by John Farrow
Émile Cinq-Mars was not concerned that the man had separated him out from the crowd and had voiced an underlying suspicion. He could work with that.
“That sounds like a good plan,” he said. “I’m personally not interested in the farm, but I’ll tell you something, I might be interested in the barn. So whoever buys the land, keep that in mind. If you already have a barn that’s good enough for you, you might have a buyer for this other barn. It’s not big, but I could use a well-built barn that’s not too big. And if you rent out the house to somebody from the city, they probably won’t need the barn either. So keep that in mind.”
The slight bobbing of heads continued as Cinq-Mars was being received into their enclave. He was here on police business, they knew, but they had also found common ground to share with him, which made him, if not one of their own, then at least one with whom they could exchange a laugh, or a covert drink, or an understanding. That made the whole police business a less formidable barrier.
They were not heavy drinkers, but a flask was passed around and Cinq-Mars joined the others for a nip. A Canadian whisky, he judged, nothing to write home about, but acceptable. Considering the environment, better than expected. He had anticipated nothing more than cider or coffee-flavored mud.
He finally got down to brass tacks. “I was wondering about Adele and Morris Lumen. Obviously, we want justice. But the police have discovered that it’s very hard to locate any information on them. They seem to have come out of nowhere. Is that your impression?”
“They left everything to a hospital, you said?” one guy asked. He stuck Cinq-Mars as being a hale man, without a lazy bone in his body. He suspected that the man had endured some stresses over time, probably a few sad losses, although he could not readily define why he thought that way, just a look around and within the eyes. A hunch, maybe. His teeth were his oddest feature, notable for the width of the gaps between so many of them even though he was not missing any. “I mean, that makes a kind of sense in a way. We never saw no family. No kids. Or grandkids. No parties. Never nothing like that.”
“They stuck to themselves, but they were friendly, too,” another man recalled. “The wife never entered the contests for the fair, you know, for the pies and that, but she came out to see the ladies just the same, to find out how they did, that sort of thing. She cheered them on.”
“The woman in particular, she liked to laugh.”
“She did. She had a big belly laugh.”
“She had a big belly.”
“You could hear her laughing across a room.”
“Across town.”
“He was quiet though, the man. Morris, his name.”
“Like a mouse.”
“He never laughed much. Don’t get me wrong. He smiled. Sometimes he even had a big grin on him. Like he was laughing on the inside. But he never came right out with it. He just kind of looked away when other people—or his wife herself—were laughing away.”
Cinq-Mars had the impression that these men discussed these matters previously, probably soon after the couple were killed, so in a way they were running down their remarks as if following a familiar script. He interrupted their loop. “So, you never saw people with them, other than folks from around here?”
They had to puzzle through the question.
“I wouldn’t never say never,” Michel Chaloult submitted. “When they first got here, you know we were checking them out. I was checking them out.”
“Only natural,” the sage man concurred.
“What did you see?” Cinq-Mars asked.
“At first, some men came around regular. Three guys once. A couple of guys quite a few times. Don’t know who they were. Haven’t seen them since.”
“They weren’t movers? Or tradesmen, fixing the place up?”
“In suits?” Chaloult asked, and he was pleased to draw a few chuckles from his pals.
“Okay, they were in suits,” Cinq-Mars noted, and to make it official he wrote that down on his pad. Suits.
“They drove black cars. Not trucks or pickups. Newer cars. Fancy ones. The kind you don’t see plumbers or electricians driving to work.”
“Or movers,” another added, getting less of a laugh than Chaloult.
Black cars, Cinq-Mars wrote down. “Only men. No women. Do you ever meet these guys?” he asked.
“Once,” Michel Chaloult told him. “That’s the time I started talking to him about working his farm. The wife—mine, I mean—she baked them a pie, and a dinner, some kind of casserole. New neighbors, we don’t get those too often, so that’s what you do. You bring over a casserole and you say hello.”
“You were introduced to these other men?” Cinq-Mars asked, trying both to keep him on point and to moderate his own rising excitement.
“Don’t ask me their names. But yeah, we were introduced. Nobody said what they were there for and I didn’t ask. I’m polite that way. I just presumed they were friends. They smiled. They were friendly in a way, but they didn’t stick around.”
“French names? English?”
“English. But the Lumens were English.”
“Could you describe the men?”
He could, and Cinq-Mars wrote the descriptions down, but he might as well have been describing any men on earth who had short hair, in one instance, or were bald, in the other. The bald guy had biggish ears, as Chaloult had noticed their size at the time. Big lips, too. Cinq-Mars worried that, over time, the image in his head had become a caricature or even a full-blown cartoon. The second man, the one with short hair, sounded remarkably indistinguishable from the majority of forty-year-old Caucasians on earth, but he looked rugged, he had a good stout chest.
“Anything at all that was unique?” Cinq-Mars pressed him.
Chaloult thought about it some more, rubbing the right side of his jaw and drawing his hand down over his Adam’s apple. “One thing,” he considered, and Cinq-Mars grew hopeful again. “He hadn’t shaved in maybe a day.” The former policeman fell back into a mild despair. “Oh!” the farmer chimed. Cinq-Mars looked up again, not wanting to become overly expectant, but not being able to help himself either. The man was poking at the side of his face. “He had this like—” He didn’t know how to describe it or the word was eluding his lips.
Ever positive, Cinq-Mars asked, “Scar?”
“No.”
“Wine-stain?” He knew that he was being excessively optimistic.
“What’s that?” Chaloult asked.
“A kind of birthmark, purple. Never mind. What do you remember seeing?”
“I forgot the word for what you call it.”
“Pimple?” someone in the group suggested.
Chaloult got upset with him. “I wouldn’t tell him about a pimple a man had four years ago! What the hell good is that?”
“What the hell good is it saying he didn’t shave for a day?”
Thank you, Cinq-Mars thought.
“Oh shut up!”
“Describe it, Chaloult!”
The man didn’t want to do that. He knew the word and he wanted to bring it to the surface on his own. The other farmers seemed as frustrated with him as the investigator in the room. Cinq-Mars counseled, “Take your time.”
A man shot out, “Dimple!” and Chaloult just fumed.
“Relax,” quietly, Cinq-Mars encouraged him.
He was now squeezing his cheeks as if raising an idea flush to the surface.
Then he said, “I know what it was.”
Everyone waited.
“Rosacea.”
A few farmers were clueless.
“The curse of the Celts,” Cinq-Mars explained. “It’s called that sometimes. Red cheeks, as if the person has been drinking. But he hasn’t been, necessarily.”
“Splotchy skin, he had a case of it,” Chaloult recalled.
Of course, the man could’ve been drinking the night before or had his skin reddened by the sun or the wind, but Cinq-Mars faithfully wrote down rosacea on his pad. He asked for
the men’s relative sizes and received back what he had already suspected, that they were of average height and build, although one was big through the chest.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
He sat there listening to the others discuss whatever came to mind. An exercise in random association. The couple came from the Maritimes, they all heard that, but no one heard either of the Lumens say it, yet one man was certain that they came from New Brunswick and another said Nova Scotia, which prompted a third to say that he was pretty damn sure they arrived from Prince Edward Island. One farmer’s daughter who worked as a waitress reported that the couple tipped more generously than most people. That instigated a discussion on what constituted a fair tip and Cinq-Mars let it play out. The longer they talked the poorer their prospective tips became. He waited for the right moment before asking his next crucial question.
“They lived on a farm,” he mentioned. “But Monsieur Chaloult, you did the work. Do you think they knew anything about farming? Or were they city folk who wanted to live in the countryside for a change?”
Michel Chaloult surprised him, and perhaps surprised them all, for the others seemed unaware that he held to this opinion. “They were farmers,” he declared emphatically. “Morris Lumen knew crops. Morris knew corn, for sure. I’d say that Morris knew as much if not more about farming than I do. For some reason I don’t understand, he decided not to do it anymore. Why does any man quit farming?”
Everyone proffered an answer to the question. “A physical infirmity, I suppose,” the sage man said, as if this was occurring to him for the first time.
“Or a physical calamity.”
“Stroke. Heart attack.”
“I hate those.”
“Doctor’s orders,” the man with the sadder eyes surmised. Then he issued swift invective. “Fuck doctor’s orders, I say! Up the arse!”
The passionate antipathy took Cinq-Mars by surprise, but the men gathered in the rectangle seemed to have anticipated the volley, as if it was inevitable or at least common. They laughed and those closest to the sadder-eyed man offered him a pat on the shoulder and others in his proximity reached across and lightly tapped his knee. He exchanged a glance with Cinq-Mars, and, ceremoniously, it seemed, rather than apologetically, he shrugged.
The oldest among them, the former policeman offered his thanks and departed. He came away with one more puzzling notation, namely that the murdered man who lived in the farmhouse had been a farmer who had chosen not to engage in his profession despite living on a farm. This case, if anyone could call it that, seemed increasingly strange no matter which way it turned.
TWENTY ONE
The road on which he departed the farmers’ cooperative created an illusion of crossing flat land, yet frequent dips into river bottoms and nasty twists through various geographic contours made the trip a challenge. That he was speeding didn’t help. He was negotiating a tricky section when his cell phone played a jingle in his overcoat. Émile slowed down, initially to check the caller ID, then to pull off to the side. By a frozen stream in a winding gulley, he stopped.
“Detective Dupree,” he answered, “how’s it going, sir?”
“I’m seriously pissed off with the universe myself,” the New Orleans cop stated. “You?”
The man had a knack for making him laugh. “I’m in a better mood than you are, Dupree. Who knows why? Mostly I’m spinning my wheels. What’s up down there?”
Listening to his response, Cinq-Mars took time to appreciate his surroundings. Without the call, he might never have noticed this place. A quiet stream meandered through the gulley in the summer, water slipping under the road through twin culverts, the shaded indentation out of sight of farmland on the next level up. In winter the stream was iced over, the trees bare, and at the base of the embankment he found himself situated in his own little world. Cinq-Mars was grateful that the operator of a snowplow had taken the trouble to clear a small, safe parking spot. Skeptical of human impulses, he figured the plow’s driver had wanted a quiet place out of sight where he could enjoy a snack and a smoke without seeing his paycheck docked.
I might come here again, Cinq-Mars considered, if only to be undisturbed.
Dupree was going on about a number of inconsequential inconveniences before he said, “Our man Everardo Flores. May I remind y’all that he was your idea.”
“My wife’s actually. What’s he been up to?”
“Bugger goes around telling people he’s a cop! I specifically told him, I warned him, ‘Don’t tell people you’re a cop.’ Bugger won’t listen.”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“Did you debrief him already?”
“Me? What? I haven’t talked to the prick. Y’all think I’d let him run around out there on his own? I got an undercover dolled up as a bag lady tracing his steps, to keep tabs on what damage he does.”
“I hope she’s a woman, your undercover. What damage is he doing?” A small flock of cedar waxwings descended onto a nearby limb. Cinq-Mars leaned over the steering wheel to observe them. Knowing that it wasn’t cold out, he opened the front door with his opposite hand and held the phone in his left, and stepped out into the brisk, clear air. The birds flew up, but settled back down again.
“I won’t call it havoc,” Dupree related. “Not yet. But he’s got no business telling people he’s a cop. That’s way against orders.”
“I hear you, Dupree. But he’s a volunteer, right? He’s not really under orders. If he’s not doing any damage maybe he’s finding something out.”
“Pisses me off, my man.”
Cinq-Mars laughed a little. “I’d have his hide if he was working under me. Look, I appreciate your procedure, Dupree, keeping an eye on him and all that. How did you swing it?”
“Officially? My undercover’s people assigned to drug-check the neighborhood. Won’t be too hard to clock visible hours, bust a few. This way, neither my boss nor the neighborhood knows what’s up. At least, they didn’t until that bonehead Flores told folks he’s a cop. Undermines the whole point of using him, you know?”
“I appreciate what you’re doing.”
“Let’s see what he comes up with before anybody appreciates a damn thing. Sorry to take up your time, Émile. Needed to vent.”
“Gotcha. You take good care, Dupree.”
He was rushing the call as another one was coming in. His quiet roadside spot was an information highway. “Agent Sivak, how are you?”
“Fine, Émile! How are things up there at the North Pole?”
“So-so. Santa’s grumpy. The elves are dipsomaniacs. Everyone’s depressed, post-Christmas. Up here we believe in Santa Claus, but we have serious doubts about spring. And you, staying clear of crocodiles?”
“Only alligators in our swamps, Émile.”
“I have a hard time keeping that straight.”
“Think of Crocodile Dundee. What country?”
Cinq-Mars hesitated. He’d seen that movie. “Australia.”
“There you go.”
“Okay. Got it. So no alligators nibbling at your toes?”
“Oh, I wish,” she said, which he didn’t get for a moment. “So about your Mr. Flores.”
A popular subject today, apparently. “What of him?”
“He never went home.”
“What?”
“On the night of your wife’s abduction—you asked me to check—he never made it home.”
“No, but he was heading home, right?”
“Wrong. We ran down the hotel’s call to him, per your request. That wasn’t easy, by the way. We have procedures in the FBI to track the GPS on phone calls and I wasn’t following them. What I’m saying is, you owe me, because this can reach back and bite me. But anyway, he never made it home, Émile. He never left a four- block radius of the Hilton.”
“No shit. Excuse my, well, my English.”
“That’s what I said when I found out. No shit. What do you make of them apples?”
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“I was thinking to myself this morning, Agent Sivak—”
“Vira is fine with me. We covered this, remember?”
“Sorry. Vira. Nothing in this matter is anything other than strange. Don’t you find that?”
“I’m off to Alabama,” she interjected out of the blue. “Shortly.”
Something in her tone felt consequential. “Great. I appreciate it.”
“No problem. It’s not on my own time. I had a talk with Special Agent Dreher. He thinks I should go but I have to do it on the sly, an officially unofficial type thing. Still. Maybe we can figure something out.”
“It’s a long shot. I know that. But thanks. So what do you make of this Flores thing? I’m still trying to process the news.”
“I know, hey? Isn’t that something? He’s lying through his teeth. But who knows about what or why. Soon as I have a minute, I’ll challenge him on that. I’ll also track down the location where he was really at, see what that gives us.”
Cinq-Mars thought about it and tromped the snow underfoot. “If you don’t mind, Vira, can we hold the first part of that in our hip pocket? I’ll ask him myself when the time seems opportune, or you can, but I’d like to feel him out more before we point out to him that he’s a lying skunk.”
“Fair enough. But only until I get back. After that, I treat him as a person-of-interest in your wife’s kidnapping. You know how it goes, Émile. I’m obliged to at least make it look like I’m doing something. I’m even obliged to do something.”
“I understand, Vira. Again, I appreciate the cooperation. It’s splendid.”
“So, Émile,” Sivak began, then paused.
“Yeah?” She had given him vital information about Everardo Flores, but her tone suggested that what she said next constituted the real point of her call.
“Like I said, I was talking to Agent Rand Dreher.”
“Right.”
“He was thinking out loud, you know?’
“Not about me,” Cinq-Mars said.
“Yeah, actually, about you. He’s wondering if he can come out from under his desk now, give you a call.”