by Stan Jones
“Can you come in here for a minute?”
With a bound she was through the bedroom doorway, hope smiling from her face. The smile faded when she saw him standing near the closet and not looking amorous in any way. She stopped and leaned against the door jamb, as if to keep her distance.
“Some of your slacks, your jeans and things, are mixed in with mine again.” He pointed into the closet where they both hung their clothes, now that Lucy was staying with him most of the time. Lucy’s dresses hung at the left end of the wooden rod, then her blouses, then her slacks and jeans. Then his trousers, then his shirts. At least, that was how it was supposed to work.
“I’m sorry.” She shrugged. “I probably wasn’t paying attention when I hung them up. I didn’t mean to crowd you.”
“I’m not saying that. It’s just - ”
“I said I was sorry.”
“I know that. But I don’t want you to think I’m an ogre. If you want to dry your bras on the shower rod, you can, or you can leave your curlers in the sink. I don’t mind.”
“I understand about the slacks, Nathan.” She moved to the closet, standing beside him now.
“It’s really just a matter of efficiency. If we have to look through each other’s clothes to find our own, well, it may take twice as long. You see?”
She looked at him, shook her head, and began rearranging the clothes. “Sure, I see. And I’m sorry I mixed them up. And now I’m putting mine back where they belong.”
Finally she pushed her things left a few inches. “There, you see. My clothes aren’t even touching yours now.”
This last came out through gritted teeth and he knew it was time, past time, to stop this idiotic discussion. He was unable to remember why he had thought it worth starting in the first place.
“I mean, it’s small.” He said. “Obviously I could live with mixed slacks if I had to, but–-”
“It’s. All. Right. Nathan.” Each word came out like a punch. “I. Under. Stand. It’s. Important. To. You.”
“No, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I could have moved the slacks myself, like I always did before.”
“No, you should bring up things that bother you. How else can we clear the air?”
“It’s just that small things accumulate.”
She stared at him hands on her hips. “Nathan, it’s only clothes. Here, I’ll move my slacks and stuff over like this…” She lifted the whole section of her slacks from the rod with one hand and with the other slid her blouses over next to his trousers. Then she hung her slacks where the blouses had been. “There, you see. My slacks, my tops, your pants, your shirts. No chance of any more mix-ups. You happy now?”
“Fine, if you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.” She shook her head emphatically. “I promise, I don’t care.”
“Good, then.”
“Good,” she said. She paused, studying the clothes. Then she looked at him, eyes squeezed almost shut.
“Good nothing!” she shouted. “Goddamn you shit this isn’t about clothes and why don’t you just say it? Its about her!”
She stumbled out and he heard her doing something under the sink in the kitchen. He walked to the bedroom doorway just as she returned with a roll of white trash bags. She peeled one off and began stuffing it with her clothes, some of them still on hangers.
“Come on, don’t do this. What are you doing?”
“Pretty soon me or my clothes won’t be mixing up your life.” She had one trash bag full now and peeled another off the roll.
“You don’t mix up my life. And when you do I like it.”
“Liar! Then why haven’t you touched me since that jailbird beauty queen of yours … ah, shit!”
Her end of the closet rod was empty now. She dragged the two bulging trash bags out to the living room, peeled a new one off the roll, and stamped into the bathroom. He heard bottles clanking into the bag as he followed her out of the bedroom, marveling that they didn’t break, marveling that there should be so many. How far in she had moved!
“Look, I’m sorry about, about … you know.” He waved a hand in the direction of the bedroom. “Maybe we could get counseling. From a minister or something.”
“Hah!” She stamped over to the telephone at the end of the sofa. “You don’t want counseling, you want Grace Palmer.”
She glared at him. “Don’t you?”
He broke the gaze. “I don’t know. She’s a murderer. Apparently. Maybe a double murderer.”
Lucy picked up the phone and dialed. “Can you send a cab to the Trooper cabin?” She said after a few seconds, “Thanks.”
“Don’t do that, it’s ridiculous. Let me drive you.”
“No thanks!” She picked up the three trash bags, dragged them into the kunnichuk, then had to wrestle with the bags to get the outer door open. “Dammit!” she said before she finally squeezed through.
She sat on the front stoop in the cold, wind-driven rain that had begun four days earlier and looked as if it might continue until it turned to snow in a few weeks. She was hunched over, head almost between her knees, shoulders shaking.
“At least wait inside till the cab comes. You’re getting wet.”
Her only answer was to twist around and slam the kunnichuk door.
He watched from the living room window, able to see just her right leg from the knee down, and occasionally her right shoulder. Finally an old Ford station wagon pulled up, a sign that said “Arctic E-Z Ride” glowing from the roof. She put her trash bags in the rear seat, got in beside the driver, and the cab pulled away as he marveled again at how much harm it was possible to do with no malice whatever.
He walked into the bedroom and studied the half-empty closet rod, tempted to drink for the first time in his life as he thought of Lucy in the cab, Jason Palmer on Cemetery Bluff, and his daughter in jail on murder charges. What if he had tried harder to bring a child sex-abuse case against the principal? Or to get Grace Palmer arrested for shoving Angie Ramos into the snowplow? Or to love Lucy Generous?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Summer drifted on, the rain and west wind becoming almost continuous.
Cowboy Decker came home from the hospital with one leg in a cast from the knee down, a diagonal furrow across his forehead where he had hit something in the Aztec’s cockpit, and a distant look in his eyes.
Willie Piqnaraq went to trial and Theresa Procopio packed his jury with elderly Inupiat men. Active watched their disbelief turn to amusement as Hughes played the videotape, and waxed indignant over the depraved acts that Willie, then sitting calmly at the defense table, had committed with Jewel, the fabled lead dog of Marcus Ashashik. Active had been much relieved and not at all surprised when the old hunters and whalers voted to let Willie Piqnaraq go.
Active was sent twice to the village of Ebrulik, once on a bad case, once on a good one.
The bad one was the result of a drunken teenage party on a sandbar on the Isignaq River. A boy, drunk, pushed a girl, also drunk, into the water. She drowned, and there was just enough evidence of intent that it was not possible to avoid charging the boy with manslaughter. He promptly pleaded guilty, against the advice of his attorney.
The good case was a result of the bad case. Two of the partygoers were so depressed by the tragedy that they not only decided to identify the bootlegger who supplied the booze for the party, but agreed to testify as well.
The bootlegger was Donnie Grant, a young Inupiaq just home from a stretch in the Army. Active brought him into Chukchi, put him in jail, and felt reasonably confident he would soon tell how the booze was getting from Chukchi to Ebrulik. Then, the Troopers would take down a bootlegging enterprise. True, it would be small and another would spring up in its place, but it would be done without the labor and expense of the Troopers mounting an undercover operation of their own.
As for the Grace Palmer case, the grapevine had it that Charlie Hughes and Theresa Procopio were wrangling endlessly over the insanity defen
se. Would Grace Palmer be sent to Anchorage for psychiatric evaluation, or would a psychiatrist be brought to Chukchi? And was one enough, or would a three-psychiatrist panel be required, as the defense was demanding? And where would the court find the money to finance it all for this virtually indigent defendant? Active stayed as far from it as possible and cultivated numbness. It made the situation at least manageable, which he supposed was the best to be hoped for.
Summer limped into fall. The rain turned into a wet snow that didn’t stay on the ground long. Then came a string of ever-shortening sunny days, hard and bright, warm at first, but colder every night until ice glazed the puddles in the mornings and the tundra rusted red-gold along the bluffs back of the lagoon.
Grace Palmer slashed her wrists in jail and was rushed to the Chukchi hospital. By the time Nathan Active heard about it and, despite himself, went to the nursing station to check on her, she was already patched up, discharged, and back in jail under a suicide watch. Active shrugged it off, resumed numbness, and focused on work.
The village plunged into its fall frenzy, the same as it had each year he had been there, the same, he assumed, as it had each year since the first ancient Inupiaq landed and raised the first tent of caribou hide on the gravel spit that would become known as Chukchi. Hammers pounded until last light, putting up new siding or new roofing. Boats pulled away from the waterfront along Beach Street, headed upriver, came back riding low with loads of Arctic char, whitefish, moose or caribou, and gallons of blueberries and salmonberries picked by the women and children as the men hunted or slept. The last cargo barge of the season dropped anchor a few miles offshore, and a fleet of smaller vessels scurried across the shoals, lightering groceries and trucks and snowmachines to the Chukchi docks in a wild, excited hurry.
From his office window, Active watched a pair of four-wheelers, their cargo racks loaded with moose meat, sputter past the Public Safety building towards the back side of town. The lucky hunters pulled up at a house on the next block, and soon the yard was full of women and children and one old man, all admiring the kill and helping unload the meat.
Active turned his attention to the folder open on his blotter, which was the bootlegging case that had grown out of the Ebrulik drowning. It was about time for another chat with Donnie Grant. Time to remind him again that he was sitting in jail while his source in Chukchi walked around scot-free, perhaps loading gear into his boat this moment for a trip upriver to hunt caribou, while Donnie’s girlfriend back in Ebrulik was no doubt doing what girlfriends traditionally did while their men were in jail.
Active’s phone chirruped and he picked it up. “Nathan,” said the voice of Jim Silver. “You got a minute? I’m up here in my office with Charlie Hughes and we’ve got a, ah, situation in the Jason Palmer case.”
“I’m really not interested. I told you everything I know already.”
“Oh, you’ll be interested in this. Trust me.”
Active sighed, told the police chief “Sure” and headed upstairs, stopping at the machine in the break room to buy a preemptive Diet Pepsi. Silver made the strongest coffee in Chukchi and insisted in serving it in Styrofoam cups in the belief that only petrochemicals could unlock the full flavor of the coffee bean.
Both men stared at him as he entered Silver’s office and set the Diet Pepsi on the edge of the chief’s battered metal desk.
“You’re not gonna believe this, Nathan,” Hughes said finally. “I don’t know if you heard, but I finally got Theresa Procopio cornered into a put-up-or-shut-up hearing on this damned insanity defense.” He looked at his watch. “It’s supposed to start in about 45 minutes.”
Active nodded, still wondering why he was there.
“You know much about the insanity defense, Nathan?”
Active shook his head.
“That’s probably because it’s rarely used,” Hughes said. “And even more rarely successful, because when it’s raised the jury almost invariably comes back with a verdict of Guilty But Mentally Ill.”
“And?”
“And off you go to a Home for the Bewildered till you get un-crazy,” Hughes said. “Then you get to serve your murder sentence. Two stretches for the price of one, sort of.”
OK,” Active said. “But why am I - ”
“So all summer I’m wondering, why are they going for insanity? Why risk it?”
“And?”
“And now I know. They weren’t risking it. They were stalling. Theresa’s filed to withdraw the insanity plea and move for dismissal.”
Active started, interested now. “On what grounds?”
“It seems they’ve got a new perp for us.”
“What? Who?”
“Ida Palmer. She’s going to confess to killing Jason.”
Active was speechless, but only for the moment it took him to realize what was going on. Then he snorted in disgust. “That’s bullshit. She’s just lying to protect her daughter. How did Grace’s fingerprints get on that gun? How did the powder residue get on her hands? Why wasn’t there any residue on Ida’s hands? You did test Ida, right?”
Hughes nodded.
“Oh, yeah,” Silver said. “Her and the kid, too, while we were at it. Both clean.”
“So all the evidence points at Grace Palmer. How are they going to explain it away?”
“I don’t know.” Hughes pulled at his chin and frowned. “But you know, that missing bullet, Jason’s fingerprints not being on the gun. I don’t like it.”
The district attorney sighed. “Maybe Grace Palmer was just decoying us away from her mother till Ida was too sick to try. That would explain why we spent the summer on this insanity nonsense.”
“Nonsense is right!”
Both men stared at Active in surprise and it occurred to him that it might be the first time either of them had heard him shout. With an effort, he continued more calmly. “This is nothing more than a dying woman lying to save her daughter. Ida’s the decoy, not Grace.”
Hughes looked at him with a skeptical expression. “You really think she could be so cold, put her mother up to something like this?”
“Absolutely,” Active said. “This is a woman who’ll go to bed with anybody for a bottle of Bacardi.”
The other two men stared at him through the difficult silence that ensued.
“But what about the suicide attempt in jail,” Hughes said. “If she was that unhinged, could she …”
“Did she slash her wrists across the veins or up and down?”
“Across,” Silver said. “That’s why she survived. You have to - ”
“- - do it longitudinally or the cuts close up again,” Active said. “She knew that. She had a friend who tried it and did it wrong and survived. She told me about it in Dutch Harbor. You can’t make any assumptions about what she’s capable of, or not capable of.”
Hughes grunted, scraped his chair backward and stood. “Well, we’re not going to figure it out sitting here. Let’s go hear what they’ve got to say.” He looked at Active for a moment. “We’d like you to tag along, too, Nathan, give us your reading after Ida’s spoken her piece, OK?”
Active felt the case, felt Grace Palmer, sucking at him again and opened his mouth to say no, then felt a surge of fury at the fox-eyed girl who could make him, make any man, believe anything.
“Wouldn’t miss it.” He rose and headed for the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The hearing on the motion to dismiss the charges against Grace Palmer took place in the state court building, across Caribou Street from the Lions Club bingo hall and a Korean hamburger joint.
Hughes attempted to have the hearing postponed, on the grounds the dismissal motion was a surprise and there hadn’t been time to prepare.
Theresa Procopio, curly-haired and intense, said she would agree to a continuance if they would let Ida Palmer give her testimony today. There was some doubt, Procopio advised the court, that Mrs. Palmer’s health would permit her to testify at a later date.
“You’re saying it’s now or never?” asked Judge David Stein, a former Legal Services lawyer who’d married a local woman and become a true Chukchi-ite, right down to the snowmachine, the boat, and the fish camp on his wife’s Native allotment up the Katonak River. Stein was clean-shaven, neat-haired, bespectacled and, at the moment, looking highly skeptical and annoyed.
Procopio nodded.
“Then maybe you should have thought of this earlier, counselor,” Stein said. “You have consumed inordinate amounts of this court’s time over the past few months with your insanity defense, not to mention considerable sums of public money flying expensive psychiatrists back and forth across Alaska. And, now, it’s ‘Never mind, we didn’t mean it’? I have to say, this miraculous last-minute confession raises some ethical questions for me, Ms. Procopio.”
“Me, too,” Hughes put in. “Your honor, I have to believe that either - -”
Stein raised a hand. “I’ll take care of this, Mr. Hughes.” He swung on the defense attorney. “Ms. Procopio, your insanity defense can hardly have been raised in good faith if you had this alleged confession in your back pocket all the time.”
“I knew nothing of it until yesterday, and the insanity defense was never my choice,” Procopio said. “Miss Palmer insisted on it, against my advice. As the court is well aware, I twice asked to be excused from representing her because of it. She’s a nightmare defendant and this is a nightmare case. Your honor will recall the suicide attempt?”
From his seat behind the railing, Active couldn’t see the nightmare’s reaction to all this, only the back of her head. Her hair, he noticed, was longer now, almost touching the collar of her blue jail denims. He wondered if they allowed lavender perfume in the Chukchi jail.
Hughes was on his feet. “Alleged suicide attempt, in our opinion, your honor. Trooper Active has told us that Miss Palmer was well aware that a transverse cut to the veins of the wrist wouldn’t inflict a life-threatening wound.”
“Now, now, Mr. Hughes, that’s not the issue before us today,” Stein said. “Our issue, one of them at least, is whether Ms. Procopio knew all along that Mrs. Palmer would be coming forward with a confession. If she did …”