by John Straley
“You need permission from me to talk to my client, Younger.”
“You did such a great job for him. He just raved.”
“I bet.”
“Would you have given me permission?”
“No.”
“So buy me a drink and tell me why you had De De Robbins whacked.”
“Not funny, Younger. I’ve been through this shit.”
He twisted around in his chair and looked at me for the first time in our conversation. “Christ, why don’t you get something to wear. You always look so damn raggedy.”
He sat up straight and brushed off the shoulders of his jacket as if my clothes were giving off airborne spores. Then he raised his left hand and, unbelievably, snapped his fingers for the waitress. Then he sat back.
“De De Robbins drowned herself. Why in the hell would I want her dead? She was the only one who saw the fight on the beach. She was my self-defense case.”
“How about the Victor kids out on the boat?”
“They were down below at the time. They never heard or saw a thing until the next day when they found out that Louis was missing.”
“What about Walt Robbins?”
“De De Robbins told the grand jury they had dinner, and then the old man had a few drinks. He went below to sleep and didn’t come to until the morning.”
“What do you know about Louis and Walt’s relationship? Did they get along?”
“Christ, you’re really boring. Haven’t you thought of going to law school instead of fooling around with this sleuthing business? Don’t you ever think of your father?”
“Constantly. Tell me about Louis.”
“Okay. He was an Alaskan stereotype—strong, proud Tlingit man, good with a gun, good finding the game. When we were looking at a self-defense claim we did a thorough check on him. He wasn’t a fighter. It’s like that with a lot of big guys, you know, big enough not to have to fight. There was only one case he was involved in up in Stellar. It was an alcohol-related something or another. Maybe a domestic assault, maybe a sex thing, but we had a hard time getting our hands on any of the records because they were sealed by the court to protect their confidentiality. There was some scuttlebutt that it had to do with Robbins and his relationship with Emma Victor.”
“So his best friend sleeps with his wife and he beats her up for it. Was there ever a criminal case?”
“I didn’t say that he beat his wife. But anyway he skated: counseling, alcohol program, and a year’s probation. Nothing that half the guys up there haven’t been through. Louis quit drinking after that. He’d been dry for the last ten years. People said that he was a perfect gentleman, never a harsh word. No incidents.
“Of course, none of that helped us to make our case. Here we had a man who, by all accounts, had led a good life with only one minor transgression, and he had made serious amends for that.”
“Serious?”
“He quit drinking. You know anybody who’s quit drinking lately?”
The waitress brought us one bourbon and water and one imported beer and a fake Waterford glass. Sy tilted the glass and poured the beer gently.
“What about Walt Robbins?”
“He was supposed to be like an uncle to the kids. They had some falling out, I guess.”
“What did they do up in Stellar?”
“I guess Louis liked the tundra in the summer. The family had a fish camp, and I heard he had a love interest.”
“Walt Robbins and Mrs. Victor?”
“Pay attention, Younger. It was Louis had a squeeze. That’s what I heard.”
“How’d Robbins react to all this?”
“Christ, you’re not going to run the ‘jealous lover murders the husband’ routine, are you? There’s nothing to tie him to it. His daughter places him down below, asleep in his berth all night.”
“And she is dead.”
“Fuck, Younger, grow up. If she had anything to say, don’t you think she would have told it to the D.A. or the grand jury?”
“You ever turn your father in for murder, Sy?”
“No. Listen, why is your sister still teaching in New Haven? She’s a great lawyer. She could be making some serious money.”
“No doubt. How did Alvin Hawkes get a job with Louis?”
“He’s a distant relative of someone’s. I think he might even have been related to Robbins. How’s that help your theory?”
“I read Hawkes’s record. Clean except for those couple of drug things. Did anyone suspect that he had mental problems in his past?”
“Hell, the state still doesn’t think he’s got any problems. But he had no record of problems before. His mom said he was ‘troubled.’ Isn’t that what all the relatives tell reporters after someone’s gone to jail? You saw him. What do you think, is he faking it?”
“Everybody’s faking it, Sy. How come you didn’t get him off? Wasn’t there enough around to at least stir up a little reasonable doubt?”
“Hey, listen, Younger, these were bad facts. I’ve got a fruitcake who just fed his boss to the bears, for Christsakes! What do you think, your big-shot sister could have worked with those facts?”
“Don’t be so defensive, man. So Hawkes’s family thinks they’ll give their troubled boy the fresh-air treatment, and a job in Alaska is all that he needs to make a man out of him. He draws a real man for a boss, flips out, and he thinks he killed him. He goes to jail and the day before the trial the only witness who can help him at all gets whacked.”
“Commits suicide.”
“What else you know about De De Robbins?”
“Not much but I’ll show you what I got.”
“If she killed herself, why was she trying so hard to climb up out of the water?”
“I don’t know what was going through her mind. Maybe the water was colder than she expected. Maybe she changed her mind.”
“Why didn’t she swim over to the ladder on the dock?”
“Don’t start in on this … please. The experts say that lots of suicides do unpredictable stuff. It’s reflexive. Only some part of them wants to rescue themselves.”
“The subconscious cavalry.”
“I heard that someone got shot in Sitka last night.”
“Yeah.”
“I heard it was your roommate. Why in the hell aren’t you working on that case instead of digging up dead college girls?”
“Pay’s better. Listen, I want pictures from De De’s autopsy, and I need a list of phone numbers and any travel records you’ve got. I’m going up to Stellar tomorrow. You going to be in early?”
“You going to see your old sweetie up there? She was a very nice-looking lady. I don’t know why you had to treat her like such a piece of shit.”
“I know you’re just trying to spare my feelings but you don’t have to refer to her in the past tense around me, Sy. I want anything you’ve got on the Victors or on Walt or De De Robbins. And I’ll be by early tomorrow.”
“Whatever. I might not be in until late.”
“Then your office will be a mess when you do get in.”
He spread his hands out and shrugged his shoulders. The woman with the blue blazer was drumming her fingers on the bar and studying the casing on the Taiwanese oak bar clock. Sy pushed away from our table.
“See ya.”
He walked over to the woman and as I was on my way to the door I heard him ask her if he hadn’t seen her in one of the local theater productions, telling her she was terrific before she could answer.
I had a cheap room upstairs. Cheap because it faced the street and the bathroom was down the hall. The carpets smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke. No phone, no TV, but lots of cute fake antiques and a sink that didn’t work just like it didn’t work during the days of ’98.
I walked up the stairs. In the shadows of the first landing a young couple was sitting on a rickety love seat staring deeply into each other’s eyes. As I padded up to the third floor I heard the woman saying urgently, “And I don�
�t want to complicate your life either, but I’m so …”
As I rounded the third landing I took out the key to my room, checked the number, and turned left. Then I heard the unmistakable metallic click of the hammer being pulled back on a large-caliber handgun. I saw a shadow in a doorway move and I felt a pipe nudging my skull.
I turned around slowly and saw Emanuel Marco smiling at me from behind a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. His greasy black hair framed his face, and he smiled like a stray dog with a burr in his mouth.
“Nice gun, Manny, but I think you’ve been watching too much TV.”
“Hey, Cecil, I forgot to mention that I took the guy up on his offer.”
I took a step toward him, slowly. “There have been several mistakes made here, Emanuel. First, why would somebody trust you to do a contract murder, because they must know that I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to tell me who hired you. You know I can get it from my sister.”
I took another small step.
“Nice try, man, but I don’t even know who it is. I just talked to the guy on the phone, and picked up half the money in a garbage can. I get half after. Anyway, anyone who pays to have you killed would pay to have me killed if I screwed them over. And besides, he offered me ten thousand.”
Now his back was against the wall. The gun was at my throat.
“Good negotiating. You think they’re really going to give you the rest? What are you going to do when they stiff you, go to the Better Business Bureau?”
I took another step forward and now I was too close for him to point the gun at my throat. He had to point it at my chest.
He’d watched enough TV to know that if he fired that cannon off in the hall he would have a hard time sliding out of the hotel on little cat feet. He had one chipped tooth in front, and as he looked at me from behind the gun he poked his tongue through the gap in a nervous twitch. Emanuel had a lot invested in his identity as a small-time criminal, and I knew he was a little nervous about his new role as a killer.
“Back the fuck up, man!” He jabbed me in the chest.
I took one more step forward and I was close enough to smell peppermint schnapps on his breath. The .44 was pointed at my stomach.
“The second mistake, Emanuel, is that you’re a fuck-up and wouldn’t know how to kill somebody if they were in an iron lung.”
I lunged forward and brought my left hand around the barrel and my right down toward the hammer. I stretched the web of my right hand, the flesh between my thumb and index finger, and wedged it under the hammer just as Emanuel pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped down and pierced the skin.
I kneed him in the testicles. There was a long phlegm-choked gasp, and then some gagging.
My hand was bleeding a little and I freed my skin from the gun. I opened the cylinder and ejected all the rounds onto the floor.
He started to move in a crouch toward the stairs and I brought the handle down on the top of his head. One of the walnut grips split off and fell over the edge of the staircase landing.
It’s a lot harder to knock a man unconscious than most people think. And it’s kind of a spooky thing to nudge a person that close to death or permanent brain damage. But I tapped him twice. His body went limp. I picked up his hand and grabbed him by his hair and dragged him to the door of my room.
I fumbled with my key, pushed the door open, and dragged Emanuel in. Tightly wedged between the plywood wardrobe and the foot of the bed, his head came to rest next to the radiator, which was banging and rattling as if someone in the basement were sending a frantic message.
I tried to fill an ice bucket from the stove-sink-refrigerator unit and got about a cup of rusty water. I threw it on his face anyway. He didn’t move but his eyelids fluttered. I squatted above his chest and put my face very near his nose.
“I’m going to listen very carefully to your explanation of who paid you to kill me. Then I’m going to decide whether I need to kill you or not.”
“It’s the truth, man. I don’t know. Hey, I was only going to scare you, you know?”
“Where’s the money?”
He pointed to his inside jacket pocket. Then his hand shifted down his leg. I jerked the knife out of his boot. It had an eight-inch black blade. Electrician’s tape was wrapped around the tang for a handle. I pressed it against his throat. His pulse fluttered through his skin at the edge of the blade. I reached in his jacket and pulled out an envelope that held a fat stack of one hundred dollar bills.
“No one gave you this much money to scare me. You have several serious problems, Emanuel, and credibility is not the least of them. Now, who hired you? Think about it. It’s important and it has a bearing on your future.”
The skin broke under the blade of his knife. A thin line of blood trickled down his neck.
“I swear to God, man, I don’t know.” His eyes were glazed, his head was shaking slightly, back and forth.
I patted him gently on the shoulder, then I took the knife from his throat and threw it in the sink. Coercion never works in real life like it does on TV.
“I believe you, Emanuel. I really do. But I can’t have you following me around.”
I put the envelope of money in my back pocket and I swung the butt of the pistol across his forehead. He moaned and lay back.
He kept moaning and his eyes kept fluttering like aspen leaves as I dragged his body parallel to the window and the bed. Now his feet were even with the edge of the radiator. What I wanted to do was set both legs up on the radiator pipe, wedging them firmly between the pipe and the wall. With his torso flat on the floor—head rocking back and forth, moaning—I could stand up on the bed, bounce twice on the mattress, vault forward and land just above his knees. I imagined that they would support me briefly, then snap like pieces of kindling.
But I didn’t. Even if Emanuel was a scumbag who was trying to kill me, I kind of liked him. So I stuck his gun in the top of his pants and threw him down the stairs.
EIGHT
WHENTHE POLICE arrived and found him on the second-floor landing, they arrested him on the spot, knowing, of course, that he was a criminal. Their investigation would fill in the details. They’d ask a few questions, and Emanuel might talk, but not about me. He had been half-smart shooting his mouth off in the bar about a contract killing, because it would look improbable, he hoped, that he would be the one to actually do it. But now if he accused me of assaulting him it would look, I hoped, as if he had taken the money for the killing.
It wasn’t worth worrying about at this point. In the morning I paid my bill in cash and walked up to a French bakery for a croissant and an espresso. I read The New York Times Book Review. If I looked at the reviews and maybe the jacket covers I could fake having read the latest trendy books. That kind of thing helped in Juneau but it didn’t matter much in Sitka. So I just scanned the poetry section to see if Wendell Berry had anything new and then tried to figure out if the waitress was really speaking French. She finally let me make some phone calls on her private line. Merci.
There is a woman at the phone company business office who does favors for me. Although she doesn’t like to see me in the flesh, she is friendly over the phone. Her husband was arrested after he had admitted to his psychologist that he had had sex with the fifteen-year-old daughter of his business partner. I worked on his case and had helped keep him from going to prison by establishing that he was also having sex with the psychologist. They couldn’t pay me enough, but they were grateful and would do things to help, as long as we didn’t have to be seen together.
When I called her at the office, I gave a false name to the receptionist. Her voice was singsong when she came on the line. “How can I help you, Dr. Face?” But it changed when she recognized my voice.
I gave her a list of names and dates and asked her to find the phone records for me. She agreed and hung up without asking how I’d been since she’d last seen me.
I called another friend out at the airport. I’d met her working on a custody/ki
dnapping case and we had talked about having an intimate platonic relationship and ended up with an empty-headed sexual one. This time I used my real name. Her voice brightened when she recognized mine. I gave her a list of travel records that I needed and told her that a woman from the phone company would be dropping off an envelope at her office. Most likely, the courier would be wearing a hat, trench coat, and dark glasses but she shouldn’t let that worry her.
Then she helped me with my travel plans to Stellar. Nonsmoking. Bulkhead. Aisle. I promised her dinner, a movie, and an uncomplicated evening of sexual intimacy. She said that would be nice as long as her fiance’ could pick out the movie. I agreed.
I walked down a winding street past the governor’s mansion with its stately columns and totem pole. I needed to get to the bottom of the hill. Instead of walking down the stairs built into the hillside, I took the elevator in the state office building. In the elevator were three men and two women talking politics and carrying cloth briefcases. They were all dressed in expensive clothes: rough wool, brass zippers, and nylon overcoats. There was one guy in coveralls with rubber boots, scabs on his knuckles, and a long smear of grease across his chin. He was carrying papers in his hand and watching the numbers flash by above the door with an expression of panic. It’s common to lose ground level in the state office building.
Some old-time Juneau residents like to complain about the Yuppies in town, the hordes of young lawyers and MBAs who have brought the taste of Seattle or San Francisco to this relatively young mining town. There are, of course, the fern bars and the espresso shops and the food carts that sell anything from lox and bagels to halibut enchiladas. It’s true, it’s not the same town. But it’s enough the same; only the food is better and the women are better looking.
Sy’s receptionist had a large manila envelope ready for me at her desk. As she handed it over the counter she apologized: Mr. Brown was unable to see me this morning because he had a court appearance. I saw his Burberry on the oak coatrack and I heard his laugh in the back office.