Okay, no point in not being equally blunt. “Howie Katelnikof told Jim Chopin that you and the other aunties hired someone to kill Louis Deem.”
Auntie Vi didn’t answer. The silence stretched out. Kate looked hard at the top of Auntie Vi’s unresponsive head. “Auntie, did you hear me?”
“Nothing wrong with my ears.”
Kate began to feel a slow burn. “Anything you’d like to say about it?” Mutt, standing next to her, moved a pace forward, putting a firm shoulder in between the two women.
“What to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kate said. “How about, Howie’s full of shit? How about, Howie’s trying to buy his way out of getting caught with a commercial load of caribou taken out of season? How about, Howie’s a little weasel who’d sell out his own mother to stay out of jail? I’m wide open for suggestions here.”
“Howie got no mother.”
Kate looked at Auntie Vi’s bent head with a dawning horror. “Jesus Christ, Auntie. Is it true?”
“Howie say who we suppose to hired?”
There was a short, charged silence. “No,” Kate said. “Not yet.”
Auntie Vi finished mending one hole and put down the needle to shake the cramp out of her fingers. “Tell something to me, Katya.” She looked up for the first time, and Kate almost fell back a step from the anger she saw there.
“What you do, Katya? Tell me what you do. Louis Deem monster. Monster,” she said again, with emphasis, making it clear. “Liar. Thief. Murderer. Murder three wives. Three. Jessie. Ruthie. Mary. All dead, by his hand. Everybody know this, Katya. And nobody do nothing.”
“Not nothing, Auntie,” Kate said. “Not nothing. He was brought to trial twice.”
Auntie Vi dismissed this with a contemptuous wave of her hand. Her button black eyes burned and her face was flushed. “What that matter? They let him go. You always let him go, Katya.” She looked straight at Kate. “You always let him go.”
“Auntie, I—”
“Then he hurt those two girls. Those two babies. That one she comes to me crying her eyes out. She beg me for help. What do we do, Katya? You tell me. What do we do?”
Kate tried to say something and failed.
“What you do, Katya?” Auntie Vi said, and the resentment in her voice was as unmistakable as it was flaying. “What do you do?”
She took up the needle again and reached for the next hole in the gear.
Kate stood there, shocked, speechless.
“Working here,” Auntie Vi said. “You bother me. Go.”
Kate went.
Outside, she was just in time to see Gallagher and Macleod loading up their snow machines.
Macleod looked up and gave her a warm smile. “Kate,” she said.
Kate made a heroic effort and managed a civil reply. “I hear you’re making a trip downriver.”
Macleod nodded. “Down first, one day in each village, back and overnight here, and then up to Ahtna, same.”
“Spreading the gospel according to Global Harvest Resources Inc.,” Kate said.
Macleod shrugged, unfazed by Kate’s less than enthusiastic tone. “I told Global Harvest that if they wanted a successful operation they’d better get to know the neighbors.”
“The ’Burbs know you’re coming?”
“Oh yeah,” Macleod said. “We’ve got town meetings set up everywhere we’re stopping, and someplace warm to lay our heads every night. People have been pretty welcoming.”
“So far,” Kate said.
“So far,” Macleod said agreeably.
Kate nodded at the rifle in the scabbard on Macleod’s snow machine. “Keep that handy. There have been a couple of attacks on the river lately.”
“Yeah, Jim told me.”
In spite of herself Kate stiffened. “Did he.”
“Yeah, I checked in with him before coming down here to pick up Dick. He wasn’t happy when I told him what we were up to. He told me about the attacks and to be careful.” Her ravishing smile flashed out again. “Good guy, Jim. For a trooper. Not to mention hot as a pistol.”
Dick Gallagher’s head whipped around at that, and his expression wasn’t pretty, but Macleod didn’t see. She pressed the starter and the engine roared into life. “See you, Kate!”
Kate stepped back as Macleod accelerated down the road, followed, at first tentatively and then with more assurance, by Gallagher.
Kate watched them until they were out of sight. “Yeah,” she said, her lips tight. “See you.”
CHAPTER 18
“You knew,” she said to Jim. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.”
“You knew I was Bernie’s alibi,” he said.
“I sure as hell didn’t know Bernie’d dragged the aunties into it,” she said hotly.
“Neither did I.”
She glared at him.
He leaned forward and stared back, his chin out. “Neither did I, Kate,” he said again, slowly and with great deliberation, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d take my word for that, too.”
A sudden rush of color scorched her face. She tried to ignore it. “Have you asked Howie who this alleged assassin was?”
“Have you asked the aunties who they hired?”
They glared some more.
“Howie’s just down the hall,” Jim said. “Shall we?”
“Let’s,” Kate said.
“Oh man,” Howie said when he saw Kate. “Come on, Jim, buddy, there’s no need for this.” He scrambled up on his bunk, pressing himself into a corner. “Don’t you come near me, Kate,” he said, his voice rising. “Don’t you do it.”
Jim opened the door to the cell and Kate sauntered in like a small but very deadly tiger, and, very much like a big cat, curled up at the end of Howie’s bed. She crossed one leg over the other and linked her hands on her knee. She looked as if she felt quite at home, with no plans to leave anytime soon. She even smiled at him.
He might have whimpered. His eyes looked wild and he was definitely sweating. He gave Jim a pleading look. “Jim, come on, man.”
Jim leaned against the door and crossed his arms. “You’re not under arrest, Howie. You can walk out of here any time you want. You want?”
Howie licked his lips.
Howie Katelnikof was a guy who never looked as tall as he was. He had a hard time standing up straight and an even harder one looking anyone straight in the eye. No matter how often he showered, his hair was always greasy, and no matter how often he changed his clothes, they always smelled of sweat, cigarette smoke, and beer. He might have been a good-looking guy, he possessed the requisites, height and weight proportional, thick hair, regular features, but his character had forced his eyes a little too close together, had pushed his chin just a fraction too far back. His character oozed out of his pores and stained him for what he was, a wannabe crook who’d watched Ocean’s Eleven so many times he thought he was George Clooney when, as Bobby said, “Who he really is is Steve Buscemi in Fargo.”
“Let’s talk, Howie,” Kate said.
“I doanwanna,” Howie said.
“Relax, Howie,” Kate said, and reached over to pat his knee. He cringed. “I don’t want to talk about the time you took a shot at me and my kid and damn near killed my dog. I’m not ready for that conversation yet. Someday. I promise you.” She patted his knee again. “But not today.”
A bead of sweat dropped from his nose. He kept his face turned away. He might have been trembling. He looked like he felt the jaws of the snake closing around him after he’d been dropped into the glass cage.
Still in that light, good-humored, terrifying voice, Kate said, “What’s this Jim tells me about the aunties hiring somebody to kill Louis?”
“I didn’t do it,” Howie said.
“What didn’t you do?” Kate said. “’Cause, forgive me, Howie, but the list is getting kind of long. You didn’t shoot at my truck? You didn’t kill Mac Devlin? You didn’t hire out to the aunties to kill your best bud Louis Deem?”
&
nbsp; “I didn’t kill Louis!” He came out of the corner, realized how close that put him to Kate, and shrank back in again. “I didn’t do it,” he said.
“But you’re saying somebody did.”
He nodded sullenly.
“So the aunties hired somebody to kill Louis Deem that wasn’t you.”
He nodded, then shook his head, then nodded again.
“Then how do you know about it? Excuse me, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing they’re going to drop casually into the conversation, Howie. Especially into a conversation with you.”
“How come you’re always so mean?” It was almost a wail.
“Because you don’t deserve anything better, you little weasel,” Kate said.
Jim cleared his throat. She turned to look at him. He shook his head. She almost flipped him off, but he was right. In this instance, insulting Howie probably wasn’t the method of interrogation most productive of results.
“Howie,” she said, turning back to him, “come on. You know you’re gonna tell me, one way or another. Either in here, where you’ve got Jim and the Fifth Amendment on your side.” She smiled again, and again he cowered from it. “Or out there somewhere, with just you, and me, and none of those messy Miranda warnings to confuse either one of us.”
She waited. Jim waited. Howie sniveled. It was disgusting. Kate clicked her tongue impatiently and got up to grab Howie a bunch of toilet paper. She shoved it into his hands. “Here. Blow your nose.”
He did, smearing snot on his cheeks.
“Jesus Christ, Howie,” Kate said, disgusted, “can’t you even blow your own nose right? Come on. What did you mean when you said that the aunties hired someone to kill Louis Deem?”
He looked at the crumpled ball of tissue. “I dint do it. I dint kill Louis.”
“Okay,” Kate said. “Say for the sake of argument I believe you. Who did?”
“I don’t know.” He looked up. “By the time I found him, he was dead.”
Back in Jim’s office, he said, “How much of that do you believe?”
Kate dropped into a chair and rubbed her face with both hands, and then scrubbed at her scalp for good measure, ruffling the short cap of thick black hair until she looked like an angry panther. She shook her head and it obediently ordered itself again. Was there anything, he thought, that didn’t do exactly and precisely what Kate Shugak told it to?
“I don’t know,” she said. “I talked to Auntie Vi this morning.”
“And?”
“Oh, god,” she said miserably.
“Did she say they did?” he asked, disbelieving.
She looked up. “She didn’t say they didn’t. And she gave me to understand that if they did have him killed, it was my fault for not doing it first.”
“Christ.” He went behind his desk and sat down with a thump. “It’s the fucking Sopranos in the fucking Park.”
“Okay,” Kate said, clinging to sanity, “say they did hire him. Do you believe him when he says he didn’t do it?”
“There was that tire track at the scene that matched Howie’s Suburban. But you know as well as I do that a tire track all by itself isn’t conclusive. Hell, Louis could have taken Howie’s ride to go up to the Step to see Dan when I sprung him that day.”
“Why wouldn’t he take his own vehicle?”
“It was at home, fifty miles from here. Howie picked him up. Or he was supposed to.”
Kate thought about it. “Howie sure had opportunity, Jim,” she said. “And if the aunties paid him to do it, he had motive. And there must be a dozen guns out at Louis’s house. He had means.”
He looked at her. “Do you think he did it?”
Mutt, as was not her custom, had not gone straight to Jim and slobbered all over him when they’d arrived at the post. Instead, she had remained at Kate’s side. Now she looked up at Kate with a steady yellow gaze. Solidarity, sister. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s just—He’s such a little weasel, Jim. This is Howie Katelnikof we’re talking about here, the Park rat most famous for achieving mobility while lacking a vertebral column. It’s kind of hard for me to imagine him setting out to kill in cold blood.”
“He took a shot at you,” Jim said.
“From one moving truck, at another,” she said. “He got lucky. Or maybe even unlucky.”
“How so?”
“You know how hard it is to shoot a stationary target. Shooting and hitting a moving target is almost impossible, even for an expert, and he’s no expert. Much as I loathe acquitting Howie of malice, he could have meant it like a shot across the bows. Throw a scare into us and then go home and tell Louis he did it. Doesn’t mean he won’t pay for it one day,” she added.
“Never for one moment imagined otherwise,” he said.
“And though Louis sure as hell wasn’t anyone’s nominee for humanitarian of the year, he was the closest thing Howie had to a brother. He fed him, he housed him. What little social structure Howie had, Louis gave him.”
“He’s still got the house,” Jim said. “Him and Willard, still living on what Louis inherited from his second wife following her untimely death.”
“You think Louis could have threatened to kick them out for some reason? And Howie killed him before he did?” Kate considered this. “Possible, I guess.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. If the aunties admit they did hire him, you can charge him.”
“And if I charged him, I’d have to charge them with conspiracy to commit.”
She straightened and looked at him, a sick expression on her face. “Oh. Of course. I . . . I didn’t think of that.”
“It’s all I have been thinking about,” he said grimly, “ever since Howie made me believe it might be true.” He paused. “Well. Mostly all I’ve been thinking about.”
Again she blushed, another scorcher. “There is no way,” she said steadily, ignoring his last words. “There is no way you’re going to march my aunties into a jail cell on the say-so of a loser like Howie Katelnikof.”
“I’ve already winked at the law once in the murder of Louis Deem,” he said. “I won’t do it again, Kate.”
“You’ll do it for Bernie but you won’t do it for Auntie Vi?” she said angrily.
He got up, came around the desk, and yanked her to her feet. She shoved her hands against his chest, but he wasn’t trying to kiss her. He shook her once, hard enough to rock her head back on her shoulders. “This is not about that, Kate. What happens there”—a stab of a finger in the general direction of the homestead—“stays there. What happens here is something else. Know the difference.”
This time she took the bait. “How could you do that, Jim?”
“I didn’t do it alone, Kate.”
“I said no!” Kate said. She made an effort and said more calmly, “I said no. Lots of times.”
“You turned off the stove,” he said.
“I—What?”
“When I started coming for you,” he said. “You turned off the stove.”
She opened her mouth and nothing came out.
“Plus you came three times.” He walked to the door and opened it. “We were both angry, Kate, but don’t try to turn it into something it wasn’t.”
She found herself on the other side of his office door without knowing quite how she got there. The door shut in her face.
Maggie gave her a quizzical look.
“I hate men,” Kate said.
Maggie shook her head. “I hear you, honey,” she said mournfully. “Oh, how I hear you.”
CHAPTER 19
Over the next three days Kate went in turn to all the aunties, Balasha, Edna, Joy, and even Auntie Vi again. To a woman, they stonewalled her.
“They’re stonewalling me,” she said with incredulity that evening. “It’s like they’ve rehearsed or something.”
“They probably have,” Jim said without looking up from George R. R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows, which he was rereading because Martin was taking an excruciatingly long tim
e to get the fifth book out, at which time Jim might finally learn what had happened to Jon and Arya. It was a good book and a great series and he felt that rereading it was a lot more productive and infinitely more enjoyable than entering into a conversation that he felt in his bones was only going to go in circles until it started biting its own tail.
“They’re stonewalling me,” she said again, this time emphasizing the last word. “Me!”
“Uh-huh,” Jim said.
“You should care more about this,” she said, glaring down at his bent head.
There had been a lot of glaring going on lately, Johnny thought. He was keeping his own head down over his books at the dining table, praying that this night at least they’d get to eat dinner before the fight started. Place reminded him of an armed camp lately. “Place reminds me of an armed camp lately,” he said out loud.
“Shut up,” Kate and Jim said together.
“Okay,” Johnny said, and went back to Robert Frost.
“Is Howie still at the post?”
“Yup.”
Frost was a cranky old fart with a forked tongue, and you were never really confident that he was saying what you thought he was, Johnny thought. They were each supposed to memorize one Frost poem, recite it in class, and then lead a discussion on it for their lit final. His turn was fast approaching and it was crunch time for picking the poem.
“He’s still afraid someone is going to kill him?”
“That’s what he says.”
He’d been considering one of the shorter poems, like “Fire and Ice” because of the whole kaboom thing, or “Once, by the Pacific” because he liked the monster image, or maybe “Design,” because the fat white spider would freak out all the girls except Van, and that would be fun.
“Because somebody shot at Mac? And because he thinks they thought they were shooting at him?”
“Something’s burning.”
Whisper to the Blood Page 22
