by Stan Jones
He studied the slimeliners who were close enough to make out. Five were women, two of whom, he judged, could be Filipino. Or Korean, Vietnamese, or Thai—the question was, was one of them Angie Ramos?
At the side of one of the conveyor belts, an Asian man sat at a small table, flipping through a carton of filets. He nodded to himself, heaved it onto the conveyor belt, and pulled another carton from the belt onto his table. He was halfway through it when Active walked over, showed his badge and, shouting to be heard over the din of the machinery, asked, “Are you Mr. Phan?”
The Asian looked up from the filets and studied the badge, then nodded without speaking, mistrust in his eyes. Active supposed life had taught Mr. Phan that no policeman ever brought anything good.
Active started to ask which of the women on the line was Angie Ramos, and was surprised to find his voice didn’t want to work. He swallowed twice and finally got out the name.
Mr. Phan pointed at a woman working the second table from the front, and facing away from them. She wore a purple baseball cap over her hair net and the same orange overalls as her neighbors.
“I need to talk to her.” Active shouted.
Mr. Phan frowned. “No good. Nobody to replace her. You wait for lunch break.” His voice was high-pitched, querulous, even in a shout.
Active looked at his watch. “How long?”
Mr. Phan looked at his own watch. “Five minutes. Lunchroom out there.” He pointed back through the double doors. “I tell her you looking for her.”
Active turned to leave, then glanced back at the slimeline, something about Angie Ramos plucking at the edge of his consciousness.
Just then she turned to the slimeliner on her left and he caught a glimpse of her profile as she spoke, just a glimpse, but enough to disclose something fox-like about the brows and the bridge of the nose, an odd silver gleam from the corner of the eye. He put a hand on the edge of Mr. Phan’s table to steady himself and studied the profile until—yes, there was no mistaking it—until Grace Palmer turned her attention back to the slimeline.
“You gonna be all right?” Mr. Phan said.
Active waved a hand. “Yes, yes, it’s just the smell.”
“You not puke in here, you go in john.” Mr. Phan stood and put a hand on Active’s elbow, making to walk him to the doors.
Active shook him off and hurried out and leaned against the wall until the dizziness passed. Then he started back up the hallway that had brought him to the slimeline, searching numbly for the lunch room.
Only three rooms opened off the passage. Two were marked “Men” and “Women” and the third had swinging double doors with a window at the top. He peered in and saw dining tables with orange plastic chairs, a bank of vending machines, and a semicircle of the plastic chairs and a stained brown sofa, all focused on a TV on wheeled cart. At the back of the room was a cafeteria-style tray line with food steaming in big stainless steel tubs. Whatever was for lunch had plenty of fat in it, he thought as he pushed in. The room smelled like roast turkey or pork.
A Perry Mason rerun played soundlessly on the TV. He found the remote, turned up the volume, and, still numb, watched from the sofa as the TV lawyer buffaloed another killer into standing up and blurting out a confession from the spectator seats.
How could she be alive? If she wasn’t Heavenly Doe, who was? Angie Ramos? Probably, almost certainly, but how had Grace Palmer … ?
CHAPTER TWELVE
He shook his head and started back over the whole thing, one step at a time, trying to line up the dates and remember everything in the files Dennis Johnson had dug up and everything Cullars had told him about Heavenly Doe. Then he heard footsteps and talk outside, the swish and crackle of the rubber overalls coming off and being hung on the hooks along the hall, doors slamming as, he assumed, the slimeliners went into the washrooms off the hall to clean up. In a few minutes, people began coming in, heading for the serving line at the rear. Mostly, they looked burned-out and dirty, ready for the lunch break but not too excited about it.
He had counted seven slimeliners when a pair of dark eyes flashed through the window in the lunch room door, barely visible under the bill of a purple cap. They met his for a moment, then vanished.
He jumped up and rushed to the door, vaguely aware of slimeliners stepping out of his way and staring, and pushed into the hall just as a female back vanished into the women’s room. The door slammed and he stood in the hall staring at the “Women” sign.
What to do? He had found Jason Palmer’s daughter and she was apparently well, or at least better than when Roy Palmer had seen her in the company of soldiers outside the Junction, better than when she was smashing windows on Four Street.
But she was passing as Angie Ramos, who had in all probability died three years ago in a blizzard on Four Street. Could Grace Palmer have pushed her into the path of the snowplow, taken her money and identification and - -
Through the door of the women’s room he heard, faintly, a barking sound. When he leaned closer, he realized Grace Palmer was throwing up.
He should ask her about Angie Ramos, but Heavenly Doe was APD’s problem. With some embarrassment, he realized he wanted nothing to do with it now that victim and suspect had traded places. He could clear his conscience by briefing Dennis when he passed through Anchorage, say that Grace Palmer had refused to be interviewed but was using Angie Ramos’ identity, and that Heavenly Doe was almost certainly Angie Ramos. She definitely wasn’t Grace Palmer.
Dennis could sic Homicide on the case, if he wanted to, while he, Nathan Active, went back to Chukchi and told Jason Palmer that his daughter was alive and well in the Aleutians, or at least alive. And then maybe he could get those damned fox eyes out of his head and get on with life.
But he hadn’t told her of her mother’s illness before she vanished. He decided to write her a note and leave it with Mr. Phan. He returned to the lunchroom and found a chair in a corner and opened his notebook to a blank page. He wrote “Dear Grace” and stopped. He had been thinking of her as “Grace” for days, he knew her so well from his crawl through the police records and his talk with Special Ed. But she didn’t know him at all.
Miss Palmer? Not for someone who smashed windows on Four Street, memorized forty-eight bingo cards at a glance, jabbed Special Ed in the eye with a dauber, and dropped out of sight with a dead girl’s name.
He wrote “Dear Ms. Palmer,” at the top of the page and studied it. It looked ridiculous, but it was the best he could come up with.
“Your father asked me …” He stopped as his cop genes finally kicked in and told him he should stand outside the women’s room in case murder suspect Grace Palmer made a break for it after she finished barfing. Go back to Anchorage without talking to her, perhaps taking her into custody? What had he been thinking?
He shook his head, started to rise, then froze as a pair of legs stopped across the table from him and a voice said “You’re Inupiat.”
He looked up into the face from the mural. It was older, but -- intact. That was the word that came to mind. Intact again. The missing tooth replaced, the street bloat gone, the skin slightly weathered perhaps, but still flawless except for a small, pale scar, three-quarters of an inch long, running horizontally along the right cheekbone. The eyes had regained the extraordinary luminosity, the silver gleam, they possessed in the mural, and the resentment too.
No, not resentment. It was something else, now. Self-knowledge, perhaps, or resignation—it was hard to be sure.
But just now they were impatient eyes. “You’re Inupiat,” she said again.
It wasn’t a question, but he nodded and started to rise. “I’m Na…”
“You’re from Chukchi?”
He nodded again and put out his hand. “I’m Nathan Active.”
Her own hands stayed at her sides while her eyes roamed over him, then returned to his own, narrowed for a moment, then relaxed as if she had reached a decision. “I can’t talk now. Come to the Triangle tonig
ht at seven. Bring cigarettes.” She turned and walked away. He had a vague impression of rust-colored bib overalls, Carhartts, he thought, and a red plaid shirt, then she was gone.
“Wait - - what’s the Triangle? What kind of cigarettes?” He was shouting and the slimeliners were staring again, this time grinning and raising their eyebrows knowingly at each other. He hurried after her, but she pushed through the lunchroom door and was out of sight before he reached the hallway.
His cop genes told him to go after her, until he remembered that the next flight off the island wasn’t until ten o’clock, at least according to the Air Aleutian schedule he had inadvertently committed to memory while trying to book his trip to the island. Well, if she didn’t show up at the Triangle on schedule, he could talk to the city cops, if Dutch Harbor had any, or the local Troopers, or even stake out the ten o’clock flight himself if he had to.
Driving back to the Royal Islander, he went over the conversation. Twenty words, maybe. The voice low, warm and … and what? Amused, he guessed. She had seen him, thrown up, spoken twenty words to him, x-rayed him with her eyes—and been amused by it all. And now she would talk to him at seven o’clock if he brought cigarettes to the Triangle, wherever and whatever that was.
“A bunk house,” said the clerk in the Royal Islander gift shop. She was very wide, approximately square, in fact. Her name tag said Stella, and her hair was blonde except at the roots.
“A lot of the slimeline workers stay there?”
She nodded, and he handed her the map from the rented Topaz.
She studied it a moment, then jabbed a spot south of the dimple representing Elizabeth Cove. “Down the beach about two miles. Triangle Seafoods. The bunkhouse is in back. Just look for the eagles.”
“Eagles? On the sign, you mean?”
Stella snorted. “On the dumpster. Triangle doesn’t take care of its trash right and there’s always a flock of bald eagles at the dumpster by the bunkhouse. At the outfall of the processing plant, too, when it’s running.”
“You mean our national symbol eats garbage?”
“Yep, flying rats, we call ’em. Welcome to the Illusions, pal.”
The phrase rolled around his head for a moment. “What did you say?”
“Flying rats. That’s what we call eagles around here.”
“No, the other. Welcome to what?”
“Oh, welcome to the Illusions. That’s what we call the Aleutians around here.”
He shook his head, marveling at the Four Street grapevine that had somehow learned Grace Palmer had gone to the Illusions— the islands in the North Pacific, not the strip club in Spenard— and communicated it to Special Ed, who was able to retain it, if not interpret it correctly, until he, Nathan Active, came along three years later.
“So what do they charge at the Triangle?” he asked.
She folded the map and handed it back to him. “Fifty bucks a night, no questions asked and none answered.” She gave a wheezy chortle, and pulled a cigarette from a pack somewhere behind the cash register.
“Which brand is most popular with your women customers?” He pointed at the shelves of cigarettes behind her as she lit up.
“These right here.” She pulled out her own pack and showed him. “Marlboro 100s.”
“Marlboros, huh? I thought they were for cowboys.”
“Oh, we gals just lie awake nights dreaming the Marlboro man will gallop up and carry us off on that great big horse of his.” She wheezed out another laugh in a cloud of smoke.
“Me too,” Active said after a pause.
This time the wheeze was a genuine guffaw.
“I’ll take a pack.”
She pushed it across the counter, along with a book of matches with the Royal Islander’s burgundy logo on the cover. He pushed some money back and she rang up the sale.
“But you’ll need more than a pack of Marlboros if you want to get lucky in Dutch,” she said as he turned away. “Women around here can afford to be picky.”
She was still wheezing as he opened the directory at a pay phone just off the lobby and looked up the Triangle Bunkhouse. Yes, they had a vacancy, a Hispanic woman told him, but they didn’t take reservations so he’d better get over there if he wanted a bunk.
He went to his room, packed, checked out and drove the Topaz down the shore of Captain’s Bay in the same drizzle that had been falling when he landed. The Triangle was a big complex— offices, warehouses, something that looked like a larger version of the factory at Elizabeth Cove Seafoods. He pulled between two of the buildings fronting on the bay and there behind them, just where Stella’s forefinger had indicated, was a long single-story building with a “Triangle Bunkhouse” sign on the front.
Also as Stella had predicted, three bald eagles were at work on a dumpster at the far end of the building. One, it appeared, had a strip of toilet paper caught on its talons. Another, he saw as he walked up for a closer look, had something black—it looked like chocolate frosting, or perhaps syrup—smeared along its bill and part way up the white patch on its head.
When he was about twenty feet away, the eagles noticed him and two flew off. The third, the one with the toilet paper dangling from its claws, hopped down from the dumpster, turned sideways on the gravel, aimed a fierce glare at him, and let loose a long and, even from where Active stood, smelly stream of white excrement.
He walked back up the side of the building and went in the door under the sign, into an office with nobody in sight. But a door to his left was open and he heard a television tuned to a shopping channel and someone making kitchen sounds. He was about to put his head through the door when he saw a bell on the counter, so he gave it a couple of slaps.
Soon a dark-haired woman in an apron hurried out, and checked him into Room Thirteen in the same Hispanic accent he had heard on the phone. “You want the meal plan?” she said as he pulled out his credit card. “It’s seventy-nine dollars with the meal plan.”
Since the room itself was fifty-five a day, that was twenty-four dollars for three meals. One meal, a very basic one, was around twenty-five at the Royal Islander. “Sure, sign me up,” he said.
She gave him a blue card that said “Meal Plan” and pointed to a door next to her counter. “Number Thirteen is down the hall on your left, the cafeteria is down at the end. Breakfast six to seven, lunch noon to one, dinner six to seven.” With that, she hurried back into the living quarters, closing the door behind her.
Number thirteen had three beds—a two-tiered bunk and a free-standing cot occupied by a shaving kit and a green duffel bag. He tossed his own bag and briefcase on the bottom bunk and sat down to think.
It was two-thirty now. Four and a half hours until Grace Palmer would talk to him. There was the Topaz. Now that he had found her, he wouldn’t be doing much driving. So he could return that and save himself eighty dollars a day.
Then what? There was dinner. He had paid for the Triangle’s meal plan, but dinner was at six o’clock. That meant Grace Palmer was planning to talk to him after she ate. Now that he thought of it, what would happen if she came in after her shift on the slimeline and saw him eating there, too? The sight of him had made her throw up at lunch.
He ended up driving the five miles to the airport to return the car, catching the shuttle van back to the Royal Islander, where he paid out most of thirty dollars, counting the tip, for a blackened salmon salad and a Diet Pepsi in the dining room, all for the privilege of not eating the dinner for which he had already paid some fraction of twenty-four dollars at the Triangle. And then there was a fifteen-dollar cab ride back to the Triangle.
At five minutes before seven, he was back in Number 13, digging into his briefcase for the Marlboro 100s and the burgundy matchbook from the Royal Islander, sliding them into a pocket of his windbreaker and walking down the windowless tunnel-like hallway to the cafeteria.
When he pushed through the swinging doors, three tables were still occupied, one by two bearded young men in blue coveralls that sa
id “Aleutian Seafoods,” one by a stocky, short-haired woman in jeans and sweatshirt who was reading a John Grisham paperback, and one, in a corner, by Grace Palmer, who was staring at a plate of untouched meat loaf and mashed potatoes. She glanced up, met his eyes briefly, and returned her gaze to the plate.
He walked over, sat down across from her, and put out his hand. “Nathan Active.” She was still in the Carhartts and purple cap, and smelled slightly of the slimeline.
She kept her hands in her lap. “I’m Angie Ramos.”
That stopped him for several seconds. Why, after accusing him of being an Inupiaq from Chukchi, would she pretend to be Filipino? She certainly didn’t look Filipino. “No, you’re Grace Palmer.”
Now it was her turn for a long silence. Finally, “Did you bring the cigarettes?”
He pulled the cigarettes and matchbook from his windbreaker and pushed them across the table. “Hope you like Marlboros.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She glanced up with what he thought was a mixture of contempt and irritation, then picked open the cigarette pack. She lit up and took a long, deep drag, eyes closed, cheeks going concave. “She’s dead. Maybe she should stay that way.”
It took him another long silence to realize she was responding, finally, to his challenge on the subject of her identity. “She looks very much alive to me, even if she doesn’t have much of an appetite.”
Her lips curved slightly in what could have been a suppressed smile. She said “Ah-hmmmph” and dropped a little cylinder of ash onto the shiny skin forming on the gravy over the mashed potatoes. “You’re a cop.”
“I’m an Alaska State Trooper.”
Her eyes flicked over him, then back to her plate. “You’re not in uniform.”