Ice Run

Chapter Twelve

The cold air hit me again as soon as I stepped outside. I hurried to the truck, slammed the door shut, and got the heater going.

“Okay, now what?” I said out loud. I didn’t want to start panicking. It wasn’t time to drive over to her house yet. If she wasn’t home, that wouldn’t do any good anyway. I knew her mother lived in Batchawana Bay… But no, how bad would that look? Me showing up on her mother’s doorstep, asking to see Natalie, like I was her date for the prom. Apologizing for tracking her down, telling her I was worried about her.

You’re driving yourself crazy, I thought. You’re imagining the worst, based on nothing.

I didn’t want to go back and sit around in my cabin, so I pulled out of the lot and headed toward Sault Ste. Marie. On the way, I called Leon at work. The man who picked up didn’t sound too thrilled to be acting as his secretary. When he came on, I asked him who had answered the phone.

“Oh, that’s just Harlow.”

“Is he your boss?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“He didn’t sound real happy, Leon. I don’t want to mess up your job.”

“Ah, who cares, Alex. It’s not what I want to be doing, anyway.”

There was an uneasy silence then. We both knew what his dream job would have been.

“How ’bout I buy you lunch again?” I said.

“You on your way in? Sure.”

“I’ll stop by,” I said. With the omelet still in my stomach, I wasn’t even slightly hungry, but I needed to see Leon. I needed to be around somebody who believed in good information as the solution to every problem. A half hour later, I picked him up at the motor shop and took him across town. I parked outside the Ojibway Hotel.

“You really want to eat here?”

“It’s still the nicest place in town,” I said. “Maybe eating here will make me think of something.”

“Whatever you say, Alex. Are we gonna have a seance, too?”

“If you weren’t doing me so many favors, I’d bust you one,” I said. We got out of the truck and suffered the cold air for twenty seconds, then we were inside. My young friend the doorman was nowhere in sight.

There was a new woman at the front desk. And of course there was no old man sitting in the lobby, tipping his hat to me. Everything felt different about the place, like nothing bad had ever happened there. We sat down in the dining room. In the daylight, the view out the big windows was blinding white in all directions. We sat one table from where Natalie and I had been that night. How many days ago had that been?

“You say there was a bar here,” I said. “Right here where this dining room is now?”

“A long time ago,” Leon said. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five years.”

“It’s hard to imagine.”

“Things were different back then. If you can picture all those men stationed up here at the air bases. Thousands of them. One minute you’re in Texas or California-next thing you know, you’re in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. It’s twenty below zero and there’s snow up to your ass. If it’s December, it’s dark eighteen hours a day. I tell ya, Alex. This place…”

He looked out the window, like he was conjuring the whole scene in his mind.

“I was just a kid, remember, but even so, I’d hear people talking about it. Places that would be open all night long. Women who’d come up here just to keep the men company. That’s what my father called it. Keeping the men company.”

“And you’re telling me they actually arrested the chief of police back then?”

“The state troopers did. Walked right into his office and put the cuffs on him. Turns out he was being well compensated to ignore certain things.”

“Could Simon Grant have been involved in this?”

“Since I last saw you guys, I asked my man at the Evening News to run Simon Grant’s name. There were a lot of hits, because Grant was involved in the dockworkers’ union.”

“That’s a rough line of work.”

“Naturally. There was nothing about him ever being in big trouble, though. Or even getting arrested.”

“Anything more on Jean Reynaud?”

“Nothing,” Leon said. “But then the man didn’t live here.”

“You know, his best friend back then was a man named Albert DeMarco. He was married to Natalie’s mother for a while, too.”

“Albert DeMarco.” He took out his pad of paper and wrote down the name.

“I didn’t bring him up when we saw you before,” I said. “He’s not a good person to talk about when Natalie’s around.”

“Some bad history?”

“He wasn’t her stepfather for very long, but it was…” I wasn’t sure what to say about it.

“If you’re going where I think you’re going, you don’t have to say it.”

“I gotta tell you something, Leon. Every time I think about it, I want to kill this guy. I want to dig him up out of his grave and kill him all over again.”

“I hear you, believe me. But listen, my guy knows someone across the river, works at the Sault Star. I’ll see if he can find anything.”

“Thanks, Leon. I appreciate it.”

“It’s my pleasure,” he said. “How’s Natalie doing, anyway?”

That was the question of the day, so I had to give him the quick rundown, just as I had done for Jackie. I didn’t get the same sermon from him, but I could tell he was just as concerned about me.

“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.”

“I saw the old report today. Apparently, you interviewed members of Mr. Reynaud’s family?”

“Yes, that’s right. Let me see… He was a Canadian, right? I had to cross over and go to this little town on the North Channel…”

“Blind River.”

“Yes, that’s right. God, it’s all coming back to me now. Isn’t it funny how that works? I haven’t thought about it for so long… I remember, the family had already been notified, of course. This was a couple of days afterward. I went out to this big farmhouse. Mr. Reynaud’s parents lived there, and I think he and his wife were living there, too. And their little girl. I remember this little girl running around. She must have been around six or seven years old. An absolute little doll. But it was really kind of heartbreaking, because this girl obviously didn’t know what was going on. She kept asking her mother where her daddy was.”

“Her name’s Natalie,” I said. “She’s a cop herself now.”

“Is that right? I’ll be damned.”

“So what happened when you talked to the family?”

“I remember talking to the man’s father first, I think. He was pretty stoic about the whole thing. He was a real hunk of granite, you know what I mean? One of those old guys who’ve worked real hard all their lives. They’ve seen it all, sickness and death. Hard times. He was just trying to keep everyone else from falling apart, it seemed like. He didn’t have much to say to me. In fact, I don’t think he was real happy to have me there, asking them all these questions. He just wanted everybody to leave them alone.”

“I never met the man,” I said. “But from what I’ve heard about him, that sounds like him.”

“The mother, she was real upset. Naturally. I mean, this was their only child. The strange thing was she told me that her son had never been to Soo Michigan in his whole life. Which was hard to believe, since they only lived what, a couple of hours away. But no, she said. She never wanted him to go down there, because it was such a terrible place. And I can’t argue with them, of course. What am I gonna say? Here I am sitting there in their house, wearing a Soo Michigan uniform, and the only reason I’m there is because their son got murdered as soon as he set foot in the place for the first time in his whole life. It was pretty uncomfortable, to say the least.”

“I imagine.”

“So next, I talk to the wife. She was pretty young-looking, I remember that. A real attractive woman, too, but I don’t know…”

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything in the report, because, well, I wasn’t sure how I’d even say it. She just seemed to be a little… off center about things.”

“How do you mean?”

“It was hard to put my finger on. I mean, you were a cop. You know how it is when you talk to somebody and everything they’re saying adds up, but just the way they’re saying it, you sorta get the feeling that everything isn’t being said. You know what I’m talking about?”

“I think so,” I said. “Are you saying you suspected she was involved in the murder?”

“No, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s just that… God, what was it? All the time I was talking to her, she was telling me that her husband had gone down there to Soo Michigan to go to this bar at the Ojibway Hotel, and had never come back home, and that they had gotten a phone call the next morning… And I remember thinking, how come she wasn’t mad at him? I mean, on the night itself, when he left her with their kid so he could go all the way down there to celebrate New Year’s Eve? She told me everything else about that night, right down to the tiniest detail. I mean, this woman could talk. But not once did she tell me how she felt that night. Then even on that day, here I was talking to her about her dead husband, and she’s telling me all these other things about how she’s gonna have to live with her in-laws, and what’s she gonna do with her daughter. Again, not one word about how she was coping with it herself, or how she felt about losing her husband. She would talk about anything, but as soon as she got close to her own self, she would stop short. I think that’s what gave me a strange feeling about her.”

I thought hard about what he was saying. I’d known enough liars in my life. You can’t be a cop without meeting plenty of them. For the worst of them, the truly hopeless born liars, maybe this is how it all starts, by keeping a tight lid on your own secrets. By never revealing the truth about yourself. When you’ve learned to control the truth, then you can start bending it. Just a little at first, then a little more when you see what it can do for you. A lie can open doors for you. Or close them.

A lie can keep you safe.

“Now the best friend, on the other hand,” Henderson went on, “he had no problem telling me how he felt about it.”

“You talked to Albert DeMarco?”

“Yeah, that was his name. He lived just down the road. As I recall, the two of them were both going to go down to the Ojibway Hotel that night. The way he described it, it almost sounded like a rite of passage for these guys. Everybody in Ontario knew what a wild place Soo Michigan was back then, and especially when your families are telling you never, ever to step foot there. Well, you can imagine what a couple of young men are going to think of that.”

“But Jean Reynaud was married.”

“Yeah, I know. Either he just needed a guys’ night out, away from the family, or maybe stepping out was more of a habit for him. I never really got a line on that one. The one thing that was pretty clear was that Mr. DeMarco blamed himself for his friend’s death. He had some reason… What was it? He got real sick that day, or something. So Reynaud went by himself. Which struck me as odd, too, now that I remember it. I had all sorts of little alarm bells going off in my head that day.”

“Did you press them on it?”

“I tried to. But like I said, I was already in a tough spot, being the ambassador from Sodom and Gomorrah, trying to find out how their man had gotten killed. I needed special permission from the Canucks just to be there in the first place. So no, Mr. McKnight, I never did get anywhere with that case. I still think about it, to this day. Can you tell?”

“I think I’d be the same way.”

“You said the little girl became a cop. What happened to the rest of them? The man’s parents are gone by now, I’m sure.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. “So is Mr. DeMarco. I guess he died a couple of years ago. His mother’s still kicking around, though. I think she’s ninety-six years old now.”

“DeMarco’s mother? Oh yeah, I remember meeting her. I don’t think we talked much, though. She’s ninety-six, eh? That’s pretty impressive.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Tell me, Mr. McKnight… The fact that you’re asking me about this now. Does this mean you might have some new information?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me throw a name at you. Simon Grant. Does it ring any bells?”

“Simon Grant… Simon Grant…” There was a long pause while he thought about it. “No, it doesn’t. Are you telling me he might have killed Reynaud?”

“I honestly don’t know that, sir. But it looks like he may have been involved.”

“What does he have to say for himself?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead now. He froze to death a few days ago.”

“My, it sounds like things are getting interesting up there.”

“I promise you, sir, I’ll let you know whatever we find out.”

“I’d appreciate it,” he said. “It’s good to close the book on things, even if it’s thirty-odd years too late.”

“I understand.”

“You’re gonna say hello to Roy for me, right? The two of you are good friends?”

“I’m not sure you could go that far.”

“Well, send my best anyway. What’s the weather like, anyway?”

“Cold and snow,” I said. “What else is it gonna be?”

“It’s eighty degrees here right now,” he said. “I was out working on the boat. But I’ll tell you, Mr. McKnight, even though it may be paradise down here, I still miss the old Soo-town. There’s just something about the place, you know what I mean?”

“I do, sir. Although eighty degrees does sound pretty good right now.”

I thanked the man, and promised to keep in touch. I even promised him one more time that I’d give his regards to Chief Maven. But I wasn’t about to go do that right then. I called Natalie. The machine picked up. I left another message, told her I had talked to the detective who had handled the case in 1973. I told her I was worried about her and that she should call me as soon as she got home.

You’re starting to sound like a nag, I thought. Let the woman be, for God’s sake. Maybe she just had a miserable time with her mother, and she wants to be alone for a while.

From there, I went right back to imagining the worst. She had promised me she would call, no matter what. She’s not the kind of person who breaks a promise.

What the hell was I supposed to do? I didn’t feel like driving back to Paradise. I didn’t want to sit around in my cabin. I didn’t want to hang out at Jackie’s and get another lecture.

I could go visit the Grants, I thought. Or the Woolseys.

No, Alex. You’re not the kind of person who breaks a promise, either.

I sat in the car for a while, watching the snow start to fall again. A county car rolled in next to me. The deputy got out of the car and hustled inside to get out of the cold air.

I picked up the phone again and dialed information. “Grace Reynaud,” I said, “in Batchawana Bay, Ontario.” I had no idea what last name she would be using now. She’d been Grace DeMarco at one time, Grace Reynaud before that. Hell, for all I knew, she was back to her maiden name now, whatever that was. But Reynaud seemed like a good place to start.

The operator found the name, but told me that the number was unpublished. I thanked her and hung up.

I watched the snow some more. I picked up the phone one last time. I dialed Natalie’s number and listened to it ring. The answering machine picked up, Natalie’s recorded voice asking me to leave a message. I turned the phone off.

Now what, Alex?

I put the truck in gear and pulled out of the lot.

When all else fails, it’s time to do something stupid.