Murder in Montparnasse

by Howard Engel

  “Not for a few months. Not after a quarrel. Sometimes he just forgets to come home and it has nothing to do with me. He just gets involved and forgets. But last night. . .”

  “Hash, after you left, the crowd from the Dingo caught up to him.” I told her about their threats and his brooding anger and how he had stomped off.

  “Oh, poor Tatie!”

  “Everybody’d had quite a lot to drink.”

  “He has no sense of humour about himself, you know. So he wouldn’t think of trying to show how silly they were being. I can just see him, getting deeper and deeper into that stolid cocoon he wraps himself in. Oh, Mike, why wasn’t I there?”

  “Now don’t start blaming yourself, Hash. He was damned mean to you after the fights, remember?”

  “This is a lot more serious. I should have been with him.”

  “If it will make you feel any better, I don’t think any of the worthless characters he was with could have done him any harm. We were all too tight.”

  “Oh, Mike, it’s not them. It’s where he went when he should have come to me.” Hash began opening drawers around the room until she found what she was looking for, a handkerchief.

  “Is there anything I can do, Hash? I hate to see you unhappy.”

  “You’re a good friend, Mike. No, I don’t suppose there is anything either of us can do. We’ll have to sweat it out, as Tatie says.” Hash blew her nose and rubbed her eyes before looking back at me. I was sure that the same name was in both of our heads, but neither of us said anything. “Of course, it may be that he woke up some crony here in the Quarter.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sometimes he just forgets to come home,” she said again. “He gets involved and forgets he has a wife and family sometimes, but I’m getting good at recognizing those episodes before they happen.”

  “You aren’t really worried?”

  “Heavens no! Tatie’s just forgotten where he lives for the moment, that’s all. I don’t think Jack’s got him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “He’s probably got talking to some people in a café. You know what retired newspapermen are.”

  “I was going around the corner to get a recipe from Alice Toklas when you knocked. I hate sitting and waiting. It would have given the Piddler an airing, too.”

  “If you still want to go, I’ll carry Snick. It’s on my way home.” She handed me her bundle and ran to find her coat, hat and gloves. She put a sweater over her shirtwaist, but she still looked chilly. The concierge chucked Snick under his chin as we passed her on the stairs. Snick looked around at the carpenters as we walked through the yard, demanding in French to know their names. Hash told me he liked playing in the curled shavings near the planing table. “That’s where he is learning his French,” she said.

  It wasn’t a long walk to 27, rue de Fleurus, which was a substantial building. To me it looked as close to a Right Bank place to live as one could find on the Left. Being so close to the park, it was a fashionable address.

  As we walked along the passage to the garçonnière in the rear, I was wondering about Wad and Hash. Had he made the final break, or was this a superficial slash of the razor with the lethal cut still to come? I couldn’t seriously believe that Wad had come to harm through that gang from the Dingo. They couldn’t organize a packet of cigarettes among them most of the time. I couldn’t see them planning and executing some plot against Waddington, especially when it had to be put into operation so quickly. And could the Spanish book be so great a threat to any of them? Wasn’t it drink talking at the Dingo, egging George on?

  Coming around the corner of the bis portion of 27, rue de Fleurus, we nearly collided into a small woman with short-cropped brown hair and bangs. She was wearing a blue apron and carrying some green herbs in her hand. Something about her dark, leathery face was familiar.

  “Oh, Alice!” Hash said.

  “Priscilla! How nice to see you! I was just cutting the last of the basil and some chives. How is Goddy?” she asked, examining Snick more closely. She addressed him in baby-talk which would have been more appropriate for a child half Snick’s age and which I will not attempt to reproduce. She reached out to Snick, but the child dug deeper into my arms. Snick had been born in Toronto; we fellow Canadians stick together. Meanwhile, I was trying to place Alice’s face. It was obscured in my memory, but I knew light would shine before long if I didn’t play with the wick.

  “He’s a bashful little man, isn’t he?” She said this to me, seeming to notice me for the first time. Hash introduced us and appeared to be at ease in spite of everything.

  ‘“Fraid o’ nothin’,” said Snick.

  From the sidelong glances I saw Alice giving me, I suspected that she, too, was trying to place my face. We were both of us far from the original context of our earlier meeting. Was it at the American Club? At the embassy? What was it about that dark face? Did it come from a bad dream? While Hash explained the reason for her visit, Snick began to play peek-a-boo with Alice, looking into her large brown eyes, first over one of my shoulders and then over the other. As soon as he was feeling safe and friendly, I handed him to Miss Toklas, who by now had put her herbs in a wicker basket. Snick liked being bounced up and down, and Alice gave him a fair measure. While this was going on, Hash explained that Gertrude and Alice called the boy “Goddy” because Gertrude was his godmother.

  Soon the women were discussing boeuf en daube, while Hash made a memorandum with a bridge pencil on a folded piece of paper whenever Alice happened to mention one of the ingredients.

  “Daube is one of the masterpieces of Provençal cookery,” Alice said, clapping her small hands together, as though she could smell the dish steaming on the stove of her imagination. “Reboul, I think it’s Reboul, says that much Provençal cooking comes from the Romans. Imagine that! I always thought of the Romans stuffing themselves with coarsely ground grain and badly cured pork.”

  Just at that moment, a white poodle came leaping at me from around the corner, and as he clung to my trousers I knew where I’d met both dog and mistress before.

  “Down, Basket!” I said. “Down, boy!”

  “You know one another?” asked Alice with raised eyebrows. She was pulling the beast from me while Snick laughed and grabbed at the dog. “Of course! You were the rude man in the park!”

  I explained to Hash how we had met some time ago in the Luxembourg Gardens. “Basket and I are old friends,” I said, watching Miss Toklas’s face. I rubbed the poodle’s ears and he moaned his approval, which I hoped might break the ice with Alice. It only served to stiffen her already straight back. While this was going on, Hash was trying to explain that, while Wad and Gertrude Stein were talking about literature, she and Alice had passed many useful evenings talking about good things to eat.

  “Are you, by any chance, a writer too, Mr. Ward?”

  “I am a journalist, Miss Toklas, with a news service. Anything more is ambition and speculation. I suspect that I have as much chance of becoming a good writer as I have of becoming a great chef.” This seemed to amuse her. She hadn’t expected to be amused and didn’t know how to proceed. I saved her the trouble by beginning to make signs of withdrawing.

  “Will you be able to get back all right?” I asked Hash.

  “I’m a big, husky prairie girl, Mike. I can do almost anything.”

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .” I smiled again at Miss Toklas and turned to find my way back to the street, thinking of the famous paintings inside the house that I should now probably never see.

  CHAPTER 18

  I walked home, skirting the park and up past St-Sulpice with its twin rounded towers. A priest in a long cassock was tucking it into a broad belt prior to mounting a bicycle as I came into the rue Bonaparte. Like a lot of priests, he was wearing a béret basque. I stopped at the corner of the rue du Four to buy a fresh packet of cigarettes, cursing the high price of tobacco. I was lighting the first of the cigarettes from the flame at the counter when I got a surprise.
As I turned to the doorway, Wad was filling it.

  “Come outside, you pinch-gutted bastard!” he said, almost hissing.

  “Wad! What’s going on?”

  He removed his bulk from the doorway and we both came out into the sunshine. He was red in the face and sweating. It was the suit he’d been wearing the night before. His necktie was crooked and his jacket looked shabbier than ever.

  “I followed you here,” he said. “They just turned me loose and there you are, walking up rue Bonaparte.”

  “I live on rue Bonaparte, remember?”

  “Haven’t spent the thirty pieces of silver yet, have you? I’ll be glad to lend you something to buy a rope with if you have.”

  “Go to hell, Wad! What’s this all about? Stop talking rot.”

  “Don’t play the innocent. You knew they brought me in. You told them about me and Laure. Some friend I’ve got! Some friend!” With that, he threw a punch that hit the side of my head. I nearly fell over, but, in fact, it was Waddington who dropped. I hadn’t raised my hands. He was on the sidewalk and people were staring at him, sprawled in front of the kiosk and under the tobacconist’s orange carrot sign.

  “Are you able to get up?” I asked.

  “Judas!” he shouted. I hadn’t missed the reference.

  “Oh, for goodness sakes, Wad, get up and take off the crown of thorns. What the hell happened to you and why do you think I’m to blame?”

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll get up,” he said.

  “Then sit there,” I said and turned back into my street, feeling angrier now than when he hit me. I tried to piece together what had happened from what he’d said. “They” and “them” could only be the authorities.

  “Hey, Mike!” It was Wad, of course, but I didn’t turn around. I had almost come to the window of the antique dealer next to my building. Chinese furniture had been added to the window since I’d last noticed. Through the glass I could see the woman crocheting tea cosies with great vigour. It was plain that the old camel, her employer, was not on the premises.

  “Mike, I’m sorry.” I turned to see Wad, a pathetic sight, standing behind me. “I take it all back,” he said. “You’re the one true friend I’ve got.”

  I looked back at the store window, but I could still see him in the glass and hear his heavy breathing behind me.

  “The flics took you in?”

  He nodded. “I was walking towards the Closerie. They grabbed me and took me to the commissariat opposite St-Sulpice.”

  “Did they hurt you? I hear they beat up on Malcolm Cowley two years ago.”

  “One of them was rough, but the others made him stop.”

  “You want to come up? I’ve got some brandy.”

  He didn’t answer, he simply followed me up the stairs and along the twisting corridor to my room. With the two of us sitting in it, one on the single chair and the other on the bed, the room looked as small as a railway signalman’s hut, but with a red-tile floor.

  “You still think I told the flics about you?” I said, handing him some brandy in my tooth glass. He took it and drank it all down fast.

  “I don’t know what the hell to think. You were asking me questions about Laure. You know about the piece of manuscript and her asking for money.”

  “Blackmail, Wad. Call it by its right name. She was trying to blackmail you.”

  “How could it be blackmail? If she had those manuscripts, I want them back. She wasn’t threatening to do anything with them.”

  “She could threaten to destroy them. That might get your attention. Did she say anything like that?”

  “Damn it, Mike. Don’t you start. At least they don’t know about the manuscripts. They think they know that I saw her recently but they can’t identify me as the man with her in the Dôme that night.”

  “They’d heard about earlier meetings? Is that right?”

  “Laure and I were attracted to one another, Mike. You know how it is. We met a few times. It was wonderful while it lasted.”

  “Did she ever threaten to tell Hash?”

  “Sure. But I was able to handle that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got her to fall out of love with me. It’s an old trick. You tell them you’re going to be so happy together. You tell her that she’ll get a job and support both of you while you’re writing stories, hoping that the Saturday Evening Post will buy one. You say that you’ll be wonderfully happy in a one-room flat above a boucherie chevaline. Stuff like that.”

  “So that’s how you got rid of her?”

  “The end came when I asked her for money to tide me over while I made the break with Hash. Then I didn’t see her for weeks.”

  “Interesting technique. I must remember that.”

  Wad took the bottle and poured himself another drink. He drank this one more slowly.

  “What do the police know for sure, Wad? Why did they bring you in?”

  “Somebody told them that I had known Laure and that we had — you know — and then broken it off.”

  “I think I can guess who might have reported that. And then?”

  “They tried to get me to tell them where I was on some dates going back to the spring. I couldn’t account for some of the dates, because I don’t keep track of such things. But I told them that my passport would show that I was in Spain all of last July. I showed it to them and they began to lose interest.”

  “There were two Jack killings in July. They were trying to get you for all of the murders.”

  “That’s crazy! I’ll get on to the American Embassy. They can’t walk all over people. I’m an American citizen and they’ll bloody well hear about it.”

  “But Wad, you see, if you were away in July, you’re home free. They’ll have to find a suspect who was here in July. You’re in the clear. You won’t hear from them again.”

  “You think so, Mike? Damn it, I’d like to believe you.”

  “As long as they think that Laure was killed by Jack.”

  “Well, wasn’t she? Oh, yes, I was forgetting your theory.”

  “Hell, I don’t know. But a lot of people aren’t too sad now that she’s dead. She had a lot of people she depended on for money. And blackmailers get murdered all the time. At least they do in books.”

  “Sorry I hit you, Wardo. I’ve got one hell of a temper. I had to hit somebody.”

  “That’s okay, Wad.”

  “Once you’ve fought professionally, your hands are considered weapons. In the States, I could have got into a lot of trouble.”

  This wasn’t the moment to dispute his career in the professional fight ring, so I let that pass.

  “Where’d you go last night?”

  “Go? Oh, after the Dingo you mean.” He was playing for time to think. I prepared myself for a free sample of prime Waddington fiction. “I flopped at a cheap hotel near the Gare de Lyon.”

  “That’s a long way from anywhere.”

  “Well, Mike, I just wanted to walk until my head cleared.”

  “I thought you might have gone over to the rue Picot.”

  “That’s where Julia Lowry lives. Why’d you think that?”

  “Thought I might have done the same thing in your shoes.”

  “Julia’s one very Catholic lady, Mike. She’d be the last to open her door to a half-drunken Chicagoan on the loose after four in the morning. How’d you know where Julia lives, anyway? I didn’t tell you.”

  “Looked her up in the Bottin. Is that a criminal act, Wad? I’m single; she’s single. A fellow has to think about the future.”

  “You know how to pick them; her family is rolling in money.”

  “So is mine, or did I forget to mention it? We well-to-do families get together, nuptial mergers as we call them, Wad.”

  “Oh, go to hell, Wardo. I half believed you for a minute.”

  We finished the last two drinks in the bottle, then Waddington got up and stretched.

  “Well, I should be getting back home. Hash might w
orry what’s become of me.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” When I thought of what he’d put Hash through, I nearly threw him down the stairs.

  “I’ll let myself out, Mike. I think I know the way.”

  CHAPTER 19

  It was a Saturday morning. Not having a thing in the world to do, I took a handful of unanswered letters with me to the Café Voltaire, across from the Théâtre de France in the Place de l’Odéon. It was a quiet, well-lighted spot with back tables where nobody bothered you. I filled my Parker pen from a newly purchased bottle of ink and began writing in earnest, but the letter to my parents in Toronto as well as one to a friend from school both had the same melancholy note. I didn’t know I was unhappy until I reread the letters. From the details I gave them, it was clear that I thought I had come too late to Paris — a feeling I’d been having more and more lately — that I had not made any contacts that were worth having, and that my return to Canada, whenever it occurred, would not be unwelcome.

  I thought about the friends I’d made . . . probably the Waddingtons were the most interesting. At least through Wad I had met most of the others. I remembered how he had helped me find my room. As a former journalist, he was sometimes condescending to my present status at the agency. He had done all that just after the war, as he never tired of telling me. Hash was all right. I liked her and felt close to her. I could even imagine her life in Toronto, with Wad off in Timmins or New York on an assignment. It must be hell to be married to a newspaper bum. I filed that thought for a nightmare.

  Lady Biz Leighton’s eyes across the table at the Select the other night, or the memory of them, should have cheered me up, but they didn’t. She was doomed to a short, fast trip on an express train to oblivion. She wasn’t interested in the company she kept; we were merely fellow passengers. It was the speed and the hoped-for end to pain that held her attention. Still, I was enough of a snob to be touched by her infrequent glances in my direction. Otherwise, why did I find myself writing about her to my parents? Did I think that her title would impress them? Surely not. There were titles enough in their address book. No, I think I mentioned Biz’s title to suggest that I was keeping my feet on the ground, meeting the right people and not making a great fool of myself.