I put the truck in the public lot by the Locks Park, and thought about taking a peek in the courthouse. It occurred to me that I wasn’t even sure if I’d remember what Swanson looked like. Trying to ask around in the courthouse didn’t seem like the right way to go about it. So I grabbed some lunch in the Ojibway Hotel dining room, sitting right by the windows so I could watch a couple of freighters pass through the locks. It was another beautiful July day. There were lots of people out there enjoying themselves in the sun, people on vacation from their jobs and all of their troubles. Or so it seemed. Me, I was fresh out of the morgue, and I had enough troubles now to last me until Labor Day. I could have dropped every single one of them. They weren’t my troubles to begin with. I could have forgotten the whole thing and gone back to being a hermit.
Somehow I didn’t think I would be doing that.
I caught up with the news while I was waiting for my lunch. The Soo Evening News crime writer was having the time of his life following the “Masked Gunmen” story. He spent half of page one describing the morning arrests of two Soo residents and a tavern owner in Paradise. Somewhere around the second column he finally mentioned that the three men arrested were apparently not the masked gunmen themselves, but merely suspected accomplices. Chief Maven of the Soo police was still hoping that anyone with information on the case would contact him immediately.
As much fun as the writer was having with this story, I couldn’t imagine what he’d do when he found out one of the gunmen was found shot in the back. I folded the paper in half, put it on the table next to mine, and didn’t look at it again.
I drove back down to Swanson’s office. There were no new cars in the lot. I pulled up to a meter, a half block down the street, and thought about what to do next. If I were a real PI like Leon, I thought, I’d wait here until he showed up. He had to stop in at the office some time today. I looked at my watch again. It was just past two. “Goddamn it all,” I said out loud. “I do not feel like sitting here for the next three hours.” But I didn’t know what else to do. Swanson was my main man at that point, and everything that had happened that day had made me even more determined to talk to him. Hell, who else was there?
I got out of the truck, went down the street to the little book store, and bought every magazine that looked half interesting. There were about a half-dozen true-crime paperbacks for sale-I was ashamed to admit I had already read every single one of them. I settled on an international spy thriller, and another book about a storm at sea. With a few candy bars and a bottle of water in the bag, I was ready for the rest of the afternoon.
I sat there in the truck for two hours, going out once to the bathroom because I would be damned if I’d piss in a plastic bottle. Cars came and went down the street, none of them turning into Swanson’s lot. The sun moved across the sky until a long shadow from the buildings finally covered me. This is what a real private investigator does, I thought to myself more than once. I really, really hate it.
At five o’clock, the secretary came out the front door and locked it behind her. She looked too young to be so skillfully unpleasant on the telephone. She got into the Camry and drove away, leaving me sitting there alone in my truck.
“Okay,” I said. “You didn’t check in at the office. So now let’s see if you check in at home.”
After looking at my map, I drove up the hill by the Lake State campus and found the address Leon had given me. The house looked like a French Colonial, assuming I knew what the hell that was. I parked on the street and then rang the doorbell, even though I didn’t see any cars in the garage. Nobody answered the door.
I moved the truck a couple of houses away, facing his driveway. Time to wait some more. Then a horrible thought came to me. Maybe Swanson was spending the afternoon with Vargas’s wife somewhere. They could have been at Vargas’s house even. Hell, for all I knew, he was banging her on the floor of her custom kitchen at that very moment.
I didn’t have long to think about it, as a dark blue Acura pulled in the driveway. A woman got out. On the way in the front door, she opened the mailbox and took out the contents. Mrs. Swanson.
When I got out of the truck, my legs were as tight as piano wire from sitting in my truck so long. I went to the front door.
The woman who answered was about my age, maybe a few years older. She had dark hair just turning to gray, big brown eyes behind a pair of rimless glasses. She smiled and said hello, and asked if she could help me. I instantly felt sick to my stomach. This was a woman who didn’t know her husband was screwing one of his clients.
“Is Dougie home yet?” I said.
“Dougie?” she said. “I haven’t heard anybody call him that in years.”
“We’re old friends,” I said, picking right up on that one. “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d stop by. He’s still in practice, right?”
“Yes, he is. He’s at the office right now, but he should be home in a few minutes. Would you like to come in and wait for him? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Alex,” I said. “Alex McKnight.”
I spent the next half hour sitting in her kitchen. It was a nice kitchen but nothing like a Vargas custom job. Mrs. Swanson cut me a piece of the best homemade carrot cake I’d ever tasted, and even asked me if I’d like a beer. We talked about my cabins, how my father had built them himself, and how he had worked for Ford Motors for thirty years. Her father had worked for General Motors. Every minute I spent with her, I hated her husband a little bit more. By the time he got home, I was ready to hit him right in the mouth.
I waited in the kitchen while she went out to meet him in the living room. “Douglas,” I heard her say, “there’s a man here waiting for you. His name is Alex McKnight.”
Swanson appeared around the corner. He was vaguely familiar-mid-fifties, in good shape for a man who worked behind a desk most of the day, and of course the silver hair any good lawyer in his fifties had to have. I had seen him around town a few times, and I was pretty sure I had been introduced to him once, but I was quite sure I had never seen him as angry as he was at that moment. “What the hell are you doing in my house?” he said.
“I’m eating your wife’s carrot cake,” I said. “Having a nice conversation.”
“You’ve got three seconds to get out of here before I call the police.”
“Honey, what’s the matter?” his wife said.
“Your husband’s a real kidder,” I said. “He always does this to me, every time he sees me. In fact, tell him about that time in college, Dougie.”
“I’m counting,” he said, picking up the phone. “One.”
“Dougie was in this hotel room,” I said. She looked at me with wide eyes, and then at her husband, and then back at me. “There’s a knock on the door. He opens it and it’s room service.”
“Two,” he said. “I’m dialing.”
“The waiter has a big tray with a bottle of champagne on it. Dougie says, ‘I didn’t order any champagne.’ The waiter says, ‘Compliments of the house, sir.’ And then the waiter loses his grip on the tray and wouldn’t you know it, he dumps the whole thing right on Dougie’s head.”
Swanson stopped dialing. Either he forgot what comes after two, or I was getting to him.
“What do you say, Dougie? You want me to tell your wife the rest of the story?”
“What do you want?” he said. “Why did you come here?”
“We need to have a little chat.” I said. “Is there someplace we can go?”
“In here,” he said. He opened a pair of glass doors. There was an antique desk in the room, and enough law books to fill two entire walls.
“I want to thank you, ma’am,” I said to Mrs. Swanson. “I apologize if I upset you.”
She just shook her head. She didn’t say a word. As soon as I stepped into his office, Swanson shut the doors tight.