The Marble Mask (21 page)

He rose to his feet, preparing to go, and then stopped. “There is something interesting, speaking of killed people—a little history. We found documentation from the Second World War in the papers of Jean Deschamps that Marcel had stored. It looks like the father thought his older son Antoine had been murdered in Italy and not killed in battle.”

“By who?”

Lacombe resumed walking to the door. “They do not say. And it might not be true. What we found were copies of letters Jean wrote to the army. The replies all say that it did not happen that way—that Jean should be proud of his son’s sacrifice, et cetera, et cetera.”

He paused on the threshold. “I have to do some of my other work right now. I am very glad things worked out last night, Joe. I would feel badly if you got hurt.”

“I know. And I really am sorry, Gilles. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It won’t happen again.”

He left then, but despite his kind words and gentle manner I knew I’d crossed a line—and suspected I’d be seen as more hindrance than help from now on.

It was time to return home, not just to mend fences back there, since I knew I’d just made VBI look a little less than stellar, but because it was becoming clear that the case against Marcel—passed polygraph or not—wasn’t panning out as we’d all hoped it might.

Despite the setbacks, though, I couldn’t repress a paradoxical optimism, as if having just been deprived of the only prize I thought was available, I now could suddenly see others of equal—if less obvious—merit.

Lost in a flurry of new options, I slowly went upstairs in search of a phone.

· · ·

Willy Kunkle came through my open door at the Commodore Inn back in Stowe and leaned up against the wall, watching me unpack.

“They throw you out or are you running for cover?”

I didn’t look up at him. “Guess you heard.”

“Hell, yeah. Didn’t make the papers—not like if I’d screwed up—but no cop I know hasn’t heard about it. Cowboy Joe, head of the Untouchables. They’re all laughing their asses off.”

I knew he was just rubbing it in—that was as natural as breathing to him. But it didn’t make it any easier to take.

“Maybe it was a blessing in disguise,” I said as a diversion.

He laughed. “God, I’m glad I never used that line on you.”

I stopped what I was doing and straightened. “Where’re Sam and Tom?”

“Sam’s in her room doing homework. I dunno about Tom. We don’t hang out.”

I resisted suggesting why that might be. “Round them up. If I’m going to tell you what I’m thinking, they might as well hear it, too.”

We convened in a small booth at the back of the inn’s over-decorated bar. It was early evening, the TV set’s volume was hovering at near murmur, and we had the place mostly to ourselves.

“I got Willy’s version of the fallout,” I told the other two. “What’ve you heard?”

I was looking at Tom Shanklin, on loan from the state police, curious about how he’d handle it.

“Not much,” he said, his voice neutral. “Just that you had a meet with some informant that went sour. No big deal.”

“Meaning everyone’s having a field day.”

He looked like he’d swallowed something distasteful. “A few people are blowing it out of proportion, but they’ve been filling my ear from the start.”

“It’s not like we don’t meet with CIs all the time,” Sammie complained more petulantly. “Things can go wrong. You get out with your butt intact, it’s a success, right?”

Predictable responses all around, I thought, although I was pleased by Shanklin’s. “Okay,” I said. “I just wanted to know what to expect. For the record, though, this was more than a meet with a CI, Sam, as you well know. I was a guest. I should’ve let the locals handle it. Don’t any of you downplay that if you’re asked, okay?”

There was no response.

“Be that as it may,” I continued, “I was telling Willy earlier that maybe it’ll work out to our advantage anyhow, which is why I asked you here.”

I paused to take a sip of my ginger ale. “The minute we found that letter from Marcel to his father—and were told by the SQ that if we hadn’t, they had another way of pointing us to it—we all thought that was pretty convenient, right?”

“No shit,” Willy muttered, poking through the small dish of pretzels in our midst.

“Still, the dead guy came from Canada, and so did his supposed killer. It looked likely he’d been whacked on our side of the border just to complicate things.”

“Wasn’t he?” Shanklin asked.

I waved that aside. “Probably. But what I’m saying is that we were happy to think that we were just the dumping ground.”

“For good reason,” Shanklin persisted. “There was no evidence to the contrary.”

“Except that now the Canadians are having doubts about Marcel. They’ve offered him a lie detector test, which, if he takes it and passes, means the prosecutors at least will probably lose interest. That’ll put us right back where we started. Whether we like it or not, we may have to either come up with an alternate bad guy, or find some new evidence to override the lie detector and profilers both. If we don’t, Kathy’ll have her hands full getting Marcel to our side of the border.”

“How the hell’re we going to do that?” Willy asked. “It was a goddamned miracle we found that letter.”

“We found Arvin Brown,” I argued, “and traced Jean Deschamps to where he spent his last night alive. The footprints are there, even if they are fifty years old. People are still around, documents are sitting on dusty shelves—they can tell us things if we find them and ask the right questions.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Willy grumbled.

“You want us to look for someone besides Marcel?” Sammie asked, obviously intrigued.

“Not exactly,” Tom answered for me. “He wants Marcel to be just one of several possibles.”

“That’s it,” I agreed, struck again by Shanklin’s objectivity. “Run through what might have happened here in 1947, but exclude Marcel as the killer.”

“Meaning no letter,” Sammie concluded.

“Right. No letter.”

In the sudden lull that followed, I became aware of the bar’s quiet vital sounds—the humming lights over the rows of bottles bracketing the cash register, the hiss of running water as the bartender washed glasses and set them into overhead racks. I wondered if I might be expecting more than these people were willing to offer, especially given how little we had after all this effort.

“Which begs the question—” Willy argued, “what got Jean down here if it
wasn’t
a letter from his son?”

“What do we know about his trip?” I asked.

“That he left Sherbrooke without telling anyone,” Tom said quickly.

“That when he was here,” Sammie added, “he stayed at a swanky inn, ate high on the hog, and felt cocky enough to leave Arvin Brown a fat tip.”

“He also packed a bag,” Tom said.

“And registered under his own name,” I remembered.

“Just as if he’d been invited down by his son,” Willy concluded sorrowfully.

But Sammie wouldn’t bite, “No letter and no son.”

“Says you.”

“Hardly sounds like he was flying under radar,” Tom said.

“What does a typed letter imply?” I asked suddenly.

There was a silence reminiscent of a classroom full of stumped students. Willy finally volunteered, “Access to a typewriter.”

“Anonymity,” Sammie answered.

“Sure,” Tom agreed, his surprise apparent. “The only handwriting was the word ‘Marcel’ in block letters.”

“And we’re talking about a time when few men used typewriters, much less had access to them on vacation,” I added.

“Okay,” Willy conceded grudgingly, “no letter, no son.”

“So why did he come down here without telling anyone?” Tom asked. “Especially when he made no effort to be discreet once he’d arrived?”

I played the trump card I’d been hoarding since Lacombe first gave it to me. “I don’t know why he was alone, but he was chasing down a lead on who killed his son in Italy in World War Two.”

Willy sat back in his chair. “You old bastard. What the hell’s that all about?”

“Something they found in Marcel’s office,” I explained. “A bundle of Jean’s old papers—including a few pieces of correspondence between him and Canadian armed forces types about Antoine’s death. Jean seemed to think he’d been murdered and not killed in action. They weren’t buying it.”

I drained my glass and continued, “Remember the other flag we had that Marcel lured Jean down here?”

“The old secretary,” Willy said.

“Right. She thought her boss had been whacked all along, so when she was given the heave-ho, she stole the receipt from the Snow Dancer Hotel—at least supposedly. One of Lacombe’s people interviewed her using a soft approach. Didn’t crowd her about the convenience of finding the receipt just when we needed it, but kept things conversational instead. From the report Paul and I read, when the interview eventually turned to Antoine, she got all enthusiastic. Antoine had been the fair-haired boy, as far as she was concerned, and Jean had taken his death hard, especially after hearing he might have been murdered. She said Jean went after the truth like someone in a ‘Greek play,’ quote-unquote. Claims he swore her to secrecy.”

“But why?” Tom repeated. “What was the advantage to keeping it secret? He could’ve used his manpower to widen the search.”

I had no answer for him, and Sammie was off on another tangent anyway. “How long before he died had he heard about Antoine?” she asked.

“Only a few months, which explains the small amount of correspondence. And she couldn’t say—or wouldn’t say—how he found out in the first place. One day he just asked her to start writing those letters—that’s how she got in the know. And when we asked Lucien Pelletier what Jean was like just before he vanished, he said he was ‘energized,’ like he used to be before a big deal was going down.”

“How do you go from that to getting him killed here?” Tom asked.

“Maybe we don’t,” I conceded. “But if we work on the theory that the Marcel letter is bogus, then a lead about Antoine’s death is the next best way I know of encouraging Jean to cross the border.”

“The guy who killed his son in Italy lives here?” Sammie sounded incredulous.

“Not necessarily. Jean was on a hunting expedition, from what the secretary said, chasing down old comrades in arms, superior officers, people who might’ve known the truth. He may have found someone living here that fit one of those categories, or he may have simply been lured across the border by someone who knew about his obsession. What we need to do is retrace his steps, not for who killed him, but for whoever he was looking for—a whole different trail.”

“Or maybe not,” Willy commented.

“Or maybe not,” I agreed.

“Is the SQ going to help?” Tom wanted to know.

“Yeah. My screwup is a bigger deal around here than it is up there. Lacombe even said the whole thing might’ve been a setup by someone wanting a police witness to a Hell’s Angels killing. And tensions
are
cranking up. The local press is all over this and the Angels have been quoted as saying they aren’t going to be pushed around—that their pal will be avenged. The Canadians don’t care much about Jean’s ancient paperwork right now.”

I half expected Willy to blurt out he had no intention of becoming an archive rat chasing down old army records, so I was surprised when he said instead, “If the letter was a frame, we could do more than just follow Jean’s footprints. We could also go after whoever planted the letter.”

“How?” Sammie asked. “It was buried in a suitcase covered with mildew—probably been there almost since Jean was killed.”

But I understood where he was headed. “The Alvarez will,” I murmured.

“Right. We found it through old-fashioned legwork, but that geezer secretary was ready if we hadn’t. Why would there be a restriction on the barn behind the B-and-B, and a further one telling any new owners they couldn’t mess with its contents? It had to be to preserve the suitcase and its smoking-gun contents.”

Sammie understood now. “Trace the will’s executor and maybe we find our bad guy.”

“Okay,” I concluded. “New attack plan. Since they’re used to me up there, I’ll go back to Sherbrooke and collect what I can on Antoine Deschamps, especially on when he was in Italy. Willy, you came up with the Alvarez angle; chase it down. Sam and Tom, we need to find out who was in Stowe and what it was like in 1947—the movers and shakers, the oddballs, the busybodies. Check the town hall, the newspaper files. Willy covered some of that ground already, so get ideas from him. Neither the state police nor the town cops were around back then, or just barely, so either the constable records or the sheriff’s office might have something. Arvin Brown seemed on the ball—maybe he could tell you more, or give you names of people who might. Also, let’s see if we can find out what Gaston Picard was doing here just before Jean’s body popped up. He claims he was playing tourist. Maybe somebody saw him around town—sure as hell someone did business with him. Check all the local lawyers, Realtors, banks, anyone else you can think of.”

We all rose to our feet as if summoned by a signal. “Any of you needs help, let out a shout. That’s the whole idea behind this unit—we have the resources, the manpower, and the network. Let’s put it to use and see if it works the way it’s supposed to.”

We filed out of the bar, Willy, I noticed, giving Sammie’s shoulder a quick squeeze—the first outward sign of affection I’d witnessed so far. There was no telling how the Canadian prosecutor was going to fare with Marcel Deschamps and the pending lie detector test. But for the first time since this all began, I wasn’t that concerned. We finally had something we could work on independently—and I could feel the longed-for adrenaline at last taking hold.

LACOMBE SEEMED BEMUSED BY MY REQUEST.
“You would like to see the papers on Jean’s son’s death in Italy? Why?”

We were sitting in his favorite restaurant for lunch, he eating seafood and drinking a beer, I nursing a Coke and a ham sandwich, wondering why they’d loused it up with some fancy cheese.

“I wish I could tell you,” I admitted. “Call it a hunch I can chase down while we wait for Marcel to decide about the polygraph. It’ll probably be a waste of time, but it occurred to us we might’ve let a few details slide after we found that letter from Marcel to his father, like what the old man was doing in Stowe in the first place. I’m hoping those old papers might help.”