Not Exactly Allies
Page 35
CHAPTER 35 – STONEWALLED
Durand tried to kick some enthusiasm into the officials in charge of investigating young Hamid's murder. In return, he got warned off anything to do with Hamid's murder.
Very well. He would appear to back off. The officials would not have his footprints on their seats, for now. But whatever he could do invisibly, he would still do. He had promised the boy's little sister he would not give up. He had promised the family. He had promised Bertin. He had promised himself.
He had not promised God (promises to God were something a man should avoid except in the rarest of circumstances, such as when a man married), but he assumed God knew his heart and would appreciate it if he kept his promises to human beings.
Durand did not flinch from such quests for justice. It took nerve, but he had nerve. It often took time. God willing, he had decades yet. It took tenacity. Tenacity was his middle name, his colleagues liked to joke. Let them joke. He had a thick skin regarding such matters, especially when he knew that he was in the right.
But he also knew there were limits to what he could do.
There were reasons he couldn't devote himself fulltime to such matters, not least of which was that he still had a household of sick people. Durand felt it his fatherly duty to fill his ailing offspring with stories about fortitude and grace under pressure, and this of course took its share of time.
Bertin also needed counseling. Durand solemnly explained to the young man that his being upset over the armed robbery was almost certainly only because he was a team player who found himself without a team. Durand had checked, and really Bertin had handled the situation very well, everyone thought – not perfectly, of course, but Delachenal would go over it with him, when they had the time. Bertin's jaw had clinched at that point, and Durand had dropped the subject. Instead he tried to keep him updated, more or less, on some of the goings-on related to work. That he had no real updates to report galled him more than he liked to admit.
But what could he do, one man drawn in so many directions at once?
It galled him, being told to back off the Hamid murder investigation. Being told to back off skewed a man's sense of proportion. It magnified the forbidden things (not that a murder investigation needed magnification to be near the top of a man's list). Durand prided himself on having above all else a sense of proper proportion. Not, for instance, like Bertin's Aunt Eustacie. Durand and his wife said soothing things to Bertin about his aunt, and Perrine surprisingly seemed to find the woman amusing and companionable (in moderate doses, anyway), but the woman was driving Durand to distraction.