Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense (4 page)

“Well, I have to say the money is attractive,” Kane said, “but I can’t see exactly what I can do to earn it. A high-profile case like this will be swarming with law enforcement and prosecutors with ambitions. I doubt they’d let me waltz in and start poking around. And I’m not sure what I could find that hasn’t already been found by the official investigators.”

The woman’s laugh surprised Kane.

“The official investigators, such as they are, are controlled by our esteemed governor, Hiram Putnam,” she said, “who is, in turn, controlled by others, including your friend Tom Jeffords. Their view is that Senator Hope did this foul deed, because it is politically convenient for them to see it that way, so the investigators will only be looking for evidence to find him guilty.”

Kane knew that investigations weren’t that simple and that most policemen didn’t give a rip about what politicians wanted, but he couldn’t see where debating the point would get him anything.

“If that’s true,” he said, “they’ll be even less interested in having me stick my nose into this.”

The woman nodded.

“I’ve thought of that,” she said. “You’ll be working, officially anyway, for Senator Hope’s defense attorney, William Doyle. In fact, I’d prefer that no one know I am involved. My late husband liked living in the spotlight, but I prefer a quieter life.”

Oh, great, Kane thought. First Jeffords, now her. How many puppet masters can one puppet have? Well, you didn’t want boring.

“William Doyle,” Kane said. “You mean Oil Can Doyle? This Hope must have some money if he can afford Oil Can.”

The woman was silent.

“Oh, I get it,” Kane said. “You’re paying Oil Can.”

“That’s not really any of your concern,” the woman said. “Do you know Mr. Doyle?”

“Not well,” Kane said. “He made a monkey out of me a couple of times on the witness stand, but that’s about it.”

The woman was silent, and so was Kane. He thought things over. There were a lot of reasons to walk away from the case, not the least of which was the amount of intrigue and ambiguity that were already involved. Kane hated intrigue and ambiguity.

But he hated his job more. And he wanted the money. He’d gone through his entire life without thinking much about money, but now it seemed to be important to him and there was no use denying it. Plus, if he stuck around long enough, maybe this woman would take off her veil.

“Will you do it, Sergeant Kane?” the woman asked. Her voice shifted to a lower register. “Please?”

It was Kane’s turn to laugh.

“Actually, it was Lieutenant Kane there for about fifteen minutes before everything went to hell,” he said, “but it’s just plain old Nik now.”

He thought some more.

“If you know that Jeffords is a political enemy of your man, and that I’ve been working for Jeffords, then why hire me?” he asked. “There must be detectives who are less…compromised.”

The woman was nodding before he finished.

“If that were all I knew about you, then I agree, I’d be foolish to hire you,” she said. “But it’s not.”

Kane sat silently until it was clear that the woman was not going to continue. Asking her what she meant would be futile. If she wanted to tell him, she would. And trying to guess would be more futile than that. Time to decide.

“I’ll take the job under these conditions,” he said. “First, I’ll need some money up front for expenses. We’ll talk about my fee when I’ve earned it. Second, I’ll need a list of your—and your husband’s—political friends in Juneau, and some sort of letter of introduction to them. Third, you’ll have to promise that you’ll tell me sometime when and where we met before.”

The woman laughed.

“If you could see me now as I was then, you wouldn’t forget,” she said. “I’ll accept your conditions and impose one of my own. I want to be kept up to date on what you find—on a daily basis if at all possible.”

She flowed to her feet, and Kane found himself standing as well.

“I’ll turn you over to Winthrop now,” she said. “He’ll see to your expense money and give you a telephone number that will always reach me. If you come by in the morning, I’ll have the list and the letter you want.”

She moved close to him and took his right hand in both of hers.

“It’s been a pleasure, Nik,” she said. “I hope to see you again soon.”

She left the room like water rolling downhill. When he turned to watch her, Kane was not at all surprised to see the big Native standing there.

“Winthrop?” Kane said. He couldn’t help smiling.

The Native grinned and raised a forefinger.

“Choose your words carefully,
gussik,
” he said. “I’m armed.”

T
his merchant in Sitka, name of George Pilz, somebody told him there should be gold here in Southeast,” the cabbie said, swiveling his head over his right shoulder to look at Kane. Fat drops of wet snow splashed onto the windshield and the cars in front of them threw up huge rooster tails of slush, making visibility near zero. The old Ford’s wipers clacked back and forth in a losing effort to clear the windshield. The speedometer read fifty-five, and Kane could feel the back end drifting as the cab tried to hydroplane.

“Might be a good idea to keep an eye on the road,” he said to the cabbie.

“Surethingright,” the cabbie said, flicking his eyes toward the front, then back to Kane.

“So he puts out the word that any Indian brings him gold will get a hundred Hudson Bay blankets,” the cabbie said. “And sure enough, a chief named Kawaee shows up in Sitka with gold. Kawaee tells old George the gold is from a creek near his village.”

The cabbie was in his mid-thirties, broad-shouldered and brown-skinned with greasy, shoulder-length black hair held back from his face by a beaded band that read: Tlingit Power. He started pumping his brakes. The rear end tried to slide to the right with each pump.

“The next year,” the cabbie said, “old George outfits a couple of white prospectors named Richard Harris and Joe Juneau and sends them to check things out. But they ain’t the most dedicated prospectors in the world. Instead of looking for gold, they spend most of the summer drinking hootch and trading parts of their outfit for sex off the village women.”

The cab slowed.

“There’s a goddamn stoplight up heres somewhere,” the cabbie said. Kane could see the muscles stand out in his forearms as he tried to keep his hack on the road. The tattoo of a stylized bird glided down one of the forearms.

“Prison ink?” Kane asked as the cabbie brought the car to a halt just inches from the back of a Mercedes SUV.

The cabbie glanced at his arm, then at Kane.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice flat. “Us Indians is all criminals.”

“Us white guys, too,” Kane said. “We just steal bigger.”

Kane could see the driver’s grin in the mirror. His even, white teeth stood out in his bronze face like a patch of snow on a parched hillside.

“My cousin did this, when we was in Job Corps together,” he said. “Anyway, here’s the rest of this story. The hootch runs out and it gets colder, so Harris and Juneau ask some of the Indians—Tlingits like me—to show them where the gold is. They follow the creek up into the mountains and find a gulch fulla gold-bearing quartz. They load up samples and, after deciding not to run off to Canada with the gold, take it back to Sitka and show it to old George Pilz. And when word gets out, there’s a stampede.”

The cabbie laughed.

“And so ends the heroic story of the founding of the city of Juneau in 1882,” he said. “My professor at the university says it’s Alaska history in a nutshell: greed, natural resource development, booze, sex, and Indians doing all the work.”

The light changed and the cabbie leaned on his horn.

“Goddamn yuppies,” he said. “She’s too busy talking on her goddamn cell to watch the light.”

Kane looked out the window of the cab at the falling slush and the hills beyond. The landscape and climate were different from those in Anchorage, six hundred miles to the north. The trees were bigger, the mountains more abrupt, what fell from the clouds far more likely to be rain than snow.

Juneau is about halfway down a narrow appendage called southeast Alaska. In geography and climate, Southeast has far more in common with British Columbia than mainland Alaska, which sometimes leads those who live in the rest of the state to refer to it as “occupied Canada.”

Kane knew from his reading that Southeast is part of Alaska because of historical accidents. After Vitus Bering “discovered” Alaska by sea in the mid-1700s, the Russian-America Company set up the headquarters of its fur trade at Sitka. When Hudson’s Bay Company traders, traveling by land, reached the area, the companies disagreed about who could do what where. Their respective governments negotiated a border that gave the southeast coast to Russia. The United States inherited the border when it bought Alaska in 1867 and, setting aside various disputes and adjustments, that’s where the border remains.

For political and economic reasons, the capital of the Territory of Alaska was moved from Sitka to Juneau early in the twentieth century. Like Sitka, Juneau could be reached only by air or water and its isolation from the majority of Alaskans led to several attempts to move the capital. But Juneau clings tenaciously to its status and the economic benefits it brings, thwarting the attempts with skillful political maneuvers.

The cabbie was hauling Kane into downtown Juneau on the Egan Expressway, a four-lane that ran along the coast connecting downtown with a glacier-carved valley that is the city’s big residential area, the airport and the bays and coves beyond. The mountains ran right down to the water, so anything that didn’t hang from a hillside rested on fill or glacier outwash.

The expressway had cost millions of dollars a mile to build in the mid-1970s. The official story was that it cost so much because of all the wetlands the road had to cross. The other story, which he’d been told once by Jeffords, was that it was because the state bought a lot of gravel from a well-connected wheeler-dealer.

One thing about Alaska politics, Jeffords had told him, there’s always another story.

“That’s the turnoff to the prison right there,” the cabbie said, pointing with his left arm. “Lemon Creek. I ain’t never been incarcerated, but I got a cousin in there now—the one did this tat, in fact. And a couple of uncles. And a nephew, I think. Damn place is just fulla Indians. So I can see why you mighta thought this was prison ink.”

“No offense,” Kane said.

“None taken,” the cabbie said. “Life is what it is.”

Kane didn’t say anything to that. He knew from his time on the Anchorage police force, and then in prison, that Alaska Natives were vastly overrepresented in the prison population. Just like minorities everywhere.

The cab rocketed past the turnoff to the bridge to Douglas Island and began to slow down.

“Harris and Juneau had staked what they thought was the richest ground,” Kane said to the cabbie. “But the joke was on them. The gold here wasn’t the kind you could dig out by hand. It was hard-rock gold, and you needed a lot of money to run a hard-rock mine. They didn’t have it. Neither did Pilz. So the money to do the mining came from Outside, and the profits went Outside, too. Not much different from what the oil industry is doing now.”

“You some kind of professor?” the cabbie asked. “Or maybe a political junkie, like everybody else in this town?”

It was Kane’s turn to laugh.

“Me?” he said. “No, I’m just a guy who had a lot of time to read. What about you?”

“I take a few courses at the Southeast campus,” he said. “And I read the paper. But I don’t get caught up in what the government’s doing. They ain’t interested in what an Indian thinks.”

He eased the cab up to the front door of the Baranof Hotel and shut the meter down. Kane made no attempt to move.

“You mean, any Indian?” Kane asked. “Or just you?”

“I don’t know about other Indians,” the cabbie said, twisting to look at Kane, “although I never noticed anybody paying much attention to any of us.”

The meter read $18.00. Kane handed over a twenty and a five.

“No Indians at all, huh?” he asked. “Not even Matthew Hope?”

The cabbie’s eyes snapped up to lock with Kane’s. They were flat and hard and black. He swiveled around, wrenched his door open, and climbed out into the slush falling from the sky. He grabbed Kane’s bag out of the trunk and carried it quickly under the overhang that shielded the hotel entrance. Kane followed and took the bag from him.

“You got something with your name on it?” he asked. “I’m going to need some more driving around while I’m here.”

The cabbie dug a card out of his shirt and handed it to Kane.

“Name’s David Paul,” he said, sticking out his hand. Kane shook it. “But everybody around here calls me Cocoa. Just call that number and ask for Cocoa.”

He started out into the rain, then stopped.

“Matthew Hope?” he said, turning to face Kane. “It’s a goddamn shame, what they’re doing to that Indian, just because he won’t play their game.”