Free Fool's Gold by Ted Wood Page A

forgot."
    I sat there while he typed up the occurrence and took my statement. Then I asked him the question I had thought of back at the hospital. "You think there's any more to this than revenge for last night?"  
    "More? Like what?" His eyebrows pulled themselves together and he leaned over the typewriter, taking his weight on the arms of his chair.  
    "Well, I've been asking a lot of questions about Jim Prudhomme today. You don't think that has anything to do with the town thug taking a crack at me?"  
    He left himself relax, leaning back slowly and opening the drawer of his desk. He took out Juicy Fruit gum and pulled himself a stick, not offering it to me, and pushed it back in the drawer.  
    "What makes you think the Prudhomme thing isn't closed?"
    I looked at him, at the obvious squareness of a lifelong copper, a hard-nose who never took anything for granted. I've known a lot of policemen and a lot of tough guys earning a hard dollar in tough places. All of them have the same iron quality to them—not in the face, in their core. I knew I could trust him. "Because I'm starting to get a whiff of something funny about this business. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Prudhomme was alive and well and the body in his grave was the body of some drifter."  
    "You were talking to Misquadis?"
    "Him and some other people." I let it sit at that and he chomped his gum a time or two and then sat forward again.
    "And he told you there wasn't any bear on that island?"
    "He said he didn't see any tracks," I said carefully.
    Gallagher snorted. "Neither did I."
    We sat there, our eyes locked. When I spoke I was careful again. "But you said Prudhomme was killed by a bear."
    Suddenly Gallagher stood up. He looked down at me as if I were a petty thief and this was our first meeting, while the loot I'd picked up lay on the table between us. "No I didn't," he said angrily. "I never made any such damn suggestion. That was the coroner. I told him there was no bear spoor, no tracks. You know what he did?" He paced away from his desk and turned suddenly, "You know what he told me?"  
    "I guess he told you he was the doctor and you were the copper," I hazarded.
    Gallagher laughed. At least, the ugly sounds that poured out of him might have been called that. To me they were the gurglings of a man in misery. "Ten out of ten," he said. He turned to the wastepaper basket and threw his gum into it, looking down as if he would like to kick the basket into ruins. "That could've been his exact words. And because I'm fifty-seven years old with nowhere else to go before retirement, I let him say it. And I went along with his finding. And I tore up my first report, which called for an investigation at the site of the killing and a proper search by Misquadis and a proper investigation by the forensic people at Queen's Park in Toronto. I let him tell me how to do my job, because without him and the rest of council there isn't any goddamn job to do and I'm still too young to be dying of old age in some single room in Toronto."  
    He sat down again, bonelessly, collapsing into his chair. I waited for him to continue but he didn't. He sat and looked down at his desk until I spoke. "It's the same in Murphy's Harbour, the same in every small town. They hire you and they think they own you."  
    He looked up at me. His face was bleak. "You've still got time," he said. "You can quit, find some other kind of work. But I'm stuck. I'm a copper with maybe eight good years left. After that I'd be lucky to get a job in security, letting people in and out of some oil company office in Toronto."  
    There was nothing to say, so instead I waited for a while, then filled him in about Eleanor and her photo. He whistled softly. "Well, there's one smart little hooker," he said. "Always struck me she was better than the job she does. She's got brains and she's got spirit but she still keeps on peddling her ass like it was fish. It makes you mad." Not a