The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Afterward, Madame Kadar stripped off her clothes and used Dupré’s bathroom to have a shower. She left her blood-splattered clothes on the bathroom floor and the knife by the bed. She had evidently arrived with a small suitcase containing a change of clothes—and after dressing, she went down to the kitchen and made coffee and waited—”

  “She made coffee after knifing him like that?”

  “The first train doesn’t leave Saint-Germain-en-Laye until five twenty-three AM. She didn’t want to be waiting outside the station—so, yes, she made coffee and wrote that simple note, FOR JUDIT AND ZOLTAN. It sounds like a book dedication, doesn’t it? Besides being an act of revenge perhaps she considered this murder to be a creative act. Certainly her planning was most creative. She left the house around five. It was a fifteen-minute walk to the station. She boarded the first train and changed for the metro at Châtelet. There she proceeded to the Gare de l’Est and bought a first-class ticket to Budapest. She even paid for a separate sleeping compartment. She had to give her own name when booking the first-class compartment. This she did. But she evidently gambled that no one would be stopping by the Dupré house on Sunday . . . or that if it was discovered, it would still take the police most of the day to figure out she was the murderer, and to alert Interpol that she was now on the run. In other words she had, at a minimum, a clear twenty-four hours to get to Budapest. As it turned out, she gambled right. Dupré’s body wasn’t discovered until late Monday afternoon when he failed to show up for work, and his employers called his wife. She went back to his house and came upon the crime scene. Of course, she was immediately considered the prime suspect—the spouse always is in a case of a murder in the home—until the forensics showed that Madame Kadar’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon and that the bloodstained clothes left behind were not Madame Dupré’s.”

  “How did you have her fingerprints on file?”

  “All resident aliens are fingerprinted. Also, in 1976, Madame Kadar became a French citizen—so she was re-fingerprinted. However, as she was traveling as a Frenchwoman, she had to apply for a visa at the Hungarian Embassy here in Paris. At the time, the Communist regime didn’t allow foreigners to obtain an entry permit at their border . . . especially former citizens. Madame Kadar applied for this visa fourteen days before she murdered Dupré, stating that she wanted to visit family members there.”

  “But she hated Hungary . . . especially after what had happened to her father.”

  “What had happened to her father?”

  I told him everything Margit had told me. Several times during this recitation, he looked down at the file, as if he was comparing the story I was telling with that which he had inside this battered, thick manila folder. When I finished, I asked, “Does that correspond with the information you have?”

  “Naturally the Hungarian police—who cooperated with us during our investigation—also informed us of the findings of their investigations into the two murders that Madame Kadar committed on her return to Budapest.”

  “She killed Bodo and Lovas?”

  Long silence. Coutard glared at me. He put down the file. He lit a cigarette. He took several deep thoughtful drags, never once taking his eyes off me. Finally: “I am trying to discern the game you are playing, monsieur. You are under investigation for two murders, and you simultaneously show extensive knowledge of a sequence of murders carried out here and in Budapest by a woman who killed herself in Hungary shortly after murdering her second victim there.”

  “She cut her throat after killing Bodo?”

  “No, after killing Lovas. But let us not digress from the issue of concern to me: why you know so much about this case. Please do not repeat that preposterous alibi that she told you all about this. I will not accept such absurdities. So how and why did you garner all this information? You are a writer, yes? Perhaps someone told you about this case—it got quite a bit of publicity at the time. You were intrigued, and using the Internet, you found out all the details of the case. And now, under suspicion for two murders yourself, you spin this absurd tale of an affair with a dead woman in an attempt to—”

  “Were there any reports in the Hungarian papers about the reason why she returned to Budapest to murder Bodo and Lovas?”

  “You interrupted me again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You do that once more, I’ll send you back to the cells for twenty-four hours.”

  Won’t you be sending me back there anyway?

  Coutard reopened the file and spent several minutes studying some more old photocopied pages.

  “We have a selection of the Hungarian press clippings about the case, and a French translation provided for us. Given the nature of the regime back then, the official reason given as to why she murdered Bodo and Lovas was, ‘These two brave defenders of Hungary had arrested Madame Kadar’s father when he was spreading “seditious lies against the homeland’ ” . . . that’s an exact quote. According to the State media, he subsequently killed himself while in prison after it was revealed he was an agent working for the CIA. There is no mention in any report—either police or in the press—of the incident you describe, in which Madame Kadar was forced, as a seven-year-old girl, to watch her father’s hanging. Then again, the Hungarian police in 1980 would never have shared such information with us. Instead, in their reports—and in the State press—Madame Kadar was depicted as a mentally unbalanced woman who, having recently lost her husband and daughter in a tragic accident, was on a rampage of revenge. The State newspaper printed all the French reports about Dupré’s murder. They also intimated that the attacks on Bodo and Lovas were savage ones.”

  “Did the Hungarian police let you know how she tracked the two men down?”

  “Of course not. According to the inspector’s report at the time, the police in Budapest only nominally cooperated with us. And no, they didn’t inform us that Bodo and Lovas were members of the security services—though in all the Hungarian press reports, they constantly referred to the two men as ‘heroes’ who had ‘given their lives to protect the security of the homeland’ . . . which is usual State double-speak for members of the Secret Police.”

  “And Margit killed herself after murdering the two men?”

  He opened the file and found a document, glanced at one page, then turned to those stapled beneath it.

  “This is a translation of a telex—remember the telex?—sent to us from the police in Budapest. First victim, Béla Bodo, age sixty-six, was found dead in his apartment in a residential district of Pest on the night of September 21, 1980. He was found bound and gagged to a chair in front of his kitchen table. His hands had been taped to the table using heavy duct tape, of the type generally employed for patching leaky pipes. The victim’s ten fingers had been severed from his hands, his eyes had been gouged out, his throat cut.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

  “There was nothing frenzied about such an attack. One must surmise that the murderer was very slow and deliberate in her maiming of her victim, in order to inflict maximum pain and terror on him. The coup de grâce when his throat was cut must have been a desperate relief to him.”

  “Did the police tell you how she had managed to bind and gag Bodo in the first place?”

  “No, but like us, they too intimated that she must have entered his apartment carrying a firearm—thus forcing him to ‘assume the position’ at the kitchen table while she bound and gagged him. Had he known what was awaiting him, I’ve no doubt he would have tried to escape. Being shot to death is so much cleaner than the torment he suffered.”

  “And Lovas?”

  “The same treatment. Only in this instance, a neighbor heard Lovas scream something—probably before Madame Kadar gagged his mouth—and decided to call the police. They took their time arriving—maybe thirty minutes after the call. When they got there, they banged on the door and announced themselves and insisted whoever was there should open the door immediately. There was no reply. So they got the co
ncierge to open the door. As the door swung up, a spray of blood hit the officers. Madame Kadar had just cut her throat . . . and judging from the blood still pumping from Lovas, Madame Kadar had sliced his jugular right before her own.

  “They tried to save them both. They both died.”

  He reached into the file, pulled out two aging black-and-white photos, and pushed them across the table to me. The first showed the bloodied head of a man lying limp, his torso also covered in blood, his hands taped to a table and so mutilated that they appeared to be gory stumps.

  The second showed a woman sprawled on a linoleum floor, lying in a pool of blood, her clothes sodden, a kitchen knife in one hand, a gash across her throat. I studied the face. Without question, it was a younger version of Margit. I looked at her eyes. Though frozen, they seemed to glow with an exultant rage—the same sort of heightened fury that I saw in her eyes when she talked about the death of her father, or the accident that took Zoltan and Judit from her. I stared at her postmortem eyes again in the photograph. It was as if Margit had taken this rage with her from the past life into eternity.

  The past life? But she was here, in this life. Now.

  I pushed the photograph back toward the inspector. I bowed my head, not knowing what to say, what to think.

  “Given the monstrousness of the attacks,” Coutard said, “it is obvious that the murderer was not of sound mind. Yet she might not have committed suicide if the police hadn’t shown up while she was slowly maiming Lovas to death.”

  “But she is not dead,” I said.

  He tapped the crime-scene photograph of Margit.

  “You insist that the woman shown here is alive?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed me another document from the file. It was in Hungarian and looked official. Toward the top of it was a space in which Margit’s name had been written.

  “This is the death certificate from the medical examiner in Budapest—signed after he performed the autopsy on Madame Kadar. The investigating inspector in Saint-Germain-en-Laye closed the case on the murder of Monsieur Dupré upon receiving this certificate from the Hungarian authorities, as he had proof that the individual who perpetrated this crime was dead. But you still insist that Madame Kadar is alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand the seriousness of your position, Monsieur Ricks?”

  “I didn’t kill Omar. I didn’t kill Yanna’s husband.”

  “Even though all the evidence points to you. Not just evidence . . . but motive as well.”

  “I had nothing to do with their deaths.”

  “And your alibi—at least in the case of the murder of Monsieur Attani—is that you were at the apartment of the woman whose death certificate you have just read?”

  “You have heard me tell you, in detail, essential aspects of her life—”

  “And these details could have been easily researched by you using a search engine . . .”

  “Ask yourself, Inspector, please, the same question you posed to me: Why would I be interested in such an old murder case? How would I have found out about it in the first place? And how would I know more intimate details of Madame Kadar’s past than you do?”

  “Monsieur, I have been doing this job for over twenty years now. And if there is one thing I comprehend about human behavior, it is this: the moment you think you can predict its pattern is the moment when it changes, and you discover that other people’s realities are often divorced from the one you exist in. You say a dead woman is alive. I say, the man sitting in front of me seems rational and lucid and intelligent. And yet, when shown proof that his lover left this life twenty-six years ago . . .”

  He opened his hands, as if to say, And there it is.

  “So you must understand, monsieur . . . I am not interested in why you have created this invention in your head, or how you gleaned your facts, or whether or not you embellished the story with tales of your lover being forced to watch her father’s execution. Naturally, I am intrigued by such detail. Naturally, I am curiously impressed by your forceful certainty that Madame Kadar exists. But as a police inspector, such interest is overshadowed by empirical facts. And the empirical facts of the case are profoundly empirical. The facts point to your culpability. Just as the fact that you use a dead woman as an alibi . . .”

  Another shrug.

  “I do suggest that you reconsider your story, monsieur.”

  “I am telling you the truth,” I said.

  He let out a deep, frustrated sigh.

  “And I am telling you that you are either a compulsive liar or an irrational liar or both. I am now sending you back to the cells so you can reflect on your situation, and perhaps come to your senses and end this mad self-deception.”

  “Am I not allowed some sort of legal representation at this stage?”

  “We can hold you for seventy-two hours without contact with the outside world.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “No, monsieur . . . that’s the law.”

  He picked up the phone and dialed a number. Then he stood up and went over to the window and peered out.

  “This morning we visited the address you gave my colleague of the apartment where you were having your ‘assignations’ with Madame Kadar. The concierge said that he wasn’t aware of your visits. So how did you gain access to it?”

  “Madame Kadar let me in.”

  “I see.”

  “How else would I have gotten inside? I mean, the apartment I described to you is exactly the one you saw, isn’t it?”

  Coutard continued to stare out the window as he said, “Madame Kadar did live in that apartment until her death in 1980. Since then, it has been empty . . . though it has remained in her estate. A small trust that was left behind after her death continues to pay, by prélèvement automatique, the service charge. But no one has occupied it in over twenty-five years. Can you describe the apartment to me, please?”

  I did. In detail. He nodded.

  “Yes, that is the apartment as I found it . . . including the 1970s décor. There was one major difference, however. The apartment I saw hadn’t been cleaned or dusted in years.”

  “That’s nonsense. It was always spotless when I visited it.”

  “I’m certain that’s how you saw it, monsieur.”

  A uniformed officer knocked on Coutard’s door and came inside.

  “Please take Monsieur Ricks back to his cell. He will be spending some more time with us.”

  The officer approached me and took me by the arm. I turned to Coutard and said, “You have to try to believe me.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said.

  They locked me up in the same cell. I was left alone there for hours with no reading material, no pen or paper on which to write, nothing but my thoughts to preoccupy me.

  Am I insane? Have I been imagining all this? During the past few months, have I been acting out a strange, warped reverie? And if it is true that Margit has been dead for all these years, what sort of alternative reality have I been living in all these months?

  A tray of cold tasteless food arrived around seven that evening. I was famished, so I ate it. Around nine, sleep began to overtake me. I stripped off my now rank jeans and crawled under the grubby blanket and quickly drifted into unconsciousness. Only tonight I did not sleep the dreamless sleep I craved. Tonight the nocturnal screening room in my mind played out a horror show where there was a trial, and I was in the dock, and everyone kept pointing fingers at me and shouting in French, and there was a judge calling me a danger to society and condemning me to life imprisonment with no chance of parole, and being locked up in this cell for twenty-three hours a day, and me continuing to swear blind that they had to find this woman Margit . . . that she would explain it all . . . and the walls of the cell closing in around me . . . and me huddled in a corner on the concrete floor, my head leaned up against the toilet, my eyes as frozen as Margit’s in the crime-scene photograph . . . and . . .

  That’s
when I jumped awake, my body drenched, my teeth biting in the filthy pillow. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. Then the realization hit: You’re incarcerated.

  I had no watch, so I didn’t know what time it was. I had no toothbrush, so I couldn’t rid my mouth of the disgusting aftertaste of my nightmare. I had no change of clothes or access to a shower, so I was now feeling totally ripe. After emptying my bladder in the toilet and finishing what little water was left in the bottle, I stretched out on the bunk and shut my eyes and tried to empty my brain and blank out the present and tell myself to somehow stay calm.

  But it’s hard to vanquish negative thoughts when you’re about to be charged with two murders, and when you’re living in a hall of mirrors where nothing is as it seems . . .

  The cell door opened. Morning light filtered in. An officer stood there with a tray of food.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Eight thirty.”

  “Is there any chance I could have a toothbrush and toothpaste, please?”

  “We’re not a hotel.”

  “How about something to read then?”

  “We’re not a library.”

  “Please, monsieur . . .”

  He handed me the tray. The cell door closed behind him. There was a plastic cup filled with weak orange juice, a hard roll, a pat of butter, a small plastic mug of coffee, plastic utensils. Five minutes later the cell door briefly opened and a hand shot in, holding a copy of yesterday’s Le Parisien.

  “Thank you,” I said as the cell door clanged shut. Having devoured the breakfast—I was famished—I now devoured the newspaper, reading it cover to cover, trying to lose myself in its reports of petty crimes, of disputes between neighbors, of road accidents, of more internal problems with some local football team, of new movies opening this week, and the bust-up of a French pop star marriage. The obituaries, as always, gripped me. How do you summarize an entire life—especially one that doesn’t merit a big journalistic splash? Beloved husband of . . . Adored husband of . . . Much admired colleague of . . . A respected employee of . . . Sadly missed by . . . Funeral Mass held tomorrow at . . . In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to . . . And that’s that. Another life vanished.