“You’re certain this is the man?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“You, too?”
“Oui.”
Lebrun dropped the Paris police mug shots of Osborn on his desk and looked at McVey.
The detectives had left the park by the river and were on their way back into the city when the call came in. McVey, listening to the French, had heard the names Osborn and Merriman but couldn’t understand what was being said about them. When the transmission was finished, Lebrun signed off and translated.
“We ran Osborn’s photo alongside the Merriman story in the paper. The manager of a golf clubhouse saw it and remembered an American that looked something like Osborn had come out of the river near his golf course this morning. He’d given him coffee and let him use the phone. He thought it might be the same man.”
Now, with the identification of the photos, there was no question that it was indeed Osborn who had come out of the river.
Pierre Levigne, manager of the clubhouse, had been reluctantly dragged in by a friend. Levigne had not wanted to get involved, but his friend warned him that this was about murder and that he could get in a great deal of trouble if he didn’t report it.
“Where is he now? What happened to him? Who did he call?” McVey asked, and Lebrun translated in French.
Levigne still didn’t want to talk, but his friend pushed him. Finally he agreed, but on the condition the police keep his name out of the papers. “All I know is that a woman came to pick him up and he went off with her.”
Two minutes later, thanked and praised for their keen sense of civic responsibility, Levigne and his friend left, escorted out by a uniformed officer. As the door closed behind them, McVey looked at Lebrun.
“Vera Monneray.”
Lebrun shook his head. “Barras and Maitrot have already talked to her. She hadn’t seen Osborn and never heard of Albert Merriman or his alter ego Henri Kanarack.”
“Come on, Lebrun. What’d you think she was going to say?” McVey said, cynically. “They get a look around her apartment?”
Lebrun paused, then said, matter-of-factly, “She was on her way out for the evening. They met her in the lobby of her building.”
McVey groaned and looked at the ceiling. “Lebrun. Forgive me if I’m stepping all over your modus operandi, but you’ve got Osborn’s picture in the paper and half of France shaking the walls to find him and you’re telling me nobody bothered to check out his girlfriend’s apartment!”
Lebrun answered by not answering. Instead he picked up the telephone and ordered a team of inspectors to search the area where Osborn came out of the river for the murder weapon. Then he hung up and deliberately lit a cigarette.
“Anybody happen to ask where she was going?” McVey was trying to control his temper.
Lebrun looked at him blankly.
“You said she was going out. Where the hell was she going?”
Lebrun took a deep breath and closed his eyes. This was a clash of cultures. Americans were boors! Further they had absolutely no sense of propriety!
“Let me put it this way for you, mon ami. You are in Paris and this is Saturday night. Mademoiselle Monneray may or may not have been on her way to rendezvous with the prime minister. Whichever it was, I suspect the investigating officers felt it more than somewhat indelicate to ask.”
McVey took a deep breath of his own, then walked up to Lebrun’s desk, leaned both hands on it and looked down at him. “Mon ami, I want you to know that I fully appreciate the situation.”
McVey’s rumpled suit jacket was open and Lebrun could see the butt of a .38 revolver, a safety strap over the hammer, resting in the holster on his hip. Where most of the world’s police carried nine-millimeter automatics with a clip that held ten or fifteen shots, here was McVey with a six-shot Smith & Wesson. A six-shooter! Retirement age or not, McVey was—mon Dieu!—a cowboy!
“Lebrun, with all due respect to you and France, I want Osborn. I want to talk to him about Merriman. I want to talk to him about Jean Packard. And I want to talk to him about our headless friends. And if you say to me— ‘McVey, you already did that and let him go’—I will say to you, ‘Lebrun, I want to do it again!’”
“And with that in mind, chivalry and everything else considered, I’d say the most direct path to the son of a bitch is through Vera Monneray no matter who the hell she’s fucking! Comprenez-vous?”
47
* * *
THIRTY MINUTES later, at eleven forty-five, the two detectives sat in Lebrun’s unmarked Ford outside Vera Monneray’s apartment building at 18 Quai de Bethune.
Quai de Bethune, even in traffic, is less than a five-minute drive from the headquarters of the Paris Préfecture of Police. At eleven thirty, they had entered the building and spoken with the doorman in the lobby. He had not seen Mademoiselle Monneray since she’d gone out earlier that evening. McVey asked if there was any way she could get back into the building without passing through the lobby. Yes, if she came in through the back entrance and walked up the service stairs. But that was highly unlikely.
“Mademoiselle Monneray does not use ‘service stairs.’” It was basic as that.
“Ask him if he minds if I call up?” McVey said to Lebrun, as he picked up the house phone.
“I do not mind, monsieur,” the doorman said crisply in English. “The number is two-four-five.”
McVey dialed and waited. He let the phone ring ten times before he hung up and looked at Lebrun. “Not there or not answering. Shall we go up?”
“Give it a little time, eh?” Turning to the doorman, Lebrun gave him his card. “When she comes back, please ask her to call me. Merci.”
McVey looked at his watch. It was nearly five minutes to midnight. Across the street, the windows of Vera’s apartment were dark. Lebrun glanced over at McVey.
“I can feel your American pulse wanting to go in there anyway,” Lebrun said with a grin. “Up the back service stairs. A credit card slipped against the lock and you’re in, like a cat burglar.”
McVey took his eyes off Vera’s window and turned to Lebrun. “What’s your relationship to Interpol, Lyon?” he asked quietly. This was the first opportunity he’d had to bring up what he’d learned from Benny Grossman.
“The same assignment as yours,” Lebrun said, smiling. “I am your man in Paris. Your French liaison to Interpol in the severed-head cases.”
“The Merriman/Kanarack business is separate, right? Nothing to do with that.”
Lebrun wasn’t sure what McVey was getting at. “That’s correct. Their help in that situation, as you know, was in “providing the technical means to convert a smudge into a clear fingerprint.”
“Lebrun, you asked me to call the New York Police Department. Finally I got some information.”
“On Merriman?”
“In a way. Interpol, Lyon, through the National Central Bureau in Washington, requested the NYPD file on him more than fifteen hours before you were even informed they’d made a clear print.”
“What?” Lebrun was shocked.
“That’s what I said.”
Lebrun shook his head. “Lyon would have no use for a file like that. Interpol is basically a transmitter of information between police agencies, not an investigative agency itself.”
“I started kicking that around on the flight from London. Interpol requests, and gets, privileged information hours before the investigating officer is even informed there’s a fingerprint that might eventually lead to the same information. That is, if the investigator knows what he is doing.
“Even if that sits a little raw, you have to say, okay, maybe it’s internal procedure. Maybe they’re checking to see if their communication system works. Maybe they want to know how good the investigator is. Maybe somebody’s tinkering with a new computer program. Who knows? And if that’s all there was, you say, fine, forget about it.
“But the trouble is, a day later you pull this same guy, someone who’s supposed to have been dead
for twenty-odd years, out of the Seine and he’s all shot up with a Heckler & Koch automatic. A job which I sincerely doubt was the work of any angry housewife.”
Lebrun was incredulous. “My friend, you are saying that someone at Interpol headquarters discovered Merriman was alive, learned where he was in Paris, and had him killed?”
“I’m saying fifteen hours before you knew about it, somebody at Interpol got hold of that print. It led to a name and then a fast-forward trace. Maybe using the Interpol computer system, maybe something else. But when whatever system retrieved Albert Merriman and matched him with a guy named Henri Kanarack, alive and living in Paris, and gave that information out, what happened next happened awfully damn fast. Because Merriman was hit within hours of the positive I.D.”
“But why kill a man who was already legally dead? And why the rush?”
““It’s your country, Lebrun. You tell me.” Instinctively McVey glanced up at Vera Monneray’s window. It was still dark.
“Probably to keep him from talking when we got to him.”
“That’s what I’d guess.”
“But after twenty years? What were they afraid of? That he had something on people in high places?”
“Lebrun.” McVey paused. “Maybe I’m crazy, but let me throw it out anyway. All this just happened to take place now, in Paris. Maybe it was coincidence that it had something to do with a man we were already following, maybe not. But suppose this wasn’t the first. Suppose whoever’s involved has a master list of old foes gone underground and every time Lyon, as a kind of international clearing house for quirky law-enforcement problems, gets a new fingerprint, or nose hair, or some other kind of connecting reference, it automatically does a search and retrieve. And if a name comes up that’s on that list, the word goes out. And it goes out worldwide, because that’s how far Interpol reaches.”
“You’re suggesting an organization. One with a mole inside Interpol headquarters at Lyon.”
“I said I might be crazy—”
“And you suspect Osborn is part of that organization, or is in the pay of it?”
McVey grinned. “Don’t do that to me, Lebrun. I can theorize till I’m purple, but I don’t make connections without evidence. And so far, there is none.”
“But Osborn would be a good place to start.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
“Another,” Lebrun smiled lightly, “would be to find who it was in Lyon that requested the Merriman file.”
“ McVey’s attention shifted as a car turned onto Quai de Bethune and came down the block toward them, its yellow lights cutting sharply through the rain that had begun to fall again.
The detectives sat back as a taxi slowed and stopped in front of number 18. A moment later the front door opened and the doorman came out carrying an umbrella. Then the passenger door opened and Vera got out. Ducking under the umbrella, she and the doorman went inside.
“Shall we go in?” Lebrun said to McVey, then answered his own question. “I think we shall.” As he reached for the door, McVey put a hand on his arm.
“Mon ami, there’s more than one Heckler & Koch in this world and more than one guy who knows how to use it. I’d be very careful how I went about my inquiry into Lyon.”
“Albert Merriman was a criminal, in the dirt of a dirty business. You think they’d chance killing a policeman?”
“Why don’t you take another peek at what’s left of Albert Merriman. Count the entry and exit wounds and see how they’re arranged. Then ask yourself the same question.”
48
* * *
VERA WAS waiting for the elevator when McVey and Lebrun came in. She watched them cross the lobby toward her.
“You must be Inspector Lebrun,” she said, looking at his cigarette. “Most Americans have quit smoking. The doorman gave me your card. What can I do for you?”
“Oui, mademoiselle,” Lebrun said, then reached over and awkwardly put out his cigarette in a stone ashtray beside the elevator.
“Parlez-vous anglais” McVey asked. It was late, well after midnight. Obviously Vera knew who they were and why they were there.
“Yes,” she said, making eye contact with him.
Lebrun introduced McVey as an American policeman working with the Paris Préfecture of Police.
“How do you do?” Vera said.
“Doctor Paul Osborn. I think you know him.” McVey was putting niceties aside.
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Vera glanced from McVey to Lebrun, then back to McVey. “Perhaps it would be better if we talked in my apartment.”
The elevator was old and small and lined with polished copper. It felt like a tiny room in which every wall was a mirror. McVey watched as Vera leaned forward and pressed a button. The doors closed, there was a deep whir, the gears caught and the threesome rode up in silence. That Vera was poised and beautiful and had been unruffled in the lobby didn’t impress him. After all, she was the mistress of France’s most important minister. That in itself had to be an education in cool. But inviting them to her apartment showed moxie. She was letting them know she had nothing to hide, whether she did or not. That made one thing certain. If Paul Osborn had been there, he wouldn’t be there now.
The elevator took them up one story. At the second floor, Vera pulled the door open herself, then led the way down the corridor toward her apartment.
It was now a quarter past midnight. At eleven thirty-five she had at last pulled the covers over a thoroughly spent Paul Osborn, turned on a small electric space heater to keep him warm, and left the room hidden under the eaves at the top of the building. A steep and narrow staircase inside a plumbing soffit led to a storage locker that opened into an alcove on the fourth floor.
Vera had just stepped out of the locker and was turning back to lock the storage closet when she thought of the police. If they had been there earlier, there was every chance they would come back, especially when they would have had no word of Osborn. They’d want to question her again, ask if she’d heard anything in the mean time, probe to see if maybe they’d missed something or if she was covering up.
The first time they’d come she’d told them she was on her way out. What if they were outside now, watching for her to come back? And what if they didn’t see her come back and later found her asleep in her apartment? If that happened, the first thing they would do would be to search the building. Certainly the attic room was hidden, but not so well that some of the older police who had fathers and uncles in the Resistance against the Nazis wouldn’t remember such hiding places and begin to look beyond the obvious.
Assuming she was right about the police, Vera took the service stairs to the street behind the building and telephoned the lobby from a public phone on the corner. Philippe not only confirmed her suspicions but read her Lebrun’s card. Warning him to say nothing if the police Came back, she’d crossed Quai des Celestins, turned down the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville and entered the Métro station at Pont Marie. Taking the line one stop to Sully Morland, she’d emerged from the station and hailed a cab back to her apartment on Quai de Bethune. The whole thing had taken less than thirty minutes.
“Come in, gentlemen, please,” she said, opening the door and turning on the hallway light, then led the way into the living room.
McVey closed the door behind them and followed. To the left, in the semidarkness, he saw what looked like a formal dining room. Down the hall to the right was an open door to another room, and opposite it another open door. Everywhere he looked he saw antique furniture and oriental rugs. Even the runner in the long hallway was oriental.
The living room was nearly twice as long as it was wide. A large Art Deco poster framed in gold leaf—a Mucha, if McVey remembered his art history—covered most of the far end wall. And the one word that sang from it was “original.” To one side, opposite a long white linen couch, was an old-fashioned armchair that had been completely redone. The curlicue desi
gn of its arms and legs was the same handpainted multicolor as the fabric and it looked, for all the world, like it could have been “ lifted straight from the set of Alice in Wonderland. But it wasn’t a prop or a plaything, it was an objet d’art, another original.
Beyond that, with the exception of half-a-dozen carefully placed antiques and the rich oriental carpet, the room was purposefully spare. The wallpaper, a fibrous gold and silver brocade, was untarnished by the grime that in a city the size of Paris sooner or later tainted everything. The ceiling and woodwork were off-white and freshly painted. The entire room, and the rest of the apartment, he imagined, had the look of meticulous daily care.
Glancing out one of the two large windows that overlooked the Seine, he could see Lebrun’s white Ford parked across the street. That meant that someone else, standing where he was, could have seen it too. Seen it pull up and the lights go out, but nobody get out. That is, until Ms. Monneray’s cab pulled up and she went inside.
Vera turned on several lamps, then looked up to face her guests. “Could I offer you something to drink?” she said in French.
“I’d rather get to the point, if you don’t mind, Ms. Monneray,” McVey said.
“Of course,” Vera said in English. “Please sit down.”
Lebrun walked over and sat down on a white linen sofa, but McVey chose to stand.
“This is your apartment?” he asked.
“It belongs to my family.”
“But you live here alone.”
“Yes.”
“You were with Paul Osborn today. You picked him up in a car about twenty miles from here, at a golf course near Vernon.”
Vera was sitting in the Alice in Wonderland chair, and McVey was looking right at her. If the police knew that much, McVey knew she would be too smart to deny it.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
Vera Monneray was twenty-six, beautiful, poised, and on her way to becoming a doctor. Why was she risking a hard-fought and important career by protecting Osborn? Unless something was going on McVey had no idea about, or unless she was truly in love.