by Stan Jones
Dennis turned the picture Active’s way. “And you said no to this?”
Active nodded, and shrugged.
“This is not just … this is …” Dennis trailed off and looked at the picture.
“A gift from God,” Active muttered.
“What was that?”
“Just something her father said when he asked me to find her.” He shook his head. “Sunlight and grace, a gift from God. That’s what he called her.”
“I’ll say.” Dennis’s eyes were on the picture. “This is pitch-your-job-and-live-in-a-trailer-if-you-have-to. This is …”
“Would you?”
Dennis laid down the picture and looked out the second floor window of Gwennie’s. There was a Harley-Davidson shop across Spenard Road. Over its roof the peaks of the Alaska Range were visible a hundred miles to the west, still loaded with snow from the winter past and glittering in the morning light.
“I might.”
“But you’ve got a wife, your girls …”
“I still might, if she asked me. Some things, you don’t expect to find even once in your life, so the rules don’t apply when it does happen.” Dennis raised his cup to his lips and gazed at Active over the brim, brown eyes unreadable. “A man doesn’t turn down a gift from God.”
Active worked on his reindeer sausage for several bites, thinking how to get this back on track. He had wanted Dennis to look at the case with cop’s eyes. Instead, Grace Palmer’s face, just a picture of it, had pulled his friend into a haze of romantic fantasy, of yearning for what probably no longer existed, if it ever had, except on the surface. The same haze in which Active himself had spent two days in the Illusions.
“The problem is I’m not sure if it was business or pleasure,” he said finally.
“What?” Dennis looked startled for a moment, then picked it up and was a cop again. “Oh, I see. You ask her a few questions about Angie Ramos’s death, and the next thing you know she’s kicked out her girlfriend and you’re invited to spend the night—is that it?”
Active nodded.
“Hmm.” Now it was Dennis’s turn to think it through as he worked over the platter of calories and cholesterol. “And she’s using Angie’s identity.”
Active nodded again.
“But she has a reasonable explanation.”
Another nod.
“And there’s no evidence, no direct evidence, that Angie had any help getting in the way of that snowplow?”
Active studied his friend. “You know, when you thought it was Grace Palmer dead, you were ready to fry Angie Ramos. Now that Grace is the suspect, you’re Perry Mason for the defense.”
Dennis looked a little chagrined, but didn’t back off. “That doesn’t change the fact there’s no direct evidence Angie was pushed into that snowplow, right?”
Active shook his head. “Except for the part about the guy who supposedly called the cops on his cell phone because they were blocking traffic. I didn’t find anything about that in the files.”
“Yeah, that is odd.” Dennis pushed back his plate, now empty, and pulled his coffee front and center. “If Dispatch sent a unit when the cellphone guy called, it should have shown up about the same time as the snowplow, eh?” He raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
“Exactly. But your guys weren’t dispatched until the snowplow driver radioed in, according to Cullars’s Heavenly Doe file. I went back over it on the plane up from Dutch this morning.”
Dennis frowned in concentration. “Well, I suppose if Dispatch got the call from the cellphone guy and never sent anybody …”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Wasn’t there a blizzard that night? They probably had fender-benders all over town. It could take a while to get around to a squabble between a couple of street drunks and a motorist.”
Active shook his head. “But the call would show up on the Dispatch log, right?”
“Yeah, it would.” Dennis nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll check and let you know.”
The redheaded waitress came up just then and said, “You guys ready for your check?” Active just nodded, but Dennis engaged in a few seconds of gallantry about his willingness to check her out, or be checked out by her, any time. She went away grinning and shaking her head and Dennis asked Active where they were.
It took him a few seconds to backtrack. “We were about to go for a walk in the rain.”
Dennis nodded, and Active picked up the story and carried it all the way through the agonizing scene on the hillside above Captain’s Bay.
Dennis frowned. “So, first she invites you to spend the night, then she’s telling you all the evil things her father did to her and her sister?”
Active nodded, feeling foolish and slightly dizzy for not having put it together that way himself. “Shit.”
Dennis shrugged. “Well, the business about her father could be true, I guess. Just like her story about Angie Ramos.”
Active nodded and said, “Sure.”
“But a bitch to prove. Especially if she won’t help.”
Active nodded again. “The statute of limitations might even have run out.”
“No, I don’t think there is a statute of limitations for kiddy-diddlers,” Dennis said as the waitress returned with the tab. They pulled out their wallets and peeled bills onto the table.
Dennis stood and pulled on his cap. “What do you want to do?”
“Write up the interview and send it to you. You can give it to Homicide, let them decide if it’s a case or not.”
Dennis nodded. “Sure. But I meant about her father.”
Active frowned as he dropped Jason Palmer’s envelope of pictures back into the briefcase. “I don’t know.”
“What about this Aunt Aggie? Grace allegedly told her about it at the time?”
Active snapped his fingers. “Good point. And I think she’s coming down to Chukchi to be with the mother. Listen, can I borrow your cell?”
Dennis pulled it off his belt and Active went into the men’s room to get away from the breakfast clatter in the restaurant. He fished out his notebook and looked up the home phone number for Cowboy Decker, chief pilot at Lienhofer Aviation.
“Listen,” he said when Decker came on the line. “Did you bring Ida Palmer’s sister down from Isignaq yet?”
“Nah,” the Bush pilot said in his smoker’s rasp. “We’re waiting till we’ve got a backhaul from Isignaq so we can give the family a break on the tab. I guess the medical bills are eating them up, even with what Indian Health pays.”
“I need to talk to her. Think you could take me up there tomorrow?”
“Come to think of it, I might be able to bring her down today,” Decker said. “I’ve got to fly a surveyor up to Ebrulik this morning if our Aztec is behaving itself. Maybe I can talk Delilah into letting me go on up to Isignaq and pick Aggie up, too.”
“Just do it. The Troopers will pay,” Active said.
“That settles it, then,” Decker said. “I’ll have her in Chukchi this afternoon.”
Active returned to the table and walked downstairs with Dennis into the morning of early summer. Anchorage had been receiving a rain shower when his flight from Dutch Harbor had landed. Now the sky had cleared and a fresh breeze had sprung up from the north. Everything in sight, even Spenard, sparkled.
“So what did you get Lucy?” Dennis asked as they climbed into his blue-and-white.
“What do you mean?” Active experienced a moment of terror, and began erecting a defense. “Her birthday was two months ago. I got her a very nice - - “ He stopped when he saw the pitying look on his friend’s face.
“You’re gone all this time, half of it on your own nickel in Dutch Harbor, chasing around after the best-looking woman in Alaska, and you don’t even bring back a present?” Dennis whistled. “You’re toast.”
“I ran out of time and, anyway, Lucy’s not like that.”
“Is she female?”
Active brightened. “Maybe the gift shop at the air
port.”
Dennis gave him another pitying look. “Yeah, I bet she’s dying for a T-shirt with a moose on it. How long before that plane leaves?”
Active looked at his watch “An hour and twenty-nine minutes. That means I should check in - - “ His words were drowned out by the howl of Dennis’s siren and the screech of tires as the blue-and-white shot up Spenard Road, directly away from the airport.
A very few minutes later, Dennis pulled into a taxi zone and waved expansively at the sign on the brown brick wall of the building beside them. “Welcome to Nordstrom’s,” he said. “A friend indeed to the man in need.”
They hurried inside, deciding en route to try Lingerie first. “You can’t go wrong with lingerie,” Dennis said, “and besides, that’s where the best-looking salesgirls work.”
Active was on the point of confessing he did owe Lucy Generous some panties—one pair of exceedingly flimsy white cotton panties, to be precise—but decided there were limits to even the closest of friendships.
Instead, he contented himself with reminding Dennis how they used to come in as teenagers and pretend to look for birthday gifts for their mothers, just to see the Nordstrom salesgirls.
“Oh, yeah,” Dennis said. “You remember that blonde, Janene?”
Active remembered not only Janene’s yellow hair, but her astonishing upholstery. Even then, in the relative innocence of youth, they had suspected that parts of Janene were probably not altogether natural, which only added fuel to their lust and admiration. “That must have been, what, twelve or fifteen years ago? I wonder if even her name was real,” Active said as they started up the escalator.
“Nope,” Dennis said with the air of one privy to a great secret. “It was Wanda. Wanda Goodwin.” Active waited for the rest of the story, but Dennis only gazed idly about with a complacent smirk as the escalator groaned upward.
“All right, I’ll ask: How do you know that? You didn’t date her!”
“No, I busted her.” Dennis now wore a look of complete triumph. “Couple years ago when I was working vice. She was dancing at the Illusions and turning tricks on the side.”
Active digested this depressing news for a moment. “How’d she look?”
Dennis shook his head grimly. “Oh, Nathan, what gravity and Father Time and Wild Turkey will do to even the Janenes of this world, it … well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Or looking at. Just be glad you didn’t have to see it.”
They reached the third floor and started for the lingerie department. Active saw that it was, in the finest Nordstrom tradition, presided over by a blonde perhaps even better put together than the original Janene.
“Man, look at that,” Dennis breathed reverently. “Enough leg there to build two girls.”
“I know.” Active stopped and pulled at his friend’s arm. “I can’t do this.”
“What!” Dennis looked both astonished and outraged. “Why not?”
“I don’t know Lucy’s size.”
“So?”
“So I’m not going to go up to that woman and do this …”—he traced out the shape of an imaginary female in the air—”… and say, ‘About this big.’ “
Dennis tried to argue him into it, but Active returned a series of variations on “No way” and “Not a chance.”
“All right,” Dennis sighed, “how about some perfume? The clerks down there are as old as our mothers, but at least the only sizes are Expensive and More So.”
Active nodded and turned toward the escalator before Dennis could see the expression on his face. He rode down in near-total silence, responding only with grunts and chuckles to Dennis’s complaints about missing their opportunity to buy underwear from Janene’s successor.
By the time they reached the first floor, Active was reasonably certain nothing showed on his face, and by the time they reached the counter staffed by old ladies, he had reviewed his account to Dennis of the Dutch Harbor trip and decided there had been no mention of Grace Palmer’s perfume.
So when he asked the saleslady for it, Dennis didn’t seem shocked at all. He just said, “So this Lucy wears lavender, huh? Must be an old-fashioned kind of girl.”
PART IV
CHUKCHI
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“He’s had his breakfast. I can take you in now.”
Active put down the Sports Illustrated and got to his feet beside the nurses’ aide, a young Inupiat woman in green scrubs. She led him through the swinging doors into the Intensive Care Unit of the Chukchi Regional Hospital, then into the room housing Cowboy Decker.
Decker had steel-gray hair and normally wore a baseball cap, a leather bomber jacket, steel-framed glasses and plenty of attitude. Today, the Bush pilot lay flat on the bed, his left leg in a cast and a bandage covering his forehead and scalp, which seemed to have bled slightly into the dressing. No jacket, just a hospital gown. A monitor to the left of the bed traced out his vital signs, and an IV bag dangled from a stand on the right.
A red-eyed, exhausted-looking woman in jeans, sneakers and a sweatshirt rose from a green vinyl chair near the bed as Active came in. Active and the Deckers weren’t close friends, but he hugged the pilot’s wife anyway. “Linda, I’m so sorry. How is he? I couldn’t believe it when I heard he crashed.”
She broke the hug and sighed. “They say he’ll make it. He’s got a broken leg, maybe a concussion, probably no permanent brain damage.” She picked up her purse. “I’m going to get some sleep. When he wakes up again, tell him I’ll be back this afternoon.”
Active nodded and turned toward the bed. Decker opened his eyes as the door clicked shut behind his wife. “Hey, Nathan,” he said. “Sorry I … sorry about Aggie.”
Decker’s voice was slowed-down, though Active couldn’t tell if it was from medication or trauma. “Take it easy,” he said. “These things happen.”
“Not to me they don’t, or at least they didn’t. I, I, I guess the odds finally- -you know much about odds, Nathan?”
Active shrugged. He didn’t know exactly how to get into the subject of how the Bush pilot had managed to kill the only witness likely to corroborate any aspect of Grace Palmer’s story of paternal rape, so it wouldn’t hurt to let Decker ramble a little. If he had a concussion, he’d probably ramble regardless. “Yeah, I had some statistics in college. But we don’t much go in for probability theory in law enforcement. You’re going to put somebody away, you want certainty.”
Decker groaned a little. “Think you can raise me up here? There’s this doohickey …”
Active saw a thick white cable running under Decker’s pillow. “Hang on,” he said, easing the controller from beneath it. He found the proper button and the bed whirred until Decker’s head was elevated a foot or so.
“Yeah, that’s better,” Decker said. “Look, suppose you flip a coin nine hundred and ninety-nine times and it always comes up heads. Don’t the odds say it should come up tails next time?”
“Not if it’s an honest coin.”
Decker had to think about that for a while. “OK, say it’s honest,” he said finally.
Active nodded. “Then it’s fifty-fifty whether you get heads or tails next time. The past doesn’t matter. It’s random.”
“Random.”
Active nodded.
“Yeah, that’s what I used to think,” Decker said. “I never worried about the odds. Other than getting laid, a man’s life is about competence, right? The more experience I got, the less chance I’d screw up, that’s what I figured. I could outrun the weather, beat the goddamn airplanes and their goddamn tricks, go on forever.”
Decker fell quiet and Active used the lull to pull the green chair up to the bed. He seated himself and took out his notebook. “Look, I need to ask you some questions.”
Decker looked surprised under the bandages. “Questions? I’ll get enough of them from the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board. You, too?”
Active shrugged. “Somebody I needed to talk to is dead, is all.” He paus
ed, decided to dive in. “Did you tell Jason Palmer I asked you to go up and get Aggie Iktillik?”
“Yeah, sure,” Decker rasped. “He was going to pick her up at Lienhofer’s when I got in. So?”
“Is there any chance what happened up in Isignaq wasn’t random?”
“What are you after here, Nathan?”
“Could your Aztec have been sabotaged?”
Now Decker’s look was beyond surprise. It was pure disbelief, two hundred proof. “You didn’t hear?”
Active shrugged shook his head. “I got in yesterday afternoon and all I heard was that you crashed and Aggie Iktillik was killed. I hung around here all night waiting for you to wake up.”
Decker closed his eyes and seemed to drift off for a moment. “I tried to take off on one engine.”
“You what?” It did sound like sabotage. “You mean one of your engines quit on takeoff? What —”
Decker shook his head, his eyes still closed. “The left engine wouldn’t start. So I tried to take off on the right one.”
“You mean you taxied out with a dead engine and, and …”
“Uh-huh.”
“With Aggie in the plane.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My God, why?”
“I did it once before. I thought I could do it again.”
Active wondered if there was any point in taking the interview farther. Unless Decker was raving, Aggie Iktillik’s death had been caused by nothing more sinister than another Bush pilot with big balls and a tiny brain. Plane crashes were a leading cause of death in rural Alaska. This one, however stupid, was apparently just another in a long line of depressing statistics.
Suddenly, all Active wanted was to be out of this room, away from Cowboy Decker and this latest dead end in the search for the truth about Grace Palmer. “Look,” he said, rising from the chair. “I know you need your rest. Why don’t we - ”
“That left engine has always been funny,” Decker said, as if to himself, eyes glittering. “You get it hot and shut it down, about one time out of ten, it won’t start till it’s completely cold again. You can grind the battery right down to nothing, and you can get out and throw the propeller by hand till you get a charley horse, but the left one ain’t gonna start again that day.”