The Singing of the Dead (31 page)

“So when Paula was found murdered, and when I found out that she was writing a novel loosely based on the life of your great-grandmother, one of the all-time great good-time girls, I wondered what you would do to keep that a secret. How far would you go? Would you murder?”

“No!” Anne said, red-faced, angry.

“Sometimes you go too far, Kate, ” Billy said.

“No,” Kate agreed, “but I had help in thinking so. Didn't I, Darlene?”

Darlene, laying the groundwork for a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, remained curled in her chair staring at nothing.

“What do you mean by that, Kate?” Jim said.

“That last threatening letter. PAY UP OR ILL TELL . And then the discovery of the ream of paper and the envelopes in Paula Pawlowski's trailer. Darlene was trying to make it look like Paula was blackmailing Anne.”

“Thus presenting us with a motive for murder,” Jim said. “Very neat.”

“Very.”

There was silence in the room.

“But why?” Anne burst out. She got up and went to kneel in front of Darlene. “Why, Darlene? Did you think my greatgrandmother working down to the Northern Light would kill my chance to win?”

Darlene didn't answer.

“It's not your great-grandmother she was worrying about,” Kate said.

“Who then?” Anne demanded.

Kate looked at Darlene. “Her great-grandfather. I think he killed your great-grandmother.”

“What!”

Kate watched Darlene, who had winced and shuddered. “No no no,” she muttered in a constant murmur, “no no no, it's not true, it's not, no no no.”

“Did you know your grandmother was murdered?”

Anne shook her head. “Nobody's ever talked about it one way or the other. I found out she worked at the Northern Light from some old health records I found up at the clinic, ones left over from when Kanuyaq Copper was still in operation. They had a whole ledger keeping records of the treatments they prescribed to the good-time girls down at the Light. My great-grandmother's name was one of them.”

“Where is it? The ledger?”

Anne flushed. “I burned it.”

“That's a shame,” Kate said. “Not a crime, I don't think, but a shame to burn something so representative of a time and place. Niniltna was the good-time town for the miners up at the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and Mill. Four miles down the road, they could spend a few hours a week away from the noise and the rock dust, with all the booze and broads they could want. Paula's research turned up records of more than a hundred working girls in Niniltna at one time.”

“Darlene?” Anne said.

Darlene didn't move.

“So yes,” Kate said, “your great-grandmother was murdered. I think she was very, very good at her profession. I think her clientele was varied and ranged up and down the social scale, to include some of the more prominent movers and shakers of Niniltna in 1915. Remember, it was a town of fifteen hundred then, a positive metropolis by Alaskan Bush standards. They had hot and cold running water, a telephone system, central heating, all the modern conveniences. And of course a court system, with a resident judge, and a federal marshal, and a chief of police. And a district attorney.” She looked at Jim. “And they were all buddies with a banker from Fairbanks named Matthew Turner.”

“Turner of the Last Frontier Bank Turners?”

“The same.”

“You're kidding,” Billy said.

“The very same. According to Paula's notes, Matthew Turner owned a bank in Dawson for a while, and then followed the stampeders to Nome, where he opened up a saloon. Angel Beecham worked for him there, so they had something of a history.”

“What makes you think he killed her?”

“Okay, a lot of this is guesswork on my part, pieced together from Paula's notes, and I admit filled in with other bits from her book. But the one really damning piece of evidence Paula dug up was a marriage certificate. In 1907,Matthew Turner married one Leonie Angelique Josephine Beauchamp Halvorsen. Angelique Beauchamp. Angel Beecham.”

“He married her?”

“It says so in the Fairbanks city records. Celebrated the twenty-second of September 1910. Said ceremony performed by Judge Joseph D. Brittain. Two years before Brittain was transferred to Niniltna, and five years before Brittain conducted the inquest into Angel Beecham's murder.”

“A Turner married a prostitute?” Billy Mike couldn't get over it.

“Those gals married up a lot. And into some of Alaska's finest families, too, didn't they, Anne?” Her smile was thin, and Billy and Jim, both listening with varying degrees of reluctant fascination, winced at it. “Handy, having a judge in your pocket.”

“When was she killed?”

“April 1915.”

“Why kill her?”

“Wait a minute,” Anne said. “Matthew Turner married Cecily Doogan.”

Kate nodded. “He sure did. And with Peter Heiman and James Seese he went on to found a bank, which looks after my money today.” Such as it is, Kate thought. She looked at Billy Mike. Well, she'd probably saved Anne from getting shot by a neo-Nazi Park rat. Maybe her ten grand wasn't totally in the toilet after all.

“But he married Cecily Doogan in 1914,” Anne said. “January 1914.”

Kate sat up. “What? Are you sure about the dates?”

“Yes. Darlene has all the family marriage certificates in an album. She's very proud of the family, you know.”

The irony inherent in Anne's words struck her the same time it did the rest of them, and she flushed.

“Did they have a child?” Kate said. “Does Darlene keep the birth certificates, too?”

“No no no, no no no, don't believe her, none of it's true.”

“What?” Anne said.

“Darlene's grandfather, when was he born?”

Anne looked shaken. “Nine months after the marriage. I remember because I heard Darlene's mom laughing about how they just made it under the wire.” She tried to smile. “She says she doesn't think the old folks were as prim and proper as the Victorian writers like to make out they were.”

“How's that for motive?” Kate said to Jim.

“He was a bigamist,” Jim said.

“Indeed he was.”

“And if his marriage to Angel Beecham in 1910 was valid, then his marriage to Cecily Doogan wasn't, and that means his children were illegitimate. Unless he married her again, after Angel Beecham was killed.”

“I'd like to have heard him explain that to Cecily,” Kate said. “And I'd have to look up the state statutes on inheritance, but I would imagine that the children, who inherited Matthew Turner's shares in the Last Frontier, would be very much concerned with maintaining their legitimacy in the eyes of the law, or those shares could go to the real heirs.”

“Who would they have been?” Billy Mike said.

“I have no idea,” Kate said.

They turned to look at Darlene, who had ceased her mournful lament and had uncurled enough to lay her head on the back of her chair. As they watched, a tear trickled down her cheek. “My father told me, his father told him, his grandfather told his father. I wished he never told me. I didn't want to know, but he said someone had to know so we could be sure it never came out. He said it should have been his son, but he never had a son so it had to be me. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know.”

“What did Paula tell you?” Kate said.

“She came back all excited from Fairbanks, where she was doing some research for the campaign in the library. She said she'd stumbled across the darndest story of the murder of a prostitute in Niniltna. She had a good idea who'd done it, she said, even though the murder was unsolved. She was going to rewrite her book around it, she said. She had to quit, she said, because she had to write her stupid little book!” She sat bolt upright, bellowing out the words.

“I took my pistol out there, and I asked her to turn over her research. She grabbed the gun. I never meant to shoot her. It was her fault. I had my finger on the trigger, and she pulled the gun toward her, and it just went off. I don't know anything about Jeff Hosford; I don't know what you're talking about as far as he's concerned.”

Kate remembered something. “Your hair was wet.”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

“When you came and got me out of bed to show me the letter, your hair was wet. You'd just gotten out of the shower you took to wash off Paula Pawlowski's blood.”

Darlene stared at her, mute.

“And you wrote that last letter, didn't you. Didn't you!”

Darlene flinched.

“You wanted Anne to think that Paula had found out about Angel Beecham, and that she was going to blackmail her to keep that information quiet. That way, it would look like Anne had a motive. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it!”

“Darlene?” Anne said. “Darlene, say something!”

“Two murders with the same weapon, you knew we'd be looking at the campaign and everybody working on it hard. Anything to diffuse suspicion, even if it fell upon the candidate you had already murdered for in order to keep her in the race. What did you do with the pistol? Toss it in the Kanuyaq?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Darlene said through stiff lips. “I want a lawyer before I say anything else. You're all out to get me.”

Anne, shocked, drew back. “Darlene?”

“Yeah, you're right,” Kate said. “I hit myself over the head.”

“I don't know anything about that,” Darlene repeated.

Yeah, and you don't know anything about how Jeff Hosford died, either, I heard you the first time, Kate thought. “That night in Ahtna when I came to work for Anne, you saw me with Peter Heiman and confronted me in the lobby of the Lodge. Doug broke it up when he came to get you. What was it he said?”

“I don't remember.”

Kate's eyes narrowed in thought. “Anne wanted you—” She snapped her fingers. “Of course. Paula had called and wanted you to call her back. What did she want, Darlene?”

“I don't remember. I don't know what you're talking about.”

Kate looked at Jim. “Remember Paula's notes?”

“Sure.”

“Remember where she scribbled down Pete's and Anne's names and put a circle around them, and connected the circle to Hosford's name?”

“What?” Anne said.

“Yeah?” Jim said, knowing where she was going and willing to play straight man.

“And how we decided it wasn't Anne Gordaoff Paula meant, but Anne Seese, Pete Heiman's sometime girlfriend? And how maybe Anne Seese had loaned Jeff Hosford to Pete Heiman as a spy?”

“I remember that,” Jim said.

Kate turned back to Darlene. “I don't suppose that's what Paula's phone call was about, that evening? She found out somehow that Hosford worked for Seese, and that Seese was sleeping with Heiman, and that as a result the Gordaoff campaign might hold no secrets from the Heiman campaign?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Darlene said.

“And you lured Jeff Hosford out to the van, not a difficult thing to do, and you rode him shotgun, to coin a phrase, and you shot him when his attention was, shall we say, otherwise engaged. Because, like you told me, you'd say or do anything to get Anne elected.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Darlene said. “And I said I wanted a lawyer. I get a phone call. It's my right.”

“Speaking of phone calls.” Kate looked at Jim. “Cell-phone records can be subpoenaed, can't they?”

“They sure can.”

“And we'll find a witness, Darlene. We always do. The month I spent watching you work, you were constantly on the move. One minute at Anne's elbow, the next halfway across town buttering up some elder. You had plenty of opportunity to slip away. To murder. We'll find someone. It's just a matter of time.”

It seemed that everything had been said, and that it was time to go. They got to their feet, Jim with a firm hand on Darlene's elbow as he urged her forward.

“One more thing, Darlene, ” Kate said. Everyone stopped and looked at her. Kate looked only at Darlene. “She didn't know.”

“What?”

Darlene looked exhausted and wholly unattractive sniffing the snot back into her nose, but Kate had no mercy. “There was nothing in her notes to indicate that Paula Pawlowski knew that Matthew Turner was your great-grandfather. I don't think she even knew that Angel Beecham was Anne's great-grandmother. She was interested in what happened to the people who lived then. She didn't give a damn who their kids were or who their grandkids were. She never bothered to trace the descendants. She didn't know Matthew Turner was your great-grandfather.”

Darlene stared up at her.

“You did it all for nothing,” Kate told her. “All of it, for nothing. You killed, you committed murder in the first degree, for no reason. Paula didn't know.” She turned to the door and added over her shoulder,“I really liked her, Darlene. Paula Pawlowski. I only talked to her once, but it was a long talk, and an interesting one, and I considered her a friend. Just so you know. I'll be Jim's first witness up on the stand.”

Darlene's curses followed her out into the night.

T here are holes in Angel's inquest you could drive a truck through,” Jim said.

Kate nodded. They were at Bobby and Dinah's, sitting over the remains of a moose roast avec sauce sauvage ,a little recipe Bobby had picked up from a French friend in Vietnam. Kate had never asked about the French friend, if it was ami or amie ,and he never volunteered, but whatever the sex, the French friend had been one hell of a cook. She mopped up the last of the sauce with a piece of bread and let it dissolve on her tongue in sheer delight. Tony's partner, Stanislav, would kill for this recipe.

Jim nodded at the inquest into the death of Angel Beecham, which a week later they'd all had a chance to read. “They never call the husband. Can you believe that? Not only is he a material witness to the scene of the crime, the judge knows he's the deceased's husband because the judge is the guy who married them in Fairbanks, and he never calls him to the stand.”

“How about the glove?” Dinah said. “Anybody ever look for its mate? Anybody ever try fitting it on Turner's hand?”

They were all calling her Angel now. Truth to tell, she was more real to them than Paula Pawlowski, something the writer in Paula would have rejoiced at. It was one kind of epitaph, Kate thought.