by Wood, Ted
The northern lights were flickering across the sky as I went out, and the air was colder. I stood and looked at her house for a minute, then got into the car and drove back to the motel.
Sam was restless and I let him out for a while before going in through the side door into the corridor of the motel.
The whole place was in darkness except for the emergency exit light behind me. I was surprised. Most places, even this far north, would keep the hall lights on. But I found my room and tried the key, scraping it slightly as I searched for the lock. It swung open and I stepped inside and stopped, still in the short corridor that led to the room itself. My hair was prickling on my neck. Something was wrong, I could feel it. The light didn't go on when I hit the switch and I could smell cigarette smoke in the air. I crouched instinctively, left arm up over my head, staring out through the darkness toward the translucency of the gauze curtains, lit from outside by the sky. And as I watched a form sprang into my vision, reaching up to swing a club as hard as a Blue Jays batter trying for a homer.
6
I had an advantage. Whoever it was had put himself between me and the window. I straightened, arm still raised, stepped forward under the club, and brought my knee crashing up into his testicles. At the same time I upper-cut a solid right hand, bringing it up into his descending face like a hammer.
He collapsed like a falling wall, the club clattering uselessly behind me. I stepped back and felt for it with my foot, listening for other sounds than the anguished gasping of the man at my feet. I could hear none, but I crouched carefully and retrieved the club. It was a piece of rough lumber, still with the bark on it, about four feet long. It felt like a small fence post. I held it by the middle, like a Parris Island pugil stick, ready to block or swing in any direction, up, down, across. Still nobody moved. Whoever had set me up had sabotaged the lights. They had probably left one plugged in, most likely the one that switched on from the bed. That way they could have sat back and put the lights on to prod my body with one toe and laugh when they had me on the floor, moaning.
There was no alternative. I swung the stick, trying to be silent, cutting the air in front of me in every direction as I inched for the bed. When I felt it against my shin I edged along and found the bedside switch.
As I clicked it on, the other man sprang for me, leaping across the bed, swinging his club sideways at my head. Maybe if we'd been somewhere high enough for him to come overhand he would have decked me, but the ceiling was too low. I parried his swing with my stick and then windmilled him with both ends, twice each in the head, scattering his teeth across the floor. He gave a half scream of pain and collapsed, bleeding from his mouth and his nose.
I ran back to the bathroom and threw up, dry bile and undigested fear and horror at my own ferocity. Once I'd spent hours in boot camp working with a padded pugil stick, wondering why the hell they wanted me good with the thing, learning it only so the DI wouldn't: be able to pound me anymore. But it was a boxing glove compared with the bare knuckles of the post I had used tonight. Even the day my training and practice had paid and I squared myself with the DI, knocking him on his butt, he had been on his feet shouting orders, first bounce. Now I had used a raw club without pads and smashed a man. The fact he had been trying to kill me didn't stop me from being sick. But I beat it, soon. And though I felt filthy, I kept the club in one hand in case either of them got up and tried again.
I was wasting my worry. Neither one of them moved and I came back into the room and turned the first one face up. It was Carl from the night before, moaning soundlessly, both hands clutching his groin. I left him and checked number two. He was conscious but shocked beyond speech.
He looked at me blankly and I let go of him and picked up the phone, dialed the operator,, and asked for the police. Surprisingly, I got right through to Chief Gallagher, patrolling in the scout car. In the instant he responded "police chief," I realized he must have a shunt through the radio at his station and thought about getting one installed in Murphy's Harbour.
"This is Reid Bennett at the motel. Two guys jumped me with clubs in my room, number thirty-four."
"Two of them, eh?" His interest was clinical. "Both still there, are they?"
"Yeah, I think they could use an ambulance."
"If it'll wait until I've been there, hold onto them for five minutes, I'm down at the mill."
I hung up and looked around. They had broken into my case and taken out the bottle of Black Velvet I had brought with me. Both the motel glasses were on the table, used, so I took a slug straight from the bottle. It calmed me and I sat and waited until Gallagher arrived. The men moaned in pain, but I've seen guys with worse injuries waiting hours for the choppers to come in.
Gallagher came in without knocking and checked both of them. "Shit," he said respectfully. "Remind me not to get you mad. What'd you hit them with?"
I showed him the post I'd taken off the first man. He whistled, surprised but not shocked. It looked as if I'd been right in my instincts about him. He was the typical copper. His presence in the room was like the return of daylight after a bad night. The blood on the carpet seemed less vivid, the two men less grotesque in their pain. I held out the whisky bottle without speaking and he took it and pulled himself a good taste. "Thanks. What happened?"
I told him while he reached for the phone and called the hospital. He asked them to send somebody to the motel, pick up a couple of fighters. Then he asked, "Where were you, until now?"
"I was out visiting."
He grinned, a bleak, copper's grin. "Thought that was your car at the Graham place," he said, and asked, "What happened?"
I spelled it out for him and he nodded. "I believe you, but in the morning the magistrate is going to find it difficult to credit that they ambushed you."
I shrugged. I knew firsthand that he was right, but there was nothing to say about it. It sure as hell looked like excessive use of force, even to me, and I'd been there.
"You gonna charge them?" he asked, flopping down on the edge of the bed, making it look casual but dodging the bloodstains. He took off his hat and tossed it aside. "Might be an idea, ya know," he urged. "Otherwise some shyster is going to suggest they charge you with assault."
I didn't answer him directly. Instead I picked up one of the clubs, four-foot hunks of cedar, cut with a hatchet, judging from the marks. "They both had these," I said, tossing it to him.
He caught it casually and reached down to prod the second man. "Either one of you two scumbags wanna charge Mr. Bennett with assault?" he asked. The man groaned.
Gallagher tossed the club back at me. "Give him a good night's sleep and some dental work, he'll be chirpy as hell again, certain to think of some reason for pressing charges. You should charge them."
"Okay, break and enter and aggravated assault. Should get them out of your bailiwick for a month or two."
He stood up, suddenly angry. "I hope they get ten years," he said savagely. "That bastard there"—he pointed at Carl with one toe—"he's beat up more guys. But none of them will press charges. It's not like the city, you know. Up here, working on mine construction, you have to love thy goddamn neighbor or the bastard's likely to drop a pick down the shaft on your head. Only they're afraid to do it to him. He deals in terror, constantly. Nobody ever charges him. He thinks he's King Kong."
He walked over and tapped Carl on the shin, lightly, but the man looked up out of pained, dull eyes. "How're you feeling now, big shot?" he asked. "Finally picked the wrong guy, didn't you?"
Outside I could hear a siren wailing toward us. Gallagher turned toward the window and sighed. "He really needs that, to clear the traffic away at three-thirty a.m. in Olympia, doesn't he?"
"It's his only chance," I said. "It's to let his wife know he's working."
I went to the outer door and directed the ambulance men in. They had a stretcher with them, but they looked at Carl in dismay. "He's a heavy sonofabitch, ain't he, Chief?" one of them said to Gallagher.
&
nbsp; Gallagher nodded. "Hope you been eating your Wheaties," he said casually. "The other one is walking wounded." He reached down and tapped the man on the shoulder. "On your feet, sunshine, these nice men are taking you to the hospital."
The injured man stood up slowly, pulling himself up on the bed, then putting both hands back over his mouth. I felt my sickness rising again but hung on. If they'd surprised me as they intended, I'd have the injuries of both of them, plus others.
The ambulance men grunted Carl onto the stretcher and staggered out with him. We followed. I left the light on.
We went to the hospital first. From there Gallagher called one of his men, waking him up and asking him to come down and guard the pair of them. He arrived ten minutes later, with the drained look of someone woken from a sound sleep.
He looked at me wide-eyed when Gallagher filled him in and we left as a nurse brought him coffee. Gallagher drove me down to the station and let us in.
"You know the routine," he explained casually. "I need a formal complaint and I can lay the charges. No doubt in my mind it was like you said."
"Does this mean court in the morning?"
He nodded and grinned. "Which means you'll be lucky to get five hours' sleep. Welcome to police work, in case you forgot."
I sat there while he typed up the occurrence and took my statement. Then I asked him the question I had thought of back at the hospital. "You think there's any more to this than revenge for last night?"
"More? Like what?" His eyebrows pulled themselves together and he leaned over the typewriter, taking his weight on the arms of his chair.
"Well, I've been asking a lot of questions about Jim Prudhomme today. You don't think that has anything to do with the town thug taking a crack at me?"
He left himself relax, leaning back slowly and opening the drawer of his desk. He took out Juicy Fruit gum and pulled himself a stick, not offering it to me, and pushed it back in the drawer.
"What makes you think the Prudhomme thing isn't closed?"
I looked at him, at the obvious squareness of a lifelong copper, a hard-nose who never took anything for granted. I've known a lot of policemen and a lot of tough guys earning a hard dollar in tough places. All of them have the same iron quality to them—not in the face, in their core. I knew I could trust him. "Because I'm starting to get a whiff of something funny about this business. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Prudhomme was alive and well and the body in his grave was the body of some drifter."
"You were talking to Misquadis?"
"Him and some other people." I let it sit at that and he chomped his gum a time or two and then sat forward again.
"And he told you there wasn't any bear on that island?"
"He said he didn't see any tracks," I said carefully.
Gallagher snorted. "Neither did I."
We sat there, our eyes locked. When I spoke I was careful again. "But you said Prudhomme was killed by a bear."
Suddenly Gallagher stood up. He looked down at me as if I were a petty thief and this was our first meeting, while the loot I'd picked up lay on the table between us. "No I didn't," he said angrily. "I never made any such damn suggestion. That was the coroner. I told him there was no bear spoor, no tracks. You know what he did?" He paced away from his desk and turned suddenly, "You know what he told me?"
"I guess he told you he was the doctor and you were the copper," I hazarded.
Gallagher laughed. At least, the ugly sounds that poured out of him might have been called that. To me they were the gurglings of a man in misery. "Ten out of ten," he said. He turned to the wastepaper basket and threw his gum into it, looking down as if he would like to kick the basket into ruins. "That could've been his exact words. And because I'm fifty-seven years old with nowhere else to go before retirement, I let him say it. And I went along with his finding. And I tore up my first report, which called for an investigation at the site of the killing and a proper search by Misquadis and a proper investigation by the forensic people at Queen's Park in Toronto. I let him tell me how to do my job, because without him and the rest of council there isn't any goddamn job to do and I'm still too young to be dying of old age in some single room in Toronto."
He sat down again, bonelessly, collapsing into his chair. I waited for him to continue but he didn't. He sat and looked down at his desk until I spoke. "It's the same in Murphy's Harbour, the same in every small town. They hire you and they think they own you."
He looked up at me. His face was bleak. "You've still got time," he said. "You can quit, find some other kind of work. But I'm stuck. I'm a copper with maybe eight good years left. After that I'd be lucky to get a job in security, letting people in and out of some oil company office in Toronto."
There was nothing to say, so instead I waited for a while, then filled him in about Eleanor and her photo. He whistled softly. "Well, there's one smart little hooker," he said. "Always struck me she was better than the job she does. She's got brains and she's got spirit but she still keeps on peddling her ass like it was fish. It makes you mad." Not a word about the evidence.
I waited a moment or two, then told him about the bearskin Prudhomme had bought, and about the fact that Sallinon had said it was something else.
"I was starting to figure that somebody killed Prudhomme and tried to dress it up as a bear mauling," I said. "But when the guy owned the murder weapon already and when he's found alive and well enough to get laid some days later, I wonder just whose body that was up there on the island."
Gallagher sat up. "If this Eleanor is right—and we'll know better when we get that photo—then you've got to think that Prudhomme killed some other guy and dressed him up in his own clothes."
"Why?" I wondered out loud.
Gallagher stood up and paced around his desk. "Hell, I don't know. Why does anybody kill anybody? Maybe he was in over his head with a loan shark? Maybe he was sick of his wife and wanted to drop out of sight. We don't need a motive, we've got a goddamn body."
"Yeah. But that raises another question, for me anyway. If he bought that bearskin from Sallinon, why did Sallinon lie about it? Did Prudhomme ask him to, I wonder?"
"Beats the hell outa me." Gallagher said. At last he began to grin. It started around his mouth, cold and hard, a flexing of the muscles. Then it spread until it lit up his whole ugly face. "Go to it, Reid. Let's bring this case back to life and show these arrogant bastards that they know nothing. It won't make any difference to them, they're in too solid in a town this size. But it'll show them there's more to life than taking the plane to Chicago or Los Angeles and standing up there talking bullshit about animal bites."
I wondered why he had such a personal anger against the good doctor. Was he perhaps interested in the big nurse? It was a thought, but I let it slide. "Okay. I'm heading to Thunder Bay tomorrow. As soon as I've got the picture we'll turn this investigation on its ear."
He didn't say anything. Instead he reached across the table and shook hands with me. "Come on," he said. "I'll drive you back to the motel."
7
I was up at eight after four hours' broken sleep. First I let Sam out of the car, fed him, and gave him a brisk run, then I went for breakfast. The same girl was on duty and I ate the same breakfast, looking through the same window at the same grand view. After that I went down to the little courthouse, ready to tell the magistrate what had happened.
First I had to sit through half a dozen hearings of vagrancy. In each case Gallagher gave the same evidence. He had found the men panhandling in town. He had driven them all to the city limits and give them five dollars and told them to head back down the highway, there weren't any jobs vacant in Olympia and there was no room for beggars. All of them had come back into town and taken up panhandling again. He had arrested them, given them a night's shelter in the cells and a solid breakfast, and brought them to court. In each case the magistrate cautioned the men, told them they would get thirty days next time, and advised them to leave town for keeps. They had all ag
reed to do so. Two of them had stopped on their way out of court to shake hands with Gallagher and thank him. He brushed it off, but it increased my respect for the man. He was a good copper and a kind man.
I didn't get a chance to talk about the attack. The town lawyer was there on behalf of the two men, Tettlinger and Gervais. He asked for a one-month remand, telling the magistrate that his clients had suffered a severe beating, frowning at me as if he expected me to go red. I didn't. My initial horror was over. These two were bad news. They deserved a jail term. I would do what I must to see they got one. In the meantime, thanks to the Bail Reform Act, they were freed on their own recognizance and told to return a month later for the hearing.
There was only one florist in town, but he had yellow roses. I bought seven of them, then went to the grocery and picked up an empty carton to hide them in. It had previously held somebody's toilet tissue, but I didn't figure that was too outlandish to carry into a motel.
Alice Graham was at the desk, looking as perky as ever. She had some miner type with her, checking out, so I set the box down carefully and waited. She glanced at me over his head as he bent to sign the credit card form, and winked. "A little early for deliveries," she said.
"They told me this was an emergency," I said, and waited until he had gone.
Suddenly, without his presence, she was a little shy. I didn't let it cool me but lifted the box up onto the counter. "Never judge a carton by its cover," I told her.
She looked at me, her eyes wide, face still neutral, and opened the lid. She peeked in and closed it down immediately, bowing her head. Then she opened it again. "This is good-bye, isn't it?" she said quietly.
"How about au revoir?" I asked. "I have to drive to Thunder Bay this afternoon and I won't be back until midnight."
She pulled the roses out of the box and sniffed them. "You know where I live," she said. And then the phone rang and she was all business again.
