by Mike Doogan
Beneath the robe, Potter wore a leather halter and tight leather shorts with a black leather codpiece. The leather was studded with copper rivets.
Cocoa took a cell phone from his pocket and opened it.
“Who are you calling?” Kane asked.
“I ain’t calling anybody,” Cocoa said. His voice sounded like he could barely contain his joy. “I’m taking pictures.”
The senator scrambled to his feet and clutched his robe around him. He was making noises, but no words came out.
“Who do you suppose he’s dressed up like that for?” Cocoa said. “Maybe we should go look.”
Pushing the senator before them, Kane and Cocoa went out of the living room and down a hall, past the bathroom, and into a bedroom with an open door. The mousy receptionist from Potter’s office was struggling to untie her right hand from the post of a four-poster bed and sobbing. Her ankles were still tied to the bed, and it was clear that she’d been spread-eagled across the end of the bed. She was naked, and her back, buttocks, and thighs were pink and ridged with welts. A leather-handled whip lay on the floor near her.
“Why, you kinky old devil,” Cocoa said, snapping away with his cell phone, “and you a conservative Christian.”
“I’m not…we’re not breaking any laws,” the senator said. “This is completely consensual.”
Kane walked over and untied the woman’s hand, then knelt to remove the ties on her ankles. The material used to tie her was soft, and there weren’t any difficult knots in it.
“I’d guess that this was okay with both of them,” he said. “She needed to be punished, and he needed to feel powerful, and somehow in this cockeyed world, these two crazy kids found each other.”
Once she was free, the woman scrambled into the bed and under the covers.
“Why are these men here, Orestes?” she said. “What do they want?”
The old man sank down on the bed next to her and patted her hand.
“This is consensual,” he said again. “And heterosexual. And legal. We’ll be all right.”
His voice sounded like even he didn’t believe that, and the woman began sobbing again.
Kane knew he should feel revolted by the two of them, but his stomach was tied in a knot of apprehension.
“I’m only asking one more time, Senator,” Kane said. “Where was your daughter the night Melinda Foxx died?”
“She was,” Potter began, but Cocoa waved the cell phone at him and he stopped. “I don’t know where she was. I was at Anita’s and we were doing…this.”
“Why aren’t you at her place now?” Cocoa asked. The cabbie really seemed to be enjoying the situation.
The woman mumbled something.
“What was that?” Cocoa asked. “I can’t hear you.”
“I said my mother is visiting,” the woman spat. “We couldn’t do this in the same apartment with her. That would be sick.”
“And this isn’t?” Cocoa said softly.
“Enough, Cocoa,” Kane said. “We don’t have the time. The night Melinda Foxx was killed, Senator?”
Potter ran his hand over his hair, but it sprang right back up.
“As I said, Anita and I were together at her place. And I could hardly use that as an explanation for my whereabouts, so I said my daughter and I were home together. Letitia swore that she was at home, alone, and I believed her.”
“And, of course, she offered to alibi you, so you were anxious to believe her,” Kane said. “She must have seen the advantage to that right away. Neat. Did you believe her when she said the same thing about the night Ralph Stansfield died?”
He could see doubt creep into the old man’s eyes. He’d been a politician too long to really believe anything he hadn’t seen with his own eyes.
“Yes, I did,” he said. “But what if she wasn’t? What reason would she have to kill those people?”
“I don’t know that yet,” Kane said, “but I think she was in a lesbian relationship with Melinda Foxx that went wrong somehow.”
The old man looked baffled, then outraged.
“Lesbian? Letitia? How could that be?” he said. “She was—she is—the most devout person I know. She would never engage in that wickedness.”
“You’re a fine one to be talking about wickedness,” Cocoa said.
Kane tapped the cabbie on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time with this old fraud. We need to find his daughter.”
Kane hobbled quickly through the house and got into the cab, Cocoa right behind him.
“Well, at least we’ve got the goods on the old hypocrite,” Kane said.
“What goods would those be?” Cocoa asked, putting the cab in gear.
“The pictures,” Kane said. “The ones you took with the cell phone.”
“Don’t tell the senator,” Cocoa said as he accelerated down the street, “but my cell phone don’t take pictures.”
35
Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?
LEWIS LAPHAM
Kane was out of the cab before it was completely stopped. He limped around it and started across the street toward the Capitol.
Cocoa rolled down his window.
“Want me to go with you?” he asked.
“No,” Kane said. “Go down to the Silver Bow. You should find Tank Crawford there. You should know him; he’s a Juneau cop. Tell him if he wants to catch the White Rose killer, he’ll race right up to the Senate Finance office.”
“You could wait and make it legal,” Cocoa said. “The Silver Bow’s just down there.”
Kane shook his head, crossed the street, and mounted the steps. He wanted to race up the five flights, but didn’t think his leg would take it. He punched the button for the elevator and the doors slowly opened.
“Not many offices occupied on a Saturday,” the security guard said.
Kane ignored him and punched the button for the fifth floor. The elevator seemed to crawl upward. As it rose, Kane did his best not to think about what might have happened to Dylan. The boy wasn’t strong. Why did he have to get involved?
The elevator stopped on the third floor and a couple of guys in tennis outfits started to get in. They saw the look on Kane’s face and backed right out again.
“It’s going up,” one of them said to no one in particular. “We don’t want to go up.”
When the elevator opened on the fifth floor, Kane limped rapidly down the hall, passing a janitor who was polishing the drinking fountain and doing a tightly controlled dance to the music coming through his earphones. The floor seemed to be empty otherwise, all the office doors closed and no lights showing. Kane pushed open the swinging doors to the Finance Committee, walked across the big hearing room, and tried the door to O. B. Potter’s offices. It was locked. He pounded on it hard enough to make the frosted glass rattle in the frame.
“Open up,” he called. “Police.”
No response.
“Open up now,” he called, pounding again, “or I’ll break it down.”
He heard a muffled response, the sound of doors closing, then the sound of the lock being turned. The door opened a crack.
“What is it?” a woman’s voice asked.
Kane hit the door with his shoulder and bulldozed it open, pushing the woman’s body backward. Then he was in the outer office, watching Letitia Potter rubbing her forehead. There was a red mark where the door had hit it.
“That hurt,” she said. “Who are you? Oh, Mr. Nikiski. What are you doing?”
“Several things,” Kane said. “One is looking for my son.”
The woman dropped her hand from her forehead and made a show of confusion.
“Your son?” she said. “Who is he? Why would he be here?”
Kane looked at her face and saw the striking beauty there. She’s like a Greek goddess come to life, he thought, but her eyes are as empty as a panhandler’s pockets.
&
nbsp; “If he’s not here,” Kane said, “I’m sure you won’t mind if I look around.”
The woman shrugged.
“Whatever,” she said.
Kane opened the door to the staff office. It was an even bigger mess than it had been. Stacks of folders and what looked like office supplies covered the desktops. Kane saw a key hanging from the handle of one of the metal cabinets and started forward.
He sensed rather than saw the blow coming, hunched his shoulders, and half-turned. Too late. Whatever the woman was swinging made contact with the back of his head and he was down, stunned. He landed on his side. Hands scrabbled at the automatic on his belt. He tried to pin one of them, but they got away, taking the gun with them. He rolled over and looked up at Letitia Potter.
She held the gun on him, a slight smile on her lips.
“You lose,” she said in the little-girl voice Kane had heard at the bagel place.
She reached up with her free hand, grabbed the lapel of the blue work shirt she wore, and pulled. Buttons popped and the shirt gaped open to reveal creamy skin and a lacy, pale blue bra.
“You forced your way in and tried…tried to do things to me,” she said in the same voice, “but I—we struggled and I got your gun and shot you.”
She unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down around her hips. Then, before Kane could move, she raked the automatic’s sight across her exposed abdomen, leaving a livid welt that seeped blood at one corner. She shivered and laughed, her eyes now glistening pinpoints.
“Naughty man,” she said. “Naughty man must die.”
All Kane could think was, Stall. Stall.
“Where’s my son?” he asked.
Letitia’s eyes flicked to the locked cabinet, then back to Kane. She smiled but said nothing.
“Why did you kill Melinda Foxx?” he asked.
Letitia’s finger whitened on the trigger.
Wrong question, he thought.
“No,” he said. “Killing me won’t help you. Too many people know.”
He watched as she eased off on the trigger.
“Too many people know what?” she asked. There was something ghastly about the singsong little-girl voice coming from a grown woman.
“Too many people know you killed Melinda,” Kane said. “And Ralph Stansfield.”
“That was an accident,” Letitia said, shaking her head from side to side. “You told me he knew something and I waited to talk with him about it and we were the only two left in the office and he went out to smoke a cigarette and I went with him and he said something that made me mad and I pushed him and he fell over the…over the railing and he died.”
“What did he say?” Kane asked.
The woman silently raised the gun again.
“He said he knew you and Melinda were lovers,” Kane said quickly. “He said he would tell your father if you tried to have him fired.”
Letitia looked at him wide-eyed.
“How did you know that?” she asked, lowering the gun again. “What else do you know?”
“I know that you and Melinda were being very careful,” he said. “I know that if you’d been found out, it would have been a scandal. You couldn’t have that, could you? A scandal?”
“We were careful. So careful,” she said. She stuck out her lip and stamped her foot. “Daddy would be so mad if he found out. He thinks I’m his little angel. That’s what he calls me. But when he’s angry, he beats me.”
A leer chased the child’s smile off her lips for an instant, and her voice became a woman’s, deep and sexy.
“I like to be beaten as much as that little slut Anita,” the woman said, “but I’ll never tell him that.”
She looked down at Kane and she laughed.
“You’re just stalling, aren’t you?” the woman said. “You think somebody is coming to save you.”
Got that right, Kane thought, and said, “If you were lovers, why did you kill Melinda Foxx? Did you find out she was betraying you? Did she tell you she was pregnant?”
The woman took a step back and brought her left hand to her mouth.
“She was pregnant?” Letitia said. “Melinda was pregnant? How could she be pregnant?”
Kane opened his mouth, but Letitia held her finger to her lips and listened, as if she’d heard something, then relaxed.
“How could Melinda be pregnant?” she asked again, raising the gun.
“She was seeing Matthew Hope,” Kane said. “They were lovers, too.”
Letitia shook her head as if denying what she’d heard.
“I never knew,” she said. “I knew she was betraying me—Daddy and me—but not that way.”
Her voice took on another timbre, neither the woman nor the girl, someone in between.
“I was a virgin,” she said. “I had boyfriends but didn’t really like them that much. They just wanted one thing, and the thought of all that bumping and stickiness made my skin crawl.
“Then Melinda came to work. She was smart and efficient and so good-looking. I liked being around her. Then, this summer, she started being really nice to me. And one night we were working late, going over the draft of a bill, and she just leaned down and kissed me. Just once.
“And I fell in love with her,” the woman’s voice said. “I chased her and she ran until, just as the session started, she stopped running. It was wonderful. The sex was wonderful, and the playacting, pretending we were just coworkers, that was wonderful, too. At first we’d meet at her place, but then she suggested we do it at the office, and that made it even better. Doing it there on my father’s desk, the desk he pounded when he yelled about dirty faggots, made it so good.
“But I guess I was suspicious, because a little voice in my head told me to watch her.”
Letitia stopped to listen again, and when she went on, it was the little girl speaking.
“This voice told me. I knew we were doing dirty things, and that meant she was a dirty person, to do those things with me. So I watched her, and one day, she left her computer unlocked and I read her e-mail. One of them was to Senator Hope, about how she knew something that would make my father let out the bill about dirty faggots getting married.”
She stopped talking and raised the gun again.
“Why am I talking to you?” she asked. “I should just shoot you.”
“Don’t you want to tell me how you killed her?” Kane asked. “You knew she was in cahoots with your father’s political enemy, that she was sharing office secrets with him, that if she told people about your relationship your father would have no choice but to send you away to try to salvage his political position. You couldn’t have that, could you?”
“I have nowhere to go,” the little-girl voice said. “I didn’t plan to kill her. It was just, we were in my father’s office, doing stuff, and I was sitting on his desk and she was kneeling there making me feel so good, and when I was finished feeling good, it was just so easy to pick up that stupid award and hit her with it and she fell down and died. I was just so mad at her.”
Letitia stared into the middle distance, but her eyes focused quickly when Kane tried to move.
“That’s it?” Kane said. “It was an impulse? You were smart enough to pour cleaner in her mouth to destroy evidence of your lovemaking. Where did you get that? The janitor’s cart? And you were certainly able to take advantage of your father’s weird sexual practices to provide yourself with an alibi. None of that jibes with your story that you killed Melinda on impulse.”
The woman looked at him and raised the gun again. Her eyes were like shiny pebbles, made hard by the certainty of Kane’s death.
“When they arrested Senator Hope, I thought I’d gotten away with it,” Letitia said, her voice back to normal now. “But then there was Ralph, and that stupid boy who found me here last night and started asking me questions. When I got tired of that, I hit him and put him in that cabinet. It was all so easy, just like this is going to be. And then maybe people will quit asking me questions and let me g
o back to my life. Good-bye.”
She gave him a smile and her finger tightened on the trigger and a groan came from inside the metal cabinet. Her eyes jerked up and the gun barrel lifted, and using his good leg, Kane kicked her in the knee. She screamed and started to fall, and the office was full of the noise of the automatic firing. Something punched Kane in the left side, but he was already moving, rolling up her legs. He tried to grab her gun hand, but his muscles wouldn’t answer, so he flopped his left arm on her right one. The automatic went off again and again and the bullets hit metal somewhere. Letitia was screaming like a little girl and hitting him in the head with her left fist and he knew he was going to lose this fight and that he would die and something flew past his right ear and hit Letitia Potter in the forehead and her eyes rolled up and she was still.
“Mister, are you okay?” a man’s voice asked. “I heard what she said. She was an evil lady, and I tried to help you.”
Hands grasped his right side and helped him to his feet. The wreckage of a portable CD player lay next to Letitia Potter’s head.
“I threw it—my CD player,” Baby Santos said. “It was all I had.”
Kane could hear feet pounding across the floor of the big hearing room. He felt like passing out.
Not yet, he told himself, not just yet.
He shook off the janitor’s hands and stumbled to the metal cabinet.
“You’re shot,” the janitor said.
“Nik, what the hell…,” Tank Crawford’s voice said. He sounded a thousand miles away.
Kane leaned against one side of the cabinet, put his right hand on the key, and turned. Then he grasped the handle and turned it to open the door. But he’d seen the three big holes that the bullets from the automatic had punched low down in the door. He knew what he would find. He fell to his knees and pried the door open and in his chest his heart turned to stone.
