by Ed Ifkovic
“It means, ‘My word is golden.’ I’ve seen Noah do it. Or—‘This is important.’”
“But what in the world?”
Emboldened, Jack repeated that line more than once. “Maybe it ain’t him.’ Each time louder, a little more plaintive.
Jack began jabbing Sam again, almost like a crazed man. And Sam, towering down at him, thundered, “You may be the meanest man in Alaska, but you can still die with a knife in your gut.’ He mimicked a knife rammed into a chest. Jack stumbled backwards. Sam pointed a finger and said, “Die.”
That one word was chilling, horrible.
Then, quietly, Sam stepped back and walked away.
Drunk, Jack spun around, banged into a post, started cursing the onlookers. He slipped onto the sidewalk.
Sonia laughed nervously. “Thank God this long, long dark winter will soon be over.” She squeezed my hand. “You’re pale, Edna—and frozen. Roll up your window. We’re late for the party.”
As she pulled away from the curb, I watched Jack struggling to his feet. I closed my eyes, and shivered. I said out loud, “A knife to the gut.”
Two days later, early morning, I sat with coffee and blueberry pancakes in the Gold Nugget Café across the street from the Nordale. So early, Second Avenue was largely deserted, a few delivery trucks pulling up in front of the Nordale. Alone in the café, I scribbled some notes in the pad I always carried, but I was tired. Yesterday Sonia and I went shopping for souvenirs—“authentic as all get-out,” she guaranteed—at a small shop near the airport. Trifles for friends back in New York. A sleepy afternoon, Sonia and I dissolving into inane laughter for no reason—the most precious kind of laughter when friends become helpless with glee.
I smiled at the thought.
Suddenly a barking sound from the street, a man’s thick, panicky voice. The waitress shot out of the back room, stared at me. The two of us rushed to the front door. A milk deliveryman, his face hidden behind a knit scarf, was pounding on the window.
He pointed to the alleyway next to the café.
His head rocked back and forth.
What we learned, a half hour later as police swarmed the street, was that a body lay half concealed in a snowbank.
Jack Mabie had been clubbed to death the night before.
Chapter Seven
No one spoke of anything else that long day in the Nordale lounge. The gruesome murder of the sudden celebrity Jack Mabie galvanized the room, not only the regulars—those souls who lingered there for hours, the diehards, the old-timers—but even the tourists from the Lower Forty-eight who found themselves intoxicated with the news—yes, Alaska was still a raw, shoot-’em-up frontier, old sourdoughs beaten up in alleys in the dark, windy night. Worse, one frisky wag, emboldened by the carnival spectacle, announced loudly that, indeed, there was some dreadful lout in Alaska who was meaner than the meanest man, now dead.
The tasteless remark had some currency as ripples of laughter moved from one corner of the lounge to the next—then to newcomers who wandered in. May Tighe, the day clerk, kept shushing folks, but finally she gave up.
I didn’t find it funny. Late in the afternoon I sat with Noah and Clint, the three of us huddled by the fireplace. We had no news—no one did. Rumor moved like a wave across the snow-fogged Fairbanks streets, everyone with a different and more salacious story. Folks brought up the confrontation a while back between Jack and Jeremy Nunne that made it into the police blotter in The Gold, even Jack’s unfortunate encounter with Preston Strange in the Model Café. “Yeah, I seen that man push Jack around. I seen it.” Others recounted tales of Jack’s nightly belligerence at Omar’s, his rowdiness at the Frontier Home. Some folks remembered how he’d assailed them—or, at least, they thought the staggering fool in the street was—maybe Jack.
Noah was noticeably quiet, and a couple times I caught Clint’s eye. Worry there. Sam Pilot, I figured—his blood, though distant. Blood, though ornery and combative.
A newsboy dropping off copies of the afternoon edition of The Gold only made matters worse. Of course, the late-breaking headline: PIONEER BLUDGEONED TO DEATH. Capitalized, bold. And beneath: “Jack Mabie was a well-known figure.” Well, hardly. No details, given the newness of the murder. The first paragraph: “The meanest man in Alaska was found murdered in an alley next to the Lacey Street Movie House.” A number of blows to the back of the head and neck. A bloodied club nearby. Chief of Police Rawlins was quoted as saying: “Jack was obviously headed back to the Frontier Home from Omar’s in the wee hours of the morning.” A quaint way to phrase it, I thought—the wee hours. A nursery tale.
Looking up from the newspaper, I was surprised to see Noah’s face set in a stern grimace. “What?”
He didn’t answer, but Clint, shaking his head, pointed to an inside column. “Sonia done it again.”
“What?”
Clint had been rifling through his own copy of the newspaper. “She goes on a bit about Jack’s bad-guy reputation and she…she puts in print what everyone is talking about—Sam Pilot’s street brawl, but worse, Sam’s threat to kill Jack.” He squinted at the newsprint. “She even mentions Preston Strange and Jeremy Nunne. Their tussles. Them guys and Jack. I mean—upright citizens. Powerful men who…”
Noah broke in, unhappy. “Sonia’s trying to fan the fire. Yellow journalism. Always.”
“A rabble-rouser, she is,” said Clint.
“What can Preston and Jeremy do?” I looked at Noah. “Documented encounters, doubtless known to the police, but trivial really, the stuff of…”
His voice thick. “No.” He stood up and walked away. I followed his stiff shoulders, his rigid head.
Clint was muttering softly. “Sam Pilot.”
“I don’t follow.” I looked from one man to the other.
Clint explained, his eyes on Noah’s retreating back. “Noah may have contempt for Sam Pilot but Sam’s his blood.”
“Still and all.” Helpless, not understanding.
“Sonia’s playing with fire.”
An hour later, I was sitting alone, bothered. May Tighe walked from behind the reception desk and stood in front of me. An old woman in a faded gingham housedress and pin-curl chestnut haircut, she smiled at men—a jack o’ lantern grin with missing front teeth— and glowered at women. Maybe my age, maybe a decade older, a face of wrinkles and blemishes, she’d rolled her eyes when I requested a cup of tea. She never answered me—nor did I see a cup of tea.
“Here.” She dropped a note into my palm. “Someone put it in your box, but since you are here all afternoon doing nothing…” She walked away.
A summons from Tessa Strange. In a tight script of red-ink block letters, written on creamy linen stationery, Tessa invited me to dinner that night. “A visit from you is now overdue.” Scribbled at the bottom in black ink in someone else’s hand was this: “My car will pick you up at 7.” No phone number, no way of contacting her—just the assumption that I had no other plans or, had I, that those plans would be immediately abandoned.
I couldn’t wait to go. Such summons, I gathered, were rare, and given the recent events, propitious.
Tessa Strange was a local legend. Twice-wed and long widowed, a woman in her late sixties, she lived a reclusive life in the biggest house in Fairbanks, a turreted Victorian monstrosity with a wraparound porch that looked down onto a pier where sternwheeler riverboats docked to allow tourists to snap pictures of the incongruous building. Her second husband had erected the rambling house at one of the turns of the Chena River. Each summer she painted it flamingo pink, though she maintained the color was (appropriately) candy salmon, but by mid-winter the house faded to a grimy gray. She entertained few people, but would venture out, perversely, at odd times—like a sudden appearance in the mayor’s chambers or at a funeral at St. Matthew’s.
Someone told me Tessa Strange weighed over four hundred pounds, others
said three hundred, and they insisted she had her hair permed into a corkscrew mess of blue-rinse ringlets.
Bundled in a bulky parka—or parky, to use the common localism—gloves, scarves, and obligatory mukluks on my feet, as though headed into the bleakest Arctic night, I slipped into the backseat of the long town car waiting for me in front of the Nordale.
An Indian girl opened the double doors of the grand house, and I found myself in an octagonal anteroom dominated by loud burgundy velour wallpaper. On one wall an oil painting: a young, plump woman in a debutante’s dress, a dangerously precarious tiara on her bushy head, and a little too much exposed cleavage for such a northern climate. Immediately I was ushered into a vast living room where a fire crackled and popped. Like most of Fairbanks, the room was obscenely overheated. Here was a room so large it contained three different sofa sets, which tickled me—it was as though there could be three separate functions happening at once, each one independent of the others. But at the far end of the room sat the redoubtable Tessa Strange in a blue wing chair, Buddha-like, staring at me as I walked toward her.
A huge woman, as I’d expected, perhaps three hundred pounds, maybe more, but dressed in what struck me as mundane nightwear—a flannel nightgown stamped with garish hibiscus blooms, a utilitarian smock that strained at her upper body, her feet encased in outdoor mukluks, fur-lined. Cascading layers of fat, neck and chin and arms and belly, a continent of soft tissue. Any slight movement led to a seismic rippling of flesh. She said nothing as I approached, and I thought of royal audiences, of supplicants pleading their cases, humbled before raised platforms.
When she spoke, I was surprised. Her voice was not the volcanic eruption I expected, but a little girl’s squeaky timbre. “Miss Ferber, you’re so tiny. I expect I could lift you in the air with an index finger.”
“A feat I could never obviously reciprocate.”
A moment’s pause, then Tessa Strange burst into a cackle that dissolved into a smoker’s thick cough. She looked around for a cigarette but did not touch the pack at her elbow.
“I was surprised at the invitation,” I began.
Tessa motioned for me to sit in the wing chair at her side. Within seconds the Eskimo girl wheeled in a cart with tea. “Would you prefer hard liquor?” Tessa asked.
I shook my head. “Tea will be fine.”
The girl poured tea, handed a cup to me, nodding, and then reached into a leaded-glass cabinet and extracted a bottle of whiskey, pouring a jelly glass full and handing it to Tessa. “Thanks, Raina.” She looked at me. “Medicine. I have a bad heart.” She drank half a glass. “I figured it was time we met. Last summer you ignored me. Hank monopolizes the interesting folks who come Fairbanks way.”
I sipped the awful tea. “I gather that the two of you are not close.”
Again the woman laughed. “Hmmm. Understatement, my dear.” She stifled a belch. “But he’s more foolish these days than wise.” She gulped the whiskey, licked her lips.
“You don’t see eye to eye…”
She broke in, her voice harsh. “On anything. On statehood, for one.”
“So?”
“Statehood will bring people here.”
“And you don’t like people?”
She swigged the whiskey in the glass and reached for a cigarette. “Not at all. Do you? My dear, have you met people? Look around you. Most people are horrible.” A heartbeat. “I still haven’t decided about you.” Again the phony laughter, the choking. “I used to like Hank. Even Sonia.” She sighed. “You see, he’s the last of the Alaskan puritans. Ironic in that I spent my younger days as an Episcopalian missionary up in the Bush, while he caroused and made lots of money. Lord, I had to marry to get money, a husband who conveniently died before I murdered him.”
“You were married two times?”
“I guess you’ve been told.”
“People talk.”
“The mother of Preston. Have you met him?”
“Yes, briefly.”
“A wonder of jackass vacuity.” She stifled a giggle. “People are afraid of me—but not of him. That’s unfortunate. They think I’m a fat witch conjuring up spells in this…this coffin of a castle.” She manufactured a gap-toothed grin. “I’m just a tired old lady who has to plan getting out of a chair. It’s hard to be a damn provocateur—or a malcontent—when you spend a lot of time trying to stand up.” Her tongue ran across her upper lip. “Yes, dear Miss Ferber—I’m going to call you Edna, you’re as old as I am, if not older, from the looks of you.”
I paused. “I take it you didn’t invite me here to discuss statehood.”
She eyed me closely. “Very good, Edna. I already know your position. But yes—another matter. This…the troublesome murder of that drunk.” Now the eyes were wide, glassy.
“Jack Mabie.”
“No matter the name.”
“Yes, it does matter.”
She waved her hand at me. “If you say so.” She scratched her chin. “My spies tell me you witnessed Preston’s stupidity at the Model Café, putting his hand on that…derelict.”
“Jack Mabie.”
Her voice rose. “I know his name. I remember it from the old days up North. A shiver down everyone’s spine.”
“Then say it.”
Irritated, she spat out her words. “And you’ve been spotted with Noah West. Another one of my least favorite souls on this planet.”
That surprised me. “He’s bright, clever…”
She yelled at me. “He destroyed Preston’s romance with Sonia.”
“That’s not how I heard it.”
She belched loudly, closed her eyes dreamily. “I’m allowed to write my own history.”
I sat back, stared into her face. “Why am I here?”
Color rose in her cheeks. “You have a lot of questions, Edna.”
“And so far none of them answered.”
Her eyes got small, cloudy. “You are probably the most annoying person your crowd in Manhattan knows.”
I counted a beat. “I hope so, Mrs. Strange.”
“Call me Tessa.” A sharp look. “A powerful family should have nothing to do with murder.”
“Preston?”
“A fool. A head for business but a hothead. His name in Sonia’s scurrilous column. My nephew Jeremy, as vacuous as an empty nutshell.”
I laughed out loud. “Character references?”
She didn’t laugh. “Do know my story, Edna?” She didn’t wait for an answer as she took a huge gulp of whiskey, shivered, and her eyes got droopy. She looked for the cigarette she’d placed on the side table. “You wanna hear my life story?”
“Tessa…” I opened my mouth to answer, but she held up her hand.
“Every gossip in town could fill in the scandal.” She didn’t pause, and her singsong narrative had a rehearsed tone to it. “A restless young girl in Sitka, religious as all hell but liked to dance with the boys, shuffled off to an Episcopalian missionary college by confused parents, met my husband Lionel Strange who was born in Topeka of missionary parents. That’s what brought him to my attention. His folks were missionaries in a small village in the Yukon, Minto, on the Tanana. So I married the pious fool, came to Venetie, bore colicky Preston, watched Lionel drown in a river, drifted to Fairbanks, married money, watched him die of cancer, leaving me a rich woman.” She breathed in. “And now the final act of this tragicomedy.”
“It’s a novel.”
An edge to her voice. “It’s a tedious flashback, that’s all. I’ve honed it over the years—keeps people away from bothering me.”
“Sounds like you’re hiding another story.”
That stunned her. Her eyes flashed and she sucked in her breath. “Never you mind. My life in your hands would be a—farce.” She watched me closely. “This is the Reader’s Digest of a fat lady’s life. And not a prett
y one. Now I’m stranded in Fairbanks in this mausoleum. And I plan on living to be a hundred, just to annoy the tongue-waggers.”
I took a sip of tea. “I’m not going to die until my older sister Fannie goes first. I won’t give her the pleasure…”
Tessa roared. “Good for you, Edna. Nothing keeps a woman alive longer than bile.” She patted her fat cheeks. “And good for the complexion.” She narrowed her eyes and hissed, “Everything I’ve built—in danger because of the murder of that derelict.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Preston is being questioned in that murder.”
“But surely…”
“Of course he had nothing to do with it, but Sonia will indict him in her columns.”
“That’s unfair.”
Anger in her voice. “I know what I’m talking about.”
“And you think that I can help?”
“You have that woman’s ear. My spies tell me she likes you.”
I rustled in my chair. “I’m afraid yours was a wasted invitation.”
She fumbled with a cigarette, but changed her mind. She pressed a bell on a side table, and in seconds Raina walked in. “But you’ll stay for supper.”
Raina set a tray in Tessa’s ample lap and wheeled a noisy cart in front of me. Supper in the living room. I ate smoked salmon that tasted like pats of sweetened butter—“Squaw candy,” Tessa called it, “the best”—served on slabs of brown crusty bread, whipped potatoes, heavily peppered, and canned string beans so limp and pale they seemed to have been harvested in another century. I savored the salmon and picked at the potatoes. The string beans remained untouched. Tessa apologized, “I swear I had a jar of canned wild rhubarb from last summer. Saving it, I was. Raina or her no-good husband Joe—he’s an Eskimo, so’s you know, only mildly dishonest—pilfered it, most likely.”
I heard the front door open, followed by a flurry of raised voices in the anteroom. Preston and another man sailed into the room.
Tessa grinned, nearly toppling her tray from her lap. “Now it’s time for the evening’s entertainment. You get to meet Jeremy Nunne, pebble-brained nephew. Lucky you.”