A Taint in the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  She looked in the mirror. Her hair, cut short to the nape, was brushed straight back from her forehead. For the hell of it, she wetted it down and parted it high up on the right. She looked like Victor/Victoria. She ruffled it up again. No jewelry, because she didn’t own any and wouldn’t have worn it if she had. Her feet hadn’t changed any in the intervening years and she stood an inch taller in the shoes.

  She surveyed herself in the mirror. “Okay,” she said.

  Mutt whined.

  “Yeah, yeah, heard it all before,” Kate told her. “You coming?”

  They headed for Turnagain.

  At Minnesota, she pulled off into the Texaco station and got out her cell phone. She managed to dial the number without yelling out the window for help, but it was a close call.

  “Yeah,” Brendan said.

  “It’s Kate, Brendan.”

  “Yeah,” Brendan said, drawing it out, and Kate could imagine him leaning back in his chair and putting his feet up, a grin spreading across his face. “Light of my life, heart of my heart, sexiest thing walking around town on two legs. What can I do for you? Apart from the obvious.”

  “I got invited to this party,” she said.

  “Really? Need an escort?”

  “No. Especially not you.”

  He laughed, and she realized how that had sounded. “No, I meant I don’t want to use you yet.”

  He laughed harder.

  “Damn it!” she said, half laughing, half exasperated. “I don’t want anyone to know I have an in at the DA’s, not yet.”

  “Could be deeper in,” he said.

  “Down, boy,” she said.

  “Too late,” he said.

  “Will you please behave? I’m going to Erland Bannister’s for a cocktail party.”

  Dead silence.

  “Brendan?”

  “Why?” he said finally. All humor had left his voice.

  “He invited me.”

  “Erland invited you?”

  “Yes.”

  Another silence. “Again I ask the question. Why?”

  “He’s my client’s uncle.”

  Another silence, followed by, “I don’t think that’s a good-enough reason, Kate.”

  “I don’t, either,” she said. A big shiny black Ford Explorer pulled into the pumps. It had a bumper sticker that read I’M TOO POOR TO VOTE REPUBLICAN. Kate doubted that, given what bumper that sticker was on.

  “If you don’t need an escort, why did you call?” Brendan said.

  “I don’t know.” She hesitated. It sounded ridiculous, now that she came to put it into words. “I was thinking someone should know where I was.”

  He didn’t laugh. “So noted. Kate?”

  “What?”

  A brief, taut silence. “Park for a quick exit.”

  “I always do,” she said. “Brendan, at the party, what should I watch out for?”

  “Assholes.”

  She laughed, and started out again for Turnagain with a lighter heart.

  The Turnagain neighborhood had been one of the first residential suburbs of Anchorage and one of the hardest hit during the 1964 earthquake, magnitude 9.2 on the Richter scale. Half of it fell into Turnagain Arm and the other half just felt apart. Frantic to keep people in the state following the earthquake, the city traded home owners in the area for property up on what was now Hillside, the west-facing slopes of the Chugach Mountains, where now, if you didn’t have five thousand square feet beneath one roof, including the indoor swimming pool and the marijuana grow, you weren’t shit. For example, Charlotte Bannister Muravieff lived on Hillside.

  Of course, twenty years later waterfront property again began looking good to people with short memories and a greedy turn of mind, and the previous owners of property below the Turnagain Bluff successfully challenged the city for title to that property. Now, the rich and powerful were building mansions on what was essentially in midquake quicksand, and since Alaska sat on the northern edge of the Ring of Fire and experienced literally at least one earthquake per day, the future was ripe with the possibility of violent death, not to mention potential litigation. “Ah, Alaska,” Kate said out loud, threading the Subaru down the switchback. “The land of opportunity, and of opportunists.”

  Mutt yipped agreement. “What do you know about it?” Kate asked her as they emerged from the trees to a vast parking lot in back of a house the size of the Hyatt Regency Maui. The view was superb, though, a gentle slope of green grass down to the coastal trail, after which the land gave way to mud flats and Knik Arm. It was a lovely evening, and the Knik was placid as a pond. On the far side of the water, Susitna, the sleeping lady, lay in peaceful repose, and beyond her Foraker and Denali scratched at the sky.

  “Might be worth it,” Kate said after a few moments’ judicial study, “might just be worth living with the constant prospect of imminent death to have this view.”

  This from a woman who hated to get her feet wet on a hunt. Mutt gave this observation the credulity it deserved, shoving past Kate when she opened the door. Kate left a window open for her and didn’t bother locking the car.

  The front door of the mansion was actually two, reached by a wide set of stairs that spilled to either side in graceful arcs around a carefully tended grouping of flowers arranged by hue and height. Sidelights and a fanlight let a gentle interior glow leach through, and Kate could hear the sound of many voices and the tinkling of glasses. She supposed it might sound inviting to some.

  She looked down at Mutt. “Want to come in?”

  Mutt bared her teeth.

  “Okay, try not to get into too much trouble,” Kate said, and at a hand signal Mutt was off the porch and into the underbrush like an arrow from a bow.

  Someone cleared his throat. Kate looked around and beheld a young man in what looked like a bellhop’s uniform, an ingratiating smile on his face. “May I park your car?” he said.

  “It’s already parked,” Kate said, and headed up the steps.

  He nipped ahead of her and opened the door. She eyed him suspiciously. His smile stayed in place. The door remained open. “Thanks,” she said after a moment.

  She went in, and the gates of mercy closed behind her.

  The room was large, the biggest private room she’d been in, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the spectacular view and hardwood floors polished to a shine bright enough to hurt your eyes. Not that Kate could admire either the view or the shine, because the room was jammed with what seemed to her appalled eyes like simply hundreds of people. Most of the men were in suits. Most of the women were in black, with the only variables the depth of the neckline and the height of the hemline. There was a lot of loud jewelry flashing from ears and wrists, and everybody had big hair, even the men. There was an occasional black face and a few more Native ones, but this could not be construed in any way by even the most nearsighted viewer as a multicultural gathering. Kate could feel her skin getting darker by the second.

  They were all talking at the tops of their voices. The resulting roar sounded like a 747 on takeoff. It took a few moments for Kate’s ears to accustom themselves to the cacophony.

  “Excuse me? Mr. Mayor, I’m so glad to have this opportunity to shake your hand and tell you what a fine job I think you’re doing for the city. You’ve got my vote all the way.”

  “That’s great. I’m not the mayor, but I’ll be sure to tell him when I see him.”

  “Down to there and up to here. She couldn’t be more obvious if she was wearing her own billboard.”

  “That’s not what they taught us at Harvard.” Modest laugh. “I’m sorry, I went to Harvard. MBA. With honors.”

  “I believe you mentioned that already. Seven or eight times.”

  “Erland was telling me the other day that he’s bidding on the leases opening up in the Beaufort next year.”

  “He thinks the tax breaks are getting through, then?”

  “—and now he’s going for full custody, and how he can ask for that with
a straight face with that bimbo he’s got living in his brand-new house—”

  “Sounds like you could use an attorney. Mine took Phil to the cleaners for me. I’ve got his card here somewhere—”

  “It’s buried so deep in committee it’ll never see daylight again.”

  “Who sits on that committee? Maybe Erland’ll make a few calls.”

  “Harvard, schmarvard. Wharton’s the place you want your kids to go to if you want them to learn anything about making money.” Modest laugh. “Class of ’eighty-eight. I’ll make a few calls for you.”

  “The union is just going to have to suck it up. The state can’t foot the entire insurance bill. People are going to have to ante up their share. I’m telling you, it’s not an option. If they don’t like it, they can get a job in the private sector.”

  “The legislature makes one move on the permanent fund and Jay is going to rise up out of Lake Clark like Saint George coming after the dragon.”

  “I keep thinking if we just explain to people, educate them—”

  “We’ve been sucking at the federal tit since Seward bought Alaska from Russia. We don’t know how to do anything else.”

  “Erland says all we have to do is cut the fat out of the budget.”

  “So we got a granite countertop and, would you believe it, they’ve put it in three times and they’ve broken it every single time.”

  “Sounds like you could use a better contractor. Let me give you my card.”

  “I come from Seldovia. There used to be five goddamn canneries in Seldovia when I was growing up. You know where the name comes from? Seldevoy. Russian word, means herring town. No goddamn herring in Seldovia anymore. Not much goddamn salmon left, either. We used to be able to pull goddamn king crab right out of Seldovia Bay. They aren’t even in the Kachemak anymore. What, you never read the book Cod?”

  “Yeah, but that was the Atlantic.”

  “The Pacific’s just another ocean. I’m telling you, we need to go to a thousand-mile limit and start arming the goddamn Coast Guard with cannons so they can sink a few of those goddamn fish processors. And I ain’t talking about just the foreign processors, either, ’cause the American processors are just as bad, if not goddamn worse.”

  “Well, as long as I can pull a king salmon out of the Kenai, I’m happy.”

  “Global warming’s a myth.”

  “Right, and so’s the Pribilofs remaining ice-free year-round, and golfing in Palmer in January.”

  “They were acting like they were at a slumber party, instead of prosecuting a rape-murder, with the victim’s family right there in the courtroom. I sent the DA an E-mail and told her so.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “The usual—the media blew it all out of proportion, it wasn’t really that bad, Anchorage DAs are held to a high standard, yakety-yak.”

  “Erland went to school with her, didn’t he? Maybe you should talk to him about it.”

  Glasses clinked, people put pinkish blobs of something into their mouths and kept talking around the blobs, and the air was thick with cigarette and cigar smoke. Kate’s sinuses gave a single vicious throb, and instinctively she made as if to turn back to the door, everything in her telling her to escape from this hellhole before she saw someone she knew.

  “Kate!”

  Inches from a clean getaway, she took courage in hand and turned back to face the room. “Oh,” she said a little weakly. “Hi, Pete.”

  Pete Heiman elbowed through the crowd and stood grinning at her. “Couldn’t believe my eyes when you walked in. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I was invited,” she said, trying to talk without breathing.

  “Really? You know Erland?”

  She shook her head. Not breathing wasn’t working, so she tried to breathe through her mouth instead. “His niece.”

  “Charlotte?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, hell, small world.” He was still grinning. He looked her over. “You clean up pretty damn good, Katie.”

  “Pete? Nobody calls me Katie.”

  “I know. It kinda puts me in a class by myself, don’t it?”

  He pretended to preen, and she had to laugh.

  Pete Heiman was the legislative senator (for life, some people had started saying after the last election) from Kate’s district, her mouthpiece in Juneau and like Max one of the original Alaskan old farts. He’d played pinochle with Abel and fished for salmon alongside Old Sam and swung a pick, if only for a photo op during an election swing, next to Mac Devlin. His politics were conservative but erratic; he was a member of the Republican party, but he voted against the majority in Juneau often enough to keep his liberal and Libertarian constituents happy, and he’d managed to weasel his way through the subsistence issue without having to take a firm stand in one camp or another. He was pro-choice, which always surprised the hell out of Kate, until she remembered that he was a longtime friend of Auntie Vi. Kate had a feeling that Auntie Vi had something on Pete, but she’d yet to find out what.

  “Want a drink?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Come on.” He grabbed her hand and towed her through the crowd, nodding and smiling with that practiced politician’s charm to clear a path. There was a bar with a smiling bartender, who seemed genuinely disappointed to pour her only a glass of club soda with a twist of lime.

  “Want something to eat?” Pete said. “What am I saying, you always want something to eat,” and he towed her forthwith to a buffet laden with shrimp, crab, salmon, and halibut, six different kinds of cheese, a dozen different kinds of crackers, chips and dips, and a dazzling display of Go-diva chocolates.

  Kate took one look and said, “Why are the plates so small?”

  Pete eyed the column of shrimp leaning like the tower of Pisa from the tiny saucer held in Kate’s hand and said, “Couldn’t tell you.” He turned to survey the crowd. “Eat up. There are some people I’d like you to meet.”

  “Some people” turned out to be every second person in the joint. Kate gulped her food—the pink blobs turned out to be cheese puffs, which didn’t explain why they were pink—and endured handshakes that ranged from the limp noodle to the damp rag to the hearty grip to the bone crusher, and smiles that ranged from tight-lipped to a vast expanse of synthetic enamel, from the ingratiating to the predatory.

  The women were impressed by her outfit, less so by her hair and lack of makeup, and greeted her with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Whose man was she there to take? Red was a power color. Whose attention would she usurp? The men wondered if she was Pete’s protégée or his new girlfriend, or both, and what that might mean in the next legislative session in terms of lobbying. Would she be long-term or short? If long-term, how much influence would she wield over Pete’s vote? Would she drink on their tab, or would her favor be more labor intensive to acquire? Would they have to sleep with her? Would she sleep with them? Some were clearly hoping for the latter.

  One woman, a slender, hard-faced blonde, who wore a black blazer over a black silk shell, white leggings, and black boots with four-inch heels that buckled over the instep, looked Kate up and down and drawled, “Cute outfit honey. Your mother pick that out for you?”

  “Sondra—” Pete said, or started to.

  “That’s all right, Pete,” Kate said, and smiled at Sondra. “Not my mother, my man.” She ran one teasing finger down the buttons of the glittering red jacket and back up again to trace the neckline. “He liked the idea of…buttons.” She gave the man hovering at Sondra’s elbow a languishing glance and ran her tongue slowly over her lower lip.

  The man inhaled part of his drink and started to cough, spraying green liquid of some kind over Sondra’s leggings. Sondra swore. “You moron!” She brushed ineffectually at her leggings and glared at Kate.

  Pete threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  “Um,” the man said, his eyes watering a little, “I’m Greg Nowaka. And you are—”

  The wo
man transferred the glare from Kate to him.

  Still laughing, Pete waved him off. “Way out of your league, buddy boy. Run, run for your life.”

  He towed Kate away as she said to the woman over her shoulder, “Did you practice that nostril flare in the mirror? It’s kinda cool, makes you look like you’re about to charge a red cape.”

  “Jesus, Shugak, enough already.” When they had achieved what Pete considered to be a safe distance, he stopped to grin down at her. “Where’d you learn to do that? I figured I was shepherding a lamb through the wolf pack, but I’m thinking now I got that backward.”

  “When in Rome,” Kate said, and wondered how soon she could get the hell out of there.

  A touch on the shoulder stopped her. She turned to see Charlotte, Emily at her elbow. Emily looked at Kate with the first expression of approval Kate had yet seen. Charlotte was even smiling. “Thanks,” Charlotte said.

  “For what?” Kate said.

  Charlotte looked over her shoulder. “Hi, Pete.”

  “Hi, sweetie.” Pete kissed her cheek and then Emily’s. “How you doing?”

  Charlotte’s smile widened. “Better now.”

  Pete laughed. “I bet.” He grinned down at Kate.

  Kate, mystified, was about to inquire as to what had just happened, when Charlotte said, “Let me introduce you to my aunt.” She nodded to Pete, who stepped back. Charlotte led Kate to a chair tucked into a corner next to the windows. “Aunt Alice?”

  The woman seated in the chair wore a sleeveless scoop-necked mauve linen sheath and was chatting animatedly with a well-dressed, smooth-featured man twenty years her junior, who looked like he was trying not to appear bored. She looked around at Charlotte’s greeting. Her hair had been artfully streaked, her large gray eyes were exquisitely made up, her fingernails were polished the same shade as her toenails, displayed in elegant sandals with delicate straps. Her collarbone was a knife edge above the neckline of her dress, her arms about the width of a piece of spaghetti, and there was something wrong with her face. The skin was very smooth and very taut, but it seemed to be pulling her lips open to show the fleshy inner lips inside. It tugged at the corners of her eyes and eyebrows, narrowing the eyes and elongating the brows. Kate wondered if perhaps Alice was recovering from burns of some kind. She’d seen burn victims grow just that kind of new skin.