The deputy nods.
“Unless this isn’t his first… Hendrix has been looking for similar cases. The only plausible profile is that of a certain John Doyle, jailed for three murders – old women whose throats he cut before he disfigured them with the help of chemicals. But right now he’s still inside… Apart from him the psychiatric services have suggested a few names, a few angles, but nothing substantial.”
“Let them keep looking.”
And if we find nothing, what then? thinks McCarthy. Will the killer strike again? Has he left town? Is he still among us? And above all, for heaven’s sake, what kind of a guy can he be?
21
Spacious, well lit, and tastefully furnished, Patricia Froger’s office is in striking contrast to the remainder of the building, which is austere and shabby. Sitting in a white leather armchair, the principal of Watertown High School wears an icy smile that betrays no hint of emotion. Her tone is courteous, dry, and precise. She is taking no pleasure in this interview. But as the principal of a highly reputable establishment it is appropriate for her to speak to a private detective – as long as there is nothing reprehensible about his investigation and it does not involve one of the students.
“So,” continues Franck, “Professor Ernest Caron quit entirely of his own accord?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Did you make any effort to keep him on?”
“No. As I told you, he was a serious, trustworthy employee, well-liked by the students. But he had made up his mind to leave.”
“From one day to the next?”
The principal hesitates. “I… I think he had come into an inheritance, or something like that.”
Franck smiles. He glances quickly at Ernest Caron’s file, which is open before him and which includes his written resignation. “May I read it?”
The principal sighs.
The detective reads the document. Then he returns it to the file, closes it, and smiles broadly.
“Mrs. Froger, just one more question… How much did Lance Le Carré pay you for your silence?”
Startled, she blushes. “I beg your pardon?”
Franck slides the file slowly toward the principal. He is still smiling. After a moment’s silence he asks, almost in a whisper, “What were your specific reasons for firing Professor Ernest Caron?”
22
As soon as he was warned that the premises of one of his men were about to be searched – and that the man in question was suspected of involvement in the widely publicized murder of a Watertown retiree – Lance Le Carré had immediately done the necessary to get rid of him, so that Hiscock never reached his apartment. The gangster then made certain that his contact in the Watertown Police Detective Unit was taking care that any trace of drugs in old Jimmy’s vehicle would disappear. Hiscock is not the first of his employees he has disposed of; likewise, he has corrupted more than one public servant. Such things are, so to speak, merely an aspect of normal business. But Le Carré is feeling uneasy about the encounter between Hiscock and Franck, which has been reported to him by one of the two tarts. What was this guy doing at the Jaguar anyway? he wonders. How is he mixed up in this business? And what does Ernest have to do with it?
A few weeks earlier, on the recommendation of a friend, Le Carré had hired Franck to carry out a tricky operation. It consisted in recovering some important data from a Canadian mafia don. Le Carré’s own men couldn’t be involved. Le Carré had contacted Franck. The two had met briefly, then he’d had no further news from the detective until two days later, when Franck called him from Ontario. Le Carré had invited him into his home. He had paid him. So what’s the guy still doing here? That’s something Le Carré can’t figure out… Accustomed to viewing human relations in terms of profit and loss, he can’t understand why an employee he has already paid off is still on his territory. It makes no sense. None of his other bagmen behave like that. He gives orders, they carry them out; he pays, and they disappear. So why doesn’t this one do the same?
Le Carré lights a cigar and then dials Franck’s number. Franck responds on the second ring. The gangster puffs on his cigar. He waits for a few moments, ejects the smoke, and asks in a calm voice, “Are you trying to double-cross me?”
“No.”
“Who are you working for?”
“I’m working independently.”
“In that case, tell me why you’re tracking my men right into my nightclubs, to investigate my family? Who are you working for?”
“I repeat, I’m working independently, Mr. Le Carré.”
“So it’s for yourself you’re attempting to connect Caron to the death of some old waster?”
“You remind me of my secretary!” exclaims Franck. “And, if I may inquire, why do you attend fashionable exhibitions in Boston? Well? I’ll tell you why: it’s because you like to. Well, it’s the same for me: I’m investigating your cousin on a whim, just because I like to!”
Le Carré doesn’t understand anything of this. He’s being taken for a fool! Angrily, he stubs out his cigar in the marble ashtray, and declares, “He’s not the killer.”
“I never said he was.”
“He had nothing to do with that murder!”
“He’ll have an opportunity to deny it.”
The gangster covers the mouthpiece with his palm, and calls to one of his men in a low voice, “He’s going to Caron’s! 77 Francis Street. Bring him back to me.” Then, to Franck, “There won’t be time for that.” He hangs up.
Furious, Le Carré gets up. He paces up and down in his office. Is Ernest capable of something like that? He’s an odd fish, all right. But kill someone? He considers that the beatings, kidnappings, and murders he pays for belong to the rational sphere. They are financially justifiable. Very often their only purpose is to protect him from competition, to preserve an advantage, to maintain his profit margin; they are required by necessity, by circumstances – what Le Carré calls “fate”; they are the result of planning, of foresight. The principles underlying his crimes are identical with those observed by any business leader with minimal ambition. But what’s the sense of leaving this old guy mutilated on a street corner? It defies logic, and he hopes the guilty person will receive an exemplary sentence.
But what if the bastard really is his cousin? Hasn’t Caron always been odd? Didn’t he have to intervene personally a few years ago with the school where he taught after the parents of a female student discovered a worrisome correspondence between their daughter and her physics teacher? (Caron had written “I’d like to slip my tongue into your skull after I’ve boiled it” to the teenager.)
But that’s just stuff you write, thinks Le Carré; it doesn’t mean anything. My cousin’s no lunatic.
23
“For the individual lacking in high resolve and unable to react against the tide of the times, the general decay of ideas and concepts leads to a formidable phenomenon of enticement.” Reclining on Ernest Caron’s sofa, Franck is reading aloud from The Supreme Vice. Three cigarettes have been enough to give the professor’s tiny living room the appearance of an aquarium. “The sapping of willpower that is accepted, the pairings that debase the scholar ruled by his cook, the poet by his daughter, the husband by the wife; all this pusillanimity has an aim, namely the huge relief of abdicating all agency, the nirvana of passivism, total indifference to the dignity of life, the definitive collapse of human respect: in a word, a hypocritical pretext desired by the cowardly to allow them to declare that they bear no responsibility.”
The detective interrupts his reading, lays his book on the coffee table, and on it cuts two lines of coke that he snorts slowly, then throws his head back and closes his eyes.
No. 77 Francis Street is at the extreme edge of Watertown, a stone’s throw from Mount Auburn Cemetery, in one of those dead-end neighborhoods of which there are thousands throughout the country. The roadway is potholed and the houses are poorly maintained, with weeds growing up to the windows. It’s not that the
people living there are poor; they just don’t care. Ernest Caron doesn’t care either. His Mercury, parked in front of the house, is rust-eaten and the hubcaps are missing; the windshield is cracked, while through it can be seen an accumulation of fast-food wrappers, old newspapers, and parking tickets. The path to the door is overgrown; the massive, robust front door has been tagged by neighborhood pranksters; the entrance hall is narrow and dark, lit only by an ancient light fixture surmounted by a flower-patterned shade that casts just a feeble glow; there is a lingering odor of incense, mothballs, and stale meat; the kitchen is cluttered with the normal bachelor’s mess; the tiny sitting room where Franck is sitting is encumbered with aged furniture, the wallpaper is yellowing, and the bookshelves hold a jumble of scientific books, periodicals, the MIT monthly newsletter, and a modest collection of jazz CDs. Franck has laid his machine pistol on the low wooden coffee table.
“Frailty of the will is of all ages. The decadent, a broken marionette with strings hanging loose, lacks even the resources needed to relocate his vice and move to a different midden; he rots where he is, content with this irritant which, in exchange for the few rights it takes away, also removes all duties. Contemptuous of his liberty, which is a burden to him, he longs for the tyranny of a vice. In the age of chivalry one held one’s own life cheap; in ages of dandyism one holds one’s own freedom cheap.”
Franck sits up, folds over a corner of the page, and lays his book on the table beside the Steyr TMP. Then he looks Professor Caron straight in the eye. “Have you calmed down?”
The carrot-top, gagged and handcuffed to his chair, answers with a nod.
“I’m delighted.”
Franck goes across and unties the gag.
In the sheriff’s office, Laura Henderson is sitting across from Gomez and McCarthy.
“Thank you for coming, Ms. Henderson,” the sheriff begins.
She nods, looking pale.
“You are here as a witness, of your own free will.”
She nods again.
“Do you still maintain that Alexander Marshall killed your father?”
She shrugs. “Who else could it be?”
Gomez leans forward. “Why not some drug trafficker your father was working for? Maybe he met someone at your place. Bill Hiscock, for example?”
Laura shakes her head. “It was Alexander, I tell you. Hiscock had nothing to do with it.”
Professor Caron stares at a point on the yellow wallpaper in his sitting room.
“Have you swallowed your tongue?” asks the detective.
Caron doesn’t answer.
Franck takes a pull on his cigarette. He spews out the smoke, and after a moment’s pause asks, “And old Henderson’s tongue, what did you do with that?”
The professor’s eyes widen. He shivers.
“You’re afraid to look at me?”
No answer.
“You’re afraid to look men in the eye, isn’t that it, Professor? You’ve been made fun of, despised, endlessly pushed aside, you’ve never been granted a glance of desire. Isn’t that so? The eye, which they say is ‘the window of the soul,’ has never been anything for you but a tepid orifice through which all kinds of filth is dumped on you. So, old Jimmy Henderson—”
“Be quiet!”
“Come on! I know very well you didn’t kill him.”
Caron nods, as if this was obvious. “I was following you…” he finally gets out.
“But I shook you off.”
“Yes… But then I saw you in the distance, as you were turning onto Parker Street, where—”
“Where you stumbled upon a corpse. And you indulged in your bit of meddling. Did your bit of surgery: the tongue. Added your personal touch!”
“Stop! You don’t understand at all!”
“Understand why you slashed a dead man’s eyes and then stole his tongue? Of course I understand. You prefer the company of the dead to that of the living. I haven’t come here to blame you!”
“I know why you’re here,” declares the redhead in a somber voice.
Franck shrugs. “Go on.”
Caron hangs his head, resigned. “You’re here to get rid of the only witness to your… Well, you… You’re here to kill me.”
Gomez and McCarthy are puzzled. “How can you be so sure?”
“I know him.” That is enough for her. She knows his past, she has seen him at work, waiting for her daughter to step out of the shower, beating up kids suffering from withdrawal. His need to dominate, the beatings she got, and even his way of knuckling under to Hiscock and thugs stronger than himself. It all adds up to a killer’s profile. The sketch may not be precise, but it’s clear enough. “That guy killed my father.” For Laura there’s no room for doubt.
Gomez speaks more softly. “Did he say anything to you?”
“He told me to keep my mouth shut.”
“About what?”
She shrugs. “He was always telling me to keep my mouth shut.”
The sheriff takes over. “Have you any concrete reasons for thinking he’s the killer?”
Laura smiles. “You want to see my bruises, Sheriff?”
He sighs. “No, it’s your father’s wounds that interest me—”
Gomez intervenes. “Was there any blood on your partner’s clothes?”
She thinks for a few moments. “No,” she finally says. “I didn’t notice anything.”
Franck lights another cigarette. “Do you smoke?” he asks Caron, holding out his packet of Davidoffs.
The other man swallows with difficulty. “No.”
“You should. It’s relaxing.” Then he flings himself backward on the sofa. It’s really depressing in this place, he thinks. And he feels a certain sympathy for Professor Caron rising up within him. Can anyone live like this? Here? With this furniture, my God! This wallpaper! The smell… This conventional collection of CDs… The daily humiliation of never meaning anything to anyone. Nothing, ever. Caron could die and lie here rotting for a year before his mobster cousin would – maybe – send someone to check on him. It all began when he was a teenager. It always starts in adolescence. Until then, on the whole, you look no different than the other kids, and there’s always a doting grandmother to show you affection. But then you grow older, get acne, become ugly – and you simply cut yourself off. You used to be a “strange kid,” now you’re a “solitary young man,” “a bit mental.” That’s okay for some… They accept the role naturally. But others cast blame, they resist. They approach the herd, awkwardly. They stammer, they blush, they drip sweat. They have imploring eyes. They’re crazy for acceptance. But the herd doesn’t want any part of them: it bleats, it pushes them away; they have to retreat to the barbed-wire fence in the farthest corner of the pen. It goes on like that for several years. Then a few swallow their humiliation and manage to join the herd. They drop out of school. Find a job. Have more or less normal relations with their coworkers. Unless of course they go to university and manage to shine in some student society. Sometimes they find themselves a wife and have kids. They “found a family,” as they say. But then there are the others. They never manage to escape from their exile, or adapt to it; they’re crazy for human contact, for women, for everything they’ve never had. That’s Caron. Franck feels tears welling up in his eyes.
Suddenly he sits up and stubs out his cigarette on the table. Then he gets to his feet and throws himself on the physics professor, pulls him to him, envelops him completely in his arms. “Poor man,” he murmurs in his ear. “Poor, dear man.” Weeping, he kneels in front of him. He takes his hand and kisses it. He recognizes all the distance that separates Caron from someone like Lyllian, or other artists he has met. They aren’t outsiders; they’re outstanding. The public, while sometimes perplexed by them, embraces them. They’re free to keep their distance from it, to reject it, despise it. They always find it ready to welcome them back. But people like Caron lack that security. Theirs isn’t an “alternative lifestyle.” For them, there’s no alternative
.
Regaining his composure, he backs away as rapidly as he had approached, and returns to his place on the sofa. He lights another cigarette.
“Your impressions will be taken into account, Ms. Henderson. But we didn’t bring you here to talk about Alexander Marshall.” After a pause, Gomez goes on. “You’re here because you agreed to collaborate with us.”
She sighs, and then says resignedly, “Go on.”
“What can you tell us about the… unsavory relations of your father with drug traffickers?”
Laura starts. “Not again! You’re going in circles, Sheriff! I told you they had nothing to do with it. You’re obsessed by—”
“And you,” interrupts the sheriff, “who are you obsessed by? Who are you protecting?”
“I don’t understand—”
“Hiscock was your lover?”
Laura pulls herself up. “What gave you that idea? You’re crazy!”
Franck looks the carrot-top up and down. There is a glint of amusement in his eyes.
“So apparently you think I’ve come to kill you?”
Terrorized, the professor nods.
“Because you’re… a witness?” adds Franck.
“Yes.”
“And what did you witness, pray tell?”
“Henderson’s murder, of course!”
“What?!” exclaims Franck. “You think I killed the old guy?” He roars with laughter.
Caron is dumbfounded. “But… I was following you… It’s true… I lost you, but then—”
“There! You lost me! You’ve said so yourself. And when I left Henderson after greeting him, he was very much alive.”
“Then why are you here?” asks Caron.
Franck clears his throat. “I’m just playing a game, my friend. It’s just a little diversion for me. I’m so bored in New York, in Boston, everywhere… So, when I saw you the other day, sunk down in your chair, crushed by your family, dragging your history, your sackful of saucepans, your personal cannonball! Crushed! I said to myself, ‘Now there’s a strange guy.’ But most of all it was your eyes. When we talked about the old guy’s murder you trembled, and there was a gleam in your eyes. Do you know what that look expressed? A secret. Yes, a little secret that has kept me entertained for more than a whole day. I came here to confirm my intuition.”
Three Drops of Blood and a Cloud of Cocaine Page 13