Fool's Gold

by Ted Wood

  "Normal enough trick, wanted half and half," she went on cheerily. "No way I'd have thought anything about him but he was like the picture in the paper, and you asked me."

  "Where's the photograph now?" First things first. Let's get our hands on some evidence. I knew a prostitute's testimony wouldn't last two minutes in court. Some slick lawyer would crucify her and smile his way back to his seat, leaving any case in ruins. A photograph would give me the credibility I needed to reopen a formal investigation.

  "I've got it right here with me," she said, and my pulse started to jump. "Don't tell me where you are," I almost shouted. "Just fix a rendezvous, somewhere we can meet and you can give me the picture."

  "Why the hell wouldn't I tell you?" she asked, and laughed. Then she must have thought about it because in the few seconds I remained silent she said, "Hey, you don't think somebody's listening in?"

  "No idea." I tried to sound cheerful. "But I was in a small war once and they taught me one thing."

  "What was that?" She genuinely wanted to know.

  "Tell them nothing," I said. "That's the whole of it. Tell nobody anything."

  She laughed again. "Well, that's heavier than I normally worry about, but okay, I can give you the photo tomorrow."

  "Why not tonight?" I was full of the old familiar hunting lust, the thrill of an investigation. It makes you feel like a caveman on the trail of your dinner. No other thrill matches it, except for its big brother, of course—patrol in enemy-held territory.

  "Honeylamb, tonight is the men's social," she said patiently, and told me the name of the do-gooding organization whose membership was gathering that night to tell jokes, smoke cigars, drink eight-year-old rye, and watch Eleanor in the embraces of one of their younger members. "Two and a half yards easy money," she explained.

  "What time will you be through?"

  "Not till maybe three. Some of these old goats may get ideas and that means a little extra action for me. I could make five hundred."

  I never dwell on lost causes. "Where and when tomorrow?"

  She thought about that one. I could imagine her, twisting her blond hair around one finger as she worked out what to do.

  "Well I'm in, well, like, around Thunder Bay. So how about I wait for you at the Terry Fox memorial at five o'clock. Know where it is?"

  I did. Terry Fox was the gutsy kid who lost a leg to cancer and then set out to run across Canada anyway, trying to raise money to fight the disease. The secondaries returned in his lung before he reached Thunder Bay and there's a handsome statue there with the name of every goddamn cabinet minister who could swing the connection any way at all after Terry died. It's a few miles east of the city. "Yeah, I know where it is. If you're certain that's the best time to get together."

  "Unless you've got five big ones to buy me off tonight," she said teasingly. I said nothing and she went on quickly, "Just kidding. Believe me, if I wasn't promised for months now, I'd leave the old farts to jack off on their own."

  "Tomorrow is fine, Eleanor," I said. "Thanks for worrying about it. It's great."

  "Five o'clock then. The cocktail hour. Maybe we could have a drink," she said.

  "I'd like that a lot," I said. "See you at the monument at five tomorrow."

  She hung up and I got up at once and drove down to Jack Misquadis. He had finished his work and was sitting in the doorway of his cabin, staring out at what little view there was, perhaps fifty yards to the stunted evergreens.

  I told him I had to meet a guy the next day. I could be ready for a bear hunt the day after, would that be suitable?

  He heard me out and nodded. Sure, the day after would be good. First t'ing. I nodded thanks and left. His attitude is one of a lot of things I admire about Indians. You don't have to make a big thing of arrangements when you're dealing with them. The old cliché about white time and Indian time is very true. They're not concerned with big hands and little hands on a clock, their time runs from events. They don't say, "See you at eight o'clock"; they say, "See you after supper." Now, if I chose to put some other event before bear-hunting, that was fine. We would hunt bears later.

  With the arrangements made I felt better. I would have liked to have the photograph of Prudhomme in my hands, but that would come. And then I would have enough evidence to open the inquest up again. This time we wouldn't take the word of a man who recognized the clothes Prudhomme's body had been dressed in. We would disinter the body and check the dental record for the upper jaw. I had a feeling that we would come up with some information to startle all the Prudhomme mourners.

  It was hard to set thoughts of the case aside, but I had no choice. Tomorrow I could roll up outside the police station with the photograph and stir things up. Until then, I had nothing to do but prepare for my first honest-to-God date in I didn't know how long.

  What I did first was to drive out of town with Sam and find a logging trail. There I pulled off the highway and stripped down to jeans and T-shirt and put myself through a solid workout. It's a habit I've been in since the service. As a copper, your major piece of equipment is your physique. You never know when you're going to need the most it can give you in strength, agility, or response time. It pays to get off the seat of the patrol car every day or so and make sure everything is still in working order.

  It was. Soaked with sweat, I kibitzed with Sam for a while, then worked him through his paces once or twice and finally drove back to the motel.

  I had a long, luxurious shower and changed into the best clothes I had with me, a good pair of corduroy pants, what my dad used to describe as the Bennett tartan, Viyella shirt, and a tweed jacket. Not exactly evening dress but plenty formal for this far north.

  Alice was in the front office talking to Willy, who had widened up his grin a notch when he found she was going out to dinner. He looked at me, ignoring Alice, who was giving him instructions, and asked, "Had any more fights?"

  Alice looked at me over his shoulder and threw her hands up in mock despair. Then she finished her briefing and I walked her out to the car. Sam was in the backseat and I let him out first.

  "This could be a problem—I don't have anywhere else to leave him, except the room. Do you mind sitting in front of him for forty minutes?" I asked.

  She looked at me over the top of the car, her face a pale smudge against the surrounding darkness. "It won't take forty minutes," she said firmly. "Leave him in the car."

  I opened the door for her, then let Sam in the back again. If she thought the interior smelled a little doggy she didn't mention it; she had gone quiet on me. I wondered if I had offended her. Her next words put me straight.

  "No sense driving all the way to Esterhaven for dinner," she said. "I can cook rings around the guy at the restaurant there."

  "You're sure?" I tried to sound casual but I felt like a high school kid on his first date. "If I'd known I would have picked up some wine or something."

  "You couldn't buy anything but domestic sparkling rose around here. I bring mine in from Toronto when I order for the motel."

  Even with Sam in the car I could smell her perfume, light and subtle, and I noticed that she had changed when I picked her up. I guessed she had a pad at the motel as well as some place of her own. "Head back toward town," she directed quietly. I turned left from the entrance, away from the Trans-Canada, down the four-klick side road to the middle of Olympia. After a minute or so we started to come to houses. She indicated one of them, a small place, in darkness, set up on top of a sandy slope. "In here," she said.

  I pulled up beside the door and she got out matter-of-factly and unlocked the side door. I followed her in and she turned on the light. The place had been gutted by somebody who knew what he was doing. The standard sparse little rooms had gone. In their place was a single room, decorated like the loft of a girl I met in New York once on liberty from the Marines. There was a wood stove in the center, low, comfortable furniture, and a pine bar at one end with the kitchen behind it. The walls were cream-colored plast
er, hung with pictures, most of them watercolors. There was an open staircase against one wall, leading up to a balcony that filled half the upper area, leaving a tall ceiling space over the rest of the room. A big, tropical-type fan hung there to keep the heat from the stove down where it would do most good, I guessed. You don't have to worry about cooling, not north of Superior.

  "This place is beautiful, a real studio," I said. She grinned and wagged her head deprecatingly.

  "I had some of the local women in here last year, working on a fund drive for the hospital. They asked me which magazine I'd seen the design in."

  I stood at the door, still looking around, and she took her topcoat off and hung it on a pine coatrack on the wall. "How about you get the stove going while I pour a drink?"

  I was looking at her, admiring the sheen of her hair and the aptness of the green color in her silk blouse. "Sure," I said. "That's something I'm good at."

  There was a box of pine kindling close to the stove with a pile of birch bark on top. I laid some thin sticks on a piece of the bark and lit a match. Within moments the big Fisher was warming up and the crackle filled the room with comfort.

  She had gone to the other side of the bar. As I waited to put a log on the sticks when they were ready, she brought out a couple of glasses. "What's your tipple?" She sounded a little tough, as if she were not sure she had done the right thing and was scared I would come after her like a rutting moose.

  "Rye and water, if you have it, please."

  "Coming up." She busied herself with the bottles, still not looking up. I went over to the wall and started looking at the pictures. Most of them were landscapes—hers, I judged, all with the same sad light I had seen in the current painting she was doing. But there were two small oils; one of them looked as if it might be a genuine Tom Thompson, the first guy to paint the Canadian bush in an impressionistic way. And there was a very fine watercolor of a man sitting in a canoe, laughing out at me. He was about thirty, big, judging by the scale of the paddle in his hands, fair haired and blue eyed, with a strong chin. He had the confidence you see in prewar pictures of buddies who died in combat. I guessed instinctively who he was, and with a small chill of presentiment, what had happened.

  She came over to join me, carrying two glasses, rye and water for me, what looked like Dubonnet for her. She gave me mine, not meeting my eyes, looking sadly at the picture.

  "Thank you," I said, and then, "Was he your husband?"

  Now she looked up, like a startled bird. "Why did you ask 'Was he?' "

  I sipped my drink and shrugged. "It's got a 'Paradise Lost' feel to it. I've been to the homes of buddies of mine who were killed in Nam and their folks have pictures like this on the wall, photographs usually, but with this kind of sadness to them."

  She looked at me, clear eyed. "You're sure you're not psychic or anything like that?" Her mood suddenly changed and she waved one hand almost impatiently. "No, that sounds silly, but you certainly go right to the heart of things."

  "I'm sorry if I opened up any old wounds." I sipped my drink again, taking one last look at the man in the picture and then turning away to check the watercolors close to it. "All your work?"

  "Don't tell me they're good," she said almost angrily. "They're competent, able even, but they don't have the real touch."

  "I don't know that I would recognize it in a landscape, even a brilliant one." I turned back to her and saw a frightening brightness in the corners of her eyes. She put her drink down and went to the counter for a tissue. She blew her nose and then turned back, smiling again.

  "Sorry about the dramatics," she said with a wide smile. "Some nights it hits me that he's never going to come in through that door with a string of pickerel and three days' growth of beard."

  "When did it happen?" I knew what—from the picture I guessed he had been an outdoorsman, one of those guys who out-Indians the Indians, paddling alone into lakes where only bears and trappers ever penetrate. That kind of guy usually tempts Providence one step too far at some point.

  "August seventeenth, last year. He was alone, like always. He was heading upriver in his canoe, then carried it over the portage to some place he loved. I never found out what happened. His canoe was there, on the river below the rapids. The guy who found it figured he was trying to shoot the white water on his way home. His body never surfaced."

  She looked so frail in that moment that I wanted to put my arm round her, would have done it if I'd known her longer. Instead I said "I'm sorry," and turned away to look at a watercolor.

  She came up beside me, pointing out a rock in the foreground. "That's where we sat, the night he asked me to marry him. It was the same lake he was heading for when he ..." She let the sentence dangle for a heartbeat and then finished it bravely, "... when he died."

  "And it's the same lake you've been painting ever since?"

  She nodded, then laughed awkwardly. "Can't paint the damn place out of my mind. I'd never done landscapes before, I always was a portrait painter, in watercolors yet, it made me halfway unique and I was good. I was very good, but since Ivan died, I haven't seen any faces I wanted to paint."

  I left her looking at the painting and went back to the stove to check on the logs. This wasn't going to be the evening I had expected—a few drinks, a little steak, a gradual warming up that might have led anywhere while I was in Olympia, maybe longer. This was like the time I visited the widow of a man in my platoon, a plain girl with glasses who knew she had lost the only husband she would ever have and spent the evening in tears. I felt clumsy and inadequate.

  Then she came over and sat on the couch next to the stove. "You do good work," she said brightly. "That's going just fine. Now if you'll pick out some music I'll think about tearing some lettuce up and scraping the frost off some fish fingers."

  I laughed with her and the bad moment was over. She had a good record collection, light on rock, which is fine with me, but heavy on classics and, surprisingly, country. I picked out Willie Nelson's "Stardust" and sat across from her, enjoying the warmth of the stove.

  She spoke first. "Sorry to seem such a Harlequin Romance character," she said. "It's just that you remind me of ... of the way things used to be. He was big, like you, only blond, but he had the same blue eyes."

  I took the reins of the conversation and steered it away gently. "That's what you get from an English father and a Quebecois mother. Black hair and blue eyes. You should see my sister, she makes the combination work."

  From that we moved to safer ground. I even told her about my divorce, and the reason for it, the aftermath of the encounter I'd mentioned to Gallagher.

  She picked up her drink, still almost untouched, and went back to the counter, where she made salad and put steaks under the grill. We were talking easily now. She was as bright as she had been the night before when I walked into the office at the motel. It seemed that Ivan was a forgiving ghost. Now she had paid her dues, the chill was off the evening, the way it had gone from the room under the influence of the big Fisher stove.

  She brought out a bottle of California red wine. The name meant nothing to me, but it was better than most of the French wine you can buy in Ontario. We ate and drank wine and listened to Willie and talked. She had a cheesecake, made by a German woman in town, she confessed, and after that coffee and Hennessy and a seat, side by side, in front of the stove.

  And then, in the warmth of the fire and the friendship we had built up over the few hours, we kissed. Her mouth was soft and when she pulled away she looked into my eyes and smiled. "You've done that before, haven't you?" she said.

  "I did warn you I'm an ex-husband, a secondhand man," I told her. She reached up again and this time when we broke she said, "Come with me."

  I followed her up the open staircase, like a companionway on a ship, and found that the whole second floor was a bedroom. She turned at the top of the stairs, one step higher so that we were eye to eye. "You like?" she asked playfully.

  "I believe I could g
row to love it," I said, and picked her up and carried her over to the bed.

  It must have been three when I left. She was half asleep and I kissed her on the nose and got dressed. "Love 'em and leave 'em, eh, Bennett?" she said drowsily.

  "I'd love to stay but I live in a small town myself. I know the neighbors are going to be watching by daylight." I stroked her hair. "It's up to you."

  She sat up then, the sheet slipping down so her firm breasts were uncovered. I kissed them both. "Maybe you're right," she said. "Will you be in town tomorrow?"

  "I'm here for a while and my dance card is completely open."

  "Good," she said, and settled down again. "Lock the door as you go. And put me down for the next boogaloo."

  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.