Blood is the Sky am-5

by Steve Hamilton

  That little scene up on the cliff. Vinnie not wanting to talk about it, or to even think about what to do next. That wasn’t the Vinnie I knew.

  We sat in the lodge for at least an hour. It was better than any sauna I had ever been in. The sweat rolled down over my face, as if every poison in my body and every bad thought in my mind were being drawn out by the heat. Nobody said a word.

  Finally, one man opened a flap and we all crawled out. The air felt as cold as the water had been in that lake, but I didn’t shiver. Instead I felt a tingling all over my body, and a lightness in my chest. I put my clothes back on, moving in slow motion. When I was dressed, I looked around for Vinnie, but didn’t see him. He was still in the lodge, fast asleep.

  I helped a couple of his cousins carry him out of the lodge and into one of the cars. He didn’t wake up, and we didn’t bother dressing him. We just wrapped him up in blankets.

  “Just take him to his house,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “We’ll take him home,” Buck said.

  “Good, I’ll follow you.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean we’ll take him to the reservation.” He stood there in front of the car door, his body between me and Vinnie. He was four inches taller than me. The other cousins were all looking at me.

  This was the look. I’d seen it before. Between one moment and the next, my welcome among them had ended. I was an outsider again.

  “Thank you for everything you did,” Buck said. “We’ll take care of Vinnie now.”

  Thank you, he says. The man says thank you and they’ll take care of him now. I had a sudden urge to fight them, all of them at once. They would have taken me apart, but what the hell.

  “He’s my brother now,” I said. “You understand? Vinnie’s my brother.”

  Nobody said a word.

  “You can’t change that,” I said. “This time you’re not going to come between us.”

  Buck didn’t move.

  There was nothing else to do. I shook my head and left. As I looked in the rearview mirror, they were all still standing there, watching me drive away.

  I headed back home. I pointed the truck straight down the road and I drove. I was tired and used up and empty. Finally, I pulled off the road. I sat there for five or six minutes, staring off into nothing. The wind kicked up and whistled past the windows. I thought about how good it would feel to go sit by the fire at Jackie’s place. Put your feet up and forget about it.

  Then I turned the truck around and went back the way I came. I drove due east, straight toward Sault Ste. Marie.

  If I was going to do something stupid, I couldn’t do it alone. And if Vinnie couldn’t help me now, then I knew there was only one other choice.

  It was time to talk to my old partner, Leon Prudell.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I found Leon Prudell at the big custom motor sports shop on Three Mile Road. It was the kind of place that’ll sell you a snowmobile in the winter, an outboard motor in the spring, and a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle for hunting season. I found Leon in the showroom, pointing out the features of an Arctic Cat to a prospective buyer and his young son. “This is a hell of a sled,” I heard him say. I knew that’s what the real riders call them. They’re sleds, not snowmobiles.

  When he spotted me, he stood up straight and switched off the sales pitch. “Excuse me,” he said, and then he came over to me and took my right hand.

  “Leon,” I said. He was the same old Leon, 240 pounds of nervous energy and wild orange hair-the Leon who had always wanted to be a private eye, the Leon who introduced himself to me by trying to take me apart in Jackie’s parking lot, and who would later talk me into becoming his silent partner in the short-lived Prudell-McKnight Investigations. He tried to go it alone after that, but it didn’t work out. Sault Ste. Marie just isn’t the right market for a private investigator, especially when everybody in town remembers you as the goofy fat kid in the back of the class. That’s why he was selling snowmobiles now. He wore a black windbreaker with the name of the business on one side of the zipper, and “Leon” on the other.

  “Alex, my God. Are you all right?”

  “You must have heard-”

  “Of course I did. You were in the paper. You and Vinnie. I’m sorry I didn’t get out to the funeral.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “Listen, I hate to bother you, but I don’t know who else to ask.”

  “Hey, once a partner, always a partner,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s about what happened,” I said. “I’m trying to find some things out.”

  “Oh yeah?” The way he said it, the way his eyes came alive, I knew I had him hooked. It made me feel even worse.

  “I’m sorry, Leon. It’s just-”

  “I’m almost done here, all right? You hang tight for a few minutes. We’ll go somewhere and talk.”

  When he turned around, the man and his son had disappeared.

  “I blew your sale,” I said.

  “Nah, they weren’t buying. I could tell. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Can you just leave?”

  “It’s slow today,” he said. He went in the back for a moment. I heard him talking to somebody, and then he came back out. “Where do you want to go?”

  “You still have your computer at your house? You see, I just wanted to look up a couple of names.”

  “Say no more,” he said. “Let’s go to my house. I’ll drive. Just leave your truck here.”

  “But then you gotta bring me back.”

  “It’s all right, Alex. Come on. You can brief me on the case in the car.”

  Brief me on the case, that’s the kind of thing Leon would say. Two minutes around me and he was already talking like a private eye again.

  He opened the car door for me and got in the driver’s seat. It was the same old red Chevy Nova he’d had forever. How he could drive this piece of crap in the snow was a mystery to me. “It’s good to see you,” I said. “Everybody at home okay?”

  “Yeah, Eleanor’s a lot happier,” he said as he pulled out of the parking lot. “Now that things have settled down a little bit.” Settled down meaning he didn’t have his little office in town anymore, and he wasn’t buying any more high-tech listening devices or hidden cameras.

  “I feel bad,” I said. “I haven’t even seen you since the last time you saved my ass.”

  “Alex, stop apologizing and tell me what’s going on.”

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s the deal.” I ran through the whole story again, just as I had done for Jackie. A few more days had passed since the last time I told it. I should have felt more distance from it, but I didn’t. It still felt like something that had just happened to me.

  “The funny thing is,” I said as I got toward the end of the story, “every time I say that name, Red Albright, it gets more familiar to me. I’m starting to think I’ve heard that name before, somewhere.”

  “Well, you said he lives in Detroit, right? You were a police officer down there, when?”

  “For eight years. Up until 1984.”

  “When you were shot.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you ran into him when you were on the force?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

  “Well, we’ll work on that name,” he said. “I still have access to my databases.”

  “Doesn’t that stuff cost you money?”

  He hesitated. “Yeah, a little bit.”

  “You’re not thinking of going back into business, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m done with that. Really.”

  I wasn’t sure that I should believe him. But on this day I was glad he could still think like a private investigator.

  When we got to his house, I gave his wife Eleanor a hug. She was still just as big as her husband, and she still looked strong enough to bench-press me. If I had any doubts, she gave me a squeeze that almost
broke a few ribs.

  But as happy as she was to see me, there was something else in her eyes when she looked at me. She had always humored Leon with his private-eye dreams, until those dreams almost got him killed. Now that he was making a safe and steady living selling snowmobiles, his old partner Alex was probably not the most welcome sight.

  “I’m helping him with something,” Leon said. “We’re just gonna look somebody up.”

  She gave us a weak smile and a nod of her head as he took me into the guest room. He had his computer in there, along with a printer. “Have a seat,” he said. “We’ll get this thing going. Tell me the name of the individual in question.”

  There he goes again, I thought. Individual in question. “The man’s name is Red Albright,” I said.

  “He’s one of the deceased.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll try a P-search,” he said. “It’s a standard person search, using most of the public databases. You say he lives in Detroit?”

  “DeMers said he came from Grosse Pointe.”

  “I’ll try all of Michigan,” he said.

  I sat there and watched him type.

  “This won’t take long,” he said. “Let’s see what comes back.”

  A few seconds later, he had exactly one hit to show me. “Here’s a Red Albright in Port Huron.”

  “No, that can’t be it,” I said. “I mean, Red is obviously a nickname, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure you’re right. If I try Albright, though, we’re gonna get a lot of names.”

  “How about his brother?” I said. “His name is Dal.”

  “Probably short for something,” Leon said. “But that’s okay. We’ll look for any first name that begins with those letters.”

  He typed that in and waited a few seconds. A few names came back. “Here’s one,” he said. “Dallas Albright, in Grosse Pointe.”

  “That’s gotta be him,” I said. “Can you give me that address?”

  “Done,” he said. He hit a button and the printer came to life.

  “What else can we find out about him?”

  Leon smiled at me. “What else? How about his whole life? Employment history, court records… It’s all out there, Alex. Yours is, too.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Well, there are a couple of things we can try right now,” he said. He was off and running. Within the next hour, we had found out that Dallas Albright was a part owner of Albright Enterprises in Detroit, and that one of the other owners was named Roland Albright. We assumed Roland was Red. We found his home address, too, and an address for Albright Enterprises on the east side of Detroit. The one thing we didn’t find was any mention of either man in the criminal justice system. They were both clean.

  We tried Hank Gannon, too. There was nothing to find, outside of his off-season address in Sudbury and his pilot’s certification.

  “I’ve got a friend over at the newspaper,” Leon said. “He’ll run a LexisNexis on them if I ask real nice.”

  “That’s the one that searches the newspapers, all over the country?”

  “Yeah, it goes back about twenty years.”

  “This is really great, Leon. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  That sparkle in his eyes faded away as he stood up. “Yeah, well…” he said, looking down at his computer. “It’s no problem.”

  “You miss it, don’t you.”

  “It was nothing but trouble.”

  “You’re good at it,” I said. “Better than I ever was.”

  He laughed at that. “That’s not saying much, Alex. You always hated it.”

  If only he knew, I thought. But today, what I hated was seeing him like this, trying to live a certain kind of life instead of doing the one thing he loved. I never thought I’d admit it, but I missed being his partner.

  And here was another friend, come to think about it, who I hadn’t seen much of lately. Another lost connection. But this one was mostly my fault.

  “I should get out of here,” I said. I looked out his window. The sun had gone down. “I think your family ate dinner without you.”

  “Let’s take you back to your truck.”

  I gave Eleanor another hug on the way out. The two kids were sitting at the kitchen table, doing homework. They gave me the same look their mother had given me. When Alex is around, it usually means trouble. Leon stood there putting his coat on, which made the whole scene look even worse. I was obviously dragging him out into the dark night.

  “I’m just gonna run Alex back,” Leon said.

  Nobody in the room was buying it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as we got into his car. “Your family’s all worried now.”

  “They’ll be all right. When I get back, they’ll see it was no big deal.”

  “I shouldn’t be putting you through this,” I said. “Or them. This was a mistake.”

  He drove out to the highway and headed north, back to the motor shop. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You say Vinnie’s brother was on parole.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not trying to convince you he was getting in trouble again, but hear me out, okay?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You’ve got a convicted drug offender, some men with money, and a bush pilot. Doesn’t that sort of add up to something?”

  “Of course it does. If I didn’t know anything about Tom, I’d say the combination looks pretty bad.”

  “Do you really know him? I mean, you know Vinnie-”

  “And if I’m seeing Tom through Vinnie, I might not be seeing a very clear picture.”

  He shrugged. There was nothing to say.

  “What am I gonna do? Go hang around the rez and ask about Tom? Find out the real story?”

  “You wouldn’t get very far with that,” he said. “You probably need to talk to Vinnie about this.”

  “He’s kind of unavailable right now. Maybe in a couple days.” I didn’t feel like talking about it.

  He kept driving. The road was empty. It was a lonely October night in the Upper Peninsula. Firearm season was still a week away.

  “Just watch yourself, okay?” he said after a while. “I don’t have to tell you, these might be some pretty bad people.”

  “I know.”

  “Is your gun loaded?”

  “I don’t have one anymore,” I said. “I threw it in the lake, remember?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  “You just want to find out what really happened.”

  “Yes.”

  “And who did this to Vinnie’s brother.”

  I thought about it. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Leon said. “Whatever you say.”

  I looked at him. “Don’t do it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t get me a gun.”

  “Who said I was going to get you a gun?”

  “I know you.”

  “Obtaining a handgun for someone else is illegal in the state of Michigan,” he said, as only Leon Prudell could manage with a straight face. “I’d lose my license.”

  “You don’t have a license anymore,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought I caught a little smile.

  A few minutes later, Leon dropped me off at my truck. I thanked him again and sent him on his way. On the way home, I stopped in at the Glasgow and had a late dinner. Vinnie’s cabin was dark when I drove past on my way home. It looked small and lonely.

  I went to my own cabin. Since coming back home, this was the first night that sleep didn’t come easy.

  I had some more bow hunters leaving the next day. When I was done with them I drove down to the Glasgow for lunch, passing Vinnie’s empty cabin. I passed it again coming back.

  You’re gonna drive yourself crazy, I thought. You’re gonna make yourself absolutely insane.

  I thought about giving Leon a call. I decided not to. If Elea
nor answered, I’d just upset her again. So I decided to do something even worse. I called the Hearst OPP Detachment and asked for Constable Reynaud.

  It took a minute for somebody to find her, and then I heard her voice. The distant static on the line made it sound like she was on the moon. “McKnight? What’s the matter?”

  “I just wanted to ask you something,” I said. “Tom’s body came home yesterday. I assume that means you’re done with the forensics.”

  “Is there a question in there?”

  “Constable, please. Can I call you Natalie?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  I held the phone away from my mouth and counted to three. “Look,” I finally said. “Have you ever been to an Ojibwa funeral?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “It lasts four or five days. So I’ve had all that time to think about it. Isn’t there anything you can tell me?”

  “McKnight, I suppose there’s one thing you might want to know. This is something you can share with the family, when the time is right. Tom was shot first, and then burned. He wasn’t alive when they set him on fire.”

  “What about the others?”

  For a moment there was nothing but the faraway static. “The others weren’t so lucky.”

  “He must have struggled,” I said. “They had to shoot him.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Do you have any more information on why this happened?”

  “I can’t really say, okay? I will tell you that we’re not close to anything.”

  “And how are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m just fine, McKnight. You don’t have to ask.”

  “I told you before, I’ve been there. I know how it is.”

  “Yeah, you told me. Thank you very much. Now if that’s all…”

  “Nobody’s looking you in the eye, are they,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. More static, humming on the line.