A Cold Day in Paradise

by Steve Hamilton

  “Sit down, Prudell.”

  “Here, let me take my apron off for you. You’ll be needing this.” There were a couple truckers at the counter, a waitress serving them, another one just sitting in a booth. They all looked over at us.

  “Just sit down,” I said.

  “All you got to do is keep these tables clear,” he said. “And once an hour you gotta go clean up the bathrooms. I’m sure you’ll be able to handle it.”

  “Prudell,” I said. I was trying to control myself. I was really trying. “If you don’t shut up and sit down, I’m going to hurt you. Do you understand me? I’m going to beat the hell out of you right here in the restaurant.”

  “McKnight, if you don’t get out of here right now—”

  I grabbed his left hand and bent it back against his wrist. It had always been a great way to convince someone to get into the back of a squad car. Not as dramatic as an arm behind the back, but just as effective. Prudell gave out a little yelp and then he sat down in the booth. The whole place was watching us now, but I didn’t care.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said. “You trying to break my wrist?”

  I sat down next to him. It was a tight fit. “Listen to me very carefully,” I said. “Do you remember that night in the bar, the first night you came after me? I know you were drunk, but try to remember what you said to me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said I took your job and now you were going to go broke and you had a family to take care of, remember? You gave me the whole sob story about your kids not going to Disney World and your wife not getting a new car and all that shit. And then you said something else, something about a man who was helping you out. You said he was down on his luck and the only thing keeping him together was running errands for you and feeling like he was doing something important. Do you remember that?”

  “I remember,” he said. “It was all true. You really fucked over a lot of people. Not just me.”

  It had been five months and change since I took Prudell’s job. He had nursed his grudge for a few months until he had finally worked up the nerve to face me.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Whatever you say. I ruined all your lives. Now just tell me his name.” “The guy who was working for me?” “Yes,” I said. “Tell me his name.” “His name is Julius,” he said. “Raymond Julius.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A LONG SILENCE passed while it sank in. Prudell slipped me a quick elbow in the ribs, but it didn’t get him out of the booth. It just made me even madder. “Do that again and I’ll take your head off,” I said.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve, McKnight. Just let me out of here.”

  “Where does he live?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “The hell you don’t. The guy worked for you.”

  “I only saw his house once,” he said. “That was a long time ago, before you—”

  “Yeah yeah, before I fucked you both over. We’ve been through that already. You were at his house, but you don’t know where it is? What, were you blindfolded?”

  “It’s in the Soo,” he said. “On the west side of town somewhere. I don’t remember exactly where, all right?”

  “Have you talked to him since then?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  I sat there and thought about it. Finally, I got up out of the booth and said, “Let’s go.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yes you are. We’re going to go find his house.”

  “Like hell I am. I’m in the middle of working here.”

  “Go tell your boss you need to take a little break. Call it a family emergency.”

  He worked his way out of the booth, adjusted his white apron, and picked up a plate. “You can go fuck yourself,” he said.

  I counted to ten in my head while he cleared the table. “Prudell,” I said. “You got two choices. Number one is I bounce you off every wall in this place and then throw you through a window. I’m sure I’ll get arrested. I don’t care anymore. Number two is you help me find Julius’s house, and I pay you five hundred dollars for your time.”

  He looked up at me. “You expect me to believe that? You’re going to pay me?”

  “You’re a private investigator, aren’t you? Consider it a case.”

  “I was a private investigator,” he said. “Now I’m a busboy.”

  “What’s your choice, Prudell?”

  “You’re something else, you know that? You’re a real piece of work.”

  “Choose, Prudell.”

  He dropped the plates on the table and went back through a couple of swinging doors to the kitchen. I didn’t know if he was calling the police, or getting a big knife, or sneaking out the back door. Finally, he burst back out through the doors, untying his apron. A frowning little man who had to be his boss came out behind him.

  We walked out to the parking lot without saying a word. He wasn’t happy about the missing window in my truck, especially when he sat down on some of the glass I hadn’t quite cleaned up.

  I started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. “Start talking,” I said. “Tell me about Raymond Julius.”

  “God, it’s freezing in here,” he said. It was about thirty degrees outside. I’m not sure what the windchill would be if you were riding around at sixty miles an hour in a truck with no passenger side window. The man didn’t even have a coat on.

  “Raymond,” I said again, nice and slow. “Julius.”

  “What can I tell you? He was kind of weird. He was way into all that militia stuff. Hated the government.”

  “So he belonged to a militia?”

  “No. He tried, I think. It didn’t work out. He was more into being a detective than being a soldier. Or a patriot or whatever the hell they call themselves.”

  “He had guns?”

  “Yes,” Prudell said. “The man had guns. He didn’t have permits for them, but he had guns.”

  “Did he have a nine-millimeter pistol?”

  “Don’t know for sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Would he know how to get his hands on a silencer?”

  “I’m sure he would,” he said. “Why are you asking me all this?”

  “Which way are we going?” I said. “Three Mile Road? You said the west side of town. Be more specific.”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I remember getting off there, I think. I had to pick him up one day when his car broke down.”

  “Old junker? No muffler?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  I took the exit and headed west. “Now where?”

  “I told you, I don’t remember.” He peered out at the road, running his fingers through his hair. “I think it was up by the industrial park.”

  “How did he start working for you?”

  “I had a listing in the Yellow Pages. He called me up, wanted to know if he could work for me. I told him no, he kept calling me up again and again. Every day. Said he’d do anything, run errands, take phone calls. Said he wanted to be a private detective so bad, he’d start out working for free.”

  “What, he expected to work his way up to investigator?”

  “That’s how he saw it. I explained to him how it worked. You gotta be certified by the state, you gotta get a gun permit. That really set him off. Like I said, that man hated the government so much. Far as he was concerned, the state of Michigan was the only thing preventing him from being an investigator.”

  “And you let this guy work for you?”

  “The man was begging me. Said it was a matter of life or death to him. So I figured, hell, I’ll take him with me one day, just make him get me lunch, cover me while I went to the bathroom. I was just watching lifeguards, writing down their routine. I figured he would see how boring it was and forget all about it.”

  “That was the place out on Drummond Island.”

  “Yeah,” h
e said. “I watched those lifeguards for three days straight, wrote out a detailed report. I tried to do a good job for Uttley. I guess it wasn’t good enough, huh?”

  I looked over at him. He was looking out the window into the cold night. The wind was whipping his crazy red hair in every direction.

  “Julius is dead,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking out the window.

  “Did you hear me? He’s dead.”

  “I thought so,” he said. He looked at me for a second, and then looked at the dashboard. “The way you were talking about him.”

  “He was stalking me for months,” I said. “He killed three men, including Edwin Fulton. He tried to kill me, too.”

  Prudell just nodded.

  “Doesn’t surprise you?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t have expected something like that from him, but… hell, who knows anymore. I remember, he’d get this look in his eyes sometimes. Made me wonder why I ever let him hang around me.”

  “I killed him,” I said.

  He turned and looked at me. He didn’t say anything.

  “I had no choice,” I said.

  He just nodded his head.

  I came to Fourteenth Street. “Do I turn here?”

  “I think so,” he said. “I think I came this way. I remember having to look around for his street.”

  We came to a stop sign. I could keep going north on Fourteenth Street or turn east on Eighth Avenue. “Which way?”

  “I’m thinking,” he said. We just sat there in the truck. One single street lamp burned above us. It sounded eerily quiet without the rush of wind through the open window. “Go straight,” he finally said. “I think it’s up this way.”

  We passed small brick houses built close together, most of them at least fifty years old. This was one of the original neighborhoods in the Soo, back when there was an Air Force base just across the highway, long before the casinos and the tourists. We went up Fourteenth Street, past Seventh and Sixth, and then we ran into a dead end. “I remember now,” he said. “I came to this dead end and had to turn around. Go back down to Sixth Street.”

  I did as he said. I was getting disoriented in this maze of numbered streets. It wasn’t like in New York City, where all the numbers make some kind of sense, and where the streets run one way and the avenues run another way. “All right, now go to Thirteenth Street and take that all the way up until it ends.” We passed Fifth Street and then the road ended at Fourth. “Let’s try a left,” he said.

  “It feels like we’re going in circles,” I said.

  “Feel free to take over the navigation,” he said.

  As we worked our way west on Fourth Street, the houses got smaller and smaller. Most of them had every window and door covered with plastic. With the bay and all its violent weather less than a mile away, I couldn’t see how some of these places were still standing.

  “This is starting to look familiar,” he said. As we rounded a bend, a sign told us that were now on Oak Street. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I remember the tree names. There’ll be some more tree streets around here. I’m pretty sure his house is on one of them.”

  We worked our way through Ash Street, and then onto Walnut and then Chestnut. Prudell kept staring out of the open window and then looking back across at my side of the street. “I know we’re close,” he said. “I know it’s in this neighborhood.”

  “We’ve been down every street,” I said. The man was being more cooperative than I could have hoped, but even so my patience was starting to fray around the edges.

  “No, we haven’t,” he said. “As soon as we see his house, I know I’ll recognize it. It had this awful siding on it. I can picture it in my mind. It looked like a mangy dog, that siding. All this hairy stuff on it like it was shedding. That house was such a dump. He was renting it. I remember him complaining about the landlord, all the stuff that was broken. The pipes used to freeze every night in the winter, he said. The way he talked about that landlord, I swear. All the things he said he would do to him if he ever got the chance.”

  “He never tried anything?”

  “I don’t think so. I think he was afraid to even talk to him.”

  I thought about that while he looked down the street. It was a dark corner in an unknown neighborhood. The Soo is a friendly place in general, but you never knew who’s going to take exception to a strange truck cruising back and forth in front of the house. I was sure there were a lot of guns around here, high-powered deer rifles with scopes, shotguns.

  “How about we keep moving?” I said.

  “Wait a minute, now that I think of it, there was a street that I missed the first time through here. I didn’t even see it until I doubled back. I think it was another tree name.”

  I turned the truck around and headed back up Chestnut. We took the right onto Ash, and went all the way down the street to Walnut. “This time, keep going straight,” he said.

  “It’s just a dead end down here,” I said.

  “No, there’s another street down here, see?”

  He was right. You didn’t see it until you came to the very end, a side street named Hickory.

  I took the left and saw the police car immediately. I held onto the wheel and swung the truck all the way through, like I was just turning around. “Where are you going?” he said. “His house is down that street.”

  “There’s a police car in front of the house,” I said. “I don’t want them to see me.”

  “Just cruise by like you’re looking for something else.”

  “No, they might be watching for my truck,” I said. “I wouldn’t put it past Maven.” I went back up Walnut Street a few houses and pulled over.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  It was a good question. In the back of my mind I knew that there was only one thing I could do if I wanted to answer all the questions. There was no way that Maven would ever let me see those papers. The news clippings, the diary. I couldn’t think of a way to force him to show them to me. Technically, they were all pieces of evidence that would be used to close the file on three murders.

  “I have to go inside his house,” I said.

  “Are you totally insane?”

  “I have to,” I said. “If I don’t, this is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  “You’re going to break into a sealed house,” he said. “You’re going to corrupt evidence. That’s a felony.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “There’s a policeman right outside the front door.”

  “I know,” I said. It might be Dave, I thought, the same man who was keeping watch at my house. They could be sticking him with more offshift duty. But how would I know for sure unless I went up and knocked on his window? Excuse me, is that Dave in there? Any chance of letting me inside the house for a minute?

  “So how are you going to get in the house?” he said.

  “When you were here before, did you go inside?”

  “Yes, for a second.”

  “Was there a backdoor?”

  He just looked at me for a long moment. “I think so, yes.”

  “Good.”

  “You really need to do this, don’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m coming with you,” he said.

  “The hell you are.”

  “I’m not gonna just sit here in this truck while you go breaking into that house. I’m an accessory already. I might as well go with you.”

  “Why would you want to help me?” I said. “I thought you hated me.”

  “Who says I’m going to help you? I just want to see how you do it. I want to see how good you are.”

  “I think you should just stay here,” I said.

  “Back at the restaurant, you gave me two choices, remember? Now I’m giving you two choices. Either we go together or I go wake up that cop.”

  We went together. Leaving the truck where it was, we made our w
ay through the woods to the back of the house. I brought a pair of work gloves from the truck, a flashlight that I would only turn on if we absolutely needed it, and a set of lock picks. I had ordered them the same week I had gotten my license, but I’d never thought I’d get to use them. If I had, I would have practiced.

  The back door was maybe thirty feet from the woods. The night was dark enough, nobody was going to see us. The houses on either side looked deserted. We crept up to the back door and knelt down on the ground. I snapped on the flashlight for a second and took a quick look. There were a couple garbage cans, an old lawn-mower. The siding on the house was just like Prudell described it, rough and shaggy like a shedding dog. There was police tape across the door.

  “You don’t want to break this tape,” Prudell whispered tome.

  “I will if I have to,” I said.

  “Wait, turn the light back on for a second.” When I did, he stood up and traced the line of tape to its end. When he pulled on it, it came right off. “Very sloppy work,” he said. “It comes right off this siding. They should have run it all the way around the house.”

  “I’ll be sure to give Maven that tip,” I said. I took my gloves off, took the set of picks out of my pocket, and began working on the door. With the tension bar set, I tried a couple rakes to see if I could get lucky. The lock didn’t give. I settled down to working the tumblers one by one. Prudell stood by, making sounds of impatience. A cold wind kicked up, the kind of wind that starts somewhere near the North Pole, picks up a load of moisture off the lake, and then hits you across the face like a frozen porcupine. I lost the tension on the bar and had to start all over. One tumbler. Two tumblers. Three. And then I lost the tension again. The top half of the door was all window, so I just slipped my right hand back into the glove and took dead aim.

  Prudell stopped my hand. “What’s the matter with you?” he hissed. “Give me those.” He took the picks from me, set the tension bar, and then gave the tumblers three quick rakes. “How’d you ever become a private eye, anyway?” he said as he opened the door for me.

  I stepped into the house first. Prudell came in behind me and gently bumped the door closed with his hip. He doesn’t want to leave fingerprints, I thought. Not a bad idea. I put my work gloves back on.