I worked my way along the house and the raised deck, toward the pier. Muffled noises came from the shelter: a winglike flapping, as of a piece of canvas being shaken; little thumpings and clatterings. I used those to cover my run from the end of the deck to the pier. I’d gone halfway out to the T floats when the noises in the shelter stopped. I stopped too, waiting. I had the flashlight in my left hand now, the .38 out in my right.
The light inside moved, flicked bright over another part of the wall and then dulled as he turned it away and downward. More noises then, different ones, louder but only because I was so much closer to the shelter. I went ahead to the floats, walking soft, and turned along the inner edge of the left one. The sounds inside the shelter continued unchecked. When I reached the near wall I stopped again and then poked my head around the corner so I could peer inside.
Thick, murky shadows enclosed a puddle of light from his torch. The puddle was inside the shadow-shape of a boat—a small, new-looking outboard runabout—tied to iron hooks set into a narrow walkway on this side. On the walkway where he’d pitched it, a canvas cover lay partly folded and partly crumpled in a shape that resembled a huge mangled bird. He was down on one knee in the cockpit, his back to me, the flash on the deck beside him so he could see what he was doing under the dash. Crossing the ignition wires, probably—an easy enough job with a boat ignition.
I stepped around the corner onto the walkway, pointed the gun and my flashlight at him, pinned him with the flash beam, and said, “That’s enough of that, John.”
He came around on his knees with such suddenness that he sent his own torch clattering across the deck; it hit something and canted upward at a forty-five-degree angle, so that its stab of light picked out a cobwebbed corner of the far wall. He threw one arm up to shield his eyes. I could see his body tense, like an animal gathering itself to spring.
“No sudden moves, John. I’m armed.”
He didn’t relax any, but the coiling stopped; he was frozen in place now. He said in a low, tight voice, “Who are you?”
“The detective from San Francisco, remember? We talked up at Pyramid Lake.”
“... I remember.”
“I just came from there. Your trailer. Janine and I had a long talk.”
He made a sound that was as close to a growl as any human sound I’ve ever heard. “If you hurt her—”
“I didn’t hurt her. She had a pistol of yours and I took it away from her, that’s all.”
“The authorities ... ?”
“No, I didn’t call them. Not yet. I came straight here.”
“Why?”
“To stop you from getting rid of Polhemus’s body.”
“She didn’t kill him,” he said. There was anguish on his heavily seamed face, and a fierce protectiveness as well. “It was an accident ... he was out of his head and he tried to hurt her ...”
“Then why do this? Why didn’t you just notify the authorities yourself?”
“You think they’d believe her?” Bitterness warped his voice, made it crack a little. “An Indian girl?”
“What did you do with Polhemus’s gun?”
“Put it with his body.”
“Okay. Stand up. Turn the pockets of your jacket inside out and then turn around, slow.”
He did that. The jacket pockets were empty, and if he’d had the Saturday night special shoved into his belt, I’d have seen it; the old Levi jacket was short-hemmed.
“Let’s go up to the house, John.”
“And do what? Call the sheriff?”
“No. There’s something else I want to do first.”
He stared, squinting, into the flash beam without moving. Then he started to reach down for his own torch.
I said, “No, leave it there. Shut it off but leave it there.” And when he’d obeyed and then climbed up onto the walkway, “Before we go, listen to this. If you’ve got any idea of jumping me, you’d better forget it. What would you do if you got the gun? Shoot me with it? You’d have to, you know—shoot me and then take my body out into the lake and dump it along with Polhemus’s. I don’t think you’re capable of murder, not even to protect Janine. How about it?”
One, two, three beats. “No,” he said.
“No trouble between you and me, then?”
“No trouble.”
“I’ll back up and you follow.”
I backed around the corner, waited for him to appear, then switched off the flash. The moonlight was bright enough. I let him precede me off the pier and he went docilely enough; he was a man of his word. But bitterness and frustration were strong in him; I could see them in the set of his face, the slump of his shoulders. It was plain enough what he was thinking: He had failed his daughter. She’d finally come home, finally turned to him as he had always hoped she would—and this sacrifice he had been willing to make for her, this compromise of his honesty and his principles, had turned out to be empty, futile. He would lose Janine again, now, and this time it would be for good. There is no magic. There aren’t any miracles.
As we neared his pickup I said, “Did Janine give you the key to Polhemus’s car?”
“No. But I found his keys inside the house.”
“You have them on you?”
“In my pocket.”
“Go on ahead to the carport.”
When we got there I told him to unlock the driver’s door, slide in under the wheel, and unlock the passenger door for me. He obeyed without question or comment. I sat on the passenger seat, the door open so the dome light would stay on, and punched the latch button on the dash compartment. The cassettes for the Cougar’s tape deck were jumbled inside—the same ones that had spilled free last Sunday when Polhemus yanked his Saturday night special out of there. I removed them one by one. The first eight were all labeled: various groups with names like Blood and Thunder that specialized in heavy-metal rock music. The ninth cassette had no label of any kind.
I said to John Wovoka, “Switch on the ignition. I want to play this tape.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see. Go ahead.”
He switched on the ignition. I fed the cassette into the tape deck and punched the Play button. Static ripped out of the speakers; I lowered the volume. And what was recorded on the tape began to play.
It was the right tape, the one Janine had told me about. Not the safest place to keep it, here in the car with a bunch of labeled cassettes, not if Polhemus had intended it as an insurance policy. But then, he hadn’t been a very smart kid. Good for me, too bad for him.
He started out—a little stiffly, as if he’d been self-conscious about speaking into a microphone even when he was alone with it —by identifying himself and saying that he was going to record what had happened since “Dave Burnett found a lot of money and screwed up his life and mine.” He was making the record, he said, in case anything happened to him the way it had to Burnett. “They say he killed himself and I guess he did but I don’t know it for sure. I’ll never kill my self and if I turn up dead and it looks like I did, it’s a lie, a big fucking lie.”
I glanced over at John Wovoka. He was sitting rigidly, eyes front, listening to Polhemus’s scratchy, nervous voice. In the pale dome light, his face was like one cast in bronze—a Charles Russell sculpture of a Sioux warrior I had seen once.
Polhemus spent a minute or so sketching in background: his and Burnett’s trips to Tahoe and Reno “to gamble and party, see what kind of pussy we could find.” None of the girls they picked up meant anything to them, he said. “They were just for grins. I’m a lover, not a husband.” Small-boy smugness in that last; I could almost see him smirking a little, slyly, as he spoke. I looked over at John Wovoka again; he hadn’t moved. But I could feel his anger and his bitterness and his pain.
Polhemus’s voice droned on. A Saturday night at the end of April ... a party in Reno ... the girls they were shacking up with wanted to drive up early, do some shopping, catch a lounge show at Bally’s ... Burnett didn’t want to go along
, he felt like playing some blackjack, but maybe he’d drive up later. Then, finally, Polhemus got to the meat of it—the first link in the big chain.
Dave left Tahoe about eight o’clock. It was dark and there wasn’t much traffic, he said. He was coming down the grade from Spooner Summit and this car a couple of hundred yards in front of him, all of a sudden it started weaving funny, jumped over a lane and veered onto the shoulder. Dave said it wasn’t like a blowout, it was like something had happened to the driver.
He pulled off in front of the other car, this big Caddy sedan, and went to have a look. That was Dave, always poking his nose where it didn’t belong. The other driver was slumped over the wheel, gasping for breath, and when Dave opened the door the guy, an old guy in his sixties, he said something about having a heart attack. Dave didn’t know what to do, he was no paramedic, but he thought maybe the old guy had pills or something so he fumbled around in his pockets looking but he didn’t find any pills. Then he saw this suitcase, it was lying on the passenger seat, and he thought maybe there was pills in there. He got in on that side and started to open the suitcase. The old guy had a fit, tried to stop him. Then he grabbed his chest and slumped over the wheel again.
Dave thought he was dead. But he opened the suitcase anyway, still looking for pills, and it was full of money. Dave said he nearly crapped in his pants when he saw it—fifty-dollar bills, hundred-dollar bills, all stacked inside that suitcase.
So he took it. Who wouldn’t take it? He thought the old guy was dead, there was nobody else around except cars on the highway and none of them was stopping, and all that money just sitting there. So he waited until the highway was empty and then he put the suitcase in his car and got the hell out of there.
He didn’t keep on going to Reno. He turned around and drove back to my cabin at Fallen Leaf. It was the safest place to count the money, he said. Turned out there was two hundred thousand bucks in that suitcase. Two hundred thousand big ones. He got a hard-on sitting there with all that money. That’s what he said when he finally told me about it. Biggest hard-on he ever had in his life. Bet he jerked off, too, right into all that cash.
Me and the girls got back late that night. He was still up, half stoned on grass. He told us he found some money but not how or how much there really was. He wanted it all for himself, the greedy prick. He said there was only fifty thousand He said he’d give me ten—ten out of two hundred. Big shot, big pal. I should of known when he wouldn’t show us the money, just the suitcase. He kept that suitcase locked in the trunk of his car until we were back in San Francisco. Then he told me how much there really was. He had to because he was gonna tell Karen, his main squeeze, that he’d won one of the Megabucks jackpots and he wanted me to back him up. I told him go fuck himself but he said he wouldn’t give me the ten thousand if I didn’t back him up. So I had to do it.
Outrage tightened Polhemus’s voice as he spoke those last several sentences. He had begun to hate his best buddy when he learned the true amount of the stolen money: the price of friendship to Jerry Polhemus had been one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And his hatred really blossomed a few days later, when the whole thing blew up in Burnett’s face and the backlash caught him, too.
They grabbed Dave when he was leaving work. Two guys—Mob guys, enforcers. The girls warned him, they said it might be Mob money. Nobody has that much cash in a suitcase in Nevada except the Mob, they said, and they thought it was only fifty thousand then. But Dave, big smart Davey, he wouldn’t listen. He said there was no way anybody could know he took the suitcase. No way, he said. Well, he was wrong, God damn him. The two guys that grabbed him, they took him to this place on De Haro Street, some manufacturing company, and they pushed him around and told him how wrong he was.
That old guy in the Caddy, he wasn’t dead when Dave took the suitcase. He didn’t die until a week later. Dave’s car was in front of the Caddy, the Caddy’s lights were on, and the old guy raised up before Dave drove off and he got Dave’s license number. He was in a coma or something for a few days but he came out of it long enough before he went belly-up to give the number to his bosses. Then Dave, and me too, we were in deep shit.
The enforcers told him he had to give the money back, all of it, every penny. And ten thousand more as a penalty. He said he’d already spent some, bought a new car and a bunch of other stuff, blew a couple thousand gambling, gave the ten thousand to me. He said there was no way he could come up with so much cash, not in a hurry like they wanted it. They didn’t care. They gave him a week. If he didn’t have it by then they said they’d kill him, and Karen and his sister too.
But he couldn’t do it. And he couldn’t get them to give him any more time. So he went and killed himself—took a whole bottle of pills, for chrissake. But before he did that he came around and told me the whole story and said I had to give the ten thousand back. I told him to piss off, it was my money now and his problem. So the son of a bitch sicced those enforcers on my ass. Jesus, I was never so scared in my life. I gave them the money—I had to. What else could I do? They said they’d kill me and they meant it. They might still kill me. How do I know they didn’t murder Dave when he couldn’t come up with the rest of what he owed them? Maybe they did. Those guys, those Mob guys, they’ll do anything to get what they want.
There was more, but most of it was self-pitying maunderings. And one nasty aside: He’d almost told Karen the truth after the funeral, he said, “to get back at Dave for siccing those enforcers on me,” but decided it was smarter to keep his mouth shut. The tape had been made before Allyn hired me, so there was nothing about his reactions to my reopening the whole can of worms.
He had been wrong about Burnett’s death; there was no question in my mind that David Burnett had died by his own hand. Terrified kid no brighter than Polhemus, with a warped sense of loyalties, in way over his head with people who had a reputation for making good on their threats. The pressure had been too much for him, and so he’d taken the easy way out. I could just see him rationalizing it: He was sacrificing himself for Allyn and Karen, the two people in his life he had actually cared for. If he was dead, the Mob would just write off the balance owed and that would be the end of it. All very noble—the last act of a coward and a fool. He’d made the right guess about Arthur Welker’s decision, but he could just as easily have been wrong. He could have put Allyn’s and Karen’s lives in even more jeopardy than if he’d stayed around and faced the consequences of his greed.
No loss, David Burnett. No loss, either, Jerry Polhemus.
I let the tape run for a full minute after Polhemus’s voice stopped, to make sure he hadn’t recorded anything else; then I pushed the rewind button. I had closed the car door midway through the cassette and John Wovoka and I were sitting there in the dark. I still had the .38 resting on my lap but I might as well have tossed it into the backseat. Or given it back to John Wovoka.
So here we were, at the end of it, with the last link in place. Nothing much left to do now except to call the sheriff’s department and explain the whole sorry business to the authorities. Tell them about Arthur Welker, too—sure. Let them listen to the tape. Only problem was, Polhemus hadn’t mentioned Welker’s name. Likely never knew it because it had never been given to him or to Burnett. Welker had let Manny Atwood handle things and kept himself hidden in the background. There was nothing to tie him to Burnett or Polhemus, no evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.
WELKER WINS. Like a gleeful headline in Satan’s newspaper. WELKER WINS.
The recorder made a low clicking sound and switched off. I retrieved the tape, put it into my pocket. I was aware, then, that John Wovoka had turned his head and was looking at me for the first time since we’d got into the Cougar. I met his gaze in the faint glow from the tape deck’s red indicator light.
He said, low, “Pigs—rutting pigs. I’m glad they’re dead, both of them.”
“You have a right to feel that way. But they were victims too, John. Just like Janine. The
real villain is the owner of that two hundred thousand dollars.”
“The Mob,” he said, nodding. “Scum of the earth.”
“Just one man. His name is Arthur Welker.”
“You know him?”
“I know him,” I said. I explained about Welker, with the name bitter in my mouth. I even confessed my humiliation at Welker’s hands on Lobo Point.
“He won’t pay,” John Wovoka said, “not in this life. His kind never pays. They’re above the law.”
“Not always. This time ... yes.”
He was silent for a clutch of seconds. Then he said, “‘When your loved ones die or are hurt you must not cry or do harm to anyone in return. You must not fight. You must do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life and rewards in the afterlife.’ ” He laughed, a short sharp humorless bark. “The words of the false prophet Wovoka, disciple of Wodziwob.”
“They’re good words,” I said, “for the most part.”
“I believed in them once. No more.”
“What do you believe in now? That sometimes you have to fight? Maybe even fight evil with evil?”
“Would I have come here tonight if I didn’t?”
“No. No, you wouldn’t. Let’s go into the house, John.”
He switched off the ignition and we went on into the house. From the foyer, you could see the phone on the kitchen wall. John Wovoka stopped, looked over at it, looked at me.
“No,” I said, “I’m not going to make the call. Not now, maybe not at all.”
A puzzled frown added creases to his deeply lined face. He stood watching me.
There was a thickness in my chest; I felt sweaty, hot and cold at the same time. A voice in my head said: Don’t do this, you’re as big a fool as David Burnett if you do. But I had been thinking about it for some time now, off and on. I had started thinking about it on the drive down from Pyramid Lake.
John Wovoka said, without emotion, “What, then? Will you help me, help Janine?”
Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) Page 19