The coroner just shrugged when I looked at him. I followed Maven back through the office, down the hall to the elevator. We stood there waiting for it.
“Where did you find him?” I said.
“Right on top of the blood.”
“What’s his name?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“It’s public information,” I said. “It’ll be in the paper tomorrow.”
“Not necessarily. We might withhold it for a few days.”
“What’s the big secret?”
“If I were to bring Mr. Connery down here, or Mr. O’Dell or Mr. LaMarche, do you think any of them would recognize him?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t think anybody else got a good look at him.”
“That’s assuming they didn’t know who he was already.”
“Yeah, that’s assuming.”
“If his name happened to be Danny Cox, would that mean anything to you?”
“Is that his name?”
“I’m just asking, if it was…”
“I’ve never heard that name before,” I said.
“That’s your answer? Just like that? You didn’t even take a minute to think about it.”
“I don’t have to think about it. I don’t know the name.”
“Most guys, they’d say, ‘Hmm…Let me think. Danny Cox…Danny Cox…Nope, never heard of him.’”
“I’ll think some more if it’ll make you feel better.”
“Never mind.” He looked up at the numbers above the elevator. Without looking at me, he said, “What were you doing downstate, anyway?”
“I had an appointment.”
“I probably don’t even want to know, do I…”
The elevator opened. We got in.
“I know two of the thieves drove away in a car with a Canadian license plate,” I said. “Have you traced it yet? I don’t think American private investigators can call Canada for that information.”
“First of all, how did you come to know anything about a Canadian license plate?” he said. “Second of all, you’re not a PI anymore, remember?”
“I came out of retirement,” I said. “You obviously need a little help, Chief. You’re letting your personal bias get in the way here. You should be out looking for the person who’s really behind all this.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “The appointment you had this morning…”
“Kendrick Heiden,” I said. “I don’t think he was involved, if you want my opinion.”
“You know how much I value your opinion, McKnight. Who’s next on your list?”
“Douglas Swanson.”
“He wasn’t there that night.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Maven rubbed his eyes. “I’m getting a headache.”
“Tell me who owns that car,” I said. “I’m going to find out anyway.”
“Go right ahead. Knock yourself out.”
“If it was a real lead, you wouldn’t say that. It must have been a stolen car. Or a stolen plate, at least. Am I right?”
The door opened on the ground floor. Maven stepped out and walked quickly to the front door. In the sunshine I felt like I was a million miles away from the cold light of the morgue. “I got things to do,” he said.
“So do I,” I said.
He stopped and turned to face me. “You know what? You think you’re helping out your friends? Let me tell you something. The district attorney had a deal on the table. The first one of those guys who flipped was gonna have the conspiracy charge dropped. It was gonna be a class A receiving stolen goods, probation and no jail time. But now we’ve got a dead body on the ground. He was shot in the back, McKnight, and left in the woods so a couple of little kids could find him this morning. You think I’m in any kind of mood to hear you tell me I need help on this case? And that you’re the one who’s gonna help me?”
“Maven, it’s real simple. You’re dead wrong. You’re looking at the wrong men.”
“Because you just know in your heart that they’re innocent.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m the one with the personal bias,” he said. “Think about it.” Then he walked away.
Chapter Fifteen
I drove back over to August Street to check out Swanson’s office again. I hadn’t asked Leon what kind of car Swanson drove, so I didn’t know what to look for. It didn’t matter. There was only one car in his lot, so I figured it had to be his secretary’s. It was a Toyota Camry, which sure didn’t seem like a lawyer’s car to me.
I put the truck in the public lot by the Locks Park, and thought about taking a peek in the courthouse. It occurred to me that I wasn’t even sure if I’d remember what Swanson looked like. Trying to ask around in the courthouse didn’t seem like the right way to go about it. So I grabbed some lunch in the Ojibway Hotel dining room, sitting right by the windows so I could watch a couple of freighters pass through the locks. It was another beautiful July day. There were lots of people out there enjoying themselves in the sun, people on vacation from their jobs and all of their troubles. Or so it seemed. Me, I was fresh out of the morgue, and I had enough troubles now to last me until Labor Day. I could have dropped every single one of them. They weren’t my troubles to begin with. I could have forgotten the whole thing and gone back to being a hermit.
Somehow I didn’t think I would be doing that.
I caught up with the news while I was waiting for my lunch. The Soo Evening News crime writer was having the time of his life following the “Masked Gunmen” story. He spent half of page one describing the morning arrests of two Soo residents and a tavern owner in Paradise. Somewhere around the second column he finally mentioned that the three men arrested were apparently not the masked gunmen themselves, but merely suspected accomplices. Chief Maven of the Soo police was still hoping that anyone with information on the case would contact him immediately.
As much fun as the writer was having with this story, I couldn’t imagine what he’d do when he found out one of the gunmen was found shot in the back. I folded the paper in half, put it on the table next to mine, and didn’t look at it again.
I drove back down to Swanson’s office. There were no new cars in the lot. I pulled up to a meter, a half block down the street, and thought about what to do next. If I were a real PI like Leon, I thought, I’d wait here until he showed up. He had to stop in at the office some time today. I looked at my watch again. It was just past two. “Goddamn it all,” I said out loud. “I do not feel like sitting here for the next three hours.” But I didn’t know what else to do. Swanson was my main man at that point, and everything that had happened that day had made me even more determined to talk to him. Hell, who else was there?
I got out of the truck, went down the street to the little book store, and bought every magazine that looked half interesting. There were about a half-dozen true-crime paperbacks for sale-I was ashamed to admit I had already read every single one of them. I settled on an international spy thriller, and another book about a storm at sea. With a few candy bars and a bottle of water in the bag, I was ready for the rest of the afternoon.
I sat there in the truck for two hours, going out once to the bathroom because I would be damned if I’d piss in a plastic bottle. Cars came and went down the street, none of them turning into Swanson’s lot. The sun moved across the sky until a long shadow from the buildings finally covered me. This is what a real private investigator does, I thought to myself more than once. I really, really hate it.
At five o’clock, the secretary came out the front door and locked it behind her. She looked too young to be so skillfully unpleasant on the telephone. She got into the Camry and drove away, leaving me sitting there alone in
