Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) (18 page)

“He doesn’t want me to go to jail for something I didn’t do,” she said. “He’s my father, he loves me ...”

“Yeah. And you love him, too, now that you need him. How long ago did he leave?”

“Not long before you came ... ten or fifteen minutes.”

One of the infrequent sets of headlights I’d passed on Highway 445 on my way here. That close, the two of us rushing by each other in the dark—going in opposite directions, after different links to finish off the chain. More than half an hour’s lead now. Still enough time to stop him? Depended on how fast he drove, how fast I drove, exactly what his plans were once he got to the house on Sweetwater Drive.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems ...

I said, “I’m leaving now,” and moved over to the door. “You stay here until you hear from your father or me. Understand? Don’t talk to anyone, don’t go anywhere, just wait.”

She passed a hand over her tear-damp face; lifted the hand toward me, palm up, in a gesture of despair. “I don’t have anyplace to go,” she said.

Janine Wovoka and Wendy Oliver.

Sisters.

JOHN WOVOKA WAS THERE, all right. Still there.

From where I stood alongside a split-bole Douglas fir, I had a clear view of the house and parking area below. The entire property was bathed in light from the harvest moon, with only a few streaky clouds scudding past now and then to dim its hard white shine. The moonglow was so bright I could almost read the lettering and government seal on the driver’s door of the pickup. There was no sign of the man himself. Likely he was inside the house; lights burned in there, making dull gold rectangles of the opaque windows flanking the entrance.

I stayed put for a time, waiting and watching to make sure I didn’t blunder into anything when I went down there. I had looked at my watch just after letting the car drift, dark and silent, onto the shoulder across Sweetwater Drive. Half-hour past midnight. Coming onto the first of the night’s long empty hours. Weariness lay heavily on me now: dull ache behind my eyes, muscles like ropes knotted through the upper half of my body. The last segment of the drive from Pyramid Lake—down Highway 89 along the Tahoe shore—had been a constant struggle to stay alert and to keep myself from driving too fast and inviting the attention of a county sheriff’s deputy or highway patrolman.

Last link, I kept telling myself then, and I did it again now. We’ll complete the chain before dawn, one way or another.

Stillness down below. Stillness all around me, except for the whisper and rattle of the wind in the tree branches. The hard moonlight glistened off the surface of the lake beyond the house, softened into a long silverish stripe out toward the middle. The rest of the water shone like polished black onyx. The only sign of life out there was the red-and-green running lights of a boat moving away to the southeast, toward the neon shimmer that marked the Stateline casinos.

Time to move.

I stepped back up onto the road, went slowly along the edge of it to the driveway turning. Paused there, didn’t see anything to detain me, and descended at the same slow pace, over at the far edge where there was plenty of tree shadow. My shoes made little sliding sounds on the rough surface, but they weren’t sounds that carried.

On level ground, I angled over to the carport and across in front of Polhemus’s Cougar to the house wall. Listened, didn’t hear anything, started out past the comer—and then backed up quick and froze because I
did
hear something: a clicking, a scraping, then heavy footfalls. I eased my head around the corner. John Wovoka had opened the door and was coming out.

He didn’t look my way as he shut the door. In his left hand he carried a flashlight—a little bigger and more powerful than the one I’d unclipped from under the dash and slipped into my jacket pocket before quitting the car. I slid my left hand in on top of it; put my right on the Smith & Wesson .38 that weighted the other coat pocket. But I did not need either one yet. John Wovoka put his back to me and moved past the pickup, walking in a stiff, purposeful stride, and made his way down to the pier and then along the float arm onto which the boat shelter had been built. He disappeared inside the shelter. A few seconds later, through chinks in the rough-wood siding, I saw flickers of light from his flash.

I sidled around the corner and along the wall to the front entrance. The door wasn’t locked. And he’d left the lights on inside. I opened the door without making any sound, slipped through and shut it soft behind me.

He had drawn the drapes in the living room; that was the first thing I noticed. I moved through the foyer, past the kitchen, to where I could see into the hallway. Polhemus’s body had been shifted toward the far end; it lay wrapped now in a thick canvas tarpaulin, the ends tied off with pieces of brown hemp. The hallway floor where the corpse had originally lain was so clean, it glistened. There was no sign of the Saturday night special. Had John Wovoka put it with the body or kept it on his person?

I reversed direction, eased the door open again, eased myself out. He was still in the boat shelter, but now the beam from his flash was stationary: he’d propped it on something so he would have the use of both hands. There was not much doubt what he was up to down there, or what he intended to do with Polhemus’s corpse.

I worked my way along the house and the raised deck, toward the pier. Muffled noises came from the shelter: a winglike flapping, as of a piece of canvas being shaken; little thumpings and clatterings. I used those to cover my run from the end of the deck to the pier. I’d gone halfway out to the T floats when the noises in the shelter stopped. I stopped too, waiting. I had the flashlight in my left hand now, the .38 out in my right.

The light inside moved, flicked bright over another part of the wall and then dulled as he turned it away and downward. More noises then, different ones, louder but only because I was so much closer to the shelter. I went ahead to the floats, walking soft, and turned along the inner edge of the left one. The sounds inside the shelter continued unchecked. When I reached the near wall I stopped again and then poked my head around the corner so I could peer inside.

Thick, murky shadows enclosed a puddle of light from his torch. The puddle was inside the shadow-shape of a boat—a small, new-looking outboard runabout—tied to iron hooks set into a narrow walkway on this side. On the walkway where he’d pitched it, a canvas cover lay partly folded and partly crumpled in a shape that resembled a huge mangled bird. He was down on one knee in the cockpit, his back to me, the flash on the deck beside him so he could see what he was doing under the dash. Crossing the ignition wires, probably—an easy enough job with a boat ignition.

I stepped around the corner onto the walkway, pointed the gun and my flashlight at him, pinned him with the flash beam, and said, “That’s enough of that, John.”

He came around on his knees with such suddenness that he sent his own torch clattering across the deck; it hit something and canted upward at a forty-five-degree angle, so that its stab of light picked out a cobwebbed corner of the far wall. He threw one arm up to shield his eyes. I could see his body tense, like an animal gathering itself to spring.

“No sudden moves, John. I’m armed.”

He didn’t relax any, but the coiling stopped; he was frozen in place now. He said in a low, tight voice, “Who are you?”

“The detective from San Francisco, remember? We talked up at Pyramid Lake.”

“... I remember.”

“I just came from there. Your trailer. Janine and I had a long talk.”

He made a sound that was as close to a growl as any human sound I’ve ever heard. “If you hurt her—”

“I didn’t hurt her. She had a pistol of yours and I took it away from her, that’s all.”

“The authorities ... ?”

“No, I didn’t call them. Not yet. I came straight here.”

“Why?”

“To stop you from getting rid of Polhemus’s body.”

“She didn’t kill him,” he said. There was anguish on his heavily seamed face, and a fierce protectiveness as well. “It was an accident ... he was out of his head and he tried to hurt her ...”

“Then why do this? Why didn’t you just notify the authorities yourself?”

“You think they’d believe her?” Bitterness warped his voice, made it crack a little. “An Indian girl?”

“What did you do with Polhemus’s gun?”

“Put it with his body.”

“Okay. Stand up. Turn the pockets of your jacket inside out and then turn around, slow.”

He did that. The jacket pockets were empty, and if he’d had the Saturday night special shoved into his belt, I’d have seen it; the old Levi jacket was short-hemmed.

“Let’s go up to the house, John.”

“And do what? Call the sheriff?”

“No. There’s something else I want to do first.”

He stared, squinting, into the flash beam without moving. Then he started to reach down for his own torch.

I said, “No, leave it there. Shut it off but leave it there.” And when he’d obeyed and then climbed up onto the walkway, “Before we go, listen to this. If you’ve got any idea of jumping me, you’d better forget it. What would you do if you got the gun? Shoot me with it? You’d have to, you know—shoot me and then take my body out into the lake and dump it along with Polhemus’s. I don’t think you’re capable of murder, not even to protect Janine. How about it?”

One, two, three beats. “No,” he said.

“No trouble between you and me, then?”

“No trouble.”

“I’ll back up and you follow.”

I backed around the corner, waited for him to appear, then switched off the flash. The moonlight was bright enough. I let him precede me off the pier and he went docilely enough; he was a man of his word. But bitterness and frustration were strong in him; I could see them in the set of his face, the slump of his shoulders. It was plain enough what he was thinking: He had failed his daughter. She’d finally come home, finally turned to him as he had always hoped she would—and this sacrifice he had been willing to make for her, this compromise of his honesty and his principles, had turned out to be empty, futile. He would lose Janine again, now, and this time it would be for good. There is no magic. There aren’t any miracles.

As we neared his pickup I said, “Did Janine give you the key to Polhemus’s car?”

“No. But I found his keys inside the house.”

“You have them on you?”

“In my pocket.”

“Go on ahead to the carport.”

When we got there I told him to unlock the driver’s door, slide in under the wheel, and unlock the passenger door for me. He obeyed without question or comment. I sat on the passenger seat, the door open so the dome light would stay on, and punched the latch button on the dash compartment. The cassettes for the Cougar’s tape deck were jumbled inside—the same ones that had spilled free last Sunday when Polhemus yanked his Saturday night special out of there. I removed them one by one. The first eight were all labeled: various groups with names like Blood and Thunder that specialized in heavy-metal rock music. The ninth cassette had no label of any kind.

I said to John Wovoka, “Switch on the ignition. I want to play this tape.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see. Go ahead.”

He switched on the ignition. I fed the cassette into the tape deck and punched the Play button. Static ripped out of the speakers; I lowered the volume. And what was recorded on the tape began to play.

It was the right tape, the one Janine had told me about. Not the safest place to keep it, here in the car with a bunch of labeled cassettes, not if Polhemus had intended it as an insurance policy. But then, he hadn’t been a very smart kid. Good for me, too bad for him.

He started out—a little stiffly, as if he’d been self-conscious about speaking into a microphone even when he was alone with it —by identifying himself and saying that he was going to record what had happened since “Dave Burnett found a lot of money and screwed up his life and mine.” He was making the record, he said, in case anything happened to him the way it had to Burnett. “They say he killed himself and I guess he did but I don’t know it for sure. I’ll never kill
my
self and if I turn up dead and it looks like I did, it’s a lie, a big fucking lie.”

I glanced over at John Wovoka. He was sitting rigidly, eyes front, listening to Polhemus’s scratchy, nervous voice. In the pale dome light, his face was like one cast in bronze—a Charles Russell sculpture of a Sioux warrior I had seen once.

Polhemus spent a minute or so sketching in background: his and Burnett’s trips to Tahoe and Reno “to gamble and party, see what kind of pussy we could find.” None of the girls they picked up meant anything to them, he said. “They were just for grins. I’m a lover, not a husband.” Small-boy smugness in that last; I could almost see him smirking a little, slyly, as he spoke. I looked over at John Wovoka again; he hadn’t moved. But I could feel his anger and his bitterness and his pain.

Polhemus’s voice droned on. A Saturday night at the end of April ... a party in Reno ... the girls they were shacking up with wanted to drive up early, do some shopping, catch a lounge show at Bally’s ... Burnett didn’t want to go along, he felt like playing some blackjack, but maybe he’d drive up later. Then, finally, Polhemus got to the meat of it—the first link in the big chain.