The Stiff Upper Lip (5 page)

“So what did you do then, Roscoe? Once you were dead?”

“What'd I do? I ran, man. I took off like a big bird. Oh, like I didn't run, but I walked fast. I had to
git
, man, that was the one idea in my head. I must've been all over town, walkin,' didn' know where I was goin', didn' know what I was doin', tried telephonin', telephoned you but you wasn't there, telephoned Val but Val wasn't there, man, I felt like a ghost, I don't know …”

But he couldn't remember where he'd gone. He'd felt like a ghost. He'd been in cafés and out of cafés, he couldn't remember which or where, half the cafés in Paris it seemed like. Had he had anything to eat? No, he couldn't remember eating. Maybe ghosts don't have to eat. Yes, he could remember being up on Gaïté sometime, the rue de la Gaïté, because the brothers had had the public dice game out on the sidewalk, the one where they mark off the top of a carton into a betting layout, he could remember seeing that, it must have been up on Gaïté because that's where they play it. But otherwise, nothing, until he'd gotten Valérie on the telephone finally. Yes, that had been from a café on Gaïté. When he told her what had happened, she'd told him not to move from where he was. But he'd been too scared to stay put. But no, he couldn't remember where he'd gone next.

According to Valérie, it had taken her the rest of the afternoon to find him. She'd tracked him to a bar off the avenue d'Italie, where he was already halfway up to the astral plane on Pernod and water. Then they'd driven around awhile because, ghost or not, she hadn't wanted to go to the Neuilly apartment till after dark.

The Neuilly apartment belonged to a friend of hers. The friend was out of town; the place was empty; she'd gotten the key.

That was yesterday.

This was today.

“There's one thing,” I said to Roscoe. “I know ghosts don't need to, but the way you tell it, you've gone something like thirty-six hours without eating.”

“Without eating? No, man, I had some stuff to eat.”

“Not here anyway.”

“Not here? No, not here. But when I was walkin'. I had some stuff then. Some crêpes. I had some crêpes up on Gaïté, they sell 'em on the street. Jelly an' sugar. An' some dogs. I had me a couple o' dogs in a café.”

Valérie had turned around by the window and was watching us. In fact, I realized, she'd been watching us for some time, and me more than Roscoe.

“You're lying, Roscoe,” she said flatly. The way she said it, you knew she wasn't talking about hotdogs either.

The thing was, I knew how
I
knew; but I didn't know how
she
did.

Roscoe glanced up at her, then away.

“Look, honey,” he said, “why don' you go out awhile, take in a little air, buy us some
food
? Now we started talk-in' about it, my stomach's rumblin'. I bet Cage here too, he could use …”

For once, though, his voice trailed off. It must have been her expression. Her lips were tight, her eyes narrow. Roscoe stood partway up. His king-sized palms were spread in some kind of beseeching gesture.

“Look, honey, there's something I want to talk to Cage here about. Personal-like, you know what I means?”

I began to have an idea why.

“Roscoe,” I said, “there wasn't any traffic jam yesterday up on St. Michel, and no crowd of people.”

“Shit, man, maybe I was wrong about the
time
.” He stood up the rest of the way. “Maybe it wasn't half pas' one. I
tole
…”

“At no time, Roscoe. Not a half past one or any time. They had the ambulance on the back street. They took his body out that way. There was only one cop car you could recognize, the rest were unmarked. You …”

“What are you calling me?” he said, nostrils flaring. “A
liah
?”

“I don't think you were anywhere near the Puke yesterday. And like you said: a good thing too.”

“Yeah? What makes you so sure about that?”

“Because I was there myself.”

Let's get one thing out of the way right now: I didn't kill Odessa Grimes, I only found him.

I'd gone up to the P.U.C. gym myself, late that morning, looking for him and Roscoe. My California sources of information weren't what they'd once been, but I had a notion I wanted to try on them. Both together. I was late getting there, though, thanks to a transatlantic conversation, largely one-way, with one Robert Richard Goldstein, and by the time I arrived the action was fast and frantic. It was strictly playground style: no whistles, no refs, no fouls, no time-outs. And no Roscoe either. And no Odessa Grimes.

I asked around if anybody had seen them. Nobody had. I watched the action for a while. Then I decided to take a look for myself.

I found him lying between a bench and the locker-room wall, in a swamp of his own blood, with his street clothes on. A big and ugly giant, and recently dead. Very recently. Judging from the smears on the floor, he'd crawled the last part. He hadn't been going anywhere, though; it was more like an animal looking for a hole to die in.

The way it looked to me, whoever had done it had clubbed him on the head first, with a blunt object about the size of the Eiffel Tower, and then had cut his throat for good measure. Somebody's idea of spade work, maybe. Later on, the medical expert said the skull injury could have been caused in a fall, and maybe so, but it was hard to imagine anybody taking on Odessa Grimes with something as flimsy as a Gillette, and there was no sign of a struggle.

Other than the corpse's with himself.

I bent over him. His jaws hung open at the hinges, but for a weird second I'd have sworn he was trying to whisper something.
Jesus
, maybe.
Sweet Jesus
. But it wasn't Odessa Grimes who was calling on the Good Lord, it was me, and I didn't have to feel his pulse to tell he'd gone up for his last rebound.

Then my mind started stripping gears in a hurry.

My first thought was to get the hell out of there. But it was already too late for that. There was the matter of witnesses, for one: I'd been seen in the gym. Then too, the Law had a shortcut for connecting me with Odessa Grimes. Then, in no particular order, I thought of Roscoe, of Valérie, of a telephone. Somewhere I found a telephone. I tried calling Roscoe: no answer. I tried Valérie: ditto. I got through to my hotel and left a message for her. Then I called the Law. But I was still talking to them when one of their minions, in plain clothes, took the receiver out of my hand and finished the conversation for me.

I mean, the Paris constabulary has been known to move fast on occasion. But not that fast.

Unless, that is, they've been tipped off.

Whoever had gotten Odessa, it turned out, had given them Roscoe. And failing to find Roscoe, they took me.

I spent the rest of that day trying to convince them, first, that they'd made a mistake, and, second, to give me a chance to prove it. They convinced hard, and looking at it from their point of view, you couldn't blame them. The pressures on the Law are pretty much the same in France as elsewhere, and in the early stages of a case, when the cameras are popping and the bigwigs demanding results, simple arithmetic holds sway. Meaning that in the eyes of tehe Police Judiciaire for every, dead body there has to be a live one. Furthermore, I was the only live one they had who wasn't wearing sneakers, and the only one, white or black, who didn't answer them in nigger talk. The basketball players in the P.U.C. gym, it seemed, had gone deaf, dumb, and blind to a man. They'd seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing, and they were their own mutual alibi. I was the odd man, and when, in mid-afternoon, they found out that a day or two before I'd been poking around the foreigners' section at the Préfecture, had even “talked” my way into a look at the dossiers on Grimes, Odessa and Hadley, Roscoe, all my hopes of passing myself off as an innocent bystander went up in Gauloise smoke.

By this time we'd moved from the Boulevard St. Michel down to the Quai des Orfèvres. That's a pretty historic corner of Paris—the sightseeing boats go right under your feet and Notre Dame's just a couple of blocks away—but once inside, it's like you never left home. The smell does it mostly, I guess, compounded of dust and nicotine, ink and bad breath, but of fear also and suspicion. A sweaty, metallic smell, inhuman even though it's man-made. The lair of the Law, in sum, and you don't have to have been farther than your friendly L.A.P.D. to know what it's like.

I gave them what I had.

They weren't much impressed with it.

Neither was I. The fact was: I didn't know why Odessa had been killed, unless it was a case of mistaken identity. Nor did I know who had killed him. Nor why, if he was innocent, somebody would have fingered Roscoe Hadley. Nor where Roscoe Hadley was.

And around and around we went. Until I asked to see Dedini.

Dedini wasn't my favorite cop, and no, I probably wouldn't have bought a used car from him. He'd long since risen as far as he was going to in the Police Judiciaire, and he knew it and was bitter about it, and he took out his bitterness on whoever came to hand, including his fellow gendarmes. But he had a kind of brutal realism, born of contempt and experience—some three decades' worth—and I thought I could deal with him.

I had before.

But Odessa Grimes wasn't Dedini's case. Furthermore, Dedini was out on sick leave. Furthermore, it wasn't up to me to decide who I would and wouldn't talk to. Furthermore, if I didn't tell them where they could find Roscoe Hadley, they were going to have me charged me with obstructing a police investigation. Etc. Etc. Until, a while later, Monsieur le Commissaire Dedini, Jean-Pierre, stood in the doorway of the office where I'd been being furthermored.

He was a big, ugly man with a square, bulldog head and a pair of rimless glasses that got lost in his jowled face. Despite the mild weather, he wore a sweater under his suit jacket and a raincoat over the lot. You could see why he was on sick leave. He was doing battle with the Paris grippe, but the only weapon he had at hand was a wadded handkerchief, with which he mopped at his forehead and his nose. The handkerchief was visibly getting the worst of it.

“Hello, Monsieur le Commissaire,” I said. “I was sorry to hear you were sick. But aren't you rushing the season a little?”

He gazed around the office, at his colleagues, at me. His expression was what I'd once called his scum look. It was habitual, and it took in the whole world.

“What's this shit that you want to talk to me, Monsieur?” he said hoarsely, following the words with a thick cough.

“Alone, Monsieur le Commissaire,” I said. “I want to talk to you alone.”

I saw the eyebrows go up around the room.

“This isn't my affair,” Dedini said with a shrug. “Anything you want to say to me, you can say it now.”

“All right,” I said, shrugging back at him. “I don't know how much you've been briefed on what's happened. A man called Odessa Grimes has been murdered, a professional basketball player, American, black. I found him. Shortly before I found him, an anonymous caller told the police about it and accused one Roscoe Hadley of having done it. I don't think that's likely. Roscoe Hadley and Odessa Grimes were friends and teammates. These gentlemen here seem to think I know where Hadley can be found. I don't, other than his address, which I've given them. Hadley has troubles of his own, serious ones. It's more likely that the people who murdered Grimes were really after
him
. He may already be dead. If he isn't, the longer you hold me here, the worse our chances of finding him alive.”

While I was talking, one of the inspectors who'd been questioning me handed Dedini a sheaf of papers. Among them were the notes he'd been taking. Dedini read through them. He didn't seem to be listening to me. When he'd finished, he looked at me, rheumy-eyed, over the rims of his glasses.

“What do …?” he began. “What do you …?”

But the cough got the better of him. He took out the handkerchief, unwadded it, spat weakly into it, then wadded it back and wiped at his forehead.

“What do you want of me, Monsieur?” he said.

“I want you to tell these gentlemen to let me go. I'm not doing you any good here. I just might be able to on the outside.”

I've referred before to a deal I once made with the French Law. Somewhere in the archives of the Police Judiciaire was a copy of the deposition I'd signed. Dedini knew about it. In fact, I'd used his pen. The deposition was a lie which at the time had served the interests of certain people with influence in high places, but it gave me a certain small leverage over the Law. Dedini sighed and sneezed and lumbered out of the office with the Monsieur le Commissaire in charge of the case, Frèrejean by name. I didn't see him again, but when Frèrejean came back some time later, the message he had for me was pure Dedini.

“We'll give you twenty-four hours, Monsieur,” he said.

Somehow I doubted it would be enough. On the other hand, when you're dealing with the Law, you learn to take what you can get.

Another thing you learn: you're going to come away feeling dirty. I mean physically, collar-sticking dirty. When I came out on the Quai des Orfèvres, night had already fallen, bringing a damp and germ-laden chill off the Seine, and about all I could think of was a hot bath and a flagon of Glenfiddich, preferably at the same time.

I could have walked to my hotel, but the Giulia was parked out by the curb, between two no-parking signs. It was the first dumb thing she'd done.

I walked around to the driver's side.

“Move over,” I said. She did, and I got in. She flung her arms around me and kissed me. I didn't kiss her back.

“Are you all right, Cage?”

“No, I'm not. We'd better find Roscoe. In a hurry.”

“I already found him. He's safe, in Neuilly. Just drive, Fll tell you where to go.”