The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery (8 page)

“God, this place hasn’t changed at all,” he said. “There’s Johnny Butsakaris over there behind the bar. Think he remembers me?”

“You were here a couple times almost thirty years ago,” I said. “You really think he’s going to remember you?”

“You’re right,” he said, rubbing his mustache and goatee. “Not with this stuff on my face.”

“I’m gonna go see if Mr. Shannon is home yet,” I said. I had his number circled on one of the sheets of paper Leon had given us.

“You’re gonna call him?”

“No. I’m gonna go walk back to his house,” I said.

“Somebody’s a little grouchy,” he said. “I’ll get you another beer. Then we’re gonna go out and you’re gonna show me around, right? You promised.”

“I didn’t promise that, Randy.”

“I want to see where you grew up, Alex. I want to see the parking lot where you lost your virginity.”

“I’m gonna go call him now,” I said.

“Go,” he said. “Go do your thing.”

I went to the pay phone and called the number. I heard two rings and then a rough voice saying hello.

“Mr. Shannon?” I said.

“Speaking.”

“My name is Alex McKnight. I’m a private investigator. I’ve got a question for you, and it’s going to sound a little strange.”

“A private who? What’s this about?”

“Mr. Shannon, I’m trying to find somebody who lived at your address in 1971. I don’t suppose you know who owned your house back then.”

“Nineteen seventy-one? Are you serious?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry to disturb you this evening. The family’s name was Valeska.”

“No, no, stop. Nineteen seventy-one, I was nowhere near here. I’ve only been in this house a couple years.”

“Perhaps the person you bought the house from?”

“No, he only had the place for . . . a year, I think. And before he had it, I remember him telling me, the place was sitting empty here for a long time. . . .”

“I understand, sir. Can I ask if you’re aware of an old staircase that used to run up the right side of your house?”

“Matter of fact, yeah. It looks like there used to be something like that. They redid the whole place, knocked the back wall out. Looks like they put in a new staircase when they did that.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “That’s kinda what we figured.”

“If you know about that old staircase,” he said, “then I guess you really
are
looking for somebody from that long ago. You’re really a private investigator?”

“Yes, sir, I am. If I can ask you just one more question . . .”

“Ask away.”

“Is there anyone on your block who may have been living there back in 1971?”

“I wouldn’t think so. It’s changed a lot around here.”

“Well, okay, then. I really appreciate your time.”

“I wouldn’t swear to that. You could ask around.”

“Perhaps I will, sir.”

“Stop by the house if you do. I’ve never met a private investigator before. I’m here after three o’clock most days.”

“We’ll do that, sir. And thanks again.” I hung up the phone.

When I got back to the booth, something had changed. That smooth little look Randy always wore, like he was ready to be amused by something, was long gone. His eyes were wide open.

“What happened?” I said.

“I got us another round,” he said, sliding a draft my way. “No problem.”

“There’s a problem,” I said. “What is it?”

“There’s no problem.”

“You’re lying,” I said “I told you, you can’t lie to me. You’re the world’s worst liar.”

“I got into a little disagreement, that’s all.”

I looked around the place. There were a couple of young men seated at the bar, watching us. White boys from the suburbs, slumming it in the Motor City.

“With those guys over there, I take it?” They didn’t look too happy. They didn’t look too small, either.

“A couple local gentlemen with some misinformed opinions,” he said. “They were talking about how badly the Tigers sucked, which is pretty much true this year, so I couldn’t disagree with them. But then they started going on about how it didn’t matter, because
baseball wasn’t a real sport and anybody could play it.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You tried to straighten them out.”

“I just asked them when was the last time somebody threw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour at them. That’s all I said. Then I just paid for our drinks.”

“I meant to tell you,” I said. “Detroit’s not the best place to be flashing a big roll of bills.”

“They asked me about the tattoo on my arm. I told them my cell mate gave it to me, the last time I was in prison. He also taught me how to kill a man using just my index finger.” He pointed to the ceiling with the finger in question, on his left hand, of course, and then brought it down on the table like he meant to break it in two. Somehow, the table stayed intact.

“That’s quite a story,” I said. “I bet that put them in their place.”

“I think it was the slinky that really got them going,” he said, shaking his hand. Then he took a hit off a tall glass. Whatever he was drinking, it was brown and foamy.

“You told them about your old pitch?” I said.

“No, it’s a drink I invented,” he said. “I can’t throw them anymore, so I have to drink them now.”

“I’m probably going to regret asking this, but what’s in it?”

“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “One part vodka and one part root beer. You wanna try it?”

“I’m gonna say no to that.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “You’ll be surprised.”

“No, Randy, nothing would surprise me now. I’ll probably never be surprised again in my entire life.”

“You know what this drink is good for?” he said.

“Killing rats?”

“You see a really nice-looking woman at the bar, you go up and stand next to her and order a slinky. It never fails.”

I didn’t say anything.

“The bartender doesn’t know what it is, so I have to tell him how to make it. The best vodka you got, preferably Charodei, which isn’t filtered through charcoal like other vodkas. And she’s standing there listening to this. Vodka and root beer? What kind of a man drinks vodka and root beer? She turns around to take a look at me, and I just give her this smile. Like I’m drinking the best vodka in the house because I’m sophisticated and successful, and I’m drinking root beer because I’m still a little boy at heart. And when she asks me why it’s called a slinky, I tell her I was once a major-league pitcher and that was my money pitch. It works every time.”

“Uh-huh. Are you gonna try the same game when you find Maria? Order up a slinky?”

“Come on, Alex, I’m just joking around. I drink it because I like the way it tastes. Here, try it.”

“I told you, I’m not drinking that,” I said. “Vodka and root beer, for God’s sake. What next, Randy? Are you crazy
all the time
? Do you ever take a day off?”

“You would have backed me up, right? If those guys tried something? Just like the good old days. Remember that brawl we were in that one game? Where was that, Evansville?”

“It was Savannah,” I said. It all came back to me. There was another side to Randy Wilkins. You didn’t see it very often. It took a lot to get him to lose control of himself. But when he did, he lost it completely. “You hit two straight batters in the head. What did you expect?”

He took a long drink and then put the glass down. “I think I know what your problem is,” he said. His voice had changed.

“What?” I said. “What’s my problem?”

“The problem is that I got a shot and you didn’t. And it doesn’t help that I got to play right here in Tiger Stadium. How many times did you go and see games there when you were a kid? How many times did you dream about playing on that field someday?”

“Randy, do you really think that I’m upset because you got to play in Tiger Stadium and I didn’t?”

“It’s got to bother you,” he said.
“Something’s
bothering you.”

“Let’s go,” I said, standing up.

“Where are we going?”

“You wanna see the sights?” I said. “You wanna see where I grew up and where everything else happened in my whole life? Fine, I’m gonna show you.”

I got up. As I walked out of the place, I heard Randy saying something to the boys at the bar, something cute about how they could go ahead and jump him now that I was leaving. I stood outside on Michigan Avenue, breathing in the night air. A spring night in Detroit, cold but not painful. I waited twenty seconds and then headed back inside, figuring I was going to get that bar fight whether I wanted it or not. But Randy came popping out the door and almost ran
me over. He was alone and without a mark on him. Either he had talked his way out of another one or he’d killed both men with his index finger. For once, I didn’t care. This whole escapade was starting to feel like a mistake. I looked at him for a long moment without saying anything, and then I started walking down Michigan Avenue. He fell in beside me, matching my silence with his own.

We walked past Leverette Street, the street where Randy’d had his fortune told in 1971 and met Maria and fell in love with her. Or whatever the hell had happened. Mr. Shannon, the man I had just spoken to on the phone, he was probably sitting in his living room at that very moment, a half a block down, watching the Tigers on television. Randy looked down the street but did not break stride. He did not say anything.

The stadium loomed above us. It was dark except for a blue neon sign at the very top.
DETROIT TIGERS
in blue letters. Tiger blue. And a sign that glowed white, with black letters that read
HOME OPENER, APRIL
19
CLEVELAND INDIANS
.

When we hit the motel parking lot, I opened up the door on my side of the truck, leaned over, and unlocked the other door. Randy got in. I pulled out of the lot, took a right and then a U-turn to go west. Because long ago somebody had decided that you don’t take left turns on major roads in the greater Detroit area. Thirty-four years, I’d lived down here, and probably one full year of that was making rights and U-turns to go left.

I took Michigan Avenue west all the way out of Detroit, past Roosevelt Park to Dearborn. I switched
over to Ford Road, drove past River Rouge Park and the Dearborn Country Club. All the way to Telegraph Road, where I had to take another right and a U-turn instead of going left. I found the old street, took a left, an honest-to-God left this time, because I was leaving the main road, went down two and a half blocks. I pulled the truck over and stopped.

Brick houses. Just like the neighborhood back in Detroit. Maybe a little nicer. The lawns were watered a little bit better. The backyards were a little bigger. But the same idea. Brick houses in a row, with just enough room between them to drive your car into the detached garage.

“This is where I grew up,” I said.

Randy looked out the window. “This house here?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like a nice house.”

“It’s a nice house,” I said. “When I was seven years old, my mother got pancreatic cancer. She lasted a year and a half.”

He didn’t say anything. He kept looking at the house.

“You think a seven-year-old kid even knows what pancreatic cancer is? Or what a pancreas is? Where you even find a pancreas in your body?”

He didn’t say anything.

“All I knew was that my mother kept losing weight and getting sicker and sicker and there was nothing I could do about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“My father worked for Ford Motors,” I said. “Most people did back then. He got up every morning at five o’clock and took care of her and made me breakfast
and got me off to school. We could actually walk to school back then. When school was over, I walked home. I would be alone with my mother for a couple hours. Just sitting with her. Watching her die a little bit more every day. And then my father would come home and make dinner. I never went to one baseball game the whole time she was sick, you know that? I never
played
baseball when she was sick. Not once. A couple months after she died, my father finally got all my baseball stuff out of the garage. I had outgrown my glove. He had to buy me a new one.”

A car came down the street. For an instant we were blinded by the headlights. Then it was dark again.

“When I was in high school, my father bought the land up in Paradise. I remember wondering what the hell he was doing spending all that money for a piece of land six hours away, way up there in the middle of nowhere. He took me up there, and there was nothing but pine trees. Nothing. I finally asked him why he had bought that land. You know what he said? He said he bought it because my mother had always loved the smell of Christmas trees.”

I pulled away from the curb, made my way back to Telegraph Road. I could see Randy’s face in the light from the streetlamps. He was staring straight ahead.

“I assume you don’t need to see where I went to school,” I said. “Or the field where I hit my first home run. When I graduated, I went right to the minors, but you know that. That season in Toledo was as close as I ever got to making the big leagues. I was disappointed that I didn’t get a call-up in September. I was envious of you, I’ll admit that. But I got over it. As
a matter of fact, I think I got off pretty easy. The next year, when they traded me to the Pirates and I spent that season in Columbus, I knew I was done. At the end of that season, I knew it was time to get on with my life. How many more years did you spend chasing that dream?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. I knew that he spent six more years bouncing around between double-A and triple-A, riding the same broken-down buses and sleeping in the same lousy motel rooms. The Tigers gave up on him, but then the Athletics picked him up, and then the Dodgers, and then the White Sox.

I was a catcher who knew how to handle pitchers but couldn’t hit .240, so my destiny was clear. But Randy had the one unforgivable talent. He had a live left arm, and when he was throwing well, he could kill left-handed batters. There would always be another team waiting to give him a chance.

I drove north on Telegraph, all the way up to the edge of Wayne County. I did another right and U-turn to go west on Seven Mile Road. Another side street. Another row of brick houses. This neighborhood was somewhere in the middle of the scale between Detroit and Dearborn.