KS17.5 - Cherchez la Femme (2 page)

“She,” it transpired, was Dulcey Kineen, and it wasn’t Boris’s blood. He’d acquired it when he went to Dulcey’s place, went in and found it on the couch, on the coffee table, and on dish towels and hand towels wrung out into the sink. He’d torn the place apart looking for a body and hadn’t found one, which he guessed was how he’d gotten blood all over himself.

Jim went to the tiny little cabin. Dulcey wasn’t there. The scene was about as bad as Boris had described it, and since Auntie Edna lived next door and kept a weather eye out for the goings and comings of her neighbors she had seen Boris go in that morning and come out again not five minutes later not quite as spick-and-span as he had gone in. He had placed no bundles in his pickup, however, and buried nothing mysterious in the yard. He had shouted greetings at Albert, who had only a moment before loosed the lines of the
Mary B
. prepatory to heading downriver to Alaganik Bay and the next fishing period.

Jim, his heart sinking, drove around looking for Nathan’s pickup. He found it parked in front of the post office and Nathan himself coming out the post office door. He gaped at Jim’s questions. No, he hadn’t been to Dulcey’s place in the last twenty-four hours. He hadn’t seen Dulcey in five days, come to that, he’d been up at the lodge guiding Demetri’s fishermen to trophy mounts for their corner office walls.

At the post Nathan saw Boris’s red-stained hands and launched himself at his brother. Jim pulled out the Capstun, told the dispatcher to vacate the premises, and emptied the canister on the brothers. He followed Maggie outside and held the door closed until the brothers stopped screaming and started sobbing. Afterward, he put Boris in one cell and Nathan in another, over the vociferous objections of both.

No Dulcey, a lot of blood, and two brothers in a fierce competition for the affections of the same woman. Demetri Moonin confirmed Nathan’s alibi. Auntie Edna confirmed Boris’s.

Jim went back to Dulcey’s cabin with his murder bag.

One room with a loft for sleeping, the cabin’s floor plan was a familiar one. On the ground floor there was a wood stove for heat, an oil stove for cooking, a sink in a counter with shelves above and below, a small dining table with mismatched chairs, a battered couch, a coffee table, some brick-and-board shelves. Electricity had been added post construction and there were wires tacked to the log walls everywhere.

One end of the dark blue corduroy couch was stained with blood. He took photographs.

The coffee table, a relic of George Jetson’s living room circa 1962, was staggering on the corner nearest the stained end of the couch. Upon closer examination, that corner had a preponderance of blood on it, along with a quantity of short dark hairs.

On the table were two place settings, plates, knives, forks, and the remains of a pork chop, green bean and applesauce dinner, for the most part unconsumed. Meal, interrupted.

Upstairs, the bed looked like it had been hit by a tornado, covers slid to the floor, bottom sheet holding on by one corner, mattress cattywumpus on the box springs. Dulcey’s clothes were stacked neatly on more brick-and-board shelves under the eaves, though. He couldn’t tell if any were missing. He took more photographs, bagged the sheets from the bed, some samples from couch and coffee table and sink, and returned to the post, where he spent some time writing a timeline of events, and some more time in thought.

Then he sent for Kate.

Kate Shugak was a lifetime Park rat and a private investigator who took on the occasional job for the state at his behest. Five feet, a hundred and twenty pounds, hazel eyes tilted at the corners, short cap of black hair, she had a presence that reminded him of that line somebody, maybe Shakespeare had written, ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ Her size was indeed deceptive, for she was strong as an ox, quick as a snake and smarter than the average bear. She was also related to most of the Park either by blood or by marriage, which made her a walking, talking repository of Park history going back generations. Whoever was voted most likely to, odds were Kate knew them, knew where they lived, and could bring them in without mess or bother. She was sort of like shorthand for the Alaska state trooper presence in the Park. The Park covered twenty million square acres and he was its only trooper, so she was the perfect resource, in more ways than one.

She listened without comment as he ran down the story of Dulcey’s disappearance, said, “I’ll be back,” and left without speaking to Boris and Nathan.

· · ·

“You unbelievable morons,” Kate said two days later, Jim thought pretty dispassionately under the circumstances. Kate’s tolerance for idiots was very low and well-known. “She’s not dead.”

Both brothers sat up at this. “What do you mean?” Nathan said.

“I saw the blood!” Boris said.

“It was all over you!” Nathan said.

“Shut up,” Kate said.

They shut up.

“She and Albert eloped,” Kate said.

“What?”

“What!”

“They took the
Mary B
. to Cordova. Dulcey was hiding below when Boris and Auntie Edna saw Albert heading down river.” She looked at Jim. “Whatever you said to him that day convinced him to talk to Dulcey.”

He waited. Nathan waited. Boris waited. Finally Jim said, “And?”

“Jim,” she said. “It’s Dulcey.”

“Oh,” he said, and then repeated, “Oh.”

“It turned into a very long talk. It lasted all night.” Her expression dared him to laugh which, recalling the disturbed state of Dulcey’s sleeping loft, he was hard put to it not to do. “The next morning Albert, uh, tripped and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table in front of the couch.”

Jim remembered the goo solidified on the corner of the coffee table.

“Albert’s got a shiner on him the color of an eggplant and he still can’t see out of that eye. Dulcey mopped him up as best she could and they got on the
Mary B
. and went downriver and to Cordova, where they were married that afternoon.” She sat back and watched their various reactions, not without a certain satisfaction. “Boris, when you found all that blood, you said it was Nathan just for meanness. You knew he was working up at the lodge, didn’t you?”

Boris wouldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t look at anyone.

“Nathan, Jim tells me you jumped Boris here at the post and he had to pepper spray you to pull you off him.”

Nathan wasn’t making eye contact, either.

“One way or another, you boys have made a spectacle of yourselves and caused a great deal of annoyance for the whole Park for the last six months. There will be consequences.”

Everybody wondered what that meant. They were not held in suspense for long.

“I talked to a few people on my way back here, and we’ve come up with something that looks a little like justice.” Kate looked at Nathan. “Nathan, you’re going to caretake Demetri’s lodge for him this winter. You get minimum wage, board and room, and a box of books. I’d recommend at least one of them be written by Deepak Chopra.”

“Who else is going to be there?”

“No one.”

Nathan swallowed hard. “I’m going to be up there all alone?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t go.” He looked at Boris, at Jim. “I won’t go, Kate.”

“Yeah, you will,” she said. “You earned this, Nathan. You’ve pretty much proved yourself unfit for human companionship, at least in the short term. Take this winter and think about it.”

She looked at his younger brother. “Boris, the mayor of Cordova has finally convinced Shitting Seagull to use up his accrued vacation time. You’ll be the acting harbormaster from October one to April one, and yes, that does include keeping space open in transient parking for alien spaceships on their way through to Delta Epsilon. You’ll be living in Gull’s quarters in the harbor and you’ll be on call twenty-four seven for the whole six months.”

“What! Why, you—”

“I can think of no punishment better suited to fit your crime than to spend six months serving the public. You’d better be polite to them. If I get to hear of otherwise… ” She let the words trail off into an artistic silence.

· · ·

“So Dulcey Kineen’s alive and well and in Cordova with Albert Balluta?” Jim said in his office. Mutt, the half gray wolf half husky who let Kate live with her, was watching her favorite man with the usual adoring look in her great yellow eyes.

“No, actually, she’s in Anchorage. They both are.”

“What for?”

“They’re at the Division of Family and Youth Services, applying for custody of Dulcey’s younger siblings.”

“Really.” Jim let the word stretch out. “So that was her price.”

Kate shrugged.

“And Albert’s?”

“Ratio of men to women in the Park used to be seven to one. Since the mine opened it’s probably more like twenty to one. And you know how long most women stay here who weren’t born to it.”

“Um. Well, Albert’s got one of his very own now. Let’s hope he doesn’t know he has a tiger by the tail.”

“Think about it,” Kate said. “Albert’s the head of his family. Dulcey’s the head of hers. They do sort of fit. I don’t know that it’s a happy ending, but it may actually be the right one.”

“Well, you have to hand it to her. She went through every guy in the Park until she found the right one. And speaking of tigers, just what happened that morning?”

“Well.” Kate looked as if she were trying to decide how much it was good for him to know. “As near as I can figure, Dulcey made the mistake of smiling at Albert on their way out the door, which naturally Albert regarded as an invitation to kiss her. One thing led to another and they still had an hour to make the tide, so things got a little… athletic out.”

He let his eyes drop down over her body, lingering here and there. “I can see how that might happen.”

Her answering smile was long and slow and full of promise.

· · ·

Jim left the boys locked in the cells, dimmed the lights and went home, promising to let them out the next morning.

An hour passed. Another. The July sun tracked around the walls, lessening in intensity but still omnipresent.

Of course Nathan spoke first, and of course it was conciliatory. “She sure was cute.” He spoke of Dulcey in the past tense, as if she was dead.

A long silence. “Yeeaaaah,” Boris said, drawing it out. “Did you see that little tattoo on the inside of her—”

“Yes, Boris,” Nathan said. “I saw it.” He sighed and rolled over to look at his brother through the bars.

“I guess now all three of us have seen it.”

Silence. A reluctant rumble sounded from the other cell.

A moment later, they were both laughing.

If you enjoyed “Cherchez la Femme,” we think you’ll like
Breakup
. It’s a novel in the popular Kate Shugak series by Dana Stabenow, and it’s now available as an e-book at
stabenow.com
.

KATE SURVEYED THE YARD
in front of her cabin and uttered one word. “
Breakup
.”

Affection for the season was lacking in the tone of her voice.

Ah yes, breakup, that halcyon season including but not necessarily limited to March and April, when all of Alaska melts into a 586,412-square-mile pile of slush. The temperature reaches the double digits and for a miracle stays there, daylight increases by five minutes and forty-four seconds every twenty-four hours, and after a winter’s worth of five-hour days all you want to do is go outside and stay there for the rest of your natural life. But it’s too late for the snow machine and too early for the truck, and meltoff is swelling the rivers until flooding threatens banks, bars and all downstream communities—muskrat, beaver and man. The meat cache is almost empty and the salmon aren’t up the creek yet. All you can do is sit and watch your yard reappear, along with a winter’s worth of debris until now hidden by an artistic layer of snow, all of which used to be frozen so it didn’t smell.

“The best thing about breakup,” Kate said, “is that it’s after winter and before summer.”

Mutt wasn’t paying attention. There was a flash of tail fur on the other side of the yard and the 140-pound half-husky, half-wolf was off with a crunch of brush to chase down the careless hare who had made it. Breakup for Mutt meant bigger breakfasts. Breakup for Mutt meant outside instead of inside. Breakup for Mutt meant a possible close encounter with the gray timber wolf with the roving eye who had beguiled her two springs before, then left her flat with a litter of pups. All five had been turned over to Mandy a nanosecond after weaning. One had been on the second-place team into Nome the month before.

Kate tried not to feel resentful at being abandoned. It was just that it seemed someone ought to have been present, looking on with sympathy as she plodded through the million and one tasks produced by the season’s first chinook, which had blown in from the Gulf of Alaska the night before at sixty-two miles per hour and toppled the woodpile into the meat cache, so that the miniature cabin on stilts looked knock-kneed.

The chinook had also awakened the female grizzly wintering in a den on a knoll across the creek. Kate had heard her grousing at five that morning. She was hungry, no doubt, and a knock-kneed cache was probably just the ticket to fill her belly until the first salmon hit fresh water.

And speaking of water, before Kate started work on the truck she had to check on the creek out back. With the coming of the chinook the ice had broken, and the subsequent roar of runoff was clearly audible from her doorstep. The previous fall had brought record rain, and the boulders that shored up her side of the creek had been loosened to the point of destabilizing the creek bank, but before she could do anything about it she’d had to go to Anchorage, and by the time she got back the creek had been frozen over.

Before her lumbar vertebrae could start to protest at the mere prospect of such abuse, she went to take a look, shoving her way through the underbrush that closed in around the back of the cabin to the top of the short cliff overlooking the course of the stream.