The Marble Mask Page 23

  “Or did he even come from this country?” Willy added.

  She laughed again. “Which one do I answer first? Actually, it’s no to both. I don’t think he was in the war, and I’m pretty sure he’d come from Canada.”

  “How did you come to those conclusions?” I asked.

  She looked thoughtful. “On the war thing it was more of a feeling I had. It was definitely something you didn’t talk about—unless you wanted Mike in one of his rages. I guess that could have been due to a traumatic combat experience, too, but I always sensed it was because he’d never had the chance to fight. People forget it now, especially since Vietnam, but the whole world was wrapped up in that war, and unless you had an arm or leg missing—I’m talking about the men, of course—you were made to feel like you had to explain yourself. The war had finished by then, obviously, but I still felt a leftover sense of shame in him.”

  “What about the Canada connection?”

  “That’s easier. He spoke like they do, and he had some pictures he’d pinned to the wall over his desk.”

  “Could you recognize the places?”

  “I remember one was Sherbrooke, all lit up at night. I asked him about it and he told me they once called it the Electric City in an effort to attract more tourists. This was during the Depression, when all they had going for them was hydro-power. The whole town looked like a Christmas tree. It was a wonderful postcard.”

  I glanced at Willy and asked, “Did he ever say he was from Sherbrooke?”

  “If he wasn’t, he knew a lot about it, and he spoke perfect French, too. Nowadays, half of Stowe is filled with Canadians—it wasn’t that way back then, but there were still a fair number that came down to ski or visit, and he’d chat with them whenever they came in to eat.”

  “You got those pictures on you?” I muttered to Willy, who dug into his inside pocket. “When these French-Canadians came to visit,” I asked Amy Butynski, “did they just come to eat, or were they friends of Sawyer’s?”

  She thought back a moment. “Most of them were customers, but Mike had a small office, and I remember him taking a couple of men back there once. I walked in on them by accident. I thought the office was empty and I was getting some more order pads. Mike got really mad at me—it stuck in my mind because there was no reason for it, not even for him. They were speaking French.”

  I handed her the pictures Willy was dangling from his one hand. “I know it’s been a long time, but do you recognize any of these faces?”

  She looked at them all carefully—of Jean, his son Marcel, Guidry, and Picard—but finally shook her head and gave them back. “I’m sorry—it’s been too many years.”

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “It was a long shot. How did the restaurant do in the beginning, before Sawyer got the hang of things?”

  She shrugged. “It seemed to do fine. I mean, the customers were few and far between at first, but that’s pretty normal.”

  “Sawyer paid cash for the restaurant,” Willy explained in his own shorthand style, “and to fix it up after.”

  She stared at him wide-eyed. “Really? Wow. No wonder we didn’t have any problems early on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shifted her gaze to me. “Those beginner glitches I mentioned—Mike would yell at us and have a fit, but it was never any trouble to buy our way out of a jam. Once, when he under-ordered filet mignon on a Friday night, he didn’t just admit it to the customers and push another item. He went across town and bought what he needed from a competitor. It must have cost him a fortune, but he didn’t seem to care.”

  “Did he live high on the hog?” Willy asked.

  “I didn’t think so. He was better off than I was, but then almost everyone was. He didn’t drive a fancy car or anything.”

  “Probably being discreet,” I said softly, mostly to myself.

  Amy’s husband spoke up at that. “I don’t suppose we could ask why you want to know all this?”

  “You could,” I told him, “but we wouldn’t be able to tell you much. It’s a very old story, with quite a few holes in it. And we’re not actually singling out Mike Sawyer—he’s just one of many leads.”

  “Did the restaurant have a freezer?” Willy asked abruptly.

  Butynski’s face lit up. “Yes. Actually, that’s another example. Right after we had the problem with the meat shortage, Mike had one put in. It was quite a big deal—I’m not sure anyone else had one then. They were quite rare in those days. In fact, the government had started a program of building community freezers here and there so that people could use them the way municipal swimming pools are used now—for the benefit of all. But typically, Mike wasn’t interested in anything like that. It was always first-class for him. It made the newspaper, if I recall correctly, and the freezer was enormous—as big as a room. In the summer, some of us would go in there to cool off—when Mike was away, of course.”

  Unconsciously, both Willy and I leaned slightly forward in our seats.

  He spoke first. “What time of year did he put it in?”

  “Easy—late winter, before the ground thawed. That was part of what made it news—that he didn’t wait till summer, or spring at least. It must have cost him much more to have it done then, but he was insistent, even though it caused a big mess and lost him business.”

  “Ms. Butynski… I mean Sommers,” I asked, “was there anything unusual about the freezer? Maybe a locker that Sawyer kept secured or even a separate room he might have used for storage?”

  She was silent for a moment and then shook her head. “It was just a room. It had shelves running along both long walls, of course, but they were open, and it had hooks for the bigger pieces of meat, but that was it.”

  That was disappointing. I was so sure we’d found where Jean Deschamps had spent at least the first few years of his afterlife.

  “You said you used to go in there to cool off during the summer,” Willy asked. “Where did you sit?”

  “On the box,” she answered pleasantly, “at the back.”

  “How big was that?” I asked, as impressed by our luck as I was by Willy’s inspiration. “Maybe seven feet long by three or four wide?”

  She smiled broadly. “Exactly. How did you know?”

  Chapter 22

  THE MOOD IN THE AIR WAS REFRESHINGLY UPBEAT, especially after so many setbacks. We were sitting around our quasi-official table at the Commodore’s bar, Willy and I updating Paul, Gary, and Tom about our conversation with Amy Butynski.

  “Assuming the box had Jean’s body in it,” Tom was asking, “who’s the connection between Mike Sawyer and Sherbrooke—Picard, Guidry, or Marcel?”

  “Rule Marcel out,” I said. “He may be a crook and he may’ve benefited from his father’s death, but I think he was clueless here.”

  “Joe thinks the ‘we’ in the letter was Picard and Guidry both,” Willy explained. “Could’ve been, too, with Guidry as the pig sticker and Picard the mastermind.”

  “They set up Mike Sawyer in a fancy restaurant just so they could put a body in the freezer?” Tom asked incredulously. “Give me a break.”

  Willy didn’t take offense, his optimism holding the upper hand for once. “Sawyer was probably only a money launderer at first. But the freezer was installed in late winter, just before a body in the snow would begin to thaw. It was luck of the draw. Jean Deschamps was indulging in chasing down his son’s supposed killer. He came to Stowe, perfect for Guidry because it was not only across the border, but where Sawyer had already been put in place. Guidry knocks the boss off and sticks him in the snow, while Picard pays Sawyer to order the freezer and—probably a few years after everything’s calmed down—lays the trail that eventually nails Marcel by salting Alvarez’s records, setting up that weird will, and planting the letter that led us to Marcel. A nice, neat, lawyerly approach.”

  “But why bother?” Tom complained. “Why not just knock off both father and son and take over the business?”

  Wi
lly was beginning to lose patience. “Because it was a family business, duh, and to destroy that means to destroy the works. Besides, now Guidry moves up from chauffeur to right-hand man, and Picard becomes the consigliore, all because snotnose Marcel turns into this smoking son of a bitch who transforms Pop’s outfit into a multimillion-dollar hotrod. Everyone comes up roses, with the extra advantage that the first two have this rabbit in their hat they can use against Marcel whenever they want—which is when he comes down with galloping cancer and talks about handing everything over to his son, Michel, who is guaranteed to piss it all away.”

  Tom was silent, considering Willy’s version of reality. Gary Smith, however, seemed won over. “I’ll be damned. That would explain why things have gone to hell since Marcel passed the polygraph, and why they tried to hit Joe for poking around beyond the trail they laid out.”

  “I think it’s been more Guidry than Picard,” I said. “He’s the one with the street-brawler past. Could be the two of them are falling out, which would explain the stupidity of trying to shoot a cop.”

  Gary Smith reached for his silent pager and looked at the display. “Be back in a sec,” he said and left the table.

  Tom Shanklin didn’t look totally convinced but obviously had no counterarguments. “What’s the next move? See what the Canadians can make fit?”

  “After meeting Butynski, Willy and I did just that—we called Lacombe to try some of this out. He already had a little on Sawyer, from Sammie’s call earlier, and confirmed that Sawyer was a bad boy up there before leaving for the U.S. during the war, which is why he didn’t get into the fighting, apparently. The kicker, though, is that he may’ve been here illegally all this time, which means we’ll have something to squeeze him with. I doubt he’ll want to go back to Canada to do time at his age, even with their soft sentencing.”

  I took a swallow of my Coke and then asked Willy, “Where is Sammie, anyway?”

  He curled his lip. “Obsessing, surprise, surprise. She’s still running that World War Two roster against the Stowe records.”

  I saw Smith returning from the phone out in the hallway and could tell from his expression he wasn’t bearing good news.

  He didn’t sit down. “I hope you didn’t plan to talk to Mike Sawyer again.”

  No one said a word.

  “He’s been found dead at home. Shot three times, with a frozen hot dog shoved down his throat.”

  · · ·

  We drove to Sawyer’s house in a caravan, to find the Stowe PD had already cordoned off the area, laid out a narrow path into the building, and made sure that whatever evidence there was would be preserved. I’d already called the mobile crime lab, and since Waterbury was just down the road a few miles, their response time promised to be mercifully short.

  In the meantime, donning white coveralls, a cap, and booties, I followed the access path into the house to see Mike Sawyer one last time.

  He was still in the tastefully appointed living room, now oddly silent and somehow not smelling quite right. He was sitting in an armchair, his head thrown back grotesquely. The bullet wounds were to his chest, the dark stippling around the holes indicating the shooter had stood very close. The now thawed hot dog was there as advertised, protruding from between his lips, probably placed there posthumously as a statement to us—this was a man who was not going to speak. Ironically, I’d figured that would have been the case anyhow, despite my high hopes around the table at the Commodore. The one time I’d met Mike Sawyer, I hadn’t thought him easily susceptible to pressure. Killing him had therefore been totally gratuitous, which gave me a glimpse into the character of the shooter.

  · · ·

  Three hours later we were back at the Stowe police department, with nothing much to work with. The neighbors hadn’t heard or seen anything. Sawyer had lived alone and had apparently let his killer in. There were no signs of a struggle or of anything being disturbed in the house, and while the forensics team had collected a fair amount, including an open package of frozen hot dogs in a sink, they’d found nothing immediately revealing except a large empty freezer in the basement—presumably Jean Deschamps’s arctic condo for the last few decades. Basically, we were left hoping that either the surveillance Lacombe had ordered on Marcel’s gang would reveal Guidry’s having left for Stowe, or that the Customs and Border Patrol people we’d alerted would get lucky and give us a call.

  But we still hadn’t heard from either one.

  It was therefore in a relative state of despondency that Sammie Martens found us, having at long last extricated herself from the town clerk’s office.

  “No luck on the Sawyer shooting?” she surmised.

  “Sure,” Willy came back. “We won’t have to worry about how to make him talk.”

  She put a single Xeroxed sheet on the table before me. “Then maybe we should try this guy.”

  I studied the document as she explained to the others, “Roger Scott. He’s lived in Stowe since the war, bought big early, held on till the land rush of the 1970s, and has been selling here and there for a bundle ever since. He’s also on the roster you gave me of the Special Service Force—the only one, so far as I can tell.”

  She looked exhausted, her hair unwashed and lank, her eyes ringed with dark, puffy skin.

  “Nice work, Sam. He must’ve been the man Jean Deschamps came down to visit,” I said.

  She sat heavily in one of the chairs surrounding the conference table. “Wonder if they ever met?”

  “We’ll find out tomorrow,” I told her, “after you get a good night’s sleep and I give that press conference announcing I have a secret.”

  Tom Shanklin looked at me dubiously. “You still doing that—after Sawyer?”

  “All the more reason. Sawyer’s death proves we’re on the right track. Someone—presumably Pierre Guidry—is running around trying to plug as many holes as he can. What better time to present him with another and force him into the open? Besides, I already told Lacombe I would.”

  “How did the shooter know we were hot on Sawyer’s heels?” Willy asked.

  “Sawyer probably called to report after our first visit,” Sammie proposed.

  “Maybe,” Willy grumbled.

  “What’re you thinking?” I asked him.

  “That things are a little leaky in your pal Lacombe’s outfit. Seems like a lot of bad happens right after you tell ’em what’s doin’.”

  I hated the idea of that.

  He held up his one hand and began folding down his fingers, one by one. “The press tumbled to Jean Deschamps’s identity right after you hit Sherbrooke. The old gangster Lucien Pelletier was conveniently recommended to fill your ear about how Marcel was a son of a bitch who hated his father, while swearing Jean didn’t have Guidry along as chauffeur the day he vanished. The secretary—what’s her name, Marie Chenin—spilled the beans about Jean being lured down here by his son just before we could report the same news back to Sherbrooke. That guy in the motel knew exactly what door to knock on before he took a shot at you. And now Sawyer gets whacked before we get a chance to squeeze him. You can explain all that a bunch of different ways, but they make for a pretty interesting bundle, if you ask me, and most of them trace back to the Sûreté.”

  “And to Jacques Chauvin,” Paul said in his typically quiet voice.

  We all stared at him, while my private gloominess was suddenly given a reprieve.

  “The old Sherbrooke cop we talked to almost as soon as we got there,” he reminded us. “He put us onto Pelletier. The first domino, if Willy’s right,” he added. “It looked to me like he had free run of the building.”

  I saw Willy give Paul an appraising glance—a ringing endorsement from a hard-core independent like Kunkle, and one I was happy to second.

  “Could be,” I conceded. “I’ll give Lacombe a heads up. It doesn’t alter the value of putting more heat under Guidry’s feet.”

  “Sure,” Willy finally agreed. “What the hell? Worst that can happen is you die
with your boots on.”

  “By the way,” Paul added in the silence following that crack. “When you meet Roger Scott, you might want to ask him why Dick Kearley thinks he died from a dud mortar round while he was standing next to Colonel Frederick. Remember?”

  · · ·

  The press conference setting me up as a target went off the next morning as planned, ostensibly to update the media on the Sawyer murder, and also to appease the governor, the commissioner, and my boss, Bill Allard.

  I tried to do the latter first, explaining VBI’s role yet again and handing the mike to Frank Auerbach so he could say how happy he was with the teamwork. I also downplayed the attempt on my life in Sherbrooke, which had taken its time to filter down to the U.S., and highlighted the effectiveness of our working with the Sûreté, stating with confidence that the mystery of the “frozen man of the mountain,” as Jean was being called, would soon be solved.

  The real point of the exercise, though, was brought up at the end, when the inevitable question was asked about how we were planning to arrive at that goal.

  “At this time,” I answered in practiced bureau-speak, “we are following a number of solid leads, any one of which could give us the break we need.”

  “Is there one you like better than the others?”

  “You could say that,” I said coyly. “It’s pretty vague right now—more of a theory. I haven’t even shared it with my team.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that a little unusual?”

  “We all have ideas we chase down now and then on our own—saves on informational clutter. If this works out, though,” I added with a laugh, “you might end up with some interesting headlines.”

  Afterward, Bill Allard was not amused. He called me on my cell phone five minutes after the story aired on the radio. “What the hell’s this private theory crap? You sounded like Sherlock Holmes, for Christ’s sake. The point of this unit is to support the locals, not hold out on them.”

  “I’m not. Auerbach’s in on it. I wanted the opposition to think I know something I don’t. We’re hoping it’ll flush them out. I’m sending you my report by fax within the hour.”