This from a woman who hated to get her feet wet on a hunt. Mutt gave this observation the credulity it deserved, shoving past Kate when she opened the door. Kate left a window open for her and didn’t bother locking the car.
The front door of the mansion was actually two, reached by a wide set of stairs that spilled to either side in graceful arcs around a carefully tended grouping of flowers arranged by hue and height. Sidelights and a fanlight let a gentle interior glow leach through, and Kate could hear the sound of many voices and the tinkling of glasses. She supposed it might sound inviting to some.
She looked down at Mutt. “Want to come in?”
Mutt bared her teeth.
“Okay, try not to get into too much trouble,” Kate said, and at a hand signal Mutt was off the porch and into the underbrush like an arrow from a bow.
Someone cleared his throat. Kate looked around and beheld a young man in what looked like a bellhop’s uniform, an ingratiating smile on his face. “May I park your car?” he said.
“It’s already parked,” Kate said, and headed up the steps.
He nipped ahead of her and opened the door. She eyed him suspiciously. His smile stayed in place. The door remained open. “Thanks,” she said after a moment.
She went in, and the gates of mercy closed behind her.
The room was large, the biggest private room she’d been in, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the spectacular view and hardwood floors polished to a shine bright enough to hurt your eyes. Not that Kate could admire either the view or the shine, because the room was jammed with what seemed to her appalled eyes like simply hundreds of people. Most of the men were in suits. Most of the women were in black, with the only variables the depth of the neckline and the height of the hemline. There was a lot of loud jewelry flashing from ears and wrists, and everybody had big hair, even the men. There was an occasional black face and a few more Native ones, but this could not be construed in any way by even the most nearsighted viewer as a multicultural gathering. Kate could feel her skin getting darker by the second.
They were all talking at the tops of their voices. The resulting roar sounded like a 747 on takeoff. It took a few moments for Kate’s ears to accustom themselves to the cacophony.
“Excuse me? Mr. Mayor, I’m so glad to have this opportunity to shake your hand and tell you what a fine job I think you’re doing for the city. You’ve got my vote all the way.”
“That’s great. I’m not the mayor, but I’ll be sure to tell him when I see him.”
“Down to there and up to here. She couldn’t be more obvious if she was wearing her own billboard.”
“That’s not what they taught us at Harvard.” Modest laugh. “I’m sorry, I went to Harvard. MBA. With honors.”
“I believe you mentioned that already. Seven or eight times.”
“Erland was telling me the other day that he’s bidding on the leases opening up in the Beaufort next year.”
“He thinks the tax breaks are getting through, then?”
“-and now he’s going for full custody, and how he can ask for that with a straight face with that bimbo he’s got living in his brand-new house-”
“Sounds like you could use an attorney. Mine took Phil to the cleaners for me. I’ve got his card here somewhere-”
“It’s buried so deep in committee it’ll never see daylight again.”
“Who sits on that committee? Maybe Erland’ll make a few calls.”
“Harvard, schmarvard. Wharton’s the place you want your kids to go to if you want them to learn anything about making money.” Modest laugh. “Class of ‘eighty-eight. I’ll make a few calls for you.”
“The union is just going to have to suck it up. The state can’t foot the entire insurance bill. People are going to have to ante up their share. I’m telling you, it’s not an option. If they don’t like it, they can get a job in the private sector.”
“The legislature makes one move on the permanent fund and Jay is going to rise up out of Lake Clark like Saint George coming after the dragon.”
“I keep thinking if we just explain to people, educate them-”
“We’ve been sucking at the federal tit since Seward bought Alaska from Russia. We don’t know how to do anything else.”
“Erland says all we have to do is cut the fat out of the budget.”
“So we got a granite countertop and, would you believe it, they’ve put it in three times and they’ve broken it every single time.”
“Sounds like you could use a better contractor. Let me give you my card.”
“I come from Seldovia. There used to be five goddamn canneries in Seldovia when I was growing up. You know where the name comes from? Seldevoy. Russian word, means herring town. No goddamn herring in Seldovia anymore. Not much goddamn salmon left, either. We used to be able to pull goddamn king crab right out of Seldovia Bay. They aren’t even in the Kachemak anymore. What, you never read the book Cod?”
“Yeah, but that was the Atlantic.”
“The Pacific’s just another ocean. I’m telling you, we need to go to a thousand-mile limit and start arming the goddamn Coast Guard with cannons so they can sink a few of those goddamn fish processors. And I ain’t talking about just the foreign processors, either, ”cause the American processors are just as bad, if not goddamn worse.“
“Well, as long as I can pull a king salmon out of the Kenai, I’m happy.”
“Global warming’s a myth.”
“Right, and so’s the Pribilofs remaining ice-free year-round, and golfing in Palmer in January.”
“They were acting like they were at a slumber party, instead of prosecuting a rape-murder, with the victim’s family right there in the courtroom. I sent the DA an E-mail and told her so.”
“What’d she say?”
“The usual-the media blew it all out of proportion, it wasn’t really that bad, Anchorage DAs are held to a high standard, yakety-yak.”
“Erland went to school with her, didn’t he? Maybe you should talk to him about it.”
Glasses clinked, people put pinkish blobs of something into their mouths and kept talking around the blobs, and the air was thick with cigarette and cigar smoke. Kate’s sinuses gave a single vicious throb, and instinctively she made as if to turn back to the door, everything in her telling her to escape from this hellhole before she saw someone she knew.
“Kate!”
Inches from a clean getaway, she took courage in hand and turned back to face the room. “Oh,” she said a little weakly. “Hi, Pete.”
Pete Heiman elbowed through the crowd and stood grinning at her. “Couldn’t believe my eyes when you walked in. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was invited,” she said, trying to talk without breathing.
“Really? You know Erland?”
She shook her head. Not breathing wasn’t working, so she tried to breathe through her mouth instead. “His niece.”
“Charlotte?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, hell, small world.” He was still grinning. He looked her over. “You clean up pretty damn good, Katie.”
“Pete? Nobody calls me Katie.”
“I know. It kinda puts me in a class by myself, don’t it?”
He pretended to preen, and she had to laugh.
Pete Heiman was the legislative senator (for life, some people had started saying after the last election) from Kate’s district, her mouthpiece in Juneau and like Max one of the original Alaskan old farts. He’d played pinochle with Abel and fished for salmon alongside Old Sam and swung a pick, if only for a photo op during an election swing, next to Mac Devlin. His politics were conservative but erratic; he was a member of the Republican party, but he voted against the majority in Juneau often enough to keep his liberal and Libertarian constituents happy, and he’d managed to weasel his way through the subsistence issue without having to take a firm stand in one camp or another. He was pro-choice, which always surprised the hell out of Kate, until she remembered that he was a longtime friend of Auntie Vi. Kate had a feeling that Auntie Vi had something on Pete, but she’d yet to find out what.