The Day After Tomorrow

32

HAIR COMBED and neatly shaven, Henri Kanarack was dressed in the light blue overalls of an air-conditioning company repairman. He had no trouble entering the service entrance nor of taking the maintenance elevator to the mechanical room floor. Jean Packard had given him Paul Osborn’s name and the name of the hotel where he was staying. He had not had Osborn’s room number or he, would most certainly have given that up, too. Hotels did not give out room numbers of guests, especially five-star hotels like Osborn’s on the avenue Kléber where the clientele was wealthy and international and carefully protected from outsiders who might have a political or personal ax to grind.

Picking up a toolbox from the mechanical room, Kanarack walked down a service corridor and took the fire stairs to the lobby. Pushing through the door, he stopped and looked around. The lobby was small, finished in dark wood and brass, and decorated mostly with antiques. To his left was the entrance to the bar and directly across from it, a small gift shop and a dining room. To the right .were the elevators. Opposite them was the front desk, and behind it, a clerk in a dark suit was talking with an extraordinarily tall, black African businessman who was apparently checking in. For Kanarack to get Osborn’s room number, he needed to get behind the front desk. Purposefully crossing the lobby, Kanarack approached the clerk and, when he looked up, immediately took the upper hand.

“Air-conditioning repair. Some problem with the electrical system. We’re trying to locate the trouble,” he said in French.

“I know nothing about it.” The clerk was indignant. That haughty, superior attitude was something Kanarack had hated about Parisians from the day he got there, especially when it came from salaried workers who made little more than he did and barely made it from paycheck to paycheck.

“You want me to go, okay. The problem is not mine,” Kanarack said with an animated shrug.

Instead of arguing, the clerk dismissed him with a tepid “Do what you have to do,” and turned back to the African.

“Thanks,” Kanarack said, and walked behind the desk to a position beside the clerk where he could examine a line of electrical switches directly above the master guest register. As he bent over to study them, he could feel the press of the .45 automatic tucked in the waistband under the bulky overalls. The short silencer fitted to the snout pushed against his upper thigh. A full clip in the magazine, a second clip was in his pocket.

“Pardon,” he said, picking up the entire guest register and setting it to one side. At the same time the desk telephone rang and the clerk picked up. Quickly Kanarack ran down the register. Under the O’s he found what he needed. Paul Osborn was in room 714. Quickly he set the register back in place, picked up his toolbox and walked from behind the desk.

“Thanks,” he said again.

McVey stared out the window at the fog, tired and disgusted. The Charles de Gaulle Airport was socked in and all flights had been grounded. He wished he could tell if it was getting darker or lighter outside. If it was going to be socked in all day, he’d grab a nearby hotel room and go to bed. If it wasn’t and there was the chance he’d get off, he’d do what everybody else had been doing for the last two hours—wait.

Before he’d left Lebrun’s office, he’d put in a call to Benny Grossman at New York Police Department head-quarters in Manhattan. Benny was only thirty-five but was as good a homicide detective as McVey had ever worked with. They’d jobbed together twice. Once when Benny had come to L.A. to retrieve an escaped killer from New York, and again when the NYPD asked McVey to come to New York to see if he could figure out something they couldn’t. As it turned out, McVey couldn’t get to the bottom of it either, but he and Benny had done the fumble i work together and afterward had a few drinks and a few laughs. McVey had even gone to Benny’s house in Queens for a Passover seder.

Benny had just come in when McVey called and had jumped on the line.

“Oy, McVey!” Benny said, which is what he always said when McVey called, then after some small talk got around to things with “So, boobalah, what can I do for you?” McVey had no idea if he was trying to sound like an old-time Hollywood agent or if he said that to everyone when they got down to business.

“Benny, sweetheart,” McVey had quipped, thinking that if Benny was a frustrated agent why not play along, then explaining that he was not in Manhattan or L.A. but sitting in the headquarters of the Paris Préfecture of Police.

“Paris, like in France or Texas?” Benny asked.

“Like in France,” McVey replied, and took the phone away from his ear at Benny’s extended whistle. Afterward he got down to specifics. McVey needed to know what Benny could come up with on an Albert Merriman who had supposedly bought the farm in a gangland killing in New York in 1967. Since Benny was eight years old in 1967, he’d never heard of Albert Merriman, but he’d find out and call McVey back.

“Let me call you,” McVey said, with no idea where he was going to be when Benny retrieved the information.

Four hours later McVey called back.

In the interval since they’d talked Benny had gone to the NYPD Records & Information archives and come up with a solid smattering of information on Albert Merriman. Merriman had been discharged from the U.S. Army in 1963 and very shortly afterward teamed up with an old friend, a convicted bank robber named Willie Leonard who’d just been released from Atlanta. Merriman and Leonard then went on a free-for-all and were wanted for bank robbery, murder, attempted murder and extortion in half-a-dozen states. They were also rumored to have made a few hits for organized crime families in New Jersey and New England.

On December 22, 1967, a body, later identified as Albert Merriman, was found shot to death and burned beyond recognition in a torched-out car in the Bronx.

“Mob job, looks like,” Benny said.

“What happened to Willie Leonard?” McVey asked.

“Still wanted,” Benny Grossman said.

“How was Merriman’s body identified?”

“It’s not on the sheet. Maybe you don’t know, boobalah, but we don’t keep extensive files on dead men. Can’t afford the storage space.”

“Any idea of who claimed the body?”

“That, I got. Hold on.” McVey could hear a rustle of papers as Grossman looked through his notes. “Here it is. Looks like Merriman had no family. The body was claimed by a woman who’s down on the sheet as a high-school friend. Agnes Demblon.”

“Any address?”

“Nope.”

McVey wrote Agnes Demblon’s name on the back of his boarding pass envelope and put it in his jacket pocket.

“Any idea where Merriman’s buried?”

“Nope again.”

“Well, I’ll bet you ten dollars to a Diet Coke if you locate the box you’ll find it’s Willie Leonard in there.”

In the distance McVey heard his flight being called. Amazed, he thanked Benny and started to hang up.

“McVey!”

“Yeah.”

“The Merriman file. Hasn’t been touched in twenty-six years.”

“So?”

“I’m the second guy to pull it in twenty-four hours.”

“What?”

“A request came yesterday morning from Interpol, Washington. A uniform sergeant in R and I pulled the file and faxed them a copy.”

McVey told Grossman Interpol was involved on the Paris end and had to assume that was the reason. Just then a final boarding call came for McVey’s plane. Telling Grossman he had to run, he hung up.

A few minutes later, McVey buckled his seat belt and his Air Europe jet backed away from the gate. Glancing again at Agnes Demblon’s name on the back of the boarding pass envelope, he let out a sigh and sat back, feeling the bump of the plane as it moved out onto the taxiway.

Glancing out the window, McVey could see a succession of rainclouds rolling across the French countryside. The wet made him think of the red mud on Osborn’s shoes. Then they were up and in the clouds.

A flight attendant asked him if he wanted a newspaper and he took it but didn’t open it. What caught his eye was the date. Friday, October 7. It was only this morning that Lebrun had been notified by Interpol, Lyon, that the fingerprint had even been made legible. And Lebrun himself had traced it to Albert Merriman while McVey stood there. Yet a request to the New York police for the Merriman file had come from Interpol, Washington, on Thursday. That meant that Interpol, Lyon, had sourced the print, uncovered Merriman and asked for data on him a full day earlier. Maybe that was Interpol procedure, but it seemed a little odd that Lyon would have a complete folder long before giving the investigating officer any information at all. But why did he think it made any difference anyway? Interpol’s internal procedure was none of his business. Still, it was something that needed to be brought to light if for no other reason than to relieve his discomfort with it. But before bringing it up either to assignment director Cadoux at Interpol, Lyon, or cluing Lebrun, he’d better have his facts straight. He decided the simplest way was to backtrack from the time of day Thursday the Interpol, Washington, request had been made to the NYPD. For that he’d have to call Benny Grossman when he got to London.

Abruptly bright sunlight hit him in the face and he realized they’d cleared the cloud deck and were moving out over the English Channel. It was the first sun he’d seen in almost a week. He glanced at his watch.

It was 2:40 in the afternoon.