IT’S NOTHARD to find people in Juneau. The suspects are drinking in bars on one side of the street and their lawyers are drinking on the other. I was in the North Pole Bar and I would bet fully half the clientele in the North Pole that night were in violation of the terms of their releases. Some were keeping a low profile, hunched over their drinks like bulldogs over their last bits of food. Emanuel Marco wasn’t keeping a low profile. He was wearing his broad-brimmed hat, and as he walked he was weaving like a dancing bear. He was wearing a full-length leather coat and I knew that he was carrying a gun in the deep inside pocket and had a Balinese throwing knife tucked into his boot. Corny, but I think Emanuel thought it added to his aura as a-man-not-to-be-taken-lightfy.
“It was just a voice on the fucking phone, man. It rang here, man said he was trying to get me since nine this morning. Some guy asking what it would take to have you killed. You, man, Cecil fucking Younger.”
This struck him as incredibly funny. He wheezed out a tobacco-breath laugh that ended in a mucus gag and a swallow. Then he tried to focus on me.
“He must have had the wrong guy. I mean, first of all, you’re nowhere near important enough to have killed. I mean, who in the fuck is going to pay the five grand it takes to have you whacked? We were just sitting around trying to figure it out, Cecil. You don’t know anyone important. All of your enemies are either cops or scumbags. The cops can do you anytime they want, and the scumbags can’t afford to.”
A round of laughter went up around the bar. The bartender, chuckling, continued to wipe the bar with a damp rag.
“I feel safer all the time.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, man. It was somebody just jerking me off. Let me get you a drink.”
He turned his back on me and shouted down the bar at the bartender, who was now leaning across the counter under the TV set trying to talk to a blond lady who was crying and stirring her drink with her finger.
The North Pole is a room for serious drinking. It is long and narrow with a high ceiling that holds the thick smoke above the patrons like a summer fog. There is a mirror and a lineup of bottles. There are no stuffed animal heads or pictures of ships foundering on reefs. There is one beer company sign that has shimmering lights behind a scene of a hunter getting ready to shoot a stag just cresting a hill. The only artifact of honor is in the center above the bottles: an eight-inch basketball trophy. The inscription is tarnished; none of the bartenders know who won it or when. The single leather booth near the bathroom door has been slashed across the bottom so that anyone sitting there sinks awkwardly into the stuffing. The bathrooms are in the rear, and the closer you get to them, the stronger the smell of the round deodorant bricks that are in the bottoms of the urinals. I woke up in one of the bathrooms once in broad daylight and saw some kind of tobacco-colored stalactites hanging from the ceiling. The North Pole doesn’t serve mineral water, and the bartenders don’t give out information about any of the patrons to outsiders unless under subpoena.
Seated next to the blond woman was a woman with raven black hair. She was wearing a blue North Pole Bar wind-breaker. Her head rested on the bar and her arms were folded over her head. She held a lighted cigarette in one hand, a five-dollar bill wadded in the other. She had the hiccups. The bartender took a slice of lemon and doused it with bitters and then a pinch of salt. He placed it in front of her.
“Lucille? Eat this.”
She looked up at him in confusion as if he were standing at her door at four in the morning. Without a glimmer of recognition, she ate the lemon. “Fuck it,” she said. She took a deep breath and sighted down her cigarette, then stubbed it out.
The key to life in the North Pole was to avoid the sunlight and to survive until the night crowd came in. Once that happened anything was possible.
Over in the corner nearest to Lucille was the bar’s only icon. It was a small religious painting. One of the old owners of the bar had been Russian Orthodox and he had put a Russian icon in there but it caused such a stir that the bishop himself came down to see that it was taken out. The owner then found a picture in a library book and ordered a copy of it for the far end of the bar. It was embossed and then mounted behind unbreakable glass and bolted to the wall underneath the hot dog rotisserie. There were scratches on the glass but no writing. The bishop heard about the new image but understood it was a page torn from a book and as long as it wasn’t really an icon he couldn’t muster the energy to go down to the bar again. Besides, he had heard the painting was by an Italian.
It was a little reproduction of the Crucifixion by Anatello da Messina. I had once watched it for the better part of a day, and it was one of the best reasons to drink in this bar. Griinewald had painted the torture of the Crucifixion and the ecstasy of the Resurrection in two separate paintings, but Messina’s Christ was caught in the middle: tired, with his head to one side, beautiful and expectant … but sad nonetheless. The hills beyond Golgotha were sprinkled with the sizzling green light of the olive trees and the sky was the milky blue of an ascending morning. Why would anyone want to leave such an earth?
The ceiling of the bar was painted black yet the smoke still seemed to stain it. The cushions on the stools were red leather and the electric beer sign illuminated the patrons’ skin like a lamp designed to kill bugs. Lucille sat with her head slumped down in front of the Messina, with the five-dollar bill still wadded up in her hand. And she still had the hiccups.
“Fuck it … fuck it.”
Emanuel Marco put the bourbon and water on the bar in front of me. I looked at my watch and it was 2:30 P.M.
“So why in the fuck would somebody want to kill you?”
“Don’t know. Maybe somebody trying to get back at my old man.”
“They sure as fuck wouldn’t kill you if they wanted to hurt his feelings.”
Again, the snot-sucking laugh. Marco was the kind of guy I hoped wouldn’t grow on me. “Hey, I heard about the Judge. I’m sorry, man.” The laugh became a stifled smirk.
“What do you know about Louis Victor?”
Emanuel sighted an imaginary rifle down the bar. “Man, he was the best. ‘Boom.’ The Indian motherfucker could shoot. Best I ever saw. Best my old man ever saw. He used a 45–70. An old army round. I heard that crazy guy who killed him was one huge motherfucker. Huge. Thought he was a bear. Revenging all the lost souls of his brother bears or some shit like that. Anyway, you’d have to be awful big and awful crazy to take on Louis Victor.”
“Victor ever get in trouble with the cops?”
“Nothing serious, you know. Maybe assault, DWI, but shit, nothing serious. Nothing dangerous. He was clean with the Fish and Game cops. Hunting was his life, man; he couldn’t afford to lose his license. I did hear that he was in some trouble when he lived up in Stellar.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, nothing big. Blew over quick and it didn’t follow him down here.”
“What are his kids like?”
“Mousy. More likable than Louis maybe. You know, normal. Lance can shoot, too. He’s really into guns. But he didn’t want to get his hands dirty with work, like his old man did.”
“You know anything about his friend Walt Robbins?”
“All I heard is the same old shit. People say that Robbins was fucking Louis’s old lady when they lived up in Stellar. Robbins is a hell of a hunter, too. He wanted to go into business here in Southeastern but couldn’t get the permit. I heard Louis had some pull with the game board and made sure that Robbins couldn’t get a guide’s permit. Why sweat the competition?”
“What caliber of gun did Robbins use?”
“Fuck, I don’t know.”
“You recognize the voice that talked to you on the phone this morning?”
“Naw, man, I told you—somebody just jerking me off. The voice was all husky and fake-like. It was one of my friends trying to hose me. Hey, don’t worry about it, bud. It’s pretty funny if you think about it.”
I put five dollars on the bar, told the bartender to put it toward Lucille’s cab fare, and headed across the street to see what the ruling class thought was funny. Emanuel was doing his dancing-bear routine as I left, his arms around two embarrassed tourist ladies who had obviously gotten directions to the wrong bar.
The rain had stopped and I could see the near slopes of the mountains that press in on Juneau. Juneau was built on a gold strike around the turn of the century, and the old downtown area still has the feel of a mining town. There are narrow streets and old frame houses that have the lines of Victorian affluence. The whole town clings to the side of the mountains. Of course, out on the highway there are malls and efficiently designed homes built around landscaped woods to accommodate the government workers who live in the capital city. The old downtown area is blooming with international cuisine and espresso shops. But still, down here late at night, you can hear the ore trucks that used to rumble on the planked streets. And sometimes you can hear the laughter of the Norwegian miners coming from the half-opened windows along with the practiced cooing of their whores.
The hotel across the street from the North Pole has been restored to a condition that people like to believe is authentic turn-of-the-century. There are thick carpets and English “antiques” and leaded-glass insets in some of the doors. The bar off the lobby is a power meeting place, where people who make deals and people who want to be perceived as deal makers like to drink. They definitely do serve mineral water at the bar, and the bartenders hug each other when they change shift. The jukebox has George Winston and Billie Holiday, featured but always low and in the background.
I sat at a corner table—oak veneer, with a blue hurricane lamp in the center. I ordered Maker’s Mark and water and waited for someone to come in who would be of some use to me.
Stellar. I’d been looking for a reason to go to Stellar for about six months. Two people who I wanted to see were now in Stellar. So I told myself that I might be able to find something there to explain the relationship between Louis Victor and Walter Robbins.
Edward was in Stellar. At least that’s what I’d heard. Edward and I had been friends in high school. He is Yupik Eskimo, from Stellar originally. He had gone to the Indian boarding school in Sitka but had gotten thrown out and come to Juneau to live with his uncle who worked in the legislature. We’d hunted together every fall. We’d meet on the docks in Juneau and load our gear into a skiff and make the crossing over to the islands off the mainland. We’d pack tarps and a tent, but often we’d move into different cabins scattered around on the homesteads or on mining claims.
We also packed whiskey. We sat in front of a rusted-out barrel stove blowing on the wet wood, passing the bottle back and forth. I think of: whiskey and drying wool, the water-stained wood in the corner of the cabin, the galvanized buckets on stumps holding the dishwater, the light smell of the kerosene lantern. With our rifles unloaded and slung over nails in the corner above the stove, we passed the bottle back and forth, talking about animals. As the bottle got lighter our gestures became wilder, our eyes widened and we imagined we were expanding into our own stories. The animals and the words combined and filled the cabin.
There is always a time when drinking and telling stories that the words begin to dissolve into vague discontent. Sentiment and romance for me … anger and history for Edward. Edward’s speech was a strong staccato when he was sober: musical and percussive. But as he got drunker he would affect the slurred diction of a hopped-up jazz musician. Lying in the bunk, we watched the phosphorescence that glowed on the wet alder wood. The fire sputtered and Edward smoked a cigarette, stretched out in his flannel sleeping bag.
“You don’t know shit about hunting. White men hunt like they’re looking for a job. Get it? Salmon come up the rivers, deer come down in winter. You think it’s like keeping an appointment. You work hard and all that shit, and buy expensive tools … you think you’re pretty good.”
He tried to sit up straight and I heard his elbows knocking against the planks of the bunk. “My brothers are hunters, man. Coldest place in the world. Cold … big … sooo big. You need your luck and, I don’t know … stealth maybe. My brothers know about luck … all of their senses go out into the air. They move through it like wind. They never say anything bad about the bear, or the moose. They keep their luck good. Warm blood out there somewhere, like everything can smell it. They know things about the bears, bears they don’t even see yet. Attention, you got to pay attention, and you take care of your luck. You don’t just bump into the motherfuckers no matter how hard you work.”
He lay back down, banging his head hard against his bunk, his eyes closed, bottle cradled in his arms. He was sick with bad luck, with sweat running down his neck, the wet wood in the stove hissing and popping with smoky flames.
As a private investigator I’m pretty much doomed to hunting by industry: checking records, going through files, interviewing every witness, putting myself in position for the information to come to me. But sometimes I like to fantasize about stealth, to try and understand the thoughts of my prey by smelling the air that he breathes and feeling the ground that he walks on. It’s a fantasy, like I say, and it’s impossible to maintain when I’m drunk. When I’m drunk my senses are blurred by vanity and pity. The perfume of the beautiful blonde.
There in the cabin we drank out of the Jack Daniel’s bottle until we went to sleep. Edward reached for the bottle and toasted the air. He said his teachers at the boarding school really wanted him to be a drunk. He didn’t know why but he knew it was true. He said it wasn’t fair getting thrown out for doing what they wanted.
After I left college I wanted to learn something. I thought if I just filled my head with facts about music and sacred art, all the scary stuff I suspected about myself would be squeezed out, and my head and heart would lighten. Of course it didn’t work, and I knew it wasn’t working all the time I stood by the side of a road in north Africa with my thumb out, reed flutes and books by Henry Miller in my pack. I just ended up with more embarrassing stuff to cart around.
Edward went to college in Kansas and then went back to his village to try and live a life his grandfather would understand. He ended up on the North Slope, working in the kitchen making doughnuts for the work crews and drinking bourbon in the corner of the pantry. He didn’t get in trouble. His white bosses said it was just his disease. I heard a rumor he was turning it around and giving his disease back. I had heard he was sober.
Fuck it.
There were six people in the downstairs section of the bar. I read the paper and had several more cups of coffee. It was about 5:30. Soon the predinner crowd would be ambling in: healthy young professionals, looking good in their wool slacks and fleece jackets. It was a good bar for finding defense attorneys.
I compromised between my dream state and stealth and ordered another bourbon … but in my coffee. Soon I would go back to just bourbon because it would be too late for coffee.
Sy Brown made his entrance, in a raw silk sports jacket with narrow lapels and a thin red tie. He stood framed by the lintel and the doorjamb, scanning the crowd. He studied each person in the bar, and he tugged on his walrus mustache. His dark eyes paused at the woman in the blue blazer and white satin blouse, then they drifted to me. Our eyes met, then he went back to the woman. He studied her as he walked toward my table. He didn’t take his eyes off her as he sat down across from me. She hunted in her purse for a lighter. She wore a pearl necklace and had a pleasing shadow between her breasts.
“You need permission from me to talk to my client, Younger.”
“You did such a great job for him. He just raved.”
“I bet.”
“Would you have given me permission?”
“No.”
“So buy me a drink and tell me why you had De De Robbins whacked.”
“Not funny, Younger. I’ve been through this shit.”
He twisted around in his chair and looked at me for the first time in our conversation. “Christ, why don’t you get something to wear. You always look so damn raggedy.”
He sat up straight and brushed off the shoulders of his jacket as if my clothes were giving off airborne spores. Then he raised his left hand and, unbelievably, snapped his fingers for the waitress. Then he sat back.
“De De Robbins drowned herself. Why in the hell would I want her dead? She was the only one who saw the fight on the beach. She was my self-defense case.”
“How about the Victor kids out on the boat?”
“They were down below at the time. They never heard or saw a thing until the next day when they found out that Louis was missing.”
“What about Walt Robbins?”
“De De Robbins told the grand jury they had dinner, and then the old man had a few drinks. He went below to sleep and didn’t come to until the morning.”
“What do you know about Louis and Walt’s relationship? Did they get along?”
“Christ, you’re really boring. Haven’t you thought of going to law school instead of fooling around with this sleuthing business? Don’t you ever think of your father?”
“Constantly. Tell me about Louis.”
“Okay. He was an Alaskan stereotype—strong, proud Tlingit man, good with a gun, good finding the game. When we were looking at a self-defense claim we did a thorough check on him. He wasn’t a fighter. It’s like that with a lot of big guys, you know, big enough not to have to fight. There was only one case he was involved in up in Stellar. It was an alcohol-related something or another. Maybe a domestic assault, maybe a sex thing, but we had a hard time getting our hands on any of the records because they were sealed by the court to protect their confidentiality. There was some scuttlebutt that it had to do with Robbins and his relationship with Emma Victor.”
“So his best friend sleeps with his wife and he beats her up for it. Was there ever a criminal case?”
“I didn’t say that he beat his wife. But anyway he skated: counseling, alcohol program, and a year’s probation. Nothing that half the guys up there haven’t been through. Louis quit drinking after that. He’d been dry for the last ten years. People said that he was a perfect gentleman, never a harsh word. No incidents.
“Of course, none of that helped us to make our case. Here we had a man who, by all accounts, had led a good life with only one minor transgression, and he had made serious amends for that.”
“Serious?”
“He quit drinking. You know anybody who’s quit drinking lately?”
The waitress brought us one bourbon and water and one imported beer and a fake Waterford glass. Sy tilted the glass and poured the beer gently.
“What about Walt Robbins?”
“He was supposed to be like an uncle to the kids. They had some falling out, I guess.”
“What did they do up in Stellar?”
“I guess Louis liked the tundra in the summer. The family had a fish camp, and I heard he had a love interest.”
“Walt Robbins and Mrs. Victor?”
“Pay attention, Younger. It was Louis had a squeeze. That’s what I heard.”
“How’d Robbins react to all this?”
“Christ, you’re not going to run the ‘jealous lover murders the husband’ routine, are you? There’s nothing to tie him to it. His daughter places him down below, asleep in his berth all night.”
“And she is dead.”
“Fuck, Younger, grow up. If she had anything to say, don’t you think she would have told it to the D.A. or the grand jury?”
“You ever turn your father in for murder, Sy?”
“No. Listen, why is your sister still teaching in New Haven? She’s a great lawyer. She could be making some serious money.”
“No doubt. How did Alvin Hawkes get a job with Louis?”
“He’s a distant relative of someone’s. I think he might even have been related to Robbins. How’s that help your theory?”
“I read Hawkes’s record. Clean except for those couple of drug things. Did anyone suspect that he had mental problems in his past?”
“Hell, the state still doesn’t think he’s got any problems. But he had no record of problems before. His mom said he was ‘troubled.’ Isn’t that what all the relatives tell reporters after someone’s gone to jail? You saw him. What do you think, is he faking it?”
“Everybody’s faking it, Sy. How come you didn’t get him off? Wasn’t there enough around to at least stir up a little reasonable doubt?”
“Hey, listen, Younger, these were bad facts. I’ve got a fruitcake who just fed his boss to the bears, for Christsakes! What do you think, your big-shot sister could have worked with those facts?”
“Don’t be so defensive, man. So Hawkes’s family thinks they’ll give their troubled boy the fresh-air treatment, and a job in Alaska is all that he needs to make a man out of him. He draws a real man for a boss, flips out, and he thinks he killed him. He goes to jail and the day before the trial the only witness who can help him at all gets whacked.”
“Commits suicide.”
“What else you know about De De Robbins?”
“Not much but I’ll show you what I got.”
“If she killed herself, why was she trying so hard to climb up out of the water?”
“I don’t know what was going through her mind. Maybe the water was colder than she expected. Maybe she changed her mind.”
“Why didn’t she swim over to the ladder on the dock?”
“Don’t start in on this … please. The experts say that lots of suicides do unpredictable stuff. It’s reflexive. Only some part of them wants to rescue themselves.”
“The subconscious cavalry.”
“I heard that someone got shot in Sitka last night.”
“Yeah.”
“I heard it was your roommate. Why in the hell aren’t you working on that case instead of digging up dead college girls?”
“Pay’s better. Listen, I want pictures from De De’s autopsy, and I need a list of phone numbers and any travel records you’ve got. I’m going up to Stellar tomorrow. You going to be in early?”
“You going to see your old sweetie up there? She was a very nice-looking lady. I don’t know why you had to treat her like such a piece of shit.”
“I know you’re just trying to spare my feelings but you don’t have to refer to her in the past tense around me, Sy. I want anything you’ve got on the Victors or on Walt or De De Robbins. And I’ll be by early tomorrow.”
“Whatever. I might not be in until late.”
“Then your office will be a mess when you do get in.”
He spread his hands out and shrugged his shoulders. The woman with the blue blazer was drumming her fingers on the bar and studying the casing on the Taiwanese oak bar clock. Sy pushed away from our table.
“See ya.”
He walked over to the woman and as I was on my way to the door I heard him ask her if he hadn’t seen her in one of the local theater productions, telling her she was terrific before she could answer.
I had a cheap room upstairs. Cheap because it faced the street and the bathroom was down the hall. The carpets smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke. No phone, no TV, but lots of cute fake antiques and a sink that didn’t work just like it didn’t work during the days of ’98.
I walked up the stairs. In the shadows of the first landing a young couple was sitting on a rickety love seat staring deeply into each other’s eyes. As I padded up to the third floor I heard the woman saying urgently, “And I don’t want to complicate your life either, but I’m so …”
As I rounded the third landing I took out the key to my room, checked the number, and turned left. Then I heard the unmistakable metallic click of the hammer being pulled back on a large-caliber handgun. I saw a shadow in a doorway move and I felt a pipe nudging my skull.
I turned around slowly and saw Emanuel Marco smiling at me from behind a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. His greasy black hair framed his face, and he smiled like a stray dog with a burr in his mouth.
“Nice gun, Manny, but I think you’ve been watching too much TV.”
“Hey, Cecil, I forgot to mention that I took the guy up on his offer.”
I took a step toward him, slowly. “There have been several mistakes made here, Emanuel. First, why would somebody trust you to do a contract murder, because they must know that I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to tell me who hired you. You know I can get it from my sister.”
I took another small step.
“Nice try, man, but I don’t even know who it is. I just talked to the guy on the phone, and picked up half the money in a garbage can. I get half after. Anyway, anyone who pays to have you killed would pay to have me killed if I screwed them over. And besides, he offered me ten thousand.”
Now his back was against the wall. The gun was at my throat.
“Good negotiating. You think they’re really going to give you the rest? What are you going to do when they stiff you, go to the Better Business Bureau?”
I took another step forward and now I was too close for him to point the gun at my throat. He had to point it at my chest.
He’d watched enough TV to know that if he fired that cannon off in the hall he would have a hard time sliding out of the hotel on little cat feet. He had one chipped tooth in front, and as he looked at me from behind the gun he poked his tongue through the gap in a nervous twitch. Emanuel had a lot invested in his identity as a small-time criminal, and I knew he was a little nervous about his new role as a killer.
“Back the fuck up, man!” He jabbed me in the chest.
I took one more step forward and I was close enough to smell peppermint schnapps on his breath. The .44 was pointed at my stomach.
“The second mistake, Emanuel, is that you’re a fuck-up and wouldn’t know how to kill somebody if they were in an iron lung.”
I lunged forward and brought my left hand around the barrel and my right down toward the hammer. I stretched the web of my right hand, the flesh between my thumb and index finger, and wedged it under the hammer just as Emanuel pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped down and pierced the skin.
I kneed him in the testicles. There was a long phlegm-choked gasp, and then some gagging.
My hand was bleeding a little and I freed my skin from the gun. I opened the cylinder and ejected all the rounds onto the floor.
He started to move in a crouch toward the stairs and I brought the handle down on the top of his head. One of the walnut grips split off and fell over the edge of the staircase landing.
It’s a lot harder to knock a man unconscious than most people think. And it’s kind of a spooky thing to nudge a person that close to death or permanent brain damage. But I tapped him twice. His body went limp. I picked up his hand and grabbed him by his hair and dragged him to the door of my room.
I fumbled with my key, pushed the door open, and dragged Emanuel in. Tightly wedged between the plywood wardrobe and the foot of the bed, his head came to rest next to the radiator, which was banging and rattling as if someone in the basement were sending a frantic message.
I tried to fill an ice bucket from the stove-sink-refrigerator unit and got about a cup of rusty water. I threw it on his face anyway. He didn’t move but his eyelids fluttered. I squatted above his chest and put my face very near his nose.
“I’m going to listen very carefully to your explanation of who paid you to kill me. Then I’m going to decide whether I need to kill you or not.”
“It’s the truth, man. I don’t know. Hey, I was only going to scare you, you know?”
“Where’s the money?”
He pointed to his inside jacket pocket. Then his hand shifted down his leg. I jerked the knife out of his boot. It had an eight-inch black blade. Electrician’s tape was wrapped around the tang for a handle. I pressed it against his throat. His pulse fluttered through his skin at the edge of the blade. I reached in his jacket and pulled out an envelope that held a fat stack of one hundred dollar bills.
“No one gave you this much money to scare me. You have several serious problems, Emanuel, and credibility is not the least of them. Now, who hired you? Think about it. It’s important and it has a bearing on your future.”
The skin broke under the blade of his knife. A thin line of blood trickled down his neck.
“I swear to God, man, I don’t know.” His eyes were glazed, his head was shaking slightly, back and forth.
I patted him gently on the shoulder, then I took the knife from his throat and threw it in the sink. Coercion never works in real life like it does on TV.
“I believe you, Emanuel. I really do. But I can’t have you following me around.”
I put the envelope of money in my back pocket and I swung the butt of the pistol across his forehead. He moaned and lay back.
He kept moaning and his eyes kept fluttering like aspen leaves as I dragged his body parallel to the window and the bed. Now his feet were even with the edge of the radiator. What I wanted to do was set both legs up on the radiator pipe, wedging them firmly between the pipe and the wall. With his torso flat on the floor—head rocking back and forth, moaning—I could stand up on the bed, bounce twice on the mattress, vault forward and land just above his knees. I imagined that they would support me briefly, then snap like pieces of kindling.
But I didn’t. Even if Emanuel was a scumbag who was trying to kill me, I kind of liked him. So I stuck his gun in the top of his pants and threw him down the stairs.