An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  VICTOR PROBABLY was a good kid, but he was at a perilous age and he’d already made at least one bad decision. Theo thought maybe he should refer the boys to Diversion, which was a citizen committee empowered to impose community service-type penalties in underage matters, in the hope of discouraging future infractions.

  But leaving Irene’s house—looking back through the lace panel before the light in the hall went out at the slim blonde woman in a ragged undershirt and men’s boxers, a Glock semi-automatic pistol hanging by her side in one hand, a bag of frozen vegetables held against her face with the other—Theo’s heart was wrenched. He thought of the alarm in Victor’s voice as he’d called out to his mother, and the stricken look he’d flashed at Theo as he retreated inside. The boy and the mother seemed a fragile unit in a turbulent world, and Theo didn’t think he had the stomach to become one more devil snapping at their heels. Maybe he’d see Victor and young Patrick McGrath in court some other time, but he was letting this one go. And he felt good about the decision.

  THEO STOPPED at a hole-in-the-wall taco shop off Railroad Street and bought a plate of carnitas to go, spicy pulled pork on corn tortillas wrapped up in tinfoil with lime wedges and chopped cilantro, a smoky salsa on the side. Freddie Fender was wailing on the radio.

  There was a huge Hispanic population moving north into Mason County, working the orchards and the strawberry fields and the new shellfish farms springing up along the tidelands, changing the demographic and the local culture. Theo supposed most were illegal and some probably cooked meth as well as tacos, but he liked the cuisine they brought with them and the good humor, the vivid color of their skin and clothes, their music and the shy smile of the girl who could barely understand his order. He said gracias and she said thank you and he dropped a tip that was nearly the same as the price of his meal into the jar on the counter.

  Chavez, he thought walking out. Who, he wondered, was the man who had left Irene with that name and the dusky boy.

  THEO DIDN’T know it, but the route he traveled in his pickup heading home was the same one Irene had run. The Shelton Yacht Club, located just past the Simpson timber mill off of Highway 3, consisted of one long dock that was home to a motley assortment of moored vessels. Theo had brought his Alaskan fishing boat south and was living aboard, modifying it in his spare time—though there was so little of that the project was in perpetual hiatus—to make it more habitable. The boat, an older wooden trawler, had nice beamy lines and relatively roomy below-deck spaces. The vessel was hooked up to water and electricity, and in these warm summer months, with a charcoal grill hanging off the deck railing and the cabin portholes and hatches open to the breeze, it was a fine place to come home to. The winter would be a different story, with mold and damp and wind and chop. But Theo was frugal and not particularly well paid and the boat had been home for many years in different seas and ports. He was content for the time being to pay moorage instead of rent while he waited to see how his new job panned out, to sleep in the vee berth up under the prow and to spread his files out over the galley table.

  Theo was the only live-aboard in residence, but on Tuesday evenings and every other Saturday there were sailing regattas which brought people down to the pier, and on the weekends there was a lot of recreational boating activity and offers of drinks late in the day. Sometimes Theo crewed in the races for one neighbor or another, and he enjoyed the casual fraternity of competition and the chat about gear and rigging and strategy.

  Theo had been adopted by an apparently homeless orange cat that now greeted his arrival in the parking lot and followed him down the gangway and out along the dock, attracted, Theo cynically supposed, more by the carnitas than by companionship. Theo liked the cat and had taken to calling it Joe after a song he remembered from childhood about a marmalade cat named Joe that traveled with the rodeo. He missed it when it didn’t appear and liked feeling its weight on the bedclothes in the night.

  He opened a beer and sat on deck in a lawn chair in the warm dark sharing his tacos with the cat. Exploding ordnance dropped over the McChord air base lit the underbelly of the thin cloud cover rose, and the delayed booms of the concussions rolled north like thunder. Theo thought about the kids flying those planes and dropping the bombs on the practice reservation south of Tacoma, and of their mothers and their future deployments, and wondered if in a few years Victor Chavez would be one of them. There was a ceiling in Mason County and the military was one way up and out.

  Theo felt unaccustomedly glum and moody. The attack on Irene Chavez upset him. He now thought that he shouldn’t have been at her house in the first place, but given that he had been there, he shouldn’t have left when he did. He should have insisted she go to the hospital or call the police, or both. He shouldn’t have left her there battered and alone with only her son and her gun. She flummoxed him and he was afraid he hadn’t been altogether professional. It bothered him to recognize a self-serving worm of worry that this information would come out someday and become public and embarrass him. He wondered what she was doing now.

  The warm night wrapped around him, and he put his feet up on the rail and tilted back in his chair with the cat in his lap. Overhead he recognized the constellations of Orion and the Big Dipper and the W of Cassiopeia, and as he watched he could see the steady progress of a satellite or the space station floating eastward across the sky. Anywhere in this hemisphere a person looking skyward would see the same things, didn’t matter if you were in Iraq or Afghanistan or Mason County, Washington, the same velvet universe enfolded you. More people should look up, Theo thought. It was humbling and unifying.

  He felt a pang of missing his once wife—a woman long gone from his life—and his most recent girlfriend, a physical therapist in Sitka. Neither one had ever been truly right, but that didn’t stop the empty feeling. He’d like to be getting into bed with more than a cat to wrap his arms around.

  Theo wondered if he were to ask Irene Chavez out, if she’d go.

  XVII

  The next morning Irene started her day at the Walmart store up on the bench above town where she bought a tube of concealer and picked out a pair of enormous faux tortoiseshell sunglasses. At the register she clipped off the tag and put the glasses on. “Very Jackie O.,” said the checker, sympathetically ignoring the obvious. It was dispiriting to realize the assumption of domestic violence, but convenient not to be asked to explain. Irene’s eye was blue and puffy despite the icing of the night before, and she knew there would be a garish evolution before the bruising ultimately faded. She was stiff and sore and angry with herself and the world.

  At the courthouse as she walked past Wanda with only a nod, the dark glasses got raised eyebrows but no comment. She decided to skip the morning meeting—with Inspector Gilbert gone it seemed optional and unnecessary. In her cubicle she didn’t know where to begin. Her desk was buried in paper. She had other matters besides the Paris family to attend to which she had been neglecting. Most of it had to do with the usual—cooking, using or selling meth. A court appearance the next day on a possession with intent charge would keep her in town, but after that she thought she could shake free for a day. She eyeballed the flight schedules on her computer, then buzzed reception and asked Wanda to book a redeye to Boston and back for her. The department had a travel budget but it was rarely tapped, and she could picture Wanda’s disapproval in the silence that followed the request, no doubt thinking that Irene was getting uppity in the absence of Inspector Gilbert and weighing the appropriate response. “Just do it,” Irene snapped.

  Next she called Officer Sean Egan, the Cambridge police officer she’d talked to previously, and left a message on his phone telling him to expect her. She would, Irene figured, either find something illuminating in Anne’s Cambridge apartment or not, but she wouldn’t know until she got there. She had no very clear idea of what she’d be looking for—something to help her identify the man in the Donley cabin, first of all—but she knew if she didn’t investigate for herself she’d
always wonder if something critical had been missed.

  At the mental hospital where Anne had worked, the director’s secretary didn’t want to put Irene on her boss’s calendar without knowing the nature of the meeting; but Irene was law enforcement and she pled confidentiality concerns and got herself squeezed in for a half an hour before lunch. Surprise was an advantage Irene always tried to retain, though in this instance she didn’t expect it to yield anything of value. Still, given the option, it seemed more prudent to break the news of Anne’s death in person.

  SITTING AT her desk Irene wrote a short list. U/K, which was her shorthand for the unknown man in the Donley cabin, her prime suspect. Ira Logan. Libby Burton. Elliot Burton. Rueben Guevara wasn’t making the cut at the moment, though his apparent obsession with Anne and the feud with Dr. Paris along with the intriguing bottle of Bordeaux, held him a place on the long list.

  Following Ira’s name Irene wrote ‘possible motive no alibi.’ It was clear that Ira and Anne were having trouble and most likely breaking up. According to Ira’s account he’d worked on his car until nearly dark, eaten cold leftovers standing up in the kitchen—this much was corroborated by Yvonne as near as Irene could tell with the language difficulty—then had walked down to the beach to look at the tide. The wind, he said, even then was pushing waves high up onto the dune. In the dark he hadn’t thought one way or another about the presence or absence of the I-14 out on the buoy. He’d smoked a cigarette sitting on a log and had been in his cot in the barn before ten. Irene had his butt in a bag—or anyway a butt—so the part about the cigarette at the beach was corroborated. But except for the interlude in the kitchen with Yvonne, no one recalled seeing him at any point throughout the evening, though nobody seemed to think this was unusual.

  Libby Burton, the same, ‘possible motive no alibi.’ Anne’s death changed Libby’s fortunes considerably just simply in terms of future inheritance. But beyond the practical matter of financial gain, always a motivator, Irene intuited an abiding resentment on Libby’s part toward her younger, more favored half-sister—a less tangible but equally galvanizing factor to weigh.

  Libby and the others had eaten dinner outdoors at the table on the bluff, watching the tall sail of the I-14 slice back and forth across Case Inlet in the increasing wind. The water, Libby said, turned green and whitecaps came up. It didn’t occur to her to worry about her sister, she said, but her father commented anxiously to no one in particular that Anne should come in. Leland contradicted him, saying that it looked like great sailing and he wished he were out there with her.

  Later Libby helped Yvonne clear the table and clean up the kitchen, and then repaired to the barn loft where she read to her boys—Old Yeller she said was the book, an account corroborated by Owen and Neal who wanted to know if Irene had read it and if she’d cried at the end. Irene said she had read it and, yes, she had cried, and as she answered she had to fight back tears again thinking of boys and dogs and the wrenchingness of growing up, and of reading it to Victor not that long ago.

  So Libby was accounted for until she closed the book and the boys went to sleep. After that, with Elliot absent, Libby could easily have left the barn unremarked.

  Elliot Burton, ‘possible motive, flimsy alibi.’ Elliot had flown into Burbank the day before Anne’s death, rented a car and stayed with a friend in the Palisades overnight, then auditioned for a Law and Order spin-off at Universal Studios, returned the car and caught a flight home. There was a stop in Portland and a mechanical delay, and when the airline offered to put passengers up in a hotel or bus them to Sea-Tac, Elliot decided to rent a car and drive himself to Gustavus Island, which explained the Dodge Neon with Oregon plates. It was past midnight, he said, when he got in, and he said Libby didn’t waken when he slipped in next to her. No one reported hearing or seeing him drive in in the wee hours, and he was up and out ahead of Libby and the boys, so it was really only his word as to when he’d arrived or that he’d been in bed at all. The story about the flight delay and mechanical problem was true—Irene had checked.

  The unknown man. About his possible motive or alibi Irene had no idea. But he had fled. And he had broken into and been living in the Donley cabin, crimes against property that in Irene’s mind made it more plausible that he’d commit crimes against persons. And he’d known Anne in some clandestine way. She would have to find him, Irene thought, though at present she didn’t have the faintest idea how. She wondered if the diamond ring had come from him.

  Irene’s mind was going in circles. She wished she’d known Anne in life. As it was, having looked at photographs, having seen her dead body and having held her hand, Irene felt that she too had fallen a little in love with Anne Paris, under the spell of this oddly compelling, now dead, young woman. Irene felt totally committed to finding her killer and altogether stymied at the present moment.

  IRENE HAD her hand on the phone when she changed her mind. She could call people in for interviews if she wished, but she decided to go out to Gustavus Island yet again. She felt like a yo-yo running up and down the string of Highway 3, but something was telling her she’d get more from them out there on their own turf. Inspector Gilbert might not agree, but he wasn’t around to argue with her.

  DRIVING OUT of town Irene relived her run of the night before and pulled off the road where she thought it had happened. She thought she saw scuff marks in the gravel shoulder but she wasn’t certain. She felt queasy and chilled despite the summer heat.

  Irene hadn’t had sex with a man since Luis had died, eleven years ago. She’d never dated, not because of any sort of principle or promise or prohibition, she just hadn’t been interested. She’d worked and looked after Victor, and it had seemed like enough. She had rebuffed offers and interest, building a wall that most men recognized and didn’t even try to penetrate. But the sheer weight of elapsed time lent import to her abstinence. It was almost like being a virgin again, a state she wouldn’t change lightly. Last night had nearly ended that.

  Standing there in the warm August morning she realized that Theo Choate had been right the night before, she should have made a report, should have been seen at the hospital. Her head hurt and she ached all over. When she got back from Gustavus, she decided, she’d make a belated record of what had happened. One of the other deputies could go out to Patrick McGrath’s trailer and talk to him, look for a laceration on the side of his jaw and bring him in if there was one. In her imagination she tasted his blood in her mouth again. She wondered if she should have some sort of test.

  XVIII

  Ira Logan was lying on his cot with a road map open against his knees when Irene walked into the barn. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said back, clicking off the headlamp he was using to read.

  Irene circled the Triumph, inspecting it. It looked finished, all the dials and gauges fitted into a gleaming walnut dashboard, no more dangling wires, no tools littering the floorboards.

  Ira folded up the map and hitched himself into a sitting position, making room for her at the foot of the cot, but she sat down on an upended five-gallon bucket nearby and looked at the collection of items stored behind him on the crosspiece in the stud wall. A prescription vial was one thing. She wondered what it held. It was dim in the barn, she couldn’t see very well, and she’d like a closer look. A half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark, a thick paperback copy of a Swedish mystery everyone was reading, and an oyster shell he’d been using for an ashtray.

  “You’re back,” he said.

  “I am,” she replied. “Got to wrap this thing up.”

  “Cool,” he said. Then, “What’s with the shades?”

  Irene flipped the dark glasses up onto her forehead, looking steadily at him. Ira snapped his headlamp back on and leaned in close, blinding her. Her eyes blinked closed and she felt him touching her cheekbone and eye socket, moving the tips of his fingers firmly but gently in a little pattering palpation pattern around the area of damage.

  “Ouch,” he said, l
eaning back. “What happened?”

  Irene didn’t answer. She opened her eyes and slid the glasses back into place. End of discussion.

  He shrugged as though he didn’t care, but she could tell he was piqued. He had wanted to be let into her confidence.

  “Have you been seen?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Any nausea, anything like that?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “you probably are. Responsive pupils, no apparent fractures. But that’s a doozy. You should probably have an x-ray.”

  Looking at her that way, touching her clinically, he’d turned her into a patient, and turned the tables, reminding her of his status and education and of her own vulnerability. She thought for a moment of his professional life in the emergency room, seeing all the horrible stuff that happens to people. Maybe, she thought, it hardened a person. Maybe Ira, who saved lives, felt entitled to take one. She wondered.

  “Ira,” she said, “Anne was seeing someone—who?”

  “What do you mean Anne was seeing someone?” he asked. He looked genuinely puzzled.

  “She wasn’t?” asked Irene.

  “Seeing someone like a shrink you mean?”

  Irene laughed. ‘Seeing.’ She wasn’t used to the nomenclature of this set. “No. Another man. Seeing another man.”

  “No,” he said, quite emphatic, “Anne wasn’t seeing anyone. Not like that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.” he said. “I mean, she was unhappy, I told you that, about the girl in Ecuador that I saw. Well, saw is the wrong word. You know what I mean. My fandango or whatever you call it. She was pissed, that’s for sure. But seeing someone, no.”