Fool's Gold (10 page)

I sat stupidly, wearily, watching as she laid strips of bacon in the pan. I noticed the roses I'd given her in a crystal bowl on the bar. Part of me wanted to go over and hug her, not for the sex but for the closeness to somebody who cared about people, me and poor dead Eleanor. But I was too aware of my own presence, the stale lived-in feel of my tired body. I had no right looking for proximity, even to a girl in a mackinaw jacket and a nylon nightdress.
 

So instead I went over to the stereo system against the wall and dug through her records. She had a copy of the "Four Seasons" and I put on side one, the "Spring" section.
 

Alice looked up from the stove. "Nice," she said. "I didn't know you liked Vivaldi."

"Grew up with classics. My father was a brass band man in the Old Country. He taught us what music was, saved me from being a rock fan."
 

She smiled, a quick beam that looked as if she meant it, then turned the bacon and reached for eggs. The coffeepot bubbled, filling the room with fragrance. I swallowed hungrily, waiting for breakfast and for something to go wrong. I figured it had to. Women don't often get out of bed to cook me a breakfast. It's hello, good-bye, generally. This time was a lot more fun.
 

She lifted the bacon out onto a paper towel and cracked eggs, three of them, into the pan. "Over easy, right?" she asked, and I must have grinned because she grinned back. "You men are so goddamn predictable."
 

I waited while she finished cooking and set the plate on the bar top and ordered me to start.

She diplomatically did nothing but make toast for a few minutes until I'd finished. "More coffee?"

I shook my head. "No, thank you. The charitable thing for me to do would be disappear and let you get an hour's sleep."

"You think that would be charitable?" She laughed.

I looked at her, surprised, I guess. She had been so buttons-and-bows domestic for the time it took to cook breakfast that I had thought we were going to settle for polite handshakes at the door. Instead she slipped out of the jacket and tossed it on the couch. "You've still got a couple of hours before you start working again, Mr. Detective."
 

I was standing up as she said it and her words stopped me like a punch in the head. "Who told you I was a detective?"

"Nobody had to. That story about being in the insurance business is hokey. We have a Prudential man in town and he's never heard of you. And all this work and worry over this geologist. I want you to know that the drinkers in the cocktail lounge have you pegged for a detective."
 

I straightened the rest of the way up and she turned away toward the staircase. "And what do you think I am?"

She laughed again. "If I told you out loud, my mother would wash my mouth out with soap. Come on, it's getting early."

She paused on the stairway and I came up below her and put my arms around her, my skin tingling at the feel of her warmth through the nylon. She shuddered and pressed herself close to me. "Come on," she said urgently, and led me up the stairs.
 

It was nine before I got to the police chief's office. The little clerk beamed nervously and ushered me in. "Chief Gallagher said he wanted to see you right away."
 

By now I was shaved and showered and wearing a clean shirt, but Gallagher looked at me and grinned. "Hard night?"

"A long drive," I said carefully.

He laughed again. "Don't break my heart. I called your room at seven, you weren't in yet."

"I'm here now." His locker-room jocularity was breaking one of the few rules of gentlemanly conduct my father ever drummed into me. You don't kick a man when he's down and you don't talk about women.
 

Gallagher hadn't gone to the same school. He held onto the topic for a sentence longer while he poured coffee. Only now his face was grim. "Don't get the idea she's some kind of roundheels. You're the first guy she's taken to since her husband drowned. That's a whole lot of grieving for a woman as ripe as her."
 

I said nothing and he passed me coffee and we sat each side of his desk. "So, I talk too much. It's difficult not to, living so far from people worth talking to. Sorry if I stepped on your toes."
 

"No offense taken," I told him. "You want to hear about Eleanor?"

"I think I got the most of it already from Pedersen at Thunder Bay," he said, sipping his coffee. "She was shot at close range with a small-bore weapon, likely a twenty-two pistol. The fact that it was through her eyes looks like a very specialized killing. I figured whoever hit her did it that way because of something she'd seen."
 

"That's the way I read it," I said. "I was looking forward to getting that picture and opening up this case again. I don't believe Prudhomme's dead, but I don't know if we've got enough evidence to go for a disinterment order."
 

Gallagher looked at me over the rim of his cup, both elbows perched on the same arms of his chair, head hunched down on his thick neck. And he grinned. "And what would you do with the remains when they dig him up?"
 

"Check the dental record. That's the safest bet. Even if he only had his top jaw left intact. He was a typical middleclass guy, he must have gone to one particular dentist. We could get the records and make sure it was his jaw, and that means his body."
 

Gallagher set down his cup and stood up, still grinning. "Good thinking/' he said amiably. He went over and leaned on the top of his file cabinet. "Only I don't think we should go to all that trouble, moving all that dirt an' all."
 

"You're stringing me along," I said, trying to stay as happy as he was.

"Well no, but I can do you a favor," he said. "Turn your back a minute."

Something in his forcefulness triggered my alarm mechanisms. I don't turn my back on trouble of any kind, especially physical trouble. I looked at him unblinkingly, and he laughed. "No sweat. I just have to open the office safe. You can wait outside the office if you want."
 

I turned away and heard the click of the wheel on his little safe. Then he spoke. "Okay, take a look at this." I turned back. He was holding out another file folder to me. "I didn't submit this one with the rest of the material in that folder I made up for the files," he said, and passed it over.
 

I opened it and found two pieces of paper in it. The first one had a dozen or so lines of typing on it. "Look at the next one," he told me. I did, and whistled in surprise. It was a clean sheet of paper with a crescent-shaped series of indentations on it. "Right," he said happily. "That's what one jaw looks like biting down on a piece of paper held by a dumb, handicapped chief of police."
 

"You mean you took an impression of his jaw?" I looked up, astonished. "Why didn't you say so before?"

"For the same reason I told you last night," he said, and all his amusement had gone. He was stoney eyed. "Because nobody in this town wanted to know. But I took it and I kept it. And the first sheet lists all the peculiarities I could make out. Gaps, fillings, what looked like old chips out of the front teeth, everything."
 

"Then we've got it." I glanced down the written sheet. It may not have been what a dentist would write, but there was no doubt it was as complete as a layman could make it, complete enough to check with a professional record.
 

He nodded. "Yeah. I guess you could say we've got it. Only what do we do with it now?"

 

 

 

9

 

 

We talked it over for an hour while some outraged citizen with a parking ticket waited in the front office for the chief to go out and explain why he couldn't park against fire hydrants, even if he was a thirty-third degree Freemason passing through this one-horse town. It all came down to one thing. We had to get the imprint checked against Prudhomme's dental record.
 

"We can do it one of two ways," Gallagher said over his fourth cup of coffee. "Either I can call the Montreal police and ask them to do it, or you can head down there. One way it takes three weeks, if we're lucky. The other way you have the answer tomorrow."
 

"Then what?" I was prepared to go, for the sake of the investigation, but I had a reason for staying in town now that hadn't existed when I arrived in Olympia.
 

Gallagher put it all on the line. "Then I can put out a warrant for Prudhomme, suspicion of murder. Because if that wasn't him dead in his clothes, someone killed the guy who was wearing them, and the logical suspect is Prudhomme. And I can see that fat prick Sallinon and ask why he lied about the thing Prudhomme bought off him. And I can show the yo-yos on council that I'm a policeman, not a night watchman."
 

"Why not head down there yourself?" It was the obvious question, but he had the obvious small town answer.

"Because everybody knows everything about everybody else in this town. If I go, the news will be all around by noon and anyone with anything to hide will have it well hidden by the time I come back with the evidence," he said wearily. "And if that doesn't warn you to get the hell out of the place you run before you're too old, I don't know what will."
 

And so I went. First I drove to the motel, where I found Alice painting, as usual, only this time she wouldn't show me what it was. I respected that and asked her a favor. "It's about Sam. I can't take him on the airplane with me without a lot of hoopla. And another thing. Carl Tettlinger and Pierre Gervais were released this morning. They're a bad pair and they might come looking for me and find you instead."
 

She laughed, although her eyes were serious. "And your dog will take care of me?"

"Against a troop of cossacks," I promised. "Let me show you what he can do." She left the phone untended and we went out into the lot. I did that on purpose, hoping that the help was watching from the dining room or the bar, taking notes on how good Sam is. It would be something to talk about that evening, something that would get back to the cowardly bastards who had tried to jump me in my room.
 

I put him through the simple stuff first, the "speak" and "keep" commands that did all my crowd-control work for me back in Murphy's Harbour. Then I got my leather sleeves out of the trunk, along with the dummy knife. Sam watched me out of his dark, intelligent eyes and I took a minute to stroke and fuss him. Then I straightened up and spoke crisply, going through the handing-over routine I had worked out for him, passing his control to Alice. "I want you to act as if I'm trying to attack you. When you think it's gone far enough, tell him to fight." I whispered the last word so Sam couldn't hear and miscue.
 

"You're the boss," she said nervously.

I shook my head. "Not any more. You are. Wait and see," I promised. I held the knife the way a kid from the South Bronx taught me on a slow weekend in the marines when we couldn't afford to go to town, and started walking toward her, doing my best to look mean. It doesn't take that much. I'm six-one, one-eighty, dark. The best day I ever saw I seemed like a menace to most people. As I drew nearer, Sam stiffened, but did nothing until Alice spoke.
 

He jumped for me, grabbing my right wrist, the hand that held the knife. I wrestled it into my other hand, struggling against the crunching pressure on my right wrist, kicking out at him. He didn't hesitate. He grabbed the other wrist. I relaxed, dropping the knife, but he hung on, tugging me off balance until Alice remembered what I had told her and called "Easy."
 

"Good. Now stroke him, pat his back. Tell him good boy," I said. As she did it I reached down for the knife and again she said "Fight" in her high, nervous voice. And again he had me.
 

"There. See what I mean?" I didn't break the protocol I'd established by reaching out to pat Sam. I let Alice do that. As far as he was concerned, she was his boss until I got back and we put the same procedure into reverse.
 

We went back into the office and Sam curled on the rug in front of the counter. I thanked Alice and said good-bye. She looked at me with an intensity I have only encountered once before, in Nam, from a bar girl, a fragile Chinese beauty of seventeen who was killed in a bomb blast in Saigon. I kissed her, quickly, as if we were in a crowded railroad station, and went out to my car.
 

They have a small airport at Olympia now, since the work started on the gold mine. I parked there and took a local hop to the Soo—Sault Ste. Marie—where I got a Nordair flight to Montreal.
 

It was after five when I finally reached Dorval Airport and I took the bus downtown along the elevated expressway that was built in time for Expo '67, when half the world came to Montreal. It takes you past the industrial section of the city and then along the backs of streets of those typically Quebecois apartments with outside stairways to the second floors. In the gathering dusk there were lights and warmth coming from the windows, and I could imagine the smells of good home cooking and the clatter of French as tired men opened beers while wives cooked in all those kitchens.
 

I took a room at the Queen Elizabeth. It's fancier than I needed, but Gallagher had given me a couple of hundred bucks expense money and I intended to head down to Chez Pauze for a lobster once I'd seen Carol Prudhomme. I checked in and called her. She was in, just as tense-sounding as she had been when I called from Olympia.
 

"Hi, Carol, Reid Bennett. I'm in town, can I come over?" There was a five-second pause before she answered. I'm enough of a policeman that I measured the pause and decided she was not alone. It seemed as if she was all through mourning. I sensed a man in the house with her.