Ice Run: An Alex McKnight Novel (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

I took the hat with me. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I thought it would help me figure out who the man was.

  If we had stayed there a little longer, if we had gone downstairs and had breakfast, then we might have heard about the discovery down the street. But we didn’t. We left before they found him.

  Now I sat there at the bar and looked at the hat, rotating it in my hands. It had obviously cost some money, way back when. It was gray with a slightly darker band. The lining felt like satin. The crease ran perfectly across the top. It was in excellent condition except for the new stains on it. As the stains dried, they left the pale residue of salt.

  “What’s with the hat?” Jackie said. “Ashamed of that dye job you’re walking around with?”

  “I told you, Jackie. I was just trying to rinse out some gray hair.”

  “For this woman, I know. You did it for Natasha.”

  “Her name is Natalie.”

  “Let me see that hat,” he said. He looked at the label. “Borsalino, Milan and New York. This was a nice hat. What happened to it?”

  I gave him the quick version of the story.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” he said, turning the hat around. “Some old bird ruins a great old hat just to let you know he recognized you?”

  “What would you call that, a fedora?”

  “This is a homburg,” he said, trying it on. It fit him perfectly. “See how the brim is turned up all the way around? My father used to have one, back when men actually wore hats.”

  “I’m gonna call the hotel,” I said. “See if they know anything more.”

  “Hell of a thing,” he said, taking the hat off. “Doing this to a good homburg.”

  He kept fooling with it while I called the hotel. He wet a dish towel and tried to rub away the salt stains, but it wasn’t working.

  “Nope, this hat is a lost cause,” he said, then he stopped short when he saw my face.

  When I was done, I thanked the woman and hung up the phone.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “The old man’s dead,” I said. “They found him outside in a snowbank.”

  “Holy God.”

  “She said his name was Simon Grant. He was eighty-two years old.”

  “What happened? I mean, how did he—”

  “He just walked outside. He went down Ashmun Street. They think he must have just got lost or got tired or something. They don’t really know. A snowplow ran over his body this morning.”

  “Nobody should go that way,” Jackie said. “Nobody should freeze to death like an animal.”

  I took the hat from him. “I have to call Natalie,” I said. I dialed the number and waited while it rang.

  “What are you going to do with this hat?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said. Her phone kept ringing.

  “You should turn it in.”

  “What?”

  “It belonged to the old man, didn’t it?”

  I held up my hand to him as Natalie finally answered the phone. When I told her what had happened, she didn’t say anything.

  “You still there?” I said.

  “Yes, Alex. I’m here.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Do you still have the hat he left on the floor?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it right here.”

  “You have to give it back. You know that.”

  “What? How can I—”

  “His family,” she said. “They should have the hat.”

  “I don’t even know how to get in touch with them.” I looked up at Jackie. He nodded his head at me like he knew exactly what she was saying.

  “Take it to the police,” she said. “They’ll give it to the family.”

  “I guess I could do that,” I said. Although driving back into town was the last thing I felt like doing.

  “That poor man. What a terrible night.”

  “Natalie …”

  “I’m sorry, Alex. I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said. And then she hung up.

  “She agrees with me,” Jackie said. “Am I right?”

  “What’d you guys do, talk about this beforehand?”

  “It’s the only right thing to do.”

  That’s how I ended up driving back to the Soo for the second time in two days, with the hat resting on the seat beside me. The sun was finally out, and it made the snow shine so bright it was hard to look at. Not that there was anything to see. The banks were piled five feet high all along the roads, and the plows were still out there trying to catch up.

  When I got to the city, I saw a hundred people with snow shovels, trying to reclaim the sidewalks. I drove by the Ojibway Hotel, but I didn’t see the doorman outside. I kept going, taking the right on Ashmun. This is where it happened, I thought. According to the woman at the hotel, this is where they found him.

  I slowed down as I crossed the little bridge over the canal. A few yards beyond it I could see where they had dug out most of the snowbank, right in front of the bookstore. There were lots of tire tracks and sand and dirt and God knows what else. An empty paper coffee cup blew across the road.

  You could tell that men had been there, working hard at something. But there was no crime scene tape, or anything to suggest that something bad had happened. But then, come to think of it, there had been no crime. It was just an old man who fell into the snow and froze to death.

  Simon Grant. That was his name. I looked down at the hat lying on the seat next to me. Simon Grant, whoever the hell he was, is no more.

  The City County Building was back on the north side of the bridge, over on Court Street. I knew what I had to do next. But instead I kept going. I wasn’t ready yet. On the spur of the moment, there was one thing I wanted to do first.

  Simon Grant. I kept saying the name to myself. Simon Grant.

  When I got to Three Mile Road, I hung a left and drove down to the Custom Motor Shop. They had just plowed the parking lot, and there was a mountain of snow to one side you could have used skis on. As I pulled in, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. Sure, I had promised I’d stop in to see him the next time I was in town. But how convenient that I just so happened to have this little thing to ask him about.

  I might have sat there thinking about it, but at that moment the man himself came out the door. Leon Prudell, my old partner. When a local lawyer talked me into trying out the private eye business, it was Leon who lost his job to me. It was Leon who showed up at the Glasgow Inn and called me out into the parking lot. That’s how much he loved his job, and how much he hated me at that moment. When the whole private eye thing blew up in my face, he was there, and he actually helped me out, and proved that he knew what he was doing. Later, we had an off-and-on partner thing going for a while. When I walked away from it, he was still there to help me, whenever something would drag me back into the game. Now here he was, selling snowmobiles for a living, trying to forget all about those old dreams of being a private investigator.

  “Alex!” he said when he saw me. I got out and shook his hand. He looked the same as always, with the wild orange hair and the extra pounds around the middle. In his down coat he looked as big as the Michelin Man.

  “How’s business?” I said.

  “We had a busy morning,” he said. “Now that the snow finally came.”

  I looked into the front window and saw a long line of gleaming snowmobiles. “I do love those machines. I just can’t get enough of that noise.”

  “Snowmobilers pay your bills, Alex. What the hell did you do to your hair?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’ll wash out in a couple of days.”

  “I guess things are going well with Natalie?”

  That stopped me. Then I remembered. Leon was the one who ran down her address for me, back when I had this crazy idea I should try to find her. That plus the hair, it was pretty basic detective work.

  “Actually, I was with her last night,” I said.
“But something kinda strange happened.”

  That’s all I had to say. He was already hooked. I could see it in his eyes. So I gave him the rundown, up to and including the old man being found in the snowbank.

  “Do you have a name?” he said.

  “Yes, the woman at the hotel told me. His name is Simon Grant.”

  “Hold on,” he said, taking out a small pad of paper. You could count on Leon to always have a pad of paper.

  “Simon Grant,” he said slowly, writing it down. “Any other information on the deceased?” He was slipping right back into private eye mode.

  “Leon, I’m just telling you what happened. I don’t expect you to go to work on this.” I hesitated. “I mean, I suppose if you still have the access to your database, whatever that thing was…”

  “The P-Search,” he said. “Yes, I still have it. I can do that, no problem.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to do this. Every time I see you, it’s like I want something from you.”

  “I’d be mad if you didn’t ask me, Alex. Now what else can you tell me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just have a name. And the hat he left in front of our door.”

  “You kept the hat?”

  “Yeah, I did. I’m not sure why. I just…”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I figure I’d better give it to the police. Maybe they can give it to the man’s family or something.”

  “Do you have it with you right now? Can I see it?”

  “Sure,” I said. I opened the passenger’s side door and brought it out for him.

  “This looks old,” he said. He examined it as closely as a jeweler appraising a diamond.

  “You can see the stains,” I said. “From the ice and snow.”

  “You said there was a note, too.”

  “Yes.” I pulled it out of my coat pocket and unfolded it.

  “I know who you are,” Leon said, looking at the note just as carefully.

  “I swear, I never saw this man before in my life.”

  “Here, hold these a second,” he said. He handed me the hat and the note, and started writing on his pad again.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “The lining says Borsalino, Milan and New York,” he said, writing it down. “There’s no year on it. And no size. Although I’d estimate seven, seven and a half.”

  Good old Leon, I thought. Who else would stand in a parking lot and take notes on an old hat?

  “Let me take some pictures,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got my digital camera in the car.”

  “What do you have a digital camera for? I thought you were out of the private eye business.”

  “Everybody has a digital camera, Alex. It’s no big deal.”

  It sounded like something he’d tell his wife Eleanor. No big deal, honey. It’s just for taking pictures of our next vacation.

  He went to his car, the little piece of crap Chevy Nova that somehow never got stuck in the snow, and found a black bag. “Here we go,” he said, pulling out the camera. It looked a little too sophisticated for pictures of the kids, but I wasn’t going to give him a hard time about it.

  “Okay, let me take a picture of the note first,” he said. “Put it on your hood.”

  I did as I was told. He bent down close and snapped two shots.

  “Okay, now the hat.”

  I put the hat on the hood and watched him take nine or ten shots, turning the hat around and then tipping it over.

  “Leon, is this really going to help us?”

  “You never know,” he said. “Now you can go give it to the police and we’ll still have the pictures.” He put the lens cap back on the camera.

  “You’re something else,” I said. But I knew this is what he would do. He’d grab on to this like a dog on a steak bone. It’s what he lived for.

  “I’ll let you know what I find out,” he said. “You wanna get some lunch now? I was just on my way.”

  I was about to decline, but then I thought, what the hell. Go buy the guy some lunch. He deserves that much from you, at the very least. Besides, look what’s next on your to-do list. A visit to the police station means you might just run into your old friend, Chief Maven. The longer you can put that one off, the better.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take you to lunch on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We don’t eat at the Ojibway Hotel.”

  We had lunch at the Chinese Buffet, then it was time for Leon to go back to selling snowmobiles, and for me to go back downtown. Chief Roy Maven of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Department can usually be found in the City County Building, which is basically a big gray cement block attached to the old courthouse. The building and the man go together, for me anyway, because they both have roughly the same amount of charm. Today, at least, I knew there was no need to see Chief Maven himself. All I was doing was dropping off a stupid hat. I figured I’d just give it to the receptionist and leave.

  There was a truck working hard to clear the front parking lot, so I parked around back by the police entrance, right next to the jail’s courtyard. It was a little twelve-by-twelve square, completely surrounded by a chain-link fence and razor wire. Ordinarily, there’d be somebody out sitting on the picnic table, having a smoke, but today the table was buried under two feet of snow.

  The city police department shares the same building with the county, which puts Chief Maven somewhere near the bottom of the totem pole, below the sheriff, who owns the jail and the best part of the building, the state police, who have their own barracks down the road, and the feds, who run the Soo locks and control the border. That’s half the reason why he’s always so happy.

  The other half is that he genuinely doesn’t like me. We had this sort of chemical reaction to each other the first time we met, and we never found a way to get past it. Hell, for all I knew, he was a great guy, and under different circumstances, we would have even been friends.

  But I wouldn’t have bet on it.

  I went inside, stomped the snow off my boots, and told the woman at the desk that I wanted to leave something for Chief Maven.

  “Is he expecting you?” she asked.

  “No, no,” I said. “I just wanted to give him this hat. It belonged to the man who was found dead in the snow this morning.”

  “Oh my,” she said. She looked at the hat like she wouldn’t have touched it for a thousand dollars.

  “I was thinking he could return it to the man’s family. That’s all.”

  “I’m going to call him.”

  “No, please, that’s not necessary.” I knew what would happen if she called him. He’d tell her to make me wait out here, and then sometime around spring he’d actually come out to see me. I’d played this game with him before.

  “I’m sure he’ll want to speak to you,” she said, the phone already in her hand.

  “I’ll just drop it off at his office,” I said. “I know where it is.”

  “Sir, you can’t just go back there …”

  But I was already gone. I went down the hallway and saw that his door was open. When I poked my head in, he was on the phone. No doubt the receptionist had called to warn him I was on my way.

  “Hello, Chief,” I said.

  “McKnight,” he said, slamming down the phone. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I just wanted to give you something.”

  “The waiting area’s out in the lobby. And what the hell did you do to your hair?”

  I went in and sat down on the plastic guest chair. As always, his office was nothing more than a windowless box, with gray concrete walls and not much to hide them. One bulletin board. A calendar. It all went perfectly with Maven himself, with his drill sergeant haircut and his weather-beaten face that never changed.

  “I’ve got snow up to my ass,” he said. “Half the town I can’t even get to. I got a poor old man found frozen stiff in a
snowbank. Now you show up.”

  “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “Just knock it off, McKnight. What do you want from me?”

  “It’s about Simon Grant.”

  He looked at me. “What about him?”

  “I saw him last night,” I said. “At the Ojibway Hotel.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You see this hat?” I said, holding it up.

  “What about it?”

  “It belonged to Mr. Grant.”

  “What, is he a friend of yours?”

  “As far as I know, I never met him before last night.”

  “So how come you have his hat?”

  “He left it for me,” I said. “Right before he went out and froze to death.”

  Maven thought about that one. “Okay, start at the beginning,” he said. “What were you doing at the hotel? Having dinner?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Then staying the night.”

  “Staying the night? With who?”

  “That’s none of your business, Chief.”

  “Now I understand the dye job,” he said. “McKnight, could you get any more ridiculous?”

  “Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I ran through the rest of it for him. It was the third time I had told it that day, but it still didn’t make any sense to me.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said when I was done. “You’ve never seen this man before, ever?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure about that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when you see this hat lying there on the floor outside the room, you go downstairs and chase this eighty-two-year-old man into the snow?”

  “I didn’t chase him into the snow. I was just looking for him.”

  “So you could … what?”

  “So I could ask him what the hell he was talking about. Why he thought he knew who I was.”

  Maven closed his eyes. “You were involved in, let me think, the last three homicides in this city? No, four. Now we’ve got this poor old man who freezes to death in the snow. Even with that, you’ve got to show up holding the man’s hat.”

  “Chief, I don’t know why he did this. Okay? I’ve got no idea.”

  “Maybe my wife is right,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to retire. Move to Florida.”