“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I think it was you who went to the bridge and asked the captain to page Nina, am I right? You were supposed to meet up with her on the Emerald Isle, but you couldn’t find her anywhere. But did you see her at all that day? On the boat, or before?”
“Are you stupid or something?”
“I do get asked that from time to time. Look, Mr. Leinberger. David.”
“Did you notice my car out there, when you came in?”
I didn’t know where this was going, so I just shook my head.
“That’s because it’s not here. It’s in the shop. It’s always in the shop. It’s an utter piece of crap. I’d like a decent vehicle, but I can’t get one. Because of the repo on my credit. I was just at the Chevy dealer last week.”
“All I do is what the bank tells me, David.”
“No. No. You didn’t even talk to me. Tax season was just getting started. I could have gotten caught up in just a few days. You didn’t have to repo my car! You know what it did to my reputation in this town when that happened?”
“You just stole his car? Without even talking to him?” Alan demanded indignantly. I wondered just what he thought a repo man did.
“I went through hell that year. My marriage fell apart, I lost Nina, business went to shit … but I was getting it back together. I had been sober for twenty-one days when you showed up. I could have told you all of that—I was trying to tell you—but you just drove off without a word.”
“Would it make a difference if I told you I was sorry?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m here because something happened to Nina on that boat. And I’m trying to find out what. All I’m asking is for your help. I would think you’d care.”
His expression was utterly disgusted. “Time for you to leave, McCann.”
* * *
“I thought that went well,” I said to Alan once we were back in the wrecker.
“He didn’t tell us everything he knows.”
“Gee, ya think?”
“You can really be unpleasant to talk to sometimes.”
“You’re right. You should quit talking to me.”
Alan took my advice for about five minutes. “I couldn’t tell if Leinberger saw something on the Emerald Isle or not.”
“If he didn’t, then we’ve wasted a lot of time.”
“I don’t agree. He might not have seen anything, but this is still an important lead, the best one we’ve got at this point.”
“Listen to yourself. Lead. Says detective Harry Bosch. Leinberger was on the boat and couldn’t find Nina Otis, so he had her paged. She didn’t show up. What more can he tell us?”
“You’re forgetting the panel van theory.”
“I’m not forgetting it; I’m ignoring it.”
“It’s the only thing that fits all the facts.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe it happened exactly as everyone believes—she fell off the Emerald Isle. Just like the woman who got drunk and slipped off the sailboat; or the one who got drunk and took the dive off the public docks in Charlevoix. Maybe what we’re really learning is that it’s not a good idea to be intoxicated around deep water.”
“Because if you are, and you’re a woman, you’re going to drown and wind up floating to shore five days later with semen in you,” Alan finished for me.
I thought about this for a moment. We were literally at the turning point—the place where, taking the back way, I would turn left to get to Kalkaska. Instead I remained on M-32, pushing on.
“Where now?” Alan asked, sensing a change of plans.
“So, okay. Let’s go to Charlevoix and ask around, see if we can find anyone who saw Nina that day, before the boat left for Beaver Island.”
“That would have been in the newspaper,” Alan objected.
“Not necessarily. If you saw a woman having a couple of drinks before she got on the boat, would you call the cops or a reporter when you found out she’d fallen off?”
“I would, yes.”
“That is right, Alan. And I’m sure they would have given you another merit badge for your Cub Scout uniform. But normal people would just shrug it off.”
He went back to not talking to me.
Deputy Timms swung out after me as soon as I crossed the county line, as if he’d been sitting there, waiting for me. My ticket was for “following too close.” I shoved it into the middle of the pile of citations in the glove box.
The downtown stretch of Charlevoix wraps around a round lake called, well, Round Lake. The Pine River, about which I spouted worthy facts to Katie, runs from Round Lake under the drawbridge to Lake Michigan. Lake Charlevoix is on the opposite side of Round Lake from Lake Michigan and is the same body of water that connects most of the places where I do my work: Charlevoix; Boyne City, where bodies float up; Ironton, where I drove into the channel; East Jordan, where Katie worked. In the summer, the Emerald Isle tied up at the docks on Round Lake, right at the place where the drunk woman had fallen into the drink and drowned. I had no idea where they parked the car ferry in the winter.
I parked out in front of the row of shops on the Round Lake side of the main drag, stopping in front of what used to be the Star movie theater and is now a couple of retail stores. I experienced my first kiss in that theater, with a girl named Susie. I’d heard recently that Susie had gone on to become a sister at the Carmelite Monastery of the Sacred Hearts, but I doubted our kiss had anything to do with that.
At the end of the row of shops, positioned so that it would have the best view of the car ferry, was a bar named, appropriately enough, the Ferry Bar. “Where do you think someone would go to get a drink or two before getting on the boat?” I asked Alan.
“Maybe,” Alan conceded. “So what are you going to do? You can’t just go in there and start asking people if they remember if Nina was there that day.”
“What I’m going to do is go in there and ask people if they remember if Nina was there that day.” I grabbed the folder with the pictures of the missing women. The sky was cloudy, but the air was warm, so warm that the snow in the eaves was starting to turn gray with meltwater and drip in a rainlike patter to the ground.
The Ferry Bar was not as big as the Black Bear, but otherwise wasn’t much different—just a small-town saloon, though the wall was decorated with pictures of boats and a bunch of nets and fishing crap. Not nearly as classy as a dead stuffed bear, in my opinion. I walked in and got the sort of assessing glances you see from regulars when someone they don’t know shows up, though I imagined that in the summer, the place was jammed with tourists. That’s why I like the Black Bear: Our summer crowd isn’t really any different than our winter crowd. Nor is it hardly ever a “crowd.”
The guy behind the bar was what Jimmy calls “cue bald”—a shaved skull gleaming in the overhead light. He was almost my height but very thin. I’ve spent more than a few hours of my life in bars, and slipped onto a stool with practiced ease, asking for a beer. “This your place?” I asked Cue Bald.
“Yeah. Wade Rogan.” He extended a friendly hand.
“Ruddy McCann.” I waited for a reaction and got it. He frowned a little, trying to place the name, so I nodded. “Yeah, from the Black Bear in Kalkaska,” I told him. Not the guy who drove Lisa Marie Walker into the drink—more and more, that guy was fading away.
“Ah, the competition!” He grinned at me. He had narrow dark eyes but a friendly smile, the kind of happy look that keeps people coming back for a drink. Nowhere near as handsome as Jimmy Growe, but the same joyful personality type.
“You do siphon off a lot of our business,” I agreed. “People driving thirty miles so they can watch your TV instead of ours.”
“You and your wife own that place, right? Becky, Betsy?”
“No, Becky’s my sister. I’m not married, but I’m engaged to Katie Lottner.”
He gave me no reaction to that one. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard of her—it s
eemed to me that every man in a seven-county area would know who she was.
There were two other men at the bar who, if this were a movie, would be Guy at Bar #1 and Guy at Bar #2. They looked like they’d been sitting there so long, their pants were adhered to their stools. They didn’t react to me or Katie’s name at all—it seemed as if their reflexes were pretty well anesthetized.
“How long you had this place?” I asked Rogan.
“About ten years. I worked here a little before I bought it. I was a dentist down state, but I really always wanted to own a bar up north. My partners decided to buy me out of the practice, and the rest is history.”
“That’s funny, because I always wanted to quit the Black Bear and become a dentist.”
Rogan laughed, and Alan made an impatient noise. I brought out my folder. “So, were you working the day that woman fell off the boat? Nina Otis?”
Rogan’s expression shifted, looking not so much suspicious as wary. “Actually, no, I wasn’t here that day.”
I pulled out the photograph of Nina, the blurry one from the newspaper, and then another one that ran with her obituary. “You sure?”
“What have you got there?” Rogan asked, eyeing the other papers in the folder.
“I’m just looking into a few things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Well. Missing persons. I work with Barry Strickland, the former sheriff. And we came across some unanswered questions on a few people.”
“Can I see?”
I couldn’t think of a reason to deny the request. I opened the folder and spread out the pictures like I was dealing cards. “A couple of these women were found floating in the lake a few days after they vanished. But these last three are more recent. They’re still missing.”
“Huh,” Rogan said. I could see he was swept up in the mystery, because he had an excited look on his face. This was how I was going to solve this thing, I realized—I was going to get people to help me, ask people to ask people.
Rogan sifted through the pictures, stopping at one of them and regarding it carefully. It was a professional headshot, like maybe she was an actress or a model. She was quite pretty, actually. “Who is this?” he asked, holding the photo up.
“Rachel Rodriguez,” Alan informed me when I hesitated.
I told Rogan. “So, have you seen her before? Has she been in here?”
“In the Ferry Bar? No, not that I know of.”
“You know who you should ask is the mayor,” Guy #1 piped up. I hadn’t even realized he was conscious.
Rogan darted a look at him, as if angry at the interruption, then grinned. “That’s right; anybody’d know, it’d be Mr. Mayor.”
“The mayor? Of Charlevoix?”
Rogan laughed. “He wishes. Naw, of Shantytown. You know how they elect a mayor every year? It’s pretty much a formality. Phil owns all the emergency equipment, keeps it in his shanty, so they can’t really vote for anyone else, since the only real job he’s got is to keep the emergency equipment handy for anyone who needs it.”
“So how would he know if any of these women have been in here?” I asked, tapping the photo of Nina Otis because it was really only her I cared about.
“Because he spends most of his time planted right next to where you’re sitting. Year-round. July, at Venetian festival, when the crowds are lined up to get in here, I won’t let anyone sit on that stool. He’s spent enough in here that I told him he’s bought the thing. I’ll bury it with him if he wants.” Rogan laughed again.
“So he might show up here today?”
“Be surprised if he doesn’t.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll ask him.” I started to shuffle the pictures back into the folder, but Rogan reached out and picked up the photo of the woman who had fallen off the Charlevoix docks.
“Now her, I know, of course,” he told me.
“Of course?” Alan repeated.
Rogan was nodding. He tried to look mournful, but on his happy face it just came across as something like embarrassment. “Yeah. She fell off the docks right behind here. I saw her.”
18
Looks Good on Paper
“He saw her fall off the dock?” Alan demanded with the stridency of a person watching a pet theory get shot to death.
“You saw her?” I repeated to Rogan.
“Yeah. I mean, she was in here.”
“Oh, so you saw her in here.”
“Yeah. I served her. She got a little lit, but not, you know, totally wasted. Got to be careful about that.” Rogan gave me an insider’s smile—purveyors of alcohol are always gauging the line between increasing sales and increasing liability. “She said she didn’t drive here, though. So, you know.”
“So you served her drinks, but you didn’t actually see her fall off the docks.”
“No, I saw that, too.”
“Ah.”
Alan groaned.
“See, I left early that night,” Rogan explained. “Can’t remember why. And as I was backing out of the garage—I’ve got a one-car stall underneath here that I park in during winter, and it was November—I saw her heading down to the docks. She had a brown bag, and I saw the neck of what I’m pretty sure was a bottle of Maker’s Mark sticking out of it. You know, the red wax at the neck? She wasn’t walking really well, like maybe after she left here, she took a few pulls on the Maker’s.”
“So he didn’t see her fall,” Alan summarized excitedly.
“So you didn’t actually see her fall into the water,” I pressed.
“Oh no. No, and I told the cops about her going to the docks. I guess—maybe I should have tried to help her.” The guy’s facial muscles couldn’t really do guilt, either.
“No one can blame you,” I told him. “You didn’t know what was going to happen. Sometimes things occur and you feel responsible, but you’re not.” Like me. Like how I had felt responsible all these years for something I now believed I did not do.
“Thanks, man,” Rogan said sincerely.
I waited around for the mayor of Shantytown to show up, but there’s really nothing to do in a bar in northern Michigan but drink, and after my second beer, I got bored with that. I gave Rogan a nice tip and told him to stop in the Black Bear sometime. I gave him my repo man business card and asked that he have the mayor call me. “Kramer Recovery,” Rogan read out loud.
“Yeah, it’s the company Strickland and I work for.”
On the way back to Kalkaska, I got pulled over by Dwight Timms again.
“Have you got a crush on me or something, Dwight?” I asked mockingly.
He wanted to know if I’d been drinking, and when I told him I’d had two beers in two hours, he made me do a roadside sobriety test. Another deputy pulled up to watch the fun, but I touched my nose and leaned back and walked in a straight line like a circus performer, and he finally let me off with a warning. That’s how he put it: “I’m letting you off with a warning.” He didn’t tell me what, exactly, he was warning me about. That the local deputies were stupid?
I went to see Kermit to get my dog and vent a little bit. “Timms hasn’t let up, Kermit. He says he’s going to pull me over every time he sees me,” I complained. “Can’t you get an injunction or something?”
Kermit thought it over. “I could put a camera in your unit.”
“My … unit?”
“The tow truck.”
Alan laughed.
“I’m not sure what good that would do,” I said.
“You get him to say he’s harassing you with deliberation, I think we can injunctify him.”
“Injunctify,” I repeated. “Well, let me think about it. Would the video camera have a shutoff, like the emergency Kermit transmitter?” I asked, thinking of my date with Katie.
“You mean, could you unplug it?”
I grinned at him. “Yeah, like that.”
“I suppose.”
Something occurred to me. “Hey, are you going to get back into financing, like your uncle
?”
“Yes, I think probably so. I don’t know a lot about buying paper, but I get calls sometimes.”
“Buying paper?”
“You know. The car dealer writes a contract, and I repurchase it from him. Some of the people around here can’t get financing because the credit logarithms score them so badly, but we know who they are, so we can figure on servicing the paper without too much trouble.”
“Real estate is the same way. The loan originator often sells the mortgage off for servicing,” Alan lectured me.
I leaned down and stroked Jake’s ears, putting my face very close to his. “Alan,” I whispered to my dog, “shut the hell up.” I straightened. “Well, there’s a deal I want you to do. His name is David Leinberger. We repo’d him a few years ago, back when he was a drunk and his business was going south. Now he’s sober, his client base is up, and he needs a break. I think he would be a good risk.” I told Kermit to call the Chevy dealer in Gaylord.
He nodded, writing it down. “If you vouch for him, I’m sure it’s a good deal,” he said.
“Yep,” I replied, hoping it was true.
* * *
“Ruddy McCann, repo man with the heart of gold,” Alan pronounced skeptically as I opened my front door for Jake. “Or maybe the repo man willing to have his brother-in-law risk investing in car paper so the guy will talk to us about Nina Otis.”
“Okay, Alan? First, don’t say car paper. It sounds stupid. Second, Leinberger doesn’t talk to us, because there is no us. And third, I thought you said I was a war criminal for stealing his Malibu. Now I’m helping him get a replacement and I’m a bad guy for doing that, too?”
With Alan hovering in disapproving silence, I called Katie. She answered breathlessly. I couldn’t imagine what she might be doing in Grand Rapids that would cause panting—making out with her aunt’s doctor? Well, I didn’t like that image insinuating itself into my mind. My grip tightened on the phone. “Hi!” I chirped, trying to sound lighthearted but coming out more like I was being strangled.
“Ruddy! Hang on a second.”
I listened intently. I heard some bouncy, high-energy music get abruptly cut off.