Fool's Gold (Reid Bennett)

by Wood, Ted

  I waved and left. It was noon and Thunder Bay was four hours of driving away, at least. Sam was glad to be moving. He sat up next to me for the first fifty miles until we reached the restaurant where I'd expected to eat the night before. I pulled off and had fish and chips, having to specify no gravy on the fries. By then it was one o'clock and I settled back for the rest of the journey.

  The weather was perfect. The sky was brilliant and all the hardwoods were changing color. Right in that section, the Trans-Canada highway has to be one of the most beautiful roads in the world. There are little mountains peeking out of the endless trees, sheer cliffs, and the occasional view to the shores of Lake Superior. I knew that in one month there would be snow up to the hubcaps, but on an afternoon like this I could envy the lonely people who live there. Each of the scenic lookouts had cars at them, mostly carrying American license plates. Moms and pops were snapping their Instamatics at their Oldsmobiles with the view in the background. I stopped at a lookout about an hour from Thunder Bay to let Sam stretch and to get my mind away from Alice Graham and back to the case. I've known my share of women, but this one was a rare delight in a town like Olympia. She was intelligent and spirited and almost beautiful. I found it hard to get her out of my thoughts.

  But I concentrated, and when I got back in the car I had worked out what I would do. It was simple. I would pick Eleanor up and drive her into town for a quiet drink, perhaps dinner. I'd take her through the story enough times to be sure she'd got the date right. Then I would thank her and take the photograph back to Olympia and let Gallagher see it for himself. From there on, he could take over the investigation and I would do any legwork he suggested. And in the evenings, I would spend what time I could with Alice.

  As I came up the slight slope from the east, I could see a Winnebago at the foot of the Terry Fox monument. There were a couple of other cars parked there. One, I noticed, had Michigan plates; the other was Ontario. People were standing around the monument, reading the words at the base, taking photographs.

  I pulled in next to the Winnebago against the low wall that surrounds the scenic lookout. Eleanor wasn't in the driver's seat, but that didn't surprise me. Her vehicle was a home. She was probably relaxing in the back, maybe making herself a cup of coffee on the propane stove. It occurred to me that she might be carrying through on the reward sequence she had sketched for me the night I fought Carl Tettlinger. Maybe she was back there in a housecoat, waiting to show her gratitude in the most obvious way she could think of.

  I grinned at the thought. I'm no prude, but I didn't need the gesture. I'd rather be her friend than just another John. I tapped on the door and waited. Nothing happened. I tried it, but it was locked, I went around to the other side where the main entrance door was located. I knocked again but there was still no answer. A pulse in my throat started to kick. This wasn't right. You don't have to beat the door down to be heard in a motor home. If she was inside she was in no shape to answer. And I wondered why. I turned the handle and found the door was open.

  That was unusual. It's not smart to leave a recreational vehicle open. Kids could swarm through it and rip off everything that wasn't screwed down. It could happen, even here in the true north, strong and law-abiding.

  I stuck my head in and called "Eleanor." My voice echoed. Slowly I climbed the first step and called again. Still no answer. The interior was tidy. The double bed was made, covered with a silk bedspread as close to scarlet as I've ever seen. It had been ruffled, as if someone had lain on it and got up hurriedly, but there was no sign of her. I glanced around. The only inside door led to the head. It was shut. I tapped politely and called again, "Eleanor." All I got was silence. Working now on a policeman's instinct, I opened it.

  Her body fell out with a slithering rush and sprawled at my feet. She had been shot, at close range, through both eyes.

  8

  The next six hours were a replay of a dozen homicides I've dealt with in my time. I got the couple in the next car to call the police. They came, a couple of uniformed patrolmen. I showed them my Murphy's Harbour ID and filled them in. They called the detectives. The detectives called their homicide guy, just one for the peaceable folks of Thunder Bay. He came. So did the CID people with their fingerprint gear and their cameras. And then the ambulance, picking its way through the crowd that had swarmed there: sightseers, reporters, cameramen, gum-chewers. By nine o'clock I was in the police station, drinking bad coffee and making a statement.

  They started off suspicious but slowly thawed out. One of the detectives called Olympia and spoke to Gallagher, who told them I was kosher. Then they went over all the contents of the Winnebago, pulling out everything—from the milk in the little fridge to the working girl's wardrobe of garter-belts and fancy lingerie they found in the drawers under the bed. There was the usual amount of sniggering over all of that stuff, especially from the uniformed coppers who were still young enough to think that everybody's sexuality except their own was a scream.

  They uncovered her camera, hidden behind what looked like a smoked-glass pelmet over the window facing the main entry door. It had no film in it. There were no photographs of any kind in the camper.

  The detective, a big Nordic blonde by the name of Pedersen, sipped his coffee with distaste and asked me, "Who all would've killed her?"

  "No idea. I only met her two nights ago, like I told you. I was coming here to see her about some customer she'd had that looked like a man I'm after."

  He sipped again and looked at me as if I smelled bad. "So it's likely your fault she's dead," he said in a growl. "That shooting through the eyes, that's somebody's way of saying she'd seen too much."

  "That's the feeling I got. But I don't know who could've done it. It could've been some trick she was blackmailing. She didn't strike me as the type, what I saw of her, but I don't know any more about her than you do."

  "Less, probably," he said, crumpling his coffee cup. "I was in high school with her." He stood very straight and scrubbed his tired face with the heels of his hands. "Bright as a goddamn dollar. Some asshole tourist knocked her up and her family kicked her out. She couldn't get a job that paid enough to support the kid so she took to hooking. And now this." He looked at me for any sign of smugness. I didn't show any. Women like Eleanor don't make me feel superior. They make me feel fortunate to have been born male. We don't get landed with her kind of trouble. The bad ones among us cause it, the rest of us mostly blunder through our lives without having to touch the sides.

  Pedersen must have sensed sympathy in my silence. "She was fifteen when it happened. Grade ten. Her folks ran a campground, lived out there all summer. She stayed there, picking up paper, working the kitchen, all the chores a kid would do to help around the place. That was my last year. Grade thirteen. She was in ten, so I guess that makes her thirty." He corrected himself, "Made her thirty, when she was still alive."

  I said nothing. There isn't anything to add to that kind of story. A lot of social workers would have you believe all the women on the street get started that same way. It's not true. Some of them are lazy, some of them hate men and take out their resentment by accommodating them, enjoying the power they hold over them for the time it takes. Others are just unlucky, like Eleanor. My mother, rest her soul, would have said a Hail Mary for her. I don't say prayers much, since Nam, but I felt for Eleanor.

  After an hour or two they secured the scene. Her camper had already been towed into the police car pound and they had sent four uniformed men scrambling down the escarpment in front of the lookout, one of them with a metal detector, searching for the murder weapon. It hadn't shown up by midnight, although they must have turned up fifty bucks' worth of beer cans, so they called two of the guys off and left the others to guard the scene against souvenir hunters until daybreak. Me they let go, with a warning to stand by to be recalled for the inquest.

  I drove back down the dark highway, boring through the blackness with my lights on high beam, going thirty miles at a stretch w
ithout seeing a house or another car. In one spot a truck had hit a moose and a pickup full of Indians had appeared from nowhere to butcher the carcass. They looked up at me over the big bloodstain in the road, eyes gleaming red in my headlights as I barrelled through.

  I made Olympia at five a.m. and drove down to Alice Graham's house. It was in darkness, but the door opened almost as soon as I turned off the engine. I paused to let Sam out, leaving him in the predawn chill as I slipped in past Alice, who was shuddering in the cold, wearing a nylon nightdress that Eleanor might have been proud of. I picked her up under the elbows and kissed her on the forehead. "Sorry I'm late. I ran into trouble."

  "It was on the radio," she said softly. "They said a local woman had been murdered in her Winnebago at the monument and police were questioning a man." She tilted her face to kiss me quickly on the chin. "I put two and two together."

  She closed the door and stood a foot away from me in the darkness. "You want to talk about it?"

  "Nothing to say. She had some information for me. I went to pick it up and she'd been killed and the evidence was gone. It looks as if somebody learned about it and beat me to it."

  Now she reached out and turned on a low reading lamp. Her house looked dim and comfortable, like a stage set for a romance, only I didn't feel romantic. I felt dirty and hungry and disappointed. "And that's all it meant to you?" she asked soberly. That somebody beat you to it?"

  "No, it meant the end of a remarkable women. It makes me sad and it makes me angry and I'd like to catch the sonofabitch who did it and break his arms and legs," I said, suddenly angry. "I'm not a machine, Alice. I like people, I want them to stay healthy. I liked what I'd seen of that woman and now she's dead."

  She shivered quickly, then reached out and hooked a coat off the peg by the door. It was a red mackinaw jacket, barely long enough to cover her hips. Frothy white nylon spilled out underneath, transparent against the low light. "I'm sorry. You just seemed so matter-of-fact about it. Would you like some coffee, a drink, what?"

  My empty stomach rolled and I reached out and stroked her cheek. She caught my hand and held it against her face, then quickly let it go as if her mother might come in and see her playing with the boys. "Have you had anything to eat?"

  "Not since one o'clock yesterday, and I want to be in Chief Gallagher's office as soon as he gets there."

  "Then you need bacon and eggs," she said. "I'll put some on." She went over behind the counter and opened the fridge. I had half expected her to go for a housecoat, but she didn't, she moved around in her crazy half-sexy, half-practical outfit as if I wasn't there. For the first time in three mostly lonely years I felt like a married man.

  I sat stupidly, wearily, watching as she laid strips of bacon in the pan. I noticed the roses I'd given her in a crystal bowl on the bar. Part of me wanted to go over and hug her, not for the sex but for the closeness to somebody who cared about people, me and poor dead Eleanor. But I was too aware of my own presence, the stale lived-in feel of my tired body. I had no right looking for proximity, even to a girl in a mackinaw jacket and a nylon nightdress.

  So instead I went over to the stereo system against the wall and dug through her records. She had a copy of the "Four Seasons" and I put on side one, the "Spring" section.

  Alice looked up from the stove. "Nice," she said. "I didn't know you liked Vivaldi."

  "Grew up with classics. My father was a brass band man in the Old Country. He taught us what music was, saved me from being a rock fan."

  She smiled, a quick beam that looked as if she meant it, then turned the bacon and reached for eggs. The coffeepot bubbled, filling the room with fragrance. I swallowed hungrily, waiting for breakfast and for something to go wrong. I figured it had to. Women don't often get out of bed to cook me a breakfast. It's hello, good-bye, generally. This time was a lot more fun.

  She lifted the bacon out onto a paper towel and cracked eggs, three of them, into the pan. "Over easy, right?" she asked, and I must have grinned because she grinned back. "You men are so goddamn predictable."

  I waited while she finished cooking and set the plate on the bar top and ordered me to start.

  She diplomatically did nothing but make toast for a few minutes until I'd finished. "More coffee?"

  I shook my head. "No, thank you. The charitable thing for me to do would be disappear and let you get an hour's sleep."

  "You think that would be charitable?" She laughed.

  I looked at her, surprised, I guess. She had been so buttons-and-bows domestic for the time it took to cook breakfast that I had thought we were going to settle for polite handshakes at the door. Instead she slipped out of the jacket and tossed it on the couch. "You've still got a couple of hours before you start working again, Mr. Detective."

  I was standing up as she said it and her words stopped me like a punch in the head. "Who told you I was a detective?"

  "Nobody had to. That story about being in the insurance business is hokey. We have a Prudential man in town and he's never heard of you. And all this work and worry over this geologist. I want you to know that the drinkers in the cocktail lounge have you pegged for a detective."

  I straightened the rest of the way up and she turned away toward the staircase. "And what do you think I am?"

  She laughed again. "If I told you out loud, my mother would wash my mouth out with soap. Come on, it's getting early."

  She paused on the stairway and I came up below her and put my arms around her, my skin tingling at the feel of her warmth through the nylon. She shuddered and pressed herself close to me. "Come on," she said urgently, and led me up the stairs.

  It was nine before I got to the police chief's office. The little clerk beamed nervously and ushered me in. "Chief Gallagher said he wanted to see you right away."

  By now I was shaved and showered and wearing a clean shirt, but Gallagher looked at me and grinned. "Hard night?"

  "A long drive," I said carefully.

  He laughed again. "Don't break my heart. I called your room at seven, you weren't in yet."

  "I'm here now." His locker-room jocularity was breaking one of the few rules of gentlemanly conduct my father ever drummed into me. You don't kick a man when he's down and you don't talk about women.

  Gallagher hadn't gone to the same school. He held onto the topic for a sentence longer while he poured coffee. Only now his face was grim. "Don't get the idea she's some kind of roundheels. You're the first guy she's taken to since her husband drowned. That's a whole lot of grieving for a woman as ripe as her."

  I said nothing and he passed me coffee and we sat each side of his desk. "So, I talk too much. It's difficult not to, living so far from people worth talking to. Sorry if I stepped on your toes."

  "No offense taken," I told him. "You want to hear about Eleanor?"

  "I think I got the most of it already from Pedersen at Thunder Bay," he said, sipping his coffee. "She was shot at close range with a small-bore weapon, likely a twenty-two pistol. The fact that it was through her eyes looks like a very specialized killing. I figured whoever hit her did it that way because of something she'd seen."

  "That's the way I read it," I said. "I was looking forward to getting that picture and opening up this case again. I don't believe Prudhomme's dead, but I don't know if we've got enough evidence to go for a disinterment order."

  Gallagher looked at me over the rim of his cup, both elbows perched on the same arms of his chair, head hunched down on his thick neck. And he grinned. "And what would you do with the remains when they dig him up?"

  "Check the dental record. That's the safest bet. Even if he only had his top jaw left intact. He was a typical middleclass guy, he must have gone to one particular dentist. We could get the records and make sure it was his jaw, and that means his body."

  Gallagher set down his cup and stood up, still grinning. "Good thinking/' he said amiably. He went over and leaned on the top of his file cabinet. "Only I don't think we should go to all that trouble, moving al
l that dirt an' all."

  "You're stringing me along," I said, trying to stay as happy as he was.

  "Well no, but I can do you a favor," he said. "Turn your back a minute."

  Something in his forcefulness triggered my alarm mechanisms. I don't turn my back on trouble of any kind, especially physical trouble. I looked at him unblinkingly, and he laughed. "No sweat. I just have to open the office safe. You can wait outside the office if you want."

  I turned away and heard the click of the wheel on his little safe. Then he spoke. "Okay, take a look at this." I turned back. He was holding out another file folder to me. "I didn't submit this one with the rest of the material in that folder I made up for the files," he said, and passed it over.

  I opened it and found two pieces of paper in it. The first one had a dozen or so lines of typing on it. "Look at the next one," he told me. I did, and whistled in surprise. It was a clean sheet of paper with a crescent-shaped series of indentations on it. "Right," he said happily. "That's what one jaw looks like biting down on a piece of paper held by a dumb, handicapped chief of police."

  "You mean you took an impression of his jaw?" I looked up, astonished. "Why didn't you say so before?"

  "For the same reason I told you last night," he said, and all his amusement had gone. He was stoney eyed. "Because nobody in this town wanted to know. But I took it and I kept it. And the first sheet lists all the peculiarities I could make out. Gaps, fillings, what looked like old chips out of the front teeth, everything."

  "Then we've got it." I glanced down the written sheet. It may not have been what a dentist would write, but there was no doubt it was as complete as a layman could make it, complete enough to check with a professional record.

  He nodded. "Yeah. I guess you could say we've got it. Only what do we do with it now?"

  9

  We talked it over for an hour while some outraged citizen with a parking ticket waited in the front office for the chief to go out and explain why he couldn't park against fire hydrants, even if he was a thirty-third degree Freemason passing through this one-horse town. It all came down to one thing. We had to get the imprint checked against Prudhomme's dental record.