“Okay,” I said. “Me too.”
“The owner of the residence, Winston Vargas, he invited you to play poker? Are you a friend of his?”
“I had never even met him before. He really didn’t invite me, but Jackie is one of the regular players, and they needed a sixth.”
“Three men broke in around eleven o’clock, it says here. All with handguns. Glocks, according to you. One of them took Mr. Vargas upstairs, the other two stayed downstairs with the other five players. It looks like you got as much of a description of those two as would be possible under the circumstances. It’s fortunate you were there, Alex. Your training as a police officer came in pretty handy.”
“Anything to help, Chief. You know me.”
He let that one go without even blinking. “Breaking and entering, armed robbery, vandalism. It sounds like they were pretty cool about it. Like it was all business.”
“I’d say so. You have any suspects in mind?”
“Not at this point. We sent a copy of this over the bridge today, based on your judgment that one of the perps sounded Canadian.”
“What was the grand total, anyway?”
“Grand total?”
“You know,” I said. “What they stole, what they destroyed.”
“Mr. Vargas says he had just under five thousand dollars in the safe. Says he likes to pick up hundred-dollar bills at work. I guess he’s got an appliance store down in Petoskey. Custom kitchens, that sort of thing. When he sees a hundred in the drawer, he says he puts a hundred of his own money in, takes the bill, puts it in the safe. He’s got a five-year anniversary with his wife coming up, his second marriage, I presume. Says he was going to give her five thousand dollars in hundreds, tell her to go buy whatever she wanted.”
“Five thousand dollars,” I said. “That’s not big a score, for all the effort they put into it.”
“Good point,” he said. “The vandalism hurt him a lot more. All that stuff he was collecting. And the telescope. Just about all of it they threw into the river. It doesn’t make any sense. What do you make of it, Alex? Do you have any theories?”
“Do I have any theories? Chief, if you’re setting me up for something, I’d appreciate it if you could cut to the chase.”
“I’m not setting you up for anything. Why would I be setting you up?”
“It’s either that or you’ve been taken over by aliens,” I said. “If I go to your house, I’ll find pods in your basement, right?”
“Alex…”
“In fact, that’s why you weren’t there last night. Your detective said you were out of town. Little did he know.”
“You want to know where I was last night, Alex? I’ll tell you. I was on my way back from a retreat down on Mackinac Island. My wife and I went together. You want to know why?”
“This is even scarier than the alien thing,” I said. “It’s starting to sound like you’re talking to me like one human being to another. But go ahead.”
“It’s really a couple of different things that all happened at the same time,” he said. “First thing was, my doctor told me I was killing myself. I mean, literally killing myself. High cholesterol, high stress, no exercise. I was a coronary waiting to happen. Second thing was my wife tells me one day, she says, Roy, we’ve been married almost forty years now, and I’ve never had the nerve to tell you this until now. You’re bringing your job home with you every night, and I’m sick of it. You either quit the job, or you talk to somebody about how to handle it better, or you find yourself a new wife. I’m not going to watch you kill yourself.”
He stopped. I just sat there. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him.
“The third thing,” he said, “was my oldest daughter told me I was going to be a grandfather. She’s due in…” He looked behind him at a calendar sitting on a credenza. “Ten weeks, Alex. I’m gonna be a grampa.”
“Congratulations,” I said, finally finding a word.
“So this retreat, it was just something my wife and I did. There was a lot of New Age mumbo-jumbo they were talking about. I didn’t have much use for most of it. But one thing they said made sense. You want to hear it?”
“Why not?”
“They said that in life there are all sorts of things you have no control over. The only thing you can control is your reaction to those things. It’s a pretty simple idea, but I don’t know, it just hit me. All this stuff I get upset about every day, I can’t stop it from happening, no matter how hard I try. But I can choose how to react to it.”
“Okay…”
“This is a perfect example,” he said. “In fact, maybe it’s a little test. You know, somebody upstairs seeing how I’d do. Here I come back from vacation and I’ve got three men breaking into one of the most expensive houses in town. They’re holding six men at gunpoint, breaking into a safe, destroying the man’s valuables. I look at the list of people who were in the house, and who do I see? Alex McKnight! What do you think my reaction’s gonna be?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it wouldn’t be pretty.”
“That’s how it would have been,” he said. “That’s how the old Chief Maven would have reacted. But not now, Alex. Not now. In fact, it’s a good thing you were there. Look at this report! You’re the only one who gave us any kind of physical description. For all I know, you were the only guy there who kept his cool and showed everyone else how to get through it. If you weren’t there, it might have all turned out pretty badly. I’m glad you were there, Alex. I really am.”
“If all this is true,” I said. “And I’m still not sure I can believe it. But if it’s true…”
“Yes?”
“Then I guess I’m surprised, Chief. Surprised and even a little impressed.”
He raised his hands, sat back in his chair. If he had wished me a good day right then and sent me on my way, I might have left the place fully convinced he was a new man.
But he didn’t do that.
“Besides…” he said. He picked up a pen and twirled it in his right hand, looking down at the report again. “Even though you seem to show up every time there’s a major crime in my town, look at how well it turned out this time.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nobody was killed,” he said. “Nobody was abducted. I’m not out looking for anybody. I’m not dragging the lake for bodies. And the best part of all…”
He looked up at me. He was smiling.
“The best part of all,” he said, “is that you won’t even be involved this time. I won’t be seeing you every time I turn around. I won’t be hearing your name every time I pick up the phone. Because you…”
He put the pen between his two palms and rubbed it back and forth, like he was a Boy Scout starting a fire.
“…are not…”
He kept rubbing and smiling.
“…a private investigator…”
I couldn’t decide which was more annoying.
“…anymore. Am I right?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”
“This man Vargas,” he said. “You don’t work for him.”
“No.”
“You never will work for him.”
“I’m sure I won’t.”
“You’ll never work for anybody again. Not as a private investigator, anyway. Not in my town.”
“Are we about done, Chief?”
“I saw your old partner last month,” he said. “Leon what’s-his-face. I was getting some lunch and I saw him on Ashmun Street. He actually has an office there now?”
