A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  The phone was barely back in its cradle when it rang again.

  “It’s me, Kate,” Kurt Pletnikoff said. “I found her.”

  Luba Hardt was in the hospital with multiple contusions, a cracked rib and, the medical staff informed them, a raging case of withdrawal. So much for the Bean’s Café assessment of Luba’s condition. Not only was she not talking, she wasn’t focusing very well. She didn’t respond to Kate’s questions, and after a moment Kate went into the hall. “Where did you find her?” she said to Kurt.

  “In the trees between Third Avenue and the railroad yards,” Kurt said. “A bunch of street people have built themselves shelters there.”

  “Was anyone else there?”

  He shook his head.

  A big man in the one-tone black of the Anchorage Police Department approached. “Shugak,” he said.

  “O’Leary,” she said.

  “Long time no see,” he said, his tone indicating it hadn’t been long enough. “You know the vic?”

  Kate nodded. “She’s from Niniltna.”

  O’Leary eyed Kurt. “And this is?”

  “Kurt Pletnikoff. He was looking for her, at my request.”

  O’Leary nodded, holding Kurt’s eyes. “I see.”

  “I didn’t do this,” Kurt said.

  “Who said you did?” O’Leary said.

  “I’ll vouch for Kurt,” Kate said. “He works for me.”

  Kurt’s expression was wooden, but O’Leary knew something was off. “Oh yeah?” Sandy eyebrows didn’t quite disappear into the receding hairline that O’Leary hid with his uniform cap. Kate had never seen him without it.

  “Really,” Kate said.

  “I thought you worked alone.”

  Kate shrugged. “You thought wrong.” She threw a little attitude into her tone, too, as if to say, Nothing new. And by the way, back off, motherfucker.

  O’Leary nodded. “Got a number?” he said to Kurt.

  Before Kurt could answer, Kate gave O’Leary hers. “We’ll come down to the cop shop tomorrow for statements.”

  O’Leary’s turn to shrug. “I’ve got everything I need.”

  Safely in the parking lot, Kurt said, “What’s with him?”

  “We’ve got history,” Kate said. “Plus, I don’t think O’Leary thinks Natives are really necessary. Especially not Native women.”

  “Necessary to what?”

  “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” She turned to face him. “You did good, Kurt.”

  He looked glum. “I wish I could have found her before she got hurt.”

  “Me, too, but at least she didn’t lie out for three days and die of exposure. You found her. That’s what I hired you for. How hard was it to find her?”

  He shook his head. “Not that hard. I walked all over downtown, talked to the guys who hang out on the grass in front of the visitors’ center, went into all the Fourth Avenue bars, described Luba, asked if they’d seen her. She’s been living on the streets since she got to town, I think. Eventually, I found someone who told me a couple of places she might be. I found her the third place I went.”

  Kate nodded. “How much did it cost?”

  He pulled out a small wire notebook and thumbed through it. “About a hundred fifty bucks’ worth of cheap beer, and a hamburger.”

  Kate nodded again. “How did you like it? The job, I mean. How did you like doing it?”

  He thought about it. “It was okay,” he said in a surprised tone of voice. “All I had to do was be halfway civil, buy a few drinks here, a six-pack there, and people were ready to talk.”

  “Not everyone has the ability to listen,” Kate said. It took him a minute to realize that she’d paid him a compliment. When he did, he blushed like a teenager. “How would you like another job?”

  He looked at her. “Same wages?”

  She nodded, hiding a smile. “First thing, though, you buy yourself some new clothes. Get a decent sports jacket, a couple of pairs of slacks, some good shoes.”

  He looked appalled. “Jesus, Kate. Do I have to?”

  She sighed. “Yeah. Look, go to Nordstrom. Go up to the second floor and ask for a salesperson named Alana. Tell her Kate Shugak sent you in for a businessman’s makeover. She’ll get you outfitted.” Whether you want to be or not, she thought. She gave him an assessing glance. “Tell her I said you need a haircut, too. Second thing, I want you to go to a print shop and get a business card made up.”

  Still terrified by the prospect of his makeover, Kurt said weakly, “A business card? What do I put on it?”

  Kate thought. “Your name, with my phone number beneath it. Wait, I’ll go with you. I know a print shop, and I know what I want the card to look like.”

  “I don’t know what the hell I need a card for.”

  “The people you’re going to be talking to on this job will expect a card. It’s part of the costume.”

  “The costume for what?”

  “I want you to find someone for me,” she said. “We’ll have to rent you a car, too, come to think of it.”

  “Who do you want me to find?”

  “Someone who disappeared thirty years ago.”

  “America’s Mounties, that’s what they used to call us,” Morris Maxwell told Kate.

  They were in the Pioneer Home, a big brick state-run old folks home on I Street. Morris Maxwell was a shrunken giant, pretty much confined to a wheelchair—“I can walk,” he told her, “I just choose not to”—shoulders stooped, hair completely gone from a wrinkled liver-spotted scalp, but there was a bright gleam in his eyes and he was quick to grin. He insisted she wheel him from his room into the common room so he could show all the other old geezers that he had a good-looking woman visiting him. Now they were sitting at a table over cups of weak coffee that no amount of sugar or creamer would improve.

  “Alaska’s Mounties,” he repeated, “that was us, the territorial police. TPs, they called us. Weren’t that many of us. I remember figuring once that if you divided the square miles of Alaska by the number of state cops we had back then, each of us was responsible for eight thousand eight hundred and eighty-five square miles.” He cocked an eyebrow, and she looked suitably impressed.

  “I was a pilot, so they assigned me to the Bush. I got forty-three hours in the air my first week.”

  “What was it like?” Kate said.

  “What was it like? What was it like? I’ll tell you what it was like. It was eating corned beef out of a can for three days straight when you were weathered in in Tooksook Bay, and the weather running you out of corned beef and you having to eat fermented seal instead. It was taking a rolled-up magazine with you when you went outside to take a crap to beat the dogs off your ass in McGrath. It was having to be nice to every living soul no matter how much of an asshole they were or what god-awful thing they’d done in Nome, just so you wouldn’t get into a fight and mess up your uniform, which cost two hundred dollars, and the state sure as hell wasn’t paying for a replacement.”

  Kate, entranced by and a little envious of this portrait of frontier law enforcement, said, “Tell me more.”

  He tossed back his head and let out a cackle of laughter, and for a moment she saw him for the vibrant man he had been, instead of the shriveled-up hulk he was now. Just so would she be in fifty years.

  “Can you get around without that chair?” Kate said.

  His gaze sharpened. “Why?”

  She jerked her head. “If you can, let’s blow this pop stand for a while.”

  She took him to Club Paris for one of their justifiably famous steaks, and there was nothing wrong with Max’s appetite, or his teeth. Under the influence of his second martini, he began to wax even more eloquent about times gone by. He had a gift for storytelling, and after awhile the bartender stopped even pretending to polish the section of the bar closest to their table. The waitress just pulled up a chair. She wasn’t the only one.

  Max had severe opinions on the topic of American presidents for whom
he had worked security detail. “Eisenhower was a gentleman. Johnson was an asshole.” This led to reminiscing on the subject of statehood, which came in while he was a TP. “Some of the villages we went into, we were the only representatives of any government, state or federal, those folks had ever seen. I’d fly into a village, wearing my full uniform, and give a talk at the school on the new state and pass around my cuffs and my empty revolver. Most of them had never seen a revolver before, although they all had rifles and shotguns. Then I’d do it all over again for the village council that night. I remember one time—where was that? Chuathbaluk? Tuluksak? No, farther north, maybe Point Lay or St. Mary’s—I was the first they knew Alaska had become a state.”

  He’d had some experience in giving medical care, too. “I stopped counting the babies I delivered after I got to ten. Of course that kind of thing could rebound on you—if you knew how to deliver babies, they were apt to think you could do other things, like splint a broken bone or dig out a bullet.” He finished off his martini and the bartender had a third in front of him in sixty seconds flat.

  “We didn’t have a state penitentiary back then, and the state rented cells from the feds. Cost about ninety-eight dollars a day to put up state felons in federal prisons, which was probably why everybody’s sentences were so short. We never sent Natives up for longer than five years, they just didn’t survive being jailed. Some of them didn’t survive the five years.” He looked at Kate. “You’re Native.”

  Kate nodded. “Aleut. Mostly.”

  “Never got that far south.”

  “I’m from Niniltna,” she said.

  “Niniltna, Niniltna…Oh yeah, sin city for the Kanuyaq Copper Mine.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “How’d Aleuts wind up that far away from the water?”

  “World War Two.”

  “Huh. I remember I had to fly up to Niniltna one time to investigate an arson case. It was breakup. Lot of arson during breakup—everybody needs a start-up check in the spring. Still like that?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Who’s the cop up there nowadays?”

  “Jim Chopin.”

  Max shook his head. “Never heard of him,” he said, “a Johnny-come-lately, eh?”

  “I’ll say,” Kate said, but he was already off on his adventures in Barrow, where the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory just east of the village made the cardinal error of letting lumber sit around in a pile in the open. “Just a few boards at a time,” Max said, “that’s all, but pretty soon the pile was gone, and the next time I flew into Anaktuvuk Pass, about a hundred miles southeast, I noticed a brand-new addition on somebody’s house. The navy guys decided to chalk it up to experience. They locked up their lumber after that, though. The invention of the snow machine really opened things up for people living in the Bush, I’ll say that for it.”

  After about two hours of this, during which time Max never repeated a tall tale, Kate had to forcibly remind herself why she was there. The staff had to begin setting up for the dinner crowd and Max and Kate were left alone.

  He cocked an eyebrow in her direction. “I’m guessing you didn’t haul this old carcass out on the town for the pleasure of listening to me yammer on, as delightful as I know that must be.”

  She grinned. “You guessed right.”

  “So?”

  “So. You remember the Victoria Bannister Muravieff case?”

  He looked at the ceiling through narrowed eyes. Kate could almost hear the card index flipping forward to the M’s. She wondered why they put these old cops out to pasture, the sharp ones like Max, walking, talking repositories of decades of Alaskan criminal history. They knew which oil company had bribed the sitting governor with subsidized travel in return for favorable exploration legislation, they knew which banker had bankrupted which local Native corporation with bad business practices, they knew where all the bodies of the strippers and hookers shot by the serial killer were buried. It was all there, available for the price of asking the question. And maybe a couple martinis. It seemed like such a waste.

  “Muravieff,” Max said, “Muravieff. Thirty-one years ago. A house burned down in Bodenburg Butte in the valley. A seventeen-year-old boy was home, died from smoke inhalation. Turned out the mom had taken out a large life-insurance policy on him a few months before. She was convicted. Got life.”

  Kate looked at him with real respect. “I’m impressed.”

  He preened a little.

  “Did you work the case?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Heard the shop talk about it, of course, and we were a lot smaller force in those days, so what one trooper knew, pretty much all of us did.”

  It was the closest thing she was going to get to an impartial eyewitness account. To say that Kate was excited was an understatement. “Tell me everything you remember,” she said.

  “Tell me why you want to know,” he countered.

  “Victoria’s still in jail, out at Hiland Mountain. Her daughter hired me to get her out before she dies, which is looking sooner rather than later because Victoria’s got cancer.”

  “No parole after thirty years?” he said, frowning. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “I’ve read the trial transcript. The judge was horrified that she’d killed her own son for money. He didn’t want Victoria to get out of jail, ever.”

  “Which judge?”

  Kate closed her eyes, the better to visualize the transcript. “Kelly? Kennedy? Kiddle, that was it, Judge James Kiddle.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, a nasty smile spreading across his face, “old Jim Kiddle. We loved cases coming before old Jim. He never met a perp he liked.”

  “Is he still around?”

  Max shook his head. “He retired about seventeen years ago, when the grandchildren got old enough to enjoy. Three years ago, he took his grandson white-water rafting on the Russian River and fell out of the raft.” Max shook his head. “Damn shame, that. Man was a monument to law enforcement.” He reflected. “Of course, he was eighty-four at the time. At least he went out doing something fun.”

  It was the only reference he’d made all day to his own situation. “Do you have family?” Kate said, her voice carefully devoid of sympathy.

  “Nah. Well, an ex-wife, who stuck it out up here for all of five minutes before she hightailed it back Outside.” His face softened. “It was my fault. She was new into the country, wasn’t used to the cold or the dark, and I was gone a lot. She thought she was getting a husband, and what she got instead was missing in action. I don’t blame her for leaving.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of the hand. “About your case.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “It was a different place back then, a different time. You need to understand that going in.

  “Weren’t but fifty thousand people in the whole state. Everybody knew everybody else—we were all on a first-name basis, made no difference if you were digging ditches or running an airline. Best thing about a frontier society is that it’s wide open to everybody. Course, that never lasts long. Civilization is an insidious thing. You ever hear of Lazarus Long?”

  “Sure,” Kate said. “Robert Heinlein character, lived forever.”

  Max’s smile was approving. “Lazarus Long said that when a place gets crowded enough to require IDs, it’s time to go elsewhere.”

  “You think it’s time to go elsewhere from Alaska?” Kate said.

  He cackled. “I’m about to any minute now.”

  Kate laughed with him, even if it did feel a little macabre.

  “Still,” he said, “even on the Alaska frontier there were the high-muckety-mucks, like there always are, people who get things done or get lucky, usually both. This woman—what was her name again?”

  “Victoria.”

  “That’s right, Queen Victoria. We called her that,” he said in answer to her look, “Queen Victoria. You couldn’t see the crown when they brought her into the station, but she held her head like it was there, and she sure as hell looked down h
er nose like it was there. In court, too, from what I hear. Yeah, Queen Victoria was a daughter of two families who made it big in the north, part of the Alaska aristocracy, at least before ANCSA came along and the Natives started elbowing for room at the top. The Pilzes made their money in coal, the Bannisters in supplies, and then they merged by marriage, and it was like the whole state was served up on a plate to their offspring. There isn’t a pie it baked in Alaska they don’t get a slice of.” He cocked that eyebrow. “You talk to any of them yet?”

  “Her daughter, Charlotte, who hired me. Her surviving son, Oliver. And Victoria. Sort of.”

  “And I suppose she says she didn’t do it.”

  “She’s not saying anything at all. She fired me.”

  It was the first time all day she’d seen him look surprised. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. Turns out her daughter didn’t tell her she’d hired me to begin with, and Victoria wasn’t happy when she found out. I went out to Hiland to talk to her and she fired me.”

  “Then what are you doing here listening to me yammer on?” He drained the current martini. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Her daughter pointed out that since she was the one who hired me, she was the only who could fire me.”

  “Huh,” he said, and looked around for the bartender. “I have to say, that may be the first time I’ve ever heard of a perp not declaring their innocence every hour on the hour of every day they’re on the inside.”

  “Me, too,” Kate said. “Will you tell me what you remember about the case?”

  “Do I get a consultant’s fee?”

  Kate grinned and pointed at the new martini that had materialized in front of him.

  He cackled, throwing his head back, and again Kate could see the man that he had been. She wondered about the ex, if she was still alive. He hadn’t mentioned children.

  “Thirty years ago,” Max said, taking an appreciative sip of martini, the unending supply of which did not appear to be affecting him in the slightest. He spoke clearly, without hesitation, from memory, and as he spoke, a young woman walked past on the sidewalk outside the window. She was wearing a black leather jacket hung with chains, racing gloves with the knuckles studded with silver, and black eye shadow and lipstick. Paper clips climbed the curve of her ear, which led the eye upward to the spiked purple hair moussed to stand straight up from her scalp. In the space of two strides, she morphed into a slim young woman with straight light brown hair hanging to her waist, round glasses perched on the end of her nose, a blue-flowered dress gathered just beneath her waist and falling to feet, clad in Birkenstock clogs. Nickleback was superceded by Paul Revere and the Raiders, crack and AIDS was yet to be heard of, the United States was still in Vietnam, and the final report of the Church hearings was three years away.