The Woman Who Married a Bear (4 page)

The autopsy report, stapled to the police report, indicated that the corpse had been a pregnant female Caucasian.

There was also a police summary indicating that the police had talked to De De's boyfriend (in his wife's presence), and he had reported that on the evening of her death, De De had been extremely upset, had been drinking, and had gone out to meet someone else. He didn't know whom and apparently he didn't care.

In a letter to the Alaska death investigators, the Bellingham Police Department reported that, as a result of their investigation, they had concluded that De De Robbins had committed suicide. The findings were based not only on the diary and the police reports, but on statements from her college classmates, all saying she was “despondent during the last few days of her life,” and from her boyfriend, Rudolfo Anastanso, a Filipino floor-covering contractor, who was in the process of separation from his wife at the time of De De's death.

With the death of the only independent witness (and maybe because of a little fear of the official heat created by the Robbins death investigation), the defense attorney folded. On July 7, he pleaded Hawkes guilty but mentally ill to the murder two count and to the offense of tampering with evidence.

But there was one last surprise. The D.A. produced several doctors who had examined Hawkes. They testified that while Hawkes “had suffered periodic psychotic episodes, he was not currently legally insane. The best therapy for him would be to serve whatever sentence seemed appropriate not in the Alaska mental-health system but in the correctional system.” Hawkes was crazy, but not crazy enough.

Sy Brown had been taken by surprise by the state's assertion that Hawkes was sane. I read through a flurry of official memos from him to the Department of Law.

One from Brown read, “If this guy is so sane, how about a third-party work release into your custody?”

The response: “He's not crazy and you know it. He's just your basic murderer. We might consider a twenty-four-hour release to you. It's going to be a long winter for the bears.”

There were others complaining about the ethics of surprise tactics and about the propriety of handshake agreements when dealing with the “protection of the citizens of the state.”

The memos never changed a thing. Hawkes went down hard. On October 15, 1982, he was sentenced to forty years for murder two and five years for tampering with evidence. His case wasn't appealed on the Miranda issue.

Hawkes is presently being held at Lemon Creek jail until he can be shipped to Leavenworth where he will serve no less than three-fourths of his original sentence: thirty years of Salisbury steak and instant mashed potatoes, weight lifting, skull picks made from toothbrushes, and listening to the voices scream inside his head.

THREE

IT WAS FIVE
o'clock, pitch dark and raining outside. I stood and looked out the window to the channel. There was a little wooden troller at the fuel dock and a skiff was running toward the fish plant dock. Through the dock lights I could see the driver of the skiff was wearing bulky yellow rain gear and had a tarp across his lap. The lights of the Pioneer Home reflected in the water of his wake.

After I was fired from the Public Defender Agency in Juneau I was out of commission for a while and then came to Sitka. It seemed foolish to the people in Juneau, some of whom I had grown up with. They said I could never run a business in Sitka. It's only about seventy miles by air from Juneau but to Juneauites Sitka is almost the Third World. For all of its historic charm and Tlingit/Russian heritage, it's a hick town. “Come on,” they said, “mysterious blondes never go to Sitka when they want to hire a detective to find the rare coin stolen from their father's mansion.” It's true. But still, I seem to get enough of the work that keeps me busy. Rape, assault, an occasional murder, always for the defense, and an occasional personal injury civil suit. I don't do divorces or insurance work unless I'm completely broke, which is about four times a year. I don't do all that much of my work in Sitka but travel out of town. Because of my reputation, I can't charge what most of the ex-cop-type investigators get, so I get work from skinflints from all over the state who don't care as much about reputation as they do about billings. I'm not too disappointed that I don't do much work in Sitka because I'm not liked all that well around here as it is, without having every sex offender who surfaces in my new hometown as a client.

Having a lot of enemies has few advantages, but one of them is being able to trust the couple of friends that you have. My friends have to suffer some public humiliation just by being associated with me, and that gives us a certain esprit de corps not enjoyed by people with more morally comfortable lives. We judge each other by what we don't have as a consequence of being together, what we've given up. It was pointed out—rather dramatically—by the woman who used to love me that this was a bonding based on emotional and spiritual poverty. She laid these insights on me about six months ago as she was leaving. She said she wanted more than ego, irony, and alcohol. I agreed, but I couldn't imagine what was left—other than silliness, and maybe despair. She walked out the door. I waited ten minutes and then went to the bar.

The bar was where I was headed now. My eyes were tired. I had read enough and needed to hear a good story about Louis Victor's murder. The particular bar that I was walking to was the Beinecke Rare Book Library of gossip. The walls are lined with photographs of fishing boats, and the ceiling is studded with dollar bills tacked to the chipped acoustical tiles. If I was lucky, and if today was like any other of the three hundred and sixty-four, I would find the master of the
Julie M,
in his booth by the package-goods store. His name is William; he's my friend, and also the curator of the gossip collection.

As I walked in, he was talking with a young woman fisherman. William has long gray sideburn whiskers that he ties under his chin. He was wearing an insulated canvas work suit. She wore a thermal underwear shirt, black jeans, rubber boots, and a purple beret. She was drunkenly describing a mule ride in the jungles of Costa Rica. She reeled back in the booth and fixed her eyes on the tropical distance, describing the slap in the face of a palm frond. William smiled into his plum brandy and pushed the frond from his face with his forearms. I held up two fingers to the barmaid and made a circular gesture in the direction of William's booth. The barmaid nodded, and I went over to sit down.

“Cecil Younger, the subarctic gumshoe, have you ever considered opening a fishing lodge in Costa Rica?”

“Can't say as I have, William. Mind if I sit down?”

The woman with the beret looked up in surprise at finding me so suddenly in the jungle and said, “Well, if you don't want to open a fishing lodge then just fuck off, both of you.” She stood up and began a port tack to the other end of the bar.

“An excitable child,” William said. “But she knows Costa Rica. Business or pleasure, Cecil? If you're here to ask me what I know about the shoplifting, I'm a dead end for you.”

“Shoplifting?”

“Today at the gun shop. Someone ran out of the store with a hunting rifle. The police have been tearing up the waterfront.”

“No, I don't know anything about that. I'm here to buy you a drink and see if you know any good stories.”

“Plentee stories, the finest kine!” William said in mock Hawaiian pidgin.

“What do you know about Louis Victor and Walt Robbins?”

William smiled up at me and twisted the braid that was tied under his chin while he acknowledged the drinks the barmaid brought to the table.

“A murder, is it? Well, you know the basics, I take it.” He didn't wait for me to answer.

“Louis and Walt grew up in Juneau together. They stuck out; Walt took a lot of teasing for being friends with this Indian kid. Walt was a year or two younger, I think. Louis was a better hunter, or at least he brought more and bigger game in. Louis was better with the women and always seemed to have more money. I always kind of suspected that it was humiliating for Walt to work for Louis all those years. Louis made his money on the North Slope, enough to buy his guide business.

“I've heard rumors that Walt was sleeping with Emma, Louis's wife. I don't buy that. Emma's a knotty piece of wet rope. I don't think she could loosen up even if she wanted to.”

“Did Robbins want in on the hunting territory?”

“Yeah, I guess Walt wanted that territory. It was great bear hunting, it had a fair anchorage.”

“Enough to kill Louis?”

William drank the last of his brandy. “How the fuck should I know?” He looked down into his drink. “I don't think he killed Louis. Louis was an Indian and he was kind of arrogant but Walt loved him.” He pulled the tip of his finger around the rim of the glass. “And, anyway, the facts don't fit all that well. Walt had passed out on his boat. And even if he wanted to kill Louis for the permit, Emma inherited it after Louis's death and Emma hates Walt's guts. The poor bastard. I heard he offered to buy the outfit and permit for three times what it's worth but Emma wouldn't let him in the door. I mean, I don't know. I just heard that Emma and Louis had their own troubles. But Walt never got his foot in the door, that I know.”

“Someone said that Robbins was already in Bellingham when his daughter committed suicide.”

“I never heard that. I heard that Walt was up here. You're not fishing on me, are you, Younger? Man, you are sick—but I like it. Robbins was worried about her, I know that. She was sleeping with some Filipino guy. It bugged the shit out of him. But he would never have killed her. Robbins is supposed to be kind of flipped out ever since she died.”

He waved down the barmaid, and signaled for two more brandies. “But, Cecil, you just can't get around the wacko. You know, Louis was big—there's a story that he and Walt were once jumped by a brown bear sow and Louis wrestled it before Walt killed it. You'd have to be a pretty husky motherfucker to wrestle a sow. But I hear this wacko was huge—six six or something. They say he tried to eat Louis himself.”

I hate plum brandy but I drink it out of consideration for William. I swallowed the last of it and set the glass on the other side of the table. “You believe that about the wacko?”

“Cecil, my boy, I know you haven't come to me for the truth. I just tell you the story.”

Someone put money in the jukebox next to our table and we had to stop our conversation. We sat with our backs to the wall. William knotted his whiskers and watched the lady in the beret. Like a dope, I began to trace the rim of my empty glass with an index finger and listen to the wheezy dance tune blare out.

I should never have given all of my music away after she left me.

We drank until about eight. The Costa Rican fishing-lodge entrepreneur returned and forgave us briefly for our lack of judgment, and then she started talking about black-cod fishing in the Gulf of Alaska and hiking the Napali coast of Kauai, which were two related subjects in her mind.

I took a walk around the bar and heard a story of how they diagnose transmission trouble in California by swinging a crystal over the drive train. I heard a story about the crew having sex with a goat on the deck of a whaling ship in the South Pacific. I heard about a skipper who spent his fifty thousand dollars of halibut money on cocaine, and didn't regret it a bit. This is a great bar. You can't believe a thing anyone says, but you have to take them seriously. When I left, William was riding the back of the booth as if it were a mule and the woman in the beret was leading him down the steep terrain of Kauai.

Right now the whole story of Louis Victor belonged in the same dream world as the jungles of Costa Rica. What William had told me was a story like all the others—who knew where it came from? But I might be able to find it useful in selling an acceptable version to my client.

Todd had supper ready when I walked through the door. I could smell halibut under the broiler. I padded up the stairs, holding the rail as if it were a mule's saddle horn. I could hear Todd reading aloud from the encyclopedia about the sunken ships of the North Atlantic while he stirred the rice. He held the book very close to his face, his eyeballs swimming across the page.

“Some ships went down with all hands lost. Cecil, do you think there could have been any wild animals on board those ships? I mean, could a zoo or something have been shipping some animal from Africa or somewhere? I'd hate to think of that. I would hate to think of that—monkeys or zebras going down in a ship, in their cages and all. Do you think it ever happened?”

“I don't think it ever did, Todd, and, anyway, I think they make cages so they'll float free of the ship if it sinks, and they have radios attached to them so they will be easy to find. I wouldn't worry.” Once Todd worried so much about the wild animals in a traveling carnival he was almost arrested for pulling grass from people's lawns to take over to the cages to feed to them. “I wouldn't worry, Todd. I think the new cages float.”

Just as we were about to sit down and eat, the phone rang. A woman who spoke in a very strained tone of voice was on the line.

“Mr. Younger, my name is Emma Victor, and I believe you've been hired by my mother-in-law to investigate the facts surrounding the death of my husband.”

The rice was boiling over and Todd was frantically looking for a pot holder. I reached in the drawer beside the sink and gave him one.

“That's correct. May I ask how you knew that?”

“I live with my family here in Juneau but I speak to my mother-in-law quite frequently. In fact, I spoke to her by phone just this afternoon and she told me about your … commission, I suppose you'd call it.”

The rice was calmed down, but now it needed more water and Todd was having trouble holding the pot over the sink and turning on the water. I reached over and twisted the spigot.

“Yes—is there something I can do for you?”

“It is very important that I talk to you, Mr. Younger. In fact, I might have some information that could … drastically affect your work. I can't go into it over the phone. Could we meet here in Juneau sometime? Will you be coming here soon? As I said, it is very important that I talk to you.”

“I hadn't planned on making any trips right away but I'm sure I could arrange something.”

“Good. I live at the twenty-four-mile post on Tee Harbor. I know that you know Juneau. Our number is in the book. Call and come out. I'll phone you day after tomorrow if I haven't heard from you before then. All right?”

And she hung up. Her voice lingered like the whine of a dentist's drill.

“Who was it?” Todd asked.

“I guess it was the daughter-in-law of my new client. She called me from Juneau and acted like she wanted to talk but she didn't want to get into much of a conversation over the phone.”

Todd set the rice and the halibut on the table and just as we sat down someone knocked on the door.

Todd pushed up from the table. “I'll get it, Cecil,” he said, and I watched him lumber downstairs.

His voice came up from the stairwell. “Cecil, there is someone here to see you.”

“Who is it? Send them up.”

“They say they need to talk to you outside.”

I could hear Todd walking back up the stairs. He walks methodically like an experienced mountain climber pacing himself on the lower slopes. First I saw his bristly head and then his eyeballs behind his glasses.

“I don't know who he is, Cecil. He won't come in. He won't even come close to the door. He just sort of stands back in the dark—kind of grumbling.”

We walked down the stairs together. The room on the street level is a mudroom, with rain gear hanging from pegs and red rubber boots lining the wall. There is a large window in the yellow cedar door to the street and a white curtain hanging across the window for privacy. With the street light on, you should be able to see the silhouette of a person standing at the front door. There was no one. We looked at each other. Toddy frowned.

“I'm sorry, Cecil, but there was somebody. There really was.” He walked to the door. “He was standing right here, kind of in the street, just a second ago. I couldn't see very well but it was a skinny person standing back in the dark. I didn't make it up.”

Todd opened the door and stepped out.

“His voice was all gravelly and I couldn't see him very …”

His head rocked back against the doorjamb. At first I thought he'd stumbled. I put my arms under his armpits to steady him and we both slumped to the floor.

“Toddy?”