“Sit him down and make him a drink,” I said. “I’m sure he can use one. I’m on my way.”
I hung up the phone and threw it on the passenger’s seat. Just as I was pulling out of the parking lot, it rang. I picked it up.
“Alex, this is Gill.”
“I’m glad you called me back,” I said. “How did it go?”
“Pretty routine,” he said. “These felony arrests are getting monotonous.”
“I’m glad you can joke about it. Any chance of me asking you a couple of questions?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“You know, I’m still in town here. I was gonna go back to Paradise, but why don’t I swing by your place first?”
“Do you know where it is?”
I thought about the videotape. “Yeah,” I said. “I know the way.”
“You’ve never been here before, have you?”
“No, never,” I said. “But I’ve seen the movie.”
You can see the Kewadin Casino from halfway across town. It’s easily the biggest building in the Soo, and it sits over on the east side, on land that was carved out of the city and given to the Sault tribe. As I drove past it, I couldn’t help noticing how many cars were parked in the several acres of asphalt surrounding the place. There was one special parking lot on the side, just for RVs-there had to be a couple hundred of them. All the summer people who came through here, almost all of them ended up at the casino at least once.
There was a health clinic right across the street, then the Big Bear Arena, all fruits of the casino money. The whole scene looked a lot better in the bright sunlight, as opposed to the grainy dark video I had watched in Leon’s living room. I followed the route I remembered seeing, turning after the casino into a new neighborhood they had built in its shadow. I knew a lot of the people who worked at the casino lived in these new houses, including Gill.
Gill was sitting outside on his front porch when I got there. He had a big glass jug filled with lemonade sitting on the table waiting for me. I sat in the empty chair, looked out at the street with him for a few minutes, and at the casino a half-mile away. We sat in the shade, drinking lemonade as a soft breeze came down the street to us. It would have been a perfect afternoon if not for the fact that Gill was sitting here only because he had made bail. I almost didn’t want to mention it. But that’s why I was there.
“What did the police ask you?” I finally said.
“They didn’t get the chance to ask me much of anything,” he said. Looking down at the remains of the ink on his hands, he wiped his pants with them, just as Bennett had done. “My lawyer was there practically before I was. They did most of the talking to him.”
“What did they say to him?”
“They wanted to know who did the actual breaking and entering,” he said. “They wanted the men with the guns. They made it clear to my lawyer that any cooperation on my part would be very much appreciated.”
“What did your lawyer say to that?”
“He said that I would love to cooperate in any way possible, but that I had nothing to give them.”
“What did they find in your house?”
He looked at me for a moment. “They found some artifacts,” he said. “Apparently, they came from Vargas’s house.”
“That’s all they found? No money?”
“Just the artifacts, Alex. They were on my porch when I got home that night-the night everything happened.”
“What did you do with them?”
He looked back out at the street. “Well, you’ve got to understand a couple of things. First of all, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I had been held hostage, lying on the floor, at gunpoint… Well, you know what I’m talking about, of course. You went through the same thing. By the time the police got done with us, it was what, after one in the morning? When I finally got home, there was this box next to my side door. To tell you the truth, and this is what my lawyer told the police chief today, I honestly had no idea where it had come from. Remember, Alex, all of this had just happened. And here’s this box by my door when I got home. I assumed someone had left it there that day, and I just hadn’t seen it. I don’t go out that side door too often. Or else they had left it that evening, when I was out. I certainly wasn’t thinking that it was stolen from Vargas’s house. It felt like I had just been there five minutes before. How would it even get to my house so quickly?”
“So you open the box…”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t recognize the artifacts? I mean, you’d seen them before, right? That night, when he gave me the tour, you said you had already done it.”
He let out a small laugh. “He gave me the tour, maybe three months ago, the last time we played at his house. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, yes, I suppose I should have recognized that stuff. It just didn’t stand out in my mind.”
“I would have thought him having that stuff would have really bothered you.”
He laughed again. “Alex, let me tell you something. All that Ojibwa stuff he had up there? It was essentially worthless. A couple of pieces were interesting, although they weren’t in very good shape. I suppose the museum at the community college would take them, but I’m sure they wouldn’t exhibit them. They were too damaged.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“You know the best part? You remember that oar he had in his case, right in the middle?”
“Yeah, the one that looked really old,” I said. “With the carvings.”
“That oar was not old, first of all. You take a wooden oar and you drop it in fresh water, it’s going to disintegrate. Salt water is a different story, but fresh water, after one year it’s going to look like that oar in his display case. And those carvings? Please, Alex. It looked like somebody had been horsing around with a knife, some kid maybe, or some old guy who was sitting around on his porch all summer. Sort of like me.” He smiled at that, and stopped talking long enough to take a long sip of lemonade. “Of course, I don’t sit around ruining my oars with fake carvings.”
“Was that oar in the package you got?”
“I would have recognized that oar,” he said. “And gotten another good laugh at it. No, it was falling apart in that case, I remember. I don’t imagine you could move it.”
“This is good,” I said. “I’m glad you’re telling me this.”
“You know what’s really good,” he said. “Imagining that Vargas paid somebody a ton of money for that oar, thinking it was some sort of authentic Ojibwa relic.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “But what I’m thinking is, this proves you had nothing to do with this. Because why would you? The stuff’s worthless.”
“Worthless in a material sense,” he said. “It did belong to somebody. But yes, you’re right. It would not have been worth stealing.”
“And the fact that somebody would leave it at your house can only mean one thing…”
He looked at me with those dark, careful eyes, waiting for me to finish my thought.
“You were set up,” I said. “Whoever did this thought it would look incriminating to you, to have this stuff found on your premises.”
He thought about that one, slowly shaking his head. “There was someone here again,” he said. “Last night.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“I was at the casino,” he said. “My neighbor saw somebody, right here on this porch. We all look out for each other, you understand.”
“What was this person doing? Did your neighbor get a good look at him?”
“No, he didn’t. He moved like a man, that’s all he knows. He said he was here one moment, and then gone. He just disappeared.”
“Something strange is going on here,” I said. “Somebody’s playing games with us. With all of us.”
“Cat and mouse,” he said. “And you want to know who the cat is, don’t you…”
I looked him in the eye. “That’s the idea.”
“I know why you’re doing this. Jackie is the best friend you have in this world.”
“I’m doing it for all three of you.”
He smiled. “It’s okay, Alex. No matter why, I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”