Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense (7 page)

By the time he finished, Doyle was red in the face.

“It’s just his preliminary statement,” the lawyer all but shouted. “I’ll have plenty of time to get all that.”

“Jesus,” Kane all but shouted back.

The two of them were silent for a minute.

“Okay, the truth is, I can’t get the guy to talk to me,” Doyle said. “I’ve visited him every day, but that’s all he’ll say. That, and that he didn’t kill Melinda Foxx.”

“Then I suppose I’d better have a try,” Kane said. “I’ll need a letter of authorization from you to show to the people at the prison and, I suppose, to Hope.”

Doyle slid a folded paper across the table.

“Already done,” he said. “Here it is.”

Kane opened the paper, read it, refolded it, and tucked it into the pocket of his suit coat next to the letter from Mrs. Foster.

“So he’s hiding something, but you don’t know what,” Kane said.

The lawyer nodded.

“Then I’d guess we’d better let that go until later,” Kane said. He thought for a moment. “What do you know about the victim?”

The lawyer shook his head.

“Not much yet,” he said. “She was twenty-four. Graduated from Princeton a couple years ago, went to work for Potter. Said to be good at her job.”

“Nothing about her personal life?” Kane asked after he’d finished making notes in the little notebook he always carried. “Her habits? Her ambitions?”

“So far it’s all
de mortuis nil nisi bonum,
” Doyle said. “But that should change soon. Gossip is the common currency of the legislature.”

He looked at his watch.

“I’ve got to get to work,” the lawyer said. “You can reach me here or where I’m staying, at the Mendenhall Apartments up the hill.” He rattled off a couple of phone numbers. “Or you can try my cell.” He gave Kane that number, too. “Now, what are you going to do first?”

“I’m going to read Hope’s statement,” Kane said. “Then I have to make a stop at the police station.”

“The police station?” Doyle said. “What for?”

“Well, normally it would just be a courtesy call, to let them know I’m working on the case,” Kane said, “but in this instance I have to follow up on an incident from last night.”

“Incident?” Doyle said.

So Kane told the lawyer about his encounter with Smith and Jones. When he finished, Doyle said, “They were trying to scare you off? What sense does that make?”

Kane shrugged.

“You said yourself that there are people who want to see Hope stay in prison,” he said. “Or maybe they’re involved somehow in Melinda Foxx’s death. Maybe I can pick up something from the cops on that, if they’ve gotten around to questioning those two. But what I’d like to know is, how did they find out so fast that I was working on the White Rose Murder?”

Doyle snorted and waved a dismissive hand.

“There’s nothing faster than the political rumor mill,” the lawyer said. “I had people calling me up about Matthew Hope an hour after I’d agreed to represent him. And it’s even faster here in Juneau when the legislature is in session. There were probably people here who knew you were going to take the job before you did.”

“Maybe so,” Kane said. “However those guys found out, you should be careful. Nothing would slow down Hope’s defense like his lawyer suddenly quitting. Or maybe falling down and breaking a leg.”

For once, Doyle actually looked surprised.

“I’m an officer of the court,” he said. “They wouldn’t dare.”

Kane got to his feet, picked his coat up from the floor, and put it on.

“Whatever you say,” he said. “Anyway, once I’m done at the police station, I’m going to see your client, our client, in jail. He might be more likely to talk to me there than when he gets back into his comfort zone, his normal environment.”

The lawyer nodded.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said, “although I don’t think you can call the legislature a normal environment.”

I
need a place to sit and read,” Kane said to the receptionist.

Helga gave him a stern look.

“I have my own work to do, you know,” she said, as if she hadn’t been leafing through a women’s wear catalog when Kane emerged from Doyle’s office.

Kane stood there until, with a sigh, Helga got to her feet and showed him into a small conference room. He sat at the table and read the statement. It was every bit as unrevealing as Doyle had said. Kane walked into the reception area, laid the file on Helga’s desk, and said, “Please see that this gets back to Mr. Doyle.”

Helga looked up from her catalog. The fashions in it looked like they were for women several decades younger than she.

“I don’t work for you,” she snapped.

Kane gave her his best smile.

“Of course you don’t,” he said pleasantly. “If you did, I’d fire you. Now, before your burst something, why don’t you tell me where the police station is.”

“Only if they’re going to put you in a cell,” Helga said. Kane kept his mouth shut and she gave him the directions.

Kane left the office and walked the half-dozen blocks from Doyle’s office to the police station, following Helga’s directions carefully downhill, then along the flat. He could see the ruins of the millhouse of the Alaska Juneau gold mine hanging from the hillside above the town. Most of the flat part of downtown was built on rock the miners had gouged out of the A-J in their search for gold. The fog had lifted from the water, and across the channel the homes of Douglas Island, built on the hills in patches stripped from the forest, were visible. Another mine, the Treadwell, had been located on the island. The miners there had been so enthusiastic that they’d followed the gold out under the channel’s bed and finally been flooded out.

Even though it was given over mostly to government and tourism now, Juneau retained some of the hard edge of its mining past. A handful of grimy-looking bars crouched among the tourist shops like winos at a cotillion. A few of the people Kane passed on the street looked like they knew the inside of those bars better than the outside world.

Kane told the woman on the front desk at the police station his name and business there. She told him to take a seat and wait. Maybe ten minutes later, a rumpled guy came out of the back and looked around the waiting area. He was about six feet tall and nearly as wide. His suit looked like it had been slept in, or maybe dragged behind a car. He walked over to Kane.

“So it really is Nik Kane,” he said. “Long time, no see.”

Kane looked at the man, trying to recall his name. A dozen years fell away and they were at a conference in Anchorage. Even with the extra thirty pounds he was carrying, not all of it muscle, he looked like his nickname. Tank. Something that started with a
C.
Crawford, that was it. Harry Crawford, known as Tank.

“They still calling you Tank?” Kane said, getting to his feet and offering his hand.

Crawford eyed the hand warily. The shooting, and the drinking that had preceded it, had made Kane a problematic figure for other Alaska cops, and Kane was never sure what sort of reaction he’d get.

Crawford folded his big mitt around Kane’s hand, gave it a quick shake, dropped it, and patted his stomach.

“Yeah,” he said, “still Tank. Although the weight I’ve put on, I’m not rolling quite as fast. I don’t know what happened. A few years ago everything I ate and drank started staying with me. Now I’m on South Beach and going to the gym. Nothing seems to do any good.”

Kane nodded.

“You’re lucky you’re not eating prison food,” he said. “You’d weigh six hundred pounds.”

Crawford looked him up and down.

“I don’t know, bubba,” he said. “You don’t look so bad.” He pointed at Kane’s scar. “From the neck down, anyway.”

The two men laughed more than the witticism deserved.

“Come on back,” Crawford said.

Kane followed him back into the station to a metal desk that was set facing another just like it. A young guy with an unruly head of curly red hair sat at the second desk.

“That’s Hugh Malone,” Crawford said, taking a seat at the desk. “He’s a mick, if you can believe it. And my partner, if you can believe that, too.”

Kane nodded at Malone and sat in a chair next to Crawford’s desk.

“They get younger every year,” Kane said.

“You got that right, bubba,” Crawford said, then sat looking at Kane. Kane looked back. The silence lengthened. Finally, Kane broke it.

“I’m here to make a statement about being burglarized and assaulted last night,” he said.

Crawford looked down at his desk, took a deep breath, and said, “You don’t have to make a statement, Kane. The arraigning DA decided to kick those guys loose. Said she wouldn’t go forward with a he said/he said, especially when it was two-to-one.”

Kane sat there thinking, then said, “That won’t cut it. The arraigning DA’s, what, a year out of law school? She’s going to decline a case of breaking and entering and impersonating police officers all by herself? With an ex-cop as the complainant? I don’t think so.”

“Think what you want, bubba,” Crawford said, his voice harsh. “That’s the way it is. Maybe the ex-cop’s record had something to do with it.”

Kane could feel the heat climbing up his neck.

“What the hell is going on, Crawford?” he said. He could hear the anger in his own voice.

“That’s all I’m telling you about this,” Crawford said, getting to his feet. “Now, you got anything else?”

Kane stayed in his seat.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “I’ve been hired by Matthew Hope’s lawyer. I was hoping you might tell me if there’s anything I should know that isn’t in the files.”

Crawford looked at him, then at his partner.

“There’s no law against hoping,” he said. “People in hell hope for ice water. But you know I couldn’t discuss this case with you even if it was still mine.”

Kane raised an eyebrow.

“Still yours?” he said.

Crawford gave him a disgusted look.

“Case has been taken over by the state troopers,” he said.

“No kidding?” Kane said. “A murder in your jurisdiction and the troopers got it? How’d that happen?”

“How do you think it happened?” Crawford spat. “Goddamn politics, that’s how.”

“Now, Harry,” the younger detective said.

“Don’t ‘Now Harry’ me, bubba,” Crawford said. “You know goddamn well this wasn’t the chief’s idea. He said it came from the mayor. And somebody’s probably twisting the mayor’s arm, too. Or offering him something. Christ, I hate politics.”

Kane couldn’t think of anything else to say to that, so he got to his feet.

“I guess I’ll have to go talk to the troopers,” he said. “Good to see you, Tank. Malone.”

“Lots of luck with the troopers,” Crawford said. “When I gave what I had to the chief, he said he’d been told to take it straight to the governor’s chief of staff. Police work going to a political appointee. Go figure.”

Kane turned to go.

“You watch your ass, bubba,” Crawford said. “The media’s all over this like white on rice, and all the politicians are looking for someone to sacrifice to the cameras and notebooks. Little guys get ground up in deals like this.”

Kane found his way back to the front desk, asked the woman where the nearest coffee shop was, and walked to it. He sat over a cup of coffee, thinking for a while, then took out a card, looked at it, and punched a number into his cell phone.

“I’m looking for Cocoa,” he said. He listened for a moment. “Okay, have him call me at this number.” He rattled off his cell phone number, ended the call, and sat nursing his coffee. A few minutes later, his phone rang.

“Cocoa?” he said. “Nik Kane. The guy from your airport trip yesterday. I need a driver. A trip out to the valley, some waiting, and a trip back. How much? Okay, that’s fine. I’m at the Heritage Coffee place on South Franklin. Twenty minutes? See you out front.”

While Kane drank his coffee, he read a copy of the thin local daily someone had discarded. “Bail in White Rose Murder?” the front-page headline screamed. Below that story, which was rehashed information glued together with speculation, was a sidebar saying that reporters from several large, Outside newspapers had arrived to cover the killing, along with a couple of Seattle TV crews and people from at least two supermarket tabloids. The story even reported a rumor that a representative of the famous crime reporter Dominick Dunne was in town.

Jesus, Kane thought. The situation reminded him of the Doones-bury strip on the Patty Hearst trial: “Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, jugglers and dancing bears were seen in the streets.”

He scanned the rest of the headlines. A meeting on the school budget. A house fire. Inside, a story on the attempt to raise oil taxes and, above it, a headline that read: “Domestic partners bill stalled in committee.”

The story said that a bill by Senator Matthew Hope, a Democrat, to legalize domestic partnerships for gay couples was buried in the Senate Finance Committee and, according to committee chairman O. B. Potter, a Republican, would never get out.

The bill had been headed for a floor vote, the story said, when Potter asked that it be referred to his committee on the grounds that the state would have to hire more bureaucrats to process the civil unions paperwork.

“I believe in the sanctity of marriage and the family,” Potter was quoted as saying. “Homosexual marriage or civil unions or whatever you want to call them are a threat to marriage.”

The bill’s sponsor, the article said, was unavailable for comment because he was being held for murder. A statement from his office said that the bill was about civil rights, not sexual practices.

“We shouldn’t be discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation,” the statement quoted Hope as saying, “just as we shouldn’t discriminate against people based on their race or religion. The voters amended our constitution to ban gay marriage, and it’s only fair that gays have a legal way to establish their partnerships.”

The story quoted a political science professor as saying it was amazing that, in a state as conservative as Alaska, Hope had gotten the bill through two Senate committees, but that its chances of becoming law were still very poor. Now that Hope was involved in a criminal case, the story said, the fate of the bill was more uncertain than ever.

“We’re still hopeful that the bill will get an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor,” said a spokesman for a gay rights group. “Our legal rights deserve protection as much as anyone’s.”

A Jimmy Joe Carlisle, the spokesman for something called Defenders of Alaska Families, said his organization “and all God-fearing Alaskans” were grateful to Potter for his courage in blocking the bill and that they would continue to oppose any recognition of “the plague of homosexuality.”

“God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” he said. “Homosexuality is a sin and we should not condone it. We should be helping the sinners to renounce their vile practices, not enshrining them in the law.”

Racketa, racketa, racketa, Kane thought. Blah, blah, blah.

Situations like this were the reason he hated politics. Nobody seemed interested in fixing problems anymore. They just wanted to pose and prance for their supporters. Kane found it hard to believe that who was sleeping with whom was any of the government’s business, or that gay people had any less right to enter into legal relationships than straight people. What was it the guy said? “Let gays marry. Why should straights be the only ones who suffer?”

Well, the bigots had made sure gays couldn’t marry in Alaska, Kane thought. Now they were apparently going to prevent any legalization of gay relationships. Then what? Pink triangles?

Shaking his head in disgust, Kane took his coffee cup and walked out onto the sidewalk. Across the street the hillside rose sharply, the few buildings clinging there giving way quickly to trees.

Being here, Kane thought, is just more evidence of how vast Alaska is. You’d think it would be big enough to allow everyone to live in peace. But Alaskans were a contentious lot and, with the imported poisons of the American religious right, the lack of tolerance and respect grew a little every year. Sooner or later, every dispute arrived here, in the state capital, to arouse, to enrage, to bring out violent passions.

Violent enough to lead to murder? Kane thought. I guess I’ll find out about that.