A Cold Day in Paradise (25 page)

My gun. I didn’t have my gun anymore. It was still at the police station. But that was okay. I didn’t need it anymore, right?

I went inside and found the phone book. I tried to look up Raymond Julius. He had no listing.

Five or six months ago. What happened five or six months ago?

You’re not going to figure this out tonight, Alex. Just go to bed. You need to cut some wood tomorrow, clean up the place. Get some food in the house, for God’s sake. Become a human being again.

I slept. Two hours, maybe three. And then I sat up in my bed and turned on the light. It was just past midnight.

Five or six months ago.

The phone book was still on the kitchen table. I paged through it until I found Leon Prudell. The address was in Kinross, a little town south of the Soo, down by the airport. I threw some clothes on and got in the truck. With the cold air whipping through the open window I raced toward Kinross. It was late, but Leon and I had something to talk about.

It didn’t take long to find his house. Kinross is almost as small as Paradise, one main road and a few side streets. It was a little clapboard house, not much bigger than my cabin. There was a faint smell of dead fish in the air. A tire swing hung from a tree in the front yard.

I knocked on the door, waited, knocked again. Finally the porch light came on and a woman looked around the door at me. “Who is it?” she said.

“I need to speak to your husband,” I said.

“He’s not here. Who are you?”

I thought for a second. “I want to hire him,” I said. “I understand he’s a private investigator.”

“He
was
doing investigations,” she said, “but he don’t do that no more.”

“I hear he’s good,” I said. “Are you sure he won’t take a case? I’ll pay five hundred dollars a day.”

That got her to open the door all the way. I saw a lot of
woman and a lot of red bathrobe. The way she was built, I was glad that Leon had come after me in the bar that night and not her. “He’s working up at the truck stop on I-75 tonight,” she said. “In the restaurant.”

“The one by the Route 28 exit?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“I appreciate it, ma’am.”

“He works nights,” she said. “Ever since he lost the investigating job.”

“I see.”

“Do you know a guy named Alex McKnight?”

“Can’t say that I do,” I said.

“That’s the man who got him fired. You see him, you tell him he’s an asshole, okay?”

“I’ll do that, ma’am. I’m sorry I had to disturb you at this hour.”

“For five hundred dollars a day, you can disturb me anytime you want.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Good night.”

I got out of there and made my way back to the highway. The truck stop was a few miles north on 1-75, one of those places you see from the road, lit up all night long, a hundred trucks gassing up or just sitting there while the drivers have their apple pie and coffee.

I found Prudell clearing off a table, a big white apron hanging over his gut. As soon as he saw me, he set his pile of plates down with a clatter.

“Well, look who it is,” he said. “Don’t tell me, you came to take this job away from me too, right?”

“Sit down, Prudell.”

“Here, let me take my apron off for you. You’ll be needing this.” There were a couple truckers at the counter, a waitress serving them, another one just sitting in a booth. They all looked over at us.

“Just sit down,” I said.

“All you got to do is keep these tables clear,” he said. “And once an hour you gotta go clean up the bathrooms. I’m sure you’ll be able to handle it.”

“Prudell,” I said. I was trying to control myself. I was really trying. “If you don’t shut up and sit down, I’m going to hurt you. Do you understand me? I’m going to beat the hell out of you right here in the restaurant.”

“McKnight, if you don’t get out of here right now—”

I grabbed his left hand and bent it back against his wrist. It had always been a great way to convince someone to get into the back of a squad car. Not as dramatic as an arm behind the back, but just as effective. Prudell gave out a little yelp and then he sat down in the booth. The whole place was watching us now, but I didn’t care.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said. “You trying to break my wrist?”

I sat down next to him. It was a tight fit. “Listen to me very carefully,” I said. “Do you remember that night in the bar, the first night you came after me? I know you were drunk, but try to remember what you said to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said I took your job and now you were going to go broke and you had a family to take care of, remember? You gave me the whole sob story about your kids not going to Disney World and your wife not getting a new car and all that shit. And then you said something else, something about a man who was helping you out. You said he was down on his luck and the only thing keeping him together was running errands for you and feeling like he was doing something important. Do you remember that?”

“I remember,” he said. “It was all true. You really fucked over a lot of people. Not just me.”

It had been five months and change since I took Prudell’s job. He had nursed his grudge for a few months until he had finally worked up the nerve to face me.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Whatever you say. I ruined all your lives. Now just tell me his name.” “The guy who was working for me?” “Yes,” I said. “Tell me his name.” “His name is Julius,” he said. “Raymond Julius.”

A
LONG SILENCE
passed while it sank in. Prudell slipped me a quick elbow in the ribs, but it didn’t get him out of the booth. It just made me even madder. “Do that again and I’ll take your head off,” I said.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, McKnight. Just let me out of here.”

“Where does he live?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“The hell you don’t. The guy worked for you.”

“I only saw his house once,” he said. “That was a long time ago, before you—”

“Yeah yeah, before I fucked you both over. We’ve been through that already. You were at his house, but you don’t know where it is? What, were you blindfolded?”

“It’s in the Soo,” he said. “On the west side of town somewhere. I don’t remember exactly where, all right?”

“Have you talked to him since then?”

“No, I haven’t.”

I sat there and thought about it. Finally, I got up out of the booth and said, “Let’s go.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yes you are. We’re going to go find his house.”

“Like hell I am. I’m in the middle of working here.”

“Go tell your boss you need to take a little break. Call it a family emergency.”

He worked his way out of the booth, adjusted his white apron, and picked up a plate. “You can go fuck yourself,” he said.

I counted to ten in my head while he cleared the table. “Prudell,” I said. “You got two choices. Number one is I bounce you off every wall in this place and then throw you through a window. I’m sure I’ll get arrested. I don’t care anymore. Number two is you help me find Julius’s house, and I pay you five hundred dollars for your time.”

He looked up at me. “You expect me to believe that? You’re going to pay me?”

“You’re a private investigator, aren’t you? Consider it a case.”

“I
was
a private investigator,” he said. “Now I’m a busboy.”

“What’s your choice, Prudell?”

“You’re something else, you know that? You’re a real piece of work.”

“Choose, Prudell.”

He dropped the plates on the table and went back through a couple of swinging doors to the kitchen. I didn’t know if he was calling the police, or getting a big knife, or sneaking out the back door. Finally, he burst back out through the doors, untying his apron. A frowning little man who had to be his boss came out behind him.

We walked out to the parking lot without saying a word. He wasn’t happy about the missing window in my truck, especially when he sat down on some of the glass I hadn’t quite cleaned up.

I started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. “Start talking,” I said. “Tell me about Raymond Julius.”

“God, it’s freezing in here,” he said. It was about thirty degrees outside. I’m not sure what the windchill would be if you were riding around at sixty miles an hour in a
truck with no passenger side window. The man didn’t even have a coat on.

“Raymond,” I said again, nice and slow. “Julius.”

“What can I tell you? He was kind of weird. He was way into all that militia stuff. Hated the government.”

“So he belonged to a militia?”

“No. He tried, I think. It didn’t work out. He was more into being a detective than being a soldier. Or a patriot or whatever the hell they call themselves.”

“He had guns?”

“Yes,” Prudell said. “The man had guns. He didn’t have permits for them, but he had guns.”

“Did he have a nine-millimeter pistol?”

“Don’t know for sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Would he know how to get his hands on a silencer?”

“I’m sure he would,” he said. “Why are you asking me all this?”

“Which way are we going?” I said. “Three Mile Road? You said the west side of town. Be more specific.”

“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I remember getting off there, I think. I had to pick him up one day when his car broke down.”

“Old junker? No muffler?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I took the exit and headed west. “Now where?”

“I told you, I don’t remember.” He peered out at the road, running his fingers through his hair. “I think it was up by the industrial park.”

“How did he start working for you?”

“I had a listing in the Yellow Pages. He called me up, wanted to know if he could work for me. I told him no, he kept calling me up again and again. Every day. Said he’d do anything, run errands, take phone calls. Said he wanted
to be a private detective so bad, he’d start out working for free.”

“What, he expected to work his way up to investigator?”

“That’s how he saw it. I explained to him how it worked. You gotta be certified by the state, you gotta get a gun permit. That really set him off. Like I said, that man hated the government so much. Far as he was concerned, the state of Michigan was the only thing preventing him from being an investigator.”

“And you let this guy work for you?”

“The man was begging me. Said it was a matter of life or death to him. So I figured, hell, I’ll take him with me one day, just make him get me lunch, cover me while I went to the bathroom. I was just watching lifeguards, writing down their routine. I figured he would see how boring it was and forget all about it.”

“That was the place out on Drummond Island.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I watched those lifeguards for three days straight, wrote out a detailed report. I tried to do a good job for Uttley. I guess it wasn’t good enough, huh?”

I looked over at him. He was looking out the window into the cold night. The wind was whipping his crazy red hair in every direction.

“Julius is dead,” I said.

He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking out the window.

“Did you hear me? He’s dead.”

“I thought so,” he said. He looked at me for a second, and then looked at the dashboard. “The way you were talking about him.”

“He was stalking me for months,” I said. “He killed three men, including Edwin Fulton. He tried to kill me, too.”

Prudell just nodded.

“Doesn’t surprise you?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t have expected something like that from him, but… hell, who knows anymore. I remember, he’d get this look in his eyes sometimes. Made me wonder why I ever let him hang around me.”

“I killed him,” I said.

He turned and looked at me. He didn’t say anything.

“I had no choice,” I said.

He just nodded his head.

I came to Fourteenth Street. “Do I turn here?”

“I think so,” he said. “I think I came this way. I remember having to look around for his street.”

We came to a stop sign. I could keep going north on Fourteenth Street or turn east on Eighth Avenue. “Which way?”

“I’m thinking,” he said. We just sat there in the truck. One single street lamp burned above us. It sounded eerily quiet without the rush of wind through the open window. “Go straight,” he finally said. “I think it’s up this way.”

We passed small brick houses built close together, most of them at least fifty years old. This was one of the original neighborhoods in the Soo, back when there was an Air Force base just across the highway, long before the casinos and the tourists. We went up Fourteenth Street, past Seventh and Sixth, and then we ran into a dead end. “I remember now,” he said. “I came to this dead end and had to turn around. Go back down to Sixth Street.”

I did as he said. I was getting disoriented in this maze of numbered streets. It wasn’t like in New York City, where all the numbers make some kind of sense, and where the streets run one way and the avenues run another way. “All right, now go to Thirteenth Street and take that all the way up until it ends.” We passed Fifth Street and then the road ended at Fourth. “Let’s try a left,” he said.

“It feels like we’re going in circles,” I said.

“Feel free to take over the navigation,” he said.

As we worked our way west on Fourth Street, the houses got smaller and smaller. Most of them had every window and door covered with plastic. With the bay and all its violent weather less than a mile away, I couldn’t see how some of these places were still standing.

“This is starting to look familiar,” he said. As we rounded a bend, a sign told us that were now on Oak Street. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I remember the tree names. There’ll be some more tree streets around here. I’m pretty sure his house is on one of them.”

We worked our way through Ash Street, and then onto Walnut and then Chestnut. Prudell kept staring out of the open window and then looking back across at my side of the street. “I know we’re close,” he said. “I know it’s in this neighborhood.”