Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  “I appreciate your concern for me, Roy, and I look forward to cooperating fully with you and your investigation. I look forward to clearing this up, right after I speak with my attorney.”

  Roy Pomfret’s face sagged as if I had just turned into a large pile of excrement on his carpet. “I want my lawyer” are still the magic words in Alaska. Non-custodial or not, the interview is supposed to end.

  “Eat me, Younger,” Roy Pomfret muttered.

  “Not now, thanks,” I said, smiling, and started to reach for the door. “You know, Roy, I really enjoyed this little chat. But the truth is, I didn’t come by to talk to you about Kevin Sands.”

  Pomfret reached around and took the microcassette recorder off the shelf where it was sitting behind a stack of paper. He snapped the record button off.

  “You can get up and go talk to your damn lawyer, Younger, but I’m telling you, if you do that, I’m going to try and hook you up for obstruction of justice at the very least. Do you know what I’m saying? Obstruction of justice . . . if not full complicity in the death of Kevin Sands . . . and maybe others.” Pomfret just couldn’t help himself with that last jab. He stared at me hard, as if trying to de­cide on the best way to throttle me.

  “Listen, Lieutenant, I might help you if you help me a little bit. What I came by to talk to you about is this: Have you recently col­lected a sample of Richard Ewers’s DNA?”

  Pomfret stared at the top of his tiny desk, as if he were trying to levitate the entire thing. His jaw was tight and his hand moved down toward his belt next to his leather holster.

  “What we’ve done with Richard Ewers’s DNA is none of your concern, Younger,” he spat out toward the floor. Now his hand rested on the outside of his holster.

  “But you have some, don’t you? You have a known sample of Richard’s DNA?”

  “Listen, this interview is over. You want to talk to your lawyer? You are free to do that. Now . . . if you want to sit back down and talk to me, to answer my questions, let’s do that, okay?” He picked up his little tape recorder again.

  “You have a known sample, don’t you?”

  “You and your buddy George Doggy are going down on this, Younger. Doggy wanted Ewers dead. Sands didn’t mind having Ewers dead but he wanted money to keep quiet. Chevalier didn’t want any part of it. He tried to get rid of the money. Kevin was pissed and was going to snitch George off. So Kevin ends up dead. Don’t think George can protect you, Cecil. Not on murder. Not on this kind of murder.” Pomfret threw the empty tape machine across the desk. “But we weren’t talking about that, were we? Let’s just sit down and chat.” He said the word “chat” as if it were a death threat.

  I didn’t say anything more. I have used the two-tape recorder method, making a show of turning one machine off and letting the other run. This was a very bad time to try to explain myself. Par­ticularly when I didn’t really know what I knew.

  I walked out of Roy Pomfret’s office telling him only that I was looking forward to cooperating with him in the future. Which was almost true. I knew I would have to cooperate with him eventually. I just wasn’t looking forward to it.

  I also knew two things for certain and had one pretty good guess. One, Richard Ewers was dead. Two, the police had a sample of his DNA. And my pretty good guess was that they had collected the DNA sample from Ketchikan, Alaska a little less than a week ago.

  Admittedly, I have a high tolerance for ambiguity. Some have claimed that I prefer uncertainty to knowledge, equating uncer­tainty with a kind of passive wisdom. This may or may not be true, but almost against my will I was beginning to come to a kind of knowledge I thought could possibly flower into a type of certainty. I felt an exhilarating freshness in my brain as if I had just woken up from a long and dreamless sleep. There was just one more piece of evidence I needed to see.

  I walked to Gary’s house in my uncomfortable shoes and asked him if he could give me a ride out the road. Gary was working in his machine shop. He was adjusting the settings on his large lathe with his left hand as the machine spun an eight-foot shaft on its spindles. Gary was blowing on an E harmonica in his right hand. He yelled at me that it would take a couple of minutes to shut down the lathe, but then he’d run me out. He needed a break anyway, and maybe we could go for coffee on the way.

  “Nice suit!” he yelled over the machine noise.

  I telephoned Jane Marie and told her that if George Doggy came by to meet me at home to hold him there until I got back. Not to let him leave. If he did leave before I got home, she was to call me at George’s house and tell me. Jane Marie listened to these directions carefully and didn’t ask me the obvious questions. She recognized the tone of my voice. She would ask questions later.

  I then called Doggy at home and told him to meet me at my house right away. I told him I knew about what had happened to Richard Ewers and that we needed to talk. Doggy tried to pull me into a conversation, but I cut him off by suggesting his line might be bugged. I told him again to meet me in town at my house. George said he would be there right away and that it would take maybe twenty minutes to drive from his house to mine. I hung up just as Gary was ready to go.

  Gary didn’t ask questions but kept playing a lick he was learning off of a new Paul deLay album. “I think it’s really set, Cecil. Paul deLay is coming to play in Sitka. Do you believe it?” I told him I didn’t, and the truth was, I didn’t. We don’t get many top blues harmonica players passing through Sitka, Alaska. But I didn’t doubt Gary’s enthusiasm. We went downtown and bought coffee for our live-mile drive out the road. George would be close to town now, and I doubted he would recognize me heading toward his house sitting in Gary’s truck.

  This was the second residence I had broken into in a week, which is strange because I’m not particularly good at breaking into houses. The whole procedure gives me the creeps, even if I don’t really have to break anything to gain entry. George Doggy didn’t lock his doors, and I walked into the too-quiet house, carrying my shoes in my hands as I walked across the thick white carpet. George Doggy’s house was always warmer than I cared for. He kept the woodstove in his basement going all the time. The furniture up­stairs was a rugged overstuffed fifties style. I had the impression Doggy didn’t spend any time in the living room. There was a dining room table near the big windows that looked over the bay. Uncom­fortable formal chairs ringed the table as if waiting for a meeting to begin. There were paintings on the wall that no one would look at twice: northern mountainscapes with the pinkish glow landscape painters are always using to try to capture the last light on the hills. This was the museum George maintained for his wife, but he didn’t live in this part of the house.

  Doggy’s office was in the basement off the shop. Here were his desk and his gun case with six hunting rifles lined up like toy sol­diers. Here was a safe. On his desk were scattered papers, catalogs, letters from insurance companies, old checkbooks. The gun case was locked, both the glass doors to the rifles and the drawers that would hold his handguns. I looked through the drawers in the desk. Nothing. I stood in front of the safe. I almost despaired of trying it, but then I remembered that I had a safe at home too. But I kept forgetting the combination, so I wrote it on the door of the safe. Finally, I completely stopped locking it. I was hoping Doggy’s memory for numbers was worse than mine.

  The handle of the safe clicked straight down, and my heart rose and fell in almost equal proportions. I was lucky to have it open, so that must mean what I was looking for wasn’t there. I opened the door, and there, in fact, was exactly what I was looking for.

  Sean Sands’s photo album had been his treasure. Doggy had im­plied that the album contained proof that the boy had been plan­ning a schoolyard shooting. I could believe this from the things I had seen in Sean’s room: the AK-47 and the photos of his school­mates with some of them ominously X’d out. George had thought of the photo album as crucial evidence, but he had
never turned it in, and he was keeping the police from looking at it.

  The album cover was red plastic made to feel like leather. The evidence tape had been ripped away from the edges of the covers. The inside of the safe had a chilled and musty smell, like bad memories. I took the album and laid it carefully on the desk. I have reviewed ugly evidence in the past: postmortem photographs of children beaten to death, the wild diaries of men twisted toward murder. I always have a sick feeling just before opening up those files. There is always a push-pull of dread and fascination, the voyeurism of crime and the fear of what might resonate in oneself when faced with brutality. I always open the files.

  The first page of Sean’s photo album was a portrait of a man and a woman: black-and-white with a hazy studio background. The woman was seated. She appeared lovely and young, her hair curled under at the shoulders. She wore a pale sweater and a string of pearls. The man stood behind her with his hand spread awkwardly on her shoulder. He could have been a young Robert Mitchum, soulful eyes and a hard, worn face. He wore a wool sportsman’s style jacket and on his left hand he wore a thick wedding ring. Underneath the photo in very deliberate handwritten print were the words: “Mom and Dad.”

  There were baby pictures of Sean, birthday parties; toddler Sean dressed as a pumpkin, crying up toward the camera; young Sean in a Superman suit, with the lettering underneath describing “Super Sean!!!”

  There were two young boys dancing in and out of a wading pool in the drenching sunlight of some backyard patio. The in­scription read, “Me and you at the Douglases’ house in Juneau.” The next shot was a color Polaroid of Sean in a suit, awkwardly holding a flower, standing next to a TV set in what must have been their old trailer. The inscription said, “Handsome Dan, waiting to go to a dance.”

  Kevin must have started putting this album together for his brother. Both boys were dead now. Pressure built up behind my eyes, and a cavernous, sick feeling settled in my stomach.

  In the back of the book Sean had started putting pictures in the album. He had cut out school pictures and pasted them in. Sean’s handwriting was an awkward combination of printing and cursive, an uneven scrawl. Underneath the picture of a boy in a torn T-shirt was written, “Rodney James, most best friend forth grade. Moved to Anchorage in fifth.” There was a picture of a pretty girl with dark hair and a wide smile. There was a heart drawn around the picture and only the name “Chandler” written underneath it. There were other pictures of friends with nicknames or simple exclamation marks. One page had “Girls I Like” written on the top, and the facing page simply said “snobs.” The majority of the pictures were on the “Girls I Like” page.

  Sean Sands never had a chance to be cool. He never had a chance to grow strong and thin and say a self-assured word to pretty, smiling Chandler. I hated thinking of that. I recognized, too, that the photos I had found in his bedroom were only scraps he had rejected from placement in this book. The discarded photos weren’t a hit list.

  This was the evidence I always look for and rarely find. This was evidence of innocence. On one of the final pages of the book was a large picture of Kevin Sands sitting on a couch, smiling and looking happily at the camera. The inscription read: “My Bro.”

  That was where the pictures should have ended. But the Sands boys had added a postscript to the book. On the last pages there was a series of pictures of two young boys standing in bright sun­shine. They were in the glen just off the beach in Kalinin Bay. One of the boys in the photos was Sean and the other was Albert Chevalier. In one, Albert was wrapped up in a blanket in front of a campfire. His eyes looked dulled and exhausted. Sean sat beside him smiling into the camera lens. In another photo, Albert was kneeling beside a fallen log. On top of the log were lined up dozens of dead squirrels. Albert was not leaning like a hunter but was standing over the dead animals with his gun propped on the log and the barrel pointing straight at his own head. The rifle was an AK-47. Albert’s face was half in shadow and he looked lost in thought as if he couldn’t quite take his eyes off the creatures he had killed. Underneath this picture someone had written, “No rest.”

  Then I saw the sticker on the stock of Albert’s rifle. There in the photograph was the sticker of the cartoon boy sailing his skateboard right into a brick wall. There were the words on the logo: No Doubt.

  I didn’t hear the phone ring. Finally I recognized Jane Marie’s voice coming over the answering machine: “Uh, hello. I’m calling for Cecil. I forgot to call earlier. Are you there? Uh, Cecil, George left here about fifteen minutes ago. I guess you guys got your wires crossed. I told him you might have thought the meeting was out at his house. I didn’t really understand what you wanted and George was, well . . . in a hurry, and I had to take care of the baby and I re­membered you wanted me to call when he left. So . . . I am. Uh . . . I guess that’s it then, bye-bye.”

  I felt cold metal nudge the back of my head, and with Sean’s photo album in my hands I turned around to see the muzzle of a large-caliber handgun at my nose.

  “I knew I should have locked the safe,” George Doggy said. “But you know, I keep forgetting the damn combination.”

  He pulled back the hammer of his revolver and I closed my eyes.

  “I don’t want to do this, Cecil,” Doggy said, with what sounded like genuine remorse in his voice.

  14

  “Why did you take this album, George?” I asked.

  The old man let out a long sigh, stepped back and flicked a switch near the door.

  “I kept it because I thought it contained evidence that I had killed Richard Ewers in Ketchikan.”

  George Doggy was now standing near the basement door, which was opposite the safe and the desk. I stood up and walked toward the center of the room. George’s gun followed me. I stared at him and tried to imagine what Sean Sands had been thinking before George’s bullet murdered him.

  “I saw that picture of Albert holding the rifle. I knew it was the missing gun from the Mygirl. It was the gun Chevalier saw Ewers carrying in the skiff that night. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I just wanted to find what it was the brothers had that tied me to Ewers’s death, but I swear, Cecil, I never intended to kill that boy on the playground. I got a call: a voice I didn’t recognize said that Sean Sands was taking an automatic rifle up to the school. I went there, and sure enough he had. I asked Sean to put the gun down on the ground and he didn’t. I argued with him, and he would not move. I watched him. I wanted every other option. He raised his rifle to fire at me, and I had no other choice. If he had shot me, that would only have been the beginning. You know that, Cecil. That boy would have shot those children.” George Doggy’s hand was shaking, and he ran it through his gray hair. His voice shim­mered with uncertainty.

  “George, I have no reason to believe Sean Sands was a killer. It seems more likely to me that he knew something about your in­volvement with Richard Ewers’s death. Sean knew something about Richard’s disappearance. Kevin surely did. Is that why you killed them both?”

  Doggy sat down and set the shiny stainless revolver on the desk. He covered his eyes with his hands.

  “I swear to God, Cecil, I didn’t plan to shoot that boy. I wanted to know what he knew. I knew the Sands brothers knew about Ewers. I had tracked them down through the money. Patricia Ewers had sounded the alarm. That afternoon we were cutting wood, she’d gone to the police. They knew Ewers was missing. The Sitka police heard that Sands had a lot of cash. I knew nothing about the raid. It was a mistake. A mess. Patricia grabbed a gun and that young cop shot her. A woman dead and no chance of get­ting either Kevin or Sean to tell me what they knew. It was a mess, a stupid accident.

  “I took the album because the boy was obviously protective of it. I thought for sure it had some evidentiary value, something about Ewers. But it mostly . . .”

  “Mostly, it was full of innocent schoolboy memorabilia,” I said, walking to the edge of the d
esk, yelling down at my father’s most trusted friend. “And the only reason Sean didn’t want you to look at it was he didn’t want you to know the soft part of his heart. He didn’t want you to trample on the only real evidence of a normal life he ever had. He didn’t want the men with guns to know that he was just a goofy kid with a crush on one of his classmates and a sick feeling about his past.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Cecil?” Doggy looked up at me with tired eyes.

  “I liked that kid. I was hoping to help him. Now the cops think I’m helping you in your efforts to cover up the murder of Richard Ewers. They think you and I killed Kevin Sands to cover our tracks. That’s more felonies than I care to count. No, George, I’m not enjoying this.”

  George sat at the desk a moment. Then he stood up.

  “I’m not going to shoot you, son. I was a little excited when I saw you going through my safe. I got excited. Let me put some more wood on the fire and let’s just talk.”

  He headed out the back door. I walked over to the desk, emp­tied his revolver and put the gun and shells in the pocket of my suit coat.

  Doggy came in with an armload of firewood and opened the stove with a dirty potholder. After he fed the stove, he sat on a stump he used for splitting kindling on winter days. He looked over at his desk and then sadly up at me.

  “Do you have my gun? Are you going to shoot me now, Cecil?” He seemed tired and resigned to whatever was going to happen next.

  “I’ve got the gun,” I said slowly. “You don’t need it if you aren’t going to shoot me. Besides, I’m sure you still have another one strapped to your leg.”

  He smiled and didn’t answer. He was wearing stiff, baggy jeans that were cut long in the leg, so I couldn’t see for sure if I was right about the ankle gun.