Blood Will Tell (15 page)

He brightened, whereupon the two of them plunged into a discussion of cosmetics. "What's wrong with Lubriderm?" Kate said, almost wailing. "It comes two bottles for twelve bucks at Costco, it lasts a year, why can't I just use that?"

They were relentless. Kate was shampooed, conditioned, trimmed and moussed within an inch of her life. When Jeri came at her with a can that hissed when she pressed down on the knob Kate panicked, snatched off her cape and stumbled out of the chair, her back to the wall. "What in the hell is that?"

"Hairspray. To fix the style."

"Hairspray my ass! Sounded like a frigging blowtorch you were fixing to light!" Kate headed for the door. "I am out of here."

Jeri, like Alana, was made of stern stuff. "Wait! I wanted to try this new highlighter I just got in from Paul Mitchell--"

Outside, Mutt looked her over with some alarm. "One word," Kate told her, "just one word and I'll turn you loose in front of a Fish and Game helicopter next fall." The Blazer was locked and Jack had the key. He was still inside, probably conferring with Jeri over the right way and the wrong way to pluck an eyebrow.

She took a grateful gulp of fresh air, the first in hours, or so it felt. Still no smell of snow. She'd bet her last dime there was some on the homestead, which was where she should be at this moment, not in this modern Gomorrah where the termination dust had crept barely halfway down the Chugach Mountains and no more. In the full light of day they looked half-dressed, their white robes up around their knees, and faintly embarrassed about it.

"You think you feel bad," Kate told them, "look at what they've done to me."

They didn't answer and she leaned back against the Blazer's bumper and shoved her hands in her pockets, watching the traffic and wondering how anyone could stand to drive in it every day of their lives. Winterbrooke Hair was a door off Northern Lights Boulevard, and four lanes of studded tires with no snow to grip buzzed down the pavement like angry wasps.

The sound was hypnotic and she lapsed into a partial trance, staring unblinkingly at the Sears Mall and the people going in and out. A lot of them were Alaska Natives in rental cars and trucks, and she wondered if there was anyone left at the convention center for the afternoon panels.

The panel on sovereignty, the one with Olga and Cindy on it, ought to prove lively, to say the least.

Sarah Kompkoff had been big on sovereignty, she remembered. "Our own laws for our own people," she had said once, just about the time the state attorney-general had gone into orbit at the thought of ceding so much as one degree of prosecutorial power, no matter how far out in the bush.

How had Lew Mathisen known that Enakenty Barnes had been in Hawaii with his girlfriend? Had Lew been in Hawaii, too? He and Harvey Meganack were acquainted, the dinner at Mama Nicco's had made that clear, but Betty hadn't been present that evening. She supposed Harvey could have told him, but it seemed awfully pat. Lew Mathisen was a lobbyist always available to the highest bidder; he was undoubtedly on some lumber or paper company's payroll, probably why he was bud dying up to the one member of the Niniltna Native Association board who favored logging in Iqaluk. The North Pacific Fisherman's League could easily be another client.

The big question was if Sarah and Enakenty's deaths factored into the puzzle. Kate hoped like hell they didn't. She was greatly afraid they did.

Yes. She was going to be very interested in who brought whom to the party this evening. If new clothes and a new hairstyle was what it took to get her in the door, she would just have to suffer through it.

Which is not to say she wouldn't rather have been back on the deck of the Avilda in the middle of the Bering Sea in a twenty-foot swell, facing down three murderers.

"Kate!" Jack trotted down the steps. "Stop leaning up against that fender, you'll ruin your hair!"

That evening she stamped downstairs trussed up like a gift wrapped ham.

Jack was waiting at the door, his burly frame barely contained in his court suit, cleaned and pressed for the occasion. A white shirt and a brand-new bright red tie with no discernible food stains on it completed the picture. At the best of times his hair could only be described as unruly and tonight it stood up in dark curls all over his head, but he was clean-shaven and his shoes were shined. He looked comfortable. Kate was bitterly envious, so much so that she failed to notice the expression on his face when he looked up and saw her, fully assembled, so to speak, for the first time.

She couldn't miss Johnny, standing stock still between them in the middle of the hall, his mouth open. "Wow, Kate," he breathed.

The red bugle beads on the short, draped jacket glittered in the light, the tuxedo pants broke across the instep of the shoes at exactly the right length, her hair fell from the rhinestone barrette in soft, shining waves around her shoulders, no bra straps or panty lines disgraced her by their appearance, the leather of her new shoes gleamed and altogether she was a stunning sight. The scar across her neck was barely noticeable.

"Wow, Kate," Johnny said again, "you look--you look--" Words failed him.

At twelve years old you haven't had a lot of time to work up a good line.

By forty-six you have, but at this point all Jack could do was hope that his tongue wasn't hanging as far out as his son's. His voice squeaked when he first tried to speak. He suppressed a blush by sheer effort of will and cleared his throat. "Where're the earrings?" "They hurt my ears," Kate said, daring him to pursue it.

She didn't need them, he thought, it would only be gilding the lily. He cleared his throat again and didn't quite have the guts to offer his arm. "Well? Shall we?"

Mutt barked at her, a sharp, short, warning sound that startled all of them. "What?" Kate said.

In the living room doorway, Mutt lowered her head and growled. "Mutt?"

Kate said. "What's the matter, girl?"

Mutt actually flattened her ears. "Mutt! It's me! It's just me! Jack! My own dog doesn't know me! Mutt, it's just me, it's Kate!" Kate held out a hand.

Mutt's lips curled back from her teeth, exposing a very large set of canines that Kate had never seen at quite that angle before. Others had, not her. She didn't move. Mutt gave her hand a wary sniff, looked at the vision standing before her, sniffed again. The lip came back down, and Mutt looked her over one last time, shining head to gleaming leather toes, gave a contemptuous and comprehensive snort, tossed her tail up in disgust and stalked into the living room to plump down in the middle of the rug with her back turned pointedly to Kate.

There was a short, charged silence.

"That does it," Kate said. Her hand went to the hidden fastening of the jacket.

Jack intercepted it just in time and Johnny scooted around them to yank open the door. As the babysitter, who had not the benefit of the before picture, watched in puzzlement, Kate was tucked securely into the Blazer and hied on her way to the Discovery Room of the Captain Cook before the first button was undone.

As has been said before, Jack Morgan was adept at reading Kate Shugak sign. His son bid fair to becoming a useful back-trailer, too.

THE CAPTAIN COOK HAD BEEN BUILT BY AN EX-BOXING champion who had come to Alaska after World War II to make his fortune in real estate. He lost the fortune and a good portion of the real estate itself in the 1964

Alaska Earthquake, and struck the right note with the citizens of the new state newly devastated by a 9.2 temblor by digging the foundations of a new hotel before the year of the quake was out. From the new hotel he went on to the governor's mansion, and from the governor's mansion to the position of Secretary of the Interior, where he lasted two years before President Nixon fired him for publicly opposing the conduct of the Vietnam War. He returned to Alaska and ran again for governor. It took him twenty years to get reelected, a great shock to the citizens of Alaska, who had voted in larger numbers to retain the decriminalization of marijuana than they had for him, a candidate who made Newt Gingrich look liberal. His second term was highlighted by a plan to build a water pipeline to California, another to ship chunks of Alaskan glacier ice to Saudi Arabia, and by an indictment for granting a state lease with very favorable terms to a building owned by his chief campaign contributor.

The legislature failed to impeach, which did not come as a great shock to the citizens of Alaska, who had become inured to this kind of behavior in the thirty-five years since statehood. Five years later the legislature even reimbursed him $302,653 for his legal fees, not much of a shock, either.

He did fail of reelection, and nowadays occupied himself by running his hotel and dispensing political patronage at the behest of the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He'd always been skilled at keeping a foot in both political houses; it was good for business.

He, along with the current occupant of the governor's mansion, was very much in evidence at the Raven party. So were both U.S. senators and most of the legislature, Alaska's lone congressman of course phoning in his regrets from a duck hunt in Oregon, or maybe an elk hunt in Montana, no one was really sure. There were oil company executives and legislative aides and lobbyists from Russia, Korea and Japan rubbing shoulders with anyone who'd ever held political office in the last thirty-five years, or who'd ever been indicted for bribery, fraud and racketeering since statehood, which pretty much amounted to the same thing. The tribes were out in force; Yupik, Inupiat, Aleut, Athabaskan, Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit, attired in their best bibs and fuckers and somewhat stiff and self-conscious in consequence.

There were two buffet tables loaded with stuffed mushrooms and boiled shrimp and raw oysters and cheese cubes and crackers and cubed cantaloupe and whole strawberries and olives and pickles and salad peppers. Two standing rib roasts were presided over by two chefs in tall white hats wielding carving knives the size of machetes. Before each buffet was a long line of people with plates. There were four bars with even longer lines in front of them. The sobriety movement was gaining momentum but there was still a long way to go. For every Native who signed the sobriety movement pledge there was another who backslid, and for every village that voted to go dry there were ten others who voted to stay wet.

Ekaterina sat in state at a table in the geographical center of the room, the focus of the longest line of all. Kate, standing in the doorway next to Jack and for the moment forgetting her silk, lace and bugle bead misery, looked across the room at her grandmother with a frown in her eyes. "What?" Jack said.

"Nothing, probably. It's just that she usually works a room on her feet." Her grandmother looked exhausted, her face drawn and strained.

Her spine was as straight as ever, though, even at this distance. She bestowed a gracious smile on the next person waiting to speak to her, appeared to listen to what he had to say with a complete and total absorption, and at the end of the audience murmured a few words that caused the man to back away from her with a proud, pleased and somewhat dazed expression on his face.

"So she's sitting down," Jack said, "she's had a busy day, and in the last month she's lost two board members, not to mention which she's about a hundred years old. You'd be tired, too. Let's pay our respects and then we can grab some grub. I'm starving. I never knew shopping was such hard work."

They walked inside.

Conversation, if it did not actually die, definitely slowed. Heads turned. Drinks paused halfway to mouths. Forks were suspended in mid-air. Hands touched shoulders, elbows nudged sides, heads nodded in their direction.

Well, in Kate's direction, Jack thought, always fair minded. He didn't blame them. He felt a grin forming and repressed it. His ass was hanging out over the edge as it was.

Kate got three steps into the room before the first successful intercept. "Hello, Kate." The man stopped her forward motion by the simple expedient of stepping into her path and grasping her hand. She looked down at the hand, puzzled, and back up at him. He gave her a smile that reminded her of Alana, all teeth and pasteurized, processed charm. "Nice to see you again." "Oh," she said. She vaguely remembered meeting him that morning at the convention, what the hell was his name?

He worked for the state, didn't he, something in the Fish and Game. "Uh, hello."

"Mike Lonsdale," he said, "we met this morning."

"Of course, Mike Lonsdale," she said, adding insincerely, "nice to meet you again." She moved as if to go around him. He held on to her hand so she couldn't. Surprised, she looked at him again and saw that he was considering her with an interest that was neither professional nor brotherly. There were two other men standing at his shoulder with the same expression on their faces, obviously waiting their turn.

Uncomprehending and a little alarmed, she turned to Jack for guidance.

Jack, who had just discovered that dressing up your lady and taking her out on the town to show her off could have its down side, looked as if he had bitten into a fresh lemon.

It took Kate a minute to catch on. When she did, a long, slow smile, rich with mischief, spread across her face. Payback time, the smile said, as clearly as if she had shouted the words out loud. Jack's expression changed from fresh lemon to fingernail-scraped blackboard, and Kate's smile turned positively beatific. She turned that smile on Mike Lonsdale and his two friends, and as Jack watched in paralyzed disbelief, the three men gained a foot each in height, a hulk in shoulder-width and their palms covered with hair.

Kate's progress across the room slowed to a deliberate stroll. Jack was convinced there wasn't a man in the room who didn't scurry over to renew an old acquaintance, gain a new one or just plain slobber. Kate turned no one away. One idiot actually kissed her hand, another asked if she were staying in the hotel and if so what was her room number, a third invited her to dinner, lunch or breakfast, whatever she preferred, and expressed a preference for dinner himself, followed by breakfast later.