I didn’t take offense. From where Marvin stood, I must have looked as old as Methuselah.
“I like to think I still am the real deal,” I replied, “but as Joe Kenda says, ‘Homicide is a young man’s game.’ That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t like keeping my hand in on occasion. When I took this case, I had no idea it would lead me to a possible homicide.”
“Or two,” he added quietly.
The word “two” certainly grabbed my interest. “I could tell by your reaction to the name of Shelley Loveday Adams that it rang a bell with you,” I suggested.
He nodded. “You can say that again, because I’m pretty sure that woman had something to do with her husband’s death. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, she’s going to get away with it.”
Obviously, Hank Frazier really had put in a good word for me. Marvin’s coffee finished brewing. I handed him his cup and started mine.
“So tell me about that Jack Loveday case,” I urged. “Was it yours to begin with?”
Marvin shook his head. “At the time I was still working patrol, and Barry Caldwell was in charge of investigations. When I moved up from patrol to investigations in 2011, he was still there, and he was still pissed about the case. As far as he was concerned, the Loveday case was a screwup from day one.”
“I knew that Shelley’s first husband was dead,” I ventured, “but everyone I’ve spoken to so far seems to be under the impression that he committed suicide.”
“Yes,” Price told me, “that’s the official story, but in my opinion it ain’t necessarily so.”
“Care to tell me about it?”
Marvin stared into his coffee cup for a moment before he answered. “If I tell you this, I’m talking out of school,” he said finally, “and there are any number of people in town—powerful people at that—who aren’t at all interested in having that story rehashed.”
“Like Roger Adams, for instance?” I asked.
Marvin favored me with a wry grin. “Precisely like Roger Adams,” he said.
“So tell me about it,” I said.
“First off,” Marvin said, “you need to know I’m not exactly unbiased here.”
“You’ve got a dog in this fight?”
“I do,” he admitted. “My dad’s best friend growing up was a guy named Larry Earling, whose sister, Lois, happened to be Jack Loveday’s first wife. Dad was invited to their wedding. He and Jack hit it off, and they became good friends as well. Makes sense, of course. They were birds of a feather—both bush pilots and both hard drinkers who loved their tequila. They drank it the old-fashioned way—straight with a dab of salt and a section of lime. My dad sobered up before he died. Obviously, Jack never did.”
The subject of drinking too much was familiar territory for me, although José Cuervo was never a friend of mine. I always favored a cheap Canadian blend called MacNaughton’s. As for drinking buddies? Those kinds of friendships generally come to an abrupt end when one or the other of the drinking pals either sobers up or croaks.
“You said obviously Jack never quit,” I observed. “How come ‘obviously’？”
“Hold on,” Marvin said. “I’m getting ahead of myself. In the old days, my folks and Lois and Jack all palled around together—playing cards, fishing, camping, that sort of thing. Once Shelley came into the picture and got her claws into Jack, my dad and he called it quits as far as friendship went.
“As soon as Jack and Lois divorced, he married Shelley. That was ten years or so before his crippling plane crash, which occurred in November of 2008. In January of 2009, he was released from rehab and sent home to continue his recovery. Due to mobility issues, he needed a hospital bed, which was installed in the master bedroom while Shelley slept in a guest bedroom down the hall.
“On the morning of February fifteenth, she went into his room, purportedly to help him out of bed and into his wheelchair. That’s when she found him unresponsive. She dialed 911. When EMTs arrived, they were unable to revive him. Jack was declared dead at the scene, and that’s when Lieutenant Caldwell entered the picture. Inside the bedroom he noticed an empty tequila bottle tipped over on the bedside table along with two separate pill containers lying empty on the bedding. Barry Caldwell, like my dad, wasn’t a big fan of Shelley’s either. Before leaving the scene, he declared the cause of death as undetermined and ordered the body shipped off to the medical examiner’s office in Anchorage so an autopsy could be performed. Then he brought Shelley in for questioning.”