Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) (17 page)

What I’d thought at Polhemus’s cabin earlier today was true: I was not the same person I had been before last winter. I was still learning things about this new man I’d become, some good and some unsettling. And one of the things I had learned these past few minutes was that—professionally, at least—I no longer had the virtue of patience. My kidnapper had robbed me of that, too.

I told myself I would notify the authorities later tonight or tomorrow morning, after I had my answers; that my intention was only to delay my duty, not to shirk it. Then I went to the front door, threw the dead bolt, and left the house that way.

Long drive coming up; maybe a wild-goose chase, though I would have bet against that. I don’t mind long drives if there is a purpose to them. And I wasn’t tired, not anymore. In my business you learn to trust your hunches, and the one prodding me now was as sharp and certain as any I’d ever had.

Where does a young woman go when she’s in serious trouble and has nobody else to turn to? Where does she go for help and comfort and a feeling of safety? Where does she go even if she’s vowed over and over never to return there again?

Yeah.

She goes home.

BY NIGHT, Pyramid Lake had an even stranger aspect than during the daylight hours. There was a harvest moon tonight, an intricate webwork of stars; their combined light dusted the lake and its barren islands and the surrounding desert in an eerie radiance that was almost spectral. Ghost lake in a ghost landscape. As if it might all disappear at any second, in the blink of an eye, the way apparitions generally do.

I glanced at my watch as I came down the long hill to the lakefront fork. A little past nine-thirty. I’d made good time from Paradise Flat, taking 89 to Interstate 80 and then 80 through Reno and onto 445. Minor slowdowns in Tahoe City and Sparks; otherwise the traffic had been light enough so that I could drive at a steady sixty-five. Fatigue had begun to gather at the edges of my mind, despite the sense of urgency. My neck and shoulders were stiff with tension.

I turned along the western shore toward the clustered lights of Sutcliffe. One lake to another the past few days—Tahoe to Fallen Leaf to Tahoe to Virginia to Pyramid to Tahoe to Virginia to Tahoe to Fallen Leaf to Tahoe to Pyramid. Linkage. Another chain that stretched back to David Burnett and his suitcase full of money. But in any chain there is a final link. Pyramid Lake would be one, if I was lucky, and Janine Wovoka would be another.

Past Sutcliffe, on up toward Pelican Point. Isolated lights ahead, lakeward: John Wovoka’s trailer. I slowed, looking for the access road; saw it and made the turn and bumped along toward the flat-topped rise ahead. In the silvery moonshine I could see the trailer and its frontage clearly. The U.S. Wildlife Commission pickup wasn’t parked there, nor was any other vehicle. And yet lights were on inside the trailer, showing behind drawn blinds over front and side windows.

I coasted to a stop thirty feet from the door. Shut off engine and headlamps and got out into a hush that matched the ghostly aspect of the lake. No sounds came from inside the trailer. I stood for a few seconds, stretching cramped muscles, watching the blinds on the near window. I thought I saw movement at one corner: someone watching me through a canted slat.

Slowly I moved over that way. But instead of going to the door or window, I continued around the far corner to the rear. Car parked back there, all right. Small, pudgy foreign job—Yugo?—drawn in close against the trailer’s back wall and nose up to the accumulation of junk overflowing the shed.

I retraced my steps to the front, went to the door. Knocked and called out my name. “Open up, Janine. We need to talk.”

No response, no sound.

“Come on, Janine. I know you’re in there. And you know who I am. You can’t hide anymore.”

Silence.

“I’ve just come from Paradise Flat,” I said. “I found Jerry. I haven’t called the sheriff yet but I will right now if you don’t open the door. I’ve got a phone in my car. I’ll give you thirty seconds; then you can watch me make the call.”

Silence for half that time. Then there were hesitant footfalls; a scraping and rattling as she released the door lock. Muffled voice: “All right, come in.”

I opened the door and entered a neat, Spartan room that was half living area and half kitchen and dinette. Its lone occupant was backed up against the far wall, braced there with her feet apart. That was my first look at Janine Wovoka in the flesh: scared young woman in stone-washed denims and a loose blue sweater, crouched against a trailer wall and pointing a long-barreled revolver at me with both hands.

I closed the door behind me, doing it slowly. “Put the gun down, Janine.”

“No. You stay away from me.”

“You don’t want to shoot me. I’m on your side.”

“My side?” Her laugh was edged with hysteria. “My God, if it wasn’t for you, Jerry ... Jerry might still be alive.”

Yeah, I thought. If it wasn’t for me and you and Burnett and Wendy and Scott McKee and Jerry’s own lust and greed. And Arthur Welker—let’s not forget Arthur Welker.

“Don’t make things any worse than they are,” I said. “Put the gun down.”

“No.”

“You want to kill two people in one night? Shoot two men down in cold blood?”

“What? No ... no!”

“You shot Jerry. Why?”

She shook her head. Kept shaking it, brokenly, so that her black hair swirled around her face in damp tangled strands. She had been strikingly attractive in the snapshots I’d found, but she wasn’t attractive now. Haggard, pinch-faced; the sweat of fear dampening skin gone pale and blotchy and stretched so tight over the high cheekbones, it seemed ready to split. Big dark eyes alight with something more than terror, as if she had gazed through a crack and seen the landscape of hell.

“I didn’t shoot him,” she said, “I didn’t, I didn’t!”

“No? There wasn’t anyone else in the house.”

“I tell you, I didn’t!”

“Then who did?”

“He
did. He ... Jerry ... he did it himself.”

“Suicide? I don’t buy it, Janine. Not him, not in the stomach like that. He didn’t have the courage.”

“You don’t understand ... it was an
accident.
He was out of his head ... he went crazy, he just ... went crazy ...”

“Drugs? Was he high on something?”

Another series of head wags. “He had some grass but it wasn’t that. He was sick, hurt ... he woke up with a bad headache and stayed in bed all day ... oh, God, I was in the kitchen, I was going to make some sandwiches, and I heard him yelling ... he just started yelling for no reason ... I ran into the hall and he ran out of the bedroom waving that gun of his and yelling ... he was out of his head, he said I was one of them and I wanted to kill him but he was going to kill me first and he ... he tried ... I grabbed for the gun and he pulled away and it ... it went off and he screamed and fell down and thrashed around and I couldn’t ... the blood ...”

Headshakes, violent now. She had had a glimpse of hell, all right, and she was having it again inside her head. It made her physically ill. She coughed, then gagged, then lunged over to the kitchen sink and vomited into it. She still had the revolver in one hand but she’d forgotten about it by then; forgotten about me, too, until I eased up beside her and caught her wrist and disarmed her. She turned toward me, her features pulled out of shape, her mouth streaked and stained, but then another spasm overtook her; she vomited again into the sink. And I backed up with the weapon.

When she was done puking she began to cry—great racking sobs that shook her whole body. There was a towel beside the sink; she groped that up, blindly, and wiped her mouth and then stumbled to an old two-seat mohair couch at the far wall and sank onto it with her face buried in the towel. I let her sit there and cry while I dealt with the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber target revolver with a six-inch barrel. John Wovoka’s, probably. All the chambers were loaded. I removed the cartridge from under the hammer before I tucked the piece into my jacket pocket.

Janine’s sobbing diminished, finally quit altogether. It was another minute before she raised her head and looked at me again, out of eyes that had gone dull in the ravaged plain of her face. “I wouldn’t have shot you,” she said in a voice as dull as her eyes. “I didn’t shoot Jerry ... I loved him. I couldn’t hurt anybody. Please, you have to believe me ...”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Do you? Really?”

“Really.”

It seemed to relieve her. She took a couple of deep breaths, made a vague gesture toward the dinette table. “My purse,” she said. “I need a cigarette ...”

“I’ll get it. Stay where you are.”

I opened the purse and looked inside before I gave it to her, to make sure she didn’t have some other kind of weapon tucked away in there. A package of Marlboros was the most lethal of the contents. She fired one with shaking hands, sat dragging on it hungrily. On the wall above her was an oil painting of an Indian woman in some sort of ceremonial costume, holding a conical-shaped basket in her hands. The juxtaposition struck me as symbolic of the differences between the Indians of yesterday and the Indians of today, the sad old world and the bitter new.

Janine took another drag on her cigarette, coughed out smoke, and said, “It must have been the fight. Jerry was in a fight Monday night ...”

“I know. With Scott McKee.”

“He hit his head when he fell. His temple, it was all soft and ... pulpy, you know? He could hardly talk when he called me. And when I got there he was so dizzy I had to help him walk.”

“Why didn’t you take him to a doctor?”

“He wouldn’t go. He said he was all right, he just needed to rest. The next day ... he was all right, except for a headache that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t until this morning that the headache got so bad he couldn’t get out of bed. I wanted to call a doctor then, too, but he said no. I should have called one anyway ... I knew I should have, I
knew
it.”

“Too late by then, probably.”

“What do you mean?”

“Brain damage. That’s what it sounds like.” And I thought but didn’t say: Walking dead man since Monday night. The bullet in his guts was like pulling the plug on a cancer patient with a short time to live.

Janine said, “But then ...
Scott
killed him. In the fight.”

“Technically, yes. But he’s no more guilty than Dave Burnett or your former bosses.”

“... You know about all that? The money?”

“The big jackpot. Yeah, I know. All except where and how he got hold of the suitcase.”

“I wish to God I’d never met him,” Janine said with sudden vehemence. She jabbed out her cigarette in a stoneware ashtray and immediately lit another. “Him or Jerry. They ruined my life ... my life is ruined now. What am I going to do? Live here on the reservation with my father? Be somebody’s squaw like my mother was? Just another fat, ugly Indian squaw. ...”

“How did Burnett get the money, Janine?”

She blinked her swollen eyes at me. “What?”

“The suitcase, the money—how did he get it?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You must have some idea.”

“No, he wouldn’t tell us. Not any of us, not then.”

“Meaning he told one of you later?”

“Jerry ... he told Jerry.”

“But Jerry wouldn’t tell you?”

“No. He said it was better I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t even give you a hint?”

“No.”

And now he’s dead, I thought. They’re both dead, Burnett and Polhemus, and the only ones left who know the whole truth are Welker and Manny Atwood. Welker, Welker, Arthur goddamn Welker ...

“But he made a tape,” Janine said.

The words jerked me back out of myself. “Tape? What kind of tape?”

“Telling everything that happened, how Dave got the money and how
they
found out. He said he did anyway. To protect himself if there was any more trouble.”

“What did he do with this tape?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hid it somewhere, gave it to somebody, put it in a safe-deposit box?”

She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me. Honest.”

Damn all the secrecy! If I could find that tape ... if he’d named names, mentioned Welker’s name just once ...

Janine snubbed out her second cigarette, ran her hands together in her lap as if she were trying to cleanse them. Her eyes, now, were bright, shiny—like those of a trapped bird watching a cat. “What are you going to do?” she said.

“About what?”

“About me. About Jerry. You said you haven’t called the sheriff yet ...”

“Not yet, no.”

“Do you have to?”

“What do you think?”

“But why? What good will it do now?”

“Not much, maybe. But Jerry’s dead. You want to leave his body lying there in the house?”

She shuddered. “No. But what if they don’t believe me? I don’t want to go to jail.”

“You won’t go to jail.”

“You don’t know that. Please don’t call them, please. If you don’t, I’ll ... I’ll do ...”

“Do what, Janine?”

“Anything you want. Anything.”

That made me angry. “You can’t buy me with sex, little girl. Not anywhere, at any time, and especially not here in your father’s house. Not even a whore screws a customer in her father’s house.”

She began to cry again. But it wasn’t shame; it was self-pity. Everybody I had had dealings with tonight was loaded down with self-pity and I was sick of confronting it. “Please,” she said between sobs,
“please
don’t call anybody. You don’t understand, it’s not just me ... my father ...”

“What about your father?”

Headshake.

A belated realization, cold and crystal-sharp, opened up in my mind. “Where is he? Why isn’t he here with you? Why did he leave you alone tonight?”

She swallowed, said, “He ...” and swallowed again.

“He went to Tahoe, didn’t he. To Paradise Flat.”

“... Yes.”

“To do what? Tell me, Janine!”

“He ... he said I shouldn’t worry. He said he’d take care of things ...”

Take care of things. Christ!