TimeLocke

by Jack Barnao

  “Do you get much of this?” I asked. Amy was composed again, but she didn’t look likely to say very much.

  “Theft? D’accord,” Labrosse said. “The cutting of throats, no.”

  “Did you find the murder weapon?”

  “Why would you ask that, m’sieur?” Labrosse wanted to know.

  “Because it could mean that Pierre recognized the man who robbed him and was killed with whatever was at hand.”

  “We found no weapon,” he said, and then added inconsequentially, “The cut was made by a right-handed man.”

  “So we’re looking for a right-handed man with a knife. In wine country, where most of the men work in the vineyards, that has to be most of the male population.”

  Labrosse rubbed his chin, making a faint rasping sound. “Tell me, Miss Roger. About what did you talk to Madame Boulanger today?”

  “The Resistance. Her husband was a member. He was killed in 1944. Why do you ask, is this important?”

  He didn’t reply at once. Without asking if she objected, he took out his cigarettes and lit up, flicking the dead match casually out the window. “And what else did she say?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Amy was getting acerbic, her grief all burned away in righteous anger. Good; she was easier to handle mad than sad.

  “She told you perhaps that the man Orsini was known as Le Loup?” He dropped the question in casually. Apparently Amy’s scoop was not as exclusive as she’d imagined.

  “Among other things,” Amy said tensely. I glanced at her as she spoke. Her hand had come up to her throat. She was worried. Was it professional concern about her sources or anxiety about her own safety?

  “And these other things, did any of them concern people now living?” He was patient, the way he would have been patient in a cell in Algeria during the civil war, waiting for his man to beat a confession out of some terrorist. You get the same kind of calm at the eye of a cyclone.

  “Only her son.” Amy was back in stride now, as highhanded as ever. “Why do you ask?”

  He changed the subject. “Tell me, ma’amselle. Do you think that Armand was killed for a handful of francs?”

  She was baffled and turned to me. It was time to act like a gentleman. “I think perhaps someone who discovered the body may have known where he kept his money and taken it.”

  “Do you, M’sieur Locke?” His voice was icy. “May I remind you that it was you who discovered the body.”

  “I was the one who reported finding the body,” I corrected him. “Do you know who else visited him this morning?”

  He blew smoke. “You are an expert on theft, perhaps?”

  “I know something about death, Captain. That death was not in keeping with a theft.” I got bold and made the suggestion that had occurred to me when he mentioned theft. “I do not wish to question the honesty of his housekeeper, if he has one. But perhaps she took the money, although I don’t think a woman cut his throat.”

  “Very good,” he said dryly. “And finding this money will raise Armand from the dead?”

  “Nothing will do that, Captain.”

  “Now you begin to understand,” he said. “All we can do is to look for the man who killed him and prevent such an incident from happening again. To a policeman, the cure is simple. Miss Roger talks to someone, they die. I say to you, Miss Roger, that you must stop talking to people. Then they will stop dying.”

  “But I came here to work on my book,” Amy spluttered.

  “And this book is more important than the lives of Frenchmen?” Labrosse showed his disgust by snuffing out his cigarette between finger and thumb and tossing it away.

  Amy was controlled again now. “Of course not. No book is worth lives, Captain. But how can you be sure this is cause and effect?”

  “I cannot be sure that a man who has consumed a liter of cognac will kill people as he drives home,” Labrosse said. “I merely remove him from the road if I see him near a car.”

  “Are you telling me I’ve got to leave?” Amy asked.

  “A professor such as yourself knows better than that,” he said. “I am telling you that I suspect you of complicity in the murder of Pierre Armand. I am not going to arrest you, but if someone you spoke to were even to slip on the street and scratch his knee, I will arrest you and charge you with the murder.”

  Anger blazed in her eyes. “You have no right. John, tell him he has no right.” She almost yelled it.

  I shook my head. “This is the captain’s town, Amy. He makes the rules.”

  “Damn you,” she said. “Damn all men.” She got out of the car, slamming the door. Labrosse sat calmly, looking me right in the eye. Deliberately, he got out his cigarettes and lit up again.

  “She isn’t going to quit, Captain,” I said.

  He nodded, squinching up one eye against the smoke from his Gauloise. “I know that,” he said. “But do you know why she is so determined to continue?”

  “She told me it’s important to her position at the university.” I shrugged. “It seems odd to me. Her field was the Roman occupation of Provence. Now she’s skipping two thousand years to talk about the German occupation. I wonder why.”

  “I also wonder why,” he said. “Many books have been written about the Resistance. None of them has been important enough to risk a life for. Then we have this girl insisting suddenly on writing, and at the same time, we have a murder. As a policeman, I wonder why.”

  “I appreciate the need-to-know rule, Captain,” I said carefully. “But it sounds as if you have information you have not conveyed to me. For instance, you haven’t mentioned Orsini in all this. He’s the one with the grudge against Amy. It seems logical to me that he’s the guy who did this killing. Or had it done for him.”

  He drew on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes the way smokers do, studying me hard. At last he said, “I think you are a soldier, M’sieur Locke, so I will tell you.” I didn’t change my expression, and he went on slowly. “I have investigated the event last year.” He paused and waved vaguely. “The incident at the restaurant which was the commencement of all this.”

  “The night she clobbered Orsini?”

  He nodded. “Yes. One heard that Miss Roger was having dinner when Orsini first spoke to her, then molested her. Then, one hears, she hit him with the wine bottle.”

  “And this didn’t happen?”

  “No.” He let the word hang there alone, filling the car like the smoke from his cigarette.

  “And what were the facts?”

  Now he became formal, as he might have been with a witness. “You and Miss Roger are close?”

  “I work for her, that’s all.”

  “Then perhaps you will not be too desolated to hear that she spent the night with him,” he said.

  I guess my jaw dropped. He reacted with a tight smile. “Yes, I was surprised also.”

  “But the story didn’t end there. Apparently one of the film people was beaten because he laughed in the restaurant. And Constance at La Fongeline called out all her old Resistance buddies and stood guard. You mean that’s all lies as well?”

  “The film man was beaten,” he said. “But the reason was quite different. When Orsini and Miss Roger left the restaurant, he took Orsini’s woman to his room. Poor fool must have thought it was love; he refused to pay, and one of Orsini’s men punished him.”

  I whistled in surprise. “That puts a very different complexion on things. But what about the old Resistance people at Constance’s farm? What about Amy leaving the next morning to return to Canada?”

  He shrugged again, his face expressionless. “One thinks perhaps Constance is a good friend to Miss Roger. This story was prepared as an alibi.”

  “Why in hell would she need an alibi? She can sleep with any man she chooses to,” I said, but the answer had already occurred to me. The truth had to be kept from Wainwright. He was obviously Amy’s lover, protector, whatever, in Canada. It looked as if Janet Frobisher’s thoughts had been on t
he right track.

  “She has no husband?” he asked carefully. “No one who would find such news unpleasant?”

  I considered my answer carefully. Labrosse was leveling with me; I owed him the same courtesy. “I was hired by an older man. He says he is Miss Roger’s uncle.”

  Labrosse lowered the corners of his mouth. “Peut-être.” Perhaps.

  I sucked my teeth thoughtfully. “This is very interesting, Captain, but it doesn’t explain why those two guys tried to abduct Amy yesterday or why somebody cut that man’s throat this morning. What’s going on?”

  He had only half-smoked his cigarette, but he took it out of his mouth and tossed it out the window angrily. “That is what I need to know,” he said.

  “May I ask why you haven’t questioned Amy about this?”

  “Sometimes in an investigation it is better to observe, to act slowly.”

  “What do you expect to learn from the observation?”

  He shrugged again, slowly, almost a caricature of the gesture. “If I talk to her at once, I may perhaps learn something of what has happened before. But I already know much of that. I do not believe she knows why her friend Armand was murdered. That is the only event that concerns me.”

  “How about the two men I stopped yesterday? What did they tell you?”

  “They were sent by a man in Marseilles. Alas, they do not know his name. They were sent to bring Miss Roger to Marseilles, to this man.”

  “Did they give you a description at least?”

  “It would fit most of the men in Marseilles between the ages of thirty and sixty years.” Labrosse opened the door of the car and half-turned to get out. “And so the work continues. In the meantime, I wish that Miss Roger does not speak to anyone else. Can you convince her of the need for this?”

  “I’ll sure as hell try, Captain. Thank you for your confidences.” I turned away, wondering why Amy had lied about Orsini and what the fact meant to me.

  CHAPTER 8

  The others were standing up, preparing to go. “We’re going to stay with M’sieur Armand and Hélène,” Amy told me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Thank you, m’sieur.”

  He nodded, and Hélène told Amy, “You know where we are. We have things to attend to. We will see you at the house later.”

  “You’re very kind.” Amy was on the brink of tears, but Hélène brushed off the thanks impatiently. “You should have called us.”

  They went back to their car, and I led Amy over to ours. I glanced up at Madame Boulanger’s window. She was at her post.

  Constance’s old car was missing when we went back to La Fongeline, so Amy wrote her a quick note explaining what had happened. It covered two pages, so it must have gone into a fair amount of detail, but it was her concern. I left the book Constance had lent me on the bed and put the bags into the car, looking over my shoulder the whole time. I didn’t say a lot to Amy. I wanted to know all about Orsini and try to get to the bottom of what was happening, but that would have to wait. For now, it seemed, nobody was after her.

  The Armands were staying in a château located in one of their vineyards. It was a second residence, Amy told me briefly. They lived in Paris most of the time, where the senior Armand had his offices, dealing with wines from all of the regions of France. But he had started out here, in his ancestral home, and still kept an apartment in the château, which was also occupied by the factor of the estate.

  Set among vineyards, it was a handsome late-nineteenth- century brick building with a half acre of lawn and old oak trees around it. The resident family lived in an apartment on the ground floor, leaving the major rooms free for the owners, Amy had told me. They had made themselves at home, it seemed. There was a clutter of young children playing around the house, swinging on a rope hanging from an oak limb, laughing and calling out like kids anywhere.

  Madame came to the door when Amy knocked and insisted on helping us in with the bags. She was a round-faced, happy woman, as close to plain as any Frenchwoman ever gets but pert and cheerful.

  She was not sure of our domestic setup, and so she put all the bags in the bigger spare bedroom. Amy was subdued and didn’t argue, but we didn’t do any unpacking. Instead, we accepted her invitation to coffee on the terrace and went down to sit and and watch the children playing and wait for the Armands to arrive.

  Forcing herself to make conversation, Amy asked, “What do you think of Hélène?”

  “Sensational,” I said. “I’ve worked for movie stars that can’t hold a candle to her.” I was watching Amy, trying to read her emotions. She had seen more violence in the last twenty-four hours than had happened in her whole life, and here she was chatting like a cocktail-party guest. Either she had no heart, or she was hanging on to her sanity by her fingertips.

  “Don’t lose your heart over Hélène.” She said it lightly, but it came out almost bitchy.

  I grinned agreeably. “I leave my heart at home when I’m working.” My glands travel with me, but I didn’t tell her that.

  “Very professional,” she said. And then the Bentley rolled in, and we got up to meet our hosts.

  Hélène soon set the domestic arrangements straight. Amy stayed along the hall from her on the second floor. I was moved up to the third. I said nothing, but the arrangement didn’t please me. I hadn’t seen any security arrangements around the house. There was a dog, but it was a children’s pet, small and silent. A professional could get into the house and murder Amy, or even abduct her, without anybody’s knowing. I would have to make changes.

  We were invited to share a late lunch with the Armands. Amy and I sat and sipped wine while the other two picked at their food. Nobody said much, and afterward Armand went to his room. The women sat and talked, soon lapsing into French, a clear signal that I wasn’t welcome.

  I took the hint and excused myself and went outside to check the lay of the land.

  It was a typical Provençal summer day, sunny, the temperature in the high eighties. The heat had slowed down even the kids, and they were sitting in the shade of a tree having a serious-seeming conversation. I walked all around the house. The garage was at the back, and I found the chauffeur washing the car, unnecessarily, moving slowly, filling time. He smiled when I spoke to him but made no attempt to answer, so I didn’t push it but walked on. The only useful thing I noticed was that the roof of the garage, formerly the stables by the look of it, reached to the second floor of the main house, giving access to a window. I rechecked the map of the interior in my mind and saw that the window must be in Amy’s room.

  She and Hélène were still talking when I returned. They looked up when I came in. Hélène spoke first. “Yes?”

  Regal women leave me cold. I was once dumb enough to fall for the daughter of an earl, the sister of a fellow officer in the Guards. It ended when she broke her claws trying to make me feel small. “Excuse me,” I said, and spoke to Amy. “Your room has a roof outside, right?”

  “I think so.” Canadian women don’t have the knack of superiority. They’re still busy trying to prove they’re equal.

  “I don’t like it. Any guy who isn’t in a wheelchair could be over that roof and into your room like a shot.”

  Hélène spoke first; I would have bet on that. “My friend is in the guest room,” she said.

  I ignored her. “If you’re staying there, I’d suggest you leave the door unlocked, and I’ll sleep in the corridor.”

  Hélène was about to speak, but Amy beat her to it. “You think someone will follow us here?”

  “If they’re after you, yes. You’re gift-wrapped and waiting if you sleep in that bedroom.”

  Hélène picked up the bell she’d used to call Madame during lunch and spoke to Amy in French. I made out the word lit, bed.

  “No,” I said firmly. “Thank you, anyway. Don’t tell Madame. She doesn’t need to know, and I don’t want a bed.”

  Hélène stretched her elegant cheeks in a mocking smile. “You are hoping to use someone else
’s?”

  I looked at her and sighed. She flushed; I’d trumped her ace.

  Amy said. “You think someone would climb over the roof to reach me?”

  “Somebody is serious enough to have killed Pierre. Until the gendarmes catch whoever it is, you’re in danger.”

  Hélène said, “Not while you stay here, Amy. Papa will have men patrol the grounds at night.”

  “I can’t just hide like this,” Amy burst out. “I came here to do a job.”

  I answered that one. “It will wait a few days or weeks. You heard what the captain said. You can’t go back to questioning people. If anything goes sour, he’ll lock you up.”

  Amy stood up angrily. “I’m going to rest,” she said. “I’ll be in my room, Hélène, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Hélène only nodded. I stood aside to let Amy pass, and then Hélène spoke. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  Nobody would attempt to go over the roof in daylight, I was off duty for an hour, so I nodded. “Thank you.”

  She poured us both a glass and handed mine to me.

  I raised it to her. “A votre santé.”

  “Well done,” she said mockingly. “And to your health.”

  It was time to get her support. Amy was still at risk, I was certain of it. If I was thrown out of the house for being unreasonable, it would mean sneaking about the grounds all day instead of staying close to Amy. I had to play nice. “I am very sad about your brother. I met him only once, but he was a good, gentle man.”

  “Gentle, yes.” She sipped her wine and sat with her right elbow cradled in her left hand, looking into the glass. It was as formal as an art deco sculpture.

  “Not good?” I made the question gentle.

  “If good is the absence of positive evil, then yes, he was good.”

  “I seem to have disturbed something. I’m sorry.” It wasn’t clear whether or not she was flirting. If she was, I figured it was only because she didn’t have a good book with her.

  “He was wasting his life with his silly writing.” She was angry now, controlled but venting steam like an overstressed boiler.