“Everything will be okay,” I told him. “As soon as she gets back home, I’m sure she’ll tell me all about it.”
We had our lunch and then I took him back to work. I tried her number again. There was still no answer. I checked my answering machine. Nothing.
There was only one place to go next. I drove up to the City County Building, with a new appreciation for Chief Roy Maven. Say what you want about the man-the state police have never broken down his door to put handcuffs on him.
The receptionist was sitting in the middle of the lobby, with doors on either side of her that kept opening again and again. The poor woman was trapped in a wind tunnel. She had her coat on, and those gloves with no fingers so she could work the phones. I asked her if Chief Maven was around. She told me to have a seat.
“Please tell him that Alex McKnight and Natalie Reynaud are here to see him,” I said.
She looked on both sides of me, like she was wondering if I had brought an imaginary friend with me.
“Trust me,” I said. “Just tell him that.”
Nine seconds later, Chief Maven appeared in the lobby.
“Where’s Ms. Reynaud?” he said, looking around.
“She had to run out for a minute,” I said. “We can start without her.”
He gave me a look like he knew he’d been had. “Yeah, let’s not wait,” he said. “Come on back.”
He led me to his office.
“Where’s the comfortable chair you brought in for Natalie?” I said. “You should go get it. She could be here any minute.”
“Cut the crap, McKnight. Just sit down and tell me what you want.”
I sat in the cheap plastic Alex McKnight memorial guest chair. “I’m just wondering,” I said, “if you had a chance to find the old police report on the murder.”
“Because I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“No, because we asked you, and because it’s important.”
He rolled his eyes, then opened one of his desk drawers. “I was going to call you today,” he said. “I’ve got it right here.”
He pulled out a faded blue file folder and put it on his desk.
“I gotta tell you, though. There’s not much to it.”
He started showing me all of the materials, beginning with the crime scene photos. The colors were a little washed out after almost thirty-plus years of storage, but there hadn’t been much to see in the first place-just a man lying facedown on the ground, a great dark stain on the back of his head and down the back of his overcoat. In one shot I could see a couple of inches of snow under the body, and in another a larger mound of snow running along the side of him. It looked like he had been shot on a shoveled sidewalk. At that moment I was glad Natalie wasn’t here with me to see it.
“The autopsy’s here,” Maven said. “No surprises. Gunshot to the back of the head, time of death around midnight, probably a little after.”
“Witnesses?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s all here in this report. Henderson interviewed everyone working at the hotel that night, and as many of the partygoers as he could track down. It’s midnight on New Year’s Eve, so everybody’s drinking and making a lot of noise. If you think about it, it’s the perfect time to kill somebody.”
“So what else is in here?”
“Just some more interviews. He went over to Canada to speak to Mr. Reynaud’s family.”
“Really? Can I see those?”
“They’re a little sketchy,” he said, sliding several sheets of paper over to me. “Henderson wasn’t exactly Tolstoy when it came to his interview reports. I did find out, though, that he’s living in Tampa now. I even have a phone number if you want to talk to him.”
“Are you kidding me?” I took the piece of notepad paper from him. It had Mac Henderson’s name and a phone number with a 727 area code.
“Tell him hello from me,” Maven said. “It’s been a long time.”
“I don’t get this,” I said. “Why are you being so cooperative?”
“What do you mean?”
“All this stuff. The old file. The original detective’s phone number.”
“Why wouldn’t I try to help out?” he said. “I’m here to serve the public.”
“If it was just me and not Natalie, I wonder…”
“I’m offended, McKnight.”
“What about Simon Grant? As long as you’re being such a mensch, can we find out anything about him?”
Maven ran his hand through his hair. “You’ve got to remember, McKnight, Simon Grant was an old union man, going back a long way. He was president of the dockworkers’ union for seven years, in fact. This was back in the sixties and seventies.”
“When Sault Ste. Marie was Sin Central.”
“I wouldn’t go around saying that,” Maven said. “Like I told you before, people around here like to keep that stuff in the past.”
“Okay, fine. Just tell me what kind of trouble he got into.”
“He really didn’t. At least not on the record. He was a material witness to a number of cases back then-menacing, assault, a couple of smuggling cases. The line of work he was in, you almost have to run into that sort of thing.”
“Is that all you can tell me?”
Maven put his hands up. “It’s a long time ago,” he said. “The man is dead. There’s not much more you’re gonna find out now.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“McKnight, you’re keeping your promise to me, right? You’re staying away from the Grant brothers?”
“So far, yes.”
“McKnight, I swear to God…”
“Thank you, Chief,” I said as I stood up. I looked him in the eye. “I mean that. Thank you.”
“Stay away from them,” he said, standing up himself. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I said. “Loud and clear.”
I kept hearing him, all the way down the hall, until I walked out the lobby door into the cold air.
When I had the heater going enough to use my hands, I dialed Mac Henderson’s number on my cell phone. It rang a few times, then a woman answered. I asked for Mac. She asked me to hold for a moment. A few seconds passed. Then I heard a male voice on the line. It was a deep voice. It didn’t sound like that of an old man. I introduced myself, told him that Roy Maven had given me his number.
“Roy Maven!” the man said. “How is that old bird doing? I haven’t heard from him in ten years.”
“He’s just fine,” I said. “As mellow as ever.”
That got the man laughing. “Roy was a real live wire back in the day,” he said. “I don’t imagine that’s changed much.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but I was wondering if you’d be willing to discuss an old case.”
“I’ve been off the job for almost twenty years now, but go ahead.”
“The man’s name was Jean Reynaud-”
“Murdered outside the Ojibway Hotel. Shot in the back of the head.”
“Okay, I guess you remember.”
“I’ll tell you why, Mr. McKnight. In twenty-seven years on the police force, I might have seen, I don’t know, maybe seven or eight murders? Were you living up there back in the seventies?”
“No,” I said, “but I know things were a lot different then.”
“Yeah, different is one word for it. But I tell you, even with all that other stuff going on, we never had many murders in town. That’s not counting the lake, of course. Old Superior, she’d kill a half-dozen men every year. I’m sure she still does.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anyway, what did I say, seven murders? Maybe eight? Every single one of them I solved except one.”
“Jean Reynaud.”
“Exactly. I got absolutely nowhere with that one. No weapon recovered. No witnesses. The victim has no apparent ties to anyone in the area at all. I mean, absolutely nothing. Really no physical evidence at all, aside from a. 45 caliber slug that went right through the back of the poor man’s head and out through his face. Aside from that, we didn’t have a thing to go on.”
“I was a police officer myself for eight years,” I said. “Down in Detroit. So I think I know what you mean. There’s no such thing as a totally random crime.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Just what you say. Yet this was as close to random as I ever saw, before or since.”