Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense (10 page)

“God knows,” Kane said. “Could Senator Hope’s interest in Melinda Foxx have been personal? Social?”

Grantham shrugged.

“As I said, I know very little of their social lives,” he said. “Either of their social lives. But Senator Hope is single and so was Ms. Foxx.”

Kane nodded.

“I’ve been told that even married men aren’t always immune to the temptations of a legislative session,” he said.

“That’s true,” Grantham said. “Spending four months in Juneau every year is more than some spouses can take. So some legislators are here alone, under constant pressure and surrounded by young women and men. Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise that some stray. But if Ms. Foxx was involved with any legislator, married or single, I hadn’t heard about it.”

“Does your wife come with you?” Kane asked, nodding toward a large photo of Grantham and a woman his age that was turned half toward him on the senator’s desk.

Grantham shook his head.

“Unfortunately, no,” he said. “She’s back in Anchorage, tending to our children and grandchildren.”

That line of questioning seems to be petering out, Kane thought.

“How important is the civil unions bill?” Kane asked.

Grantham considered his answer.

“I suppose it is important to certain interest groups,” he said, “and it could have some repercussions at election time. But it is far from the session’s most important issue.”

“Which is?” Kane asked.

“Oil taxes,” Grantham said without hesitation.

“Why are they important?” Kane asked.

Grantham greeted the question with a smile.

“You’re not very political, are you?” he asked. When Kane shook his head, the senator continued. “Oil income accounts for about eighty to eighty-five percent of the state’s general revenue. Our current tax structure is outdated. With the value of oil as high as it is, we’re letting a lot of money get away. There’s a bill to change the tax system. The oil companies oppose it. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.”

“Is Senator Hope involved in the tax issue?” Kane asked.

“We’re all involved in it,” Grantham said. “One thing people don’t understand is that we have hundreds of issues, big and small, to deal with every session. This session, no issue is bigger than oil taxes. The House has sent us a bill, so the ball is in our court. The Senate is sharply divided and every vote counts. So, yes, Matthew Hope is involved in the oil tax issue. As are we all.”

There was a knock at the door and Alma stuck her head in.

“Your lunch appointment is here, Senator,” she said.

Grantham got to his feet. Kane did, too.

“I’m sorry I can’t be more help,” the senator said. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell the press we’ve talked. They’re so hungry for a story about this murder, they don’t care who they hurt in the process.”

He ushered Kane out of his office. One of the whitest men Kane had ever seen stood in the reception area. He was probably six inches over six feet, and so broad he looked square. His hair was the color of straw and his eyes were a blue so pale they were nearly white. His skin was the color of copy paper.

“Hello, George,” Grantham said. “Mr. Kane, this is George Bezhdetny. George is a lobbyist. Mr. Kane here is a detective, working for Matthew Hope’s defense.”

The man took Kane’s hand gently, as if he was afraid he’d break it. Looking at him, Kane was afraid of the same thing.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Kane,” the man said. His voice was a low rumble shot through with an accent Kane couldn’t identify.

“You, too, Mr. Bezhdetny,” Kane said. “Senator, if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to Ms. Atwood for a while.”

Grantham took an expensive-looking overcoat from the rack. Kane and the big man had to step back to give him room to maneuver himself into it.

“If she’s willing to talk to you, I have no objection,” he said. “Shall we go, George?”

The two men left the office.

“That guy’s not very big, is he?” Kane said.

The dark-haired young woman laughed. Alma made a face. Neither of them said anything.

“Do you get to eat lunch?” Kane asked Alma. “I’m buying.” He turned to the dark-haired woman. “That invitation includes you, too.”

The two women exchanged a look.

“I’m afraid Jennifer will have to stay here to answer the phones,” Alma said, “but I’d be happy to join you. Just let me get my coat.”

She went into her office. Kane had his coat on by the time she returned, wearing a bright ski jacket. When he held the office door for her, Alma gave him a big smile.

“Oh, a gentleman,” she said. “I like that.”

Kane smiled back.

“You must have a lot of those here,” he said, as they walked down the hall.

“Not as many as you might think,” she said.

W
hen they reached the lobby, Kane and the woman had to navigate around a knot of people surrounding a well-dressed, dark-haired young woman. They waved notebooks and shouted questions and, every time the woman tried to take a step they shifted to block her way. In the glaring light from the TV cameras, the woman looked dazed.

“Oh, that’s Mary David, Senator Hope’s staff,” Alma said. “She looks like she’s in trouble.”

“How well did your boss know the White Rose?” somebody shouted. “Were they having an affair?”

“How about you?” another called. “Are you sleeping with him?”

“Wait here,” Kane said.

He forced his way through the circle of reporters, earning himself some startled looks and angry mutters. When he was next to the young woman, he said softly, “Hello, Miss David. I’m working for your boss’s lawyer. Would you like to get out of here?”

The woman nodded her head.

“Please,” she said, a note of panic in her voice.

Kane took her arm and started forward. A man in a three-piece suit and carrying a tape recorder blocked their way. Kane put his hand in the middle of the man’s chest and pushed. The man stumbled backward.

“Hey,” he said. “You can’t do that. I’m a member of the press. Who do you think you are?”

“I’m the guy who is going to tie your nose in a knot if you don’t stop impeding this woman’s lawful progress,” Kane said in a loud voice. “That goes for the rest of you, too. Miss David has nothing to say and wants you to leave her alone. So get out of the way.”

“The public has a right to know,” the man in the three-piece suit said.

Kane laughed, put his hand on the man’s chest, and shoved again, harder. The man banged into a TV cameraman behind him. The camera slipped off the man’s shoulder and clipped the man on the side of the head.

“Ow,” he said. “You all saw that—he assaulted me.”

“Last chance,” Kane said, taking another step forward. The man shrank to the side. Kane led the woman to the door, then turned and stood in the doorway while she made her escape. When one of the reporters tried to get through another of the entryway doors, Kane reached out and grabbed his shoulder.

“You really don’t want to do that,” he said.

Deprived of their prey, the pack of reporters broke up. Kane stood there watching until Alma walked up to him.

“That was bold,” she said.

“I hate bullies,” Kane said.

Alma put her hand on Kane’s arm.

“Around here, we treat reporters with kid gloves,” she said.

“I guess that’s because you care what they write about you,” Kane said. “The ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate. What a laugh. Shall we go?”

Kane and Alma became part of a steady stream of people leaving the Capitol, the court building across the street, and the state office building a half-block away.

“Pretty much everything you can see from here is state government,” Alma said. “It’s what keeps Juneau going.”

Kane let her pick the lunch spot, so they walked carefully downhill, avoiding the biggest patches of ice. Alma took a cigarette from her purse and gestured with it.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

“I don’t,” Kane said, “but I thought smoking was not politically correct anymore.”

“It’s not,” Alma said. She stopped, turned her back, and cupped the cigarette to light it. Turning, she sucked in a lungful of smoke and let it trickle out her nostrils. “I guess I’m just an addictive personality. You don’t smoke?”

“I did,” Kane said with a wry smile, “but I had the opportunity to break the habit.”

As they chatted their way downhill, they passed several men chipping ice off the sidewalks. That and all the ice melt spread around made the footing better, but both Kane and the woman placed their feet carefully. During the walk, Kane learned that Alma was thirty-two, originally from Minnesota and working her tenth legislative session, all of them for Grantham. She also said that she was thinking about giving up legislative work to go to law school.

“It’s just not as much fun as it used to be,” she said.

They reached the narrow strip of flat land that rimmed the water. Across the street was a big, blue, shedlike building built out over the channel on pilings.

“This was once the hangar for the airline that flew seaplanes out of Juneau,” Alma said. “They’d take off and land in the channel right there. A man who’d ridden in them said that the first time he took off in one, there was so much water splashing over the little porthole window he thought they were sinking.”

The building held a number of places to eat and a few tourist shops. Their restaurant was built along the channel side of the building, big windows giving a view of the water and Douglas Island beyond. Both the bar and the restaurant were packed.

“Do you live in Juneau?” Kane asked as they waited for a table.

“Year-round, you mean?” Alma said. “No. I spend the interim, the time between sessions, in Anchorage. Here I rent a place across the channel. In fact, you can just see it from here, a little brown place down by the water.”

She took his arm, pulled him close, and pointed. Kane looked along her arm and pretended to see her place.

“You come back to the same place every year?” he asked.

She smiled.

“One of the perquisites of being a longtime staffer,” she said. “I’ve got the moving back and forth thing down pretty well.”

One of the waitstaff led them to a table well away from the windows.

“This is what comes of not being anybody,” Alma said. “The window tables are full of lobbyists and legislators and important staffers.”

Kane picked up the menu, scanned it, and set it down again.

“Was Melinda Foxx an important staffer?” he asked.

Alma set her menu on top of his.

“I suppose I can talk to you about this,” she said, “or else the senator would have said something. But even though I don’t really know much, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone we discussed this subject. As you just saw, the media pressure on this is tremendous, and that means the political pressure is, too. I don’t want the press hounding me, or anything I say to cause problems for my boss.”

Kane nodded.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I suppose everyone I talk to about this is going to be a little wary. So I won’t tell anyone we’ve talked about this. Now, was Melinda Foxx an important staffer?”

Alma looked at him for a time.

“I suppose I’ll just have to trust you,” she said. “Was Melinda important? Yes. Many of the most important bills have to go through the Finance Committee, and she was in a position to affect what happened to them. So she was important.”

The waitress brought them water and bread and said she’d be right back.

“Tell me about the civil unions bill,” Kane said.

“There’s not much to tell, really,” Alma said. “When Senator Hope introduced the bill last session, everyone thought it was just for show. Something to energize his support among progressives. Alaska is such a conservative place, no one thought the bill had a chance. But the bill actually moved through a couple of committees. Nobody knows how. Then it got sent to the Finance Committee, and now it’s stuck there.”

“I read an article about it,” Kane said. “Senator Potter and his allies have some pretty old-fashioned views about homosexuality.”

Alma laughed.

“Old-fashioned,” she said. “I like that. They’re a bunch of bigots, is what they are.”

“So you think civil unions are a good idea?” Kane asked.

Alma gave him a look.

“I’m a woman who likes men,” she said with some heat. “Does that mean I should have more legal protections than a woman who likes women?”

Kane raised a hand in defense.

“Hey, I’ve got nothing against gay people,” he said, “and I don’t know enough about civil unions to know whether they’re a good idea. Marriage isn’t working out so well for a lot of straight people these days.”

Like me, he thought.

“I’m sorry to bite your head off,” she said. “It’s just that the system stacks the deck against getting anything progressive done because it gives power to Cro-Magnons like O. B. Potter. The civil unions bill isn’t the only piece of legislation stuck in his committee.”

“Did Melinda Foxx have strong feelings about the bill?” Kane asked.

“If she did, she kept them to herself,” Alma said.

She gave an embarrassed smile.

“Like I should be doing,” she said. “It isn’t really smart for staffers to express opinions on policy issues.”

The smile left her face and she knit her brows.

I’m paying an awful lot of attention to the way she looks, Kane thought. Danger, Will Robinson. Danger.

“Why are you asking so much about that bill?” Alma asked.

Kane shrugged.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “except that legislative politics are Matthew Hope’s business and were Melinda Foxx’s business, and understanding what people do for a living helps me to understand them.”

“Is that what you try to do?” Alma asked. “Understand people? I thought detectives looked for evidence and clues and stuff.”

The waitress returned. Alma ordered a salad. So did Kane, along with a cup of coffee. When Alma raised an eyebrow at him, he said, “Fighting my weight. I’ve finally got it down to where I want it, but keeping it there isn’t easy.”

“Tell me about it,” Alma said “That’s why there’s something called the Juneau Twenty. It’s the twenty pounds most everyone gains every session from all the free eating and drinking down here.”

The waitress left.

“You asked about evidence and clues and stuff?” Kane said. “People love to think of detecting as a scientific enterprise these days, particularly with all these CSI shows on TV. But I’ve never put much stock in that. I’m certain that something in Melinda Foxx’s life caused someone to kill her, and if I can figure out what that was I’ll find the murderer. So I’m trying to find out as much as I can about her whole life. So you don’t know what she thought about the civil unions bill?”

It was Alma’s turn to shrug.

“I haven’t got a clue,” she said. “Like I said, it’s a bad idea for staffers to express their personal views on legislation. Particularly if they have a boss with ambitions for higher office.”

“Senator Potter has ambitions?” Kane said “What ambitions are those?”

“The story is that he’s thinking of running for governor, like practically everyone else,” Alma said. “Governor Hiram Putnam is so low in the polls that this table would have a good chance against him. And the rumor going around is that the price to get even the mildest bill out of that committee is financial support for Senator Potter’s run for governor.”

Kane took out his notebook and made a note.

“That’s not legal, is it?” he asked.

Alma shook her head.

“No,” she said, “but quite a few legislators don’t seem to care much about legalities. Including Senator Potter.”

Kane wrote for a minute, then asked, “Was Melinda Foxx important to you and your boss? Did—does Senator Grantham have a bill he wants to get through the Finance Committee?”

Alma shook her head.

“When you’ve been in the legislature as long as he has, and in the minority as long as he has, you know that you’re not going to get any bills passed, so you don’t bother,” she said. “You introduce the bills, so you have something to show the voters, but you know that someone in the majority will steal the idea if they think it’s any good, and otherwise your bills are going to just sit there.”

“That must be frustrating,” Kane said.

Alma nodded.

“It is,” she said, then added quickly, “but it’s the way things are. It’s not a reason to kill somebody, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Kane looked out over the room full of people. The ones at the window tables were talking loudest and gesturing most broadly. Like they’re on stage, Kane thought. And I guess in a way they are.

Alma shifted in her seat so she could take in the whole crowd.

“I know someone at every one of these tables,” she said. “I’ve been here too long.”

The waitress brought Kane’s coffee. It wasn’t as watery as the hotel coffee, but it wasn’t great.

“What about other legislation?” he asked. “Like the oil tax bill?”

“I see,” Alma said. “My senator was giving you his ‘importance of oil taxes’ speech. Well, he’s right. Before the White Rose Murder, the press was focused on the domestic partners bill, but the legislature—the governor’s office, too, for that matter—was focused on oil taxes. Now the press is focused on the murder and the legislature is still focused on oil taxes.”

She paused.

“Although I suppose the two are related in a way,” she said.

“The murder and oil taxes?” Kane said. “How?”

“Everyone thinks that if the oil tax bill gets to the floor, the vote will be very close,” she said, “so close that if Matthew Hope—or any other senator likely to vote for it—isn’t there, or changes their vote, the bill will fail.”