Listening? Come on. I would have guessed the most important ability was to be able to photograph both faces of two people fucking.

Of course, like so many things in life, over time the concept kind of grew on me. The more cases I had, the more times I realized that something I’d heard ended up playing a pretty big role in the case. So maybe the afternoon had been worth a little more than a sore ass and a few glasses of watered-down Coke.

I thought of the seminar when I realized that something Nevada Hornsby had said to me, that really hadn’t registered then, was now simmering on my brain. At the time, I hadn’t really been listening. But now, I knew I had. Because he had told me something important.

It was just before he slammed the boat into gear. He’d said something about we’d be out there for eighteen hours and that I would have to work because someone had called in sick. Now I searched my brain for the name. Had he said a name? I thought about it, cursing that hotshot from L.A. I never should have laughed at her. Karma.

Rudy.

No, that didn’t sound right. But it had definitely started with an R. I was sure of that.

Ralphie.

Rodney.

Randy.

Randy.

That was it.

Randy had called in sick the day the boat blew up and everyone but a scared PI died. I’d always been wary of coincidences and that was just too glaring for me to take in stride. Maybe I’d host a seminar one day and make that my big point.

Fortunately, during my questioning with the good police officers of St. Clair Shores, this particular memory had yet to surface. Somehow, now that I’d had some time to recover from the initial shock, it just popped right up. I’d even been with my sister and still hadn’t remembered it then either. Coincidence or had some small part of me repressed the idea until I could act on it alone?

Go figure.

Since I had failed to remember this little detail during my official questioning, it didn’t seem like a terribly significant slighting of protocol if I were to look into this Randy angle by myself.

I may not be the best listener in the world, but I am one hell of a rationalizer.

•

My first challenge was to find out just who this Randy guy really was and where I might be able to find him.

I pulled up across the street from St. Clair Salvage. I didn’t feel any post-traumatic stress from my near brush with death, but I wasn’t exactly doing cartwheels over being back. And having finished going through Jesse Barre’s workshop and apartment, I wasn’t thrilled at being back at another murder victim’s place of work. Again, I wasn’t the most sensitive guy in the world, but this case was really starting to get to me.

In the gray light of early morning, with a fog rolling in from the lake, the bright yellow police tape over the front door of St. Clair Salvage made the message pretty clear. Everyone stay away. Especially nosy private investigators.

In the old days, I suppose a ballsy investigator might pick a lock or slip through an old window into Hornsby’s office and check his employee records. But I had a couple problems with this. One, I wasn’t anxious to break any laws. The guys at Jackson State Prison just a half hour away would love my soft white ass. It’d be like chucking a Krispy Kreme donut into an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.

Second of all, and not quite as anally intrusive, I figured Nevada Hornsby’s records were about as neat and organized as a frat house after Rush Week. In fact, I highly doubted that Hornsby kept any employee records at all. No W-2s, no problems from the IRS, right? I pictured him paying cash under the table, along with a few beers and a greasy burger at the café across the street.

The café across the street. It was a Ram’s Horn. I’d eaten once at a Ram’s Horn. Runny eggs, soggy hash browns, weak coffee. It was one big room with no dividers between the tables. The culinary equivalent of a pig’s trough to an uppity Grosse Pointer like myself, but nirvana perhaps to Hornsby and his crew.

I locked the Taurus, crossed the street, and went through the restaurant’s fingerprint-covered glass door. A cute, chubby waitress took my order of coffee with a pleasant little smile. She had a dimple and a nametag telling the world her name was Gloria. I sipped my coffee. It was weak, all right. Kind of like coffee-flavored water. When she returned to refill me, I ordered the Hungry Man Special, figuring she might be a little more cooperative if a slightly larger tip were at stake. Fifteen percent of a fifty-cent coffee wasn’t about to loosen her up.

When Gloria came back in an astonishingly quick five minutes, burdened down like a pack mule with my Hungry Man Special, I said, “Hey, I was supposed to meet a guy for breakfast. He worked at the salvage shop across the street. His name is Randy. Do you know him?”

Gloria’s face blanched a little bit. “Did you hear about the accident?” she said.

“What accident?”

“Their boat blew up. The owner and one other guy died.”

“Was it Randy?”

“I don’t know.”

She unloaded her arm full of platters onto the table. It was like a dump truck raising its bed and a ton of gravel sliding down to the pavement. The smell of grease was intense and, in a morbid kind of way, somewhat alluring. I made my face good and thoughtful. “I wonder how I could find out if Randy’s okay.”

“Don’t you have his phone number or something?”

I shook my head. “I bumped into him at a bar. I overheard him telling someone he worked for some place that salvaged old lumber. I’m remodeling my kitchen, and the better half wants something fancy for the cabinets, so I introduced myself and he said he could hook me up with a good price, but we’d have to make it look like he was buying the cabinets, for the discount, you know? So we agreed to meet here and talk.”

Gloria seemed to buy it. The dimple kind of faded in and out while I talked. I wondered if it was a tell, kind of like full dimple for when she believed me, less dimple for skepticism. If so, I was doing pretty well.

“You should talk to Michelle,” she said. Full dimple. I was golden. “Those guys came in here once in a while, but they always wanted Michelle to wait on them.”

“Okay. Is she working today?”

“She’s on break. Out back.”

Gloria topped off my coffee and left. I threw money for the Hungry Man down and added a nice hefty tip, then hurried out the door and around the back of the restaurant where I spotted a large tangle of blond hair and a steady plume of smoke.

“Michelle?” I said.

She turned to me and I got a good look at her. Fine features, hidden beneath some thick makeup. Pretty green eyes. A slight overbite. I had to admit, these Ram’s Horn waitresses were kind of cute.

“Uh-huh,” she said. Her voice was deep with a hint of rasp. It wasn’t the most flattering setting. Michelle stood next to the restaurant’s dumpster. I’m glad I hadn’t touched the Hungry Man. The smell from the giant green bin of death was overpowering. If I had consumed the 10,000-calorie special, I might be hurling it back up right about now. But the back of the restaurant opened up onto an alley, and there was nowhere else for a smoker to go.

“I’m trying to track down a guy I met . . . his name is Randy, and he said he worked for the salvage shop across the street.”

“He ain’t workin’ there no more,” she said. Grammatically challenged, I noted, without judgment. Hey, we all had our faults. Mine happened to be a propensity for lying to waitresses.

“Because of the accident?”

She nodded.

“Did you know him?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “He’d only worked there a week or two, right?”

It was my turn to shrug.

“I knew his boss, Nevada,” she said. “He’d been coming here for years.”

“Were you guys friends?”

She raised an eyebrow at me while simultaneously taking a deep drag.