A Cold Day in Paradise (10 page)

“What happened?”

“The cook found him when he was taking the garbage out,” he said. “He was shot three or four times, looks like.”

“Do you think it was the same killer?” I looked up at Edwin and Sylvia. They were both staring at me. Sylvia started to shiver.

“Well, I’m not psychic, McKnight, but I have a feeling that we’re going to find the same bullets from the same gun.”

“Who was the victim?”

“Guy named Vince Dorney. You know him?”

“Vince Dorney. No, I don’t know him.” I looked to Edwin. He shook his head. “Edwin doesn’t know him, either.”

“He’s right there by the phone, eh?” Maven said. “Sounds like I called you right in the middle of your slumber party.”

“Save it, Maven. What about… I mean, did he cut him again?”

“No, not this time,” he said. “This time he used the knife for something else.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you better get down here, McKnight. Right now.”

“What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m calling from a squad car parked right outside your cabin.”

I
SAW THE
lights from the squad cars first, the blues and reds bouncing madly through the pine trees. When I rounded the corner, I saw four cars in front of my cabin. There was a county car, a state car, and two Soo cars. Eight men stood together by my door. When I stopped my truck and got out, it didn’t take too long to figure out who was running this little show.

“Mr. McKnight,” Maven said. “How nice of you to join us this evening.”

I nodded to the two county deputies. I had seen them once or twice at the Glasgow Inn.

“Some of the county and state boys were good enough
to stop by,” Maven went on. “We’re a few miles out of the Soo, after all. But this pertains to a Soo case, so I’ll be handling things. I was just explaining that to these gentlemen.”

“What’s going on?” I said. “Why are you here?”

“I tried to call you as soon as I found out about the murder behind the restaurant. You weren’t home, so I got worried. I sent a car out here just to make sure you were all right. That’s the kind of guy I am,” he said.

“So why did
you
come out here? And why are all these officers here?”

“I called the county and state out here just as a courtesy,” he said. “I’d expect the same if one of them came calling in the Soo. Now go take a look at your front door,” he said.

I thought of the rose that had been left there. I shuddered to think what he might have left this time.

I went to the door. One of the Soo cops was taking a picture with an instant camera. In the sudden moment of white light I saw a piece of paper pinned to the door by a large hunting knife.

“Don’t touch it yet, McKnight,” Maven said from behind me. The officer carefully removed the knife and put it in a plastic bag. He put the note in a separate bag. “That’s a shame about your door,” Maven said. “It’s gonna leave a nasty mark.”

“What does it say?” I said. “Let me read it.”

“Just hold on,” Maven said. He took the bags from the officer and held a flashlight over them. “Looks like blood on this knife,” he said. “Three guesses who the lab says it belongs to.” He passed it back to the officer and then stretched the clear plastic flat against the letter. “Sweet Jesus,” he said as he read it. It took a long time to read it. I could see that there were many words crammed on the single page.

When he was finished, he passed it to me without another word. The note looked like it was typed on an old manual machine with a ribbon that needed changing.

I read the letter twice and then I gave it back to Maven. All the officers just stood there watching me.

“I’ll say one thing for you,” Maven finally said. “You certainly get more interesting mail than I do.”

“This is impossible,” I said. “There’s no way he could be here. There’s no way he could have written this letter.”

“I take it you know who this Rose woman is?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know Rose. It’s a man, not a woman.”

“All right, a man named Rose. How do you know him?”

“It was fourteen years ago,” I said. “He’s the man who shot me. He’s the man who killed my partner.”

I
T WAS 1984
, a long hot summer in Detroit. Cocaine was still king that summer, the good old-fashioned powder, long lines of it all over the city. Crack was just a rumor. I had been on the police force about eight years, and was just about ready to take the detective’s exam. My partner, Franklin, was new on the job. He was an ex-football player, an offensive lineman. He played at the University of Michigan and made second-team All Big Ten his senior year. The Lions drafted him, but he blew out his knee the first week of training camp. He went back and finished up his degree, and a couple years after that he joined the force. They stuck him with me, figuring an ex-football player and an ex-baseball player would get along together. They were wrong.

“This is what a baseball player does,” he said one evening in our squad car. The argument had been going on all day. “He stands around in a field. Once in a while, a ball might get hit to him. And if it’s not hit right at him, he might have to move sideways a little bit. I’ll give you that. Occasionally, the man has to move sideways.”

I just shook my head. We were on our way to the hospital. One of the emergency room doctors had called in a disturbance, and we were the closest car.

“Now after he’s done standing in the field,” Franklin went on, “he comes back into the dugout to rest. I mean, it’s hard work standing out there like that, right? So he’s
gotta come into the shade and sit down on a bench. All right, so he’s sitting in that dugout for a while, having a drink, and then what do you know, it’s time for him to get up and go to bat! So now he’s gotta get up and go stand in a little box they painted in the dirt and swing this big stick, right? Now again, I’ll admit to you, swinging a big stick is a lot of work. I mean, if he fouls a couple balls off, he ends up swinging that stick something like five or six times!”

“Keep talking, Franklin,” I said. “Just keep digging that hole.”

“And then, get this, Alex. Say he hits that ball, what’s he gotta do then? He’s gotta run all the way down to first base. What is that, like ninety feet?”

“Ninety feet, yes. Very good.”

“Ninety feet the man has to run! And if he wants to try to stretch that into a double, that’s a hundred and eighty feet!”

“A football player with math skills,” I said. “What a bonus.”

“Where you going, anyway?” he asked.

“Receiving Hospital,” I said. “This is the best way.” I was going south down Brush Street, deep into the heart of downtown Detroit. The heat from the day was still lingering there on the streets, long after the sun had gone down.

“Best way if you don’t want to get there in a hurry,” he said. “You should have swung over to St. Antoine Street, go right down by the Hall of Justice.”

“Nah, this is faster,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I grew up in this city, friend. What do
you
know?”

“See, we’re here already,” I said. I pulled around to the back of the building near the emergency room entrance.

“We would have been here and gone by now if you’d listen to me.”

“The day I listen to you is the day I retire,” I said. We walked into the place, expecting the usual chaos. But everything seemed quiet. There was a woman in the waiting room, holding an icebag against her cheek. Across from her a man sat doubled over, hugging himself and gently rocking. A nurse was looking through a stack of files at the reception desk. She looked up at us and did a double take. Either I was just too damned good-looking or Franklin was just too damned big.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Franklin said. “We’re police officers.”

“In case you’ve never seen the uniform before,” I said. “Don’t mind my partner. He’s an ex-football player.”

She didn’t seem too amused by either one of us. “You want Eh”. Myers,” she said. “Take a seat.”

We sat down in the waiting room and watched the woman shift the icebag around on her cheek. Somebody had given her quite a shiner.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “Are you all right?”

The woman looked at us. “Do I look all right?”

“No, ma’am, I guess you don’t. Is there anything I can do?”

The woman shook her head.

“Did your husband do this to you?”

She shook her head again.

“Because if he did—”

“Just leave me alone, all right?”

“Ma’am, I’m just saying—”

“I don’t want to hear what you’re saying, all right? I don’t want to hear it.”

I put my hands up in surrender and settled into my seat. We sat there for a long time. From outside we could hear the sounds of the city, a dog barking, a siren wailing in the distance. Detroit was always at its worst in the summer, but tonight it was really simmering. The heat was even worse
than usual. And the bus strike was still on. There wasn’t even a Tiger game to watch because of the All-Star break. I didn’t see how the emergency room could be so empty. I kept waiting for those big double doors to burst open with fresh casualties.

“So tell me, Franklin,” I said. “Have you ever tried to hit a fastball?”

Franklin just looked at me.

“Have you ever had somebody throw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour right at your head?”

“Keep trying, Alex.”

“I’m serious, Franklin. I’m trying to enlighten you here. You obviously have no appreciation for other sports. I suppose I can understand that, though. I mean, basically, what did you do when you were playing football? You were an offensive tackle, right? So let’s see. You crouched down and you put one hand on the ground. And then when the quarterback said ‘hut!’ you stood up and hit the guy in front of you. Am I right? Oh no wait, it was more involved than that, wasn’t it. Sometimes the quarterback would say ‘hut-hut!’ and you had to be smart enough
not
to stand up and hit your guy until the second ‘hut.’”

Before he could say anything, Dr. Myers came into the waiting room. “I’m sorry, Officers,” he said. “Please come this way.” When we stood up I slipped the woman with the icebag a piece of paper. It had my name and Franklin’s name on it, and the phone number for our precinct. I didn’t expect her to call, but I figured that was about all we could do for her that night.

The doctor led us out of the waiting room into a small lounge behind the reception area. He was a thin black man, with a meticulous doctor’s air about him. There was a slight Caribbean lilt in his voice. After we turned down the coffee and doughnuts, he finally told us why he had called the police.

“There’s a man who’s been coming in here,” he said. “Pretty regularly. Although you never really know when he’s going to be here. He’ll come in every night for a few nights running, then he’ll disappear for a few days. Then he’ll show up again. He’s obviously very disturbed, probably paranoid schizophrenic, although I couldn’t say that for sure. I certainly don’t have the time to try to talk to him.”

“What does he do when he’s here?” I asked.

“Mostly he just sort of … this is going to sound strange. Mostly he hides.”

“He hides?”

“We used to have this big plant out in the waiting area. You know, like a palm tree? He always used to stand behind it. Eventually, we had to take the plant away. He was scaring the patients.”

“You have security guards here, don’t you?”

“We have some,” he said. “Not nearly enough. Whenever we called them, as soon as they showed up, he’d be gone. It’s like he had a sixth sense about it.”

“When’s the last time he was here?”

“He was here earlier tonight,” he said. “He had a doctor’s coat on this time. I think he must have stolen it from our linen closet. He was walking around the examination rooms, pretending to be a doctor. One of the nurses stopped him, and he just said something like, ‘Just act natural, nurse. I’m undercover.’”

I looked at Franklin and shook my head. “Great.”

“We’re accustomed to having some pretty odd people around here,” he said. “It comes with the territory. But this man is becoming very disruptive.”

“Do you have any idea what his name is? Or where he lives?”

“We don’t know his name. But I think we know where he lives now. As soon as the nurse called security,
he disappeared again. But the guard saw him on the street and followed him. There’s an apartment building about eight or nine blocks up, on the comer of Columbia and Woodward, right before the freeway. He saw the man go in, but he didn’t see which apartment he went into.”