Fool's Gold (13 page)

"Could you tell me one thing? Is all the land up there claimed by now, all the good gold prospects?"

He coughed on his cigarette smoke. "It was claimed within a month of our initial discovery. Every sonofabitch and his brother was up there staking claims. It's tied up so tight it'll take years to work out who owns what."
 

"And is there likely to be another reef, if that's the word, as rich as the one you're working?"

He shrugged. "Could be, the whole area has much the same geology. There could be ten more finds this size up there, any one of them worth a couple of billion bucks."
 

"And Jim, as an employee of Darvon—could he have claimed land in his own right?"

Another cough. "No. Absolutely not. He was locked into us by his contract. Anything he did, geologically speaking, was our property." His phone rang, then stopped, then buzzed. He picked it up and said "Yes?" snappishly, then, "Oh, okay, if I have to," and pressed the button and began to speak.
 

I got up, making a small motion of thanks. He replied in kind but kept on talking and I left the office, certain that I had the news that was pulling this whole case together.
 

I had a quiet flight to the Soo, getting there in time to transfer directly to the flight to Olympia. Gallagher was waiting for me in the scout car and I filled him in as we drove. He wound down the window and spat into the darkness. "You making the same of this that I am?" he wondered aloud.
 

"Like Prudhomme staked a bunch of claims of his own in a company name maybe, then rigged his own death so his widow could get the insurance. She goes her way, he goes his, coming back sometime in the future, carrying the ID of the man he killed, sells out his claims to Darvon or some other mining company, and lives happily ever after," I said. I'd spent the whole of the flight putting the pieces together.
 

"That's how it looks," Gallagher nodded. "From what you say, this lawyer is thick with Prudhomme's widow, or wife, whatever. She's taken care of, marries her fancy man, and everything's peachy."
 

"Except for the poor schnook you found on that island," I said, "it all fits like a glove. The only thing is, we can't prove that Prudhomme wasn't the corpse. If we can do that, we can open the case and bring in some national help looking for him."
 

Gallagher cleared his throat in an angry growl. "Or maybe if we can find out who the guy was who was killed up there. That would help."
 

I had a thought, one of those odd threads of intuition that bail you out sometimes in cases like this one. "I wonder if Prudhomme ever had his teeth fixed anywhere else? Like, for instance, is there a dentist in town?"
 

"I already checked that one out," Gallagher said, turning off the highway down the now-familiar road to the motel. "We do have a Painless Pete of our own, but Prudhomme never went to him."
 

"Pity," I said, and we both snorted.

He swung into the driveway of the motel and stopped. The lot was full of cars. "Looks like you may not have a room here tonight," he said. Then he chuckled. "If you need one."
 

I got out of the car and reached in for my bag, saying nothing. He was starting to bug me, breaking the rules again by sniggering about Alice. "Thanks for the ride," I said, and suddenly he reached out and held my sleeve anxiously.
 

"Listen. No offense. Like I said, she's been on her own for a year and you're an unusual kind of guy. The only thing is, I don't want anybody, including you, screwing her around."
 

There was real passion in his voice and I suddenly understood. I was careful when I spoke. "That's not my way."

He let go of my sleeve and sat back in his seat. "No, I guess it isn't," he said quietly. "I just don't want to see that woman hurt. They don't come like her very often." I shut the car door gently and he waved and left. I watched him go, then turned to walk into the motel. Alice was at the desk, registering a guest who turned and looked at me and then away without interest.
 

I could tell by his clothes that he was American. There's something about the casual assurance in the way an American dresses that you never find in Toronto or even Montreal. Good clothes, a little softer and looser than a Canadian would wear. I wondered idly what he was doing up here. A salesman, I guessed, tougher looking than most of them and with noticeably bad skin, but they don't deduct marks for acne when you're selling drill bits.
 

Alice was behind the counter and I winked at her without speaking. I didn't want my greeting tangled up with the other guy's business. Sam was beside her, on his feet with his tail wagging, staying close to Alice but anxious to remind me that he had recognized me.
 

I waited until she had given the other man his key and directions down the hall, then I reached over the counter and pulled her close. Her kiss was soft and we lingered over it, craning awkwardly over the counter until Sam gave a tiny, miffed bark.
 

Alice pulled back and laughed. "Looks like we both missed you," she said.

"That's doubly nice. Just tell him, 'Good boy, go to Reid,' " I instructed, and she did and Sam jumped on the counter and down my side and wagged his fool tail off. I crouched to fuss him, rubbing his big head and telling him he was good and letting him know that the feeling was entirely mutual. Most of the time he's the only living creature around to let me know he cares if I'm alive or dead and I wanted him to know I appreciated it. Then I told him "Easy" and straightened up.
 

"If you're looking for your old room, you're out of luck," Alice said. "Mr. Wallace from Buffalo, New York, has just taken it, you saw him."
 

"So I sleep in the car," I said, and she laughed.

"Not if you play your cards right," she promised. "It's good to have you back."

"I hated to leave in the first place. Did anybody miss me, besides you two sentimental slobs?"

She shook her head, but she had stopped laughing. "Nobody. But I was glad of the company last night. There was someone outside the house around two a.m." She pointed at Sam. "I'd told him 'Keep,' like you showed me, and he barked for about ten minutes, then stopped." Her face was serious. "I've never had prowlers before, even now when the town is full of guys from out of town, looking for work."
 

"That could have been those two rounders who tackled me. I'm glad you had Sam with you," I said, and when he heard his name, Sam gave a happy little bark. "Listen, if you're on duty, hand off the ball somewhere while I give Sam a walk, then we'll head on home."
 

God! it felt good to use that word. I still didn't think of my place at Murphy's Harbour that way. I'm square enough that I need a woman around to make it complete. Over the eighteen months I'd been there I'd had a couple of volunteers, but nobody I wanted to assign the duty on a regular roster.
 

"We're slack at the bar tonight, I'll close up and leave a card for people to speak to the barman over there if they have problems," she said. "You do the thing with Sam while I lock up."
 

That's what we did. I put my bag back in my car and then took off my town jacket and ran halfway to the highway and back, with Sam springing beside me like a kid let out of school. A couple of cars came by, slowing to see what was going on, but Sam ignored them, happy to be back with me again.
 

I was sweating by the time we got back and found Alice waiting in the doorway of the office. "I've got a lake trout thawed out at the house," she said. "Put Rin-Tin-Tin in the car and let's go."
 

I hugged her, feeling more like a kid than I had since I left Sudbury to enlist in the Marines. In the back of my mind was the sick certainty that this couldn't last. But I've grown with that feeling since Nam. This was like a quiet time on patrol, no snipers, no booby traps, nobody trying to infiltrate. I was happy to enjoy it and let the next day take care of itself.
 

I drove to her house and she invited both of us in. "The hell with sleeping in the car, he's family," Alice said.

The house was cool, but I lit the stove and then showered while she put the fish in the oven and opened one of the bottles of Pouilly Fuisse I'd picked up in Montreal. And then, as we sat down to eat, she gave me the news.
 

"I heard something funny today," she said, "Wanna hear it?"

'Td rather hear there were seconds on the trout, but fire away."

She helped me to another slice. "Well, that Indian friend of yours, Jack Misquadis. One of his nephews was in the bar, early on. He'd had a few beers and it got to the point where I didn't want to see him snockered, so I asked him to leave."
 

"And Sam gave you the required minimum use of force," I said.

"No," she frowned. "He went okay, that wasn't it. But instead of trying to break the place up he said something that stuck in my head."
 

"What was that?" I didn't really care about barroom chat, but her animation made her even better to look at so I listened.

"Well. He went, but he said, 'My uncle Jack could buy this place up, no trouble.' I didn't know any of the people in the band were rich, did you?"
 

"He sure doesn't live rich." I remembered his shack, crude and comfortable but worth maybe five hundred bucks total. He had that and his traps and his old twenty-dollar World War II rifle and his canoe, that was it.
 

"Well, I didn't argue. You don't when somebody says something like that. It's kind of like, my dad can whip your dad," she explained. "But then he said something else."
 

I stopped eating and looked at her. Her oval face was lit from above by the Tiffany lamp and she looked beautiful. I didn't much care what any drunk had said, I just wanted to watch her repeating it. "What was that?" I prompted.
 

"Well, he said, 'Jack's the real owner of all them claims.' " She frowned slightly. "Does that make any sense to you?"

I put down my knife and fork and looked at her seriously. "It makes more sense than anything else I've heard since I came up here."
 

 

 

 

11

 

 

We had no prowlers. If it had been Tettlinger who'd been hanging around the previous night he must have recognized my car and stayed away. But I wasn't sure he would keep on staying away. Guys like him don't let go of a grudge. And now he had even more reason to dislike me—the threat of a jail term. He might decide that the best way to stay free would be to stand off and blast me from a distance with a deer rifle. Before the sound died away he could be gone, melted into the bush that reached back behind Alice's house until he found a nameless lake to throw the gun into. I'm not paranoid, but there was something particularly ugly about that guy that worried me.
 

That's why I insisted Alice keep Sam with her while I went down to the police station and talked to Gallagher.

He was in his office, preparing his duty roster for the coming month. He waved me to a seat. "Try some of the lousy coffee. This won't take but a minute," he invited. So I did, and found he was right. Bad coffee seemed to be an art form with his secretary. But she, or somebody, had brought in a box of donuts and one of them took the taste away and within a couple of minutes Gallagher was ready.
 

I told him what Alice had repeated. He listened, looking at me narrow eyed as if he'd found me shoplifting the donut. "I never knew an Indian yet ever staked land," he said. "Did you?"

I shrugged. "There's nothing minable in Murphy's Harbour, but no, I'd have to agree with you."

"Which means what?" he wondered out loud. We stared down one another's eyes blankly for a minute and then I put forward my idea.
 

"I wonder if maybe he's acting for somebody else. Somebody who doesn't want the world to know he's staking claims."

"Could be," Gallagher growled. "But if his nephew says that he owns the claims, they must be in his name. That means they're his property, that's no good to anybody else."
 

"But what if he's acting for a company? The ABC Mining Corporation. He's a vice-president, they tell him. He gets to register the claims but they belong to the company. He's just one of the crowd, a guy doing the clerical work. That way, when Darvon or somebody wants to use the claims, all the management gets a share, including him."
 

"And including the rounder who set him up," Gallagher completed for me. "Yeah, that would work. Let's go see him."

We took the scout car and drove to Misquadis's shack, but he was gone. The shack was unlocked—it didn't even have a lock, for that matter. A lot of cabins don't, up that far north. A place is there to be used if somebody doesn't have a roof and the weather turns vicious. People go in, stay warm, use what they have to, and then leave the place as they found it, paying for the stay by topping up the wood pile before they go.
 

His old car and canoe were missing, so we guessed what was happening, but Gallagher opened the door anyway and we went in. His rifle was gone, so were the blankets from the bed. "Gone hunting," Gallagher said. "The fool council put a bounty on that bear that's supposed to have killed Prudhomme. I'll bet a million bucks to a cup of Gladys's lousy coffee he's up there on that island shooting one."
 

We went out and stood in the pale fall sunshine and thought about our next move. "I guess the best thing would be to check the claim files and look for any unknown names," I suggested.
 

Gallagher snorted. "Have you got any idea how many crackpots got into the act? Hell, when they found that ore deposit, you couldn't find anybody in town for a month. Everybody was out registering claims. Old Yoong at the laundry was out there, even. Must be seventy, but he trekked out and looked for gold. No, I'd rather go find Misquadis and talk to him. He's a straight guy, if there's anything he can do to help, he'll do it when I explain."