The Twenty-Year Death (6 page)

“Why are you so interested?” Pelleter said, determined to give no signs one way or the other.

“Oh, just curiosity, curiosity. I have an amateur interest in the mystery of crime, let’s say.”

Pelleter felt his anger rising. “Excuse me,” he said again.

“Oh, of course, it’s getting late. But just tell me, is that really true? Surely the newspapers must have exaggerated. No one would do that to children just for his own entertainment.”

“I have nothing more to say on this. It was a long time ago.”

“Then maybe you could tell me about our local murder. Have you any suspects there?”

Pelleter took a step forward as though to walk through the man.

The man held his ground so that he was too close, directly in Pelleter’s face. “I don’t believe that anyone could get away with what Mahossier did even if he would do it. You have to tell me that. It can’t be that that is how it was.”

It was as though the man needed some reaction out of Pelleter, as though he were deliberately pushing him to see what kind of a man he was.

“There were really bones with children’s teeth marks on them? That detail always seemed too extreme.”

Pelleter grabbed the man’s shoulder then and pushed him out of the way. The man fell against the wall, and hopped to regain his balance as Pelleter stepped around him. “There’s nothing more to be said.”

The man called at Pelleter’s back, “So it really is true, and you saw all of that. Why didn’t you kill him on sight?”

Pelleter turned back and rushed the man, stopping inches away from his face. “Because that’s not how the law works.”

“When there are murdered men in the streets of Verargent, maybe the law doesn’t work.”

Pelleter glared at the man. He could have told the man of the years of scars on the surviving boy, the evidence of many battles fought and won. That the bite marks on the bones suggested that this last boy had killed no less than six other children in his short life, and that he was still in an institution in the city unable to talk, often in restraints. They had managed to keep that out of the papers, for the boy’s sake.

Instead he said, “Good night,” and turned away.

Behind him the man said, “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just wanted to know.”

Pelleter unlocked his door.

“You—”

But the man stopped himself before Pelleter had even closed the door.

In the room, the inspector felt too wound up for such a small place. Mahossier was one case. He could have told the man of so many other cases over the years that the papers were too busy to notice. Was one horror really more terrible than another when somebody was dead?

And somebody was dead again, and Mahossier was close at hand again. Even if Mahossier had nothing to do with this, it just made Pelleter uncomfortable.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It had just been a tactless man. As he had told Officer Martin that afternoon, people can do anything. Right now, only the questions were important:

Who moved the body?

Why hide that Meranger was a prisoner by changing his clothes?

He shrugged off his jacket and stepped over to the bed. He tried to review his interview with Madame Rosenkrantz as he sank onto the mattress.

Instead, the image of that lone boy in a cage in Mahossier’s basement crowded everything else out. His anger flared up again at the guest from across the hall, and he clenched his fists and ground his teeth.

Of course the papers had left out the smell. Mahossier’s basement had smelled like a latrine outside a slaughterhouse. Pelleter had had to discard the suit he wore that day, because the smell had woven its way into the cloth.

These were the memories that he had to fight against when he saw that clownish glee on Mahossier’s face in the interrogation
room at Malniveau. There he had succeeded in being all business. And now some curious civilian threw him off his guard.

He looked at the phone sitting in the pool of light from the bedside lamp. He checked his watch.

It was too late. If he called Madame Pelleter now it would only make her worry.

The next day was clear as Pelleter and Letreau set out for Malniveau Prison. The fields were muddy and there were occasional twin stripes of tire tracks on the pavement from where trucks and automobiles had turned onto the main road from unpaved country roads.

Fournier met them himself at the front entrance. He wore a tailored gray suit that looked as though it had been pressed that morning. He had a clipboard in hand, and began to speak before Remy had managed to relock the front door.

“Meranger was present at roll call two nights ago, April 4... The guard who took roll call yesterday morning counted him as present...There was no exercise yesterday because of the rain, so the next roll call would have been last night, and you contacted me before then.”

“Where’s the guard who made the mistake?” Pelleter said.

“He’s already been reprimanded.”

“I still want to talk with him.”

“It will not happen again...I have long suggested to the warden that certain reformations must be made to our roll call procedures.” His manner was sharp and authoritative. He was not going to be pushed around in his own domain.

Pelleter and Letreau locked eyes. Fournier was impossible.

Letreau said, “We’re all in this mess together.”

Fournier opened the door to the administrative offices. “The Meranger file—”

“I’d like to see Meranger’s cell,” Pelleter said.

Fournier looked back at him, still holding the office door. “We have been through the cell,” he said flatly. “There’s nothing to see.”

Suddenly Inspector Pelleter stepped so close to Fournier that the two men’s coats were almost touching. “I am trying to do my job. Your job is to assist me in doing my job. So I don’t care if you’ve reprimanded your guard or if you’ve searched the cell or if you think you’ve got everything under control. I want you to help me when I say help me and otherwise I want you to stay out of my way.”

Fournier’s face remained impassive during this speech, but when it was clear that Pelleter was done, he looked away first. “Right. He was on cell block DD, which is on the second floor.”

Pelleter stepped back. Fournier pushed past him and led the way through a door at the end of the hall, only several doors down from the room in which Pelleter had met with Mahossier the day before. It opened onto a set of stone stairs. There was a cloying smell of mildew, and the temperature was noticeably cooler than it had been in the hall.

Fournier seemed to have recovered from his dressing down, and was using the opportunity to proudly show off the prison. “The doors lock behind us as we go, so that anyone caught without a key at any juncture would be trapped until somebody else came through...We’ve of course never had a successful escape here, and there hasn’t even been an attempt since the war.”

“Until now,” Pelleter said.

“Well, we’ll see.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man was dead, after all.”

They reached the second floor landing, and Fournier sorted through his keys. “You’ll notice the two doors. The one to the left here leads to the inside hallway between the cells, and the one further to the right,” he said stepping over to it, “leads to the outside gallery that overlooks the inner courtyard.” He fit his key into the outer door. “You’ll want to look at this...The prisoners weren’t able to go out yesterday because of the rain, so they were eager to go out today.”

He opened the door, and a breeze rushed in, blowing cold air. They stepped out onto the gallery, a narrow iron walkway only wide enough for one man. A guard stood ten paces away, carrying a shotgun.

The prisoners were in the courtyard below. Many held their arms across their chests against the cold. They were like the random crowd on a market day, jostling against one another, walking with little regard as to where they were going.

“The guards down there carry no firearms.” Fournier pointed out the other guards along the gallery. “The men up here have shotguns...The prisoners that are allowed outside get one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon.”

“Did Meranger have outdoor privileges?”

“Yes. He was a model prisoner. He’d been here a long time.”

Pelleter watched the prisoners milling about in the relative freedom of the yard.

Suddenly a cry came from the far corner. Everyone’s attention was drawn to the sound, and immediately the prisoners were shouting and rushing into the area.

The guards on the ground began to run as well, joining the general melee.

Fournier turned back to the door, shuffling through his keys. His movements hurried but precise. He went through the door, leaving Pelleter and Letreau locked out on the gallery with the armed guards.

As they watched, the guards on the ground got to the center of the crowd, and forced the prisoners back. A prisoner was lying on the ground, his hands clutching at something on his chest.

“They’ve knifed him,” Letreau said.

The man’s mouth was wide open in agony.

Fournier appeared below them. He cut across the yard, directly into the crowd, yelling at the prisoners as he went.

The guards on the gallery had their rifles in hand, and watched with care.

Two men appeared with a stretcher through one of the doors. The prisoners parted to let them through. The noise had diminished enough that the injured man’s cries could be made out as he rolled on the ground.

Fournier was at the center of the crowd, yelling at the prisoners. He grabbed one man and pushed him back.

The injured man was moved onto the stretcher, and rushed inside.

Fournier, still yelling at the prisoners, followed.

By the time the prison yard was emptied and one of the guards could readmit them into the building, Pelleter and Letreau were thoroughly chilled. The guard who escorted them to the infirmary talked continuously, still energized from the excitement of the stabbing.

“You sure saw something...It can be so dull out here, just standing for hours and hours at a time. You forget that these are
dangerous criminals. You almost let your guard down...Then, pow! It’s a powder keg...You don’t know if you should shoot or not.”

Every door they came to required two sets of keys. There were locked guard boxes at all major intersections. The guard had to return his shotgun to the armory, a locked room in which the guns were locked in cages and overseen by the arms keeper.

“How often does something like this happen?”

“It could be months. When I first started here, there was a whole year before anything happened. I didn’t believe the older guys who said different. But this month! Wow! There must be some kind of gang war going on. Here we are.”

Pelleter stopped him outside of the infirmary. “How many?”

The guard rocked on his feet, he was so excited. “I don’t know, four, five. The guards don’t always find out about everything, you know?”

“Any dead?”

“Not that I know of.”

Pelleter nodded at that, as if all of the answers had been expected. He pushed his way into the infirmary.

It was a small white room with six beds, three on each side of the room. The knifed man was in the furthest bed on the right. His shirt had been cut off, and two guards and a nurse were holding him down as the doctor stitched the wound on his chest and stomach. The man did not seem to be struggling.

“He’s been given morphine,” Fournier said from just inside the door. He was taking notes on his clipboard. “He’ll live. It’s only a gash.”

“Can we talk to him?”

“He doesn’t know who did it. He was walking and then he was on the ground in pain. It could be any number of people
who were in his vicinity, but he’s not even sure who was nearby.”

“Any enemies? Did he have a fight with someone?”

Fournier held his pencil against his clipboard with a snap. “No. Nothing. I asked him.”

“Would he tell you?”

Fournier’s nostrils flared, and his movements were sharper than usual, the only indication that he was under a great deal of stress. “Listen, Inspector. If we’re all in this together, then you’re just going to have to trust me. He didn’t see anything. He doesn’t know who did it. That’s it.”

A moan came from the prisoner. The doctor could be heard placating him. They were almost finished.

“Now if you still need to see Meranger’s cell, let’s go and be fast about it. I have a lot of work to do. We’ve got to search all of the prisoners and all of the cells. Not that we’ll find anything, but it has to be done.”

Pelleter would have liked to question the prisoner himself, but he had seen the incident and it was quite possible that the man knew nothing. It could wait.

“Yes, let’s,” Pelleter said, and he stepped back as if to let Fournier pass. Then he stopped him. “And what does the warden say of all of these stabbings?”

“All of them?”

“The guard said that there have been at least four this month.”

Fournier’s brow furrowed, his eyes narrowing. “If you count Meranger then this is three that I know of, and for all we know Meranger was stabbed on the outside.”

Letreau started to speak, but Pelleter held up a hand to hold him off. “Surely, you will be calling the warden about this?” Pelleter said.

“The warden has left me in charge because I am fully capable of being in charge. He will be informed when he returns on Monday. No need to ruin his vacation.”

“Of course.”

Fournier nodded his head once for emphasis, then led out the door.

Letreau stepped in close to Pelleter. “What’s going on?”

“There’s been a stabbing.”

“I know there’s been a stabbing, but...”

“Then you know what I know.”

Fournier had gotten ahead of them, and he waited at the next door for the two of them to catch up. In the hallways, away from the courtyard, with no one in sight but the occasional guard, it was impossible to know that a man had almost been killed within these walls less than an hour before. The stones were gray and impassive.

Meranger’s jail cell was on the outer wall, with a narrow window that looked out onto the neighboring fields. The space was large enough for the iron cot and steel toilet with barely enough room left over to stand. Fournier stood impatiently in the hallway, reviewing the papers on his clipboard, and Letreau stood outside the cell door watching Pelleter survey the room.