Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  “When did you first hear about the New Order of the Black Sun?” Julian asked.

  Marcus got it, then. “Gabrielle Brand told me,” he said easily. “She’s one of my best contacts for the neo-Nazi world. Having had some experience of the former one, don’t you know.”

  “But she didn’t,” I said. “Her father didn’t even know she existed.”

  “Beside the point,” Marcus replied. “Allow me to show you what I have.” He turned on the projector and an image came up on the wall, a large imposing building with water behind it. “This is Aleister Brand’s headquarters,” Marcus said. “In—”

  “—Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” Julian finished for him. “We’re heading out there ourselves.”

  “Are you? Good, then.” He touched the laptop and a new image appeared. “Photo taken last year, in Calgary, the center of Canada’s neo-Nazi movement. That’s not the term they use, by the way: they prefer to call themselves nationalists. Here’s Aleister Brand with Kyle McKee, Calgary’s leading nationalist. Look to be on friendly terms.”

  It was my first look at Gabrielle’s son, and the contrast between the two men was stark. While McKee looked the stereotypical skinhead—dressed in black, covered in tattoos, his head shaved—Aleister Brand was wearing a button-down shirt and khakis. Kyle McKee looked like he belonged in the streets; Aleister Brand looked like he belonged in the boardroom.

  Marcus had more images. A march in some large western city, could have been Calgary, could have been Edmonton, Aleister discreetly visible on the sidelines. A rally, with Aleister present but not on the podium: standing beside it. Then a photograph taken from behind, of an unidentifiable person wearing a cape. The stylized swastika of the Order of the Black Sun was front and center on the cape.

  “When did you find these?” asked Julian. He was frowning.

  “I collect them,” said Marcus, turning off the projector light and wheeling around to face us. “You forget my job. I keep an eye out on all the right-wing groups in Canada.”

  “The spider image,” I said helpfully.

  “Indeed.” Marcus’s gaze was benevolent. Nothing to see here, folks, move along. “You would be surprised at what tidbits come my way.”

  “And yet,” said Julian, “you didn’t mention any of it the last time we were here.”

  Marcus was unfazed. “I thought it better for you to speak to Gabrielle first,” he said blandly. “I wasn’t positive there was even a connection to your—case.” He made it sound questionable. “But I think that your researcher, Miss Mason, was onto Brand.”

  “Onto Brand in what way, exactly?” asked Julian.

  “Well, it stands to reason that there was some connection,” said Marcus. “He wanted the missing diamond; she had the missing diamond. The moment she had someone valuate it, people would start talking, he’d find out about it. Montréal’s a small town in a great many ways, and no doubt Aleister Brand has his own sources of information.”

  “His own spiderweb,” I suggested. Why was Marcus throwing Aleister at us? He couldn’t be any clearer about accusing him of murder.

  “As you say.” He smiled. “I must do my investigations online, alas, as I find my lack of mobility to be an obstacle in getting around to question suspects. You have no such limitations.” He beamed at us. “I wish you luck.”

  His door had no sooner closed behind us than I rounded on Julian. “And what was that about?”

  He was jiggling keys and change in his pants pocket. “Not exactly subtle, was he?”

  “He might have been clearer if he’d put watercress around the platter he’s serving Aleister up on, but only a little,” I said. “If he’s so desperate about it, why didn’t he tell us about Aleister before? Why wait?”

  “Something changed,” Julian said. It appeared to be his mantra. “Let’s find out what.”

  * * *

  I told Julian about Ivan and Margery and Claudia and Lukas on our way down to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. “I feel like if I say yes, then a huge chunk of my life is going to get subsumed, and I don’t know if I have the energy,” I said, closing my eyes briefly as we passed a slower-moving car with inches to spare. “On the other hand, if I say no, then that pretty much makes me the Wicked Witch of the West. And I lose my marriage.”

  “Why?” He looked startled. “Ivan would leave you?”

  We were advancing quite quickly on a stationary car and my right foot automatically sought the brake. Hard. Deep breath. “Yeah, he has to say yes. They’re his kids. He loves them. The worst part of the divorce, for him, was losing the kids. Of course he wants them to live with him. And if I don’t…” I let my voice trail off.

  “I see,” said Julian.

  I glanced across at him, suddenly curious. He was probably about eight years younger than me, handsome in a way that comes from generations of good breeding and a whole lot of money. And he was, after all, one of the Westmount Fletchers. “Why aren’t you married, Julian? Seems to me you’d be quite a catch.”

  He surprised me. “I was, once.”

  “Really? What happened?” I prepared myself for a tale of dramatic woe and expensive alimony.

  “She died,” he said shortly.

  There was nothing constructive to say to that. “I’m so sorry, Julian,” I said, inadequately, and he didn’t answer. We crossed the Jacques-Cartier Bridge in silence. After a moment, Julian said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be so abrupt.”

  “That’s all right. It was my fault. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “You had a right,” he said, and I could feel his shrug next to me. “So here it is. Her name was Elizabeth. She wanted to go to law school, but she wanted a baby first. Her mother was forty-two when Liz was born, and she always said she didn’t want to be an old mother, too. So she got pregnant almost as soon as we were married.”

  “How old were you?”

  He frowned at the road. “Where’s— Oh, there’s the turnoff.” He negotiated the turn, managing to keep all four tires on the road. “I was twenty-one,” he said. “She was a year older, twenty-two. Anyway, long story short, things went wrong, she had to have a caesarian long before the baby was due, and she died.”

  She died. No intruders in that thought; I didn’t intrude. I let the silence go on for a few heartbeats before asking the question. “And your baby?”

  “He lived for ten days,” Julian said. “I spent all of them in the hospital with him. Ten days, ten nights.” A pause. “So tiny, so incredibly tiny. In an incubator, you know, but I could touch him, they let me touch him. I sang to him, sometimes, when we were alone, during the night. Beatles songs, mostly. I don’t know where those came from.”

  I shivered. I could see Julian, a younger version of Julian, wearing jeans and a cashmere pullover and perhaps awash in the realization that this was the first disaster his family’s money and influence couldn’t fix. Touching the tiny feet, the tiny hands. Singing in the night. “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.

  “No problem,” he said, his voice light. “I don’t talk about it much. And haven’t really seen the point, since then, of getting involved.”

  “Unless the woman’s already married,” I said.

  “Yeah, there’s that.”

  “Explains a lot.”

  Time to change the subject. We were driving along the Chambly Canal now, the water serene and unruffled. Trees here had burst into a brilliant symphony of color, reds and yellows and oranges, garish and gorgeous. “Is he dangerous, do you think?” I asked suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “Aleister.”

  “Dangerous in what way? Is he likely to whip out his grandfather’s Luger and shoot us? I think not. Is he involved with Patricia Mason’s murder? Quite possibly. Does he preside over satanic rituals? Who cares?”

  “I think we should care.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you think,” I said diffidently, “that there are things beyond simple policing which make a difference?”

 
He glanced at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I mean,” I said, trying to articulate something I was feeling intensely and didn’t know how to communicate, “I mean that evil is at the root of criminal activity anyway, isn’t it? So any time you have the opportunity to stop something evil…” I let my voice trail off.

  He seemed to think about it. “Okay. I don’t always even know the motives behind crimes, you know what I mean? Much less looking through those motives for something as abstract as evil.” He braked at a stop sign. “I really need to get myself a GPS device,” he said.

  “But evil—”

  He interrupted me. “I get what you’re saying. And, sure, we see a lot of what you’d call evil. But it’s not something you can define, or bottle, or do a blood test for. Lacking all that, I’m still after the motive, the opportunity, the weapon … you know, boring police business.”

  I felt like I was losing some sort of argument, and didn’t even understand what it was supposed to be. “But if you could stop something evil before it manifested, wouldn’t you want to do it? Before it became police business?”

  “Then it wouldn’t be police business.” He glanced at me, exasperated. “I know what you’re saying, Martine. But thinking something bad isn’t against the law. I wish crime didn’t exist, but at least once a crime has been committed, the right path is clear. You catch them, you take them to trial and, with a little luck, you punish them. For something they did, not something they thought.”

  “Magic rituals are more than a thought,” I said.

  “And they’re not against the law.” He scowled at the road. “That’s the canal.”

  “But there’s law, and then there’s morality,” I objected. “Would you kill Hitler if you could time travel and go back to his days in Vienna and shoot him before he ever got started? Of course you would.”

  “Moral dilemmas are, fortunately, out of my purview,” said Julian. “Do I wish I could have done that? Sure. I’d take him out without a second thought. Does that mean it’s legal? Not for one second.”

  I started to say something else, and he cut across my words. “Listen, Martine. We’re not dealing with Hitler here. We’re not dealing with hindsight here. We may just be looking at a bunch of socially inadequate people who get their identities through chanting and burning incense. Which isn’t all that far off from your religious tradition, if I recall rightly.”

  “Catholic monks and nuns,” I said tightly, “do not try to bring back the dead to wreak havoc on the world.”

  We rolled quietly up to the building we’d just seen at Marcus’s office. It was clearly meant to be a warehouse, sitting right on the canal, probably for ease in offloading onto barges some of the textiles for which the city had once been famous. There was some faded paint high up on the wall that looked like a company name, but I couldn’t make out the letters. No number on the side, of course. Doors closed, windows blank.

  That didn’t matter. As soon as I got out of the car it hit me: someone watching. I scanned the windows but couldn’t see anyone there. “Someone’s here,” I told Julian.

  He nodded, unconcerned. “That’s the hope, isn’t it?”

  The door was rusted in places but had once been a rather cheery orange. There was no bell, no nameplate, no mail slot. And there was something about the door, about the whole building in fact, that reminded me somehow of a creaking old sailing vessel—or a freighter: that was it. An abandoned freighter left to haunt the seas, its crew mysteriously disappeared, its appearance a harbinger of misfortune. A ghost ship.

  Well, we’d started with treasure ships. Perhaps we were coming full circle.

  Julian, plagued by no such fantasies, pounded on the door and immediately pulled his hand away. “Fuck me!”

  “What is it?”

  “You try knocking. That thing is solid.”

  Before I could say anything, the door opened.

  I don’t know what I expected, really. Despite having seen him in casual khakis in the photos, the warehouse itself built up tension. Aleister Brand was anticlimactic in almost every way: he was about Julian’s height, clean shaven, with blue eyes (of course) and brown hair that had just started to recede. “Oui?”

  Julian said, in English, “Are you Aleister Brand?”

  “Who is inquiring?” His voice was lightly accented but not, I thought, from French.

  Julian pulled out his identification. “Détective-lieutenant Fletcher,” he said.

  The man looked at the ID and lifted his eyes to Julian’s face, as though assuring himself that it was the same person. “From the Montréal police,” he said. “How interesting. Are you not away from your jurisdiction here?”

  “I am,” said Julian, unruffled. “But I’m only here for a conversation.” He paused. “For now.”

  “I see.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the doorjamb. “A conversation about what?”

  “Let’s start with you,” Julian suggested. “Are you Aleister Brand?”

  The light eyes rested on him, briefly, then moved back to me. “I am,” he agreed. “I have not yet met the young lady.”

  Odd way to refer to me, I thought. I was clearly older than Julian, probably close to Brand’s own age. “I’m Martine LeDuc,” I said, wondering why it felt as though I were handing him something precious, something significant, in giving him my name. “I work for the city, also.”

  “I see.” There was a hint of amusement in his voice now. “And what would you like to talk about?”

  “Can we come inside?” Julian asked.

  “I think not. It’s a lovely day, and there’s no reason for me to invite you in.”

  Julian started to say something, but I interrupted. “I met your mother,” I said, hoping to surprise him, catch him off guard.

  Nothing. If I was rattling him at all, he hid it well. “Yes?” he said politely, as I’d paused.

  “She told me that she worries about you.”

  A lift of the eyebrows. “And?”

  “And I thought you might be concerned about her,” I said, floundering. He wasn’t giving me anything to work with here.

  Julian asked, “Where were you last Thursday afternoon between two and six?”

  Aleister transferred his gaze, lazily, to Julian. “My,” he said. “That sounds like you’re asking me for an alibi, detective.”

  “Something like that,” Julian agreed.

  “You know that I don’t have to give you anything of the sort,” he said pleasantly. “But because you have come all this way, I will. On Thursday I spent the afternoon and evening here at my home.”

  “And a cozy one,” Julian commented, looking at the forbidding windows.

  “Thank you.”

  Julian’s eyes came back to Aleister. “Anyone confirm that?” he asked, almost conversationally.

  “Any number of my friends,” he said. “We were having a little—get-together, I think you’d call it.”

  “What would you call it?” I asked.

  That limpid blue gaze again. “An evening with friends,” he said.

  “And you wouldn’t mind supplying their names?” Julian had taken out his notebook. I could feel his discomfort. He wanted to be in the place, looking around. He wanted to find something he could sink his teeth into. Drugs lying out in the open. A stolen diamond in the center of a circle. A law being broken. Anything. I wanted to tell him to stop visualizing: if I could pick up on his thoughts, then what did he expect from Aleister Brand, celebrated mind reader?

  “I would be very happy to supply you with my friends’ names once I am legally compelled to do so,” Aleister answered. “Otherwise, I think we shall respect their privacy. I don’t believe that I have broken any laws, Detective.” A flash of a glance my way, amusement. “Accuse me of something if you’d like, or let me get back to my work.”

  “And what work would that be?”

  “I am a journalist, Detective. As I’m sure my mother tol
d Mrs. LeDuc.” He stepped back into the shadows and began to close the door.

  “We’ll be back,” Julian said, clearly running out of things to say.

  “I shall look forward to it.” The door was partway closed. “Oh, and Martine?”

  A sharp thrill of cold running down my spine at the casual use of my name. “What?”

  “You can say yes to the children.” And then it shut for good.

  I turned to Julian, fear coursing through my body like adrenaline. “Did you hear that?”

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.” He was already halfway to the TT.

  “Julian, did you hear that?”

  For someone who didn’t believe in magic, he was moving very quickly. Already in the car. Already starting the engine. “Come on, Martine.”

  I slipped in beside him, my heart pounding. “He knows about Lukas and Claudia. How does he know about Lukas and Claudia? Are they in danger? Oh, my God, Julian. What have I done?”

  “Nothing.” We nosed our way out of the driveway. “You haven’t done anything, Martine.” He sounded irritable. “His mother may have called him, and he looked you up. Maybe he keeps files on people anyway. And he’s obviously good at reading people; he saw your tells. That’s all. There’s no magic there.”

  I’m not married to a casino director for nothing. “I don’t have tells,” I said. I was lying to myself, of course. Everybody has tells.

  “Everybody has tells,” Julian said, unaware of echoing my thought. “Don’t let him get under your skin, is all I’m saying.”

  I looked at him. “Seems like he got under yours.”

  He did look shaken, and I wasn’t sure that I understood why. What else had he expected? For Aleister Brand to say, yes, you’re right, I shot her? “Let’s get something to eat,” I said impulsively. It had been three hours since Chez Cora, so chances were good that Julian would have his appetite back, and I needed to sit somewhere where I didn’t feel my life was in danger. Julian’s TT—with Julian driving—didn’t qualify.