A Cold Day for Murder (16 page)

His eyes wavered around the room and eventually came to rest on her face. “Katya,” he said, a foolish smile crossing his face, “what you doing here? I thought—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kate said impatiently, “you thought I swore off the Park. Martin, do you remember Mark Miller?”

“Who?”

“Mark Miller, the park ranger.”

Martin made a face. “Doan know him. How ’bout ’nother beer?”

“Bernie!” Bernie looked up and Kate circled her forefinger in the air. Bernie nodded and a moment later brought over three Olys and a Coke. Martin grabbed for his and sucked half down thirstily.

Kate wrestled the bottle out of his hand and held it out of his reach. “You know Miller, Martin. The park ranger who was going out with Xenia.”

Martin’s brow furrowed in deep thought. “Xenia.”

“Your sister,” Kate specified.

Martin transferred his wavering gaze to his sister’s pinched face, and frowned. “I remember.”

“Thank God,” Jack said to Kate. “I thought for a second we were going to have to introduce them.”

“Little bastard,” Martin said, unheeding. “Told him to leave my sister alone.” He brightened. “Beat the shit out of him, too. Candy-ass.”

“Then what did you do?” Kate said. “After you beat the shit out of him.”

He looked at her, surprised. “Went home, I guess.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“Nope.” He snickered. “Probly hiding.”

“He’s been missing for six weeks, Martin, and you had a fight with him just hours before nobody ever saw him again.”

“So what?” Martin said, seeming a little surprised that Kate would waste both their time remarking on it. “Good riddance, I’d say.”

Kate reached over and grabbed Martin’s face with both hands, trying to penetrate the alcoholic fog with sheer force of will. “I’ll tell you what we think happened, Martin. Xenia was dating him and you didn’t like it. She said he was going to marry her and take her away from the Park, and you didn’t believe him or her. You argued with him about it. Half the crowd at Bernie’s heard you say you were going to kill him if he didn’t stay away from her.”

“Aw shit, Kate,” Martin said, looking everywhere but at her face. “Aw shit.”

“So you did. You left Bernie’s and you waited till he came out and you killed him, and then you rolled his body into Lost Chance Creek off the old railroad bridge.”

Martin blinked. “What you say?”

“Martin, Xenia saw you do it. She recognized your truck, she saw the license plate and the expired sticker and the dented fender. She heard the splash when the body went in.”

“Xenia?” Martin said, sitting up straight and suddenly more sober than he had been all week. “Body? Kate, what the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the park ranger you dumped over the Lost Chance bridge Thursday night, October 26, an hour after you fought with Miller right here in this bar.”

Martin stared from Kate to Xenia to Jack and back to Kate. “I didn’t kill no park ranger.”

“Prove it,” Kate said.

“I didn’t kill nobody,” Martin said doggedly. His eyes lit on Xenia and brightened. He pointed at his sister and said, “Xenia probably killed him because he wasn’t going to marry up with her and take her out of the Park like he said.”

Xenia reached across the table to grab a hank of Martin’s hair in one fist and begin beating on him with the other. The table rocked, the drinks spilled in everyone’s laps, and Martin and Xenia rolled onto the floor, hissing and spitting and biting and scratching. When Jack and Kate finally got them separated Martin was missing a hank of hair above his left ear and Xenia’s right eye was swelling shut.

“Sit down, Xenia,” Kate said tightly. “I said sit down!” She slung the girl into a seat as Jack righted a chair and jammed Martin into it. “I’m having a good time,” he told Kate. “Are you having a good time?” Activity in the Roadhouse barely checked. Bernie brought over another round, and peace if not serenity reigned supreme once more.

“If you didn’t kill the ranger, Martin,” Kate said, “then whose body were you dumping into Lost Chance Creek that night?”

“Aw shit, Kate,” Martin said, “it wasn’t nobody’s body, it was a goddam moose.”

There was a stunned silence. He looked from Kate’s face to Jack’s and back again. He hung his head and admitted, “It was a yearling female. I shot it up on the Kanuyaq around Silver Creek and I was bringing it home when Dandy told me there was a fish hawk in town. I wasn’t going back to jail for no goddam moose.” Kate met his eyes, and he slammed down his beer indignantly. “Jesus, Kate, if you won’t believe me, ask Dandy, he was with me, he’ll tell you.”

Kate was silent for a moment. “Where were you last night about nine o’clock?”

Martin thought hard about this, his brow furrowed. Realization was long in coming, but when it did, his face flushed. He looked from his cousin to his sister with an expression half-guilty, half-pleading. “Oh,” he said. “That.”

“Yes,” Kate said dryly, “that. You could have killed me.”

“Aw shit, Katya,” Martin said, “you know I can put a bullet wherever I want.”

“Yes, well,” Kate said, “why shoot at me at all?”

“I wan’t—wasn’t shooting at you,” he insisted. “I dint even know you was there.” He waved his hands expressively in the air. “I was just…you know, aiming in the general direction of the NorthCom shack. She”—he hooked his thumb toward Xenia—“keeps picking up these little bastards and I keep having to scare them off. I tell you, Katya,” Martin said with a martyred air, “I tell you, it’s a full-time job being Xenia’s brother.”

Kate gave Xenia a long look and said, “I can understand that, Martin. It’s a full-time job being her cousin.”

“Yeah,” Martin said with deep fellow feeling. “So anyway, no hard feelings about last night, right, Kate?”

“No, no hard feelings, Martin,” Kate said, and added casually and cruelly, “I can’t speak for Abel, of course.”

Martin’s face lost its alcoholic flush and went a little gray. “Jesus Christ, Kate, was that who that was with you?”

Kate nodded.

Martin licked his lips, and braced himself. “He know it was me?”

Kate smiled.

Martin swallowed, tried to speak, went red, then white, shoved himself upright and staggered back to the bar. Xenia, ignoring everyone, flounced over to another table and proved how unconcerned she was with Kate’s opinion by drinking a great deal of beer and talking loudly and laughing often.

Jack sat back and nursed his beer. “Well?”

“I love my family,” Kate said, her voice grim.

“Besides that.”

“He’s telling the truth,” she said flatly.

Jack sighed. “Yeah.” There was a brief silence. He thought of something else and brightened. “This means we don’t have to climb down into the Lost Chance gorge, doesn’t it?”

Kate managed a mirthless smile. “As soon as we find Dandy Mike and he confirms Martin’s story, that’s what it means.”

“That’s what I thought it meant,” Jack said in a satisfied voice. “Does Abel know it was Martin who shot at you two last night?”

“Not yet.”

Jack finished off his beer and rose to his feet. “Oh, Katie, you can be such a hard-nosed bitch.”

She batted her eyelashes at him. “You do say such sweet things, Jack honey.”

Bobby was in the process of negotiating a fee, to be paid in moose steaks, for the broadcasting of a sale notice of Samuel Dementieff’s last summer’s red salmon gear. “Five roasts, not less than five pounds each,” Bobby said in his usual roar, glaring at the elderly fisherman. “And don’t think I won’t weigh ’em, either.”

Sam, seventy going on fifteen, glared right back and said fiercely, “Three, and you repeat the ad every night for a week.”

“Four; and you get the weekend back-to-back special,” Bobby said, leaning forward and glaring harder.

“Three,” Sam said, leaning forward in turn, “and I’ll throw in the tongue, and I get the weekend special and the week in between.”

Mention of the tongue weakened Bobby visibly, as Sam had known it would. “And you play The Doors around it,” he added. “I like ‘Light My Fire.’” With gnarled hands he smoothed his cap on over his grizzled hair.

The deal was struck. It took them another ten minutes of haggling to compose the ad, and Bobby another five to pare it from a hundred words to fifty, each one of which Sam examined suspiciously and approved reluctantly, letter by letter. At the door he turned to fire his parting shot. “Starting tonight?”

“Will you get the hell out of here, you old pirate!” Bobby yelled. Sam Dementieff smiled, a thin, triumphant smile, and swaggered out. “And what the hell do you want?”

This last was addressed to half a dozen teenagers loitering purposefully on the porch. The kids, three of whom Kate recognized as part of Bernie’s first-string junior varsity girls’ team, looked down at the snow melting on their boots and said nothing. “And get in here before you give the place a bad name,” he added irritably with a slight reduction in decibels, but only slight, because he didn’t want anyone ever to be able to say he was softening up in his old age. “Well? You there. You’re Mike Kvasnikof’s son, aren’t you? Eknaty, isn’t it?”

Mutely appealed to by his friends, Eknaty Kvasnikof hesitated and then said with a rush, “Mr. Clark, you know that commercial you’re broadcasting for the bake sale the junior high class is having on Saturday at the gym?”

“What of it?” Bobby said. “It’s on the spindle, I’ll get to it in order tonight at eight when I go on the air. Get out.”

Eknaty cast a wild eye about him for support. His friends looked at their feet, at the ceiling, out the window, anywhere but at Bobby or at anything that might draw Bobby’s attention. Eknaty swallowed and said in a timid voice, “Well, when you do, we were wondering…maybe you could play some modern music before and after? Not too modern,” he hastened to add. “Actually, it’s kind of a classic.”

Bobby snorted. “Mod-run music,” he said, rolling his eyes at Kate, who had the temerity to laugh. “A classic, no less. Which?”

Eknaty reached beneath his parka and pulled out a copy of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

There was an electric silence. Bobby’s eyes bulged. Bobby’s neck swelled. Bobby’s black skin went blacker. Before he had one word out the kids were already trampling over themselves in their haste to get to the door, reminding Kate irresistibly of the scene at the Roadhouse the night before. A string of unprintables followed the stampede outside, and Bobby rolled over to the open door to roar after them, “Idjits! Any moron knows that any track recorded after Credence Clearwater broke up is noise ain’t fit to inflict on a fruit bat! Now get the hell off the earth!”

He slammed the door so hard that the rafters rang, shutting out the faint cries of panic receding down the road, and threw back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

“Well,” Jack remarked in an unruffled voice, “I guess it’s Jim Morrison tonight and like it.”

“How the hell are you, Morgan?” Bobby said, wiping away tears and sending his chair whizzing across the room.

Jack did a quick two-step to keep his toes out of range, and gripped Bobby’s hand in a warm clasp. “Got a license yet for that broadcast of yours?”

“What broadcast?”

“You’re nothing but a born-again outlaw, Clark,” Jack said, and Bobby grinned hugely.

“Why, I thank you, Jack, I purely do. If you thought on it for a year, you couldn’t have come up with a nicer compliment.” He turned to look at Kate. “Abel stopped by on his way home this afternoon, Kate, and cussed you up one side and down the other.” He sighed reminiscently and added, “I do love to hear that old man cuss. It’s an art form, the way he puts four-letter words together.”

“Oh hell. Why’s he mad this time?” Kate said, sounding plaintive. “I haven’t done anything lately.”

Bobby grinned again, this time a wicked, evil grin. “Seems he found out who was shooting at you two last night.” He watched Kate’s expression change with evident satisfaction. “Seems he thinks you knew all along it was Martin and didn’t tell him just because you thought Abel might shoot him. I told him I couldn’t believe you would think such a thing, since we all know what a mild temper he has, and he called me a—let me see, a black-faced, black-hearted Park parasite without the brains God give a lemming, and at that he thought he might be insulting the lemming.”

“And?”

“And after that he got really nasty.”

“Where is he now?”

Bobby scratched his head. “From what I could make out, I think the idea was to go home and stay home for the rest of his natural life, and if somebody started shooting at you not to look for him to get in the way ever again.”

“Good,” Kate said fervently. “Let’s hope he stays there this time. The third time’s liable to be the charm for him taking my bullets.”

“Maybe everybody’s really been shooting at Abel, not you,” Bobby suggested.

Kate yawned. “I wish.”

It had been a long day, a longer week and the longest ever year, and the warmth of Bobby’s fire and the comfort of Bobby’s couch were siren songs too seductive to be ignored. She summoned up just enough energy to shrug out of her parka, kick off her shoepacs and stoke up the fireplace. With the men’s voices a low, pleasant hum in the background and Mutt curled up on the floor next to her, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, not even waking when Jack drew a quilt over her.

· · ·

The next morning Bobby raised KL7CC in Anchorage and got him to call Gamble. In an hour the FBI agent had confirmed Mac Devlin’s alibi. By noon they had located Dandy Mike, in bed with one arm around Vic Porter’s wife and the other around a fifth of Canadian Club. When they told him what they wanted, Dandy laughed so loud and so long they almost didn’t bother confirming that it had been, indeed, a cow moose that had gone over the side of Lost Chance Creek bridge that dark night six weeks before.

Back at Bobby’s house, Jack said, with more irritation than mystification, “If Martin didn’t kill Miller like Xenia thought he did, and if Xenia didn’t kill him like Martin thought she did, and if Devlin didn’t kill him like we all wish he had, we’re back to square one. We don’t have any bodies, other than a bunch of dead moose that by now is probably too worn out to turn into steak.” Jack appeared to regret the loss of the steak more than he regretted the loss of the culprit. “All we do have are, one, a park ranger, missing, and, two, the investigator I sent out after him, also missing.” He looked up. “And that’s it. There is no ‘three.’”