The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery (5 page)

“What condition?”

“You know, from his accident. Are you telling me he’s your partner and you don’t even know about his accident?”

“No,” I said.

“He fell off his roof. He was trying to get the ice out of his gutters or something. I tell ya, you guys are crazy living up here.”

“Yeah, we’re crazy,” I said. “Come on, let’s go see what he did to himself. And see if he’s got any ideas about how to find your fortune-teller’s daughter.”

Leon’s wife answered the door. Her name is Eleanor, and the first thing you notice about Eleanor is how large she is. You can’t help it. There was a time when Leon hated me, back when he believed in his heart that I had cost him his job as a private investigator. In those days, I was honestly more afraid of Eleanor than of Leon. They’re both bigger than I am, but something about Eleanor always made me think she’d move a lot faster than her husband.

Since then, I’ve gotten to know Eleanor a little bit, enough to know that she’s a good woman, with a quick mind and a sense of humor. And a lot of patience about her husband’s dream of being a practicing private eye. I’d still take her over Leon, though, if I needed some backup in a bar fight.

Randy kissed her hand when I introduced them. Another woman charmed right out of her socks.

“Don’t mind him,” I said.

“I don’t mind him one bit, Alex,” she said.

“What in hell happened to your husband?” I said. “Randy said he fell off the roof?”

She rolled her eyes and pointed behind her. There was an open door on the other side of the kitchen, and through it I could see Leon lying on the bed with both feet propped up on pillows. There were casts on
both ankles. “Alex!” he called when he saw me. “Bring our client in here!”

The lights were off in the bedroom. There was a computer monitor set up on one side of the double bed, and Leon was bathed in the blue glow off the screen. It made his unruly red hair look downright frightening. He had a plaid flannel shirt on and gray sweatpants. The keyboard from the computer was in his lap.

“You must be Mr. Wilkins,” he said, extending his right hand.

“Call me Randy.” He shook Leon’s hand.

“Leon,” I said, “did you actually fall off the roof and break both your ankles?”

“I was trying to get the ice out of the gutters,” he said. “Ellie’s been carrying me around for the last week. Good thing I’m as light as a ballet dancer.”

“Make that three ballet dancers,” Eleanor said as she came into the room. “I should have just left him out in the snow.” She was carrying a big wooden kitchen chair in each hand as casually as a pair of dinner plates. “You’ll be wanting some chairs in here,” she said, “seeing as how my husband isn’t going anywhere.”

When we were sitting on either side of the bed, he finished tapping something on the keyboard. From somewhere behind me, a printer sprang to life.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ve put in a good twenty hours on the case, and here’s what I’ve done so far.”

“Twenty hours?” I said.

“Hey, what else am I gonna do?”

“I’m glad that you’re keeping track,” Randy said. “I’m going to be paying you both for your time.”

“And getting your money’s worth, I hope,” Leon said. “You can count on our best efforts.”

“Save the commercial,” I said. “And speaking of which, remind me to ask you about that Web site. . . .”

Leon moved his eyes over to Randy and kept them there. “As I said, here’s what I’ve done so far. I know that you’ve already tried a couple of the locator services. For both Maria and her brother, Leopold. They can run the names through every database out there, but there just isn’t enough information to go on. All we have are a couple names, an approximate year of birth for Maria at least—sometime in 1952, based on the fact that she was nineteen years old in 1971—and a very old address, where she worked with her mother and . . . you said they lived there, as well?”

“Yes,” Randy said. “On the top floor.”

“And you don’t remember either of the parents’ first names?”

“No, I don’t,” Randy said. “Her mother was just Mama to Maria and Madame Valeska to everybody else. I don’t think I ever heard her father’s first name.”

“And it was just the one brother, you think? No other siblings?”

“Yes,” Randy said. “She said her parents had a hard life before they came to America. They were already in their forties when they had Leopold and Maria. I think that’s part of why they were so protective of her.”

“And you don’t know how old Leopold was in 1971?”

“I know he was older,” Randy said. “But I have no idea how much.”

“Those locator services,” Leon said. “They usually need a date of birth, a Social Security number, or a recent address,” Leon said. “Without any of those, they’re not going to get very far. But then, you know that. That’s why you’re here.”

“Absolutely,” Randy said.

“The good news, right off the bat,” he said, “is that she isn’t dead. Not if she’s in the Social Security system, anyway. There have been four women with that name who have died since 1971. All four of them were a lot older than she would have been.”

“Okay,” Randy said. “Okay, that’s good.”

“I didn’t see a Leopold Valeska, either. For what that’s worth.”

“That’s good, too,” Randy said. “Even though he did hate me.”

“She’s not in prison, either. Not in a Michigan state prison, or a federal prison. Again, same thing for Leopold.”

“Right.”

“Our biggest problem,” Leon went on, “is the amount of time that has passed since you last saw her. Obviously, a lot can happen in that almost thirty years. A woman can get married. Leopold has the same last name, you would think, but Maria’s name may be different now. She may have moved out of the area. How many people do you know who still live in the same neighborhood they did in 1971? What we have to do, in effect, is go back in time and try to trace her whereabouts from 1971 until the present. It’s not going to be easy, but I think it can be done. The one thing we have going for us is her last name. If you were looking for Maria Smith, I wouldn’t be
optimistic. Maria Valeska is another story. That’s gotta be what, some kind of Eastern European name? Yugoslavian maybe? Romanian?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Randy said. “I just know that both of her parents were born in Europe.”

“You didn’t even ask her where they came from?” I said. “Or were you too busy doing—how did you put it? What everybody else was doing in 1971?”

“I might have,” he said. “I just don’t remember.”

“Alex,” Leon said, “when the man is in this room, he’s our client, okay?”

“Yeah,” Randy said, “so treat me with some respect.”

“What happened to your eye, anyway?” Leon said.

Before I could decide which one to strangle first, Randy told Leon to continue.

“I know those services must have already given you the numbers for every Maria Valeska listed in all the phone directories in the country right now. Just doing a quick search, I found five of them.”

“Yeah, I think they gave me seven numbers,” Randy said. “I called them all, but none of them was her.”

“And Leopold . . .”

“They found two Leopold Valeskas,” Randy said. “Neither was the right one.”

“Life’s not that easy,” Leon said. “But the phone directories are still one way to go here. The name is still an important link. If we call every Valeska in the country, we might find another relative.”

“Every single Valeska?” Randy said. “In the whole country?”

“Just counting the people who have listed numbers,” Leon said, “I’ve found about three hundred of them. I did a search on the national directory. That’s what’s printing out right now.”

“We have to call every one of them?”

“Well, exactly thirty-one of them live in Michigan, so I started there. I pretended to be a lawyer working on a class-action suit, told them I was looking for a Maria Valeska who lived in the Detroit area in 1971. I said she might be eligible to receive part of a large settlement.”

“You couldn’t just ask them up front?” Randy said.

“I could’ve, but you never know these days. People are suspicious. I didn’t get anywhere. So we still have a good two hundred and seventy or so we can try. It’s a lot of work. I think we should try to narrow it down first.”

“How do we do that?”

“Well, a birth certificate would be nice, because then we’d have the parents’ names at least. If they were immigrants like we think, there would be records. Problem is, birth certificates are very hard to get in Michigan. Most other states, all you gotta do is walk in the vital records office and ask for them. In Michigan, they’re not
supposed
to give it to you unless you’re one of the parents or a court officer. Although you never know. You’re pretty sure she was born in Detroit?”

“She grew up in Detroit,” Randy said. “I gotta think she was probably born there.”

“They’d have it at the state office in Lansing. You could stop there on your way down. They’d also have
it at the city clerk’s office in Detroit. It’s worth trying.”

“We just go in the office and ask for her birth certificate?”

“I think you’re gonna have to beg,” Leon said, “and hope you get a clerk who’s having a really good day.”

“We’ll just turn on the charm, right, Alex?”

I let that one go right out of the room.

“Once you get to Detroit,” Leon said, “the first thing you have to do is go to that address on Leverette Street. The man who lives in that house right now is named—what was it?” He grabbed a pad of yellow legal paper off the bed and flipped through it. “Here it is. Henry Shannon.”

“How did you find that out?” Randy said.

“The city directory,” Leon said. “I called the Detroit Public Library, asked them to look it up. That’s the thing about librarians. Unlike most public servants, they actually
like
their jobs. So they’re usually a lot more helpful. She gave me everything she could find on that whole block on Leverette Street. I’ll give you a copy.”

“So what about this Mr. Shannon? Did you call him yet?”

“I called him a few times,” Leon said. “But he hasn’t been home. I did try calling a couple other numbers on that block, but I didn’t get very far with that. Somebody calling out of nowhere, asking about who might have lived on the block thirty years ago . . . it just doesn’t work over the phone. That’s the kind of thing you have to do in person. Go up to the door and let them see how nice a guy you are, tell them why you’re there, what you’re looking for.”

“That’ll work,” Randy said. “We can do that.”

“I did find out who owned that house in 1971,” Leon said. “A man named Michael Kowalski. The librarian at the Business and Finance desk put me through to the Burton Historical Collection. They’ve got city directories going back to the 1920s.”

“Wait a minute,” Randy said. “That makes sense. They must have been renting the upstairs of that place. I remember . . .” He stopped for a long moment, looking into the past. “It’s coming back to me now. She said her father was trying to save some money so they could buy a house. He loved America, but everything was so expensive. Food especially. Sausages. I remember that. He hated to pay a whole dollar for sausages.”

“Write that down,” I said. “Sausages.”

“Needless to say,” Leon said, ignoring me, “there are a lot of Kowalskis in Detroit. I tried all the Michaels, but no luck. I think your best bet is still going to be knocking on doors in that neighborhood. You’re bound to find one person who’s lived there a long time, or at least
bought
his house from somebody who lived there a long time.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Randy said. “This is going to be fun.”

“And like I said, if you want to stop at the state office on the way down there, or maybe try the city office, you might get lucky on the birth certificate. Oh, and you’ve got to stop in at the library. Here’s the name of the librarian I spoke to at the Burton Historical Collection. She said she’d try to think of some other ways we can trace Maria. Give her my
regards when you see her. And buy her some flowers or something.”

“You got it,” Randy said. “Man, you really know what you’re doing, Leon. I’m impressed.”

“All part of the job,” Leon said. “Just make sure you guys call me every day, let me know what’s going on.”

Randy pulled out a roll of bills. “Let me give you some money for what you’ve done so far,” he said.

“You don’t have to do that now,” Leon said.

“I insist. You’ve already been working on this. You shouldn’t have to wait. A couple hundred? Five hundred?” He started ripping off twenties and throwing them on the bed.

“Stop, already!” Leon said. But I knew he had earned that money. I wasn’t going to stop Randy from greasing him.

“How about you, Alex?” Randy said.

“I haven’t done anything,” I said. “And if I go down there and help you, I’m going to do it for the hell of it, you understand? You’re not paying me any money. If you were paying me, that would mean I’d have to take orders from you.”

“I’m a great man to work for,” he said. “Just ask my ex-wife.”

I was saved by Leon’s two kids in the doorway. Leon Junior and Melissa, nine and eight years old, respectively. They stood there looking at Randy with big eyes, until finally Leon Junior said, “Were you really a major-league baseball player?”

“Sure was, kids,” he said. “Come on in.” A half hour later, we were all eating pizza around Leon’s bed. Eleanor and the kids, Leon in the middle, spilling
pizza sauce on himself, all listening to Randy tell his story again.

And me, not quite listening, wondering what the hell I was doing there, why I would be going down-state the next morning to help Randy find this woman, driving down like the northern wind, “the hunting wind,” as the Ojibwa call it, hunting for the lost love of his life.

Jackie was right. I am the biggest sap on the planet.

It was dark by the time we left. If Randy was cold, he didn’t show it. He was humming to himself all the way out to the truck.

“You guys really have casinos up here?” he said. “Real casinos?”

“The Indians do,” I said. “The Sault tribe has the Kewadin here in town, and the Bay Mills tribe has a couple out on the reservation.”