Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

Owen Keane, Terence Faherty’s first series character and protagonist of his debut novel Deadstick, has appeared in EQMM a number of times over the years, always in thought-provoking cases. In December 2011, The Mystery Company published a twentieth anniversary edition of Deadstick that includes a new afterword and a Keane chronology. It’s available as a trade paperback and in e-book formats. This new Keane short story is characteristically reflective and revealing.

1.

“We all know what happened to Jesus after the Wedding Feast of Cana, where he performed his first miracle. He began his public ministry. But John the Evangelist doesn’t tell us what became of the young people who were married that day. We can only assume that they had the same chance that every newly married couple has: the chance to make a happy life.”

Two seats to my left, Mary Ohlman squeezed her husband’s hand. They were no longer a newly married couple — they had a five-year-old daughter — but Harry and Mary still held hands. My date for the afternoon, a young woman named Beth Wolfe, didn’t reach for my hand, nor I for hers. We’d been set up a few months back by Mary, and though the match had failed to ignite, we’d become friends and occasional escorts for one another. At the moment, I was the one providing the service. We four were seated in a crowded church, witnessing the wedding of a teacher friend of Mary and Beth’s. As usual on those rare times when I found myself inside a house of God, my mind was wandering in the past. Then the minister, a guy so young his complexion had yet to settle down, said something that caught my attention.

“We here gathered today are a community. A unique community. As a group, we’ve come together to celebrate Kit and Emile’s wedding. If they hadn’t fallen in love and decided to pledge their lives to one another, this particular congregation would never have existed. Their love has created a couple from two separate human beings, but it has also created a new community of friends and family. As we join together to share their joy, let us also pledge to work together to support this beautiful union.”

He then returned to his earlier point about the Wedding Feast at Cana, wondering at the luck of a couple whose love had created a community that included Jesus Himself. When he took it one obvious step further, pointing out that this Wedding Feast at Basking Ridge, New Jersey also had Jesus as a guest, I drifted off again.

I started by asking myself if the minister’s theory of community could apply to a solitary man like me. Was there an Owen Keane community, made up of the people I’d interacted with in a meaningful way over the years? If so, it wasn’t a tightly packed group, like the one around me now. It was a crooked, straggling line with one member barely in sight of the next.

Later I thought of that linear group again, while standing in the receiving line, watching the bride fuss over a gray-haired man in a wheelchair. Mary and Beth were discussing homeschooling and Harry was out running the air conditioner on his new BMW and probably sneaking a cigarette.

In addition to being thin on the ground, the trail of people I’d left in my wake was less homogenous than the happy, well-dressed throng jostling for space in the vestibule of the church. My troop was occasionally seedy and often strange. I was, for my sins, an amateur detective, an impulsive inquirer into things that didn’t concern me. Or rather, things that shouldn’t have concerned me but did. At a time in my life when I’d needed answers badly, they hadn’t been around to find. Now, a dozen years on, I still searched for them, turning over every oddly shaped rock I came across. Some remarkably odd.

I was yanked back to the present by a subtle elbow to the ribs from Mary. Then I was shaking the hand of the groom, a kid still so pale from his ordeal that the black stubble on his chin stood out like the studs on his shirt front. The bride, petite but lovely with glistening eyes and a stray sprig of baby’s breath hanging down from the floral wreath that anchored her veil, took my hand next and squeezed it as Mary had squeezed Harry’s.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, as though she actually knew who I was. “Thank you for being part of our community.”

2.

The reception was held at Killdeer Country Club, a small place near the church. Small and old, its golf course tree-choked and the wood paneling of the room where we had our cocktails dark and well scarred.

Harry looked the worm holes over approvingly and even smiled down at a worn spot in the carpet. “These old-money guys know how to squeeze a nickel,” he said.

He wasn’t exactly new money himself, being the descendant of a sturdy grove of Boston lawyers that had sent out shoots as far south as New York City. Harry was now the head man of that southern outpost, and it was getting harder to remember him as the college roommate who’d often had to borrow beer money from me. For one thing, he looked quite different, the dark hair he’d had at Boston College now as thin and as lovingly preserved as Killdeer’s ancient carpeting. The face beneath it had also changed, too many expense-account lunches having both widened it and softened its regular features.

Mary, another college friend, looked more like her old self, though she’d also sacrificed in the hair department, in her case to the gods of fashion. Her honey-colored hair, once long and incredibly straight, was now short and curled. There was a subtler difference too, one that fell under the category of behavior. She’d never been much of a drinker at Boston, but she’d already reduced her first Killdeer Manhattan to a glass of musical cubes.

She noticed me noticing that and spoke before I could comment. “My bad back is acting up. That church pew must have been designed by Cotton Mather.” And then, before I could comment on her comment, “So Kit’s family is old money?”

“Emile’s too,” said Beth, whose family had a little bit of their own socked away. As usual, she was barely sipping her champagne cocktail, the better to preserve a figure that was elegantly thin.

“Then why Quebec for a honeymoon?” Harry asked. “I heard somebody talking about that outside the church. If they’re loaded, why not the French Riviera?”

“Why not the Buick Riviera?” I said, just to be saying something.

“One of them has family in Quebec,” Beth replied. “Emile, I think. And, as you said, you don’t get to be old money by spending it.”

An hour or two after the best dinner I’d had in months, I worked up the nerve to ask Mary to dance. To earn that privilege — and to limber up — I’d danced several times with Beth, acquitting myself okay, though we hadn’t exactly moved as one. Dancing with Mary, on the other hand, was as comfortable as walking beside her. We’d been more than friends back at Boston College, prior to Harry’s ascendancy, and we’d had more than our share of awkward moments since, but the club’s small dance floor seemed to be neutral ground.

“You’re not counting,” Mary observed. “You used to count when we danced to keep time.”

“Now I say the rosary.”

“That’ll be the day.”

I told myself that we’d reached a new plateau, courtesy of the passage of time. In five or six years, we might even be confidants again.

Mary’s next words made that goal seem closer and less desirable. “Do you think Harry’s happy?”

“If he’s not, he’s losing more upstairs than his hair.”

“Maybe he’s just been married too long. Maybe he’s in a rut.”

“It can’t be that,” I said.

I was saved from saying more by a collision with a couple of dancing bears. I moved us to a neutral corner, but awkwardly.

“Sorry, Owen,” Mary said. “I’ve got you counting again.”

The other dancers all seemed to be following our example and moving away from the center of the dance floor. I understood the trend when the bride and groom took that place of honor. He’d lost his tuxedo jacket and she her veil and shoes, but they were both still smiling like happy newborns.

“I wonder how they’ll be feeling in ten years,” Mary said, a little wistfully.

“You and Harry can ask them then,” I said.

3.

Two days later I was at my day job, sorting packages for an express shipper that had several acres under roof near the Newark airport. It was the latest in a long series of jobs I didn’t care about, but one of the pleasanter ones, as the place was clean and dry and well lit. The work was steady and usually kept my mind from wandering, which might have been a bigger benefit than the dental plan. My supervisor, Martha, around whom the place had been built, had a soft spot for me. She was flexible about my shifts, which was important on those rare occasions when I had a case to investigate.

I’d just taken my place on the line that morning when Martha tapped me on the shoulder. One of her assistants was at her elbow, ready to cover for me. Martha led me away from the noise of the machines.

“Telephone for you, Owen. Some kind of emergency.”

I took the call in her office, wondering which of my dwindling list of relations would be on the other end. It turned out to be Harry Ohlman.

“Owen, sorry to be bothering you at work. Mary was so upset I promised her I would.”

“Amanda okay?” I asked, naming their daughter.

“Yes, she’s fine. It’s about Kit and Emile Derival. Owen, they’re dead. They were mugged on some street in Quebec last night. Robbed and shot. Mary’s sick about it. I am myself.”

I sat down heavily at the little table where I got my performance reviews. “What do you know?”

“That’s most of it. They’d gone out to dinner and a play. They were walking to some nightclub district when it happened. I guess Quebec’s a city where you feel safe at night.”

I never would. “I’m sorry, Harry. And I’m sorry Mary’s upset. You said you had to promise her you’d call me?”

“You know why, Owen. She still thinks you’re Sherlock, Jr. She thinks you’ll figure out why this happened, when there isn’t any deeper reason than some drug addict needing a fix. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to find the guy who did this and fix him for good. If I thought there was a chance of that, I’d drag you up to Canada myself. I tried to tell Mary there wasn’t anything anyone could do, but she wouldn’t listen. Sorry to lay this on you. Call me if you think of anything.”

“I will,” I said.

4.

I assumed Harry had meant that I should call if I came up with anything useful, so I didn’t bother him with the thoughts that spoiled the accuracy of my sorting for the first hour or so after his call. Those thoughts included the memory of Kit Derival’s last words to me, “Thank you for being part of our community,” and some reflections on grief. Did it help the family, I wondered, if the grief over these senseless killings spread out as far as possible, so far that they affected the work of a package handler none of them even knew? Did that make the pool of grief they were drowning in the slightest bit less deep? I decided it didn’t.

Still, the idea that I was a member of a community, a grieving community, haunted me. And it made Mary’s suggestion that I should do something about this senseless crime a little less absurd. The minister had called on the people at the wedding to support Emile and Kit. Our duties might be stretched to making sense of their deaths, if that were only possible.

But did that community even still exist? The minister had said that Emile and Kit’s love had created us, a single unit where there had previously been separate families and an assortment of friends and acquaintances. Now that those two were dead, was the bond broken? It would last a bit longer, I decided. Long enough for the community to gather again. This time for a funeral.

That thought made me sit down hard on the little stool at my station. For a moment, the familiar boxes from Land’s End and Pottery Barn slipped by unobserved. I was seeing something else, only in outline, but no less mind-seizing for that. Then the next person in the line threw an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup at me, bringing me back.

When my break came, I hurried to the pay phone near the lavatories. Harry must have given instructions about my possible call, because his secretary, the original immovable object, put me right through.

In place of hello, Harry said, “So, we going to Quebec?”

“It’s coming to us, maybe. I need you to find something out for me, if you can.”

“Now I’m doing your legwork?” This was a reference to a time in the not very distant past when I’d worked for him as a researcher.

“Mary’s legwork,” I said.

“Right. What is it?”

“I want you to identify a guest at Emile and Kit’s wedding. He or she will be a recluse, probably very wealthy, who lives in some kind of high-security environment.”

“Like a prison?”

“More like a castle with an extra-wide moat. It’ll be somebody closely associated with one of the two families, the Derivals or the Le Clares. You’ll have to find someone from each family who isn’t in shock and ask. Say you’re trying to help, but don’t promise too much.”

“Who is this recluse?”

“A long shot. And maybe an alternative to a senseless killing.”

“Assuming I trace him or her, what do we do then?”

“We storm the castle.”

5.

The castle turned out to be a Beaux-Arts tower with a beautiful view of New York’s Central Park and security like the U.S. Mint’s. Harry and I were actually patted down between the first set of guarded lobby doors and the second. After that indignity, we had a moment to ourselves.

“They have a lot of doormen to tip at Christmas,” I observed while we waited.

“These aren’t doormen, Owen. I’ve never seen security like this. They must have an ex-president living here.”

“Lincoln, I hope.”

As that remark suggested, I was feeling a little nervous. For one thing, my best suit, still wrinkled from the wedding reception, looked shabby next to Harry’s. And even his was no match for the opulent inner lobby, which reminded me of one of the quieter galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“My dad never heard of this Crevier guy,” Harry said, “which is pretty amazing.” It was. Harry Ohlman, Sr., now retired, was a famous collector of gossip. “I still don’t know how you suddenly turned into Nero Wolfe, Owen. How you figured out from your armchair that this guy existed. That’s not your style. You usually go door-to-door bothering people until one of them knocks you on the head.”

That wasn’t a fair description of my investigative technique. But Harry’s Nero Wolfe allusion was apt. I had made the kind of deductive leap that gentleman specialized in. And, like him, I’d been reluctant to explain myself to my Archie Goodwin, Harry. It had been more than wanting to hold on to a slight advantage too. I’d found the line of thinking that had led to my leap too disturbing to discuss.

My hand had been forced by the speed of events. On the evening of the day when I’d given Harry his impossible assignment, he’d called me at my apartment to say that the person I’d hypothesized not only existed but wanted to see us the next morning. I’d confessed all then. Harry now knew as much as I did, though he seemed reluctant to believe that.

One of the lobby elevators opened its doors. The car contained two large men, neither a born smiler. They motioned us inside.

“Here’s where I get knocked on the head,” I whispered.

Our escorts neither hit us nor spoke to us. I guessed that we were bound for the penthouse, but we actually stopped halfway up the tower.

There we were greeted by a man of about five foot six who seemed to be trying to make it to six even by stretching his neck. Something about his rigid posture made his plain brown suit resemble a uniform, though that suggestion might actually have come from the old scar tissue on one of his cheekbones. He looked like he badly wanted to pat us down again. Instead, he showed us into an apartment.

Based on the lobby, I expected it to be a scaled-down Versailles. It turned out to be very ordinary and even underfurnished. The man who lived there didn’t need much furniture, as he took a seat with him wherever he went. I saw the marks it had made on the hallway carpet as we entered, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by the identity of our host. It was the wheelchair-bound man Kit Derival had fussed over in the receiving line.

“Mr. Ohlman?” he said. “Mr. Kane, is it?” The gravel in his voice had come right out of the river Seine.

“Keane,” I said.

“Pardon. My name, as I believe you know, is Anton Crevier. Please sit down, gentlemen. I once enjoyed having men stand in my presence. Those days are gone.”

In those bygone days he’d been broad-shouldered, I decided, basing my guess on the amount of padding some nostalgic tailor had put in the shoulders of his suit coat. Under the shock of gray hair I’d noted at the wedding, Crevier had a jowly, drooping face that seemed to be suspended from his straight, unkempt brow. His small black eyes moved from one of us to the other as he extracted a cigarette case from his pocket. He offered the case to us first, and we both declined, Harry with visible regret. The scarred lackey lit the cigarette Crevier had selected and then placed himself behind the wheelchair, ready to jump on any grenades that happened by.

“My good friends the Le Clares called me with terrible news yesterday,” Crevier said. “The most terrible news. Their beloved daughter and her husband dead, murdered for their traveler’s checks. A few hours later, they called me back. They had been contacted by a friend of Kit’s, who told them that I might have something to do with the killings. They were most upset, as was I. I have passed a bad night, gentlemen. I am hoping you will be able to explain this business to me before I have to pass another.”

Harry said, “We were looking for an alternative explanation for the crime. Owen — Mr. Keane — may have come up with one.”

“And you two are what? Investigators?”

“I’m a lawyer. Mr. Keane is... someone who sorts things.”

Overnight parcels, if we were being literal. Crevier looked to me with higher expectations. “Yes?” he prompted.

“Do you have an enemy?” I asked. “One who would do anything to get to you?”

“All men have enemies, Mr. Keane, unless they are saints. Perhaps especially if they are saints. Why are we discussing my enemies? Why not yours or Mr. Ohlman’s? Why not the Le Clares’, since it was their daughter who was killed?”

“The Le Clares, Mr. Ohlman, and I don’t fit other... requirements,” I said. Crevier’s face seemed to droop even more, and I hurried on. “You may recall something the minister said during the ceremony: Those gathered there were a new community created by Kit and Emile’s love.”

“I remember.”

“I think those words inspired the crime. I think someone in that community was desperate to recreate it. There was one sure way to accomplish that. He or she could kill Kit and Emile, either making it look like an accident, which would have taken time to plan, or like a random killing committed during the commission of a robbery. The marriage community would then be reunited for a double funeral.”

“Why would anyone go to those lengths, Mr. Keane?”

“That’s what I asked myself next. It had to be that a guest at the wedding saw someone very important to him, saw him so unexpectedly that he was not prepared to act. Before he could gather himself, this unexpected person left. So I had one characteristic of the murderer’s real target. He didn’t attend the reception.”

“I did not,” Crevier said.

“This target had to have some other characteristics to explain what happened in Quebec. Even if he’d given the murderer the slip after the wedding, it should have been possible to trace him through the Derivals or Le Clares without resorting to violence. That didn’t happen, so the target had to be unapproachable through any conventional means, someone who lived behind a wall of security that the murderer couldn’t breach, someone who had to be tricked into the open.

“I asked Mr. Ohlman to inquire about such a person. If there hadn’t been one, I would have accepted the killings at face value. But there was one, Mr. Crevier. You. So I have to ask you again, do you have a mortal enemy?”

The old man drew deeply on his neglected cigarette. “To answer that, gentlemen, I must tell you a story.”

6.

“Are you familiar with the Algerian War of Independence?”

I would have had to say not very. Luckily, Harry was tired of sitting out the hand.

“It was an uprising against French colonial rule back in the fifties,” he said.

Crevier nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Some of us did not consider Algiers to be a colony. We thought of it as part of France. It seems an odd conceit after all this time. But the belief was strong enough then to support the fighting for years. By nineteen sixty-one, however, the French people had had enough. They voted in favor of separation with Algiers. Some elements of the French army refused to accept this decision. They seized control of Algiers in April nineteen sixty-one. I was a member of that group. The man you are seeking — if Mr. Keane’s conclusions and mine are correct — was another.

“The putsch lasted but a few days. General de Gaulle rallied the nation against us, and key army units refused to follow us. The generals and colonels in command of the insurrection fled or were arrested. I myself was almost killed.

“I had decided to surrender to the civilian authorities and return my troops to the flag of France. My second in command, a major named Burnon, urged me instead to join a group of officers who planned an underground resistance. Burnon had lost a brother in the fighting and become a fanatic. When I refused to join him, he shot me, condemning me to this chair. Nevertheless, with the help of Tritt—” he indicated the man behind him with a wave of his cigarette — “I escaped Algiers with my life.

“I came to the United States, hoping for a cure for my legs that did not come. I stayed because I had friends here, some ex-patriots, some American. I had served as a liaison to the Americans in North Africa in the war against the Nazis. Those old comrades proved more faithful than Burnon.”

“What became of him?” I asked.

“He joined the OAS, the terrorist organization formed by survivors of the Algiers putsch. When the OAS was crushed, there were rumors that Burnon had been killed, but I never believed them. I believe he has been living in exile all these years, as I have, under a false name, as I have, enduring God knows what indignities and privations for which he now blames me. He must have formed some connection to the French ex-patriot community here, which is natural enough. By an unhappy chance, he was also a guest at the wedding.”

Harry said, “You saw him there?”

“No. Believe me, gentlemen, when I say that if I had known Burnon was there, if I had guessed that he posed the least threat to those children, I would have acted to save them.”

“We can still get the guy,” Harry said. “We’ll give the police what we know. They’ll go over the guest list, narrow it down, and nail him.”

“They never will,” Crevier said. “If Burnon was responsible for that horror in Quebec, you must believe that he has cut himself free of whatever identity he has been living under, so he could melt away at the first suggestion that the police had uncovered his plans. They could establish his discarded persona but never put their hands on the man. There is only one way to do that, gentlemen.”

He handed me the punch line with a glance.

“Go ahead with the funeral,” I said.

“Yes. Go ahead with the funeral. I will attend. That will draw Burnon out of hiding.”

Tritt didn’t like the idea, or so I concluded from a tightening of his mouth and a darkening of his skin that made the scar on his cheek glow white. Harry didn’t like it either, and he spoke up.

“We could be adding to the list of innocent bystanders. Suppose he puts a bomb under the church.”

“Not Burnon. He will shoot me face-to-face as he did thirty years ago. He will sacrifice his own life to do it.”

“It’s hard to stop an assassin who’s willing to sacrifice himself,” I observed.

“I am a soldier, Mr. Keane. Danger is part of my profession. I would face this danger just to avenge those two young people. But I also have a motive of my own. You have observed, perhaps, the manner in which I live. Not uncomfortably, thanks to some investment advice, but not freely. There has been a price on my head since nineteen sixty-one, placed there by the government I once served. All these years, I have waited for the knock on my door and the hand on my collar.

“Now that has changed. Not long ago, an amnesty was passed in France for the officers who led the putsch. I have made inquiries since and learned that, if I desired to return to my native land, I would not be molested. My dream is to go back to the village where I was born and live quietly and simply, without locked doors around me. But until Burnon is caught, my plans must wait. I dare not leave this prison I have made for myself while he is free.

“So, gentlemen, how do we proceed?”

He addressed the question to me, but Harry answered. “We contact the authorities down in Somerset County. And we make our plans.”

7.

Harry had likened my original deduction, the one that led us to Crevier, to the work of Rex Stout, but I stepped from that tower thinking instead of the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Of The Sign of Four and “The Crooked Man” and the others in which some ancient crime, committed in an exotic place, is recounted and accounted for in the present.

I would have shared this reflection with Harry, but he was, as usual, all business now that there was business to conduct. “We’ll have to get in touch with the police in Quebec,” he said as we waited for the tower’s doorman to snag us a cab. “They’re the ones who’ll end up with Burnon, assuming we get him alive.”

“Assuming we get him period,” I said. “I don’t think we surprised Crevier today. I mean, when we told him why we were there, he looked sadder, but he never seemed shocked.”

“The Le Clares told him yesterday about my call, Owen. So he had all night to work it out. We just confirmed his worst fears this morning. Don’t feel bad if he reached the same conclusion you did. He had a lot more pieces of the puzzle to work with. Burnon, for one.”

The doorman landed our taxi, and we headed off at the usual breakneck pace. Today, it seemed justified. We had plans to make, as Harry had said. That is, he and the other responsible adults did. That Harry had been referring to a group that didn’t include me when he’d used the second person plural was brought home to me when he asked if I wanted to be dropped at Penn Station or the Port Authority Building.

I selected the train station, and we careered along in silence for a time. I didn’t blame Harry for excluding me. I’d had some close calls during my years as an amateur sleuth. I couldn’t enter a barn or a liquor store without thinking of two especially close ones. Luckily, I hardly ever entered a barn. But for the most part, my cases didn’t involve shootouts or blood feuds. So I wouldn’t contribute much in a strategy session with a SWAT team. And I was consoled by the certainty that the police would dump Harry as quickly as he had dumped me.

A block from the station, Harry broke the silence. “The toughest part of this may be keeping Mary away from the funeral.”

“You’re still thinking about a bomb?”

“Bombs, bullets, water balloons. I don’t care what this Burnon uses. I don’t want Mary within a mile of him. I don’t want to risk her life.”

That might have been a dig at me and my past performance as a guardian of Mary — she’d been tied up with me in that long-ago barn — but I didn’t care. I liked hearing that Harry was concerned for her safety. Ever since I’d danced with Mary at the reception and she’d asked about Harry’s happiness, I’d been worried. And I’d been looking for an opening for a conversation with Harry that I really didn’t want to have. Now, it seemed, I didn’t have to have it.

A moment later, as we pulled up in front of Penn Station, Harry yanked that deep-pile misconception out from under me.

“Here’s the thing about a rut, Owen. You only live in one in the first place because the world outside it frightens you. The last thing you want is for anything to change.”

8.

I had time on my hands when I stepped from the train in Elizabeth, where I rented rooms. I’d gotten the morning off by switching with someone on the second shift, which was still hours away. So I walked the hills of the old city. It had been badly served by the twentieth century, had in fact become an apt symbol for modern life, squeezed as it was on all sides and sliced through the middle by super highways. But it wasn’t a bad place for a walk, in daylight at least.

I fell into thinking about Crevier’s world, comparing his Spartan apartment to the busy streets around me. His empire was cleaner than downtown Elizabeth and certainly safer, but it was very much less alive. I could understand his desire to return to his native village, perhaps to watch the comings and goings from a table in the café, if it had one, on the central square, if there was one.

From there I moved to wondering how Crevier had spent his years of exile. Not buttoned up in his tower, surely. Not completely. De Gaulle and his successors didn’t have that long a reach. And if he’d never ventured out, Crevier would never have met the Le Clares and become a favorite of Kit’s. If he got out at all, New York would have been a comfortable place for his exile. A prison, perhaps, but one with a very nice exercise yard, complete with restaurants, theaters, and museums. I’d known people who’d passed much harsher sentences on themselves. In fact, I’d done it myself, once upon a time.

That led me to wonder whether, should Burnon be captured and Crevier returned alive to his village, the old man would be content with his choice. Would he miss the bright lights when he was sitting beside some trout stream, waiting for a bite?

Regretted choices were a regular feature of my contemplations, not surprisingly, given the odd course my own life had taken. But that day the subject seemed especially pressing, and not just because of Crevier. I was also worried about Harry, the man who had brought me the Crevier case and then bumped me from it. In fact, one of the reasons I was thinking about the Frenchman now — pointless though it was since my demotion to spectator — was to avoid thinking of Harry’s assessment of his marriage: You only live in a rut in the first place because the world outside it frightens you.

That paraphrasing came to my mind against my will, and I tried to force it out again by returning to the subject of Anton Crevier. The transition was easy to make, so much so that I was almost able to fool myself into believing Harry had been referring to the old soldier’s life and not his own when he’d spoken of ruts.

The coincidence brought me up short in the middle of Broad Street. I recovered just as the light changed and managed to reach the far curb in one piece. There I checked through my reasoning before setting off again at a run. I started for my apartment and then spotted a much nearer alternative: a supermarket where I’d once stocked shelves. Inside its door, between the mechanical bronco and the gumball machines, was a pay phone. I used it to place a somewhat breathless and very collect call.

9.

The Derivals and the Le Clares got a nice day for the joint funeral, for whatever solace that was to them. The church where Kit and Emile had been married was pressed into service again, and was even more tightly packed. Or so I judged from the crowd that streamed past my sentry post. That crowd included Harry and Mary — who hadn’t been talked out of attending — and Beth Wolfe. I didn’t escort her today, preferring for some reason to stand apart from the proceedings.

I also stayed well away from the police, who were there in force, though discreet. The headquarters of my stakeout was a little three-sided park across the street from the church. From there, I saw Anton Crevier arrive at the last possible moment, pushed by Tritt, whose head never stopped turning on its stork’s neck. Crevier didn’t scan the crowd once, but he didn’t slump in his chair either. He sat as upright as his damaged body would permit, looking straight before him. As far as I could tell from my vantage point, none of the other stragglers so much as met the old man’s gaze.

After the service, the process was reversed, Crevier and his bodyguard leaving a little after the main crowd and drawing no special attention. Tritt seemed to grow edgier as they neared the limousine that had carried them out from the city. Crevier, in contrast, sagged visibly, like a man who’d tired of waiting for his firing squad to come off break. The process of loading him into the car forced Tritt to lower his guard. Still, no one approached them.

I joined the waiting Ohlmans and Beth for the short ride to the cemetery and then deserted them again, climbing a hill from which I could just hear the words of the graveside service. When it was over, the mourners drifted away, leaving, finally, only two men, one in a wheelchair. I walked down the hill to them.

“Our plan has failed, Mr. Keane,” Crevier said. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his jowly face. “My penance is not over yet, it seems.”

Harry joined us, accompanied by two men. I would have tagged them as policemen even if I hadn’t been in on the day’s proceedings.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said to the old man. “We’ll have to think of something else. Owen has an idea.”

“Yes?” Crevier said, fixing me with his black eyes.

Tritt was also watching me intently. I reached into the side pocket of my suit coat, a bit of stage business designed to hold their attention a moment longer. As my hand came out empty, the two policemen grabbed Tritt, one on either arm.

“What is this?” Crevier demanded, struggling to turn in his chair.

By then, Tritt had been relieved of a slim black automatic. When they led him off, his head was bowed almost to his chest.

“What is this?” the old man asked again, this time of me.

I asked him a question in turn. “Where was Tritt the day the Derivals were killed?”

“It was his free day. I don’t know what he did.”

Harry told him. “He flew to Quebec. The police identified the flight and the alias he used. He killed Kit and Emile.”

“But Burnon—”

“Died in nineteen sixty-one, probably,” I said. “When we came to see you at your apartment, you weren’t surprised by anything we told you. Why was that?”

“We had worked it out for ourselves after speaking with the Le Clares.”

“We?”

“Tritt and I...” Crevier’s voice trailed away to nothing.

I said, “We accidentally played into Tritt’s hand by coming up with our solution. If we hadn’t, he would have found some other way to get you thinking about Burnon. He needed you to be frightened for his plan to work.”

“What plan?”

“His scheme to hold on to a life he couldn’t give up. He didn’t want your exile to end. He didn’t want to be let go or to find himself living in a little village in charge of a staff of one. He couldn’t undo the amnesty your government had offered you. But if he could get you living in fear again, his routine would be safe. So he committed murder to do it.”

10.

The driver of Crevier’s limousine approached, nervously scanning the headstones around us. His employer held him off with a raised hand.

“And for that two young people died?”

Meaning, of course, that it wasn’t enough, that the solution to the mystery didn’t satisfy him. One selfish man’s wishes couldn’t balance scales holding two young lives. I understood his disappointment. I’d filed the same complaint at the same window more than once, for all the good it had ever done me.

When he tired of waiting for an answer, Crevier waved his chauffeur up. Harry went with them, to help with the challenge of moving the old man into the car. I hung back.

I was tempted to pluck a flower from one of the arrangements and toss it onto the gleaming caskets, as I’d seen other mourners do. Instead, I fell into thinking, for the last time, of the sermon from the wedding service. The minister had said then that no one knew what had happened to the lucky couple who had been married at Cana, and it occurred to me now that that wasn’t true. We certainly didn’t know the details of their married life. But we knew how the couple had ended their years or months or weeks or days together. They’d ended them exactly as Kit and Emile had, minus the fancy trappings. They’d died, perhaps together, more likely not. But if death had parted them, it had reunited them eventually. They’d ended up together in some plot of land, like the one near which I stood.

That conclusion might have dragged me into a spiral of despair, as my conclusions often did. But this time was different. The idea that the Derivals had managed to complete a cycle as old as marriage itself made me feel a little better. When Beth came up the hill to lead me away by the hand, I squeezed hers back.

Copyright © 2012 by Terence Faherty