The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  In the lobby of the hotel, Pelleter asked the girl at the desk to ring up headquarters for him. The missing children had distracted him. He should have gotten in touch with Lambert before this. Hopefully the lost time would not prove too costly.

  The girl left for a moment and when she returned she said the call would be put through directly.

  He asked for a newspaper and told her that he was ready to take his dinner.

  She pulled a fresh copy of the Vérité from under the counter, and then came around and disappeared into the dining room.

  Pelleter didn’t watch her go. His eyes were fixed on the headline:

  FOUND!

  Of course Servières could not leave it as a simple story. He placed emphasis on the fact that the boys had been found by two civilians, not gendarmes, and he cast aspersions on the effectiveness of Chief Letreau and the local police department given the recent rash of crime. Yes, he was making his bid for a larger market. Stirring up trouble was a good way to do it.

  Pelleter flipped through the rest of the two-sheet paper and stopped at the article on the Meranger murders. As of right now, the Vérité was not committing to the idea that Meranger’s murder was connected to the five murdered prisoners from the field. They had been found in different places after all, and in different circumstances. The Vérité, however, was encouraged to find that visiting Chief Inspector Pelleter of the Central Bureau was very optimistic about the case, having uncovered a promising new lead that he would follow up immediately.

  There was no mention of Madame Rosenkrantz’s disappearance. Pelleter hoped that Monsieur Rosenkrantz would appreciate that he had done that much for him. He was pleased that Servières had gone along with his ploy. Now the inspector would have to think of something to back it up with in the morning.

  He turned to go into the dining room, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that there was a man sitting in an armchair in the corner, a second before the man said, “Chief Inspector.”

  The inspector turned fully then.

  The man sat with his right ankle on his left knee. The same newspaper was spread out in his lap. His suit, as always, was impeccable.

  “I think we need to have a talk,” Fournier said.

  9.

  The Assistant Warden

  Pelleter realized that Fournier must have been waiting for him since before he arrived, which meant that the assistant warden had been able to watch the inspector turn through the paper unobserved. Pelleter had done nothing inappropriate, but he was still rankled at being caught unawares. There was nothing to be done about it now.

  “Yes,” he said, and with a false bow, he invited Fournier into the dining room. “Let’s talk.”

  Fournier refolded the paper, taking care to pull at the end of each crease so that when he was finished the paper appeared brand new. He stood, left the paper on the seat, and led the way into the dining room.

  Once inside, Pelleter took his seat so that he faced the door, and spread his napkin in his lap as though he were simply sitting down to dinner. He looked uninterested, a man at the end of an exhausting workday, when in reality he was watching Fournier’s every movement.

  The assistant warden took the seat opposite, where Clotilde-ma-Fleur Rosenkrantz had sat two nights before. His face was set, as though he were determined to say what he had come to say without being waylaid.

  As he prepared himself, the girl from the counter approached behind him.

  Fournier began, “You can not come and go as you please at the prison. It’s unacceptable!”

  “Monsieur Inspector?”

  Fournier jumped, and turned in his seat to see the girl who was leaning in towards them with her hands clasped.

  “The phone...”

  “Ah, yes,” Pelleter said, bunching up his napkin. “You’ll excuse me, Monsieur Fournier, of course. It’ll only be a moment.” Pelleter stood, pushing back his seat, and extracting himself from the table. “And you should let the chef know that it will be two of us for dinner.”

  Fournier looked frightened by this sudden turn of events, looking at the girl and then Pelleter and then the girl again. “No, I’m not staying for dinner.”

  “Of course you are. You’ve had a very trying few days, after all. I won’t be a minute.”

  Fournier’s fear had converted to frustrated anger, but Pelleter passed out of the dining room, and went to the phone that had been left on the front desk for him.

  He picked up the receiver:

  “Lambert? It’s me...Yes, I need you to locate somebody for me...” He gave the name. “Check the hotels...He’s with his wife, so he shouldn’t be hiding too carefully...Call me when you’ve found him, either at the hotel or through Letreau. But don’t lose sight of him...Very good...Yes.”

  He hung up, and went back into the dining room.

  Fournier was sitting facing forward, his back to the door. He sat up straight, his shoulders squared. Pelleter spoke before Fournier could see him, but the assistant warden did not act startled. He’d regained his composure.

  “Sorry about that. The telephone must not be ignored. Never know when it’s going to be something important. Or when you’ll be able to get in touch with the other person again, the chances of you both being at the phone at the same time...” He resumed his seat, and replaced his napkin. He continued to ramble, setting a nonchalant, jovial tone, knowing that it would further anger Fournier and make the man more likely to make a mistake. “Perhaps it’s best to communicate through telegraph, but a telegraph can be too easy to ignore, so...here we are. You were saying?”

  Fournier pressed his lips together, and exhaled through his nose. In a tight voice, he said, “You can not come—”

  “Oh, yes, I can not come and go as I please at the prison. Well I had an escort, and I was told you were busy.”

  “That’s beside the point. The prison must remain secure, and to do that, certain rules must be followed.”

  “Ah, of course.” Pelleter said, remaining offhand. “Where were you today, by the way?”

  “The results of our search turned up many things that had to be dealt with even if it didn’t turn up the knife used to cut our prisoner. Running a prison is complicated enough without outside forces meddling. For instance, you can not have your man at the prison. That too is unacceptable.”

  “My man?”

  “Going through our files.”

  “Well, it’s not my man. It’s Letreau’s. You must take it up with him.”

  Fournier scoffed. “Letreau? The chief of police is adequate at his job, but this is a small town, and his job does not ask much of him. Everybody knows that you are running this investigation.”

  “But it was Letreau who sent the officer to Malniveau.”

  Fournier clenched his teeth. His eyes lit with anger. “I will not—”

  The proprietor appeared then with two steaming plates of ratatouille. “Ah, here you are, Chief Inspector, and Monsieur Fournier, what a pleasure to have you. You will love this, I am sure. Bon appetit! Bon appetit!”

  He set a plate down before each man, and clapped his hands together. There was a pause, and then he edged away from the table.

  Pelleter took up his silverware. “What’s the problem with my man?”

  “He’s distracting my staff, and interfering with my systems. I can’t have an outsider requesting to see every piece of paper we have produced in the last two months.”

  Good boy, Martin, Pelleter thought. He was the right choice for the job. He has shown more big-city pluck than any of the others. I have to be sure he gets back out there first thing in the morning.

  “I told you earlier, if you insist that we’re all in this together then you must trust that I will come forward with anything I find.”

  “Then can you tell me what you know of the five prisoners who were buried in a farm field ten miles from the prison?” Pelleter said. He took a bite of his meal after this quiet question, but his eyes didn’t leave Fournier’s face. />
  “What! I will not be mocked. Surely you’re not serious.”

  With the same calm, Pelleter said, “I am serious.” He reached into his pocket, took out his notebook and flipped it open to the page with the five prisoner numbers on it, and slid it across the table. “You haven’t heard about this yet?”

  Fournier glanced at the numbers without touching the notebook. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  Pelleter took another bite of his food, but still watched Fournier. The assistant warden’s anger had shifted away from Pelleter and broadened, as he looked off to the side, thinking. It seemed as though he were genuinely surprised at this discovery. He was isolated out at the prison. And it seemed he did not know everything that went on there either.

  The assistant warden turned back to the inspector. “When was this done? Perhaps this was from years ago...”

  What he meant was, before his time. “In the last few weeks.”

  Fournier looked to the side again. When he turned back to the inspector, his anger had dissipated, and he was now conspiratorial. “You must understand...the warden...” He paused, and Pelleter could see him struggle with his political self, trying to decide if it was yet time to speak out against his superior. “The warden started his career as a guard at Malniveau. He did his time, his years pacing those corridors, standing watch with a shotgun, sitting in a cold guard box alone for hours. He didn’t go to school. He’s never been out of Verargent for more than the occasional trip to the city or the seashore. For him, the prisoners are the enemy to be controlled, and that’s it.

  “And they are! I don’t disagree, but there’s more to that then violence and a show of force...I studied administration. I worked in the private sector for an importer, overseeing shipments, arranging transport. Everything had to be planned in advance, calculated on paper—the paperwork! And the reality of it all had to be addressed, of the people out there on the boats or on the docks, real people, you understand. Real people.

  “All of these things are the same in a prison. The prisoners are people. But they are also the things that must be transported, stored, maintained. That means paperwork. And diligence. And understanding.”

  He was really opening up now. Pelleter had fallen silent, not wishing to interfere with the assistant warden’s confession. And Fournier took that silence as a sympathetic invitation. They were both in law enforcement, after all. Pelleter understood.

  “The warden is all violence and might,” Fournier said. “He has no finesse.”

  “Are you saying the warden killed these men?” Pelleter said suddenly, leaning forward.

  Fournier looked confused. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “The warden? No, he’s not a murderer...”

  Pelleter sat back, and took another bite of his ratatouille. He was almost finished with it.

  “I’m simply saying the warden is incompetent. That you have no idea what work I have had to do to get things in order, and I have had to fight at every step. We need a form for this. We need a form for that. And the warden always resists. But then things slip between the cracks.” He raised his hand and let it fall on the table in frustration.

  Pelleter pushed back his dish. “Like people getting counted present, when they are missing.”

  “For example,” Fournier said, and sneered.

  Pelleter waited in silence to see if the assistant warden would say more.

  Fournier renewed his vigor. “You can not push me around. I’ve worked in the city, and I worked my way up at two other national prisons.” He stopped, sitting up in his seat. He had not touched the food in front of him. He felt empowered by recounting his story. “Call off your man.”

  Pelleter took a cigar from his pocket, and took the time to light it. He blew out the smoke, which hung over the table between them. Then, in a quiet, deliberate voice, he said, “How did Meranger get out of the prison?”

  Fournier, surprised by the question, exploded, “I don’t know! I’m doing everything—”

  “Not enough!” Pelleter barked, and the benevolent confessor was gone, as was the babbling fool from the beginning of the meal.

  Fournier for all of his bluster, blanched at Pelleter’s quiet indignation. “Are you accusing me of being involved?”

  “It had crossed my mind,” Pelleter said.

  Fournier looked down at his untouched meal, and then out through the thin curtain, and then into the empty dining room, unable to settle his gaze. At last, he looked back at Pelleter, and he was seething, his anger from earlier nothing compared to the white anger that was paralyzing his body. “How dare you,” he managed, choking on the words.

  Pelleter blew a plume of smoke, calm and dismissive.

  Fournier pushed back from the table, almost knocking over his chair, which was only saved from falling by the chair behind. He righted it, and then stormed across the room, and out the door. A moment later, a car could be heard as it started and screeched around the square, the man still controlled by his outrage.

  Pelleter sat, enjoying his cigar, the air above him filling with smoke. Verargent was quiet, a small town after dark.

  In his room with the lights off, Pelleter could not sleep, despite the physical activity of the afternoon and evening.

  Fournier had been genuinely surprised when Pelleter had told him of the five murdered prisoners found in the field. If Meranger constituted a sixth murder, and the man stabbed the day before was meant to be a seventh... Well, it stood to reason that somebody was committing the murders inside the prison. The real question was the one that Mahossier had put to Pelleter and Pelleter had put to Fournier and was now putting to himself over and over:

  How were the dead men removed from the prison without anybody knowing?

  Or the other way to ask that was, Who was removing the dead prisoners from the prison without anybody else knowing?

  Because Pelleter was certain that Meranger had been killed within the prison walls as well. And if Fournier truly knew nothing...

  He tried to remember everyone who he had seen in his three trips to the prison, but there were too many to recall, and he had not seen everybody. That was definitely the case: he had not seen everybody.

  His mind turned the facts round and round, and then at some point, as he asked himself again who had moved Meranger, he fell asleep.

  10.

  A Lineup

  Pelleter had not taken two steps out of the Hotel Verargent the next morning when he was accosted on the street.

  “Inspector Pelleter! Were you happy with my article? Another special edition, no less.”

  It was Philippe Servières.

  Pelleter turned towards the police station without even casting a glance towards the reporter. The town was busy with early morning activity. People who worked in the businesses in town hurried to their jobs, while housewives who liked to do their shopping early already carried parcels. Two senior citizens had taken up their place on the shaded side of the war monument.

  It all seemed quite normal. Pelleter had seen small towns like this in a panic once an article like Servières’ came out, but it had had no serious effect. Perhaps they viewed it as a prison problem, something outside of town.

  Servières hurried two steps to fall in beside Pelleter. “We’re doing another special today. This is big news. Do you want anything else to go into the paper? Do you think we can help flush out the murderer?”

  Pelleter walked with quick assurance, ignoring the reporter. He had awoken with an idea that he was eager to put into effect, something to support his claims in the paper, and it felt good to be on the move, acting instead of reacting.

  “I need to keep the story alive. I can’t keep the Rosenkrantz girl’s disappearance out of it forever. Inspector, a comment?”

  They were outside Town Hall now, a police car parked out front. Pelleter turned the corner towards the police station.

  “It seems to me,” Servières went on, “that the only reason Madame Rosenkrantz had to run off was be
cause she killed her father. And that your lack of interest in finding her is a gross failure.”

  Pelleter turned back then, already on the steps to the station so that he towered over Servières. Servières fell back, surprised and off-guard.

  “Is that what you’re going to say in the paper?” Pelleter said.

  Servières’ assurance had vanished. “Well, yes.”

  “You may want to think twice about that. Monsieur Rosenkrantz will be very unhappy.”

  “I don’t print things to make people happy. I print the news.”

  “But this is just your opinion,” Pelleter said, and turned away, going into the police station, and leaving Servières cowed on the steps.

  The station was in direct opposition to the sunny calm outside. Martin was back at the front desk. The woman with the yappy dog had returned, dog in hand, another poor driver accused of attempted canine slaughter, the yelling parties handled by two officers. Pelleter was surprised to see that Monsieur Rosenkrantz stood in front of one of the other desks, shouting over the noise at one of the officers who had assisted Pelleter with the coffins.

  When Rosenkrantz saw Pelleter, he walked over, leaving the officer who was taking his statement behind. “She still hasn’t turned up,” Rosenkrantz said.

  “Sir?” the officer said. “I’ll help you.”

  “You seem steadier on your feet this morning.”

  “I’m beside myself with panic.”

  “This officer will take your statement,” Pelleter said, inviting Rosenkrantz to turn back around.

  “These officers should have taken my statement days ago! She’s disappeared. She could be dead somewhere, but what are they doing? Looking after dogs and children! Someone killed her father, why not kill her too? Wipe out the whole family. This is what you should be working on.”