The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery (9 page)

“Here’s where I lived when I was married,” I said. “My wife’s name was Jean. You know, I can’t even remember the last time I said her name out loud. The day we got married, I promised her I’d spend every day with her for the rest of my life. Now I couldn’t even tell you what state she lives in.”

“I’ve been married, Alex.” It was the first time he had spoken in the last hour. “I know what it’s like to be married.”

“Okay,” I said. “That one you know.” I looked out at the window at the house. There was a light on in the living room. There was a family in there, watching television. Maybe one kid was doing homework. Another kid already in bed. They didn’t know we were out here, looking at the house. They didn’t know that this was once
my
house.

“We lived in that house for nine years,” I said. “I was a police officer in Detroit for most of that time. We were going to have kids, and I was going to take them up to Paradise in the summers, show them the cabins that their grandfather was building.”

“So what happened?”

“She was pregnant once,” I said. “She had a miscarriage. I was on duty at the time. A night shift. She drove to the hospital herself. She could have called me. I would have come and gotten her in the squad car. But she didn’t. She drove there by herself, bleeding the whole way.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.

“I know that,” I said. “Just like my mother dying, right? It wasn’t my fault.”

“Yes, Alex. That wasn’t your fault, either.”

“Okay,” I said. I pulled away from the curb again, made my way back down Seven Mile Road to Telegraph.

“This is the way I’d drive to work,” I said. “In the morning or at night, whenever.” This time, I got onto 1-96, which runs southeast all the way into Detroit. “I was a cop in Detroit for eight years,” I said. “I had a partner named Franklin. Big black guy, played football at the University of Michigan. We used to argue
about sports all the time—you know, which sport was harder to play.”

“Gotta be baseball,” Randy said.

“Oddly enough, Franklin didn’t agree with that. Go figure. Anyway, one night we answered a call at the Emergency Room at Detroit Receiving Hospital. There was this . . . disturbed man there. He was bothering people, hiding behind things. Harassing the doctors and the nurses. He was wearing this big blond wig. One of the security guards at the hospital followed him back to his apartment.”

“And?” Randy said.

“I forgot this stretch of 1-75 is going to be closed up here,” I said. “This is the way I’d go to get to the precinct. I’m going to have to get off, get back onto Michigan Avenue again.”

“So what happened?”

“I’ll be able to show you the precinct this way.”

“You’re not going to tell me what happened.”

“You see a lot of things when you’re a cop for eight years in this city,” I said. “I saw women who had been murdered by their husbands. Or their boyfriends. Or whoever. I saw a lot of prostitutes. Some of them, God, they couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. A lot of drug dealers. Some of them were even younger.”

Randy settled back into his seat. He let out a long breath.

“I saw kids who had been abused by their parents,” I said. “Or by their mother’s boyfriend. Or by their older brothers. Or hell, the worst one of all, by their older
sister.
This little baby, he was only four months old. . . .”

“Okay, Alex,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me all this.”

“You came up here for one month, Randy. You got to put on a major-league uniform and pitch in Tiger Stadium. You had your fortune told by Madame Valeska and then her beautiful daughter fucked you so hard you’re still thinking about it thirty years later.”

He didn’t say anything.

‘To you, Detroit is like this dream you once had. It’s Disney World and Fantasy Island all rolled into one.”

“Okay, Alex. I get it.”

“I don’t think you do,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I totally get it. Detroit is a horrible, shitty place. With drugs and crimes and murders and the most god-awful boring little brick houses I’ve ever seen. Okay? I get it.”

I let that one hang in the air for a while. I drove down Michigan Avenue, past the ghostly ruins of the old train station. As tall as a hotel, it stood out against the night sky, blacker than the darkness itself.

“Randy,” I said. “The next time you say stuff like that about Detroit, I’m gonna punch you right in the face. I’m serious.”

He looked at me. “Are you not giving me the grand tour of all the reasons why I should think Detroit is a bad, bad place?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

I kept driving, straight toward the lights of downtown.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I need to do this. I need to show this to you. All of it.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m with ya. Hell, maybe you need to show it to
yourself
Go back over your whole life. You ever think of that?”

“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”

“I’m serious, Alex. Have you been back here since you got shot?”

I drove past Tiger Stadium and our little motel and the Lindell AC, where this whole evening had started.

“Where did it happen?” he said. “Is that where we’re going?”

“The man at that hospital,” I said. “He lived up here on Woodward. We went to see him. We went to tell him to stop bothering people at the hospital. That’s all we wanted to do.”

I drove north on Woodward, past the City-County Building, where we had been that afternoon, straight toward the corner of Woodward and Seward.

“He shot us,” I said. “He shot Franklin first. Then me. I watched Franklin bleed to death on the floor next to me.”

We drove through Grand Circus Park, empty on a cold April night.

“I should have drawn my weapon sooner,” I said. “I didn’t do it in time.”

We stopped for a red light at Adams Street.

“They took two bullets out of me, but they had to leave the third one,” I said. “Franklin had a wife and two little girls. I didn’t go to the funeral. I was in the hospital. When I got out . . .”

The light turned green. I didn’t move.

“I drank a lot. Jean divorced me. I took disability, moved up to my father’s cabins in Paradise. It took
me fourteen years to be able to sleep at night without taking pills.”

From behind us, a horn blew.

“I finally saw the man who shot us,” I said. “In prison. I finally saw him face-to-face.”

The horn blew again. I took my foot off the brake, touched the accelerator.

“This is the first time I’ve seen the building. Where it happened. This is where it happened.”

Grand Boulevard. We were a few blocks away. I held on tight to the steering wheel.

“I could have drawn my weapon, Randy. I could have shot him before he shot us. It was my fault that Franklin died.”

We came to Seward Street. I stopped in the middle of the intersection. The same horn blew behind us again. But I didn’t care.

Where the apartment building had once stood, there was now only a construction fence. The ground inside the fence was covered with straw.

“It’s gone,” I said. “The building is fucking gone. They tore it down.”

We were two blocks away from where they were building the new stadium. This whole corner had been mowed down. The whole block. Half the city, it seemed. Torn down to make way for a new stadium and casinos and God knows what else.

The horn kept blowing behind me.

“Can we get out of here before we get killed?” Randy said.

I drove through the intersection, hung a left on Euclid and another on Cass, back to Michigan Avenue. Back to our motel and the Lindell AC. We’d sit right
at the bar this time. If those two men were still there, Randy would buy them drinks. If we were lucky, we’d catch Johnny Butsakaris’s eye and call him over, and I’d get to hear Randy’s story again.

“Alex,” he said, “I’m sorry about what I said.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you in the bar. I’ll never do it again.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t hit a curveball.”

“Randy,” I said. “I’ve got a question for you.”

“Ask away, my friend.”

“Was that really vodka and root beer in that glass?”

“It was indeed. The slinky.”

“You really are crazy, you know that? I mean, I’ve said it a million times, but you really are crazy.”

“Of course I’m crazy,” he said. “Why else would I be here?”

We didn’t get up quite as early as we had planned the next morning. But then we hadn’t planned on staying so late at the Lindell AC. My head was throbbing when I got up, and it didn’t look like Randy was feeling any better. The one thing I had going for me was the fact that I had refused to try his stupid slinky. So at least I wouldn’t be tasting vodka and root beer all day.

And whatever had happened between us the previous night, that was done and gone. Like when you have a rough game one night and you forget all about it before the game on the very next day.

After a couple hot showers and some aspirin, we were new men. We headed out into another Michigan April day, with gray clouds and a cold wind whipping down Michigan Avenue. We went east to Woodward, then north toward the library. We stopped at a flower shop and Randy went in to pick out something nice for the lady at the library who had been so helpful to Leon. Randy came back out with enough flowers for a wedding reception.

“First-class all the way,” he said. I just shook my head and kept driving. A few blocks later, we parked in front of the Detroit Public Library. It was a massive building of stone, the same shade of gray as the sky. When we walked into the main lobby and asked about
the Burton Historical Collection, we were sent to the opposite side of the building, where the doors opened onto Cass Avenue, on either side of a huge globe. We took a right and found the room. The collection itself, mostly reference material from an entire century, was stored in bookshelves both here on the ground floor and above, on a balcony that ran along three of the walls. The fourth wall was all windows. Across the street, we could see the Detroit Institute of the Arts. There were flags advertising a van Gogh exhibit. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered reading that van Gogh was left-handed. Another crazy southpaw.

We found the librarian who had worked with Leon over the phone. She was a trim black woman in her fifties, with the eyeglasses and the hair in the bun that all librarians are required to have. But there was a sparkle in her eye that said something a little different. Randy buried the poor woman in the flowers before I could even tell her who we were.

When she had jungle-chopped her way out of the flowers, I introduced ourselves and gave her Leon’s warmest regards.

“Such a nice gentleman he was,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “You gave him a lot of information.”

“Yes, but I promised I’d keep thinking about it,” she said. “I took it as rather a personal challenge. Finding someone you haven’t seen in thirty years. And with such a rare last name like Valeska, I was sure I’d be able to find something. I’m afraid the only other option I have left is to go through the old newspapers
to find a birth announcement. As Mr. Prudell and I were discussing, if we had the parents’ names we’d have a good chance of finding some immigration records.”

“We tried to find her birth certificate,” Randy said.

She laughed at that one. “Not in this state,” she said. “You wasted your time.”

A few minutes later, we were both sitting in the microfilm room, looking through all of the birth announcements from September 1951 to October 1952. If she was nineteen in September of 1971, we figured her birth would have to be in there somewhere. I took the
Detroit News
and Randy took the
Detroit Free Press.

A couple hours later, we both emerged, blinking like mole rats, into the light of day. We had found nothing.

We went back to the desk to thank the woman. She had found half a dozen vases from somewhere and was busy subdividing Randy’s flowers.

“I’ll keep thinking about it, boys,” she said. “A good reference librarian doesn’t sleep until she finds what she’s looking for.”

On our way out to lunch, I gave Leon a call. I didn’t have much to tell him, but I was sure he was sitting there in the Upper Peninsula, wondering what we were doing.

“Mr. Shannon hasn’t lived in the house for long,” I told him. “And he didn’t have any leads going back more than a couple years. We’re going to go try the rest of the neighborhood after lunch.”

“You guys must be having a great time,” he said. “Working the leads, trying to pick up a trail that’s
thirty years old. God, I wish I was down there with you.”

“It’s a thrill a minute,” I said. “We just got done looking at a year’s worth of old newspapers, and now we get to go knock on strangers’ doors and ask them if they remember a fortune-teller and her family from 1971.”

“That’s what a private investigator does, Alex. He digs in the dirt until he finds the bone.”

“That’s beautiful, Leon. I’m gonna write that down.”

“Go get it, partner,” he said. “Go find that bone.”

With those inspirational words ringing in my ears, I was ready to face the rest of the day. “Come on, Randy,” I said. “Let’s go get dirty.”

We grabbed a quick lunch at a little restaurant down the street, then headed back to Leverette Street, parking the truck against the curb, right in the middle of the block. “How do you wanna do this?” I said. “You wanna split up or stay together?”

“Let’s split up,” he said. “I want this side.” He pointed out at the side where Maria had lived. “For old time’ sake.”

“Good enough,” I said. “Don’t bother hitting that house next door.”

“That lady who thought you were trying to solve the case of the missing staircase? I thought she was great.”

“Fine,” I said. “You go have tea with her. I’m gonna go do this and try not to think about how stupid I sound. If somebody asked me if I remembered a
fortune-teller who used to live across the street thirty years ago, I’d slam the door in his face.”