Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Why kill her?”

  “Wait a minute,” Anne said. “Matthew Turner married Cecily Doogan.”

  Kate nodded. “He sure did. And with Peter Heiman and James Seese he went on to found a bank, which looks after my money today.” Such as it is, Kate thought. She looked at Billy Mike. Well, she’d probably saved Anne from getting shot by a neo-Nazi Park rat. Maybe her ten grand wasn’t totally in the toilet after all.

  “But he married Cecily Doogan in 1914,” Anne said. “January 1914.”

  Kate sat up. “What? Are you sure about the dates?”

  “Yes. Darlene has all the family marriage certificates in an album. She’s very proud of the family, you know.”

  The irony inherent in Anne’s words struck her the same 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 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?”

  “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 Hos-ford 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 Hos-ford 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 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. “Cellphone 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 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.

  16

  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 sauvage, 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 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 hates more than a bad cop, even if he has been dead for seventy years.

  She remembered, some years back, when Roger Mc-Aniff 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 something 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 place, of the day of Bobby and Dinah’s wedding and Katya’s birth, and she thought her heart would break beneath the pain.

  It didn’t, of course. Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Kate kept breathing in and breathing out; she kept waking early every morning and moving like she had a purpose through every day; she’d even taken on a job in her own field again, and sometimes, if a good-looking man twanged the heart that had once been the personal property of Jack Morgan, why, Jack Morgan himself would be the first to say, “Forward motion, girl, that’s all that counts.”

  Warm hands settled on her shoulders and squeezed once. She looked up, and then had to look down, because the hands belonged to Bobby, seated in his chair, not the ghost whose blue eyes she had for a foolish moment expected to meet.

  “Okay?” Bobby said.

  She blinked away tears she hadn’t known were there. “Okay,” she said, and she pretty much was, except for crying in public, a thing she would rather die than do.

  He bought her some time by asking Jim Chopin, “What happened to the guy at the gym?”

  “Parka Man? He’s in jail, where I’m probably going to be able to keep him forever, since he refuses to lawyer up. Says the justice system in this country is a sham and a joke run by niggers and kikes and spies and slopes who look out for their own by putting the screws to all those pure-as-the-driven-snow wh
ite folks out there, and he’ll go to jail as a martyr before he allows it to make a mockery of his cause.”

  “Speaking as one of the niggers, albeit one who stays as far away as possible from the justice system,” Bobby said, “what is his cause, exactly?”

  “Exactly? I’m not sure,” Jim said, creasing his brow in an elaborate and failed attempt to act like he really cared. “White supremacy seems a little conservative for the brand of separatism he’s preaching. I think you’re supposed swim back to Africa, just for starters.”

  “I’ve got news for him, I’m not even gonna roll back to Tennessee.” Bobby grinned at Dinah, who laughed.

  “Anyway, he took it upon himself as an upstanding white folk to discourage Anne’s candidacy. He’s not entirely stupid; he could read the polls, like all of us he knew she had a good chance to get in.”

  “So he started writing her letters,” Ethan said.

  Jim nodded. “Yeah, we found the stationery and the envelopes and the pens up to his cabin.”

  “What about the last letter?” Kate said.

  “Like we figured,” Jim said. “The lab came back today with the results. Darlene wrote it.”

  “She admit it?”

  “No. Unlike Mr. Duane Mason, who is eschewing the American legal system in all its forms, Darlene Turner Shelikof has engaged herself an attorney, who has advised her to say nuffin to nobody.”

  “Who’s her attorney?” Kate said.

  Jim cocked an eyebrow, and the grin came out, cutting a finned and sinuous wake. “Guess.”

  She sat back, all thought of Jack and tears forgotten for the moment. “Oh man, tell me you’re kidding!”

  “What?” Ethan said, looking from one to the other, his expression indicating to anyone who was looking that he didn’t particularly care for the fact that Jim and Kate understood each other so well. Dinah smiled down at the table.

  Jim was nodding. “None other than good old Eddie P. himself.”

  Kate shook her head, marveling. “Man, I don’t hardly believe this.”

  “I don’t know,” Dinah said. “It’s all a part of the same story, isn’t it? Turner and Seese—and Heiman, the not-so-silent partner—start a bank a hundred years ago. They marry—and murder—and have children and flourish, and their families grow along with the territory and then the state. One of Seese’s descendants becomes a lawyer, one of Turner’s becomes a political operator, one of Heiman’s becomes a legislator. One of them becomes a murderer herself. Full circle. It’s Oedipus. It’s Hamlet. It’s the Duchess of doggone Malfi.” She stared off into space with dreamy eyes. “It’s going to make for a great documentary, though. I figure two hours, or maybe even a miniseries.”