Lie in the Dark (33 page)

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Authors: Dan Fesperman

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Suspense, #Contemporary Fiction, #Thrillers

BOOK: Lie in the Dark
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He arrived back at the office to find Damir still in an eager and mischievous mood, but he seemed fueled by something headier than the cola and chocolate he must have devoured during the past few hours. As Vlado approached, Damir pointed toward the waiting area by Garovic’s office, and Vlado saw, with a sinking feeling, what had made his partner so keyed up.
“You have a visitor,” Damir said. “A very patient one judging by how long she’s been waiting for you.”
She sat on the same couch where Vlado had taken her a few weeks ago, only now she looked prim, knees together, holding a purse in her lap. She looked up, startled to see Vlado headed her way.
“First the Nescafé man, now a visitor from the French barracks,” Damir said. “It must be your lucky day.”
“Yours, too. While I’m talking to her, maybe you can get ready to start checking some new leads.” He waved the fax from Bogdan.
“What’s that?”
“I’ll explain when I’m done with her. But if we’re lucky, it’s the heart of the case.”
 
 
She looked different by daylight, or maybe it was just that her makeup was gone. No more rouge, eyeliner, or lipstick, leaving a plain but pleasing face, tired looking but fairly well nourished, more so than the time before, a bit fuller, or perhaps his memory was playing tricks on him.
Vlado approached uncertainly, not knowing quite what to say.
“I believe that this is where we last met in your office,” she said, although thank God not loud enough for Damir to hear. The remark broke some of the tension, and she extended a hand in greeting. “Perhaps this time the results will be more productive for you.”
“Depends on what you’re here for,” Vlado said, regretting the remark immediately.
“I needed to talk to you,” she said, her tone a shade cooler, or perhaps once again it was Vlado’s imagination. “About the shooting. With Maria there the other night I didn’t feel comfortable saying anything.”
Maria. That must be the prostitute who’d done all the talking.
“Please,” he said, pointing toward an interrogation room with glass partitions. “We can talk in here.”
They settled into chairs on opposite sides of a battered wooden table. The aging tubes of a fluorescent light hummed and sputtered overhead. Vlado felt some of his discomfort returning, and moved quickly to fill the silence. “First things first,” he said, opening a notebook. He scribbled the date at the top and asked, “Your name, please. For the record.”
“Hodzic, Amira,” she said.
“Address? And phone number, if you have one.”
“For what reason?” she asked, a sudden edge to her voice.
“In case I need to talk to you again,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Unless of course you’d rather have me come to your place of business to ask any followup questions, in the presence of Maria, who I presume is the one who did all the talking the other night.”
“Yes, she was, and, no, I suppose I wouldn’t like that. Number seven-twelve Bosanska Street, apartment thirty-seven. I have no phone.”
Which probably meant she was a refugee, Vlado thought, or else she’d still have the hookup from before the war, whether it was working or not.
“So. The night of the shooting, then. You were there I presume, outside the barracks.”
“Yes. The usual location.”
“And you heard the gunshot?”
“Yes. Maria was right about one thing, though. There had been shooting off and on for hours. The usual stuff in that area. But this one was different. Louder and closer, and from the near side of the river. Maria thought right away that it must have something to do with her man. Her regular man. Or at least the closest thing she had to a regular man. It turned out that it didn’t, of course. Her man was safely off somewhere else. We all heard the next morning who had really been killed. But, well, you seemed interested in knowing any detail, no matter how small, so I thought I at least owed you that, if only because Maria seemed so determined none of us would say a word.”
“Why did she think her man might be out there? Was she expecting him?”
“No. She’d seen him just a few minutes before. He’d come out through the gate.”
“From the barracks?”
“Yes.”
“On foot?”
“No. In a jeep. One of the white U.N. ones. Armored, with thick windows, but we could all see who was driving because we knew him from other times.”
“So he was a soldier, then. Not a civilian employee.”
“Yes, an officer.”
“Rank?”
“A colonel. Or that’s what Maria calls him. Her French colonel. Or sometimes she just calls him Sweet Maurice. Or the Little Colonel, like Napoleon.”
“Well, then, a colonel with a regular squeeze waiting at the gate.”
“Yes, I thought you’d want to know, especially when I heard that the man who was killed was someone important.” She glanced toward the table. “Do you think I could have one of your cigarettes?”
“Please.”
He slid a pack of Drinas across the table. He held out his lighter and watched her inhale, lips tight. When she began speaking again she kept the cigarette clenched in her teeth, making little bursts of smoke with every word. It seemed almost contrived to lend her an air of harshness, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. Something in the gesture didn’t ring true. Yet she clearly preferred projecting this image to whatever might be the real one, and it occurred to Vlado that there were probably children at home, perhaps a husband in the city or out on some frontline. The pose was for their sake. This was the prostitute speaking, not the mother or the wife. He wondered for a moment what she must be like in that other world.
“So,” he said, “we have a French colonel driving a U.N. jeep possibly in the area a few minutes or even a few seconds before the shooting,” Vlado said, “perhaps in position to have seen or heard something himself.”
“Yes.”
“Can you pin it down a little more? What do you mean by a few minutes. Ten? Five? One or two?”
“One, if I had to guess. It really was quite short, or seemed that way,” she said, with more of the little puffs of smoke bursting from her mouth.
Well, this was something, perhaps. At minimum the colonel would be worth talking to, Vlado thought. If he’d driven in the right direction, perhaps he’d at least noticed Vitas standing on the corner, or anyone else who might have been with him. It was a longshot, but better than any other shot at a witness he had right now, which was no shot at all.
“Is there anything else you remember from those moments right before or after the gunshot? Any other sounds. Someone running. A car driving away, perhaps.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I would have heard anything else. From the minute we heard the shot Maria was hysterical. It was all we could do to keep her from crawling around the sandbags and running across the bridge to see for herself what had happened. She was screaming for her little Maurice, her Little Colonel. It was close to curfew anyway and we were worried she’d have us all in jail for the night. And frankly, the stories you hear about police and prostitutes ...”
She stopped short, suddenly embarrassed.
“What did you finally do?”
“After a few minutes she calmed down. We wanted to walk her home but she refused. Said she was going to his apartment, that he would be there if he was okay, that she’d stay there for the night, so she left. If he wasn’t there, she had a key to let herself in, she said. The rest of us—it was only Leila and I that night—we walked home together. She lives in the building next to mine. Neither of us knows where Maria lives, the colonel either. And the next night everything was back to normal. Maria seemed fine. The only time she’s acted funny since was when you showed up.”
“This colonel. He was used to having her at his apartment? Is that normal in, well, this business? With U.N. officers, I mean.”
“Is this part of the investigation?”
Was it? Vlado wasn’t sure. “I don’t know, frankly. Just a matter of finding every detail I can.”
“You’ll have to ask someone who’s been at it a little longer than me. I’m new. So is Leila. We started the same week, a little more than a month ago, and from what I hear women come and go from it month to month, except for the ones like Maria who’ve been doing it for years.”
“So tell me what you know, secondhand or whatever, then, about Maria and this colonel. Maurice, you said. Did she ever say his last name? And that is definitely part of the investigation, ’cause I’d like to talk to him.”
She shook her head.
“From what a few others have told me, it was quite a romance, at least on her part. He’d been posted to Sarajevo a year ago, and picked her up almost right away. A few nights a week. After a while he got himself an apartment. Apparently some of the higher ranking officers do that, and she started staying over at his place two or three days at a time.
“After a while he must have cooled on her. He may even have found someone else he liked better. She ended up back on the beat more and more nights, mooning outside the barracks like a teenager, waiting for him to drive in or out in his jeep. The few times I’ve seen him drive through he gives her a smile and a wave, that’s all. It made me wonder if everything she said about the two of them was true. She’s not exactly the most stable person in the world, after all. But she did show us a key she said was to his apartment. And she did seem to know an awful lot about him.”
“Like what?”
“Little details from his apartment. More than what you’d just pick up in a few minutes between the sheets. Knew what his wife’s name was. What she and their kids looked like. She’d seen all his pictures from home. Knew what sort of guns he kept. Told us he was an important man with the U.N. Said he was tougher than the others. That if a Chetnik shot at him he’d shoot back, and wouldn’t miss. Not like the ones who just take cover and file a report. It sounded to me like he’d talked a lot of manly bullshit to her and she’d believed it.”
“And now I guess we’ll find out if he has any powers of observation and memory. Whatever the case, you were right to come in. Sometimes it’s the little things that lead to the big ones.”
They went out the door together, and he escorted her to the steps, listening as her heels clicked down to the ground floor, echoing just as sharply as the time before.
He ignored Damir’s questioning gaze as he sat back at his desk, but Damir didn’t take the hint. “So,” he chirped. “Success?”
“Not the sort you have in mind,” Vlado answered.
“But you got a phone number, I hope.”
“Confidential. If you want to reach her you’ll have to walk down to Skenderia. Just make sure to take a carton of Marlboros if you want anything more than conversation.” He felt cheapened by the remark the moment he spoke it, though it certainly seemed to be a hit with Damir. “Besides, don’t you have some work to do?”
“That depends. Where are those new leads you were promising.”
“Yes. These.” Vlado pulled the fax from his satchel. “Here, take a few pages and you can get started right away.”
Damir scanned the Cyrillic writing and his eyes lit up. “Where the hell is this from? Somewhere we don’t belong, that’s for sure.”
“Never mind that. Just oil up your rusty Cyrillic and get reading. It’s a list of paintings, valuable artworks hanging around town, with their last known addresses. We want to know which ones are still here, which ones are missing. Check them one by one, address by address. If the building’s been destroyed, move on to the next one. If the apartment’s been destroyed, ask the neighbors what happened, where the occupants went, then follow up. And if the place is occupied but the painting’s gone, find out when it was taken, and by who, and the official reason given. Get descriptions of whoever they saw, as much detail as you can. With any luck we’ll be on the trail to Vitas’s killer within a day.”
Damir glanced down at the papers, eagerness apparent in his features. “Sooner, if I can help it,” he said. “I’m on my way.” And he bustled out the door, coattails flying like wings.
 
 
Left on his own, Vlado picked up the phone, and he was pleased to again hear a dial tone. He thumbed through a U.N. directory and dialed the number for the Skenderia barracks. A man’s voice answered in English with a heavy French accent.
“Yes, this is Inspector Petric from the civil police. I’m trying to reach one of your colonels, only I’m afraid all I have is a first name.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem, the battalion’s only got one colonel, and his first name is Alain. Would you like me to connect you?”
Vlado sighed. So much for the delusional ravings of an unstable old prostitute, Vlado thought.
“Never mind, thank you. The colonel I was looking for is named Maurice. I obviously got some bad information.”
“No you didn’t. Just the wrong place. You’re looking for Colonel Maurice Chevard. He was officially posted here with the battalion last year, but he’s assigned to headquarters at the PTT building. Would you like his number?”

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