by Stan Jones
“No shit,” Silver chimed in. “Whole damned system’s going to the dogs.” He raised a Styrofoam cup to his lips to mask his own smile, but ended up snorting a blast of coffee out his nose, at which point he and Active burst into helpless laughter, all the tension and stress of the day and of the tangled, twisted Grace Palmer case coming out of them in huge, belly-deep guffaws.
“Jesus,” Hughes said. “Who did I piss off to get sent up here with you morons? This is serious.”
Active finally calmed down and tried to look serious. “All right, so what about Ida, then? Easy conviction, right?”
Hughes grimaced. “Fat chance. No jury’s going to convict a dying woman, in the unlikely event she ever gets well enough to stand trial.”
“But she just confessed,” Active said.
“Trust me on this one,” Hughes said. “A jury will be very sympathetic to a woman with terminal cancer in a wheelchair accused of shooting her husband to protect a little girl from being molested. Theresa Procopio will get at least a hung jury.”
Active shook his head. “She’s representing both of them?”
“If Ida Palmer is charged, yes. That’s what she said on the way out today.”
“Can she do that?”
Hughes shrugged. “The Chukchi defense bar consists of exactly one attorney: Theresa Procopio. I could raise a little hell about it if we ever get to trial, but we probably aren’t going to, and, if we do I probably won’t.”
“Well, one of them surely did it,” Active said. “You have to do something.”
Hughes rested his elbows on Active’s desk and studied the casing in its baggie. “I think I’ll go along with Theresa’s motion to drop the charges against Grace, then get an indictment against Ida and suspend proceedings until she’s well enough to stand trial, which is obviously going to be never, and release her into the custody of … well, the hospital, I guess.”
Active shook his head in despair. “Come on, you know Grace did it. She’s smarter than God and she’s always run circles around me.” He grabbed the baggie and shook the casing at them again. “Now she’s doing it to you guys, too, and you’re letting her.”
Hughes shrugged. “I don’t know she did it and, like I said, I’m fucked either way. At least this’ll clear the books and I won’t have another damned acquittal on my record. Kind of a nice package, actually.”
Active looked around the office for inspiration and suddenly remembered, “At least check on the Angie Ramos case before you pull the plug here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of you has something the other one can use for leverage. Maybe the Anchorage cops have been talking to the people Grace was with on Four Street before she came up here and one of them heard her say something about going home to kill her father.”
“Nah.” Hughes grimaced and waved a hand dismissively. “Not worth the time and trouble. Let it go, Nathan.”
“Well, then, I’ll call them.” He reached for his phone, punched the speaker button so they could all hear, then noticed the watch on his wrist. It was now after six, and dark outside except for splotches of orange-white where the street lights hit the sparse falltime snow cover. His shoulders sagged. “Sorry, it’ll have to be tomorrow, I guess.”
“Yeah, well, call me if you turn up anything,” Hughes said. “Just do it before I have to go in front of Stein again at eleven o’clock.”
Hughes and Silver stood, scraping their chairs back.
“Don’t mind if we take this, do you?” Silver plucked the baggie and casing from the desk blotter.
“Don’t worry,” Hughes said. “We’ll give it back when this is all over. Kind of a souvenir.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dennis Johnson didn’t answer his desk line the next morning, but Active did catch him on his cell phone.
“So where’s the Angie Ramos case?” Active asked after they got the whatcha-been-up-tos out of the way.
“Don’t you rem - - oh, shit, I forgot to call you, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”
“What?” Active’s throat was so tight the word came out in an adolescent bleat.
“Your beauty queen’s off the hook. Cullars came through.”
“Cullars? The missing persons guy? No.”
“Yep, he found the dispatch logs from the night Angie Ramos was killed. Well, he didn’t exactly find ‘em. What he did was, he calls up Records one day and says, ‘When you guys gonna get these archive boxes outta my basement?’ “
“You mean - - “
“Yep, the logs were there all along. The same boxes that were in the hall when we went to see him.”
“Geez, that must have impressed the chief.”
“Oh, yeah. The head of Records actually got a reprimand in his personnel file. We all thought it was just a rumor till somebody leaked a copy to the Anchorage Daily News and it made the Alaska Ear.”
“So Grace Palmer’s really off the hook? The Dispatch log supported her story?”
Dennis chuckled. “Did it ever. Turns out the guy on the cell phone called back about ninety seconds after the first call, said one of the women had left the scene, the bitchy one who said he should give himself a blow job, and was about half a block up Four Street and was going to get clean away if we didn’t start acting like cops instead of bureaucrats.”
“I guess that pretty much settles it,” Active said.
“More than, in Lieutenant Boardman’s opinion,” Dennis said. “He sends his love to the Trooper hotshot and says he’s faxing your boss a bill for all the APD time you wasted on this wild goose chase.”
“I was just following it to its logical end.”
“Yeah, right. Well, you might wanna break the news to your beauty queen. Homicide might get around to calling her about it or they might not.”
“I’ll let her know.”
“How’s that thing up there going, anyway? She really shoot her old man for messing with her when she was a kid?”
Active switched ears with the phone, and was silent so long Dennis said, “Hey, buddy, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Actually, her mother confessed to it yesterday.”
“Really? I thought you said she was real sick–lung cancer or something.”
“Liver. But she was more or less in remission at the time of the shooting.”
Dennis whistled. “That’s some tough women you Eskimos raise. I’d grab one if I was you.”
“When I need advice - ”
“One in particular.”
“Yeah.”
“Now that she’s not a double murderer anymore.”
“Yeah.”
“So long buddy.”
“Yeah, so long.”
Active hung up and sat silently at his desk for a long time. Finally he left the office and climbed to the top floor of the public safety building where the city maintained its little jail. An Inupiat matron let him into Grace’s cell.
She put down a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and smiled. “Sorry about the casing.”
He looked away. “The Anchorage police have cleared you in Angie Ramos’s death. They finally found the dispatch logs from that night with the cell phone call about you and Angie. Two calls actually. The guy called a second time to report you were leaving the scene and the cops better hurry if they wanted to get both of you.”
“Now aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
He turned and stared at her until she looked away to fold down the corner of her page and close the book.
“Look at me,” he said.
She turned the fox eyes on him again.
“Who killed your father?”
The eyes were open wide, unblinking, unwavering. “My mother.”
He held the gaze a few seconds, then nodded and left.
Back in his office, he dialed Charlie Hughes’ number and told the prosecutor Grace Palmer had been cleared in the Anchorage case.
Hughes breathed a relieved-sounding sigh and said he’d also drop his charges a
gainst Grace Palmer and get an indictment against Ida Palmer, then seal it and do nothing further unless the widow miraculously regained sufficient health to stand trial.
“So Grace is really in the clear? Under your theory of the case, she obstructed justice to protect her mother, you know.”
“Leave the woman alone, Nathan. I’ve got better things to do with the People’s resources than torment Grace Palmer.”
“And she committed Oil Dividend fraud in Dutch Harbor.”
Hughes sighed again. “I don’t want to hear about it. Call the DA in Dutch Harbor.”
“Well, you’re my official point of contact with the criminal division.”
“All right, you did your duty. You reported her. Your conscience is clear.”
Time resumed its drift for Nathan Active, the landscape becoming whiter, the days shorter, until the first blizzard of winter blew up from the Bering Sea to the south of Chukchi. For two days and nights the village was locked down as tight as though it were still a huddled cluster of sod and driftwood huts with seal-gut skylights. No jets in or out, the charter fleet grounded, not even the canniest old hunters venturing out by snowmachine.
The third day broke to dying winds and clearing skies and a village drowned in white, long fat dunes of perfect titanium white, blue in the shadows, that stretched downwind from the buildings, hundreds of feet downwind in the cases of the high school and the National Guard Armory and the other big buildings. By midmorning he heard a roar from the direction of the airport as the first jet after the blizzard touched down and the pilot hit the thrust reversers. By noon the city snowplows had the street in front of his cabin open. After lunch, he dug the Suburban out of its snowdrift and was on his way back to the office when he heard on Kay-Chuck that Ida Palmer had died during the blizzard and would be buried in two days on Cemetery Bluff across the lagoon from Chukchi.
The announcer reminded her audience of Jason Palmer’s recent demise, of the charges leveled against his daughter, then dropped, of the mother’s rumored indictment on the same charges, now never to be tried.
Active had supposed Grace Palmer would leave town once her mother died, go to Anchorage or Fairbanks–maybe Harvard if she wanted to, with her freakish intellect–to resume her studies, but she stayed on as winter deepened, stayed in the job she had found in the Chukchi administrative headquarters of the Gray Wolf copper mine, which was in the foothills of the Brooks Range a hundred miles north of the village. He heard this through the grapevine, as he avoided contact with Grace Palmer when he saw her on the street or anywhere else.
He also heard that Grace was trying to adopt little Nita, who was gradually recovering from the triple shocks, so close together, of her mother’s death in the air crash at Isignaq, of her beloved Uncle Jason’s shooting, and of her equally beloved Aunt Ida’s death from liver cancer.
One day, he found himself at the dispatch station inviting Lucy Generous to dinner again, hoping she’d say “Where?” so he could say “My place?” just like in the old days. And she almost did, he was pretty sure of that, but then she got a sad smile on her face and said, “I guess not, Nathan. I just hope somebody opens you up someday like you opened me.”
He tried to catch her eye, but she was studying her dispatcher’s console. “Thank you,” he said after a long time. “Thank you for everything.”
Not long after that, he started seeing her around town with a young white schoolteacher who hunted a lot and played basketball in the city league. Lucy looked pretty happy, Nathan thought, and he hoped the schoolteacher would be nice to her.
He was thinking this over at his desk one day a couple weeks before Christmas and marveling at how Grace Palmer had upended his life, or perhaps led him to do it himself. It was as incomprehensible as everything else about her.
His phone warbled and when he picked it up, Lucy’s voice was carefully neutral. “Grace Palmer’s on her way up to see you.”
He thought for a moment of hiding in the men’s room until she gave up and left, but decided Grace would just come in after him. So he got a fresh cup of coffee from the pot in the main office, returned to his office, and closed the door.
He watched through the window in his door as she came into the outer office and spoke to Evelyn O’Brien. No visible trace of Four Street, no bruises or cuts, no scars except the one on her cheekbone he had seen in Dutch Harbor. Her hair reached almost to her shoulders now, glossy black with just the slightest hint of red-brown when the light hit it right. She was wearing Sorels and jeans and a red knee-length winter parka with a huge fur ruff that looked to be wolf. Her cheeks were slightly flushed from the blizzard wind that, even dying, still rolled across the tundra at perhaps twenty miles an hour.
She was the Grace Palmer of the high school mural again, though grown to full womanhood. And there was one other difference: the old resentment seemed gone, as if it had never burned in the fox eyes. Was such healing possible? With Grace Palmer, perhaps so.
Evelyn O’Brien looked at him questioningly through the window and he nodded. Then he watched as Grace walked to his door, opened it, and took one of his guest chairs, filling the little office with the scent of cold, clean air that usually followed someone in from a winter day. That, and lavender. He thought she would say “Hello” or “Nathan” or something, but she just stared at him.
“Hello,” he said finally, and nodded. “How have you been?”
“Not bad, considering I’m an orphan now.” The fox eyes twinkled for a moment.
He tried to think of something to say. “Sorry about your mother,” he managed, finally.
“Thanks.” She nodded. “You’ve heard I’m trying to adopt Nita?”
He lifted his eyebrows in the Inupiat yes.
“That’s what I’m here about,” she said. “My history is becoming an issue with the tribal court in Isignaq, to put it mildly. I think it would help if a policeman, particularly an Inupiat policeman, were to vouch for me.”
“What could I say that they don’t already know?”
“Please?”
It was the first time he had heard her say it, the first time he could remember her asking for anything, except cigarettes.
“If you could just say you believe I’m of good character and I’ve recovered from the problems that put me on Four Street.”
“Have you?”
“Absolutely.” The fox eyes flashed as she looked past him, into an indeterminate distance. “When I woke up in a Visqueen lean-to last summer with that guy Jake - -”
“I think his name was Jack.”
“Was it?” She looked amused that he would remember. “I think you’re right. Anyway, I noticed he looked a little like Jason and I thought how they were all a little like Jason somehow. If they didn’t look like him, they sounded like him or smelled like him.”
She stopped and looked at Active. “I almost feel like we’re back at the Triangle. Wouldn’t have a Marlboro handy, would you?”
He found himself grinning as he shook his head. “Sorry. This is a smoke-free building.”
“Hmm. This is not the Chukchi of my youth. They used to let you smoke in the hospital here.” She grinned back. “So I looked at Jake, no, Jack, sleeping it off there in his lean-to and I thought about Cowboy Decker killing my aunt and about Jason up here with Nita and I knew that crash was fate telling me this was never going to be over for me unless I put an end to it or to myself. So I decided to come back home and take care of it, but my mother did it first, God bless her. When I saw Jason slumped over his desk in that office, yes, I absolutely knew that it was over. Like a stone was rolled away from the door of my tomb and I was reborn.”
She stopped and thought it over for a few moments. “All of which no doubt strikes you as suiting me perfectly to adoptive motherhood.”
“May I see your wrists?”
She bit her lip, then held them out. He reached for them, then decided against touching her and merely bent over them, breathing in lavender. The scars were bar
ely discernible. “That suicide attempt in jail. Another one of your stunts?”
She nodded. “They were going to send me to Anchorage to be evaluated by the shrinks, but I couldn’t risk being away from Mom. I knew she’d break down and tell the truth. So, a little jailhouse drama and, voila, the shrinks are on their way up here for the evaluation.” She shrugged. “I knew it wouldn’t kill me, from when Angie tried it.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “There’s no one in Isignaq to take Nita? No other relatives?”
“Not on my mother’s side of the family. I guess Aunt Aggie’s husband, my uncle, had a half-brother, but they say he never came back to Alaska after he joined the Navy, he must live Outside somewhere.” She looked grim for a moment. “Anyway, I’d never turn her over to any man I don’t know, not if I could help it. I just … I wouldn’t.”
“What about your brother, Roy?”
“He’s overseas and I gather his marriage is falling apart. He’s not a candidate.”
“Can you support her? I mean, you know how it is with kids. They need braces, the right clothes, CDs—my stepfather says he could afford an airplane if it wasn’t for what he spends on basketball shoes for my stepbrother.”
She waved a hand as if to fan the problem away like campfire smoke. “Oh, the Gray Wolf pays OK and I have a little savings from Dutch, plus Jason had a few assets, even after Mom’s medical bills were paid and Roy took his half. Nita and I will get by.”
“I’m guessing you already wrote up something for me to sign?”
She smiled and handed him an envelope from her parka. “I did.”
He opened it and scanned the letter inside, pulled a pen from the cup on his desk. “I suppose you two will be leaving when the adoption goes through?”
“I suppose,” she said. He was surprised by her tentative tone. “I’m not sure about Nita in Anchorage, though. It’s been the ruin of many a village girl, you know.”
She grinned her fox-eyed grin and he found himself grinning back, even though she was talking about herself. How could she joke about —.
“You know, you’re some kind of freak.” Her eyes widened as he went on. “You look like you do, you have that photographic memory, you do that thing with phone numbers, you appear to be physically indestructible, here you are joking about life on Four Street after all that’s happened and you, you …” The words ran out and he shook his head.