Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  I don’t know whether Marsha had seen something or not, because we didn’t see each other afterwards. And I never tried to remember precisely what I saw that evening, because I knew it would have been in vain. I only know that I asked myself for years why I had to go inside the Hogarth house and what kind of sick curiosity prompted me to do it, apart from my great love for Dan Johnson’s daughter. Or, more exactly, why, once inside, did I become aware of that thing that was lurking in the darkness, as if it was waiting for me and only for me. I may not remember what I saw that night. But from then on, I knew that there are things far worse than death, and that each of us has their own one-of-a-kind nightmare.

  I remembered what Julie had once told me: “You’ve picked the most dangerous profession in the world. One day, while you’re raking through those dark places, you’ll come upon a monster that will gobble you up in the blink of an eye, before you even realize what’s going on. If I were a ghost hunter like you, I’d be more careful.”

  I went to the bathroom, took a shower, and then fell back asleep, leaving the bedside lamp on.

  In the morning, I switched on my laptop and checked my emails. In my inbox I found a new message from Mallory. One of his researchers had come across some new information about Abraham Hale. It was a story that ran in a local newspaper in Louisiana back in the early sixties. The scan was attached and read like this:

  The Mirror, September 4, 1962

  Recent murder case possibly connected to five-year-old kidnapping

  by Randal Cormier and Olima Landry

  According to a source close to the police, the murder that recently shattered the quiet community of Credence Creek might be related to a kidnapping case. Three years ago, a local boy named Abraham Hale, aged five at the time, was kidnapped and held for more than two weeks at an unknown location.

  Abraham was born in Credence Creek, a township about twenty miles from Baton Rouge. His father is a salesman and during the fall fishing season works on a shrimp boat. His mother is a housewife. Abraham is the couple’s only child.

  At around seven o’clock on August 14, 1959, Mrs. Hale realized that her son had vanished from their front porch, where he’d been playing just minutes before. Mr. Hale was out of town on business and after looking for her son in the surrounding area, she called the police. It was as if the ground had swallowed him up.

  The authorities carried out an extensive operation for several days and nights—the Sheriff’s Office in Albert County, Louisiana State Police, and even federal agents were involved in the search—but there was no trace of the child. Kidnapping for ransom was deemed unlikely given the family’s financial circumstances, and detectives concluded that the boy had probably wandered into the swamp, about three hundred yards from the Hales’ home, and either drowned or been eaten by gators. After a week, the search was called off. Pictures of little Abraham remained pasted up all over town. Neighbors and acquaintances described the Hales as a quiet, reclusive family, with no known problems.

  Two weeks later, on September 4th, Abraham was found wandering in Mulberry Park by some passersby who alerted the police.

  The boy was wearing new clothes, the labels of which had been carefully removed. A medical examination concluded that he showed no traces of physical violence, nor had he been abused in any way. He had been well fed. The authorities stated that somebody had been looking after him during the missing period.

  For days, the police, his parents, and a psychologist from the county general hospital tried to get the boy to speak, but all he would say was that he remembered somebody had come up to him on the porch while he was playing and that he couldn’t recall anything else.

  Four days ago, the body of a white adult male was discovered in the swamp a short walk from the Hales’ house. He was wearing a black leather jacket and jeans, and had drowned two days before, a suspicious occurrence, given that the county has been experiencing a severe drought and the water level is very low. “It’s like the guy drowned in a puddle,” Sheriff Donoghue said.

  At the autopsy, the medical examiner discovered that the victim had been hit over the back of his head with a blunt object. Detectives suspect that he may have gone to the edge of the swamp to relieve himself, before being hit from behind by an unknown aggressor. He lost consciousness, fell, and drowned in just a couple of inches of water. The man still had fifty-five dollars in his pocket, ruling out robbery as a motive.

  The victim, in what has now become a murder investigation, turned out to be Eloi Lafarge, a vagrant who spent most of his life in and out of prison, with a long list of convictions including sexual assaults against minors. He recently moved to the area from New Orleans and was living in a caravan on the other side of the town.

  The police think that there might be a connection between Abraham’s disappearance, three years ago, and the death of the man near the Hales’ home. A source confirmed that Mr. Hale was brought in for questioning. “It was a simple interview rather than an interrogation,” our source stressed, “and Mr. Hale was cooperative and responded to all our questions. He does not have an alibi for the evening of the murder.”

  We’ll be bringing you news of further developments as the investigation continues.

  Mallory had added a postscript:

  I don’t know whether this piece of information is important or not, but it looks like Hale Sr. didn’t believe his son. He thought that Abraham was lying and remembered everything that had happened. The guy was a violent alcoholic, who abused his family. He put pressure on his son to get him to tell the truth. Eventually, Mrs. Hale filed a complaint with the police and they gave him a caution. The police never found out who killed Lafarge and whether the guy had been involved in the kidnapping.

  I also found something very interesting about the old man, Lucas Duchamp. I’ll try to call you later today.

  Mallory

  He called me at about ten, told me about the information he’d uncovered, and gave me the phone number of a man named François Garnier, who back in the seventies had worked for the DGSE, the French secret service.

  I phoned Garnier that evening and had a long talk with him. After a rambling introduction, he told me what he knew about Lucas Duchamp. He kept insisting that none of what he told me should be made public, and I assured him yet again that I intended nothing of the sort.

  I spent the rest of the evening checking online a few details about the piece of information Garnier had given to me, and the next day I left for France.

  nineteen

  I LANDED IN PARIS at 8:35 a.m., having finished the last fifty pages of an entirely predictable crime novel, watched two movies, and eaten a terrible meal. The weather was dreadful: a cold rain and biting wind whipped across the city. After I passed through passport control and collected my luggage, I had to wait for fifteen minutes in a long line before I finally got a cab.

  I’d visited the city a few times before, the last time being a year and a half previously. There were few places I liked at first sight as much as I did Paris, and I can still remember the impression the bridges over the Seine, the large plazas, and the historic monuments had on me the first time. On the journey from the airport, I looked out the window of the metallic green Renault Scenic, trying to relive the sensation of that first encounter.

  But all I saw were the streams of water furiously lashing the wide boulevards, through which people and cars darted like fugitives. I didn’t even realize when we arrived at the hotel. We pulled up in front of a tall building and the driver turned and said, “Le Meridien, monsieur.”

  The reception desk was at the left of the entrance and I had to wait another ten minutes for my turn. I went up to my room and stored my things in the closet by the bed. I took a shower, changed my clothes, and went down to the bar on the ground floor, which was just opening. The breakfast room opposite was crowded, and it looked like the hotel, although huge, was probably almost fully booked.

  In my imagination, the hotel from Josh and Abraham’s story
looked more like an old mansion on a mysterious street, covered in ivy and crammed with secrets. Instead, I found myself in a modern building fitted with dark marble and stainless steel, and I wondered whether I might have come to the wrong place.

  I ordered a coffee and drank it slowly, chatting with a young bartender with a golden ring in his right earlobe. The hotel first opened in the early seventies and had gone through a couple of renovations, he told me. It was always full, thanks to the fact that it was near the Palais des Congrès, where there were conferences almost every day. I asked him whether he knew of any dark tales connected with the building’s past, and he asked me if I was a journalist.

  “I’m a psychiatrist,” I said.

  “Oh, I see ...You Americans have an interesting term for people in that trade—shrimp?”

  “The word you’re looking for is shrink.”

  “Right, shrink. Well, I’ve been in the business for eight years now and I’ve worked in a number of hotels. Every place has its own story. Two years ago, a woman committed suicide here. Her lover, who was a famous singer from Spain, had left her, so she booked herself into a suite and jumped out the window. Management kept it quiet, because stories like that can drive customers away. But people quickly forget unpleasant things. We have short memories, don’t we? And of course there was also the story of those twin girls who were murdered with an axe by their crazy father …”

  I looked at him in amazement. “What twins?”

  He laughed. “I’m joking. I remembered an old movie with Jack Nicholson, The Shining, about a big hotel up in the mountains.”

  “I’ve seen it, it’s a very good movie,” I replied, and signed the bill. “See you later, take care.”

  *

  I called Claudette Morel and told her I’d arrived in Paris. She gave me the address of a café and invited me to meet her there at twelve o’clock.

  I had two hours to kill, so I left the hotel for a walk. I went right, passed a pub called the James Joyce, which wasn’t open yet, and arrived in a small plaza with heated sidewalk cafés covered with awnings. The rain turned to bone-chilling sleet. I headed toward the Champs-Elysées, and stopped in front of a café with a front terrace called Le Madrigal. The place was heated and I sat down at a table.

  It was full of people laden with shopping bags, many of them with that dazed, contented air of people on vacation, a stream of passersby flowing along the pavement and gazing at the window displays. Not far away, the Arc de Triomphe looked like a large gray hound crouching ready to pounce.

  I ordered a coffee and thought about Simone, Josh, and Abraham.

  I imagined them meeting in a place like the one I was in and pictured Abraham’s reaction when he read for the first time in Josh’s eyes that he had more than a friendly interest in the woman he’d fallen in love with. Cain’s motive for killing Abel was jealousy—Abel’s offerings were more pleasing to the Lord than his own. But in that case, who had fallen in love with whom, and who had been jealous of whom? Somewhere, in a big city shining like a diamond, three destinies had intersected and mingled forever. Whether in pain or love wasn’t important—too often the two words mean one and the same thing.

  A blonde girl dressed in a burgundy-and-blue school uniform bent down, picked up something from the pavement, and walked away, absorbed in her cellphone. I finished my coffee, stood up, and headed for the cabstand across the boulevard.

  *

  I was quickly able to pick Ms. Morel out. She was sitting alone at a table on the pavement, dressed in a green raincoat which she hadn’t taken off, her frizzy hair pushed back with a couple of bobby pins. Although she was wearing a lot of makeup, it was obvious that the passing years hadn’t been forgiving.

  “Ms. Morel?” I asked, and she gave a nod. “I’m Dr. James Cobb, pleased to meet you.”

  I sat down at the table, on a chair upholstered in red artificial leather, while she studied me carefully, sizing me up with her light brown eyes.

  “Pleased to meet you too. You must be very interested in this story to have come all this way for it,” she said and then pointed at the menu. “Your first time in France?”

  “No, I’ve been here a few times. Thank you once again for agreeing to meet with me, Ms. Morel.”

  “Please call me Claudette. May I call you James?”

  “Thank you, Claudette. Of course you can.”

  “Are you married, James? Do you have any children?”

  “No, I’m not married.”

  She already had a glass of amber-colored liquid in front of her. I asked her what she was drinking, and she said, “Calvados, apple brandy. It’s a suitable drink in France. If I were ten years younger, I’d show you the Paris that only the real locals know. We’d have hot tea and red wine, a stroll down the Champs-Elysées, and stay up until dawn in a café in Montmartre. But for me those days have long since passed.”

  I ordered a Calvados, thanking God that she wasn’t ten years younger.

  “Santé,” she said theatrically and half-drained her glass.

  I tasted the liquid. It was as strong as whiskey but more aromatic. A blackbird landed near the table and gazed at us with its beady black eyes and then took flight, vanishing into the sky. An ambulance siren could be heard in the distance, like a bad omen.

  “Well, James, you haven’t told me yet why you’re so interested in this,” she said.

  “The whole affair’s very intriguing. I’m sure that Laura and her parents did everything they could in order to find out what happened to Simone, didn’t they?”

  Her face suddenly darkened and her mood changed, as often happens with drunks. She finished her drink and then fumbled through her handbag, which was on the chair next to her, took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one of them, smearing its filter with lipstick.

  “Laura and I weren’t just schoolmates, but the best of friends,” she said, while looking at the waiter and pointing at her glass. “We always kept each other warm, because in our lives it was always winter.”

  She suddenly went silent, as if she’d forgotten what she meant to say, drank her second drink in a single go, and looked around her primly. The table was very close to a heater and it was warm, but she didn’t seem to notice, wrapped up in her shabby coat.

  “I’m desperate, James. Two years ago, a friend of mine persuaded me to mortgage my apartment and invest the money in a business that came to nothing. He vanished after that, and now I barely have enough to get by. My husband died fifteen years ago, I don’t have children, brothers or sisters, and so I’m all by myself. I live hand to mouth and it won’t be long before I will be thrown out onto the street. I couldn’t bear such a thing. I don’t deserve to spend the last years of my life in a cheap old people’s home because I was stupid enough to trust a friend.”

  Her accent was getting thicker the more she drank, and it was harder and harder to understand her. She ordered another drink and I realized that I’d have to work fast: at the rate she was going, in another half hour or so she’d be stone drunk. I noticed that she was wearing an old gold watch on her left wrist, probably a family heirloom.

  “Do you know what happened to Mrs. Claudia Duchamp, Simone’s mother?”

  “She died in the late eighties, from peritonitis. I found out later from my mother, who had been in touch with one of the Duchamps’ neighbors. We weren’t even invited to attend the funeral. I understood that she’d been feeling sick, but refused to see the doctor. When she eventually did, it was too late, she already had septicemia. I don’t know why Laura refused to talk to me all these years. We were like sisters.”

  She lit another cigarette and asked me, “Now, might you be willing to offer some money for the information I have, James? Are you rich, like Fleischer? You probably don’t know this, but a few months ago I called him and sent him a letter. I must admit: I asked him for money, I knew he had plenty of it. And I was sure that he didn’t want anybody else to find out what I know.”

  I told myself that she must
have sent the letter around the same time Josh hired me, so her call must have been the catalyst for his last desperate attempt to remember what happened that night.

  “When precisely did you call him?”

  “Four or five months back, in the fall ... I think it was in September. He probably thought I was just an old woman who wasn’t worth paying any attention to. We talked on the phone once, but after that he refused to speak to me. A man called Walter, who was very rude, told me to stop calling.”

  “Mr. Fleischer was very ill.”

  “I know, you told me, but if he’d wanted to help me, it would have been very simple for a wealthy man like him. If I hadn’t been so desperate, I’d never have asked him for help. Not him, never, because ... So, what do you think? Are you willing to pay?”

  “I’d like to know what you have to say first.”

  She grinned and winked at me. “Do you think that’s how it works? Do you think I’m some stupid old woman you can ply with drinks so that she’ll talk?”

  “No, I don’t think that. But I have to know how important and valuable what you have to tell me is, before we discuss anything else.”

  “Do you think I’m afraid of you?” she snapped. “You look like a hitman, not like a real doctor. Have you come here to intimidate me, to tell me to keep my mouth shut?”

  “Not at all. I just want you to tell me what you know, and then we can discuss the money.”

  For a few seconds she seemed to be bracing herself. A beam of sunlight bashed her face; beneath her makeup, her nose and cheeks were covered by a scribbly pattern of tiny red-blue veins, like a small-scale, clumsy reproduction of a Jackson Pollock painting.

  She looked around her, as if afraid that somebody might overhear us, waved her cigarette at me, and said, “Well, it’s about those boys, Abraham Hale and Joshua Fleischer.”