Two more weeks passed. The kids were all out of school, running around on the streets. I was still on the day shift until the end of June. The days were hot, and the nights seemed even hotter. For the first time, Sergeant Grimaldi did not so much as mention the Elana Paige case during roll call.
I was out in the car with Franklin. I was driving that day. There’s a place called Covenant House, up on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. They take care of young people who have nowhere else to go, and this wasn’t the first time we’d taken some kid up there with the vague hope it would be the right place for him or her. If it’s that or prison for some girl who’s shoplifting food from the 7-Eleven, we’d rather give the House a try first.
When we had dropped her off, I was driving back east on the boulevard. I was looking at every young face on the sidewalk, something I’d probably never stop doing for the rest of my life, especially when I was in this part of town.
“How hard did you hit this street?” Franklin said. “This was still in the target area, wasn’t it?”
“We drew a line here, actually. This is about as far north as we thought our man would come.”
“All these apartment complexes,” he said, looking out the window as we rolled past them. “That’s a lot of doors to knock on.”
“We knocked on every one. Probably twice.”
When I got to Wabash Street, I turned right and headed south.
“Where are we going? Oh, don’t tell me…”
It was late in the day, time to get back to the precinct. But there was no rule about taking the most direct route.
“You must have covered all of these neighborhoods,” he said. “This was right in the middle of the detective’s golden triangle, or whatever he called it.”
“The horseshoe. Between the freeways.”
“The horseshoe, that’s right. You must know every house by now.”
“Pretty sure I do.”
“And yet here we are.”
I came up to the first intersection. Ash Street. I slowed down, thinking to myself, the man is right, we worked the hell out of each one of these streets. This is just a waste of time.
I turned anyway.
We passed Fourteenth Street and the little corner store. Three young men were hanging around out front. I looked them over and then kept going.
We passed Fifteenth Street and then Sixteenth Street. The elementary school was closed up tight for the summer. Some more kids were hanging out on the playground equipment, violating a minor rule but nothing I was going to stop for. I looked them over and kept going.
I came to Seventeenth Street and was about to make the turn. There was only a block more, with just a few houses. Then the street dead-ended at a locked gate, with a parking lot on the other side.
I kept going straight.
“Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “You’re driving yourself crazy. You’re also going to make me late for dinner.”
He was right. I had no argument. But I kept going down that last block, already figuring I’d loop back and then head down to Butternut Street, maybe check those houses on the way because what the hell, as long as I’m there, and why did I even bother because I don’t see a soul on this street now anyway, except for that one woman hanging out the laundry.
I was two houses past before I even realized what I’d seen. I stopped the car.
“What is it?” Franklin said.
“Probably nothing,” I said, swinging the car around. “At least I didn’t ruin your shoes this time.”
I rolled back down the road slowly, the house on our left now, out my driver’s side window. It was a white two-story house with a little porch on the front. A woman was out in the side yard, hanging clothes from a line she had strung from the side of the house.
“Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “Not this game again.”
I watched her take out another pair of jeans and hang it on the line. Next to the other jeans, and the gray shirt.
“I told you,” he said. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy.”
I looked more closely at the shirt. Plain gray. Yes. But the sleeves…
No. There was no tear. Both short sleeves were perfectly intact.
“I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I guess I’ll never look at a gray shirt again without doing a double take. I’ll go my whole life just waiting to see that one torn sleeve.”
I took my foot off the brake and aimed the car dead ahead. To the precinct, to civilian clothes, to dinner.
“Alex, hold up!”
I stopped the car again and looked out the window, just as the woman was pinning another gray shirt to the line. A gray shirt with one ragged short sleeve.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I went back to the Soo the next day. I needed to try out this idea, to say it out loud, hear myself saying it, see someone else’s reaction to it. Someone I could trust.
I parked on Portage Avenue, a busy street on this day, one of the last days of the tourist season. The freighters would keep running until the weather closed them down for the winter, but today was one last chance to walk through the Locks Park without a warm coat. I knew people came from all over to see these seven-hundred-footers go through the locks. I don’t totally understand the attraction, but then I live just up the bay, so I see these boats all the time.
I walked into the Soo Brewing Company. The air was heavy and the front window was steamed up, but enough light came through to make the furniture in the seating area look even further past its prime. Although I suppose the lingering aroma of the hops more than made up for it.
Leon appeared from the back room, dragging a large metal trash can. “Alex,” he said when he saw me, “two visits in two days. I knew this beer would win you over.”
“You need help with that?”
“I got it. But I bet you can’t guess where it’s going.”
I looked into the trash can and saw nothing but a soggy mass of grain. “I’m guessing the Dumpster out back?”
“Hell no. This is from the mash tun. It’s going to the buffalo ranch so they can feed it to the herd.”
“The buffalo ranch.”
“Down toward Pickford, yeah. You’ve seen them.”
“If you say so,” I said. Then I saw his coffee on the counter and realized I desperately needed one myself.
“I’ve got a pot going,” he said, before I could even ask. “I’ll get you a cup.”
A couple of minutes later, we were sitting in the front room on the beat-up couch. The cushions were shot, and I knew it would be a battle to get back on my feet, but for now I was comfortable. I took a sip of coffee.
“You don’t look like you slept a whole lot,” he said to me.
I shook my head.
“I imagine the story you told me last night has something to do with that.”
“I’m not exactly sure how I know this,” I said. “Or why I didn’t know it until now. All these years later. But I believe we put away an innocent man.”
“You believe this based on what?”
“Well, based at least partly on something I thought of in the middle of the night. You’re the one I always come to when I need help seeing something clearly, right?”
“I try.”
“You do more than try. You have a gift for it. You cut through all the clutter that gets in the way and you go right to the one thing that makes it all fit together. I’ve seen you do it over and over again.”
“You’re flattering me now. But go ahead.”
“When I was telling you what happened at the train station, when I was chasing Darryl King down the tracks, you stopped me and you asked me a question. Do you remember what it was?”
He thought about it for a few seconds.
“I asked you,” he said, “why the young man threw away the bracelet and not the knife.”
“Right. Which is exactly the same question I asked Detective Bateman, when he told me the story.”
“What was his answer?”
“His answer was the kid threw away the knife later, after he got home. Or he just wasn’t thinking straight at the moment. Or whatever. It really doesn’t matter, because the whole question is just one of those things that gets in the way of us seeing the situation clearly.”