A Cold Day in Paradise (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

  All right, take it easy. You’re okay now. That asshole just wanted to scare you. And he picked a hell of a day to do it. You lost your cool for a moment. After the weekend you just had, it’s understandable.

  And besides, that was the first time someone has pointed a gun at you since Detroit.

  I remember sitting in an office with a psychiatrist. The department made me go see him, after the shooting. I thought it was a waste of time. I didn’t listen to much of what he was saying, but I did remember one thing. He said I’d always have this hair trigger in my head. One little thing and I’d be right back there in that room, lying on the floor with three bullets in me. A loud noise, like a gunshot or even a car backfiring. Maybe a certain smell, he said.

  Or maybe the sight of blood.

  THE MARINER’S TAVERN looked just like you would expect it to look. It had the fishnet with the shells and starfish in it hanging from the ceiling, an old whaling harpoon stuck to the wall. It was on Water Street, right next to Locks Park, with big windows on the north side of the building. During the summer you could sit there and see a freighter or two going though the locks every hour, getting raised or lowered twenty-one feet, depending on which way they were going. Now that November had arrived, the freighter season was almost over.

  I meant to just stop in and have a quick word with the bartender, but I ended up sitting at a table for a while, the only customer in the place, looking out that window at the St. Mary’s River and on the other side of that, Soo Canada. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a drink before noon, but this day seemed to need it.

  I made a little toast to myself. Here’s to your brilliant decision to become a private investigator.

  Lane Uttley had found me at the Glasgow Inn one night that past summer. He told me that Edwin was one of his clients, and that Edwin had told him all about me, the fact that I had been a cop in Detroit, even the business about getting shot.

  “A man who takes three bullets has to be one tough son of a bitch,” he said. “Edwin tells me you still have one of the bullets in your chest. Do you ever set off the metal detector at the airport?”

  “It happens,” I said.

  “What do they say when you tell them about the bullet?”

  “They usually just say, ‘Ouch.’”

  “Ha,” he said. “I imagine they do. Anyway, Mr. McKnight, I won’t waste your time. Reason I’m here is, I have a big problem and I’m wondering if you can help me out. You see, I have this private investigator working for me named Leon Prudell. Do you know him?”

  “I think I’ve seen him before.”

  “Yeah, well, at the risk of speaking unkindly, I have to say that the situation with Mr. Prudell is not working out. I imagine you’re familiar with what a private investigator really does?”

  “Mostly just information gathering, I would think. Interviews, surveillance.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “It’s very important to have someone who’s intelligent and reliable, as you can imagine. I’ve done a little bit of criminal defense work. And I have some long-standing clients like Edwin, you know, for wills, real estate, and so on. But a lot of my work is negligence, accidents, malpractice, that sort of line. That’s where I really need a good information man.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” I asked. “I’m not a private investigator.”

  “Ah,” he said. “But you could be. Have you ever thought about it?”

  “Can’t say as I have.”

  “The private eye laws are pretty loose in this state. All you need are three years as a police officer and a five-thousand-dollar bond. You were an officer for eight years, right? Spotless record?”

  “Are you asking me,” I said, “or did you already check me out?”

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “I told you I value good information.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to pass on your offer. Thanks just the same.”

  “I sure wish you’d think about it. I’m prepared to make this well worth your time.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “FU think about it.”

  He was back two nights later, this time with one of Prudell’s reports in his hand. “I want you to read this,” he said. “This is what I have to deal with every day.”

  Prudell had apparently been sent to a resort out on Drummond Island to document some haphazard lifeguarding in support of a suit over a drowning. The report was a jumble of irrelevant notations and misspellings.

  “Listen to this, Alex,” he said. “Twelve-fifteen. Subjects back on duty after eating lunch under a medium-size tree. Subjects become aggravated upon observation of my picture taking with the camera.’ I assume that when he says subjects, he means lifeguards. Why can’t he just say lifeguards, Alex? I tell ya, this guy is killing me.”

  “What makes you think I could do a better job?” I said.

  “Alex, come on. Don’t make me beg.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Uttley.”

  “Alex, you work when you want to work, and you name your price. I’ll even put up your state bond myself. You can’t beat it.”

  The truth was, I had been thinking about it. As a cop, I was always good at dealing with people, making them feel at ease, making them feel like they could talk to me on a human level. I was pretty sure I could make a decent private investigator. And I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of drawing three-quarter disability pay and not having much else to do except cut wood and clean up after deer hunters.

  “There’s just one condition,” I said. “No divorce cases. I’m not going to go following some guy, waiting to get a picture of him with his pants around his ankles.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said. “I haven’t done divorce work in ten years.”

  A month later, I had my license. He apparently knew someone in Lansing, was able to get the forms through that quickly. One day in late August, after I had just received the license, he gave me a piece of paper with a name and address on it.

  “Who’s this?” I said.

  “It’s a dealer in the Soo,” he said. “I’ve ordered a gun for you. You have to pick it up yourself, of course. Fill out the paperwork. You know some guys in the county office, right? You’ll need your permit, too.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What kind of gun are we talking about?”

  “A .38 service revolver. That’s what you used when you were a police officer, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I really don’t want to carry one again, if you don’t mind.”

  “Hey, no problem,” he said. “Just keep it at home. You never know.”

  It took me a while to figure out why he ordered that gun. Then it came to me. He probably just liked the idea of me having it. I could see him sitting across the table from a prospective client, saying, “Yes sir, I’ve got a good man working for me now. He packs heat, of course. It’s a rough world out there. My man took three bullets once, still has one in his chest. That’s the kind of man we both need on our side …”

  When I had finally picked up that gun, I took it home and put it in the back of my closet. I hadn’t touched it since.

  THE BARTENDER WAS no help. I asked him if he had been there that past Monday. It took him a full minute to figure that one out, so I didn’t think he’d be able to remember if there were any suspicious characters there that night. So I just paid the man and headed down to Uttley’s office. It was right around the corner from the courthouse, between a bank and a gift shop. The whole downtown area was starting to smell like money again, thanks to the casinos. Uttley was doing well, as were a lot of the other local businessmen. The strange thing was that, for once, a lot of the money was coming to the Chippewa Indians first and then trickling down to everyone else. I knew a lot of people around here who had a hard time dealing with that.

  Uttley was on the phone when I came in. He gave me a little wave and motioned me into a big overstuffed guest chair. His office was classic Uttley: a desk you could land an airplane
on, framed pictures of hounds and riders ready for the foxhunt, a good ten or twelve exotic houseplants that he was always misting with his little spray bottle. “Jerry, that number doesn’t work, and you know it,” he was saying into his phone. “You’re going to have to do a lot of work on that number before we talk again.” He gave me a theatrical headshake and double eyebrow raise as he covered the receiver with his hand. “Almost done here,” he whispered to me.

  I picked up the baseball that was sitting on his desk, read some of the signatures. Without even thinking about it, I turned the ball over into a four-seam grip, ready for the throw to second base.

  “Okay,” he said as he hung up. He rubbed his hands together. “How are you doing?”

  “Can’t complain,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t do you any good if you did complain, eh?”

  “I did receive an interesting phone call last night,” I said. By the time I told him everything, he was just staring at me with his mouth open.

  “Did you tell Chief Maven about this?” he said.

  “I haven’t stopped by to see him yet,” I said. “I thought I’d try the bar first, see if the bartender remembered anything from Monday night.”

  “I take it he didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. Do you want me to come to the police station with you?”

  “You don’t have to do that. I’ll go see him right now.”

  “Chief Maven can be a bit… blustery,” he said.

  “That’s one word for it.”

  “Oh and, by the way,” he said. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Mrs. Fulton would really like to speak with you as soon as possible.”

  I swallowed my surprise. “Sylvia Fulton wants to see me?”

  “No no,” he said. “Theodora Fulton. Edwin’s mother. She came up from Grosse Pointe yesterday. She’s staying with them for a couple days.”

  “Why does she want to see me?”

  “She’s worried about her son. She thinks you might be able to help him.”

  “What does she expect me to do?”

  “Mrs. Fulton is a great old lady, Alex. A little eccentric maybe. Only rich people are eccentric, by the way. Everyone else is just crazy.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” I said.

  “Anyway, she’s very protective of her son. She came up as soon as she heard about what happened. She seems to think he’s in some sort of danger up here.”

  “Then I probably shouldn’t tell her about our new friend the killer, huh?”

  “I’d find a way to leave that out of the conversation,” he said. “Alex, I should warn you, this is a very intense woman we’re talking about. She has a different way of looking at things. She wants to talk to you about a dream she had.”

  “What kind of dream?”

  “She dreamed about what happened on Saturday night. It got her very upset, Alex. She thinks Edwin is next.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I don’t know what to think of it, Alex. All I know is, while we’re standing there in that parking lot, Edwin’s mother is down in Grosse Pointe, three hundred miles away. And she’s dreaming about it. She saw it, Alex. She didn’t see who did it or anything. She just saw the way it looked afterward.”

  “What, you mean …”

  “The blood, Alex. She says she saw the blood in her dream.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WASN’T THE best day for a walk along the river, but it sounded more fun than my appointment with Maven. I followed the path through the Locks Park, looking out at the water, cold and empty. There were no freighters headed for the locks. No small boats out for a spin. No sign of life whatsoever.

  The path ran east, right out of the park and onto the front lawn of the courthouse. There were two statues there. One was the giant crane from Ojibwa legend, the one that landed here next to the river and brought the Indians. The other statue was the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. If there was supposed to be some connection between that and the city of Sault Ste. Marie, I didn’t know about it.

  The City County building sat directly behind the courthouse. It was an ugly thing, just a big brick rectangle as gray as the November sky. The Soo Police and the County Sheriffs Department both lived in that same building. The county jail was there, too. Stuck on one side of it was a little courtyard for the prisoners. It was really just a cage, maybe twenty feet square, with a picnic table inside, surrounded by another fence with razor wire running along the top.

  I stopped in at the county desk first, said hello to a deputy. “Bill around today?” I asked.

  “No, he’s down in Caribou Lake,” he said. “You want me to leave him a message?”

  “No, just wondering,” I said. “I’m actually here to see Chief Maven.”

  “He’s that way,” the deputy said, pointing down the hallway.

  “I know where he is,” I said. “I’m just stalling.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. As I left, I saw him smile and shake his head.

  I checked in at the city desk, stood there for a few minutes while the woman called him on her phone. She stood up and told me to follow her. The look on her face told me she didn’t want me to hold her personally responsible for what was about to happen.

  She led me down a maze of corridors, deep into die heart of the building where no sunlight had ever reached. There was just the steady hum of fluorescent lights. I was shown to a small waiting area with hard plastic chairs. One man was sitting there, staring at the floor, a pair of handcuffs linking him to a piece of metal imbedded in the cement wall. I sat down across from him. There was one ashtray on the table. No magazines.

  “Gotta cigarette?” the man asked.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He went back to staring at the floor and did not say another word.

  I kept sitting there while days seemed to pass, and then weeks and months until it was surely spring outside if I ever got out again to see it. Finally a door opened and Chief Roy Maven waved me inside. The office was four walls of cement. No window.

  “Good of you to stop by, Mr. McKnight,” he said as he beckoned me into the chair in front of his desk. “I’ve been anxious to talk to you.”

  “I can tell that by the way you rushed me right in here to see you.”

  He let that one go while he picked up a manila folder and slipped on a pair of grandmotherly reading glasses that clashed with his tough-guy face. He paged through the contents of the folder until he arrived at the page he wanted. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said. “Alexander McKnight, born 1950 in Detroit. Graduated from Henry Ford High School in Dearborn in 1969. Says here you played two years of minor league baseball.” He looked up at me. “Couldn’t hit the curve ball. It doesn’t actually say that here. I’m just assuming.”

  “You seem to have a pretty complete file on me,” I said.

  “This is just your private investigator application. It’s part of the public record. Anybody can see it.” He went back to reading. “Held a number of interesting jobs for a couple years. House painter. Bartender. Went to Dearborn Community College for a couple years, studied criminal justice. Joined the Detroit police force in 1975. Served eight years. Two commendations for meritorious service. Not bad. Wounded on the job in 1984. Took a disability retirement soon after. Three-quarter pay for the rest of your life ain’t half bad, is it? Of course, that’s more than fair when a man is disabled.” He looked at me over his reading glasses. “And in your case, that disability would be…?”

  I looked at him for a long moment. “I was shot three times,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Hell of a thing to happen.” He looked at me for a long moment, waiting for me to tell him the story. I didn’t, so he looked back down at the papers. “Moved up here in, where did it say that? Ah, here it is, moved into the area in 1985. Been here ever since. Funny, most people with a dis
ability, they’d move to Florida or Arizona, somewhere nice and warm. But here you are.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Your choice,” he said. “Anyway, let’s see, you filed your form in July, got your license in August. Looks like somebody kicked that one through pretty quickly. You must have friends in high places.”

  I just sat there and watched him. It brought back memories. That good old cop swagger, I had seen so much of it. I had slipped into it myself now and then. It was so easy. Problem was, it got harder and harder to slip back out of it when the day was done. It’s not the kind of thing you want to take home. Just ask my ex-wife.

  “Now, Mr. McKnight,” he said, taking off his glasses, “seeing as how you’re pretty new at this private investigator business, I’m going to let you in on a couple little tricks of the trade. Do you mind if I do that?”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Very well. First of all, when a private investigator is operating in a police jurisdiction, it is a common courtesy to check in at the police station to let them know who you are and what you are doing. Not that I care about such formalities, of course. No, sir. But somewhere down the road, you’re going to run into a police chief who really doesn’t like the fact that you’re working in his town and he hasn’t even been introduced.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Second, and even more importantly, I would suggest that the next time Edwin Fulton calls you up in the middle of the night and asks you to come down to a major crime scene, I would just take a moment to double-check with him, just to make sure that he has in fact called the police first. Actually, I would say, just go ahead and assume that he hasn’t called the police. That doesn’t seem to be his strong suit, after all. But you, of course, being a former policeman yourself, and understanding how important it is for an officer to arrive on the scene before the friends and neighbors do, you should go ahead and phone it in yourself. In fact, I’ll give you my home number, so the next time Mr. Fulton wants you to come look at a murder, you can call me directly, day or night.”

  We both just sat there looking at each other.