Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (296 page)

“Vic is the best thing that ever happened to them. He recommends in their favour every time.”

“What can you tell me about the scuffle he got into back in the wintertime, with a man named Scott Lasalle?”

The bartender grinned. “That was a beaut. Nice to see Vic taken down a peg or two, even though I didn’t think the young fella had it in him. Vic’s built like the side of a mountain, and whatever time he doesn’t spend chasing the ladies, he spends in the gym. Did college wrestling too, a few years back.”

“I guess the other guy took him by surprise?”

“I don’t know how much of a surprise it could be. Things been heating up pretty good between them for awhile there.”

“Oh, they weren’t just strangers passing by?”

“Oh no, boy. They were together a good hour or so, sat right at that table in the corner there.” Frank pointed across the crowded room to a table by the window. “They had dinner together and went through two, three pitchers of Yukon Gold.”

“Maybe the place was crowded and there was no other place for either of them to sit?”

“Oh no, no. The young fella was waiting here at the bar, and soon as Vic walked in he introduced himself, they shook hands, and Vic pointed to the table in the corner. The place was crowded, but not that crowded. Looked like they was after a private chat.”

“Could you hear any of their conversation?”

“Not at first.” Frank squinted through the noisy bar at the table, now occupied by five young men intent on getting drunk. He seemed to be trying to replay that night. “At first it was just talk, you know. What the young fella was studying, what places he’d visited in the Yukon, a bit about adventure trips. Then they got into it. The young fella —”

“Scott?”

“Scott, yeah. He had a backpack and took out a bunch of papers. Some of them were maps, I could see that, and a couple looked kinda legal. I remember Vic got pretty excited. Then the young man got mad about something. They started to argue. Scott showed him some more papers. Vic said it was all worthless anyhow, and how could he prove he was who he said he was.” Frank chuckled. “Scott called him a cheater and Vic called him a fraud and that pretty much did it. Next thing I knows, the pitcher of beer went flying. Sliced Vic’s head up good. Jumpin’ Jaysus, there was a lot of blood!”

Frank seemed caught up in the bloody aftermath, but Chris was back in the thick of the conversation. Before the argument. “Do you have any idea what the papers might have been? A mining claim or a map of one, for example?”

“Mine?” Frank’s expression cleared. “Now that would make sense. Nothing would get Vic’s blood up like a mine. And come to that, I did hear something about rubies. Vic said, ‘Rubies!’ And he laughed. The kid said, ‘Somebody thought so.’ I didn’t hear exactly, but something about his grandfather getting cheated, maybe even killed. Vic got mad then and that’s when the young fella — what’s his name again?”

“Scott Lasalle.”

“Lasalle.” Frank’s eyes widened. “Lasalle, you said? Jumpin’ Jaysus! That’s what this is about!”

“What?”

Frank laughed. “I’ll be the devil. I never made the connection!” He pulled two pints of beer and nodded his head toward the patio. “We’d best sit down for this one, boy. It’s quite the tale. Angel, I’m going out for a smoke, can you take the bar for me? And watch those young fellas at table five.”

Settling outside, Frank took a long swig of beer, lit a cigarette, and blew out a slow, lazy stream of smoke. “Lasalle. That’s a legend up here with the old timers. More in Yellowknife and Fort Simpson than here in the Horse, but good stories travel far. There was two Lasalle brothers come up from New Brunswick during the Depression to make their fortune. Not a penny to rub together but there was good money to be made if you knew how to trap, and lots of shifty-eyed speculators willing to take advantage. They’d hire them to trap and prospect. Drop them in the bush for the winter and pick up the furs in the summer. Summertime, they set them to prospecting with nothing but a kit, a compass, and a lousy map. The Lasalles worked the Nahanni-Flat River area, panning for gold in the creeks and taking rock samples. One time, so the story goes, they failed to make their pickup point and then they showed up instead down at Nahanni Butte.”

He sucked deeply on his cigarette and blew the smoke sideways. “This was back when the Butte was a trading post, before all the tourists started using it. They had a sack full of rocks they said were rough rubies. They went to record the claim and round up some backers. Next summer, they went back up for more samples and that’s when things started to go to shit. The geological report on the new samples said they were worthless. No rubies, no red stones of any sort, so the story goes. The investors pulled their money, called them a fraud, said they must’ve salted the original claim. The whole venture collapsed and left them penniless. But they were tough buggers. They set up their own company called Northern Rubies, and one of them went to work the oil pipeline where there was big money to be made — this was during the war and the Americans wanted it built in a hurry. The other brother, Guy, stayed in the bush trapping. Good money in furs in those days.”

“So they were going to develop the mine themselves?”

Frank nodded, pausing long enough to drain half his beer and take another long draw on his cigarette. The street was still busy and the patio was filling up with revellers enjoying the warmth of the northern summer night. Chris found himself holding his breath as he waited for the story to resume.

“Yeah. Word is Guy Lasalle got a touch of bush fever and started getting suspicious, thinking the other was in league with the backers, maybe trying to squeeze him out. So he stayed behind at the base camp all winter to guard the claim. All alone, all winter long in the dark with his suspicions. That’s the last anyone ever saw of him.”

“Was there a search?”

“Oh yeah, people looked. Locals and you fellas. It was like the wilderness swallowed him up.” Frank shrugged dramatically. “Some say the wolves got him. Some say he went bush crazy after that long winter and killed himself rather than face the humiliation,” Frank leaned forward and waggled his eyebrows, “and some say he was murdered.”

Chris grinned. “And why would that be?”

“No shortage of motives where gemstones are concerned, boy. Maybe the local Indians objected to him trapping on their land, maybe the backers got greedy, maybe the other brother came back and finished him off. Who knows? But the point is, the story never died. Every now and then someone comes back from a hike with a tall tale about red stones lying for the taking in the till on the mountainsides. Or glittering from the bottom of creeks. And now it sounds like the Lasalle blood has risen up again to take up the cause.”

“What do you think Scott’s relationship is to Victor? Both grandsons of Guy Lasalle?”

“Could be. I can tell you there were some lively times out there in the bush back in those days. Lots of kids weren’t sure who their daddies were.”

Chris made a mental note to check birth records for the name Lasalle during the period around the 1940s, as well as Scott and Victor’s birth records. The registry offices would be closed for the day, but he’d get an early start on the search in the morning. At least he now had some interesting information to report to Sergeant Nihls when he got back. He wasn’t sure what relevance all this history had, and he suspected Nihls would say it had none, but Scott clearly had planned something bigger in the Nahanni than a summer wilderness trek.

A tall blond young woman was coming toward the bar, a look of intense concentration on her face. She was dressed in blue jeans, flip-flops, and a tight tank top, with a bright pink purse slung over her shoulder. With a jolt of pleasure and surprise, Chris recognized Olivia Manning.

He called her and jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over. She stopped. For an instant, confusion and alarm flitted across her face, but then her big, beautiful smile came back.

“Well, well, well. Flyboy! What are you doing here?”

It was too much to explain, especially in his tongue-tied state. “A case,” was all he managed. “What about you? I thought you were doing a Nahanni tour.”

Her gaze flicked to Frank, who was stubbing out his cigarette and scrambling to his feet.

“Only as far as Glacier Lake,” she said once he’d gone back inside. “I had a meeting I couldn’t miss here in Whitehorse.” She wrinkled up her nose in distaste. “School stuff. But not till tomorrow. It looks as if I can buy you that drink I promised. And you can tell me all about your case.”

He nodded. As she pulled up a chair and stretched out her long, lithe body, all words, and all thought of the case and his plans for tomorrow, fled from his brain.

Chapter Thirteen

Little Nahanni cabin, March 12, 1944,

Mon amour pour toujours!

I am so happy to receive your letter. An Indian trapper from the Butte brought it today, and I am so glad to have some news of our baby. I knew he must be born. William is a fine name. It is also English for Guillaume, my full name. How I wish to see him and hold you in my arms. It is so quiet up here. I have no company but the dogs, and at night the wolves. It seems colder than other years, and this time Gaetan is not here. At least now the days are longer.

Do you have news of Gaetan? I hope he got a good job on the pipeline. The furs are not so good as I hoped, even the Indians say so. I am obliged to extend my lines farther west.

I am reading
Romeo and Juliet
you gave me, but the English is hard and it makes me lonely for you. What a grand love they shared. I confess sometimes I read
Huckleberry Finn
in its place.

I live for your letters, and promise to come home to you and the baby soon!

Your ever devoted husband, Guy

 C
hris woke the next morning to the caress of unfamiliar sheets and the delicious scent of female skin, overlaid with musk and sweat. He hardly dared move. He could hear the soft rhythm of breathing next to him and the distant rumble of traffic though the closed window. He blinked at the white ceiling of the hotel room. Plain, cheap, anonymous, but transformed to a sensual paradise in the heat of last night.

He could barely believe his luck. They had shared two bottles of wine with dinner, walked the streets arm in arm, and finished up in the small bar of his hotel, ordering the only brandy on the menu before picking up their glasses, wavering down the hall to his room, and tearing off their clothes. In the end, no words, no awkward requests, no coy innuendos. Just a look exchanged between them.

He wondered if she’d regret it when she woke up. Did she do this often, or had she really shared the connection he’d felt all evening? Had she found him lacking, despite her three orgasms and his considerable staying power, at least for that third one? The wine and brandy had barely touched him, although he knew he’d talked too much. The isolation of months, the rigid control of the job, the pent-up need…. He’d unleashed it all last night in his eagerness to keep her with him. He’d talked about his farm, his homesickness, his dreams for advancement in the RCMP, his impatience with the promotion process, with the unspoken motto of the RCMP: “Don’t screw up. Follow procedure. Cover your ass, cover your boss’s ass, and above all, cover the force’s ass.” Too much turmoil and bad publicity, too many complaints and bad choices, had made cowards of them all.

It wasn’t the noble vision he had dreamed of when he joined the force.

“Oh how the mighty have fallen,” Olivia had said at one point, midway through the second bottle of wine. She’d commiserated, saying that university had been just as disillusioning. The world is a compromise and if you want to do even some small bit of good, you have to wade in the crap where the game is being played.

He told her about his attempts to investigate Scott Lasalle’s disappearance, about the contortions he’d gone through just to convince his sergeant that this trip was important. That tracing Scott Lasalle’s recent movements and checking out his relationship to Victor Whitehead was important.

He didn’t mention what an idiot he’d made of himself during the interview, but she seemed to sense it.

“Whitehead is a creep,” she’d said. “It’s bad enough he wants to put roads and dams and pipelines all over the north, but he’s the slimiest slug a woman ever had to pick off herself. You get him, flyboy.”

Last night, fuelled by the wine and her obvious admiration, he’d wanted to march right over to Whitehead’s house, grab him by the lapels, and demand to know why he’d lied about his meeting with Scott. This morning, however, he felt far less confident. Much as he wanted to squash the slug for the woman who slept like an angel next to him, he knew Whitehead would wipe the floor with him again. He hated to admit it, but he needed reinforcements.

As he slipped on his clothes and tiptoed around the room, hoping not to wake her, he stubbed his toe on the table. A curse escaped his lips. She stirred. Opened her eyes. Miraculously, she smiled.

“Mmm. That was a night.”

He paused, shoes in hand, and came back to the edge of the bed. “Sorry. My feet aren’t looking where they’re going this morning.”

“I wonder why.” She yawned and stretched like a cat, long limbs arcing through the air. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

“I want another crack at Victor Whitehead. But I have to figure out the connection between Whitehead and Lasalle first. They’re related somehow. Cousins of some sort.”

“No kidding.”

He nodded. “And whatever it is, it seems to go back to Lasalle’s grandfather. To that mining claim.”

“But that’s ancient history.”

“Maybe. But maybe people have long memories. Frank Flaherty says the grandfather disappeared. That may be ancient history but if Frank’s ears aren’t deceiving him, Scott still thinks there’s a score to be settled.”