The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery (12 page)

“Well?” Randy said.

“Leon’s gonna work on those names,” I said.

“Good deal,” he said. “We’re back on track. Come on, let’s go to the Lindell.”

“I’m gonna take you someplace else,” I said. “Someplace a little quieter.”

“It’s your town,” he said. “Let’s go.”

I took him to a restaurant I remembered on Telegraph. I was hoping he’d see it all himself, how ridiculous this whole thing was turning out to be. I kept waiting for it to sink in. It didn’t.

I drove him back to the motel. When I turned out the light, he stayed awake, staring at the ceiling. From outside our room came the sounds of the traffic passing on Michigan Avenue. Then he started talking again. It was just his voice in the darkness, like that first night, the night he flew all the way up to Paradise to find me, waited until he was lying on my couch in the darkness to tell me why he had flown all the way up there.

“The day before the game,” he said, “Maria and I got a hotel room. Maria told her parents that she was sleeping over at a friend’s house. We got this room
and we made love. For the first time, really. The first and only time. But then afterward . . . That’s what I really remember, Alex. I was just sitting on the bed, thinking about the game the next day. It was like my whole future was hanging in the balance, you know? I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep much that night. And Maria, she was just sitting there in a chair. And she was drawing a picture of me. She loved to draw. Did I tell you that?”

“No,” I said.

“She wanted to be an artist. She always had this big pad with her and little canvas box with pencils and charcoal and stuff in it. Sometimes in the afternoons, we’d walk along the waterfront and we’d stop and sit down somewhere and she’d draw something. But she never drew a picture of me until that night. And I was just getting so keyed up about the game the next day, I wasn’t really thinking about it, you know? I was just sitting there not talking and she was drawing her picture.”

He stopped. A big truck rumbled by outside, rattling the pictures on the walls.

“Did you ever see that painting by—who was it? Toulouse-Lautrec, I think. The painting of the girl who’s just sitting on a bench along the wall in a bar? You can tell there’s some kind of party or something going on, and there’re some people right next to her. But she’s just sitting there looking at nothing, like she’s lost in her own world. You know the one I mean?”

“I think I’ve seen it.”

“Well, the thing about that painting is that you just look at it, and you can
feel
how tired that woman is,
you know? How
lonely
she is. I mean, hell, if they had cameras back then and he had just taken her picture, you wouldn’t have felt it like that. It was the way he painted it. I’m sorry, it’s not like I’m an art critic or anything.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

“Okay, so Maria shows me this drawing she did of me sitting there on the bed. And when I looked at it, I was just . . . My God, I couldn’t even speak. The way she drew that picture, you could
feel
how scared I was. Just absolutely terrified of what was going to happen the next day. I couldn’t believe it.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Perhaps he was picturing the drawing in his head again. I didn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t just that she was a good artist,” he finally said. “She could draw that picture because she
knew
me. You know what I’m trying to say, Alex? At that moment, she knew me better than I knew myself. I didn’t even know that I was that scared until I looked at the picture. How many times in your life does somebody know you that well? You wanna know how many times it’s happened to me?”

“How many?” I said.

“Twice,” he said. “There was you. And then there was Maria. Not my wife. Not the woman I slept next to every night of my life for eleven years. Lord knows, not my parents. Not my kids even. It was you and Maria. You were the only two people in this world who could see right through me. All the jokes and the games and the bullshit. I know it was only one season we played together, but when I was pitching
and you were catching, it was like you knew everything that was going on inside my head. Everything. Even stuff I didn’t know. You knew what I could throw better than I knew. Which is why I could never be the same pitcher with anybody else. I came all the way up here and found you all these years later and it was like I had just seen you the day before. Am I right?”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Maybe.”

“And Maria,” he said. “I swear to God, Alex, she knew me just as well as you did. It didn’t matter that we only spent a week and a half together. No matter how long ago it might have been. Hell, it doesn’t even matter that I didn’t know her real name.”

Another silence, and then another truck rumbling by in the night.

“No offense, Alex,” he said. “You both knew me just as well, but she wins the evening gown competition.”

I laughed. What else was I going to do?

“Do you think we’ll find her?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t put money on it at this point.”

“Do you think we should stop looking?”

“Don’t ask me that,” I said. “Not unless you want the truth.”

‘Tell me.”

“Randy, I’ve been telling you all along that this is crazy. I know you don’t want to hear that. And I know that if I had stayed home, you would have come down here by yourself. So I figured I had nothing to lose. A couple days hanging out with my old teammate,
just to see what happens. But now I think you should stop. I really do. I think this is a bad idea.”

Another long silence. Another truck passing outside, and then the sound of him breathing in the dark.

When I woke up the next morning, Randy wasn’t there. His bag was still in the room, and when I looked out the window, I could see my truck parked in the lot. So I figured he couldn’t have gone too far.

I took a shower and got dressed, went down to the motel lobby and sat there reading the paper for a while. Then I gave up waiting for him and went outside. It was an overcast April day in Detroit, with a fine mist in the air that worked its way into your lungs and through your clothes.

I found him on Michigan Avenue, sitting on a bench across from Tiger Stadium.

“Good morning,” I said as I sat down next to him. “Not a real nice day to be sitting out here.”

“I just wanted to look at this place one more time,” he said.

“You planning on going somewhere soon?”

He smiled and shook his head. “I’ll let you go home, Alex. I’ve kept you away too long already.”

“I’m sure Jackie’s managing quite well without me,” I said. “Hell, he probably feels like he’s on vacation.”

He looked back up at the gray wall of the stadium. “You know, if I had gotten Rettenmund out instead of walking him, then I would have had two outs, with Boog Powell coming up. I would have been in a
whole different frame of mind. The whole game could have gone my way at that point.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to argue with him, or tell him to forget about it.

“And then after the game,” he said, “I would have gone out to celebrate with Maria.”

“Randy . . .”

“Maria Valenescu,” he said. “Anyway, you can’t undo the past, right? Only a fool would even try.”

“Let’s go, Randy.”

I took him back to the motel so he could put some dry clothes on. When we got to the room, the message light on our phone was blinking. I called the desk. A Mr. Leon Prudell had called, they said, and left a message to please call him back.

“What do you have for us, Leon?” I said when I got him on the line.

“Not a whole lot. I’ve only found three Valenescus in the entire country. They’re all in New York City. I don’t see any Gregor or Arabella or Leopold or Maria. It’s worth calling these numbers, though. There might be a connection. You want to call, or should I?”

“I’m not sure we’ll need them,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Ah hell, give me the names,” I said. “I’ll call you back later.”

“All right, let me know how it goes!”

I thanked him and hung up. Randy came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his neck.

“He found three Valenescus,” I said. “You want me to call them?”

“It’s up to you,” he said. He sat down on the bed.

I dialed the first number and asked if they knew any of the four names. They didn’t.

I dialed the next number. Same question. Nothing.

I dialed the last number. Whoever answered couldn’t speak English very well. I think I got the idea across, and the answer seemed to be a firm no.

“No go,” I said when I hung up.

“Okay,” he said. “Time to pull the plug. Let me give Leon a call so I can thank him myself.”

I didn’t say anything. I sat there with the phone still in my hand.

“We played it out,” he said. “That was our last card. What else could we do now, anyway?”

“Just hold on,” I said. “Give me a minute here.” I grabbed the Yellow Pages. “How old would her parents be right now?”

He looked at me. “What are you doing?”

“Humor me,” I said. “How old would they be?”

“Eighties at least. Maybe nineties.”

“Like the Meisners,” I said. “So maybe they’re living in the same kind of place right now.”

“Assuming they’re still alive, and assuming they’re still in the area, then yes.”

I looked up “Nursing Homes” again. I had just seen the same pages the day before, when we found the Peach Tree Senior Community.

“Alex, you’re the one who told me this is a bad idea.”

“I know,” I said. “I just want to do this one thing. Otherwise, it’s gonna bother me.”

“You’re gonna call every one of them, Alex? How many are there?”

“A lot,” I said. “This might take awhile. Why don’t you go get us some breakfast?”

A couple of hours later, I dialed the last number. I went through the routine for the hundredth time. Ask for Mrs. Valenescu, figuring there would be more chance of her being alive than her husband. In the obituaries, it’s always men who are survived by their loving wives. The women die alone. Even if I was wrong on that, they’d probably catch me on it and tell me that there was no Mrs. Valenescu there but that there was a Mr. Valenescu. The name would stick out in their mind.

“Okay, thank you,” I said, and hung up. I stood up and stretched.

“You’re something else, you know that?” Randy said.

“It was worth a shot,” I said.

“Thanks, Alex. Now we can stop.”

“Not so fast,” I said. “I got one more idea.”

“Now what?”

“Her brother,” I said. “What did he do for a living in 1971?”

“He was a housepainter. Like his father.”

“Mr. Meisner said he was good at it, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So what do you think he’s doing for a living right now?”

“I suppose he could still be a housepainter.”

“Let’s say he is,” I said. “Do you think he still lives around here?”

“He might.”

I grabbed the Yellow Pages again. “I don’t see him listed here under ‘Paint Contractors,’ but that doesn’t mean much. Most of those guys just work on word of mouth. So let’s say that’s what he does. What do you think he’s doing right now?”

“Painting something?”

“Okay,” I said. “You think he still makes people call him Leopold?”

“I would bet on it, yeah.”

“So what happens when Leopold runs out of paint?”

“He buys more paint.”

“He buys more paint,” I said. “And where does he buy it?”

“At a paint store?”

“And how about next week,” I said, “when he
needs more
paint?”

“At a paint store?”

“At the
same
paint store,” I said. “I see about forty listings here for the whole Detroit metropolitan area. Why don’t you go get us some lunch?”

When he was gone, I started working through the numbers. It was a long shot, but I’d be thinking about it for weeks if I didn’t give it a try.

When I got through to the first number, I went into my spiel. “Hey, have you seen Leopold over there?” Thank God for strange names. If his name were Al, I’d have no chance.

“Leopold?” the man said. “Don’t know no Leopold, sir.”

“Ah, okay, wrong place. Sorry to bother you.”

I did ten of the numbers.

I did twenty.

And then on number twenty-one . . .

“Leopold?” the man said. “Not today. He was here on Monday, I think.”

I froze. My God, I’ve got a bite.

“Hello? Sir?”

I was about to play it straight, tell him who I was and why I was looking for Leopold. But then I thought about Leopold, and what Randy had told me about him. How much he hated Randy. Almost killing him on the street in 1971.1 had two seconds to decide how to play it. I went for theater.

“Oh, uh, sorry,” I said. “Hey, I’ll be perfectly honest with you.” Honest, my ass. “I’ve got one of Leopold’s thirty-foot ladders here, and if I don’t get it back to him today, he’s gonna have my head on a platter. You know how he is.”

“Oh man,” he said. “Do I ever. I can’t believe he even let you borrow it.”

“Hey, I know he’s been working on that job over there. Where was that again? Maybe I can just run it over to him.”

“No, he didn’t say.”

Damn! Think, think.

“Oh man, I’m dead,” I said. Okay, let’s go for the home run here. “Hey, I know. Maybe if I just run it over to his house, you know? Leave it there. Hell, maybe he’ll even forget he loaned it to me. You think that would work?”

“I still can’t believe he loaned it to you.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I must have caught him on a hell of a good day. I was over at his house one time. God, where was it? It was over on . . .”

I let it hang. I was sweating. Come on, take the lead here.

“On Romney Street,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s right! On Romney Street. I’ll just go over there right now and put that ladder in his garage.”

The guy started laughing. “That’ll never work, my friend.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But at least this way, I’ll have a running start.”