Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense (27 page)

“Man,” he said, “that sounds deep, doesn’t it? All I know is that it’s only okay to be gay if you don’t flaunt it.”

“Dylan, are you…,” Kane began, then thought better of what he was going to ask. “So why do you hang around with her?”

Dylan shrugged again, and when he spoke his voice sounded forlorn.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not good with girls. She’s safe and there’s no pressure. I’m still trying to figure stuff out.”

“It’s worth the effort,” Kane said. “Figuring stuff out. It’s hard, and sometimes you don’t like the answers, but it’s still worth it.”

Dylan put out his hand and Kane took it, then pulled the boy into his arms. The strength of his hug surprised Kane. Then they both let go and Dylan opened the door.

“You know, Dad,” he said, “right after they found Melinda Foxx’s body, Samantha told me that they’d been friends last year. Samantha’s kind of friends, that is. And that Melinda had a new friend this year. Maybe I can find out more about that.”

“I think you should let me do that, son,” Kane said. Dylan gave him an unreadable smile and left.

Kane thought about putting on his coat and going to find Dylan and Samantha and questioning the woman. But he was sore and found that the conversation had drained him.

I’ll do it first thing tomorrow, he thought, and started getting ready for bed.

Y
ou look like you’re about to go on safari,” Mrs. Richard Foster said as she opened the door for Kane.

The detective had to admit she was right. Kane had gotten some of Cocoa’s purchases back from the hotel laundry, and everything but the underwear had some sort of loops or epaulettes or little squares of Velcro on it.

“This is what I get for sending the fashion impaired out to buy me clothes,” he said, shooting a look over her shoulder at a laughing Cocoa. “Where’s Winthrop?”

“He’s in the kitchen making mimosas,” the woman said. “Please come in and help yourself to the croissants. The kitchen here baked them special.”

Kane sat down at the big table, poured himself a cup of coffee, and tasted it.

“This isn’t the usual dishwater they call coffee here, either,” he said.

“If you have a choice between being rich and poor,” Mrs. Foster replied with a smile, “pick rich.”

Winthrop came in and set a tray of mimosas in delicate-looking flutes in the center of the table, then went to answer a knock at the door. Oil Can Doyle came in, removed a paper from under his arm, handed it to Mrs. Foster, took off his coat, tossed it to Winthrop, patted his toupee into place, and sat.

“Listen to this,” Mrs. Foster said. “The headline says, ‘Governor’s office aided alleged criminals.’ It’s the big headline, too, on the front page.”

Doyle was grinning like a crocodile.

“That’s today’s paper,” he said. “It should give Hiram Putnam and his minions heartburn. Here’s yesterday’s.”

He took a folded paper from his inside pocket and handed it to Mrs. Foster. She unfolded it and said, “It’s the main headline again. It says, ‘Blackmail, kidnapping in scheme to defeat oil tax.’”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Doyle said. “Somehow that reporter, Cockerham, got his hands on copies of Miss Atwood and Senator Grantham’s statements, plus a lot of information on what happened to you, Kane. I can’t imagine how he did that. Or what the jury will make of all this if Senator Hope comes to trial.”

Instead of replying, Kane took a bite of croissant. It practically melted in his mouth. He swallowed and said to Mrs. Foster, as if Doyle hadn’t said a word, “That’s good advice. Be rich. I’ll have to remember that. Why doesn’t everyone sit and we can get started.”

Before going to bed the night before, Kane had made a round of telephone calls to set up this meeting. Then he’d gotten up early and hobbled up the hill to sit in the back of the church during the early mass. The old priest had given a vigorous sermon against what he called “unnatural acts” and the civil unions bill “being considered down the street,” using as his text Romans 1:26: “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections; for even their women did change the natural use unto that which is against nature.”

A pair of middle-aged women got up in the middle of the sermon and walked out, talking loudly about “closeted old queers” and “mixing religion and politics.” Kane followed them out, thinking about what Dylan had said the night before. How have we gotten to this place in America where people glory in looking down on other people? He knew that religions weren’t perfect—the Roman Catholic Church has plenty to answer for, God knows—but expected them to resist the impulse to condemn people, not encourage it. No wonder Dylan’s friend Samantha was careful not to tread on convention.

When everyone was seated, he began, filling in the group on his dealings with George Bezhdetny.

“So you think he isn’t involved in the murders?” Mrs. Foster asked when he’d finished. “Where does that leave us?”

“I’m not sure,” Kane said. “But last night my son told me that a woman he knows named Samantha was once involved romantically with Melinda Foxx, and that Melinda may have had another woman lover this year. I think my next step is to find this Samantha and get her to tell me what she knows. But I don’t even know her last name. I tried calling Dylan just before coming here, but he wasn’t home. All I did was wake up his roommate again.”

“I’m sure I can find out,” Mrs. Foster said. “Let me make a few calls.”

Cocoa cleared his throat. Kane looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“I know where she lives,” he said. “I can take you there.”

He looked at the surprised faces around the table and said, “What? All the cabbie can do is drive? I’ve driven Samantha home plenty of times. Like I already told Nik, I expect I know where everybody in the legislature, and everybody who works there, lives.”

“Okay,” Kane said. “Then I guess I’ll go talk to her. Does anybody have anything they want to say before I go?”

“I do,” Oil Can Doyle said. “After I left you yesterday, I went out to talk with my client, and he actually told me some things.”

“What things?’ Kane asked.

Doyle looked around the table.

“I’m not sure how much I can say,” he said. “The rest of these people could be subpoenaed.”

Kane gave the little lawyer a disgusted look. Mrs. Foster opened her mouth, but the detective held up his hand to silence her. Everyone looked at Doyle until he actually began to squirm.

“I need something to drink,” he said, looking at Winthrop. “Could I have some just plain orange juice?”

Winthrop got up and went into the kitchen.

“Too early for you, Counselor?” Mrs. Foster asked, amusement in her voice.

“He doesn’t drink,” Kane said.

Both the woman and the lawyer looked at Kane in surprise.

“But his reputation…,” Mrs. Foster began.

Kane nodded.

“He pretends to drink,” Kane said, “but it’s all part of his act. He wants people to think he’s strange and flawed and repugnant. He wants them to underestimate him.”

Winthrop returned with a glass of orange juice and handed it to Doyle. The lawyer took a drink and said, “I’m not sure about repugnant. How did you know?”

“You stuck me with the bar tab, remember?” he said. “The night I got here? All that was on it was ginger ale.”

Doyle smiled, a real smile this time, not the horrible rictus he usually employed.

“I guess I can’t be both a deadbeat and a pretend lush,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that.”

He looked around the table.

“Melinda Foxx called Senator Hope when he was in Anchorage last fall and asked to meet him in an out-of-the-way bar,” he said. “He thought it was odd, but she said it was important.

“When she arrived, she seemed to be both troubled and afraid. She said she had proof that her employer was breaking the law. She said that she was willing to give the proof to Hope but that he had to keep her identity a secret. He said he started out suspecting she was part of some sort of scheme to discredit him but her sincerity convinced him otherwise. Still, he was reluctant—the whole one-senator-spying-on-another problem—but she told him that they both had an obligation to expose corruption. He couldn’t argue with that, so he agreed.

“She gave him the information about the no-bid contract. He handled it carefully, he said, and when the information turned out to be good, he was happy to meet with her again when she called. This time, she insisted on a hotel room. She was very excited when she arrived, he said, and even more afraid. He tried to comfort her and she was, by his account, more than willing to be comforted. At the end of their…encounter…she gave him the information about the illegal campaign contributions.”

Doyle swigged orange juice and looked around the table.

He likes being the center of attention, Kane thought. I suppose that’s one of the things that make him a good trial lawyer.

“He saw her frequently after that, always at the same hotel,” Doyle said. “She said she was still looking for information, but mostly they met to have sex.”

Kane looked at Mrs. Foster. Her face was deadpan. He realized that she had never actually said how she felt about Hope now that her husband was dead, and thought about trying to get Doyle to stop talking about the sex he was having with another woman. But he decided that it was too late for tact and that she was going to have to protect her own heart.

“They continued to meet here after the session started,” Doyle said. “About a week before she was murdered, they met at their usual spot. She was very excited. She told him she was pregnant with his child and asked him what he wanted to do about the baby. He said he’d have to think about it. They agreed to meet again the night she was killed. As she was leaving, she said, ‘We make a good team,’ and that’s when he knew she wanted him to marry her.”

Doyle stopped talking and looked around the table.

“That’s it?” Cocoa said. “What happened?”

“What happened is that she sent him an e-mail a couple of days later saying she had some information that might help him get his civil unions bill passed, that she’d give it to him at their next meeting. Their usual meeting place was a hotel room out by the airport. But she didn’t keep the appointment,” Doyle said. “So Hope went to her apartment, didn’t find her there, and returned to the Capitol to look for her. And found her dead.”

Silence reigned for several minutes.

“Did Senator Hope say what he planned to do about the pregnancy?” Mrs. Foster asked. Kane could tell from her voice that she had been harboring something for Hope.

“You mean, might it have been a motive for killing her?” Doyle asked. “No. He said he had decided to do the honorable thing and marry her. I don’t know how much luck I’d have selling that to a jury, but I believed him.”

Kane watched Mrs. Foster’s face for a moment without learning anything more.

“So does he think she honey-trapped him?” he asked Doyle. “Do you?”

“He said he wasn’t sure, that she seemed sincere about everything,” Doyle said. “But, really…”

Kane let the silence stretch out.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.” He paused, then said, “Did he have any idea what the new information might be?”

“No,” Doyle said, “but if it was something on Potter, that might have been a motive for murder all by itself.”

“Maybe,” Kane said, “but everyone around here keeps telling me people don’t murder for political reasons.”

“And they do blackmail and kidnap?” Doyle said, his voice squeaking like he’d suddenly remembered it was supposed to. “That’s a pretty fine line.”

Kane nodded.

“You’re right,” he said. “It is.”

He got to his feet, wincing as the stitches in his thigh pulled.

“I think I’ll go talk with Samantha,” he said. “Maybe she knows something, maybe she doesn’t. But the only other thing to do is sweat Potter, and I don’t like my chances of getting in to see him, let alone get the truth out of him, without something to hold over his head.”

He reached down, picked up his coffee cup, and drained it.

“Ready to go, Cocoa?” he asked.

As the two of them headed for the door, Mrs. Foster said, “I think Winthrop and I will return to Anchorage. With those men in custody, I don’t see why we should stay.”

Sure, Kane thought. What sort of threat is a double murderer? But at least you won’t have to see Hope if he ever gets out.

“You’ll keep me informed?” she went on.

Kane nodded.

“I will,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

Cocoa opened the door and Kane limped through it.

“Keep your guard up,” Winthrop said.

Good advice, Kane thought. Damn good advice.