Fool's Gold (6 page)

We set a time, kind of early by city standards, seven o'clock, but as she explained, the nearest place other than her own dining room was forty miles up the highway and she didn't want to eat with a patron in her own place.
 

It suited me. It meant an extra couple of hours in her company so I said sure and went back to my room and picked up the telephone. I got through to Carol Prudhomme's number in Montreal and she answered on the third ring. "Hello, Carol, Reid Bennett. I'm in Olympia."
 

Carol is a tall, dark, Latin type of woman. She was at Laval University with my ex but had done nothing with her education except marry herself a geologist and keep the home fires burning while he trekked all over faraway terrain trying to make them rich. As a result she is tense and has an underused quality that came across brittle on the phone. "Oh, Reid, this is so good of you, going to all this trouble. I mean, I don't know why Amy insisted. After all, nothing's going to bring Jim back." It sounded rehearsed. I imagined she had been living with the idea of me up here in the bush wasting my time when I could have been writing parking tickets in Murphy's Harbour, and she felt guilty.
 

"No problem. I just wish I could promise it would do any good." I had already decided to tell her nothing about my suspicions. It was bad enough being widowed—having to add murder by persons unknown as the reason would be too much to handle.
 

I kept my voice calm and reasonable. "I'm just calling to bring you up to date. I'm sure everything is as you were told, but there are a couple more facts I'd like. First, the man Jim was working for. He's with the Darvon outfit, Amy told me that much, but she didn't have a name. I'd like to talk to him."
 

Her voice was suddenly breathy. I've heard the same kind of tone from suspects in interrogation rooms. She was very anxious about something. Maybe she was afraid I'd offend some vice-president of the Explorations Division and the company would take back her insurance money. "Is that necessary?"
 

"It may tell me something I don't know, something that's been overlooked up until now." When she didn't answer I went on, "Don't worry, Carol, I'll be the soul of tact. I understand how you feel."
 

There was another short silence on the line, and then she spoke in a tearful rush. "I'm sorry, Reid, there you are, working away for me and I'm being negative. I'm sorry. Anyway, the man you want isn't up there, he's here in Montreal. His name is Paul Roger." She pronounced the name the French way, accented on the second syllable.
 

"Thanks, Carol. I'm not sure I'm going to do anything about it but it's good to have the name. In the meantime, I'd like to say it out loud: I'm sorry to have this investigation to make. But while I'm here, I might as well do it right."
 

She said something pleasant, and I responded and then asked her the last question on my mental list. "By the way, what was in the parcel that was up here with Jim's stuff?"
 

The line sighed and whispered as she thought about that one. Then she said, "There was a pair of boots in one package and a skin of some kind in another."
 

I kept my voice nice and even. "Can you remember, was it a bearskin?"

"I don't know," she said, almost angrily. "When I got home I was so sick about everything that I took one look at it and gave it to Henri."
 

"Who is Henri?" Nice and polite, but still wondering.

"Henri Laval. He was a good friend of Jim's—his lawyer. He came with me to Olympia and took care of things for me. I saw that this was some kind of skin and I gave it to him."
 

"Did you notice if it had its head and feet on?"

She laughed, high and nervous. "Reid, you ask the craziest questions. No, I didn't notice. I'll ask Henri, next time I see him."
 

"If you would, please."

We exchanged a couple more politenesses and I hung up and sat back on the bed, thinking. There weren't many more rocks to turn over. It would be interesting to talk to the wonderful lawyer man and see if the head and claws were on the skin, or whether, as I was beginning to think, someone had hacked them off to use in disfiguring Prudhomme's corpse in the bush. This was all a leap in the dark on my part. It's a fact with homicide that most often the murderer is somebody who knows the victim. That meant somebody Prudhomme knew in Olympia, somebody who might have known Prudhomme had bought himself a bearskin that would come in handy in disguising the murder method. I knew it was all thin, but something was out of whack in this case and my guess was as good as the next clairvoyant's.
 

Aside from that I had nothing to go on, nowhere to look. Roger, the geologist in Montreal, wouldn't know much. He might just be able to explain why Prudhomme wasn't carrying rock samples, but that wouldn't move me much further ahead.
 

I was still sitting there thinking when the phone rang. I picked it up, expecting to hear Alice's voice with some message about the evening. Instead a woman said, "Hi, Mr. Bennett?" It took me a moment to recognize her—Eleanor, the prostitute from the night before.
 

"Hi, nice to hear from you. What's on your mind?"

"You," she said, with professional charm. Then she went on, excited. "You know you asked me about that guy who was missing—Prudhomme, wasn't it?"
 

My own excitement matched hers. "Yes, what about him?"

Like most people who don't get a chance to talk much, she milked her moment. "Well, I was trying to remember, all last night, and then today, just when I woke up, I remembered. He was a trick of mine, just once."
 

"Are you sure?" I didn't want to throw cold water on her help but there was no doubt she had a lot of customers and probably didn't pay much attention to what most of them looked like.
 

"Yes, I'm sure. I remember that he was really up, you know, the way a guy gets when he's been through a lot, been in the bush for a while or that. And anyway, I got a photograph of him."
 

I sat staring at the wall, my mouth open. "A photograph? That's incredible. How did that happen?" I thought it might have been in a bar. Maybe she had an arrangement with the girl who circles with the Polaroid, some fee-splitting arrangement. But she was even smarter than that. "It's kind of a habit of mine, in the van. I take a shot of everybody as they come in. They don't know, but, like, it could be useful." Her voice hesitated. "Like I wouldn't want this getting around, eh? I mean, people might get the wrong idea, only a friend of mine put me up to it."
 

I said nothing. There was only one reason a prostitute would take pictures: for blackmail. It lowered her in my estimation, but what the hell, she had to live, and by the sound of it she had a pimp to support.
 

When I didn't answer at once she broke into the silence. "Yeah, I know what you're thinkin'. Like I said, I don't want it getting around. I wouldn't tell people normally, but I owe you."
 

"I appreciate the help, Eleanor. Thank you," I said. Then I framed the important question. Prudhomme's body had been identified on September fifteenth, two weeks and two days previously. "Do you have any idea when it was taken?"
 

"Yeah," she said, and gave a little girlish giggle. "That's what makes it a gas. This was the last time I was in the Soo, which would have been the eighteenth of the month, a fun-filled Saturday night."
 

 

 

 

5

 

 

I've been a copper too long to accept good news just because it's welcome. I asked the obvious question. Was she sure he had been Jim Prudhomme? She was honest with her answer. No, she didn't remember meeting him before, but this guy was a ringer for the man in the photograph in the Thunder Bay newspaper, allowing for the beard and the fact that he had aged twelve years. That was when I asked the sixty-four-dollar question. How did he sound?
 

"French," she said without hesitation and then added the clincher. "An' he had like a slush sound in his voice, y'know, an impediment, I guess."
 

I remembered, as if he was talking in my ear. Jim was born Jacques; Jim was only a nickname. And he had that hissy sound that you hear sometimes and wonder if the person is wearing dentures. There was no doubt about it. She had found Prudhomme for me three days after the body on the island had been identified as his.
 

"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.