Dark Tiger (18 page)

Now she'd decided not to talk to him, and there was no sense in trying to figure out why, because the reason was buried somewhere in that inscrutable woman-ness that he loved about her but that sometimes frustrated him beyond tolerance.

While he was sitting there in front of the St. Cecelia police station pondering the mystery of Kate Balaban, a cruiser pulled into the side lot, and a uniformed officer got out. He glanced over at Calhoun, hesitated, then came strolling over. He bent
down to the open side window and said, “You're from Loon Lake, huh?”

“How'd you know that?”

The cop jerked his chin at the side of the car. “It's written all over your vehicle.”

“Right.” Calhoun nodded. “My name's Stoney Calhoun. I'm a guide up there. Just started.” The cop's nameplate, which was pinned to his uniform shirt over the pocket on the left side, read
SGT. A. CURRIER
.

Sergeant Currier bent down, looked into the car as if he expected to find something illegal there, and saw Ralph. “Hi, dog,” he said.

“His name's Ralph,” said Calhoun.

The cop shrugged. “Last time I seen one of these Range Rovers,” he said, “there were two dead bodies in it. You don't see Range Rovers in St. Cecelia very much.”

“It's not mine,” said Calhoun. “It belongs to the lodge. I borrowed it.”

“I figured,” said Currier. “I hope to hell you don't end up dead in it, Mr. Calhoun.”

“Well, me, too. So were you the one who found the vehicle with McNulty and the Gautier gal in it?”

He frowned. “What do you know about that?”

Calhoun shrugged. “Just what I heard.”

“Yeah, big story around here,” Currier said. “I wasn't the one who came upon them—that was a civilian—but I did catch the call, and I was the first officer at the scene. They'd been shot. The two of 'em in the front seat. I figured we had a murder on our hands. Murder and suicide is what it looked like, though somebody could've shot 'em both and set it up to look that way. Around here we have husbands and wives arguing and stabbing each other on a regular basis. Once in a while a bar
fight gets out of hand. This looked like it was gonna be a real murder case, though. Then the ME reports that the two of them had already died before they got shot, and the only mystery left is, who'd bother shooting bullets into a couple of dead bodies?”

“What'd they die of?” said Calhoun. He wondered if the St. Cecelia police had been told about the botulism.

The cop shrugged. “All I know is, it wasn't gunshot wounds.”

“Where were they found?”

Sergeant Currier pointed down the street in the direction of the church and the cemetery. “An old logging road in the woods south of town. Their Range Rover was pulled up under the branches of a big hemlock tree, and the two of them were deader'n doornails in the front. Bullet holes in their heads, weapon in the man's hand.”

“So who in the world would shoot them if they were already dead?” said Calhoun.

“Everybody figured it was Harry Saulnier. He had a thing with the girl. Folks figured he was mad that she was cheating on him.”

“This was the boyfriend?”

“If you want to call him that, a thirty-six-year-old good-for-nothin' drunk and a crazy sixteen-year-old girl.” The cop waved the back of his hand in the air. “Anyway, it wasn't Harry. He was out of town when it happened. Not that it matters, since shooting people who are already dead isn't much of a crime.”

“How did McNulty and the girl know each other?” said Calhoun.

Currier frowned. “I don't know why I'm telling you all this.”

“I'm interested,” said Calhoun.

“What do you know about it?”

“Me?” Calhoun shrugged. “Nothing. But you probably heard,
they found one of the guides up to Loon Lake murdered yesterday. Maybe there's some connection.”

Sergeant Currier nodded. “I did hear about that, and that occurred to me, too. I guess the sheriff's got himself a suspect.”

“They arrested one of the other guides, but he didn't do it.”

“No?”

“No,” said Calhoun. “So how come this McNulty and the Gautier girl were together? You must've looked into that.”

“Oh, sure. We don't know much about them. We do know they were at Tiny's the day before they died.”

“What's Tiny's?”

“It's a roadhouse. Strippers and booze. Food's not so bad, actually. If you drove down from Loon Lake, you had to've passed it. It would've been on your left, the other side of the road from the big potato field.”

“I remember the field,” Calhoun said.

“A couple witnesses said they saw McNulty and the girl in there in the afternoon. I questioned Tiny myself. He said the man was there first, nursed a beer at the bar, and she come in a little later and joined him.”

“She picked him up?”

Currier shook his head. “That's not how Tiny saw it.”

“Like they already knew each other, you mean?” said Calhoun.

“That's right,” said Currier. “Like they had planned to meet there at Tiny's.”

“Did they eat there?” Calhoun said. He was thinking they might've gotten botulism poisoning from something they ate at Tiny's.

Currier nodded. “The two of them sat at the bar, had lunch, watched the TV. After they ate they left together.”

“This was the day before they were found dead?”

Currier nodded.

“Any idea where they were before they went into Tiny's?”

He shook his head. “He probably came from out of town. From your place on Loon Lake, I'd guess. As for her, who knows?”

“Or how they met in the first place?”

“Nobody seems to know.”

“Did anybody see them after they left Tiny's?”

“No witnesses in St. Cece turned up who'd seen them. The truth is, once the coroner said those bullets were shot into them after they were already dead, which might not even amount to a crime, we didn't work very hard at finding witnesses.”

“Weren't you interested in what they did die of?”

He shrugged. “I guess so, but that's up to the medical examiner.”

“And you haven't had any more mysterious deaths like those two in your town here?”

Sergeant Currier shook his head. “Nope. No deaths at all in the past couple weeks.” He straightened up and slapped the roof of the Range Rover. “I gotta get going.”

Calhoun nodded. “Take it easy.”

Currier nodded. “You, too.” He bent down and peered into the car. “See you, pooch,” he said to Ralph. He straightened up. “I hope you're not planning to go snooping around in our town here, Mr. Calhoun.”

“Snooping? Why would I do that?”

Sergeant Currier shrugged. “You seem like a snoopy guy.”

“Not me.”

“Well, that's good,” Currier said. “Wouldn't want you to get yourself in trouble.”

 

 

 

 

After Sergeant Currier went into the police station, Calhoun started up the Range Rover and drove south again, heading out of town, until he'd gone past the cemetery and left St. Cecelia behind. The paved road wound past a potato farm and some blueberry burns, and then it entered a pine forest. Here and there a little dirt road angled into the woods. He wondered if one of these old cartpaths was the one where McNulty stopped his car on the day he and Millie Gautier died.

When he came to a pretty little brook trickling under an old stone bridge, he pulled into an open area beside the road. He got out and held the door for Ralph.

While Ralph was watering the bushes and drinking from the brook, Calhoun took out his cell phone. He checked his voice mail to see if perhaps Kate had called while he'd been talking with Sergeant Currier. He figured she probably hadn't, but Kate was just unpredictable enough that she might've.

She hadn't.

He thought about calling the shop again, but he decided that he'd just be humiliating himself. Not that he particularly
minded humiliating himself, if it meant he might speak to Kate, but he figured she was no more likely to agree to talk to him now than she had been an hour ago.

He whistled to Ralph, and then they both got back into the Range Rover. Calhoun followed the road south through the woods, heading out of town. He wanted to get a feeling for the area, to see it the way McNulty had seen it. Maybe he'd have an insight. Sheriff Dickman liked to describe investigating as turning over rocks and kicking bushes and seeing what might crawl out or fly away. Calhoun guessed that's what he was doing.

They'd gone eight or ten miles, and nothing had crawled out from any rocks or flown out from under any bushes, and the road didn't get any better, so he turned around and headed back to St. Cecelia.

They drove through town and picked up the road heading north to the lodge. After about a mile, they came to the potato field, and sure enough, just as Sergeant Currier had said, there on the other side of the road was a rectangular wooden building with a painted sign hanging from a post out front that read
TINY'S CAFÉ—EXOTIC DANCERS
. Red and green neon beer logos—Budweiser, Coors Light, Molson's—glowed in the big front window. Three motorcycles were parked out front, and a few pickup trucks and dinged-up old sedans sat in the side lot.

Calhoun pulled into the lot and turned off the ignition. “You're gonna have to stay and guard the vehicle,” he said to Ralph.

Ralph looked at him, then turned his head away. He understood the word “stay,” and he didn't like being left behind.

Calhoun made sure all the windows were cracked open, and then he got out of the Range Rover and went into Tiny's Café.

He stopped for a moment inside the doorway and blinked
against the gloom. Some kind of canned music was playing softly from hidden speakers. Calhoun recognized the tune. It was the Beatles' song “Norwegian Wood,” but it was performed by an orchestra heavy on the violins, with an exaggerated upbeat tempo that the Beatles never intended. Elevator music. Or more likely, he guessed, stripper music.

All of the windows were covered with heavy curtains, so that you couldn't tell what time of day or night it was. The odor of stale beer and tobacco smoke burned in his nostrils. The half of the big interior to the left of the entry was washed with dreary fluorescent overhead lights. Here there was a bar, with a few booths along the wall and a scattering of tables. The right side of the room was dark except for a single pale blue floodlight focused on a small stage.

Eight or ten people—two were women—were sitting at the long bar. Several of them wore black leather jackets and bandannas on their heads. One of the booths was occupied by a middle-aged couple. Nobody was sitting at the tables.

A burly, barrel-chested man with a full black beard and black hair pulled back in a ponytail and a hoop in his left ear worked behind the bar. A television mounted on brackets over the bar was showing a tennis match with no sound.

Calhoun went over and sat on a stool at the end of the bar. Two stools over, a young guy wearing overalls and work boots glanced at Calhoun and lifted his chin by way of greeting.

Calhoun lifted his own chin and looked up at the tennis match. Two women were playing. They had strong bodies, thick, muscular legs. He marveled at their athleticism.

After a minute or two the bartender came over. “What'll you have, friend?”

“Can I get something to eat?”

“Ayuh. This here is a café. We got food.” He reached under
the bar and handed Calhoun a typed piece of paper sandwiched in transparent plastic. “This is what we got. How about a beer?”

“Coffee,” said Calhoun.

“You got it.” He went to the other end of the bar and returned a minute later with a heavy white mug full of coffee. “Milk and sugar?”

Calhoun shook his head. “Black is good. So are you Tiny?”

The bartender grinned. His white teeth flashed from the depths of his black beard. “How'd you guess?”

“Well, you're anything but tiny.”

“Tiny Cormier. My parents named me Roland.”

“I'm Stoney Calhoun.” He held out his hand.

Tiny shook it. “You're a stranger hereabouts. Least, I never seen you before. I'd've remembered you.”

Calhoun nodded. “I'm guiding up at Loon Lake. Just started a few days ago. This is my first visit to St. Cecelia.”

“Well, Mr. Calhoun, you come to the right place if you're looking for some fun. The girls don't start performing till evening, but if you want . . .” He arched his eyebrows.

“No,” said Calhoun. “All I want is some lunch.” He frowned at the menu. “Cheeseburger, I guess. Medium. Slice of onion on top. And some fries.”

“You got it.” Tiny turned and went down to the other end of the bar.

The guy sitting beside him said, “You said you was guidin' at the fishing lodge up there at Loon Lake? That right?”

“Yes, that's right,” said Calhoun.

“Had a murder up there, huh?”

“Yup.”

“I heard they nailed an Indian for it.”

“They arrested a man, but he's not the one who did it.”

“No, huh?”

“No,” said Calhoun.

“So who did?”

Calhoun shrugged. “I don't know.”

“You probably heard about the shooting we had down here few weeks ago. That involved a fella who was staying at your lodge.”

“I heard about it,” Calhoun said. “That was before I started at Loon Lake. A girl from St. Cecelia was involved, too, I understand.”

“Yep. That was Millie Gautier. Edwin, her old man, he's pretty shook up by it.”

“Hard to blame him,” Calhoun said. “Man loses his daughter? That's a rough one.”

“Actually,” said the guy, “it's hard to tell how Edwin's feeling about it. Some folks are saying he's the one who shot those two.”