Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  “So you are quite satisfied that Bec did it?”

  “Oh yes. The concierge placed him in the apartment late that afternoon and four years earlier he had served eighteen months of a three-year sentence for stabbing a prostitute. There is also the fact of his disappearance.”

  “And you never traced him?”

  “No. It is as if he stepped off into oblivion. I personally believe he returned to Algeria, which comes to much the same thing.”

  “Did you question the daughter?”

  Daugart allowed himself a look of amused incredulity. “What do you take us for, Lieutenant? Of course we questioned the daughter, but she could furnish us with no useful information. She had not seen her mother in three months and had never even met Bec.”

  “So she was never a suspect?”

  “No. At the time of the crime she was locked up in her convent—an alibi not to be trifled with, believe me. Besides, one only had to look at her to know she was incapable of such an act.”

  Incapable of such an act. The professional opinion of an experienced homicide detective—but, then, Pratt had never met Angela Wyman and therefore could not judge. It just went to show . . .

  “Did you meet the mother?”

  “You mean the victim’s mother?” Daugard raised his eyebrows significantly. “A formidable woman. She manifested no interest whatever in our efforts to catch Bec. Without actually putting the thing into words—since that kind, you must know, says very little to the point—she managed to suggest that the murder was entirely her daughter’s fault. One gathers that the women of that family are not strongly maternal.”

  He peered into his wine glass as if to confirm to himself the sad truth that it was in fact empty and then leaned back against his chair and sighed, pursing his lips in resignation. Apparently he had reached some self-imposed limit, because he did not recall the waiter.

  “But she was not far wrong, you know, my friend? You, like I, have sifted through the lives of many murdered men and women, but how many have you found that were entirely blameless? There is usually a certain rough justice in the victim’s fate. He or she deserves to die. Blanche Wyman surely did. If René Bec had not killed her, eventually someone else would have. She was a bad woman.”

  Pratt did not disagree. If pressed he would have said that no one deserves to be murdered, but it was also true that some people attract violence to them, as if somehow they could never be complete until their heads had been beaten into pulp.

  The Chief Superintendant seemed in danger of losing his train of thought. Evil, like blood on the wallpaper, had apparently lost its shock value and was in danger of becoming a bore.

  “Did you ever find a father for the girl?” Pratt asked, simply to pull Daugard back. “Was there any record of a marriage?”

  “No, no marriage. There were many men, most of them like Bec; certainly none was in any hurry to claim paternity. There was no father and, for all practical purposes, there was no mother. Madame Wyman hardly ever saw her child. It is a mystery to me why she ever went through the pregnancy, since she seemed the type for which an all-seeing Providence put expensive Swiss abortion clinics on this earth. Narcotics, gangster boyfriends, all the usual vices of wealthy, bored women, these were her natural element. I am at a loss to imagine how even the briefest excursion into motherhood could have tempted her.”

  “I would have liked to talk to Bec,” Pratt announced suddenly, as if the idea had just occurred to him.

  “Why?” Daugard made a face, a mingling of horror and distaste. The waiter might have just offered him a peanut-butter sandwich. “Take my word for it, he was not an interesting conversationalist.”

  “I would have liked to speak with someone who knew her habits—who knew what her life was like.”

  “Well. If that is all . . .” Daugard made a small, dismissive gesture. “I suppose something of the sort can be arranged.”

  28

  It was the smell, of course—that mingling of hopelessness and disinfectant. Prisons were the same everywhere. Pratt could have closed his eyes and imagined himself back in the Dayton city lockup.

  But he was not. He was in Paris, enjoying celebrity status as an emissary of American police culture. Daugart placed a car and driver at his disposal, and the young constable with whom he went splashing through the rain puddles of suburban streets—and who had probably never even heard of Dayton—entertained him with questions about life on the homicide squad. Pratt decided not to be flattered. After all, policemen live on crime, so America is the Promised Land. Every cop in the world wants to be Kojak.

  In any case, everyone had been wonderfully coöperative. Daugard even promised to look for one of Blanche’s bad boys who spoke English. As it happened, just such an article happened to be doing twenty-to-life in the slammer at Corbeil-Essonnes for multiple counts of burglary and aggravated assault.

  Jean-Pierre DuBoisseau was a rather seedy thug of about fifty who looked as if he had come to terms with the fact that he was going to die behind bars. Fifteen years ago he had probably been handsome in a brutal sort of way, but boredom and bad food had softened him. He hadn’t shaved in three or four days and his black hair was shot through with gray and beginning to grow grizzled.

  “Do you have a smoke?” he asked, in an accent he seemed to have picked up from Humphrey Bogart movies. His fingers rested against the heavy steel mesh that divided the visiting room in half. The spaces between were just wide enough to allow Pratt to push through one of the cigarettes with which he had been far-sighted enough to provide himself. The guard, who was standing just behind and to the right of his chair, raised his eyebrows but made no objection—a fact which was not lost on DuBoisseau.

  “Camels,” he said, holding the cigarette under his nose with the appreciation of a connoisseur. “Delicious. They kill you all the faster, but who cares? Do you have a light?”

  Pratt lit a paper match and held it through the grating. “You can have the rest of the pack,” he said. But DuBoisseau only shook his head.

  “There is no point.” He glanced at the guard standing beside the door through which Pratt had come in. “He will only take them away the moment you leave. Let us have a long conversation, long enough to allow me to smoke five or six. Against whom are you collecting evidence?”

  “Against no one. I want you to tell me about Blanche Wyman.”

  For a moment DuBoisseau seemed not to have understood, but then he smiled. It was a smile full of cruelty.

  “That one,” he said, and then took a deep drag on his cigarette. “She had plenty of money and she was a good fuck. What else is there to tell?”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “Why? Are you an aggrieved relative?” The idea seemed to amuse DuBoisseau, or perhaps it was simply that the nicotine in his lungs was making him feel more relaxed. “Perhaps you are the husband Blanche left behind when she ran away from America.”

  “I never met the lady. Is that why she came to Europe, to escape her husband?”

  DuBoisseau’s face collapsed into an expression of droll melancholy, and he shook his head. “There was never any husband—if there had been she would have mentioned him. I don’t believe she knew herself who was the father of her child.”

  With the guile born of scores of homicide interrogations, Pratt allowed his eyes to drop to the cement floor, as if he found the oblique reference to Angel slightly embarrassing. He did not want to talk about Angel just yet, because he did not want DuBoisseau guessing that Angel was the real subject of their conversation. DuBoisseau was a man with hardly any power left over the world, and Pratt did not want him to be aware that he had it in his power to deny him what he most wanted.

  “Where did you meet her?” he repeated.

  DuBoisseau shrugged. “I picked her up in a café, I think. I hardly remember. Why? What is it to you?”

  “I’ve been hired to find out what I can.” Pratt managed a faint smile—he was a mercenary, you see. He was in it for th
e money. He didn’t really care. “Someone wants to know about the life Blanche Wyman lived in Paris. I didn’t think it very tactful to ask him his reasons.”

  “Someone in America?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well. In that case it is all right. I shouldn’t like anyone having trouble with the police, but America doesn’t matter.”

  “I have the feeling the thing is entirely personal—the police don’t come into it. Perhaps my client is the husband she ran away from.”

  DuBoisseau laughed loud enough at this that the guard pursed his lips in disapproval.

  “Then perhaps you should tell him how she liked to have sex with a man’s hands around her throat. She was a gasper, that one. She couldn’t come unless you half killed her.”

  “Do you think that was how she died?”

  After considering the matter to a few seconds, DuBoisseau shrugged once more. “I understand she was beaten to death, but it is possible her tastes in lovemaking had something to do with it. A woman like that can lead a man into bad habits.”

  “I gather you didn’t like her very much.”

  “She had her uses. That is the most which can be said.”

  DuBoisseau took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it with an expression of evident distaste. It was only half consumed, but he dropped it on the cement floor and ground it out under his shoe. Pratt passed him another through the mesh.

  “In prison one smokes them until they burn one finger’s,” he said, “but I assume you are prepared to indulge me. There is no pleasure after the first few puffs—one is merely feeding an addiction.”

  “Did Blanche Wyman have any addictions?”

  DuBoisseau blew smoke through the grating that divided the visiting room in two, simply to annoy the guard.

  “You are not who you claim,” he said. “You are police. Otherwise this fat monkey would have had me dragged back to my cell.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Retired? From what? Narcotics?”

  “Homicide.”

  “An American homicide detective—no wonder they are so tolerant. Even I am impressed.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll answer the question. Did Blanche Wyman have any addictions?”

  “Do you mean to something besides myself?” DuBoisseau smiled, as if uttering a boast, but when Pratt didn’t respond he seemed to lose interest. “She had the usual vices. She liked men. She liked the fast life. Had she lived she would be a ruin today. Whoever killed her did her a favor.”

  “Is there any doubt?”

  “About what? That she is better off dead?”

  “No.” Pratt shook his head. “About who killed her. The police seem quite certain it was her last lover.”

  “Bec? No—it was not he. I knew him. René did not have the vitality to kill someone in so direct a manner. Blanche’s murderer had to have been someone who really hated her.”

  “Then who?”

  “Perhaps an old lover. Perhaps that pretty daughter of hers—there would at least have been a certain poetic justice to that. In any case it was not René.”

  “Did the daughter hate her mother, then?”

  “Who said so?” DuBoisseau looked suddenly wary. “Is that it? Did you come here to question me about Angel?”

  “Was that her name?”

  “Yes. And I have no desire to cause her any trouble.”

  “She’s beyond trouble. She’s dead.”

  “Oh.”

  The middle-aged convict’s face sagged and an expression of tenderness began to appear about his eyes, confirming yet again Pratt’s theory that all petty criminals are at bottom sentimentalists.

  “How did she die?”

  “I don’t know the circumstances, except that she died in a mental hospital.”

  “I don’t believe it,” DuBoisseau announced, without defiance. “Angel was not the fragile type.”

  “Then perhaps I’m lying.”

  “Do not mock me.”

  With an almost comical dignity, DuBoisseau threw his cigarette away so that it rolled along the floor, scattering sparks. A few minutes later, however, he was constrained to ask for another one.

  “So she is dead, eh?” he said, almost as if to himself. “Alas—what a waste. What a beauty that child was!”

  “Could she have killed her mother?”

  “Do you mean, was she capable of it? Yes. She was capable of anything. To survive being Blanche’s daughter she had to have had considerable resourcefulness. Beyond that you will have to consult the police, for I was in Lyon when the crime was committed. By then I had not seen Blanche Wyman in over a year.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you were involved—I don’t care who was involved,” Pratt said, in a tone of emphatic sincerity he only used when he was lying. “I’m not concerned with the legal consequences of Madame Wyman’s murder. I only want to understand the kind of life she led that made such an end possible.”

  DuBoisseau shifted slightly on the metal prison chair and folded his arms as he tucked his head down in an attitude to concentration. The cigarette between his lips looked as if it had been nailed in place.

  “Possible, no,” he answered at last. “Inevitable.”

  “Then tell me.”

  . . . . .

  Daugard’s young constable had at least learned when to shut up. During the entire drive back from the prison, with Pratt sitting morosely beside him on the front seat, he never uttered a syllable.

  This was wise. The last thing Pratt wanted was conversation. He wanted to think, and to remember.

  “Men wandered in and out of Blanche’s life as casually as if it were a Metro station,” DuBoisseau had said. “I myself lived with her on three separate occasions, once for nearly a year. I had other women as well—she did not care, so long as I did not bring them home.”

  “This was going on while she had her daughter with her?”

  “Yes, of course. Have I shocked you?” DuBoisseau smiled with a kind of amused pity. “Well then, perhaps you are not precisely shocked, but you do not like hearing it. Nevertheless, Angel had nothing to fear from her mother’s various lovers. Bec, for instance, was in awe of her.”

  “And you?”

  “Angel was eight or nine years old when I first knew her. We were perfectly content to ignore each other.”

  “And later?”

  “Later, her mother had much to be jealous of.”

  Jean-Pierre DuBoisseau, petty thief, minor league drug dealer, suspected murderer, smiled again, implicitly adding child abuse to his list of offenses.

  “I thought you said Blanche wasn’t the jealous type.”

  “She was jealous of Angel—why do you suppose she locked her away in that convent? To safeguard her virtue? Hah!”

  His one syllable of laughter appeared to startle DuBoisseau, enough that he paused for a moment and then lapsed into a fit of coughing.

  “Cigarettes are very bad for the health, but one must die of something, eh? Be kind enough to give me another.”

  “Fine.” Pratt fished one more out of the pack and slipped it through the wire mesh that separated the prisoner from his visitor. He lit a match but held it away, cupping his hand around it as if to focus its light. “Now tell me about Angel.”

  For perhaps three or four seconds DuBoisseau was perfectly still, and then he moved his head closer to the mesh, inviting Pratt to light his cigarette.

  “What is it you wish to know?” he asked.

  What indeed? Why would anyone wish to hear such things?

  “She was not a victim,” DuBoisseau had said. “If humanity is truly divided between predators and prey, then she belonged among the former. I have had little experience of children, but I do not believe that Angel was ever a child. Once, when she was very young, I bought her a doll, a pretty, old fashioned thing I found in a flea market near the University. I took it home to her, thinking she would be pleased. She took the doll by the legs and broke its face in against a radiator pi
pe. She was not even angry. She simply did it.”

  In his mind’s eye Pratt could see the crime scene photos of Branche Wyman’s corpse, her face beaten into an unrecognizable pulp. It would have taken a fair amount of time to inflict that much damage—more time than could be accounted for even by psychotic rage. And he remembered another corpse, found lying on a motel room floor, its face peeled carefully away.

  “Did she hate her mother?”

  “No more than she hated the doll,” DuBoisseau answered, his eyes narrowing slightly to show that the parallel had not been lost on him either. “As I said, she was not a victim. At thirteen and fourteen she was all but seducing her mother’s lovers—Angel had a heart that beat once an hour. It was Blanche who hated her. And with reason. Can you imagine what it must have been like in that apartment, the two of them alone together?”

  “Did she kill Blanche?”

  DuBoisseau, his faced clouded in cigarette smoke, merely shrugged.

  “The police say René Bec killed Blanche. Who am I to challenge the wisdom of the police?”

  Who indeed. Riding back through the streets of suburban Paris, trying not to listen to the buzz of his own mind, Pratt had no difficulty imagining how the crime could have been committed. In outline it was clear enough.

  It was a maxim of police work: if you need to find your way around an apartment house, just find yourself a kid who lives there. A kid will know everything—all the forgotten doorways blocked up with old packing cases, all the dark, shadowy hiding places beneath the stairs, every inch. And Angel had lived in the same building all her life. There was nothing surprising in the idea that she could have gotten in and out of her mother’s apartment without the concierge having any knowledge of it.