I DON’T LIKE to tell people what I do. They always say, “That must be interesting” and then stare at my chest as if they expect me to pull a gun from under my jacket and dive through the open window out to my waiting car. I don’t like to tell people what I do because eventually I disappoint them. I don’t drive an expensive car or an old car with lots of character. In fact, I don’t have a driver’s license. I hitchhike, take cabs, or walk. All three are much better for conversation anyway.
I don’t carry a gun. I don’t own a handgun, but it seems like there are guns everywhere I work. Look beside the cashbox, behind the bar, the nightstand in the lawyer’s bedroom, the cargo pouch of the snowmachine—you’ll find one. Large-caliber revolvers mostly, with a solid phallic gravity. But every once in a while there’s a small well-made lady’s gun.
It’s not that I disapprove of handguns; I don’t carry one mostly because the police won’t let me. They like to picture me knocking on a psychopath’s trailer door with nothing but a number 2 pencil, a spiral notebook, and maybe a tape recorder for protection. But it generally works out. The few times I’ve been able to predict that I’m going to need a gun I take the Judge’s long-barreled 12-gauge to the front door. And when the unexpected happens and I am most needy, I wait for the karmic cycle to deliver a piece into my hand. Of course, that hasn’t happened, but hope springs eternal.
Physically, I’m also a disappointment as a private investigator. The scar above my right eyebrow is my only dramatic feature. I got it in the sixth grade when Eric Hoffert pushed me into the water fountain. It’s the outward sign of my heroic inward suffering.
I like where I live and that hasn’t been a disappointment yet: a three-story frame house built on pilings over the water. It has everything I need—office, kitchen, bedroom. Two years ago, we used to flush our toilet and hear the water drop right into the Pacific Ocean under the house. But now the city has a new system so we can flush the toilets and it will travel along an elaborate system of drops and pump stations and be deposited several miles across the island—into the Pacific Ocean. I like where I live, only it seemed a little far away on this particular morning.
I was teetering the boxes down the street, sweating, cursing alcohol, and needing a drink. I stopped in front of the bar and leaned against the wall to talk to a fisherman I knew. I was hoping he would be able to fill me in on what had happened last night—specifically to my charge card. No luck. He had been practicing his saxophone down on his boat all night and he was very excited that he had finally learned to play “In a Sentimental Mood.”
He explained that he was a former folk musician taking that twisting musical road into the nineties.
“Pretty twisty,” I said, and shouldered my boxes up. I told him to drop on by and play for me sometime and reminded him not to leave my old Sonny Rollins records next to the exhaust manifold, that my Willie Dixon records had never survived his blues period at sea. I had given all of my records and tapes away and it hadn’t occurred to me yet to buy a CD player, but I still didn’t like the thought of my treasures being abused.
It was a rare clear morning at the end of October, but it was bound to change. The fishing season was slowing down and most of the boats were in their slips in the harbor. Music was playing from their pilothouses, and the air was filled with the romantic ambiance of gulls calling to the air and diesels blowing out their cooling systems. Someone had had bacon for breakfast, and there were groups of three or four men and women standing around the dock thumbing through engine manuals with their cups of coffee perched on the electrical meters.
Sitka is an island town where people feel crowded by the land and spread out on the sea. This morning to the north and east, the mountains were asserting their presence by showing off the new snow that dusted them down to the two-thousand-foot line. A woman on a troller threw a bucket of breakfast scraps off her back deck and an eagle dove, lifted a blackened crust of bread, and flew off toward the trees where the deserted graveyards lay.
I banged the front door with my feet and Toddy came down the first flight of stairs to help me. Toddy is my roommate—actually, I’m his unofficial guardian. An old friend from Social Services asked me to look out for him until other arrangements could be made. That was two years ago.
He and I were born in the same year under the same sign. We’re 1950 models and Cancers. He has a crew cut, and his glasses have lenses so thick that when he stares up at you, his eyes swim around his face as if he were trying to balance half-dollars in his eye sockets. He is continually sliding his glasses up his nose with his index finger even when he doesn’t need to.
I first met Todd in jail. He had been arrested for stealing a pair of shoes and several women’s suit coats. When I went to interview him in his cell he was wearing inmate’s blue pajamas. His head was shaved and he sat on his bunk, rocking back and forth, twisting his finger as if he were braiding cable.
The police and the shopkeepers never put all of the facts together: Money was never missing, there was never any vandalism, but every so often a gray woman’s suit jacket would vanish and once a pair of brown leather pumps was gone from its cardboard box. Store employees were subjected to long straightforward interviews of the “It will be all right if you just want to get it off your chest” variety. It was suggested that a polygraph machine would help them to get it off their chests. But it wasn’t until a janitor at the elementary school found a gray woman’s suit coat hanging above some sensible shoes in the back of the furnace room that the whole spectacular crime unraveled. Todd, an assistant janitor at the time, was sitting behind the hot-water heater with his head in his hands, weeping.
After he was placed under arrest, the police prided themselves upon solving a particularly puzzling crime. The Social Services people were assured that their suspicions about Todd were well founded. He was designated as a “person in need of aid,” handcuffed, and taken to the jail.
Some people say Todd is retarded. At Social Services they said he was “mentally and emotionally challenged,” but the woman who used to love me said he had too gentle a heart to live in the real world.
He was charged with criminal mischief. I was sent by his attorney to talk to him about his defense. First I had to go to the law library and find out what the elements of criminal mischief were and then interview Todd and see if it was true that he was a mischievous criminal. I intended to talk to him about times, places, motives, and maybe an alibi; instead he told me about his mother.
Todd’s mother had been a teacher at the elementary school; his father had been a mechanic working out in the logging camps. When he was six, they had ridden on a friend’s small trailer out to the logging camp at False Island. After his dad finished work on one of the light plant generators, he and some of his friends in camp went down to the dock to drink and listen to the radio. They were drinking beer and whiskey, telling stories, and every once in a while when a good song came on through the static, his dad would grab his mother and spin her around on the dock to dance. Todd remembered how her laughter seemed to bubble out of her mouth like birdsong. He was laughing when his father twirled her an extra flip and she fell into the bay, and everyone was laughing when they hauled her out. She stood with water beading off the strands of her hair, embarrassed and shivering, trying to giggle. Someone gave her another drink of whiskey to warm her up. It was a cool fall afternoon and everyone thought she was going down below to change her clothes, but when someone checked on her later they laughed again because she had passed out with her wet clothes on. The radio played up on the dock and Todd sat down below in the boat watching her teeth chatter. He was worried when he saw that she’d broken one of her teeth chattering so hard. He put a blanket over her. He wished his father would come, but gradually he stopped worrying when she stopped shivering. I’m not sure if he realized he had watched his mother die of hypothermia, but, if he did, it didn’t seem to bother him because his mother had since told him not to worry.
The cell was the green cement of an old railroad station. The bunks were metal slats and damp blankets. The tags that said, “Do not remove under penalty of law” were missing from the mattresses. On the back wall was an elaborate chalk drawing of a trolling boat with its poles down, lines in the water, sailing toward a black setting sun. Underneath in blue ink someone had written “Seiners Suck.” There was a radio playing, and the guy in the next cell was doing pushups to the beat of a Bruce Springsteen song.
“It’s a funny thing,” Todd said, and he squinted at me. “When Jesus was alive, how was he connected to the earth? By his feet, just like the rest of us, except he didn’t wear shoes because his spirit went right into the ground like lightning. But most of the rest of us wear shoes so it keeps us from grounding out. Ever notice how it hurts most people to walk barefooted but the people in the Bible go barefoot so easy—that’s because they’re ready to be hit by lightning.”
The radio in the next cell had switched to a country western ballad, and the inmate was doing situps.
Todd spoke a little more softly. “If I arrange the shoes just right somewhere my mom might have stood, God will hover there like a little mist. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t even look like anything except maybe a little rain cloud, but”—he sat forward and his body relaxed as if the words were an exhalation of a long-held breath—“if I hang a coat above the shoes, the mist fills up her clothes and Momma can talk to me from heaven. But only if I arrange the shoes in just the right place in a particular way. It would be crazy to do it otherwise.”
He told me about the place in the furnace room where his mother had told him what heaven was like and about all the gifts she was saving to give him when she saw him again. She made him promise never to tell anyone else what heaven was like because it would make life on earth that much harder. In fact, she had regretted telling Todd the details of heaven and that was why he was crying when the janitor walked in on them. His momma had told him she was not going to talk to him anymore. She was worried that he wanted to be in heaven more than he wanted to be on the earth. She said that God wanted him to be on earth a little longer. “You are all I have left on earth,” she told him and then began to fade into the furnace pipes and asbestos insulation.
I read somewhere that when a child realizes his favorite doll cannot speak back to him, there is a silence that fills the mind. There was Toddy, with nothing of his greatest love but some stolen shoes and a suit jacket, and the world was very quiet.
I sat in the cell with him. The inmate next door had turned off his radio and was stretching. I felt a little uncomfortable, and I didn’t quite know what to ask next. But there was one thing I wanted to know.
“What is heaven like?”
He held his hands palms up and looked sad and apologetic. “It’s funny,” he said, “but since she left I can’t remember a thing about heaven. Not pictures or anything, only feelings sometimes. Feelings … like I can almost remember but I’m not sure. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think I do.”
The door banged against the wall. “Todd, get one of these boxes, would you, pal?”
“Sure, Cecil. I was just listening to the radio and looking at books about how they pumped air into the hull of the Titanic and about how you can avoid getting the bends. Do you know those bubbles when you open a pop bottle? Well, that’s like what happens when you get the bends.”
Todd was wearing bib overalls and a forest green jersey underneath. He had his down booties on, so it was a good bet he had spent the morning under an afghan reading the encyclopedia.
I kicked off my leather slip-on shoes and put on my house slippers. We both started padding up the stairs. I wanted to smell some coffee.
“Those bubbles get in your blood and they can cause extreme discomfort.”
“I can imagine. Listen, we got any coffee?”
I looked out the windows above the sink overlooking the channel. A beautiful steel-hulled crab boat was passing, gulls diving in its wake. I noticed there was coffee on, and Toddy had done all the breakfast dishes. I walked over and took a mug down from one of the brass hangers.
“Cecil, do you think you could salvage boats from underwater? It is very dangerous and there is a great amount of discomfort involved, but very often it can be quite lucrative.”
“I don’t know, Todd. I bet between the two of us we could get it done. But, listen, do you think you could turn down the radio some? I’ve got to read all the crap in these boxes, and I’ll have to make some phone calls.”
“You have another case, Cecil?”
“You don’t have to ask in such a tone of shock, do you? I have plenty of cases. They’re mostly inactive at this point.”
“Sunken,” Toddy murmured, and he chuckled as he padded toward the radio.
“Funny! To answer your question, I don’t know if I have a new case or not. It might be more storytelling than investigation.”
“Will it be quite lucrative?”
“Excessively lucrative, Todd, and particularly free of extreme discomfort. So much better than raising sunken ships.”
I sat on the couch facing the woodstove. It had started to rain, which is what it mostly does in southeastern Alaska in October. The stove created a pleasant bubble of heat in the room. The rain sounded like birds dancing on the tin roof. I was drinking coffee with half-and-half and as the afternoon progressed I added one small shot of Irish Cream. Todd flipped through the T’s and listened to the radio while I read the history on Louis Victor’s murder.
In May of 1982, Louis Victor had hired a young farmhand from Illinois named Alvin Hawkes. Hawkes worked as a deckhand on the charter boat. Victor needed an errand boy to help meet the needs of the German industrialists who come to Alaska and pay an average of ten thousand dollars for the privilege of shooting a brown bear with a high-powered rifle. Hawkes also packed lunches, filled gas tanks, and started lunch fires on the beach to warm the clients.
There were several people who came forward later to say that Hawkes seemed strange; that he talked to himself, and would sometimes stand alone and seem to be arguing with himself. There was a transcription of telephonic testimony from a well-known Hollywood actor who had been a client of Victor’s. He told the grand jury that at the time he thought Hawkes “had a screw loose” but he had never mentioned it to anyone until contacted by the district attorney’s office.
On October 2, 1982, Hawkes was supplying a remote hunting cabin on Admiralty Island. Hawkes had stayed in the cabin for a week, cutting wood and hiking, trying to get a fix on the bears in the area. For ten thousand dollars you don’t want just any bear, you need to take home the skin of an awesome man-eater, the only other slavering omnivore in North America. And you don’t want to walk too far to find it. So the guides learn the habits of the local bears to give their clients the shortest walk and the best shot.
On October 3, Louis Victor received a radio transmission from Hawkes that sounded like he was in some kind of trouble. Victor and his two adult children, Lance and Norma, took their boat, the Oso, from Juneau up into Seymour Canal on Admiralty Island. A close family friend, Walter Robbins, traveled with them in his own vessel along with his daughter De De, who was his deckhand that season before she started college. It was early evening when they arrived.
Robbins said in his statement that he saw Louis go ashore with his rifle to speak with Hawkes. The next morning, Alvin Hawkes was raving about how Louis Victor had gone crazy and tried to kill him and then had run off into the woods. Hawkes had a cut across his cheek and a bruise where it appeared he had been hit with a blunt instrument. There was blood on his shirt and a great deal of blood on the steps and door latch of the cabin. Hawkes maintained that all of the blood was his own, and that Louis had attacked him with a splitting maul.
There was a statement from Lance Victor that he had seen Hawkes throw a rifle into the bay early that morning. Lance showed the state troopers where the rifle had been thrown. Later, a dive team recovered it from the water.
I flipped through a dozen packets of 3-by-5 color prints: Shots of the cabin from the air. Shots of the cabin from the water. Shots of blood spattered on the outside of the door. Shots of troopers holding rulers next to blood spattered on the doorjamb. Shots of gray hair caught in the splinters on the edge of the chopping block. And shots of the rifle. It was a 45—70, not the most common caliber in this part of the country, but it was the rifle that Louis Victor carried when he hunted Sitka blacktail deer.
They found Louis Victor’s body lying in the grassy flats of an estuary about half a mile from the cabin. His body had been partially consumed by brown bears.
There were some notes back and forth from the FBI and some bear experts at the university in Fairbanks. The experts expressed the opinion that it was unusual for a brown bear to have destroyed the body, and the only possible way to explain it would be if the man was dead before being consumed. Brown bears won’t eat their human prey, it seems; black bears do.
The photographs of the body were 8-by-10, in color, showing long strands of meat clinging to the skeletal remains of an upper torso. The thin bones of the sternum had been snapped into splinters where the bears had rooted around in the chest cavity snuffling up Louis’s internal organs. The cuffs of his blue wool shirt were still intact around his wrists. His head was shorn of its scalp where a massive paw had slapped across it. The bone of the skull was glaring white. The head was propped on a rock, and the eyes in the sockets were brown, the lids gone, the eyes staring at the photographer as if in shock.
I imagined the D.A. putting those pictures in the files to give to the victim’s mother: “The meddling old bitch wants to see everything, we’ll show her everything.”
There were transcripts of four interviews the state troopers had conducted with Hawkes on the fourth, fifth, seventh, and tenth. On the fourth, Hawkes seemed nervous. He was stammering, and he must have moved around the interview room a lot, because he showed up as “unintelligible response” on the typed transcripts, but he stuck to his story: Louis had gone crazy and had come at him with a splitting maul. They had struggled briefly, and when Hawkes had slugged him, Louis had run into the woods. Hawkes knew nothing about a killing.
The transcripts of the fifth and seventh showed a much more nervous Hawkes. His stuttering was more pronounced, and he blurted out non sequiturs as if speaking to someone not in the room: “Shut up, you bastards.” It was noted that Hawkes shook his head violently and kept digging in his ear with a wooden match, repeating: “Shut up, you bastards.”
On the ninth, the autopsy report was released, indicating that Louis Victor had been killed by a gunshot wound in the head. There were no powder burns nor signs of heavy bruising, indicating the shot was not fired at close range. The entry wound was a small hole below the right eye that originally had been mistaken for the puncture of a large canine tooth.
On the tenth, Hawkes spit out his words in spraying stutters. The typist who had worked on the tape was clearly struggling; she punctuated his comments with question marks in parentheses. Hawkes claimed to be an agent of “a great power.” He heard voices generated from the center of the earth. A transmitter had been implanted in his inner ear at birth, and this allowed Alvin Hawkes to hear the instructions. He had tried to explain to Louis Victor that the voices had foretold his death. The voices had said that Louis would be killed by the great power. He would be killed, he had to be killed. And wasn’t Victor now dead? Didn’t that prove that he was telling the truth—that the voices always told the truth? They foretold the future perfectly, perfectly.
In Alaska, there is no insanity defense that’s worth anything to a defendant, so the troopers weren’t worried about that, but they were worried about the fact that Hawkes seemed to be confessing before he had answered yes to the Miranda questions as to whether he understood his rights. The typed transcript of the last interview was obviously more worn than the others, and the critical statements constituting his Miranda warnings were marked in yellow, probably the work of Hawkes’s attorney.
The interview had started off as a friendly talk. “You understand, Alvin, we just need to clear things up. You were there. You can help us. Now, Alvin, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. … Do you understand, Alvin? Do you understand?”
Although Hawkes had answered yes to several questions, including the one about the Miranda warnings, whether he understood them was left open, since by the end of the interview the transcripts indicated “unintelligible sobbing” and profanity: “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Christ. Oh, Jesus.”
For the next six months, Alvin Hawkes underwent a battery of psychological evaluations while he was in custody. His court-appointed lawyer decided to make the question of his sanity moot and tried to force a deal with the D.A. to reduce the charge to manslaughter by threatening to take the case to trial on the self-defense issue. Crazy or not, Hawkes’s story seemed to be that he had been attacked by Louis after he had given Louis the disturbing news from the center of the earth. He had been attacked by Louis and had fought back in self-defense.
There had been a witness to the fight. Walt Robbins’s daughter; eighteen-year-old De De, had been on deck while her father’s boat was anchored in the bay. De De Robbins told police investigators and the grand jury that she had seen two men fighting in front of the cabin after Louis went ashore. She had seen them wrestle out the door and then roll back into the cabin. She thought it looked more like horseplay than a real fight. She went down to the forward berth where her father was sleeping. He had gone below shortly after dinner. Walt and De De pulled anchor early the next morning to go hunting. They only came back to the cabin when they heard the emergency radio transmissions from the Oso to the state troopers’ office in Juneau.
The D.A. wanted murder one and tampering with evidence: Hawkes had dragged the body to the estuary to destroy the evidence of the crime. The defense attorney was holding out for a manslaughter plea bargain. Otherwise, he would take it all the way and either try to get Hawkes off on a Miranda-violation motion or make the state try him on the self-defense angle. He intended to keep Hawkes off the stand and introduce the first taped statement because Hawkes wouldn’t sound as crazy as he would if the D.A. got hold of him on cross-examination. The jury would love the crying on the tape.
The best part of a murder trial is the victim never gets a chance to testify.
I poured a little more Irish Cream into my cold coffee. Todd got up and turned off the radio and went to the refrigerator to pour himself some milk. Up to this point, the case seemed unremarkable, although it did seem to have some sad touches of drama. But as I read the next section of the file I had a funny reaction: In spite of my hangover and the first blurring effects of the Irish Cream, my skin crawled like I had just eaten some bad Chinese food.
On the eve of the trial, De De Robbins, the only defense witness, was found floating next to a pier off the docks in Bellingham, Washington. Friends had seen her walking out of a rock concert with a date. The witnesses stated that they thought De De and her date had been drinking, they appeared to be weaving and stumbling. The autopsy indicated an elevated blood-alcohol level. There were pictures of her body on the stainless steel examining table. She was milky white, and the insides of her arms and her chest were abraded with scratches and bruises where, it appeared, she had tried to pull herself out of the water by climbing up one of the mussel-encrusted pilings. In one shot her head was tossed back and hidden from the camera by the strands of wet hair clinging to her face. The next shot showed her full face: lifeless eyes open, stunned and afraid.
There was a memo from the Bellingham Police Department speculating as to whether Alvin Hawkes could somehow be tied in to an organized-crime network. The state troopers couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for that theory, so they focused on the defense attorney, Sy Brown. Could he have wanted to win the case so badly that he would arrange a key witness’s death?
“She was my witness. Why in the hell would I want her dead? Grow up.” That brief message was handwritten on a yellow memo pad.
Two days after her death, De De’s father, who’d claimed the body, was packing up her room. He read the diary that was inside her night-table drawer. In the entries for the last five days of her life she had written that she was worried about a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t know how Rudy would deal with the situation, if it went the wrong way. She’d written poems, rhymed couplets, asking God to take care of her and Rudy and “please not to give us gifts that we are not ready for.” The last entry was written in an uneven scrawled hand. It said that she had prayed a lot and had decided she couldn’t live without her baby. There was a photocopy of this page. The last two lines read, “There are so many lies—there are so many lies. There is nothing I can do. Papa, do you understand? There is nothing I can do.”
The autopsy report, stapled to the police report, indicated that the corpse had been a pregnant female Caucasian.
There was also a police summary indicating that the police had talked to De De’s boyfriend (in his wife’s presence), and he had reported that on the evening of her death, De De had been extremely upset, had been drinking, and had gone out to meet someone else. He didn’t know whom and apparently he didn’t care.
In a letter to the Alaska death investigators, the Bellingham Police Department reported that, as a result of their investigation, they had concluded that De De Robbins had committed suicide. The findings were based not only on the diary and the police reports, but on statements from her college classmates, all saying she was “despondent during the last few days of her life,” and from her boyfriend, Rudolfo Anastanso, a Filipino floor-covering contractor, who was in the process of separation from his wife at the time of De De’s death.
With the death of the only independent witness (and maybe because of a little fear of the official heat created by the Robbins death investigation), the defense attorney folded. On July 7, he pleaded Hawkes guilty but mentally ill to the murder two count and to the offense of tampering with evidence.
But there was one last surprise. The D.A. produced several doctors who had examined Hawkes. They testified that while Hawkes “had suffered periodic psychotic episodes, he was not currently legally insane. The best therapy for him would be to serve whatever sentence seemed appropriate not in the Alaska mental-health system but in the correctional system.” Hawkes was crazy, but not crazy enough.
Sy Brown had been taken by surprise by the state’s assertion that Hawkes was sane. I read through a flurry of official memos from him to the Department of Law.
One from Brown read, “If this guy is so sane, how about a third-party work release into your custody?”
The response: “He’s not crazy and you know it. He’s just your basic murderer. We might consider a twenty-four-hour release to you. It’s going to be a long winter for the bears.”
There were others complaining about the ethics of surprise tactics and about the propriety of handshake agreements when dealing with the “protection of the citizens of the state.”
The memos never changed a thing. Hawkes went down hard. On October 15, 1982, he was sentenced to forty years for murder two and five years for tampering with evidence. His case wasn’t appealed on the Miranda issue.
Hawkes is presently being held at Lemon Creek jail until he can be shipped to Leavenworth where he will serve no less than three-fourths of his original sentence: thirty years of Salisbury steak and instant mashed potatoes, weight lifting, skull picks made from toothbrushes, and listening to the voices scream inside his head.