“Sure,” Kate said. “Robert Heinlein character, lived forever.”
Max’s smile was approving. “Lazarus Long said that when a place gets crowded enough to require IDs, it’s time to go elsewhere.”
“You think it’s time to go elsewhere from Alaska?” Kate said.
He cackled. “I’m about to any minute now.”
Kate laughed with him, even if it did feel a little macabre.
“Still,” he said, “even on the Alaska frontier there were the high-muckety-mucks, like there always are, people who get things done or get lucky, usually both. This woman-what was her name again?”
“Victoria.”
“That’s right, Queen Victoria. We called her that,” he said in answer to her look, “Queen Victoria. You couldn’t see the crown when they brought her into the station, but she held her head like it was there, and she sure as hell looked down her nose like it was there. In court, too, from what I hear. Yeah, Queen Victoria was a daughter of two families who made it big in the north, part of the Alaska aristocracy, at least before ANCSA came along and the Natives started elbowing for room at the top. The Pilzes made their money in coal, the Bannisters in supplies, and then they merged by marriage, and it was like the whole state was served up on a plate to their offspring. There isn’t a pie baked in Alaska they don’t get a slice of.” He cocked that eyebrow. “You talk to any of them yet?”
“Her daughter, Charlotte, who hired me. Her surviving son, Oliver. And Victoria. Sort of.”
“And I suppose she says she didn’t do it.”
“She’s not saying anything at all. She fired me.”
It was the first time all day she’d seen him look surprised. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Turns out her daughter didn’t tell her she’d hired me to begin with, and Victoria wasn’t happy when she found out. I went out to Hiland to talk to her and she fired me.”
“Then what are you doing here listening to me yammer on?” He drained the current martini. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“Her daughter pointed out that since she was the one who hired me, she was the only who could fire me.”
“Huh,” he said, and looked around for the bartender. “I have to say, that may be the first time I’ve ever heard of a perp not declaring their innocence every hour on the hour of every day they’re on the inside.”
“Me, too,” Kate said. “Will you tell me what you remember about the case?”
“Do I get a consultant’s fee?”
Kate grinned and pointed at the new martini that had materialized in front of him.
He cackled, throwing his head back, and again Kate could see the man that he had been. She wondered about the ex, if she was still alive. He hadn’t mentioned children.
“Thirty years ago,” Max said, taking an appreciative sip of martini, the unending supply of which did not appear to be affecting him in the slightest. He spoke clearly, without hesitation, from memory, and as he spoke, a young woman walked past on the sidewalk outside the window. She was wearing a black leather jacket hung with chains, racing gloves with the knuckles studded with silver, and black eye shadow and lipstick. Paper clips climbed the curve of her ear, which led the eye upward to the spiked purple hair moussed to stand straight up from her scalp. In the space of two strides, she morphed into a slim young woman with straight light brown hair hanging to her waist, round glasses perched on the end of her nose, a blue-flowered dress gathered just beneath her waist and falling to feet, clad in Birkenstock clogs. Nickleback was superceded by Paul Revere and the Raiders, crack and AIDS was yet to be heard of, the United States was still in Vietnam, and the final report of the Church hearings was three years away.
In Alaska, ANCSA was barely a year old, plans for the TransAlaska Pipeline were going full bore, and in two years little Molly Hootch of Emmonak would file a lawsuit that would force the state of Alaska to build her and her one thousand coplaintiffs schools in their villages so they wouldn’t have to leave home to get an education.
“We’ll start with the crime,” Max said, “because that’s where we always start. First I heard of it was reading the story in the Anchorage Times that morning. House burned down in the valley. Seventeen-year-old boy died in the fire. His brother, though injured, survived. His mother and sister were somewhere else and came home just in time to see the younger brother swan-dive out of his upstairs bedroom window. There was a lot of sympathy for the family. The funeral was like a Who’s Who of Alaska. I think the governor came, and I know both senators and our congressman did.”
“Was the husband there?”
“Who?”
“Eugene Muravieff, Victoria’s husband and the dead boy’s father. Was he there?”
Max rubbed his nose. “No.”
He let the single syllable lie there and gather dust.
“What?” Kate said.
Max shook his head. “Who’s telling this story? All right, then, let me tell it.”
The investigation turned up signs of arson right away, “like it always does,” Max said. “I know the jails aren’t filled with smart people, but I think arsonists have to be some of the dumbest of the bunch. You get a halfway-bright investigator with a decent lab backing him up, you’re always going to know if it’s arson. But all the arsonist is thinking about is getting on a plane to Hawaii with the insurance check in his pocket.” He shook his head. “Nature’s optimist, that’s an arsonist, every time. Well, except when they’re firebugs.”
“Pyromaniacs,” Kate said.
“That’s what I said, firebugs,” Max said.
So they found an accelerant, Max said, in this case gasoline, which the lab identified as being the same gas that was in Victoria’s car.
“Did the car have a locking gas cap?” Kate said.
“A what?” Max said.
“Never mind,” Kate said, “keep talking.”
“Troopers were doing the investigating, because Butte didn’t have a police force and the city limits didn’t even include Eagle River at that time. I was in the office the day they found out about the insurance policies Victoria Muravieff had taken out on her children.”
“What did you think?”
Max snorted. “What do you think I thought? I thought the same thing the investigating officer thought. I thought two million dollars was a hell of a motive for murder. So they brought her in.”
“She didn’t confess.”
“She didn’t say much of anything at all. She called her brother and he got her an attorney. Then we went to court and she went to jail.”
“What about her husband?”
“That would be Eugene,” Max said. He seemed to savor the name.
“Eugene Muravieff,” Kate said.
“Ah yes, Eugene. You know the Muravieffs.”
“We’ve howdied at the AFN convention, but I don’t think you could say we’ve shook,” Kate said.
Max nodded. “Think their shit don’t stink.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Kate lied.
Max barked out a laugh and conjured up another martini. His eye had lost none of its keenness, his words none of their bite. Amazing. “From what I heard as the investigation went back then, Victoria and Eugene had a relationship that looked from the outside more like an armed truce than it did a marriage.”
“Unfriendly, were they?”
Max stroked his chin. “Wouldn’t say that, exactly. You ever read up on the Civil War?”
“A little,” Kate said. “You can’t avoid it.”
Max snorted. “Know what you mean. They’re still fighting that war in the South. Anyway, used to be a hobby of mine, and I remember one of the things I read about was that in the middle of a battle-maybe it’d be Christmas, or maybe it wouldn’t even be a holiday-they’d call a truce, say for twenty-four hours. And for that twenty-four hours, brothers on opposing sides would step out into the no man’s land between the lines and call out messages to each other, news about the family and friends, who was still living, who’d died. And then the truce would be over and they’d go back to killing each other. That was Victoria and Eugene’s marriage, no man’s land, with the occasional truce and some communication, but mostly shooting and a lot of blood.”