by John Straley
The Sands boys had been the survivors in my most important murder case. Kevin Sands let me work on his cases even though he hated me, even though he knew I suspected him in the murder of his own parents, even though I had tried to befriend his younger brother, hoping that I might save him from becoming a monster, too. Kevin saw right through me but it didn’t hurt my pride. I don’t have much practice at doing good, so I hadn’t developed that much of it—pride, that is. So little practice, in fact, that I had no words to reply to Patricia Ewers when she came to me again for help. In her eyes, just by talking to these boys, I was sleeping with the enemy. She might even consider me a suspect in the disappearance of her husband. I couldn’t blame her.
I looked up at the trailer park where old cars lay near the ditches with their hoods open like dark mouths. Ravens picked apart the garbage bags piled near the firewood stacks. I suspected that Kevin was bullying or abusing Sean. I didn’t even want to fully examine what I suspected, and as I stood there looking up at their trailer, I remember now that I felt a strange pain near my heart and some kind of pressure behind my eyes as if I might start crying. I wondered if, in the same way God could prevent things in the past, perhaps He could make someone experience future suffering. Maybe that was what I had been feeling ever since the Ewers verdict: suffering that sat inside me like a swallowed pin, inching closer and closer to my heart until finally I would not remember anything—the pin, the heart, or a fine, mild day before a storm came ashore.
When I looked out to sea the sun flared off a breaking wave, and when I looked back to the road the raven had tipped forward off the nearest corner of Kevin Sands’s trailer house and landed right in front of me. The black bird cackled, then barked, and I shuddered as if ice had been dropped down my shirt.
Just then, Jane Marie pulled her old station wagon up next to me and honked the horn loud enough to save me from a bad case of the creeps.
“Hey, handsome, storm coming. I’d better give you a ride.” She smiled, and I knew no matter how long I had to live, I was a lucky, lucky man.
Jane Marie was headed out the road to check out a potential garage sale. There were many new things I never thought we would need that were apparently necessities now.
“I saw in the paper they had baby clothes and a playpen. I know we don’t need a playpen now, Cecil, but we will before long.”
Blossom was in her carrier next to her mom, and I got into the backseat and warily fluffed up her downy hair.
“Can you drop me at Doggy’s?” I said to Jane Marie while stroking our daughter’s wildly flabby cheeks. Blossom raised her nose as she tried to get me in focus. She looked a little like Winston Churchill and I couldn’t get over the feeling that she was going to snap at me.
“Sure,” Jane Marie said, and she looked up in the rearview at me. “You okay, big guy?”
“I’m just thinking,” I said, as we pulled away from the Sandses’ trailer court and Blossom chewed on the callused tip of my finger. If I was struggling with my own attitudes, I knew for certain Jane Marie was tired of my life of crime.
George Doggy had bought a couple of adjacent lots at the end of a dead-end road near the boat repair yard. They must have cost a fortune, because both lots had nice waterfront houses. George lived in the smaller one nearer the bend in the cove, and he had converted the larger one into a bed-and-breakfast. Ever since Blossom had been born, Doggy had been offering to let me manage the B-and-B. He’d give us a place to live in a little cabin back behind the houses, and we could work cleaning and scheduling people in. I couldn’t drive a car thanks to having had my license jerked during my drinking days, but I could certainly drive a boat to take visiting white men with thick necks out salmon fishing. I had passed on Doggy’s offer repeatedly. Jane Marie made enough money to pay her expenses: the maintenance on her boat and the fuel to run it. She made enough money from her publications and selling photographs so that she could remain independent. She had never put pressure on me to earn more, even when we had been well short of money, and I loved her for that, but it had been dawning on me that we were running out of options on this island and maybe it was time for me to take Doggy up on his offer.
She stopped at the end of the road and pulled on the Subaru’s hand brake. She turned and looked at me with concern. Jane Marie has black hair and sparkling dark eyes. She is truthfully prettier than any of the anorexic movie stars plying their trade today. If anything she most resembles Myrna Loy in the old Thin Man movies. Jane Marie has the hooded eyes and crooked smile of the perfect drinking companion. She is so pretty that I often can’t pay attention to what she’s telling me.
“Cecil,” she said softly, “have you looked at our checking account lately?”
“Huh?” I said. “No . . . no, I haven’t.”
Jane Marie leaned her forearms above Blossom’s carrier so her face was right in front of mine. All I could see was her.
“You know what I like least about being a mother?”
“Is there a quiz on this later?”
“No,” she snapped. “What I’m trying to tell you is, you know, I always liked our lives. I liked that you did what you loved, and not having a lot of money felt like freedom to me.”
“But now?” I offered her the opening. I looked at her and felt that pin near my heart.
Jane Marie stroked the top of our daughter’s head and looked into her tiny face. “Now, our life feels too much like poverty. I hate that feeling, Cecil. I do. But that’s the truth.”
I had two hundred-dollar bills from the herring fisherman’s case that I still carried around in my pants just to feel flush walking around town. I fished them out of my pocket. Jane Marie bit her lip.
“Don’t get me wrong, Cecil. You’ve been great. You’re not drinking or whatever.” She leaned over the seat and kissed me. I could taste waxy lip balm and the coffee on her tongue. “But maybe it’s time for something else, something that pays a little better.”
I handed her a hundred-dollar bill and she crumpled it in her hand. Then she shoved it back at me.
“Forget it, Cecil. I can’t do this. I’m not going to start down this road. You’ve done enough.”
“Janey, I haven’t done jack shit. You do everything.”
She kissed me again, harder this time so I felt the cat-like roughness of her tongue. “You’re here. You quit drinking. You walk with me and swim with me. That’s enough, Cecil. Heck, if I could pay you to be my companion I would.”
Blossom squawked, and I opened the car door.
“Male escort. That might pay better than private eye work,” I said and frizzed Blossom’s hair one more time and she bobbled her head around accusingly.
Jane Marie rolled her eyes at me and locked the car door. The baby made some little barking sound. I swear that strange little girl was growling at me.
“Go cut some firewood.” Jane Marie smiled, then blew me a kiss.
After she released the brake she called out through the window, “Hey, I almost forgot. Patricia Ewers called for you, must have been just after you left. There was a message on the machine. She sounded sad. Said she was going to make the calls herself and that she was sorry for walking out on you.”
I waved as if it didn’t matter. Truthfully, I didn’t want to think about murder so soon after kissing this beautiful woman.
“She’s back in town,” I told Jane Marie. “She got mad I couldn’t do something right away. It will be all right. I’ll talk to her later,” I said, as I jammed the crumpled hundred-dollar bill back into my pants pocket. I turned and saw George Doggy coming down the steps of his house putting on his leather work gloves.
“Bye, sweetie. Call me if you need a ride.” Then she was gone. The wheels of the station wagon kicked up a few fallen alder leaves. The weather was a swirl of possibilities, but all of them called for change.
So here is the question I was posing to myse
lf as I got out of the car: How much of this did I really need to carry with me during the day? In a story, you expect that every single person will be part of the plot, but how does that happen? If your life is a story, a story you revise over and over again in your memory, how do you choose the themes? How do you choose the people? Richard Ewers was missing but Bob Rose was surfing Sandy Beach by now. Jude and Rachel were most likely taking their tourist mother for coffee. Gary was fabricating a part in his machine shop. Paul deLay was probably playing the blues in Portland, Oregon. And I had made it to work with the help of a beautiful woman in the company of her cranky and unexpected baby, Kevin Sands’s parents were dead. George Doggy had lived a long and productive life. And all of these people were part of my story this morning. But what to make of that? Every investigation, whether a murder or a shoplifting, begins with a swirl of unimportant facts. The trick is not to throw any of them away too soon.
I kept going back to that raven on the roof of the Sandses’ trailer. I couldn’t shake the feeling that God was reaching back from the future and showing me a clue, that the raven was telling me, “Right now! Pay attention. Don’t throw this one away.” Of course, it could all have been a trick of memory, or maybe this shudder I felt was just the storm pushing in, foam-flecked and howling, indifferent to any story other than its own.
2
There has always been a certain kind of person at the top of the heap of blue-collar heroes. They are smart working people whose jobs involve getting important things done in an understandable way: tanker captains, commercial pilots, auctioneers, some clergymen and certain veterinarians. They have this quality of being both elite and common at the same time. Most simply have it and are generally unaware of it, but George Doggy, whom I had known from my childhood, had refined this presence into a valuable asset for police investigations.
Most of the criminals I’ve met wanted nothing in this life so much as the respect of these blue-collar heroes. Teachers and doctors could go fuck themselves as far as most crooks were concerned, but almost every pedophile, bar brawler, or opportunistic burglar would clear his schedule and put on a clean shirt to be invited to dinner by a coastal pilot or to stand at the bar with the chief engineer on a container ship. These were the guys who made the world work and asked for nothing but a fair wage, unlike the lawyers and government assholes whose authority infested the lives of the poor and unsuccessful. George Doggy had mastered the vibe of the blue-collar hero.
Doggy had found early on that men with horrible secrets would rather talk to other men they admired. He saw it in the interview rooms when young lawyers from the DA’s office pined and wheedled away for confessions, and blunt officers faked a cajoling tone, talking sports with a suspect for hours trying to build some kind of “relationship.” Doggy had learned as a young man how to walk into an interview room with a suspect and take charge without ever saying a word. Everything—from his posture to his tweed coats to the calluses on his hands when he firmly gripped the witness’s hand—bespoke this fact: here, finally, was a man who got things done. Here was a man you wanted on your side, a man to whom you could entrust a secret. He had found a way of becoming a father figure to men who had always hated their fathers.
Doggy had become a legend for his ability. He had more confessions than anyone else in the system. There was only one exception, and that was a sex cop up north who had a gift for breaking down child abusers, but the cop went over the edge himself and ended up charged, so the official record belonged to Doggy. There were many stories: the ten-second confession where the guy spilled in record time, the Moonlighter confession where the defendant spilled to four homicides in the Moonlighter Hotel and afterwards sent Doggy a thank-you note. But the one I had always been most impressed with was the young soldier out of Fairbanks who had picked up three girls on Fourth Avenue, killed them and buried their bodies out on Becker Ridge. Forensics had nothing and the other witnesses only tied this guy loosely. He had been interviewed twice and was leaving the country. The soldier was flying by jet from a base in Seattle on his way to Korea. He was drumming out and was traveling in civilian clothes. He had cashed out everything he had and was wearing twenty-five thousand dollars in the lining of his clothes. His plane laid over for an hour in Anchorage. Doggy went on board the plane and asked the soldier if he would like to have a soda with him. Doggy explained shyly that he had been given a free pass to the private boardroom at the airport. He was just thinking it would be a good opportunity to talk before the soldier shipped out, and besides, the pass might not be good all that long.
Before they called for the flight, the boy with a fortune in his coat and a confirmed ticket to a foreign country told George Doggy all about the killings and where to find the evidence the police had overlooked.
Doggy apologized when he snapped the cuffs on a little too tightly, and the soldier said, “That’s okay, George. I understand.” He did understand, probably right up until Doggy handed him over to the street cop who put him in the back of the cruiser. Then it dawned on him that he was not going downtown with his new best friend but was going to jail for the rest of his life.
That was the layover confession, and its myth had been told and retold many times by law enforcement types over the years. So many times, in fact, it didn’t really matter anymore if it was true.
George Doggy had had only one failure that had entered into lore, and, like most blemishes on otherwise handsome records, I sensed that the Mygirl killings were the only thing George Doggy saw when he looked back on his career.
George Doggy had been at the peak of his fame when he became the chief investigating officer in the Mygirl murders. More than any other case in modern times, the Mygirl killings were all about missing evidence, and the most important thing missing from the Mygirl that night was a crewman who swore he’d gone off to town in a skiff to get drunk. This, of course, was Richard Ewers, and it had fallen on George Doggy to get a confession from him. Without it, the evidence was a mess of circumstantial facts that was thin at best, and mere gossip at worst.
At that time Ewers was twenty-five years old and a typical deckhand. He was from Ferndale, Washington, and had dropped out of high school to follow the Alaska fisheries. He was a pot smoker and owned a 9mm handgun. The 9mm showed up in the charred remains of the scow, but the bullet pathways and slug fragments from the bodies were inconsistent with having come from his handgun. Like everything else in this case, the ballistic evidence was inconclusive. The slugs were so shattered it would have been hard making a definite match even if they had had a known weapon to compare them to.
The most damning thing against Ewers had been his own attitude. Friends said he acted strangely after the boat fire, and some said he had been dissatisfied working on the scow. He had never had anything good to say about Charlie Sands as a boss or about Sands’s family as human beings. Richard had been a complainer, which also didn’t really distinguish him from any other deckhand. But no other deckhand was being accused of mass murder.
George Doggy had interviewed him twice, but apparently Richard Ewers had had a good relationship with his father because he would not confess anything to Doggy other than stealing some of the cash off the Mygirl before he went to town that night. He lied about it at first, but when a bartender from the Pioneer Bar gave a statement that Ewers had rung the bell above the bar and bought everyone in the place a drink to the tune of two hundred dollars with cash he had wadded up in his pants, Richard admitted to stealing the money off the Mygirl.
Harrison Teller, Ewers’s lawyer, was the most fervent true believer in Ewers’s innocence. Teller hired me, originally, to find the real killer. But of course I labored under the same burden as the official police investigators. There was no substantial physical evidence left. Teller had wanted to paint Kevin Sands as a suspect, but he hated the idea of tearing down Sands’s kid brother on the stand. The kid brother who had lost his entire family and
was a stand-up alibi witness for his big brother. Teller preferred the phantom robber or drug-dealer theory. Teller had fantasized that somehow we could bring this real killer into court and there he would apologize to Richard Ewers.
I had spent eighteen months working on Richard Ewers’s case. I moved around the state and made contacts in the fishing fleet all up and down the coast from Valdez to Bellingham. I spent a year listening to bar talk and psychics. I traced down a man with a beard who had once been sitting next to a fisherman on a plane who had said he knew that the Sands family had welshed on a debt to a Canadian drug enforcer. When I did find the bearded man he looked at me as if I were asking about alien abductions and he told me he knew no such thing. Physical evidence is usually the fulcrum used to help pry statements out of people: show someone the bloody boots and he’ll feel compelled to tell some story about them. But if you’re empty-handed and he knows it, no one with any sense is going to tell you a story.
There was a singing psychic who would put her visionary predictions into operatic-style rhymed quatrains. She told me she had seen a helicopter landing near the Mygirl and men in dark hoods holding guns jumping out of it. She could see three of the numbers on the side of the chopper. Teller had told me to check out all the choppers on the west coast bearing these numbers, but I put my foot down.
By the end of the trial, the case file filled one hundred and five banker boxes. I had to make sure all of the interviews, expert reports, witness statements, previous testimony, and the hundreds and hundreds of motions, which Teller dictated in an almost endless stream, were kept in some kind of order. This fell to me because Teller’s two secretaries were constantly on the verge of hysteria just keeping up with the typing and other casework that piled up as Teller devoted more and more time to Ewers’s case.
I finally convinced Teller that we should stop trying to find “the real killer.” If three law enforcement agencies and three million dollars of the State of Alaska’s money hadn’t done it, we weren’t going to find anything more useful than they had. Teller dismissed this line of reasoning. But he listened to this: What, I asked him, would “the real killer” be doing right now? The real killer would be living his own life and watching with interest the prosecution of Richard Ewers for the crime the real killer had committed. What, I asked again, would the real killer have to say about the crime even if we could motivate him to talk? Say I had some small shred of evidence, a jailhouse snitch, or a written statement from a known drug dealer pointing the finger at the real killer. What would the real killer say if I could drag him into court? Teller waited for my answer as I stood in the shambles of his office.