Murder at the Grand Hotel

Meet Warren Sykes. He and his wife, Gladys, are at Mackinac Island, a resort parcel of land at the top of Michigan in Lake Huron. They have been vacationing there for several years, since Mr. Sykes sold his medical supply business. It was lucrative, giving them a nice retirement. Mrs. Sykes did not need to work, and spent her time volunteering in the community, raising three children, and taking care of their spacious suburban home.

In short, nothing in their amenable life to date prepared them for the adventure they were about to experience on Mackinac Island.

It was a warm Wednesday. A breeze was coming in off Lake Huron, and it brought moisture with it, giving the day a balmy feel. All over were the sounds horses make when they clip and clop along, pulling wagons full of tourists. Mr. and Mrs. Sykes had just finished lunch in the dining room, and were about to take a golf cart ride around the island, Mr. Sykes at the wheel.

The rented cart was waiting for them at the entrance to the porch of the Grand Hotel. This is the world’s longest porch. It stretches across the entire hotel façade, 880 feet. On the boat ride coming over from the mainland one can easily see the wide white smile of this enormous porch. It is a welcoming and familiar sight.

Always an amateur shutterbug, Mr.Sykes had his digital camera hanging from his neck. Shorts, tall white stretch socks, a logo polo shirt, and a gentlemen’s straw hat, gave him the look of an affluent tourist. Mrs. Sykes wore her usual pearl ear rings and necklace, a royal blue flowered dress, and a straw ladies sun hat.

Mr. and Mrs. Sykes got into the golf cart and began their leisure journey, going west along the front of the hotel. As they turned to get onto the road that leads past some of the most expensive summer homes on the island, Mrs. Sykes exclaimed, "Warren! Stop. Look. There." She was pointing toward the west end of the porch.

Mr. Sykes stopped the golf cart. Not being able to see what his wife was talking about he got out and walked toward the porch. He stopped abruptly. Turning to his wife, he said,
"It must be a prank."

They both were motionless, and silent.

"What kind of a prank?" Mrs. Sykes asked.

Mr. Sykes: "Did you ever see a fake leg sticking out of a car trunk? It’s just a joke. To fool the driver behind."

"Warren. Take a closer look, please."

Mr. Sykes walked carefully to the end of the porch. There, a single human leg was sticking out of the wood paneling that enclosed the end of the porch, just laying there on the ground. The leg was dressed in a denim pant leg, a white athletic sock, and a tennis shoe with the lace untied.

"Don’t touch it, Warren," Mrs. Sykes cried out. "We’ve got to notify the hotel security."

Mr. Sykes pulled his camera up to his eye and took a photo.

"There," he said, "I have some proof of what we are looking at."

He drove the golf cart back to the concierge station on the Grand Hotel porch.

"Go up and tell him what we found," Mrs. Sykes ordered.

She watched as he approached the desk, talked to the concierge, and even showed him the digital photo. Mrs. Sykes thought it odd that the conceriege seemed unruffled about it. That leg could be attached to a dead body, for goodness sake, she thought. Mr. Sykes was now waving his arms in frustration.

Back in the golf cart, he told his wife: "He thinks it is a game that some of the guests are playing. Hide and seek, maybe. But he’s going to walk over and look at it with us."

The concierge took his time. But finally he walked along the porch, taking the steps to ground level. At the end of the porch Mr. Sykes pulled the golf cart close. The concierge rounded the corner of the porch and just stood there, with a knowing look on his face, annoyed yet still with an "at your service" attitude.

"Warren, where is that leg? That leg that was there, right there," Mrs. Sykes said.

Mr. Sykes, always the gentleman, just stood and stared. He pulled up his camera and looked at the digital photo, clearly showing a single human leg. But now, there was no leg.

The concierge: "School kids playing." His look was all knowing.

Mr. Sykes: "Should you check with police or security, just in case?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Sykes," the concierge said, "please continue your journey around the island." With that he turned and walked away.

Mrs. Sykes, clearly agitated, walked to the very spot where the human leg had laid. She pushed against the wood paneling with her foot. A piece broke off easily, creating a hole.
The sun shone a few inches into the hole under the porch and Mrs. Sykes bent her 76-year-old body down to look. "I don’t see anything, Warren."

Now Mr. Sykes bent over. "The dirt has been moved around. It looks like something was dragged under the porch." It was dark under the porch, and the hole was small, and they felt stymied. There were a few spots in the soil that could be blood.

"That was a human leg," Mr. Sykes said. "I know it was. It was a dead leg on a dead body."

This was more excitement than they were used to, and they decided to park the golf cart and go up to their room and rest. Their guest room was painted in greens and white and other pastels, and was a bright and cheerful setting. Not the kind of atmosphere in which one would expect to discuss a murder.

Mr. Sykes was 78, but in good health, with a robust look that came from ruddy red cheeks. He liked good food, and his girth betrayed that. He acted younger than his years.
But there was a limit. He still needed his rest.

"I am going to go downstairs and talk to hotel security," Mr. Sykes told his wife after he felt up to it.

The security officer was reading the island newspaper.

Mr. Sykes told him the story.

The security officer, an older man himself, took his glasses off and rested them on the desk. "This island has almost no crime. Mr. Sykes, is it?"

"Yes."

"There’s nothing on this island except tourists, horses, buggies, and fudge."

Mr. Sykes thought that if this security officer would have had access to a fly swatter he would have used it to brush him off. He showed the security officer the digital photo of the human leg.

To his credit, the security officer studied the photo. "That end of the porch was struck by a wagon that got loose from the hitch," he said. "It was quickly patched and a permanent repair is in the works."

Mr. Sykes detected interest.

"Why don’t we take a walk over there?" the security officer said. "Do you have time?"

"Yes. Yes, I do. But would you mind if I phone my wife, Mr. Sykes asked."

Mr. Sykes used the security phone to tell Mrs. Sykes that he and the security officer were going to look at that spot where the human leg had been spotted.

When they got there, the hole that had been created when Mrs. Sykes poked at the wood paneling with her foot was closed up. Mr. Sykes thought that odd.

The security officer pushed against the paneling and the whole panel collapsed off the west end of the porch.

"Like I said, this was just a makeshift repair."

Neither man had a flashlight. But the security officer bent and found his way under the porch, directing Mr. Sykes to stay put. A couple of minutes passed, which Mr. Sykes found a long time. It was a long porch, but he doubted the security officer would go very far into the pitch darkness. Now ten minutes had passed. Mr. Sykes was beginning to believe he was involved in a hoax, or that the security officer was just rude and found his way out another exit and went back to his business. Twenty minutes into this experience, Mr. Sykes decided to walk back to his hotel room, where he told his wife the story.

"You go down to the security desk, Warren, and ask that officer what is up."

Taking his wife’s direction, he did so. When he got to the desk he found the island newspaper still spread across the desk, and the officer’s eyeglasses still setting where they had been placed.

Back in his room, Mr. Sykes told his wife they would go to dinner as usual, then check with that security officer in the morning. Surely he got called to an emergency.

The next morning right after breakfast Mr. and Mrs. Sykes stopped by the security desk.
The newspaper was in the trash, but the glasses were still on the desk. A female officer was sitting at the desk. Mr. Sykes explained his story.

The officer picked up the phone and said, "Tell Detective Gresjuit to come over to the Grand right away." Then she said, "Would you folks please take a seat, right there, in those two chairs, please. Thank you."

Suddenly, there was activity around the security desk. The concierge. Hotel desk clerks. The maitre ‘d. The Sykes felt like they were caged zoo animals. Everybody wanted a look.

Mrs. Sykes to Mr. Sykes: "What did we do?" He just grunted, and stared ahead.

Detective Gresjuit was a young man, in his late twenties. He came in wearing buds in his ears from an iPod. Very unprofessional, Mr. Sykes thought.

"You are the Sykes?" the detective asked.

"You are the only witnesses to a murder."

Mr. and Mrs. Sykes looked at each other. The leg, the human leg; now they were about to hear the explanation.

"The Grand security officer was murdered yesterday, under the porch. Mr. Sykes, you were seen with him." The detective paused a long, difficult pause.

The Sykes were astonished. They were on vacation. A murder was not in their plans. And this murder, yet. What about the human leg?

"What human leg?" Mr. Sykes showed the detective the digital photo.

"A prank, " he said.

"Mr. Sykes, you are under investigation for murder." The detective stared at both of them. They looked at each other.

"Surely you have made a mistake," Mr. Sykes stood up to explain. "That security officer went under the porch and didn’t come back. I thought he went out another exit and went back to work."

"His throat was cut and he bled to death, not twenty feet into the porch," the detective said.

"We’re on vacation! Why! Why would I do such a thing?"

The detective fiddled with his iPod.

"Mrs. Sykes. You are free to go."

"To where? Where am I going to go without my husband?"

"You’re going to have a lot of time to figure that out, I’m afraid." It was a smart-aleck comment.

Think back to the point at which a runaway wagon unhitched from the horses slammed into the west end of the Grand Hotel porch. It was considered an accident at the time. No police report. Just an insurance claim to make repairs. The owner of that horse-drawn wagon was a summer islander named Jared Clawson.

This was Jared Clawson’s first summer on the resort island. Police did not realize the connection at first, but when Mr. Clawson arrived in May, drug traffic increased. Nor did police connect the dots with a new type of "tourist" who routinely arrived and departed. These men and women looked like the everyday tourist, but their baggage contained contraband that remained hidden to the islanders accustomed to happy, carefree tourists.

When Mr. Clawson arrived in May, he bought a team of horses and a hay wagon, and entered the business of delivering hay to horse stables; horses being the mode of transport on this island without motorized vehicles.

Mr. Clawson soon welded into the daily life of the island and became no more noticeable than a tree by the side of the road. From that vantage point, he conducted a drug operation that supplied the resort areas of upper Michigan.

Five years prior, in his prison cell, he plotted that his next drug operation would be hidden in plain site. Think now about the Grand Hotel. It is the single most visible sight on Mackinac Island. It is the center of thinking, the center of all being; the words The Grand convey to anyone on the island the stature of the hotel. Where better than to run a drug operation. Using its highly-visible porch yet, for a drop point.

The security officer’s murder was murder number two. The human leg was attached to murder victim number one.

So, as you witness the island police taking Mr. Sykes into custody for a homicide, you know it is a sloppy and blind example of police work.

The police station on the island is small, and contains only a couple of holding cells, usually occupied by college students who drank too much the night before. Mr. Sykes, a gentlemanly chap, now found himself inside a holding cell looking out the metal bars.

"Don’t you worry, Warren," his wife said. "I will call our lawyer and have him come up here and take care of this ugly mess." Mr. Sykes seemed in a state of shock, and sat down on a concrete slab that served as a seat in his cell. His camera was still hanging from his neck.

When Mrs. Sykes left she passed the detective who now had the iPod buds back in his ears and was thumbing through the island newspaper. Young enough to be her grandson, Mrs. Sykes wanted to tell him what was on her mind but refrained.

When she got back to the Grand she noticed a work crew installing a new panel on the west end of the porch. That is good, she thought. Jared Clawson thought otherwise: a convenient hiding place was now lost. He had pulled up his horses and was sitting on the wagon looking at the workmen doing their job. Mrs. Sykes thought: Why is this wagon driver so interested in this end of the Grand Hotel porch. Jared Clawson got down from the wagon and moved closer to the work crew. Gladys Sykes took the opportunity to walk past the wagon, acting disinterested, but when she got to the back of the hay load she took a close look. The only thing other than hay bales she saw was a white shoestring, a shoestring like the one on the human leg and foot she and her husband had first discovered sticking out from the porch.

She looked about. Jared Clawson seemed engrossed in the work crew’s work. Mrs. Sykes pulled at the shoestring. It was attached to something. Even at her age she was able to push up on the hay enough to run her hand along the shoestring until she felt a shoe. In her mind it was a white tennis shoe, attached to a foot, attached to the leg of a dead person.

Startled, she backed away from the wagon.

Mackinac Island bans the motor vehicle. Except for emergency vehicles, such as ambulances and police cars. She heard a car engine coming up behind her, approaching the back of the hay wagon. She turned to see the police detective in the driver’s seat and her husband in the passenger seat. Two other officers were in a second car.

The three police officers got out of their cars with their guns drawn and quickly but quietly approached Jared Clawson. He acted cool. What is the problem, officer? I am just delivering a load of hay. The detective ordered him to spread-eagle with his hands on the load of hay. Jared Clawson was carefully searched, a small handgun was retrieved from a back pocket. He was handcuffed and ordered to lie face down on the grass.

The three police officers began throwing hay off the wagon and rather quickly discovered a wooden crate buried beneath the bales of hay. They pried the crate open to find well over one hundred pounds of a leafy substance in small plastic bags. Under other bales was a dead body, that of a 19 year old unidentified male. On his feet were white tennis shoes, the laces on one shoe untied.

Mrs. Sykes seemed puzzled. Mr. Sykes was not.

The police detective got down from the wagon, came over and shook the hand of Mrs. Sykes.

"I am so sorry to put you nice folks through all this. You just happened to stumble into our investigation, and we had to then incorporate you into it."

Mrs. Sykes noticed that the detective seemed more serious; there were no iPod buds in his ears.

Mr. Sykes’ ruddy complexion was now in full bloom as he realized he and his wife had been caught up in an adventure not of their making.

"What about the murders?" Mrs. Sykes asked.

"That is the only murder, right there," the detective said, pointing to the dead body on the wagon.

"But the hotel security officer?" Mr. Sykes said.

"You’ll see him back at his desk now that this is solved," the detective said. "The investigation kept changing as you folks got involved and we had to have the hotel security officer ‘killed’ under the porch after he discovered the drop point. Actually, you folks helped us solve this thing?

Mr. and Mrs. Sykes just looked at each other.

What a vacation this has been, helping solve a murder at the Grand Hotel.

That night when they entered the formal dining room everyone stood and applauded.

Said Mrs. Sykes: ‘Wait till we tell the grandchildren."