The Marble Mask Read online

  Eventually, after some fussing from the daughter about coffee and cookies, and a bit of chicanery from Lacombe about the need for privacy, we found ourselves in an upstairs bedroom with a large old man who sat in his oversized chair like a walrus in a cave opening.

  He spoke no English, so we repeated the routine we’d followed in Lacombe’s office. But no playacting was necessary. Immediately following his daughter’s departure from the room, Lucien Pelletier shot Lacombe one quick, hard question.

  Lacombe laughed while Paul translated. “He wants to know what he’s done to deserve so many lousy cops.”

  “Tell him he’s lived too long,” I said.

  Pelletier let out a wet, gurgly chuckle that ended in a prolonged coughing fit.

  “Then it’s a good thing you dropped by,” Paul said on his behalf, “’Cause I’m about to get that over with.”

  Gary Smith sat on a chair just off to Pelletier’s side. “We’re here for a history lesson,” he said. “About the early days of the Deschamps family.”

  The old man studied him a moment. “Why?”

  “It’s an American case. We think we have something that goes back to World War Two.”

  Pelletier smiled and nodded. “Ah—when Jean ran things.”

  “Yes. What was he like?”

  “Very tough. A man of his word.”

  “You got to know him when?” I asked.

  “Nineteen thirty-one. Back during Prohibition. I was still a teenager. Deschamps was a big cheese in the business, with lots of trucks and warehouses. He was moving thousands of bottles a week by then. I broke into one of his depots to steal a few cases. I didn’t see why he should have all the fun and profit. And he caught me—personally. The Old Man himself. He’d seen me casing the place earlier and kept an eye out for me. He let me break in, waited till I had my arms full, and then stuck a gun in my ear.”

  Pelletier laughed again with the same wet, racking results. We all waited until he’d regained his breath and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. “It was lucky for me,” he resumed. “If it had been one of his boys, I would have died that night. People disappeared all the time when they ran afoul of the Deschamps. But the Old Man took a shine to me. I don’t know why. He said he liked people with balls, and who planned before they acted. I didn’t think I’d done too well in that department, but I wasn’t going to argue. So he hired me instead of killing me.”

  “Just like that?” Gary asked incredulously.

  Pelletier smiled ruefully. “He did say he’d kill me if I crossed him. I guess he knew I’d never do that.”

  “What did you do for him?”

  “Not much at first. I worked in the warehouse I’d tried to rob. Eventually, I moved up to driving trucks—”

  “Across the border?” Gary asked.

  “Not at first. It was pretty legitimate to start with. I’d drive to just shy of the border and leave the truck. When I came back, it would be empty. Later, I found out what happened to the stuff.”

  “Which was?”

  “It depended. Sometimes it went onto the backs of men or horses or horse-drawn sleighs; other times, it was switched over to an American truck. About a year after Jean Deschamps didn’t kill me, I was doing work like that, going across the border.”

  “What about after Prohibition?”

  “Things were changing even before then. The Mounties were feeling the heat from the Americans. A lot of our men were getting caught. The Old Man had almost gotten out of the liquor business by 1933. By the Depression, we were moving other things—anything that had a market value.”

  “But you were doing more than smuggling by then, no?” Labatt asked.

  “Of course,” Pelletier admitted but then fell silent. “It’s more than a history lesson you want,” he said after a pause. “What is this American case?”

  Lacombe cleared his throat and tried to address his problem. “Monsieur Pelletier, this conversation is just that. It is not being taken down as evidence. Whatever you might have done will not come back to haunt you through us.”

  But the loyalty born all those years ago was unaffected by either threats of reprisal or promises of anonymity. This man’s feelings for Jean Deschamps clearly mirrored a son’s for his father.

  I tried a different approach. “You must have gotten to know his two sons pretty well.”

  “Jean had them doing other things,” he said. “But we saw them around. Antoine made it a point to get to know us. He was a nice kid. Jean was a broken man after he died.”

  “In Italy, during the war?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought I’d try exploiting the prejudice that had influenced our coming here. “Still, he had Marcel to lean on. That must’ve been a comfort.”

  Lucien Pelletier didn’t answer at first.

  “Marcel was next in line,” he finally said, blatantly restraining himself. “He’s done a good job.”

  “Actually,” I added, pretending not to have noticed his reluctance, “it’s kind of ironic when you think of it. First Antoine dies, breaking his father’s heart, then Jean disappears, which must’ve been equally hard on Marcel. Tragic, in a way. He was pretty young then, wasn’t he?”

  “I never saw Marcel feel anything about anybody,” he said bitterly.

  “But his own father,” I exclaimed, feigning surprise.

  Pelletier finally opened up. “He didn’t care. He took over the family like he’d been born to the job. Didn’t give a shit about a damn thing except his own ambition.”

  “What happened to Jean?” I asked suddenly.

  There was dead silence in the room. Pelletier had been staring at the floor through most of the conversation. This time, he looked straight at me, his eyes moist. “I don’t know.”

  “He just vanished?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “We think he went for a drive. He took the car. We never saw him or it again.”

  “I thought he had a chauffeur.”

  “He did, but he didn’t use him all the time. Sometimes, when he wanted to be alone, he’d drive himself.”

  “So he was feeling reflective the day he disappeared?”

  “I didn’t think so. I thought he was acting like he did when a deal was about to go down—energized. Restless and distracted. I’d seen it before. Like before a big job.”

  “You must have had some ideas about what happened. What did you all think?”

  “We knew he’d been killed. He’d been so close to it so many times before—robbing banks, muscling the competition, fighting off the law…” He suddenly straightened with pride and added, “On both sides of the border.”

  “What was done to find out?” I asked.

  “We put pressure on people like never before. But quietly, without noise. That was Marcel’s doing, and at first I was impressed. I thought, ‘Just like the Old Man—strong and tough. Get the job done right without fanfare.’ Only later did I think he only did it that way to make things easier for himself afterward.”

  “So no one else would know?”

  “Right.”

  “But none of you knew, either,” I protested. “You just thought he’d been killed. If he had been, wouldn’t someone have bragged about it?”

  “That’s what we were waiting for. It never happened.”

  “And so things kept going as if nothing had changed?”

  “Yes, to the outside world. People asked after a while, when they noticed the Old Man wasn’t around anymore. First, we were told to play dumb, then to say he’d retreated to a life of contemplation. What a laugh. Before anyone put two and two together, Marcel was fully in command. The time to exploit any weakness had passed.”

  “Mr. Pelletier,” I said, leaning closer to him, “I hate to circle the same point, but didn’t it seem odd that no one took credit for killing the legendary Jean Deschamps?”

  “Not in the long run,” he said.

  I let a long pause follow and then said softly, “B
ecause you all assumed he’d been killed by his own son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you ever sensed Marcel had that in him?”

  He surprised me then, giving me a look of utter bewilderment. “Never. He was a cold boy and a heartless man, with none of his father’s knowledge of human nature. He hadn’t had to carve his way up from the bottom, so he didn’t know how to lose as well as to win. But I never saw him disagree with his father, never caught him looking at him angrily when his back was turned. He was like a machine, before and after his father’s death. That’s one reason the transition was so smooth.”

  “But we’re missing two people in all this, aren’t we?” I asked. “What about Pierre Guidry and Gaston Picard, Jean’s right-hand boys? We heard Guidry especially moved up the ladder after Jean died.”

  Like Chauvin before him, Pelletier shook his head. “Guidry was more like the Old Man’s substitute for Antoine, and Marcel adopted him like he adopted the business. It was a good move, too. Guidry had what Marcel lacked—he liked people and they liked him. Marcel could use him to smooth things out.”

  “That must’ve been handy when everyone thought Marcel had killed his own father,” I said, almost as an aside.

  “We weren’t killed ourselves,” Pelletier conceded simply. “We took that as a plus.”

  “That why you parted company with the Deschamps?”

  “I shot my mouth off. Guidry was very nice about it, but I knew what would happen if I refused. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to stay anyway, and I couldn’t have left if they hadn’t let me. It was a one-time offer, and it suited me. I did all right afterward. It was a privilege to work with Jean Deschamps. It was a pleasure to leave his son to fend for himself. Not that he suffered any.”

  “Nor did Guidry, from what we were told.”

  “Pierre was justly recompensed, and I’m sure Michel will continue the tradition. If it weren’t for the blood connection, in fact, Pierre would probably run things. Not that he wants to—he likes being behind the throne.”

  Once again, Lucien Pelletier had been staring into space as he spoke—an old man addressing the ghosts of his past. But at the surprised silence greeting his last words, he looked up and took us all in. “What’s the matter?”

  Lacombe spoke directly to him, letting Paul translate for both sides. “You said Michel—did you mean Marcel’s son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Implying he’s about to take over?”

  I noticed Rick Labatt sitting forward, his expression keen.

  “Well, if not him, I don’t know who. God knows Marcel’s been doing his damnedest to train the little brat behind the scenes. Big mistake, if you ask me, not that I care anymore.”

  “But why now?” I asked. “With the Angels and the Rock Machine about to rumble, Marcel should want to keep his hand on the tiller.”

  Pelletier’s eyes widened and he let out another long, wet chuckle. “Boy, you do need help. Don’t you know? Marcel’s dying of cancer—has a few months to live, depending on who you believe. Fitting end to that bastard, rotting from the inside out.”

  Chapter 10

  LACOMBE LEFT THE COOKIE-CUTTER NEIGHBORHOOD where Lucien Pelletier was living out his life and headed east toward downtown on Portland Boulevard—a broad new avenue north of and parallel to King Street, as fast, sterile, and empty as King was stop-and-go, cluttered, and tacky. Not for the first time, I wondered if Sherbrooke might be jamming the American city-center-to-strip-mall-to-suburbs phenomenon into too small an area—with jarring results.

  “So, Rick,” Lacombe asked in a mocking voice from the front. “Did Intelligence know about Marcel’s medical condition?”

  Labatt was obviously embarrassed. “We knew he hadn’t been seen in public much lately.”

  “I guess not.” Lacombe was smiling, in fact not very concerned.

  “It’s an interesting piece of timing,” I said. “Marcel’s father, long dead, is brought out of the freezer just as it’s revealed Marcel’s living on borrowed time.”

  “You think there is a connection?” Labatt asked.

  Paul Spraiger answered for me. “Jean’s body appeared for some reason—must’ve been a big one, since he’d been kept on ice for so long. Sounds reasonable this might be it.”

  “But it is to the advantage of who?” Lacombe asked.

  No one had an answer for him.

  Reinforcing my earlier musing, Portland Boulevard ended abruptly in the town’s oldest section, called Le Vieux Nord, or the Old North End. Originally home to the high and mighty, it was a hilly, tree-shaded cluster of elegant, graceful homes harking back to Victorian times and earlier. Unlike Pelletier’s nearby neighborhood, this area reflected a passage of years without any town planner’s influence. The streets were meandering and narrow, and lined by everything from schools to churches to museums to regal homes. In the center of it all was the gorge connecting the two large rivers, blocked by several dams and overshadowed by factories both functioning and gutted, as impressive in their solidarity and antiquity as the squat, huge, and ponderous cathedral that sat like a sleeping hippopotamus on the hill overlooking it all. It was an industrial tableau of the nostalgic values of church, home, and business—all three equally worn down and neglected by time.

  Lacombe pulled over on a side street next to a thick row of trees and killed the engine. “Let me show you something,” he said, swinging out into the cold, ebbing light.

  He led us through a hole in the trees and out onto a cantilevered platform jutting fifty feet above a misty, boiling, ice-choked tumult of water. Below us and to the right were a dam and a hydro station. Beyond the dam in the distance, the flat expanse of the Magog River was visible under the Montcalm Bridge. But what made the scene remarkable was the absence of humanity’s touch. Despite the industrial accessories, the gorge itself was primarily wild—a deep cut through sheer rock, bordered by thick stands of trees. Looking downstream, and ignoring the cityscape peering through the denuded branches, I felt I was out in the mountainous wilds, at a secret, never-visited natural aquatic enclave. It was as startling and impressive as the cathedral just one block away. Once again, this town had taken me by surprise, throwing open yet another curtain—mere feet from its predecessor—to reveal a whole other face.

  “This is the source of Sherbrooke’s existence,” Gilles Lacombe explained. “From here came everything. The first Abnaki visitors three hundred years ago and the Deschamps and the Hell’s Angels. It is not all the time you can point to one thing and say that.”

  It was a curiously philosophical comment, especially in the context of our current conundrum. I sensed a yearning inside Lacombe to locate some similar touchstone in the case we were investigating with which he could restore order where only confusion was now apparent.

  We stood there awhile, shivering as much from the sight of such frozen chaos as from the actual cold, and then Lacombe led us back to the van’s warm embrace.

  “I now take you on a different tourist trip,” he said, starting up the engine and heading back into the Vieux Nord.

  Five minutes later, he slowed opposite a large, old, dark brown house with a steep slate roof and heavy wooden beams crowning the doors and windows. It looked like what Hansel and Gretel’s witch might have called home had she suddenly hit the Lotto.

  “This is the house of Marcel Deschamps,” Lacombe said. “It has ten bathrooms and two kitchens and all of that.”

  I studied the house with renewed interest. There was no one in sight, no movement from behind any of the curtained windows. The snowy lawn was large but not vast, the house itself indistinguishable from its equally accessible neighbors. In short, it looked utterly normal—for the average eccentric rich guy.

  “Okay,” Lacombe announced. “Now to the place of business of Monsieur Deschamps.”

  We left the Vieux Nord for Wellington Street North, proceeded down its respectable corridor of boutiques, restaurants, businesses, and banks, and crossed King to We
llington South, discovering at the intersection, with a suddenness I was becoming used to, King’s San Francisco-style plunge toward the Aylmer Bridge across the St. François River below us.

  Wellington South was instantly totally different. In a minor key, it reminded me of Boston’s old Combat Zone—gritty, gap-toothed, and cluttered with bars, discos, flophouses, cabarets, and a Salvation Army chapel. Craning through the window, I looked up at the apartments overhead and the tattered shades and greasy panes of human misery and hopelessness.

  It made for a fitting contrast with the house we’d left just minutes before, purchased with the proceeds generated from the appetites this neighborhood fed all too well.

  Lacombe continued south, to where Wellington became Queen, and then drove a very short distance past a sign announcing our entrance into Lennoxville. “Look to the right,” he said, slowing down.

  Around a gentle corner, we slowed before a driveway cutting above us into an embankment, and blocked by a reinforced steel gate topped by gleaming razor wire. Behind it was a large, new, red-roofed house festooned with security cameras and a bouquet of oversized searchlights. It was difficult to see clearly, blocked off as it was by the wire, a row of tall hedges, and a cinderblock wall. But it looked like an armed outpost in the middle of enemy territory.

  “Hell’s Angels headquarters,” Lacombe told us, “with bulletproof glass in all the windows. They are the other lords of Wellington Street.”

  We continued into Lennoxville village, a pleasant cluster of old red-brick buildings reminiscent of what we’d left in Vermont, and pulled over in front of a small restaurant/bar. Lacombe led the way to a corner table near the back. He and Labatt ordered wine. Spraiger, Smith, and I chose coffee.

  “I thought you might find that of help,” Lacombe said. “It gives an idea of how both parties see the world. While they share the dark culture of Sherbrooke, you can see they are very different. One is old, traditional, built like the Mafia. The other is angry, violent, paranoid, and quick for the action. I showed you that because I think you should see how their peace is fragile, even though it has lasted for many years. It is like the two legs on a ladder.”