A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  In Alaska, ANCSA was barely a year old, plans for the TransAlaska Pipeline were going full bore, and in two years little Molly Hootch of Emmonak would file a lawsuit that would force the state of Alaska to build her and her one thousand coplaintiffs schools in their villages so they wouldn’t have to leave home to get an education.

  “We’ll start with the crime,” Max said, “because that’s where we always start. First I heard of it was reading the story in the Anchorage Times that morning. House burned down in the valley. Seventeen-year-old boy died in the fire. His brother, though injured, survived. His mother and sister were somewhere else and came home just in time to see the younger brother swan-dive out of his upstairs bedroom window. There was a lot of sympathy for the family. The funeral was like a Who’s Who of Alaska. I think the governor came, and I know both senators and our congressman did.”

  “Was the husband there?”

  “Who?”

  “Eugene Muravieff, Victoria’s husband and the dead boy’s father. Was he there?”

  Max rubbed his nose. “No.”

  He let the single syllable lie there and gather dust.

  “What?” Kate said.

  Max shook his head. “Who’s telling this story? All right, then, let me tell it.”

  The investigation turned up signs of arson right away, “like it always does,” Max said. “I know the jails aren’t filled with smart people, but I think arsonists have to be some of the dumbest of the bunch. You get a halfway-bright investigator with a decent lab backing him up, you’re always going to know if it’s arson. But all the arsonist is thinking about is getting on a plane to Hawaii with the insurance check in his pocket.” He shook his head. “Nature’s optimist, that’s an arsonist, every time. Well, except when they’re firebugs.”

  “Pyromaniacs,” Kate said.

  “That’s what I said, firebugs,” Max said.

  So they found an accelerant, Max said, in this case gasoline, which the lab identified as being the same gas that was in Victoria’s car.

  “Did the car have a locking gas cap?” Kate said.

  “A what?” Max said.

  “Never mind,” Kate said, “keep talking.”

  “Troopers were doing the investigating, because Butte didn’t have a police force and the city limits didn’t even include Eagle River at that time. I was in the office the day they found out about the insurance policies Victoria Muravieff had taken out on her children.”

  “What did you think?”

  Max snorted. “What do you think I thought? I thought the same thing the investigating officer thought. I thought two million dollars was a hell of a motive for murder. So they brought her in.”

  “She didn’t confess.”

  “She didn’t say much of anything at all. She called her brother and he got her an attorney. Then we went to court and she went to jail.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “That would be Eugene,” Max said. He seemed to savor the name.

  “Eugene Muravieff,” Kate said.

  “Ah yes, Eugene. You know the Muravieffs.”

  “We’ve howdied at the AFN convention, but I don’t think you could say we’ve shook,” Kate said.

  Max nodded. “Think their shit don’t stink.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Kate lied.

  Max barked out a laugh and conjured up another martini. His eye had lost none of its keenness, his words none of their bite. Amazing. “From what I heard as the investigation went back then, Victoria and Eugene had a relationship that looked from the outside more like an armed truce than it did a marriage.”

  “Unfriendly, were they?”

  Max stroked his chin. “Wouldn’t say that, exactly. You ever read up on the Civil War?”

  “A little,” Kate said. “You can’t avoid it.”

  Max snorted. “Know what you mean. They’re still fighting that war in the South. Anyway, used to be a hobby of mine, and I remember one of the things I read about was that in the middle of a battle—maybe it’d be Christmas, or maybe it wouldn’t even be a holiday—they’d call a truce, say for twenty-four hours. And for that twenty-four hours, brothers on opposing sides would step out into the no man’s land between the lines and call out messages to each other, news about the family and friends, who was still living, who’d died. And then the truce would be over and they’d go back to killing each other. That was Victoria and Eugene’s marriage, no man’s land, with the occasional truce and some communication, but mostly shooting and a lot of blood.”

  “What was the trouble?” Kate said. The Muravieff family was a pretty uptight bunch, born-again Christians, going back to the first Baptist minister to arrive in Sitka willing to go up against the local Russian Orthodox priest. Of course, Eugene Muravieff could have suffered from PK syndrome. The PK stood for “preacher’s kid.” In high school, Kate had watched the daughter of the pastor of the Niniltna Little Chapel go from singing soprano in the choir to cooing seductively at the varsity basketball team. She dropped out of school suddenly in the middle of her senior year and was not seen in Niniltna again. Her parents said that she had won a scholarship to a private school whose graduates were guaranteed admission to the Ivy League, and they left the following June when the pastor’s contract with the chapel was up.

  At the keggers in the dorms at UAF, it was the same thing; the heartiest partiers were always the kids from the most straitlaced backgrounds. Yeah, she could see a guy like Eugene turning into a rounder, something a WASP like Victoria Bannister couldn’t and wouldn’t put up with.

  “What do you think was the problem,” Max said, heavy on the sarcasm.

  Kate readjusted her ideas. “Because she was white and he was Native?”

  Max looked at her, not without pity. “You’re awful young, aren’t you?”

  “Thirty-five,” Kate said. She had to admire how he had put her on the defensive.

  “Then you should clean the wax out of your ears when your elders are talking,” Max said, not without relish. “You think because Natives got land and money now that they always did. Back when Victoria married Eugene, ANCSA was barely a twinkle in Willie Hensley’s eye. Anybody who was anybody in the state was white, and white didn’t share power with Natives, didn’t socialize with Natives, and white sure as hell didn’t marry Native. In particular, the Bannisters and Pilzes didn’t marry Native. This would be mostly in the big towns,” he added parenthetically. “In the villages, it was different.”

  “No white women in the villages,” Kate said.

  “Bingo,” he said, firing a gnarled finger at her. The bartender, listening in, took that as a sign and brought over another martini, and, for the first time all afternoon, refreshed Kate’s club soda.

  “Alaska had been a state for less than ten years when Victoria told her parents she was marrying Eugene. Some people still had “No Dogs or Natives” signs in their store windows. The Bannisters would never have gone that far—they needed the customers, and Alaska Natives spent as much money on groceries as anyone else—but the no-no was there for anyone to see. Except Victoria evidently didn’t.”

  “How did they meet?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Three kids,” she said. “They were married for a while.”

  “Yeah,” Max said. “Surprising, when you think of the pressure they must have been under.”

  “Her parents support the marriage?”

  “In public, I never heard different.”

  “His parents?”

  “Same thing. Gossip had it that they weren’t any happier about the marriage than the bride’s family was, being as how Eugene was a bona fide war hero who could have done a lot better for himself than a daughter of someone who wouldn’t sit next to an Eskimo in a movie theater because they smelled. But one thing the two families had in common was the ability to keep family conflict private. Who knows what went on behind closed doors. I’m just surprised Muravieff didn’t bail sooner.”

  �
��Why didn’t they divorce right away?”

  Max rolled his eyes. “You didn’t divorce back then, Shugak, especially if you were a Bannister or a Muravieff. Bannisters were old-line Catholics and the Muravieffs were born-again Christians trying to live down their Native heritage. What?” This as Kate frowned.

  “I still don’t see how you get race as a contributory factor in the breakdown of the marriage.”

  “You sound like a social worker,” Max said. “And you don’t see it because you don’t know the whole story.”

  “Why am I buying martinis by the keg for you, old man,” Kate said in mock indignation, “if you’re not telling me everything?”

  Max grinned. “Well, hell, girl, I figured it was ’cause you were falling madly in love with me and willing to put up with just about anything so you could jump my bones.”

  Kate grinned back. She liked this quintessential Alaskan old fart. He reminded her of Old Sam Dementieff. “Good guess.”

  Max went into a paroxysm of choking laughter, which Kate was afraid was going to carry him off before she could get him back to the Pioneer Home and life support. “Where were you thirty years ago, woman?” he gasped out finally.

  “Right here, just in kindergarten,” Kate said, and that set him off again. She waited, and when he had recovered himself by getting on the outside of some more of his martini, she said, “You were talking about race, and what it had to do with Victoria and Eugene Muravieff’s marriage.”

  “Yeah,” he said, setting the martini glass down with a satisfied smack of his lips. “Basically, Eugene wanted a job with Pilz Mining and Exploration, and they wouldn’t have him.”

  “Why not?”

  “They said it was because he didn’t have a mining degree.”

  “Did he?”

  “Nope.” Max shook his head. “Erland, Victoria’s brother, didn’t, either, but his father handpicked him to run the company. He started as gofer to the manager of the Skyscraper Mine and worked his way up. All Eugene wanted was the same chance.”

  “And they wouldn’t give it to him.”

  “Nope.”

  “Because he was Native.”

  “Yup. Course they didn’t say that.” Max reflected. “Or maybe they did. Wasn’t a lot of call for PC back then.”

  “So Eugene bailed on the marriage.”

  “Yeah. Dumb.”

  “Why dumb?” Kate said. Her sympathy was, not unnaturally, all with Eugene.

  “Dumb because he had a good thing there, by all accounts. Up till then, he had a good wife, three kids, a paying job with the Bannisters. Man was a bona fide war hero in Korea, came home with a couple of medals. You’d think he would have had more grit than to fall down a bottle.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  Max nodded. “Yeah. He started screwing around on her, and they fought.”

  “It got physical?”

  Max nodded again. “One night, he came home drunk and started another fight. Victoria had had enough, and she shoved him into a radiator. He was unconscious when the ambulance arrived. He moved out after that and after the trial he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Kate said.

  “Of course,” Max said, “nobody was looking that hard for him.”

  Kate wondered about that. The Muravieffs didn’t sound like a family that gave up on its kids, no matter how badly they behaved. In particular, they would want to keep the bad ones around to remind them to repent of their sins and as an object lesson for any other offspring who threatened to get out of line. And what about Eugene’s own children? “The defense attorney has vanished, too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Right after the trial.”

  “Really,” Max said thoughtfully. “Well, maybe he went hunting and a bear ate him.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Been known to happen.”

  Kate nodded. “A time or two.”

  “Or he could have just got a wild hair and hit the Alcan with a blonde and a case of beer.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s been known to happen, too.”

  “More than once,” Kate said.

  “But still,” Max said. “Interesting.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “They could both have taken off with the same blonde,” Max said.

  Kate smiled. “And shared the beer?”

  “Does seem a little unlikely, doesn’t it?”

  Kate signaled for the bill. “One more thing. What happened to Victoria after Eugene split?”

  “She took a job with her brother, Erland, at Pilz Mining and Exploration, which by then had mining concerns all over the state and had moved their base of operations from Homer to Anchorage.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She was a bookkeeper,” Max said. “It was that or wait tables down at the Lucky Wishbone. What else could a woman with no schooling and no experience but marriage do back then?”

  10

  After Kate dropped Max off, she spent ten sweaty minutes figuring out how to dial out on her new cell phone. She was not helped in this by Mutt, who was intrigued by the sounds it made when the keys were pressed, which sounded a little like ptarmigan talking among themselves. Eventually, woman triumphed over machine and Charlotte answered on the second ring. “Do you remember the make and model of the car your mother was driving the year your brother died?”

  There was a brief silence. “No,” Charlotte said.

  “Is there someone who would?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I want to know if it had a locking gas cap.”

  “Just a minute, I’ll go out in the garage and check.”

  Charlotte put the phone down before Kate could say anything, which was all right since Kate was speechless. When Charlotte picked up the phone again, Kate said, “You’ve still got the car your mother was driving before she went to jail?”

  “It still runs,” Charlotte said, “why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t have a locking gas cap. I’m not sure they were even making locking gas caps back then.”

  “Me, either,” Kate said. “One more thing, Charlotte. Have you heard from your mother’s attorney since the trial?”

  “Henry?” Charlotte’s voice changed. “No, I certainly have not.”

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “If he’d done his job, my mother wouldn’t be in jail.”

  “I see,” Kate said. This was not an atypical response from someone whose attorney had failed to earn his client an acquittal. “So you haven’t heard from him.”

  “He would know better than to call me. I told him what I thought of him in court the day the verdict came in.”

  “And you haven’t seen him since?”

  “No. And I returned anything I got in the mail with his address on it.”

  “You got mail from him?”

  “Bills,” Charlotte said. “Like I would pay them after he got my mother put in jail.”

  “How do you know they were bills if you didn’t open them?”

  “What else would they be?” Charlotte said.

  “Okay,” Kate said, repressing a sigh. “Thanks, Charlotte.”

  “Wait,” Charlotte said, “does this mean you’ve found something?”

  “A few somethings,” Kate said, “but nothing to convince a judge that Victoria didn’t set that fire.”

  “Oh,” said Charlotte. She rallied. “But you’ll keep looking.”

  “That’s what you’re paying me for,” Kate said.

  “Until you find something to get her out.”

  Kate said nothing.

  In a forlorn whisper Charlotte, said, “Because I want her out.”

  The outfit was still hanging in Jack’s closet, although Kate had to do a little excavation to find it. Jack had poked a hole in the bottom of the trash bag for the hook of the hanger and tied the bag in a knot at the bottom. She hesitated before untying the knot. It was silly, but Jack had tied that knot with his own hands. She thought abou
t tearing the bag open from the top, but that seemed even sillier. What was she going to do, save the garbage bag so she could save the knot? She could just hear Jack, and the thought made her smile.

  The jacket was short, single-breasted, with a V neck that revealed a discreetly sexy cleavage. It was covered with bright red sequins, which glittered in the light. The pants were black silk, with a single stripe of lighter black silk running in a trim line down the outer seam of both legs. She rummaged around the closet and found the shoes tucked into their original box.

  Jack had bought her this outfit nearly three years before, in order to infiltrate a party Ekaterina was throwing at the Hotel Captain Cook for the Raven Corporation shareholders during the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention. They’d been investigating a double homicide at the time. Kate, brutally rebuffed when she had suggested they go as servers in white shirts, black pants, and comfortable shoes, had been coerced into Nordstrom entirely against her will, and then into a glorified barbershop to have her hair done, also entirely against her will.

  A grin stole slowly across her face. It had been worth it to see the expression on Jack’s face when the first group of men had caught sight of her in all her glory. She’d cleaned up pretty well.

  In a drawer of the dresser she found the diaphanous lingerie that Jack had taken such pleasure in selecting, and she slipped into it. The jacket, worn alone, felt heavy against her skin. The tuxedo pants, by comparison, felt barely there.