“Old Sam says you did some work on the Freya, too.”
“Oh yeah, forgot about that. Last September, maybe? Old Sam had her in dry dock. He flew us both down.” Dandy grinned. “I like Cordova. It’s a great little town.”
Translated into Dandyspeak, that meant one or more willing women per block.
“Did Len socialize any?”
“Not that I noticed. He was always on time for work, I remember that. It got to be really annoying after a while.” A sly grin appeared. “I oversleep a lot.”
The grin creased his cheeks and lit his eyes and displayed a full set of white, even teeth to best advantage. He was a good-looking, well-spoken man, and not for the first time Kate wondered why she’d always been immune to his charm. She hadn’t even had a crush on him in high school like all the other girls. He had no focus, she thought, and no ambition beyond the next beer and the next girl.
She wondered if there was any White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in her background. Certainly some ancestor had hardwired her with a respect for the work ethic that wouldn’t quit. The jury was still out on how grateful she was for it. “Anything else you can tell me?” she said. “What’d he do for fun? Who did he hang with? He ever married? Have a girlfriend? Did he read? Did he listen to music? What did he spend his money on?”
“He never mentioned a wife or a girlfriend. Hell, I never saw him with a man friend. He didn’t like Megadeath. He did like Poison, or at least he liked ‘Something to Believe In’ when I played it. Asked me to play it again. He didn’t smoke. Never saw him drunk.” Dandy thought. “I don’t know, Kate, when it comes right down to it, Len Dreyer could’ve taught dull to a brick.” He looked over her shoulder to where Sally was standing at the bar, waiting on beer and flirting with Bart Grosdidier. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a previous engagement.”
“Dandy.” She restrained him with one hand. “There’s nothing else you can tell me?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing.”
You’re lying to me, you miserable little shit, Kate thought. Should she warn him to keep his nose out of it, or not? Not, she decided. Riding herd on Dandy Mike wasn’t her job, and he wouldn’t listen to her anyway.
She made it back to Bobby’s just as Dinah was pulling steaks off the barbecue.
Bobby shoved a fistful of paper at Kate. “Brendan came through.”
She looked at the first page. “Great,” she said with a sigh. “There are eleven Dreyers in the system. None of them are named Leonard.”
“It would certainly be easier on you if he was on the lam, with a rap sheet a mile long,” Bobby agreed.
Kate mumbled something that might have been “Oh, shut up,” and turned the page. “Okay,” she said after a minute. “This is weird. According to Brendan, Dreyer never had a driver’s license.” She paged through more of the pile. “And I don’t see a vehicle registration, either.” She looked at Bobby. “He must have had transportation. Any handyman has to have something to haul his tools around in.” She thought. “I seem to remember, what, a pickup, maybe?”
Bobby frowned. “Yeah, he had a truck. Old Chevy, I think it was, a V8 crew cab with a long bed. A 1981, maybe? Maybe 1982. It might have been silver originally, but that might just have been the primer he was using to patch the rust.”
Kate looked at Dinah. Dinah grinned. Men couldn’t tell you the color of a woman’s eyes they’d spent the previous night with but they never forgot a vehicle. She looked back at the paperwork. “He never applied for a hunting or a fishing license, either. No moose permits, no bear tags.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t hunt and fish, Kate,” Bobby said very dryly.
“No, but still.”
“Not everyone hunts and fishes, either. Even in Alaska. Hell, I let everyone else do my hunting and fishing for me. What?” he said, when Kate looked too long at the page.
Kate read the entry for the third time, and it wasn’t because it was hard to read, as Bobby’s printer was working fine. “He never applied for a permanent fund dividend.”
“What!” Bobby roared. “Even a hermit like Dreyer knew enough to stick his hand out for free money!” He would have said more, but the concept of not applying for the permanent fund dividend shocked him into what for Bobby was speechlessness, and well it might. The permanent fund dividend was paid out to each Alaska resident every year from interest earned on oil pumped from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, which sat on leased state lands. The annual dividend over the past twenty years had varied from $300 to almost $2,000, and no Alaskan, whether you agreed with the program or not, failed at the very least to apply for it.
Bobby gave her a shrewd look. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“I know exactly what it means,” Kate said. “It means his name wasn’t Leonard Dreyer.”
“Dinner,” Dinah said, bringing in a platterful of steaks from the porch, “is served.”
“I got to thinking after you left,” Bobby said, handing Kate a plate to dry. The dinner dishes had been cleared away, and Dinah was readying Katya for bed. “I think maybe Dreyer was in ‘Nam.”
“Yeah?” She put the plate away and got handed a bowl.
“I was working in the yard the day he was working on the roof, and I had the portable CD player on the porch with CCR on. ”Run Through the Jungle‘ was playing, and he sang along to it. Hell, we both did. When it was over he looked down at me and said, “Lord it was a nightmare,” and I said ’The devil was on the loose,“ and he said, ”Got that right,“ and I went back to my bonfire and he went back to stapling shingles.”
“That’s all?”
“If you were there, that’s enough.” He pulled the plug and let the water gurgle down the drain.
Kate thought about it as she hung the dish towel on the handle of the refrigerator. The only other personal information on Dreyer she had discovered was that he’d liked a song by another band, who was it… Poison, that was it. It rang a bell with her but she couldn’t place it. She’d have to look through her tapes when she got back to the cabin.
“Kate?”
She looked around to see Bobby jerk his head toward the porch. Dinah was billing and cooing to Katya and didn’t notice them leave, or pretended not to.
Kate perched on the porch railing and inhaled spring air. It had been another sunny day, temperatures in the mid to upper fifties. That was one thing she liked about living in interior Alaska, it warmed up faster and got hotter than the coastal communities. “What?” she said.
Bobby rolled the tires on his chair back and forth some. He radiated an aura of deep discomfort. Kate wondered what was coming. Was Dinah pregnant again? If so, why the long face? Was he finally, at long last, low on cash? She did a mental calculation, figuring out how much she could spare from what she needed to keep in reserve to wage a custody fight.
“It’s about my brother,” he said, the words bursting out of him like champagne following a cork, only not quite as effervescent.
Kate stared at him, mouth slightly open.
“What?” he said defensively.
She got her jaw back up and her voice working again. “You have a brother?”
He scowled. “Why does everyone keep saying that? Yes. I have a brother. And he’s coming to town. Tomorrow.”
“Oh.” For the life of her, Kate couldn’t think of what next to say.
Bobby stewed for a moment. “Name’s Jeffrey. Not Jeff, not Jeffie, Jeffrey.”
“Okay.”
“Jeffrey Washington Clark. Washington was my mama’s family name. It’s my middle name, too.”
“Okay,” Kate repeated. “So,” she said, venturing out cautiously, “great, your brother’s coming. Be the first time he’s visited the Park, right?” Oh no, she thought, realizing suddenly what was in the wind. He wanted her to give his brother the dollar and a quarter tour. She remembered what had happened the last time she’d toured a friend’s relatives around the Park, and shuddered.