The Woman Who Married a Bear

by John Straley

  “Enough to kill Louis?”

  William drank the last of his brandy. “How the fuck should I know?” He looked down into his drink. “I don’t think he killed Louis. Louis was an Indian and he was kind of arrogant but Walt loved him.” He pulled the tip of his finger around the rim of the glass. “And, anyway, the facts don’t fit all that well. Walt had passed out on his boat. And even if he wanted to kill Louis for the permit, Emma inherited it after Louis’s death and Emma hates Walt’s guts. The poor bastard. I heard he offered to buy the outfit and permit for three times what it’s worth but Emma wouldn’t let him in the door. I mean, I don’t know. I just heard that Emma and Louis had their own troubles. But Walt never got his foot in the door, that I know.”

  “Someone said that Robbins was already in Bellingham when his daughter committed suicide.”

  “I never heard that. I heard that Walt was up here. You’re not fishing on me, are you, Younger? Man, you are sick—but I like it. Robbins was worried about her, I know that. She was sleeping with some Filipino guy. It bugged the shit out of him. But he would never have killed her. Robbins is supposed to be kind of flipped out ever since she died.”

  He waved down the barmaid, and signaled for two more brandies. “But, Cecil, you just can’t get around the wacko. You know, Louis was big—there’s a story that he and Walt were once jumped by a brown bear sow and Louis wrestled it before Walt killed it. You’d have to be a pretty husky motherfucker to wrestle a sow. But I hear this wacko was huge—six six or something. They say he tried to eat Louis himself.”

  I hate plum brandy but I drink it out of consideration for William. I swallowed the last of it and set the glass on the other side of the table. “You believe that about the wacko?”

  “Cecil, my boy, I know you haven’t come to me for the truth. I just tell you the story.”

  Someone put money in the jukebox next to our table and we had to stop our conversation. We sat with our backs to the wall. William knotted his whiskers and watched the lady in the beret. Like a dope, I began to trace the rim of my empty glass with an index finger and listen to the wheezy dance tune blare out.

  I should never have given all of my music away after she left me.

  We drank until about eight. The Costa Rican fishing-lodge entrepreneur returned and forgave us briefly for our lack of judgment, and then she started talking about black-cod fishing in the Gulf of Alaska and hiking the Napali coast of Kauai, which were two related subjects in her mind.

  I took a walk around the bar and heard a story of how they diagnose transmission trouble in California by swinging a crystal over the drive train. I heard a story about the crew having sex with a goat on the deck of a whaling ship in the South Pacific. I heard about a skipper who spent his fifty thousand dollars of halibut money on cocaine, and didn’t regret it a bit. This is a great bar. You can’t believe a thing anyone says, but you have to take them seriously. When I left, William was riding the back of the booth as if it were a mule and the woman in the beret was leading him down the steep terrain of Kauai.

  Right now the whole story of Louis Victor belonged in the same dream world as the jungles of Costa Rica. What William had told me was a story like all the others—who knew where it came from? But I might be able to find it useful in selling an acceptable version to my client.

  Todd had supper ready when I walked through the door. I could smell halibut under the broiler. I padded up the stairs, holding the rail as if it were a mule’s saddle horn. I could hear Todd reading aloud from the encyclopedia about the sunken ships of the North Atlantic while he stirred the rice. He held the book very close to his face, his eyeballs swimming across the page.

  “Some ships went down with all hands lost. Cecil, do you think there could have been any wild animals on board those ships? I mean, could a zoo or something have been shipping some animal from Africa or somewhere? I’d hate to think of that. I would hate to think of that—monkeys or zebras going down in a ship, in their cages and all. Do you think it ever happened?”

  “I don’t think it ever did, Todd, and, anyway, I think they make cages so they’ll float free of the ship if it sinks, and they have radios attached to them so they will be easy to find. I wouldn’t worry.” Once Todd worried so much about the wild animals in a traveling carnival he was almost arrested for pulling grass from people’s lawns to take over to the cages to feed to them. “I wouldn’t worry, Todd. I think the new cages float.”

  Just as we were about to sit down and eat, the phone rang. A woman who spoke in a very strained tone of voice was on the line.

  “Mr. Younger, my name is Emma Victor, and I believe you’ve been hired by my mother-in-law to investigate the facts surrounding the death of my husband.”

  The rice was boiling over and Todd was frantically looking for a pot holder. I reached in the drawer beside the sink and gave him one.

  “That’s correct. May I ask how you knew that?”

  “I live with my family here in Juneau but I speak to my mother-in-law quite frequently. In fact, I spoke to her by phone just this afternoon and she told me about your … commission, I suppose you’d call it.”

  The rice was calmed down, but now it needed more water and Todd was having trouble holding the pot over the sink and turning on the water. I reached over and twisted the spigot.

  “Yes—is there something I can do for you?”

  “It is very important that I talk to you, Mr. Younger. In fact, I might have some information that could … drastically affect your work. I can’t go into it over the phone. Could we meet here in Juneau sometime? Will you be coming here soon? As I said, it is very important that I talk to you.”

  “I hadn’t planned on making any trips right away but I’m sure I could arrange something.”

  “Good. I live at the twenty-four-mile post on Tee Harbor. I know that you know Juneau. Our number is in the book. Call and come out. I’ll phone you day after tomorrow if I haven’t heard from you before then. All right?”

  And she hung up. Her voice lingered like the whine of a dentist’s drill.

  “Who was it?” Todd asked.

  “I guess it was the daughter-in-law of my new client. She called me from Juneau and acted like she wanted to talk but she didn’t want to get into much of a conversation over the phone.”

  Todd set the rice and the halibut on the table and just as we sat down someone knocked on the door.

  Todd pushed up from the table. “I’ll get it, Cecil,” he said, and I watched him lumber downstairs.

  His voice came up from the stairwell. “Cecil, there is someone here to see you.”

  “Who is it? Send them up.”

  “They say they need to talk to you outside.”

  I could hear Todd walking back up the stairs. He walks methodically like an experienced mountain climber pacing himself on the lower slopes. First I saw his bristly head and then his eyeballs behind his glasses.

  “I don’t know who he is, Cecil. He won’t come in. He won’t even come close to the door. He just sort of stands back in the dark—kind of grumbling.”

  We walked down the stairs together. The room on the street level is a mudroom, with rain gear hanging from pegs and red rubber boots lining the wall. There is a large window in the yellow cedar door to the street and a white curtain hanging across the window for privacy. With the street light on, you should be able to see the silhouette of a person standing at the front door. There was no one. We looked at each other. Toddy frowned.

  “I’m sorry, Cecil, but there was somebody. There really was.” He walked to the door. “He was standing right here, kind of in the street, just a second ago. I couldn’t see very well but it was a skinny person standing back in the dark. I didn’t make it up.”

  Todd opened the door and stepped out.

  “His voice was all gravelly and I couldn’t see him very …”

  His head rocked back against the doorjamb. At first I thought he’d stumbled. I put my arms under his armpits to steady him a
nd we both slumped to the floor.

  “Toddy?”

  I was surprised that he seemed so limp, and then the back of his shirt felt damp. I looked at his face. His glasses were on. His eyes were closed. There was a small hole in the middle of his jersey above his overalls, and there was a hole the size of a softball under his shoulder blade. I raised my hand up to my face and it was sparkly and red as if in a vivid dream.

  I remember a squeal building up from my lungs. I remember blood drying in his hair and under my fingernails. I remember the smell of the ocean, the sound of the gulls … and then sirens.

  FOUR

  WHEN THEY FIRST arrived they shook me down, looking for the weapon. They spread me on the sidewalk and frisked me, asking questions about cocaine and my drug connections. I lay still with my cheek pressing down onto the cement, watching the thick soles on black shoes. Men and women arrived with the ambulance. There were tackle boxes and many packages of gauze. Men giving orders in urgent whispers. Blue and red lights pulsing, tubes, IV bottles and a stretcher. They loaded Todd into the ambulance. They took me to the police station.

  They told me to get a hold of myself. That I would feel better if I told them everything; that nothing could change what had happened but I could change what would happen from here on out if I would just level with them.

  If I had been in a little better shape, I would have answered with swelteringly pithy epithets. But I just told them to look around on the hill behind my house for a high-powered shell casing. Beyond that they could fuck off.

  They gave me a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup and a pair of jail pants because they needed my blue jeans, which were sticky with Todd’s blood. They also gave me lots of slow, steady stares as if I were a piece of rotting meat sitting in their station.

  They knew I didn’t shoot him but they also knew they wouldn’t mind if they could prove that I had. In most small towns, if a crime is committed and it isn’t painfully obvious who did it, the rule of thumb is to grab the nearest slimeball, so at least you’ll have something to show the D.A.’s office on Monday morning. I was the nearest slimeball.

  It was about 10:00 P.M. when Detective Lester Bloom walked into the combination kitchenette and interview room behind the first lockup and said that my loudmouth Jewish lawyer was outside.

  My attorney, Dickie Stein, is a rabid terrier, who has a flexible attitude toward reality. The police hate him unless they need to hire him to represent them after they’ve been sued for aggressively counseling prisoners in their cells. He walked in: red high-top sneakers, blue jeans, and an Albert Einstein T-shirt that said, “186,000 MILES PER SECOND ISN’T JUST A GOOD IDEA, IT’S THE LAW.” He sat down.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Somebody shot Toddy, rifle shot, some distance, never heard a thing. Man—woman, I don’t know. I guess they wanted me.”

  “How come?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to think about it.

  “The cops are questioning all of the store owners where Todd stole those clothes.”

  “Figures. Is anyone taking time out from making brilliant motivational analyses to check the scene? Did they find the rifle that was stolen from the gun shop yet? Any shell casings, footprints? Or are they hoping to save time by beating a confession out of some of the girls down at the clothing store?”

  “They’ll get to it. You know how they like to work. So, you need a lawyer?”

  “Ask the police.”

  “They’re bored already with the thought of sending you to prison. All they’ve got is a vague description of a guy stealing a rifle earlier today and you, in jail. This is going to be a semi-big deal around here, you know. Somebody’s going to have to go down. Maybe, even if you didn’t shoot him, they might just want to hold on to you. Maybe to see what’s in the toilet after you piss if nothing else. Right now they want to hold you on a firearms violation. So, you want to talk to an attorney?”

  “Firearms violation! I want a drink, Dickie. I need to do some more reading and talk to a few people before I can tell you anything. Listen, just get me out of here and as soon as I know something I’ll tell you.”

  “Have they taken any pictures of your face?”

  “Yeah, when I first came in. I had blood all over it.”

  “Any bruises?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  I waited in the kitchenette, I drank coffee and tried to scrape the blood out from under my fingernails with the tines of a plastic fork. After about twenty minutes Bloom came in, his stomach peeking out from where his shirt should have been tucked.

  “It doesn’t look like we’ll be needing anything more from you tonight, Mr. Younger. We’re going over the physical evidence and we’ll be in touch.”

  “You’re supposed to say ‘Don’t leave town.’”

  “Don’t leave town.”

  “I’m going to Juneau tomorrow. You can reach me at Lemon Creek.”

  Bloom worked on a sly grin.

  “You figure you might as well go check yourself into jail now? Awful nice of you to help us out, Cecil.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Dickie, before he asks me to squeal like a pig.”

  As we walked out of the police station, Dickie stopped and talked with the chief, who was shaking off his raincoat as he came in the door. Dickie assured him he could work something out with me so I wouldn’t pursue a claim against the city for being slapped around by Bloom when I was brought in.

  “Not real bright to take pictures of the bloody prisoner, Ed. I can take care of it, but you’ll owe me one. Okay?”

  The chief thanked him and promised to have a talk with Bloom. Bloom was just getting the gag, and he didn’t look particularly happy. His face was taking on the character of a basset hound standing in the rain. I didn’t wave as we walked out.

  I left Dickie at the intersection and walked up the hill to the hospital. The nurse at the night station told me Todd was in room 203 but that he couldn’t have any visitors. Then she looked at me and at my bloody shirt and my prison pants. Then she said he had just gotten out of the E.R. and someone from the state troopers was in with him now. They were going to do emergency surgery as soon as the surgical team arrived. I told her I was with Todd’s attorney and that the troopers had asked me to come down. I told her this over my shoulder. She began to yell at me as my hand turned the knob of room 203.

  George Doggy sat next to Toddy’s bed, changing the batteries in his backup tape machine while he rewound the tape on the machine plugged into a socket. He was wearing a strange outfit of running pants, a T-shirt, and a tweed jacket. His gray hair was wet and uncombed. It looked like he had come from his workout.

  Doggy had been around since before statehood. He had been involved in every successful investigation the state ever ran. When the time came, he didn’t want to retire, so the state sent him to Sitka to be a consultant to the police academy, which is the statewide training center for all the law enforcement in Alaska. As far as I could tell, he mostly walked around in his sweats carrying his athletic bag. But they kept him on the payroll and when something interesting came along anywhere in the state, the commissioner in Juneau sent Doggy out to “ease around the investigation” and report back to him.

  When I first started doing defense investigations 1 had the idea that all cops in Alaska were ape-like creatures without enough integrity to keep their jobs as bouncers in the pipeline strip joints where most of them came from. And for the first few years of doing traffic accidents and nickel-bag drug cases this image held up pretty well. Doggy changed that. He only had to report to one man plus the governor. And all of the governors since statehood were scared of him. They were never sure how much he knew and they were never sure they wanted to know. He hated politics and political pressure but he understood them both, and there was speculation that he thoroughly documented any loose political talk that came his way, and a lot must have passed by him over the years. Doggy rarely kept notes
but he was always covered. He wasn’t afraid to admit a mistake and he didn’t care if a defense lawyer tramped on his ego but he never got caught in a contradiction or a knowing lie. This put him up there with Buddha as far as most police investigators were concerned. Doggy didn’t play games and he knew that “just the facts” could be a twisty mess that would take a cop with patience and intelligence a long time to unravel.

  “He can’t talk now, Cecil.” Doggy unplugged the machine and began curling the cord around his fist. He looked the way men in good shape look when they are called out on a job late at night, tired but healthy.

  “They’re not going to ship him to Seattle. It’s bad, but not worth the risk of transporting him. He looks like a strong kid.”

  My clothes were stained with Todd’s blood. My shirt was stiff with it and I smelled like a soggy meat wrapper. My head hurt and I was having trouble focusing.

  Doggy smiled up at me, and motioned for me to sit. “I think they are going to want your clothes.”

  I nodded.

  “Did they interview you already?”

  “Yeah. They acted a little disappointed that I didn’t break down and confess so they could get back to their TV shows.”

  “Now, Cecil, you know they don’t have a lot to work with.” And he smiled again. “What do you think?”

  I buried my head in my hands and then stared down at his running shoes. “I don’t know, Doggy. He said it was somebody with a scratchy voice at the door who wanted to talk to me. He didn’t know who it was.”

  “They found a shell casing near the Russian blockhouse across the way from your place. It’s a .308. It’s a good thing it didn’t hit him solidly but more or less passed through his lung. And there’s this …”

  He pulled a scrawled-over piece of paper from a bag at his feet. He also pulled his half glasses out and reviewed the paper.

  “A rifle consistent with this shell casing was stolen today from a gun shop. A woman saw a guy run out with it. She tried to chase him but he lost her. She described him as a white male, unknown age, blond or sandy brown hair, wearing a halibut jacket and maybe a hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap.