He looked at the crumpled ball of tissue. "I dint do it. I dint kill Louis."
"Okay," Kate said. "Say for the sake of argument I believe you. Who did?"
"I don't know." He looked up. "By the time I found him, he was dead."
Back in Jim's office, he said, "How much of that do you believe?"
Kate dropped into a chair and rubbed her face with both hands, and then scrubbed at her scalp for good measure, ruffling the short cap of thick black hair until she looked like an angry panther. She shook her head and it obediently ordered itself again. Was there anything, he thought, that didn't do exactly and precisely what Kate Shugak told it to?
"I don't know," she said. "I talked to Auntie Vi this morning."
"And?"
"Oh, god," she said miserably.
"Did she say they did?" he asked, disbelieving.
She looked up. "She didn't say they didn't. And she gave me to understand that if they did have him killed, it was my fault for not doing it first."
"Christ." He went behind his desk and sat down with a thump. "It's the fucking Sopranos in the fucking Park."
"Okay," Kate said, clinging to sanity, "say they did hire him. Do you believe him when he says he didn't do it?"
"There was that tire track at the scene that matched Howie's Suburban. But you know as well as I do that a tire track all by itself isn't conclusive. Hell, Louis could have taken Howie's ride to go up to the Step to see Dan when I sprung him that day."
"Why wouldn't he take his own vehicle?"
"It was at home, fifty miles from here. Howie picked him up. Or he was supposed to."
Kate thought about it. "Howie sure had opportunity, Jim," she said. "And if the aunties paid him to do it, he had motive. And there must be a dozen guns out at Louis's house. He had means."
He looked at her. "Do you think he did it?"
Mutt, as was not her custom, had not gone straight to Jim and slobbered all over him when they'd arrived at the post. Instead, she had remained at Kate's side. Now she looked up at Kate with a steady yellow gaze. Solidarity, sister. "I don't know," she said. "He's just- He's such a little weasel, Jim. This is Howie Katelnikof we're talking about here, the Park rat most famous for achieving mobility while lacking a vertebral column. It's kind of hard for me to imagine him setting out to kill in cold blood."
"He took a shot at you," Jim said.
"From one moving truck, at another," she said. "He got lucky. Or maybe even unlucky."
"How so?"
"You know how hard it is to shoot a stationary target. Shooting and hitting a moving target is almost impossible, even for an expert, and he's no expert. Much as I loathe acquitting Howie of malice, he could have meant it like a shot across the bows. Throw a scare into us and then go home and tell Louis he did it. Doesn't mean he won't pay for it one day," she added.
"Never for one moment imagined otherwise," he said.
"And though Louis sure as hell wasn't anyone's nominee for humanitarian of the year, he was the closest thing Howie had to a brother. He fed him, he housed him. What little social structure Howie had, Louis gave him."
"He's still got the house," Jim said. "Him and Willard, still living on what Louis inherited from his second wife following her untimely death."
"You think Louis could have threatened to kick them out for some reason? And Howie killed him before he did?" Kate considered this. "Possible, I guess." She shook her head. "I don't know. If the aunties admit they did hire him, you can charge him."
"And if I charged him, I'd have to charge them with conspiracy to commit."
She straightened and looked at him, a sick expression on her face. "Oh. Of course. I… I didn't think of that."
"It's all I have been thinking about," he said grimly, "ever since Howie made me believe it might be true." He paused. "Well. Mostly all I've been thinking about."
Again she blushed, another scorcher. "There is no way," she said steadily, ignoring his last words. "There is no way you're going to march my aunties into a jail cell on the say-so of a loser like Howie Katelnikof."
"I've already winked at the law once in the murder of Louis Deem," he said. "I won't do it again, Kate."
"You'll do it for Bernie but you won't do it for Auntie Vi?" she said angrily.
He got up, came around the desk, and yanked her to her feet. She shoved her hands against his chest but he wasn't trying to kiss her. He shook her once, hard enough to rock her head back on her shoulders. "This is not about that, Kate. What happens there"-a stab of a finger in the general direction of the homestead-"stays there. What happens here is something else. Know the difference."
This time she took the bait. "How could you do that, Jim?"
"I didn't do it alone, Kate."
"I said no!" Kate said. She made an effort and said more calmly, "I said no. Lots of times."
"You turned off the stove," he said. "I- What?"
"When I started coming for you," he said. "You turned off the stove."
She opened her mouth and nothing came out.
"Plus you came three times." He walked to the door and opened it. "We were both angry, Kate, but don't try to turn it into something it wasn't."
She found herself on the other side of his office door without knowing quite how she got there. The door shut in her face. Maggie gave her a quizzical look. "I hate men," Kate said.
Maggie shook her head. "I hear you, honey," she said mournfully. "Oh, how I hear you."
NINETEEN
Over the next three days Kate went in turn to all the aunties, Balasha, Edna, Joy, and even Auntie Vi again. To a woman, they stonewalled her. "They're stonewalling me," she said with incredulity that evening. "It's like they've rehearsed or something."
"They probably have," Jim said without looking up from George R. R. Martin's A Feast for Crows, which he was rereading because Martin was taking an excruciatingly long time to get the fifth book out, at which time Jim might finally learn what had happened to Jon and Arya. It was a good book and a great series and he felt that rereading it was a lot more productive and infinitely more enjoyable than entering into a conversation that he felt in his bones was only going to go in circles until it started biting its own tail.
"They're stonewalling me," she said again, this time emphasizing the last word. "Me!" "Uh-huh," Jim said.
"You should care more about this," she said, glaring down at his bent head.
There had been a lot of glaring going on lately, Johnny thought. He was keeping his own head down over his books at the dining table, praying that this night at least they'd get to eat dinner before the fight started. Place reminded him of an armed camp lately. "Place reminds me of an armed camp lately," he said out loud.
"Shut up," Kate and Jim said together.
"Okay," Johnny said, and went back to Robert Frost.
"Is Howie still at the post?"
"Yup."
Frost was a cranky old fart with a forked tongue, and you were never really confident that he was saying what you thought he was, Johnny thought. They were each supposed to memorize one Frost poem, recite it in class, and then lead a discussion on it for their lit final. His turn was fast approaching and it was crunch time for picking the poem.
"He's still afraid someone is going to kill him?"
"That's what he says."
He'd been considering one of the shorter poems, like "Fire and Ice" because of the whole kaboom thing, or "Once, by the Pacific" because he liked the monster image, or maybe "Design," because the fat white spider would freak out all the girls except Van, and that would be fun.
"Because somebody shot at Mac? And because he thinks they thought they were shooting at him?"
"Something's burning."
Kate charged back into the kitchen and yanked the moose roast out of the oven. She'd been cooking a lot lately, taking both his and Jim's turn in the rotation. The food had been really good, too, and there had been a lot of it.
He liked "Two Tramps in Mud Time" best but it was too long. Maybe "In a Glass of Cider." He read through it again. It was short enough. Maybe too short. Was there enough there to discuss? It had that whole "seize the day" thing going on. Seize the bubble thing, anyway.