Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Envelopes?”

  Kenny produced a third bag, filled with white envelopes. “No window, lined on the inside for security, gummed flap, you can buy them a hundred at a time. I’ve only seen copies of the previous letters.” He tossed the bag to Jim.

  Jim caught it. “Hell, I don’t know, envelopes look pretty much the same to me. Doesn’t look any different than the ones the other letters came in. Kate?”

  She took the bag from him. “Yeah. Look the same. How about the handwriting?”

  “Block printing. Pen strokes seem a little longer on the previous letters, but that may be the copy effect. I’ll send the new one off to the lab today. Were there fingerprints on any of the others?”

  Jim shook his head.

  “Hell.”

  Jim grinned. “If it was easy, everybody’d be doing it.”

  “I had dinner with her last night,” Kate said.

  Both men looked at her. She fixed her eyes on Kenny. “At the hotel. It was crowded; she had a seat at her table she didn’t mind sharing.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Kenny said. He was every inch the cop now, unbullshitable eyes trained on Kate’s face.

  “Things started happening kind of fast after we found the body. I figured it would keep. I didn’t know it was her,” she said, before Kenny could say anything. “I mean, I didn’t know I was having dinner with the researcher Darlene hired.”

  “You didn’t talk?”

  “Oh no, we talked. We talked until after ten.” She saw the look the two men exchanged, and sighed. “She told me she was a writer. She told me about the book she was writing, some tale about a dance-hall queen during the gold rush and her daughter and granddaughter. Or that’s what it was turning into. She’d been doing a lot of research, she said, but she never mentioned the campaign. Although Darlene did say later that Paula had just gotten off a plane from Fairbanks, where she’d been doing some research at the library. We only exchanged first names.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jim said, with a quick, dismissive laugh. “Two women sit down at a table, five minutes later they know each other’s favorite floors at Nordic’s, their book club’s most recent book selection, and how dumb their men are.”

  “No,” Kate retorted, “that’s only what we want you to think, Jim. Actually we’re trading notes on how bad you are in the sack.”

  “If we could get back to the case?” Kenny said.

  “Certainly,” Kate said.

  Jim jerked his head. The gesture caught Kate’s eye and when she glanced over involuntarily she saw that his skin had reddened beneath its tan. The traitor Mutt, sitting between them, bumped his hand and he scratched behind her ears.

  “Did you walk back to the trailer with her?”

  Kate shook her head. “She said she wanted to stay on a while and watch what happened at the bar. Said she was going to have some bar scenes in her book and since she doesn’t—didn’t drink, she needed to put in some research.”

  “Any guys around?”

  “Yeah. Couple of them asked us to dance, but we turned ‘em down.”

  Kenny glared at Jim before he could say anything.

  “Anybody making a pest of himself?”

  “No. Pretty mellow crowd. I saw Tom Gordaoff in there just before I left, putting the moves on a girl.”

  “Recognize her?”

  “No.”

  “Would you know her again?”

  “Kenny.”

  He waved a hand. “All right, all right, dumb question.”

  “Where are Pawlowski’s personal effects?” Jim said.

  “Jeannie’s sitting on them outside.” They followed him into the outer office.

  Paula Pawlowski’s possessions, or what they had found in her trailer, were pitifully few and carefully spaced out across a work table. There was a laptop computer, a black three-ring binder, half a dozen notebooks, and a Ziploc bag full of pens and pencils. There was a cheap carry-on stuffed with one change of clothes, worn, and a ditty bag, probably the bag she’d taken to Fairbanks with her. Kate pulled on the surgical gloves Kenny gave her and opened it up. “Shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush, toothpaste. No perfume, no eyeliner, no mascara.”

  “Like you would know a mascara wand if you saw one,” Jim said.

  She gave him her most dazzling smile, at the sight of which Mutt’s ears went straight up. “Like you would have any idea what I would know or not know.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Kenny said. “Jesus, you two, you just get worse and worse. Anybody’d think you were shacking up.”

  There was a split second of silence. “No jewelry,” Kate said. “Was she wearing a watch when we found her?”

  “No.”

  “She wasn’t wearing one at dinner, either.”

  Kate looked at the laptop. “Can we turn on the computer?”

  “Why not?”

  Kate pulled over a chair and opened the computer.

  “Kenny,” the woman at the desk behind them said, “Andy Anderson’s calling, wants to know if you’ve seen Jerry Dial in town.”

  Kenny went to the phone.

  A Windows 95 desktop popped up on the computer, no password necessary. One of the icons was Word for Windows. She clicked on it on the assumption that a researcher would use a text and not a graphics file, and she was right. Paula had organized her professional life into folders containing files. One file was labeled NOVEL and contained seven separate files labeled DRAFT1 through DRAFT7. Every one of them had a different title, as if Paula had been unable to decide between the relative merits of “Pointing North,” which brought an involuntary grin to Kate’s face, and “Years of Gold,” which made her want to gag. She was more interested in the folder marked DIRT, however. She clicked on it. There was one file called HEIMAN and another called GORDAOFF.

  “Click on Gordaoff first,” Jim said, leaning over her shoulder.

  “Uh-huh.” Kate looked around. “Grab me one of those floppies, would you?” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it, Chopin.”

  He did and she slipped it into the slot on the side of the laptop and copied both files.

  Jim sighed. “Why didn’t you just ask him if you could?”

  “Because then he might have to say no to me. I don’t like making my friends uncomfortable.”

  “Sure you don’t,” Jim said beneath his breath, as Kate slipped the floppy into a pocket.

  “You aren’t my friend,” she said before she could stop herself.

  There was another of those tense silences between the two of them that seemed to be popping up with uncomfortable regularity. “You got that right, if nothing else,” Jim said, his voice cool and his words clipped.

  Kenny came back and picked up the expanding file folder that was also part of Paula Pawlowski’s effects.

  “Anything in there?” Kate said.

  “Notes about Peter Heiman, mostly. About his brother, his dad, his grandfather. Mostly history, starting back in Fairbanks right after the Klondike. That what she was supposed to be looking up?”

  “I think she was supposed to be finding out anything about Peter Heiman that would help Darlene beat him in the election.”

  “I thought Anne Gordaoff was running against Pete.”

  Kate smiled. “It’s her face on the posters,” she said, and left it at that. “Mind if I take a look?”

  Paula’s handwriting was large and sprawling, with a lot of marginal notes surrounded by balloons with arrows pointing to other balloons and paragraphs. There were a few doodles here and there, asterisks, five-pointed stars, a hand-drawn game of Dots the likes of which Kate hadn’t seen since grade school. “Think I could have copies of what’s in here?” she asked Kenny.

  “Oh, like the copy you made of the files on the laptop?” Kenny asked.

  Kate refused to blush. “I was thinking more of a Xerox machine for the paperwork.”

  “You might have asked.”

  “But then you might have had
to say no.”

  “True.” To Jim Chopin’s immense and visible disgust, Kenny waved her to the copy machine.

  “Thanks, Kenny,” she said when she was done.

  “I don’t like this, Kate.” He stood in the center of the outer office, arms folded, his large figure dominating the space and infusing it with a sense of purposeful menace. “I get paid-ftrkeep a peaceful, prosperous community peaceful and prosperous. The community doesn’t like it when somebody gets killed here, and I don’t like it when the community doesn’t like it.”

  “I know.”

  “Now there have been two murders.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I don’t have a suspect for either one.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t like that, either.” Kenny spoke with deliberation, giving each word its due weight. He wouldn’t be deflected and he wouldn’t be rushed. Kate listened to him with a sober expression. Jim listened in without kibitzing, not something he would do for every other one of his brothers and sisters in arms. “I want this cleaned up, and quick. Okay, Billy Mike and the mayor and anybody who is anybody is telling me to low-key this, fine. But a man is dead, murdered. A woman’s dead, murdered, and she lived here. I didn’t know her, but that doesn’t matter. She was one of mine.”

  He raised his eyes to Kate’s. “You’re working for the campaign, Pawlowski was working for the campaign, you’ve got the best shot at figuring this out. Figure it out. Meantime, I’ll get on forensics in town. She fought. Maybe some of all that blood isn’t hers. Call me, every day; tell me what’s going on.”

  “All right.”

  He gave her an envelope for the copies. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve got the Cessna.” Jim Chopin said, staring into the air over her head. “Want a ride?”

  After Gilbert and Sullivan, Anne and company had been scheduled to fly out to Niniltna, leaving Kate to follow how she could.

  The best that Kate knew of Jim Chopin was that he was an excellent pilot, even of planes he’d never flown before and never would again, as witness their brief and, for lack of a better word, exhilarating flight together in a Lockheed C-130 the previous July. “I want to check out Paula’s trailer again.” She looked at Kenny for permission. He considered, nodded.

  The Airstream was on a lonely stretch of riverbank, no neighbors around for two miles in any direction. “We’ve already gone through it.”

  “I know, but I want to look again.”

  “Fine. I’d have to change my flight plan anyway.”

  Kate left, followed by Mutt, who pasted a wet one on Jim in passing.

  The two men watched them out of sight. She looked sad in repose, Jim thought, quieter, less irritable. He didn’t like it.

  Kenny looked at Jim and shook his head. “Boy, Chopin, you’ve got it bad.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jim said.

  10

  What do you drive?” she asked Tony.

  “A Ford Escort, also known as a McCar,” he said.

  “Could I borrow it for a couple of hours?”

  “Sure.” He pitched her the keys. “Two door, dark blue, should be around back of the kitchen.”

  “Thanks, Tony. I’ll fill her up before I bring her back.” At the Airstream, Kate ducked beneath the crime-scene tape and opened the door. Mutt looked at Kate pleadingly from the cement square that served as the trailer’s front porch. “God knows you deserve it,” Kate said. “Take the afternoon off, girl. Go.” Mutt gave a joyous bark and in two leaps was in the underbrush. A spruce hen exploded upward, squawking indignantly. The hydraulic hinge pulled the door shut behind Kate and nudged her the rest of the way inside the tiny living room. She set the envelope containing the copies of Paula’s notes down on the table and took a long, slow look around.

  You had to train long and hard to see the rest of the room a body lay in. Maybe Kate was out of practice, but she didn’t remember the matching flowered print of the curtains and the sofa cushions on the two couches with the table between them. Poppies, it looked like, on a dense forest green background that gave the material the look of tapestry, and almost hid the bloodstain from view.

  The corresponding bloodstain on the white linoleum-tile floor had dried a hard brown. She’d been shot once, had fallen to the couch, then to the floor. They’d found no evidence that she’d hit the table.

  Bookcases, homemade but sturdily built and nicely finished with a natural stain and a light coating of varnish, filled every available inch of the wall space above the couch backs, between the windows, and below the ceiling. The books were alphabetized by author, all history, all about eras of Alaskan history, World War II, gold rush days, the Civil War. Some Kate recognized from her own library: The Thousand Mile War by Brian Garfield,The Flying North by Jean Potter, Pierre Berton’s The Klondike Rush, his mother’s I Married the Klondike, and Murray Morgan’s Confederate Raider. Little yellow sticky notes festooned the pages, where passages had been marked in light pencil.

  She saw an oversized book bound in leather with fading letters on the spine, which proved to be a copy of the duke of Abruzzi’s account of his expedition to climb Mount St. Elias in 1897, a book Kate had given up on acquiring when Rachel at Twice Told Tales in Anchorage had told her it was priced on the Internet at seven hundred and fifty dollars. There were photographs, and she sat down on the unstained couch and leafed through them, pausing to read a paragraph here and there.

  She replaced the book on the shelf with due reverence, and wondered what other treasures Paula had hidden away in her little tin hot dog. There was no filing cabinet, no notes. Everything Paula had been working on must have been either in the notebooks or on the laptop.

  The kitchen cupboards were neatly organized, the dishes melamine, the pots and pans Paul Revere, the glassware Wal-Mart, the flatware Costco. In the little refrigerator fitted beneath the counter there was an aging block of cheddar cheese, a half-empty carton of eggs, and a bunch of green onions that looked like they were melting. The remainder of a loaf of Wonder Bread on the counter was dried hard. There was a box of Walker shortbread rounds in the cupboard, the only evidence of sin. The sink, the tiny gas stove and oven, everything was spotlessly clean. The countertops looked new, some kind of fake wood. The cupboard below was stocked with dish soap, clothes soap, bleach, paper towels, and plastic trash bags, all in giant economy-size boxes. Paula hated to shop, and bought large when she did so she wouldn’t have to do so again any time soon. Kate’s heart warmed to her, and hardened toward her killer.

  Down the tiny hallway the bathroom was stocked with Ivory soap in hand-bar and bath-bar sizes, half-gallon jugs of generic shampoo and conditioner with pump handles, another half gallon of generic hand lotion on the sink. The single bed (more room for bookshelves) had two changes of sheets, one on and one in the clothes hamper, a quilt for summer and a down comforter for winter. Paula hadn’t liked to shop, and she wasn’t a prisoner of her possessions, and for no reason this realization made Kate’s anger at Paula’s killer run higher. Paula Pawlowski had refined living down to its essentials, so that she could concentrate on what mattered.

  What mattered was books, if the bulk of the contents of the trailer was any indication. Shelves, built-in and freestanding, took up every available inch of floor space, were wedged between bed and wall, were mounted over all the windows. Every one of them was lined with books. It took Kate a while to see that they were in alphabetical order, clockwise from the door, starting with the five-shelf bookshelf nailed to the divider between the kitchen/living room and the bedroom, and ending with the two shelves mounted on brackets over the toilet in the bathroom. She saw Jane Austen, L. Frank Baum, Lois McMasters Bujold, Bernard Cornwell by the door; Loren Estelman, Steven Gould, Robert Heinlein, Georgette Heyer (and now she was seriously angry), John D. MacDonald, L. M. Montgomery, Ellis Peters, J. K. Rowling, Sharon Shinn, Nevil Shute down one side of the little hallway, around and over the bed; Laura Ingalls Wilder and Don Winslow over the toilet.
/>   There weren’t that many people in the world who read for fun, who would rather read than watch television, who were physically incapable of walking past a bookstore. Kate had come to it late, a gift from a gifted English teacher at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, which meant that she had a keen sense of time wasted, a reverence for the art, and deep respect for those who practiced it. She looked at all of Paula Pawlowski’s books and realized that Paula had been a lifelong friend of hers before they’d ever met. She found herself growing very calm.

  I will find out who did this to you, she said silently to the spine of The Death and Life of Bobby Z. I will find out, and I will make them pay.

  A knock at the door startled her. She went back into the hallway, and could make out a shape through the translucent glass pane in the door. “Who’s there?” she called.

  “It’s me, Paula, open the damn door.” Another knock, impatient this time. “Look, I know you’re mad at me, but—”

  Kate opened the door and found a man staring up at her in surprise. “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Kate,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “Gordy Boothe, I—wait a minute. What are you doing in Paula’s trailer? Where’s Paula?” He craned his head to look around her. “Paula?”

  She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. “How well did you know Paula Pawlowski, Mr. Boothe?”

  “What?” Now he was staring down at her in bafflement and growing anger. “Look, what the hell is this? Where’s Paula? Paula!” He banged on the door with his fist. “Paula, open this door!”

  “Mr. Boothe. Mr. Boothe!” She put a hand on his arm. “She won’t hear you. She’s not here.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not here? She just got home last night; I drove her home from the Lodge.”

  “Really,” Kate said. “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know, eleven, eleven-thirty.”

  “Did you stay with her?”

  “No.” He hadn’t been happy about it, either, and he still wasn’t. “She wouldn’t let me. She said she’d had this great idea, and she wanted to work on it before she lost it.” He’d been watching Kate’s expression. He was a pleasant-faced man in his mid-fifties, about five-ten, with a bald spot that made him look like he was tonsured and a body that looked like it had once played team sports in a desperate battle to stave off a middle-aged spread. “Look, Miss—what did you say your name was?—what’s going on here? Who are you?”