“So, you do remember him,” I said, “from 1971?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I remember him.”
“It was almost thirty years ago.”
“It could be eighty years,” she said. “I’d still remember.”
“He certainly is one of a kind, but—”
“Alex, I know I already asked you this,” she said, “but why did he come here, really? Do you really think he was—what did you say? Trying to scam me?”
I looked at her. “I told you before. At first, I thought it was because he wanted to find you again. Because he thought you were the one who got away.”
“You believed him.”
“Yes,” I said. “If I had seen you in person, it would have been easy to believe.”
“I appreciate the flattery,” she said. “But even so, Alex, most people wouldn’t have come all the way down here to help him.”
“I’m a complete idiot,” I said. “I think I’ve established that pretty well.”
“No,” she said. “You believed him because that’s the kind of man you are.”
“The idiot kind.”
She smiled. “What do you believe now? Do you really think he came here to steal money from me?”
“It seems to be his calling,” I said. “I think his record speaks for itself.”
She looked out the big window at the lake. “I do have money to steal,” she said. “My husband’s business was very successful, before . . . before he died.”
“You said Harwood killed him.”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
She took a deep breath. “Alex, when I met Randy, I was very young. But he was the first, if you know what I mean. When he left without saying a word, it hit me very hard. I didn’t think I would love another man ever again. But then a man came to see my mother. A man named Harwood. Charles Harwood. He kept coming back, and he always paid her a hundred dollars for each reading. That was a great deal of money in those days. He drove a big convertible, too. My father was very interested in this man. And this man, this Charles Harwood, he was obviously very interested in me. He asked me many times to go driving with him in his big convertible, but I always turned him down. My father was angry with me. Eventually, he persuaded me to go with Harwood. ‘Just a little trip around town,’ my father said. ‘What is the harm, a short trip in the car? With this man who pays your mother a hundred dollars every time he sees her.’ So I went with this man, and he drove around Detroit with the top down. He asked me all these questions, but I didn’t feel like talking to him. So he finally shut up and just drove me back home. I thought that would be the end of it, but the next week he was back, asking me to go driving with him again. I went with him, and this time I did not say one single word the entire time. But he kept coming back, and he kept giving my mother a hundred dollars every time, and he kept asking me to ride in his car. And I would go and not say a word. Until finally one day he drove right out of the city and through all the suburbs and right out into the countryside. I was scared. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want him to know how scared I was. He drove all the way out to a farm in Oakland County, right down this little dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and when he finally stopped, I was sure he would do something terrible to me. But he didn’t. He just sat there and looked out at the farm, and then he told me that he and his partner had just bought the place and that they were going to build a golf course. And then they’d find more land and build another one, and then another one. And they would both become very rich. He asked me if I had ever thought what it would be like to have lots of money, but before I could answer him, his partner showed up. He drove right up behind us in his beat-up little car, and he came up to see who this young girl was sitting in Harwood’s convertible. His name was Arthur Zambelli.”
She paused to take a long drink; then she looked out the window at the lake again and continued.
“Arthur Zambelli was everything that Harwood wasn’t. He was kind and gentle. And he didn’t care about money, even though he would end up having a lot of it. He just didn’t think about it. All he wanted to do was build things. And eat. And drink good wine. And champagne. The man loved champagne. He told me that every single day of your life should be special enough to celebrate with champagne. Which sounds kind of corny, but he made you believe it. We were married for ten years, Alex. Almost ten years. Our ten-year anniversary would have been . . .”
She stopped again, a small smile coming across her face, then disappearing.
“Harwood was not happy when I chose Arthur over him. He tried not to show it. He would have left the partnership in a second, but he wasn’t about to walk away from the golf course deal. And then after that, there was another deal, and then another deal. There was always another property to buy. Another hotel or golf course or resort to build. They were very successful. I married Arthur, and eventually Harwood married another woman. We spent a lot of time together, all four of us. We had to. But the way Harwood looked at me, and the way he talked to me whenever we were alone, I knew he hadn’t forgotten.
“Harwood’s marriage didn’t last. I wasn’t surprised. The more I got to know him—I mean, with all the time we had to spend with him . . . My God, Alex, he is the most horrible man. He had Arthur fooled so badly. For years, I tried to warn him. I tried to convince him to dissolve their partnership. I think he would have, too, if Harwood hadn’t . . .”
She stopped.
“What did he do?” I said.
“Arthur was out on one of the properties one night. He liked to do that—just walk around for a couple days to get a feel for the land. They found him the next morning at the bottom of a drainage ditch. His neck was broken. They said he walking alone and he must have fallen, but I knew better. Harwood killed him. I know he did.”
“When was that?”
“It was just six months before Delilah was born,” she said. “We had been trying for so long to have children. Can you believe it? He never even saw his own baby. I’ve been a widow for eighteen years now, and I’ve been running from Harwood the whole time.”
“How can you run that long?” I said. “Eighteen years.”
“Not all the time,” she said. “I move; he finds me. I move again, and a few years later, he finds me again. . . .”
“Maria, what does he want from you? Does he hate you that much just because you married his partner instead of him?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “There’s more to this than just a personal vendetta. A few years before Arthur died, they bought about seven hundred acres up near Traverse City. There was nothing up there then, but now the whole county is booming. There are so many new resorts up there right now, and this land they bought, it’s right next to one of the big golf courses, with a little ski mountain even. We could sell that land for twenty million, easy.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Alex, the old partnership still owns that land. Harwood-Zambelli. And there’s a provision in the partnership that both partners have to agree before selling any jointly owned property.”
“And you can’t agree? Why wouldn’t you both want to sell it?”
“It’s not so simple,” she said. “The terms are very specific about what happens if either partner dies. A surviving spouse takes over the partner’s vote and is entitled to half of the profits. A divorced spouse only gets twenty percent, and no vote. Harwood’s ex-wife is fighting that one, even though she signed the prenuptial agreement. Michigan’s a pretty strong common-property state, so she has a shot at it.”
“So what does that have to do with you?” I said. “You’re a surviving spouse. He can’t change that. Unless—”
“Unless I’m no longer surviving,” she said. “There’s a provision for that, too. Just like the divorce clause. Twenty percent to my estate, and no vote. Arthur didn’t realize what he was doing when he signed that agreement, Alex. He didn’t know he was signing my death warrant.”
“I think it’s safe to say that he would do that for six million dollars, yes.”
I took a hit off my beer and thought about that one.
“I can’t see your brother running away,” I said. “Ever. How come he hasn’t killed this guy by now?”
“He almost did,” she said. “When Arthur died, I told Leopold what I suspected. He went after Har-wood, tried to kill him. Thank God he didn’t. He would have gone to jail. Since then, Leopold has always wanted to make a stand, to stay in one place and dare Harwood to come get me. That house in Farmington, that’s the first house that any of us have owned outright. Delilah’s in high school now. I want her to finish there. Leopold promised me that she’d be safe. They watch her every minute.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw that firsthand.”
“So you did,” she said. “So you did. And I’m close enough, I can see her sometimes. We’re very careful about it. We meet on weekends. We make sure nobody follows her.”
“Randy wasn’t careful,” I said. “That white Cadillac, it belongs to a private investigator.”
“How do you know?”
“My partner ran the plate,” I said. “His name is Whitley. He works out of Detroit.”
“Harwood must’ve hired him,” she said. “He’s done that before.”
“Well, we could contact him ourselves,” I said. ‘Tell him to lay off.”
“He’d send somebody else,” she said. “Now that he’s found me again. Or he’d come himself. . . .”
“Maria, why don’t you just sign away the full partnership money? Tell him you’ll take the twenty percent and forfeit the rest?”
She looked at me.
“You could stop running,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s what I should do.”
“You already have money. You said so yourself. The money your husband left you, right?”
She looked out at the lake. “It may be too late,” she said. “I should have done that eighteen years ago. Maybe even ten years ago. It’s an obsession with him now. After all this time, I don’t think he’d settle for less than everything. Every dollar, Alex.”
When she faced me again, I saw tears in her eyes. God help me, all I could think about was how lovely she was. That was the only word for her. Not beautiful, not pretty. Maria was lovely.
“Every dollar,” she said. “And my life, Alex. He wants me to die.”
I wanted to reach out and take her hand. But I didn’t. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sure I can’t imagine what it’s been like.”
“And now Randy shows up,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”
“Maria, you still haven’t told me why you said that stuff in the bar, about not remembering him.”
She looked down at the glass in her hand. It was empty.
“Maria?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Maria, what’s the matter?”
“It was me,” she said, her voice so low now, I could barely hear her.
“What do you mean?”
“It was me,” she said. “I shot him.”
CHAPTER 17
She opened the front door. She didn’t follow me out onto the landing, just stood leaning against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest. The landing was made of flat bluestone, with tall plants on either side that were nothing more than tangled bare branches at this time of year. The air was cold. I’d left my coat behind, somewhere in the living room. But I didn’t care. I stood there looking down at the landing while she told me what had happened.
“I came home three days ago,” she said. “As soon as I walked in, I knew somebody had been here. Everything was where it was supposed to be, and yet not exactly. Something was just . . . wrong. I could feel it. I called Chief Rudiger, but he swore he hadn’t come here. Even though he has a key, he doesn’t do that. Not without asking me. Then when I started seeing the white Cadillac around town, it didn’t take me long to figure it out. Harwood had found me again. Somehow. And the man in the Cadillac, he broke in here. He had touched everything in the house, Alex. Everything that belonged to me, he had put his hands on it. I called the chief again. He told me he’d keep an eye out for him but that he could only do so much. He’s the only full-time officer in town.”
“So I’ve learned,” I said. “One professional and a lot of amateurs with guns. So what happened next? Did the car come back?”
“Yes,” she said. “I saw it the next day. There’s a room up on the second floor; you can see out onto the road, through the trees. The car was just sitting there. I called the chief, but by the time he got over here, the car was gone. It came back later, just after dark. I was upstairs, watching for it. He pulled up there in the same spot on the road, just through the trees there where the fence starts. I was just about to call the chief again, when I heard somebody coming up the walkway.”
She stopped. She stood there with her arms still folded in front of her, staring out at nothing.
“What happened?” I said.
“I had a gun,” she said. “One of Leopold’s shotguns. He keeps one at the house, and he made me take the other one. I was sure it was Harwood, or somebody Harwood had hired to kill me. I got the gun, and when I looked out the little window by the door here, I saw something in his hand. It was dark, but I could see he was holding something. It’s a gun, I thought. It has to be a gun. He was coming to kill me, Alex. It didn’t matter if the door was locked. He had already gotten into the place before. Nothing could stop him. There was nothing I could do, except . . . open the door and shoot. I shot him, Alex. I threw the door open and shot him. Then I ran past him, got in my car, and drove away. As I was driving, I started seeing the man’s face. Like I looked at him but I didn’t really see him until later, when I had time to think about what had happened, you know what I mean? I could still see his face, just before the gun went off. And I knew him. I knew that face. He has a beard and mustache now, doesn’t he? He looks different. Yet he’s still the same. All these years later, he’s still the same. And I shot him.”
“Did he have a gun?”
“What?” She looked up at me.
“In his hand. You said you thought he had a gun. Did he?”
“No,” she said. “It was a flower. A lilac. That’s what he was holding. It’s supposed to mean something, isn’t it? When you give somebody a lilac? Something about the innocence of youth. If it did mean something, he never got the chance to tell me.”
I looked down at the stones. There were no lilac petals there now. There was no blood, no trace of what had happened.
“He was the first man I ever loved,” she said. “And I shot him.”
She didn’t cry. I didn’t know if she wanted me to hold her or if she wanted me to go away and never come back. I just stood there.
“You have to tell them, don’t you,” she said.
“Tell them what?”
“That I shot him. You have to tell the chief, and I’ll go to jail.”
I thought about it for exactly two seconds. “Not necessarily,” I said. “It was an accident. You panicked. What did you do with the shotgun, anyway?”
“I threw it in the woods.”
“Where?”
“Down the highway,” she said. “A couple miles outside of town.”
“Probably not the best place,” I said. “But there’s no sense trying to move it now.”
“Will you help me, Alex?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Find out why he came here. If he found out I had money, or if Harwood was using him somehow. And then help me find Harwood. Somehow, I have to make him stop. Will you help me?”
“I don’t know if I can, Maria. How are we going to find him? What do we have to go on?”
“We
have this man,” she said. “The man in the white Cadillac. I’m sure Harwood hired him.”
“We can’t prove he broke into your house,” I said. “Aside from that, he’s just following you around. The police can give him a warning, but I doubt they could charge him with anything. And they certainly can’t make him talk about who hired him. There are laws that protect that information.”
“Like a doctor and a patient,” she said. “Or a lawyer and a client.”
“Exactly.”
“Or a private investigator,” she said. “If I hire you, you don’t have to say anything, either. About any of this.”
I could see where she was going. I guess I didn’t blame her for wanting to protect herself, now that she had made her confession to me. And I didn’t blame her for wanting to find Harwood so she could put an end to it. I didn’t blame her for anything, not even for the shooting itself.
I was the man who’d helped Randy find her. If I was going to blame anybody, I would start with myself.
“Maria, I’ll talk to my partner. Maybe he’ll have some ideas. He’s good at this stuff.”
“And what are you good at?” she said.
“Well, the police can’t make that PI tell them who his client is, or where he is. But maybe I can. That’s the advantage of not being a police officer anymore. I don’t always have to follow the rules.”
“Do you think you can catch him?”
“I may not have to,” I said. “I’ll try calling him, see if he’ll meet me. One private eye to another.”
“Does that mean you’re on the case?”
“If I can help you, I will,” I said. “But you should know that I’m not really a private eye. It just sort of happened. I was a cop once, but—”
“Does that mean you’re on the case, Alex?”
I looked at her. I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.
We went back inside the house, our faces red from the cold air. She told me more about Harwood, about the ways he had tried to find her in the past. After her husband’s death, she had moved to Florida, had her baby there. She’d spent four years in Tampa, without the slightest contact from him. She let herself believe that he had given up, until the day she went home and stopped to talk to her neighbor before going inside. The neighbor told her that two men had come that day to repair her refrigerator. The landlord had given them the key, or so they said. Maria knew better. She called her brother, Leopold, who was living in Seattle with their mother, and then drove right to the airport. She left everything behind.
The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery Page 19
