The Marble Mask Page 21

  Abandoning our short-lived detachment, we both began jogging toward the bridge as well. The urban cowboy had almost reached it by now, and two strings of uniformed cops, advancing from either abutment, had just set foot on the frozen water. With high-pitched screams, a couple of snowmobiles sped by, hoping to grab him before he vanished under the bridge’s archways.

  But it wasn’t to be. As suddenly as they’d come to life, the machines slid to a halt a few hundred yards from their target.

  Paul had the phone to his ear again. “They’re holding off because of thin ice,” he told me. “The water moves so fast from the bridge to the first dam, they don’t want to risk their men.”

  We came abreast of the frustrated snowmobile riders glaring into the gloom under the arches. To the right and left, the people who’d gained the river’s surface from opposite sides of the bridge were very slowly feeling their way toward the middle, roped together like mountain climbers. Paul and I, lighter than the machines, continued cautiously up the middle.

  Suddenly, the darkness before us vanished as in a lightning strike. The police had rigged portable lamps along the railing overhead, facing downriver, illuminating the entire scene as if it were an enormous barren stage—and the man in its glaring midst a trapped intruder.

  A loudspeaker crackled. In contrast to its bellowing metallic voice bouncing off the hard surfaces around us, Paul’s quiet translation sounded like the whispers of a prompter.

  “This is the police. Move back toward the bridge. You are on thin ice and could break through at any moment. Do not go any farther.”

  For a moment, it seemed the man might follow orders. He twisted around jerkily, his body slightly bent as if both fearful and spring-loaded, but then he obviously saw what looked like a better option. His feet slipping initially, he began running toward the darkness and the faint but ominous rumble of falling water, heading for the quasi-wilderness Paul had mentioned earlier.

  But things didn’t work out for him. It looked like he stumbled at first—he seemed to go down on one knee. But as he struggled to rise, we saw his pants clinging wetly to his leg, and realized he’d broken through. He took a couple of more steps, went down as before—but deeper this time—and tried to push himself back up with his arms. Then the other leg vanished from sight. Momentarily, almost playfully, his dark-clad torso stayed level with the ice’s hard, even plane, and we suddenly saw the pallor of his face as he plaintively looked back over his shoulder at us all before disappearing from sight as if through a trapdoor. Instantly, the river’s surface became as bland as before—pale, cold, and impassive—with no trace or memory of the man it had just swallowed whole.

  “So much for finding out what that was all about,” Paul said softly.

  Chapter 20

  “I’M SORRY ABOUT THIS,” I TOLD GILLES Lacombe. “I couldn’t wait around for a bunch of medical types to do this the official way. And I’m getting pretty good at thawing myself out anyway.”

  I was lying in my tub back at the motel, immersed in water so hot it limited visibility. Lacombe was sitting on the toilet seat beside me, slowly removing layer after layer of clothes, hoping to get comfortable.

  “It is not a problem,” he said politely, pulling off a sweater. “Is it working?”

  “I can move my hands and feet again, but I can’t say I’m toasty yet.”

  He laughed weakly. “You are lucky.”

  Paul was leaning against the doorjamb. “I read somewhere warming yourself up like that can cause a heart attack—all the cold blood from the extremities rushes back to the core and drops its temperature further down than it is.”

  “I guess this is your chance to see if they were right,” I said testily, having no intention of getting out. “I take it the cowboy didn’t survive his midnight dip.”

  Down to his shirt now, Lacombe shook his head. “We have not found the body. If it went over the dam, it will be under the ice now. We will not find it until the spring. This has happened with fishermen and skaters. We know he did not make it to the shore.”

  “What about his car?” I asked.

  “We are looking at it. In the computer, the registration says the man is a muscle-for-hire. He worked for several of the bars and clubs on Wellington Sud.”

  “Any affiliation to either the Angels or Deschamps?” Paul asked.

  “The two of them,” Lacombe told him, squinting through the steam. “And people who have nothing to do with them.”

  “Great,” I said. “Maybe he has a note in his pocket, signed by whoever hired him.”

  “Better be in waterproof ink,” Paul said.

  “I am afraid I have some questions about this,” Lacombe added. “I do not understand how this man knew where you lived in this motel.”

  “Take your pick,” Paul suggested. “It’s not like we’ve been undercover.”

  Lacombe nodded. “Oh, that is true, of course. But how he knows the room number becomes a little problem. Also, why try to kill you, and why try to kill you right now? What have you done that causes worry?”

  · · ·

  The next day Willy looked at me from across the conference table back at the Stowe police department and seconded the question. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What the hell do you know that deserves a bullet?”

  The whole team had been pulled out of Canada, except for Kathy Bartlett, who was still fighting with her Canadian opposites to get Marcel extradited.

  “We were rattling a few offbeat cages,” I told him. “We must’ve hit the right one.”

  Tom Shanklin looked unconvinced. “The World War Two angle? How’s that make sense?”

  Paul Spraiger had been sitting back in his chair, seemingly half asleep, and now stirred himself to say, “It doesn’t, necessarily, but this attack followed right on the heels of our digging into Antoine’s death.”

  Gary Smith sounded doubtful, too. “You don’t kill a cop because he’s getting close to something—another just takes his place and everyone’s a whole lot more pissed off.”

  “That’s if you’re thinking,” Paul persisted, speaking on my behalf, since I had no more to contribute than anyone else.

  “If you’re feeling cornered and you tend to lash out by nature,” he continued, “shooting a cop might seem like a no-brainer.”

  “So we pick out the suspect who’s an idiot with a short fuse?” Willy asked.

  “More realistic would be to keep on the pressure,” I suggested. “If it hadn’t been for that literal thin ice last night, we might’ve had a pathway back to this creep—there’s no reason to think he won’t try again, especially if he feels I’m after him personally.”

  Sammie could see what I was driving at. “You think the grand plan is to knock off the top cop and throw the troops into confusion?”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Smith disagreed. “Look at the IQ’s of most of the jerks we go after. Plus, opening the World War Two can of worms wasn’t the only sudden change here. Assuming Marcel was framed for his father’s death, that plan just went down the tubes, too.”

  “All right, all right, but so what?” Willy persisted. “It’s not like we can tie the boss like a goat to a tree.” He suddenly laughed. “Not that it’s a terrible idea.”

  Amid the scattered laughter, I suggested, “We could hold a press conference to make it look like I’m the right target.”

  There was a telling hesitation in the room. “What do we do with you afterward?” Paul asked.

  “Nothing,” I answered him. “We don’t know for a fact any of this is true. It’ll just be another iron in the fire. Besides, the governor and Bill Allard have been breathing down my neck—a press conference could be a good way to throw them a little meat and test our theory at the same time. Can’t hurt, right?”

  No one bothered answering that.

  I glanced at the notes before me. “Anyhow, the World War Two connection is the only soft spot we’ve found so far—I don’t see tha
t we have a choice. Willy, what did you find out chasing down Federico Alvarez’s last will and testament?”

  “It’s on file at the courthouse, and it reads like what the innkeeper told us. The good news-bad news is that the paper trail had too many legal firewalls for me to track it back to any source besides a lawyer who won’t talk.”

  “What’s good about that?” Smith asked.

  “Shows they got something to hide. Cuts down on the chance we’re just dealing with some crazy, compulsive bastard who liked old luggage.”

  Smith looked unconvinced. I couldn’t argue with him. “That’s one possibility. I’ve known a lot of nuts who’ve hired attorneys. What would it take to crack the lawyer open?”

  “Won’t need to,” Willy answered. “He figured we might waste his time, and he thinks it’s bullshit anyhow, so he told me off the record all he’s got is more documentation leading nowhere. He used some legal babble that didn’t mean squat to me, but the gist of it was that Alvarez was secretive enough—and the whole thing old enough—that we’re not going to find out what was behind it. All the major players are long dead.”

  “All right,” I conceded. “We’ll have to drop it. Speaking of lawyers, did we ever find out what Gaston Picard was doing down here just before Jean Deschamps showed up on Mount Mansfield?”

  “I checked that out, too,” Willy answered. “’Nother dead end. I talked to lawyers, bankers, Realtors—like you said. Also the town clerk, since we were already over there digging through files, and even a couple of travel agents. I tried the airport manager and crew, just for what-the-hell. I asked Gary here what ideas he had, and he put me onto a few more people. Total waste of time. Picard might as well’ve not even been here.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Drive all the way down and not meet with anybody? Where was his car parked when it was ticketed?”

  Gary Smith spoke up. “Main Street, opposite Shaw’s.”

  “Why the ticket?”

  He hesitated. “Overdue meter, I think.”

  “When?”

  “Around noon, more or less. I could look it up.”

  “That’s close enough,” I said. “High roller hits town, parks for a long time on the main drag at midday. Why’s he here?”

  Willy sounded disgusted. “Meet someone for lunch. Shit.”

  I tried easing the pain. “You thought of everything else.”

  “’Cept the obvious.”

  “What good restaurant’s near there?” I asked Gary.

  “There’s more’n one.”

  “We’ll need a list, starting with the most expensive. If Picard did the choosing, he probably went five star. We can divvy it up and get it done under an hour.” I glanced back at my notes. “Sammie, you and Tom were going to see what you could find out about Stowe in the late forties.”

  “It was more upscale than Arvin Brown told us,” she said, fishing a sheet of paper from her pocket to consult. “A thousand-foot rope tow was put on the mountain in ’37. By 1940, a sixty-three-hundred-foot chairlift went in—first in Vermont—which had carried a million skiers to the top by ’53—”

  “Sounds like ripe pickings,” I interrupted, “for a sharp-eyed investor.”

  “Or a crook,” Willy added.

  “Which goes to what we’re after,” I agreed. “We need less history and more about the people back then, especially anyone who might’ve been handy with an ice pick.”

  Sammie gave me a hapless gesture. “If you mean old rap sheets, that part’s turned out to be almost impossible. What cops they had are gone and buried. We couldn’t find any police files anywhere. We got names of some of the old movers and shakers, just by talking to any geezer we could find, and some of them spilled a little gossip, but what do you do with that?”

  I pulled the Special Service Force roster book we’d borrowed from Dick Kearley from under the papers before me and slid it across to her. “That’s a list of the people Antoine served with in the war. Inside is a printout of known surviving Canadian taxpayers from the RCMP. But it was an American/Canadian brigade, and the Mounties admitted their records might be iffy. Still, it’ll give you something to compare against anyone you might find in the town clerk’s archives. Later, we can try the Pentagon for what they have, too.”

  I looked around the room and saw her disappointment reflected in most of the faces there. “I know this isn’t fun—geriatrics, ancient history, and dusty files—but somebody on the other side thinks we’re getting close, which means the ball’s back in motion. We’ve got to do the homework.”

  I placed my hands on the table and rose. “Okay. While you and Tom are doing that, the rest of us will find out who Picard had lunch with—assuming that’s what happened. Maybe one will help the other. We’re looking for a missing link here, and we know it exists ’cause I wouldn’t’ve been shot at otherwise, right?”

  · · ·

  It was mid afternoon by the time I entered the Deeryard Restaurant. A couple of people were sitting by the stained-glass windows drinking coffee over immaculate tablecloths, but otherwise the place was in the dark and peaceful chasm between lunch and dinner, its staff either prepping the bar for the evening onslaught, discreetly vacuuming the carpet far away from the clientele, or creating muted chaos from beyond the leather-padded kitchen doors.

  I stood stock-still in the middle of the room, adjusting to the tasteful gloom, when an artificially cultured voice asked, “May I help you, sir?”

  I discerned the emerging form of a man in a jacket and tie, looking much like a television anchorman in his perfection.

  “I hope so.” I pulled out my badge. “I’m Joe Gunther, Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

  The man’s tone changed from fake cultured to instant nasty, which made me think he might be as unpleasant a colleague as he was obsequious a host. “We passed inspection two months ago with flying colors. What son of a bitch complained this time?”

  I pocketed the badge with a sigh, wondering if I shouldn’t drop the whole VBI intro. “I’m not a restaurant inspector. I’m a cop working a homicide. What’s your name?”

  The man at least paid me the compliment of looking astonished. “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought… Johnny Philbin.”

  He seemed torn over whether a handshake was appropriate. I let him dangle his wrist in the air uncertainly.

  “You work lunches or are you dinner only?” I asked him.

  The hand dropped. “Both.”

  I mentioned the date Gaston Picard had received his parking ticket. “How ’bout then?”

  “Yeah, I think so… I mean, yeah, I was here.”

  “You take reservations for lunch?”

  “We take them. They aren’t necessary. Dinner only.”

  I pulled a photograph of Picard from my pocket, provided earlier by the Sûreté, and repeated a question I’d tried unsuccessfully at two other places on the block. “This is important. Take your time. Tell me if you remember seeing this man that day.”

  He barely glanced at it. I prepared myself to be disappointed. “Sure.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yeah. He had lunch with Mike Sawyer,” he said without expression, as if sharing common knowledge.

  “Who is…?” I asked nevertheless.

  “He’s a famous guy around here. Ran the first really classy restaurant in the valley—Michael Sawyer’s it was called. Old guy, but nice, and knows his food business. Gives you hell if you mess up, overtips if you do it right.”

  I waggled the photograph I was still holding in my hand. “This one a regular, too?”

  Philbin shook his head. “Never saw him before. I just recognized him because of Sawyer. When Mike comes to eat, I pay attention.” He smiled with an oily self-satisfaction. “Makes it worth my while.”

  My earlier dislike of the man returned. “During your hovering to be of service, did you hear what they were talking about?”

  He slid both hands into his trouser pockets an
d shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk about that. Isn’t there some kind of right-to-privacy thing there?”

  I stared at him a moment, wondering if he was trying to be cute, angling for some money, or just plain stupid. “There’s your right to remain silent when I arrest you for impeding an investigation.”

  The hands came back out. “Jesus Christ. You don’t have to get so touchy. They talked about a lot of bullshit—the old days, their health. The same kind of crap all these old farts talk about.”

  “How about their waiter? Who was he?”

  He surprised me by suddenly looking uncomfortable. “I was.”

  I understood immediately. “Screwed the real waiter for the tip. Where’s Sawyer live?”

  Philbin was anxious to get this over. “Edson Hill area.” He gave me the precise address. “It’s where a lot of bigwigs live.”

  “He get there just because of the restaurant?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  · · ·

  I went to Edson Hill with Gary Smith. He called the homes there “starter castles” and shared a few past tales of their owners’ eccentric behavior. His take on them was like that of an indulgent father who didn’t mind a little mischief from his children. It was one of the interesting things about Stowe that I’d already noticed—that the simmering anger some towns felt for the occasional wealthy resident had been diluted by compromise here, either because there were so many millionaires, or perhaps because Stowe had made its peace with what it had become.

  That thought prompted me to test Gary on a topic closer to home. “What do you think about VBI, now that we’ve been working together awhile?”

  He was still looking out the passenger window at the parade of huge houses, most of them new, many of them reflecting in their architecture the stone and woods that defined the entire region.

  “I’m still not sure why they dreamed you up, what with VSP already in place, but it hasn’t bugged me any.”

  “We haven’t been too pushy?”

  “Our PD wouldn’t have ended up with this case anyhow, and you guys have been good to work with, ’cept maybe Kunkle. He’s a little much.”