Jackpot (Nameless Dectective)

by Bill Pronzini

  I glanced at my watch as I came down the long hill to the lakefront fork. A little past nine-thirty. I’d made good time from Paradise Flat, taking 89 to Interstate 80 and then 80 through Reno and onto 445. Minor slowdowns in Tahoe City and Sparks; otherwise the traffic had been light enough so that I could drive at a steady sixty-five. Fatigue had begun to gather at the edges of my mind, despite the sense of urgency. My neck and shoulders were stiff with tension.

  I turned along the western shore toward the clustered lights of Sutcliffe. One lake to another the past few days—Tahoe to Fallen Leaf to Tahoe to Virginia to Pyramid to Tahoe to Virginia to Tahoe to Fallen Leaf to Tahoe to Pyramid. Linkage. Another chain that stretched back to David Burnett and his suitcase full of money. But in any chain there is a final link. Pyramid Lake would be one, if I was lucky, and Janine Wovoka would be another.

  Past Sutcliffe, on up toward Pelican Point. Isolated lights ahead, lakeward: John Wovoka’s trailer. I slowed, looking for the access road; saw it and made the turn and bumped along toward the flat-topped rise ahead. In the silvery moonshine I could see the trailer and its frontage clearly. The U.S. Wildlife Commission pickup wasn’t parked there, nor was any other vehicle. And yet lights were on inside the trailer, showing behind drawn blinds over front and side windows.

  I coasted to a stop thirty feet from the door. Shut off engine and headlamps and got out into a hush that matched the ghostly aspect of the lake. No sounds came from inside the trailer. I stood for a few seconds, stretching cramped muscles, watching the blinds on the near window. I thought I saw movement at one corner: someone watching me through a canted slat.

  Slowly I moved over that way. But instead of going to the door or window, I continued around the far corner to the rear. Car parked back there, all right. Small, pudgy foreign job—Yugo?—drawn in close against the trailer’s back wall and nose up to the accumulation of junk overflowing the shed.

  I retraced my steps to the front, went to the door. Knocked and called out my name. “Open up, Janine. We need to talk.”

  No response, no sound.

  “Come on, Janine. I know you’re in there. And you know who I am. You can’t hide anymore.”

  Silence.

  “I’ve just come from Paradise Flat,” I said. “I found Jerry. I haven’t called the sheriff yet but I will right now if you don’t open the door. I’ve got a phone in my car. I’ll give you thirty seconds; then you can watch me make the call.”

  Silence for half that time. Then there were hesitant footfalls; a scraping and rattling as she released the door lock. Muffled voice: “All right, come in.”

  I opened the door and entered a neat, Spartan room that was half living area and half kitchen and dinette. Its lone occupant was backed up against the far wall, braced there with her feet apart. That was my first look at Janine Wovoka in the flesh: scared young woman in stone-washed denims and a loose blue sweater, crouched against a trailer wall and pointing a long-barreled revolver at me with both hands.

  I closed the door behind me, doing it slowly. “Put the gun down, Janine.”

  “No. You stay away from me.”

  “You don’t want to shoot me. I’m on your side.”

  “My side?” Her laugh was edged with hysteria. “My God, if it wasn’t for you, Jerry ... Jerry might still be alive.”

  Yeah, I thought. If it wasn’t for me and you and Burnett and Wendy and Scott McKee and Jerry’s own lust and greed. And Arthur Welker—let’s not forget Arthur Welker.

  “Don’t make things any worse than they are,” I said. “Put the gun down.”

  “No.”

  “You want to kill two people in one night? Shoot two men down in cold blood?”

  “What? No ... no!”

  “You shot Jerry. Why?”

  She shook her head. Kept shaking it, brokenly, so that her black hair swirled around her face in damp tangled strands. She had been strikingly attractive in the snapshots I’d found, but she wasn’t attractive now. Haggard, pinch-faced; the sweat of fear dampening skin gone pale and blotchy and stretched so tight over the high cheekbones, it seemed ready to split. Big dark eyes alight with something more than terror, as if she had gazed through a crack and seen the landscape of hell.

  “I didn’t shoot him,” she said, “I didn’t, I didn’t!”

  “No? There wasn’t anyone else in the house.”

  “I tell you, I didn’t!”

  “Then who did?”

  “He did. He ... Jerry ... he did it himself.”

  “Suicide? I don’t buy it, Janine. Not him, not in the stomach like that. He didn’t have the courage.”

  “You don’t understand ... it was an accident. He was out of his head ... he went crazy, he just ... went crazy ...”

  “Drugs? Was he high on something?”

  Another series of head wags. “He had some grass but it wasn’t that. He was sick, hurt ... he woke up with a bad headache and stayed in bed all day ... oh, God, I was in the kitchen, I was going to make some sandwiches, and I heard him yelling ... he just started yelling for no reason ... I ran into the hall and he ran out of the bedroom waving that gun of his and yelling ... he was out of his head, he said I was one of them and I wanted to kill him but he was going to kill me first and he ... he tried ... I grabbed for the gun and he pulled away and it ... it went off and he screamed and fell down and thrashed around and I couldn’t ... the blood ...”

  Headshakes, violent now. She had had a glimpse of hell, all right, and she was having it again inside her head. It made her physically ill. She coughed, then gagged, then lunged over to the kitchen sink and vomited into it. She still had the revolver in one hand but she’d forgotten about it by then; forgotten about me, too, until I eased up beside her and caught her wrist and disarmed her. She turned toward me, her features pulled out of shape, her mouth streaked and stained, but then another spasm overtook her; she vomited again into the sink. And I backed up with the weapon.

  When she was done puking she began to cry—great racking sobs that shook her whole body. There was a towel beside the sink; she groped that up, blindly, and wiped her mouth and then stumbled to an old two-seat mohair couch at the far wall and sank onto it with her face buried in the towel. I let her sit there and cry while I dealt with the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber target revolver with a six-inch barrel. John Wovoka’s, probably. All the chambers were loaded. I removed the cartridge from under the hammer before I tucked the piece into my jacket pocket.

  Janine’s sobbing diminished, finally quit altogether. It was another minute before she raised her head and looked at me again, out of eyes that had gone dull in the ravaged plain of her face. “I wouldn’t have shot you,” she said in a voice as dull as her eyes. “I didn’t shoot Jerry ... I loved him. I couldn’t hurt anybody. Please, you have to believe me ...”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “Do you? Really?”

  “Really.”

  It seemed to relieve her. She took a couple of deep breaths, made a vague gesture toward the dinette table. “My purse,” she said. “I need a cigarette ...”

  “I’ll get it. Stay where you are.”

  I opened the purse and looked inside before I gave it to her, to make sure she didn’t have some other kind of weapon tucked away in there. A package of Marlboros was the most lethal of the contents. She fired one with shaking hands, sat dragging on it hungrily. On the wall above her was an oil painting of an Indian woman in some sort of ceremonial costume, holding a conical-shaped basket in her hands. The juxtaposition struck me as symbolic of the differences between the Indians of yesterday and the Indians of today, the sad old world and the bitter new.

  Janine took another drag on her cigarette, coughed out smoke, and said, “It must have been the fight. Jerry was in a fight Monday night ...”

  “I know. With Scott McKee.”

  “He hit his head when he fell. His temple, it was all soft and ... pulpy, you know? He could hardly talk when he called me. And when I
got there he was so dizzy I had to help him walk.”

  “Why didn’t you take him to a doctor?”

  “He wouldn’t go. He said he was all right, he just needed to rest. The next day ... he was all right, except for a headache that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t until this morning that the headache got so bad he couldn’t get out of bed. I wanted to call a doctor then, too, but he said no. I should have called one anyway ... I knew I should have, I knew it.”

  “Too late by then, probably.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Brain damage. That’s what it sounds like.” And I thought but didn’t say: Walking dead man since Monday night. The bullet in his guts was like pulling the plug on a cancer patient with a short time to live.

  Janine said, “But then ... Scott killed him. In the fight.”

  “Technically, yes. But he’s no more guilty than Dave Burnett or your former bosses.”

  “... You know about all that? The money?”

  “The big jackpot. Yeah, I know. All except where and how he got hold of the suitcase.”

  “I wish to God I’d never met him,” Janine said with sudden vehemence. She jabbed out her cigarette in a stoneware ashtray and immediately lit another. “Him or Jerry. They ruined my life ... my life is ruined now. What am I going to do? Live here on the reservation with my father? Be somebody’s squaw like my mother was? Just another fat, ugly Indian squaw. ...”

  “How did Burnett get the money, Janine?”

  She blinked her swollen eyes at me. “What?”

  “The suitcase, the money—how did he get it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You must have some idea.”

  “No, he wouldn’t tell us. Not any of us, not then.”

  “Meaning he told one of you later?”

  “Jerry ... he told Jerry.”

  “But Jerry wouldn’t tell you?”

  “No. He said it was better I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t even give you a hint?”

  “No.”

  And now he’s dead, I thought. They’re both dead, Burnett and Polhemus, and the only ones left who know the whole truth are Welker and Manny Atwood. Welker, Welker, Arthur goddamn Welker ...

  “But he made a tape,” Janine said.

  The words jerked me back out of myself. “Tape? What kind of tape?”

  “Telling everything that happened, how Dave got the money and how they found out. He said he did anyway. To protect himself if there was any more trouble.”

  “What did he do with this tape?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hid it somewhere, gave it to somebody, put it in a safe-deposit box?”

  She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me. Honest.”

  Damn all the secrecy! If I could find that tape ... if he’d named names, mentioned Welker’s name just once ...

  Janine snubbed out her second cigarette, ran her hands together in her lap as if she were trying to cleanse them. Her eyes, now, were bright, shiny—like those of a trapped bird watching a cat. “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About me. About Jerry. You said you haven’t called the sheriff yet ...”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Do you have to?”

  “What do you think?”

  “But why? What good will it do now?”

  “Not much, maybe. But Jerry’s dead. You want to leave his body lying there in the house?”

  She shuddered. “No. But what if they don’t believe me? I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “You won’t go to jail.”

  “You don’t know that. Please don’t call them, please. If you don’t, I’ll ... I’ll do ...”

  “Do what, Janine?”

  “Anything you want. Anything.”

  That made me angry. “You can’t buy me with sex, little girl. Not anywhere, at any time, and especially not here in your father’s house. Not even a whore screws a customer in her father’s house.”

  She began to cry again. But it wasn’t shame; it was self-pity. Everybody I had had dealings with tonight was loaded down with self-pity and I was sick of confronting it. “Please,” she said between sobs, “please don’t call anybody. You don’t understand, it’s not just me ... my father ...”

  “What about your father?”

  Headshake.

  A belated realization, cold and crystal-sharp, opened up in my mind. “Where is he? Why isn’t he here with you? Why did he leave you alone tonight?”

  She swallowed, said, “He ...” and swallowed again.

  “He went to Tahoe, didn’t he. To Paradise Flat.”

  “... Yes.”

  “To do what? Tell me, Janine!”

  “He ... he said I shouldn’t worry. He said he’d take care of things ...”

  Take care of things. Christ!

  “He doesn’t want me to go to jail for something I didn’t do,” she said. “He’s my father, he loves me ...”

  “Yeah. And you love him, too, now that you need him. How long ago did he leave?”

  “Not long before you came ... ten or fifteen minutes.”

  One of the infrequent sets of headlights I’d passed on Highway 445 on my way here. That close, the two of us rushing by each other in the dark—going in opposite directions, after different links to finish off the chain. More than half an hour’s lead now. Still enough time to stop him? Depended on how fast he drove, how fast I drove, exactly what his plans were once he got to the house on Sweetwater Drive.

  Nothing is ever as simple as it seems ...

  I said, “I’m leaving now,” and moved over to the door. “You stay here until you hear from your father or me. Understand? Don’t talk to anyone, don’t go anywhere, just wait.”

  She passed a hand over her tear-damp face; lifted the hand toward me, palm up, in a gesture of despair. “I don’t have anyplace to go,” she said.

  Janine Wovoka and Wendy Oliver.

  Sisters.

  Chapter 22

  JOHN WOVOKA WAS THERE, all right. Still there.

  From where I stood alongside a split-bole Douglas fir, I had a clear view of the house and parking area below. The entire property was bathed in light from the harvest moon, with only a few streaky clouds scudding past now and then to dim its hard white shine. The moonglow was so bright I could almost read the lettering and government seal on the driver’s door of the pickup. There was no sign of the man himself. Likely he was inside the house; lights burned in there, making dull gold rectangles of the opaque windows flanking the entrance.

  I stayed put for a time, waiting and watching to make sure I didn’t blunder into anything when I went down there. I had looked at my watch just after letting the car drift, dark and silent, onto the shoulder across Sweetwater Drive. Half-hour past midnight. Coming onto the first of the night’s long empty hours. Weariness lay heavily on me now: dull ache behind my eyes, muscles like ropes knotted through the upper half of my body. The last segment of the drive from Pyramid Lake—down Highway 89 along the Tahoe shore—had been a constant struggle to stay alert and to keep myself from driving too fast and inviting the attention of a county sheriff’s deputy or highway patrolman.

  Last link, I kept telling myself then, and I did it again now. We’ll complete the chain before dawn, one way or another.

  Stillness down below. Stillness all around me, except for the whisper and rattle of the wind in the tree branches. The hard moonlight glistened off the surface of the lake beyond the house, softened into a long silverish stripe out toward the middle. The rest of the water shone like polished black onyx. The only sign of life out there was the red-and-green running lights of a boat moving away to the southeast, toward the neon shimmer that marked the Stateline casinos.

  Time to move.

  I stepped back up onto the road, went slowly along the edge of it to the driveway turning. Paused there, didn’t see anything to detain me, and descended at the same slow pace, over
at the far edge where there was plenty of tree shadow. My shoes made little sliding sounds on the rough surface, but they weren’t sounds that carried.

  On level ground, I angled over to the carport and across in front of Polhemus’s Cougar to the house wall. Listened, didn’t hear anything, started out past the comer—and then backed up quick and froze because I did hear something: a clicking, a scraping, then heavy footfalls. I eased my head around the corner. John Wovoka had opened the door and was coming out.

  He didn’t look my way as he shut the door. In his left hand he carried a flashlight—a little bigger and more powerful than the one I’d unclipped from under the dash and slipped into my jacket pocket before quitting the car. I slid my left hand in on top of it; put my right on the Smith & Wesson .38 that weighted the other coat pocket. But I did not need either one yet. John Wovoka put his back to me and moved past the pickup, walking in a stiff, purposeful stride, and made his way down to the pier and then along the float arm onto which the boat shelter had been built. He disappeared inside the shelter. A few seconds later, through chinks in the rough-wood siding, I saw flickers of light from his flash.

  I sidled around the corner and along the wall to the front entrance. The door wasn’t locked. And he’d left the lights on inside. I opened the door without making any sound, slipped through and shut it soft behind me.

  He had drawn the drapes in the living room; that was the first thing I noticed. I moved through the foyer, past the kitchen, to where I could see into the hallway. Polhemus’s body had been shifted toward the far end; it lay wrapped now in a thick canvas tarpaulin, the ends tied off with pieces of brown hemp. The hallway floor where the corpse had originally lain was so clean, it glistened. There was no sign of the Saturday night special. Had John Wovoka put it with the body or kept it on his person?

  I reversed direction, eased the door open again, eased myself out. He was still in the boat shelter, but now the beam from his flash was stationary: he’d propped it on something so he would have the use of both hands. There was not much doubt what he was up to down there, or what he intended to do with Polhemus’s corpse.