Kate, entranced by and a little envious of this portrait of frontier law enforcement, said, “Tell me more.”
He tossed back his head and let out a cackle of laughter, and for a moment she saw him for the vibrant man he had been, instead of the shriveled-up hulk he was now. Just so would she be in fifty years.
“Can you get around without that chair?” Kate said.
His gaze sharpened. “Why?”
She jerked her head. “If you can, let’s blow this pop stand for a while.”
She took him to Club Paris for one of their justifiably famous steaks, and there was nothing wrong with Max’s appetite, or his teeth. Under the influence of his second martini, he began to wax even more eloquent about times gone by. He had a gift for storytelling, and after awhile the bartender stopped even pretending to polish the section of the bar closest to their table. The waitress just pulled up a chair. She wasn’t the only one.
Max had severe opinions on the topic of American presidents for whom he had worked security detail. “Eisenhower was a gentleman. Johnson was an asshole.” This led to reminiscing on the subject of statehood, which came in while he was a TP. “Some of the villages we went into, we were the only representatives of any government, state or federal, those folks had ever seen. I’d fly into a village, wearing my full uniform, and give a talk at the school on the new state and pass around my cuffs and my empty revolver. Most of them had never seen a revolver before, although they all had rifles and shotguns. Then I’d do it all over again for the village council that night. I remember one time-where was that? Chuathbaluk? Tuluksak? No, farther north, maybe Point Lay or St. Mary’s-I was the first they knew Alaska had become a state.”
He’d had some experience in giving medical care, too. “I stopped counting the babies I delivered after I got to ten. Of course that kind of thing could rebound on you-if you knew how to deliver babies, they were apt to think you could do other things, like splint a broken bone or dig out a bullet.” He finished off his martini and the bartender had a third in front of him in sixty seconds flat.
“We didn’t have a state penitentiary back then, and the state rented cells from the feds. Cost about ninety-eight dollars a day to put up state felons in federal prisons, which was probably why everybody’s sentences were so short. We never sent Natives up for longer than five years, they just didn’t survive being jailed. Some of them didn’t survive the five years.” He looked at Kate. “You’re Native.”
Kate nodded. “Aleut. Mostly.”
“Never got that far south.”
“I’m from Niniltna,” she said.
“Niniltna, Niniltna… Oh yeah, sin city for the Kanuyaq Copper Mine.”
“That’s the one.”
“How’d Aleuts wind up that far away from the water?”
“World War Two.”
“Huh. I remember I had to fly up to Niniltna one time to investigate an arson case. It was breakup. Lot of arson during breakup-everybody needs a start-up check in the spring. Still like that?”
“Pretty much.”
“Who’s the cop up there nowadays?”
“Jim Chopin.”
Max shook his head. “Never heard of him,” he said, “a Johnny-come-lately, eh?”
“I’ll say,” Kate said, but he was already off on his adventures in Barrow, where the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory just east of the village made the cardinal error of letting lumber sit around in a pile in the open. “Just a few boards at a time,” Max said, “that’s all, but pretty soon the pile was gone, and the next time I flew into Anaktuvuk Pass, about a hundred miles southeast, I noticed a brand-new addition on somebody’s house. The navy guys decided to chock it up to experience. They locked up their lumber after that, though. The invention of the snow machine really opened things up for people living in the Bush, I’ll say that for it.”
After about two hours of this, during which time Max never repeated a tall tale, Kate had to forcibly remind herself why she was there. The staff had to begin setting up for the dinner crowd and Max and Kate were left alone.
He cocked an eyebrow in her direction. “I’m guessing you didn’t haul this old carcass out on the town for the pleasure of listening to me yammer on, as delightful as I know that must be.”
She grinned. “You guessed right.”
“So?”
“So. You remember the Victoria Bannister Muravieff case?”
He looked at the ceiling through narrowed eyes. Kate could almost hear the card index flipping forward to the M’s. She wondered why they put these old cops out to pasture, the sharp ones like Max, walking, talking repositories of decades of Alaskan criminal history. They knew which oil company had bribed the sitting governor with subsidized travel in return for favorable exploration legislation, they knew which banker had bankrupted which local Native corporation with bad business practices, they knew where all the bodies of the strippers and hookers shot by the serial killer were buried. It was all there, available for the price of asking the question. And maybe a couple martinis. It seemed like such a waste.
“Muravieff,” Max said, “Muravieff. Thirty-one years ago. A house burned down in Bodenburg Butte in the valley. A seventeen-year-old boy was home, died from smoke inhalation. Turned out the mom had taken out a large life-insurance policy on him a few months before. She was convicted. Got life.”
Kate looked at him with real respect. “I’m impressed.”
He preened a little.
“Did you work the case?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Heard the shop talk about it, of course, and we were a lot smaller force in those days, so what one trooper knew, pretty much all of us did.”
It was the closest thing she was going to get to an impartial eyewitness account. To say that Kate was excited was an understatement. “Tell me everything you remember,” she said.
“Tell me why you want to know,” he countered.
“Victoria’s still in jail, out at Hiland Mountain. Her daughter hired me to get her out before she dies, which is looking sooner rather than later because Victoria’s got cancer.”
“No parole after thirty years?” he said, frowning. “That doesn’t sound right.”
“I’ve read the trial transcript. The judge was horrified that she’d killed her own son for money. He didn’t want Victoria to get out of jail, ever.”
“Which judge?”
Kate closed her eyes, the better to visualize the transcript. “Kelly? Kennedy? Kiddle, that was it, Judge James Kiddle.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, a nasty smile spreading across his face, “old Jim Kiddle. We loved cases coming before old Jim. He never met a perp he liked.”
“Is he still around?”
Max shook his head. “He retired about seventeen years ago, when the grandchildren got old enough to enjoy. Three years ago, he took his grandson white-water rafting on the Russian River and fell out of the raft.” Max shook his head. “Damn shame, that. Man was a monument to law enforcement.” He reflected. “Of course, he was eighty-four at the time. At least he went out doing something fun.”
It was the only reference he’d made all day to his own situation. “Do you have family?” Kate said, her voice carefully devoid of sympathy.
“Nah. Well, an ex-wife, who stuck it out up here for all of five minutes before she hightailed it back Outside.” His face softened. “It was my fault. She was new into the country, wasn’t used to the cold or the dark, and I was gone a lot. She thought she was getting a husband, and what she got instead was missing in action. I don’t blame her for leaving.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of the hand. “About your case.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “It was a different place back then, a different time. You need to understand that going in.
“Weren’t but fifty thousand people in the whole state. Everybody knew everybody else-we were all on a first-name basis, made no difference if you were digging ditches or running an airline. Best thing about a frontier society is that it’s wide open to everybody. Course, that never lasts long. Civilization is an insidious thing. You ever hear of Lazarus Long?”