The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  Letreau noticed that Pelleter’s manner changed. The inspector’s movements, already slow, grew slower, and his eyelids dropped halfway. “How about your name? Will you say that?”

  The guard sucked in his lower lip, and resettled his bulk on his chair. “Passemier.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Thirty-two years.”

  Pelleter raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Impressive.”

  “I’ve been here longer than most.”

  “But not the warden,” Pelleter said. “He got his start here as well.”

  “We started together. We’ve been here the same amount of time.”

  “How come you’re not warden?”

  Passemier shifted, pressing his lips together. He paused before answering, weighing what he had already said versus what he was going to say. “We can’t all be the warden. The warden’s a good man. A great friend.”

  Pelleter turned the notebook towards himself. There was apparently something very interesting there all of a sudden that was more pressing than the interview.

  Passemier waited him out, not saying anything.

  “So you don’t know anything about any of this?” Pelleter said, still looking at the notebook, although he wasn’t reading a single line there. All of his energy was focused on the guard.

  “Any of what?”

  “Any of this?” Pelleter pushed back the notebook, and looked at the old guard.

  “Meranger?” the man said, squinting. He brought a hand to his chin.

  Pelleter made a gesture with his hand, but it was impossible to tell what it meant.

  Passemier resumed his self-assured military pose. “Nothing.”

  “Okay,” Pelleter said. He picked up the notebook and turned to a fresh page. “If you could just write your name here...”

  “Okay?” The guard looked surprised. He had been prepared to get grilled. He glanced at Letreau and then back at Pelleter. “That’s it?”

  “You have nothing to say. You don’t know anything about this. You’re a long-standing guard here. What more can I ask?”

  The guard shrugged, and his whole figure loosened up, the weight of his stomach pulling his shoulders forward. He reached for the outstretched notebook and pencil, and held the notebook in hand while he wrote instead of setting it down on the table. When he finished he set it down, sighed, looked at both men again, and then stood by pushing his hands against his thighs.

  When he was at the door, Pelleter said, “One last thing... How many stabbings would you say there have been in the prison this month.”

  “Seven,” Passemier said, his hand on the doorknob.

  “Is that a lot?”

  Passemier shrugged. “It’s happened before. But it’s not usual.”

  “Thank you. No one else was sure.”

  Passemier nodded, and stepped out into the hall.

  “You think he knows something,” Letreau said as soon as they were alone.

  “I know he knows something,” Pelleter said, smoking again. “He knows that there were seven stabbings. No one else guessed more than four.”

  “So what now?”

  “We continue.”

  But as the remainder of the employees filtered in one by one, Pelleter seemed disinterested, eager to get through them so that he could move on. He allowed Letreau to question some of them. Letreau followed the same method that he had seen Pelleter use all morning, and Pelleter would step in if he thought that something was missing. But no one else excited the same interest.

  In the administrative office, Pelleter went directly to Martin, who had indeed been given the desk in the corner that Pelleter had spotted the day before. He had stacks of files spread out before him.

  “So?” Pelleter said.

  Martin handed him a small stack of six folders without saying anything. The top one was Meranger. At the end of the file it said that Meranger had been transferred to the National Prison at Segré.

  He went through the other five folders. They were the men who had been found in the field. They too had each been transferred to the National Prison at Segré.

  “Good,” Pelleter said, and handed the files to Letreau, so he could see.

  “There is no national prison at Segré,” Martin said, still seated and looking up at the inspector.

  “I know.”

  “My god,” Letreau said.

  Pelleter stepped over to one of the nearest desks and picked up the telephone. He waited while he was connected.

  Fournier arrived then. “Are you satisfied, now that you’ve terrorized my staff?”

  Pelleter turned his back on the assistant warden, and spoke into the phone.

  “Who is he calling?” Fournier said to Letreau, annoyed that the inspector was ignoring him.

  “I don’t know,” Letreau said.

  Pelleter hung up then. “Good. How’s our stabbing victim from yesterday?”

  Fournier seemed put off by this question. He had been expecting something else. “He’s fine.”

  “Good. We’ll see you later, I hope.”

  “Wait one second. What’s going on?”

  Pelleter turned to Martin. He showed him his notebook. “Pull these two files. Then go through all of the employee records. I want to know anyone else who started at the same time and is still on staff.” Pelleter paused for a moment. Then he added, “Or was on staff until recently.”

  Martin stepped off.

  Fournier sputtered. “I demand that you tell me what is going on.”

  Pelleter smiled, and it seemed to only make Fournier angrier. “Soon,” Pelleter said. “When the first train arrives in the morning. We’re almost done now.”

  Pelleter turned to Letreau, and then headed for the front door. Letreau fell in behind him.

  Fournier called behind him, “Wait!”

  Pelleter said, “We’ll let you know.”

  Then he and Letreau went out to the car, which was just then in a bright ray of sunshine.

  12.

  Madame Rosenkrantz is Found

  It was dusk when they reached the police station in Verargent. As always, the town in evening was a shadow of its daytime self. The square was deserted. The lights in the café, the hotel, and a few other buildings were the only indication that the town was more than a stage set.

  “You must join us for dinner tonight,” Letreau said, slamming the police car’s door. “My wife’s appalled that I’ve let you take dinner by yourself through all this.”

  Pelleter met Letreau at the front of the car. “I haven’t eaten alone yet. If people know where I am, they can reach me.”

  Letreau shook his head. He looked worn out, the lines in his forehead deeper than usual, his cheeks lax, pulling his eyes down. “Do you really have this thing nearly wrapped up? Because I don’t see it.”

  “Some of it. We’ll see what I actually know in the morning.”

  Letreau studied the inspector’s face to see if he could read the solution there. He sighed, and dropped his hand on Pelleter’s shoulder. “You’re sure about dinner?”

  “I want to go for a little walk now,” Pelleter said. “But thank your wife.”

  Letreau shook his head. “You’re not making things easy for me.” He laughed, but it was strained, his face muscles tight. He dropped his hand, nodded, seemed as though he was going to say something else, nodded again, and then went up the station steps. At the top of the steps, he turned, hand on the door, and called, “First thing in the morning.” Then he disappeared into the station.

  Pelleter wanted to check on something before he returned to his hotel. He walked away from the square.

  The streetlamps had been lit, and the light from the houses cast a pale glow into the night. The evening had a safe coziness to it proper to the town, and it was hard to imagine that Verargent could ever feel unsafe. When he came to the hospital, the extra light from the building seemed harsh and unnecessary.

  The hospital was a single-story structure th
at had been built at what was once the outskirts of town, but was now embedded in the town proper. The building was simple and functional, which made it appear institutional even from the outside.

  Pelleter went inside. A nurse sat at a desk just inside the door, reading the new special edition of the Verargent Vérité. Its headline simply read, “Murder!”, which meant that Rosenkrantz had been very convincing when he spoke to Servières about not mentioning his wife in the paper.

  “May I help you?” the nurse said, looking up.

  “I’m Inspector Pelleter. I’ve come to look in the morgue.”

  “We don’t have a morgue. More of an all-purpose storage room in the back. But they’ve sure filled it up with bodies this week...Take that door there. That’s the men’s ward...There are double doors straight back, which lead into a hall...The first door in front of you will be the storage room.”

  The ward had twelve beds along each of the longer walls. There were windows lining the outer wall, but the inner wall was a solid partition separating the men’s ward from the women’s. It didn’t extend to the ceiling.

  Only eight of the beds were occupied, two of them by children, both asleep. Pelleter stopped and looked at the boys. They must have been the Perreaux brothers. It was amazing that such little forms could stir up so much trouble. The chief inspector’s mind turned involuntarily to the fate he had imagined for these two boys when it seemed as though Mahossier could have them. He looked away. A nurse was distributing dinners from a cart in the center aisle. Pelleter went on.

  No one paid attention to the chief inspector as he went through to the doors at the back of the room. The hallway there lined the rear of the building with evenly spaced doors down the length of the hall. One door was open at the center of the hall, and a radio could be heard playing a slow jazz song.

  Pelleter opened the door to the makeshift morgue and was met with a hurried, fearful face that stared out over the draped form of a body on a gurney.

  “I hope you’ve had something to eat since I saw you last,” Pelleter said to Madame Rosenkrantz.

  She hung her head, resuming the position she no doubt had held for the last three days, her knees together, her shoulders hunched forward, her hands held in her lap, the pose of a praying supplicant. In other words, a daughter in mourning.

  “Yes. The nurses feed me.”

  Pelleter found another chair and turned it around just inside the door. He straddled it, resting his elbows on its back. The five coffins had been piled in two stacks to the side, and there was a sour smell of decay in the enclosed room.

  “Your husband has been quite distraught over your absence.”

  “But you knew where I was.” She spoke to her hands.

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t tell him.”

  Pelleter remained silent.

  “When I was a girl, I would tell people that both my parents were dead...It was easier than admitting that my father was in prison...I never saw him and I had nothing to do with him, so it was almost like he was dead, and I would forget that it wasn’t true. Every now and then the thought would startle me that my father was still alive. I’d stop whatever I was doing, and think, my father is alive, but it wasn’t real. In truth, I believed my own lie.”

  She spoke mechanically. There was none of the self-assurance, or meekness, or emotion, or any of the conflicting tempers she had shown at dinner three nights before. Her face was white, and her tone was flat.

  “I didn’t even tell my husband the truth until after we had moved to Verargent, and at that point I had known him for over a year. Verargent was his idea. It was small, quiet, had the train but nothing else to attract people, and so he thought it would be the ideal place to live so that he could write undisturbed. I went along with it, only half-realizing the proximity to my father. It seemed to me, what difference could it make if I was twenty miles or one hundred from him, so I didn’t say anything until after we had bought our house. Even then I only explained that my father was in prison, not that he was in Malniveau.”

  She spoke as though the body before her wasn’t the man she was speaking of.

  “I told you that I believed my father had murdered my mother, and that’s true, and I told you that I didn’t hate him, and that’s true too...

  “When I was little, he taught me how to take apart his watch and put it back together. My mother told him that was for little boys, but he said he didn’t care. His daughter could do anything. He set the watch on the table, and took out his tools, and he showed me piece by piece, pulling each little gear and spring out of the bronze case and spreading them out on a cloth. There were all these pieces of metal, and I couldn’t understand how they could keep track of all of the seconds in the day. I thought that somehow the time must be contained in them, but when they were apart, everything went on, and when they were together, it wasn’t really different. Except, I remember when the last pieces went into the watch, and he would wind it, and the second hand would start turning, it felt as though we had started the world again.

  “He was so patient with me those times. And he was not always a patient man. My mother got plenty of smacks and beatings when he felt things weren’t being done right...”

  Pelleter reached into his inside pocket for a cigar, but he found that there were none there. He had smoked them all during the day.

  “Other than that, I don’t have any good memories of my father. He wasn’t around a lot, and when he was, he frightened me. He could be laughing and he’d have my mother laughing, and then he’d suddenly start hitting her, or he’d storm out. I tried to stay out of his way.

  “Do other people feel as though they are a part of their parents? Do they feel that the pieces of each of these grown strangers are really the parts that make them up? Can they say, this part is my mother and this part is my father? And if so, does it matter if their mother or father is still alive? If your parents die, are you the only part still living, or has a part of you died as well?”

  She looked up as though she expected Pelleter to answer, and he could see just how young she was.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She looked at the shrouded form on the table in front of her. “I don’t know either. But I don’t want to be what’s left of my father. He was a bad man. I know that, even if I don’t feel it.

  “When my mother was killed, they took me away to live with my aunt and cousins. My father was missing at that point... They found him later and then he went to prison, but I had already started telling people that both of my parents were dead...For me it was as though I was an accident created out of nothing. Maybe I was a bad person, and that was why I was all alone.”

  “I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Pelleter said. “What your parents do is not your fault.”

  “Then why did I lie all those years?”

  “That doesn’t make you a bad person. And in a way, it was true.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. She reached out as though she were going to touch the sheet, and then drew back, gripping the hand that she had extended in her other hand. “It wasn’t true. I can tell you that now. There’s absent, and there’s dead, and there’s a difference. Because when he was just absent, then he was still out there in the world, affecting people, causing things, even if it was only to cause the prison cook to cook one extra meal and for a guard to check his name on a piece of paper. And even if I couldn’t imagine his life, and I didn’t know who he was really, my idea of him seemed as though it were outside of me.

  “But now that he’s dead, he’s nowhere but in my head. What was he to the people in the prison? Nothing. One more prisoner. He’s just gone. But here...” She paused, and her eyes narrowed, the great strain of her thoughts and emotions somehow making her more precious, more delicate. She shook her head. “Now it’s only building that watch, and...” She shook her head again as though shaking the thoughts away.

  Pelleter could see how hurt she was, and he wanted to
step around the gurney and to put a fatherly arm around her, to reassure her. But he knew it wasn’t his place. He stayed seated in his chair.

  “I haven’t pulled back the sheet,” she said. “I haven’t looked at him directly...But I don’t need to.”

  “Why don’t you go home? Your husband’s worried about you.”

  She nodded her head, but without taking her eyes off of her father’s corpse. She had not cried once during her whole confession, but she looked wan and emptied.

  “He loves you. He thinks you are not just a good person, but the best person. He’d do anything for you.”

  “I know,” she said, almost a whisper.

  “I’m just about finished with the case.”

  She looked at him then, but it didn’t look as though she saw him. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It might not. But for the living, it’s all we can ever do.”

  “It’s still nothing. I am nineteen years old and I am finally an orphan for real. Knowing that it’s going to happen, and having it happen...Not the same.”

  Pelleter stood at that. The smell of the dead was going to his head. He felt as though it was surrounding them, and pulling them away from the world outside. He went to her then, and helped her to her feet with a firm hand on her elbow.

  As he did, there was the squeak of a rubber soled shoe on the floor in the hallway. Pelleter listened without showing that he was listening, not wanting to alarm Madame Rosenkrantz. Had he been followed again? There was no other sound and he began to guide her towards the door.

  Madame Rosenkrantz didn’t resist his guidance, and he led her out into the hall, where the door to the men’s ward was still easing shut on its hinges, no doubt the footsteps from a moment before. But when they went into the ward, there was no one there other than the same nurse who was now removing the dinner trays from each of the patients’ tables.

  The nurse looked up at them with a matronly frown.

  Pelleter stopped. “Did someone just come through here?”

  “All you folks running through, and it’s not even visiting hours. I’m going to give that girl at the front desk a talking to.”