Fool's Gold (14 page)

I objected. "He likely left yesterday. I'm not sure where this place is that he's going to. But it's a couple of days' paddling and portaging and then we could draw a blank. Can you afford a helicopter to head in and check the location where the body was found?"
 

"Me?" Gallagher laughed a big, square-mouthed, mirthless laugh. "Helicopter nothing. It's all I can do to squeeze enough out of the council to run the scout cars."
 

"In that case, let's go at it a different way. If this is what we think, and Prudhomme set it up, he'd have made sure the claims were all in the richest area he could find. How can we find out where that is?"
 

Gallagher straightened up and tapped his hat more firmly on to his head. "Let's go ask the expert," he said. "Get in the car." He took the wheel and poured on the gas, up the highway to the site of the new mines.
 

There were three of them, all within a mile of one another, the shiny new headframes visible above the trees at roadside. We passed the first two and drove to the third one, the Darvon mine. Gallagher nodded at the headframe as we turned into their roadway. "Look at that. A fortune in gold lying not a hundred yards off the Trans-Canada Highway. And the poor slobs down in Olympia have lived and died on what they make at the pulp mill for damn near a century. No justice, is there?"
 

He stopped at the barrier and a prettyish girl in a hard hat let us in, directing us to the office up the road. It lay on the other side of the construction site where earthmovers as big as a house were removing broken rock. Gallagher switched off the radio. "They ask you to do that. Damned if I see how it could set off their dynamite, but mining is dangerous enough without extra risk."
 

The flagman on the road let us through between loads, and we drove to the work office. It was a cluster of sixty-foot-long house trailers set up on waist-high stands and interconnected by a central passageway. There were pickup trucks with the insignias of a dozen construction and building trades companies parked alongside. Opposite stood a similar complex, without any parked vehicles.
 

"Those are the miners' quarters," Gallagher explained as we got out. "Not like the shacks the old miners used to live in. They've got showers, TV, everything except women."
 

Inside the office was the kind of clattering busyness that can't be faked. Draftsmen were working, women were typing, men in big construction boots and hard hats were clumping in and out with plans in their hands. Gallagher nodded to a few of them and they nodded and grinned and called him "Chief."
 

"That's what gets to you about being the kingpin in a place like Olympia," he confided over his shoulder. "The town's going to double in size. All of these people will be in my patch before they're finished. And I'm tryin' to get to know them all before they settle." He expanded on it as we walked on. "A year ago I could police this town like being dad in a family. When the bonspiel is on at the Legion, I'd park up there, and when a drunk came out I'd take his keys and tell him, 'Take a cab, Eddie, pick up the car tomorrow.' They liked that and they respected the law. Now I'm going to have to treat 'em all like strangers. It's the only way to be fair and it's the end of the hominess of this town." He sucked his teeth and sighed, not looking at me.
 

There was a small private office at the end of one of the trailers. Outside it sat the prettiest girl in the whole place, tapping something out on a word processor. She looked up and beamed when Gallagher approached. "What's up, Chief, Mac forget to pay his parking tickets?"
 

Gallagher warmed to her smile and I realized how much he thought of women and wondered why he was up here alone. Maybe he had a story like mine to tell. In any case, his looking like a bear didn't seem to be stopping him from winning real affection from women. "No. He's been a good boy. I just wanted him to meet a friend of mine. Is he busy?"
 

"Always," she said, with another grin. "I'll tell him you're here." She got up and tripped into the inner office, moving nicely. She kept the door tactfully half shut around her as she talked to the man inside, then turned and pushed it wide open. "Come on in, please."
 

"Thanks, Sue." Gallagher smiled his big honey-bear smile and we went on by. The man inside was as big as he was, wearing green work pants with a good shirt and tie. He stood up and stuck out his hand. "Hey, Chief, nice to see you. Who's this?"
 

Gallagher introduced me and we shook hands. I learned that his name was Walter McKenzie and he was the construction manager for the mine. He had a good handshake, powerful but not crushing.
 

"Siddown." He waved us to a couple of old wooden chairs. We sat and he asked, "What brings you out here? You majoring in crises?" We all laughed and his phone rang, then stopped.
 

Gallagher said, "Reid here has been asking around about the last days of that guy, what's his name?" He turned to me and I supplied Prudhomme for him. "Yeah, you remember, the guy who was killed by the bear."
 

McKenzie looked at me with new interest. "Checking up on the chief?"

I shook my head. "No, just an insurance hassle. But I'm trying to look into all the things I can while I'm here, and part of it is trying to get an idea of where he was working, generally, before he died."
 

McKenzie waved over his shoulder toward the window. "The whole shooting match," he said cheerfully. I noticed the faint buzz of the Highlands in his speech. He was another expatriate Scot, I think maybe they're the most widely scattered race in the world.
 

We all grinned at his joke and I acted humble and added some detail. "No, in particular I wondered if he had been following up something logical, something connected with the ore body. The chief said he didn't think so, that he was outside the area, but we thought you could spare me a minute to tell me where that runs."
 

McKenzie looked at me under eyebrows that seemed to bristle more every minute. "Y're in a curious kind of insurance work, Mr. Bennett," he said.
 

Gallagher took his cue. "Don't worry, Mac. I checked him out good, he's legit."

McKenzie took out an old pipe from his desk, looked at it grimly, and put it away. "Giving it up again," he said, then looked at us. "If you're happy, Chief. Sure. I can tell you." He stood up and walked to the wall where there was an oil company map of the area pinned to a board. "The survey maps aren't small enough scale to show the extent of the whole area that interests us," he said. "This is the biggest deposit I've seen in all my years in mining." He indicated a semicircle with a radius of about thirty miles. "This whole area is worth looking at closely. You won't necessarily find another deposit like this one, but you might."
 

"So Prudhomme was just looking around in a general sort of way," I suggested.

McKenzie's phone rang, then stopped. He tapped the map with his finger. "No. He was found here, on an island in this lake. The thing is, he'd already looked there, it was in his preliminary report. Hell, we'd already drilled a test hole there and come up empty. He had no reason to be there."
 

"And what about the other deposits you think are around? Are they all the same quality, or what?" I asked.

He gave me another frown. "Now this isn't my area, you understand, but so far we've only identified one deposit for sure, right here on the highway, where all three companies are opening their mines. Like I say, the geology is promising for the whole region, but so far this is the only strike we've made for certain. And that's fine by me, it means we can build right on the highway. It's so damn convenient, you can't believe it. It saves millions in construction costs alone, not having to build a road in."
 

I had to ask him: "Excuse my ignorance, but what kind of a find are we talking about? For a layman, you understand."

McKenzie didn't even look around. He had the figures on the top of his mind and he rolled them off at me. "We're estimating nineteen million ounces of gold. And just so you'll get the idea, that's six times the amount that came out of the whole Yukon strike in the last century." Now he turned and grinned. "In case you're counting on your fingers, that comes to something close to six billion dollars' worth if gold stays at three hundred dollars an ounce." I whistled with respect. Six billion is enough to cause all kinds of disappearances.
 

Gallagher took over, asking the next question so naturally that McKenzie would never have known it was loaded. "And I suppose you cagey bastards have sewn up all the hot spots where there might be gold," he said.
 

McKenzie laughed and took his finger off the map. "I wish," he said fervently. "By the time we'd made our first claims there was a rush on. For all I know there's three more deposits as rich as this one. There's a fortune waiting for the people who find them and put up the capital."
 

Gallagher moved back toward his chair and I followed suit. "And I guess that'll be Darvon once you've made your money back from all this." He thumbed casually toward the outside.
 

"We won't wait that long'' McKenzie told him. "We'll be moving out there as soon as this one is in production. We've got the lawyers out already trying to buy up promising claims. Plus we're still prospecting everywhere. For all I know somebody's already found what we want. And if he has, why, you could say he's sitting on a goddamn gold mine."
 

The phone rang and McKenzie looked at it anxiously. "I'm always expecting trouble," he explained. "Anything from complaints about the food to breakage on the drill they're using to sink the shaft. Whatever happens, I'm in the hot seat."
 

Gallagher stood up. "We'll leave you to it. Thanks for the time, and if you want a game o' chess some night, call me."

"I'd like to have the time," McKenzie said. He reached out to shake hands. "If there's anything else I can tell you."

I shook his hand and said, "No, I don't think so, you've been very kind." And then I dropped my next question, as casually as I could. "Oh, there is one thing. How did Prudhomme get in and out? Did he go by chopper?"
 

"Nothing but the best for Darvon guys," McKenzie said. "Yes, he flew in everywhere. Always used the same outfit, the guy who reported him missing."
 

Gallagher said, "Sure. I didn't give Reid all the details yet, I'll fill him in."

We left, Gallagher stopping to say good-bye to Sue warmly, like a departing uncle, and then we walked back through the corridor and out to the car.
 

"I thought it was in the report, about the chopper," he said as he unlocked the cruiser.

"It was, but I wondered if he ever got in and out on his own," I said. "Now we know he didn't. So maybe I'll go and talk to the chopper pilot while you put somebody on the claim search, try and find out if Misquadis is a registered owner."
 

Gallagher started the car. "And which of my minions would you suggest I use?" he asked. "I don't want the whole damn world to know what we're up to here."
 

"In that case the choice is limited," I said. "And I'm going to talk to the chopper pilot."

He checked over his shoulder and drove off, slow and careful, past a gaggle of miners who were getting out of a yellow bus, looking round-shouldered tired, the way a man looks after eight hours on the muckstick, raking broken rock. "I guess that's the way it is," he said. "You high-powered investigators have all the fun while we coppers do the work."
 

"That's life in the fast lane," I told him. "Can you take me to the chopper pad? Unless you'd rather take me back to get my own car."
 

"No sweat." He tapped his hat more firmly on his head. "No sweat, but say, if he starts offering free rides, ask him to show you where the body was found. Then, if Misquadis is doing business with the bears up there, drop in and ask him about the claims."
 

"Will do," I said. "Let's find the pad. Who knows, it could lead us to another six billion bucks."

 

 

 

12

 

 

I had thought the mining companies would have choppers of their own, but that wouldn't have given them the same tax breaks. Instead of owning birds, Gallagher explained, they were just plain folks, hiring as they needed them. Which meant that they did business with Olympia Lift Corporation, a helicopter company up at the big motel a further five miles east.
 

When we arrived there was only one chopper at home, on a flat gravelled area in front of the main motel building. Beside the landing pad there was an office, an army-type Ouonset hut with the name of the company painted badly on a sheet of plywood.
 

"This is it," Gallagher told me. "I have to get back. If you find anybody to talk to, wave from the window and I'll take off. When you're through, give me a call and I'll come back. You can get a beer at the motel while you wait."
 

I nodded and got out, taking a quick check of the chopper as I walked to the hut. It looked like the standard Hughes 500, the civilian version of the Hughes OH-6 Cayuse that I'd seen in Nam. They were small and quick and had been used only for scout work. I'd never flown in one.
 

I went into the building and was time-whacked right back into the service. Most of my flying had been done in the field, scrambling in and out of choppers in LZs in the boonies. But once, on my way out of Saigon, I had been in a flight office, carrying a message from the captain to the flight crew. This place was the same. There was the same smell of jet fuel, the same temporary, kicked-around look to the interior. The only difference was a counter at the front, about eight feet from the door. I walked up to it and called, "Anybody home?"