by Trevanian
“Oh, yes, sir. He could hardly contain his delight. He was particularly colorful on the subject of Dr. Bouvier. He said he needed that kind of help about as much as starving Pakistanis need Red Cross packages filled with menus.”
“Hm-m. But that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing in my office.”
Guttmann goes to the wall map and points out light pencil lines he has drawn on it. “I got this weird idea in the middle of the night.”
LaPointe is puddling about in his paper work. “Joans aren’t supposed to have ideas. It ruins their typing,” he says without looking up.
“As it turned out, it wasn’t much of an idea.”
“No kidding? Let’s hear it.”
Guttmann shrugs his shoulders, not eager to share his foolishness. “Oh, it was just grade-school geometry. It occurred to me that we know where each of the three men was killed, and we know where each was going at the time. So, if we extended the lines back on the map…”
LaPointe laughs. “The lines would meet on the doorstep of the killer?”
“Something like that. Or if not at the doorstep of the killer, at least on the doorstep of the woman they all made love with. I assume it was one woman, don’t you?”
“Either that or a whorehouse.”
“Well, either way, it would be one dwelling.”
LaPointe looks up at the map on which Guttmann’s three lines enclose a vast triangle including the east half of the Main district and a corner of Parc Fontaine. “Well, you’ve narrowed it down to eastern Canada.”
Guttmann realizes how stupid his idea sounds when said aloud. “It was just a wild shot. I knew that any two lines would have to meet somewhere. And I hoped that the third would zap right in there.”
“I see.” LaPointe moves aside the files Guttmann brought along with him and picks up a splay of unfinished reports. He wants the kid to see he came here to do some work. Not because he was lonely. Not because his bed was too big.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee, sir?”
“If you’re getting one for yourself.”
While Guttmann is at the machine down the hall, LaPointe’s eyes wander back to the wall map. He makes a nasal puff of derision at the idea that things get solved by geometry and deduction. What you need is an informer, a lot of pressure, a fist.
With a brimming paper cup in each hand, Guttmann has some trouble with the door; he slops some and burns his fingers. “Goddamn it!” He gives the door a kick.
LaPointe glances up. This kid is usually so controlled, so polite. As Guttmann sits in his old chair against the wall, his long legs stretched out in front of him, LaPointe sips his coffee.
“What’s your problem?”
“Sir?”
“Trouble with this girl of yours?”
“No, that isn’t it. That’s turning out to be a really fine thing.”
“Oh? How long have you known her? A week?”
“How long does it take?”
LaPointe nods. That is true. He had been sure he wanted to spend his life with Lucille after knowing her for two hours. Of course, it was a year before they had the money to get married.
“No, it isn’t the girl,” Guttmann continues, looking into his coffee. “It’s the force. I’m thinking pretty seriously about quitting.” He had wanted to talk to LaPointe about this that evening after they’d been at the go-go joint, but there hadn’t been an opportunity. He looks up to see how the Lieutenant is taking the news.
There is no response at all from LaPointe. Perhaps a slight shrug. He never gives advice in this kind of situation; he doesn’t want the responsibility.
There is an uncomfortable, interrogative quality to the silence, so LaPointe looks up at the wall map for something to fill it. “What’s that northwest-southeast line supposed to be?”
Guttmann understands. The Lieutenant doesn’t want to talk about it. Well… “Ah, let me see. Well, that X is the alley where we found Green.”
“I know that.”
“And the circle is his apartment—the rooming house with the concierge with the broken lip? So I just drew a line between them and continued it on southeast to see where it would lead. Just an approximation. It cuts through the middles of blocks and such, but it must have been the general direction he came from.”
“Yes, but he wasn’t going back to his rooming house.”
“Sir?”
“He was going to the Happy Hour Whisky a Go-Go, remember? He had a date with that dancer’s retarded kid.”
Guttmann looks at the map more closely and frowns. “Yeah. That’s right!” He takes out his pencil and crosses to the map. Freehand, he sketches in the revised line, and the vast triangle is reduced by a considerable wedge. “That narrows it down a lot.”
“Sure. To maybe thirty square blocks and six or eight thousand people. Just for the hell of it, let’s take a look at the other lines. What’s the one running roughly east-west?”
“That’s the McGill professor. The X is where his body was found; the circle is his office on the campus.”
“How do you know he was going to his office?”
“Assumption. His apartment was up north. Why would he walk west unless he was going to the campus? Maybe to do some late work. Grade papers, something like that.”
“All right. Assume it. Now, what about the other line? The north-south one?”
“That’s the American. His body was found right… here. And his hotel was downtown, right… ah… here. So I just extended the line back.”
“But he wouldn’t have walked south.”
“Sure he would. That was the direction to his hotel, and also the best direction to go to find taxis.”
“What about his car?”
“Sir?”
“Look in the report. There was something about a rented car. It was found three days later, after the rental agency placed a complaint. Don’t you remember? The car was ticketed for overparking. Bouvier made some wiseassed note about the bad luck of getting a parking ticket the same night you get killed.”
Guttmann taps his forehead with his knuckle. “Yes! I forgot about that.”
“Don’t worry about it. One line out of three isn’t bad. For a Joan.”
“Where was the car parked?”
“It’s in the report. Somewhere a few blocks from where they found the body.”
Guttmann takes up the folder on MacHenry, John Albert, and leafs quickly through it. He misses what he’s looking for and has to flip back. The major reason Dr. Bouvier is able to come up with his little “insights” from time to time is his cross-indexing of information. In the standard departmental files, the murder of MacHenry, the report of the car-rental agency, and the traffic report of the ticketed car would be in separate places; in fact in separate departments. But in Dr. Bouvier’s files, they are together. “Here it is!” Guttmann says. “Let’s see… the rental car… recovered by the agency from police garage… ah! It was parked near the corner of Rue Mentana and Rue Napoleon. Let’s see what that gives us.” He goes to the map again and sketches the new line. Then he turns back to LaPointe. “Now, how about that, Lieutenant?”
The three lines fail to intersect by a triangle half the size of a fingernail. And the center of that triangle is Carre St. Louis, a rundown little park on the edge of the Main.
LaPointe rises and approaches the map. “Could be coincidence.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We would be looking for a woman somewhere around Carre St. Louis who has made love three times in the past six years. It’s just possible that more than one would fit that description.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Murders aren’t solved by drawing lines on maps, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hm-m.”
Guttmann lets the silence extend awhile before offering, “I’ll bet Sergeant Gaspard would let me go with you. I’ve just about finished his paper work too.”
LaPointe taps the pale green rectangle of the squa
re with his thick forefinger. It has been about a week since he wandered through there on his rounds. The night of the Green killing, come to think of it. He pictures the statue of the dying Cremazie.
Pour Mon Drapeau
Je Viens Ici Mourir
The empty pond, its bottom littered. The peace symbol dripping rivulets of paint, like a bleeding swastika. The word love, but the spray can ran out while they were adding fuck yo…
LaPointe nods. “All right. Tomorrow morning well take a walk around there.” He returns to his desk and finishes his cooling coffee, crushing the cup and tossing it toward the wastebasket. “What does she think about it?”
“Sir?”
“Your girl. What does she think about your decision to leave the department?”
Taken off balance, Guttmann shrugs and wanders back to his chair. “Oh, she wants me to do what I want to do. Maybe… maybe I shouldn’t have joined up in the first place. I came out of school with the idea that I could do something… useful. Social work, maybe. I don’t know. I knew how people felt about the police, particularly the young, and I thought… Anyway, I realize now I wasn’t cut out to be a cop. Maybe I’ve always known it. Being with you these few days has sort of pushed me over the edge, you know what I mean? I just don’t have the stomach for it. I don’t want everyone I meet to hate me, or fear me. I don’t want to live in a world populated by tramps and losers and whores and punks and junkies. It’s just… not for me. I’d never be good at it. And nobody likes to be a failure. I’ve talked it all over with Jeanne; she understands.”
“Jeanne?”
“The girl in my building.”
“She’s canadienne, this girl of yours?”
“Didn’t I mention that?”
“No.”
“Well, she is.”
“Hm-m. You’ve got better taste than I thought. Are you going to drink that coffee?”
“No. Here. You know, this idea about the map was really sort of an excuse to come down here and think things over.”
“And now you’ve decided?”
“Pretty much.”
Guttmann sits in silence. LaPointe drinks the coffee as he looks at the wall map with half-closed eyes, then he scrubs his hair with his hand. “Well, I’d better call it a day.”
“Can I drop you off, sir?”
“In that toy car of yours?”
“It’s the only car I’ve got.”
LaPointe seems to consider this for a moment. “All right. You can drop me off.”
Guttmann feels like saying, Thank you very much, sir.
But he does not.
13
A clammy mist settles over Carre St. Louis, sweating the statue of Cremazie, sogging litter in the pond, varnishing the gnarled roots that convulse over a surface too cindery and hard-packed to penetrate. Between stunted, leafless trees, there are weathered park benches, all bearing carved graffiti in which vulgar, romantic, and eponymous impulses overlay and defeat one another.
Once a square of town houses around a pleasant park, Carre St. Louis has run to ruin and has been invaded by jangling, alien styles. To the west is a great Victorian pile, its capricious projections and niches bound together by a broad sign all along the front: young Chinese men’s Christian association. Even the lack of repainting for many years and the hanging mist that broods over the park does not mute its garish, three-foot-high Chinese characters of red and gold. The top of the square is dominated by a grotesquerie, a crenelated castle in old gray stone and new green paint, the home of the Millwright’s Union.
What in hell is a millwright, LaPointe wonders. A man who makes mills? No, that can’t be right. He glances at his watch: quarter after eleven; Guttmann is late.
Only to the east of the park is the integrity of the row houses preserved; and even there it is bogus. Behind the facades, the fashionable and artsy have gutted and renovated. Soon this bit of the Main will be undermined and pried loose from the cultural mosaic. The new inhabitants will have the political leverage to get the trees trimmed, the fountain running, the spray-paint peace symbol cleaned off the side of the pool. There will be grass and shrubs and new benches, and there will be an ironwork fence around the park to which residents will have keys.
LaPointe grunts his disgust and looks around to see Guttmann crossing the park with long strides, anxious about being late.
“I couldn’t find a parking place,” he explains as he approaches. When LaPointe doesn’t respond, he continues with, “I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”
The Lieutenant blocks the small talk. “You know this square?”
“No, sir.” Guttmann looks around. “God, there are a lot of houses. Where do we begin?”
“Let’s take a little stroll around.”
Guttmann walks beside LaPointe, their slow steps crunching the gravel of the central spine path, as they scan the buildings on both sides.
Guttmann continues along in silence, until it occurs to him to ask, “Sir? What is a millwright?”
LaPointe glances at him sideways with a fatigued expression that says, Don’t you know anything?
They cross over from the park and walk down the east side of the square, down the row of renovated buildings. LaPointe walks with the long slow steps of the beat-pounder, his fists deep in his overcoat pockets, looking up at each doorway in turn.
“What are we looking for, sir?”
“No idea.”
“It’s sort of a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? It occurred to me on the way over that if one of those lines on the map was just a few degrees off, the woman could live blocks away from here.”
“Hm-m. If she still lives here. If it’s one woman. If…”
LaPointe’s pace slows slightly as he looks up at the next door. Then he walks on a little more quickly.
“If what, sir?”
“Come on. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
They take coffee in a little place two blocks east of the square, in one of those self-conscious bohemian cafes frequented by the young. At this time of day it is empty, save for an intense couple in the far corner, a bearded boy who appears to be staggering under the impulse to communicate, a skinny girl in round glasses who is straining to understand. They work very hard at avoiding artifice.
The waitress is a young slattern who tugs a snarl out of her hair with her fingers as she repeats Guttmann’s order for two cappuccini. Back at the coffee machine, she stares indifferently out a front window hung with glass beads as she lets steam hiss into the coffee. For once they are in an atmosphere in which Guttmann is more at home than LaPointe, who looks across the table and shakes his head at the young policeman. “You talk about God being on the side of drunks, fools, and kids. I didn’t expect anything to come of your silly game of drawing lines on a map. Not one chance in a thousand.”
“Has something come of it?”
“I’m afraid so. Chances are our woman works, or did work, at that school.”
“School, sir?”
“Seventh building from the end of that renovated row. There was a placard on the door—brass. It’s a school of sorts. One of those places that teaches French and English to foreigners in a hurry.”
Guttmann’s expression widens. “And Green was learning English!”
LaPointe nods.
“But wait a minute. What about the American?”
“Could have been learning French. Maybe he wanted to set up a business in Quebec.”
“And the McGill professor?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see how he fits in. If he does.”
“But wait a minute, sir. Even if the school is the contact point, maybe it isn’t a teacher. Could be one of the students.”
“Over a period of six years?”
“All right. A teacher, then. So what do we do now?”
“We go talk to somebody. See if we can find out which teacher is ours.” LaPointe rises.
“Aren’t you going to finish your coffee, sir?”
“This swill? Just tip the greasy kid and let’s get out of here.”
Considering the slop and dregs he has had to drink with the Lieutenant in Chinese, Greek, and Portuguese cafes, Guttmann doubts that it is the quality of the coffee LaPointe is rejecting.
“…so, out of a total faculty of thirteen, that would make a full-time equivalency of nine or nine and a half, considering that some of my teachers are only part-time, and some are university students training in our techniques of one-to-one intensive language assimilation.” Mlle. Montjean lights her cigarette from a marble-and-gold lighter, takes a deep drag, and tilts her head back to jet the uninhaled smoke upward, away from her guests. Then she lightly touches the tip of her tongue between thumb and forefinger, as though to pluck off a bit of tobacco, a residual gesture from some earlier time when she smoked unfiltered cigarettes.
Many things about her put Guttmann in mind of a fashion model: the meticulous, underrolled coiffure, that bounces with her quick, energetic gestures; the assured, almost rehearsed moves and turns; the long slim arms and legs; the perfectly tailored suit that is both functional and feminine. And, like a model, she appears to be aware of herself at every moment, as though she were seeing herself from the outside. Guttmann finds her voice particularly pleasing in its combining of great precision of pronunciation with a low, warm note just above husky. She laughs in exactly the same key as that in which she speaks.
“I suppose that seems quite a large faculty for a little school like ours, Lieutenant, but we specialize in intensive training with a low student-to-teacher ratio. We submerge the student in a linguistic culture. The student who is learning French, for instance, doesn’t hear a word of English for six hours a day, and he even takes lunch with instructors and other students in a French restaurant. And at night, if he wishes, the student will be taken to French nightclubs, cinema, theatre—all in the company of an instructor. We concentrate on the music of the language, you might say. The student learns to hum in French, even before he learns the words to the song. Our methods were pioneered at McGill, and indeed some of our student teachers are graduate students from there.” Mlle. Montjean suddenly stops and laughs. “I must be sounding like our promotional material.”