We both heard the footsteps and looked up at the same time. A man was coming down the hallway toward us, moving fast enough to rattle the papers on the bulletin board.
“Have you met the pride of Orcus Beach yet?” the doctor asked.
“Is he a tough customer?”
“No, but he plays one on TV.”
Before I could ask him about that, Chief Howard Rudiger stopped in front of us, his hands hanging down at his sides like a gunslinger. He was breathing heavily, and there was enough mileage on his face to put him in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. But he still had movie-star looks and more hair on his head than any man his age had a right to have. It was black and oiled up into a wave, and it looked so impeccable it could have been a wig. But of course it wasn’t. Police chiefs don’t wear wigs.
He looked at the doctor and then at me. His eyes stayed on me. “You,” he said, pointing his finger at me and then curling it in a come-hither. “Follow me.”
Five minutes later, I was back down on the first floor, sitting in room 119 while Chief Rudiger made the coffee. He stood with his back to me the whole time while he loaded the coffeemaker and then watched it make two cups’ worth. For another five minutes, there was no sound in the room but the steady dripping. I sat there and looked at all the little flowers and seashells on the wallpaper. It was obviously trying to be a cheerful room, in a place where the news is not always good. When I got tired of doing that, I looked at his police hat sitting on the table, ORCUS BEACH, MICHIGAN, it said, with a picture of a cannon sitting on a mound of sand.
He’s making me wait, I thought. I’m supposed to be sitting here wondering what he’s going to ask me, and when he’s going to ask me. An old cop game, but with a twist.
“How do you take it?” he finally said.
“Black,” I said.
He poured out two cups and put them on the table. Then he sat down facing me and took a long sip, looking at me over the rim of his mug. I returned the favor.
“Thank you,” I said. “I needed this.”
He nodded.
“So are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” I said. “Why is there a county man outside his door?”
“We’ll talk about that,” he said. “After I ask you a few questions. We’d be done by now if you hadn’t gone up there on your own.”
“Chief, please,” I said. “Don’t run the hard-ass cop game on me, okay? I was an officer in Detroit for eight years, and I’ve seen it done by the best. Hell, there’s a chief up in the Soo who could show you a few tricks, believe me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“You can’t do it in a room like this, first of all,” I said. “You need a dingy little interview room. In your station. You know, on your home turf. And you should be smoking, so you can blow it in my face. And for God’s sake, you shouldn’t be making me coffee.”
“We don’t have a police station,” he said. “We have one room in back of the town hall. I’m the only full-time officer, with four part-timers. I don’t smoke, and even if I did, I wouldn’t do it in a hospital. And I made you coffee because I was already making some for myself. I’m not playing a ‘hard-ass cop game,’ as you call it, Mr. McKnight. If I decide it’s time to be a hard-ass, believe me, you’ll know it. Now if you’re done with your critique, may I ask you some questions?”
“Yes, Chief. Ask your questions.”
He took another sip of coffee and then pulled a card out of his shirt pocket. His uniform was perfectly pressed, his tie perfectly knotted. “Is this your card?” he asked, putting it down on the table.
“Yes.”
“Prudell-McKnight Investigations,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It was found in Mr. Wilkins’s coat pocket. I take it he hired you?”
“Not really,” I said. “He was a friend of mine, a long time ago. I was helping him find somebody.”
“Go back to that ‘not really’ part,” he said. “Because it’s important. If he hired you, you know you don’t have to tell me anything about what you were doing for him.”
“He gave my partner some money,” I said. “But not me.” I thought about it for a moment. “I mean, he did give me some money, but just for gas. For driving him around.”
He frowned. “If he gave your partner money, he hired both of you. If you’re both in business together.”
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I have nothing to hide from you. I was helping him find a girl he met a long time ago. In Detroit. We didn’t find her, so he went back home. Or so I thought.”
“A girl,” he said.
“She was a girl in 1971,” I said. “Now she’s in her forties.”
“He was looking for a girl he knew in Detroit, in 1971,” he said. He took out a pad of paper and wrote down ‘Detroit, 1971.’ “What’s her name?”
“Maria something.”
He looked up at me.
“We don’t know her real last name,” I said. “It could be Valeska or Valenescu or Muller.”
He made me spell all three of the names. He shook his head slowly as he wrote them down.
“When did you last see Mr. Wilkins?” he said.
“Three days ago. I took him to the airport.”
“Where was he going?”
“Back to Los Angeles.”
“Did you actually see him get on the plane?”
“No,” I said. “I dropped him off at the terminal.”
“Okay,” he said. “Did he ever mention anything about Orcus Beach?”
“No.”
“You have no idea why he might have come up here?”
I hesitated, deciding how to play this one. “I have an idea,” I said.
“Care to share it with me?”
“He may have had some reason to believe that Maria was in Orcus Beach.”
“The two of you were looking for her in Detroit,” he said. “Then you gave up and took him to the airport. Why would he suddenly think she was way up here in my tiny little town?”
I took a long breath and dived into it. “We talked to her family,” I said. “They told us that Maria was hiding from somebody. They wouldn’t tell us where. Randy may have gone back to their house and found out somehow. In fact, that’s where you should start looking, Chief. If Randy was hit with a shotgun.”
“Who said anything about a shotgun?”
“The doctor,” I said. “When we were at her family’s house in Farmington Hills, her brother threatened us with a shotgun.”
“What does a shotgun in Farmington Hills have to do with a shooting in my town?”
“A shotgun gets pointed at his head, and then a few days later he gets blasted by one.”
“Even if it’s not just a coincidence, you can’t trace buckshot, Mr. McKnight. There’s no rifling to match up like on a bullet. You know that.”
“So just ask him about it,” I said. “I’ll give you his address.”
“Write it down.”
“She’s in your town, isn’t she?” I said as I wrote. “She’s in Orcus Beach.”
“Who, Maria? The woman with three last names?”
“If it’s such a small place, you’ve got to know about her. Hell, if she’s got an order of protection on this guy she’s hiding from, you’d have to know about it.”
“Do you know anything else about your friend?” he said. “Do you know what he does for a living these days?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What does Randy Wilkins do to make money, Mr. McKnight? Do you know?”
“He said something about commercial real estate.”
