by John Straley
Jonathan said nothing, but shook his head from side to side.
“Okay,” I said, and I laced my hands behind my head. “Let’s go back to the night of the fire. Two men pass each other in skiffs. The Mygirl is on fire. It is fully involved in flame. The gas has sent it up like a firebomb. One man is coming toward the boat to see if there is anything he can do to help. The other has just set the fire and is leaving quickly. It’s a dark night and as they pass each other, the fire is at the back of the arsonist’s skiff. The arsonist can get a good view of the man who is coming to help. The man coming to help can only get a dim view of the arsonist’s face because the figure is lit up in profile with his face to the darkness, his back to the flames. Only the arsonist can see the other clearly. But it doesn’t matter because you never saw a skiff operator leaving the burning scow.”
Jonathan was shaking his head back and forth as if trying to keep a bug from flying into his ear. “You think you are so smart but you are stupid. You don’t know. You don’t know a thing about what it feels like to try and protect a brother or what it feels like to see him suffer like that.”
“It must have been hard for you, Jonathan. It must have been harder still when you learned Richard was going to talk to the press, when you realized that he was giving the money to the Sands boys for the murder of their family. Kevin wanted the money. Why not? He had lost his family and he had kept quiet, but he didn’t understand the dynamics, did he? He didn’t understand that his shelter was going to fall down after Richard pulled out and took the Sands boys with him. Richard was tired of keeping quiet for you, Jonathan. Particularly after you hedged on your description of him at trial. Richard pulled out and took the Sandses with him. You were left out. No one was going to believe you hadn’t done all of the killings, were they, Jonathan?”
Now the master of the Naked Horse was slumped on the top of the companionway. He was shaking as if freezing to death. Doggy reached his left hand out and placed it on Jonathan’s shoulder. The other hand Doggy slid near his ankle.
I continued, “Richard was going to give you over to George. You found out from Kevin. You flew to Ketchikan on the same jet George was on, didn’t you? Somehow you got George’s gun from the baggage handlers and you made that first ferry to town. You killed Richard with George’s gun. Then when George just walked away from it you got scared. You waited around but you didn’t know what was up, so you cleaned up the room and stuffed Richard into your green river bag, then waited to dump him over the side during the storm. There was no chance anyone would follow you out into the storm. Once Ewers was dead, Kevin finally got the picture. He was going to get fingered not only for the Mygirl but for killing Richard as well. Everything was really broken now. All the agreements you made the night the Mygirl burned. The whole dynamic that held your silence together had collapsed. When Kevin realized it was over he wanted to cut a deal with George. That’s what he wanted to do on the back deck. Kevin didn’t really know if George had killed Ewers or not, but it didn’t matter. He felt better confiding in George at that point. Maybe in his own reptilian brain he wanted to re-create the shelter of your original agreement.”
“You still have nothing. Richard Ewers did the whole thing. Who’s going to argue with me now? I’ll say I didn’t testify against him at trial because I was afraid he was going to kill me. No one’s going to believe you, Cecil. You’ve got nothing and there’s no one left to give you anything.” Jonathan was smiling weakly now, staring down into the darkness of his sailboat.
I felt almost light-headed from happiness and vindication. “What would the real killer say?” I mumbled to myself. Then I pressed on, because I needed just a bit more from the master of the Naked Horse.
“You’re right about that, Jonathan. There is no one left. Sean was going to turn the AK-47 in to the police. He was going to take the gun to school and give it to the officer there. So you called George to report the schoolyard shooter. Whatever happened, you made sure you were down one witness.”
“You’re fishing, Cecil.”
“Then, of course, I have this.” I held up the scrap of paper from Sean’s photo album. “Sean was worried about his brother. He couldn’t let Kevin go down for you. When Kevin was in jail and you were dancing around on the street giving away all the evidence, Sean wrote me a note so he could protect his brother. Brothers are like that, aren’t they?” I studied the haggard man in front of me. Jonathan reached down and pulled on a heavy wool pea coat. He stood in the sun and wrapped his arms around his shoulders. He looked from me to George and back again.
“I’m tired” was all he said.
Then he reached into his coat and pulled a heavy revolver from his pocket. Doggy’s hand slid up his shin. I pushed myself back in the cockpit, fumbling in my pockets.
Jonathan smiled at both of us, placed the gun squarely in his mouth, and squeezed his eyes shut tight.
“Wait!” I shouted. Jonathan opened his eyes.
He looked at me. His tired eyes were both sorry and hateful, if that is possible. The barrel of the gun rattled against his teeth. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut once more.
Across the harbor I heard a woman laugh. A car horn sounded in the distance.
Jonathan took the gun out of his mouth and shot George Doggy in the forehead.
I heard people yelling and footsteps on the ramp. I remember my hand feeling sore and the smell of burning fabric, but I don’t remember pulling the trigger on the revolver in my pocket. I don’t remember seeing the slug from the gun I fired hitting Jonathan in the throat or reeling him backwards down into the darkness of the Naked Horse’s cabin. I do remember kneeling over George Doggy’s body, reaching out with hands that seemed to be someone else’s. I remember that he seemed very, very far away, and I wondered if he could even see me from where he lay.
The shots echoed up and bounced around the harbor. Gulls rose up into the air. People ran down the dock; someone screamed at them to stay back and call 911. Jonathan lay sprawled on the deck of the cabin. The back of his neck was a mass of torn flesh and bone fragments. He must have looked much the same as Richard Ewers looked when Doggy found him in the hotel room in Ketchikan.
I cradled Doggy in my arms; I laid his limp body on the top of the cockpit hatch and jumped down to the cabin’s floor. There, in the dark with the smell of powder, I felt as if I were standing at the bottom of a well. When I looked up to the sky, I saw the misshapen outline of George Doggy’s head. I took a pencil stub from my pocket and picked up Jonathan’s revolver through the trigger guard and held it up to George’s body.
“Does this gun look familiar to you?” I asked him, holding up the gun that had been stolen from him back in Ketchikan, the gun that Jonathan had used to kill Richard Ewers and, now, my father’s oldest friend.
15
I remember George Doggy’s funeral. It was a community event along the lines of some sort of medieval festival of grief, with speeches and fund-raisers for law enforcement and midnight vigils to “Stop the Violence.”
The funeral itself was held in the Harrigan Centennial Hall, the largest room in town, most often used for concerts and important public meetings. The Governor came and made remarks concerning a legacy of decency and respect for civilization. The entire trooper detachment from the training academy was there wearing sidearms on their dress uniforms. When the Governor called upon all of the assembled to live their lives in accordance with George Doggy’s example, I felt all the cops in the place glaring at me.
After the speeches there was food, crying, backslapping and more food, or so I was told. I went home early. As I walked out the door past a group of glaring law enforcement cadets, it struck me that there were so many flowers at his funeral you would have thought George had won the Kentucky Derby rather than getting gunned down by the man who had tried to frame him.
The town was generally split on whether I was to blame for George Doggy’s
murder. On the side of my being guilty sat almost the entire law enforcement community of the State of Alaska and my mother. On the side of my being innocent were Jane Marie, Toddy, most of the bar crowd who thought I didn’t have enough balls to have pulled it off, and strangely enough, Sitka Police Lieutenant Roy Pomfret.
Pomfret had responded to the scene down on the Naked Horse. He found me on the cabin floor holding George’s gun with a pencil. I was sitting flat on the deck at the bottom of the companionway steps. Pomfret crawled down, took the gun away and stood me up gently. He patted me down and found the other revolver still in my pocket, the fabric of my coat singed by the muzzle blast. I had, apparently, not taken the gun out of my pocket when I fired. Pomfret took the gun and placed it carefully on the chart table and said, “Come on, Cecil, let me get you out of here.”
Pomfret turned the scene over to the troopers from the crime lab who happened to be at the academy in a forensics training session. This had been a busy week for gunshot wounds in Sitka, and the cops were benefiting by getting unprecedented practice in processing crime scenes. State purchasing agents had to lay in two new cases of latex gloves.
Pomfret took me to the police station. He didn’t read me my rights, but that was fine, since I wasn’t saying anything anyway. I sat in a room wearing my best suit, singed and smeared with blood. I stayed there until they must have gotten a search warrant, because after an hour sitting silently on the folding chair in the interview room, they came back, took all my clothes, and gave me a hospital robe to wear.
After about two hours, Pomfret came in and held up a microcassette recorder, which appeared to be covered in dried blood. He had taken it off of George’s body. They had also gone to Doggy’s home and taken the tape from the tape recorder that had been running in the basement. George had been recording our entire conversation, from the moment he came in while I was going through his safe, to the confrontation with Jonathan when I had showed him Sean’s note, and right up to the time Jonathan shot him in the head. The recorder had whirred silently away in his coat pocket while George lay dead in my arms.
Pomfret had listened to the tapes. He had gotten the first draft of the story from the lab techs at the scene. He only had one critical question that wasn’t cleared up by the tapes. “What was in that kid’s note?” he asked me.
I handed him the paper from Sean’s album, which I was still gripping in my hand. Pomfret spread it out on the metal table in the interview room.
The note was written in Sean’s blocky handwriting. All it contained was a girl’s name. It read, “Chandler, Chandler, Chandler . . .” down the entire length of the paper. There was a heart drawn at the end of the page.
“Jesus Christ,” Pomfret said.
“It was a bluff” was my only statement to the police that day.
George Doggy has become one of the great law enforcement martyrs in the region. In a few years there would be a junior high school named after him. No one questioned his motives in the deaths that autumn that had culminated in his own. No one dispelled the belief that George had saved lives at the school when he shot Sean Sands. No one doubted he was involved in a legitimate investigation when Kevin Sands went over the stern of the Winning Hand.
No one except me, apparently. So many of the things I thought and learned about George since his death have clouded my memory of him. I learned he had gotten Kevin Sands out of jail. George had put up the bail. Why had he done it? I can only imagine he wanted to follow Sands to the money and Ewers’s body, but when he had the chance to search the Naked Horse he seemed disinterested. Had George bailed Kevin out so he could then follow him and kill him? And after killing him, did he intend to shift the blame to me?
But George was part of the honored dead now, and he would not answer, so I could afford to be generous. I think Doggy probably just ended his life in unfamiliar territory. He was frightened and caught up in circumstances he couldn’t control, like so many of the men from whom he had coaxed confessions.
I just don’t know how to judge Doggy’s guilt or innocence. It seems strange to be in the position at all, so I’ll just leave it at this: George Doggy loved my family and he wanted to help me. That’s all that matters to me now.
But I had to be charged with something. I was the last one left standing in some demonic party game. These were the directions which came down from above: I had to be found guilty of something. So the district attorney eventually took a case against me to the grand jury. It was for negligent homicide in connection with the death of Kevin Sands. I could have come up with more creative charges against myself, but the DA’s office was playing it safe.
Troopers had worked the ballistics on all the guns and had reinterviewed everyone involved in both the Sands brothers’ deaths and Patricia Ewers’s police killing. They revealed the DNA evidence they had from the bathtub in Richard Ewers’s hotel room in Ketchikan, where the investigators had found “significant trace evidence of blood along the edges of the tub.” But it wasn’t until they took the plumbing apart and found clots of bloody tissue in the traps of both the sink and bathtub that they were able to say with some confidence that Richard Ewers had been cut up for transport in the hotel bathtub. So eventually a coroner’s jury found that Richard Ewers had died by an unspecified homicide. The troopers tested ballistics of the AK-47 young Sean Sands had been carrying when he had been gunned down and found that it “could not be excluded” as a possible source for the slug fragments that had been found years ago in the Mygirl killings. One expert stated that there were enough similarities between the test slugs from the AK-47 and the lands and grooves found in the badly misshapen slug fragments found in the four burnt bodies to make a positive identification, whereas another expert said there were clearly not enough similarities. None of it mattered to me. I believed Jonathan Chevalier had used Albert’s own rifle, the one with the No Doubt sticker on the stock, to kill Albert himself. Then he gave his brother’s rifle to Sean knowing it would loop the Sands brothers into the killings if suspicion ever came down on him. Sean Sands had simply not wanted to throw the weapon away, no matter that it had been used to kill his family. Later, when Jonathan felt the pressure of George Doggy tracking him down, Jonathan had told Sean to get rid of the rifle. Sean said he was going to turn the gun in to the police officer who visited his school. It was in that second that Jonathan decided to tip Doggy about the young schoolyard shooter.
Why didn’t Sean put the rifle down when Doggy had commanded him? Perhaps all the years of passively viewing his violent dreams made him want to finally take things into his own hands. Guns feel good in a young boy’s hands. A gun gives the illusion that he is in control of his own destiny, and there is some truth in that. Sean must have known his own destiny, from the moment his playmate Albert had made him an orphan. Perhaps that made Sean put the old man in his sights.
I had actually killed Jonathan Chevalier, but that was too sloppy for the DAs. The ballistics were against them and pointed toward a “defense of others” argument. Also there was Doggy’s own tape, which was fairly conclusive. I hadn’t been around for Patricia Ewers’s or Sean Sands’s deaths, so the DA’s office was left with Kevin’s death as their best opportunity to convict me of murder. Jane Marie was scheduled to testify, after they forced her to take an immunity deal so she didn’t have the option of taking the Fifth. I was asked to appear before the grand jury although the request was given in the form of a “target letter,” which is the official warning that I was the target of a grand jury investigation and I might also find the Fifth Amendment to be useful.
I got Harrison Teller to represent me even though he could have been a witness against me. He said he’d cross that bridge if the DAs were stupid enough to try and make him cross it, but he claimed he wasn’t all that concerned. I, on the other hand, was very concerned. The reason most cases settle before trial is that everyone familiar with the system knows that juries are unpredi
ctable. Many lawyers would rather settle litigation by cutting cards.
But I was most worried because I frankly had no real clear memory of how Kevin went over the back deck of the Winning Hand. All I could remember was the tiny bundle of my daughter in his arms, the gun in Doggy’s hand, and Blossom’s skin turning blue as Kevin held her. I also remembered the time we waited before we started looking for Kevin in the water.
My worry was building to a nearly manic pitch when Todd finally got a bunch of his film back and discovered, rather casually, a week before the grand jury was to convene, that he had filmed the entire incident on the back deck of the Winning Hand in spectacular, color-soaked 8mm.
That first time we watched it, I was a swirl of anxiety, for it was shot clearly and all the action was visible. We were struggling. Kevin was obviously holding the baby as some kind of hostage. Doggy had his gun, and we were all backing Kevin up against the rail. Lips moved. Hands jerked around, and then Kevin was gone. Glinting sun dogs seared into the old camera lens. Todd had then focused on Blossom, back in Jane Marie’s arms, Jane Marie crying and stroking the baby’s head. Then he’d stopped shooting. The next image was of the Coast Guard helicopter, taken many hours later.
My first impression of the film was ambiguous. When we slowed it down, we could pay more attention to the gestures and each individual movement: my right arm had been around Kevin’s back, apparently trying to prevent him from going over, or at least that was what we would argue at trial. Doggy seemed to be holding Kevin by the shirt and pulling up just before Kevin handed Blossom over to Jane Marie. Teller forwarded a copy of the film on to the DA, along with a written notice that we fully expected the film to be shown to the grand jury as exculpatory evidence.
The DA showed the film, and all the jurors saw was a baby in peril. They “no true billed” the case in record time. This meant I was out from under the charges, though later the district attorney threatened me with an obstruction of justice charge, which he never got around to taking to a grand jury.