Midnight come again (28 page)

"You can get that, can't you?" he said to Baird, and walked toward the girl, leaving Baird standing next to a truckload of Michelob and a half-empty pallet. Jim ignored the string of curses that followed along behind him.

"Hi, Stephanie." He knelt down, and didn't make the mistake of reaching for her. "It's nice to see you." She wouldn't look up, as usual.

He hesitated, and then said gently, "I was really sorry to hear about your mother."

A brief, almost indiscernible nod.

She touched her finger to his wound, so lightly he could barely feel it.

He looked like he'd started to get a decorator shave of his scalp and had changed his mind halfway through. "You got hurt." "Yeah," Jim said, and gave her his best smile. "But you should see the other guy."

She did smile then, although without looking up, and about then the Here landed with a hold full of reds from Quinhagak. He led the girl to a fifty-five-gallon drum of engine oil and perched her on it, her and her Super Cub. "You stay here until I tell you, okay? You can come look at the plane, but only when I say so, all right?" He grinned. "I don't want you getting in the way of those props. God knows what damage your hard head would do to them."

She did smile then, revealing dimples and straight white teeth. It didn't last long, but at least now he knew she had teeth.

Baird emerged from behind the beer truck and skidded to a halt when he saw Stephanie. He inspected her closely from a distance of thirty feet.

"Is that yours?" he said to Jim.

"Yes," Jim said. "I mean no. I mean, she's a friend. She won't get in the way." "She better not," Baird said, a scowl darkening his face.

"She loves planes," Jim said.

Baird snorted. "Everybody loves planes."

"She builds model ones. She built the one she's holding. You should take a look--it's a Super Cub that's the twin of any one I ever flew in, except for size." Baird snorted again, although it was less contemptuous this time. "Everybody builds model airplanes."

Jim helped fuel the Here for its trip into Anchorage and when he returned, Stephanie was no longer on her barrel. He panicked until he saw Baird sitting in the Cessna's left seat, talking to someone in the right seat Jim couldn't see. On a hunch he approached from behind, and heard Baird say, "Okay, we'll have to leave the rudders for when your legs are longer." "Blocks," Stephanie's voice said.

"Blocks? This ain't no time to play ABC's, kid, we're--oh. Wooden blocks, big ones, we could duct-tape them to the rudder pedals. Then your feet could reach. Good idea, kid, we'll do that next time. Okay, remember what I told you about landing without flaps? We call it landing clean, but you need a lot of runway. Say you're going into a Bush strip in your Cub, maybe all you got is three hundred feet before the alders take over, then you gotta use flaps to--"

Jim tiptoed away. sounds to sunrise one clear voice in tongues

--The Ripples Kate walked into town. The day after the Fourth, the road was littered with the wrappings of fireworks. It would seem Bering had no local ordinance against them. In another town, in a wet town, the feeling would have been subdued, the morning after the night before, but in Bering it was business as usual, traffic nonstop between the docks and the airport, stores bustling with customers, lines at restaurant doors.

The joint was jumping.

"Stay," she said to Mutt, who flopped beneath a rose bush with a martyred sigh. Kate trod the steps to the Bering Public Library, a small, square prefab building with coppery brown siding and windows neatly outlined in white paint. Each window had its own flower box, overflowing with pansies and nasturtiums. Twelve-bytwelves cut into four-foot lengths marked a line of parking spaces, only one of which was in use.

Inside rows of metal shelves crowded with books filled the center of the room. To the left was the children's corner, with low round tables and tiny chairs. To the right was the reference section. A few grownup chairs were grouped around a rectangular work table, upon which a dark, burly man had his feet propped. His nose was buried in a copy of The Carpetbaggers that looked as if it had already seen much use. He didn't bother to look up at Kate's entrance. There was something familiar about the shape of his head, but she couldn't place him and she was intent on her mission so she didn't try very hard. A mistake, as it later turned out, but then Kate wasn't perfect, as she herself would be first to admit.

"May I help you?"

This from a pleasant young woman with a nice smile and a mop of straight black hair that fell into her eyes. She wore a flowered blouse with short sleeves tucked into a loose blue skirt, and flat heels. She looked like somebody's mother.

She looked a little like Alice, in fact.

"I'm hoping you've got the state newspapers on microfilm," Kate said, trying not to sound grim.

"Yes, we do--?" Her eyes flickered to Kate's scar and back again.

"Kate," Kate said. "Kate Shugak." There wasn't much point in trying to keep her identity a secret any longer if Ray Chevak was going to introduce her around.

"Hi, Kate, I'm Heidi. Right over here."

She led Kate to a row of cabinets holding long, small drawers filled with rolls of microfilm in boxes.

"If there is anything else I can do to help, please let me know." She hesitated. "I knew your grandmother."

As who didn't?

"She visited here quite often, Bering, I mean, although she stopped by the library every now and then, too. Of course, she spent most of her time out at the Chevaks'."

Not only had Emaa had a prolonged romantic relationship, the entire city of Bering knew every detail.

While her outstanding dullard of a granddaughter remained totally in the dark.

"Thanks," Kate said with determined civility. "I'll yell if I need help." Her smile of thanks was more of a grimace. Heidi looked a little startled. "Well, take your time. There's only one other person in here, and he's reading, so I can help whenever you want." She retreated to her desk.

Bering was hooked up to a computer service, so Kate could do a search on the name of Michael Sullivan and another on the name of Christopher Overmore and make a list of dates of articles. Overmore's name got far more hits than Sullivan's, which was not surprising. She concentrated on the articles written within the past twenty years, in the Juneau Empire, the Anchorage Daily News, and the Bering Sea Times.

She hit paydirt almost from the first frame.

Overmore had been a banker before he had been a senator, one of the founders of Great Land Savings and Loan, which in turn was one of the original repositories of funds dispersed under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1972. The savings and loan had gone under during the financial bust in the mid-eighties, involving the loss of twenty-three million dollars. Most of that twenty-three million had originally belonged to five Native associations around the state.

Kate was delighted to read that in 1992 there had been an indictment, followed by a trial and, further, that the Anchorage Daily News had sicced Sheila Toomey onto it. Toomey wrote smart, always a plus. Kate kept her savings on her kitchen table in a one-pound Darigpld butter can. She would need someone who wrote smart to explain major-league banking to her.

Toomey wrote funny, too, although it would be a stretch, even for her, to write funny about mortgage rates.

It took the state six years to hand down forty-two counts of conspiracy and bank fraud, and another two years to bring the accused to trial. The prosecutor claimed that Overmore et al had made a number of unsecured loans in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars each to members of the bank's board, so that the board members could buy stock in an attempt to take over another bank, this one in Fairbanks. Witnesses testified that they thought the loans so problematical that lower management refused to sign off on them. The defense attorney protested that this was simply taking advantage of a good business opportunity, as the bank in question was undervalued and badly run.

The prosecution claimed that the officials of Great Land Savings and Loan had falsified minutes and forged documents to get federal approval of the takeover plan and to prove its adherence to the regulatory process. Witnesses from the Federal Reserve Bank said they'd never seen said documents and certainly had never signed off on them. The defense attorney protested that the allegedly falsified documents were last-minute corrections made sloppily by a legal secretary who wanted to get home to her kids. He attached no blame to the secretary, instead drawing a moving picture of her three children, one of whom had cerebral palsy. He maintained that the paperwork to the Federal Reserve Bank had been lost in the mail.

The prosecution claimed that bank funds had been misappropriated to open a branch of Great Land Savings and Loan in Palm Springs, California, and further, that bank funds had been used to finance a lifestyle that would make Frank Sinatra weep with envy, including a townhouse on a golf course for each board member, a Mercedes-Benz 450 SL coupe in each garage, and ten memberships in Club Palm Springs. The recreation director of Club Palm Springs testified that various board members had, in fact, played golf, tennis or racquetball at the Club three out of every four weeks from November to March, and had the daybooks to prove it. The defense attorney protested that by 1987 there was no banking business left in Alaska. Wasn't it sensible and businesslike for responsible officers of the institution to seek out new investors where the money was? Palm Springs would be such a place. And certainly in seeking out new investors in Palm Springs one wouldn't go down to the local Y.

The trial lasted three and a half months. A great many documents were introduced into the record concerning the laws governing money in America, most of them by the defense. The judge had to wake up on average one juror per week. In the end, the jury was unable to decide if Great Land Savings and Loan's failure was due to embezzlement of funds or just plain incompetence, and Over more and his partners had walked.

Of course, that was Fairbanks, Kate thought. It was a byword in Alaska that if you were guilty, petitioning for a change of venue to Fairbanks was your best bet for being found not guilty.

The next article, some two years later, announced Overmore's intention of running for office from District 5.

"Excuse me?" she said to Heidi.

"Yes?" Heidi hurried over.

"Do you have a Legislative Review, going back about five years?"

"Certainly. What do you need?"

"I want to look up Christopher Overmore's voting record."

There was the sound of a book dropping to the floor.

"Excuse, please," a male voice called.

"No problem, sir," Heidi said cheerfully, flapping a dismissive hand.

She consulted the stacks and produced the light green paperbound books for the years required, hovered in case Kate needed help finding her way around them, and returned sadly to her desk when Kate didn't.

Overmore had run unopposed, because you couldn't count the city councilman from Dillingham who advocated Alaska's secession from the Union, the purchase of Siberia from Russia and the formation of their own country, or the mayor of Nome, who wanted to give away condoms in the schools. Overmore was a moderate Republican who had backed rural preference for subsistence and limited sovereignty for Alaska Native tribal governments. Of course, these were safe positions to take, as the Republican Party had a lock on the legislature and there was no way either initiative would pass. Kate suspected the Republican Party allowed Overmore these radical opinions, the outward manifestation of which would keep his seat, so long as he toed the party line in other matters.

This he appeared to do, and with enthusiasm. During the past five years in office Overmore had sponsored a bill that outlawed abortion, and when that failed, cut funding to any agency that offered either advice or monetary help to get one. He sponsored another bill to return prayer to the schools. He cosponsored a bill advocating private school vouchers, and joined with the majority in undermining the public ballot which had legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes. Every year, he sponsored an amendment to the Alaska constitution to return the death penalty for perpetrators of capital crimes. He sat as chairman of the joint banking committee, where further research indicated he favored doing away with banking controls completely.

At least, Kate thought, replacing the copies of the Legislative Review on their proper shelf, thus earning an approving smile from Heidi, Overmore hadn't had a vision from God telling him what to do about subsistence, as another honorable--and still in office--representative of the Republican persuasion had had.

She sat down again to review her scribbled notes. Mike Sullivan had not been one of the board members of Great Land Savings and Loan. His name had not been mentioned at trial. The only court case related to him she had found in the judicial listings was the announcement of his divorce from Judith A. Sullivan, nee Calhoun, no children, in 1995. He started Alaska First Bank of Bering in 1992.

His backers were not listed anywhere, but Kate bet she knew one of their names.

She looked up and caught Heidi's eye. The librarian left off arranging by date a year's worth of issues of the Smithsonian Magazine and bustled over. It was a slow day at the Bering Public Library.