by John Straley
She wheeled back to her place by the window. She stared up at me with a startlingly clear expression. There was just the slightest tremor to her head. She fingered the Russian cross on a silver chain around her neck. “How much does it cost to hire you?”
I had never been hired to find out the whole truth before so I had to refigure my time schedule. Since I didn’t have to locate the paper on the case I would save time, but if she had actually read it all and still hadn’t resolved for herself why it happened, I might have to dig up some outside source to satisfy her. It might be very far outside, and that could take time, and some more of her money.
“That all depends on the type of case and the client. Let me read through the files and see what, if anything, I can do for you. Generally I charge twenty-five dollars per hour plus expenses, and generally no one ever pays their bills so I have to be flexible.”
Behind me, there was a knock on the door. I heard it open just a crack. Mrs. Victor looked up.
“One minute! I’ll be done in just a minute,” she called. “I’m sorry, Mr. Younger, but I have an appointment. Someone is coming to visit. If you could read the files I will pay you two hundred dollars just for your opinion of the case and then we can talk about what to do from there. Can you come and see me tomorrow?”
I nodded, hefted the boxes into my arms, and pried open the door with my knee. There was no one in the hallway waiting to get in so I turned and walked toward the main entrance.
Ordinarily, two fifteen-pound boxes wouldn’t be a problem for me but this morning as I teetered down the steps I was breaking into a sweat under my flannel shirt. It was unpleasant. The heat from my body smelled like barroom smoke, and the sweat in my eyes felt like tequila burning under my lids. Even if my body felt like it was rotting, my spirit was beginning to rise. This, at least, was a big case, with some good reading. I wouldn’t have to be following somebody in a neck brace, waiting to photograph them playing tennis or jumping on a trampoline. At least this was a murder, even if it was old and already solved.
I walked past the bench. I had too much to carry already so I left the Berry there. It wouldn’t be a problem. I had once left Mind and Nature on that same bench for a week and no one disturbed it. It was just a little damp and the corners were frayed where it looked like a raven had been turning pages.
TWO
I DON’T LIKE to tell people what I do. They always say, “That must be interesting” and then stare at my chest as if they expect me to pull a gun from under my jacket and dive through the open window out to my waiting car. I don’t like to tell people what I do because eventually I disappoint them. I don’t drive an expensive car or an old car with lots of character. In fact, I don’t have a driver’s license. I hitchhike, take cabs, or walk. All three are much better for conversation anyway.
I don’t carry a gun. I don’t own a handgun, but it seems like there are guns everywhere I work. Look beside the cashbox, behind the bar, the nightstand in the lawyer’s bedroom, the cargo pouch of the snowmachine—you’ll find one. Large-caliber revolvers mostly, with a solid phallic gravity. But every once in a while there’s a small well-made lady’s gun.
It’s not that I disapprove of handguns; I don’t carry one mostly because the police won’t let me. They like to picture me knocking on a psychopath’s trailer door with nothing but a number 2 pencil, a spiral notebook, and maybe a tape recorder for protection. But it generally works out. The few times I’ve been able to predict that I’m going to need a gun I take the Judge’s long-barreled 12-gauge to the front door. And when the unexpected happens and I am most needy, I wait for the karmic cycle to deliver a piece into my hand. Of course, that hasn’t happened, but hope springs eternal.
Physically, I’m also a disappointment as a private investigator. The scar above my right eyebrow is my only dramatic feature. I got it in the sixth grade when Eric Hoffert pushed me into the water fountain. It’s the outward sign of my heroic inward suffering.
I like where I live and that hasn’t been a disappointment yet: a three-story frame house built on pilings over the water. It has everything I need—office, kitchen, bedroom. Two years ago, we used to flush our toilet and hear the water drop right into the Pacific Ocean under the house. But now the city has a new system so we can flush the toilets and it will travel along an elaborate system of drops and pump stations and be deposited several miles across the island—into the Pacific Ocean. I like where I live, only it seemed a little far away on this particular morning.
I was teetering the boxes down the street, sweating, cursing alcohol, and needing a drink. I stopped in front of the bar and leaned against the wall to talk to a fisherman I knew. I was hoping he would be able to fill me in on what had happened last night—specifically to my charge card. No luck. He had been practicing his saxophone down on his boat all night and he was very excited that he had finally learned to play “In a Sentimental Mood.”
He explained that he was a former folk musician taking that twisting musical road into the nineties.
“Pretty twisty,” I said, and shouldered my boxes up. I told him to drop on by and play for me sometime and reminded him not to leave my old Sonny Rollins records next to the exhaust manifold, that my Willie Dixon records had never survived his blues period at sea. I had given all of my records and tapes away and it hadn’t occurred to me yet to buy a CD player, but I still didn’t like the thought of my treasures being abused.
It was a rare clear morning at the end of October, but it was bound to change. The fishing season was slowing down and most of the boats were in their slips in the harbor. Music was playing from their pilothouses, and the air was filled with the romantic ambiance of gulls calling to the air and diesels blowing out their cooling systems. Someone had had bacon for breakfast, and there were groups of three or four men and women standing around the dock thumbing through engine manuals with their cups of coffee perched on the electrical meters.
Sitka is an island town where people feel crowded by the land and spread out on the sea. This morning to the north and east, the mountains were asserting their presence by showing off the new snow that dusted them down to the two-thousand-foot line. A woman on a troller threw a bucket of breakfast scraps off her back deck and an eagle dove, lifted a blackened crust of bread, and flew off toward the trees where the deserted graveyards lay.
I banged the front door with my feet and Toddy came down the first flight of stairs to help me. Toddy is my roommate—actually, I’m his unofficial guardian. An old friend from Social Services asked me to look out for him until other arrangements could be made. That was two years ago.
He and I were born in the same year under the same sign. We’re 1950 models and Cancers. He has a crew cut, and his glasses have lenses so thick that when he stares up at you, his eyes swim around his face as if he were trying to balance half-dollars in his eye sockets. He is continually sliding his glasses up his nose with his index finger even when he doesn’t need to.
I first met Todd in jail. He had been arrested for stealing a pair of shoes and several women’s suit coats. When I went to interview him in his cell he was wearing inmate’s blue pajamas. His head was shaved and he sat on his bunk, rocking back and forth, twisting his finger as if he were braiding cable.
The police and the shopkeepers never put all of the facts together: Money was never missing, there was never any vandalism, but every so often a gray woman’s suit jacket would vanish and once a pair of brown leather pumps was gone from its cardboard box. Store employees were subjected to long straightforward interviews of the “It will be all right if you just want to get it off your chest” variety. It was suggested that a polygraph machine would help them to get it off their chests. But it wasn’t until a janitor at the elementary school found a gray woman’s suit coat hanging above some sensible shoes in the back of the furnace room that the whole spectacular crime unraveled. Todd, an assistant janitor at the time, was sitting behind the hot-water heater with his head in his hands, weeping.<
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After he was placed under arrest, the police prided themselves upon solving a particularly puzzling crime. The Social Services people were assured that their suspicions about Todd were well founded. He was designated as a “person in need of aid,” handcuffed, and taken to the jail.
Some people say Todd is retarded. At Social Services they said he was “mentally and emotionally challenged,” but the woman who used to love me said he had too gentle a heart to live in the real world.
He was charged with criminal mischief. I was sent by his attorney to talk to him about his defense. First I had to go to the law library and find out what the elements of criminal mischief were and then interview Todd and see if it was true that he was a mischievous criminal. I intended to talk to him about times, places, motives, and maybe an alibi; instead he told me about his mother.
Todd’s mother had been a teacher at the elementary school; his father had been a mechanic working out in the logging camps. When he was six, they had ridden on a friend’s small trailer out to the logging camp at False Island. After his dad finished work on one of the light plant generators, he and some of his friends in camp went down to the dock to drink and listen to the radio. They were drinking beer and whiskey, telling stories, and every once in a while when a good song came on through the static, his dad would grab his mother and spin her around on the dock to dance. Todd remembered how her laughter seemed to bubble out of her mouth like birdsong. He was laughing when his father twirled her an extra flip and she fell into the bay, and everyone was laughing when they hauled her out. She stood with water beading off the strands of her hair, embarrassed and shivering, trying to giggle. Someone gave her another drink of whiskey to warm her up. It was a cool fall afternoon and everyone thought she was going down below to change her clothes, but when someone checked on her later they laughed again because she had passed out with her wet clothes on. The radio played up on the dock and Todd sat down below in the boat watching her teeth chatter. He was worried when he saw that she’d broken one of her teeth chattering so hard. He put a blanket over her. He wished his father would come, but gradually he stopped worrying when she stopped shivering. I’m not sure if he realized he had watched his mother die of hypothermia, but, if he did, it didn’t seem to bother him because his mother had since told him not to worry.
The cell was the green cement of an old railroad station. The bunks were metal slats and damp blankets. The tags that said, “Do not remove under penalty of law” were missing from the mattresses. On the back wall was an elaborate chalk drawing of a trolling boat with its poles down, lines in the water, sailing toward a black setting sun. Underneath in blue ink someone had written “Seiners Suck.” There was a radio playing, and the guy in the next cell was doing pushups to the beat of a Bruce Springsteen song.
“It’s a funny thing,” Todd said, and he squinted at me. “When Jesus was alive, how was he connected to the earth? By his feet, just like the rest of us, except he didn’t wear shoes because his spirit went right into the ground like lightning. But most of the rest of us wear shoes so it keeps us from grounding out. Ever notice how it hurts most people to walk barefooted but the people in the Bible go barefoot so easy—that’s because they’re ready to be hit by lightning.”
The radio in the next cell had switched to a country western ballad, and the inmate was doing situps.
Todd spoke a little more softly. “If I arrange the shoes just right somewhere my mom might have stood, God will hover there like a little mist. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t even look like anything except maybe a little rain cloud, but”—he sat forward and his body relaxed as if the words were an exhalation of a long-held breath—“if I hang a coat above the shoes, the mist fills up her clothes and Momma can talk to me from heaven. But only if I arrange the shoes in just the right place in a particular way. It would be crazy to do it otherwise.”
He told me about the place in the furnace room where his mother had told him what heaven was like and about all the gifts she was saving to give him when she saw him again. She made him promise never to tell anyone else what heaven was like because it would make life on earth that much harder. In fact, she had regretted telling Todd the details of heaven and that was why he was crying when the janitor walked in on them. His momma had told him she was not going to talk to him anymore. She was worried that he wanted to be in heaven more than he wanted to be on the earth. She said that God wanted him to be on earth a little longer. “You are all I have left on earth,” she told him and then began to fade into the furnace pipes and asbestos insulation.
I read somewhere that when a child realizes his favorite doll cannot speak back to him, there is a silence that fills the mind. There was Toddy, with nothing of his greatest love but some stolen shoes and a suit jacket, and the world was very quiet.
I sat in the cell with him. The inmate next door had turned off his radio and was stretching. I felt a little uncomfortable, and I didn’t quite know what to ask next. But there was one thing I wanted to know.
“What is heaven like?”
He held his hands palms up and looked sad and apologetic. “It’s funny,” he said, “but since she left I can’t remember a thing about heaven. Not pictures or anything, only feelings sometimes. Feelings … like I can almost remember but I’m not sure. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think I do.”
The door banged against the wall. “Todd, get one of these boxes, would you, pal?”
“Sure, Cecil. I was just listening to the radio and looking at books about how they pumped air into the hull of the Titanic and about how you can avoid getting the bends. Do you know those bubbles when you open a pop bottle? Well, that’s like what happens when you get the bends.”
Todd was wearing bib overalls and a forest green jersey underneath. He had his down booties on, so it was a good bet he had spent the morning under an afghan reading the encyclopedia.
I kicked off my leather slip-on shoes and put on my house slippers. We both started padding up the stairs. I wanted to smell some coffee.
“Those bubbles get in your blood and they can cause extreme discomfort.”
“I can imagine. Listen, we got any coffee?”
I looked out the windows above the sink overlooking the channel. A beautiful steel-hulled crab boat was passing, gulls diving in its wake. I noticed there was coffee on, and Toddy had done all the breakfast dishes. I walked over and took a mug down from one of the brass hangers.
“Cecil, do you think you could salvage boats from underwater? It is very dangerous and there is a great amount of discomfort involved, but very often it can be quite lucrative.”
“I don’t know, Todd. I bet between the two of us we could get it done. But, listen, do you think you could turn down the radio some? I’ve got to read all the crap in these boxes, and I’ll have to make some phone calls.”
“You have another case, Cecil?”
“You don’t have to ask in such a tone of shock, do you? I have plenty of cases. They’re mostly inactive at this point.”
“Sunken,” Toddy murmured, and he chuckled as he padded toward the radio.
“Funny! To answer your question, I don’t know if I have a new case or not. It might be more storytelling than investigation.”
“Will it be quite lucrative?”
“Excessively lucrative, Todd, and particularly free of extreme discomfort. So much better than raising sunken ships.”
I sat on the couch facing the woodstove. It had started to rain, which is what it mostly does in southeastern Alaska in October. The stove created a pleasant bubble of heat in the room. The rain sounded like birds dancing on the tin roof. I was drinking coffee with half-and-half and as the afternoon progressed I added one small shot of Irish Cream. Todd flipped through the T’s and listened to the radio while I read the history on Louis Victor’s murder.
In May of 1982, Louis Victor had hired a young farmhand from Illinois named Alvin Hawkes. Hawkes worked as a deckhand on the charter boat. Vict
or needed an errand boy to help meet the needs of the German industrialists who come to Alaska and pay an average of ten thousand dollars for the privilege of shooting a brown bear with a high-powered rifle. Hawkes also packed lunches, filled gas tanks, and started lunch fires on the beach to warm the clients.
There were several people who came forward later to say that Hawkes seemed strange; that he talked to himself, and would sometimes stand alone and seem to be arguing with himself. There was a transcription of telephonic testimony from a well-known Hollywood actor who had been a client of Victor’s. He told the grand jury that at the time he thought Hawkes “had a screw loose” but he had never mentioned it to anyone until contacted by the district attorney’s office.
On October 2, 1982, Hawkes was supplying a remote hunting cabin on Admiralty Island. Hawkes had stayed in the cabin for a week, cutting wood and hiking, trying to get a fix on the bears in the area. For ten thousand dollars you don’t want just any bear, you need to take home the skin of an awesome man-eater, the only other slavering omnivore in North America. And you don’t want to walk too far to find it. So the guides learn the habits of the local bears to give their clients the shortest walk and the best shot.
On October 3, Louis Victor received a radio transmission from Hawkes that sounded like he was in some kind of trouble. Victor and his two adult children, Lance and Norma, took their boat, the Oso, from Juneau up into Seymour Canal on Admiralty Island. A close family friend, Walter Robbins, traveled with them in his own vessel along with his daughter De De, who was his deckhand that season before she started college. It was early evening when they arrived.
Robbins said in his statement that he saw Louis go ashore with his rifle to speak with Hawkes. The next morning, Alvin Hawkes was raving about how Louis Victor had gone crazy and tried to kill him and then had run off into the woods. Hawkes had a cut across his cheek and a bruise where it appeared he had been hit with a blunt instrument. There was blood on his shirt and a great deal of blood on the steps and door latch of the cabin. Hawkes maintained that all of the blood was his own, and that Louis had attacked him with a splitting maul.