The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery

by Steve Hamilton

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

  “Okay, so Maria shows me this drawing she did of me sitting there on the bed. And when I looked at it, I was just . . . My God, I couldn’t even speak. The way she drew that picture, you could feel how scared I was. Just absolutely terrified of what was going to happen the next day. I couldn’t believe it.”

  He was quiet for a long moment. Perhaps he was picturing the drawing in his head again. I didn’t say anything.

  “It wasn’t just that she was a good artist,” he finally said. “She could draw that picture because she knew me. You know what I’m trying to say, Alex? At that moment, she knew me better than I knew myself. I didn’t even know that I was that scared until I looked at the picture. How many times in your life does somebody know you that well? You wanna know how many times it’s happened to me?”

  “How many?” I said.

  “Twice,” he said. “There was you. And then there was Maria. Not my wife. Not the woman I slept next to every night of my life for eleven years. Lord knows, not my parents. Not my kids even. It was you and Maria. You were the only two people in this world who could see right through me. All the jokes and the games and the bullshit. I know it was only one season we played together, but when I was pitching and you were catching, it was like you knew everything that was going on inside my head. Everything. Even stuff I didn’t know. You knew what I could throw better than I knew. Which is why I could never be the same pitcher with anybody else. I came all the way up here and found you all these years later and it was like I had just seen you the day before. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “And Maria,” he said. “I swear to God, Alex, she knew me just as well as you did. It didn’t matter that we only spent a week and a half together. No matter how long ago it might have been. Hell, it doesn’t even matter that I didn’t know her real name.”

  Another silence, and then another truck rumbling by in the night.

  “No offense, Alex,” he said. “You both knew me just as well, but she wins the evening gown competition.”

  I laughed. What else was I going to do?

  “Do you think we’ll find her?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t put money on it at this point.”

  “Do you think we should stop looking?”

  “Don’t ask me that,” I said. “Not unless you want the truth.”

  ‘Tell me.”

  “Randy, I’ve been telling you all along that this is crazy. I know you don’t want to hear that. And I know that if I had stayed home, you would have come down here by yourself. So I figured I had nothing to lose. A couple days hanging out with my old teammate, just to see what happens. But now I think you should stop. I really do. I think this is a bad idea.”

  Another long silence. Another truck passing outside, and then the sound of him breathing in the dark.

  CHAPTER 9

  When I woke up the next morning, Randy wasn’t there. His bag was still in the room, and when I looked out the window, I could see my truck parked in the lot. So I figured he couldn’t have gone too far.

  I took a shower and got dressed, went down to the motel lobby and sat there reading the paper for a while. Then I gave up waiting for him and went outside. It was an overcast April day in Detroit, with a fine mist in the air that worked its way into your lungs and through your clothes.

  I found him on Michigan Avenue, sitting on a bench across from Tiger Stadium.

  “Good morning,” I said as I sat down next to him. “Not a real nice day to be sitting out here.”

  “I just wanted to look at this place one more time,” he said.

  “You planning on going somewhere soon?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I’ll let you go home, Alex. I’ve kept you away too long already.”

  “I’m sure Jackie’s managing quite well without me,” I said. “Hell, he probably feels like he’s on vacation.”

  He looked back up at the gray wall of the stadium. “You know, if I had gotten Rettenmund out instead of walking him, then I would have had two outs, with Boog Powell coming up. I would have been in a whole different frame of mind. The whole game could have gone my way at that point.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to argue with him, or tell him to forget about it.

  “And then after the game,” he said, “I would have gone out to celebrate with Maria.”

  “Randy . . .”

  “Maria Valenescu,” he said. “Anyway, you can’t undo the past, right? Only a fool would even try.”

  “Let’s go, Randy.”

  I took him back to the motel so he could put some dry clothes on. When we got to the room, the message light on our phone was blinking. I called the desk. A Mr. Leon Prudell had called, they said, and left a message to please call him back.

  “What do you have for us, Leon?” I said when I got him on the line.

  “Not a whole lot. I’ve only found three Valenescus in the entire country. They’re all in New York City. I don’t see any Gregor or Arabella or Leopold or Maria. It’s worth calling these numbers, though. There might be a connection. You want to call, or should I?”

  “I’m not sure we’ll need them,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ah hell, give me the names,” I said. “I’ll call you back later.”

  “All right, let me know how it goes!”

  I thanked him and hung up. Randy came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his neck.

  “He found three Valenescus,” I said. “You want me to call them?”

  “It’s up to you,” he said. He sat down on the bed.

  I dialed the first number and asked if they knew any of the four names. They didn’t.

  I dialed the next number. Same question. Nothing.

  I dialed the last number. Whoever answered couldn’t speak English very well. I think I got the idea across, and the answer seemed to be a firm no.

  “No go,” I said when I hung up.

  “Okay,” he said. “Time to pull the plug. Let me give Leon a call so I can thank him myself.”

  I didn’t say anything. I sat there with the phone still in my hand.

  “We played it out,” he said. “That was our last card. What else could we do now, anyway?”

  “Just hold on,” I said. “Give me a minute here.” I grabbed the Yellow Pages. “How old would her parents be right now?”

  He looked at me. “What are you doing?”

  “Humor me,” I said. “How old would they be?”

  “Eighties at least. Maybe nineties.”

  “Like the Meisners,” I said. “So maybe they’re living in the same kind of place right now.”

  “Assuming they’re still alive, and assuming they’re still in the area, then yes.”

  I looked up “Nursing Homes” again. I had just seen the same pages the day before, when we found the Peach Tree Senior Community.

  “Alex, you’re the one who told me this is a bad idea.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just want to do this one thing. Otherwise, it’s gonna bother me.”

  “You’re gonna call every one of them, Alex? How many are there?”

  “A lot,” I said. “This might take awhile. Why don’t you go get us some breakfast?”

  A couple of hours later, I dialed the last number. I went through the routine for the hundredth time. Ask for Mrs. Valenescu, figuring there would be more chance of her being alive than her husband. In the obituaries, it’s always men who are survived by their loving wives. The women die alone. Even if I was wrong on that, they’d probably catch me on it and tell me that there was no Mrs. Valenescu there but that there was a Mr. Valenescu. The name would stick out in their mind.

  “Okay, thank you,” I said, and hung up. I stood up and stretched.

  “You’re something else, you know that?” Randy said.

  “It
was worth a shot,” I said.

  “Thanks, Alex. Now we can stop.”

  “Not so fast,” I said. “I got one more idea.”

  “Now what?”

  “Her brother,” I said. “What did he do for a living in 1971?”

  “He was a housepainter. Like his father.”

  “Mr. Meisner said he was good at it, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So what do you think he’s doing for a living right now?”

  “I suppose he could still be a housepainter.”

  “Let’s say he is,” I said. “Do you think he still lives around here?”

  “He might.”

  I grabbed the Yellow Pages again. “I don’t see him listed here under ‘Paint Contractors,’ but that doesn’t mean much. Most of those guys just work on word of mouth. So let’s say that’s what he does. What do you think he’s doing right now?”

  “Painting something?”

  “Okay,” I said. “You think he still makes people call him Leopold?”

  “I would bet on it, yeah.”

  “So what happens when Leopold runs out of paint?”

  “He buys more paint.”

  “He buys more paint,” I said. “And where does he buy it?”

  “At a paint store?”

  “And how about next week,” I said, “when he needs more paint?”

  “At a paint store?”

  “At the same paint store,” I said. “I see about forty listings here for the whole Detroit metropolitan area. Why don’t you go get us some lunch?”

  When he was gone, I started working through the numbers. It was a long shot, but I’d be thinking about it for weeks if I didn’t give it a try.

  When I got through to the first number, I went into my spiel. “Hey, have you seen Leopold over there?” Thank God for strange names. If his name were Al, I’d have no chance.

  “Leopold?” the man said. “Don’t know no Leopold, sir.”

  “Ah, okay, wrong place. Sorry to bother you.”

  I did ten of the numbers.

  I did twenty.

  And then on number twenty-one . . .

  “Leopold?” the man said. “Not today. He was here on Monday, I think.”

  I froze. My God, I’ve got a bite.

  “Hello? Sir?”

  I was about to play it straight, tell him who I was and why I was looking for Leopold. But then I thought about Leopold, and what Randy had told me about him. How much he hated Randy. Almost killing him on the street in 1971.1 had two seconds to decide how to play it. I went for theater.

  “Oh, uh, sorry,” I said. “Hey, I’ll be perfectly honest with you.” Honest, my ass. “I’ve got one of Leopold’s thirty-foot ladders here, and if I don’t get it back to him today, he’s gonna have my head on a platter. You know how he is.”

  “Oh man,” he said. “Do I ever. I can’t believe he even let you borrow it.”

  “Hey, I know he’s been working on that job over there. Where was that again? Maybe I can just run it over to him.”

  “No, he didn’t say.”

  Damn! Think, think.

  “Oh man, I’m dead,” I said. Okay, let’s go for the home run here. “Hey, I know. Maybe if I just run it over to his house, you know? Leave it there. Hell, maybe he’ll even forget he loaned it to me. You think that would work?”

  “I still can’t believe he loaned it to you.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. I must have caught him on a hell of a good day. I was over at his house one time. God, where was it? It was over on . . .”

  I let it hang. I was sweating. Come on, take the lead here.

  “On Romney Street,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right! On Romney Street. I’ll just go over there right now and put that ladder in his garage.”

  The guy started laughing. “That’ll never work, my friend.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But at least this way, I’ll have a running start.”

  “Good luck to you,” he said.

  “Hey, um, just one more thing. I appreciate you helping me out here. I’m just trying to remember which house it was on Romney. It was like a sort of white kind of—”

  “Hell if I know,” the man said. “I sure as hell never been to the man’s house. I just know it from the address on the bills.”

  “Oh yeah, of course. Ah, well, never mind. I’ll find it.”

  “Here, let me see,” the man said. God bless this man. “Seventeen forty Romney Street.”

  “That sounds familiar,” I said. “Man, you’re really helping me out here. I appreciate it.”

  “Hey, no problem. Just don’t tell him I helped you do the drop and run.”

  “Ha! You got it! Thanks a lot.”

  I hung up and let out a big breath.

  By the time Randy came back with the McDonald’s bags, I had already looked up the street in the index and found it on the map. It was in Farmington Hills, an upper-middle-class suburb to the northwest. “Looks like Leopold moved up in the world,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I held up the piece of paper where I had written his address. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  I remembered Farmington Hills as one of the nicer suburbs of Detroit. It was what they called “semi-rural,” with four-bedroom houses on half-acre lots. A good old-fashioned mailbox on the street, with the little flag you raised when you had a letter to be picked up. I couldn’t believe how much had changed.

  “I remember this corner,” I said as we drove past a strip mall. All the usual suspects were there now: Blockbuster Video, Subway, TCBY. “I swear to God, there was nothing here but one gas station.”

  “Yeah, the owner used to come out, pump the gas himself, wash your window, and then turn the crank on the front of your car for you.”

  “Randy, I’m talking about fifteen years ago. It’s like an entirely different place now.”

  “Progress,” he said. “That’s what I’m supposed to say, right?”

  There was a lot of traffic on Halstead Road now. It used to be a lazy little two-lane road through nothing but weeds and dirt. We found the new subdivision we were looking for, right next to about five other new subdivisions, and turned in. We drove past a few dozen houses that looked like they had all been built that morning. We passed Corriedale Street and then we found Romney Street.

  “Sheep,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Corriedale and Romney. They’re types of sheep. They must be running out of names.”

  We followed the numbers on the mailboxes until we came to 1740. The house was a split-level ranch, set back about a hundred feet off the road.

  “Nice lawn,” Randy said.

  “I don’t see a name on the mailbox,” I said.

  “So what do we do?”

  “We’ll just go knock on the door and ask,” I said. “No big deal.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “No big deal.”

  We drove down the driveway. It was asphalt, with what looked like a new coat of sealer on it. I stopped my truck behind a little red compact.

  We got out. We walked to the door, passing a row of rhododendrons that had a long way to come back from a hard winter. We rang the doorbell.

  A young girl answered. She was sixteen or seventeen years old, dressed in a softball uniform. There was an F on her jersey. Farmington High School. She smiled at me. She looked at Randy and her smile got a little bigger.

  “Hi there,” I said. “Is this the Valenescu residence?”

  Her smile faded. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nobody here by that name.”

  “There’s nobody in your family who used to have that name even?” I was really reaching now. “Somebody named Maria? Used to live in Detroit? Her parents were Gregor and Arabella?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  I looked up at the sky. “Okay,” I said. I suddenly felt very tired. “We’re sorry to bother
you. You play softball, eh?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m a pitcher.”

  “Hey,” I said, hitting Randy in the chest. “Another pitcher. Just what the world needs.”

  The look on his face stopped me.

  “Randy?”

  He was staring at the girl.

  I looked at her, and then back at him. “Randy,” I said. “What is it?”

  He didn’t take his eyes off her. “What’s your name?” he finally said.

  She swallowed. “Delilah.”

  “That’s a beautiful name,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said. She sneaked a look at the doorknob.

  “Delilah,” Randy said. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I need to get to practice,” she said. “I came home to get my uniform.”

  “You’re Maria’s daughter, aren’t you,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I told you, there’s nobody here by that name.”

  “You’re Leopold’s daughter, then,” he said. “That could be. You’re Maria’s niece.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I told you. My name is Delilah Muller and I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She started to look a little scared.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, stepping in front of him. “I’m sorry, please excuse my friend.” I turned to face him. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “This girl,” he said, and then he looked at her again over my shoulder. “This beautiful angel . . .”

  “Is not who you’re thinking,” I said. “You heard her. What are you trying to do?”

  “Alex, I know she is.”

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing his arm. I pulled him back to the truck. As I turned to apologize again, the door was already shut.

  Randy shook me off and got in the passenger’s side. I got in, slammed the door, and backed up all the way down the long driveway to the street. I dropped the truck into drive and got us out of there.

  I was already back on 1-275 when I finally looked over at him. He had his hands together between his knees. He was staring out at the hood of the truck.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You scared that girl,” I said. “You really scared her. She’s all alone in that house and you gotta go freaking her out like that.”