Fool's Gold (29 page)

"Of course." There's nothing like winning it all to bring out the generosity in a man.

"Well, we still haven't printed that garage where Sallinon was murdered. I need the scene protected until tomorrow. Can you put your dog in charge? Our guy goes off duty at midnight. He's got to double up anyway." Before I could answer he rushed on. "I'm having to bring him in to take over in the station and we don't have a spare man for the crime scene. I want to get it printed, I think it's not connected with these other killings."
 

"All right. I'll go by the place and put Sam in charge, and drive your man back to the station," I promised. After which, I thought, I'd make my statement to the OPP and head back to the motel to fall into bed.
 

I drove back down the highway at normal speed. There is only one radio station within range of Olympia and it plays nothing but rock. At night you can pick up other stations, but they float in and out so I switched off and just followed my headlights down to the turnoff.
 

The young constable was sitting sullenly on the workbench in Sallinon's garage. He brightened when I gave him the sergeant's instructions. I installed Sam and told him "Keep." Then I drove the kid down to the station.
 

Jackaman was there, talking to the lawyer who had finally arrived from Thunder Bay to represent Tettlinger. He told him about the upcoming investigation, gave him a few minutes with Tettlinger, and sat him down to wait for the OPP to start questioning his client. Me he took through to the chief's office and fed coffee.
 

I should have waited for the OPP to arrive, but I was too tired. Instead I made a statement, using the station tape recorder, setting out all the events as Gallagher and I had deduced them before: the phony killing of Prudhomme, the evidence Eleanor had given me, our suspicions that Prudhomme had staged the whole event to profit from his knowledge of the ore body, our belief that the Mob was involved and had started wiping one another out—everything.
 

Jackaman listened without comment, and when I'd finished he switched off the recorder and said, "Now I'm glad the chief asked the OPP to take over. This is more than just a shooting."
 

"A whole lot more," I told him. "And now I'm quitting. Tell the OPP I'll be back at nine tomorrow to answer their questions. Right now I'm going home. Three guys have taken shots at me tonight and I want to rest up."
 

He thanked me and showed me out past the angry lawyer— a junior partner, I judged, pale faced and restless on the station bench. Outside the reporters crowded around me, shoving tape recorders in my face, but I smiled and waved them all away. It wasn't until I was sitting in my car that I realized I hadn't surrendered Sallinon's pistol. I debated going back inside, but weariness won out and I started the car and drove off.
 

I still had my motel key to the outer door so I let myself in and went along to unit four. There was a note taped to the door and I stood close and read it. "Heard the news. It's safe. Have gone home." It was signed with four kisses, no name.
 

I took it down and went back to the car, wearier than ever. Twice in the mile drive to Alice's house I almost went off the road as my eyelids drooped, but I made it and pulled in gratefully beside her house. There were no lights on, which didn't surprise me, it was after one a.m. I closed the door quietly and went to the side entrance. It was unlocked and I let myself in.
 

The warmth of the stove greeted me like a blessing and I eased my shoulders back and called out softly, "Hello." And then every nerve in my body blazed alive as I heard a soft whimper out of the darkness.
 

I dropped to one knee and edged away from the door, feeling in my pocket for Sallinon's gun. I called out, "Are you all right?" and rolled silently sideways toward the stove, away from the direction from which the whimper had come. I found the stove by its heat and crouched behind it and suddenly the room was bright with light from the big central chandelier.
 

A man was standing at the top of the stairs, holding Alice by the hair. He was wearing a ski mask and he had a bowie knife in his right hand. He spoke softly. "Drop the gun or she dies." I did as he said and he added, "Good, kick it away from you." I did that too, and while his eyes followed it I made another move, invisible to him. I pulled out the box of .22 shells I had taken from Sallinon's desk and set it on top of the stove. Then I stood up straight, looking at him.
 

"Who are you?"

He didn't answer. Still holding Alice, he came down the stairs one at a time, keeping her in front of him, his knife at her throat. "Look, she doesn't have any money," I said. "I'm carrying a real wad, let go of her and you can have it."
 

"I'll have it anyway," he said. He was tall and by the look of him fair skinned, a blonde. This wasn't Laval, and I had thought he was the only wild card left in the deck.
 

The man came down further and I closed in, not near enough to scare him but ready to move if he cut her. If he did he would die. I'd made up my mind about that.
 

"You must be Bennett," he said.

"That's right. What's your name?" I didn't care. All I cared about was his knife, but I wanted him off guard. Talk can do that, if you're careful.
 

"You don't need to know," he sneered. He reached the bottom of the stairs and edged around to his left, toward the dropped gun. "You won't live long enough to have it matter," he said.
 

I could smell thick smoke of burning cardboard behind me and knew my moment was almost here. He sniffed the air like a deer in the presence of wolves, but kept edging toward the gun. When it was at his feet he shoved Alice away from him and picked it up. Alice got to her feet and ran toward me but I threw her aside onto the couch. He raised the gun toward me and in the same instant the bullets on the stove began to cook off with the rapid crackle of automatic weapon fire.
 

He froze. I used the single moment to dive headlong into his diaphragm. He went down like a tree and I knelt up on him and smashed him back and forth across the face with my elbow, back and forth more times than I needed until he lay still, eyes rolled up, broken jaw sagging open against the wool of his bloody ski mask.
 

I turned to Alice. She was lying on the couch, weeping helplessly. "Did he attack you?" I knew the signs. She was traumatized almost out of her mind. But she shook her head.
 

"Who is he? Do you know him?" I was intense enough to grab her and shake the information loose.

"Oh Reid," she sobbed. "Oh Reid. I thought he was dead. It's Ivan. My husband."

 

 

 

24

 

 

He hadn't hurt her. He had been inside the house when she came home, looking for money in the secret cache they had established to hold the Saturday-night take at the motel bar, back before it was enough money to warrant installing a safe. When Alice came in he'd pinned her, covering her mouth, making sure she wasn't with anybody. Then he had heard my car in the driveway, turned the lights out, and waited.
 

I poured her a drink and called the hospital to come for her husband. I had to explain everything three times over before the dispatcher understood that this was a real emergency. His shock mechanisms were still buzzing from the excitement at the helicopter pad.
 

Alice was too shaken to leave on her own, so I drove her to the hospital behind the ambulance. She didn't speak, but sat crying quietly all the way there. Millie was on duty and she took over, giving me a stern look before she found out about the reappearance of Ivan Graham. Then she turned all maternal and took Alice away to be tucked in for the night.
 

I went back to the police station. I'd gone past the point of being tired. Now I was wide awake, the way you get on long patrols in enemy territory. I was fired up on natural speed.
 

The OPP team was there and they latched onto me at once. I filled them in first and they thanked me, separated their prisoners, and began to question them. First Tettlinger, then Kinsella, and then, as dawn broke, they went to the hospital and talked to Ivan Graham and the man I'd shot at the helicopter pad. He was the man I'd seen at the motel, only his name wasn't Wallace, it was Huckmeyer, and there were warrants out in New York State for his arrest on a weapons charge. The news heartened everybody except him.
 

Graham's arrival opened up all of them except Huckmeyer. The others competed with one another to get the story out fastest.

They all blamed Graham for the mess. It had been his idea, his and Prudhomme's. They had met in a bar in the Soo one night when Eleanor was in business. Both were clients of hers, Prudhomme a first-timer, Graham a regular. Graham was half in love with her and had a bantering relationship that amused her and made her do favors for him sometimes, like setting up the camera. The camera had been Sallinon's idea. He was the third member of the plot locally. They let him into it because he was a regular trick of Eleanor's, visiting her on his "Lodge Nights." The other two men had needed someone as a go-between to link up with Misquadis, who would go out and stake the claims Prudhomme identified and register them.
 

Later, Sallinon had helped again, in Prudhomme's disappearance, finding him the bearskin he wanted. But a lifetime of slavish attention to his books had tripped them up. He'd given Prudhomme the receipt that led me to his store in the first place. And now he was dead, killed by Graham when the net started to tighten around them all. Graham had been the real force. That night in the Soo, when he recognized Prudhomme, a man he knew from his stay at the motel in Olympia, Graham had started talking and Prudhomme had brought forward his idea.
 

They set it up, carefully. First Graham arranged for his own disappearance. This left him a free agent. He moved in with Eleanor, pimping for her except in places around Olympia where he was known, living off her earnings, and helping Prudhomme to stake out claims on the island in the lake.
 

"The main ore body is there," Graham explained to his investigator painfully, with his broken jaw. "There reckons to be ten million ounces of gold. And if Jim had reported his findings to his company, they would have said thank you very much and given him his month's pay and forgotten about him."
 

They asked Graham about the unproductive hole that had been drilled there, putting the Darvon people off the place. He explained that one very simply. Prudhomme's boss had a share of the action. He had substituted useless rock cores for the ore they had found. Kinsella had made the switch when he flew the samples out. It was all so clean then. And then Prudhomme was too clever.
 

He knew that the startup costs for a gold mine could range anywhere from ten to a hundred million dollars. The size of this ore body made it likely that the figure would be high, not low, because they would go after it full tilt. He was afraid that if anyone started looking for that kind of money in the legitimate mining community there would be an enquiry and the plot would be uncovered. So he went to Laval, knowing that Laval had Mob connections.
 

The Mob had done what it always does. It had moved in, politely, and then taken over. They had sent Huckmeyer north to cut down the number of their shareholders. Prudhomme had to go. So did Misquadis, whom Huckmeyer killed. So did Sallinon, killed by Graham under Huckmeyer's instructions, for leading the police into the case. Next on the list were Tettlinger, as expendable muscle, and Graham himself. Only he got lucky—I put him in the hospital and later in jail, before the Mob had chance to finish him.
 

But in the beginning, Prudhomme had been smart. He had registered the claims he wanted by using a dummy company with Misquadis working as the errand boy. Misquadis hadn't known anything illegal was involved; Prudhomme and Graham had stayed away from him, working through Arnie Sallinon. All of them grooving on the money they thought would be coming in. They expected to make a royalty of ten percent of the gold extracted, millions of dollars between them.
 

And so they had worked out how to make Prudhomme disappear. At first they were going to pull the same stunt Graham had pulled. He would go overboard from his canoe and vanish. But they worried about the coincidence. And on top of that, he needed another identity, something that would put an end to any chance of blackmail when he tried to get phony identification. So he had pulled in a transient the same size and age and general coloration as he was and had taken him out to the island in Kinsella's helicopter.
 

"That was why Prudhomme didn't have the samples bag with him," Gallagher said when I gave him the news next morning. "I'll bet he took the guy out with that first bang, the one that broke his skull. He probably swung at him with a rock in the bag, then had to get rid of it because of bloodstains."
 

I agreed, stirring my coffee which had come with an unexpected shot of rye in it, courtesy of Millie. "And then he used the teeth and the claws from the bearskin he'd bought off Sallinon to muddy up the face and hands. His lawyer identifies the body, they cremate it, and they're home free."
 

"Well, they would've been for a year or two, anyway, if it hadn't been for that long nose of yours," Gallagher said.

"Well, Prudhomme screwed himself with that receipt from Arnie Sallinon for the bearskin," I argued. "And then, the bloody arrogance of keeping the skin and passing it on to Laval. They must have thought they were so smart and the rest of us were too dumb to think."
 

"They figured me for a lame duck," Gallagher agreed. "They'd never seen me do anything more clever than write a parking ticket. They thought that was all I was good for." He was pale and unshaven and there was an intravenous drip in his left arm, but he was as sharp and gruff as ever. I could sense his pride.