The Day After Tomorrow

46

“I ALWAYS tell the kids it won’t hurt. Just a little jab under the skin,” Osborn said, watching Vera draw 5ml of tetanus toxoid out of a vial and into a syringe. “They know I’m lying and I know I’m lying. I don’t know why I tell them.”

Vera smiled. “You tell them because it’s your job.” Withdrawing the needle, she broke it off, wrapped the syringe in tissue paper, did the same with the vial, then put them both in her jacket pocket. “The wound is clean and healing well. Tomorrow we’ll start you on exercises.”

“Then what? I can’t stay here for the rest of my life,” Osborn said, sullenly.

“You might want to.” Vera plopped a folded newspaper down in front of him. It was the late edition of Le Figaro. “Page two,” she said.

Opening the paper, Osborn saw two grainy photographs. One was of himself, a mug shot taken by the Paris police, the other was of uniformed police carrying a blanket-covered body up a steep river embankment. Linking both was a caption in French: “American doctor suspect in Albert Merriman murder.”

All right, so they’d dusted the Citroën and found his prints on it. He knew it would happen. No need to be surprised or shocked. But—“Albert Merriman? Where did they get that?”

“It was Henri Kanarack’s real name. He was an American. Did you know that?”

“I could have guessed. From the way he talked.”

“He was a professional killer.”

“That part he told me—” Suddenly Osborn saw Kanarack’s face staring up at him from the rushing water, terrified that Osborn would give him another shot of the succinylcholine. At the same time he heard Kanarack’s horror-stricken voice, as distinctly as if he were in the room with him now.

“I was paid—”

Again, Osborn felt the shock of disbelief—that his father’s murder had been cold, detached business.

“Erwin Scholl—” he heard Kanarack say.

“No!” he shouted out loud.

Vera looked up sharply. Osborn’s jaw was set and he was staring straight ahead, focused on nothing.

“Paul—”

Osborn rolled over and slid his legs over the side of the bed. Unsteadily, he pulled himself to his feet. Wavering, he stood there, his face white as stone, his eyes utterly vacant. Sweat stood out on his forehead and his chest heaved thunderously with every breath. Everything was catching up. He was on the edge of a breakdown and knew it, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“Paul.” Vera came toward him. “It’s all right. It’s all right—”

His head snapped around to look at her and his eyes narrowed. She was crazy. Her reasoning came from the outside world where no one understood. “The hell it’s all right!” His voice was thick with rage. But it was the tortured rage of a child. “You think I can do it, don’t you? Well, I can’t.”

“Can’t what—” Vera was very gentle.

“You know what I mean!”

“I don’t . . . .”

“The hell you don’t!”

“No—”

“You want me to say it?”

“Say what?”

“That. That . . .” He stammered. “That I can find Erwin Scholl! Well, I can’t. That’s all! I can’t! Not start all over again! So don’t ask again. Is that clear?” Osborn was leaning over her, yelling at her. “Is that clear, Vera? Don’t ask, because I won’t! I won’t, because I can’t!”

Suddenly he glimpsed his pants hanging over the back of the chair by the window table and lunged for them. As he did, his bad leg gave way and he cried out. For a mordent he glimpsed the ceiling. Then the floor hit him in the back. For a moment he just lay there. Then he heard someone sob and his vision blurred and he couldn’t see. “I just want to go home. Please,” he heard someone say. There was confusion because the voice was his own, only it was much younger, and it was choked with tears. Desperately he rolled his head, looking for Vera, but he saw nothing but unfocused gray light.

“Vera—Vera—” He cried out, suddenly terrified something had happened to his eyes. “Vera!”

Somewhere, somewhere near, he heard a thumping. It was a sound he didn’t recognize. Then he felt a hand slide through his hair and he realized he was leaning against her breast and what he was hearing was the beat of her heart In time he became aware of the rhythm of his own breathing. And he had the sense that she was on the floor with him, and had been for some time. That she was holding him and rocking him gently in her arms. Still his vision hadn’t cleared and he didn’t know why. It was then he realized he was crying.

“You’re certain this is the man?”

“Oui, monsieur.”

“You, too?”

“Oui.”

Lebrun dropped the Paris police mug shots of Osborn on his desk and looked at McVey.

The detectives had left the park by the river and were on their way back into the city when the call came in. McVey, listening to the French, had heard the names Osborn and Merriman but couldn’t understand what was being said about them. When the transmission was finished, Lebrun signed off and translated.

“We ran Osborn’s photo alongside the Merriman story in the paper. The manager of a golf clubhouse saw it and remembered an American that looked something like Osborn had come out of the river near his golf course this morning. He’d given him coffee and let him use the phone. He thought it might be the same man.”

Now, with the identification of the photos, there was no question that it was indeed Osborn who had come out of the river.

Pierre Levigne, manager of the clubhouse, had been reluctantly dragged in by a friend. Levigne had not wanted to get involved, but his friend warned him that this was about murder and that he could get in a great deal of trouble if he didn’t report it.

“Where is he now? What happened to him? Who did he call?” McVey asked, and Lebrun translated in French.

Levigne still didn’t want to talk, but his friend pushed him. Finally he agreed, but on the condition the police keep his name out of the papers. “All I know is that a woman came to pick him up and he went off with her.”

Two minutes later, thanked and praised for their keen sense of civic responsibility, Levigne and his friend left, escorted out by a uniformed officer. As the door closed behind them, McVey looked at Lebrun.

“Vera Monneray.”

Lebrun shook his head. “Barras and Maitrot have already talked to her. She hadn’t seen Osborn and never heard of Albert Merriman or his alter ego Henri Kanarack.”

“Come on, Lebrun. What’d you think she was going to say?” McVey said, cynically. “They get a look around her apartment?”

Lebrun paused, then said, matter-of-factly, “She was on her way out for the evening. They met her in the lobby of her building.”

McVey groaned and looked at the ceiling. “Lebrun. Forgive me if I’m stepping all over your modus operandi, but you’ve got Osborn’s picture in the paper and half of France shaking the walls to find him and you’re telling me nobody bothered to check out his girlfriend’s apartment!”

Lebrun answered by not answering. Instead he picked up the telephone and ordered a team of inspectors to search the area where Osborn came out of the river for the murder weapon. Then he hung up and deliberately lit a cigarette.

“Anybody happen to ask where she was going?” McVey was trying to control his temper.

Lebrun looked at him blankly.

“You said she was going out. Where the hell was she going?”

Lebrun took a deep breath and closed his eyes. This was a clash of cultures. Americans were boors! Further they had absolutely no sense of propriety!

“Let me put it this way for you, mon ami. You are in Paris and this is Saturday night. Mademoiselle Monneray may or may not have been on her way to rendezvous with the prime minister. Whichever it was, I suspect the investigating officers felt it more than somewhat indelicate to ask.”

McVey took a deep breath of his own, then walked up to Lebrun’s desk, leaned both hands on it and looked down at him. “Mon ami, I want you to know that I fully appreciate the situation.”

McVey’s rumpled suit jacket was open and Lebrun could see the butt of a .38 revolver, a safety strap over the hammer, resting in the holster on his hip. Where most of the world’s police carried nine-millimeter automatics with a clip that held ten or fifteen shots, here was McVey with a six-shot Smith & Wesson. A six-shooter! Retirement age or not, McVey was—mon Dieu!—a cowboy!

“Lebrun, with all due respect to you and France, I want Osborn. I want to talk to him about Merriman. I want to talk to him about Jean Packard. And I want to talk to him about our headless friends. And if you say to me— ‘McVey, you already did that and let him go’—I will say to you, ‘Lebrun, I want to do it again!’”

“And with that in mind, chivalry and everything else considered, I’d say the most direct path to the son of a bitch is through Vera Monneray no matter who the hell she’s fucking! Comprenez-vous?”