Fool's Gold (5 page)

He thought about it for a while, staring through me with those sky-blue eyes. "What the hell, it can't hurt anything," he said with a bleak grin. "Let me get the book."
 

He dug under the counter and pulled out a Charles Dickens-sized accounts book, opening it as if it were the family Bible. I had a feeling he was taking time for my benefit. He knew to the last tooth or nail what anybody had bought from him in the past twenty years. But I leaned on top of the glass counter full of immortal animals and waited. He ran back through the last four pages, item by item, then skipped forward almost up to date and said, "Oh, yeah, here it is." He turned the book so that I could look at the entry in his spidery handwriting in ink as blue as his eyes.
 

I read it aloud. "One mink, mounted."

I looked up and found him grinning the same thin-lipped grin. "Satisfied?" he asked.

"You charge three hundred for a stuffed mink?" His smugness was getting me down. He'd known from the start what Prudhomme had bought from him.
 

My question offended him. "Not stuffed," he said angrily. "That's all you laymen think it is, a sewed-up skin stuffed like a mattress. It was mounted, just as if it were alive. It even had a little mounted mouse in its mouth. Very lifelike."
 

"I'm sure it was," I said, "but three hundred bucks is a lot to pay." I walked over to the wall and pointed at the first thing that came to hand, a raccoon sitting up prettily, the way it might in the bush or on top of a garbage can in Toronto. "How much is this piece?"
 

He didn't answer for a moment and I turned to find him staring at me with the dislike plain in his face. "For you, three hundred dollars," he said mockingly.
 

I met his gaze and said, "Yeah, well, raccoons are a dime a dozen. Any kid with a twenty-two rifle could bring you in as many as you needed. But, a mink—that's different. Sounds like Jim got a deal."
 

Sallinon snapped the book shut, ending the discussion. "We negotiated a price," he said without looking up.

I didn't believe him, but dislike and disbelief are no reasons for pursuing an inquiry past its dead end so I did the obvious thing. "Well, thanks for your time," I said and left, clanking the cowbell he had hung down the back of the door.
 

 

 

 

4

 

 

I didn't dwell on Sallinon's lack of cooperation. Lots of small town people are resentful of strangers. They make their living from us and they smile at us from their eyes but their mouths remain set and their wishes are not for our well-being; they resent the fact that we have time and money to visit while they're stuck in their rut. I just stored my feelings away and went back over the suspicions Misquadis had brought into my mind.
 

Who could have swept up the campsite where Prudhomme was found? It wasn't him, obviously. Surveyors like him are usually tidy in the bush. They bury their garbage and clean up their campsites when they leave, but they don't sweep around with a big branch. And even if he had, if he was so compulsively house proud that he kept the site tidy all the time, the bear's arrival would have left tracks on top of his work. I knew that Gallagher had investigated and closed the case but it smelled suspicious to me. It smelled like murder disguised as a bear mauling.
 

I thought back to my few meetings with Prudhomme. We had never been close, I'd spent maybe three evenings in his company, back in my married days. My impression was of a quiet man with restless eyes, as if the sights of suburbia weren't enough to hold him. He would have preferred to be off in the wilderness, putting up with the flies and the discomfort for the sake of the peace and the chance of making a big strike that would earn him glory in his company and perhaps get him a vice-president's corner office in Montreal. And now he was dead. The bush he had loved so well had turned on him, as if he was just as ignorant of its ways as the rest of us who live in houses most of the time, instead of in tents away from the city. Except that his bear, if it had really been a bear, had cleaned up after itself.
 

Which left the question of why Misquadis had said nothing about that in his statement. Maybe he was right and Gallagher had been too forceful, putting down what he thought Misquadis had said and pushing it in front of him for a signature. Misquadis was an Indian and a bush Indian at that. As far as he was concerned the whole procedure was meaningless. A white man had been killed and other white men were filling up pieces of paper to make the body disappear. It didn't matter very much what was put on that piece of paper. If nobody had asked him about bear tracks, he wouldn't have volunteered the information. And when the bear horror story grew and the town put a bounty on the animal, he would have kept quiet out of good sense. He wouldn't need more than a day or two in the bush to come back with a bear carcass in his canoe. He'd have his winter's meat, a skin to sell to Sallinon, and a five-hundred-dollar bonus, big money for a trapper. Most of them make less than five grand a year—if he was lucky he might make ten. That was all.
 

I guess I should have gone hotfooting back to Chief Gallagher with my suspicions, but I didn't want to wear out my welcome too early. So I headed for friendly turf, back to the motel.
 

Sam was getting bored with the car so I let him out for a scamper before going into the front office. The same woman was on duty, working away at a painting below the level of the counter. She pushed it out of sight automatically, then recognized me and smiled. It was a nice smile and I was glad I'd opted for talking to her rather than the chief. "Good morning, how's the insurance business?" she asked me.

I stuck out one hand and did the
comme-ci, comme-
Ò«
a
gesture. "Tell me about the art business and I'll sing you the whole sad song," I promised.
 

Surprisingly, she responded. She drew out her unfinished watercolor and waved it at me, half embarrassed. I could see it was a landscape and it had a good feel to it; the washed sky reminded me of a thousand overcast mornings in the bush. "Hadn't you better keep painting?" I suggested. "I thought watercolors had to be finished in a rush."
 

"They should," she said, nodding firmly. "But an artist in a place like this is considered a bit of a freak so I can't work the way I'd like to."
 

I found myself hanging on her words. She was frankly pretty in daylight, wearing a soft blue wool sweater with big open stitches and a pair of designer jeans. She was getting to me.
 

"Consider your painting invisible while I'm around," I said, and she smiled and reached for her paints.

"Okay, you're on, as long as you don't give advice."

"Not a chance. I'm looking for some from you." That made her glance up as she dipped her brush in the water jar. "About what?"

"Well, I'm here to look into the death of Jim Prudhomme, the guy who was killed by the bear last month," I said carefully. It didn't clash with the insurance story I'd given her and I needed her help. She looked at me and nodded slowly, then looked down and went on painting while I continued. "I've been talking to some of the people involved—the Indian who found him and the police chief. Now I was going to ask you a favor."
 

"I'll help if I can," she said, mixing up green and black in her palette.

"Well, I understood that Prudhomme left most of his gear at the motel here when he went into the bush."

She worked at trees, not looking up, not missing a stroke as she answered. "Yes, most of our guests do, geologists and pilots and so on. But his widow collected everything when she came up for the inquest."
 

"Yes, I imagined she would have. But I wondered if you saw the pile of stuff at any time." I waited and she thought for a moment, working more slowly.
 

At last she looked up again, almost frowning with concentration. "I'm trying to remember. Seems to me he had two suitcases—well, one case and one suit bag, you know, the folding type. And there were a couple of wrapped parcels."
 

"That was one of the things I was interested in. He's supposed to have bought a stuffed animal from Keepsakes in town. I wondered if it was among his belongings."
 

I waited and she slowly dipped her brush again and went back to creating trees. "If he had, it would have been bulky, wrapped up for protection, maybe in a box," she said. Another tree shook itself out of the brush and she dipped more paint and looked up. "There wasn't a box. One of the two parcels was fairly heavy, tied with thick cord. The other was small, maybe a pair of boots or something like that."
 

"Could the big one have been anything from a taxidermy shop?"

Now she set the brush down and looked at me. "As a matter of fact, it could. One corner of the paper was torn—I think somebody else's gear was stacked alongside it in the storeroom and one of the geology instrument cases had caught the paper and opened up a tear. There was fur inside, black fur. Looked like a bearskin."
 

"I see." I didn't question how she knew it was a bearskin. Women in the north may not know fur coats very well, but they know pelts. Their fathers and husbands all shoot and they see the animals themselves sometimes, in the bush. She went on painting while I stood and wondered why Sallinon had lied about the item he'd sold Prudhomme. Just being ornery, I supposed.
 

But I've been a policeman for a long time. If Prudhomme had bought a bearskin, no matter whether it came from Sallinon or not, the person who had killed him could have cut the head and claws off it and used them on him. Which meant this other person knew him well enough to be at the motel with him, maybe only socially, for a beer, but maybe they'd been seen together.
 

"Tell me, can you remember if Prudhomme was alone when he left to go on that last trip?"

"Yes." She nodded instantly. "I was in the office when he came in and asked me to store his gear. Then he drove off past the office window. He was alone then."
 

"Did he always work on his own?"

She put down her brush for a moment, flexing her arms at the elbows. "I've no idea what his pattern was. But when he was found they said he was alone on the island."
 

I looked at her, musing, and she looked down and picked up her paintbrush. "Are there many transients around? Guys he might have picked up on the highway?"
 

She glanced up. "This place is lousy with transients. Ever since the gold strike was made. Most days I turn away twenty or thirty men, unemployed guys from Toronto or the Soo or Thunder Bay, looking to wash dishes, wait tables, anything."
 

I nodded and said "I see" again. It jibed with what I'd seen in the coffee shop and her diner, earlier, and in the crowded campsite. I guessed too that Gallagher kept transients moving. Olympia wasn't big enough to support a bunch of welfare cases. The paper business had suffered during the recession in '82 and '83. Any charity the town could provide was spoken for at home.
 

She went back to her painting. "Did you have some work for somebody?"

"Not right now, but I might, you know how it is." Not exactly true, but on an investigation you often find yourself dealing in fractions of the truth. The whole thing is too rare for use outside a courtroom.
 

I stood and looked down at the curls on the top of her head, thinking more about her than about my investigation. As far as the world was concerned, that was a closed book. Anything I found was going to be an embarrassment.
 

She glanced up and caught my gaze. "You're looking thoughtful. Run out of questions?"

"Not quite." As I started to speak I felt the same awkwardness that always fills me at times like this. I'm thirty-five years old, divorced. I'm six-one and rangy and women have been good to me over the years but I don't have the assurance that some men seem to bring with them from their cradles. I don't feel irresistible. I usually start out with women from a one-down position, like always playing chess with the black men. "This is going to sound like a thousand salesmen you've heard while you've been in this place. I mean, I don't even know your name, but I'm unattached and harmless and I was wondering if you would see your way clear to having dinner with me."
 

She laughed out loud. "My," she said, "That's totally new, I promise you. It's mostly the salesmen who ask me out. Their idea of couth is saying anything other than, 'Hey kid, let's me and you boogie.' "
 

I laughed with her, feeling redder necked than usual, and she said, "Sure. I'd like to have dinner with somebody in Olympia who can recognize burnt umber. And just to set the record straight, my name is Alice Graham." She put her paintbrush down and reached over. We shook hands, grinning.
 

"How about this place while you're out?" I asked, wondering if we were going to eat in the dining room, with her having to leave the table every few minutes to attend the desk.
 

"I'll get Willie to mind the store," she said. "No problem."

"Great," I said, then realized I needed an exit line and added, "Who's Willie, anyway?"

She was painting again, using a pinkish-brown now for the face of a rock. She put it on in gobs, then smudged it expertly with the side of her left little finger. It took about a minute before she realized what I'd asked and told me, "Oh, Willie—he's the waiter in the dining room. He's only there on paydays. The rest of the time the girl manages just fine on her own."

"I met him,” I said. "He's a nice kid, but can you leave him in charge?"

She looked up again, putting her paintbrush down into the water jar and stretching her arms luxuriously. "No problem. We're full right up; all he has to do is say no politely." And then her grin widened and she added, "That's what I do, most of the time."