by Ted Wood
It could have been true, but I could still hear Henri's voice asking me where I was going to have dinner. I'd been set up and I wanted proof so I could put the oily bastard away.
"Who told you to mug me?" I pressed up on his wrist and he half screamed. "I dunno. I was play pool wid Georges. He get a phone call. We come here, we wait. He see you. He say, 'That's the guy.' I come for you. Okay?"
He was terrified. By the smell I judged his bladder had failed him. But I'd picked the wrong man. I did what had to be done, frisking him over for more weapons. He had another knife, hung down his back Scandinavian fashion, where he could reach over his shoulder and pull and throw in one gesture. I took it out and dropped it on the sidewalk, then marched him to the curb and waited for a scout car to come by. It took five minutes, and then another fifteen of explanation before they took us to the station and booked him for assault with a deadly weapon. The detectives questioned him casually, more interested in the damage to his face than in the evidence I was looking for.
In the end he was out on bail before I left the station. The detective apologized. "You know how it is. You're a flic," he apologized. "The goddamn law says he is innocent until you can prove him guilty."
"I only wanted the name of the guy who set me up," I explained. "I've seen this happen enough times, it doesn't get me hot anymore."
He shrugged. "In the old days, he would have told me. Now ..." He shrugged again, the resigned gesture of a man doing a hopeless job. "Maybe, if you come to court six, eight times, maybe next year sometime he'll go to jail for a couple of months. You should have broken his neck."
"It was close," I said. "Thanks anyway. Can you drop me at the hotel?"
"If you prefer. I was going to dinner. Perhaps you would join me for a nightcap."
And so, in very civilized fashion, I had a brandy with him at the kind of tiny family restaurant the tourists never find. I heard about his own troubles, his lousy marriage and the son who played hooky from school and the daughter who smoked grass. And I sympathized and relaxed, and wondered how Henri had rounded up his help so quickly.
He dropped me at the hotel around two o'clock. I was up again at seven, running down Ste. Catherine against the incoming traffic, sweating out my anger and waiting for the dentist to get to his office.
At nine I got there. It was an east end location, over a drugstore. At least, it had been the night before. This morning there were firemen rolling up their hoses and complaining to one another that nobody around had brought them out any coffee. The drugstore and the offices above it were gone. The captain explained it for me. "Very strange, M'sieu. We have stores that need the insurance, they burn all the time. But this man has a good business. He does not need a fire. I find it very hard to explain, this one."
I didn't. But it put an end to any chance of matching Gallagher's imprint with records. The only thing remaining on the dentist's floor was his chair with the little sink attached, leaning crazily down through a hole into the drugstore ceiling. His files, of course, were gone.
10
I stood there, crunching broken glass under my feet and cursing quietly. I was back to square one. Except for the fact that all my misfortune had started from the moment I spoke to Henri, I had nothing. But I didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know he was in this up to his Gucci bootstraps.
I didn't want to let Carol know my suspicions in advance, so it took me an hour of going through the yellow pages to locate him. He was a full partner in a middle-sized firm of lawyers who had a general kind of practice. His secretary told me that he was away from the office, so I made an appointment in the name of Georges Claudet and said I would come around later and talk to someone about my problem, which was too personal to discuss on the phone. She probably thought I was another divorce statistic waiting to happen and didn't quibble. She would "fit me in" with a lawyer.
The first thing I did was to take a cab to Carol's house, dropping it at the corner and walking in quickly and quietly so she wouldn't see me from the window. That was just in case Henri had spent the night there, carried away on waves of hot Latin passion.
I was wrong. The only one home was a Haitian housekeeper who told me in French with a pinched African accent that madame was out and would not be back until late. She was small and nervous and looked at me as if she was certain I had come to rape and pillage, so I thanked her politely and left without pushing my way in to see if she was telling the truth about madame.
I was out of luck at Laval's office as well. He was out. His secretary turned out to be a fortyish spinster who obviously wanted to use her job as a dating service. All the signs were there. The clothes just a fraction too tight, the neckline just a fraction lower than necessary, and her makeup could have been applied by Mary Kay herself. I smiled at her like a grunt just out of all those womanless weeks at boot camp and moved in. "I assume you are his confidential secretary?"
"Of course," she said, matching my smile tooth for tooth. "I prepare all his correspondence, there are no secrets."
I looked impressed and stood thinking about it for a moment while she went on beaming. I don't like role-playing around women, but I needed information and she was the key. I checked my watch. It was eleven-forty. "I wanted to talk to M'sieu Laval—a friend recommended him to me— but I must leave the city this evening. Perhaps as it is so close to noon, you would do me the honor of having lunch with me and we could talk." I was shoveling on the charm the way French chefs shovel on the garlic, but she was buying.
"It is not regular," she said sternly, but immediately unbent when I looked anxious. "But as -M'sieu Laval will be away for a few days, I could do that."
She took me to one of those ordinary-looking Montreal restaurants that serve magnificent food at prices that keep them filled up with locals. Everybody knew her and she chattered with the patron about the special of the day and we ordered it, sole Veronique and, at her recommendation, a carafe of the house white wine. It cost me a small fistful of Gallagher's dollars but it was worth it.
She ate with great enjoyment while I told her a little fairy story about coming home and finding my wife missing overnight. It took about five minutes, and then I sighed and acted philosophical and started pumping her gently about Henri, who had gone, she told me, to an important client in New York.
She was ready to talk. I ordered another half liter of wine and we sat there until two o'clock while she explained what a wheel her boss was and how important his clients were. A couple of them were local biggies, but she went on to say that he was also a very important criminal lawyer who had defended men on heavy charges, one of them accused—wrongly of course—of murder. And then she played her ace. He also had a number of clients who were involved in the gold business. She used the word "gold" with the kind of respect King Midas would have appreciated.
"Gold?" I looked properly awed and she elaborated.
"One of them was the man who discovered the deposit at Chaudiere. He found gold where hundreds of others had missed it, not a hundred meters from the highway at Chaudiere. And then, only last month, he was working in the bush alone and he was killed by a bear."
I took her through that one fairly quickly and got her onto the subject of his other clients in gold. She was unfolding like a rose by now, under the warming influence of the wine and my attention. I was beginning to despise myself for taking advantage. She was still attractive—not beautiful, but handsome and charged with that implicit sexuality that Frenchwomen all seem to radiate so effortlessly. She was smiling more easily, putting on less of a show, relaxing and getting ready to handle the proposition she expected me to put to her once the bill was paid and we left.
But I kept on working and she told me that Henri had many important clients, businessmen from New York and Buffalo as well as from Montreal. That made me think. Calling them "businessmen" rather than executives was pretty open-ended. And both New York and Buffalo are notorious Mafia towns, as is Montreal itself. Maybe Henri was connected. I was chew
ing this over when she told me the most interesting piece of news yet. It seemed that her boss handled the business affairs of the vice-president of the company that was opening the mine at Chaudiere. He was a geologist.
She was telling me this when the patron came alongside with the suggestions for coffee and dessert. We ordered coffee only and suddenly the spell was broken. It was as if the thought of coffee, the lubricating fluid of the business day, made her realize she was still employed by a law firm, and she became all business again.
I've seen the same thing happen in a lot of interrogations. When there are two of you working it's easy to break through. One of you changes the subject for a while and the other comes back to it later. But I was alone with her and there was no way back. So I did the sensible thing, probing her on other subjects. She kept up her momentum, but everything now was unclassified. She had been at the law firm for longer than she cared to remember, since before M. Laval joined them. He was a good boss, a thoughtful man. Why, only last month he had given her a beautiful present, something a client had given him.
I said something obvious about how gracious that had been, and asked what the present was.
She spread her arms wide. "The skin of a bear, bigger than this. I have it on the floor of my living room."
"In front of the fireplace," I suggested, and got a slap on the wrist. I grinned and shrugged. "Well, I was imagining the bear smiling at you with his big teeth."
"Oh no." She shook her head and laughed. "No, I could not look at such a thing. Fortunately this bear has no head, no claws. He is a soft bear."
This fit exactly with my notion of somebody taking the bear's head and claws and using them to gussy up a murder, but I said nothing and tried not to look excited and we laughed and the patron offered more coffee and I glanced at my watch and exclaimed at how late it was.
I paid and led her back to the office and took her hand at the door and thanked her for her patience in listening to a familiar story.
"Sad stories are never familiar," she said, with charm. "I am sorry for what has happened, but I thank you for a superb lunch. When will you be back?"
"In one week. I have to go to Vancouver. Will M'sieu Laval be here by then?"
She gave a little "don't know" pout. "I am not sure, but perhaps you will come into the office and check."
"I would never again miss the opportunity," I assured her, and squeezed her hand and gave a small bow and left, feeling like a louse, but an informed louse. I headed for the nearest pay phone and called Olympia.
Chief Gallagher was at his desk, eating a hamburger, he informed me cheerfully, and wondering what was happening down among the bright lights. I filled him in and he wondered out loud what Laval was doing in New York so soon after I figured he had set me up and had the dentist's office burned down. He had the same policeman's suspicions as me. When I mentioned that his clients were "businessmen" in Buffalo and New York, he made the same jump any Ontario copper would make. "I wonder if he's running with the Mob?"
"I wondered the same thing," I agreed. "If he was, he'd certainly know how to find people to give me the kind of trouble I've had this past twelve hours."
"Right now I'm going to check with Prudhomme's boss," I told him. "After that, I'll take the evening plane to the Soo and back to Olympia."
"Okay. I'll meet the plane," he said, and hung up.
Twenty minutes later I was in M. Roger's office. He was a big, soft man, heavier than he would have been if he had been out in the field as much as his underlings. He was chain-smoking American cigarettes and fiddling with files and worrying and answering telephones as if there were nobody else in the company.
I didn't take much of his time. I flashed my police chief identification from Murphy's Harbour and told him I would appreciate learning what Prudhomme had been doing when the disappeared.
"Why would a policeman from another jurisdiction want to know about Jim?" he wondered, leaning back in his chair and lighting up a fresh Camel.
"My ex-wife is a friend of the widow," I explained. "I had some vacation time left and she asked me to take a nose around and make sure that the local police had been thorough." I shrugged. "I'm convinced that they were. I've met the chief and he seems a good man, but you know what it is when women get into the act."
We exchanged knowing, male-chauvinist smiles over that one and then he took the precaution of having all his calls held for ten minutes and gave me the facts. Prudhomme's work had been just about finished up there. He'd been a first-class field man, looking for new deposits. He had been one of several company geologists who had made the Chaudiere discovery. It was big, maybe the biggest ever outside South Africa. He even drew me a rough sketch of the probable outline of the find, a big circle with Olympia close to the southern rim. It might possibly have been caused by volcanic action millions of years ago. Prudhomme had analyzed the signs more cleverly than all the other clever men who had been looking in that region for close to a century. "Jim only drilled three test holes," Roger said proudly. "Two of them didn't turn out as he hoped, but the third one hit a real find. It assays at a quarter-ounce a ton, and there's eighty million tons at least—maybe more. In fact, I think there will be once we get down to it. We didn't get all of it, of course; there's two other companies involved right now, but we sure staked a big one. It could be worth six, seven billion, maybe."
"Could you tell me one thing? Is all the land up there claimed by now, all the good gold prospects?"
He coughed on his cigarette smoke. "It was claimed within a month of our initial discovery. Every sonofabitch and his brother was up there staking claims. It's tied up so tight it'll take years to work out who owns what."
"And is there likely to be another reef, if that's the word, as rich as the one you're working?"
He shrugged. "Could be, the whole area has much the same geology. There could be ten more finds this size up there, any one of them worth a couple of billion bucks."
"And Jim, as an employee of Darvon—could he have claimed land in his own right?"
Another cough. "No. Absolutely not. He was locked into us by his contract. Anything he did, geologically speaking, was our property." His phone rang, then stopped, then buzzed. He picked it up and said "Yes?" snappishly, then, "Oh, okay, if I have to," and pressed the button and began to speak.
I got up, making a small motion of thanks. He replied in kind but kept on talking and I left the office, certain that I had the news that was pulling this whole case together.
I had a quiet flight to the Soo, getting there in time to transfer directly to the flight to Olympia. Gallagher was waiting for me in the scout car and I filled him in as we drove. He wound down the window and spat into the darkness. "You making the same of this that I am?" he wondered aloud.
"Like Prudhomme staked a bunch of claims of his own in a company name maybe, then rigged his own death so his widow could get the insurance. She goes her way, he goes his, coming back sometime in the future, carrying the ID of the man he killed, sells out his claims to Darvon or some other mining company, and lives happily ever after," I said. I'd spent the whole of the flight putting the pieces together.
"That's how it looks," Gallagher nodded. "From what you say, this lawyer is thick with Prudhomme's widow, or wife, whatever. She's taken care of, marries her fancy man, and everything's peachy."
"Except for the poor schnook you found on that island," I said, "it all fits like a glove. The only thing is, we can't prove that Prudhomme wasn't the corpse. If we can do that, we can open the case and bring in some national help looking for him."
Gallagher cleared his throat in an angry growl. "Or maybe if we can find out who the guy was who was killed up there. That would help."
I had a thought, one of those odd threads of intuition that bail you out sometimes in cases like this one. "I wonder if Prudhomme ever had his teeth fixed anywhere else? Like, for instance, is there a dentist in town?"
"I already checked that one out," Gallagher said, t
urning off the highway down the now-familiar road to the motel. "We do have a Painless Pete of our own, but Prudhomme never went to him."
"Pity," I said, and we both snorted.
He swung into the driveway of the motel and stopped. The lot was full of cars. "Looks like you may not have a room here tonight," he said. Then he chuckled. "If you need one."
I got out of the car and reached in for my bag, saying nothing. He was starting to bug me, breaking the rules again by sniggering about Alice. "Thanks for the ride," I said, and suddenly he reached out and held my sleeve anxiously.
"Listen. No offense. Like I said, she's been on her own for a year and you're an unusual kind of guy. The only thing is, I don't want anybody, including you, screwing her around."
There was real passion in his voice and I suddenly understood. I was careful when I spoke. "That's not my way."
He let go of my sleeve and sat back in his seat. "No, I guess it isn't," he said quietly. "I just don't want to see that woman hurt. They don't come like her very often." I shut the car door gently and he waved and left. I watched him go, then turned to walk into the motel. Alice was at the desk, registering a guest who turned and looked at me and then away without interest.
I could tell by his clothes that he was American. There's something about the casual assurance in the way an American dresses that you never find in Toronto or even Montreal. Good clothes, a little softer and looser than a Canadian would wear. I wondered idly what he was doing up here. A salesman, I guessed, tougher looking than most of them and with noticeably bad skin, but they don't deduct marks for acne when you're selling drill bits.
Alice was behind the counter and I winked at her without speaking. I didn't want my greeting tangled up with the other guy's business. Sam was beside her, on his feet with his tail wagging, staying close to Alice but anxious to remind me that he had recognized me.
I waited until she had given the other man his key and directions down the hall, then I reached over the counter and pulled her close. Her kiss was soft and we lingered over it, craning awkwardly over the counter until Sam gave a tiny, miffed bark.
