Fool's Gold (Reid Bennett)

by Wood, Ted

  "Good thing there's somebody with her. It'll keep her off our backs," I said, and Gallagher humphed and said nothing.

  He pulled up behind a car as close as he could get to the house and we got out. "I better introduce you," he said. "As far as they're concerned, you're working with me because Prudhomme was involved in your jurisdiction. I phoned the pastor for her and he turned up before I came away. He's a good guy but a bit of a mother hen. He may get sticky about you talking to her, use whatever charm you haven't used up on Alice, otherwise you'll be out of there in two seconds."

  I let Sam out of the car and told him to stay, then walked behind Gallagher up to the front door. He tapped and entered and we were greeted at once by a pretty blond woman in her forties. Gallagher took his cap off. "Hi, Mrs. Andersen. I just wanted to introduce my deputy, Police Chief Reid Bennett. Can I have a quick word with Ida?"

  "She's through here," the blonde said. She was wearing a sleek blouse that looked a little dressy for this end of the world and her hair was swept back from her face with a carelessness that had taken hours. She looked at me the way my Marine recruiting sergeant weighed me up when I first walked into his office. "How do you do, Chief. My name is Gretchen Andersen." She extended her hand and smiled a formal little smile.

  I took her hand, which was cool and firm. "Reid Bennett, Mrs. Andersen. I wish we could have met under happier circumstances." Above her head I could see Gallagher doing his best to swallow a grin. I let go of her hand and she led us through to the sitting room out behind the original parlor Sallinon had used as his storefront. This place was no more lively. It was full of dark, heavy furniture with an enormous TV and plastic flowers. At a glance I could count eight stuffed birds and animals scattered around it. A big woman in a flowered dress was sitting on the couch with a gaunt young minister beside her and two other women sitting opposite in big chairs.

  The minister looked up. He nodded to Gallagher and then stood up and approached us. "Pastor Aalto," he said, not giving me his hand.

  Gallagher spoke to him first. "Good evening, padre. Thank you for coming over. I just stopped in to introduce my deputy." He turned and indicated me as if I didn't speak the language. "This is Police Chief Reid Bennett. He's a very senior investigator who happens to be in town and he volunteered to help me."

  Aalto nodded and looked at me out of oyster-colored eyes. "Are you a private detective or something?" He had a cool, resonant voice and he was proud of it. I figured he was something of a showboat and would be trouble if he didn't get stroked.

  I used the same formality Gallagher had, the military courtesy. "No, padre. I'm an accredited chief of police. I also happen to be a friend of Chief Gallagher's. I've been visiting with him and he's asked for my assistance. I'm only sorry that it's necessary."

  "So am I," Aalto said. "Arnold was a good, kind man. I cannot imagine what pain he must have been suffering." He turned back to the widow, who was looking up blankly. There were no tears. They would come later, perhaps a week later, when the neighbors stopped calling and the world rocked back onto its axis, without the bulk of the man in the garage. "Ida, I believe Mr. Bennett can help."

  She tried to smile at me, but it collapsed in a puckering of her cheeks and a nervous dropping of her head. I said, "I'm very sorry for your sadness, Mrs. Sallinon. I'll leave you with your friends for a while," nodded, and turned away with Gallagher close behind me.

  The blond bombshell followed us to the door. She touched me lightly on the shoulder as I paused to open it. "Ida is terribly distressed," she said, "but if there's anything at all I can do to help ..." She opened her eyes very wide. Lord, she was sincere!

  "I'll remember that, Gretchen," I said, and did my best to look like John Travolta. Sometimes police work calls for skills they don't ever teach at the Ontario Police Academy in Aylmer.

  I went out and Gallagher led me back around to the garage. "Don't feel too flattered," he growled quietly. "She's got the hottest pants in Olympia. Her husband's a salesman for the mill, he's away a lot, and I've seen her in more parked cars than you've had hot dinners."

  "Just doing my job," I told him cheerfully. "You want charm, I've got charm."

  "I'd call it bullshit," he said, "but it seems to be working."

  The door of the garage was closed and he swung it up. Inside, the light was on and a young uniformed constable was standing looking down at Sallinon's body, which lay on its back on the clear space to one side of the parked car, a 1983 Cadillac.

  I nodded to the constable and Gallagher said, "Bill, this is Chief Bennett, he's handled a lot of things like this. Help him anyway you can."

  The young guy stuck out his hand. "Glad 'a know you, Chief, I'm Bill Pigeon."

  "Bill." I shook hands. "Ever had a suicide before?"

  "No." He shook his head. "I've seen a few stiffs in traffic accidents, but this is my first suicide."

  "Okay. There's no magic, just work, but a good trick is to stick your hands in your pockets, then you won't touch anything and change the scene at all."

  He said "Sure," and put both hands in his pants pockets.

  I turned to Gallagher. "When did you get here?"

  "Right after you took off from the station. Drove up, spent a couple of minutes at the house, then came out. Altogether, that was, say, twenty minutes ago—maybe seven-thirty." He crouched beside the body. "Like I said, it looks like a suicide. See for yourself."

  I stopped to check Sallinon's face. It was congested, but he had been flabby so it did not appear deformed. It had the pinpoint red marks that sometimes erupt on the skin during strangulation. There were also scratch marks on his neck, close to the cable, an indication that he had scrabbled to try and unfasten it before he lost consciousness.

  The white, plastic-covered extension cord he had used as a ligature was still in place around his neck. I checked the knot. It was a clumsy slipknot. The wire had been twisted twice and then pulled through itself, a casual knot for such a formal purpose.

  "If this guy worked sewing up skins, you'd think he'd know some fancier knots than this one," I said.

  Gallagher nodded. "I noticed that. It sure looks amateur, doesn't it? But that doesn't mean somebody else did it, maybe he just wasn't figuring he'd be on display anywhere."

  I crouched there, staring at the knot and wondering why it seemed familiar to me, and then I understood. "Tell me, was this guy a fisherman?" I wondered.

  "Not to my knowledge," Gallagher said. "You can tell he didn't spend much time outdoors and I never heard him talk fishing at all." He turned to his constable. "Did you ever hear anything about him?"

  The constable shook his head silently and Gallagher turned back to me. "What makes you ask?"

  "Well, that knot is exactly what I make when I'm tying on a new leader to a spinning line. It's the knot a real fisherman would make without thinking." I stood up and walked to the beam from which the end of the wire still hung, clipped with a pair of pliers Gallagher had found and dropped when he cut the body down. The wire went over it and down to a six-inch nail driven into the wall. It was tied around the nail in a clove hitch. I stood up on the hood of the car and examined the beam over which the wire had run. It was made of soft lumber, spruce by the look of it, and there was a groove lying under the wire for the whole width of the rafter.

  I jumped down and Gallagher asked, "What's up there?"

  "Pressure marks on the beam. But not static, the way they would be if he'd hung himself. There's a groove sliced into the wood, the way it would be if somebody had hoisted him off his feet, pulling the wire back over the beam." I walked over to the nail in the wall. "And another thing, look at this knot. There's three feet of wire below it."

  "Okay, Sherlock, so what?" Gallagher wasn't mocking me, he was teasing, the way a father might have been with a bright son, happy to impress his constable with the smartness of the help he'd brought in.

  "So there's precisely enough wire on the business side of the nail to make a loop the right heigh
t from the floor. I think that means it was tied after the loop had been put over Sallinon's neck and the wire had been pulled tight enough to lift him off the ground."

  Gallagher frowned. "He could've planned it himself so it was just the right height," he argued, but I could see he didn't believe it.

  "Unlikely. He'd have been more likely to tie the wire to the nail with lots of slack, then take it up by making the noose higher in the wire."

  "Sonofabitch!" he said slowly. "I think you're right. I think he was murdered." He bent down and picked up the dead man's hands. "Look. His nails are all broken. He died trying to get that cord off o' his neck."

  21

  We spent five minutes planning the things we had to do. First, Gallagher would arrange to have the scene photographed and fingerprinted. His own expert was one of the two officers up in the bush, but he had used the town's civilian photographer before so that was no problem, although he would have to do the fingerprinting himself. After that he would start a door-to-door canvass of the area. It's the bread and butter of police work, checking if anybody had seen anything suspicious. You can usually bet that nobody has, but you don't know until you've knocked on enough doors. My job was to question Ida Sallinon and see if her husband had given her any indication that he was in danger.

  "Something strikes me as wrong, anyway," I said. "I mean, how much money does he make, stuffing chipmunks?"

  "Not a lot," Gallagher agreed. "He does all right during the summer when tourists are up here, wanting their fish mounted, but once the fishing and hunting seasons are over, nothing."

  "And yet he can afford last year's Cadillac," I said. "Seems a bit out of whack to me."

  "Maybe he has family money," Gallagher said. "He's been a member of council for years and those jobs generally go to the boys with bucks."

  "Let's go ask," I said, and Gallagher agreed. He stopped to brief his constable on which photographs he would need when the man arrived, and warned him against touching anything until the whole place had been fingerprinted.

  I left Sam out there, with no special commands. He would be a peaceful part of the scenery until I was finished inside, and we went back in. Gretchen poured on the charm like a second helping of syrup, but we smiled by and went into the sitting room. The women were all listening to the pastor, who was reading the Twenty-third Psalm. It was the version from the new Bible, nowhere near as beautiful as the old Authorized Version they sang at my father's funeral, an Anglican ceremony. He saw us come in but continued reading. I waited until he had finished and he stood and came over to me, holding his place in the Bible with his finger. "What is it?" he asked icily. There didn't seem to be much charity in his makeup.

  "Could I speak to you in private a moment, padre?"

  He inclined his head regally and we went out into the hallway. Gretchen tried to follow us out but he smiled at her and shooed her back into the room with the rest of the women. She went, and he closed the door and asked again, "What is it?"

  Gallagher spoke first. "It looks as if this might not be suicide, padre. We've found a few signs that indicate that Arnie was murdered."

  His response was classic. "Thank God." He closed his eyes and bowed his head. We waited a moment until he finished his prayer. He opened his eyes and said, "I didn't think Arnold could be guilty of taking his own life."

  Gallagher moved in with diplomacy I hadn't expected. "I share your relief, padre. But as a policeman I have to deal with the new problem this raises. Who murdered him?"

  The pastor waited and I took over. "It's a shocking idea, but we think it happened. Now I need to talk to Mrs. Sallinon and then look through Arnold's things, to see if there's any clue there. I'm wondering if you will help me by advising her to talk and assist us."

  He looked at me solemnly for about half a minute and then said, "Of course. Come with me."

  I turned and nodded to Gallagher, who stuck his hat on and left. Then I followed the pastor back into the room.

  There was the expected amount of fluttering when he made his announcement that there were some questions I would like to ask and would the other women please leave us alone in the parlor. And then I set to work.

  It took only a few minutes to learn the obvious answers. No, Arnold Sallinon had no enemies. He was universally liked. Except by Gallagher and me, and the murderer, I thought, but pumped further. Nobody had called for him this evening. No, there had been no phone calls since he came in from his shop. Yes, he went out every evening to the garage and worked. His radial arm saw was there and he built cabinets and plaques to mount his specimens on. Yes, he did have some other income. He had speculated shrewdly a few years before when nickel became a scarce commodity and had made big money. She didn't know how he handled it. It seemed she was a typical Old Country wife. He earned the money, she kept the house and went to church.

  This gave me the lead for the next question. Would she object to my looking through his accounts? I needed the pastor's help here. Small-town people would rather talk about their sex life than about their businesses, but I knew that the answer I needed could be among his papers. And I wondered whether I would find anything to connect him with the rest of the case, the other murders. They were all tied together with the same string, I figured.

  She consulted with the pastor over the ethics of letting me see Arnold's papers, but he backed me and within minutes I was in the office beside his showroom with the key for his file cabinets. The pastor was itchy to help. Every man has a weakness somewhere and I thought perhaps his was nosiness, but I managed to talk him out of it. And then Gretchen wanted to come with me but I got rid of her, too. Women like her have never gotten me excited. I'm no saint but I don't want to be a notch on anybody's sexual gun and she was becoming a pain. I sent her for coffee and opened up the cabinets.

  Most of the papers were what I would have expected. There were business records, neatly kept, showing he had made a gross income of thirty-two thousand dollars the previous year but that this netted out at less than the price of the Cadillac outside. There were receipts for supplies and copies of his bills to his customers.

  Gretchen Andersen came back with coffee and conversation but I got rid of her promptly, and when I failed to turn up anything in the file cabinet, I made a complete search of the room. The desk was locked and there wasn't a key for it among those Ida Sallinon had found for me. I expected it was probably in Sallinon's pocket. I could have gone out for it but I didn't want to leave the room. Getting in there had been a major triumph. If I left even for a moment, the pastor would probably consider I'd had my chance. So, instead of going and searching the body, I harked back to some skills I'd picked up on a slow Sunday in boot camp. A Kentucky kid had shown me how to open a lock as simple as this one with a bent wire. A paper clip did it and within seconds I found out Sallinon's real secrets.

  First there was a bottle of Polish vodka, half empty. And then, in the top drawer I found a neat little .22 revolver. I checked the gun. It was loaded in all chambers, but it had never been cleaned. The barrel was dirty but not pitted. That could mean that it had been fired only a very few times. I also noted a rusty-looking incrustation at the muzzle end of the barrel. I'm not a pathologist, but I happen to know that a gun sucks back air into its barrel when it's fired. If it had been used close up to a body it would draw blood into itself. It looked to me as if this gun had been used close up. And that was when the pieces came together in my mind. Eleanor had been shot from close range. I was certain that this was the murder weapon.

  There was a box of shells, with eight missing. That added up: two used to kill Eleanor, all chambers filled. I slipped the shells and the gun into my coat pocket and went on looking. There was a flat manila folder and I opened it and knew at once that I was right about the murder. It was full of photographs taken by the hidden camera in Eleanor's mobile home. Some of them were young men in the universal heavy jackets and work hats of the north, but there were about thirty of men in good suits. One was even wearing
his Shriner's fez. And at the bottom of the pile, grinning happily, the last recorded likeness of Jim Prudhomme—the picture that had cost Eleanor her life.

  I checked the back of it but there was no name or date, although I soon found that there were dates on all the others, in the same round handwriting Sallinon had used in his books. And there were more photographs in another drawer. Some of them had been stroked across with a fine felt pen. These were mostly of working men, people I guessed Sallinon had not thought worth the trouble of blackmailing. The others, any showing men in suits or city topcoats, were clean, and most of these had other photos attached to them, action pictures taken with Eleanor.

  I stopped and thought about that for a while. I wondered where that camera had been located in the mobile home, and how she had managed to take pictures without anybody's knowing what was going on. Perhaps Sallinon had been there, hiding in the head or peeking in at the side window, using ultra-fast film. The shots were all grainy enough to have been taken in low light with 1000-speed film. I checked them over. All of them had notes written on the backs. The standard note consisted of name, address, in some cases occupation, license number, and type of vehicle. A lot of them all carried dates and figures, the figure usually being two hundred and fifty dollars. No doubt about it. Blackmail. I made a quick count, rounding out the figures for convenience and found Sallinon had made better than sixty thousand dollars in a little over one year. No wonder somebody had looped a wire round his neck and dragged him into eternity, clawing at his own throat.

  There were other papers in the desk, but they were mostly personal—insurance policies, the purchase papers for his Cadillac, for which he had paid cash. Mortgages he held on properties in town and in Thunder Bay, places he had bought with money raised from Eleanor's leads. I sat for a moment and thought about her, trying to remember whether she was a blackmailer by nature. I didn't think so. She had honestly believed that all she was doing by going along with the photography was to provide herself with some insurance. Perhaps she meant it. Maybe the other pictures had been taken from outside the vehicle. In any case her knowledge had killed her. I wondered for a while about the logistics of the blackmail. Sallinon was rooted here. It couldn't have been his finger on the button of the camera. Maybe he had been the guy who thought up the idea and managed the blackmail arrangements. But somebody else was involved as well, someone free to travel with Eleanor. I wondered if it could have been Prudhomme.