Dana Stabenow - A Fine and Bitter Snow

“It’s not that far. Stop whining and drive.”

They trod the steps to the broad expanse of split-wood deck, neatly shoveled, a wrought-iron table leg peeping from beneath a lashed-down blue plastic tarp in one corner. She knocked, far too conscious of Jim Chopin standing directly behind her.

They waited. He must have heard them coming up the river road.

The door opened. “Hello, John,” Jim said.

“Jim,” John said. He looked down. “Kate. You’re back. Come on in.” He stepped back and pulled the door wide. “Get you a drink? Or some coffee?”

“Coffee’d be fine,” Jim said.

John served it up in the same carafe on the same black lacquer tray, this time with a plate of Oreo cookies. “Got a sweet tooth,” he explained, and took a handful for himself before he sat down. Mutt sat next to Kate’s chair. She had not greeted Letourneau. He had not saluted her. “What can I do you for, Jim?”

“It’s about Dina Willner.”

Letourneau didn’t start or pale. “That a fact. And why would you think I would have anything to tell you about Dina Willner?”

Kate, watching Jim, saw the split second it took him to make up his mind. “Maybe because you were married to her.”

“Mmm.” Letourneau ate another cookie with studied nonchalance, but Kate, watching him now, got the impression that he was anything but unconcerned. “So we were. For about three seconds once, a long time ago.”

“Twenty-five years ago, to be exact.”

Letourneau’s eyes moved restlessly beneath heavy lids. “If you say so.”

“The marriage certificate at Dina’s house says so.”

“Ah. Surprised she kept that. Dina never was one to collect souvenirs.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No,” Letourneau said coolly.

“No?” Jim said.

“No,” Letourneau repeated, and stood up. “If that’s all, I’ll say good night.”

“John.” Jim sat where he was.

For the first time that evening, John Letourneau’s voice rose. “I thought you had whoever killed her locked up in Tok.”

“I thought I did.”

Letourneau stiffened. “You thought you did? You mean you don’t think he did it?”

“There are some loose ends.”

There weren’t, or not any that would stand up in court, Kate thought, and wondered again why she and Jim were there.

“Well, this isn’t one of them. My marriage to Dina had nothing to do with her death.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” Jim wasn’t the self-effacing type, but he could put on a pretty good show when he thought it might get him information he wouldn’t get any other way.

The moment hung in the balance. It could have gone either way. Seconds ticked by.

Letourneau sighed and sat down again. Rate walked over and refilled her mug, grabbing up a couple of cookies while she was at it. She wandered over to the window and stared out on the moonlit expanse of river, frozen hard and, due to the stresses and strains exerted by the subsurface current, anything but smooth. It was covered with snow machine tracks, swooping and winding around bergs and pinnacles. An open lead streamed gently, then vanished as she watched, the ice closing it off again.

“What do you want to know?” Letourneau said. She turned to watch.

Now that he had what he wanted, Jim added a little humility for effect. “I don’t know, John, I’m just fishing, really. It surprised me that Dina had been married.”

Letourneau gave a short laugh. “It’d surprise a lot of people.”

“I thought she came to the Park with Ruthe.”

“She did.”

“But…”

John’s back was very straight. He seemed to Rate rather like a soldier marching into battle, facing heavy enemy fire yet determined to do his duty. “Back when I was just proving up on my homestead, back when Dina and Ruthe first bought the camp and started importing tourists, they got some who wanted to shoot with more than a camera. They farmed them out to me. They helped me get my start. I was ten years younger, but we had a lot in common, and there weren’t a hell of a lot of other people around in those days. Dina and I got to know each other.” He paused. “And then it got to be more than that.”

“How did Ruthe feel about your relationship?”

“I don’t know. I never talked to her about it.”

“Come on, John.”

“I don’t know, damn it,” Letourneau said sharply. “We eloped, just the two of us. Dina flew us to Ahtna. We got married by the magistrate there. We lasted a month.”

“What happened?”

“It’s personal.”

“What happened?”

“I’m telling you it has nothing to do with Dina’s death.”

There was a time to ease up. This wasn’t it. “What happened, John?”

Letourneau swore beneath his breath and got up to pace to the fireplace. It was the first time Kate had ever seen him lose his composure. He turned and gave them an angry look. “I took her away from Ruthe. Ruthe took her back. That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

There was present anger and remembered misery on John Letourneau’s face. There was also the whip of humiliation, an emotion in a man of John Letourneau’s age and upbringing that would matter more than the first two. He’d been outperformed by a lesbian. His woman had gone from him to another woman.

“And since?” Jim said.

Letourneau mastered his feelings and returned to his chair, making a business out of refilling his mug and biting into another cookie. “There is no since. We coexist. I even send customers their way. They do the same. We get along.”

Kate remembered Dina tripping Letourneau with her cane on the Roadhouse dance floor ten days before. In Letourneauspeak, “get along” could mean anything short of murder.

Or it could mean murder.

It was a well-known maxim of law enforcement that the spouses of the unexpectedly deceased were always the prime suspects. The nearest and the dearest got the motive with the mostest. One of Jack Morgan’s Laws.

But Jim Chopin had the prime suspect in custody. So what, Kate asked herself for the tenth time, were they doing here, exactly?

“You got along, did you?” Jim said.

Letourneau looked irritated. “What I said.”

Jim pretended to consult a note on his pad. “That why you turned the Kanuyaq Land Trust into the IRS for using donations to politic instead of to buy land?”

What? Kate almost said, and then Jim caught her eye and she thought better of it.

Letourneau shrugged. “They were using money to lobby the legislature and Congress on environmental issues. Money raised specifically to underwrite land purchases in the Park. That’s just wrong.” He gazed at Jim benignly. “It was my public duty as a citizen to report that to the proper authorities.”

Kate thought of what Dina’s reaction would have been to that statement and now understood completely why they had come to John’s lodge.

“I also heard the judge kicked the case,” Jim said.

Letourneau shrugged again, and this time he smiled, too. He had regained his equilibrium. Kate had the uneasy and entirely unwarranted suspicion that it was because they had missed something, something he didn’t want them to know, that he was glad that the conversation had turned into this channel, and that there were others they could have taken that would have been far more dangerous to him. “He disagreed with my attorneys. What can you do?”

“I also heard-”

“You hear a hell of a lot, now don’t you?”

Unperturbed, Jim began again. “I also heard that you fought the increase in acreage to the wildlife refuge of the Park included in the d-2 lands bill.”

“So? More wildlife refuge equals less hunting. I surely to heaven wasn’t alone in that.”