The Marble Mask

Chapter 11

“What’s it like up there?” Sammie asked on the phone.

I was sitting on my motel bed, my shoes off, leaning back against a pile of pillows, the TV on but muted before me. It was almost midnight. “Pretty nice. Middle-class industrial town with no pollution and no pretensions. So far, that fits the cops, too. Nice, laid-back bunch. Turns out Lacombe’s the head Sûreté guy. He set up a task force right off the bat. We had our first meeting an hour ago-Sherbrooke police, us, the Sûreté people, and some guy from RCMP intelligence. Went well. We visited Marcel Deschamps at his home earlier and suggested he killed his old man, just to see what would happen. He threw us out. Lacombe’s put surveillance teams on him and a bunch of his top people. We’ll keep track of all contacts made for the next week and run them through the computer up here. If we did stir them up, maybe we can make sense of the flurry. Marcel’s dying of cancer, so time’s against him. He already looks like death warmed over.”

Willy Kunkle’s voice came over the speaker phone as if filtered through an empty can. “You think he did it?”

I paused a moment, remembering Marcel’s reaction. “I’m not so sure. He denied it, of course, but he looked pretty surprised. You two find out anything new?”

“We got jack,” Willy said bluntly. “This cancer thing got anything to do with our finding the Popsicle?”

“It’s got to,” I agreed. “I just don’t know how.” I then filled them in on all we’d learned, including Marcel’s comment that he’d had no reason to kill a father who was shortly planning to put him in charge, and Pelletier’s saying that in the long run everyone had just assumed patricide.

“Anyhow,” I finished, “it looks like the Deschamps family’s made a fortune illegally peddling across the border. I know you got nowhere running Jean’s name through the system, but try Pierre Guidry, Lucien Pelletier, and Gaston Picard.” I gave them spellings and dates of birth. “They’re all old-timers, so maybe one of them got nailed for something in the U.S. during their younger years. Give ’em a shot and see if we get lucky.”

“Will do,” Sammie said. “By the way, we got the final autopsy report. Stomach contents were the only unusual thing: a combination of venison, raccoon, and bear meat.”

I whistled. “Jesus. What the hell was he doing? Living in the woods?”

“If he was,” Willy put in, “he wasn’t going hungry.”

The red light on the side of the phone began flashing. “Someone just called in with a message. I better get off and find out what’s up. Let me know if you hit anything with those names.”

“You got it.”

“Oh, hey, Sammie?” I suddenly asked.

“Yeah?”

“How’re you two getting along with Tom Shanklin? Any friction?”

“I try to keep him away from Willy so he won’t quit law enforcement altogether,” she said. “But he seems pretty mellow. We haven’t done a whole lot as a team, though.”

“Right. Just being a mother hen. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up, dialed the operator, and got a message to call Lacombe. He answered on the first ring.

“I was wondering if you would like to see how we in Québec work a crime scene. We just have a report of a murder on La Rue Galt Oueste-one of the Deschamps family.”

“There’s a coincidence. Sure, I’d love to be included.”

“A car will pick you up in five minutes.”

Galt Street West was another of Sherbrooke’s major arteries but on the older, poorer south side of town. There were no malls or motels or American greasy spoons here. Where I was deposited by a Sûreté squad car fifteen minutes later was working-class residential-rows of plain brick apartment buildings stained by time and neglect, the layers of stacked balconies, typical of virtually every Québec city, sagging and in need of paint.

A pleasant young man in a parka greeted me as I stepped into the slush piled on the sidewalk. “Mr. Gunther? Le Capitaine Lacombe asked me to escort you to him.”

I followed him into the nearest building, noticing that while the majority of uniforms belonged to the Sherbrooke police, the Sûreté was clearly represented. Lacombe had briefed us earlier that in a town this size, the Sûreté played mostly a support role, appearing only when requested. I assumed the exception here meant the task force’s mission was playing front and center.

In fact, when I reached a dingy apartment two flights up, Lacombe was accompanied by Rick Labatt and André Rousseau, the intelligence officer from the RCMP.

Lacombe turned at my entrance and motioned to me to join them in the kitchen across from the living room. “Joe. I am sorry it is so late, but as I said on the telephone, I thought you would find this interesting.”

On the kitchen floor, spread-eagled like a butterfly pinned down for display, was a large barefoot man resting in blood extending like wings to either side of him. A good portion of his skull was missing. Surrounding him like carefully moving ghosts, a forensics team clad in protective clothing went through the motions I knew all too drearily by heart.

Lacombe made the introductions. “This is Monsieur Jean-Luc Tessier. He was a Deschamps enforcer-a big cheese, correct? It looks like he was shot in the head, from behind with one bullet.”

I glanced back at the living room. “No obvious struggle. Was the door forced?”

“No. We are thinking that he knew who killed him.”

“And trusted him,” Labatt added, pointing at the corpse. “He turned his back on the man, maybe to make some coffee.”

“He live alone?” I asked, noticing the coffee maker on the counter ahead of the corpse, still half full and with its red indicator light on.

Lacombe smiled. “Yes. You are wondering how we found him so fast. The neighbor became angry at the television sound. When the Sherbrooke police got here, it was very, very big.” He put his fingers in his ears.

“But the noise came suddenly, just before the neighbor complained?”

Lacombe nodded.

“Meaning whoever killed him cranked up the volume to attract attention afterward,” I surmised. “It couldn’t have been that loud when he knocked on the door and Tessier went to pour coffee-it wouldn’t make sense. No gunshot heard?”

All three of them shook their heads. The comfortably bilingual Mountie-Rousseau-said, “Tessier was one of Marcel’s chosen men. He’d been with him twenty years and in the last eight or ten handled all the key dealings with rival operators. A hard man-loyal and savvy.”

“A big loss to Marcel,” I murmured.

“On top of others, yes,” Lacombe agreed.

I turned to both Labatt and Rousseau. “You two read tea leaves for a living. Who’d be putting this kind of pressure on Marcel?”

“It might not be so simple,” Labatt answered. “We were just discussing that before you came.”

Rousseau added, “It’s likely Jean Deschamps’s reappearance and this murder were orchestrated by the same people, but with Marcel near death and the Rock Machine gearing up against the Angels, Jean-Luc Tessier would have been a perfect target for either one of them-the Angels so they can solidify their grip on Sherbrooke before war breaks out; the Rock Machine so they can attack the Angels through the back-door by destroying the Deschamps and grabbing their territory.”

“Are the Rock Machine that subtle?” I asked. “I would’ve thought if that was their plan, they’d have knocked off five guys like Tessier tonight. Not just one.”

Lacombe laughed softly, escorting us back into the hallway to get out of the way of the crew carrying a stretcher. “It is very American. It would be not so messy to kill just one and then suggest a meeting to avoid more bloodshed. Monsieur Tessier may be something like a calling card. Right now, somewhere, maybe Marcel and Picard and Guidry and the others are negotiating with the people who did this.”

“Can’t we get wiretaps to find out?” I asked.

The Canadians all shook their heads. “The good old days,” Lacombe said. “We could have, twenty years ago. Now, it is very difficult. Taps are for after everything else has been tried and has failed. We are far from that right now.”

“We’ll have to use the old-fashioned tools first,” Rousseau suggested. “Informants, surveillance, intelligence, and patience. If this is leading somewhere, we’ll find out about it sooner or later. In the meantime, if they want to kill each other and break down the walls that have kept us out, maybe that’s not so bad.”

It was an interesting take, and not surprising from a federal man who had no investment in maintaining an unofficial compromise with the local crooks to keep the peace. But if Rousseau was going to mention selfishly practical matters, then I had one of my own. VBI was supposed to be a fast and efficient way to cut red tape and get results-waiting around for crooks to take action wasn’t part of the sales pitch. And I had politicians watching me like bookies timing a fledgling racehorse.

I therefore cast my vote for a more energized option-as diplomatically as possible. “Assuming whoever did this wants us to act on it, though,” I said, “then they’ve probably left us some bread crumbs to follow.”

Lacombe glanced around at the people streaming in and out of the apartment. “You are probably right. By tomorrow, we should know that.”

In Lacombe’s office the following morning, however, the killing of Jean-Luc Tessier was not the first topic of discussion. As the task force members gathered around his conference table, we found several newspapers spread out, all sporting a photograph of Jean Deschamps, alive and well sometime in the late 1930s, wearing a snap-brim fedora and smoking a cigarette. I didn’t need a translator to read the headlines.

I remained standing and asked, “I take it this didn’t come from any of your people?”

Lacombe shook his head, looking unhappy.

“May I use your phone?”

I called Sammie from Lacombe’s desk. “You seen the morning papers?” I asked her.

“Yeah. The leak come from up there?”

“Not that we know of. Phone around and see if you can find out-Stowe Mountain Rescue, Frank Auerbach’s crew… I know there was some buzz about who the stiff was when they found him. Maybe a reporter got lucky somewhere. But if it was a leak, I’d like to talk to whoever’s behind it. There was a murder here last night that suggests a major move in the making. Call my pager if you hit pay dirt.”

I hung up and joined the others at the table. “Had to come out sooner or later,” I said philosophically. “Be interesting to know if our visit to Marcel was the stimulus.”

André Rousseau, the Mountie, looked at me carefully. “How’s that?”

“When we spoke to Pelletier, he had no idea why we were there. Marcel and company might’ve spilled the beans to the press to guarantee we wouldn’t have that kind of anonymity again.”

“Does sound like a lawyer’s move,” Gary Smith grumbled.

“Then again,” I said, “it might’ve been leaked to show there was something rotten in the house of Deschamps.”

“Which brings us back to Jean-Luc Tessier,” Rick Labatt stated, laying a pile of crime scene photographs on the table. “I spent several hours last night with André and Etienne,” Labatt indicated the quietest member of our small group, the Sherbrooke police liaison, “digging through everything we had on Tessier and the Deschamps. It turns out Tessier was more than just the chief enforcer for Marcel, he was Marcel’s private man-used not only to take care of business outside the family, but inside also.”

“Marcel must be feeling pretty isolated around now,” Paul Spraiger commented.

“Why is it nobody talks about Michel Deschamps?” I asked. “According to Lucien Pelletier, he’s the heir apparent on the verge of taking over. He must be knee-deep in all this-or he better be.”

Rick raised his eyebrows and tapped a folder he’d placed next to the photographs. “That is something I also wondered.” He flipped open the folder to a full-face photograph of a young, soft-featured man sporting an immature mustache. “Michel Deschamps, twenty-eight, economics graduate of McGill with barely passing grades, employed by his father ever since as a quote-unquote bookkeeper, and making a salary any real bookkeeper would kill for. He drives a BMW sports car, several motorcycles, has many girlfriends, and is not thought by our sources to be of much use to his father’s organization.”

Rousseau added, “We have a file on him, too. Seems to be a classic case of generational dissipation.”

“So was Pelletier wrong?” I wondered aloud. “Given what we know of Marcel’s character, it seems he shouldn’t trust his son farther than he can spit him.”

Rick shook his head. “I don’t know about Pelletier, but I have heard Marcel is crazy about Michel. Father and mother were divorced many years ago, and Marcel has spoiled the boy rotten. André may be right from our view but not from Marcel’s. Michel can do no wrong.”

“What do Picard and Guidry think about that?” I asked, wondering privately how they had viewed Tessier’s elite role within the organization.

Lacombe, whom I’d come to see as a bit of a philosopher, merely suggested, “How would you feel, knowing the heir would be totally dependent on you for running the kingdom? It sounds not so bad.”

There was a knock at the door, and a uniformed policewoman entered, handed Rick a slip of paper, and retired without a word. Labatt read the message’s contents quickly and said, “Good thing we put tails on everybody yesterday. A man watching Tessier’s place last night just filed this report-he saw someone enter the apartment, stay about five minutes, and then leave rapidly, putting something into his pocket as he went. He followed this man around town for several hours until he entered the Hell’s Angels headquarters at almost dawn.

Surveillance photos matched him with somebody named Christophe Bossard.”

“We know him,” Etienne said softly. “He is… un apprenti.”

“An apprentice,” Paul translated.

“A Hell’s Angels wannabe,” Rousseau explained further. “They use them a lot for their dirty work-usually it’s carrying drugs, though. Not for a hit job.”

“And we know where Monsieur Bossard resides?” Lacombe asked Labatt.

“Oh, yes.”

A couple of hours later, I was sitting on the transparent side of a one-way mirror, watching a fat, hairy man in stained biker clothes sitting at a table next door, before a video camera and two police officers, one of them Rick Labatt.

Lacombe, Paul Spraiger, and I were lined up on folding chairs like spectators at a private viewing, Paul’s shoulder almost touching mine as he translated throughout the conversation.

“You are Christophe Alphonse Bossard,” recited Labatt, “born on January fifth, 1973, in Compton, Québec?”

Bossard stared at them both, hesitated, and finally nodded.

“Speak up for the record, please.”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Bossard, you have already been explained your rights under the law and have agreed to this conversation. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Let’s start with last night, around eleven-thirty. You were seen entering the apartment of Jean-Luc Tessier on Galt Street-”

“That’s a lie,” Bossard interrupted.

Labatt wordlessly slid a photograph across to him. He stared at it a moment.

Labatt resumed, “You were seen entering the apartment, as it shows in that photo. You stayed there about five minutes and then left in a hurry. The next people to visit Mr. Tessier were the police, and they found him dead with a bullet in the head-a bullet which came from the gun we found this morning in your apartment, in the pocket of the coat you are wearing in that picture. Would you like to tell us what happened in that apartment?”

Bossard swallowed hard. “He was already dead.”

Another long silence filled the room. Over the speaker above the one-way mirror, I could just hear Bossard’s labored breathing. I imagined the two cops facing him were also smelling his sweat.

“The apartment was under surveillance, Christophe,” Labatt said almost gently. “Had been for hours.”

But Bossard remained adamant. “He was dead. The blood was still running out of him.”

“Your fingerprints were found in every room.”

The fat man scowled and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I looked around a little. He wasn’t going to miss anything.”

“You ransacked the place while he was bleeding to death? Looking for what?”

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

“When you left, you were shoving something into your pocket.”

“That was the gun. It was the only thing worth a shit.”

“You should know. You used it to kill him.”

Bossard’s face reddened. “I did not,” he shouted. “I found the goddamned thing. It was lying on the floor next to him. You think I’m going to leave something like that behind? You stupid or what?”

Labatt declined debating who was most stupid in the room. “Why’d you go there in the first place, Christophe, if it wasn’t to kill him?”

“He called me. Said he wanted to talk.”

“What about?”

Bossard looked scornful. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have had to visit him, right?”

We all heard the incredulity in Labatt’s voice. “So you just wandered over to visit Jean-Luc Tessier for a casual chat-with his reputation?”

Now the fat man moved his shoulders back, swelling the stained Harley logo across his chest. “I wasn’t scared of Tessier. Besides, we’d worked together before. He knew I was honorable.”

“Why did you work together?”

Again, Bossard looked like he was talking to the village idiot. “I represent the Hell’s Angels. He represented the Deschamps. Of course we would meet-iron out the wrinkles that competitors sometimes run into.”

Labatt maintained his composure, even sounding solicitous. “Important job. Had the Angels been having trouble with Deschamps?”

Bossard scratched his neck thoughtfully-the consultant hard at work. “Nothing that couldn’t be sorted out. You have to keep on top of the situation, of course. Not let things slide.”

“Of course,” Rick echoed. “Nevertheless, all this has put you in an awkward spot.”

The other man’s face closed up. “I didn’t kill him.”

“You better help us prove that, because you’re the best candidate we’ve got. Was the television on when you got there?”

“Yeah.”

“Loud?”

“No. It was normal.”

“You turn it up to hide the gunshot?”

Bossard’s voice rose. “There was no goddamned gunshot-not from me.”

“It was loud when we got there, Christophe.”

Bossard worked his mouth soundlessly a couple of times and then admitted, “I heard it as I was leaving-going down the hall… I mean, I heard it somewhere. I didn’t know it was his.” He paused, looking troubled for the first time. “You saying it was turned up after I left? By who?”

“What did you do afterward, Christophe? You must’ve been concerned, going to a meeting with a Deschamps bigwig and finding him dead. Weren’t you worried you’d be pegged with the killing?”

“I didn’t do it. Why should I worry?”

“Did you call anyone? Meet anyone?”

“I wandered around a bit, like usual. Saw a few people, but not about Tessier. I ended up at the Lennoxville house to sleep a little. Then I went home. That was it. That’s where you assholes busted me.”

“Were the guys at the Lennoxville house happy with what you’d done?”

He scowled. “I told you, they didn’t know nothing about it.”

“Christophe, didn’t it cross your mind to tell them? They would’ve liked to have known that a major Deschamps player had been executed, don’t you think? It might’ve even earned you some brownie points.”

Bossard began shifting in his seat, as if feeling it heat up. “Maybe I didn’t think it was a good idea,” he murmured.

“What? Speak up.”

He seemed stung by Labatt’s harsh tone. “I said I was thinking it maybe wasn’t such a great idea.”

“Because you might be blamed. Because the Angels would think you’d taken the law into your own hands and upset the applecart. Maybe, Christophe, you started to think that your grand plan of killing the Deschamps negotiator for extra credit wasn’t such a great idea after all, eh?”

This time, he yelled so loudly his neck veins bulged. “I didn’t kill him.”

We were in a small room lined with vending machines, extracting coffee from one of them-Lacombe, Labatt, Paul, and I.

“I double-checked with the surveillance team,” Labatt was saying. “They’d stepped back a little to avoid being seen directly from Tessier’s door. They heard the TV suddenly blare, and then they saw Bossard. But they can’t swear he was still inside when the volume went up.”

“Meaning that if you believe Bossard,” Paul said, “someone was watching and waiting the whole time-maybe even inside the apartment.”

“Or out on the balcony,” I suggested. “Bossard said he tossed the place looking for loot. Do the crime scene photos show the door leading out there?”

Rick Labatt still had them with him in a manila envelope. He poured them out onto a nearby table and began pawing through them. “Yes-here.”

We all leaned in to study what he’d found. Not only was the balcony door deadbolt snapped open, but there appeared to be a damp spot on the rug before it, like a faint, slushy footprint.

Lacombe straightened first. “It has possibilities. But the best murderer looks like Christophe Bossard.”

“And that’ll be what’s told to the press?” I asked.

Lacombe looked faintly apologetic. “I have bosses, also, and they like to show the people we are hard at work.”

It wasn’t my place to argue. Not only did I have no viable alternatives, but my political position was exactly the same.