Fool's Gold (Reid Bennett)

by Wood, Ted

  She took a long pull at her cigarette and then breathed the smoke out through her nostrils, something you don't see often since the surgeon general started telling fortunes on the back of cigarette packs. "I figure you for a veteran, only you're too young."

  I said nothing and she did her smoke trick again and then put the cigarette down and snapped her fingers. "You're American, of course. Viet Nam."

  "I was in Nam, but I'm not American." It's a story I've explained enough times now. About twenty thousand of us went south to the States looking for excitement at the time the same number of their guys were coming north looking for a safe haven. I'm still not sure why I went, but I'm glad I was there.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and took a sip of her Coke. I noticed that she had tiny green sparkles on her eyelids. She was loaded for bear on a night when the entire town was loaded for her. "You did me a favor," she said at last. "I owe you."

  I said nothing and her face crinkled into a smile—a warm human grin, not a working grimace. "Bashful?" she asked innocently.

  "Not exactly. I'm just trying to think of a polite way to say no, you don't owe me a thing."

  "You figured I was going to invite you out into my magic trick truck?" she said, and grinned again.

  "It occurred that you might. And it occurred that I would probably like it a lot, but not right now."

  "You can take a rain check," she said, and then, "Look, I don't wanna embarrass you, anything. Like, I'm in your debt." She was anxious and vulnerable. She didn't believe in True Romances any more than I did, but I'd made the first spontaneous kind gesture she'd seen since some pump jockey offered to wash the windshield of her Winnebago. She was just redressing the natural balance, getting out of emotional hock. On impulse I decided to tell her why I was there. After all, she talked to a lot of men, maybe somebody had said something that might be useful to me.

  "There is something I'd like you to do for me," I said, and she leaned forward.

  "Name it." She was all attention and I studied her face. It looked intelligent.

  "A friend of mine died up here around three weeks ago. He was a geologist by the name of Jim Prudhomme. He was attacked by a bear, I heard, somewhere north of Chaumiere. He was camped alone there on a lake and when the chopper came in for him they found him dead, torn up badly as well."

  She nodded. "Yes. I heard about that last time I was in town. It was the biggest news since the gold strike."

  I nodded and took a pull at my beer. "Yeah, it would have been. Well, anyway, I'm trying to find out whatever I can about him." I improvised quickly. "We went to school together and I haven't seen him in a while. I wondered if anybody told you anything about the business, anything that wasn't in the papers."

  She looked at me soberly. "I saw the papers, they had a picture of him from his company. He looked about twenty-five."

  "That was a graduation photo," I explained. "He would've been thirty-eight now and he'd shaved off the beard."

  She thought about it for a minute, staring blankly at the candle on the table, replaying some mental videotape of past clients. At last she shook her head. "Can't place him, you know how it is. But I'll keep trying and I'll ask around. You staying here?"

  "Yes, room forty-seven." I raised my glass to her and she stood up. "Thanks. Take care of yourself," she said.

  "I can, most times. But thanks again for what you did," she said seriously.

  There wasn't anything to reply so I nodded and she raised one hand in farewell and turned away. Before she reached the door a table of men called her over and she sat down with them. She left with one of them before I'd even ordered my second beer.

  2

  The next morning I got up at seven and took Sam for a brisk run, maybe three miles, then fed him and left him in the car while I showered and went over to the dining room for breakfast. I had the place almost to myself. Most of the diners from the night before were back at the mine site, working their sixteen hours a day, trying to start bringing the gold out of the ground and into Darvon's pocket on schedule by the following summer. The salesmen were already off down the road with their smiles and shoeshines. Which left me, plus a succession of road-stained job-seekers, roughly dressed men who came in, about one every ten minutes, looking for work. By the look of them they had already been to apply at the gold mines and now they were anxious to win a stake to get them back to the city or farther west out to Alberta, where there was rumored to be work in the oil fields. The cook took time to give each of them a cup of coffee and a polite turndown. I guessed he'd been out of work himself once and remembered how it felt. It seemed he was getting stretched as the new people poured into town, following the gold strike.

  The waitress was a girl of about seventeen who would have been attractive if she hadn't been addicted to chewing gum. But she brought me bacon and eggs over easy with home fries, and half an hour later I was down at the police station talking to the chief.

  His name was Gallagher. He was an old-time copper, an inch taller than me at six-two, thickening slightly but still carrying an air of authority as unmistakable as a drawn gun. He had a grizzled moustache and dark brown eyes that looked as if they had already seen all the bad sights there are and would welcome something good. I wasn't it.

  "You the guy who clobbered Carl Tettlinger?" was his first question.

  "We never got around to exchanging names," I said, "but I did have a donnybrook with some big guy, name of Carl."

  "I hear you decked him and scared the hell out of his buddies," he said, frowning.

  "Kind of." I wasn't looking for glory, I wanted this man on my side.

  He snorted out a sound that might have been a laugh. "Good," he said, and that was that. We were standing in the front office of his station, a frame building he shared with the local fire department. It looked a lot like my own police station at Murphy's Harbour: teletype, typewriter, a couple of guns. The only differences were a middle-aged woman clerk and a collection of police sleeve flashes from departments across Canada and the States. Gallagher watched while I looked things over, then asked, "You approve?" and we both grinned.

  He threw up the flap on the counter and the little clerk glanced up anxiously as if he were giving away the secrets of the Masonic rite. He looked at her indulgently. "This gentleman is Mr. Reid Bennett. Anybody asks, he's with the—" He turned to me. "Which insurance company did you say?"

  "Prudential," I told him, and he nodded.

  "Yeah, the Prudential Assurance Company. You don't have to let anybody know that he's not—he's a police chief, like me."

  I looked at him quickly. It wasn't a piece of news I had intended laying on him or anybody else up here in Olympia. He waved me through toward his office, a comfortable little den down a short corridor. "Yeah, the name rang a bell when Alice at the motel spoke to my constable last night. Bennett, she said. Able to handle Carl without getting cut up at all. My guy told me today, so I checked with some old copies of the Police News. You're the chief at Murphy's Harbour, right?"

  I nodded, but he wasn't really listening, didn't even turn, but went into his office, a homey little spot with carpet on the floor and bookshelves that looked as if he had knocked them together in his basement. There were revolver trophies around and the usual pictures of groups of policemen, obvious even in fishing clothes, holding up dead trout. There were only two chairs, one behind the desk, upholstered, the other in front, plain wood.

  He pointed me to the plain one and sat behind his desk. "Yeah, I've read a few things about you. You were with the Americans in Viet Nam, then a spell in Toronto until you resigned, then Murphy's Harbour." He sat back in his chair and cocked his feet onto his desk. The top of it had black heel marks that indicated he did this a lot. "How come you quit Metro?" he asked softly.

  It's a question I've been asked before, usually by policemen who see only the career path open in the Metro department, not the red tape and compartmentalizing. "I was off duty and found a bunch of bikers raping a ki
d from a milk store. They came at me and I took two of them out."

  "Yeah?" He prodded me gently, craning up slightly to look over his boots. I noticed that the underside of the instep was polished. Ex-service for sure.

  "So they arrested me for manslaughter. I got off but the media wouldn't let go, so I quit."

  "It happens," he said softly. We sat and thought about that for a minute until the clerk came in with a pot of tea and two cups. "Tea?" he asked, smiling at the clerk and bringing his feet back down again so he could swing forward and do the pouring. When the clerk had gone out again he said, "Gladys is English. Been here for thirty years, bless her heart, good as gold. But damn if she's ever learned to make coffee. I gave up on it finally. When she brews up, I drink tea."

  We drank tea and chatted about nothing for a minute or two, courteous as a couple of Arabs. Then, as he poured himself a second cup, he asked, "So what brings you to Olympia? Looking to find gold?"

  I laughed, as he expected me to. "Hell no, wouldn't know what to do with it." I put down my teacup and leveled with him. "The widow of Jim Prudhomme, the geologist who was killed up here, she's a friend of my ex-wife and she's the one who asked me if I'd come up and talk to you, see what happened."

  Gallagher pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit up, placed the match very carefully in the clean ashtray, and said, "I don't know what she expects you to find out. The widow was up here herself when it happened, with her lawyer. Hell, he was the guy who identified the body."

  I could see I was on thin ice. His professional pride was injured. What was another cop doing looking over his shoulder? "Well, you know how it is. My ex-wife, feeling helpful, suggests I come up and talk to you, see if the lawyer missed anything. I'm just going through the motions because I'm a month late with my alimony." The last part was a lie. All Amy had asked from me was distance. Big rough men who clobbered people were not what she had bargained for. She was happier with the computer salesmen she worked with.

  But the lie worked, the chief was placated. He sat and smoked quietly and looked at me before asking: "You know the details, right?"

  "Just in general terms. Prudhomme was out on a survey, working alone, didn't make his rendezvous with the chopper so you set up a search party and they found the body, gnawed by a bear, unrecognizable."

  "You got it." He nodded. "That's what made the papers get all excited. There hasn't been a case like it since Coffin was hanged for murdering those hunters. Before you were born, likely, happened in Quebec. By the time they found the bodies, bears had chewed the heads up. Heads and hands, the only portions exposed, I guess."

  "How did you make a positive identification? From the clothing, what?" I pointed to the teapot and cocked my head, he nodded, and I poured us more tea. The case was on.

  "Clothes and pocket contents," Gallagher said. "I was all set to get a check made on his dental records but she didn't want that. That friend of hers, the lawyer, he said he was sure it was Prudhomme right enough and that was enough for our coroner. After all, who the hell else could it have been?"

  "How much of the head was left?" An ugly question, but I've seen enough injuries and wounds that I'm past worrying about the polite observances.

  "Not a whole lot," Gallagher admitted. "The bone structure was mostly there but the skull was crushed and the lower jaw was gone." He swung around and opened the file cabinet closest to him, pulling out a long drawer and taking a folder from it. He shoved it toward me and I opened it. On top of the contents lay a couple of eight-by-ten photographs. "That's the whole case in a nutshell," Gallagher told me. "How about you take a look at it while I head down to the school for the safety lecture for the kids. I'm due at nine-thirty, be back in about an hour."

  "Thank you. 'Predate that." I stood up as he left me, reaching for his hat, which had two lines of gold braid on it. Pretty fancy. My own only has one, but then, he had six men working for him. I only had Sam. Scrambled egg doesn't impress him unless it's in his dish.

  I sat down and took out the photograph. It was as the chief had described it. Prudhomme's body was lying in a tangle as if it had been thrown down by some impatient giant. The face and most of the head were gone, so were the hands. Aside from that the body was intact, still dressed in a heavy canvas-type jacket with lots of pockets, what looked like jeans, and prospector's boots with thick, ridged soles for walking over rough terrain. The second shot showed a close-up of the head. It had been crushed and most of the contents of the cranium were missing. If a bear had done it, he must have been as strong as a grizzly, not one of our local blacks. And I couldn't help thinking that the injury couldn't have been better designed for disguising a body.

  I read the police report next. Prudhomme had been reported lost by the chopper pilot, a man named Kinsella. When Prudhomme didn't show for the rendezvous the two had arranged, Gallagher had taken a couple of his own men and some volunteers and gone into the area to search. It took them two days, in canoes and the chopper, to locate the body on an island in one of the small lakes that dot the whole area. They were lucky to find him so soon but one of the searchers was an Indian, Jack Misquadis, which I happen to know is the Ojibway word for turtle. Misquadis was a trapper by profession and he had picked up signs on the second day on the portage leading to the lake where the island, and ultimately the body, had been found.

  There were statements from Misquadis and Gallagher and the pilot all confirming the discovery in the dry language that police reports use to turn horror into paperwork. The only colorful statement among them was from Misquadis. He had written: "I have been trapping this place thirty years but I never saw anything like this before. This one must be a mean bear."

  The other important document was the coroner's report. Prudhomme had been killed by a crushing blow to the head, the damage was compatible with a swipe from a bear's paw, and the teeth marks on the bone were compatible with the dental structure of a bear. That was it.

  I read the rest of the papers. There was an itemized list of Prudhomme's personal effects: wallet, the usual ID and a couple of receipts, one of them from a place in Olympia called Keepsakes, two letters, gold watch, compass, tin of Erinmore tobacco, matches, pipe, all the etceteras you would have expected. In the ruined backpack there were cooking utensils, cup, plate, geologist's hammer, and a camp lantern. That was it.

  The silent Gladys refused to make a photocopy of the file. Her face grew tense and she smiled like a Japanese diplomat, but there was no way I could make copies of anything without direct permission from Chief Gallagher. I didn't force it. I was sure Gallagher would let me take one later.

  While I waited for him I went over everything twice more, looking for anything that jumped out and shouted murder. Nothing did. I was rereading the list of Prudhomme's belongings when Gallagher came back. I heard his rumble in the outer office and the tiny piping of the clerk explaining what a bad boy I had been. Then another rumble and Gallagher came down the corridor with her in front of him, like a frigate escorting a carrier. She stopped in front of me, bent slightly from the waist like a bird on a windowsill, and told me, "The chief says it's all right. So if you'll let me have the file, Mr. Bennett."

  I thanked her and she swept everything away. Then Gallagher sat down behind his desk and reached for his cigarettes. "Find anything we missed?" he asked with enormous unconcern.

  "You knew I wouldn't," I said cheerfully. "I appreciate the chance to look through it, though. And I do have a couple of questions."

  He struck a match on the sole of his boot and lit up. "Shoot."

  "Well, I was wondering if you'd mind if I talked to the pilot and the Indian," I began. "And secondly, I wondered if you came up with any kind of bag of rock samples at the scene."

  He shook his head. "Nothing. I was a little surprised by that. He had that hammer they all carry, all the geologists, but no rock samples."

  "Maybe he was just heading out from his camp. Hadn't had time to collect any," I suggested, but Gallagher shook his head again, lo
oking huge and shaggy as a bison.

  "No, he just didn't have a bag with him, period."

  We thought about that one, but before I could go "Aha!" and stick my finger in the air Gallagher reminded me, "Don't forget that all the land around here is already licensed. Some of it belongs to Darvon, some to other mining outfits. Some of it belongs to moms and pops in towns like this. That's one mothering big lode out there. They say it's the biggest thing outside South Africa. And it's no secret to anybody."

  "So don't go painting any picture of murder to conceal a big gold strike," I said, and we both laughed at the thought. "Pity, would have led us right to the guy who did it."

  "I think he'd be called the culprit in that kind of story," Gallagher said, and then dropped the amiability. "Anything else you need?"

  I shook my head. "No. Like I said, you've wrapped it all up. I just want to talk to those men, go home, and say I checked everything."

  "Okay, then, I'll turn you loose." He stood up and shook hands formally. "I've got my summonses to get out for the month. Call me if you get stuck."

  I shook hands with him—it was something like reaching into an oven—collected my photocopies, and left. As I went out I was going over the one fact that had come through so far. Joe Misquadis was a trapper, but nobody had asked him about bear tracks at the site of the killing. It looked as if he would be my next point of call.

  3

  I went back out to Main Street and looked up and down it. There wasn't a lot to see. At one end was Lake Superior, bigger than any other in the world, big enough to sink big freighters without trace. On the shore stood the pulp mill as it had for eighty years, with its pyramid of logs brought in by water and dumped, ready for turning into newsprint. At the other end of the street was St. Michael's Anglican Church. Across from me was the Loyal Order of Bison lodge hall, the Bank of Montreal branch, and one of the town's four taverns. Behind me was the police/fire station and the Hudson Bay store, a small, clapboard building stocked mainly with catalogs showing the swell chain saws and shotgun shells and Day-Glo lingerie available to mail-order shoppers.