by Trevanian
And yet, he had guessed what was wrong before he went to the doctor. For a couple of months there had been that effervescence in his blood, that constriction in his upper arms and chest, those jagged little pains at the tops and bottoms of breaths.
In the middle of that first morning, there was one outburst of rage. He was pecking away at an overdue report, looking up the spelling of a word, when suddenly he ripped the page from his dictionary and threw the book against the wall. What the fucking use is a fucking dictionary! How can you look up the spelling of a fucking word when you don’t know how to spell the fucking thing?
He sat behind his desk, stiff and silent, his fingers interlaced and the knuckles white with pressure. His eyes stung with the unfairness of it. But he couldn’t push through to feeling sorry for himself. He could not grieve for himself. After all, he had not grieved for Lucille.
He insulated himself from his impending death by accepting it only as a fact. Not a real fact, like the coming of autumn; more like… the number of feet in a mile. You don’t do anything about the number of feet in a mile. You don’t complain about it. It’s just a fact.
With great patience, he mended the torn page in his dictionary with transparent tape.
LaPointe pulls the string of the bathroom ceiling light and goes into the bedroom. The springs creak as he settles down on his back and looks up at the ceiling, glowing dimly from the streetlamp outside.
His breathing deepens and he finds himself vaguely considering the problem of worn-out water hosing. Last Sunday he spent a lazy morning sitting in his chair by the window, reading La Presse. There was a do-it-yourself article describing things you could make around the house with old water hosing. He has a house; a fantasy house in Laval, where he lives with Lucille and the two girls. Whenever he passes shops that have garden tools, he daydreams about working in his garden. Several years ago he put in a flagstone patio from the plans in a special section of the paper devoted to Fifteen Things You Can Do to Improve the Value of Your House. That patio figures often in his reveries just before sleep. He and Lucille are having lemonade under a sun umbrella he once saw in a hardware store window—Clearance!!! Up to 2/3 Off!!! The girls are off somewhere, and they have the house to themselves for a change. Sometimes, in his imaginings, his girls are kids, sometimes teen-agers, and sometimes already married with children of their own. During the first years after Lucille’s death, the number and sex of their children shifted around, but it finally settled on two girls, three years apart. A pretty one, and a smart one. Not that the pretty one is what you would call a dummy, but…
He turns over in bed, ready to sleep now. The springs creak. Even when it was new, the bed had clacked and creaked. At first, the noise made Lucille tense and apprehensive. But later, she used to giggle silently at the thought of imagined neighbors listening beyond the wall, shocked at such carryings-on…
3
The phone rings.
Half of the sound blends into the eddy of a dream; half is jagged and real, still echoing in the dark room.
The phone rings again.
He swings out of bed and gropes into the dark living room. The floor is icy.
The phone ri—
“Yes! LaPointe.”
“Sorry, Lieutenant.” The voice is young. “I hate to wake you up, but—”
“Never mind that. What’s wrong?”
“A man’s been killed on your patch.” The caller’s French is accurate, but it has a continental accent. He is an Anglophone Canadian.
“Murdered?” LaPointe asks. Stupid question. Would they call him for an automobile accident? He still isn’t fully awake.
“Yes, sir. Knifed.”
“Where?”
“Little alley near the corner of Rue Lozeau and St. Dominique. That’s just across from—”
“I know where it is. When?”
“Sir?”
“When did it happen?”
“I don’t know. I just got here with Detective Sergeant Gaspard. We took an incoming from a patrol car. The Sergeant asked me to call you.”
“All right. Ten minutes.” LaPointe hangs up.
He dresses quickly, with fumbling hands. As he leaves he remembers to take the paper bag of garbage with him. He may not get back in time for the collection.
It is three-thirty, the coldest part of the night. Following the pattern of this pig weather, the overcast has lifted with the early hours of morning, taking with it the smell of city soot. The air is still and crystalline, and the exhaust from a patrol car parked halfway up the narrow alley shoots a long funnel of vapor out into the street. A revolving roof light skids shafts of red along the brick walls and over the chests and faces of the half-dozen policemen and detectives working around the corpse. Bursts of blue-white glare periodically fill the alley, freezing men in mid-gesture, as the forensic photographer takes shots from every angle. Two uniformed officers stand guard at the mouth of the alley, tears of cold in their eyes, their gloved fingers under their armpits for warmth.
Despite the cold and the hour, a small knot of rubbernecks has gathered at the mouth of the alley. They move about and stand on tiptoe to catch glimpses, and they talk to one another in hushed, confidential tones, instant friends by virtue of shared experience.
LaPointe crosses the street just as an ambulance pulls up. He stands for a time on the rim of the knot of onlookers, unobtrusively joining them. Some maniac killers, like some arsonists, like to blend with the crowd and experience the effects of their actions.
There is a street bomme in conversation with a small uncertain man whose chin is buried in a thick wrap of scarf. This latter looks out of place here, like a bank clerk, or an accountant. LaPointe lays his hands on the shoulder of the bomme.
“Oh, hi-ya, Lieutenant.”
“What are you doing up at this end of the street, Red?”
“It got too cold in that doorway. The wind shifted. It was better walking around.”
LaPointe looks into the tramp’s eyes. He is not lying. “All the same, stay around. Got any fric?”
“None I can spend.” Like most clochards, Dirtyshirt Red always keeps a dollar or two stashed back for really hard times.
“Here.” LaPointe gives him a quarter. “Get some coffee.” With a jerk of his head he indicates the all-night Roi des Frites joint across the street.
The clerk, or accountant, or pederast, moves away from the bomme. Anyone on talking terms with a policeman can’t be perfectly trustworthy.
LaPointe looks up and down the street. The air is so cold and clear that streetlights seem to glitter, and the corners of buildings a block away have sharp, neat edges, like theatrical sets. Everyone’s breath is vapor, twin jets when they exhale through their noses. From somewhere there comes the homey, yeasty smell of bread. The bakeries would be working at this hour, men stripped to the waist in hot back rooms, sweating with the heat of ovens.
As LaPointe turns back toward the alley, it starts. A light, rather pleasant tingle in his chest, as though his blood were carbonated. God damn it. A rippling fatigue drains his body and loosens his knees. A constriction swells in his chest, and little bands of pain arc across his upper arms. He leans against the brick wall and breathes deeply and slowly, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible. There are dark patches in his vision, and bright dots. The flashing red light atop the police car begins to blur.
“Lieutenant LaPointe?”
The chest constrictions start to ebb, and the stabs of pain in his arms become duller.
“Sir?”
Slowly, his body weight returns as the sense of floating deflates. He dares a deep breath taken in little sucks to test for pain.
“Lieutenant LaPointe?”
“What, for Christ’s sake!”
The young man recoils from the violence of the response. “My name’s Guttmann, sir.”
“That’s your problem.”
“I’m working with Detective Sergeant Gaspard.”
“That’s his
problem.”
“I was the one who telephoned you.” The young officer-in-training’s voice is stiff with resentment at LaPointe’s uncalled-for sarcasm. “Sergeant Gaspard is down the alley. He asked me to keep an eye out for you.”
LaPointe grunts. “Well?”
“Sir?”
LaPointe settles his heavy melancholy eyes on the OIT. “You say Gaspard is waiting for me?”
“Yes, sir. Oh. Follow me, sir.”
LaPointe shakes his head in general criticism of young policemen as he follows Guttmann into the alley where a bareheaded photographer from the forensic lab is packing up the last of his equipment.
“That you, LaPointe?” Gaspard asks from the dark. Like a handful of the most senior men on the force, Gaspard tutoyers LaPointe, but he never uses his first name. In fact, most of them would have to search their memories to come up with his first name.
LaPointe lifts a hand in greeting, then drops the fist back into the pocket of his rumpled overcoat.
The forensic photographer tells Gaspard that he is going back to the Quartier General with the film. He will get it into an early batch, and it will be developed by mid-morning. He sniffs back draining sinuses and grumbles, “Colder than a witch’s ecu!”
“Titon,” Gaspard corrects absent-mindedly, as he shakes hands with LaPointe.
“We haven’t searched the body yet. We’ve been waiting for Flash Gordon here to take the class pictures.” Gaspard addresses the photographer. “Well? If you’re through, I’ll let my men move the bundle.”
The victim is a young male dressed in a trendy suit with belled trousers, a shirt with a high rolled collar, and shoes of patent leather. He had dropped to his knees when stabbed, then he had fallen forward. LaPointe has never seen a corpse in that posture: on its knees, its buttocks on its heels, its face pressed into the gravel, its arms stretched out with the palms down. It looks like a young priest serving High Mass, and showing off with excessive self-abasement.
LaPointe feels sorry for it A corpse can look ugly, or peaceful, or tortured; but it’s too bad to look silly. Unfair.
Guttmann and another detective turn the body over to examine the pockets for identification. A piece of gravel is embedded in the boy’s smooth cheek. Guttmann flicks it off, but a pink triangular dent remains.
LaPointe mutters to himself, “Heart.”
“What?” Gaspard asks, tapping out a cigarette.
“Must have been stabbed through the heart.” Without touching each of the logical steps, LaPointe’s experience told him that there were only two ways the body could have ended up in that comic posture. Either it had been stabbed in the heart and died instantly, or it had been stabbed in the stomach and had tried to cover up the cold hole. But there was no smell of excrement, and a man stabbed in the stomach almost always soils himself through sphincter convulsion. Therefore, heart.
To turn the body over, the detectives have to straighten it out first. They lift it from under its arms and pull it forward, unfolding it. When they lower it to the pavement, the young face touches the ground.
“Careful!” LaPointe says automatically.
Guttmann glances up, assuming he is being blamed for something. He already dislikes the bullying LaPointe. He doesn’t have much use for the old-time image of the tough cop who uses fists and wisetalk, rather than brains and understanding. He has heard about LaPointe of the Main from admiring young French Canadian cops, and the Lieutenant is true to Guttmann’s predicted stereotype.
Sergeant Gaspard pinches one of his ears to restore feeling to the lobe. “First time I’ve ever seen one kneeling like that. Looked like an altar boy.”
For a moment, LaPointe finds it odd that they had similar images of the body’s posture. But, after all, they share both age and cultural background. Neither of them is a confessing Catholic any longer, but they were brought up with a simple fundamentalist Catholicism that would define them forever, define them negatively, as a mold negatively defines a casting. They are non-Catholics, which is a very different thing from being a non-Protestant or a non-Jew.
The detectives go through the pockets routinely, one putting the findings into a clear plastic bag with a press seal, while Guttmann makes a list, tipping his note pad back awkwardly to catch the light from the street.
“That’s it?” Gaspard asks as Guttmann closes his notebook and blows on his numb fingers.
“Yes, sir. Not much. No wallet. No identification. Some small change, keys, a comb—that sort of thing.”
Gaspard nods and gestures to the ambulance attendants who are waiting with a wheeled stretcher. With professional adroitness and indifference, they turn the body onto the stretcher and roll it toward the back doors of the ambulance. The cart rattles over the uneven brick pavement, and one arm flops down, the dead hand palsied with the vibrations.
They will deliver it to the Forensic Medicine Department, where it will be fingerprinted and examined thoroughly, together with the clothes and articles found in the pockets. The prints will be telephoned to Ottawa, and by morning Dr. Bouvier, the department pathologist, should have a full report, including a make on the victim’s identity.
“Who found the body?” LaPointe asks Gaspard.
“Patrol car. Those two officers on guard.”
“Have you talked to them?”
“No, not yet. Did you recognize the stiff?” It is generally assumed that LaPointe knows by sight everyone who lives around the Main.
“No. Never saw him before.”
“Looked Portuguese.”
LaPointe thrusts out his lower lip and shrugs. “Or Italian. The clothes were more Italian.”
As they walk back to the mouth of the alley, the ambulance departs, squealing its tires unnecessarily. LaPointe stops before the uniformed men on guard. “Which of you found the body?”
“I did, Lieutenant LaPointe,” says the nearest one quickly. He has the rectangular face of a peasant, and his accent is Chiac. It is a misfortune to speak Chiac, because there is a tradition of dour stupidity associated with the half-swallowed sound; it is a hillbilly accent used by comics to enhance tired jokes.
“Come with us,” LaPointe says to the Chiac officer, and to his disappointed partner, “You can wait in the car. And turn that damned thing off.” He indicates the revolving red light.
LaPointe, Gaspard, Guttmann, and the Chiac officer cross the street to the Roi des Frites. The policeman left behind is glad to get out of the cold, but he envies his partner’s luck. He would give anything to take coffee with LaPointe. He could just see the faces of the guys in the locker room when he dropped casually, “Lieutenant LaPointe and I were having a coffee together, and he turns to me and says…” Someone would throw a towel at him and tell him he was full of shit up to his eyebrows.
Dirtyshirt Red rises when the policemen enter the bright interior of the all-night coffee place, but LaPointe motions him to sit down again. Quite automatically, he has already taken over the investigation, although Gaspard from homicide is technically in charge of it. It is an unspoken law in the department that what happens on the Main belongs to LaPointe. And who else would want it?
The four men sit at a back table, warming their palms on the thick earthenware cups. The Chiac officer is a little nervous—he wants to look good in front of Lieutenant LaPointe; even more, he doesn’t want to seem a boob in relation to this Anglo tagging along with Sergeant Gaspard.
“By the way, have you met my Joan?” Gaspard asks LaPointe.
“I met him.” LaPointe glances at the big-boned young man. Must be a bright lad. You only get into the OIT apprentice program if you are in the top 10 percent of your academy class, and then only after you have done a year of service and have the recommendation of your direct superior.
When LaPointe began on the force, there were almost no Anglo cops. The pay was too low; the job had too little prestige; and the French Canadians who made up the bulk of the department were not particularly kind to interlopers.
&nbs
p; “He’s not a bad type, for a Roundhead,” Gaspard says, indicating his apprentice, and speaking as though he were not present. “And God knows it’s not hard to teach him. There’s nothing he already knows.”
The Chiac officer grins, and Guttmann tries to laugh it off.
Gaspard drinks off the last of his coffee and taps on the window to get the attention of the counterman for a refill. “Robbery, eh?” he says to LaPointe.
“I suppose so. No wallet. Only change in the pockets. But…”
Gaspard is an old-timer too. “I know what you mean. No signs of a fight.”
LaPointe nods. The victim was a big, strong-looking boy in his mid-twenties. Well built. Probably the kind who lifts weights while he looks darkly at himself in a mirror. If he had resisted the theft, there would have been signs of it. On the other hand, if he had simply handed over his wallet, why would the mugger knife him?
“Could be a nut case,” Gaspard suggests.
LaPointe shrugs.
“Christ, we need that sort of thing like the Pope needs a Wassermann,” Gaspard says. “Thank God there was a robbery.”
The Chiac patrolman has been listening, maintaining a serious expression and making every effort to participate intelligently. That is, he has been keeping his mouth shut and nodding with each statement made by the older men. But now his cold-mottled forehead wrinkles into a frown. Why is it fortunate that there was a robbery? He lacks the experience to sense that there was something not quite right about the killing… something about the position of the body that makes both LaPointe and Gaspard intuitively uncomfortable. If there had been no robbery, this might have been the start of something nasty. Like rape mutilations, motiveless stabbings are likely to erupt in patterns. You get a string of four or five before the maniac gets scared or, less often, caught. It’s the kind of thing the newspapers love.
“I’ll walk it around for a few days,” LaPointe says. “See what Bouvier’s report gives us. You don’t mind if I take it on, do you?” The question is only pro forma. LaPointe feels that all crime on his patch belongs to him by right, but he is careful of the feelings of the other senior men.