest TV monitor, which clearly displayed O-seventy-four as the first number of the game. “But that’s what he called, O-seventy-four,” Active said. He pointed to the green blob he had made.

  “This is the Big Diamond game.” The girl pointed to the Number Six game on his list, which indeed had the words “Big Diamond” beside it, along with a diagram showing that you had to get enough daubs to make a big diamond in the middle of the card to win.

  “See, the corners of the card are outside the diamond,” she said. “So you don’t mark anything there, even if it gets called.”

  He started to say “Well, why on earth does it matter?” but looked up into the old lady’s glare again and thought better of it. “Tell your grandmother I’m very grateful for her help,” he said instead.

  The girl nodded and spoke to her grandmother in Yu’pik just as Special Ed called out G-fifty-four, the second number of the Red Game, the Big Diamond game.

  G-fifty-four was inside the big diamond area on two of Active’s cards, so he daubed them in. It was outside the diamond on a third card and he almost daubed that one in, too, before remembering his bingo manners. He looked up and nodded to the old aana, who returned an approving smile and shot another jet of tobacco juice into her cup.

  The Red Game ended with somebody in the smoking section calling out “Bingo!” The aana crumpled up her red sheets and growled something to the granddaughter, then they stood and moved towards the back of room. The girl stopped at the concession stand, but the aana continued on to the Rippies booth.

  Active walked around the partition into the smoking section and up to the booth where Special Ed was putting the bingo balls back into their cage and getting things organized for Game Seven, which, if Active remembered correctly, was the Blue Game. Up close, Special Ed looked even scrawnier than he had from a distance, with long hair, a droopy Pancho Villa mustache and an Aurora Bingo T-shirt. One skinny forearm bore a tattoo of the Harley-Davidson wings.