by John Straley
“The real killer is going to look at the investment of time, energy and pure spleen the State of Alaska has put into their prosecution of our client, and the real killer is going to say Richard Ewers killed Charlie, Tina, and Edna Sands. Then the real killer is going to say that Richard Ewers killed young Albert Chevalier and poured gasoline on his body. The real killer is going to say Richard Ewers burned the Mygirl. That is the only reasonable thing for the real killer to say, this being real life and not a Perry Mason television show.”
Teller stared at me. He had been holding a yellow pad in his lap. He dropped the pad off to the side of his wheelchair, rolled into his office and slammed the door. From then on we played a defensive game, tearing into all the police evidence, making it look mean and vindictive. We offered no solution to the four murders. We called no witnesses. And the jury acquitted Richard Ewers simply because there wasn’t enough evidence.
George Doggy liked me in a long-suffering kind of way, but we never discussed the Mygirl killings, probably because Doggy never figured that work as a defense investigator was really investigative work. It was an amateurish kind of whoring in Doggy’s mind. He had been trying to find me other work for years.
“Where’s that pretty girl of yours?” Doggy said, as he walked briskly down the steps of his house making fists to stretch out his tight leather work gloves.
“She just took off.” I nodded down the road.
“I don’t know how a guy like you ended up with such a good-looking lady friend and a near perfect daughter.” He slapped me on the back.
“I was born lucky.”
“You ready to work, young fella?” The old workhorse shambled down the narrow trail, rolling his shoulders as he walked and smacking a gloved fist into his palm.
“Heck, yeah. I’m not, like . . . disturbing your television shows, am I, George? I mean, you don’t want to miss any bass fishing or the soaps.”
Doggy snorted. He hated television. He had once told me that if I found him watching television during daylight hours I could shoot him through the brain.
He had hauled three logs up onto his beach that he planned to buck up into firewood for his house, his guest accommodations, the cabins and the sauna. Doggy had a mechanical splitter and another mechanical contraption that had been a conveyor belt for putting hay bales up in a barn. This was set up with one end near the hydraulic splitter and the other up the bank to where his woodshed was set back under the trees. George Doggy was a strong and vital man, but he used every mechanical advantage he could muster when it came to putting up his winter’s wood.
The logs were old spruce trees cut long ago that had escaped from a log raft headed for the mill. The mill had been shut down for years, and there had been fewer and fewer of these logs to be found on local beaches. These particular ones hadn’t rolled around in the surf for long, because a friend had hauled them off a steep beach with a tugboat and towed them to George Doggy’s house. The spruce was straight-grained and dry. I had already cut up a cord and a half and piled it under the shed roof. George loved to use the fancy hydraulic splitter, but I still used a heavy maul and a sharp ax.
Today the hydraulic splitter was broken, apparently from some bad gas off the fuel barge that had fouled the plugs. I split by hand while George sat on a spruce round cleaning the plugs and absent-mindedly fiddling with the motor. After the first ten minutes, I fell into a rhythm of splitting straight-grained wood: a swing and a chunk that let the faint turpentine smell of the tree come up to my face. I love the light sweat of working hard on a cool morning, and I love pausing to hear the gulls tearing the stillness apart as they wheel above the water. George and I worked steadily for more than an hour. There were some forty rounds already sawn off, so we had plenty to do before we had to start any engines. Off near Old Sitka Rocks I heard a loud exhalation of breath as a humpback whale broke the surface, pushing its way toward the outside waters. I turned and saw the veil of vapor hanging like a scarf in the air.
“They say it’s supposed to storm like the dickens the next couple of days,” George told me. “I listened to the marine forecast at six this morning and they say there’s a heck of a low-pressure system coming in from the southwest. ‘High probability of damage to life and property’ is what they said. We better get this wood up off the beach or it’ll be scattered from here to kingdom come by next week.”
He wasn’t looking at me but was staring out past the cove to where the black clouds seemed to be plugging up the horizon.
Then he blurted out what was really on his mind. “You’ve got to get yourself some security, son. You can’t just fiddle around the way you have been. You’ve got that little baby girl to think about. You need to get serious now.”
The whale blew again and a second one broke the surface beside it. This second one was a much smaller whale. Almost certainly a cow and a calf.
“Serious . . . I always have been serious, George. Hell, you always told me I was a serious boy ever since I was in junior high school and I wanted to be Vincent van Gogh,” I said, and flexed my fingers to work the stiffness out.
“You were just plain goofy. I mean you need to grow up a little now, boy. You come to work for me full-time. Hell, there isn’t anything in the investigations these days, is there?”
Both whales lifted their flukes some six feet into the air and eased down underwater. From where I was I could see the water blossom on the surface where the great tails churned their first stroke.
“No,” I said almost absently. “No, there hasn’t been much in the way of investigations.”
“You’ve been hanging around that Sands kid and I’m telling you, Cecil, you steer clear of that family. They are a train wreck. I’m telling you, there are some people who will take a carrot and there are others who will only take a stick, and those brothers . . .” Doggy looked down at his boots. His voice softened with regret. “The Sands brothers have been hurt bad. They’re bent up and they’re only going to respond to the stick.”
I supposed that was true. Nothing I did seemed to help Sean Sands. He was quiet and wore army fatigues all the time, even though he was only twelve. He loved guns more than comic books, and he would talk about explosives all day long but would never think of playing a musical instrument or even listening to one. Still, there was something in his eyes that seemed to be asking for help. But how could I know for sure? Sean never asked for anything, from me or anyone else as far as I could tell. It was as if the fire and the death of his sister and parents had somehow sealed him up. He faced the world with the stony face of someone who only seems to be thinking “You don’t know. You’ll never know.”
Doggy’s wife had passed away two years earlier. He had been typically stoic and matter-of-fact about getting his life going again after her funeral, but I had started observing the irritable signs of age increasing from that time.
“No. You come live out here with me, son. We’ll have a real live lodge up and going this coming summer. You get your six-pack skipper’s license and we’ll spend the summer lying to tourists and catching salmon. What do you say?”
“You’ve been good to me, George . . .” I said, letting the words trail off.
Sometimes I think fate speaks to me in a strange kind of gibberish. My father, who had been a stern judge and a practical man, died in a Las Vegas casino after one pull and a jackpot on a hundred-thousand-dollar machine. The woman who used to love me abandoned me for good reasons, and the woman who loves me now does so for reasons I cannot fathom. Friends have been killed by stray bullets, and great loves have come to me unbidden. There is no way to make sense of this. What I wanted to tell George Doggy was that no matter how hard I tried, I had grown up as much as I ever would, and that no matter how much I tried to be responsible, I could not change my luck.
I was thinking about Patricia Ewers and her hunt for her husband, and I knew I couldn’t change
her luck either. Maybe the old policeman was right and it was time to sit by the ocean and take insurance men out fishing. I was having a hard time picturing it, though. For what Doggy couldn’t understand was that I would always be more like the Sands brothers than he liked to think. I was haunted by what had happened on the Mygirl, just as they were, and just as Doggy himself seemed to be but wouldn’t admit.
The Mygirl was a steel barge that belonged to a Seattle-based fish company. It was eighty-five feet long, with freezers, ice-making machines, a small store for supplies, and living quarters up on the second floor. There was an open deck on the center of the scow where the hands could wrestle totes of ice around and there were large scales to weigh the catch the fishing boats brought in off the grounds. Up off the living quarters was a small deck with a barbeque where the Sands family would sometimes cook dinner on nice days. The kids played on shore when their father could spare one of the tin skiffs. The Sands family had run the scow for three years before the season that would turn out to be their last. It had been an idyllic life for them, spending the summers out in remote bays in southeastern Alaska. There were long evenings in narrow bays rimmed with ancient spruce and hemlock trees. It was the perfect life that everyone on board the Mygirl had dreamed of, right up, I suspect, until the fire.
After the killings and the trial, the two Sands brothers hardened into a dark kind of cynicism which seemed to focus their hatred on everything they saw. Sad or angry, their eyes cast shadows. I tried to help them and the fact that I worked for the accused murderer of their family hardly mattered to them. Their world was too dark for them to notice me much.
If the Sandses cast shadows, Jonathan Chevalier’s eyes focused hatred like the sharp shaft of a laser. He could have done more in his testimony at trial to convict Richard Ewers, but he held firm. Jonathan would not positively identify Ewers as the skiff operator escaping the burning boat. He claimed the pictures in the lineup were confusing and that Ewers looked “similar” and “most like” the man who was operating the skiff. Jonathan got beat up by the lawyers on both sides but he would not budge. He was not sure. There was one other tantalizing detail in Jonathan’s testimony. He said that this mysterious skiff operator that night had been carrying something in his hand. He only got a glimpse. It could have been a fishing rod, or it could have been a rifle. No gun had ever been identified as the murder weapon. All the guns on board the Mygirl had been accounted for in the wreckage. The Sands brothers had identified each gun for the troopers. Doggy had always presumed Ewers had thrown the murder weapon into deep water as he ran the skiff to Sitka.
Jonathan Chevalier had been vague but credible. Too many details often bespeak a liar, at least in a jury’s eyes. The troopers had beat up on Chevalier quite a bit to “remember more,” and Harrison Teller tried to characterize him as a helpless victim of police overreaching. In the end, Chevalier just seemed sad about his murdered brother and wanted nothing more to do with the judicial system.
Jonathan was a fisherman and had rigged his wooden sailboat for salmon trolling. The boat was named the Naked Horse. She was a wooden ketch with heavy canvas sails and stays that seemed to sag from the top of the mast down to the chain plates. The Naked Horse appeared to be a loose-limbed runner, but under sail she tightened into the wind and took deep breaths with each swell she lunged through. Jonathan Chevalier had been an infantryman in the post-Vietnam army. After he mustered out, he had tried painting and then photography, but he had walked out of his only gallery show in San Francisco in 1985 and had come to Alaska to sign on with his uncle and younger brother in the last organized activity of hunters and gatherers: small-boat commercial fishing. Once it and subsistence hunting and fishing are gone, the last remaining trace of the Paleolithic age will have disappeared from North America. Jonathan Chevalier thought Alaska was the perfect place for an artist at the end of the twentieth century. He fished two years with his uncle and then bought the Naked Horse down in Port Townsend and sailed her up the coast.
Once, right after the verdict came back, I tried to offer my sympathy to Jonathan. He was standing just inside the double doors of the courthouse in Juneau. I put out my hand and said that I could understand if he didn’t take my hand but I truly thought justice had been done. He looked at my hand as if it were a bowlful of snakes. Then I offered lamely, “I can’t imagine how it feels to lose a brother. I’m sorry . . .”
Jonathan looked up at me and said the words that the Sands brothers’ eyes spoke: “You don’t know anything.” Then he turned and walked away.
Albert Chevalier had been fourteen years old when he died. He had been in some foster homes and we tried to get his records from Social Services but were denied. The prosecutors had blown up portraits of the victims for their closing statements to the jury. The lawyers had intended to play the strongest card in their circumstantial case: grief. But the effect of the huge portraits backfired. The pictures seemed like advertising: two adults, two children smiling into the camera lens. They were brief and beautiful, and they would have been great marketing tools, except the DAs had very little to sell: burned bodies and a couple of tentative memories was all, not anything approaching what was needed to overcome reasonable doubt.
Still, Albert’s portrait lingered with me. The chubby face of a boy under a baseball cap, brown eyes slightly crossed, and the turned-down, rueful smile of a kid who had never considered that his life might be cut short.
In recent days Jonathan had been drinking in the Pioneer Bar and buying rounds for the house twice a night. He was running a bar tab that would eat a summer’s wages in a week.
I knew Patricia Ewers was going to confront Jonathan and the Sandses. She would get nothing from them. I knew that. I screwed up my courage and spoke up as I pretended to be checking the handle on the splitting maul.
“George, Patricia Ewers is in town. She says Richard is missing. You haven’t heard anything about that, have you?”
“Not a word” was all the old man would say. But he stared out at the water for a time. Finally he slapped a file down onto a stump and said, “Jesus Christ, Cecil, I told you . . .” and he stopped, then looked out past where the whales had dove. “I told you I could give you a good job. I can give you security, for Christ’s sake.” George Doggy seemed pale and agitated. The spark plug he had been working on fell to his feet.
I was going to clarify my question. Then I noticed Doggy’s hands were shaking and I held my peace.
“Cecil, listen to me. Stay away from those Sands brothers.”
A murder of crows flapped down the beach and landed in the small crab apple tree above us. The crows brought ragged shadows and their voices rattled like stones in a culvert. I stopped my swing and held the splitting maul in my hands, shifting my attention from the noisy birds back to the old man.
His face was pale and George Doggy repeated, “Just stay away from those boys.” As he said this, I heard the whales blow again, but this time farther out to sea.
3
We chopped wood through the afternoon hoping to beat the rain. The sky had darkened as we worked through the lunch hour, and George had brought me a sweet roll and a hunk of sausage to eat between swings. Squalls rattled the trees and lifted a fine spray off the water. I turned my back to the weather and ate in a hurry. George tried to work through it, but bits of grit blew into his eyes and he dropped the plugs in a pile of seaweed. Even though he turned his back on the wind, he couldn’t ignore it.
He gave me a ride home in his new pickup. George had a new truck and two new charter boats. He was living in a fine house on the water. He was a walking testament to a life of responsibility.
I have never owned a new truck and maybe for that reason George’s truck seemed unreasonably large. The leather seats gave the cab the smell of a boardroom, and the scene through the windshield passed smoothly into my eyes like the large-screen movies I had seen at the World’s Fair as a kid. Th
is truck didn’t just travel on the pavement but seemed to gather the road up behind itself for safekeeping.
Leaves blew across the road in skittering patterns like small animals fleeing from a fire. Trees waved their arms around in alarm. On my right, the waves were building and breaking white, and gulls bobbed in the air like kites. On my left and ahead of me, the mountains rose up from the sea in steep-forested slopes until they gave way to rock and ice. Up high on one of the peaks I could see a fine spume of snow lifting into the sky as the wind scoured the lace of the rock.
Artists always make a lot of mountain peaks. I suppose I have always been a valley sort of guy. It never bothers me that something is taller than I am, and I’ve been content to let it stay that way. But when the light hits a peak, even if I’m watching it from the front seat of a tugboat-sized truck, something rises up in my chest. “You don’t have to be here,” the mountain says, and I know that’s true and am grateful.
I was thinking this as a small skinny white girl ran in front of the truck and George hit his brakes hard enough to send me lurching into the dash.
“Jesus . . . Lord,” George sputtered.
I couldn’t see the girl in front of the truck and when I opened the door and stepped out, I still couldn’t. Reflexively I looked under the truck. Nothing. I stepped around the front to see George Doggy stooping down and patting his hands over the pale cheeks of the girl who was standing stock-still not three inches from the grillwork.