by Allan Folsom
“Fine.”
Osborn came back in with a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. Picking up two sanitary wrapped glasses from an enameled tray on top of a replica French writing table, he pulled the plastic off and poured them each a drink.
“No ice, either, I’m afraid,” Osborn said.
“I’m not picky.” McVey’s eyes went to Osborn’s running shoes. They were caked with the dried mud.
“Been out for a jog?”
“What do you mean?” Osborn said, handing McVey a glass.
McVey nodded at his feet. “Shoes are muddy.”
“I—” Osborn hesitated, then quickly covered with a grin. “—was out for a walk. They’re replanting the gardens in front of the Eiffel Tower. With the rain, you can’t walk anywhere around there without stepping in mud.”
McVey took a pull at his drink. It gave Osborn a moment to wonder if he’d picked up on the lie. It wasn’t a lie really. The Eiffel Tower gardens were torn up, he’d remembered that from being out the day before. Best to get him off it quickly.
“So?” he said.
“So.” McVey hesitated. “I was in the lobby when you went into the gift shop. I saw your reaction to the paper.” He nodded at the newspaper Osborn had put on the side table.
Osborn took a drink of the scotch. He rarely drank. It was only after that first night when he had seen and pursued Kanarack, and then was picked up by the Paris police, that he’d called room service and ordered the scotch. Now, as he felt it go down, he was glad he had.
“That’s why you’re here . . .” Osborn locked eyes with McVey. Okay, they know. Be straight, unemotional. Find out what else they know.
“As you know, Mr. Packard worked for an international company. I was in Paris doing some unrelated work with the Paris police when this came in. Since you were one of Mr. Packard’s last clients . . .” McVey smiled and took another sip of the scotch. “Anyway the Paris police asked me to come by and talk to you about it. American to American. See if you had any idea who might have done it. You realize I have no authority here. I’m just helping out.”
“I understand that. But I don’t think I can help you.”
“Did Mr. Packard seem worried about anything?”
“If he was, he didn’t mention it.”
“Mind my asking why you hired him?”
“I didn’t hire him. I hired Kolb International. He was the one they sent.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“If you don’t mind, it’s personal.”
“Doctor Osborn, we’re talking about a murdered man.” McVey sounded as if he were addressing a jury.
Osborn set his glass down. He’d done nothing and felt he was being accused. He didn’t like it. “Look, Detective McVey. Jean Packard was working for me. He’s dead and I’m sorry but I haven’t the slightest idea who might have done it or why. And if that’s the reason you’re here, you’ve got the wrong guy!” Angrily, Osborn jammed his hands into his jacket pockets. When he did he felt the bag containing the succinylcholine and the packet of syringes Vera had given him. He’d meant to take it out earlier when he’d come back to change to go out to the river, but he’d forgotten. With the discovery, his demeanor changed.
“Look—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap like that. I guess the shock of finding out about him being killed like that . . . I’m a little on edge.”
“Let me just ask if Mister Packard finished his job for you?”
Osborn wavered. What the hell was he going for? Do they know about Kanarack or not? If you say yes, then what? If you say no, you leave it open.
“Did he, Doctor Osborn?”
“Yes,” Osborn said finally.
McVey looked at him a moment, then tilted his glass and finished the scotch. For a moment he held the empty glass in his hand as if he didn’t know quite what to do with it. Then his eyes came back to Osborn.
“Know anyone named Peter Hossbach?”
“No.”
“John Cordell?”
“No.” Osborn was completely puzzled. He had no idea what McVey was talking about.
“Friedrich Rustow?” McVey crossed his legs. White, hairless calves showed between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants legs.
“No,” Osborn said again. “Are they suspects?”
“They’re missing persons, Doctor Osborn.”
“I never heard of any of them,” Osborn said.
“Not one?”
“No.”
Hossbach was German, Cordell, English, and Rustow, Belgian. They were three of the beheaded corpses. McVey tucked it away in his mental computer somewhere that Osborn hadn’t flinched or even paused at the mention of any of them. A recognition factor of zero. Of course he could be an accomplished actor and lying. Doctors did all the time if they felt it was in the patient’s best interest not to know something.
“Well, it’s a big world and a lot of things cross in it,” McVey said. “It’s my job to find that thread where everything meets and try to sort it out.”
Leaning over to the side table, McVey set his glass down beside Osborn’s keys and stood up. There were two sets of keys. One was to Osborn’s hotel room. The other Set were automobile keys with the figurine of a medieval lion on the key chain. They were keys to a Peugeot.
“Thank you for your time, Doctor. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“That’s all right,” Osborn said, trying hard not to show relief. This had been nothing but routine questioning on the part of the police. McVey was only helping the French cops, nothing more.
McVey was at the door and had a hand on the knob when he turned back. “You were in London on October third, isn’t that right?” he said.
“What?” Osborn reacted with surprise.
“That was—” McVey took a small plastic card from his wallet and looked at it. “Last Monday.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You were in London?”
“Yes—”
“Why?”
“I—I was on my way home from a medical convention in Geneva.” Osborn suddenly found himself stammering. How did McVey know that? And what did it have to do with Jean Packard or missing persons?
“How long were you there?”
Osborn hesitated. Where the hell’s this going? What’s he after? “I don’t understand what this has to do with anything he said, trying not to sound defensive.
“It was just a question, Doctor. That’s my business. Questions.” McVey wasn’t going to let go until he had an answer.
Finally Osborn relented. “A day and a half, about—”
“You stayed at the Connaught Hotel.”
“Yes.”
Osborn felt a trickle of sweat run down under his right armpit. Suddenly McVey wasn’t looking like anybody’s grandfather anymore.
“What did you do while you were there?”
Osborn felt his face redden with anger. He was being put into a corner he didn’t understand and didn’t like. Maybe they do know about Kanarack, he thought. Maybe this was some way to trap him into talking about it. But he wasn’t going to. If McVey knew about Kanarack, it would be he who brought it up, not Osborn.
“Detective, what I did in London is my personal business. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Look, Paul,” McVey said, quietly. “I’m not trying to pry into your private affairs. I’ve got some missing people. You’re not the only person I’m talking to. All I’d like you to do is account for your time while you were in London.”
“Maybe I should call a lawyer.”
“If you think you need one, by all means. There’s the telephone.”
Osborn looked off. “I got in Saturday afternoon and went to a play Saturday night,” he said, flatly. “I started feeling ill. I went back to my hotel room and stayed there until Monday morning.”
“All Saturday night and all day Sunday.”
“That’s right.”
“You never left your room.”<
br />
“NO.”
“Room service?”
“Ever have a twenty-four-hour bug? I was full of chills and fever, diarrhea, alternating with antiperistalsis. That’s vomiting, in English. Who would want to eat?”
“You were alone?”
“Yes.” Osborn’s reply was quick, definitive.
“And nobody else saw you?”
“Not that I know of.”
McVey waited a moment, then asked softly, “Doctor Osborn, why are you lying to me?”
Tonight was Thursday evening. Before he’d left London for Paris, Wednesday afternoon, McVey had asked Commander Noble to check on Osborn’s visit to the Connaught Hotel. At a little after seven Thursday morning, Noble had called. Osborn had signed in to the Connaught Saturday afternoon and checked out Monday morning. He’d registered as Doctor Paul Osborn of Los Angeles and gone to his room alone. A short while later a woman had joined him.
“I beg your pardon!” Osborn said, trying to cover dismay with anger.
“You weren’t alone.” McVey didn’t give him the chance for a second denial. “Young woman. Dark hair. About twenty-five, twenty-six. Her name is Vera Monneray. You had sex with her during a cab ride from Leicester Square to the Connaught Hotel last Saturday night.”
“Jesus Christ.” Osborn was stunned. How the police worked, what they knew and how they knew it was unfathomable. Finally, he nodded.
“She why you came to Paris?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose she was sick the entire time you were.”
“Yes, she was . . .”
“Know her long?”
“I met her in Geneva at the end of last week. She came with me to London. Then went to Paris. She’s a resident here.”
“Resident?”
“A doctor. She’s going to be a doctor.”
Doctor? McVey stared at Osborn. Amazing what you find out when you just poke around. So much for Lebrun and his “off limits.”
“Why didn’t you mention her?”
“I told you it was personal—”
“Doctor, she’s your alibi. She can verify how you spent your time in London—”
“I don’t want her dragged into this.”
“Why?”
Osborn felt the blood start to rise again. McVey was beginning to get personal with his accusations and, frankly, Osborn didn’t like the intrusion into his private life. “Look. You said you have no authority here. I don’t have to talk to you at all!”
“No, you don’t. But I think you might want to,” McVey said gently. “The Paris police have your passport. They can also charge you with aggravated assault if they want to. I’m doing them a favor. If they got the idea you were giving me a hard time about something, they might look a little differently at the idea of letting you go. Especially now, when your name has come up in conjunction with a murder.”
“I told you I had nothing to do with that!”
“Maybe not,” McVey said. “But you could sit around a French jail for a long time until they decided to agree.”
Osborn suddenly felt as if he’d just been pulled out of a washing machine and was about to be shoved into the dryer. All he could do was back down. “Maybe, if you told me what you were really getting at, I could help,” he said.
“A man was murdered in London the weekend you were there. I need you to verify what you were doing and when. And Ms. Monneray seems to be the only person who can do that. But obviously you’re very reluctant to involve her—and just by doing that you are involving her. If you’d rather, I can have the Paris police pick her up and we can all have a chat down at headquarters.”
Up until that moment Osborn had been doing everything he could to keep Vera out of this. But if McVey carried through on his threat, the media would find out. If they did, the whole thing—his link to Jean Packard, his and Vera’s clandestine stay in London, Vera’s own story and whom she was seeing—would become front-page entertainment. Politicians could do what they wanted with starlets and bimbos and the worst that could happen would be that they’d lose an election or an appointment, while their consorts would be featured on the covers of exploitation papers in every supermarket in the world, most probably in a bikini. But a woman on the verge of becoming a physician was something entirely different The public didn’t like the idea of its doctors being that human, so, if McVey pushed it, there was every chance Vera would not only lose her residency but her career as well. Blackmail or not, so far McVey had kept what he knew between himself and Osborn and he was offering to let it stay that way.
“It’s—” Osborn started, then cleared his throat. “It’s—” Suddenly he realized McVey had inadvertently opened a door. Not only for the Jean Packard matter, but for Osborn to find out how much the police knew.
“It’s what?”
“The reason I hired a private investigator,” Osborn said. It was a deliberate lie but he had to take the chance. The police would have been through every piece of paper Jean Packard had in his home or office, but he knew Packard wrote almost nothing down. So they had to be looking for any lead they could find and they didn’t care how they did it, even to sending an American cop to shake him down.
“She has a lover. She didn’t want me to know. And I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t followed her to Paris. When she told me I got mad. I asked her who he was but she wouldn’t tell me. So I decided to find out.” As clever and tough as he was, if McVey bought his story, it meant the police didn’t know a thing about Kanarack. And if they didn’t know, there was no reason Osborn still couldn’t go on with his plan.
“And Packard found out for you.”
“Yes.”
“You want to tell me?”
Osborn waited just long enough for McVey to get the idea it was painful for him to talk about it. Then he said, softly, “She’s screwing the French prime minister.”
McVey looked at Osborn for a moment. It was the right answer, the one he’d been looking for. If Osborn was holding something back, McVey didn’t know what it was.
“I’ll get over it. One day I’m sure I’ll even laugh about it. But not now.” Osborn’s reply was reasonable, even sentimental. “That personal enough for you?”
24
* * *
MCVEY LEFT the hotel and crossed the street to his car with his gut telling him two things about Osborn: first, that he had nothing to do with the London murder, and second that he really cared about Vera Monneray, no matter whom she was sleeping with.
Closing the Opel’s door, McVey put on his seat belt and started the engine. Turning on the wipers against what seemed an incessant rain, he made a U-turn and headed back in the direction of his hotel. Osborn hadn’t reacted any differently than most people do when questioned by the police, especially when they’re innocent. The emotional arc usually went from shock, to fear, to indignation and most often ended either in anger—sometimes with threats to sue the detective, sometimes the entire police department—or in a polite exchange where the cop explains his questioning was nothing personal, that he just had a job to do, apologizes for intruding and leaves. Which is what he’d done.
Osborn wasn’t his man. Vera Monneray he might put in his book as a long shot, someone with medical training; and along with it probably some surgical experience. In that respect she fit the profile and she had been in London; when the last murder had taken place, but she and Osborn would be each other’s alibi for what they’d done there. They might have been sick, as Osborn said, or they might have spent the entire time diddling each other, and if she’d gone out for an hour or two, no one at the hotel had seen her, and Osborn, because he thought he loved her, would: cover for her even if she had. Moreover, he was sure if he: ran her she’d almost certainly come up clean with no pOlice record at all. Pushing it any further it would only serve to put Lebrun in a bad light and could end up embarrassing not only the entire department but probably the whole of France.
The rain came down harder and McVey worried that he k
new no more about the headless slayings now than he did when he’d started more than three weeks ago. But unless you got a break fast, that was usually the way. It was the thing about homicide. The endless details, the hundreds of false, leads that had to be followed, gone back over, followed again. The reports, the paperwork, the countless interviews that intruded on strangers’ lives. Sometimes you got lucky; mostly you didn’t. People got angry with you and you couldn’t blame them. How many times had he been asked why he did it? Gave his life to this kind of ugly, infuriating and morbidly gruesome job? Usually he just shrugged and said that one day he woke up and realized that’s what he did for a living. But inside he knew, and that’s why he did it. He didn’t know where it came from in him or how he got it. But he knew what it was. The sense that the murdered had rights, too. And so did their friends and the families who’d loved them. Murder was a thing you couldn’t let somebody get away with. Especially if you felt that way and had the experience and the authority to do something about it.
Taking a wide lefthand turn, McVey found himself crossing a bridge over the Seine. It wasn’t what he meant to do. Now he was all turned around with no idea where he was. The next thing he knew he was in a stream of traffic going past the Eiffel Tower. That’s when one of those little things that always nagged him after an interview or interrogation started jabbing tiny pins in that certain corner of his conscience. The same kind of thing that had made him dial Vera Monneray’s apartment that afternoon just to see who answered.
Moving into the left lane, he watched for the next side street, took it and doubled back. He was moving along the far edge of a park where, between the trees, he could see the distant lighted ironwork mass that made up the base of the Eiffel Tower. Just ahead, a car pulled out from the curb and drove off. Slowly he passed the spot, then backed in and parked. Getting out, he pulled up his jacket against the rain, then rubbed his hands together to warm them. A moment later he was walking down a pathway that ran along the edge of the Pare du Champ de Mars, with the tower looming in the distance.
The park grounds were dark and it was hard to see. Overhanging trees lining the path gave some protection from the rainy weather, and he tried to stay under them as he walked. He could see his breath in the raw night air and he blew on his hands only to jam them finally into the pockets of his raincoat.