Fool's Gold (18 page)

"Beats the hell out of me," I shrugged. "And he's never going to tell us."

"Right." Gallagher put his feet down on the floor and sat hunched over as if the case had a weight of its own that was pressing on his back. "So I've arranged to have the numbers staked out, just today. Once word gets into the paper that Prudhomme's body's been found, whoever's been using those boxes will steer clear of them. I'm calling each one of them on the hour, then the half hour, then both quarters. It's kind of hit-and-miss. We don't know what their schedule was. But if anybody answers, the local cops can pick the guy up and ask him some questions."
 

"What about the other number—weren't there five on that list?" I asked, and Gallagher grinned.

"Yeah, that one was the strangest of all. You're never gonna believe this one."

"So break it to me gently," I said. "Is it going to help us, that's all I'm asking."

Gallagher dropped the grin and his face settled into an expression I hadn't seen there before. He was sad. "This one was a number you get through the mobile operator."
 

"Whose car is it?" This was important. It could be the break we were waiting for.

"It's not a car," Gallagher said slowly. "And it's not in use anymore."

"Okay, but you must know who owned the truck, whatever."

"I do," he said. "And this one's a puzzle. It's the number of the phone in the trick truck that Eleanor drove."

"Maybe she handed it out to all her tricks."

"Not likely. It had the area code on it so it would be for calling long distance. You couldn't expect her to drive down from the Soo if you were in Timmins and felt lonely. There had to be more to it than that."
 

"Maybe he had something going with her."

Gallagher shook his head. "No, I don't think that would be it. He wouldn't have it on this piece of paper if he did. He'd have known her number right off. Hell, you know what it's like when you're involved with a broad."
 

I said nothing. He had the hangdog wistfulness about him that I'd seen the night before when he spoke about Alice. I would have bet he had her phone number memorized perfectly and I felt a quick pang of sympathy for him. He hankered for her and it was hurting him to know that I was the one she had chosen. I could still remember how it felt from the time after Amy left.
 

I waited a moment or two and he spoke again. "No, I figure it must be another contact number, something connected with this business. And it made me wonder if he had anything going with Eleanor's pimp."
 

"The homicide guy at Thunder Bay said she didn't have a pimp," I reminded him, and he waved one hand impatiently. "He just meant she didn't have some big nigger in a red fur coat beatin' up on her," he said. "Hell, I've been a copper for more years than that kid's been living and I want you to know that every hooker I ever met had a. pimp. Sometimes it's her old man, sometimes it's her brother, sometimes it's her goddamn mother. They all have pimps." He looked at me as if he was defying me to argue. I didn't.
 

"Well, did you call the guys in Thunder Bay? Maybe they can dig. Hell, it could be this pimp who killed her."

"I called," Gallagher said. "The homicide guy doesn't know, but I spoke to the Morality office. Their guy's away today and they can't reach him. But they said he'd call."
 

"I doubt he'll have much for us when he does," I said. "The homicide guy would have chased that one down the day after the murder."
 

"We'll have to wait and see," Gallagher said.

"And while we wait, what?" I queried. I hadn't got any new suggestions. He was handling his facts the way I would have done it, the way any competent investigator would.
 

He straightened up slowly and put his cap on, tapping it down over his thick hair. "While we wait we'll go see Sallinon. "Find out why he lied about the bearskin he sold Prudhomme."
 

"Good. I'll come with you." I stood up with him and Sam hustled to his feet in my shadow.

Sallinon was in his store, handing over a fair-sized lake trout on a wall shield to a guy who looked as if he'd just won the lottery. The customer turned to us as Sallinon wrote out the receipt. "How about that for a fish?" he asked proudly. "On eight-pound test. That's all. Just eight-pound. Sonofabitch weighed seventeen. He could've snapped it like that."
 

Gallagher was a good copper. He nodded and looked impressed. "Must've taken you all day to land him."

"An hour," the guy said. "That beauty's going on the wall." He got his receipt, thanked Sallinon, and left.

Sallinon looked at us and smiled a buddy-buddy smile. "Fancy getting excited about a seventeen-pounder?"

"Don't knock it, Arnie," Gallagher said. "It's guys like him pay your rent."

"Yeah, I guess," Sallinon said. "So what brings you two fellas down here?"

"Prudhomme," Gallagher said, and let the word sit there, as lifeless as one of the stuffed animals.

After a long pause, Sallinon nodded. "Yeah, I heard about that. Incredible, eh?"

Gallagher leaned on the countertop and nodded agreement. "Fer sure," he said. I watched Sallinon. He licked his lips quickly, the way a man does when he's going to lie. And suddenly Gallagher reached out and held him by the front of his wool jacket. "Listen, Arnie, I wanna know why you've been jerking Mr. Bennett around."
 

Sallinon tried to be dignified. He drew himself up to his full height, bringing himself eye to eye with Gallagher, and he reached down and removed Gallagher's hand as if it were something that had fallen off one of the dead animals above him. "You'd better explain what you're talking about," he said. It was the right thing to say, but there was so much tension in his voice that the words trembled.
 

Gallagher looked him straight in the eye and spoke so softly I could hardly hear him from a yard away. "You'd better tell me why you lied about selling him a bearskin."
 

Sallinon licked his lips again. "I didn't lie. I sold him a mink, just as I told this gen'leman."

Gallagher sniffed. It was as if he had a bad smell under his nose, a contemptuous wrinkling of his nostrils. "Then how come he had a bearskin in his gear, up at the motel? And how come he turns up dead a couple of weeks after he's been buried? Or at least after some poor sucker with bear claw and teeth marks all over him has been buried?"
 

Sallinon shrugged. "What's that got to do with me?" He was afraid, I could almost feel it. He might or might not be involved in the plot we thought Prudhomme had been running, but he was quilty of something.
 

Gallagher shook his head, looking down at the counter, then up again into Sallinon's face with a gesture as sharp as a whiplash. "Work it out, Arnie. Soon after you don't sell a skin to a guy, some other guy ends up chewed up by what looks like a bear. Now for that to happen, the killer would either have to be a bear, which is bullshit, or else it has to be a guy with a set of bear claws and bear teeth working to disfigure a stranger so he could head off into the sunset under an assumed name." He waited and Sallinon said nothing, just licked his dry lips once more.
 

"So," Gallagher went on, "if you earned your living trying to keep this town free from crime instead of stuffing chipmunks full of sawdust, what would you think?"
 

Sallinon said nothing and Gallagher suddenly reached over and grabbed his jacket again with two hands and drew him close up. I could see Sallinon trembling as he struggled to pull back. "I tell you what you'd think, Arnie," Gallagher roared. "You'd think, Why is Arnie Sallinon lying to me about the bearskin? If he had nothing to do with this, why did he bother to lie to me in the first place? That's what you'd think."
 

He released Sallinon abruptly, shoving him a little so that he staggered back against the cupboard behind the counter. A gray squirrel on top of the cupboard rocked and I thought it was going to fall on Sallinon's head but it didn't. He did good work, the base was wide enough to stand up to shocks.
 

So was Sallinon. He staggered to his feet and straightened out his shirtfront. "I don't have to put up with this," he said softly. "And I won't. I'm a member of council in this town and I think they'll take my recommendation that we don't want some slob running the police department."
 

It didn't fizz on Gallagher. "Dry your eyes, Arnie," he said. "Nobody's gonna take your word for nothing when you're in Kingston pen." He leaned on the counter again, as relaxed as a customer waiting for his parcel to be wrapped. "And while we're talking about what a good citizen you are, how about getting your sister to give you a reference?"
 

Sallinon looked at him quickly, then away, a darting little motion like a dog would make if he thought you were going to swat him with a rolled-up newspaper. But again he kept himself in check. "What about my sister?"
 

"Well, if I was on the town council, hearing how our big rough police chief had come asking questions, I might want to know why the dead man all this is about had the phone number of the honorable council member's sister in his pocket. Now, just to get in practice for when you get me fired, why don't you tell me why that would be? Were they going steady, what?"
 

"I don't know anything about my sister's private life," Sallinon said. And again he pulled himself together. "And if you're harassing her like you're harassing me, she will say the same as me."
 

"Harassing?" Gallagher laughed. He turned to me. "Did you see any harassing?"

"I've been here the whole time while you and the accused talked," I said equivocally. I don't like this kind of investigation, but so far Gallagher was keeping his anger under control. I didn't think he would get rougher. If he did I would stop him.
 

"See," Gallagher said, "Mr. Bennett says we've been talking nice."

Sallinon looked at me, then back at Gallagher, the speed of his head move making his jowls tremble. But he didn't say anything. Gallagher said it for him. "We haven't finished yet, Arnie. Your sister's not home. She's at the drugstore, where she works. I've saved her the embarrassment of having a Thunder Bay cop come calling for her, but he's waiting at her door for when she does show. Then we'll find out what all you're up to."
 

"I'd be interested to know what your twisted mind will come up with," Sallinon said. "It's going to be amusing."

Gallagher straightened up, tall and amiable, the way he must have looked at the grade school, lecturing the kids on how to cross the street. "Happy to oblige," he said. "You can laugh your way right into the goddamn pen."
 

He turned away and I followed him, but before reaching the door I stopped and asked the question Gallagher had overlooked. "If you didn't sell him that bearskin, where would he have got it?"
 

It worked. The relief of an apparently innocent question loosened him up at once. "The only man in town who sells skins, aside from me, is Jack Misquadis."
 

"Thanks," I told him and followed Gallagher out, past the clank of the cowbell.

 

 

 

15

 

 

By now it was three in the afternoon. The sun was still high but the air was colder and the northwest wind had picked up, whipping the dead leaves on the street into tight little spirals. I shuddered. Indian summer was over. It would be cold in the bush the next day. I could dress for it, but I still had to hope we didn't get a sudden cold snap that locked the lake surface tight in inch-thick ice, too thin to walk on, too thick to let us use the canoe. But there's no sense in borrowing trouble so I put the worry out of my mind. I would check the weather forecast before we let the chopper go. If it looked bad we wouldn't start on the island, we'd start on the mainland where we could portage back to the river, which wouldn't freeze up for another month.
 

There wasn't any more to do right away. All our irons had been put into the fire. Now it was just a question of waiting for something to heat up. When we got back to the station I went in with Gallagher to check if anybody had answered his calls to the pay phones. Nobody had, so I took Sam and left. I was hungry, but figured I'd be eating dinner fairly soon so I made do with a coffee at the bus station, then drove back to the motel.
 

Alice wasn't painting today. She was on edge and wouldn't talk about it. I've been married and I recognized the signs. She was upset and I was the cause. It's not smart to labor the point when that happens. Either you ignore it or you suffer. I was fond enough of her that I wished our mood of the last few nights would last, but if it didn't, I wasn't going to play games. So instead I suggested taking her out to dinner for a change.
 

This time she didn't object and so, quite early, I drove her back up the highway to the place I'd intended visiting that first night and we ate steak and drank the house red wine and acted like a couple who have been married for fifteen years.
 

While we were eating I noticed a young couple with a boy of about three sitting very quietly, ordering modestly, and eating in silence. The man had a haunted look to him that piqued my policeman's curiosity. He looked ill at ease, as if he'd just done something illegal and wasn't used to the idea yet.
 

I found out the truth when they brought him his bill. He couldn't pay. It began as a murmur that grew to a rumble as the waitress went for the manager. Then the manager came out of the kitchen, red faced, either from the heat back there or from the problem. I soon heard what it was. The young guy was flat. He had come up to Olympia hoping to get a job only there weren't any. Now he was making his way back to Montreal. He was Quebecois and frightened, explaining that his wife and kid hadn't eaten since the day before.