Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  Better To Rest

  Dana Stabenow

  "Alaska's finest mystery writer" (Anchorage Daily News) has given readers a hero to cheer for. Alaska state trooper Sergeant Liam Campbell is the representative of law and order in the fishing village of Newenham-yet struggles to keep his own life on an even keel. Now, just when his future is starting to heat up, he delves into a case of a downed WWII army plane found mysteriously frozen in a glacier.

  Dana Stabenow

  Better To Rest

  The fourth book in the Liam Campbell series, 2002

  For Susan B. English,

  my first and still my favorite librarian

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to the Literary Ladies of Anchorage, Alaska, for their (until now) unwitting loan of their name to the book club described herein, which is at best only a pale imitation of the magnificent original.

  During World War II, 8,094 American-built aircraft were ferried up through Canada to Nome and Krasnoyarsk, many of them the ubiquitous and much-beloved Gooney Bird flown by Amerian crews. The story about the medevac comes from an account by Lt. Alta Mae Thompson, 805th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, of a trip she made in September 1943 from Elmendorf to Dutch Harbor and back. They were heroes all.

  Thanksgiving, 1941

  Turkey and stuffing in the mess. It was awful. The cook runs a laundry in Memphis Tennessee in civilian life. He says he told them that when he signed up and doesnt know how he got assigned to be a cook. Typical army situation normal all fucked up.

  It never gets this cold in Birmingham. There arnt any hangars so the mechanics are working on the aircraft right out in the snow. There arent any quarters either just tents and theyve got these heaters like big bunsen burners that keep catching the tents on fire. Ive only been here two weeks and in that time three tents have burnt down. A guy on one of the other crews got burnt pretty bad and everybodys scared of the tents and the heaters but theres nowheres else to go. Were all glad to get in the air. Its cold in the cockpit of a Gooney Bird but it aint as cold as it is on the ground.

  I got a letter from Helen. Shes pregnant. We were so careful I dont know what happened. I dont know what Im going to do my pay isnt enough to pay for a kid. I could get promoted pretty soon though if Roepke doesnt get us kilt first. That would mean more pay not much but some. Ive got to figure out a way to get more money home. I joined up so I could provide for us and they send me to Alaska. I still cant believe it.

  I better hide this log I dont want anybody else reading it. But I have to tell someone what Im thinking even if its only my own self and I cant write the truth to Helen because of the censers. Ill keep it in my flightsuit. I never take it off its too cold.

  ONE

  “I’m a vampire.”

  “Of course you are,” Diana Prince said.

  “I suck blood.”

  “Of course you do.”

  The young woman sitting on the other side of Diana Prince’s desk was thin to the point of emaciation, with sharp cheekbones emphasized by fine, black, almost certainly dyed hair sleeked into a severe knot at the back of her head. Her eyebrows, eyelids and lips were painted black, and she wore a high-necked, long-sleeved, ankle-length dress of some dense fabric that seemed to suck up all the available light, which, considering that the ceiling of the post was wall-to-wall fluorescent tubing, was quite a trick. Maybe she really was a vampire.

  Then again, Diana was well into overtime, after a day of duty that had had its moments, highlighted by the disarming of an enraged father bent on avenging the defloration of his seventeen-year-old daughter by her fisherman boyfriend, who was a little less than six months older than she was. It was also the last day of what had proven to be a labor-intensive week. Maybe it was just that she was tired, and about to fall face-forward into the now cold bean burrito sitting on her desk.

  “Officer Prince,” the vampire said, leaning forward in her chair, every line of her gaunt body taut with earnest sincerity, “I don’t want to hurt anyone else. So if you will…” She proffered the items in her lap in mute appeal.

  Diana eyed what looked like a leathercrafter’s rubber mallet and a wooden stake that appeared to have been carved from the limb of a very dead spruce, and gave an inward sigh.

  From what she could hear, her boss was doing a lot better than she was, and he looked like he was in love.

  “So there I was, arms around four bags full of groceries, and coming out of the store I see this guy breaking into my car.”

  “And that was when you hit him with the jar of tomatoes,” Alaska state trooper Sgt. Liam Campbell said, his gaze rapt.

  “Sun-dried tomatoes,” the woman sitting next to his desk said. She uncrossed and crossed her legs, rearranged the skirt of her blue-flowered housedress, fussed with a short, smooth cap of still-black hair, and smiled at Liam. “And no, or at least not then. I was going to hit him with the two-pound loaf of Tillamook sharp, but it just didn’t seem hard enough to stop him. He is a pretty big guy.”

  They both turned to look at the six feet, five inches and two hundred twenty pounds of Guamanian male, by way of Chicago and Anchorage, handcuffed to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. He was bent over, his free hand cupping the left side of his face. His left eye was swollen shut with the beginnings of what looked to become a shiner of truly fabulous hue. The left shoulder of his blue T-shirt was stained a dark brown. He pulled his hand away from his face and looked at his bloody palm. “Fuck, man, how come you ain’t arresting her? How come she ain’t in the cuffs? She assaulted me! I’m wounded here, man! I’m bleeding!”

  Liam opened a drawer and handed him a Wash’n Dri. “Here, Harvey, see if you can’t clean yourself up a little. You look disgusting.” He turned back to Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, a seventy-four-year-old housewife, mother of four, grandmother of two, who topped out at four-foot-eight and couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds wringing wet with six-pound lead weights strapped to each ankle. “So,” he said, radiating a quiet joy, “instead of hitting him with the cheese, you hit him with the tomatoes-excuse me, the sun-dried tomatoes.”

  “Well, yes,” said Mrs. Tompkins, “but not yet. I was going to hit him with the artichoke hearts, but it’s an awfully big jar-did you want to see?”

  “Absolutely,” Liam said.

  “Oh, fuck me, man, do I have to sit here and listen to this?”

  “Shut up, Harvey,” Liam said.

  Harvey shut up. He was the bouncer at the Bay View Inn and he and Liam had already met professionally.

  Mrs. Tompkins dove headfirst into one of the four plastic shopping bags clustered at her feet. She upset her purse on the way down and a couple of coins rolled out. She pounced on them, holding them up to the light and squinting at them. She frowned. “No good,” she said, and caught Liam’s eye. “Except to spend.”

  She dove back into the shopping bag and emerged flushed and triumphant, jar of artichokes in hand. It was a big jar, Liam noted with respect, forty-eight ounces, and always assuming it hit its target, would have put a hell of a dent in Harvey’s head. Funny how Harvey didn’t look grateful for the reprieve.

  “It was too big, I thought,” Mrs. Tompkins said with the air of a woman who had right on her side and who knew it. “I mean, I didn’t want to kill him; I just wanted to protect my property.”

  “Of course.”

  “There he was, breaking into my car, and that car’s my property.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And I really didn’t know how else to stop him.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Liam said. “So that was when you hit him with the sun-dried tomatoes.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Tompkins, and fluttered her eyelashes. She was as taken with Liam as he was with her. “I was going
to use the olive oil, but it was a plastic bottle. I figured it’d just bounce off, and then he’d probably hit me.”

  “Oh, man!” Harvey said, unable to resist. “You see how she’s dissing me, man! Did I lift a finger to hurt this woman? Did I?” He appealed to the room at large. There was only Diana Prince and the vampire at the other desk, so the appeal failed. “No! Alls I’m doing is going to the store to buy some smokes and this… this feminazi comes along and brains me with a jar of love apples! I want a lawyer!”

  “So,” Liam said, entering a note in the case file, “thatwas when you hit him with the sun-dried tomatoes.”

  The jar in question was smaller than the jar of artichokes but larger than the loaf of Tillamook, all three lined up on Liam’s desk. Liam liked the look of them. Mrs. Tompkins’ arsenal.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Tompkins sat back in her chair, eyes bright with militant satisfaction. She crossed her legs again. For legs with that many miles on them, they still looked pretty good. Liam allowed himself an admiring glance. Mrs. Tompkins smiled at him again.

  The phone on Diana’s desk rang. “Excuse me a minute,” she said to Dracula’s bride, who gave the rubber mallet a dismissive wave, and raised the receiver. The steady voice of the dispatcher spoke without haste and to the point. “Okay, we’ll be right there.” She hung up and tried not to sound jubilant when she told Liam, “Sir, somebody tried to rip off the ATM machine down at Last Frontier.”

  “Again?” Liam was sorry to end the interview but duty called. “Mrs. Tompkins, we’ve got to go, but I want to say that it’s been a real pleasure. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Will I have to testify?” Mrs. Tompkins looked eager to do her civic duty.

  The fierce, diminutive woman glowed with family values and middle-class morality and the Boy Scout oath, for crissake, a woman who was every prosecuting attorney’s dream and every defense lawyer’s nightmare. A slow smile spread across Liam’s face. He would love to have her sworn in in front of Bill Billington. It was with real regret that he said, “I doubt it. I have a feeling the public defender will recommend a guilty plea. But I will certainly keep you informed on the progress of the case.”

  “Thank you.” Mrs. Tompkins fluttered her eyelashes at him, gathered up her bags of groceries and marched out of the post on her first-class legs. Liam thought there ought to be a trumpet playing somewhere in the background, or at the very least, a round of applause.

  “Come on, Harvey,” Liam said, “we’ll drop you off at the cop shop on our way.”

  “Oh, man, you can’t put me back there! What are the rest of the guys going to say! Knocked on my ass by a little old lady with a bag of groceries! Campbell, come on, man, have some heart!” Then, when Liam uncuffed him from the chair and steered him toward the back door with a determined hand, he shouted, “I want to talk to my lawyer, goddamn it! I’m constitutionally entitled to a phone call!”

  In the meantime, Dracula’s bride waited with the calm certainty of one who knew she had eternity at her disposal for someone to put an end to her reign of terror.

  TWO

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Whaddya mean, you guess? He just lost his wife of fifty years a year ago. He’s allowed.”

  “Accent on the year ago. He was getting better there for a while; I don’t know why he had to go off the deep end again.” Bill used the bar towel to mop up the vomit around Eric Mollberg’s head where it lay sleeping peacefully on the bar. “I oughta call Liam.”

  “Cut him some slack, woman. He’s been picked up on D-and-D twice already this month.”

  “Yeah, well. He sits on the city council, for crying out loud.”

  “Guys on the city council can’t get blind drunk when their wives die on them? You wouldn’t get blind drunk if I died?”

  Bill didn’t have an answer for that, but the fact remained that Eric Mollberg had gone from city father to public nuisance in a downward spiral that had been dizzying to watch. Still, it was something else they could fight about, not that they had lacked for bones of contention to growl over in the past month. The events at Old Man Creek had taken a toll on both of them, Bill because Moses had been shot and Moses because he had lived. Amelia Gearhart had died. Young, wounded Amelia, scarred by neglectful parents, abused by her husband. Moses had been on a fair way to rescuing her, to breaking the cycle of abuse and setting her feet however shakily on the path to a different life, and then she was dead, shot to death by the same man who had tried to kill him, just when she had begun to learn how to live. Bill and Moses had been snapping and snarling at each other ever since they got back.

  As testified to by Evan Gray, one of Bill’s regular customers currently seated three stools down. He was also Newenham’s main connection for dope. If you rolled your own, you went to the Moccasin Man (so called because he wore beaded buckskin from head to toe) for the best grade of Thunderfoot from Wasilla or Kona Gold from Hawaii. “Gets kind of tiresome, cleaning puke off the bar,” he said. Evan was also a serious rounder, and he smiled at Bill Billington, happy to give her aid and comfort in her argument with Moses.

  Moses Alakuyak, certified Alaskan old fart, only smiled, albeit his nastiest, dirtiest, most spawn-of-Satan smile. “Playing out of your league, sonny. She’d eat you alive.”

  Bill’s spine stiffened and she glared at Moses. Never mind that they’d been lovers from the night of the day they had met. When he got proprietary she got her back up.

  And even when he didn’t. “I beg your pardon?” she said, her tone frosty.

  “You can make your apology horizontally,” Moses said. “Later.”

  The other patrons sitting at the bar roared their approval, including the women.

  Bill slapped the bar towel down. “That’s it, Alakuyak. Out. Out!”

  He repeated his evil grin, only it was a lot more personal this time. He didn’t leave, either, instead swaggering over to the jukebox. Moments later, Jimmy Buffett was singing about a smart woman in a real short skirt. Bill, her eagle’s mane of white hair considerably ruffled, ignored him, and called Liam to come pry Eric Mollberg off her bar.

  There was no answer. She left a message that should have melted down the voice-mail circuitry and slammed the phone into its cradle.

  “Bad day?”

  She looked up to see Wyanet Chouinard regarding her with a sympathetic eye. “Bad month,” she said, casting a sidelong look at Moses, now regaling a tableful of other old farts with some yarn about a duel to the death with a king salmon the size of Moby Dick.

  Wy followed her gaze. “I hate men,” she said in agreement.

  “Liam?”

  “And Tim.”

  “What’s wrong with Tim?”

  Wy sat on a stool. “Nothing caning wouldn’t cure.”

  Bill, startled out of her irritation, laughed. “Ship him off to Singapore, then.” She pulled Wy an Alaskan Amber and set it on the bar in front of the pilot.

  Wy took a long pull and said, “I can’t do that. He’d probably start a war, and then I’d have the State Department all over my ass.”

  They laughed together this time. “But seriously, folks,” Bill said. “What’s wrong with Tim? Usual teenage stuff?”

  “That, too.”

  “What else?”

  “I’m letting his mom see him. He hates her. And he hates me for making him see her.” Wy took another long, soothing draft of beer, and regarded the mug with a weary kind of satisfaction. “The great thing about winter is that daylight decreases by five minutes and forty-four seconds a day and I can drink earlier every time I come in here.”

  “Yeah, you’re such a heavy drinker, Chouinard.”

  “Sometimes I wish I were.”

  Bill looked at Moses over her head. “No, you don’t.”

  Wy sighed. “No, I don’t.”

  “How is Natalie behaving?”

  “She’s still sober,” Wy said. “She’s staying in town, renting a room from Tatiana Anayuk. Go
t herself a job bagging groceries at Eagle.”

  “She’s living with Tasha?”

  “Yeah, I know, the oldest established permanent floating party in Newenham. But they’re cousins, and Natalie’s pretty much broke. And like I said, she’s still sober.”

  “She must go straight into her room and lock the door.” Bill made Moccasin Man another margarita and sent a pitcher of beer over to Moses’ table. The place was in its usual lull between the people-getting-off-work crowd and the people-coming-in-for-their-after-dinner-drink crowd, and she was able to return to Wy in a few moments. “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what?” Wy said, startled out of her absorption with beer suds.

  “Let Natalie see Tim.”

  Wy made a face. “I didn’t really have a choice. The judge ordered visitation. Limited, supervised, but still.”

  “Bullshit,” Bill said, speaking with all the authority of the magistrate she was. “You could have run her off. You still could. Why haven’t you, if it’s making the boy so miserable, and you miserable with it?”

  Wy drank beer. Bill waited.

  “She’s his mother, Bill,” Wy said at last. “She’s got rights.”

  “Just because you didn’t give birth to him doesn’t make him any less your son. Crying out loud, Wy, I could tell you stories from now until next year about cases I’ve had before my court, parents aren’t fit to keep a dog, much less a child. She’s one of them.”

  “She is when she’s drunk,” Wy agreed. “Maybe if she stays here…”

  “What? You going to give him back?”

  Wy’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing.

  “I didn’t think so,” Bill said, her voice very dry.

  “It was right to let her see him. It was right for him to see her, so that he doesn’t always remember her as the drunken monster who beat him. Damn it, Bill, it was the right thing to do!”