“Because something forced him out. Probably something this Jean Packard was working on.”
The command—PHYSICAL DESCRIP-MUG SHOT-FINGER-PRINTS-Y/N?—came up on Lebrun’s screen.
Lebrun punched Y on his keyboard.
The screen went blank, then came back with a second command, FAX ONLY-Y/N-?
Again Lebrun punched the Y. Two minutes later a mug shot, physical description and fingerprints of Albert Merriman printed out. The mug shot was of Henri Kanarack almost thirty years younger.
Lebrun studied it, then handed it to McVey.
“Nobody I know,” McVey said.
Flicking a cigarette ash off his sleeve, Lebrun picked up the phone and told whoever was on the other end to go back over Jean Packard’s apartment and his office at Kolb International with a finer comb than they did the first time.
“I’d also suggest you have a police artist see if they can come up with a sketch of how Albert Merriman might look today.” Picking up a battered brown leather bag that served as suitcase and portable homicide kit, McVey thanked Lebrun for the coffee then added, “You know where to reach me in London if our boy Osborn does anything he shouldn’t before he leaves for L.A.” With that he started for the door.
“McVey,” Lebrun said as he reached it. “Albert Merriman was deceased in—New York.”
McVey stopped, did a slow burn and turned back in time to see a grin creep over Lebrun’s face.
“For the brotherhood, McVey. Make the call, s’il vous plaît?
“For the brotherhood.”
“Oui.”
30
* * *
LITTLE MORE than a stone’s throw from the building on the rue de la Cité where McVey sat with Lebrun’s phone trying to get through to the New York City Police Department regarding the late Albert Merriman, Vera Monneray walked along the Porte de la Tournelle, absently watching the traffic on the Seine.
It had been correct for her to end her relationship with Francois Christian. She knew the break had caused him pain, yet she had done it as kindly and respectfully as she knew how. She had not, she told herself, left one of the most esteemed members of the French government for an orthopedic surgeon from Los Angeles. The real truth was that neither she nor Francois could have continued on as they had and each continued to grow. And life without growth meant a withering and finally a dying out.
What she had done was no more than an act of personal survival, something Francois would, in time, have done to her when he finally resigned himself to the fact that his real love’ belonged to his wife and children.
Reaching the top of a long flight of stairs, she turned back and looked at Paris. She saw the sweep of the Seine and the grand arches of Notre Dame as if for the first time. The trees and rooftops and boulevard traffic were completely new to her, as was the romantic chatter of passersby. Francois Christian was a fine man and she was grateful she had had him in her life. Now, she was equally grateful it was over. Perhaps it was because, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt unencumbered and totally free.
Turning left, she started across the bridge to her apartment. Purposefully, she tried not to think of Paul Osborn, but she couldn’t help it. Her thoughts kept coming back to him. She wanted to believe that he had helped free her. By giving her attention, even adoration, he’d renewed her belief in herself as an independent, intelligent and sexually attractive woman fully capable of making a life on her own. And that was what had given her the confidence and courage to make the break from Francois.
But that was only part of it, and not to admit it would be to lie to herself. Dr. Paul Osborn hurt, and she cared that he hurt. On one level she wanted to think that caring and concern were part of an instinctive female nurturing. It was what women did when they sensed pain in someone close to them. But it wasn’t that simple and she knew it. What she wanted was to love him until he stopped hurting and after that to love him more.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” a round-faced, uniformed doorman said cheerily, holding open the filigreed iron outer door to her building.
“Bonjour, Philippe.” She smiled and went past him into the lobby, then quickly up the polished marble stairs to her apartment on the second floor.
Once inside, she closed the door and crossed the hallway into the formal dining room. On the table was a vase with two dozen long-stemmed red roses. She didn’t have to open the card to know who’d sent them, but she did anyway.
“Au revoir, Franqois.”
It was written in his own hand. Francois had said he understood and he had. The note and flowers meant they would always be friends. Vera held the card for a moment, then slid it back in its envelope and went into the living room. In one corner was a baby grand piano. Across from it, two large couches sat at right angles to one another, with a long ebony and leaded-glass coffee table in between. To her right was the entrance to the hallway and the two bedrooms and study that led off it. To the left was the dining room. Beyond that was a butler’s pantry and the kitchen.
Outside, the low-hanging clouds obscured the city. The overcast and grayness made everything feel sad. For the first time the apartment seemed huge and ungainly, with-out warmth or comfort, a place for someone more formal and much older than she.
An aura of loneliness as bleak as the sky that sealed Paris swept over her and, without thinking, she wanted Paul there. She wanted to touch him and have him touch her, the same as they had yesterday. She wanted to be with him in the bedroom and in the shower and wherever else he wanted to take her. She wanted to feel him inside her and to make love to him over and over until they ached.
She wanted it as much for him as for herself. It was important he understand that she knew about the darkness. And even if she didn’t know what it was, even if he couldn’t tell her that it was all right for him to trust her. Because when the time was appropriate, he would tell her and together they would do something about it. But for now, what he had to know more than anything, was that; she would be there for him, whenever and for as long as he needed.
31
* * *
THE 1961 movie West Side Story starring Natalie Wood was playing in its original English-language version at a small theater on the boulevard des Italiens. The film ran 151 minutes and its second show, starting at four, was the one that Paul Osborn would attend. When he was in college he’d taken two successive film history courses and had written a lengthy paper on translating stage musicals to the screen. West Side Story had been the centerpiece of his discussion and he still remembered it well enough to convince anyone he’d just seen it.
The theater on the boulevard des Italiens was halfway between his hotel and the bakery where Kanarack worked and had Métro stations within a five-minute walk in any of three directions.
Circling the name of the theater with his pen, Osborn closed his newspaper and got up from the small table where he’d been sitting. Crossing the hotel dining room to pay his breakfast bill, he glanced outside. It was still raining.
Entering the lobby, lie looked around. Three hotel employees were behind the desk, and outside, two people huddled under the doorway overhang while a doorman summoned a cab. That was it, there was no one else.
Going to the elevator, he pressed the button and the door opened immediately. Getting in, he rode up alone. As he did, he weighed the situation with McVey carefully. He was sure it was Kanarack who had killed Jean Packard. The question was: Did the police know? Or, more pointedly, did they know it was Kanarack he had hired the private detective to find? As he had seen, what the police knew and how they knew it were beyond the reach of everyday people, himself included.
Playing a worst-case scenario—that the police knew nothing of Kanarack but suspected Osborn knew more about the private investigator’s death than he’d let on— McVey or someone else would be watching the hotel and would follow him the moment he left. The problem was troublesome and he needed to find some way around it.
The elevator stopped
and Osborn stepped into the hallway. A few moments later he let himself into his room and closed the door. It was 11:25 in the morning. Four hours before he would leave for the theater.
Tossing the newspaper on the bed, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, then took a shower. It was while he was shaving he decided that the best way to solve his problem was to play the part he wanted the police to expect of him, the saddened lover spending his last day in Paris alone. And the sooner he started, the better the chance to shake anyone following him. And what more advantageous place to begin his lonely journey than the Louvre, with its multitudes of tourists and numerous exits?
Pulling on his raincoat, Osborn snapped off the light and turned for the door. As he did, he saw the darkened image of himself in the mirror and for the briefest instant everything turned inward. That the police might be watching only made what he was doing more difficult. Had Kanarack been caught and tried within a reasonable time, things would have been different. But he hadn’t. Nearly thirty years later and a continent away, Kanarack’s crime stood as a crime apart, with no law that either could, or would, administer punishment or justice. In the absence of law, all that was left was to make equity as one could. And Osborn hoped that whatever God there was would understand.
Deciding that being on foot gave him more options, Osborn left the rental Peugeot in the hotel garage and asked the doorman to call him a taxi. Five minutes later he was traveling down the Champs Elysees toward the Louvre. He thought he might have seen a dark car pull out from the curb and follow them as the cab had turned out of the hotel drive, but looking back he couldn’t be sure.
Moments later the taxi pulled up in front of the Louvre. Paying the driver, Osborn stepped out into a light mist. As the cab pulled away, his immediate sense was to look around for the dark car. But if the police were watching, he dared not clue them in that he knew. Absently putting his hands in his pockets, he waited for traffic to pass, then crossed the rue de Rivoli and went into the museum.
Once inside, he took a solid twenty minutes studying the works of Giotto, Raphael, Titian and Fra Angelico before leaving the gallery to find a men’s room. Five minutes later, he joined a crowd of American tourists about to board a bus for Versailles and went with them out the main entrance. At the curb he left them, walked half a block and entered the Metro.
Within the hour he was back at his hotel, waiting for the Peugeot to be brought up from the garage. If the police had been following him, how could they imagine he was still not in the museum? Nevertheless he watched his mirror carefully as he drove off. To make sure, he turned down one street and, two blocks later, down another. As far as he could tell he was on his own.
Twenty minutes later he parked the Peugeot on a side street a block and a half from the movie theater locked it and walked off. Taking the Metro back to the hotel, he waited until the attendant who had brought his car up from the garage left the front door to retrieve another car, then slipped inside and went up to his room.
As he came in, he looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was exactly 1:15 in the afternoon. Taking off his raincoat, he looked over at the phone. Earlier that morning he’d picked it up and started to dial the bakery to make certain nothing had gone awry and that Kanarack was at work as he should be. Then he had the thought that if something happened and things went wrong, the call could be traced back to his room. Immediately he’d hung up. Looking at the phone now, he felt the same urgency of wanting to know but decided ; against it.
Better to trust to the fates that had brought him this far and assume Kanarack would be spending his Friday as he had spent his Thursday and probably every other workday of the past years, quietly, doing his job and keeping the lowest profile possible.
And now, Osborn took off the tan chinos and dark Polo cardigan he had worn to the Louvre and changed; into a nondescript pair of faded jeans, with an old sweater pulled over a plaid L.L. Bean flannel shirt, Even as he carefully tied his running shoes and put the dark blue watch cap bought at a surplus store that morning into the side pocket of his jacket, and turned, finally to prepare the tools of the day, filling three hypodermic syringes with the succinylcholine—even as he did all that, with the clock ticking down to the moment he would leave for the movie theater on boulevard des Italiens, Henri Kanarack was already parking Agnes Demblon’s white Citroën less than a half block from his hotel.
32
* * *
HAIR COMBED and neatly shaven, Henri Kanarack was dressed in the light blue overalls of an air-conditioning company repairman. He had no trouble entering the service entrance nor of taking the maintenance elevator to the mechanical room floor. Jean Packard had given him Paul Osborn’s name and the name of the hotel where he was staying. He had not had Osborn’s room number or he, would most certainly have given that up, too. Hotels did not give out room numbers of guests, especially five-star hotels like Osborn’s on the avenue Kléber where the clientele was wealthy and international and carefully protected from outsiders who might have a political or personal ax to grind.
Picking up a toolbox from the mechanical room, Kanarack walked down a service corridor and took the fire stairs to the lobby. Pushing through the door, he stopped and looked around. The lobby was small, finished in dark wood and brass, and decorated mostly with antiques. To his left was the entrance to the bar and directly across from it, a small gift shop and a dining room. To the right .were the elevators. Opposite them was the front desk, and behind it, a clerk in a dark suit was talking with an extraordinarily tall, black African businessman who was apparently checking in. For Kanarack to get Osborn’s room number, he needed to get behind the front desk. Purposefully crossing the lobby, Kanarack approached the clerk and, when he looked up, immediately took the upper hand.
“Air-conditioning repair. Some problem with the electrical system. We’re trying to locate the trouble,” he said in French.
“I know nothing about it.” The clerk was indignant. That haughty, superior attitude was something Kanarack had hated about Parisians from the day he got there, especially when it came from salaried workers who made little more than he did and barely made it from paycheck to paycheck.
“You want me to go, okay. The problem is not mine,” Kanarack said with an animated shrug.
Instead of arguing, the clerk dismissed him with a tepid “Do what you have to do,” and turned back to the African.
“Thanks,” Kanarack said, and walked behind the desk to a position beside the clerk where he could examine a line of electrical switches directly above the master guest register. As he bent over to study them, he could feel the press of the .45 automatic tucked in the waistband under the bulky overalls. The short silencer fitted to the snout pushed against his upper thigh. A full clip in the magazine, a second clip was in his pocket.
“Pardon,” he said, picking up the entire guest register and setting it to one side. At the same time the desk telephone rang and the clerk picked up. Quickly Kanarack ran down the register. Under the O’s he found what he needed. Paul Osborn was in room 714. Quickly he set the register back in place, picked up his toolbox and walked from behind the desk.
“Thanks,” he said again.
McVey stared out the window at the fog, tired and disgusted. The Charles de Gaulle Airport was socked in and all flights had been grounded. He wished he could tell if it was getting darker or lighter outside. If it was going to be socked in all day, he’d grab a nearby hotel room and go to bed. If it wasn’t and there was the chance he’d get off, he’d do what everybody else had been doing for the last two hours—wait.
Before he’d left Lebrun’s office, he’d put in a call to Benny Grossman at New York Police Department head-quarters in Manhattan. Benny was only thirty-five but was as good a homicide detective as McVey had ever worked with. They’d jobbed together twice. Once when Benny had come to L.A. to retrieve an escaped killer from New York, and again when the NYPD asked McVey to come to New York to see if he could figure out something th
ey couldn’t. As it turned out, McVey couldn’t get to the bottom of it either, but he and Benny had done the fumble i work together and afterward had a few drinks and a few laughs. McVey had even gone to Benny’s house in Queens for a Passover seder.
Benny had just come in when McVey called and had jumped on the line.
“Oy, McVey!” Benny said, which is what he always said when McVey called, then after some small talk got around to things with “So, boobalah, what can I do for you?” McVey had no idea if he was trying to sound like an old-time Hollywood agent or if he said that to everyone when they got down to business.
“Benny, sweetheart,” McVey had quipped, thinking that if Benny was a frustrated agent why not play along, then explaining that he was not in Manhattan or L.A. but sitting in the headquarters of the Paris Préfecture of Police.
“Paris, like in France or Texas?” Benny asked.
“Like in France,” McVey replied, and took the phone away from his ear at Benny’s extended whistle. Afterward he got down to specifics. McVey needed to know what Benny could come up with on an Albert Merriman who had supposedly bought the farm in a gangland killing in New York in 1967. Since Benny was eight years old in 1967, he’d never heard of Albert Merriman, but he’d find out and call McVey back.
“Let me call you,” McVey said, with no idea where he was going to be when Benny retrieved the information.
Four hours later McVey called back.
In the interval since they’d talked Benny had gone to the NYPD Records & Information archives and come up with a solid smattering of information on Albert Merriman. Merriman had been discharged from the U.S. Army in 1963 and very shortly afterward teamed up with an old friend, a convicted bank robber named Willie Leonard who’d just been released from Atlanta. Merriman and Leonard then went on a free-for-all and were wanted for bank robbery, murder, attempted murder and extortion in half-a-dozen states. They were also rumored to have made a few hits for organized crime families in New Jersey and New England.