A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  The only thing that looked out of place was a flyer on the desk, a professionally produced glossy trifold leaflet with a circular logo on the facing page of a robed woman holding a globe. Kate opened it and bolded phrases leaped out at her: “growth mania,” “conspicuous consumption,” “Silent Spring,” “Ban the Bomb,” “Group of 10.” There was a membership form, with a space for the amount of the applicant’s donation. Kate flipped back to the leaflet’s facing page. “Gaea,” she said. “The onshore Greenpeace, the poor man’s Environmental Defense Fund. We’ve been seeing these all over the Park. This Gaea group sure doesn’t like your mine.” She looked at Lyda. “Was your Wayne a closet greenie? Or maybe he was undercover for the opposition.”

  It had been meant as a joke but Lyda snatched up the flyer, her cheeks flushing. “There are always naysayers,” she said, toeing the corporate line with what appeared to be genuine conviction. “This kind of organization is a lot more anticorporate than Global Harvest is antienvironment. It will take two years for us to put together an environmental impact statement that is going to cost Global Harvest millions of dollars to write and millions more to implement. This Gaea is just a bunch of loud nuts who figure if they make enough noise they can get other nuts to write them checks.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. “How about showing me where Wayne worked. Maybe I could meet some of the people he worked with.”

  They went out to the building on the end of the back row that was serving as the warehouse. It had been gutted down to a single large room, a wall-high sliding door cut in the side facing away from camp and a rough-and-ready dock with no railing and plenty of room between the twelve-by-twelves that formed its surface. Inside the door, an overturned wooden tote served as a counter, next to which hand trucks constantly appeared and disappeared as half a dozen employees filled orders brought to the dock by other employees in pickups and on forklifts and some who just walked up in filthy coveralls, hard hats, and Xtra Tuff boots.

  They were all men and while it would be unfair to say that conversation ceased abruptly when Kate and Lyda appeared on the scene, all eyes were definitely upon them as they advanced up the steps to the dock and across the floor to the tote counter. “Hi, P.J.,” Lyda said. “This is Kate Shugak. Kate, this is P.J. Bourne. He was Wayne’s supervisor.”

  “P.J.,” Kate said.

  “Kate,” P.J. said. He was middle-aged and rotund without being soft, unshaven and not very clean. His near-together eyes were as dark as his hair, button-bright and narrowed in perpetual distrust, as if he suspected everyone he saw of having contraband duct-taped under their shirts. He wore Carhartt bibs over red flannel underwear and his cheek bulged with a wad of chewing tobacco. He spit often and without inhibition and the floor around the tote was stained a dark brown.

  “They found Wayne’s truck abandoned near Niniltna,” Lyda said. “She wants to talk to the people he worked with.”

  P.J. glared at Lyda. “I don’t fucking have time for this shit.”

  “Vern said to give her every facility,” Lyda said. To her credit, she did not appear intimidated.

  P.J. glared at Kate. “Yeah, fuck me, Vern’s not down here making sure fucking Rig 36 has enough fucking drill pipe to finish out the fucking day shift.”

  “Yeah, fuck me,” Kate said, “like I don’t have fucking anything better to do than fucking hare around after some fucking whiny little bastard who decided to fucking off himself in my fucking backyard.”

  Lyda sucked in a breath.

  P.J. glared at Mutt, standing next to Kate, ears up. “I don’t have fucking time for fucking wolves in the fucking warehouse, either.”

  Mutt lifted her lip to display a fine set of very large and very sharp teeth. Her growl and his sounded almost identical.

  P.J. glared some more. Kate and Mutt glared right back. Standoff.

  P.J. didn’t go so far as to relax into a smile, but a discernible twinkle did appear in his near-together black eyes, albeit very far back, and no one would mistake it for goodwill. “Whaddya wanna know?” A forklift roared up and slid to a halt, barely missing a man in a hard hat who tripped and almost fell in his haste to get out of the way. “Harry, for fuck’s sake try not to get yourself fucking run over on my fucking shift, all right? Fucking paperwork’s a fucking killer on a fucking accident.”

  “What was he like?” Kate said. P.J.’s head whipped around and he glared at her. “Dewayne Gammons. What was he like on the job?”

  “He fucking showed up on time, he fucking did what he was told. Until he fucking didn’t.” Harry handed P.J. a fistful of papers and P.J. snarled at him. Mutt, startled, snarled again in response, and everyone except Kate and P.J. took an involuntary step backward.

  P.J. rustled through the papers. “Fucking Suulutaq Mine is fucking killing every fucking tree on the fucking planet.” He consulted a laptop computer open on the tote, and hunted and pecked until another piece of paper spit out of the printer next to it. He checked a box, signed at the bottom, and shoved it at Harry, who took to his heels.

  “Do you remember him saying anything, where he was going, maybe about how he was feeling, before he left work for the last time?”

  The question sounded feeble even to Kate’s ears, and P.J. let out a bark of laughter. “In case you ain’t fucking noticed, this warehouse is responsible for supplying five fucking rigs a fucking camp and a hundred fucking employees working a fucking twenty-four-seven shift. We got no fucking time to stand fucking still, let alone go all Dr. fucking Phil.”

  “So, no, you don’t remember him saying anything,” Kate said.

  “Fucking right no. He had a fucking pulse and a strong fucking back and he could carry a fucking box without fucking dropping it and push a fucking dolly without running it off the fucking dock.” P.J. glared around the room. “Fucking anybody got fucking anything to fucking add?”

  Nobody fucking did. It might have had something to do with the steady roar of the approaching Sikorsky helicopter, which deposited a container of freight on a pad a hundred feet from the dock, and waited just long enough for the ground crew to unhook the sling and the air crew to retract it into the helo before roaring off again in a westerly direction. Everyone flinched away from the dust produced by the rotor wash.

  In the distance Kate heard the unmistakable drone of an approaching Herc, and saw that everyone on the loading dock heard it, too, probably before she had. “Thanks, P.J.,” she said. “Appreciate the help. Gentlemen.”

  “Uh—,” Lyda said as they were walking away, and then stopped when she saw the grin spreading across Kate’s face.

  Kate saw her expression and laughed. “Relax, Lyda. I’ve met P.J. before. Many times.”

  Lyda looked relieved. “Oh. Okay. Where next?”

  “Randy Randolph.”

  Lyda looked surprised. “Why Randy?”

  Kate explained.

  “Oh,” Lyda said again, and her own expression lightened for the first time that afternoon.

  “What is so inherently comic in the thought of Randy Randolph?” Kate said.

  “It’s not Randy that’s so funny,” Lyda said. “It’s the thought of Randy as a bigamist.”

  She led Kate to the mess hall at the rear of the camp and around to the back door, where there was a smaller version of the warehouse dock. Two pallets of dry goods were in the process of being torn down and the contents carried inside. Lyda and Kate dodged some fifty-pound sacks of enriched white flour on their way into the kitchen.

  It was another large room that extended up into the second story of the prefab. Stainless-steel appliances and counters lined the walls, and a long gas grill and a gas-fired cooktop, with an immense stainless steel hood hanging over grill and cooktop, took up the center of the floor. Large pots steamed and knives crunched through vegetables and there was a pungent smell of garlic in the air. The four men and two women hard at work were dressed in white double-breasted jackets with mandarin collars, wrap-around white aprons tied in front, black-an
d-white checked pants, black nurse’s shoes, and white paper cook’s hats.

  “Hey, Jules,” Lyda said to the guy with the tallest hat.

  He smiled at her, a wide, foolish, dazzled smile whose glow could have been seen in daylight from the moon. Jules, unlike P.J., had all the time in the world for Lyda, offering her a stool, apple slices layered with white cheddar, and a Diet Sprite, which Kate was given to understand was Lyda’s favorite drink.

  Jules was stumpy and thickset with swarthy skin and thick, untidy dark hair, but his eyes were large, brown, and liquid, and if one overlooked the spaghetti sauce and scrambled egg splatters across his broad white front and the sweat rolling down his square face, there was something rather attractive about the eager little man, with an accent that marked him down as east of the Hudson River. If he’d had a tail he would have been wagging it hard enough to power an electric generator. Kate found herself hoping the body in the woods did belong to Dewayne Gammons.

  “We just need to talk to Randy for a minute, okay?” Lyda said.

  “Sure, Lyda, anything you want.” He cast about him for more tribute and lunged at a tray of cookies, scattering staff in front of him like marbles. He trotted back to Lyda, with what Kate had to admit looked like a fabulous chocolate chip cookie cradled reverently in his hands, at a guess six inches across. He extended it in Lyda’s direction with a bona fide bow, in the manner of one sacrificing to a personal goddess.

  Lyda had to take it. “Thanks, Jules. You sure there aren’t any peanuts in it?”

  Jules looked hurt. “You know I’ll never let that happen in my kitchen.”

  She smiled at him and the hurt expression on his face vanished like spring mist. “Okay, thanks. I’ll take it with me if you’ll wrap it up.”

  Jules wrapped the cookie in enough wax paper to satisfy an embalmer in ancient Egypt. He presented his offering again, again with the bow. “Thanks, Jules,” Lyda said again, displaying a commendable patience. “Now, if we could just talk to Randy.”

  Jules made an effort to pull himself together. “We’re prepping dinner, don’t keep him too long, okay?” He looked agonized at having to lay down even this much law to her.

  “Okay.” Lyda led Kate and Mutt, neither of whom had even registered on Jules’s peripheral vision, deeper into the belly of the culinary beast. At the back of the room a man was taking trays of golden brown dinner rolls from an oven and replacing them with more. He was short and slight, with a potbelly that strained his apron and thinning hair, the remnants of which wrapped around the sides of his head like greasy wings, leaving a bald, sweaty dome that dampened the edges of his paper hat. He had no shoulders to speak of and less chin. He might even have been bow-legged.

  Lyda walked up to him and said, “Hey, Randy. Can you take five?”

  And she looked over her shoulder just so she could watch Kate’s jaw drop.

  They foregathered on the dock. “Kate Shugak, Randy Randolph. Randy, meet Kate. She’s from Niniltna, and she needs to ask you a few questions.”

  Kate was still trying to come to grips with the fact that this was the Lothario breaking hearts across the Park. He did have brown eyes, with long, curling eyelashes so thick they seemed to weigh down his eyelids. Maybe the eyelashes were his secret. “Randy Randolph?” she said, just to be sure.

  Lyda turned her head away but Kate saw the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

  Mutt, notorious for slobbering over anything with the XY chromosome pair, remained next to Kate, her head cocked to one side, regarding Randolph with a quizzical expression.

  He nodded, pulling the paper cap from his head and running a hand over his scalp. It came away wet and he wiped it on his pants. “What’s this about?” He looked over his shoulder. “I gotta get them rolls out pretty soon.”

  Kate found herself at an uncharacteristic loss for words. He was shorter than Suzy, and Bonnie had him by forty pounds. She saw Lyda watching her and while she didn’t mind providing comic relief for the sake of pulling Lyda Blue out of the doldrums, enough was enough. “I work with the state trooper in Niniltna, Randy. Got a bit of a problem we thought you might be able to help us with.”

  He shrugged his insignificant shoulders. “I’m just a baker,” he said.

  “And a serial marrier,” Kate said.

  He was mute, but even his thick eyelashes were unable to hide the trace of alarm that appeared in the brown eyes.

  “It seems you arranged for your paycheck to be sent through the mail to Suzy Moonin.”

  “Yeah,” he said, with caution.

  “The problem is that Bonnie Jeppsen is the Niniltna postmistress.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “You remember Bonnie? She would be the other woman you married since January. She intercepted your check. Suzy came looking for it.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a flash of emotion in his eyes, something gone too quickly for Kate to identify. Fear? No, not fear. Relief? Why would Randolph be relieved at being caught with two wives? When he said nothing further, she said, “That’s it? ‘Oh’? Anything you’d like to add?”

  He shrugged his negligible shoulders again. “They’re my wives.”

  “Yes, but most men settle for one at a time. What are you, some kind of Mormon?”

  Randolph displayed emotion for the first time, in this case a wan indignation. “I’d never be a Mormon! They’re against gays.”

  This was something of a non sequitur, and Kate didn’t quite know how to reply.

  “I love them,” he said. He could have said “I love NASCAR racing” with more conviction, and it took Kate a moment to realize he was referring to his wives. With the first trace of defiance, he added, “And they love me.”

  “As of yesterday?” Kate said. “Not so much.”

  Tears might have welled behind the eyelashes. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  At this, Lyda stirred. “He’s a very good baker,” she said in tones meant only for Kate’s ears. “Vern really likes Randy’s crullers.”

  Kate dwelled for a pleasurable moment on the image of cuffing and stuffing Randolph into George’s Cessna and delivering him into Chopper Jim’s unwilling arms back in Niniltna, but decided that if she ever wanted to get laid again she’d probably better not. In Alaska bigamy came under the “unlawful marrying” statute, and was rated a Class A misdemeanor. Convicted, Randolph could be sentenced up to a year in jail, along with fines and community service. The trick would be in convicting him. Judge Roberta Singh, presiding judge of the Ahtna court, did not take kindly to people cluttering up her docket with—and here as she was wont to do she would quote directly from the Alaska statutes—“Class A misdemeanors, which characteristically involve less severe violence against a person, less serious offenses against property interests, less serious offenses against public administration or order, or less serious offenses against public health and decency than felonies.” “I wasn’t hired by George W. Bush,” Kate had heard her say in a rare moment of anger in response to a request for a hearing into the legality of a search and seizure in the matter of a resale amount of marijuana found growing in someone’s back bedroom. “I’m a competent jurist, and competent jurists don’t sit on frivolous cases.”

  Bobbie Singh would never issue a warrant for Randolph’s arrest. Not that Jim would ever ask her for one. He, too, tried to reserve his best efforts for real criminals. “No,” Kate said, not without regret. “I won’t be arresting you. I don’t have that authority.”

  He blinked. “Is the trooper going to arrest me, then?”

  “Not today. Suzy and Bonnie are pretty upset with you, Mr. Randolph. You’ll have to deal with them at some point. And you’d better do something about your paycheck, too.” She turned to go and paused. “Mr. Randolph? Did you know Dewayne Gammons?”

  Lyda stiffened. Randolph looked surprised. “Sure. Works here. Haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  He gestur
ed vaguely. “He delivered supplies to the kitchen sometimes. He’d help unload the pallets, which was kinda nice. Not all those Stores people do. We talked a little.”

  “What about?”

  He shrugged. “Not much. He was a quiet type. Seemed kind of sad. I told him he should get married, make him feel better.”

  He looked at Lyda, who refused to meet his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Kate said, drawing out the word. “Well, thanks, Randy.”

  From what was apparently a hazy memory of one too many B-list noir films, Randolph said, “Can I leave camp if I wanna?”

  “Sure,” Kate said. “But Bonnie and Suzy are waiting for you in town. I wouldn’t advise it.”

  • • •

  Kate gathered up George, protesting, from the mess hall, where he appeared bent on inhaling the better part of a tray of bear claws, and Lyda escorted them to the airstrip. “Thanks for the guide service,” Kate said. “You okay?” This as Lyda started to say something, and stopped.

  Lyda nodded. “Yeah, fine.” But she looked worried.

  Kate moved a few steps away from George and lowered her voice. “What?”

  Lyda frowned at the Herc, drawn up at the end of the runway. It had dropped the clamshell to disgorge shrink-wrapped pallets of canned goods, a load of drill pipe, and a knuckleboom loader onto a semicircle of pickups and flatbeds. “There might be something else, another reason Wayne took off.”

  Kate thought of the suicide note. “A reason other than depression to kill himself, you mean?” As soon as she said it she knew it was the wrong thing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  But Lyda was already shaking her head. “It’s probably nothing to waste your time over. Forget it.” She smiled and extended her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  There was a lack of sincerity there to rival Vernon Truax’s, and Lyda’s grip was cool and brief. “I’ve got time. I can hear anything you have to say, Lyda.”

  The other woman waved a dismissive hand. “Really, it was nothing. Safe journey home.”