Jackpot (Nameless Dectective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Not by dumping Polhemus’s body in the lake, no.”

  “Then—?”

  Don’t do this!

  “There’s another way,” I said.

  Chapter 23

  IT WAS JUST 2:00 A.M. when we slipped out of the boat shelter onto the lake.

  The boat that had been tied in there was a twelve-foot Chris-Craft powered by a 3.0-litre MerCruiser—an open-cockpit four-seater with plenty of deck space. John Wovoka had had no difficulty hot-wiring the ignition. The engine hadn’t been fired in some time and it was balky at first, but once it caught and held, it purred along soft, throaty, with no hitches. The exhaust was quiet, too, at least at idle and at crawling speed.

  John Wovoka did the piloting. He knew boats better than I did. And he knew Lake Tahoe as well. Thanks to his job as a game warden, he kept government navigational charts and topographical maps of the area in his pickup. That made our task a little easier. So did the fact that the Chris-Craft was outfitted with a compass.

  I sat next to him in the left-hand forward seat. Oddly, now that we were under way, I felt very calm, almost detached. Not thinking ahead, not thinking about much of anything. The apprehension had all been in making the decision myself and then laying it out for John Wovoka. If he had balked at the idea, there might have been more anxiety for me, more soul-searching; but he hadn’t. Just listened to what I had to say, asked a few pertinent questions, thought it all out for a couple of minutes, and then agreed in a flat, determined voice. His emotionless acceptance, the machinelike precision with which he set about making the necessary preparations, had had a catalytic effect on me. It allowed me to function in the same way, to approach what we were about to do as if it were a military operation: two soldiers, linked by purpose and discipline, feelings screwed down under tight lids, with the mission and its success outweighing every other consideration.

  When we were a hundred yards out, he opened the throttle to quarter-speed, then to half, to three-quarters, to full. The engine stayed quiet at low speeds, which was all that mattered, and there was no backfiring through the exhaust. Good boat; we couldn’t have found a better one, it seemed, if we’d set out with a list of requirements.

  He set a southeasterly course at full throttle. The distance we had to cover was about a dozen miles all together. The lights of South Lake Tahoe and the Stateline casinos made a long stationary curve on our right; car headlights ran through them now and then like pinballs on a neon-lit board. More clouds had gathered but a high wind kept them moving, so that when one of them obscured the moon it was only for a few seconds at a time. Out here on open water, the night wind was chilly enough to make me glad I’d thought to get my topcoat out of the car. The droplets of spray that came over and around the windshield were icy on my cheeks.

  There were no other boats anywhere that I could see. Us alone on all that silver and black, with the stars like firepoints strewn among the clouds and the surrounding mountains lifting huge black and white-crowned goblin shapes against the sky. It was supposed to make you feel small and insignificant, all that dark immensity, but that was not the way I felt. Instead I felt a part of both the immensity and the darkness, like a cell within a vast body—integral, vital to the whole.

  For a while we seemed to be making no real headway, as if we were suspended in time and space between two points. Then, all at once, it seemed, the Nevada shore grew from a wall of shapeless black, broken only by a sprinkling of lights, into individual landmasses, houses, trees. Off on our right, the cluster of high-rise casino-hotels took on definition as well, burning varicolored holes in the darkness less than two miles away. The outjut of land that appeared directly ahead of us would be Zephyr Point. It was the landmark John Wovoka had chosen, the easiest to spot from a distance on this part of the shoreline.

  He took us to within a few hundred yards of the point before he changed direction, northward. When we cleared Zephyr Cove he angled in closer to land and cut back to three-quarter throttle. A little less than three miles to go. The passive waiting had drawn me taut, made me aware of the dragging weight of fatigue; but I could feel the tightness easing again as we closed in. I leaned forward, my hands on the dash, peering ahead over the top of the windshield.

  A short dark peninsula loomed ahead, lightless, heavily furred with trees. That ought to be it, I thought—and when John Wovoka throttled down to quarter-speed and shut off our running lights, I knew it was. Lobo Point. I stared up at the rise of land beyond, inshore. We were within a hundred yards of the point before I could make out the roofline of Arthur Welker’s house; the rest of it was obscured by the trees.

  John Wovoka chopped down to crawling speed as we came past the tip. No clouds covered the moon now; I could see the cove and the rest of the property clearly. Strip of beach, dock and boathouse, the Arthur III tied up at the end of the dock; brushy slope bisected by stairs and chair lift; three terraces and the house above, dark and monolithic from this perspective. None of the facing windows was lighted. There were a pair of night-lights in ornate lantern-type casings mounted one on either end of the house at the ground-floor level, but neither one gave off much illumination. The terraces and slope and beach area were all dark except for dustings of moonshine. Everywhere I looked there was stillness. The entire place had a somnolent aspect, turned in on itself for the night.

  We glided on past, beyond the land finger on the north side of the cove, until the house and grounds disappeared from view. Ahead the shoreline was barren and lightless for at least a mile, thick with timber close by. John Wovoka made a tight turn, came back on the north end of the finger; we were twenty yards offshore when he shut the throttle all the way down to idle. The boat settled into a faint rocking drift. The throb of the engine and exhaust was pitched so low, I could hear the rise and fall of insect noise filtering out of the woods.

  The shore along the finger here was a low rocky cutbank, overgrown with ferns and brush and the tangled roots of pine and fir trees. John Wovoka had gotten out of his seat as soon as he shut down the throttle and was up on the bow; he held us off with the boat’s emergency oar. I was on my feet too, by then, shedding my topcoat and jacket.

  I said in a whisper, “Just the way it was yesterday. And no night guards or dogs.” It was the first time either of us had spoken since a few minutes before we’d left Paradise Flat.

  “Better hurry, then.”

  He let the boat ease in sideways until the port side was tight against the cutbank. There did not seem to be any underwater snags here; he felt safe in letting the Chris-Craft lie in close like this. It would have been easy enough for me to climb ashore, make my way through the woods and around to the beach. But that was the fool’s way. You can’t walk through woods and brush at night without making noise that might carry; and there was no way to get from the trees to the dock without coming right out into the open. More importantly, I remembered Welker bragging that his house and property was protected by an expensive security system. It was likely he’d installed safeguards out here as well—photoelectric cells, pressure-sensitive alarm devices. Men like him make enemies among their own kind, deadly enemies, and they don’t like to leave themselves vulnerable to attack from any direction.

  But not even the Arthur Welkers can think of everything, safeguard every possible contingency. The one thing he apparently wasn’t concerned about was the one spot in which he was vulnerable—his Achilles’ heel.

  I stripped down to my shorts. The night wind burned cold against my bare skin. But the water would be worse; mountain lakes are always bitter cold, even in the middle of summer and especially at night. If we’d had more time to prepare, I’d have gotten a wetsuit. As it was ...

  Even though I braced myself, set my teeth and jaw as I lowered my body over the side, the first shock almost took my breath away. I submerged to the neck, hanging on to the gunwale with one hand, enduring the chill until my body temperature could adjust. I have always been a good swimmer, and I’m a better one now that I’ve
slimmed down and gotten myself in condition, but I had to swim several hundred yards in this icy water; starting out prematurely would only make me tire sooner.

  John Wovoka’s head and upper body leaned out above me. He said, “If anything goes wrong, swim straight this way. I’ll pick you up.”

  “Will do.”

  He seemed to want to say something else, turned away instead.

  I hung on to the gunwale for another minute or so. Dangerous business coming up, but I felt no apprehension. Seemed to feel even more detached, now, as if I were observing all of this at the same time I was taking part in it. Stray thought: I really don’t know myself anymore. Then I quit thinking and shoved away from the boat and began to swim.

  I used a steady crawl out around the tip of the finger and into the cove. Trod water long enough to get my bearings and to make sure that nothing had altered the quiescent aspect of the house, then struck out again toward the dock. I made sure to keep my arms and legs moving in a smooth, even tempo, so that I cleaved the water without sound. I no longer felt the cold. The muscles in my legs and shoulders were tight when I neared the dock but without any immediate danger of cramping. Exhaustion was the big worry; it was dragging at me again. There was still plenty to do, and on the swim back I would have to put forth twice the effort because of the company I would have.

  The Arthur III was tied across the outer edge of the dock, her bow to the north. Sixteen-foot Bayliner, mostly long, sleek hull and superstructure, with a short squared-off stem; she would sleep at least four belowdecks. Baby of his fleet. Yeah. But it was also his Achilles’ heel. He thought it possible somebody might try to sneak in at night to attack him or his house, but to steal one of his boats? Not many craft are stolen on Tahoe, and cruisers of this type almost never. Where would a thief take it once he got it?

  You’ll find out, Artie, I thought. Yes you will.

  I swam along the cruiser’s port side, around the stem to the dock. A scum of algae lay in the water there; when I broke through it it gave off a faint rotting-humus smell that made my throat close up. For a time I hung on to one of the pilings to rest and study the house and grounds again. Still sleeping. Clouds drifted over the moon, turning the slope and terraces into masses of inky shadow. When that happened I leaned up to where the Arthur III’s stem line was looped around a dock cleat, untied it, coiled it enough to push all of it up over the stem and onto the deck so it wouldn’t drag loose. Then I swam back along the port side and around the bow to the north side of the dock.

  The shifting clouds continued to cut off most of the moon’s hard white shine as I untied the bowline from the cleat there. I coiled the rope but this time I held on to it. When I laid my shoulder against the bow and shoved, using the dock for leverage, the cruiser swung outward with a low scraping sound: starboard gunwale rubbing against a Styrofoam bumper astern. Not a carrying sound. I paddled back along that side and made my next push amidships, to get the Bayliner completely clear of the dock. Back to the bow, then, and a nudge there to swing her farther out until she was aimed past the tip of the land finger, northward.

  John Wovoka was out there waiting. I could just make out the shape of the Chris-Craft in the still-clotted dark, lying a few yards offshore.

  I stroked forward of the cruiser’s bow, letting the rope uncoil behind me. There was just enough of it so that I could take one loop around my chest under my arms and still maintain some slack. It took me several seconds to tie it off; my fingers were starting to numb. Treading water, I glanced back toward Welker’s property. Nothing had changed in the dark tableau. One, two, three deep breaths and I struck out again in the same steady crawl, not too fast, not too slow.

  The strain of towing the Bayliner began to tell almost immediately. Its resisting weight threatened to cramp muscles in my legs, arms, and back; I had to stop and rest every couple of minutes. Seventy yards to where John Wovoka waited. Sixty. Not far now. Fifty. Not far, not far, almost there—

  Cramp in my right calf, so sudden and savage that I had to bite my tongue to keep from crying out. I twisted around, clawed up the rope until I had hold of a bow-rail stanchion, and clung there with one hand and rubbed at the calf with the other, flexing the leg and foot, until the muscle unknotted. I was shaking with cold and weakness when I submerged again.

  I wasn’t sure if I had enough strength to swim those last fifty yards—but I did not have to find out. John Wovoka had seen that I was having trouble and took the risk of coming to meet me. I saw him swing out from beyond the finger, make a wide slow loop to come in along the Arthur III’s port side. I trod water, working my leg to keep it from cramping again, listening to the faint throb of the Chris-Craft’s exhaust and looking back toward Welker’s property. The damn moon was out again, silvering the house and grounds, but nobody had woken up and seen us out here and raised an alarm. Not yet, they hadn’t.

  John Wovoka shut the throttle down and nosed the Chris-Craft in just ahead of where I was. I had the Bayliner’s bowline untied from around my chest by the time he leaned over the stem; I gave him the rope, and while he made it fast to a cleat I swam ahead along the port side. I was struggling to haul myself over the gunwale—my arms felt as if they had lead sinkers tied to them—when he caught hold of my arms and lifted me aboard.

  “All right?”

  “... All right.”

  Immediately he went to the wheel and opened the throttle just enough to get us moving. There was a jerk as the Arthur III’s bowline pulled taut, a creaking of the rope; we began to glide ahead at an angle past the finger. I encased myself in the heavy wool blanket we’d brought from the Paradise Flat house, then sat on the forward seat shivering, trying to get my wind back—watching behind us.

  Except for the two night-lights, Lobo Point remained a slumbering expanse of black and silver as we passed out of sight.

  WE TOWED the Arthur III a third of a mile north by northwest, so that we were well out into the lake before we shut down and boarded her. I was dried off and dressed by then, still a little chilled but no longer shivering. I might have a head cold tomorrow, but that was a small price to pay for a nocturnal swim in Lake Tahoe.

  The first thing we did was to don gloves and transfer Jerry Polhemus’s corpse from the Chris-Craft, where it had lain all the while under the canvas cover, to the short rear deck of the Bayliner. The body was wrapped in the tarp John Wovoka had provided, its end tied and affixed with some pieces of heavy scrap iron we’d found. In with it was a bundle made up of Polhemus’s clothing and wallet and the cassette tape he’d recorded. His Saturday night special, the gun that had ended his life, was in the pocket of my topcoat—for now.

  It took John Wovoka a little less than ten minutes to cross the Arthur III’s ignition wires. When he had the engine running smoothly, I got back into the Chris-Craft and cast off the lines and used the emergency oar to shove clear. He put on the cruiser’s running lights, opened the throttle; the course he set was due west. I followed at a distance of a hundred yards. And after we’d gone a mile or so, I took Polhemus’s revolver out of my coat and dropped it overboard.

  The place we’d picked to abandon the Arthur III was a quarter of a mile outside the entrance to Emerald Bay. There were no private homes in the immediate vicinity, for one thing; and Emerald Bay was a popular fishing spot, for another. It was still early enough, though, so that there were no other boats around when we neared the area.

  When John Wovoka cut the Bayliner’s lights, I followed suit with the Chris-Craft’s. He chopped the throttle at the same time, so that the Arthur III settled into her own wake. I moved up alongside at low speed, cut to idle, and held there for the five minutes or so it took him to undo the hot-wire on the cruiser’s ignition. When he finally clambered down beside me, I let him take the wheel and us away from there.

  That part of it—the worst part—was done.

  THE FIRST LIGHT of dawn was in the sky, a line of salmon pink above the eastern peaks, when we reached the beachfront at Paradise Fla
t. John Wovoka eased the Chris-Craft into the shelter, and I tied up while he undid his second hot-wire; then we covered the boat with its fitted piece of canvas. Except for the amount of gas we’d used, there was nothing to arouse the suspicion of the owners when they returned from their European vacation. And the fuel loss was likely to pass unnoticed.

  Inside the house, we packed up everything that had belonged to Polhemus. While I carried his luggage out to the Cougar, John Wovoka placed an anonymous call to the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department, claiming to be a fisherman and saying that he had spotted a boat adrift outside Emerald Bay and that there was “something funny” lying on the deck. That would bring a patrol boat out in a hurry.

  With my handkerchief I smeared all the Cougar’s surfaces, inside and out, that either of us might have touched. I was putting my gloves back on when he emerged from the house. He said, “No problem,” and got into his pickup. I slid in under the Cougar’s wheel. Neither of us wanted any part of a thirty-mile round-trip drive, as tired as we both were, but it had to be done. And done now, while it was still too early for most residents and early vacationers to have left their beds for the new day.

  The Cougar had a chattery clutch and loose steering; there was sweat all over me when I finished negotiating the bad stretch of cliffside road around Emerald Bay. The radio, tuned loud to a rock station, and the open driver’s window helped me stay alert the rest of the way to Fallen Leaf Lake. John Wovoka followed close behind, but when I pulled off onto the platform above the Polhemus cabin, he went on along the road to turn around somewhere farther on, even though there was no other traffic and nobody afoot in the vicinity. It was better, safer, if his truck wasn’t parked next to the Cougar for even a few minutes.

  I set the door locks on the car and managed to transport the three pieces of luggage down the stairs in one trip. I unlocked the cabin door with Polhemus’s key, took the suitcases and duffel bag into the bedroom Polhemus had occupied; opened one of the cases on the floor, put his key ring on the dresser. In the front room I gathered up the remaining snapshots from the fireplace mantel and stowed them in my jacket; I would dispose of them later. Then I hurried out, leaving the front door unlocked this time.