a Night Too Dark (2010) (12 page)

Lyda sucked in a breath.
P.J. glared at Mutt, standing next to Kate, ears up. “I don’t have fucking time for fucking wolves in the fucking warehouse, either.”
Mutt lifted her lip to display a fine set of very large and very sharp teeth. Her growl and his sounded almost identical.
P.J. glared some more. Kate and Mutt glared right back. Standoff.
P.J. didn’t go so far as to relax into a smile, but a discernible twinkle did appear in his near-together black eyes, albeit very far back, and no one would mistake it for goodwill. “Whaddya wanna know?” A forklift roared up and slid to a halt, barely missing a man in a hard hat who tripped and almost fell in his haste to get out of the way. “Harry, for fuck’s sake try not to get yourself fucking run over on my
fucking shift, all right? Fucking paperwork’s a fucking killer on a fucking accident.”
“What was he like?” Kate said. P.J.’s head whipped around and he glared at her. “Dewayne Gammons. What was he like on the job?”
“He fucking showed up on time, he fucking did what he was told. Until he fucking didn’t.” Harry handed P.J. a fistful of papers and P.J. snarled at him. Mutt, startled, snarled again in response, and everyone except Kate and P.J. took an involuntary step backward.
P.J. rustled through the papers. “Fucking Suulutaq Mine is fucking killing every fucking tree on the fucking planet.” He consulted a laptop computer open on the tote, and hunted and pecked until another piece of paper spit out of the printer next to it. He checked a box, signed at the bottom, and shoved it at Harry, who took to his heels.
“Do you remember him saying anything, where he was going, maybe about how he was feeling, before he left work for the last time?”
The question sounded feeble even to Kate’s ears, and P.J. let out a bark of laughter. “In case you ain’t fucking noticed, this warehouse is responsible for supplying five fucking rigs a fucking camp and a hundred fucking employees working a fucking twenty-four-seven shift. We got no fucking time to stand fucking still, let alone go all Dr. fucking Phil.”
“So, no, you don’t remember him saying anything,” Kate said.
“Fucking right no. He had a fucking pulse and a strong fucking back and he could carry a fucking box without fucking dropping it and push a fucking dolly without running it off the fucking dock.” P.J. glared around the room. “Fucking anybody got fucking anything to fucking add?”
Nobody fucking did. It might have had something to do with the steady roar of the approaching Sikorsky helicopter, which deposited a container of freight on a pad a hundred feet from the dock, and
waited just long enough for the ground crew to unhook the sling and the air crew to retract it into the helo before roaring off again in a westerly direction. Everyone flinched away from the dust produced by the rotor wash.
In the distance Kate heard the unmistakable drone of an approaching Herc, and saw that everyone on the loading dock heard it, too, probably before she had. “Thanks, P.J.,” she said. “Appreciate the help. Gentlemen.”
“Uh—,” Lyda said as they were walking away, and then stopped when she saw the grin spreading across Kate’s face.
Kate saw her expression and laughed. “Relax, Lyda. I’ve met P.J. before. Many times.”
Lyda looked relieved. “Oh. Okay. Where next?”
“Randy Randolph.”
Lyda looked surprised. “Why Randy?”
Kate explained.
“Oh,” Lyda said again, and her own expression lightened for the first time that afternoon.
“What is so inherently comic in the thought of Randy Randolph?” Kate said.
“It’s not Randy that’s so funny,” Lyda said. “It’s the thought of Randy as a bigamist.”
She led Kate to the mess hall at the rear of the camp and around to the back door, where there was a smaller version of the warehouse dock. Two pallets of dry goods were in the process of being torn down and the contents carried inside. Lyda and Kate dodged some fifty-pound sacks of enriched white flour on their way into the kitchen.
It was another large room that extended up into the second story of the prefab. Stainless-steel appliances and counters lined the walls, and a long gas grill and a gas-fired cooktop, with an immense stainless steel hood hanging over grill and cooktop, took up the center of the floor. Large pots steamed and knives crunched through vegetables
and there was a pungent smell of garlic in the air. The four men and two women hard at work were dressed in white double-breasted jackets with mandarin collars, wrap-around white aprons tied in front, black-and-white checked pants, black nurse’s shoes, and white paper cook’s hats.
“Hey, Jules,” Lyda said to the guy with the tallest hat.
He smiled at her, a wide, foolish, dazzled smile whose glow could have been seen in daylight from the moon. Jules, unlike P.J., had all the time in the world for Lyda, offering her a stool, apple slices layered with white cheddar, and a Diet Sprite, which Kate was given to understand was Lyda’s favorite drink.
Jules was stumpy and thickset with swarthy skin and thick, untidy dark hair, but his eyes were large, brown, and liquid, and if one overlooked the spaghetti sauce and scrambled egg splatters across his broad white front and the sweat rolling down his square face, there was something rather attractive about the eager little man, with an accent that marked him down as east of the Hudson River. If he’d had a tail he would have been wagging it hard enough to power an electric generator. Kate found herself hoping the body in the woods did belong to Dewayne Gammons.
“We just need to talk to Randy for a minute, okay?” Lyda said.
“Sure, Lyda, anything you want.” He cast about him for more tribute and lunged at a tray of cookies, scattering staff in front of him like marbles. He trotted back to Lyda, with what Kate had to admit looked like a fabulous chocolate chip cookie cradled reverently in his hands, at a guess six inches across. He extended it in Lyda’s direction with a bona fide bow, in the manner of one sacrificing to a personal goddess.
Lyda had to take it. “Thanks, Jules. You sure there aren’t any peanuts in it?”
Jules looked hurt. “You know I’ll never let that happen in my kitchen.”
She smiled at him and the hurt expression on his face vanished like spring mist. “Okay, thanks. I’ll take it with me if you’ll wrap it up.”
Jules wrapped the cookie in enough wax paper to satisfy an embalmer in ancient Egypt. He presented his offering again, again with the bow. “Thanks, Jules,” Lyda said again, displaying a commendable patience. “Now, if we could just talk to Randy.”
Jules made an effort to pull himself together. “We’re prepping dinner, don’t keep him too long, okay?” He looked agonized at having to lay down even this much law to her.
“Okay.” Lyda led Kate and Mutt, neither of whom had even registered on Jules’s peripheral vision, deeper into the belly of the culinary beast. At the back of the room a man was taking trays of golden brown dinner rolls from an oven and replacing them with more. He was short and slight, with a potbelly that strained his apron and thinning hair, the remnants of which wrapped around the sides of his head like greasy wings, leaving a bald, sweaty dome that dampened the edges of his paper hat. He had no shoulders to speak of and less chin. He might even have been bow-legged.
Lyda walked up to him and said, “Hey, Randy. Can you take five?”
And she looked over her shoulder just so she could watch Kate’s jaw drop.
They foregathered on the dock. “Kate Shugak, Randy Randolph. Randy, meet Kate. She’s from Niniltna, and she needs to ask you a few questions.”
Kate was still trying to come to grips with the fact that this was the Lothario breaking hearts across the Park. He did have brown eyes, with long, curling eyelashes so thick they seemed to weigh down his eyelids. Maybe the eyelashes were his secret. “Randy Randolph?” she said, just to be sure.
Lyda turned her head away but Kate saw the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Mutt, notorious for slobbering over anything with the XY chromosome pair, remained next to Kate, her head cocked to one side, regarding Randolph with a quizzical expression.
He nodded, pulling the paper cap from his head and running a hand over his scalp. It came away wet and he wiped it on his pants. “What’s this about?” He looked over his shoulder. “I gotta get them rolls out pretty soon.”
Kate found herself at an uncharacteristic loss for words. He was shorter than Suzy, and Bonnie had him by forty pounds. She saw Lyda watching her and while she didn’t mind providing comic relief for the sake of pulling Lyda Blue out of the doldrums, enough was enough. “I work with the state trooper in Niniltna, Randy. Got a bit of a problem we thought you might be able to help us with.”
He shrugged his insignificant shoulders. “I’m just a baker,” he said.
“And a serial marrier,” Kate said.
He was mute, but even his thick eyelashes were unable to hide the trace of alarm that appeared in the brown eyes.
“It seems you arranged for your paycheck to be sent through the mail to Suzy Moonin.”
“Yeah,” he said, with caution.
“The problem is that Bonnie Jeppsen is the Niniltna postmistress.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “You remember Bonnie? She would be the other woman you married since January. She intercepted your check. Suzy came looking for it.”
“Oh.”
There was a flash of emotion in his eyes, something gone too
quickly for Kate to identify. Fear? No, not fear. Relief? Why would Randolph be relieved at being caught with two wives? When he said nothing further, she said, “That’s it? ‘Oh’? Anything you’d like to add?”
He shrugged his negligible shoulders again. “They’re my wives.”
“Yes, but most men settle for one at a time. What are you, some kind of Mormon?”
Randolph displayed emotion for the first time, in this case a wan indignation. “I’d never be a Mormon! They’re against gays.”
This was something of a non sequitur, and Kate didn’t quite know how to reply.
“I love them,” he said. He could have said “I love NASCAR racing” with more conviction, and it took Kate a moment to realize he was referring to his wives. With the first trace of defiance, he added, “And they love me.”
“As of yesterday?” Kate said. “Not so much.”
Tears might have welled behind the eyelashes. “Are you going to arrest me?”
At this, Lyda stirred. “He’s a very good baker,” she said in tones meant only for Kate’s ears. “Vern really likes Randy’s crullers.”
Kate dwelled for a pleasurable moment on the image of cuffing and stuffing Randolph into George’s Cessna and delivering him into Chopper Jim’s unwilling arms back in Niniltna, but decided that if she ever wanted to get laid again she’d probably better not. In Alaska bigamy came under the “unlawful marrying” statute, and was rated a Class A misdemeanor. Convicted, Randolph could be sentenced up to a year in jail, along with fines and community service. The trick would be in convicting him. Judge Roberta Singh, presiding judge of the Ahtna court, did not take kindly to people cluttering up her docket with—and here as she was wont to do she would quote directly from the Alaska statutes—“Class A misdemeanors, which characteristically involve less severe violence against a person, less serious
offenses against property interests, less serious offenses against public administration or order, or less serious offenses against public health and decency than felonies.” “I wasn’t hired by George W. Bush,” Kate had heard her say in a rare moment of anger in response to a request for a hearing into the legality of a search and seizure in the matter of a resale amount of marijuana found growing in someone’s back bedroom. “I’m a competent jurist, and competent jurists don’t sit on frivolous cases.”
Bobbie Singh would never issue a warrant for Randolph’s arrest. Not that Jim would ever ask her for one. He, too, tried to reserve his best efforts for real criminals. “No,” Kate said, not without regret. “I won’t be arresting you. I don’t have that authority.”
He blinked. “Is the trooper going to arrest me, then?”
“Not today. Suzy and Bonnie are pretty upset with you, Mr. Randolph. You’ll have to deal with them at some point. And you’d better do something about your paycheck, too.” She turned to go and paused. “Mr. Randolph? Did you know Dewayne Gammons?”
Lyda stiffened. Randolph looked surprised. “Sure. Works here. Haven’t seen him in a while.”
“How well did you know him?”
He gestured vaguely. “He delivered supplies to the kitchen sometimes. He’d help unload the pallets, which was kinda nice. Not all those Stores people do. We talked a little.”
“What about?”
He shrugged. “Not much. He was a quiet type. Seemed kind of sad. I told him he should get married, make him feel better.”
He looked at Lyda, who refused to meet his eyes.
“Yeah,” Kate said, drawing out the word. “Well, thanks, Randy.”
From what was apparently a hazy memory of one too many B-list noir films, Randolph said, “Can I leave camp if I wanna?”
“Sure,” Kate said. “But Bonnie and Suzy are waiting for you in town. I wouldn’t advise it.”

• • •

Kate gathered up George, protesting, from the mess hall, where he appeared bent on inhaling the better part of a tray of bear claws, and Lyda escorted them to the airstrip. “Thanks for the guide service,” Kate said. “You okay?” This as Lyda started to say something, and stopped.
Lyda nodded. “Yeah, fine.” But she looked worried.
Kate moved a few steps away from George and lowered her voice. “What?”
Lyda frowned at the Herc, drawn up at the end of the runway. It had dropped the clamshell to disgorge shrink-wrapped pallets of canned goods, a load of drill pipe, and a knuckleboom loader onto a semicircle of pickups and flatbeds. “There might be something else, another reason Wayne took off.”
Kate thought of the suicide note. “A reason other than depression to kill himself, you mean?” As soon as she said it she knew it was the wrong thing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
But Lyda was already shaking her head. “It’s probably nothing to waste your time over. Forget it.” She smiled and extended her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
There was a lack of sincerity there to rival Vernon Truax’s, and Lyda’s grip was cool and brief. “I’ve got time. I can hear anything you have to say, Lyda.”
The other woman waved a dismissive hand. “Really, it was nothing. Safe journey home.”
This time she turned and walked down the rise. Kate watched her pass inside the doors of the admin building with a crease between her brows.
“So, we leaving any time this century?” George said. “My time’s money these days, Kate.”

Seven

So,” Jim said, “he had a girlfriend.”
“Suicides have been known to have girlfriends,” Kate said.
“She also said he was depressed. His boss said he was subdued, and so did at least one of his coworkers.”
“His boss said he didn’t say much,” Jim said. “Doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing.”
“His buddy the bigamist baker said he was sad.”
“His buddy the bigamist baker also counseled him to marry to cheer himself up. Consider the source.”
They were in his office in the post, Kate across the desk with her feet up on it and Mutt sitting next to Jim, her eyes closed in bliss as he fondled her ears. For a brief moment Kate imagined those hands fondling her own ears, and with an effort brought her attention back to the matter at hand. They were doing the devil’s advocate thing, Kate taking the role of devil. Typecasting. “You don’t want him to have been the victim of foul play, do you?”
“I really don’t,” Jim said.
“Even if he might have been?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “Kate, everything you’ve said points to suicide.”
“Lyda Blue didn’t recognize the writing on Gammons’s note.”
He rolled his eyes. “She didn’t recognize his printing.”
She was reaching and the bad part was she knew it. On a lesser woman her expression would have been called a pout. “What’s really bothering you?” he said.
“Hell,” she said, impatient more with her own qualms than with him questioning them. “I don’t know, Jim, I guess I’m just suspicious of anything this neat. Father Smith finds the truck. We find the body. The ME finds the identity. The girlfriend and the coworkers say he was depressed. Case closed.” She made a face. “We all want it to be a suicide because it’s coming on summer and we’re so busy we don’t even have time to sleep and suicide would be so much less bother for us.” She jerked her shoulders, like she was trying to shake something off. “Life is seldom neat.”
“I direct your attention to the Occam’s razor of police work,” he said. “The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”
“What about that round I found in the pickup?”
“Kate. Come on. Show me a truck anywhere in the Bush that doesn’t have a round of ammunition rolling around on the floor.”
“Where’s the gun? And who did it belong to?”
“Lacking evidence he was shot, that doesn’t seem relevant.”
“Where did he keep his truck? He couldn’t get it out to the mine, he had to leave it parked somewhere in town.”
“Probably,” Jim said. “Again, relevance?”
She thought of whatever it was that Lyda had started to tell her at the airstrip, but she could imagine his reaction if she repeated that nonconversation to him here.
“I won’t close this case if you tell me not to, Kate,” he said. “I just don’t see anywhere to go with it.”
“Nope,” Dan O’Brian said from the doorway. He flopped down in the chair next to Kate and put his feet up next to hers. “Fine bunch of detectives we have here. I was eavesdropping and you didn’t even notice. So you heard back from the ME?”
“Yep,” Jim said. “According to Brillo, the guy you found was A positive.”
“Which matches Gammons’s health records in his employee file,” Kate said.
“So it is him,” Dan said.
“It would appear so,” Jim said.
“And he marched off into the wild to kill himself.”
“So he wrote.”
“And Papa Grizzly took him up on his invitation.”
“Looks like.”
“Dumb bastard,” Dan said.
“Dead dumb bastard,” Jim said.
And that would seem to be that.
Jim propped his own feet up. It was his damn desk. “But at least it means I can put this one to bed. Be nice if they were all this easy.”
Kate and Dan both perked up. “More bigamists?” Kate said.
Dan swiveled around to stare at Kate. “Bigamists?”
So then of course he had to be told all, and when he stopped laughing he said, “Life in the fast lane. Man, the Park is starting to look just like downtown.”
Which didn’t come out as quite the joke he had intended, and provoked an uneasy silence that lasted a little longer than it should have while they all thought about what looking just like downtown would mean to the trooper post, the Parks Service, and the Niniltna Native Association’s resident shareholders. The silence was broken by Maggie, who appeared in the doorway to look at Jim with an expression somewhere between sorrow and pity.
“What?” Jim said with foreboding.
“Maybe nothing,” Maggie said, but they could all tell she didn’t really mean it. “I got a call from Cindy Bingley.”
“Not Willard,” Jim said, willing it to be so.
“No, not Willard,” Maggie said, “but she says your presence is required to stop a riot.”
So they adjourned to Bingley Mercantile down the hill and around the corner from the post, where a crowd large by Park standards was found milling near the steps that led to the double glass doors. A quick professional glance took the crowd’s temperature. Edgy but not violent. Jim took his time getting out of the white Blazer with the seal of the Alaska Department of Public Safety on the door, and when he got out took a little longer to settle the trooper badge on his ball cap directly over his eyes, and a little longer than that to hitch the gun belt around his waist. The gravitas was implied.
A respectful silence fell over the crowd at this manifestation of the might and majesty of the Alaska State Troopers, followed by a definite diminution of tension. He strode forward with a ground-eating stride that caused the people in his path to simply melt away. It didn’t hurt that Mutt had abandoned Kate to trot at his heels, head up, tail held at the ne plus ultra angle, adding her natural imperiousness to his state-sanctioned authority.
They mounted the steps, silver gray husky-wolf and blue-and-gold-clad Alaska State Trooper. At the top, they paused deliberately, looking over the crowd with a stern and daunting eye, a double-barreled assault from which grown men quailed.
Satisfied, Jim turned to pull open the door.
It opened outward with a gratifying vigor, in fact so gratifying that it was yanked out of his hand and banged back against the outside wall, hitting hard enough to crack the glass. The impetus shoved Jim backward, causing him to tread on Mutt’s toes. She let out a series
of startled yips, leaped into the air, and came down directly behind him.
What bowled out of the door resembled nothing so much as a human cannonball, very large in diameter and with many moving parts, most of them whaling on other moving parts. Punching, kicking, elbowing, kneeing, yelling, screaming, swearing, it was a mesmerizing concatenation of self-directed human energy and single-minded enthusiasm. Kate, fascinated, decided that cannonball was the wrong analogy, it was more like a fight in a
Batman
comic book. She thought she might even see “Pow!” and “Bam!” rising up out of the fracas.
That seething ball of human rage rolled right out the door and into Chopper Jim Chopin. Jim was standing in front of Mutt. Mutt was standing on the very edge of the top step. The ball hit Jim. He lost his balance. Mutt caught the backs of his knees and in another startled scramble tried to get out of the way in several different directions at once. Jim pitched back into a flawless backward somersault, any Olympic judge who wasn’t sitting on the pairs competition for ice skating would have been ashamed to give it less than a 9.9.
Sergeant Jim Chopin, pride of the Alaska State Troopers, the law of the land in blue and gold, thereafter ascribed a perfect circle, his head and his feet spinning 360 degrees around a straight torso in a movement that Kate dimly remembered from some long-forgotten math class as angular motion. His constant velocity was such as to defy enough gravity to miss every single one of the eight steps leading up to the Bingley Mercantile entrance, and so in his favor were the laws of physics this day that he made a neat two-point landing with both feet smack on the ground, facing in exactly the same direction from which he had originally launched.
A long time ago Kate remembered him saying that one of the first things they taught cadets at the trooper academy was that when a trooper arrived at the scene, the first thing they must do was establish
an air of authority. Today, Jim had approximately two and a half seconds to appreciate this undeniable achievement before the human cannonball boiled right down the steps, hit him with all the force of a runaway train, and flattened him on his back in the dirt and the mud and the half-melted snow.
Mutt, also a victim of physics, was already off balance when Jim flipped over her, and was sucked thereafter into the cannonball’s turbulent wake. She avoided landing in the middle of it by a levitational feat heretofore only achieved by Nadia Comaneci, and managed to jump clean over the melee. She landed running, a gray streak close to light speed, and she didn’t stop until she got to Kate, behind whom she promptly took refuge, uttering a distinctly un-Muttlike whine.
Those nearer to the action were too busy diving for cover to receive a clear impression of events. Kate, standing next to the door of her truck, and Dan, standing next to the door of his, got the wide-screen version and were able thereafter to replay the events of that afternoon in glorious Technicolor detail for the benefit of many, many enthralled audiences at Bernie’s Roadhouse. Under pressure they would admit that their recounting of events was something of a reconstruction, as both of them had been laughing so hard at the time that their vision was somewhat blurred.
Jim, flat on his back beneath what felt like a swarm of spitting, hissing, feral cats, took a moment to realize just what had happened and just where he was. He took another moment to muster a sense of ill use, and a third to summon a swell of outrage, enhanced by the realization that the front of his heretofore immaculate uniform now had several well-outlined footprints on it, and more than a few splashes of blood. He used this as motivation to rise to his feet, attaining the vertical in a single indignant moment, then opened his mouth and gave speech. “All right. That’s ENOUGH.”
Mild words, maybe, but given full voice by a pissed-off state
trooper in full regalia, they did not fail of effect. The human cannonball resolved into, of course, Suzy Moonin, Bonnie Jeppsen, and a third woman of whose identity he was unaware. The brief lull dissolved when Bonnie slapped Suzy and Suzy slugged the third woman. Jim grabbed Bonnie and Suzy by the scruffs of their necks, lifted them up off their feet, and banged their heads together, one time, hard.
Suzy screamed, Bonnie started to cry, and the third woman took the opportunity to kick Bonnie in the shins and elbow Suzy in the groin. Jim only had two hands and Bonnie and Suzy seemed subdued, at least for the moment, so he dropped them and picked up the third woman by a large handful of jacket, fleece vest, and turtleneck. “Lady! Calm down!” He shook her once for emphasis.
Her head rocked back hard. She stopped writhing and glared at him.
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” he said.
Tears glittered in her eyes and threatened to fall in floods. “My name,” she said, her voice trembling, her breast heaving, “is Mrs! Randy! Randolph!”
He stared at her for a long moment, her feet dangling a good six inches above the ground. “Oh hell,” he said, and then he dropped her, too.
And on that note, the Park’s Memorial Day weekend was over.