A Cold Day in Paradise (7 page)

T
HE BARTENDER WAS
no help. I asked him if he had been there that past Monday. It took him a full minute to figure that one out, so I didn’t think he’d be able to remember if there were any suspicious characters there that night. So I just paid the man and headed down to Uttley’s office. It was right around the corner from the courthouse, between a bank and a gift shop. The whole downtown area was starting to smell like money again, thanks to the casinos. Uttley was doing well, as were a lot of the other local businessmen. The strange thing was that, for once, a lot of the money was coming to the Chippewa Indians first and then trickling down to everyone else. I knew a lot of people around here who had a hard time dealing with that.

Uttley was on the phone when I came in. He gave me a little wave and motioned me into a big overstuffed guest chair. His office was classic Uttley: a desk you could land an airplane on, framed pictures of hounds and riders ready for the foxhunt, a good ten or twelve exotic houseplants that he was always misting with his little spray bottle. “Jerry, that number doesn’t work, and you
know it,” he was saying into his phone. “You’re going to have to do a lot of work on that number before we talk again.” He gave me a theatrical headshake and double eyebrow raise as he covered the receiver with his hand. “Almost done here,” he whispered to me.

I picked up the baseball that was sitting on his desk, read some of the signatures. Without even thinking about it, I turned the ball over into a four-seam grip, ready for the throw to second base.

“Okay,” he said as he hung up. He rubbed his hands together. “How are
you
doing?”

“Can’t complain,” I said.

“Wouldn’t do you any good if you did complain, eh?”

“I did receive an interesting phone call last night,” I said. By the time I told him everything, he was just staring at me with his mouth open.

“Did you tell Chief Maven about this?” he said.

“I haven’t stopped by to see him yet,” I said. “I thought I’d try the bar first, see if the bartender remembered anything from Monday night.”

“I take it he didn’t.”

“No.”

“Well,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. Do you want me to come to the police station with you?”

“You don’t have to do that. I’ll go see him right now.”

“Chief Maven can be a bit… blustery,” he said.

“That’s one word for it.”

“Oh and, by the way,” he said. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

“What would that be?”

“Mrs. Fulton would really like to speak with you as soon as possible.”

I swallowed my surprise. “Sylvia Fulton wants to see me?”

“No no,” he said. “Theodora Fulton. Edwin’s mother.
She came up from Grosse Pointe yesterday. She’s staying with them for a couple days.”

“Why does she want to see me?”

“She’s worried about her son. She thinks you might be able to help him.”

“What does she expect me to do?”

“Mrs. Fulton is a great old lady, Alex. A little eccentric maybe. Only rich people are eccentric, by the way. Everyone else is just crazy.”

“So I’ve noticed,” I said.

“Anyway, she’s very protective of her son. She came up as soon as she heard about what happened. She seems to think he’s in some sort of danger up here.”

“Then I probably shouldn’t tell her about our new friend the killer, huh?”

“I’d find a way to leave that out of the conversation,” he said. “Alex, I should warn you, this is a very intense woman we’re talking about. She has a different way of looking at things. She wants to talk to you about a dream she had.”

“What kind of dream?”

“She dreamed about what happened on Saturday night. It got her very upset, Alex. She thinks Edwin is next.”

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t know what to think of it, Alex. All I know is, while we’re standing there in that parking lot, Edwin’s mother is down in Grosse Pointe, three hundred miles away. And she’s dreaming about it. She saw it, Alex. She didn’t see who did it or anything. She just saw the way it looked afterward.”

“What, you mean …”

“The blood, Alex. She says she saw the blood in her dream.”

I
T WASN’T THE
best day for a walk along the river, but it sounded more fun than my appointment with Maven. I followed the path through the Locks Park, looking out at the water, cold and empty. There were no freighters headed for the locks. No small boats out for a spin. No sign of life whatsoever.

The path ran east, right out of the park and onto the front lawn of the courthouse. There were two statues there. One was the giant crane from Ojibwa legend, the one that landed here next to the river and brought the Indians. The other statue was the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. If there was supposed to be some connection between that and the city of Sault Ste. Marie, I didn’t know about it.

The City County building sat directly behind the courthouse. It was an ugly thing, just a big brick rectangle as gray as the November sky. The Soo Police and the County Sheriffs Department both lived in that same building. The county jail was there, too. Stuck on one side of it was a little courtyard for the prisoners. It was really just a cage, maybe twenty feet square, with a picnic table inside, surrounded by another fence with razor wire running along the top.

I stopped in at the county desk first, said hello to a deputy. “Bill around today?” I asked.

“No, he’s down in Caribou Lake,” he said. “You want me to leave him a message?”

“No, just wondering,” I said. “I’m actually here to see Chief Maven.”

“He’s that way,” the deputy said, pointing down the hallway.

“I know where he is,” I said. “I’m just stalling.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said. As I left, I saw him smile and shake his head.

I checked in at the city desk, stood there for a few minutes while the woman called him on her phone. She stood up and told me to follow her. The look on her face told me she didn’t want me to hold her personally responsible for what was about to happen.

She led me down a maze of corridors, deep into die heart of the building where no sunlight had ever reached. There was just the steady hum of fluorescent lights. I was shown to a small waiting area with hard plastic chairs. One man was sitting there, staring at the floor, a pair of handcuffs linking him to a piece of metal imbedded in the cement wall. I sat down across from him. There was one ashtray on the table. No magazines.

“Gotta cigarette?” the man asked.

“Sorry,” I said.

He went back to staring at the floor and did not say another word.

I kept sitting there while days seemed to pass, and then weeks and months until it was surely spring outside if I ever got out again to see it. Finally a door opened and Chief Roy Maven waved me inside. The office was four walls of cement. No window.

“Good of you to stop by, Mr. McKnight,” he said as he beckoned me into the chair in front of his desk. “I’ve been anxious to talk to you.”

“I can tell that by the way you rushed me right in here to see you.”

He let that one go while he picked up a manila folder
and slipped on a pair of grandmotherly reading glasses that clashed with his tough-guy face. He paged through the contents of the folder until he arrived at the page he wanted. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said. “Alexander McKnight, born 1950 in Detroit. Graduated from Henry Ford High School in Dearborn in 1969. Says here you played two years of minor league baseball.” He looked up at me. “Couldn’t hit the curve ball. It doesn’t actually say that here. I’m just assuming.”

“You seem to have a pretty complete file on me,” I said.

“This is just your private investigator application. It’s part of the public record. Anybody can see it.” He went back to reading. “Held a number of interesting jobs for a couple years. House painter. Bartender. Went to Dearborn Community College for a couple years, studied criminal justice. Joined the Detroit police force in 1975. Served eight years. Two commendations for meritorious service. Not bad. Wounded on the job in 1984. Took a disability retirement soon after. Three-quarter pay for the rest of your life ain’t half bad, is it? Of course, that’s more than fair when a man is disabled.” He looked at me over his reading glasses. “And in your case, that disability would be…?”

I looked at him for a long moment. “I was shot three times,” I said.

He shook his head. “Hell of a thing to happen.” He looked at me for a long moment, waiting for me to tell him the story. I didn’t, so he looked back down at the papers. “Moved up here in, where did it say that? Ah, here it is, moved into the area in 1985. Been here ever since. Funny, most people with a disability, they’d move to Florida or Arizona, somewhere nice and warm. But here you are.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your choice,” he said. “Anyway, let’s see, you filed
your form in July, got your license in August. Looks like somebody kicked that one through pretty quickly. You must have friends in high places.”

I just sat there and watched him. It brought back memories. That good old cop swagger, I had seen so much of it. I had slipped into it myself now and then. It was so easy. Problem was, it got harder and harder to slip back out of it when the day was done. It’s not the kind of thing you want to take home. Just ask my ex-wife.

“Now, Mr. McKnight,” he said, taking off his glasses, “seeing as how you’re pretty new at this private investigator business, I’m going to let you in on a couple little tricks of the trade. Do you mind if I do that?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Very well. First of all, when a private investigator is operating in a police jurisdiction, it is a common courtesy to check in at the police station to let them know who you are and what you are doing. Not that I care about such formalities, of course. No, sir. But somewhere down the road, you’re going to run into a police chief who really doesn’t like the fact that you’re working in his town and he hasn’t even been introduced.”

“Fair enough.”

“Second, and even more importantly, I would suggest that the next time Edwin Fulton calls you up in the middle of the night and asks you to come down to a major crime scene, I would just take a moment to double-check with him, just to make sure that he has in fact called the police first. Actually, I would say, just go ahead and assume that he
hasn’t
called the police. That doesn’t seem to be his strong suit, after all. But you, of course, being a former policeman yourself, and understanding how important it is for an officer to arrive on the scene before the friends and neighbors do,
you
should go ahead and phone it in yourself. In fact, I’ll give you my home number, so
the next time Mr. Fulton wants you to come look at a murder, you can call me directly, day or night.”

We both just sat there looking at each other.

“I’d hate to bother you at home,” I finally said. “Next time, I’ll just call it in to the station.”

“That would work just fine,” he said. He picked up a copy of the
Sault Star
, the daily Soo Canada paper, from his desk. “Have you seen this yet? We made the front page over in Canada.”

“I haven’t read it yet.”

“‘Local Man Slaughtered In Soo Michigan Motel Room.’ Now
that’s
a headline for you. Notice how they make sure to say it happened on
this
side of the river. Did you know that it took two of my men five hours to clean that room up? Have you ever cleaned that much blood up before?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“By the time we had gone over the room and then finally gotten the body out of there, most of the blood had hardened. Of course, as soon as you put water on it, it sort of comes back to life and starts spreading again. You try to wipe it up, it’s like paint. You’re painting the whole room red. One of my officers, he’s been out sick ever since. I think he’s reevaluating his career plans.”

I fought down the lump in my stomach.

“Anyway, here’s the deal. I’ve already talked to Mr. Fulton. So I’m just wondering if you might have any other information for me. Did you know the deceased?”

“No,” I said.

“You never met him? You never placed bets with him?”

“I don’t gamble.”

“Have you ever heard Mr. Fulton speak of him prior to that night?”

“I knew that he was probably putting bets down somewhere,” I said, “but he never mentioned anyone by name.”

“When did you last see him before he called you Saturday night?”

“I saw him briefly at the Glasgow Inn. He stopped in with his wife. Then later, he stopped in on his own.”

“How did he seem that evening? Did he say anything unusual?”

“I didn’t talk to him,” I said.

“You didn’t talk to him? He says you two are best buddies.”

“I was playing poker.”

“I thought you said you don’t gamble.”

“It’s not gambling,” I said. “It’s nickels and dimes.”

He nodded. “All right,” he said. He closed my folder and put it in a drawer. “That’ll do for now.”

I thought about leaving right then. The hell with this guy, I didn’t feel like telling him about the phone call. But I knew that if I didn’t tell him, it would be just the kind of thing that could come back and haunt me.

“Actually, Chief Maven, I’ve been enjoying our time here so much, I just don’t think I can leave yet.”

For one split second, he lost that little hard-ass smirk.

“I’ll take a cup of coffee with one sugar,” I said. “And then I’ll tell you about a little conversation I had last night with the murderer.”

It was worth telling him the story, just to see him choke on his tough-guy routine, if only for a minute. I told him all about the phone call while he wrote down every word. But I never did get that coffee.

I
GRABBED A
quick lunch at the Glasgow, and finally had a good look at that newspaper. There was a picture of the motel on page one. You could see the police barricades set up around the place, and a few officers carrying out what looked like a big sack of laundry. I’m sure
Mr. Bing was quite a load, even with all thirteen or fourteen pints of blood drained from his body.