“It involves you, McKnight. He says you contacted Mr. Grant and asked him to meet you at the hotel.”
“What?”
“Despite the fact that Mr. Grant is not supposed to be out alone, especially in bad weather, you told him to meet you at the hotel. Then you made him wait around there all day, and young Mr. Woolsey was unable to convince him to go back home.”
“You are kidding me, right?”
“Finally, you had words with him in the dining room. After which time you must have told him to leave the hotel immediately.”
“I must have told him? What does that mean?”
“Apparently, Mr. Woolsey was not present at that exact moment. When he came looking for his grandfather, he was gone.”
“Because I made him go out in the snow? An eighty-two-year-old man?”
“I’m just telling you the story as it was told to me, McKnight.”
“You got all of this secondhand from Marty Grant. Did you talk to Chris Woolsey directly?”
“I tried to, yes. So far, he hasn’t agreed to talk to us. He wasn’t charged, after all. Only his father and his two uncles. But I’m sure he’ll be subpoenaed for the trials.”
I didn’t have anything to say. I was completely dumbfounded.
“This kid is lying,” Natalie said. “Did you talk to anyone else at the hotel about this supposed altercation?”
“As yet, nobody else at the hotel can corroborate the story.”
“Yes,” she said. “Big surprise.”
“Chris is covering his ass,” I said. “His grandfather comes to the hotel and instead of keeping an eye on him he’s hitting on one of the maids or something. Then when the poor old guy wanders out and gets lost in the snow, Chris makes up this story so the rest of the family has someone else to blame for it.”
“I’m not saying I believe the story, McKnight. Okay? I’m not saying that. But if this is what he told his family, then it helps explain the state of mind those men were in the day of the funeral. They honestly believed that you were to blame for their father’s death. Not in a way that they could do anything about legally, but responsible just the same. Then later, when you were driving all over town trying to talk to them-”
“What does that have to do with it?” Natalie said.
“Ms. Reynaud,” Maven said. “Did Alex tell you that he went looking for Chris Woolsey the day before the funeral? That he went to his apartment on campus and then to his mother’s house?”
“He didn’t know,” Natalie said. “At the time, Alex had no idea Chris was related to Mr. Grant.”
“Okay, fine,” Maven said. “But to the Grants and the Woolseys, here’s this man who they think drove old Simon Grant out into the snow. Now here he comes around bothering them, trying to… They don’t know what. He’s leaving private investigator cards around. Whatever he was harassing Simon Grant about, now he’s after them.”
“For God’s sake,” I said. “Can we please-”
“Then when this same man shows up at the funeral,” he said to her, “to harass them even further…”
“You keep using that word,” Natalie said. “Alex wasn’t harassing anyone.”
“It’s their word,” Maven said. “I keep trying to tell you that. This is what the Grants are saying right now.”
“Listen,” I said. All of a sudden I was getting another big headache. “This is not even why we’re here, okay? We want to ask you something about Natalie’s father.”
That stopped him cold. “I don’t understand.”
“Natalie’s father was murdered right here in this town,” I said. “On New Year’s Eve, 1973.”
“How do you know that?”
I pulled out the old newspaper article and handed it to him.
“The Ojibway,” he said when he was halfway through. He looked up at both of us and then finished the article. When he was done, he handed it back to me.
“The hat that Alex gave you to give to the Grants,” Natalie said. “It wasn’t Mr. Grant’s at all. It was my father’s.”
“Are you thinking that maybe Mr. Grant-”
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
He looked back down at the article. He slowly ran his fingers over the paper’s surface, like he was reading the thing in Braille. “Good Lord,” he said.
“Chief,” I said, “were you on the force back then?”
“No, not yet. I was a county deputy that year. I remember how it was, though.”
“Did you know the chief back then? The one who was arrested?”
“He was gone by the time I got here. The state guys took him out in 1964. It took a while for things to settle down, though, I’ll tell you that much.”
“How come I never heard about this stuff?”
He looked up at me. “You didn’t grow up around here, McKnight. So of course you didn’t hear about it.”
“Here we go. I’m just a troll.”
“What does that mean?” Natalie said.
“A troll, from under the bridge. The lower peninsula, get it?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s more like, if this kind of stuff happened out west, they’d make a big deal about it, you know? The lawless Soo-town, or the little city with the big sins, something stupid like that. They’d turn it into a tourist attraction. But people aren’t like that around here. This is Michigan, so nobody makes a big deal about it.”
“So do you know anybody who might have been on the force then? Could you maybe find out who the lead detective was?”
He thought about it. “It was probably old Mac Henderson. I don’t know if he’s even alive now.”
“But you could locate the case file, couldn’t you?”
Maven rubbed his forehead. “Oh man, where would those be? Maybe downstairs, maybe in that other storage building. No, wait, we moved everything out of there.”
“Chief Maven,” Natalie said, “do you think you could have one of your men look for it? We’d really appreciate it.”
“I can ask somebody to try, but I can’t imagine what you’re gonna do with it. The case has been dead for years. Even if you think Mr. Grant was involved somehow…”
“Chief, you’re a cop, just like me,” she said. She was playing her trump card, and I don’t know how anyone could have resisted it. “No matter how long it’s been, you’ve got to find out the truth. You know what I mean.”
“Just promise me,” he said. “Don’t go stirring up the Grant family again. With all due respect, ma’am, you don’t have a badge in this country. And McKnight, he’s not exactly a master of diplomacy.”
“I can’t promise you I won’t talk to them,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Not if they know something about what happened.”
He didn’t say anything. He sat there and watched her as she stood up.
“Besides,” she said, “I want that hat back.”
Chapter Eleven
The sun was going down when we left the station, the snow coming harder, as if the daylight were abandoning us to the grip of winter.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said as we got back in the Jeep. “Any time I gotta talk to him in the future, I’m bringing you with me.”
“He seemed all right to me,” she said. “A little hardheaded, but you want that in a chief.”
“That wasn’t hardheaded for him, believe me. That was Maven the pussy cat.”
“Men always have to turn things into a pissing contest,” she said. “Did you ever try just talking to him? Taking him out for a beer?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one. I tried to imagine Roy Maven and me, sitting together at a bar. It made my head hurt even more.
“So where is this place?” she said.
“Which place?”
“Grant’s Auto Glass.”
I looked at her. “Are you serious?”
“Tell me how to get there.”
“It’s easy. Take a left out of here, go down a few blocks to Spruce. Another left, then maybe a half mile.”
“Let’s do it.” She pulled out of the lot and onto Court Street, then took the left onto Spruce. We went over the power canal. She kept the wipers on to push the snowflakes off her windshield. A few minutes later, she pulled to the side of the road. Grant’s Auto Glass was thirty yards in front of us, the yellow sign glowing through the snow and the darkness.