“Starting and ending with moose and mousse, get it?” Annie asked.
We said we did get it.
As soon as we could drag her away from the kitchen sink, practically by force, Mom started by saying she didn’t have a big enough assignment.
“Me, too,” Annie said.
It wasn’t clear to me what Annie was me too-ing, and before I could ask, she and the others had questions and comments of their own.
The conversation, or more correctly, ersatz meeting, went downhill from there. Why did I assume that four adults could settle a few logistics quickly and amicably? Benny, perhaps the only adult in the room, circled our feet under the table; he was searching for food, no doubt, but also attempting to bring order to the discussion. I felt he clung to my feet more than to the others’. A message?
Overlapping snippets included:
Do Moe and Jack
This will take a trip to Anchorage,
Gert lied,
work on weekends?
Maybe we should
she saw Manny packing
to see Kendra
I don’t think
go on Sunday,
This is still Thursday, right?
and Stanley.
less traffic.
it could be Victor.
What envelopes?
so she was covering for him.
Miraculously, everyone seemed to figure it all out, and the one thing we did agree on was that we would keep one another informed about where we were at all times. We’d meet back at my house for dinner Friday evening—there was a pan of meatloaf and gravy for enticement—and report on our findings. If one of us didn’t check in and couldn’t be reached at home or work, we’d call Trooper.
What could be safer?
* * *
* * *
I guess it’s time I went home,” Mom said, while working on a breakfast of OJ and bear claws. I noticed she held on to Benny as she spoke, her fingers never leaving his body—his neck, behind his ears, along his back.
“Why don’t you stay here until Dad gets back?”
“Okay.”
Okay? I wanted to ask, Who are you and what have you done with Evelyn Cooke? I had a hard time reconciling this woman with the one of a couple of weeks ago, who would have relished the chance to have a few days alone in her own home. I could only figure that Oliver’s murder had spooked her, the finality of his funeral yesterday cementing that feeling.
Not that I was crazy about being left alone, either.
“Why don’t we take your luggage home and pick up whatever you’ll need for the weekend?”
She nodded. “Dad will be back Sunday. He always likes to celebrate Seward’s Day, and it’s this coming Monday.”
The last Monday in March. I always thought it interesting that the purchase of Alaska from Russia had gone from “Seward’s Folly” to a state holiday. Usually I’d be on top of any celebration, but this week had thrown off both my internal and external clocks.
“Remember that essay contest you won in seventh grade?”
“‘Why I Think Alaska is Great.’ I remember I had to read it at some meeting on Seward’s Day. Sponsored by a veterans’ group, if I recall.”
“You won twenty-five dollars and a framed certificate. Do you still have that?”
“The twenty-five dollars?”
Laughs turned into giggles, and we had our disconnect with the sadness of this morning.
Mom felt it, too, it seemed. “Let’s get going,” she said.
* * *
* * *
Things moved quickly after breakfast.
Annie came by to pick up my mom for the trip to Anchorage for talks with Stanley and Kendra.
“Lots of luck,” I said, as I waved goodbye.
I picked Chris up in my heated Outback for our follow-up visit with Manny.
In between, there had been games with Benny, a phone call with my dad, and an essential end-of-the-month bill-paying session.
“I feel bad landing on Manny so soon after his heartrending confession,” I told Chris, after switching seats so he could drive.
“It’s probably the best time, speaking as a cop,” Chris said.
“If we really were cops.”
“There’s that.”
“Did you make any headway on that magazine article that listed chefs?”
“Not yet. I’m hoping Manny will be able to narrow down the date a little.”
We’d put Manny’s address on North Second Street into my GPS and rolled along, following the nice lady’s instructions. The roads were clear of snow, though it was highly likely that the skies would unload at least once more before the mosquitoes arrived for summer.
As we got closer to Manny’s address, Chris and I glanced at each other.
“Look familiar?” I asked.
“A stone’s throw from Oliver’s.”
“Coincidence?”
“You know what cops say,” Chris said.
“If we really were cops.”
* * *
* * *
I hope you’re here for lunch, ’cause I got a boatload of food from these friends of mine yesterday,” Manny said.
Manny was back to his trucker clothes, jeans and a heavy vest with lots of pockets. I wondered how often he got to wear the suit he had on yesterday, if it was even his. He invited us into a neat living room with mix-and-match furniture. Everything looked tidy and dusted, as if he’d been expecting us. Or maybe I was projecting my own housekeeping habits onto him. Dust before company, vacuum after.
“So did we,” I said, in response to his comment about the state of his larder.
“Speak for yourself,” Chris said, smiling.
“I expect you have more questions,” Manny said. He gestured to a sofa while he took a chair opposite. The coffee table between us had a neat stack of magazines, which, in my house, would be another sign of expected guests. “What can I get you? Coffee? Water? Beer?” A nervous laugh marked the last suggestion, in the middle of the morning.
I opted for water, Chris for coffee, thus giving us a few minutes to settle down and prepare our minds before Manny took his seat.
“As a newspaperman, I’m interested in how you tracked Oliver down,” Chris said. “It couldn’t have been easy.”
Way to not be a cop, Chris. Nice opening.
Manny opened his arms, palms up. “I didn’t have a lot else to do. I never married. Thought about it, came close a coupla times, but I never could see myself with another woman, a family even, with Oliver still out there. My baby boy, was how I thought of him.”
“Where did you start to look?” Chris asked.
“Figured I’d start with the hospital, but no luck there. Not like it is now. It was like a state secret back then.”
I felt another adoption lecture coming on, but from the other side. It was possible, even likely, that birth parents had an entirely different slant from institutions or adoptive parents on open and closed adoptions. But Manny wasn’t about to lecture us. Instead, he continued recounting his journey.
“I kept going back, seeing if someone else was on duty. Someone sympathetic. Still no luck, even though I gave them the exact date, down to the hour I brought Olivia in. Then I thought, what if the idea was to send the baby as far as possible from his birthplace? I wouldn’t have a chance.”
Chris was taking notes at a steady pace, but I could tell he was eager to get to the payoff—what about that telltale magazine article?
Manny told us about the orphanages he’d sought out, the churches and foster care bureaucracies.
“If he even kept his name. My name.” Manny shook his head. “I had stacks and stacks of newspapers looking to see if he was on a sports team or got married.”
“I can’t i
magine this kind of search without the Internet,” I said.
I also couldn’t imagine the pain of this, which seemed to have gone on for many years, only to end in even more heartache. I knew Chris wanted to pick up the pace on the timeline, but I wanted Manny to continue. I was eager for information that was more relevant to the murder investigation. I was also aware that Chris was doing the fun part of the meeting while my questions would sound like what they were: an interrogation. I couldn’t jump right into Why were you late for dinner on the day Oliver was murdered? I’d have to build up to it.
“I notice you live pretty close to where Oliver lived.” I pointed in the general direction of Oliver’s house, recalling the hasty exit Chris and I had made at the wrong end of a rifle. “Did you visit him at all?”
I chided myself, my jaws tight. Too personal, I thought. Too cop-like. But Manny didn’t seem to mind.
“Nah, I never got up the courage. Like I said yesterday, at a certain point, the window closes, you know?”
I tried to ignore Chris, in case he was giving me signals to butt out of the track he was on. “What about Moe and Jack?” I laughed. “Steve and Dave. Did they know? I’m sorry to be asking all this, Manny. It’s just such an interesting story.”
“It’s okay. I know Trooper sent you.”
Chris and I blubbered, speaking together in something like a falsetto voice, halfway between confirming and denying.
“I know you gotta ask,” Manny said. “Hey, listen, nobody wants to know who killed my son more than I do. Anything I can do to help—”
A loud knock on the door interrupted him.
The rest was a blur.
Trooper at the door, then stepping in, putting his hand on Manny’s shoulder. Deputy Josh behind him, hanging back. “You’re going to have to come with me, Mr. Quinlan.”
“Trooper, what are you doing? We’re having a very useful conversation,” I blurted.
“Don’t need it.”
“Why don’t you sit down and—?” from Chris.
“Don’t need to.”
And they were out the door.
EIGHTEEN
At least Trooper hadn’t argued when we said we’d like to follow him to the station and talk to Manny.
“No promises,” he’d said.
“We have a good rapport with Manny,” I’d argued. “He’ll talk to me.”
“No promises.”
When had Trooper become a man of so few words? I was beyond upset at the way Manny had been summarily dismissed and treated like a common criminal, instead of a man Trooper had known as a regular in the Bear Claw.
Chris drove us back toward town. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s drop in on Moe or Jack before we go to the station.”
“But I don’t want Manny waiting for us.”
“Trust me. It’s going to be a while before Trooper lets us talk to him.”
“But—”
“What do you think he meant by ‘No promises’?”
“I think I have a lot to learn about police work.”
“Did I leave out the part where I was an MP for a while in the army?”
“What? What else don’t I know about you?”
He reached over and took my hand. “In due time,” he said, and let go.
Hmm.
He scrolled down the list of GPS addresses and clicked on Moe’s, which we’d entered, along with Jack’s, before we left my house.
After we’d driven for about fifteen minutes, the GPS announced that we’d arrived. Maybe. But there wasn’t a house anywhere in sight. There were handmade signs, however, about every five hundred feet, along a rough road that felt like a washboard under the tires. NEXT LEFT. NEXT RIGHT. NEXT LEFT. Then a sign that said TRAIL. Finally, the last sign read STEVE CARTER 2 MI. The small log cabin with a metal roof was at the end of a gravel path. The cabin looked fairly new. So did the outhouse. It occurred to me that it had been some time since I’d visited anyone trailside, with no road access. And no indoor plumbing. Probably since high school. My friends at the time had covered a wide range of levels of income and social interaction, many of them snowmobiling in from remote areas, using that special lane they designated in the winter.
For a tiny house, Moe’s was pretty busy today. Three vehicles were on the property. I recognized one as a pickup that Moe drove sometimes on his day off. One of the others also looked familiar.
“Visitors?” Chris asked.
“Moe’s other car, and I’m betting the third is Jack’s,” I said. “Word travels fast even when there are no access roads and no apparent modern devices. And Manny has had his one phone call by now.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Uh-huh.”
* * *
* * *
Inside the attractive little house were two angry men. Unlike Manny, who was short and stocky, but like Oliver, Manny’s two friends were the burly types often associated with men who drove big trucks and lived in the woods, hefting logs.
It made sense that they’d blame us for Manny’s current predicament. Manny probably did, too. We were Trooper’s representatives. For all he knew, we were in his home to keep him there until Trooper arrived. One of us might even have snuck a call to Trooper, telling him he could come now.
“It sure looks like you set him up,” Moe said, verifying my guess. “He told us you dropped in and the next thing he knew, he was being arrested.”
“You can’t believe that,” I said. “It was only a few days ago that we bent over backward to get you guys a private spot when the diner had filled up with Annie’s guests. You’ve always been special to us.”
“You think they give all their customers such unique names?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, well, that was then,” Moe said.
The two men looked sullen, and why wouldn’t they? Their good friend, one third of their world, was missing.
It was clear from our two stops this morning that at least two of the three men lived very simply. Moe’s home comprised one room and a loft. From where I sat, I could see his entire existence. A wood stove and a pile of logs, a sink and cooking unit, shelves of food and sundries, coolers, a small table with an empty bottle and a set of keys, a fire extinguisher, a calendar with days crossed off. There was no computer, no television set, no microwave oven, no books or decorations except for the calendar and a map on the wall. Not a single photograph that I could see.
He and Jack sat on a recycled sofa from a previous decade. I was offered the only other chair; Chris won the ottoman, decorated with masking tape, cracked open in spots. It was doubtful Moe had ever planned on entertaining three guests at the same time.
“We know Manny is innocent,” Chris said. “Maybe you can help us prove it.”
“How do we do that? We don’t know anything.”
“You’d be surprised,” Chris said. “Sometimes the smallest thing can be a help.”
“Let us ask you a few questions and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Chris was so tall and the ottoman so compressed that his knees practically hit his chin. He looked so uncomfortable, I offered to switch with him, but he waved it off.
“Okay,” Moe mumbled, and Jack nodded.
“Can you tell us what Manny told you when he called from the station house?”
“He thought he should have a lawyer.”
“But we don’t know any.” Moe cleared his throat. “Except for my divorce attorney, years ago, up in Fairbanks.”
“I can help with that,” I said.
The men brightened considerably.
At the same time I ran through my mental Rolodex of contacts I still had from my one whole year in law school. I was sure I’d be able to come up with someone who’d help us.
Chris moved in. “Did he tell you what they had on him?” He quickly rephrased. “Why do they thin
k he’s guilty? Do they have evidence?”
“Nothin’.”
“That’s not quite true, Jack. We need to tell them everything or they can’t help us,” Moe said. “On the phone, Manny said Trooper told him his fingerprints were all over the outside of Oliver’s house and inside the garage. But we know Manny used to go there and look in the windows.”
“And the garage wasn’t locked. It’s not like he broke in or anything,” Jack said. “Manny wouldn’t do that.”
“When he knew Oliver was working, he’d drive over to his place and, you know, just to see what it looked like.”
“He loved that kid,” Jack said, his wistful tone suggesting that he wished Manny were his father. It didn’t seem to matter that “that kid” was fifty-one years old, certainly older than Jack himself, who was the youngest of the crew.
“So you both obviously knew that Manny was Oliver’s father,” I said.
They both smiled slightly and gave each other a knowing look. Moe explained.
“We’d stopped at a bar down near Palmer and someone was singing that song that goes, ‘Our troubles are all the same,’”—Moe’s voice was more mellifluous than I would have guessed—“and it happened to be Oliver’s birthday, and Manny just let it all out.”
Another barstool confession; perfectly understandable.
“Anything else by way of evidence?” I asked.
“Nothin’,” Jack said, predictably.
Moe rolled his eyes, gave Jack a patronizing look.
“Okay, there was the gun.”
Our turn for eye movement.
“Trooper asked Manny if he owns a gun,” Jack said. “And, of course he does, ’cause he drives a big rig all kinds of places, all hours of the day and night.”
“But when the trooper asked Manny to produce it, it was gone,” Moe continued, explaining what Manny had related via the station house phone. “Manny knew he had it the last time he drove his rig, which would have been Wednesday night. Then yesterday was all the memorial stuff, so he didn’t take it out. And this morning . . .” Moe threw up his hands.
Mousse and Murder Page 17
