The Moose Jaw (36 page)

I described this to Hard Case.

“So tell me, Gus,” he said quietly, “What does all that suggest?  What happened just before you arrived at the lodge?  You must have thought about this before.  Tell me what you think happened out there.”

At this point he turned into Haywood’s driveway, shifted into park and killed the engine.  I told him what I thought had happened.  He stared out the windshield, apparently lost in thought as his thick fingers drummed a gentle tattoo on the steering wheel. 

“My, oh my,” he said.  It was almost a whisper.  “My, oh my, oh my.”

Then he turned to me and said, “O.K. Gus, that’s enough for one day.  Let me come in and have a look at those claw marks and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

We went inside and I took off my jacket and shirt and peeled back the dressing the nurse had applied in the hospital that morning.  Hard Case had a close look.  He clucked his tongue.

“Looks like Haywood put you back together pretty well.  What did he use to stitch you up?”

“3X Tippet,” I told him.  “He liberated it from my fishing vest.”

Hard Case chuckled and shook his head in admiration, waved good-bye, and headed out the door.

“Thanks for lunch!”  I called out as it closed behind him.

His voice came muffled through the door.  “Don’t mention it.”

Then I heard the heavy door of the Explorer slam and the big engine roar to life.  His tires crunched in the gravel of the drive as he backed into the street, then he was gone.  I saw that Bosworth had vacated the living room, so the couch was fair game.  I quietly snooped around the house until I found him curled up and sound asleep on my bed in the guest room.  I softly closed the door, locking him in, and went back upstairs to the living room and the vacant couch.  It was only three o’clock but it had already been a long day.  My ribs and shoulder were giving me a good deal of discomfort so I popped a couple of pills Dr. Scanlon had given me for pain and lay down on the couch for a little nap.

My little nap took a bit longer than I had anticipated.  I didn’t wake up until I heard a car door slam shut out in the driveway.  I opened my eyes to a dark room and switched on the table lamp next to the couch.  My watch said it was just after eight.  ‘Wow,’ I thought.  ‘Five hours!’  I heard the front door open and close.  A few seconds later Haywood came bounding up the stairs from the entry.  I was just slipping on my shoes when he came into the living room. 

He snapped on the overhead lights, deposited a load of mail on the kitchen table and proceeded directly to the refrigerator.  He took out a bottle of Guinness Stout.

“How you doing?”  He asked, popping off the bottle cap and flipping it into the garbage pail.

“Good, I guess,” I said sleepily.  “Doc Scanlon gave me some pain pills.  I took two and zonked out for five hours.”

He held out a hand and said, “Let’s see ‘em.”

I fished the little plastic bottle out of the breast pocket of my shirt and tossed it across the room.  Haywood snatched it out of the air with one of his oversized hands and read the label.

“No wonder,” he said.  “You’re only supposed to take one at a time, as needed for pain.  Not to exceed two in any twelve-hour period.  He give you one this morning?”

“Yeah.  The nurse did.  My ribs were killing me when I woke up.

“Don’t suppose you had any alcohol today?” he said, knowing I probably had.

“Couple of beers with Hard Case,” I told him.

He shook his head sadly and tossed back the pill bottle.  I started to bring up my hand to catch it, got a stab of pain in the ribs and aborted the effort.  The pill bottle bounced off my chest and rolled under the coffee table.

“Allstate,” Haywood said sarcastically.  An old inside joke – “you’re in good hands with Allstate”.

He brought his beer into the living room and flopped down into his overstuffed easy chair.  He looked around.

“Where’s Bosworth?”

“On my bed.  I locked him in so I could have the couch to myself.”

Haywood sipped his stout and nodded.  “I better go feed him.  He gives me fifteen minutes grace when I get home.  Then he gets cranky.”

I had to go to the bathroom anyway, so I volunteered to feed Bosworth while Haywood went through his mail. 

After attending to Bosworth, and visiting the facilities, I went back to the living room.  Haywood was just opening another stout for himself.

“I’d offer you one but, as a doctor, I can’t encourage the mixing of drugs and alcohol.”

I nodded my understanding.

“On the other hand,” he went on, “I couldn’t stop you if you overpowered me and had your way with my beverage supply.  You know where the fridge is.”

I thought about that for a minute, decided I was awfully thirsty, and went to see what he had in his “beverage supply”.  I took a bottle of stout over to the kitchen table and eased myself down into one of the old wooden captain’s chairs.

Haywood discarded the last bit of mail onto a pile beside his chair and leaned back.

“How’d it go with Hard Case?”

I filled him in on our lunch.  Then added, “He said he wanted to check a few things out and he’d get back in touch with me Monday.  I think something I said stirred his memory.”

I had just finished saying that when headlights swung into the driveway and heavy tires crunched on gravel outside the window.  Haywood swiveled around and looked out.

He got up and went to the front door and opened it.  I heard the front steps groan under a heavy weight.

“Evening Case,” I heard Haywood say, “Got time for a beer?”

“Why not?”  Hard Case answered and came into the living room unbuttoning his topcoat.

He nodded to me.  “Evening Gus.  How you feeling?”

I told him I was good and thanked him.  He sat down at the table and Haywood brought over a bottle of Rolling Rock and another bottle of stout.  He held them both up.

“What’s your preference, Case?”

Hard Case inspected the choices, and pointed at the beer.  “Can’t handle that black stuff,” he said.  “Gives me the fantods.”

Haywood slid the green bottle across to Case, who lifted it in a silent salute and took a long pull.

“Ahhh,” he said, as if he hadn’t had a beer in months, and clunked the bottle down on the wood surface of the table.

Haywood returned Hard Case’s salute and took a long draft of his stout.

“To what do we owe the pleasure of your distinguished company this evening?”

Hard Case smiled over at me.

“Ah, Haywood,” he said.  “You are a caution.”

A caution.  I had to chuckle.  I hadn’t heard that expression since my childhood.  I had no idea what it meant, but the sound of it always tickled me.

Hard Case went on.  “You owe this after-hours visitation to our good friend, Gus, here,” he said, tipping the neck of his bottle in my direction.  “Something he said this afternoon put me in mind of an unsolved case I ran across when I was just starting with the Bureau.  It’s Saturday, and there’s nobody working the File Room, but being the retired champ does carry a few privileges – I still got all the keys.  I had to stop by the office on my way home anyway, so while I was there I went into the archives and dragged out the file.  I took it home and reviewed it this afternoon.”  He sipped his beer and looked off into space.

“Strange, gentlemen, very strange indeed.”
  He took another sip of beer and dug in his pocket for his cigarettes.

“Mind if I smoke, Haywood?”  He already knew the answer.  He was just being polite.

“Be my guest,” Haywood said.  “In fact, I think I’ll join you.”

He got up and went to the mantle and took one of his big Churchills out of the humidor.

I said to Hard Case, “Now look what you’ve done.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I just wasn’t thinking.”

Haywood ignored the aspersions being cast at his stogie.  He struck a match and puffed away happily until the tip glowed to his satisfaction and the air around his head clouded with poisonous gases.  Then he rejoined us at the table and sat back contentedly.  He picked up where Hard Case had left off.

“What did you find so strange about the file, Case?”

Hard Case flicked the ash off his Camel.  “I’ll get to that in a minute, but first I’d like to get a couple more details from Gus.”  He looked over at me.

I shrugged.  “Fire away.”

His cigarette dangled from his lip and smoke curled up into his face.  He closed one eye and stared at me with the other.

“Gus, when I asked you today about the loads you used on Roy, you said they were twelve gauge duck loads.  Could you be a little more specific?”

“Sure,” I said.  “I guess they were actually goose loads.  The last time I’d worn that field jacket I was hunting geese back in the beaver pond.  I had the pockets full of twos.  There might have been a few fours mixed in but I shot Roy with twos.  I know, because I picked up the spent cases.”

“Steel?”

I didn’t have to think about that.  I hate steel shot; it doesn’t have the hitting power of lead, and it tears up your barrel, especially if you have a full choke.

“No,” I told him.  “Bismuth.” 

I’d starting using Bismuth back in the late eighties when it was still an experimental alternative to lead and steel.  It fell in between the other two metals on the hardness scale and also on the density scale.  It packed a little more wallop than steel and didn’t pollute like lead.  Its biggest drawback was that it was damned expensive.  But, for shooting over water, it’s all I’d used for several years.

Case made a steeple with his hands, fingertips pressed together at the top.

“Bismuth,” he said pensively.
  He was quiet for a moment then continued, “You said you picked up the spent hulls.  Did you pick up the wads too?”

“No, it didn’t occur to me at the time.  They must not have landed where I would have seen them or I would have remembered to pick them up.  I didn’t give them a thought until I was in the canoe, headed back downstream.  Then it was too late.”

Hard Case looked the perfect picture of the patient fisherman who has just seen his bobber dip for the first time.

“So,” he said, looking me square in the eye, “it’s fair to say you left behind a few pieces of physical evidence at the scene.  Namely, two loads of number two bismuth shot, mostly contained in the body of the victim, and two plastic wads.  I assume they were plastic; do you remember what brand you were shooting?”

“Remington,” I told him.  “The wads were plastic.  They’re probably the same ones I use when I reload Remington hulls.  They’re called Power Pistons.

 Hard Case finished his beer and told Haywood, if he would be gracious enough to open him another, he’d explain what was so strange about the case file.

Haywood went to the refrigerator and brought back three beers.  He announced that too much stout was bad for the bowels, then set a bottle down in front of me and slid one across to Hard Case.  Case nodded his thanks, took a tentative sip, and began.

“I hired on with the Troopers back in ’71, just as they were creating the Criminal Investigation Bureau.  My first boss was Pokey Brewster.  Name probably doesn’t mean much to you boys, but he was a big man around here back then.  Third generation white Alaskan.  You don’t find many of them, even today.  He was a good cop.  Anyway, every year or so, he’d have us break out the “Unsolved Cases File” and go through them to see if anything had come up over the past year that might tie back to one of the unsolveds.  I can’t remember that we ever had any luck but we did it anyway, every year, religiously.  One of the cases went back to the late fifties.  Pokey had worked it personally so he was able to give us a pretty good picture of what went down.

It seems that a group of doctors and dentists from St. Louis had all thrown some money in a kitty and bought a fishing lodge on Rainbow Creek.  The creek got its name from the giant rainbow trout for which it was famous.  I’ve seen some of the mounts that came out of that creek back then – they looked like footballs.  Big and fat.  Fishing was big business on all the Yukon tribs during the fifties.  Trout, salmon, grayling – all big.  There were five or six working lodges on the Moose Jaw alone and more on some of its feeder streams.  Anyway, this consortium of doctors and dentists got together and bought themselves a fishing lodge.  In retrospect, they were probably doing it as some sort of tax dodge, a Limited Partnership or some such thing.  But, they were all outdoorsmen and liked their fishing so they bought the lodge.  They didn’t operate it as a commercial enterprise after they took over.  They probably wanted to show a loss on their 1040s.  There’d been an Athabascan family, mom and dad and two boys, working for the previous owner so the docs kept them on to help out around the place.  They cooked and cleaned and kept the water tank filled and the woodpile stocked.  The boys would skipper the boats and clean fish and wait table when there were guests.

The doctors would come in with their guests two, sometimes three times a year and have a big party.  They were all from Missouri, and they imported a couple of Ozark boys to live at the lodge year round and look after the place for them.  They were brothers.   Roy and Larry McCarver, a.k.a. Roy and Larry McCaslin.”

He looked at me, took a pull on his beer and said, “See what I mean about strange, Gus?”

I drank a few swallows of my beer and nodded my head.  Indeed it was.

Hard Case continued, “Well, things went on just dandy for a few years.  Looks like maybe Roy and Larry were running a little side business, opening the lodge to paying guests when the doctors weren’t around.  Set themselves up as guides, they did.  Even got licensed and ran ads in the Seattle and San Francisco newspapers as the Rainbow River Lodge.  They did a nice little business.  Don’t know if the doctors even knew it was going on, but if they did they didn’t do anything about it.

Then, the first week of moose season in 1959, a couple
of moose hunters came back to Fairbanks and reported they’d found a burned cabin and two dead men back up Rainbow Creek.  Pokey flew out with a bush pilot and had a look.  He wrote up the report that’s still in the file.  I tell you Gus, I don’t know what to make of this, but I’m going to let you read that file and tell me what you think.”