A grave denied (8 page)

“That news already out, is it?”

“Well, hell, Kate, there were a few kids around when the body was found.”

“And some of them play for you,” Kate said. “Yeah, I get it. Anyway, yes. Front and center.”

“Ouch.”

She frowned. “You know him well?”

He shrugged. “Well as anybody, I guess.”

He met her eyes with a look of such studied indifference that she stiffened. “He hang with any particular Park rats?”

“Didn’t have many friends that I noticed.” Somebody yelled for a refill, and as he moved down the bar Kate thought she heard him say, “Not a big surprise.”

She watched him pull a tray full of beers and amble over to the table in front of the television, where sat the four Grosdidier brothers and Old Sam Dementieff, taking turns calling the play-by-play and not hesitating to revile the ancestry of the referees every time a whistle blew.

She heard a song she liked, a woman singing about sweet misery, and she wandered over to the jukebox to see who it was.

“Play a song for you, Kate?” George Perry appeared next to her, smoothing out a bill in preparation for feeding it into the slot.

“I like this one,” she said.

“Yeah, Michelle Branch, great album. Want me to pick up one for you next time I’m in Ahtna?”

“Sure. George, did you know Len Dreyer?”

“Len? Yeah, sure. Well.” He shrugged. “He did some work on the hangar for me last August, after that idiot from Anchorage tried to taxi through the wall.” He fixed her with an appraising eye. “This an official interrogation?”

She made a face. “I’m asking some questions for the trooper.”

“Working for Jim, huh?”

“Yes.”

The flatness of the syllable warned him to go no further down that road, and unlike Bobby, George Perry was a man who liked a quiet life.

“Did Dreyer ever talk to you about friends, his birthday, his parents’ names, his hometown, anything? Maybe you needed his Social Security number to make his payroll deductions?”

He grinned at the hopeful note in her voice. “Nope, sorry. Len worked on a strictly cash basis. For me, anyway.”

“For everybody, is what I’m hearing,” Kate said glumly.

At that moment Brenda Souders walked in, all tits and ass and big hair, and George deserted Kate without a backward glance.

“Hey, girl,” someone said. “Looking for a job?”

“I’ve got one, damn it,” Kate said, and turned to face Old Sam. He wasn’t any taller than she was and he probably weighed less, but in this case size didn’t matter. Old Sam Dementieff had a personal authority that sprang directly from the unshakeable conviction that he was right. All the time. The annoying thing was that he usually was.

“You hear about Len Dreyer?” she asked him.

“Who hasn’t?”

“The trooper wants me to ask around.”

Old Sam raised an eyebrow, which made him look even more like a demented leprechaun. “Len Dreyer, huh? Hear he got it point-blank with a shotgun.”

The Bush telegraph, contrary to form, was keeping it right. Usually by now the weapon should have been metamorphosed into a Federation phaser. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t know him much. Him and Dandy came to Cordova to help me tear down the mast and boom on the
Freya
when I put her in dry dock last September. I was wanting to get the job done before the first snow. Good worker.”

“You didn’t like him?” Kate said, replying more to the feeling behind the words than the words themselves.

Old Sam drained his beer and looked sadly at the empty bottle.

“Come on, Uncle, I’ll buy you another.” She led the way back to the bar and got him a refill. “Tell me about Dreyer.”

“Not much to tell,” Old Sam said. “Showed up on time, knew enough about hydraulics so’s I could trust him with the winch, kept showing up until the job was done. Smiled a lot.”

“That’s it?” Kate said.

“He smiled a lot,” Old Sam repeated, “and he didn’t seem interested in women.”

“He was gay?”

“Didn’t say that,” Old Sam said. “Just I remember one day young Luba Hardt came sashaying by, you know like she does.”

“Young” Luba Hardt was fifty-five if she was a day, but then Old Sam was about a thousand. Everyone looked young to him.

“It was July, and hot,” Old Sam said with relish. “She had her jeans cut up to there and T-shirt cut down to there.” He smacked his lips, and shook his head. “Dreyer barely looked up to say hi.”

It was an exercise in self-control to keep her face straight. “I suppose he could have been playing hard to get.”

Old Sam shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

“Just because he didn’t look at women doesn’t mean he didn’t like them.”

“Didn’t say he didn’t like them,” Sam said. “Just wasn’t interested. Saw it happen a couple of other times, although I admit I mighta been looking for it after that. Can’t be too careful these days, Kate. Guy was gay, he mighta made a pass at me.”

This time Kate resorted to prayer to maintain control. “Thanks, Uncle,” she managed to say, and he took his beer back to the game just in time.

Dandy Mike was in one corner, nuzzling at the neck of a pretty girl, Sally Osterlund, if Kate was not mistaken, Auntie Balasha’s granddaughter. She looked around for a calendar. It was Monday. Quilting night at the Roadhouse was Wednesday. Sally was safe from her grandmother, if not from Dandy.

Well, Sally was of age or Bernie wouldn’t have allowed her to set foot inside the Roadhouse door. Still, Kate wasn’t averse to throwing a monkey wrench into the situation. Dandy Mike spread it around a little too generously for safety’s sake. She walked over to the table. “Hey, Dandy.”

Dandy’s right hand, caught in the act of sliding up the back of Sally’s T-shirt, descended again to a more discreet level. He didn’t dump Sally out of his lap onto the floor, though. “Hey, Kate. You know Sally.”

“Hey, Sally.”

“Hey, Kate.” Sally sprawled back in Dandy’s lap and gave Kate a companionable grin.

So much for the monkey wrench. “Dandy, did you know Len Dreyer?”

“Sure,” Dandy said. “Everybody knew Len.” He caught on. “You checking into his death?”

“I’m asking a few questions is all.”

“Jim ask you to?”

Since Jim Chopin had moved his base of operations to Niniltna, Dandy’s father Billy had been after Jim to put Dandy to work as his assistant. Billy was Niniltna’s tribal chief and not someone Jim wanted to irrevocably piss off, so he was ducking the issue by saying he wanted a bona fide VPSO, or village public safety officer, one trained in criminal statute and procedure at the state trooper academy in Sitka, to back him up. Not, he didn’t say, a rounder of epic proportions whose penchant for partying was only exceeded by his passion for gossip. Although the latter quality could be considered an asset in the law enforcement line of work, Jim absolutely did not want the details of whatever case he was working made known all over the Park. If he hired Dandy Mike, he might as well get Bobby to broadcast them nightly over Park Air.

Jim had in fact been so circumspect that Billy now regarded the situation as a done deal, with the result that Dandy, used to his father fixing little things like DUIs and unplanned parenthood for him, regarded himself as Jim’s de facto right-hand man. It followed that he did not look kindly upon Kate when she infringed on what he considered to be his territory.

He was in for a serious reality check in the near future, Kate thought, but that was Jim’s job, not hers. “Yes, Jim wants me to find out what I can about Len, who his friends were, the jobs he worked lately. What can you tell me?”

The hand on Sally’s waist regained the ability to move. Sally squirmed. Dandy bent his head and whispered something in her ear, and she giggled.

Kate pulled over a chair from another table and sat down, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. She kept her gaze steady, and she said nothing.

Dandy threaded his hand through Sally’s hair, artfully styled into a mop to look like she’d just gotten out of bed, and kissed her. It took a long time and involved a lot of tongue accompanied by, Kate had to admit, some very nice hand work. His technique, though somewhat lacking in spontaneity, appeared effective. Sally’s eyes were glazed and she whimpered a protest when Dandy raised his head. He gave Kate a challenging look.

She yawned, covering her mouth politely with one hand.

He looked exasperated. “Jesus, Kate, you could give us a little room.”

“You should get a room,” Kate said. “Right after you tell me anything you know about Len Dreyer.”

He sighed and looked down at Sally. “How about you get us a couple more beers, honeybunch?” He kissed her pout away and got her started toward the bar with an encouraging pat on the behind. “I didn’t know Len well,” he said. “We worked a couple jobs together, some construction up on the Step for Dan O’Brian, some fixer-upper stuff for Gary Drussell, some foundation work for the Hagbergs.”

“Old Sam says you did some work on the
Freya
, too.”

“Oh yeah, forgot about that. Last September, maybe? Old Sam had her in dry dock. He flew us both down.” Dandy grinned. “I like Cordova. It’s a great little town.”

Translated into Dandyspeak, that meant one or more willing women per block.

“Did Len socialize any?”

“Not that I noticed. He was always on time for work, I remember that. It got to be really annoying after a while.” A sly grin appeared. “I oversleep a lot.”

The grin creased his cheeks and lit his eyes and displayed a full set of white, even teeth to best advantage. He was a good-looking, well-spoken man, and not for the first time Kate wondered why she’d always been immune to his charm. She hadn’t even had a crush on him in high school like all the other girls. He had no focus, she thought, and no ambition beyond the next beer and the next girl.

She wondered if there was any White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in her background. Certainly some ancestor had hardwired her with a respect for the work ethic that wouldn’t quit. The jury was still out on how grateful she was for it. “Anything else you can tell me?” she said. “What’d he do for fun? Who did he hang with? He ever married? Have a girlfriend? Did he read? Did he listen to music? What did he spend his money on?”

“He never mentioned a wife or a girlfriend. Hell, I never saw him with a man friend. He didn’t like Megadeath. He did like Poison, or at least he liked ‘Something to Believe In’ when I played it. Asked me to play it again. He didn’t smoke. Never saw him drunk.” Dandy thought. “I don’t know, Kate, when it comes right down to it, Len Dreyer could’ve taught dull to a brick.” He looked over her shoulder to where Sally was standing at the bar, waiting on beer and flirting with Bart Grosdidier. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a previous engagement.”

“Dandy.” She restrained him with one hand. “There’s nothing else you can tell me?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing.”

You’re lying to me, you miserable little shit, Kate thought. Should she warn him to keep his nose out of it, or not? Not, she decided. Riding herd on Dandy Mike wasn’t her job, and he wouldn’t listen to her anyway.

She made it back to Bobby’s just as Dinah was pulling steaks off the barbecue.

Bobby shoved a fistful of paper at Kate. “Brendan came through.”

She looked at the first page. “Great,” she said with a sigh. “There are eleven Dreyers in the system. None of them are named Leonard.”

“It would certainly be easier on you if he was on the lam, with a rap sheet a mile long,” Bobby agreed.

Kate mumbled something that might have been “Oh, shut up,” and turned the page. “Okay,” she said after a minute. “This is weird. According to Brendan, Dreyer never had a driver’s license.” She paged through more of the pile. “And I don’t see a vehicle registration, either.” She looked at Bobby. “He must have had transportation. Any handyman has to have something to haul his tools around in.” She thought. “I seem to remember, what, a pickup, maybe?”

Bobby frowned. “Yeah, he had a truck. Old Chevy, I think it was, a V8 crew cab with a long bed. A 1981, maybe? Maybe 1982. It might have been silver originally, but that might just have been the primer he was using to patch the rust.”

Kate looked at Dinah. Dinah grinned. Men couldn’t tell you the color of a woman’s eyes they’d spent the previous night with but they never forgot a vehicle. She looked back at the paperwork. “He never applied for a hunting or a fishing license, either. No moose permits, no bear tags.”

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t hunt and fish, Kate,” Bobby said very dryly.

“No, but still.”

“Not everyone hunts and fishes, either. Even in Alaska. Hell, I let everyone else do my hunting and fishing for me. What?” he said, when Kate looked too long at the page.

Kate read the entry for the third time, and it wasn’t because it was hard to read, as Bobby’s printer was working fine. “He never applied for a permanent fund dividend.”

“What!” Bobby roared. “Even a hermit like Dreyer knew enough to stick his hand out for free money!” He would have said more, but the concept of not applying for the permanent fund dividend shocked him into what for Bobby was speechlessness, and well it might. The permanent fund dividend was paid out to each Alaska resident every year from interest earned on oil pumped from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, which sat on leased state lands. The annual dividend over the past twenty years had varied from $300 to almost $2,000, and no Alaskan, whether you agreed with the program or not, failed at the very least to apply for it.