“Okay, let me take a picture of the note first,” he said. “Put it on your hood.”
I did as I was told. He bent down close and snapped two shots.
“Okay, now the hat.”
I put the hat on the hood and watched him take nine or ten shots, turning the hat around and then tipping it over.
“Leon, is this really going to help us?”
“You never know,” he said. “Now you can go give it to the police and we’ll still have the pictures.” He put the lens cap back on the camera.
“You’re something else,” I said. But I knew this is what he would do. He’d grab on to this like a dog on a steak bone. It’s what he lived for.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” he said. “You wanna get some lunch now? I was just on my way.”
I was about to decline, but then I thought, what the hell. Go buy the guy some lunch. He deserves that much from you, at the very least. Besides, look what’s next on your to-do list. A visit to the police station means you might just run into your old friend, Chief Maven. The longer you can put that one off, the better.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take you to lunch on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“We don’t eat at the Ojibway Hotel.”
We had lunch at the Chinese Buffet, then it was time for Leon to go back to selling snowmobiles, and for me to go back downtown. Chief Roy Maven of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Department can usually be found in the City County Building, which is basically a big gray cement block attached to the old courthouse. The building and the man go together, for me anyway, because they both have roughly the same amount of charm. Today, at least, I knew there was no need to see Chief Maven himself. All I was doing was dropping off a stupid hat. I figured I’d just give it to the receptionist and leave.
There was a truck working hard to clear the front parking lot, so I parked around back by the police entrance, right next to the jail’s courtyard. It was a little twelve-by-twelve square, completely surrounded by a chain-link fence and razor wire. Ordinarily, there’d be somebody out sitting on the picnic table, having a smoke, but today the table was buried under two feet of snow.
The city police department shares the same building with the county, which puts Chief Maven somewhere near the bottom of the totem pole, below the sheriff, who owns the jail and the best part of the building, the state police, who have their own barracks down the road, and the feds, who run the Soo locks and control the border. That’s half the reason why he’s always so happy.
The other half is that he genuinely doesn’t like me. We had this sort of chemical reaction to each other the first time we met, and we never found a way to get past it. Hell, for all I knew, he was a great guy, and under different circumstances, we would have even been friends.
But I wouldn’t have bet on it.
I went inside, stomped the snow off my boots, and told the woman at the desk that I wanted to leave something for Chief Maven.
“Is he expecting you?” she asked.
“No, no,” I said. “I just wanted to give him this hat. It belonged to the man who was found dead in the snow this morning.”
“Oh my,” she said. She looked at the hat like she wouldn’t have touched it for a thousand dollars.
“I was thinking he could return it to the man’s family. That’s all.”
“I’m going to call him.”
“No, please, that’s not necessary.” I knew what would happen if she called him. He’d tell her to make me wait out here, and then sometime around spring he’d actually come out to see me. I’d played this game with him before.
“I’m sure he’ll want to speak to you,” she said, the phone already in her hand.
“I’ll just drop it off at his office,” I said. “I know where it is.”
“Sir, you can’t just go back there…”
But I was already gone. I went down the hallway and saw that his door was open. When I poked my head in, he was on the phone. No doubt the receptionist had called to warn him I was on my way.
“Hello, Chief,” I said.
“McKnight,” he said, slamming down the phone. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I just wanted to give you something.”
“The waiting area’s out in the lobby. And what the hell did you do to your hair?”
I went in and sat down on the plastic guest chair. As always, his office was nothing more than a windowless box, with gray concrete walls and not much to hide them. One bulletin board. A calendar. It all went perfectly with Maven himself, with his drill sergeant haircut and his weather-beaten face that never changed.
“I’ve got snow up to my ass,” he said. “Half the town I can’t even get to. I got a poor old man found frozen stiff in a snowbank. Now you show up.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
“Just knock it off, McKnight. What do you want from me?”
“It’s about Simon Grant.”
He looked at me. “What about him?”
“I saw him last night,” I said. “At the Ojibway Hotel.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You see this hat?” I said, holding it up.
“What about it?”
“It belonged to Mr. Grant.”
“What, is he a friend of yours?”
“As far as I know, I never met him before last night.”
“So how come you have his hat?”
“He left it for me,” I said. “Right before he went out and froze to death.”
Maven thought about that one. “Okay, start at the beginning,” he said. “What were you doing at the hotel? Having dinner?”
“Yes,” I said. “Then staying the night.”
“Staying the night? With who?”
“That’s none of your business, Chief.”
“Now I understand the dye job,” he said. “McKnight, could you get any more ridiculous?”
“Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”
“Go ahead.”
I ran through the rest of it for him. It was the third time I had told it that day, but it still didn’t make any sense to me.
“So let me get this straight,” he said when I was done. “You’ve never seen this man before, ever?”
“No.”
“You’re sure about that.”
“Yes.”
“And when you see this hat lying there on the floor outside the room, you go downstairs and chase this eighty-two-year-old man into the snow?”
“I didn’t chase him into the snow. I was just looking for him.”
“So you could… what?”
“So I could ask him what the hell he was talking about. Why he thought he knew who I was.”
Maven closed his eyes. “You were involved in, let me think, the last three homicides in this city? No, four. Now we’ve got this poor old man who freezes to death in the snow. Even with that, you’ve got to show up holding the man’s hat.”
“Chief, I don’t know why he did this. Okay? I’ve got no idea.”
“Maybe my wife is right,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to retire. Move to Florida.”
“I hear it’s nice this time of year.”
“Just give me the hat.”
I looked down at it. For some strange reason, I didn’t want to give it up. It felt like the hat itself was a message I still hadn’t figured out yet. But hell, at least Leon had taken those pictures.
“You’ll give this to his family?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Can you have them give me a call? I’d like to talk to them.”
“Why do you want to talk to them?”
“I just want to figure out why he thought he knew me.”
“Oh no you don’t,” he said. “McKnight, if I find out you’re bothering these people, I swear to God… Don’t you think they’re going through enough?”
“I’m not going to bother anybody.”
“You’re damned right you’re not gonna. If I find out you’re harassing this family while they’re burying this poor man-”
“Chief, please. Give me some credit.”
“I’ll give you my boot up your ass,” he said. “I’ve seen you do this before, remember? I know you. Please, McKnight, just go home and forget all about this, will you? Go dye your hair some more. I can still see some gray.”