Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense

by Mike Doogan

  The dark-haired jumped to his feet.

  “Your Honor—” he began.

  “One. More. Word. Mr. Davies,” the judge rapped, “and you will be taking Senator Hope’s place in jail on a contempt charge. You had your chance, and you blew it. Now. Sit. Down.”

  The dark-haired man sank into his chair.

  “As I was saying, Mr. Doyle,” the judge said, “I’m releasing your client OR, with the understanding that you will produce him for all pertinent court proceedings.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Oil Can squeaked.

  “The bailiff will take the defendant to be processed for release,” the judge said. “Now, I want to see opposing council in my chambers. Mr. Davies, be sure to bring your advisor with you. Court is in recess for fifteen minutes.”

  The judge dropped the gavel, got to his feet, and went through the door behind the bench. Oil Can, Davies, and the woman followed. The trooper came and took Hope out the side door.

  “I’ve been watching the courts for a dozen years now,” the woman said, “and I’ve never seen nothing like that. I wouldn’t want to be Davies right now. I’ll bet the judge is chewing him a new one.”

  “Got that right,” the man said, lowering his pencil. “When they say fifteen minutes, they mean at least a half hour. Let’s go get coffee, Emma.”

  The three of them filed out of the courtroom behind the other spectators. The two court-watchers went off together, talking. Kane took a seat in the lobby. The reporters formed up near the door, the better to ambush the lawyers when they came out. After a few minutes, a young guy with wild hair detached himself from the group of reporters and walked over to sit next to him. He had a notebook and pen in his hands.

  “I’m with the Anchorage paper,” he said, “and I understand that you’re working for the defense. Any comment on what happened in there?”

  Kane shook his head.

  “Nope,” he said. “You’ll have to wait for Oil Can.”

  “How about your investigation?” the reporter said. “Found out anything new?”

  Kane shook his head.

  “Really,” he said, “you’re going to have to talk to either the senator or his lawyer. I’m not authorized to comment.”

  The reporter nodded.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Here’s my card, in case you do want to talk to me.”

  He got to his feet and started back, stopped, turned, and said, “I’m not some tabloid guy. I didn’t just parachute in. I cover the legislature full-time. If you ever have anything for me, I’ll play it straight.”

  With that he returned to the group of reporters. Kane slid his card into a pocket and watched the reporter walk away. When he got back to the group, he shook his head.

  Time passed. Doyle, the prosecutor, Davies, and the woman from the governor’s office came out of the courtroom in a clump. Davies and the woman brushed past the reporters, the prosecutor heading for the elevator and the woman going out the door and across the street to the Capitol. Oil Can stopped and said, “Here’s what I’ve got for you.”

  The reporters gathered around.

  “In nearly thirty years of practicing law in this state,” Oil Can said, the squeak somehow absent from his voice, “I have never seen such a blatantly political attempt to interfere in the criminal justice system. Governor Hiram Putnam has made a grave error, and I hope you make him answer for it. I’m sure you’ve all seen Sean here’s story in this morning’s Anchorage paper about the governor taking over the investigation and not questioning certain political allies. That and today’s charade raise serious questions about the state’s reasons for prosecuting Senator Hope, and I’m confident that he will be found innocent on all charges, because he is innocent. Thank you.”

  The reporters spouted questions, but Oil Can walked away from them. Kane got up and followed him, catching up with the lawyer on the sidewalk when he stopped to button his topcoat.

  “Well?” Kane said.

  Doyle’s face was split by what looked like a genuine grin.

  “Talk about your gifts from God,” the lawyer said, hopping from foot to foot with glee. “Ritter is half asleep most of the time, and the time he’s awake he’s a member of the old boys’ club who will put up with practically anything from the prosecution. So drawing Sellers instead was a great piece of luck.

  “And I can’t imagine what the governor was thinking, although he’s such a dunce maybe he doesn’t think. But our client gets out of jail free, and the prosecution looks like it’s politically motivated. On top of the story about the investigation in this morning’s paper, the prosecution is looking very suspect. And I think Davies is going to need first aid for the tongue-lashing the judge gave him. All in all, a good day.”

  “What about Hope?” Kane asked.

  “What about him?” Doyle said.

  “What’s he going to do now?” Kane asked.

  “My understanding is that he’ll process out and go back to his job in the state Senate,” Doyle said, “although he’ll have to have the guts of a burglar to walk back into that place and try to get anything done.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “I’m scheduled to fly back to Anchorage this afternoon,” he said. “Nothing much happens here on the weekends, and I’ve got some matters that might keep me there until Tuesday or Wednesday. Why don’t we get together after lunch and talk about how we want to proceed?”

  “Fine with me,” Kane said. “I’ve got one or two things to talk to you about anyway.”

  The lawyer walked away. Kane stood on the sidewalk looking up at the mountainside above the town. It was steep and heavily wooded, the next thing to wilderness a short climb away. His “hangover” was mostly gone, but he felt logy and out of sorts. He walked back to the hotel and got directions to a gym from the doorman. Taking some workout gear from his room, he walked to the gym, paid a fee, changed clothes, and went into the exercise room. At midmorning most of the people using it were women in spandex.

  I don’t have any real objections to that, Kane thought as he found a place to stretch.

  After he stretched the kinks out, he found an empty treadmill and worked up a sweat, thinking all the while of the situation surrounding Matthew Hope. Was the governor actually as stupid as Doyle seemed to think? Just how did politics affect the case? Could Hope get a fair trial if the governor was in there playing politics?

  Kane thought about calling Jeffords and asking him what was going on. But the chief clearly wanted to keep his distance. He probably wouldn’t talk, and even if he did, Kane would have no way of being sure he was telling the truth. More politics.

  He got off the treadmill, found the free weights, and started sliding them onto a bar. When he had 150 pounds on, he slid beneath the bar, inhaled, exhaled, and lifted. Moving slowly and carefully, he brought the bar down, raised it, brought it down, raised it, establishing a rhythm that allowed him to work all the muscles of his upper body. He could have pressed a lot more, but his form would have broken down.

  No use speculating in the absence of evidence, he thought. So, instead, he thought about how he was going to treat Alma Atwood when he saw her again.

  That, he thought, is a political question I’ve actually got some interest in.

  19

  In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  Kane arrived at Doyle’s office feeling as fit as a regiment of marines. He had a hard time keeping a straight face when Helga greeted him with a glare and stony silence.

  “Looks like I’m winning,” he said as he breezed past her into Doyle’s office. He found the lawyer stuffing files into his bulky briefcase.

  “Glad you could make it,” Doyle squeaked. “Got anything for me?”

  Kane relayed the events of the night before, leaving out Alma Atwood’s spectacular meltdown.

  “A dead cat?” Doyle squeaked. “Someone sent you a dead cat?”

  “Actually,” Kane said, “it looked
like someone killed the cat and then sent it to me. It’s a message.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Doyle asked.

  “About the cat?” Kane asked. “That’s Tank Crawford’s problem. About the message? I’m going to ignore it, but keep my guard up. You should do the same. Anybody who would kill a cat would kill a lower life-form, like a lawyer.”

  Doyle took a last look around the room, snapped his briefcase shut, and looked at Kane.

  “Very funny,” he said. “But nobody’s going to bother me. I’ve represented some dangerous people in my time and nobody’s ever done anything worse than call me names.”

  Tough little devil, Kane thought. But he’s a lot like all these politicians. They all think that the rules of their game—politics, law, whatever—will protect them in the real world. Unfortunately for them, they’re wrong.

  “What about this aide, what’s his name?” Doyle asked “Do you think he actually knows anything?”

  “Got me,” Kane said. “He did work with the victim, so he’s more likely to know something than a lot of people. But he was pretty drunk when I talked to him.”

  “So you don’t buy the in vino veritas theory?” the lawyer asked.

  Kane shrugged again.

  “Sometimes alcohol makes people spill their darkest secrets,” he said, “and sometimes it makes them lie just for the hell of it. But mostly it makes them drunk and unpredictable.”

  Kane watched as the lawyer struggled his way into his coat. It was like watching a pig wrestle with a python.

  “Maybe you’d better go talk with him again,” Doyle said when he’d finished subduing the coat. He straightened his toupee and looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. All this homeland security nonsense means I’ve got to get to the airport early and then waste time waiting. Talk about locking the barn door after the horse got out. Anyway, call me if you get anything useful. I’m booked back here on the Tuesday-morning plane.”

  Kane followed the lawyer out of the office, giving Helga his best leer as he passed. The look she returned would have stopped a grizzly bear in midcharge. Down on the street, he watched as Doyle got into a cab and drove off. It was almost one o’clock. Kane took the card Dylan had given him out of his wallet. He dialed the number listed there on his cell phone.

  “Dylan Kane, please,” he said and waited. “Dylan? This is your dad. You had lunch yet?” He listened. “Then how about dinner?” He listened some more. “Dylan, I’m going to be here long enough that you’re likely to run out of excuses. So why don’t you just skip all that and get this over with?” He listened some more. “Yeah, tonight is good. Where?” He paused. “Yeah, I can find it. When?” He paused again. “Fine, see you then.”

  Kane put the cell phone back into his pocket, shaking his head. Dealing with his son was going to be as tough as keeping his feet on the ice. He thought about going up to the Capitol and seeing if Alma had had lunch, but decided against it. Kane knew from experience that she’d need time to come to grips with what she’d done the night before, and he thought it was best to give her that time. So he went back into the building, sat on the stairs, put his ice grippers on, and took a walk.

  His route took him onto the flat, past the police station, and along a street that followed the shoreline. The sky was covered from horizon to horizon in a film of high, white overcast. The water in the channel was gray-green and smooth as a politician’s evasion. The hillside above him was a mass of dark green spruce, barren white birches, and gray willows. Only the occasional brightly painted house broke up nature’s drab winter palette.

  Despite the lack of sun, the day was warm and drops of snowmelt fell from building gutters and the tips of tree branches. Kane unzipped his coat as he walked, wondering if spring was finally here.

  No lights showed in any of the buildings he passed. According to the signs in their windows, you could buy opals here and fudge there and T-shirts everywhere, but only when the cruise ships arrived with summer. Downtown Juneau was like the downtown of any Alaska tourist town, like the downtown of Anchorage for that matter, with year-round businesses overwhelmed by the shops of people dedicated to squeezing their livings out of the four-month tourist season. In mid-September they locked the doors and left the downtowns cold and dark until the next May.

  The state has changed so much since I was born, Kane thought as he walked. Oil has made it richer and tourism has made it tackier and every economic benefit has been matched—some would say overmatched—by a social cost. We have more people and less community, more money and less sharing, more roads and fewer places to be alone. Jeez, I sound like an old-timer, a sourdough. The thought made him laugh. Maybe he did match the cynical definition Alaskans sometimes used: Sour on Alaska but not enough dough to leave.

  The sidewalk petered out at the last tourist building. Kane thought about continuing along the side of the road, but there wasn’t enough shoulder to make walking safe. So he turned and headed back to town. He’d gotten about a block when his cell phone rang.

  “Mr. Kane?” a man’s voice said. “My name is Matthew Blair. I’m chief of staff to Governor Hiram Putnam. The governor would like you to be in his office at three o’clock.”

  “What for?” Kane asked, irritated by the man’s casual assumption that he could be ordered up like a pepperoni pizza.

  “The governor has some matters he’d like to discuss privately,” Blair said.

  Kane felt like telling the guy where to go, but he wanted to know more about what Putnam was up to. So he said, “Three o’clock? His office? Where is that?”

  In the pause that followed, Kane watched a dirty brown gull land on a railing lined with other gulls. The new arrival set off a chain reaction of squawking and flapping that ran down the railing and sent the gull on the far end skyward.

  “Seriously?” Blair said, his voice full of surprise. “You don’t know where the governor’s office is?”

  “No,” Kane said, “but I am a detective, so I can find out if you don’t knock off the what-a-rube stuff and tell me.”

  “Third floor of the Capitol,” Blair said. “Just give your name to the receptionist.”

  He broke the connection. Kane closed his cell phone, put it into his pocket, and resumed his walk. Water from melting snow formed rivulets on the mountainside back of town. Higher up still, an eagle soared, a dark speck against the milky sky.

  Tourists would ooh and aah over that, Kane thought. Outsiders—people who didn’t live in Alaska—had such extreme ideas about the place. For a long time the national image was a frozen wasteland. Now it was a storehouse of nature for an overcivilized nation. For Kane and other Alaskans, though, Alaska was what it had always been, the backdrop against which they lived their lives. More spectacular than some backdrops, but a backdrop nonetheless.

  John Muir can go to hell, Kane thought. We’re more important than the mountains and the glaciers.

  Kane stopped in a sandwich shop to eat a late lunch. Like most places he’d been in Juneau, it was crowded with people talking about government affairs. To some, anyway, those affairs included the White Rose Murder. In the course of eating a pastrami sandwich, he overheard that Matthew Hope had been exonerated, that some TV loudmouth named O’Reilly had said the murder was more proof of the evils of liberalism, and that Governor Hiram Putnam was putting pressure on the district attorney’s office to get Hope’s bail revoked. Among the younger people, there was a lot of speculation about who would play Hope in the TV movie.

  When he finished eating and eavesdropping, Kane walked up the hill to the Capitol and rode the elevator to the third floor. A pleasant young woman took his name, whispered into her headset, and asked him to wait. He took a seat in one of the brocade chairs set in the hallway. The other was overfull of a dark-haired man talking into a cell phone.

  “Who gives a fuck what that pinhead thinks?” the man was saying. “I’ve got the votes.”

  Kane listened to the man crow into the telephone for a few mi
nutes, admiring the carrying capacity of the chair. The guy weighed well over three hundred pounds, and Kane wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see the chair explode into wooden shrapnel and drop the guy onto the floor. They’d need a crane to put him on his feet.

  A bulky, gray man with a face like a map of Ireland came through the office doors and walked over to where Kane and the fat man sat. His collar was open and his tie askew, and his hair looked like it had been combed with high explosives.

  “Hey, Matt,” the fat man said to him, “I’ve been waiting for a half hour to see the governor.”

  “Well, if it isn’t Alaska’s largest lobbyist,” the man said. “Don’t worry, we’ll get to you.” To Kane, he said, “You Kane? I’m Blair. Follow me.”

  Kane followed him through the doors, through another reception area, and into a large office. The man at the big desk didn’t look up from his writing when they entered. Blair motioned Kane to one of the chairs facing the desk and sat down in the other. Kane sat and waited, studying the man behind the desk.

  Governor Hiram Putnam looked like a civic monument in a suit. His shoulders were broad and his hair was abundant and his face bore the pleasant emptiness of your favorite uncle—if your favorite uncle had a room-temperature IQ. A newspaper columnist had called Putnam “the four S man: stupid, saccharine, self-important, and sleazy,” and as far as Kane knew the governor had never said or done anything to contradict that.

  Putnam apparently decided that he’d taken long enough to show Kane how busy and important he was. He set his pen down and fixed the detective with a glare.

  “Just what the fuck are you guys doing,” he barked, “telling the newspaper that we’re not investigating this murder properly?”

  Kane opened his mouth to reply, but Putnam plowed on.

  “We’re going to find out who killed Melinda Foxx, don’t you worry,” he said, “and we’re going to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. I have my best people on it, and I’m getting daily briefings on their investigation. Daily. But people have got to realize that there is other state business to be done, important business, and we can’t let the one interfere with the other. My administration is committed…”