The Marble Mask Read online

  “Great,” we heard Willy say, as we retreated to the table and pretended to be hard at work.

  Footsteps approached and then Willy ushered in Mrs. Robin like a favorite aunt. “I think I found our translator,” he announced.

  She blushed and quickly added, “I’m not making any promises. It’s not like I’m fluent or anything.”

  I stood up and made room for her before the open register. “Right there,” I said, tapping the phrase with my finger.

  She took my place, removed a pair of reading glasses from her cardigan pocket, and sat silently for a moment, studying. “Let’s see,” she said to herself, “ ‘maleta’… that’s ‘suitcase.’ And ‘guardarropa’ I think is ‘wardrobe’ or ‘closet.’ I wonder what that means?”

  None of us had any doubts. Half the contents of the barn’s back room was luggage of one sort or another, and most of it was full. All the boredom and tedium of the past several hours vaporized. As a single unit, we headed back outside, Willy first, having dropped his charm like a hot rock.

  “Thanks, Donna,” I said, last in line. “You’re a godsend.”

  · · ·

  It didn’t take us long after that, although Federico Alvarez would not have been pleased with our methods. We went through trunks, suitcases, packs, and boxes like a herd of thieves, not quite throwing the contents of each piece over our shoulders, but close enough. Finally, fittingly, Willy said, “I think I got it,” and stood back from an open pigskin valise filled with neatly folded, slightly moldy, expensive clothing, on top of which was a leather toilet kit with the initials JMD stamped on it.

  “Deschamps’s middle name was Marie, right?” Willy asked.

  “Right,” I said, standing beside him, slightly amazed at our luck. Looking down at the same clothes that had so impressed Arvin Brown, packed by the man I’d met in the autopsy room, I was left revisiting the historical ambiguities that had haunted my dreams the night before—and wondering if they hadn’t been prescient after all.

  “Better wrap it up,” I said. “We’re going to want to take our time with this.”

  Chapter 14

  LATER THAT NIGHT, THE SMELL OF PIZZA still in the air, Sam, Willy, Tom, and I sat around the conference table at the Stowe PD with Frank Auerbach and a woman named Carrie Salt, a French teacher from the local high school.

  She had just joined us, Frank having called her at home, and was now taking us all in, her face a mixture of amusement and concern, each struggling for the upper hand.

  “What’s this all about, Frank? You said I might be able to help you with your French?”

  “I was pulling your chain a bit, Carrie,” he said lightly. “You know how well I speak French.”

  She laughed shortly. “Yeah—not a word. So what’s the real reason?”

  “We found a letter. A real old letter. I made a copy of it and was wondering if you could translate it. It’s that simple.” He slid a single sheet of paper across the table to her.

  She resisted picking it up at first, still watching us. “Is this in relation to some crime?”

  “We’re not sure,” I answered, mostly to break the wall of silence the rest of us had unconsciously created. “We found it in an old abandoned suitcase, and we have no idea what it says.”

  That wasn’t actually true. We had a pretty good idea it had been written by Marcel Deschamps.

  It obviously wasn’t as full an explanation as she wanted, but it was enough. She picked up the letter and read it.

  A minute later, visibly relieved, she put it back down and smiled. “No smoking gun here, I’m afraid. Couldn’t be friendlier. It’s basically a son writing his father to join him for a little time off.”

  “Could you give us a word-for-word?” Auerbach requested.

  She took up the letter again. “Sure. ‘Dear Dad. I don’t have much time, but I wanted to tell you what a wonderful time we’re having down here. Stowe is up and coming—good food and a few nice inns—and the skiing is excellent. A nice change of pace. It would do you good to join us, if only for a couple of days. I’ll be here the rest of the week. Come.’ That last word is followed by an exclamation point. The signature is ‘Marcel.’ That’s all there is to it.”

  “He definitely says, ‘we’ and ‘us’?” Tom Shanklin asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Is there anything in the syntax or word usage that strikes you as unusual?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I can tell it was written a long time ago. Some of the phrasing would be considered quaint today, and you can tell from the way the letters are slightly jumpy that whoever typed it used a manual typewriter. But that’s about it.”

  Frank stood up, encouraging Carrie to do the same. “You’ve been a big help. We really appreciate it. I’ll walk you out.”

  We waited until they’d left. “Don’t know about the Canucks, but in this country, that would be enough for a warrant,” Willy said. “You got the dead guy in town, you got him eating a meal that’s still in his stomach, you got his luggage abandoned in a hotel room, and you got a letter from a son who directly benefited from his death inviting him down for a little reunion.”

  “You also have the same son’s lawyer showing up in town three days before the old man’s body pops up,” Sammie added.

  Auerbach reappeared in the doorway. “Joe. You’ve got a call. Someone named Lacombe.” He pointed to a phone on a side table. “You can take it there if you want—in my office if you want privacy.”

  I leaned over in my chair and grabbed the nearby phone. “Gilles? It’s Joe.”

  “Hello, Joe. How are you doing back in the U.S.A.?”

  “Interesting stuff. Can I put you on the speaker? Spare me repeating everything to the others.”

  “By all means. Of course.”

  I hit the button next to the dial pad and replaced the handset. “Okay. What’s on your mind?”

  “Ah. We have found something I thought you should know about. It is a letter confirming a reservation for Jean Deschamps at a place called the Snow Dancer Hotel. It is signed by someone called Federico Alvarez, who calls himself the proprietor. What is really interesting is that the date for this reservation—”

  “Is January sixteenth, 1947,” I interrupted, unable to stop myself.

  There was stunned silence at the other end, followed by “How do you know this?”

  “We came at it another way, at least I think we did,” I answered. “We got an educated guess from a local old-timer about where a fancy guy like Deschamps might spend the night. It was the Snow Dancer. We not only found the place, but the old register and Deschamps’s abandoned suitcase, complete with a letter from Marcel inviting his father down for the weekend. It’s looking more likely that Jean was killed down here.”

  “This is extraordinary,” Lacombe blurted. “After all this time?”

  “Willy was wondering if it was enough for a search warrant.”

  I could almost hear Lacombe’s brain turning that over. “It might be. We would have to discuss the specifics. I would like to know that Marcel was either in Stowe then or at least not in Sherbrooke, but that is not likely information to get. I will talk to our procureur.”

  “I’ll bring you everything we collected from down here for a show-and-tell. Gilles, we also found out that Gaston Picard was in Stowe a few days before Deschamps appeared on the mountain. He got a parking ticket. You might want to lean on him and find out what he was doing here.”

  Lacombe’s voice betrayed his interest. “I will do that.”

  “By the way,” I asked him, “how did you get hold of that confirmation letter?”

  “It was from all the newspaper stories about Deschamps. From being a bad thing we feared, it became a good one. An old woman who worked for Jean Deschamps called us after the news. She never believed what they were telling about a religious retreat, so when she stopped working for the family—after Marcel came in—she stole the letter because she thought it might be a hot item, but she did
n’t do anything with it because she was frightened, and then she forgot. The publicity made her remember and call us.”

  “Was there anything besides the letter?”

  “I am sorry, no. Nothing that she gave us.”

  “Okay, thanks. I’ll see you soon.”

  I hung up and watched the others silently, waiting for someone to voice my own misgivings.

  Tom Shanklin spoke first. “I’ve had cases a week old that didn’t fall together this fast.”

  “Me, too,” Willy said.

  “It’s the belt-and-suspenders aspect to it that bugs me,” Sammie added. “I could buy the stomach contents leading to the waiter and then to the old hotel and the suitcase, but it’s a little weird having a little old lady pop out of nowhere with the same information just in case we screwed up.”

  “None of what we found was bogus, though,” I countered, more for argument’s sake. “Not as far as we can tell. We all dug through the contents of that barn—it was real dirt, real cobwebs, real mildew coating the suitcase. Does anyone here think any or all of that was recently planted?”

  No one responded.

  “It feels wrong,” Willy finally said.

  “No argument,” I told him. “But I can’t see what choice we’ve got—not yet. It looks like Marcel knocked off his father. We’ve heard two different stories so far: that he was wet behind the ears but set to inherit the throne, and that he was blindly ambitious and didn’t trust his father’s intentions after his brother died. Whatever the truth, he did take over, did prove himself a good manager, and did make a bundle over the next five decades. In retrospect, all good, old-fashioned motives for murder. What bugs me is what’s happening now. If we are being used to frame him for a piece of ancient history, why now?”

  “Same reason he actually might’ve killed his own father,” Auerbach suggested. “Only now it’s someone else wanting access to the throne.”

  “I’d agree with you if he didn’t have terminal cancer. Jean Deschamps might’ve lived for years, which could’ve made a young heir impatient. But Marcel is counting the days. Why an elaborate frame when Mother Nature’s almost done all the dirty work?”

  Sammie suddenly leaned forward in her chair. “Because it’s a different script this time,” she suggested. “We’ve been thinking it’s somebody inside the Deschamps camp doing this, just like it was fifty years ago. What if the pressure’s coming from outside? Could be the Hell’s Angels or the Rock Machine are behind it all, trying to destabilize the passing of the torch by using us to bust Marcel and destroy his inner circle, killing Tessier as extra insurance in the meantime. I know they weren’t around when Marcel’s dad was murdered, but it’s not impossible they got in cahoots with whoever’s been keeping Jean Deschamps on ice.”

  “Too fancy,” Willy said shortly. With anyone else, he would have driven the point home more sarcastically. I was struck by his delicacy.

  I also agreed with him. “It makes more sense that somebody inside is pulling the strings,” I said. “I don’t know how, why, or if Tessier’s death ties in, but I’m inclined to keep that separate for the time being. Both Picard and Guidry are old enough to have played as big a role in Jean’s disappearance as Marcel. How ’bout pinning this on one of them?”

  But Shanklin shook his head. “That puts you right back where you started. Marcel’s about to die. Assuming his son Michel does wind up in his seat, he’ll need both those guys to learn the ropes—they’re guaranteed jobs for life. Why mess that up? Plus, Tessier was killed by an Angel after years of peaceful coexistence—just before the Angels are slated to go to war. That can’t be a coincidence.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and stretched. “Okay. So we have no idea what’s going on. But we have leads, evidence, and a trail to follow. Let’s at least follow it and see where it goes. Could be we’re making ourselves nuts here for no reason.”

  But I didn’t believe that for a minute. Nor, I thought, did anyone else. Something wasn’t right about all this.

  Gilles Lacombe was on the phone when I was escorted into his office the following day. He smiled and waved me to a seat, still rapidly talking in Joual to whoever was at the other end.

  Then he hung up, leaned back, and locked his fingers behind his head. “Joe. It is good to see you again. I have been talking to the procureur, and it looks okay for the warrant. We made a list of enough specific items that we should be able to search the whole house. Thank you for faxing me what you found in Stowe. It is incredible that we both were told about the valise of Jean Deschamps, no?”

  “Incredible might be the right word. Could be we’re being led around by the nose.”

  Lacombe was unperturbed. “Perhaps. But do we care? It cannot be so bad to put a spoon in the soup and move it around a little. It might be a good time to invite your own procureur up here to meet ours. I think we will put the fire under Marcel Deschamps and see what happens.”

  · · ·

  Surveillance reports had told us what to expect. For days, the comings and goings at Marcel’s home had been recorded on tape and logged. When we finally had all the paperwork and people we needed, including Kathy Bartlett and her Canadian counterpart, we waited until the middle of the night and then hit the house without fanfare, surrounding it before politely ringing the doorbell.

  It was a Sûreté operation. Paul Spraiger, Gary Smith, Kathy, and I all stood back while the initial contact was made and only entered the building after the all-clear had been given.

  There’d been no reason to expect violence or resistance, as there might have been at the Angels’ compound, but as I walked down the familiar hallway, heading toward the library, I could tell we hadn’t been admitted with grace—several Deschamps bodyguards were being pinned facedown on the carpeting, at least two of them exhibiting bruised or bloody faces.

  The scene in the library was similarly ruffled. In place of the icy charm we’d been exposed to before, there was now turmoil and rage. Shouting at Gilles Lacombe were Pierre Guidry and a young man whose resemblance to Marcel stamped him as Michel, the family’s heir apparent. Lacombe stood looking like a man suffering the mildest of discomforts, a polite smile on his face.

  Paul Spraiger didn’t bother translating word-for-word but merely said, “According to them, Marcel’s at death’s door upstairs and can’t be disturbed, this search is illegal, and we should wait for Picard so we can all be told that our jobs are history.”

  I acknowledged the familiar refrain and took advantage of being a mere spectator to study Michel Deschamps. I’d expected someone soft and pliable, given the rumors, and was surprised by the real article. Lean and muscular—now lacking the wimpy mustache I’d seen in the picture of him—he was certainly attractive enough to fit a playboy image, but watching his aggressive body language, I had my doubts he was anyone’s pushover. In fact, the degree of anger he was venting made me wonder how downright violent he could be. It suggested the lineage we’d assumed was rotting away might be made of hardier stuff.

  Or maybe it went beyond simple hardiness. The more I watched him, the more his body language made me think of someone on the edge, although of what I wasn’t sure. But his eyes seemed slightly wider than they ought to be, his movements a little jerky, as if held under tight constraints, and his tone of voice, although I couldn’t understand a word right now, bordered on the hysterical.

  Lacombe eventually saw Paul and me standing there and disengaged himself, transferring the argument to the two prosecutors. He led us back into the hallway and shut the door. “They are not so well mannered when they are surprised. I am guessing we will get no coffee this time. Would you like a tour of the house? Maybe we can talk with Marcel before those two know what we are doing.”

  The hallway led to a sweeping staircase—ornate, curved, and hung with gilt-framed oil paintings. Upstairs, the luxury was maintained by a second passageway, lower ceilinged and lacking chandeliers but flaunting more paintings, antique furniture, and a row of elaboratel
y carved closed doors.

  Uniformed police officers were milling about, going in and out of various rooms in search of the items specified in the search warrant.

  Lacombe asked one of them a question and then motioned to us to follow him.

  We arrived at an enormous bedroom, hovering somewhere between Louis XIV and Hollywood, where Marcel Deschamps sat propped up in a bed the size of a polo field, his emaciated, pale, hairless body looking all the more fragile in comparison. The strength of his voice as he tongue-lashed Lacombe, however, removed any fears that he’d die right in front of us. It even occurred to me that our visit might possibly be therapeutic, since the angrier he got, the pinker and more normal his face became—and reminiscent of his son’s downstairs.

  For his part, Lacombe chose to silently tour the large room like a tourist in a quiet museum. It was an odd scene—we and several search team members wandering around as if totally alone, being screamed at nonstop in a language I couldn’t understand by a man who increasingly reminded me of a choleric chicken.

  It didn’t last, of course. As Lacombe had presumably calculated, Marcel’s very real medical condition eventually caught up to him, and he collapsed against the small mountain of pillows behind him, gasping and wheezing, his body spent, his face shining with sweat, and his eyes—as at our first meeting—radiating with heat and frustrated purpose. If a candle really does burn brightest just prior to guttering, then all the energy this man had left resided in those eyes.

  In the sudden calm, Lacombe gently sat on the edge of the bed, his hands in his lap like a doting nephew, and began to speak.

  Paul translated: “Monsieur Deschamps, we have warrants both to search this house—and any other property you might own—and for your arrest for the murder of your father in 1947, in Stowe, Vermont.”

  Deschamps closed his eyes briefly, as if to summon additional strength, before reopening them and commenting in an exhausted whisper, “I have never been to Stowe and I did not kill my father.”