The Marble Mask

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 Wellington 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.”

He nodded toward his younger colleague. “Rick is telling me the Rock Machine is now wanting to kick one of the legs. I am worried that what you have brought me with the news of Jean Deschamps is the destruction of the other.”

I remembered how Paul had said earlier that one of the virtues of the Angels was that they policed their own-implying the local cops had learned to live with that arrangement, however reluctantly. It underscored Lacombe’s remark about having all the crooks suddenly thrown into a competitive free-for-all.

Gary Smith had obviously come to the same realization.

“We can’t do anything about the guys in the bunker,” he said, his enthusiasm in contrast to his earlier reserve. “But we can research the hell out of the Deschamps family. If we move fast enough and get lucky, maybe we can take that one leg down piece by piece without too much bloodshed. Then you can concentrate on the Angels.”

Lacombe shook his head. “I think time will not be enough. Have the American press spoken of Jean Deschamps?”

“They haven’t identified him yet,” I said. “But it won’t be long before word leaks out.”

“That is what I thought. I would like to tell Marcel and his lieutenants of the news face-to-face, to see their reaction. We would not be prepared as with your research, Gary, but we might learn more in exchange. Is this acceptable?”

Smith raised his coffee cup to him. “Works for me.”

I felt uncomfortable walking up to the home of an unknown man whom I suspected of patricide. It was not the standard-or the smart-way to go. The trick to interviewing potential suspects was to know in advance what they might say. Yet I couldn’t fault Lacombe for his reasoning. I, too, wanted to see what Marcel would say about his father’s sudden reappearance. And I recognized that time was against us.

We were met at the door by the first indicator that this wasn’t just another millionaire’s mansion: a very large man with the face of an ax-murderer. He and Lacombe exchanged a few guttural comments in rapid Joual, during which Lacombe produced his shield, before the door was unceremoniously closed in our faces.

“Trouble?” Gary asked, angered by the lack of respect.

Lacombe’s expression was benign as he turned up his collar against the cold. “No. He is just asking his boss about us.”

I was struck once more by the difference in law enforcement styles on either side of the border. Not only was it wine for meals, dapper clothes on the job, and a lack of body builder types around the station house up here, but there was an attitudinal contrast as well. In our conversation with Pelletier, our discussions about crooks, and even in the way Lacombe accepted having a door slammed in his face, there was a lack of the kind of pseudo-military rigidity that so often stamped American cops. Not only had we yet to know our host’s official rank, but I’d noticed as well that he didn’t bother carrying a gun.

The butler/bodyguard returned several minutes later, accompanied by a slighter, much older man with little hair, thick glasses, and impressively expensive clothing. Lacombe and he obviously knew one another, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries. Thanks to Paul’s quietly translating for Gary and me, we gathered that he was the family’s longtime lawyer, Gaston Picard.

As we were escorted down a long, high-ceilinged hallway, cluttered with antique knickknacks and a couple of chandeliers, Gary leaned toward me and whispered, “They know we were coming, or d’you think they keep the lawyer upstairs?”

We ended up in an oversized, high-ceilinged library, wood-paneled, filled with leather furniture, and girdled by a balcony running around three of the walls, the fourth being occupied by an enormous stone fireplace, complete with burning logs and surmounted by a regal oil portrait of the man I’d seen as still as a marble statue on the medical examiner’s table.

Gaston Picard waved us toward a selection of armchairs and sofas and said in perfect, slightly British-tinged English, “Please, gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable.” He then stared at me, his eyes magnified by his glasses, and extended a hand in greeting. “I understand you are from Vermont’s new Bureau of Investigation.”

The hand was manicured, soft, and slightly moist, like a young girl’s.

“Yes, that’s right. Joe Gunther.” I introduced Paul and Gary, whom he also greeted with Old World formality. I noticed that wherever possible, he’d accented his appearance with daubs of gold jewelry-ring, watch, key chain, and tie pin.

“I am Gaston Picard, Mr. Deschamps’s attorney. I gather you have something you wish to discuss with him.”

I glanced around, waiting for either Lacombe or Gary to fill in, but both of them had obviously decided, as they had with Pelletier earlier, to let me carry the ball.

I was not, however, going to play with Picard. “That’s right,” I said without further explanation.

In the slight pause that followed, the dandified lawyer smiled humorlessly. “I see. Is this request of an official nature?” He held his hand out. “Accompanied by a warrant, for example?”

I’d expected that. “No. But if you choose to throw us out, I think you’ll discover later that your boss will be royally pissed off at you.”

His eyebrows rose, as much at my choice of words as at their meaning, the first of which I’d used in reaction to his oily manners. “Then you are offering something of use perhaps? Or of value?”

“Information of value, yes-something he’d like to know as quickly as possible.”

Picard nodded officiously. “Excellent. Then I will tell his secretary to put you on the very top of the appointment calendar. I take it I can reach you through le Capitaine Lacombe?”

I smiled at this first use of Lacombe’s title, realizing now how he’d rated that exclusive parking spot in the Sûreté’s basement. But I didn’t move from my comfortable seat, nor did any of my colleagues, despite Picard’s taking several steps toward the door.

“You can reach us that way if you choose to in the future. Right now, you better get Deschamps and tell him we’re here. I would guess that in his present condition, he’s come to appreciate the high cost of wasted time.”

Picard was obviously taken off guard. I decided to try to nudge him a little harder.

“Especially,” I added, pointing to the portrait above the mantel, “when what we have to say directly involves old ghosts.”

He hesitated a moment, ducked his head slightly, and said, “Very well. I shall return in a moment.”

He wasn’t gone thirty seconds before the silent giant of before appeared through a different door, pushing ahead of him a cart filled with coffee cups and a silver urn, which he abandoned in our midst like a sacrifice.

Lacombe didn’t hesitate, rubbing his hands and examining some cake slices he found under a silver dome. “Would any of you like this?”

Gary and I passed. Paul, after a pause, took him up on the offer and joined Labatt and his boss in coffee and cake both.

They’d just finished snacking when the double cherry doors swung back and Gaston Picard reappeared, pushing an old man in a wheelchair before him, and accompanied by another-tall, dark, broad-shouldered, and watchful-who struck me as something more than a bodyguard.

We all rose to our feet. Marcel Deschamps sat like a pampered scarecrow dressed in fine clothing, his skin stretched and pale to translucence, his few remaining strands of white hair sticking like cotton candy to his skull. The only sign of vitality-strong and unyielding-were his eyes. Black-rimmed and hollow, they gleamed with intelligent ferocity. Despite the overall frailty of the package, those eyes confirmed the ruthlessness Lucien Pelletier had described.

Picard made the introductions, remembering all our names perfectly, and identified the dark newcomer as Pierre Guidry. We stood in a circle respectfully, not shaking hands, since Deschamps kept his under the blanket draping his knees, and Guidry made no move to be conversational. It occurred to me as we finally broke ranks and settled back into our seats that neither Marcel nor Pierre was that much older than I. Yet while the former looked ancient enough to be somebody’s great-grandfather, the latter had the appearance of a man in his early forties.

Marcel’s voice, when he finally spoke, mirrored the strength in his eyes, however, and the fact that he chose French-not Joual-showed his tactical abilities were fully alive as well, for I was sure his command of English was as good as my own-either that or half the library’s contents were unreadable to him.

Paul Spraiger nevertheless took up his assigned role as translator.

“I’ve been led to believe,” Deschamps told Lacombe, “that you have something important to say to me-something that justifies this invasion of my privacy.”

Lacombe responded in English. “That is true, and in courtesy to our guests, I think we should speak their language.”

Deschamps indicated Guidry with a slight toss of his head, keeping to French. “My colleague and business partner would have a hard time with that, and I’d like him to be a part of this.”

I was about to suggest it didn’t matter either way, when Lacombe rose to his feet and calmly announced the meeting concluded.

I quickly stood to back him up, the others joining in ragged suit.

Deschamps’s expression turned to disgust, but his reaction proved that we’d adequately baited the hook. “Sit down,” he said in perfect English. “This is childish-it doesn’t become you.”

We all sat back down.

“Let’s do this quickly,” Deschamps added. “Since you have tumbled to my condition, you can appreciate why.”

“Mr. Deschamps,” Gary Smith asked, “when was the last time you saw your father?”

Marcel looked at him stolidly for a moment, as if wondering how he’d come to appear in the room. “Nineteen forty-seven,” he finally said.

“When in nineteen forty-seven?”

“Winter. He came to bid us all good-bye in this very house. He was dedicating the rest of his life to the contemplation of God. I never saw him again.”

“That story’s due for a revision.”

“Why? It’s the truth.”

“Is your father still alive?”

A thin smile crossed the cadaverous face. “Of course not. He died years ago.”

“How and when?”

Gaston Picard interrupted. “Gentlemen, you must know that this entire conversation is being conducted out of our good grace alone. You have no right to be here, and you certainly have no right to badger my client. If you have something to say, please say it.”

“We will,” I said, “but we want it placed in context.”

Again, Deschamps scowled. “He died at the Abbey of St. Benoit, twenty years ago, of a heart attack.”

Picard looked at him sharply, the disapproval clear on his face.

Gary extracted a picture from his inside coat pocket, crossed over to Deschamps’s wheelchair, and dropped it on the other man’s lap. “Is this your father?”

Deschamps hesitated glancing down at it, and when he did, he became so still it almost seemed as if he’d stopped breathing.

“Where did you get this?” he finally asked, glancing back up, even paler than before.

“We took it at his autopsy a couple of days ago,” I said. “He’d been stabbed with an ice pick, or something just like it.”

Marcel looked confused, staring at the picture again. “I don’t understand. He looks younger than me. What do you mean he was stabbed? When?”

“A long time ago,” Gary explained. “Back when you claim he went to the abbey.”

“Mr. Deschamps,” I said. “We know the religious story was so your competitors wouldn’t sense a weakness and put you out of business. But your father was murdered. I think even your lawyer will tell you that keeping to the old story wouldn’t be smart. It might make us wonder why you were being so evasive.”

Deschamps was very still for a moment, still holding the photograph in one bony, blue-veined hand. “Explain what this means,” he finally said in a soft voice. I was struck by his overall reaction. Either he still had reserves enough to be a very effective actor, or his apparent grief was real.

“We found your father last week on top of a mountain in Vermont,” Gary explained. “He’d been frozen stiff since the time of his death-approximately fifty years.”

This time Picard was the one who looked baffled. “It’s not that cold in Ver-”

Deschamps interrupted him with a quick command, his emotional stability fully restored. “Enough.”

He then stared at me. “How was he kept frozen so long?”

I was impressed at his immediate grasp of the situation. I could almost see his brain whirring behind those penetrating eyes. “No doubt a commercial freezer,” I answered. “Are you more inclined now to tell us how and why he disappeared?”

Picard suddenly bent over at the waist and whispered something in Marcel’s ear. The ailing man smiled slightly and said, “I will admit to fabricating the story of his religious conversion. If you had known my father, you would have been amused by that invention. Unfortunately, the truth is no more revealing. He simply vanished-took the car, supposedly for a drive, and never came back.”

“But that was rare, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Didn’t Mr. Guidry there usually drive him? And wasn’t he more concerned for his own safety to be so casual?”

“Yes and no. He was a strong-willed man, not given to showing weakness. It wasn’t his nature to hide from his enemies.”

“Meaning he’d gone to meet with one of them?”

“Meaning nothing of the kind. We have no idea what happened to him. One day he was here. The next he was not. It is that simple or that complex. We don’t know. There was even talk that he’d died of a heart attack while driving in the country. But every time we thought of an explanation, something cropped up to undermine it. Such as, what happened to the car? If a competitor killed him, why did no one brag about it? If he simply ran away, why no letters or bank withdrawals or early indications that he was unhappy with his present life? In the end, we were left with a mystery, which,” and he waved the photo in his hand, “has apparently officially become your property.” He extended the picture back to Gary, who rose once more to receive it. “I wish you luck.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “We tell you we finally found your father and that he was stabbed to death, and you wash your hands of it? Hardly a response to make us think you innocent.”

Deschamps’s almost hairless eyebrows shot up. “Innocent? You are thinking I killed my own father? Despite all your obvious homework, you’ve got much more to do. Why would I kill a man I loved? More important from your perspective, why would I kill a man whose position I was slated to inherit soon in any case? He was my tutor and I was his heir, especially after my brother died in the war. What you are suggesting is ludicrous.” His breathing had turned raspy and I noticed a damp sheen covering his forehead.

“We wouldn’t expect you to say otherwise,” Gary told him.

Deschamps lost patience, waving a hand in the air. “Enough. This conversation is concluded. Please leave. Pierre will show you out.”

Picard grabbed the handles of Marcel’s wheelchair and turned him around to face the door. But my attention was on Pierre Guidry.

He’d been behaving like a palace guard throughout the conversation, his hands clasped behind him, standing at parade rest, his expression impassive. At Marcel’s dismissive order, however, I thought I saw his lips compress slightly and his jaw tense, although when he stepped forward to escort us out, he merely looked like a faithful colleague sharing his boss’s outrage.

It had come and gone in the flicker of an instant, and I couldn’t be sure of what I’d seen in his eyes. Only my suspicions remained.