Fool's Gold (2 page)

The restaurant was built from the same block as the main building. Downstairs was the bar, filled to the walls with miners and construction men with a few, a very few women. Upstairs was dimmer and quieter—the dining room. I went up and checked. It was typical for this end of the world. The walls were covered with oil paintings one step above paint-by-number. I hoped the woman at the front desk hadn't been responsible, I'd been ready to admire her. There was a stuffed lake trout over the bar and a moose head on the wall by the door. Some wag had put a cigarette in its mouth.
 

Most of the tables were filled with men, dinner over, sitting with drinks in front of them. I judged them to be the upper echelon at the mine site—foremen, supervisors, the occasional engineer, people who didn't want to get into the buddy-buddy drinking of downstairs, even if they liked hard rock played at two thousand decibels. One table was empty so I took it.
 

After a minute or so the waiter came over. He was a big slow kid who looked as if somebody had told him a joke at lunchtime and he had just seen the punch line. "How're ya tonight, want something from the bar before you order?" There, hospitable as well.
 

I ordered a Classic and was looking at the menu when the door opened. I glanced up, wondering if it was friend Carl with his knife, looking for me. But instead it was a woman, the blonde from the parking lot, I guessed. She answered as much of the description as I'd picked up in the headlight's beam and one side of her face was swollen. She looked around and came straight for me. I wondered how the Prudential people would feel if they could see me now.
 

She had some seniority, but her figure was taut and good and she knew everything there is to know about makeup. Every guy in the room was watching her, and me. Her with admiration, me with envy. She was wearing a bright green velvet dress, high at the knee and low at the neckline. Someone must have told her it pays to advertise.
 

It was a nuisance. I just wanted to be invisible while I talked to people about Jim Prudhomme's death. If she was going to pull the My Hero stunt I'd be remembered for the rest of my stay. And I guessed she was capable of it. Hookers may not have hearts of gold, but they have tongues of brass. She would let the world know I was Sir Galahad.
 

When it was obvious I was the target I started to stand up, but she held out her hand, palm downward. "Don't," she commanded. "You already stood up for me when it counted." She wasn't joking. I had myself a fan. I pulled out the other chair for her. "Care to join me?"
 

She said, "I'd be delighted," as graciously as Nancy Reagan. I sat and looked at her, wondering what to say. I settled on, "Are you hurt?" She didn't seem to be. She was a touch puffy around the cheek where he'd cracked her, but she wasn't carrying her head in the whiplashed way I'd expected.
 

She shook her head. "No. Thanks to you. I think he was going to kill me."

"Probably not," I minimized. But she didn't agree.

"Guys never get rough, not normal guys anyway, unless they have trouble getting it on." So there was the reason Carl had hit her so hard. Now two of us knew his secret.
 

The waiter came back and set down my beer. He looked at the woman, then at me, then grinned as if someone had shown him dirty pictures. "Would you like something?" I asked the woman. She thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
 

"Yeah, please, a Coke, just to be sociable."

"You want rum with that?" the waiter asked. It was, after all, payday.

She shook her head. "Just plain old Coke." He grinned again and left.

I poured myself a little beer but didn't drink. She looked at me and then reached in her purse for cigarettes, Roth-man's. She picked up the candle off the table and lit it. "I came looking to thank you for what you did," she said.
 

"It was for me, more than you. I don't like bullies." In this room it was hard to remember why I had tackled Carl. I had done exactly the same thing once before, in Saigon. It had been a much harder fight against a much better-trained man. Only that time I had ended up with the girl for the night. That wasn't on my agenda this time. I'm not nineteen anymore. I can go for hours at a time without the kind of first aid she dispensed from her Winnebago.
 

She drew a long pull off her cigarette, then took it in her left hand and stuck out her right. "I'd like to shake your hand," she said, and before I could move she added, "unless you're the kind of guy who doesn't like to touch women like me."
 

I shook her hand. It was cool and dry and the shake she gave me was firm and confident. I figured she could handle most trouble on her own. "Reid Bennett," I told her.
 

"Eleanor." She let go of my hand and sat looking at me while the kid brought the Coke and put it in front of her. I lifted the beer to her and sipped. She lifted her own glass. "Happy times."
 

I wondered what she would do next. If she felt dramatic she would go on talking about the fight—and I didn't need it.

"You're good with your hands," she said suddenly. I shrugged, but she dismissed the gesture with a wave. "No, don't screw around. You took out a guy who's taller than you, got a longer reach, weighs maybe forty pounds more than you do. I thought you were beautiful to watch."
 

"Thank you." I owed her no explanation, but sometimes guilt gnaws at me when I find myself using tricks that were taught me in the marines against people who don't want to kill me, just stomp me a little to be sociable. I told her, "The thing is, I was trained by experts. It was a while ago, but I haven't forgotten."
 

She took a long pull at her cigarette and then breathed the smoke out through her nostrils, something you don't see often since the surgeon general started telling fortunes on the back of cigarette packs. "I figure you for a veteran, only you're too young."
 

I said nothing and she did her smoke trick again and then put the cigarette down and snapped her fingers. "You're American, of course. Viet Nam."
 

"I was in Nam, but I'm not American." It's a story I've explained enough times now. About twenty thousand of us went south to the States looking for excitement at the time the same number of their guys were coming north looking for a safe haven. I'm still not sure why I went, but I'm glad I was there.
 

She stubbed out her cigarette and took a sip of her Coke. I noticed that she had tiny green sparkles on her eyelids. She was loaded for bear on a night when the entire town was loaded for her. "You did me a favor," she said at last. "I owe you."
 

I said nothing and her face crinkled into a smile—a warm human grin, not a working grimace. "Bashful?" she asked innocently.

"Not exactly. I'm just trying to think of a polite way to say no, you don't owe me a thing."

"You figured I was going to invite you out into my magic trick truck?" she said, and grinned again.

"It occurred that you might. And it occurred that I would probably like it a lot, but not right now."

"You can take a rain check," she said, and then, "Look, I don't wanna embarrass you, anything. Like, I'm in your debt." She was anxious and vulnerable. She didn't believe in True Romances any more than I did, but I'd made the first spontaneous kind gesture she'd seen since some pump jockey offered to wash the windshield of her Winnebago. She was just redressing the natural balance, getting out of emotional hock. On impulse I decided to tell her why I was there. After all, she talked to a lot of men, maybe somebody had said something that might be useful to me.
 

"There is something I'd like you to do for me," I said, and she leaned forward.

"Name it." She was all attention and I studied her face. It looked intelligent.

"A friend of mine died up here around three weeks ago. He was a geologist by the name of Jim Prudhomme. He was attacked by a bear, I heard, somewhere north of Chaumiere. He was camped alone there on a lake and when the chopper came in for him they found him dead, torn up badly as well."
 

She nodded. "Yes. I heard about that last time I was in town. It was the biggest news since the gold strike."

I nodded and took a pull at my beer. "Yeah, it would have been. Well, anyway, I'm trying to find out whatever I can about him." I improvised quickly. "We went to school together and I haven't seen him in a while. I wondered if anybody told you anything about the business, anything that wasn't in the papers."
 

She looked at me soberly. "I saw the papers, they had a picture of him from his company. He looked about twenty-five."

"That was a graduation photo," I explained. "He would've been thirty-eight now and he'd shaved off the beard."

She thought about it for a minute, staring blankly at the candle on the table, replaying some mental videotape of past clients. At last she shook her head. "Can't place him, you know how it is. But I'll keep trying and I'll ask around. You staying here?"
 

"Yes, room forty-seven." I raised my glass to her and she stood up. "Thanks. Take care of yourself," she said.

"I can, most times. But thanks again for what you did," she said seriously.

There wasn't anything to reply so I nodded and she raised one hand in farewell and turned away. Before she reached the door a table of men called her over and she sat down with them. She left with one of them before I'd even ordered my second beer.
 

 

 

 

2

 

 

The next morning I got up at seven and took Sam for a brisk run, maybe three miles, then fed him and left him in the car while I showered and went over to the dining room for breakfast. I had the place almost to myself. Most of the diners from the night before were back at the mine site, working their sixteen hours a day, trying to start bringing the gold out of the ground and into Darvon's pocket on schedule by the following summer. The salesmen were already off down the road with their smiles and shoeshines. Which left me, plus a succession of road-stained job-seekers, roughly dressed men who came in, about one every ten minutes, looking for work. By the look of them they had already been to apply at the gold mines and now they were anxious to win a stake to get them back to the city or farther west out to Alberta, where there was rumored to be work in the oil fields. The cook took time to give each of them a cup of coffee and a polite turndown. I guessed he'd been out of work himself once and remembered how it felt. It seemed he was getting stretched as the new people poured into town, following the gold strike.
 

The waitress was a girl of about seventeen who would have been attractive if she hadn't been addicted to chewing gum. But she brought me bacon and eggs over easy with home fries, and half an hour later I was down at the police station talking to the chief.
 

His name was Gallagher. He was an old-time copper, an inch taller than me at six-two, thickening slightly but still carrying an air of authority as unmistakable as a drawn gun. He had a grizzled moustache and dark brown eyes that looked as if they had already seen all the bad sights there are and would welcome something good. I wasn't it.
 

"You the guy who clobbered Carl Tettlinger?" was his first question.

"We never got around to exchanging names," I said, "but I did have a donnybrook with some big guy, name of Carl."

"I hear you decked him and scared the hell out of his buddies," he said, frowning.

"Kind of." I wasn't looking for glory, I wanted this man on my side.

He snorted out a sound that might have been a laugh. "Good," he said, and that was that. We were standing in the front office of his station, a frame building he shared with the local fire department. It looked a lot like my own police station at Murphy's Harbour: teletype, typewriter, a couple of guns. The only differences were a middle-aged woman clerk and a collection of police sleeve flashes from departments across Canada and the States. Gallagher watched while I looked things over, then asked, "You approve?" and we both grinned.
 

He threw up the flap on the counter and the little clerk glanced up anxiously as if he were giving away the secrets of the Masonic rite. He looked at her indulgently. "This gentleman is Mr. Reid Bennett. Anybody asks, he's with the—" He turned to me. "Which insurance company did you say?"
 

"Prudential," I told him, and he nodded.

"Yeah, the Prudential Assurance Company. You don't have to let anybody know that he's not—he's a police chief, like me."

I looked at him quickly. It wasn't a piece of news I had intended laying on him or anybody else up here in Olympia. He waved me through toward his office, a comfortable little den down a short corridor. "Yeah, the name rang a bell when Alice at the motel spoke to my constable last night. Bennett, she said. Able to handle Carl without getting cut up at all. My guy told me today, so I checked with some old copies of the
Police News
. You're the chief at Murphy's Harbour, right?"
 

I nodded, but he wasn't really listening, didn't even turn, but went into his office, a homey little spot with carpet on the floor and bookshelves that looked as if he had knocked them together in his basement. There were revolver trophies around and the usual pictures of groups of policemen, obvious even in fishing clothes, holding up dead trout. There were only two chairs, one behind the desk, upholstered, the other in front, plain wood.
 

He pointed me to the plain one and sat behind his desk. "Yeah, I've read a few things about you. You were with the Americans in Viet Nam, then a spell in Toronto until you resigned, then Murphy's Harbour." He sat back in his chair and cocked his feet onto his desk. The top of it had black heel marks that indicated he did this a lot. "How come you quit Metro?" he asked softly.