Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

“He called me and told me to meet him at this cabin at Jewel Lake. I went there and two men started shooting at me. They’d already shot Kurt in the chest, and another man in the head, probably earlier that morning. I found this in the dead man’s bedroom.” She produced the photo of the three kids.

Max got out a pair of reading glasses and perched them on the tip of his beaky nose. “That would be William, Oliver, and Charlotte Bannister when they were kids, be my guess.”

She produced the head shot of the dead man.

“Eugene Muravieff,” Max said immediately.

“Victoria says she doesn’t know him.”

Max’s eyebrows went up. “Doesn’t know the father of her three children, does she? Interesting.”

“And now Charlotte’s dead, too.”

“Yeah.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Does that mean you’re off the case?”

Kate’s jaw became very much in evidence.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, without his usual sparkle.

“What?” she said.

He sighed. “Ah hell, maybe I’m getting old. I’m thinking they’ve already killed twice, attempted to kill twice more. Pursuing this could be hazardous to your health.”

“Not to mention the people working for me.”

“He over twenty-one?”

“What?”

“This Kurt guy. He over twenty-one?”

“He’s in his thirties, what’s that got to do with anything?”

She snapped out the words, and Max didn’t bother hiding a grin. “It’s got to do with him being a grown man, and you not being his mom.”

She shrugged, uncomfortable.

“You didn’t kill Charlotte, either,” he added, “just in case you were feeling all-omnipotent over there. Any identification in the cabin with the dead guy?”

“There was a wallet with twenty bucks and change in it, along with a driver’s license that identified him as Gene Salamantoff.”

“Salamantoff are shirttail relatives of the Muravieffs, as I recall. Be easy to get one of them to share his social security number for a fake license.” The waitress twitched by, and since she was a kind young woman, she put a little extra into it when she saw Max watching. He gave a sigh of pure appreciation. “Nowadays, legs on a woman are just basic transportation, you know? Used to be a pleasure watching them walk. Used to be they took care of their butts and walking was an art form. Now it’s just a butt in a bag and they could care less how they sling it around. But that girl, I’m happy to say, is an exception.”

Kate looked at him.

With some asperity, Max said “Well, pardon me all to hell for expressing an appreciation for one of the finer things in life.”

Kate rubbed her forehead. “Could we just concentrate for a minute here, Max? I’ve two dead and one injured, and it all seems to be related to an arson murder that happened thirty-one years ago.”

“Victoria did it,” Max said.

“She might have killed her son,” Kate said, “but her alibi for her daughter and her ex is kind of solid. Look, could we-”

“What?”

“For the sake of argument, could we imagine for a moment that Victoria didn’t do it? And that if she didn’t, who had the next best motive?”

She watched him take a mouthful of martini and swirl it around. The man had to have a cast-iron stomach, not to mention a worm in his gut that sucked up all the alcohol he downed and got drunk for him. She waited, patient and not entirely without hope.

In her experience, retired cops were less cynical than cops on the job because people hadn’t been lying to them on a daily basis lately and they were once again willing to allow doubt into their lives. If she could get Max to speculate, maybe it would open up a line or two she could follow.

In the meantime, Max had made a decision. “Okay,” Max said, “maybe it wasn’t meant to be murder. Maybe it was only meant to be a warning.”

“To Victoria?”

“Maybe. Maybe to Erland, or the old man. Did you see the old man at that party you went to?”

“The old man? You mean Jasper, Erland’s and Victoria’s father? I thought he was dead.”

“Not yet, although he must be even older than me by now.”

“No, I didn’t see him. Why?”

The stubble on Max’s chin rasped beneath his fingers. “Jasper had him a reputation. You ever hear the story about Richie Constantine?”

Kate shook her head.

“Before your time. You know about Jasper’s wife, Erland’s and Victoria’s mother.” Kate shook her head, and Max snorted. “They teaching you newbies anything these days? Jasper had a mistress. Her name was Ruby Jo, Ruby Jo Lawson. Rumor had it she was working the back rooms at the Mustang Club when they met, and he took her out of there and set her up in her own little house in Spenard, where he visited regularly. About that same time, another local businessman, Calvin Esterhaus, was going up against Jasper in some financial deal or other, had to do with oil leases somewheres, or that was the rumor. He told Jasper to back off, Jasper wouldn’t, and Calvin hired Richie Constantine to make Jasper see the light.

“Richie Constantine was a small-time thug who had the single virtue of loyalty. Some people say he had some kind of a thing with Calvin.” Max shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “I wouldn’t know. Alls I know is that Calvin was one of the sicker sons a bitches to walk the streets of any town, anywhere, and Anchorage was unlucky enough for him to call it home. Richie was his button man, his bag man, his enforcer, you name it. Calvin said jump and Richie said how high.

“Calvin told him to put a scare into Jasper, and Richie watched and waited until Jasper was away from home, and he went inside and raped and killed Ruby Jo.”

Max brooded for a bit. “We knew right away, of course. We arrested Richie within twenty-four hours. We even had ourselves something of a case-physical evidence linking him to the scene, not a half-bad description from an eyewitness, who even picked his photo out of a book of head shots.” He looked at Kate. “So we let him go.”

Kate stared at him. “What?”

“We let him go,” Max repeated, and waved over another martini. When it came and Max had appreciated the waitress’s walk enough, he said, “It was a different time, Kate. The word came down to turn Richie loose.” He smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. “He didn’t want to go. At one point, we had to pry his hands loose of the bars. But we tossed him out on his ear.”

Kate was beginning to understand. “When did you find him?”

“We didn’t.” He paused, enjoying Kate’s expression for a moment. “We found Calvin, though. Next morning, floating facedown in McHugh Creek. His dick was cut off and stuffed in his mouth.”

“Jesus,” she said.

Max nodded. “Yeah.”

“And Richie?”

“Richie?” Max’s mouth twisted up at one corner. “Richie was next found on the payroll of Jasper Bannister.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

Max shook his head. “Oh no. Jasper appreciated loyalty and efficiency in an employee, especially when he needed somebody to get at those hard-to-reach areas.” Max paused, clearly enjoying the expression on Kate’s face, and added, “Of course, there was that whole disappearing thing Richie did during the pipeline days-oh, say a year before oil in. Richie just flat disappeared. You know that rumor that kept floating around, about somebody finding a body in the pipeline when they walked the first pig in front of the oil from Prudhoe to Valdez? I always thought that must have been Richie.”

In spite of herself, Kate couldn’t repress a shiver. Seeing it, Max nodded. “Calvin was an amateur compared to Jasper.” He saw her expression. “What?”

“I had a case this summer. A guy got killed in the Park. Turned out he was a baby raper, on the run from the law. We had the hell of time identifying him. He didn’t have a driver’s license or a pilot’s license or a fishing license or a hunting license. He didn’t have a social security number. There was a screwup with the fingerprints, and we didn’t know until way late in the game that he’d done time, let alone been in the army. Hell, he never even applied for a permanent fund dividend check. By then, I knew we had a vie who didn’t want to be found. I never did know who he didn’t want to be found by.”