by Ted Wood
Kinsella radioed the Olympia Airport that we were planning to land at the parking lot behind the hospital and described what we were carrying. The girl on duty was pro. She didn't break stride as she confirmed that she would notify the police and the hospital. I wondered if there would be a security leak. We didn't need a lot of onlookers when we arrived, but there were bound to be ham radio operators in the area tuned to the airport frequency. And once she made her first phone call the chances for leakage would be increased time after time.
Kinsella came in high over the town and I could see at once that word had gotten around. There was a ring of cars at the parking lot and a crowd of upturned faces as we pulled in over their heads and began the slow, sweet descent.
Gallagher was alongside the machine before the blades had stopped turning. I opened the door and he leaned in to look at the dead man's face. "Sonofabitch," he said. "We were right."
He stood back as I got down and a couple of orderlies from the hospital ran over with a gurney. We loaded the body on and covered the face with a sheet, then Gallagher went with it into the hospital while I talked to the constable Gallagher had brought with him.
The crowd was shoving in close and I spoke to the constable and he ordered them back, away from the machine. He was young and inexperienced, a gum-chewer, covering his lack of knowledge with a thick layer of machismo. But he knew how to handle the crowd so I left him to it and went into the hospital and looked for the chief.
He and Kinsella and the body were in an examining room. The nurse I'd met was in there as well and she frowned when I entered, but Gallagher held up one finger. "It's okay, Millie, this is the guy who found the body. Reid Bennett. He's a p'liceman himself."
She frowned harder. "Indeed," she sniffed. "Mr. Bennett told me he was an insurance man."
Gallagher nodded, not looking up. "I know, Millie, he was working under cover. Now he don't have to anymore."
She smiled when he spoke to her and I wondered quickly if I hadn't been mistaken about who she was crazy about. Maybe it wasn't her boss after all, maybe it was the chief. They were close to the same age and had the same appealing toughness about them. Gallagher could do a lot worse, I thought.
She left and Kinsella sat down on a tall stool and lit a Rothman's. Gallagher asked me, "Okay, now what happened, exactly?"
I told him and he asked a good question. "How come the rope was tied around his ankle?"
"Most likely for security, in case he fell out. I've seen guys do that before. It's dumb if you're in fast water, you could snag and drown, but in a lake it means the canoe won't drift away before you can pull it back under you."
He nodded. "Makes sense, I guess. Anyway, he'd have been missing if he hadn't done it, so it's a good thing he did." He paused and thought for a moment. "Right, then, so far, so good. There's a doctor on call in town. He's been phoned and he'll come in and take charge of the medical end of things. Let's you and me examine the body first." He turned to Kinsella. "D'you mind, it's police business now; I'd like to keep it in the family."
Kinsella slipped down off his stool. "No sweat, I'll go put the make on Gloria." He left and we turned to examine the body.
We set to it, starting by checking for injuries. There were none on the head or hands and no marks on the front of the clothing. But there was a neat hole in the back of the parka on the body, just left of center, under the shoulder blade.
"Bullet wound," Gallagher said. "Looks like a fairly big caliber."
"There's no exit wound. That means we can dig out the slug and do some ballistic testing," I said. "And I'd say you're right about the size. This wasn't the gun that killed Eleanor."
"Could be anybody's gun," Gallagher said angrily. "Every goddamn wall in this town's got a gun hanging on it. Everybody puts a moose in the freezer in the fall. Unless we pick up somebody carrying, it won't be worth spit finding that slug."
He rolled the body on its back again and we started searching, taking notes of everything we found. In the pants pockets there was a clasp knife with a shield on the handle and the initials JP. "No bastard told us this was missing when we identified that other poor slob," Gallagher said. "Looks crookeder an' crookeder all the time."
I said nothing and felt for the dead man's wallet. This was more valuable to us. It contained all the identification of a man called Andrew Wagoner. There was his social insurance card, a driver's license with an address in Toronto's West End, a Canadian Tire credit card, and a couple of photographs of a woman in her forties.
"Had any queries about a missing person called Wagoner?" I asked, and Gallagher shook his head.
"Doesn't mean a thing," he said. "This whole area's been stiff with transients since the gold mine opened up. It all adds up this way to me: Prudhomme met him at the motel, having a beer maybe. He talks him into coming into the bush, to make a few bucks helping set up camp or some yarn like that. Then he clobbers him, changes clothes with him and takes his identity. Then, when he'd got the other guy in his gear, he marks him up with the bear teeth and claws."
"It sure looks that way. It also gives us a motive for the killing on the island. Prudhomme needed a new identity."
Gallagher nodded. "Up till now I wasn't certain who'd done what to who. Anybody could have killed that guy on the island. Now it seems stone cold certain that Prudhomme set it up himself."
I sucked my teeth and said, "I didn't think Prudhomme was tough enough to club that guy down with a bear paw and smash his head the way it was smashed."
"Well, somebody did," Gallagher said. "And when you find Prudhomme carrying some stranger's ID and you have an unidentified body, it's hard not to think he did it all himself."
He turned back to the body, opened the parka, and ran his fingers over the thick wool shirt beneath it. "Something in here," he said. He unbuttoned the breast pocket and brought out a few folded slips of paper, soft and almost transparent from the water. He laid them on the steel table and opened them as carefully as a scholar working on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I looked over his shoulder as he examined the first one. It was a hotel receipt from Sault Ste. Marie, where Eleanor had reported tricking with Prudhomme. The date was for three days, at the time she had said. "Looks as if Eleanor was right," I ventured.
"Yeah." Gallagher had taken out his notebook and was writing down the name of the motel, the dates, and the phone number. "Gives us a place to start our investigation," he said cheerfully.
He checked the other papers. One was a list of phone numbers. There were no names on it but Gallagher copied them into his book carefully, checking them all twice. I glanced at them but the exchange numbers were strange to me, except for one. "That's a Montreal exchange," I said.
"There's no area code with it," Gallagher argued gruffly. "Could be anywhere."
"Yeah, but one of the anywheres is Montreal. Let me check my own notes a minute." I reached in my pocket and found the paper on which I had written the phone number of the law office where Laval worked. It had the same exchange as the one on the list but a different last four numbers. "Yes, here it is, in the area where his lawyer works, that guy Laval I told you about."
"Small world," Gallagher said. "You make any connections down there that would be useful?"
"Yeah. I got friendly with one of the detectives. I figured he'd check it out for me, as a favor."
Gallagher looked up and grinned, then wiped his hands on his pant legs and took out a stick of gum, carefully not touching it as he folded it in between his front teeth, holding it by the foil cover. "Maybe you can collect on that favor when we get back to the station."
I nodded and he unfolded the last piece of paper. It was covered in figures, all in Prudhomme's neat handwriting. Gallagher shook it aloft in his fist. "Well, well. Lookit that. He did us a favor after all. That's his list of claims, all by number. Now we can take this down to the office and find out who all staked them and when."
We looked at one another and nodded like mandarins, not saying
any more. Then Gallagher said, "This is going to take a while. Whyn't you see if you can scare up a cup of coffee?"
Kinsella was leaning on the reception desk, talking to a nurse who was rosy and delicious as a Mclntosh apple, a blonde, smiling like sunrise as Kinsella chatted.
I could see that she wasn't wearing any rings and I guessed she and Kinsella had a thing going so I left them to it after she'd promised to bring some coffee in, and I headed back into the examination room.
Gallagher looked up. "Where's the other guy?"
"Playing nice with one of the nurses," I said. "Looks like they've met before."
"That'll be Gloria," Gallagher said. "Most guys would rather see her with no clothes on than you in your best suit." He paused and added, "That includes me."
We both laughed, ignoring the gray-faced corpse on the table. Then Gallagher slapped his hands together. "So okay, let's look at what we've got." He ticked off on his fingers. "First, we can follow up on the Wagoner ID and see if he's missing from home. If he is we can use that dental chart to get an identification on the body."
"Right. Then what about that Montreal phone number? Can I check that, see if it's Laval's number at home?" The excitement of the case was getting to me. It's always good when the breaks start happening and the pace of the investigation picks up. I figured I could call my Montreal cop and get the information right away.
Gallagher grunted and ticked a second finger. "Okay, do that. Then, three, maybe he can find Laval, and ask him how come he identified the body of the wrong guy. Nice and friendly."
I held up one finger. "It still leaves us the question of who killed Prudhomme. It's odds on he's still up there in the bush. I guess we have to get back up there and look for him."
Gallagher grunted again. Like a lot of senior police officers, he hated acknowledging that anybody else's idea was worthwhile. "That brings us to the main question. Who could've shot Prudhomme, anyway?" He stopped talking and stared at me as if the answer might be written on my face.
"The obvious choice is Misquadis," I said. "That looks like his canoe and the bullet hole is big enough to have come from that old army .303 of his."
We thought about that one some more. Gallagher reached up and took off his cap as if air to the scalp might speed up his thinking processes. He ran his hand over his hair and put the hat on again, not touching the shiny peak. A longtime uniform man, I thought automatically.
"Did he strike you as a murderer?" he asked at last.
I shook my head. "No. He looked straight arrow to me. He makes a thin living by my standards, but he has all he needs."
"And he's not a drinker," Gallagher added. "He's never been in any dutch since I got here, anyway. So he didn't get wingy and just blaze away."
"That wasn't a blazing-away shot," I said. "That was a killing shot. It looks to me like the work of a real hunter. Or a hit man."
Gallagher frowned. "What makes you say a hit man? I told you, every guy in town is a hunter, even the goddamn undertaker heads out at fall and comes back with his winter's meat." He stood silently for a long moment, thumbs hooked into his gun belt, chewing his gum in silence.
"Not many men have shot at other men," I said. "That was a heart shot, from the back—it's the way a hit man would take a guy out. And if we're right in thinking that Prudhomme is involved with a few jillion dollars' worth of gold, there could be some heavy people who wanted him dead now his part of the work is done."
Gallagher scowled, thinking. "It's worth a thought," he allowed at last. "But first, I think we oughtta cross off all the obvious possibilities. That means finding Misquadis and seeing if he's got his canoe with him, and test-firing his gun for comparison with the round we take out of Prudhomme's chest."
"How're we gonna do that?" I wondered. I could see what he had in mind for me, but my own ambitions were for working in town and spending the night at Alice's house.
"I think we should take a party back into the bush. We'll use Kinsella's chopper, lift in you and one of my guys and maybe that dog of yours, and see if we can come up with him."
"Not much sense going back in tonight, there's only a few hours of daylight left," I said, and Gallagher grinned.
"Yeah, well, I wouldn't want anybody to miss any rest. We'll go in tomorrow first thing. That way we can hear what the quack says about Prudhomme. Could be that the bullet wound didn't kill him." He snorted at that one. "Yeah, I know that's bull roar, but we have to listen to the doctor."
"He might be able to tell us how long Prudhomme's been dead," I suggested.
"Don't hold your breath," Gallagher said. He turned and pointed accusingly at the gray corpse on the table. "The only way you can ever assess the time of death is if you know for a fact when he ate his last meal. And we don't know boo-all about this guy except he got laid two weeks ago."
"Well, anyway, let's fingerprint the canoe, see if we come up with anything. And after that, we can check those claim numbers and see who registered them," I said. "That will give us some kind of a motive, at least."
We left it like that. My chore was to call Montreal and find out whose number was on Prudhomme's list. After that I was nominally free until the next morning, when I would head into the bush with one of Gallagher's men, looking for anybody who was in the area where we'd found Prudhomme. In between there was all the opportunity I needed to hang around Gallagher while he investigated. I wasn't keen to, but I knew I would, even though I'd done what I'd set out to do, however awkwardly. I'd proved that Prudhomme was dead. So I arranged to meet Gallagher at his station later. He nodded without speaking, and I left.
Kinsella was out front still, with his nurse, chuckling and talking quietly with her, leaning over the counter as if it were a neighborhood bar. I told him we would be flying to the lake the next morning and to keep us the necessary booking on his machine. He responded with a negligent wave, the kind of hand signal any serviceman would give another when he was making good time with a girl. I didn't wait for anything more formal, but walked out into the pale afternoon sunshine to find a cab back to the motel.
Alice was in the office, talking on the telephone. When she saw me she winked and held up one hand to let me know she wouldn't be long. Then she wrapped up the conversation, hung up, and stood to lean over the counter close to me for a kiss. I squeezed her shoulder and said, "Hi."
"Hi yourself," she said. "We missed you, didn't we, Sam?" She turned to look down at Sam, who was wagging his tail and looking at me like a kid waiting to be let out of class.
"Turn him over to me," I asked, and she did. Sam whisked himself up on top of the counter and down beside me, wagging his tail off. I patted him and fussed him for a minute, then settled him down and straightened up. "I guess you heard what happened."
She nodded. "It was all over the town as soon as you reached the hospital. I just hung up from the second person to call me. What's it all about, anyway?"
"I'm still not sure, but the thing is, I'm going again tomorrow morning to look for whoever's out there. In the meantime I have a call to make and then I have to go down the station again for a while. After that I'm all yours to work your wicked way with."
She grinned, but not so widely as I would have liked.
"What's up?" I asked. "You look like I just disappointed you."
"No. I'm glad you're here overnight. I'm just not crazy about your going up there tomorrow. There's some nut out there with a gun. He could shoot you before you even saw him."
"Not with Sam along," I promised. "Come on now. I've been shot at before, they always miss."
She bit the tip of her left thumb, not looking at me. "Men," she said at last. "You're a bunch of damn kids. You're off to play cowboys and Indians while I sit here waiting."
"I've told you, don't worry. The whole thing's probably an accident. Somebody's gun went off by mistake. They hit Prudhomme and we found him. Meanwhile they're only concerned with getting a fire going and waiting until we show up to rescue them."
She wasn't convinced, so I changed the subject, and just because I'm a longtime policeman, I asked her about the guests registered. I wondered if any of them might be out of the ordinary run, maybe far enough out of it that they had brought a rifle up here to take out Jim Prudhomme for keeps.
She wasn't eager to play but she did go through the list. A couple of guys were here for the first time, including the one from Buffalo I had seen the night before. But there was nothing concrete, so I went down to my room and called Montreal. I reached the station, only to find that the man I wanted was off duty. That figured, but I pushed my luck and asked for his phone number. Maybe it was because I spoke French, but the policewoman at the desk took my number and offered to call the man and have him call me. I poured myself a smash of my Black Velvet and lay back, wondering how I was going to break the news to Carol Prudhomme.
Normally you don't phone news of a death. You call the local police and have them send someone around. It's painful for them as they stand there twisting their cap in their hands, but it prevents the person at the other end from thinking she's being fooled by somebody with a Halloween sense of humor. The difference this time was that Carol already considered herself a widow. I thought about that as I sipped on my rye. On the night I'd seen her playing cozy with Henri Laval I'd wondered whether Prudhomme might have disappeared because of her affair. Maybe they'd set it up between them so she could have his company life insurance and he could get a fresh start. She had acted jumpy enough to ring a little guilty to me. And if she was, she was going to be startled to find herself widowed for real.
I compromised by phoning my ex-wife. After all, it was her fault I was up here in the first place. She was closer to Carol than I had ever been or would ever be. I reached her in her office. She sounded brisk and businesslike, probably taking me for a client. "Amy Bennett."
"Hi, Amy, it's Reid, how are you?"
Give her marks for couth. She still didn't treat me badly. She hated the work I do but she wasn't bitchy to me. She was as polite to me as to a stranger. What more can you ask?