Misery Bay

by Steve Hamilton

  “I came out here to ask for your help,” he said.

  I stared at him for a moment, waiting for it to make sense. It didn’t happen.

  “I didn’t want to call you,” he said. “I figured his is the kind of thing you need to do in person.”

  Jackie wandered over at that point, a bar towel over his shoulder.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is Roy Maven,” I said, “chief of police in the Soo.”

  “Okay,” Jackie said, reaching over to shake the man’s hand. “At the risk of being indelicate … I was led to believe that you and Alex hate each other.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. Just call it a persistent lack of liking each other.”

  Jackie looked at me for confirmation. I just shrugged.

  “Well, as long as we’re playing nice here, how ’bout we get you a beer. Alex? A Molson?”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Maven said.

  “You don’t understand,” Jackie said. “This is a real Molson, bottled in Canada. From Alex’s personal stash. He doesn’t drink anything else.”

  “McKnight, you drive all the way to Canada to get your beer?”

  “Hell if he drives,” Jackie said. “I do.”

  “Well, damn,” Maven said. “In that case I’ll have to have one. I am out of uniform, after all.”

  The evening is just about complete, I thought. All we need now is dinner and a movie.

  He looked into the fire as we waited for Jackie to come back with the beer. When we both had our bottles, Maven tipped his back and took a long drink.

  “That ain’t bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

  “So seriously,” I said, “quit joking around and tell me why you’re here.”

  “You really think I came all the way out here to have a beer with you? I meant what I said. I need your help.”

  “With what?”

  He looked around the place, like somebody else might be listening in on our conversation. Then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Can I smoke in here?”

  “Jackie would prefer that you don’t.”

  He put the cigarettes away. He fidgeted with his bottle for a few seconds, then he stood up.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go outside.”

  Now we’re getting to it, I thought. He really did come here to fight.

  “If I don’t smoke a cigarette, I’m gonna kill someone,” he said. “This is hard enough as it is, believe me.”

  I made him wait for a three count, then I finally got up and grabbed my coat. Who needs a comfortable chair in front of the fire when you can go freeze your ass off with a man you can’t stand?

  He opened the door and I followed him into the darkness. He took a few steps along the side of the building, staying out of the wind. He pulled out his cigarettes and his lighter. It was an old-school silver flip lighter. He cupped his hands around the end of his cigarette as he lit it, then he snapped the lighter shut and put it in his pocket. He took a deep draw and let out a stream of smoke.

  “So tell me what the hell’s going on,” I said.

  “I told you this wasn’t easy. So cut me some slack, eh? I came to ask you to do some work for a friend of mine.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “You still have the private investigator’s license?”

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Do you still have the license or not?”

  “It’s a moot point, I told you I don’t—”

  “Okay, so you have the license. That’s good.”

  “Maven, I swear to God…”

  “Relax, McKnight. Will you just shut up for once and listen? Here’s the situation. I’ve got this friend, Charles Razniewski. Everybody calls him Raz. I used to ride with him a lot when I was with the state police.”

  “When was that?”

  “Hell, that was what, ten years ago now? I was getting sick of the politics so I left to try something else. Eventually ended up taking the job up here.”

  “The state police’s loss was Sault Ste. Marie’s gain, you mean.”

  “I told you to shut up, okay? So Raz, he ended up leaving, too, just before I did. But in his case he went federal. He’s been a U.S. marshal ever since. Based down in Detroit. Your old stomping grounds.”

  “The marshals had an office on Lafayette. I wonder if he was there when I was.”

  “Small world, who knows. But here’s the point of all this. He’s got one kid, Charles Jr.”

  Maven stopped and looked out into the parking lot. The wind picked up and the pine trees started swaying.

  “God damn,” he said. “I mean to say, he had one kid. Here’s the thing. You see, Charlie, he was going to school out at Michigan Tech. Just starting his last semester, right after Christmas break, he goes back up to school for some New Year’s Eve party, and then…”

  He stopped and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. I waited for him to get to what was obviously a hard thing to say.

  “He hanged himself. From a tree. There was some alcohol in his system, I guess, but … I mean, he went out on his own and he drove down by the lake and he hanged himself.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “No note. There usually isn’t.”

  “I know, but…”

  But nothing, I thought. The man was right. Despite everything you see in the movies, no matter how somebody kills himself, they almost never leave a note.

  “I can’t imagine,” he said. “I mean, if it was my daughter Olivia…”

  He took another drag off his cigarette and looked away, shaking his head.

  “I don’t understand, Chief. I mean, this shouldn’t happen to anybody. Your old friend or anybody’s old friend. But what does this have to do with me?”

  “This whole thing has been eating Raz alive, okay? He can’t make any sense of it. If the kid was upset about something specific … about a girl or something. But no. He’s just … gone. Like that.”

  “I still don’t see how I can help here.”

  “He wants to know. That’s all. If there’s anything to know. He just wants to understand what was going through his kid’s head before he died. That’s all the man wants.”

  “How can anybody possibly know that?”

  “Maybe you can’t. Maybe this whole thing is just a waste of time. But he wants somebody to try. He’s already talked to the Houghton County Sheriff’s office, but they can’t do anything more for him. It’s not like they’re gonna spend much more time on this. So he’s thinking maybe if somebody talks to some of Charlie’s friends…”

  “Wait a minute, are you talking about me going out there and doing that?”

  “He can’t do it. There’s no way he can go out there again. Not yet. Even if he could, there’s not much chance they’d really be straight with him. There are some things you just can’t talk about with your dead friend’s father, you know?”

  “But hold on. Time out.”

  “I can’t do it. I’ve already talked to the sheriff out there. We didn’t exactly hit it off, but no matter what, I can’t go out there and start grilling people. I mean, I know how I can come across sometimes. I think any of these kids, they’d just feel like they were getting the third degree and there’s no way they’d open up to me. What Raz needs is an impartial third party, somebody who’s reasonably good at talking to people. And if he hires you on an official basis…”

  “No. Chief, please. Even if I was going to do this, there’s no way I’d take money for it.”

  “You’re not getting it.” He was starting to rock back and forth now, shivering from the cold and maybe something else. Some kind of raw energy he was trying to burn off. “Don’t you see? He needs to hire you. He needs to pay you some money to go talk to these kids. Find out what you can about his son’s state of mind. Talk to the sheriff’s office, find out if there’s anything else they can tell you. About any kind of trouble he might have been in. If he does that, then
he’s doing something. See what I mean? Paying you makes it real to him. So even if you don’t find out anything, he can go home feeling like he did everything he could.”

  “Why me?”

  “Well, you’ve got the license.”

  “I don’t use it. You know that. Why don’t you hire Leon Prudell?”

  He was the only other game in town. My former sometimes-partner, a man who grew up in the UP and who never wanted to be anything else other than a private investigator. Problem was, he was the fat goofy kid who sat in the back of the classroom and to most people around here, he’d never be anything else.

  “Prudell’s a clown,” Maven said. “At least you look competent.”

  “Gee, thanks. But seriously, Prudell’s a lot better than anybody realizes. He’d do a fantastic job with this.”

  “Look, McKnight, all you have to do is drive out there, talk to a few people, then drive back. Tell Raz what you heard. If that happened to be, ‘You know what, your son wasn’t depressed at all, there was absolutely no reason he should have killed himself, so it was just a tragic fluke thing, one bad night in his life and I’m awfully sorry.…’ Well, then, I mean if you said that, then everybody would be better off, I think.”

  “So now you’re even telling me what to say? Why bother even going out there? I can just say I did.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass. I’m just saying, if you don’t find out anything, that would be a good line to take. Is that too much to ask?”

  “Chief…”

  “And you make your three hundred bucks. Or whatever. I don’t see what the problem is.”

  “You’re something else,” I said. “You treat me like crap every time I see you, but now you think all you gotta do is wave some money in my face and I’ll help you.”

  He threw his cigarette down onto the gravel and reached out for me. He grabbed me by the coat and drew himself to within a few inches of my face. Here we go, I thought. We’re gonna have that fight in the parking lot after all.

  “I’m not asking for me,” he said, looking me dead in the eye. “I’m asking for my old friend, who’s spent the last three months living in hell. Okay? He’s going to be in my office tomorrow at ten o’clock. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to stop by and at least talk to him. Can you do that?”

  “Just once, would it kill you to say please?”

  I could feel him tightening his grip on my coat.

  “Please, Alex. Okay? Please.”

  Then he pushed me away from him and turned to go.

  “Ten o’clock,” he said as he got into his car. “Don’t be late.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, I helped Jackie close up the place for the night. It was starting to snow again when I went out to the truck. The whole town looked even emptier than usual. It actually gets pretty busy up here during prime snowmobile season, but tonight there were no vehicles on the road. The one traffic light blinked yellow above the only main intersection. It was so quiet I could actually hear the yellow bulb clicking on and off.

  I got in the truck and started it. I didn’t bother turning on the heat. It was only a quarter mile up the main road to my turnoff, then another quarter mile down the old logging road to the first of my cabins. I put the plow down as I rumbled along, past Vinnie’s house, then my first cabin. Instead of passing it, I decided to stop this time. I don’t know what made me do that, but I pulled up in front of the cabin and looked at it in the glow of my headlights. I could remember setting every single log with my father, back when he was alive and I was a kid who knew everything. I had lived in this cabin ever since coming back up here so many years later, my father long gone, my partner Franklin fresh in the ground with a wife and two little girls left behind, and me off the force by then, just looking to sell off the land and the cabins with it. Finding something up here that seemed to match the way I was feeling inside and deciding to stay. All the things that had happened since, both good and bad—until the day a killer from Toronto came looking for me and found someone else in the cabin instead. How many years later, and yet the feeling had been much the same. More blood, more blame. All on me, no matter what anyone else said. It was all on me.

  I hadn’t set foot in the place since that day. I had barely looked at it. Vinnie was right, I was avoiding the issue. I was working on every last detail in rebuilding the last cabin at the end of the road, unwilling to face the idea of moving back to where I belonged.

  After hearing Maven tell me about his friend living in hell after what had happened to him … that night as I looked at my cabin glowing in my headlights, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  I didn’t get out of the truck. I couldn’t bring myself to do that yet.

  I drove to the end of the road and went to sleep. Just another cold night in Paradise.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In my eight years as a Detroit police officer, I saw maybe half a dozen suicides. I say “maybe” because sometimes you just don’t know. Maven was right about them usually not leaving a note. I think the statistic I heard was fifteen percent, so maybe one out of seven will leave a note and the rest will just leave you wondering why. Or even if it was suicide at all. Somebody falls off a building, say—how do you know if it was intentional? Somebody takes too many hard drugs or a few extra sleeping pills. Or the all-time favorite way to kill yourself and leave everybody guessing—the single-car accident. Find yourself a big tree and get up some speed. If the road is dry and you don’t leave skid marks, you might be leaving behind that one single clue. But otherwise it’ll be a mystery forever.

  Hanging yourself from a tree, on the other hand … well, there was a hotshot assistant district attorney in Detroit and he had this Latin phrase I’d hear him use at least once a week. Res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself.

  * * *

  I hit the Soo around 9:45 that next morning. Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, second-largest city in the Upper Peninsula. Sister city to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and site of the Soo locks, where the big freighters line up to go from Lake Huron to Lake Superior, or vice-versa. I usually take Lakeshore Drive instead of the highway, because I like the way it winds around the shoreline, and I usually drive way too fast for my own good, because there isn’t a police officer, deputy, or state trooper in the entire Upper Peninsula who’ll give me a speeding ticket. It’s the one benefit of being an ex-cop who took three bullets on the job. That plus the three-quarter salary for the rest of my life.

  The City-County Building sits behind the courthouse on Portage Avenue, as charmless a rectangle as you’ll find anywhere in the state. If you were to take a shoebox and cover it with gray paper, then draw a couple doors and some windows, you’d have an exact scale replica. The county sheriff and his deputies all have offices there, and downstairs you’ll find the county jail. The Sault Ste. Marie police department has to share space in the same building, even borrow use of the jail, which makes you start to understand why Chief Maven is always so damned unhappy about everything. Add to that the state police barracks on Ashmun Street, the Coast Guard station next to the locks, and the U.S. Customs office at the border, and you see the rest of the picture. The man is as low on the totem pole as you can get, in his very own town.

  I parked and went inside. The receptionist told me to go right back to Chief Maven’s office. It was a trip I’d made on five or six occasions, and every single time I’d end up sitting in a hard plastic chair just outside his door for what felt like half a day. Today I was obviously on a different program. Chief Maven was there waiting for me as I came down the hallway.

  “McKnight,” he said. “You’re not late for once.”

  Maven showed me into the office, a place as welcoming and stylish as always with its four bare cement walls and lack of windows. Another man was already sitting in one of the guest chairs. He stood up when I entered. He was about my age, maybe two or three inches taller. Blond hair cut close, blue eyes. He looked sharp and he looked fit, maybe a little
tired now, a little used up. Which wasn’t a surprise. Still, I had no trouble believing he was a topnotch U.S. marshal.

  “This is Raz,” Maven said. “Raz, this is Alex.”

  “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  Raz just gave me a tight smile and a nod. Then Maven waved us into our chairs. Nobody said anything for a few seconds, so I figured I should dive in.

  “I understand you once rode with the chief,” I said. “Way back when.”

  “We were both at the Lansing post for about two years. Then I left the state police.”

  “Yeah, that would do it for me.” It was out of my mouth before I could even think about what I was saying. I mean, maybe this wasn’t the time for making jokes, but Raz gave me half a smile and even half a laugh. For a man who had just lost his son three months before, he seemed to be holding up amazingly well.

  “I couldn’t stand all the time on the road,” Raz said. “Most of it just doing speed patrol.”

  “Yeah, so he quit to go babysit federal judges,” Maven said, falling right back into the pattern. This is what you do to your fellow cop, no matter how many years it’s been. “And to drive around handcuffed to gangsters.”

  “He’ll never get it,” Raz said to me. “But I understand you were a police officer in Detroit.”

  “Yes. Third precinct.”

  “Hell, yeah. Right around the corner.”

  “I didn’t run into many U.S. marshals.”