It took me a while to figure out why he ordered that gun. Then it came to me. He probably just liked the idea of me having it. I could see him sitting across the table from a prospective client, saying, “Yes sir, I’ve got a good man working for me now. He packs heat, of course. It’s a rough world out there. My man took three bullets once, still has one in his chest. That’s the kind of man we both need on our side…”
When I had finally picked up that gun, I took it home and put it in the back of my closet. I hadn’t touched it since.
The 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.”
CHAPTER FIVE
It 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.”