Read Fool's Gold for Free Online

Prudhomme had parked his gear at the motel while he was in the bush. I could ask about that when I got back.  
    I called the waitress back along the counter. She was a bright pretty girl around nineteen. In the city she would have been a secretary, at least. Here she would work in the restaurant until some young miner married her. The prospect didn't seem unpleasant to her, she was cheerful and happy to please. She knew all about Keepsakes.  
    "Yeah, sure. It's downtown, near St. Michael's on Mill Street. Just a house, eh, with the sign outside."
    I thanked her and stood up. "What do they sell, souvenirs, that kind of stuff, Indian crafts?"
    She laughed, a nice crinkling of her face. "Nothing fancy. What he is, Mr. Sallinon, he's an animal stuffer, you know, taxidermist."
    I walked out, wondering what a taxidermist could have sold Jim Prudhomme for three hundred dollars. As far as I knew, the guy had never shot a buck or caught a fish in his life. Maybe he wanted a moose head for his rec room.  
    Arnie Sallinon was a white-blond Finn in his forties, soft and overweight, with skin so pale he looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He was standing in the converted parlor of his house, surrounded by a dead menagerie. Skunks and porcupines, a lynx and a couple of marten, seven or eight lake trout and pickerel, and a couple of moose heads filled the walls and the shelf space. He was something out of Charles Addams, even in his attitude. "What my customer buys is his business," he said firmly after I'd introduced myself. "I don't have to tell anybody."  
    "No, you don't" I agreed, sweet reason itself. "But the widow is a friend of my wife's"—ex-wife would cut no ice with a Scandinavian—"and Chief Gallagher was kind enough to help me and he gave me a list of all the evidence he had. It included the contents of Jim's pockets and that led me here. I'm just killing time until I can talk to the other witnesses and I thought I'd ask you what Jim bought."  
    He thought about it for a while, staring through me with those sky-blue eyes. "What the hell, it can't hurt anything," he said with a bleak grin. "Let me get the book."  
    He dug under the counter and pulled out a Charles Dickens-sized accounts book, opening it as if it were the family Bible. I had a feeling he was taking time for my benefit. He knew to the last tooth or nail what anybody had bought from him in the past twenty years. But I leaned on top of the glass counter full of immortal animals and waited. He ran back through the last four pages, item by item, then skipped forward almost up to date and said, "Oh, yeah, here it is." He turned the book so that I could look at the entry in his spidery handwriting in ink as blue as his eyes.  
    I read it aloud. "One mink, mounted."
    I looked up and found him grinning the same thin-lipped grin. "Satisfied?" he asked.
    "You charge three hundred for a stuffed mink?" His smugness was getting me down. He'd known from the start what Prudhomme had bought from him.  
    My question offended him. "Not stuffed," he said angrily. "That's all you laymen think it is, a sewed-up skin stuffed like a mattress. It was mounted, just as if it were alive. It even had a little mounted mouse in its mouth. Very lifelike."  
    "I'm sure it was," I said, "but three hundred bucks is a lot to pay." I walked over to the wall and pointed at the first thing that came to hand, a raccoon sitting up prettily, the way it might in the bush or on top of a garbage can in Toronto. "How much is this piece?"  
    He didn't answer for a moment and I turned to find him staring at me with the dislike plain in his face. "For you, three hundred dollars," he said mockingly.  
    I met his gaze and said, "Yeah, well, raccoons are a dime a dozen. Any kid with a twenty-two rifle could bring you in as many as you needed. But, a mink—that's different. Sounds like Jim got a deal."  
    Sallinon snapped the book shut, ending the discussion. "We