A Cold Day in Paradise (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I OPENED MY eyes. Through the skylight I could see heavy clouds, a single snowflake, then another. To my left, Sylvia’s head on the pillow, turned away from me. I did not know if she was awake.

  I got out of bed. I stood there and looked at her. She did not move. When I started to put my pants on, she said, “You’re leaving.” Not as a question.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  She turned to look at me. She kept the covers tight around her neck.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I think it’s snowing outside,” I said.

  She looked up at the skylight.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I said. It was a weak offering, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “No,” she said.

  “You drank a lot of champagne,” I said, putting my shirt on. I looked around the room for my shoes and socks.

  She sat up in the bed, keeping the blanket wrapped around her body. “Are you going to say anything else? Or are you just going to run away again?”

  I sat down on the bed. “What do you mean, again? When did I ever run away before?”

  “You always did,” she said. “Every time.”

  “That’s because Edwin was usually on his way home, remember?”

  “He’s not coming home this time,” she said. In an instant, she had that look in her eyes again. That sudden flame.

  “I have to go now,” I said.

  “Do you expect me to beg you to stay?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t expect anything.”

  I was ready for something painful. A cold silence, more venom, violence. Instead, she just looked down at her hands. “Do you think I married Edwin for his money?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I suppose you must think that. Did I ever tell you how I met him?”

  “No.”

  “I had a flower shop in Southfield. I opened the store myself. I guess I wanted to show everybody that I could do it. You know, my family and everybody. I didn’t realize what a tough business it was, but I was getting by. I was doing all right. One day, Edwin Fulton walks in the store. He’s got this suit on that must have cost five thousand dollars. These incredible leather shoes. The works. So right away, I’m thinking, okay, this guy is gonna come on smooth, try to impress me with how much money he has. He comes up to the counter and he asks me what kind of flower would look good in his boutonnišre. Says he’s terrible with colors, he’s got no idea what would look good with his tie. I had these roses from Central America. Real nice, real expensive. I said, here, you probably want one of these. You know what he said?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said no, it looks too expensive. It’ll look like I’m showing off. So he buys a big red carnation instead. Seventy-five cents.”

  I smiled.

  “The next day, he comes back, buys another carnation. And then the next day and the next day. He always seemed like he wanted to talk to me, but I don’t know, he was just shy. Which was weird, because you don’t expect rich people to be shy. Anyway, a few days later, he finally comes in and orders this huge bouquet. Every rose I had in the store. Three hundred dollars’ worth. It took me forever to put it together. When I was finally done with it, he asked me to fill in the card for him. He said, please make this card out to the most wonderful woman who ever walked the earth. Those were his exact words. And of course, I’m thinking, oh God, how original is this? He’s going to make me fill in this card and then he’s going to tell me the flowers are for me. So I’m pissed off, because now he’s just throwing his money away trying to impress me, and I’m going to say thanks but no thanks and end up putting all the flowers back. But that’s not what he did.”

  “No?”

  “No. They were for his mother. It was her birthday. He could see I was surprised, so he asked me if I thought he was going to give them to me. I said yes, to be honest, that’s what I was thinking. You know what he said? He said when he finally worked up the nerve to ask me out, he’d buy the flowers at another store. That way he could take them back and demand a refund if I didn’t fall in love with him.”

  “That’s great.”

  She looked up at the skylight. “Do you think he can see us now?”

  “God, I don’t know.”

  “You should have heard him talk about you,” she said. “He told me you were the best friend he ever had. Did he ever tell you that?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “I hope he can,” she said. “I hope he can see us.”

  “Why?”

  “All that time, he never knew about us,” she said. “I should have told him. Not because I wanted to hurt him. Just because he had the right to know.”

  “Maybe some things you don’t want to know.”

  “I don’t believe in that,” she said. “I don’t like things to happen to me without knowing why.”

  “I suppose I feel the same way,” I said. “That’s why I need to leave now. I’ve got one more thing I need to know.”

  She watched me put my coat on.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said. “Do you want me to come back or not?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet anyway.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I don’t think we can just start over,” she said. “We can’t pretend none of this happened.”

  “No,” I said.

  She looked up at the skylight again. The snow was beginning to collect in the corners. I sat there watching her.

  “Thank you for being Edwin’s friend,” she said.

  “I don’t think I did a very good job of that.”

  She smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was the first one I had seen from her in months. “He would have forgiven you anything. Even this.”

  I left. I didn’t kiss her. I didn’t touch her. As I drove away, I wondered if I would ever touch her again.

  I swung by my cabin, took a shower, changed my clothes, had some coffee. And then I got right back into the truck and gunned it into the Soo. The snow was building into a flurry, but none of it was sticking to the ground yet. Some flakes blew into the truck through the open window.

  When I got to Uttley’s office, I found him packing up a large cardboard box. He looked like his old self again, clean-shaven, his hair slicked back. A nice shirt and tie.

  “Alex, there you are,” he said. “I was looking for you last night. I figured your phone was still out, so I stopped by your cabin.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Had to be about midnight. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d come out and see you.”

  “You must have just missed me,” I said. “I couldn’t sleep, either. So I went out looking for Raymond Julius’s house.”

  “Raymond Julius? The man you …” He stopped.

  “The man I killed, yes. Turns out he did some work for Leon Prudell.”

  He stopped his packing. “He worked for Prudell? Are you serious?”

  “He ran errands for him,” I said. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t remember even hearing his name.”

  “Prudell says he helped him out on that job he did over at the resort, watching the lifeguards.”

  “Oh, wait a minute,” he said. “I remember that. He said he had a guy helping him, covering for him when he went to the bathroom, stuff like that. I don’t think he told me his name. I probably wasn’t listening too well. That was toward the end, after I had already decided to fire him. But how does this guy figure into your thing with Rose?”

  “He was upset that he lost his job. He blamed me. Started stalking me, looking into my past. He found the newspaper clippings. The rest is kind of crazy.”

  “My God,” he said. “This all happened because I fired Prudell?”

  “No,” I said. “This all happened because the guy was insane. You didn’t do
anything wrong.”

  “I can’t believe any of this,” he said. “This just keeps getting worse.”

  “There’s one thing that’s still bothering me,” I said. “This business of how he contacted Rose.”

  “You mean about whether he visited him or wrote to him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In his diary he just said that he ‘communicated’ with Rose. But he didn’t say how.”

  “How did you see his diary?”

  “You don’t want to know that,” I said.

  He raised his hands. “Say no more.”

  “I’m just wondering how it happened. How did he get through to Rose? How did he find out all the things he wrote about in his notes?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows, Alex? Why does it even matter?”

  “It just bothers me,” I said. “Maybe I should call that Browning guy down at the prison again.”

  “You won’t get anywhere,” he said. “You know that.”

  “Let me just have his number,” I said. “I might try him.”

  Uttley gave out a long tired sigh and went through some papers. He wrote the number down on a card and gave it to me. “You’re wasting your time,” he said.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “What’s with the box? Are you going somewhere?”

  “I need a vacation. I think you need one, too.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t even know yet,” he said. “Someplace very far away. Someplace warm. An island somewhere.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  “You know, all those nights I spent on the Fultons’ couch, I started to think about things. I’m not sure I want to be a lawyer anymore. Not this kind of lawyer, not up here, anyway. I think I might try something nice and quiet for a while, you know, like real estate. Just sit on my butt at a closing and collect my big check.”

  “You’re not coming back, are you.”

  “I don’t think so, Alex. Too much has happened here. I’m surprised you’re not thinking the same way.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “So anyway, I guess I probably won’t be needing you as a private investigator anymore.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not sure I ever really wanted to be one.”

  He nodded and swallowed hard.

  “Need help carrying anything out?” I said.

  “No, this is all I need,” he said. He slapped the box. “Alex, I’m not sure what else to say. You’ve had to go through so much the last couple weeks. I just hope I was able to help you through it in some small way.”

  “Of course you did.”

  He came around from behind his desk and shook my hand. And then he hugged me. He wrapped both of his arms around me and gave me a good squeeze. “Take care of yourself, Alex.”

  “Goodbye, Lane.”

  As I closed the door, I looked back at him. He gave me one last thumbs-up and then I was gone.

  I went into town and tried to find an auto glass place. The first one didn’t have my window in stock. Neither did the second or third. The last man said I could either go over the bridge and try the Canadian side, or he could put it on order and tape up the truck with clear plastic to hold me over. I went with the tape job.

  At a pay phone, I called the phone company to see about fixing my cut line. The lady told me they’d try to get out there some time that day, but she couldn’t say when. I told her I wasn’t going to hold my breath. After I hung up I took out the card with Browning’s number on it. I looked at it for a long time and then I put it back in my pocket without dialing.

  By the time I headed back to Paradise, the snow had stopped. But it was still a cold, raw day. The sky was as gray as gunmetal. I probably wouldn’t see the sun for five months. Maybe Uttley is right, I thought. Maybe I just should go away somewhere, never come back. Maybe even take Sylvia, if I could convince her.

  God, listen to yourself, Alex. Just listen to yourself.

  I stopped in at the Glasgow for a late breakfast. Jackie made me one of his omelets, with onions, peppers, cheese, the works. It was too early for a beer, but not too early for one of his famous Bloody Marys. Or two or three of them.

  I took the card out of my pocket and looked at it again. If I call him, I thought, he’s going to hang up on me. I put the card back in my pocket.

  When I got back to the cabin, the man from the phone company was up on his ladder. I owed the phone company an apology for doubting them. “What the hell happened to your phone line?” he said. “It looks like somebody cut right through it with a knife.”

  “Long story,” I said. I went into the cabin before he could ask me to tell it.

  When he was done, he gave a quick knock on my door. “She’s all done,” he said. “It’ll be on your next bill.”

  I thanked the man, and then I picked up the phone to make sure I had a dial tone. Without even thinking about it, I dialed Browning’s number. I didn’t even have to look at the card. I had the number memorized from all the time I’d spent looking at it.

  The phone rang. What the hell, I thought. If nothing else, I can at least apologize to the man for yelling at him.

  “Corrections, Browning speaking.”

  “Mr. Browning,” I said. “This is Alex McKnight.”

  “Ah yes, Mr. McKnight.”

  “Listen, before anything else, I just want to say I’m sorry about the last time we talked on the phone. I was under a lot of stress, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I know you were just following the rules.”

  “That’s quite all right.”

  “Everything’s pretty much over up here,” I said. “It wasn’t Rose, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said. “He’s been right here the whole time.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Although it turns out that there was a man up here who had been in contact with Rose. So I was just curious about how that might have happened. I’m sure you keep records on visits and letters. You probably even have to read the mail, right?”

  “We do.”

  “Listen, Mr. Browning, I know I don’t have any official reason to ask you this. But just for my own sanity, please, is there any way you can tell me if Rose has been contacted by a man named Raymond Julius?”

  “Why don’t you ask him that yourself?” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I called your Mr. Uttley this morning,” he said. “He wasn’t in his office, so I left a message.”

  “He’s gone,” I said. “He left for vacation. Why did you call him?”

  “I called him to tell him that Maximilian Rose has agreed to see you.”

  I stood there with the phone in my hand.

  “Mr. McKnight? Are you there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “When can I see him?”

  “At your convenience. Believe me, he’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’ll come today,” I said.

  “I thought you were in the Upper Peninsula,” he said. “That’s got to be, what, six or seven hours away?”

  “I’ll leave right now,” I said.

  “Our visitation stops at three o’clock,” he said. “You’ll never make it.”

  “Mr. Browning, please,” I said. I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting. I had had enough sleepless nights for one lifetime. “There’s gotta be a way you can let me see him today. I can’t tell you how important this is.”

  I heard him grumbling on the phone. “Mr. McKnight, you are one genuine pain in the ass, you know that?”

  “Does that mean you’ll let me see him today?”

  “Don’t kill yourself getting down here, you hear me? The speed limit is fifty-five miles an hour.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  “Ask for me at the gate,” he said. “Otherwise, they’ll never let you in.”

  I hung up and ran to the truck. I made it to the Lower Peninsula in less than an hour, with about 250 miles to go. I had the speedometer up in the eighties most of the way.
If my truck didn’t go into a death rattle at ninety, I would have gone even faster.

  I didn’t want to waste another minute. The answers, the resolution, my own sanity. It was all there waiting for me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE STATE PRISON of Southern Michigan, otherwise known as Jackson State, is sixty miles west of Detroit, past Ann Arbor, out in the middle of the state where the cows and the cornfields are. The prison itself is a city unto itself, a sprawling gray complex of cement and razor wire. I knew there were several wings there, with different security classifications. I was headed for maximum security.

  I had driven straight through in just over five-and-a-half hours, stopping only once to fill up the truck and to use the bathroom. I splashed some cold water on my face, got back in the truck, and kept driving. The plastic on my window kept most of the cold air out, but it was still noisy. My ears were still humming when I finally turned off the highway at Jackson.

  I gave the man at the gate Browning’s name. He looked at his clipboard, asked to see my driver’s license, and then let me through. I parked in the visitor’s lot and went into the waiting room. There were a hundred plastic chairs lined up in rows. A tile floor, a row of lockers on one wall, a glass trophy case on the other. I had the place to myself because the regular visiting hours were over. I gave my name to the guard sitting behind the bulletproof window. He took down one of the clipboards off the wall. There must have been twenty of them. Somewhere in the city of Jackson there was probably a man who made a nice living supplying clipboards to the prison. The guard looked at his clipboard and told me to have a seat.

  I went over to the trophy case and looked inside. It was all marksmanship trophies, given out to the guards with the best scores. There was a trophy for each year, going back a good thirty years. It was interesting psychology, displaying these trophies to the people who were here to visit the inmates.

  After a few minutes I heard a door buzz behind me. A man came into the waiting room. He was a large man with a crew cut. He looked like a drill sergeant. “Mr. McKnight,” he said. “I’m Browning.”

  I shook his hand.

  “Right this way,” he said. He led me back through the same door. We came to another window, with another guard behind it with more clipboards on the wall. “Just step through here,” he said as he walked through a metal detector.