“Not in my memory, and I’d have disguised the date in the book. But in fact it was,” he closed his eyes for a moment, “it was in early September 1949, I believe. Maigret of course assembles the evidence.”
“What”—Henry’s voice was remote, as if he were speaking to himself—“what happens in the book to Roosevelt’s grandson?”
Simenon laughed. “Oh, he beats the rap. Of course I change his identity, I make him out to be a young Arab prince, and the French authorities succumb to pressures from Saudi Arabia. But Maigret’s record, I am happy to say, is unspoiled. That’s what counts, you know, monsieur. The reader has no doubt that Maigret was right when he fingered the grandson as the killer.”
Much later, Simenon rose. It was time, he said, to prepare for dinner. Yes, he would agree to see Monsieur Chafee again tomorrow or the day after, if there were more questions to be asked. And yes, the morning would be satisfactory for the Time photographer. “But not more than one hour. Tell him eleven to twelve. Photographers rule the world. They tell kings and queens and prime ministers what to do. But they do not tell Georges Simenon what to do. They take more time shooting a portrait than I require to write a book. Good day, Monsieur Chafee.”
Thirty-four
AT NINE, Henry was at the Bureau de Police in Cannes. The sergeant at the desk rang a supervisor, relayed the request, received back instructions, and told Henry to proceed to the second floor. In Room C, Inspector Gilbert would be waiting for him.
Henry was surprised and pleased that the older man, tall, slim, balding, well-dressed, was cordial from the start. This was unusual in his experience with old crime cases and brusque and bored police officials asked to look into archives.
“My son is also a reporter,” Gilbert said after a few minutes, during which he offered tea or coffee to his guest.” Roland is with Paris Match, studying English at night. He hopes to be sent to New York for a tour of duty.
“Of course I will help you in any way I can. Time magazine is a very distinguished publication. I do wish they would come out with a French edition, like The Reader’s Digest Because—I am ashamed of this, but I have the excuse that I fought in two wars which … engrossed my attention … consumed a great deal of time—I don’t speak any English, or read it. A most difficult language!”
Henry sympathized, and then told him that in connection with a very important story planned by Time on Georges Simenon, Henry was doing research on some of the plots used by M. Simenon in his novels, and that yesterday the famous author had told him about the background used in the novel Le rond point. Henry’s request was to examine the police files. Henry had got the date he was looking for, the day the Continental sailed from Nice with Danny and Henry aboard in September of 1949. He got the exact date not from Caroline—the last thing Henry would do at this moment was speak to Caroline, not knowing what if anything had come up between her and police investigators. He supposed it likely that the police from Poughkeepsie had approached her, or would at any moment. He had got Margie, Danny’s secretary, to do him the little favor of calling Caroline, who had always kept a diary. Caroline reported to Margie, after digging back in her files, that the Continental had picked her up on September 8, 1949, at Southampton.
That meant that it had sailed out of Nice on September 6.
Henry Chafee was looking for police files recording the murder of a man who, if Georges Simenon was talking about the same man, had been murdered on September 6. “M. Simenon reports that the murderer was never apprehended. Would that mean that the file on the victim is still live?”
“Live?”
“Open. I mean, still open.”
“Technically, yes,” Inspector Gilbert said. “But after five years, if the case is not active, the file goes into a separate division. But with the details you give me, there should be no problem in finding it. You are comfortable where you are sitting? Here,” he handed them over, “are the morning papers.”
Inspector Gilbert was back in fifteen minutes. “It is not too thick a file. You are most welcome, if you desire to peruse it in detail, to do so over there.” He pointed to an empty desk. “M. Raymond is off duty today, so help yourself to his facilities.”
Henry sat down at the battered heavy desk of M. Raymond, with the overflowing IN and OUT boxes and the two telephones and two ashtrays. He opened the fifteen-year-old file.
It began with a typed six-page police report. The typist hadn’t made an effort to avoid typographical errors. Several of the words were XXX’d out, and there were emendations in a large circular hand. Attached was an autopsy, written in dense medical language. Several clippings from the local newspapers were in the next folder. And, after them, a folder containing a half-dozen photographs of the dead man, taken in his apartment, as he was discovered.
He was Paul Hébert. And, Henry stared at the picture, transfixed, he was exactly as Henry and Danny had left him, hands handcuffed, the heavy desk leg resting within the loop of his arms. The difference was that when Henry left, Hébert was merely shackled; here, Hébert’s head lay flat on the carpet, stained with blood.
Henry inspected another photograph, stapled to a sheet of paper, and translated the caption, which read: “Photo retrieved from deceased’s atelier. Found on floor of cabinet with developing solution. Possible suspect. See appended material for interview with woman.”
Henry stared at it. The angle of the camera highlighted the face of a full-featured woman, her blond hair disheveled, her eyes half closed, a gratified smile on her lips. Her lover was presumably fondling her breasts. Was she Danny’s woman?
Henry looked even more carefully. The lover’s buttocks were tightly drawn, his shoulders slightly lifted.
Henry had often seen Danny’s backside, walking into and out of their common shower; swimming, in the old days, at the gymnasium at Yale. He could not identify Danny from the picture, but Danny had said enough to suggest it could have been he, the night before—the photographer had caught a lover in a copulative thrust. When they had retrieved the pictures, that day in September fifteen years ago, Danny had snatched them up, the print and the negatives, and stuffed them into his jacket pocket; he had no wish to let them be seen, even by his co-conspirator.
Still, if it was Danny that Henry was looking down on, not another young man in bed with a whore, it was a deduction, not a positive identification, though a deduction backed by overwhelming circumstantial detail.
Henry wanted more. He turned to the coroner’s report with the autopsy.
The estimated time of death was given as 1400, September 6.
Henry closed his eyes.
How was it possible?
His memory then relived the moment.
Danny turned the car key, started up the motor; the air was very hot Then suddenly Danny said—yes, the memory was now vivid—Damn! He had to go back up to the apartment; he had left his dark glasses. He had left the motor running.
Danny—it was now as clear to Henry as though he had seen it all done on film. Danny had gone up in the elevator and shot Paul Hébert.
How had he got into the apartment?
He must have pocketed the key when he and Henry left the apartment to go down to the car. Either that, or he had contrived to leave the apartment door unlocked when they slipped out. Either way, it could only mean that Danny planned all along to go back, after Henry was safely out of the way, to carry out the capital sentence.
And during the drive back to Nice—it all came back now—Danny had been exultant over the success of what Henry now knew was a mission much more ambitious than the mission in which Henry had collaborated. That mission was simply to retrieve the photographs. Danny had a larger view of it. It was to kill the blackmailer.
Back in the hotel, Henry called Barbara. It was 8 A.M. in New York.
What was going on?
Three volleys of “official New York” police had come to question her, she told him. “The third was the District Attorney. He told me it made good sense to b
e completely quiet about me and Huxley and Hyde Park. I told him of course. “I’m not about to circulate stuff that might publicly incriminate Danny. I mean, unless he’s guilty. Obviously,” Barbara Horowitz’s voice trailed off just a little,”—obviously he isn’t.
“I said all the right things, but I did remind the D.A. that I am a professional reporter, and have professional duties too. He clucked an understanding cluck. The D.A. rewarded me by telling me that they were grilling Cutter Malone about the Hyde Park Capital Fund. Danny was with Cutter the whole day, Tuesday, on a hotel-inspection tour of some kind up in Massachusetts, so at least we know they weren’t personally involved. Beats me. How’s it going at your end?”
Henry found it hard not to share with her the stages of hell he had visited. But not yet, not yet. So he answered the finite question. “Very interesting, Simenon. Great talker. Great reader. Not much on imagination, though. I’ll be seeing him again this afternoon, and writing out my notes tonight.” Henry was eager to end the conversation, eager to get back to his work. To thinking. But he needed to say one thing. “Barbara, it would be great if, somehow, you could make contact with Caroline. Just—I don’t need to tell you what to say—at least say this, that I called, wanted to know about her, told you how much I love her, that kind of thing.” And then, abruptly, Henry said, “Call me back if you have any news.”
Barbara did call again, late in the evening, Henry’s time. Henry was alone in his hotel room, typing his notes and translating passages from a book of essays by Simenon and putting off a final moment of self-examination.
“Henny, soon after lunch the D.A. sent somebody to take a long deposition from me about Max. Then the D.A. came back to see me, said the French had been asked to track down Danny in Paris, but he had checked out of the Ritz Hotel. They weren’t saying anything more to me, but a minute ago I had a call from Caroline—yes, I had already called her, as you asked.… She had just put down the phone with Mrs. Cutter Malone, you remember who he is?… Yes, well, Cutter Malone has been arrested, his wife said.”
“On what charges?”
“Grand larceny. They want a hundred thousand dollars in bail, Caroline said, and Mrs. Malone asked if she had any idea where in France they could locate Danny because, she said to Caroline, Danny undoubtedly could clear up the whole business.”
Henry didn’t want to prolong the discussion. He told Barbara he’d have to call her back because a cable from Time had just been handed to him by a bellboy.
He needed to think—Henry was perspiring when he put down the telephone receiver. And the instant he took his hand off it, the telephone rang. Henry jumped, as if he had set off an alarm. He reached for the receiver before the second ring.
His voice was hoarse. “Yes.”
“Henry! This is Danny! I promised I’d call you if I came around. Well, I did. And I’m having a whale of a time at the Casino Royale. That’s exactly twenty minutes away from your hotel. You got to come join me! Like old times. We’ll have a late supper. Pick me up at the casino or just go to my suite, 7G—I told the concierge to let you in if you showed up—and call me at the casino from the suite. They’ll know who I am, you bet. By the time you get there they’ll be after me to lend them some money, the way I’m doing! What you say?”
Henry found himself saying, “Sure. Sure, Danny, I’ll be around as soon as I can get there.” And then a quick thought. “About midnight. I need a couple of hours.”
Thirty-five
WHEN HE FIRST spotted Danny from behind, leaning over the roulette table, Henry was startled. Danny was wearing a tuxedo, even though formal clothes were no longer required by the casino. He looked suddenly like the young man Henry had known fifteen years before, radiant with energy and poise and life lust. Henry’s eyes peeled Danny’s clothes off, and he stared now at the dorsal side of the ardent collegian smothering his million-dollar whore. Another photograph flashed in Henry’s mind, of Paul Hébert, his head lying in his own blood. His gaze wheeled to the casino bar, with its shaded mirrors, gilt, velvet and sconces. There was the bartender with his red jacket. It must have been on that very spot that Paul Hébert had approached Danny and made the deal. And over there, at the table where Danny was now playing, it must have been there that the beautiful blonde had raked in her winnings while Danny was dissipating all the money he had.
He thought then of Barbara’s description of the young graduate student from the University of Chicago. “A really nice guy, lovely guy, a scholar who digs like a good reporter and who has bright and funny ideas—serious, a little bit of romance there, he liked to sit at FDR’s desk—”
Henry began to walk toward Danny, who had just ordered a drink brought in from the bar. As Henry got closer, Danny began to gain weight. As he turned to lay down a bet, his chin looked a little paunchy, his hair a little sparse, with streaks of gray.
Henry stepped back.
No, not here. Danny had not seen him yet. He was intent on winning with the turn of the wheel.
Henry backed away, crossed the street and at the Negresco Hotel identified himself as the friend Mr. O’Hara was expecting. He was shown into Danny’s suite. There was plenty of time. It was not yet midnight. He placed a phone call to New York, and then another.
A half hour later a hotel porter approached the American in the evening clothes playing at the roulette wheel. He was given, on a silver tray, an envelope. Danny read it. It was Henry. Danny must join him for that late dinner, already ordered to the suite at the hotel.
Danny had been winning. He could not leave that very second, not until that lovely little silver ball that was circling about the big wheel came to a stop. And yes! It dropped on the Red, which Danny was betting. If it had been so fifteen years ago there’d have been no need for Pauline. On the other hand, that was a stupid thought! He wouldn’t have traded the memory of the night—and morning!—and afternoon with Pauline for, for—a diamond necklace! Danny thought this very funny, as he emptied the glass of champagne. By the law of averages, Henry wouldn’t have to wait very long before the ball dropped into a Black pocket. Like—now. So he lost the final bet.
He had won a mere twenty-seven hundred dollars. But after all, he had spent almost three hours. Divided into twenty-seven, nine hundred dollars an hour; Danny was worth at least that! I mean, ask old Giuseppe, Giuseppe, yousa’ think Danny Badboy no worth nine hundred dollars per hour?
That’s right, Giuseppe, you bet your … Danny collected the money from the cashier, dropped a hundred-dollar note into the slot for the croupier (“Merci, monsieur, merci du part des employés”) and accepted a quick glass of champagne for the road. After all, he smiled inwardly, he had to go all the way across the street to the hotel for dinner. He gulped it down.
He bowed deferentially to his game companions. “Bonsoir, messieurs, dames,” he said, smiling, content.
Thirty-six
DANNY POUNDED on the door of 7A even though it was unlocked. He jostled the handle boisterously, up and down, up and down, settling finally for a thump-thump that thrust the door open.
“Hey there, Henry! How are you, brother! J’espère que tout va bien! Hey. Let’s have a little gloom-chaser, what you say? Champagne, maybe? I mean, before we start eating—?”
Danny looked about the room. He had expected to see a dinner table set, with the usual Hotel Negresco apéritifs: olives, breadsticks, butter, a little paté. And where were the candles and flowers and the glimmering cutlery?
There was nothing. The suite was as he had left it. Just Henry, seated behind the coffee table with the telephone on it. Like a fucking judge, Danny half-muttered: Henry with his steno pad. Had Henry emerged from the womb with a steno pad? Danny thought it amusing to imagine this. He guessed that the waiters must be on their way.
“Sit down, Danny.” Henry motioned to the couch opposite.
Danny plopped down. “Dinner not here yet, I can see. You got some champagne coming?”
Henry looked down at his pad. For twenty-four hou
rs he had trained his mind on what he had to do and he knew now the meaning of the metaphor about sweating blood.
There was no levity in his voice. He began to speak—yes, Danny reckoned quickly, even as a judge might speak. The tone of voice was unsparing.
“At four this afternoon, Danny, Cutter Malone cracked; he told the D.A. he hadn’t traveled with you at all on Tuesday, except from the Greenwich Library to the Pickwick Arms Hotel bar and then to the railroad station. He told the D.A. you had gone to Poughkeepsie to handle the problem of the Chicago graduate student. Malone told the D.A. that when you met him, you told him there wasn’t anything more to worry about.”
Danny didn’t move. He simply changed color.
“An hour ago, the court issued a warrant for your arrest. The charge: murder and grand larceny.
“At three this afternoon, local time, I signed an affidavit. Here, in Nice. It says that we drove together to Boulevard Carnot in Cannes on September 6, 1949, that we overpowered the late Paul Hébert in his apartment; that we left him handcuffed and gagged; that as we were about to drive off, you left the car. That you told me you needed to go back to the apartment to retrieve your sunglasses; that you returned about five minutes later. That you were carrying your .22 Colt in your pocket.
“The police have located one Pauline Déboulard. She is prepared to identify the man she gave Paul Hébert’s address to on September 5, 1949. The police files already have a picture of a person she was sleeping with, retrieved from the kitchen/studio of Paul Hébert the day of the crime. A negative you and I overlooked.
“The affidavit I have signed is not in the possession of Inspector Gilbert, the police investigator I’ve been dealing with. He has merely read it. I told him I would turn it over to the police only if he agreed to give me as much time as I wanted to talk with you here, tonight.
“That’s the time I’m using up now. The police are stationed at both entrances to the hotel.”
William F. Buckley Jr. Page 27