“Listen,” I said. All of a sudden I was getting another big headache. “This is not even why we’re here, okay? We want to ask you something about Natalie’s father.”
That stopped him cold. “I don’t understand.”
“Natalie’s father was murdered right here in this town,” I said. “On New Year’s Eve, 1973.”
“How do you know that?”
I pulled out the old newspaper article and handed it to him.
“The Ojibway,” he said when he was halfway through. He looked up at both of us and then finished the article. When he was done, he handed it back to me.
“The hat that Alex gave you to give to the Grants,” Natalie said. “It wasn’t Mr. Grant’s at all. It was my father’s.”
“Are you thinking that maybe Mr. Grant-”
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
He looked back down at the article. He slowly ran his fingers over the paper’s surface, like he was reading the thing in Braille. “Good Lord,” he said.
“Chief,” I said, “were you on the force back then?”
“No, not yet. I was a county deputy that year. I remember how it was, though.”
“Did you know the chief back then? The one who was arrested?”
“He was gone by the time I got here. The state guys took him out in 1964. It took a while for things to settle down, though, I’ll tell you that much.”
“How come I never heard about this stuff?”
He looked up at me. “You didn’t grow up around here, McKnight. So of course you didn’t hear about it.”
“Here we go. I’m just a troll.”
“What does that mean?” Natalie said.
“A troll, from under the bridge. The lower peninsula, get it?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s more like, if this kind of stuff happened out west, they’d make a big deal about it, you know? The lawless Soo-town, or the little city with the big sins, something stupid like that. They’d turn it into a tourist attraction. But people aren’t like that around here. This is Michigan, so nobody makes a big deal about it.”
“So do you know anybody who might have been on the force then? Could you maybe find out who the lead detective was?”
He thought about it. “It was probably old Mac Henderson. I don’t know if he’s even alive now.”
“But you could locate the case file, couldn’t you?”
Maven rubbed his forehead. “Oh man, where would those be? Maybe downstairs, maybe in that other storage building. No, wait, we moved everything out of there.”
“Chief Maven,” Natalie said, “do you think you could have one of your men look for it? We’d really appreciate it.”
“I can ask somebody to try, but I can’t imagine what you’re gonna do with it. The case has been dead for years. Even if you think Mr. Grant was involved somehow…”
“Chief, you’re a cop, just like me,” she said. She was playing her trump card, and I don’t know how anyone could have resisted it. “No matter how long it’s been, you’ve got to find out the truth. You know what I mean.”
“Just promise me,” he said. “Don’t go stirring up the Grant family again. With all due respect, ma’am, you don’t have a badge in this country. And McKnight, he’s not exactly a master of diplomacy.”
“I can’t promise you I won’t talk to them,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Not if they know something about what happened.”
He didn’t say anything. He sat there and watched her as she stood up.
“Besides,” she said, “I want that hat back.”
Chapter Eleven
The sun was going down when we left the station, the snow coming harder, as if the daylight were abandoning us to the grip of winter.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said as we got back in the Jeep. “Any time I gotta talk to him in the future, I’m bringing you with me.”
“He seemed all right to me,” she said. “A little hardheaded, but you want that in a chief.”
“That wasn’t hardheaded for him, believe me. That was Maven the pussy cat.”
“Men always have to turn things into a pissing contest,” she said. “Did you ever try just talking to him? Taking him out for a beer?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one. I tried to imagine Roy Maven and me, sitting together at a bar. It made my head hurt even more.
“So where is this place?” she said.
“Which place?”
“Grant’s Auto Glass.”
I looked at her. “Are you serious?”
“Tell me how to get there.”
“It’s easy. Take a left out of here, go down a few blocks to Spruce. Another left, then maybe a half mile.”
“Let’s do it.” She pulled out of the lot and onto Court Street, then took the left onto Spruce. We went over the power canal. She kept the wipers on to push the snowflakes off her windshield. A few minutes later, she pulled to the side of the road. Grant’s Auto Glass was thirty yards in front of us, the yellow sign glowing through the snow and the darkness.
“What are we doing?” I said. The lights were on in the shop, but I couldn’t see any movement through the front windows.
“I just wanted to know where this place was,” she said. She leaned forward on the steering wheel. “Not the busiest place in the world.”
Just then, one of the two garage doors started to open. The rattle was so loud we could hear it inside the Jeep. When the door was chest high, a man ducked down under it and stepped out into the lot. He was a big man. He wore a down vest over flannel and denim. He had a bright white cast on his right hand.
“That’s the younger brother,” she said. “What was his name? Marty?”
“That’s him.”
The man looked up at the snow falling all around him, shook his head, and ducked back into the garage. The door kept opening.
“So let’s go,” I said. “Let’s go talk to him.”
“No way, Alex. We’re not doing that tonight.”
“Why not?”
“Well, first of all, there’s no way I can do this if you’re around.”
“Excuse me?”
“Look at you,” she said. “Look at your fists. You’re ready to fight him, and you haven’t even gotten out of the car yet.”
“I’m not going to fight them, Natalie. How dumb do you think I am?”
“Admit it, Alex. You want to bust him up so bad right now. It’s all you can think about.”
I took a long breath, making myself wait a few seconds before I said anything. “What you said before, about men…”
“Yes, exactly.”
“If I said the same kind of thing about women… You know, women in general do this or that…”
“I’d smack you, I know. This is not about that, Alex. If you and I go walking up there, those guys aren’t going to talk to either one of us. They’ll see you and they’ll get their hackles up right away.”
“If we just explain to them-”
