by John Farrow
“There you go. You could be the detective.”
“Hardly.”
They separate again in order to stroll in single file, and give themselves over to the sea breezes and the sun as they walk across the back of Seven Days Work and gain the promontory known as Ashburton Head. Émile switches his walking stick from hand to hand as he tromps along. The constant pace and the mesmerizing clarity of light and the newness of the experience, the terrain and the astonishing vista transport him through time. He may as easily be a wandering minstrel in Elizabethan days, or a shepherd on a Greek isle centuries ago, or a man hiking across the Holy Land on his way to pay taxes to the Romans some millennia back. Except that he walks on happily.
By a small creek, he stops. A mood, a thought, takes hold.
Sandra wonders what it might be.
He has to think it through himself, and ask, “Can we stay here a moment?”
She’s content to do so, as there’s much to see. They are not looking straight down at the water, but across a meadow and then through trees, yet the bay is visible to them and Sandra spots flashes of white moving in tandem, far off, which she takes to be whale spouts.
“What Pete said,” her husband remarks, and his tone is reflective, even reverential, in a way that he can be sometimes. For all his hard-core life as a big-city cop, he’s nurtured a spiritual side. “It might not be true to the nth degree, but close enough. This is old rock. Among the oldest on the planet. Not the whole island, but Seven Days Work. Upheavals, ice ages, tidal erosions, whole continents breaking apart and scattering, oceans both disappearing, then intruding. All that. This rock on which we’re standing has experienced all that. Eons and eons. We can look at great mountain peaks, yet they’re babes in time compared to this rock.”
“It’s something,” she agrees. It’s almost too much to take in, thinking of its survival through time, not dissimiliar to contemplating the lives of stars.
“And here the rock stands,” Cinq-Mars continues, “part of an island where people are dissecting a murder. After all this time,” he scoffs, “we’re infants. We haven’t learned to get along.”
“Sad. But what’s on your mind, Émile?”
“Sometimes I regret my career. A life devoted to chasing down the bad guys. Dealing with death and destruction day in, day out. There’s so much more to grapple with in the universe than just our human wasteland.”
Sandra wraps two arms around him and hugs, so that he’s supported by his two legs, his wife, and his mighty walking stick. “You did good, Émile. You did good.”
He concedes as much, although to a lesser degree than she might prefer, and they resume their march.
They leave Seven Days Work and cross the back of Ashburton Head.
Émile does not expect to identify the scene of the dreadful crime that has befallen the island. Had this been his handiwork, no sign of it would exist once he and his people concluded their investigation. Police, then, are less thorough here. The most telling evidence that they’ve landed at the minister’s last stand is a ribbon of yellow police tape knotted to the branch of a bush. Long strands of tape that previously sequestered the scene have been torn away and removed, but not untied, so telltale indicators remain. Sandra sees them, too, a second piece and a third small ribbon, and slows down to suit Émile’s shortened stride.
Émile Cinq-Mars can’t help it. He knows better than to tempt himself, and yet he has to look around.
Sandra is not cross. She expects no less, and doesn’t interfere with or admonish his embedded professional interest. This is her man, after all, and she is not about to change him. She permits him to peruse the crime scene on his own, letting him get his famous feel for the place beyond what’s visible. She sits while he wanders in a great circle, almost disappearing from her view back into the forest, and she knows that he’s done only when he returns to her side. She’s spread out part of their picnic to nosh on before continuing the hike. Émile sits on the grass with cheese and pear slices between them, and sips from the cup of red wine he’s offered. Before them, a stand of trees lines the edge of the cliff, and beyond that is the deep blue of the water below the lighter vast blue of the sky. If this place was not heaven before, it is now—now that an investigation occupies his mind.
“No secrets,” she instructs him. “Tell me what you see, Émile.”
“They missed it,” he says. “I’ll bet you anything they didn’t see what was right before their eyes.”
She knows what a brazen remark it is. That attitude often got him in hot water with colleagues. Not only is he claiming to be attuned to clues that other policemen didn’t notice, but he’s brash enough to surmise how they’ve conducted the investigation, what they’ve observed and concluded and missed. All this from taking a brief stroll around an empty meadow.
“Okay,” she encourages him, although her invitation is partly a challenge. “I’m not saying that I doubt you. I’m not that foolish. Just tell me how the heck can you reach that conclusion from looking around at grass and rocks?”
What he says next surprises her more than anything he’s confided in the past about his professional life. “I know,” he admits. “I know. It scares me, too.”
She goes quiet again, waiting, aware that his intention is not to show off. He told her one time that people, mainly other officers, prosecutors, and attorneys, usually want him to explain every drip and dribble of how he has entered into his conclusions. He always resents that approach to his work. He learned over the course of his career to back up his conclusions with the force of logic and evidence, and to expect that people who want to know what he knows also want to know how he got there, how he leapt to the right conclusions. Often, that is material that he cannot reveal. He often does not know exactly how it works himself. Intuition, he’s convinced, is a powerful force when treated with respect and properly nurtured. But try to explain that to a superior officer, or even a cadet. Try to explain that the mind has a core brain so rapid that it has no language, because speech is too slow, and communicates through impressions to the person with a mind able and willing to translate those impressions into ideas. What is commonly called intuition, Cinq-Mars credits to that core rapid-fire brain within everyone.
“Way up behind us,” he says.
“Where you were walking?”
“I went up to get an overview.”
“Your famous feel for the place.”
“But I found a clue instead.”
She looks around behind her, to the perimeter of where he patrolled.
“I don’t see anything,” Sandra admits.
“I’ll take you up in a minute. I saw grass that’s been trampled, probably while it was wet. It hasn’t popped back yet. So I followed that line. I came upon a site where someone may have been having the same problem as our new friend-for-life, Pete Briscoe. You remember what he said about trying to dig in soil that wasn’t solid rock just below the surface? Six, ten inches down—in places, sometimes less, sometimes more—this is solid rock.”
“Not to mention the oldest on earth. So?” she asks.
“Not the best or easiest place to bury a dog. Or, for that matter, a human being. The departed minister was to have a grave dug for him up there. Or, more likely, he was asked to dig his own grave. In any case, the digging commenced, but once the digger hit solid rock, and tried again, and again, fruitlessly, that part of the job had to be amended. That’s when he was tied to a tree instead.”
“How do you know he was tied to a tree?”
“People in town said so. I happened to overhear them.”
“Oh. Okay, smart guy. Aren’t you the brilliant detective.”
“But they missed it, Sandra. They missed that he was supposed to be buried up here and never found. Lescavage was supposed to disappear. Becoming a public spectacle was a second, and therefore the less preferred, option. Something about him being a public spectacle might compromise the killer, and that’s why the killer wanted him underground. Th
at might even be why he had his stomach cut out. To change the dynamic. To fool people. Also, because the killer panicked, I think, once his first option dissolved. That’s going to be a key element to this case, that he was supposed to disappear completely but the killer panicked. The unknown facts of the case have the potential to unwind against the killer. If the cops ever get on it, that is.”
“You’ll have to tell them, Émile.”
He releases a long, slow breath. “I’m not investigating this murder, Sandra.”
He seems particularly determined. “Okay. You don’t have to be,” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
“But you can still tell them.”
“They’ll think me an ass.”
They continue with their lunch. Sandra knows her husband too well and she thinks to ask, although he’s given her no indication to do so, “What else, Émile?” With him, there is always something else.
He glances at her almost guiltily. As though to have his synapses this far away from her and involved with a whole other agenda constitutes a form of marital cheating. He’s not thinking of some lover he doesn’t know or a fantasy he’s willing to indulge, he’s simply gone off into the ether, into the passionate embrace of an idea.
“Oh, Sandra,” he moans unhappily, “I really hate to say this.”
He needs encouragement, which she provides. “Just say it, Émile.”
He really does hate to reveal what he feels compelled to impart, so instead says something else. He asks a question. “Why do people come to a high promontory like this in a storm? Not for the weather. It’s miserable wherever you go. You can stay put and get just as wet. Not for the view. There is none in the rain at night. What advantage, in the midst of a deluge, does high ground provide? Other than salvation from flooding, or a better chance of a lightning strike, I suppose.”
Nothing comes to mind for Sandra. “Tell me,” she says.
“Radio signals,” he replies.
He thinks that this might end the discussion, but she’s not been fooled.
“Come on, Émile, what is it that you don’t want to tell me?”
He looks at her first, a hazard in a moment like this, then away.
“I think I know who committed the murder,” he tells her very quietly, and she can tell that he sincerely regrets having to say so.
Sandra looks around at the scene, at the lovely waving grasses, the trees, the shining vista. She looks at the dirt and the rocks and marvels that such inert objects could impart to her husband their secrets.
“So you’re on the case,” she says, “whether you want to be or not.” So much for our vacation, she’s thinking. “You have to be.”
“No.” His tone is quite emphatic, which surprises her yet again. “I can’t be. To prove it will take local knowledge, which I obviously don’t have. And even if I did, I think it might be extremely difficult at best, and more likely impossible. Not being on the case, I have to keep my mouth shut, because of course I might be wrong. And if I reveal only part of what I know, that could be destructive. Better to let things evolve on their own. A little knowledge can wreck things, and that’s all I have. A scant tidbit of knowledge. I’m better off assuming that I’m wrong. It’s not my job to get an innocent person into a whole shitload of trouble with only second-rate cops on the case. So I’m staying out of it.”
“Pointe finale,” she says, really to tease him. Émile nods in agreement. She’s still not sure, and as she packs up the remains of their picnic, adds, “We’ll see, Émile. I also have intuition, and I don’t believe that you’re done with this yet. You’re trying too hard not to be. That won’t work.”
“I don’t know what it is exactly, San, but I’m determined to stay out of it. That surprises me, too. I just believe it’s the right thing. Let the local boys handle it.”
He wanders off for a sheltered pee. On the way back, he studies, not for the first time, the cairn where someone has been sick, probably upon seeing the body as the rains would have washed it away had the person been sick earlier. So, best guess, not the killer’s vomit or the victim’s. If a policemen lost his appetite for life here, he feels empathy for that man or woman, and thinks no less of him or her, and, rather, in a strange way, thinks more of that person. The sight that instigated this illness, a glimpse of the eviscerated victim, must have been savagely ugly. Photographs would have been taken. Although he’s not on the case, not by a long shot, Émile accepts that he will find it hard to resist the temptation to examine them should anyone offer. He hopes that no one will.
“Why, Émile,” Sandra wants to know upon his return, “are you so convinced that the police didn’t see what you did? You haven’t spoken to them about this in any great detail.”
“The footprints in the grass give them away. We can see where the investigators tromped through here, and none of their footprints goes high enough, up to where there was an attempt—three attempts, I’d say—at digging.”
She has another issue to broach. “If you think you know the killer, who is it?”
“Remember the last time you had too much knowledge?”
Another time. Another place. She knew too much and was kidnapped. “Different situation, surely.”
“True. You’re in no danger here. But you might meet the person in question. Are you sure that you won’t accidentally tip off that person about my suspicions? How could you not? Or treat that person differently than you would otherwise, which, in a way, is the same thing? On top of all that, you know me. I need to keep things inside. Let the kitty out of the bag too soon and it never grows up to be a cat.”
“That’s not a saying!”
“I just made it up.”
“Émile Cinq-Mars. You’re a—”
“A what?”
“A piece of work.” A notion occurs to her. “A seven days’ piece of work. There. I just made that up.”
Happily enough, and feeling a close bond following the intimacy of their talk, they depart the crime scene and carry on across the edge of the sea and sky. They don’t know that they are both thinking more or less the same thing. Émile said, “Let the local boys handle it,” and he’s hoping that they can. Sandra, on her part, is hoping that they will.
SIXTEEN
Officer Wade Louwagie pulls up his squad car outside the old-fashioned General Store so popular with tourists, in particular, and island folk, as well. He is on his way to interview the group that has rented out the former City Hall, to check if they were up on the cliffs the night of the murder. The day is turning into a warm one. He hasn’t had much to eat and is feeling light-headed, even faint and strangely distracted, so he stops to pick up a sandwich and a cold Dr Pepper.
He chooses the egg salad.
“I guess it would be stupid for me to say the sandwiches are selling like hotcakes today, but they are, so really I should say the sandwiches are selling like sandwiches, since that’s what they are, but they don’t usually sell out so quickly, so we have less choice to offer now, because they’re selling like hotcakes. You see?”
He doesn’t. The cashier, Margaret, scarcely takes a breath, and the cop is hard-pressed to follow her logic. “I’m fine with the egg,” he manages to say.
“You’re kind,” she assures him.
He pays, thanks her, and is about to leave when she declares in a voice that’s almost defiant, her arms emphatically crossed under her modest bosom, “I’ll let you kiss me in the back room, Mr. Policeman. Nothing more. A nice kiss. In the back. That’s my offer.”
Now he knows that he’s truly lost in this conversation. The best that he can muster in return is, “What?”
“A kiss. Don’t you? Kiss girls, I mean. I do. I mean, I kiss boys, not girls, but you get me. That’s my offer. In exchange.”
Something is being bartered here, but he has no clue. He’s gone from light-headed to dizzy, and he’s dizzy enough that he’s nervous about it now. Sometimes island girls just turn his crank and he’s come to believe tha
t they do it for a lark, to make fun of him. This one is more puzzling than any.
“In exchange for what?” he asks.
“You know.”
“No,” he contends, “I don’t.”
She beckons him closer and cups his left ear while he stares down at the slight, yet mesmerizing cleavage of her breasts, revealed now as she leans in to whisper. “For information. About the murder. The gossip. You know. Tell me stuff. The lowdown on the hoedown and I’ll give you a nice kiss. That’s fair, no?”
When they both retreat, she’s smiling and he has no clue if she’s serious, half-serious, or having fun with him to the hilt. She looks like she’s about to burst out laughing, so he dares not take her up on it. He’d be the butt of jokes. Louwagie marshals his shoulders back, as though to summon a measure of dignity.
“I’m an officer of the law, ma’am. I don’t partake in gossip.”
“Partake! Oh. There’s a word. I’m only kidding anyway. You know that, right?”
He does now.
“You know how it is. People come in here all day and they want the scoop. What can I tell them? What’s, you know, public knowledge? What’s okay to pass on? I mean, a murder, come on, geez, we don’t have those around here. We burn each other’s cars and boats, houses—sometimes we might dangle somebody off a cliff for a few hours—but we don’t do anything serious. This is serious. People want to know what’s up. Should we be worried? I never lock my doors. What for? Should I now? Should I?”
Louwagie yearns for a customer to walk through the front door or to come out from the vast array of goods in the back and rescue him, at the very least interrupt. No such luck. He’s still thinking about how her breasts glow at the edges of the fabric of her blouse and blue bra and he’s imagining what that kiss in the back room might be like if that were ever possible and not just another infernal tease. He hates being a cop sometimes. Young women tease him so freely so often that he must come across to them as easy pickings.
“I’m sorry, ma’am—”
“Ma’am? Ma’am! Come on. Do I look like a ma’am to you?”