Beneath the Book Tower: An Alex McKnight Short Story (4 page)

In a way, I’ve never gotten past it. I’m still lying on that floor, watching the light in Franklin’s eyes slowly going out. My partner, the man I was supposed to protect at all costs. Later, in the hospital, they pulled two slugs from my body and left the one that was too close to my heart to touch. It’s been with me ever since, a constant reminder of the evil I saw that night, all those years ago on a warm summer evening in Detroit. You’d never convince me otherwise. No, I’d seen evil as deep as it could ever get.

But like Jackie and his beloved lake, you’d never know there was something deeper out there until somebody came to you and told you about. A deeper lake. A lake you’ve never seen before. Even then, you might not believe it. Not unless he took you there and showed it you.

It was about to happen. Minutes away, then seconds. Then the door opened and the cold air blew in and the last person I expected to see that night stepped inside, carrying a big problem and looking for my help.

Chief Roy Maven stood in the doorway of the Glasgow Inn. He was out of uniform, but everything else about him—his clean-shaven face, his buzz cut, his hard eyes, his body language—gave him away as a lifelong cop. He blinked a few times as his eyes adjusted to the light, did a scan around the room, taking it all in. He finally saw me sitting by the fire and came over.

“Chief Maven,” I said. “What the hell?”

“McKnight. Can I sit down?”

I nodded to the other chair across from me, another overstuffed leather armchair angled toward the fire—just one more reason why a Scottish pub is a thousand percent better than your average American bar.

“This is nice,” he said. “I can see why you spend so much time here.”

“You knew to find me here?”

“Yeah, it’s been an exhausting search. First your cabin. Then your bar.”

“Are you gonna tell me why you’re here or not?”

He leaned forward in the chair and rested his forearms on his knees. He looked me in the eye and as he did I was already coming up with my own theory. You see, the chief and I had sort of gotten off to a rough start. Genuinely bad chemistry from the first time I laid eyes on him and he laid eyes on me. Then things just went downhill from there, until at one point, he promised me that the day he retired, he’d come out to Paradise to find me so we could settle things between us once and for all. No more badge in the way, just a couple of men who truly didn’t like each other, having it out in the parking lot. He was ten years older than me, maybe even fifteen. But I knew it wouldn’t be an easy fight. Not by a long shot.

“I came out here to ask for your help,” he said.

I stared at him for a moment, waiting for it to make sense. It didn’t happen.

“I didn’t want to call you,” he said. “I figured this is the kind of thing you need to do in person.”

Jackie wandered over at that point, a bar towel over this shoulder.

“Who’s your friend?”

“This is Roy Maven,” I said, “Chief of Police in the Soo.”

“Okay,” Jackie said, reaching over to shake the man’s hand. “At the risk of being indelicate… I was led to believe that you and Alex hate each other.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. Just call it a persistent lack of liking each other.”

Jackie looked at me for confirmation. I just shrugged.

“Well, as long as we’re playing nice here, how ’bout we get you a beer. Alex? A Molson?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” Maven said.

“You don’t understand,” Jackie said. “This is a real Molson, bottled in Canada. From Alex’s personal stash. He doesn’t drink anything else.”

“McKnight, you drive all the way to Canada to get your beer?”

“Hell if he drives,” Jackie said. “I do.”

“Well, damn,” Maven said. “In that case I’ll have to have one. I am out of uniform, after all.”

The evening is just about complete, I thought. All we need now is dinner and a movie.

He looked into the fire as we waited for Jackie to come back with the beer. When we both had our bottles, Maven tipped his back and took a long drink.

“That ain’t bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

“So seriously,” I said, “quit joking around and tell me why you’re here.”

“You really think I came all the way out here to have a beer with you? I meant what I said. I need your help.”

“With what?”

He looked around the place, like somebody else might be listening in on our conversation. Then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“Can I smoke in here?”

“Jackie would prefer that you don’t.”

He put the cigarettes away. He fidgeted with his bottle for a few seconds, then he stood up.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go outside.”

Now we’re getting to it, I thought. He really did come here to fight.

“If I don’t smoke a cigarette, I’m gonna kill someone,” he said. “This is hard enough as it is, believe me.”

I made him wait for a three count, then I finally got up and grabbed my coat. Who needs a comfortable chair in front of the fire when you can go freeze your ass off with a man you can’t stand?

He opened the door and I followed him into the darkness. He took a few steps along the side of the building, staying out of the wind. He pulled out his cigarettes and his lighter. It was an old-school silver flip lighter. He cupped his hands around the end of his cigarette as he lit it, then he snapped the lighter shut and put it in his pocket. He took a deep draw and let out a stream of smoke.

“So tell me what the hell’s going on,” I said.

“I told you this wasn’t easy. So cut me some slack, eh? I came to ask you to do some work for a friend of mine.”

“What kind of work?”

“You still have the private investigator’s license?”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“Do you still have the license or not?”

“It’s a moot point, I told you I don’t—”

“Okay, so you have the license. That’s good.”

“Maven, I swear to God…”

“Relax, McKnight. Will you just shut up for once and listen? Here’s the situation. I’ve got this friend, Charles Razniewski. Everybody calls him Raz. I used to ride with him a lot when I with the state police.”

“When was that?”

“Hell, that was what, ten years ago now? I was getting sick of the politics so I left to try something else. Eventually ended up taking the job up here.”

“The state police’s loss was Sault Ste. Marie’s gain, you mean.”

“I told you to shut up, okay? So Raz, he ended up leaving, too, just before I did. But in his case he went federal. He’s been a U.S. marshal ever since. Based down in Detroit. Your old stomping grounds.”

“The marshals had an office on Lafayette. I wonder if he was there when I was.”

“Small world, who knows. But here’s the point of all this. He’s got one kid, Charles Jr.”

Maven stopped and looked out into the parking lot. The wind picked up and the pine trees started swaying.

“God damn,” he said. “I mean to say, he
had
one kid. Here’s the thing. You see, Charlie, he was going to school out at Michigan Tech. Just starting his last semester, right after Christmas break, he goes back up to school for some New Year’s Eve party, and then…”

He stopped and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. I waited for him to get to what was obviously a hard thing to say.

“He hanged himself. From a tree. There was some alcohol in his system, I guess, but… I mean, he went out on his own and he drove down by the lake and he hanged himself.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“No note. There usually isn’t.”

“I know, but…”

But nothing, I thought. The man was right. Despite everything you see in the movies, no matter how somebody kills himself, they almost never leave a note.

“I can’t imagine,” he said. “I mean, if it was my daughter Olivia…”

He took another drag off his cigarette and looked away, shaking his head.

“I don’t understand, Chief. I mean, this shouldn’t happen to anybody. Your old friend or
anybody’s
old friend. But what does this have to do with me?”

“This whole thing has been eating Raz alive, okay? He can’t make any sense of it. If the kid was upset about something specific…about a girl or something. But no. He’s just…gone. Like that.”

“I still don’t see how I can help here.”

“He wants to know. That’s all. If there’s anything to know. He just wants to understand what was going through his kid’s head before he died. That’s all the man wants.”

“How can anybody possibly know that?”

“Maybe you can’t. Maybe this whole thing is just a waste of time. But he wants somebody to try. He’s already talked to the Houghton County Sheriff’s office, but they can’t do anything more for him. It’s not like they’re gonna spend much more time on this. So he’s thinking maybe if somebody talks to some of Charlie’s friends…”

“Wait a minute, are you talking about me going out there and doing that?”

“He can’t do it. There’s no way he can go out there again. Not yet. Even if he could, there’s not much chance they’d really be straight with him. There are some things you just can’t talk about with your dead friend’s father, you know?”

“But hold on. Time out.”

“I can’t do it. I’ve already talked to the sheriff out there. We didn’t exactly hit it off, but no matter what, I can’t go out there and start grilling people. I mean, I know how I can come across sometimes. I think any of these kids, they’d just feel like they were getting the third degree and there’s no way they’d open up to me. What Raz needs is an impartial third party, somebody who’s reasonably good at talking to people. And if he hires you on an official basis…”

“No. Chief, please. Even if I was going to do this, there’s no way I’d take money for it.”

“You’re not getting it.” He was starting to rock back and forth now, shivering from the cold and maybe something else. Some kind of raw energy he was trying to burn off. “Don’t you see? He
needs
to hire you. He needs to pay you some money to go talk to these kids. Find out what you can about his son’s state of mind. Talk to the sheriff’s office, find out if there’s anything else they can tell you. About any kind of trouble he might have been in. If he does that, then he’s
doing something.
See what I mean? Paying you makes it real to him. So even if you don’t find out anything, he can go home feeling like he did everything he could.”

“Why me?”

“Well, you’ve got the license.”

“I don’t use it. You know that. Why don’t you hire Leon Prudell?”

He was the only other game in town. My former sometimes-partner, a man who grew up in the UP and who never wanted to be anything else other than a private investigator. Problem was, he was the fat goofy kid who sat in the back of the classroom and to most people around here, he’d never be anything else.

“Prudell’s a clown,” Maven said. “At least you
look
competent.”

“Gee, thanks. But seriously, Prudell’s a lot better than anybody realizes. He’d do a fantastic job with this.”

“Look, McKnight, all you have to do is drive out there, talk to a few people, then drive back. Tell Raz what you heard. If that happened to be, ‘You know what, your son wasn’t depressed at all, there was absolutely no reason he should have killed himself, so it was just a tragic fluke thing, one bad night in his life and I’m awfully sorry….’ Well, then, I mean if you said that, then everybody would be better off, I think.”

“So now you’re even telling me what to say? Why bother even going out there? I can just say I did.”

“Don’t be a wiseass. I’m just saying, if you don’t find out anything, that would be a good line to take. Is that too much to ask?”

“Chief…”

“And you make your three hundred bucks. Or whatever. I don’t see what the problem is.”

“You’re something else,” I said. “You treat me like crap every time I see you, but now you think all you gotta do is wave some money in my face and I’ll help you.”

He threw his cigarette down onto the gravel and reached out for me. He grabbed me by the coat and drew himself to within a few inches of my face. Here we go, I thought. We’re gonna have that fight in the parking lot after all.

“I’m not asking for me,” he said, looking me dead in the eye. “I’m asking for my old friend, who’s spent the last three months living in hell. Okay? He’s going to be in my office tomorrow at ten o’clock. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to stop by and at least talk to him. Can you do that?”

“Just once, would it kill you to say please?”

I could feel him tightening his grip on my coat.

“Please, Alex. Okay? Please.”

Then he pushed me away from him and turned to go.

“Ten o’clock,” he said as he got into his car. “Don’t be late.”