The Marble Mask (13 page)

Picard made the introductions, remembering all our names perfectly, and identified the dark newcomer as Pierre Guidry. We stood in a circle respectfully, not shaking hands, since Deschamps kept his under the blanket draping his knees, and Guidry made no move to be conversational. It occurred to me as we finally broke ranks and settled back into our seats that neither Marcel nor Pierre was that much older than I. Yet while the former looked ancient enough to be somebody’s great-grandfather, the latter had the appearance of a man in his early forties.

Marcel’s voice, when he finally spoke, mirrored the strength in his eyes, however, and the fact that he chose French—not
Joual
—showed his tactical abilities were fully alive as well, for I was sure his command of English was as good as my own—either that or half the library’s contents were unreadable to him.

Paul Spraiger nevertheless took up his assigned role as translator.

“I’ve been led to believe,” Deschamps told Lacombe, “that you have something important to say to me—something that justifies this invasion of my privacy.”

Lacombe responded in English. “That is true, and in courtesy to our guests, I think we should speak their language.”

Deschamps indicated Guidry with a slight toss of his head, keeping to French. “My colleague and business partner would have a hard time with that, and I’d like him to be a part of this.”

I was about to suggest it didn’t matter either way, when Lacombe rose to his feet and calmly announced the meeting concluded.

I quickly stood to back him up, the others joining in ragged suit.

Deschamps’s expression turned to disgust, but his reaction proved that we’d adequately baited the hook. “Sit down,” he said in perfect English. “This is childish—it doesn’t become you.”

We all sat back down.

“Let’s do this quickly,” Deschamps added. “Since you have tumbled to my condition, you can appreciate why.”

“Mr. Deschamps,” Gary Smith asked, “when was the last time you saw your father?”

Marcel looked at him stolidly for a moment, as if wondering how he’d come to appear in the room. “Nineteen forty-seven,” he finally said.

“When in nineteen forty-seven?”

“Winter. He came to bid us all good-bye in this very house. He was dedicating the rest of his life to the contemplation of God. I never saw him again.”

“That story’s due for a revision.”

“Why? It’s the truth.”

“Is your father still alive?”

A thin smile crossed the cadaverous face. “Of course not. He died years ago.”

“How and when?”

Gaston Picard interrupted. “Gentlemen, you must know that this entire conversation is being conducted out of our good grace alone. You have no right to be here, and you certainly have no right to badger my client. If you have something to say, please say it.”

“We will,” I said, “but we want it placed in context.”

Again, Deschamps scowled. “He died at the Abbey of St. Benoit, twenty years ago, of a heart attack.”

Picard looked at him sharply, the disapproval clear on his face.

Gary extracted a picture from his inside coat pocket, crossed over to Deschamps’s wheelchair, and dropped it on the other man’s lap. “Is this your father?”

Deschamps hesitated glancing down at it, and when he did, he became so still it almost seemed as if he’d stopped breathing.

“Where did you get this?” he finally asked, glancing back up, even paler than before.

“We took it at his autopsy a couple of days ago,” I said. “He’d been stabbed with an ice pick, or something just like it.”

Marcel looked confused, staring at the picture again. “I don’t understand. He looks younger than me. What do you mean he was stabbed? When?”

“A long time ago,” Gary explained. “Back when you claim he went to the abbey.”

“Mr. Deschamps,” I said. “We know the religious story was so your competitors wouldn’t sense a weakness and put you out of business. But your father was murdered. I think even your lawyer will tell you that keeping to the old story wouldn’t be smart. It might make us wonder why you were being so evasive.”

Deschamps was very still for a moment, still holding the photograph in one bony, blue-veined hand. “Explain what this means,” he finally said in a soft voice. I was struck by his overall reaction. Either he still had reserves enough to be a very effective actor, or his apparent grief was real.

“We found your father last week on top of a mountain in Vermont,” Gary explained. “He’d been frozen stiff since the time of his death—approximately fifty years.”

This time Picard was the one who looked baffled. “It’s not that cold in Ver—”

Deschamps interrupted him with a quick command, his emotional stability fully restored. “Enough.”

He then stared at me. “How was he kept frozen so long?”

I was impressed at his immediate grasp of the situation. I could almost see his brain whirring behind those penetrating eyes. “No doubt a commercial freezer,” I answered. “Are you more inclined now to tell us how and why he disappeared?”

Picard suddenly bent over at the waist and whispered something in Marcel’s ear. The ailing man smiled slightly and said, “I will admit to fabricating the story of his religious conversion. If you had known my father, you would have been amused by that invention. Unfortunately, the truth is no more revealing. He simply vanished—took the car, supposedly for a drive, and never came back.”

“But that was rare, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Didn’t Mr. Guidry there usually drive him? And wasn’t he more concerned for his own safety to be so casual?”

“Yes and no. He was a strong-willed man, not given to showing weakness. It wasn’t his nature to hide from his enemies.”

“Meaning he’d gone to meet with one of them?”

“Meaning nothing of the kind. We have no idea what happened to him. One day he was here. The next he was not. It is that simple or that complex. We don’t know. There was even talk that he’d died of a heart attack while driving in the country. But every time we thought of an explanation, something cropped up to undermine it. Such as, what happened to the car? If a competitor killed him, why did no one brag about it? If he simply ran away, why no letters or bank withdrawals or early indications that he was unhappy with his present life? In the end, we were left with a mystery, which,” and he waved the photo in his hand, “has apparently officially become your property.” He extended the picture back to Gary, who rose once more to receive it. “I wish you luck.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “We tell you we finally found your father and that he was stabbed to death, and you wash your hands of it? Hardly a response to make us think you innocent.”

Deschamps’s almost hairless eyebrows shot up. “Innocent? You are thinking I killed my own father? Despite all your obvious homework, you’ve got much more to do. Why would I kill a man I loved? More important from your perspective, why would I kill a man whose position I was slated to inherit soon in any case? He was my tutor and I was his heir, especially after my brother died in the war. What you are suggesting is ludicrous.” His breathing had turned raspy and I noticed a damp sheen covering his forehead.

“We wouldn’t expect you to say otherwise,” Gary told him.

Deschamps lost patience, waving a hand in the air. “Enough. This conversation is concluded. Please leave. Pierre will show you out.”

Picard grabbed the handles of Marcel’s wheelchair and turned him around to face the door. But my attention was on Pierre Guidry.

He’d been behaving like a palace guard throughout the conversation, his hands clasped behind him, standing at parade rest, his expression impassive. At Marcel’s dismissive order, however, I thought I saw his lips compress slightly and his jaw tense, although when he stepped forward to escort us out, he merely looked like a faithful colleague sharing his boss’s outrage.

It had come and gone in the flicker of an instant, and I couldn’t be sure of what I’d seen in his eyes. Only my suspicions remained.

“WHAT’S IT LIKE UP THERE?”
Sammie asked on the phone.

I was sitting on my motel bed, my shoes off, leaning back against a pile of pillows, the TV on but muted before me. It was almost midnight. “Pretty nice. Middle-class industrial town with no pollution and no pretensions. So far, that fits the cops, too. Nice, laid-back bunch. Turns out Lacombe’s the head Sûreté guy. He set up a task force right off the bat. We had our first meeting an hour ago—Sherbrooke police, us, the Sûreté people, and some guy from RCMP intelligence. Went well. We visited Marcel Deschamps at his home earlier and suggested he killed his old man, just to see what would happen. He threw us out. Lacombe’s put surveillance teams on him and a bunch of his top people. We’ll keep track of all contacts made for the next week and run them through the computer up here. If we did stir them up, maybe we can make sense of the flurry. Marcel’s dying of cancer, so time’s against him. He already looks like death warmed over.”

Willy Kunkle’s voice came over the speaker phone as if filtered through an empty can. “You think he did it?”

I paused a moment, remembering Marcel’s reaction. “I’m not so sure. He denied it, of course, but he looked pretty surprised. You two find out anything new?”

“We got jack,” Willy said bluntly. “This cancer thing got anything to do with our finding the Popsicle?”

“It’s got to,” I agreed. “I just don’t know how.” I then filled them in on all we’d learned, including Marcel’s comment that he’d had no reason to kill a father who was shortly planning to put him in charge, and Pelletier’s saying that in the long run everyone had just assumed patricide.

“Anyhow,” I finished, “it looks like the Deschamps family’s made a fortune illegally peddling across the border. I know you got nowhere running Jean’s name through the system, but try Pierre Guidry, Lucien Pelletier, and Gaston Picard.” I gave them spellings and dates of birth. “They’re all old-timers, so maybe one of them got nailed for something in the U.S. during their younger years. Give ’em a shot and see if we get lucky.”

“Will do,” Sammie said. “By the way, we got the final autopsy report. Stomach contents were the only unusual thing: a combination of venison, raccoon, and bear meat.”

I whistled. “Jesus. What the hell was he doing? Living in the woods?”

“If he was,” Willy put in, “he wasn’t going hungry.”

The red light on the side of the phone began flashing. “Someone just called in with a message. I better get off and find out what’s up. Let me know if you hit anything with those names.”

“You got it.”

“Oh, hey, Sammie?” I suddenly asked.

“Yeah?”

“How’re you two getting along with Tom Shanklin? Any friction?”

“I try to keep him away from Willy so he won’t quit law enforcement altogether,” she said. “But he seems pretty mellow. We haven’t done a whole lot as a team, though.”

“Right. Just being a mother hen. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up, dialed the operator, and got a message to call Lacombe. He answered on the first ring.

“I was wondering if you would like to see how we in Québec work a crime scene. We just have a report of a murder on La Rue Galt Oueste—one of the Deschamps family.”

“There’s a coincidence. Sure, I’d love to be included.”

“A car will pick you up in five minutes.”

· · ·

Galt Street West was another of Sherbrooke’s major arteries but on the older, poorer south side of town. There were no malls or motels or American greasy spoons here. Where I was deposited by a Sûreté squad car fifteen minutes later was working-class residential—rows of plain brick apartment buildings stained by time and neglect, the layers of stacked balconies, typical of virtually every Québec city, sagging and in need of paint.

A pleasant young man in a parka greeted me as I stepped into the slush piled on the sidewalk. “Mr. Gunther? Le Capitaine Lacombe asked me to escort you to him.”

I followed him into the nearest building, noticing that while the majority of uniforms belonged to the Sherbrooke police, the Sûreté was clearly represented. Lacombe had briefed us earlier that in a town this size, the Sûreté played mostly a support role, appearing only when requested. I assumed the exception here meant the task force’s mission was playing front and center.

In fact, when I reached a dingy apartment two flights up, Lacombe was accompanied by Rick Labatt and André Rousseau, the intelligence officer from the RCMP.

Lacombe turned at my entrance and motioned to me to join them in the kitchen across from the living room. “Joe. I am sorry it is so late, but as I said on the telephone, I thought you would find this interesting.”

On the kitchen floor, spread-eagled like a butterfly pinned down for display, was a large barefoot man resting in blood extending like wings to either side of him. A good portion of his skull was missing. Surrounding him like carefully moving ghosts, a forensics team clad in protective clothing went through the motions I knew all too drearily by heart.

Lacombe made the introductions. “This is Monsieur Jean-Luc Tessier. He was a Deschamps enforcer—a big cheese, correct? It looks like he was shot in the head, from behind with one bullet.”

I glanced back at the living room. “No obvious struggle. Was the door forced?”

“No. We are thinking that he knew who killed him.”

“And trusted him,” Labatt added, pointing at the corpse. “He turned his back on the man, maybe to make some coffee.”

“He live alone?” I asked, noticing the coffee maker on the counter ahead of the corpse, still half full and with its red indicator light on.

Lacombe smiled. “Yes. You are wondering how we found him so fast. The neighbor became angry at the television sound. When the Sherbrooke police got here, it was very, very big.” He put his fingers in his ears.

“But the noise came suddenly, just before the neighbor complained?”

Lacombe nodded.

“Meaning whoever killed him cranked up the volume to attract attention afterward,” I surmised. “It couldn’t have been that loud when he knocked on the door and Tessier went to pour coffee—it wouldn’t make sense. No gunshot heard?”