Though Not Dead (46 page)

And then she could go home.

The flames wavered, and she imagined she could see Old Sam’s face among them, those dark eyes with that customary expression of cynicism she now understood much better. She imagined that shit-eating, devil-worshipping grin spread across that narrow face. He’d been Puck and the Park his fairy land, although that comparison brought an involuntary grin of her own to her face. But he had certainly been a knavish sprite during the time she knew him, and he had lived his life believing what fools his fellows were.

Her grin faded. Old Sam had always been so attentive to the aunties. He had brought them the first kings of spring, filled their caches every fall with moose and caribou, made sure their woodpiles never shrank too low during the winter. She had thought he was being the good older brother, or surrogate brother. She saw now that it had all been a smoke screen, safety in numbers, that his real goal had been seeing to the needs of the object of his affections going back more than fifty years. Not that Auntie Vi and Auntie Balasha and Auntie Edna weren’t worthy of devotion and tribute and sweat equity.

Well, maybe not Auntie Edna. But the other two, surely.

She thought again of the omnipresent platter of deviled eggs that Auntie Joy never failed to bring to Old Sam’s end-of-summer blowout. None of the other aunties ever brought deviled eggs, which told Kate they knew. Maybe not everything, but something.

Kate shook her head. A love affair writ in deviled eggs. Go figure.

The four aunties were all about the same age, which made them contemporaries of Old Sam’s. And Emaa’s.

She went upstairs to Jack’s office and rummaged around for a legal tablet and a couple of pencils and an eraser and brought them back to the couch. In her opinion, looking back was mostly a waste of time, but her family tree was beginning to feel like a mess of spaghetti, if not a nest of vipers. It might help disentangle Old Sam’s story to try to disentangle it.

This story started with Chief Lev Kookesh, from the name a Southeasterner, imported to marry Alexandra, daughter of Clarence and Rose Shugak, from a family who had emigrated to the Park so many generations before that their only remaining link to their Aleutian forebears was their name.

Although it wouldn’t have been called the Park then, Kate reminded herself.

Lev and Alexandra had a daughter named Elizaveta, who married Quinto Dementieff from Cordova, but had a son by Herbert Elmer “Mac” McCullough, itinerant scam artist. This son was Old Sam. So far so good. Or bad.

Alexandra, Elizaveta’s mother, had a brother named Albert. Albert married Angelique Halvorsen from Fairbanks. They had one daughter (Kate had noticed before this propensity for Park rats to have either one child or nineteen), Ekaterina, and they adopted three more, Viola, Edna, and Balasha, who were all related by blood in some distant fashion that had never been fully explained by any of the elders to any of their children. Kate had asked, one time, and pointedly had not been answered. So, some mystery there, but nothing to do with the mystery at hand.

She didn’t think.

Ekaterina married Feodor “Ted” Shugak of the Aleutian Shugaks. Like Auntie Joy’s her marriage had been orchestrated by her parents to cement the relationship between residents and emigrant families. Ekaterina and grandpa Ted, who had died before Kate was born, had one son, Stephan, who married Zoya Shashnikof of Unalaska, a Shugak cousin he had met at Chemawa, the BIA school in Oregon. Kate was their daughter.

And now came Erland Bannister into the mix. It fair curdled her soul to imagine for one moment that they might be related, but if it was part of Old Sam’s story then it was part of her story, too, and she would have to grit her teeth and bear it.

She looked at the digital clock on the DVD player and wondered if Jim had reached Medford yet. The gods had to be yukking it up somewhere, tossing Kate and Jim into the genealogical maelstrom at the deep end of two separate pools, and leaving them both to sink or swim on their own.

Erland was in his sixties. Old Sam had been nearly ninety. That left one hell of a gap in their ages. A gap just as long as a prison sentence, perhaps? Or a prison sentence and army service. Mac was inside for almost twenty years, after which he was scooped up by General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. (truly, one of the great names in American military history, Kate thought again, toes curling) and drafted into the Alaska Scouts. Colonel Castner had been concerned only with his recruits’ survival skills in Bush Alaska. She doubted very much if anyone working for either delved too deeply into a Cutthroat’s past history.

At any rate, he had joined, or been drafted, to serve from 1939 to 1943 in what had been dubbed by historians the thousand-mile war. Where he had saved his son’s life.

Kate shook her head. She made another note to have Kurt find Mac McCullough’s army records. She didn’t expect to learn much, but the dates might be informative, and if as Hammett’s message to Old Sam would have it he had died of his wounds, surely the record would say so. And if he hadn’t, surely the record would say that as well.

If Mac McCullough hadn’t died. If he had served his time first in San Quentin and then in the U.S. Army. He would probably have been demobilized about the same time as Old Sam, in 1945. If his wounds had been severe, he would have been shipped Outside to a veterans’ hospital and demobbed there.

But Kate seemed to recall that Erland Bannister was a lifelong Alaskan, had been born in the Territory. Which seemed to indicate that if Mac McCullough had fathered him, then Mac McCullough had returned to Alaska.

Did tigers really breed true? Was Erland Bannister’s face a faithful representation of his parentage?

If it was, did Erland know it? Was that what all this was about, some ancient family scandal that Erland had hired Bruce Abbott to track down all traces of and destroy?

Had Old Sam known it?

She felt a cold chill.

If Mac McCullough had returned to Alaska, had he contacted Old Sam?

And if he had, what would Old Sam have done?

“No,” she said, so violently that Mutt, snoozing peacefully before the fire, was startled awake. When no danger appeared imminent she gave Kate an indignant look and went through her pawing, circling, and flopping ritual, this time punctuating her displeasure with a loud and aromatic fart.

“Sorry,” Kate said, and got up to open a window.

She picked up the family tree again, assembled with many slanting lines and erasures and crossings out. Ekaterina and Elizaveta were daughters of a sister and brother, Alexandra and Albert (again, Kate reveled in the names), so they were cousins. So Old Sam was Ekaterina’s cousin’s son.

And what did that make Old Sam to Kate?

Her uncle.

Good enough.

If Old Sam and Erland were, say, half brothers, what did that make Erland to Kate?

Still an asshole.

Shared blood changed some things, but not that.

Twenty-nine

“What?” she said incredulously. “When?”

“Nineteen fifty-nine.” Kurt handed over the printout and pointed to the relevant passage. “Murdered. He caught someone robbing his house. There was a struggle, Emil was knocked down, and the robber escaped.”

“And Emil Bannister died?” Kate still couldn’t believe it.

“Evidently Bannister had this big collection of Alaska Native artifacts he’d been collecting since he came into the country.”

“Like Bell?”

“All those old guys grabbed up everything they could back then. Sounds like it was kind of a contest between them. Anyway, crime scene evidence, such as it was in those days, indicates Bannister surprised the burglar in the act. There was a struggle and his desk got knocked over. He was under it at the time.”

Kate winced.

“Yeah. Crunch. Must have been a heavy sucker. The family was asleep upstairs. The commotion woke them up, and the son came down in time to watch his father die.”

Erland. “He see who it was?”

Kurt shook his head. “And they never caught the guy. It was a big deal, Kate. I think it’s even in some of the history books. Bannister was a pretty prominent guy. He was a partner in the Swanson River oil leases and he was even a delegate to the constitutional convention.”

Kate was sitting in Kurt’s office, coffee forgotten in one hand, a hard knot in her gut. It was like being in Jane Silver’s living room all over again, fifty years removed. “What was stolen?”

Kurt looked at her, concerned. “Are you okay, Kate? You look a little green around the gills.” Like Erland, like everybody, Kurt took in her fading shiners and the scabbed-over crease on her forehead. “Not that anyone could tell. You want Agrifina to get you some aspirin or something?”

“I’m fine,” Kate said. She remembered her coffee. It was hotter than hot, a little sweet, a lot creamy, and helped steady the world beneath her feet. “Does the police report have a list of what was stolen?”

He shook his head. “It just says some smaller antiques and Native artifacts.” He closed the report and tossed it on the table. “This was Anchorage in 1959, Kate. Guys like Emil Bannister didn’t get burgled. I bet he didn’t even have insurance. Do you want me to track down the wife?”

“No,” she said, after consideration. “Not yet, anyway. Let me see if I can get in to see Victoria.”

The other eyebrow went up to join the first. “She kinda owes you.”

“She kinda paid me,” Kate said. “A lot. Services rendered, check cashed.”

He was unconvinced. “Still … You got a way in?”

*   *   *

“Kate Shugak!” The wrinkled, shriveled giant beamed at her from behind an acre of desk.

“Hey, Max,” she said.

“And Mutt, too, I see,” he said when Mutt trotted around for her due. “This must be an official visit.”

“I don’t know what the hell it is, Max,” Kate said ruefully.

“Sounds interesting, which is more than I can say for the rest of the crap that crosses my desk every day. Imogene! Imogene, goddammit!”

Imogene was a plump woman Kate guessed to be in her early sixties, with a face set in pleasant lines beneath a neat cap of soft gray curls. She materialized in the doorway and said in a tart but resigned voice, “Max, how many times do I have to tell you? You don’t have to yell, all you have to do is press the intercom button.”

Max, improbably, looked abashed. “I hate them damn things,” he said, which Kate correctly took to include anything run on electricity, with the possible exception of the ignition on a Piper Super Cub. “Could we have some coffee?”

“Certainly,” Imogene said, and smiled at Kate. “How do you like yours, Ms. Shugak?”

“A lot of cream, a little sugar.”

“Coming right up.” She vanished, to reappear shortly with a laden tray. She set it down on Max’s desk and vanished again.

Max’s eyes followed her involuntarily out the door. “Nice woman,” Kate said.

He looked instantly guilty, color climbing from his cheeks all the way up over his liver-spotted pate. “Too young for me,” he said gruffly. “Now quit your yammering and pour me some goddamn coffee.”

Kate did so and sat down again. “How the hell are you, Max? You’re looking pretty good.”

“You look like hell,” he said. “Who’s been using you for target practice?”

A member of the Territorial Police before Alaska became a state, then one of its first Alaska State Troopers, Morris Maxwell’s boast was that he had flown into every town and village in state and territory during his time on the job, and that he had popped more perps than any ten state cops since, too. He was maybe a little younger than Old Sam but not much. The last time Kate had seen him he’d been living at the Pioneer Home and what little getting around he’d been doing had been by wheelchair.

There was no sign of the wheelchair today, just a handsome wooden cane carved from diamond willow, hooked over the edge of the desk within easy reach. He saw Kate’s eyes linger on it and said, “Victoria gave it to me.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “She must be finding you good value.”

“Yeah, well, whatever,” Max said, unused to and clearly uncomfortable with praise of any kind.

He looked healthier, too, more color in his face, more weight on his body, and his clothes were less threadbare, although still casual, jeans, light blue shirt open at the neck under a tweed blazer. They fit, too, Kate thought. The last time he’d been swimming around inside garments that only emphasized his contraction from the world. Now, he looked expanded to fit, clothes and world both. Being needed had amazingly restorative powers. “You’re looking good,” she said again.

His face reddened even more. “Yeah, well, whatever,” he said, this time glaring. “What the hell do you want, anyway?”

She looked wounded. “I can’t drop by to see an old friend?”

He looked at her.

She laughed. “Okay,” she said. “I’m hoping you can talk Victoria into giving me five minutes.”

“Why?”

She met the fierce stare. Ruth, Demetri, the lawyer, Ben, even Johnny—to all these she had told only part of the story. Bobby and Dinah knew all of it up to the time she’d gotten on the plane for Anchorage.

To Max, she told it all, every bit of it: the assaults, the journals, the lawyer, Old Sam’s last note, Mac McCullough, the Hammett manuscript, Jane, the trip to Canyon Hot Springs, the map, Bruce Abbott, the Russian Orthodox priest and the Lady of Kodiak, her interview with Erland, and the resemblance between Erland and Old Sam. “I asked Brendan to ask the warden to toss Erland’s cell,” she said, at the end.

Max grunted. “And?”

“And they found a copy of Old Sam’s obit. Either someone had sent it to him or he’d clipped it out himself. I had it printed in a lot of the local newspapers.”

Max grunted again. “Old bastard sure set something off. Be interesting to know if he meant to.” He cocked a sapient eyebrow. “How do you think Victoria can help you?”

“I don’t know that she can. She’s his sister. Maybe she saw or heard something, maybe she picked up on something he said…” Her voice trailed away at his look. “Yeah, okay, I’m reaching. Max, did you know that their father was killed during a burglary at their house?”

“Emil? Sure.” He shrugged. “Didn’t have nothing to do with her case.”