Though Not Dead (35 page)

There were photographs in other publications of an Alaska Steam freighter burning in Dutch Harbor after the Japanese attack, of the Japanese carriers that had launched the bombers, of before and after views of Aleut villages. Most of them had Russian Orthodox churches, each with its distinctive onion dome. She found photos of the USS
Delaroff
evacuating Aleuts from the war zone, most to old salmon canneries and defunct mines in Southeast, others to elsewhere in Alaska, including the Park. She looked for Shugaks leaning over every railing.

She found no record of Old Sam or of Mac McCullough or of the Sainted Mary in her cursory search, but the faces in the photographs stayed with her. The frightened and bewildered expressions of the Aleuts, who’d been allowed to take with them only what they could carry. Colonel Castner looking a little like Ike. The 807th Engineers in flat-brimmed World War I helmets, who built the landing strip on Adak in ten days. A shocking image of the Battle of Attu, showing a dotted string of GIs struggling across the almost vertical face of a snow-covered mountain.

It brought Old Sam’s war home in a way Kate had never felt before. In front of Dinah’s camera all he’d said was that the war had been cold, foggy, and bloody.

She understood a little better how Samuel Leviticus Dementieff and Herbert Elmer “Mac” McCullough could have forged a relationship that had nothing to do with patrimony and everything to do with survival.

Mac had given Old Sam life. Twice.

Find my father.

It didn’t have quite the ring of “Follow the money,” but it was pretty succinct nonetheless. Old Sam never had been one to babble.

Kate thanked the librarian and went out to the car and got in. Mutt sat up and looked at her, cocking her head a little.

She got out again and walked around the car, checking the lug nuts on every wheel. One time she hadn’t, and in this very parking lot, too, with disastrous results.

All serene, and having recovered some sense of equanimity, she drove to Title Wave, where she bought new copies of
The Thousand-Mile War
and
Castner’s Cutthroats,
and from there downtown, where she was further heartened by finding an empty parking space right in front of the DA’s building.

“Kate!” The big man enveloped her in a comprehensive embrace that left her feet dangling in the air.

“Oof! Brendan, let me down!”

She found herself propelled into his office and seated in a chair he emptied of files by the simple expedient of tilting it forward to let them slide off into a jumbled heap on the floor.

Brendan McCord had been an assistant district attorney for over fifteen years. During that time, he had resisted every attempt at transfer or promotion, steadfast through six different mayoral and four different gubernatorial administrations. He didn’t care about money and he had no ambition to run for office. He was perfectly happy to beaver away where he was until retirement, putting bad guys away for as long as legally possible and even, on more rare and therefore more welcome occasions, seeing something like justice done. Large, as untidy as his office, ruddy-cheeked and red-haired, clad in a suit that came off the rack at Value Village and a tie sporting the remnants of his last three meals, he sat on the corner of his desk and beamed at her, his big-featured, good-natured face the first line of defense against the intelligence and curiosity in his sharp eyes. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” he said, and leered. “Back to take me up on my offer of a life of unsanctified bliss?”

“Can you get me someone’s prison record?”

“Sure.” He made an expansive gesture. “Anything for you, my own, my black-eyed Kate. Give me a name.”

“Guy named Herbert Elmer McCullough, alias Mac, alias One-Bucket.”

One eyebrow went up. “One-Bucket?”

“Yeah.”

He grinned. “Not One-Eye or Square One?”

“Nope. One-Bucket. I’ll tell you why in a minute. Can you do it?”

“Uh-huh. Always interesting doing business with you, Shugak.” He went around his desk and sat down in front of his computer. “Give me a date. Court conviction, incarceration.”

“Uh, that’s part of the problem. He went inside in 1921.”

Brendan sat back in his chair. “Well. That makes it a little more difficult. But not impossible. The old records are being transferred into digital form as we speak. Of course the territory didn’t have any prisons back then, but there will at least be a trial transcript, and I would guess records of transporting him out of the state. Whoever took him would certainly want to claim his expenses…” Brendan’s voice trailed away when he saw Kate’s expression.

“Yes, well, that’s the other part of the problem. He wasn’t convicted in Alaska of anything, so far as I know.”

“Where did he stand trial?”

“California.” If he hadn’t been lying about it to Hammett. “He was arrested on the dock in Seattle.”

“Ah.” Brendan folded his hands over his substantial belly. “Also difficult. But again, not impossible.” He leered again. “Especially if you’re willing to put out for it.”

Kate had to laugh. “Brendan,” she said, drawing out the syllables of his name.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

Her pocket gave out with the first six bars of Jimmy Buffett’s “Volcano.” Brendan’s eyebrows went sky high. “Why, Kate, have you joined the real world at last?”

She fumbled it out. Of course it was Jim. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. “Got your message. Never mind posting the love letters on the Internet. Wait till I get home and we can take some nude photographs.”

“Let me have your cell number, Kate,” Brendan said, raising his voice, “so I can talk dirty to you whenever I want.”

“Who’s that?” Jim said.

“Brendan,” Kate said, getting up and going out into the hall. As she closed the door, Brendan sang, loudly and off-key, “When I’m calling you-ooo-ooo, will you answer too-ooo-ooo…”

She leaned against the wall in the corridor and ignored the glances of a couple of law clerks who passed within warbling range of the assistant district attorney with the most time served in the building.

Jim’s voice cooled noticeably. “Brendan, huh?”

Kate smiled to herself. “Yeah. He’s helping me with something.”

“I’ll bet. What? You’ve got a case?”

“Sort of. It has to do with Old Sam.” She didn’t want to get into it on the phone. “What’s going on down there?”

“Buried him on Thursday. Read the will on Monday.”

A week ago for the funeral, and four days ago for the will, and he was still there and not here. She wanted to ask him why he wasn’t on a plane north already. “Anything unexpected?” she said.

“No. Well, not much. Something I need to clear up.”

And then he’d be home? If Alaska still was home. “Touching base with old friends?”

“A few,” he said. “There aren’t that many left.”

“Sylvia Hernandez one of them?” Kate said, and kicked herself for it.

“She came to the funeral,” he said.

The quality of the following silence made her wait.

“And we went surfing yesterday.”

“Surfer dude back on the board,” Kate said, after a moment.

“Yeah.”

Determined to at least act like the altruist she most emphatically was not, she said, “Feel good?”

“Felt great.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “In Alaska the whole idea is to stay out of the water. It required some getting used to when I moved there.”

Immersion in Alaskan waters generally resulted in hypothermia followed almost immediately by death. It was quick, you could say that for it. “I did hear that they’ve starting surfing on a beach near Yakutat,” she said. “In dry suits.”

“Yeah, I’d heard that, too.” His voice lacked enthusiasm.

The door opened and Brendan stuck his head out. “When you hear my love call ringing clear…”

“Jesus,” Jim said.

“Yeah,” Kate said. “Later?”

“Later,” he said.

She hung up and followed Brendan back into his office. “So?”

“So where’s Jim that he’s calling you on your cell phone?”

“California. His dad died.”

Brendan’s bushy eyebrows rose again. “Oh. Sorry to hear that.” The eyebrows lowered and his grin was evil. “So you’re here in my town all alone.”

She had to laugh again. “Yes, I am, alone and at your mercy.”

He looked at the clock on the wall. “Miracle of miracles, I get out of here on time today. May I take you to dinner, where I will wine you and dine you and attempt to take ruthless advantage of you in your abandoned state?”

“You may,” she said.

“Orso’s, seven o’clock, and for you I’ll even put on a clean tie,” he said, and handed her a printout that proved to be the prison record of Herbert Elmer “Mac” McCullough, convicted felon.

“Brendan,” Kate said, “take me now.”

1946

Seattle

Sam found the man Mac had sold his loot to only after months spent slogging through the Seattle rain. In the story Mac had referred to the man he’d sold the contents of his pack to as Pappy, but no one on the docks today had heard of anyone by that name, so Sam starting asking for anyone who had been in the trade in the 1920s, especially street dealers. One day, in a little store on Sixth Avenue that reeked of quaintness, the man behind the counter listened to his question with a fascinated gaze fixed on Sam’s mouth and said, “Oh gosh, I don’t know, I’m sure. I just moved up from the Bay Area myself.”

He might have fluttered his eyelashes. He did invite Sam to dinner. His name was Kyle Blanchette. Sam was always hungry in those days, so he went. It was perhaps the civility of his refusal to Kyle’s suggestion at the end of the evening that might have inspired further information. “Of course, there is old Pietro Pappardelle. Have you been to his place yet? No?” He grimaced. “Well, his shop is rather low end, but he is known to be the
ne plus ultra
authority whenever one of us is thinking of buying something of whose provenance we aren’t quite sure.” Kyle fluttered his lashes again. “I suppose there are those who could call him Pappy.”

Tomorrow’s Treasures was located on a dingy side street in the relatively new neighborhood of Fremont, a long streetcar ride and across a bridge from downtown. Like everywhere else in Seattle it was going through the postwar building boom, and the street-level shop in the sagging three-story building looked not much longer for this world. Inevitably, it would be leveled to make room for apartments for returning GIs and their brides.

A bell tinkled when Old Sam went in the door. It tinkled again when he had to step back before he knocked over a dusty porcelain bull with a gold ring through his nose. The bull was perched precariously on a tall table with a round, tiny top that did not look the least bit stable on its three long-stemmed legs.

The interior of the shop was dimly lit and crammed full of other such traps. Sam trod warily into this brittle knickknack jungle, and after a near collision with a mahogany armoire with a corniced top and lethal corners for a man of his height and a cautious sidle past a whatnot filled with china rebels in gray suits dancing the waltz with belles in hoop skirts, he achieved the relative safety of the counter that stood against the back wall. The wall was pierced by a doorway over which a dusty curtain made of flowered cotton hung from a dirty white piece of string wound around nails at either end.

“Hello?” he said. There was a tarnished brass bell on the counter. He raised it and gave a little jingle. “Hello?”

There was movement behind the curtain. It twitched back to reveal a short, stubby man with a bulbous nose, a red face, and eyes set so closely together that for a moment Sam thought he was cross-eyed. “Yes?”

“Mr. Pappardelle?”

“Yes?”

Old Sam would have thought of a more tactful way to approach the object of his Outside exile, but Samuel Leviticus Dementieff was a young man both in love and in a hurry. “Also known as Pappy?”

The near-together eyes narrowed. “I always appreciate at least an introduction to the person with whom I converse.”

“My name’s Sam Dementieff,” Sam said. “You might have met my—my father down on the docks in 1920 when he got off a steamer from Alaska.”

“Really. Young man, I have better things to do today than—”

“Mr. Pappardelle, he died in the war. He left a, uh, a letter for me, saying that he’d sold what he had in his pack that day in 1920 to a man on the Seattle docks named Pappy. I was hoping that was you.”

“Whether it is or it isn’t is none of—”

“If it is, he sold you something he shouldn’t have. It was a family heirloom. He stole it.”

Pappardelle’s red face got redder. “If you are implying that I acted as a receiver of stolen goods—”

“No, sir,” Sam said, although he’d seen enough shifty glances during the quest that led him to the door of Tomorrow’s Treasures to have strong doubts about the entire profession of antiques dealing. “No, sir, nothing like that. Back then you couldn’t have known, I understand that. I’m just trying to track it down, to find out who has it now, so I can get it back to the original owners.”

Pappardelle eyed him for a long moment. Sam met his gaze without flinching, letting Pappardelle look him over. The threadbare state of his clothes, the gauntness of his countenance, the directness of his gaze—one or all of these things must have made an impression, because Pappardelle suddenly relaxed into a different man altogether, one much more like the man described by Sam’s dinner date of the night before. “Please come through here, Mr. Demon—Demented—”

“Dementieff,” Sam said, “but please just call me Sam,” and ducked beneath the low door frame to follow Pappardelle into an apartment with a kitchenette, a sofa bed, and a tiny bathroom glimpsed through an open door. A back door led presumably to an alley. This back room was if possible even more crowded than the front room, with everything Pappardelle hadn’t managed to wedge into the shop on the other side of the curtain crammed in here. A Victorian tea set with a cracked milk jug. A fake diamond necklace (at least Sam assumed it was fake or it would have been locked away in a safe, not left on a table between the butter and the sugar bowl). A pair of logger’s lifting tongs. A brass ship’s compass set on gimbals in a teak box that had seen infinitely better days.