time it did the rest of them, and she flushed.
"Did they have a child?" Kate said. "Does Darlene keep the birth
certificates, too?"
"No no no, no no no, don't believe her, none of it's true."
"What?" Anne said.
"Darlene's grandfather, when was he born?"
Anne looked shaken. "Nine months after the marriage. I remember because
I heard Darlene's mom laughing about how they just made it under the
wire." She tried to smile. "She says she doesn't think the old folks
were as prim and proper as the Victorian writers like to make out they
were."
"How's that for motive?" Kate said to Jim.
"He was a bigamist," Jim said.
"Indeed he was."
"And if his marriage to Angel Beecham in 1910 was valid, then his
marriage to Cecily Doogan wasn't, and that means his children were
illegitimate. Unless he married her again, after Angel Beecham was killed."
"I'd like to have heard him explain that to Cecily," Kate said. "And I'd
have to look up the state statutes on inheritance, but I would imagine
that the children, who inherited Matthew Turner's shares in the Last
Frontier, would be very much concerned with maintaining their legitimacy
in the eyes of the law, or those shares could go to the real heirs."
"Who would they have been?" Billy Mike said.
"I have no idea," Kate said.
They turned to look at Darlene, who had ceased her mournful lament and
had uncurled enough to lay her head on the back of her chair. As they
watched, a tear trickled down her cheek. "My father told me, his father
told him, his grandfather told his father. I wished he never told me. I
didn't want to know, but he said someone had to know so we could be sure
it never came out. He said it should have been his son, but he never had
a son so it had to be
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me. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know."
"What did Paula tell you?" Kate said.
"She came back all excited from Fairbanks, where she was doing some
research for the campaign in the library. She said she'd stumbled across
the darndest story of the murder of a prostitute in Niniltna. She had a
good idea who'd done it, she said, even though the murder was unsolved.
She was going to rewrite her book around it, she said. She had to quit,
she said, because she had to write her stupid little book!" She sat bolt
upright, bellowing out the words.
"I took my pistol out there, and I asked her to turn over her research.
She grabbed the gun. I never meant to shoot her. It was her fault. I had
my finger on the trigger, and she pulled the gun toward her, and it just
went off. I don't know anything about Jeff Hosford; I don't know what
you're talking about as far as he's concerned."
Kate remembered something. "Your hair was wet."
Everyone turned to stare at her.
"When you came and got me out of bed to show me the letter, your hair
was wet. You'd just gotten out of the shower you took to wash off Paula
Pawlowski's blood."
Darlene stared at her, mute.
"And you wrote that last letter, didn't you. Didn't you!"
Darlene flinched.
"You wanted Anne to think that Paula had found out about Angel Beecham,
and that she was going to blackmail her to keep that information quiet.
That way, it would look like Anne had a motive. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it!"
"Darlene?" Anne said. "Darlene, say something!"
"Two murders with the same weapon, you knew we'd be looking at the
campaign and everybody working on it hard. Anything to diffuse
suspicion, even if it fell upon the candidate you had already murdered
in order to keep her in the race. What did you do with the pistol? Toss
it in the Kanuyaq?"
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"I don't know what you're talking about," Darlene said through stiff
lips. "I want a lawyer before I say anything else. You're all out to get
me."
Anne, shocked, drew back. "Darlene?"
"Yeah, you're right," Kate said. "I hit myself over the head."
"I don't know anything about that," Darlene repeated.
Yeah, and you don't know anything about how Jeff Hosford died, either, I
heard you the first time, Kate thought. "That night in Ahtna when I came
to work for Anne, you saw me with Peter Heiman and confronted me in the
lobby of the Lodge. Doug broke it up when he came to get you. What was
it he said?"
"I don't remember."
Kate's eyes narrowed in thought. "Anne wanted you-" She snapped her
fingers. "Of course. Paula had called and wanted you to call her back.
What did she want, Darlene?"
"I don't remember. I don't know what you're talking about."
Kate looked at Jim. "Remember Paula's notes?"
"Sure."
"Remember where she scribbled down Pete's and Anne's names and put a
circle around them, and connected the circle to Hosford's name?"
"What?" Anne said.
"Yeah?" Jim said, knowing where she was going and willing to play
straight man.
"And how we decided it wasn't Anne Gordaoff Paula meant, but Anne Seese,
Pete Heiman's sometime girlfriend? And how maybe Anne Seese had loaned
Jeff Hosford to Pete Heiman as a spy?"
"I remember that," Jim said.
Kate turned back to Darlene. "I don't suppose that's what Paula's phone
call was about, that evening? She found out somehow that Hosford worked
for Seese, and that Seese was sleeping with Heiman, and that as a result
the Gordaoff
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campaign might hold no secrets from the Heiman campaign?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Darlene said.
"And you lured Jeff Hosford out to the van, not a difficult thing to do,
and you rode him shotgun, to coin a phrase, and you shot him when his
attention was, shall we say, otherwise engaged. Because, like you told
me, you'd say or do anything to get Anne elected."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Darlene said. "And I said I
wanted a lawyer. I get a phone call. It's my right."
"Speaking of phone calls." Kate looked at Jim. "Cell phone records can
be subpoenaed, can't they?"
"They sure can."
"And we'll find a witness, Darlene. We always do. The month I spent
watching you work, you were constantly on the move. One minute at Anne's
elbow, the next halfway across town buttering up some elder. You had
plenty of opportunity to slip away. To murder. We'll find someone. It's
just a matter of time."
It seemed that everything had been said, and that it was time to go.
They got to their feet, Jim with a firm hand on Darlene's elbow as he
urged her forward.
"One more thing, Darlene," Kate said. Everyone stopped and looked at
her. Kate looked only at Darlene. "She didn't know."
"What?"
Darlene looked exhausted and wholly unattractive sniffing the snot back
into her nose, but Kate had no mercy. "There was nothing in her notes to
indicate that Paula Pawlowski knew that Matthew Turner was your
great-grandfather. I don't think she even knew that Angel Beecham was
Anne's great-grandmother. She was interested in what happened to the
/> people who lived then. She didn't give a damn who their kids were or who
their grand- kids were. She never bothered to trace the descendants. She
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didn't know Matthew Turner was your great-grandfather."
Darlene stared up at her.
"You did it all for nothing," Kate told her. "All of it, for nothing.
You killed, you committed murder in the first degree, for no reason.
Paula didn't know." She turned to the door and added over her shoulder,
"I really liked her, Darlene. Paula Pawlowski. I only talked to her
once, but it was a long talk, and an interesting one, and I considered
her a friend. Just so you know. I'll be Jim's first witness up on the
stand."
Darlene's curses followed her out into the night.
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There are holes in Angel's inquest you could drive a truck through," Jim
said. Kate nodded. They were at Bobby and Dinah's, sitting over the
remains of a moose roast avec sauce sausage, a little recipe Bobby had
picked up from a French friend in Vietnam. Kate had never asked about
the French friend, if it was ami or amie, and he never volunteered, but
whatever the sex, the French friend had been one hell of a cook. She
mopped up the last of the sauce with a piece of bread and let it
dissolve on her tongue in sheer delight. Tony's partner, Stanislav,
would kill for this recipe.
Jim nodded at the inquest into the death of Angel Beecham, which a week
later they'd all had a chance to read. "They never call the husband. Can
you believe that? Not only is he a material witness to the scene of the
crime, the judge knows he's the deceased's husband because the judge is
the guy who married them in Fairbanks, and he never calls him to the stand."
"How about the glove?" Dinah said. "Anybody ever look for its mate?
Anybody ever try fitting it on Turner's hand?"
They were all calling her Angel now. Truth to tell, she was more real to
them than Paula Pawlowski, something the writer in Paula would have
rejoiced at. It was one kind of epitaph, Kate thought.
"What I liked best," she said, swallowing the last of her dinner with
reluctance, "was when the judge asked all the
265
witnesses if they knew Angel Beecham, how they all said, 'Oh no, sir,
I'm a married man.' " She snorted. "Like the messenger guy who was
walking along shopping for a girl, just like they all were, and he says
he was on his way home to dinner. And the judge doesn't even question
dinner at thirty minutes after midnight."
Ethan, next to Johnny, "I liked the doc best, especially his way of
saying, ?The instrument of death? and ?That inference may be drawn, yes,
sir.? "
"Yeah, but he's the only one really trying to do his job," Jim said. "I
mean, Jesus, Brittain doesn't even ask for a time of death. All that
stuff Davidson tries to get in about rigor mortis, the coldness of the
house, the congealed blood, and Brittain doesn't ask for a lousy time of
death, something any moron in magistrate's robes knows to do before he
signs his first warrant."
"Probably because he knows Turner doesn't have an alibi for that time,"
Ethan said.
"He's covering for one of his own," Bobby said, not without relish.
"Feels like the Five O'Clock Follies in Saigon all over again."
Kate noticed that they were speaking of the inquest in the present
tense, as if Brittain had taken testimony that day. Jim in particular
seemed to be most exercised by the incompetence displayed on the part of
the investigating officers. "Brittain cross-examines the milkman and the
messenger about who they saw in the street; he makes them, insofar as
you were able to in that time and place, admit to being customers of
Angel Beecham. The police chief, the federal marshal, nothing like that."
Kate had not known that Jim could get this upset, in particular about a
cover-up that had been contrived almost a hundred years before. He was
someone she regarded as rather relaxed in his judgments of those who
went wrong, at least for a practicing member of law enforcement. He was
a good cop, though, and there is nothing a good cop
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hates more than a bad cop, even if he has been dead for seventy years.
She remembered, some years back, when Roger McAniff had shot all those
people, only it turned out he hadn't shot one of them after all. Jim
Chopin had had an affair with the odd victim out, who had then dumped
him. Following her death he had flown to Anchorage to lay that fact out
in front of the investigating officers, one of whom was Jack Morgan. No,
if Jim Chopin had been in Judge Brittain's place, or in Chief Fortson's
place, or in Marshal Steward's place, or even in Doctor Davidson's
place, he would have forced the truth into the open and slapped the
cuffs on Matthew Turner himself.
"Why did he do it?" Dinah said, pushing her plate to one side. "Why did
he kill her? Why not just divorce her before he married Cecily?"
"I don't think anyone who does something like that thinks it through
rationally," Jim said. "That coshing, as they called it then, the almost
ritualistic slitting of the throat. It's totally out of step with making
it look like an assault in the middle of a robbery. A robber clobbers,
grabs, and runs. This was-this was a ceremony."
"A leave-taking," Dinah suggested.
"Possibly."
"Brittain never asks if she was raped," Kate said. "She was undressed
down to her shoes and stockings, with the rest of her clothes neatly
hung. The blinds were drawn so no one could see in. She's flat on her
back on the floor. And Brittain never asks if there was sexual activity
prior to the death."
"Or after," Ethan said with a shudder.
"Maybe he'd stopped by to rip off a piece for old time's sake, or that's
what he told her," Kate said.
"Maybe it wasn't the first time he'd done it, either," Bobby said,
whisking around the table to pile empty plates in his lap and ferry them
to the sink. Katya mumbled some
267
thing fretful from her crib, and he was there in an instant. Mutt
trotted over to stand next to him, head poked over the railing next to
his, nose sniffing. Her ruff expanded, she backed up and gave a violent
sneeze. "Yeah, I know," Bobby told her, reaching for a clean diaper.
"It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it."
Not me. Mutt didn't speak the words out loud but the back of her head
going rapidly away in the other direction was very eloquent.
"Bobby's right," Dinah said. "Turner probably visited Angel regularly.
He paid for her fancy house."
" ?Fancy house?? " Ethan cocked an eyebrow.
Dinah looked over at the couch, where Johnny, after inhaling his dinner,
had ensconced himself with Kate's copy of The Lost Wagon. "Fancy woman,
fancy house," she said in disapproving accents. Ethan grinned,
unabashed. Kate tried to ignore the jolt the grin gave her. Leftover
feelings from adolescence could and would be ignored. And then she
thought of Jack, and of the last time they had all foregathered in this
pla
ce, of the day of Bobby and Dinah's wedding and Katya's birth, and
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead Page 33
