A Cold Day in Paradise (20 page)

“Why don’t we both go get her?” he said.

“Just go,” I said. “I need to go to the station.”

He looked at both Maven and Allen. They had already started toward the door. “Alex, something’s not right here.”

“We’re just going to talk about Rose,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

He shook his head. “Call me when you’re done, Alex.”

I went outside with the two men. “I’ll follow you in my truck,” I said.

They looked at each other. That look, it should have tipped me off. “Why don’t you ride with us?” Allen said.

“Then I’ll be there and my truck will be here,” I said. “Go on, I’ll be right behind you.”

“Mr. Uttley can take care of that, can’t he?” Maven said. “His car is back at the casino, anyway, isn’t it? He can bring your truck into town and then you can go get his car.”

I didn’t feel like arguing about it, so I just threw my keys on the front seat of my truck and got in the back of Maven’s car.

It had been a long time since I had seen the back of a police car. When we were on our way I sat up and laced my fingers through the wire cage and looked at them. “All right, so what’s going on with Rose?” I said.

Maven just sniffed and kept driving.

“Come on, tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“We’ll talk at the station,” he said. It finally sank into my thick head. They were taking me in.

“Maven, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I said.

“Please, Mr. McKnight,” Allen said, turning his head. “Just relax. We’ll all be more comfortable at the police station.”

I sat back in the seat. After all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I couldn’t make any sense of it. Surely they don’t think I had anything to do with what happened to Edwin, I thought. They didn’t arrest me. They didn’t read me my rights.

I looked out the window at the pine trees. Edwin is dead. I poked my finger through a hole in the seat. Somebody was smoking back here and they burned a hole.

When we got to the station I tried to open the back door. It didn’t open, of course. I had forgotten, the back doors don’t open from the inside on a police car. I waited for Maven to open it for me. “Come on in, Alex,” he said. “Right this way.”

“I know the way,” I said. But instead of taking me to his office, he led me into an interview room. There was a table in the middle of the room, with four chairs. Another table stood against the wall with a coffee pot and a small refrigerator. A map on the wall showed the different types of fish in the inland lakes.

“We’ll have more room in here,” he said. “Have a seat.”

“Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on here?”

“Of course, Alex,” Allen said. “Please sit down.” He pulled a chair out for me.

“Now how did you say you like your coffee?” Maven said. “One sugar, no cream?”

I sat down. “Yes,” I said. “That’s right.” The man is finally going to make me some coffee. This is getting worse by the minute.

He poured the coffee in a mug and put it down in front of me. Then he sat down across from me, next to Allen. I
looked from one face to the other while a curl of steam rose from the coffee.

“Mr. McKnight,” Detective Allen said, “tell me about this man Rose.”

“I thought you said Maven told you all about him,” I said.

“I want you to tell me,” he said. “Chief Maven might have left something out.”

I went over the whole story, starting at the hospital in Detroit, Rose’s apartment, the gun, the shooting. I told him how Rose went away for life, how I never figured on hearing from him again, until the phone calls and the notes started coming.

“These notes,” Allen said. “They all seem to have been typed on the same typewriter.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the same man wrote them.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Just thinking out loud,” Allen said. “Let’s talk about the dead men. The first two, I mean.” Maven just sat there, watching me.

“I didn’t know them.”

“Tony Bing, a local bookmaker,” Allen said. “Your friend Edwin found him in his motel room.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I understand he called you before he called the police.”

“Yes.”

“You were on the scene, in fact, before the police even got there.”

“Yes.”

“That strikes me as rather odd,” he said.

“It
was
odd,” I said. “Edwin did an odd thing.”

“A very odd thing,” he said. “Wouldn’t you call that odd, Chief Maven?”

“It was odd at the time,” Maven said. “And it’s still odd now.”

“The next man was, what was his name?”

They both looked at me.

“Dorney,” I said. “Vince Dorney. At least that’s what the chief told me.”

“Yes, that’s right. Vince Dorney. Another local character, from what I’m told. In fact, I believe Mr. Dorney was known to engage in a little bookmaking himself, wasn’t he?”

They both looked at me again.

“I don’t know anything about the man,” I said.

“It’s just another odd thing,” Allen said. “Here’s another bookmaker who ends up dead.”

“Another odd thing,” Maven said.

“Your Mr. Rose seems to have a specific dislike for bookmakers, Mr. McKnight. Funny, I didn’t see any mention of that in his notes.”

I could feel a line of sweat starting down my back. Both of the men had their forearms on the table. As they shifted their weight it made the coffee splash out of the cup.

“I don’t like where you’re taking this,” I said. “A homicidal maniac has been terrorizing me for the last week. Three men are dead, including the most harmless man I’ve ever known. But instead of trying to find this guy, all you’re doing is sitting here grilling me like I’m your lead suspect.”

“We’re just having a conversation here,” Maven said. “Although we can give your man Uttley a call if you really want us to. If you think you need a lawyer, I mean.”

“I don’t need a lawyer, Maven. What I need is for you to start doing your fucking job.”

“Now, Mr. McKnight,” Allen said. “Is that kind of language necessary?”

“You guys aren’t even doing it right,” I said. “It’s supposed to be good cop, bad cop, not asshole cop, dickhead cop.”

“Keep going, McKnight,” Maven said. “Just keep digging that hole.”

“If you don’t get out there and start looking for this guy, I swear to God, Maven—”

“You swear what, McKnight? You swear you’ll try to choke me to death again?”

I grabbed the cup and threw it. It hit the fishing map and exploded, leaving a great brown streak right across the whole county. Maven and Allen just watched me, not even blinking.

“My, my,” Allen finally said. “Your man has a temper.”

“He was a baseball player once,” Maven said. “Did I tell you that?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I assume he had a better arm then.”

“I would hope so. That was a weak throw.”

“Never made the big leagues,” Maven said.

“That’s a shame,” Allen said.

“So he became a cop instead.”

“So I gathered.”

“He never made detective,” Maven said. “In fact, he had to leave the force after the Rose incident.”

“Another failure to deal with,” Allen said. “It’s painful to think about.”

“So here’s what I think happened, Detective Allen, if you’d care to hear it.”

“By all means, Chief Maven. Please proceed.”

“It’s no secret that Edwin Fulton had a gambling problem. More than once, in fact, he had to be escorted off the
reservation. I’m thinking maybe he got into a little trouble with these bookmakers.”

“But I thought Fulton was a wealthy man,” Allen said.

“Very much so,” Maven said. “But you know how bad they can get once they get their hooks into you. Maybe they saw him as an easy mark.”

“Good point.”

“So Mr. Fulton asks his friend Mr. McKnight if perhaps he can help him with this problem. Perhaps Mr. McKnight even owed these men some money himself.”

“Could be, could be.”

“Mr. McKnight decides that there’s only one way to eliminate the problem, and that’s to eliminate the two bookmakers themselves.”

“Seems pretty drastic to me,” Allen said.

“Drastic, yes,” Maven said. “But we’ve both seen men killed over much smaller matters. And in this case, Mr. McKnight had the perfect plan. He would write these notes to himself to make it look like this man Rose had come back to haunt him.”

“Very original. But all this just to knock off a couple bookies?”

“There could be more to it,” Maven said. “Maybe this Rose thing helped to satisfy some sort of craving. Some sort of sickness. It must be hard to live with yourself all these years. Knowing that you froze when it really counted and your partner ended up getting killed.”

“It must be a living hell,” Allen said.

“It’s just a theory, of course. But it would certainly explain a lot. Like why the phone calls he claimed he was receiving suddenly stopped when we started tapping his phone.”

“So what about Mr. Fulton, then? What happened to him?”

“Ah, that’s the interesting part,” Maven said. “After Mr. McKnight has killed the two bookmakers, he has this idea. Maybe it just occurs to him then, or maybe he had been planning it all along.”

“Are you suggesting that Mr. McKnight killed Mr. Fulton?”

“He wasn’t in his cabin that night. He was out looking for him, remember. Or so he said. All those other nights, when we had an officer over there, nothing ever happened. The one night he goes out, Fulton is killed. And this time, he dumps the body in the lake. I’m guessing that they had already disposed of the gun. So he didn’t want the body to be found. That way, it wouldn’t seem out of place that he was killed by something else.”

“The rose in the boat was a nice touch. And the blond hairs.”

“Give him points for that one, yes.”

“But why would he kill his own best friend?”

“Ah, Detective Allen. I’m surprised you even have to ask that question. Why does
anyone
kill his best friend?”

“Of course,” Allen said. “You kill your best friend so you can have your best friend’s wife.”

I had heard enough. “If you guys are about done,” I said. “I think I’ll be leaving now. I mean, unless you have a good reason to keep me here.”

“We can’t keep you here,” Maven said. “We can’t charge you yet.”

“Then why are you telling me all this?” I said.

“All those years on the force,” Maven said, “and you never saw a suspect get worked over?”

“He never made detective,” Allen said. “He never learned this stuff.”

“Good point,” Maven said. “He never got past parking tickets.”

“Tell him how it works, Chief.”

“Sometimes when you know a suspect is guilty,” Maven said, “but you don’t have enough evidence, you just bring the guy in and you lay it all out for him.”

“You tell him that you know he did it,” Allen said, “and you know that’s he going to give himself away.”

“You tell him that you’re going to be watching him.”

“You tell him that it’s only a matter of time.”

“But you only lean on him if you
know
he’s going to fold,” Maven said.

“Otherwise,” Allen said, “you’re just wasting your time.”

“I don’t think we’re wasting our time here, McKnight.”

“I can see the fear in his eyes,” Allen said. They both leaned over to look at me. They were close enough for me to catch the scent of cigars and aftershave. “Can you see it, Chief Maven? Can you see the fear?”

“I certainly can, Detective Allen. I can see it all over him.”

“You know how an owl does his hunting, Mr. McKnight?” Allen said.

They both sat there for a long moment. I didn’t say anything.

“He listens. He waits.”

“As long as you don’t move,” Maven said, “you’re safe.”

“But as soon as you move,” Allen said, “he hears you.”

“You want to stay still, McKnight. But you can’t.”

“You know the owl is there, waiting.”

“You have to run, McKnight. You can’t help it.”

“You’re too scared not to run.”

“Then he
swoops
right down on you.” Maven shot his hand out and picked up an imaginary animal. “And he eats you.”

“Eats you for dinner.”

“Makes me hungry just thinking about it,” Maven said. I stood up.

“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. McKnight,” the detective said. “We’ll be seeing you soon.”

“Very
soon,” Maven said. “I’ll bring the ketchup.”

W
HEN
M
AVEN AND
Allen had finished with me, I called Uttley. I didn’t answer any of his questions. I just told him to come and get me. I stood outside the station house waiting for him, looking out past the courthouse at the locks and beyond them the bridge to Canada. The storm had passed, but the remaining clouds filtered what sunlight there was into an otherwordly glow. Everything looked wrong and I felt sick to my stomach.

That bridge marks the northern end of one of the longest highways in America, Interstate 75. You can take it dead south more than a thousand miles, right out of Michigan, through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, all the way to Florida. Forget what Maven had said about not leaving. I could just get on that road and go. Never come back.

Would Rose follow me? How long would it take for him to find me again?

Uttley finally showed up in my truck. “God, Alex,” he said when I opened the driver’s side door. “What happened to you?”

“Just move over,” I said.

I pulled out of the parking lot and headed across town. Uttley watched me for a while and then finally said, “Where are we going?”

“To your office.”

“I told Mrs. Fulton we’d come back,” he said. “And my car. It’s still at the casino.”

“We’ll get it later,” I said.

We came to a red light and sat there for a full minute. I closed my eyes and took a long breath. “How are they doing?” I said.

“Mrs. Fulton is a mess,” he said. “I guess that’s understandable. Sylvia finally came inside, but she refused to change out of her wet clothes. When I left, she was just standing at the window, looking out at the lake.”