I took a hot shower, just standing there letting the water blast me for a full twenty minutes. I got dressed and got some eggs and coffee on. While I waited, I pushed the play button on my answering machine. It was Uttley’s unmistakable voice, as smooth and practiced as a concert violin. He must have called while I was out delivering the wood. “How are you, Alex? This is Lane, it’s about twelve-thirty on Sunday. Just calling to make sure you made it home last night. And to say thanks again for your help. I don’t know what Edwin would do without you. You’re the best friend a guy could have. I mean that. I’ll be home all day if you want to give me a call. Otherwise I’ll just see you tomorrow at the office. Hope you can stop by. But if you want to take a couple days off, go right ahead. Either way, no problem. I’ll talk to you later, Alex. So long for now!”
I didn’t feel like talking to Uttley just yet, or anyone else for that matter. I threw my coat on and headed out into the day. The sun was out, maybe for the last time before winter came. I walked down my access road and across the main road into the woods. It wasn’t a smart thing to do in the middle of deer season. The law requires you to wear bright orange if you hunt in the state of Michigan, but even if you aren’t hunting, you’d be a fool not to wear orange if you walk around in the woods. God knows there are enough half-drunken downstaters stumbling around in these woods, ready to shoot anything that moved. But I didn’t care. Not today.
I walked down the path to the lake, through the tamarack trees and the jack pine, and then north along the shoreline. There are no sand beaches on this stretch, nothing that easy and inviting. Instead there are rocks, more rocks than there are stars in the sky, pounded and washed by the waves ever since the glaciers left. There was a lot of debris on the rocks from the night’s winds, driftwood and a few pieces of what was once a small wooden boat. The water was fairly calm, but it had that November feel to it. It was ready to turn ugly at any time.
I must have walked north for an hour, past the last of the boat launches and up into the wild shore where there was no trace of human life. There were more birch trees up there, along with some balsam and black spruce. I was far enough from everything, I could let myself think about the night before. Okay, so somebody killed a bookmaker. I had known many bookmakers back in Detroit. I could remember arresting two of them. They took it in stride. It was part of the deal. You get picked up, you pay your fine, you go back to your business. Aside from that, it was a pretty monotonous way to live, sitting by your phone all evening handling bets. Most of a bookmaker’s customers are regular people. Some are cops even. As criminals go, a bookmaker is practically an upstanding member of society. So why did this guy get slaughtered in his motel room?
He didn’t pay someone. Somewhere up the line, somebody got it in their head that this guy was taking liberties. So they took him out. I’m sure it happens. Not every day, but it happens.
Whoever it was, the killer obviously had it worked out ahead of time. He probably used a silencer, after all. So why cut his throat? You just shot him in the face. If he’s not dead already, he’s dead within two minutes. Why make a mess of the place? Somebody who kills people for a living doesn’t do that, not unless it’s a message. To other bookmakers who might make the same mistake? Maybe. Or maybe it was just personal.
I threw a few rocks in the water until my shoulder complained. The sun went behind a cloud, the wind started to pick up again. The waves started to hit the rocks with a littie more feeling. As I started to walk back I picked up a petoskey stone and put it in my pocket for good luck.
I walked a lot faster on my way back to the cabin. Having gone over it in my mind, having put some distance between myself and a random act of violence that had nothing to do with me, I felt a little better. I walked over those rocks like a man who had someplace to go again. And besides, I was starting to get too damned cold.
I watched for hunters this time as I walked through the woods. The six cabins I owned were strung out down an old logging road. My old man had bought this land back in the early sixties, came up here every weekend, clearing the trees and planning his first cabin site. He built them the old-fashioned way, the “right way.” You take some good solid pine and you scribe it all the way across with a chain saw so that each log fits perfectly on top of the other. He didn’t do any chinking at all. That wouldn’t have been the right way.
I helped him that summer. That was 1968, the year the Tigers won the World Series. I had one more year of high school, and then I was on my way to minor league ball instead of college. He wasn’t too happy about that. But he didn’t talk about it much. I caught the tip of the chainsaw on a log one afternoon and almost took my ear off. He drove me to the hospital in the Soo while I held a rag against the side of my head. “You like to learn things the hard way, don’t you,” he said. “I wish I was young and stupid again.” Then he went on to tell me how I wouldn’t last a day in the minor leagues if my throws to second base kept sailing on me. He had caught some himself when he was younger. He told me again about the four-seam drill, even though I had heard it a hundred times already. “When I was your age,” he said, “I had a baseball in my hand every waking minute. You grab it, you turn it so you have four seams across your fingers. Grab it, turn it, again and again until it becomes a part of you. Then your throws to second don’t sail.”
That was what, thirty years ago? He died a couple years after I left the force. I was still trying to deal with what had happened, collecting three-quarter pay on disability. I came up here expecting to sell off the property and the cabins. He had built five more of them by himself, each one bigger and better than the first. When I decided to stay a while, I took the first one, even though it was the smallest and there were some gaps in the logs that let in the cold. I’m sure those were the logs I had done myself, back when I was young and stupid.
Later on I spent a slow Sunday night at the Glasgow, reading the paper over a steak and a cold Canadian beer. The murder had come too late for the Sunday edition, so the good people of Chippewa County would have to wait another day to hear about it. Violent deaths weren’t uncommon up here, but it was usually the lake that did the killing. Maybe four or five men a year, caught in sudden storms. Murder was a little different. It would make everyone nervous for about two weeks and then they’d forget it ever happened.
“Good evening, Alex.”
I looked up from my paper. Edwin stood next to the chair across the table from me.
“Sit down,” I said, and he did.
“So,” he said. “Anything interesting in the news?”
I looked at him and turned a page. “Not in today’s paper,” I said. “Tomorrow’s will be a little more exciting.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “A reporter already called me today. Can you believe that?”
“A reporter called you? How did he get your name?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But you know how those reporters are.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I didn’t give them your name,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t tell them about you coming out to help me. I figured that’s the least I can do.”
“Hm.”
“I’m really sorry, Alex. I shouldn’t have bothered you with it.”
“Edwin, can I ask you something?” I put the paper down and looked him in the eyes. He was wearing a red flannel shirt that day, trying to look like one of the locals. It wasn’t working.
“Sure, go ahead. Anything.”
“What are you doing getting mixed up with that guy in the first place? Didn’t you tell me that you weren’t going to gamble anymore?”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “I did say that.”
“You were sitting right across the table from me, just like you are right now,” I said. I looked across the room. “No, it was right over there. That table right there by the window. Remember? ‘I, Edwin J. Fulton the third, hereby resolve that I will never gamble again, and that I will go home and be a good husband to Sylvia, and Alex will never have to come to the casino and drag my butt home because I’ve been gone for two days.’ Do you remember saying that?”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember that very well.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know, it was around the end of March. Right after that last little episode.”
“Yeah, that little episode,” I said. I could feel the anger building inside me, and it wasn’t just because Edwin was gambling again. If the man throws his money away, that’s his business. But then he leaves his wife at home for days at a time, all alone in that big empty house out on the point. A woman like Sylvia, who had too much of what I was starving for. The winters up here are too long. I had too much time to think about it, knowing she was alone in that house waiting for me.
“Alex, it’s not what you think.”
“No, of course not. You were delivering five thousand dollars to his motel room in the middle of the night,
