by John Farrow
“Maddy, you’re a prof at Harvard,” Émile says.
“Sociology. Born and raised on this island, yet my specialty is the sustainable development of big metropolitan centers. Go figure, hey?”
“Up the road from where you live, another Harvard professor resides.”
“Oh, a few Ivy Leaguers are on the island. Summer people. Harvard’s well represented, oddly enough.”
“But one professor in particular. His name is Jason DeWitt.”
“I know him.”
“We met him ourselves yesterday. Again this morning. In fact, he invited Sandra and me up for drinks. Are you close friends?”
“Casual acquaintances, let’s say. If we pass in the street or a corridor, we nod. Unless he corners me.”
“Corners you?”
“I find him overly affable. He seems to think that everyone he meets is a bosom buddy. In Boston, he introduced me one time to a friend of his as if I was also a friend of his, and as if the other friend and me were now inseparable for life. If you’ve met him, then you know that Professor DeWitt makes himself difficult to ignore. We’re neighbors here, although I’m not around much. Academically, we’re in different fields. Why?”
“I’m sorry to tell you this, as it may invoke a certain bad memory, but this afternoon, our Professor DeWitt went over the side of Seven Days Work.”
Sandra is dumbfounded, but clearly Maddy Orrock is stunned and in some dismay. “That’s impossible. I just saw him. When did this happen? Just now? Oh my God, what’s going on? What happened? I mean, did he trip and fall? Was he pushed? Did he jump?”
Émile responds initially with a soft utterance under his breath. Then reports, as though to himself, “Apparently, on this island there’s a fourth option.” He speaks up, explaining himself and dismissing his comment at the same time. “Around here, some people hope to fly. Exactly what happened remains to be determined. Apparently, a fisherman out on the water saw someone drop off the cliff and called it in. The professor’s body was recovered on the rocks below.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“What is it?” Sandra asks.
Maddy’s voice falls to a frail whisper. “I went to see him this afternoon. A courtesy call. I guess I was looking for support. That means I was probably one of the last people to see him alive. Maybe the very last, unless someone killed him.” She looks up at Cinq-Mars, staring into his eyes, imploring him. “Honest to God, it wasn’t me,” she insists.
Cinq-Mars nods and touches her hand in sympathy. He knows what everyone does, not just cops, that that’s what people say, particularly the guilty, when accused of a terrible crime. He’s sympathetic, yet in no position to take her at her word.
PART 3
EIGHTEEN
Émile Cinq-Mars digs out Corporal Louwagie’s business card to buzz his mobile phone. The officer invites him over. His home isn’t far away, but is tucked into a wooded community off the beaten path in North Head. A challenge to locate. Cinq-Mars finds a modest, charm-free bungalow clad in the vinyl typical of New Brunswick dwellings, this one pale yellow with green trim, and a brown roof in urgent need of repair. Overall, the house and yard are due for a sprucing up. At the roofline, a crop of weeds thrives in the gutters.
He rings the bell and waits.
Neighbors have kids, yards that sport swings and basketball nets and a general mess of toys. Louwagie’s home shows only the accoutrements of chores: a lawn mower, a watering can, a stepladder pitched on its side. He’s almost feeling sorry for the man even before he answers wearing a long, forlorn face.
“Detective,” Louwagie says. “Good to see you. Come in.” His expression is far less cheery than his words, which are delivered in a lifeless monotone.
“Émile is fine. I am retired.”
“Are you? I’m hoping you’re back on the job.”
Cinq-Mars finds that his initial impression has merit, for when they sit in the living room, four bottles of liquor stand upright between them on the coffee table. A rum, a gin, and two vodkas, one Russian, one Finnish. None is open. He knows what this means.
“Did you just buy these?”
“Confiscated the lot. A year ago. Off kids. Kept them tucked away in the garage until now.”
A secret cache, just in case.
“So you’re contemplating a long leap off the wagon.”
“Or I’ll follow our professor off a cliff. Look, I can drink in moderation. One drink, maybe two on the weekend.”
“You mean glasses, not bottles.” He knew enough to take all contemplations of suicide seriously. “But I’m seeing the good news here. You haven’t started in. You’re fighting this. What’s going on?”
They’re talking, but Émile notices that the other man scarcely seems to notice his presence.
“The shrinks call it an episode.”
“What do you call it?”
“Fucking scary shit.”
The man’s as angry as he is frightened as he is depressed.
“You’ve been sober awhile?”
“Seems like forever sometimes. Or maybe it was only yesterday. I’m not that kind of an alcoholic.”
“There are kinds?”
“I’m into panic-button booze. I’m free to drink in moderation—seriously, I am—until a bender sideswipes my ass.”
“Okay. Let’s get this over with. Either take a long drink, in which case your career and most likely your life are over and done, or I’ll open the bottles and pour them out. We’ve got a murder case, looks like a multiple-murder case, to investigate. I can’t do that without your able assistance. Or I get somebody else in here. I can make that happen with a call. Don’t ask me to prove it, just decide. Either this stuff gets flushed or your life does. I’ve got enough to do. I’m not playing nursemaid here.”
Tough love. The way to go in some circumstances. Murderous in other situations. Not quite a roll of the dice, but not far off it either.
“Fuck you, too,” the cop says.
“Whatever. Your life. Your call.”
Louwagie appears to be thinking the matter over. When he nods, it’s the slightest gesture. Émile knows to jump at the chance, and takes all four bottles through to the kitchen, uncaps them, then lets the liquids gurgle away two at a time. He turns on the tap to disperse the scent, too, in case the poor guy sticks his nose down the drain later on to inhale the fumes. The waste of good booze bugs him, but he’s cheerful enough—he can afford his own. When he returns to the living room, Wade Louwagie hasn’t budged. A good sign.
Émile remains standing. “Tell me this doesn’t mean you’re over the side.”
“I’m hanging in. A tiny speck inside my brain wants to find out if this shit will pass.”
“Curiosity keeps you alive. Okay. As good a reason as any. Corporal, I know what the Mounties want from you. To stay on the job, get back in the saddle, ride that horse. It’s all bullshit, of course. They’re Neanderthals that way and because you work for them, you have my sympathies.”
At least Louwagie seems to cheer up a tad, hearing that.
“I won’t ask you to take a full load. We’ll keep you under wraps. We’ll travel together, you can guide me around. You can give me access here and there and I’ll give you the pleasure of my company. That’s what you need right now, company. I’m not saying you want it, only that you need it. But I won’t depend on you for much, so relax about it. Maybe we’ll tweak your curiosity. Bolster your life force that way. Stay upright, Wade, see what tomorrow brings. Before this, you were okay. You can get back to that again. Maybe more easily this time than last. We’ll see. Okay?”
Louwagie seems more present now. “So you’re on the case? What changed your mind?”
“Your idiot partner. I’m going to brain him. He sent Maddy Orrock to see me. She was persuasive.”
“You’re working for her then. Everybody here works for the Orrocks, sooner or later.”
“I’m on the side of truth, to see where that leads. As far a
s getting paid for my services goes, I’ll figure that out later.”
“I’m a wreck.”
“I noticed. We’ve been through this.”
“I’m spaced-out. I feel strangely remote.”
“Remote?”
“To myself. Somehow, I’m far away. From here. From now. I don’t think I can help. I should stay out of your way.”
“Yeah, that’ll work. You’ll be drunk by midnight or dead by morning. Look. First things first. Lescavage was killed. I need to visit his house, and I need to see the crime-scene photographs. I can’t do either without you. Are you in?”
“Don’t show me those photos again.”
“Again? You were there. Almost first on the scene. You went back to the pictures after that?”
“You think that set me off? Maybe. I haven’t been right since. I got through the scene, but not the pictures. Weird.”
“Maybe not so much. One is actual, real. The photos aren’t. They can get inside your head in strange ways. I’ve seen it before. Was that your vomit up on the ridge?”
Louwagie nods.
“You should’ve let yourself upchuck again, looking at the pictures. Don’t hold that shit in.”
“You sound like my shrink.”
“We’re riding together now. So I am your shrink. Can we get going?”
“The manse first?”
“You got it.”
“Sure. Why not?”
Émile’s not going to coddle this guy, but on the way out he permits himself to give Louwagie a double tap on the shoulder, to comfort him. To help buck him up. He likes the fight in his new partner. Not opening a bottle—that took some inner demon-fighting strength.
* * *
Louwagie drives in Émile’s Jeep. He’s wearing casual civilian clothes anyway, and Émile is just as happy that the man doesn’t have a gun on his hip. They don’t bother with his squad car, and stop at the police station to pick up the photographs and keys.
“House first,” Émile dictates. “If I look at those pictures now, they might affect my observations.”
On the way over to the Reverend Lescavage’s village manse, the younger man doesn’t have a word to say, his eyes off to the side ditch, his mind probably further afield. Émile has driven by the manse several times without realizing that it shares a connection to the small white church next door, the one with the bent steeple. Located far enough off the property it seems to be only a neighbor to the church and the tidy graveyard at the rear. Émile notices how it differs from what’s familiar to him back in Quebec. He’s been inside a few rectories in his day. In every instance, there was no mistaking the home as being a priest’s residence, often priests plural, whereas this one evokes the Protestant style to blend in with the community and not be segregated by any ecclesiastical countenance. Catholic to the core, he still isn’t sure how he feels about that.
Louwagie unlocks the front door and they step inside. Light falling through the windows onto the lovely patina of the old and warped pine floors and onto the dusty wooden bookcases somehow accentuates the silence of the cottage. Compared to the Mountie’s home, this one benefits from a charm the other dwelling can’t imagine.
“Where’d you get the keys?” Émile asks.
“Pardon me?”
“Did you take them off the minister’s body?”
“Oh. No. He didn’t have a set of keys on him.”
“Seriously? Didn’t that strike you as odd?”
“Lots of people don’t lock their doors around here. The church lent me this set. The extras are for the church, the vestry, and the church hall.”
“Trusting. If he left home without his keys, do you see them lying around here? His church keys, for instance? Did you see them before, up on the ridge?”
“Never did. Don’t now.”
“Which raises the possibility, no?”
Louwagie needs a moment to think about it, then nods. “Maybe somebody took his keys off him. Like I said, he might not have bothered with keys.”
He’s surprised that Émile doesn’t move much. He’s been informed of the man’s fame, his reputation as a phenomenal detective, one who’s busted biker gangs and gone up against the Mafia and come out on top, intact anyway, and who was assigned to felony crime through most of his career yet wound up solving murders on the side with a success rate rivaling anyone in Homicide. The Mounties who came out from the mainland warned that this guy was connected to police departments, including his own, at high levels, so no matter what—whether he got involved or not—he was to watch his step as long as Émile Cinq-Mars was on the island. Which intrigues him, despite his misery and depression. He wants to see how a so-called great detective operates, and is surprised when the man scarcely moves.
For his part, Émile tends not to explain himself to anyone, but in this situation feels sympathetic to the man’s plight, to his mental condition, and helps him out. “Get a feel for the place. That’ll tell you about the life that was lived here. That’ll tell you as much or more than any goddamn scrap of evidence.”
“A feel,” Louwagie remarks. Neither a skeptical nor a trusting comment. He’s willing to be educated.
Eventually, Émile browses through the man’s papers and books, with an emphasis on what he’s been reading and writing lately. The Mountie sees him smile.
“What?” Louwagie asks.
“I know these books,” Émile reveals. “Read them myself. He took an amateur’s interest in cosmology, in the origins of the universe.”
“He was a minister. God created the universe in seven days.”
“You believe that?”
“Not me,” Louwagie states. “I think most clergymen know better, too. This other stuff is way over my head. The science. Religion or science, one or the other is the same mystery. Both are wasted on me. The world wasn’t created in just seven days. Nor was that cliff at the end of this island. But they might as well have been, for all I know.”
“If you take the time line as metaphoric—I’ve long assumed that you have to be an irrational dope not to take it that way—one becomes similar to the other.” Émile looks up. “His sermon for this Sunday. You caught me smiling when I was reading it. Let me run this through out loud. They might be his last words.”
Cinq-Mars clears his throat and picks up the man’s handwritten sheets.
“‘Believe in God or don’t believe in God,’” he quotes, “‘but that’s not the question. Whichever way you step out the door in the morning, start by believing in yourself.’”
Émile smiles again. “He might’ve been addressing you, Officer Louwagie.
“Then our preacher adds, ‘If you really understand what it took for you to come into being, for a visible universe to burst into creation, for gasses to coalesce and condense and stars to form and atoms with their protons and neutrons and electrons and dense nuclei—an atom, by the way, is composed mostly of space—and those atoms fly through stars and space and time that to our puny minds is endless, a length of time that might as well be eternal in terms of our ability to conceive of it, and through all that nothingness these stray wild atoms and their cohorts land on planet earth, to be vegetables and minerals, monkeys and fish, yes, fish, and spend time in the body of Christ and in Buddha and in the bodies of various village idiots and tyrants to arrive, for now, for a brief blink in time and space, in your body and in mine—if you took into account merely the human cost, in disease and illness and the striving and migrations and war and building up and tearing down, and if you were to ruminate on the sheer accident of two people, one male, one female, abiding together at a fluke moment in time when conception is ready and able and willing to take place, then you might begin to grasp how impossible you are, and how silly you are to ever believe in yourself. But if you can believe in yourself, then you might begin to appreciate that belief in God is not so far-fetched after all, for we know nothing from nothing of dark energy and dark matter and what makes an atom tick or why two of them out of
infinite billions partner up and travel together, along with countless billions of others—with these billions but not with those billions—so in the end all we have, all we can have, thanks to science, if I may say so—I, of all people, a man who stands before you stripped of his faith—thanks to science and thanks also to Scripture, ultimately, all we have is belief and nonbelief. Knowledge? Pursue it, by all means, with honesty and passion. Know that knowledge is a mug’s game, which is to say that it is forever boundless, like the faith of certain individuals, like the ignorance of others.’”
Enjoying the homily, his voice lowering as though he’s starting to read it only to himself and not to his audience of one, Cinq-Mars takes a seat.
“‘Ultimately, you will believe what you choose to believe or what you cannot help but believe, but if you believe in yourself, then know that that is ludicrous, and no less ludicrous than another man’s belief in God. I believe in neither. Neither in myself nor in God, although I am an imperfect man, and in my weakness and decrepitude I confess before you that I have a belief, and my belief is in you. In all of you. In this cloud of life and humanity before me. People have come to this island in recent years who believe that one day they can leave by flying off it though a process of vigorously flapping their knees and thighs. Ah, you laugh, but don’t you see? Your simple understanding that you must row, sail, or power a boat, or swim, or hire an airplane, or die in order to depart Grand Manan, is so elegant in its simplicity that I can only acknowledge that I believe in you. That belief, perhaps, dooms me, for out of it I may yet crumble and come to believe in myself, and out of that impossible and absurd error in judgment, I may yet believe in God again. Although I doubt it, pun intended.’