The Day After Tomorrow

48

VERA WAS waiting for the elevator when McVey and Lebrun came in. She watched them cross the lobby toward her.

“You must be Inspector Lebrun,” she said, looking at his cigarette. “Most Americans have quit smoking. The doorman gave me your card. What can I do for you?”

“Oui, mademoiselle,” Lebrun said, then reached over and awkwardly put out his cigarette in a stone ashtray beside the elevator.

“Parlez-vous anglais” McVey asked. It was late, well after midnight. Obviously Vera knew who they were and why they were there.

“Yes,” she said, making eye contact with him.

Lebrun introduced McVey as an American policeman working with the Paris Préfecture of Police.

“How do you do?” Vera said.

“Doctor Paul Osborn. I think you know him.” McVey was putting niceties aside.

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Vera glanced from McVey to Lebrun, then back to McVey. “Perhaps it would be better if we talked in my apartment.”

The elevator was old and small and lined with polished copper. It felt like a tiny room in which every wall was a mirror. McVey watched as Vera leaned forward and pressed a button. The doors closed, there was a deep whir, the gears caught and the threesome rode up in silence. That Vera was poised and beautiful and had been unruffled in the lobby didn’t impress him. After all, she was the mistress of France’s most important minister. That in itself had to be an education in cool. But inviting them to her apartment showed moxie. She was letting them know she had nothing to hide, whether she did or not. That made one thing certain. If Paul Osborn had been there, he wouldn’t be there now.

The elevator took them up one story. At the second floor, Vera pulled the door open herself, then led the way down the corridor toward her apartment.

It was now a quarter past midnight. At eleven thirty-five she had at last pulled the covers over a thoroughly spent Paul Osborn, turned on a small electric space heater to keep him warm, and left the room hidden under the eaves at the top of the building. A steep and narrow staircase inside a plumbing soffit led to a storage locker that opened into an alcove on the fourth floor.

Vera had just stepped out of the locker and was turning back to lock the storage closet when she thought of the police. If they had been there earlier, there was every chance they would come back, especially when they would have had no word of Osborn. They’d want to question her again, ask if she’d heard anything in the mean time, probe to see if maybe they’d missed something or if she was covering up.

The first time they’d come she’d told them she was on her way out. What if they were outside now, watching for her to come back? And what if they didn’t see her come back and later found her asleep in her apartment? If that happened, the first thing they would do would be to search the building. Certainly the attic room was hidden, but not so well that some of the older police who had fathers and uncles in the Resistance against the Nazis wouldn’t remember such hiding places and begin to look beyond the obvious.

Assuming she was right about the police, Vera took the service stairs to the street behind the building and telephoned the lobby from a public phone on the corner. Philippe not only confirmed her suspicions but read her Lebrun’s card. Warning him to say nothing if the police Came back, she’d crossed Quai des Celestins, turned down the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville and entered the Métro station at Pont Marie. Taking the line one stop to Sully Morland, she’d emerged from the station and hailed a cab back to her apartment on Quai de Bethune. The whole thing had taken less than thirty minutes.

“Come in, gentlemen, please,” she said, opening the door and turning on the hallway light, then led the way into the living room.

McVey closed the door behind them and followed. To the left, in the semidarkness, he saw what looked like a formal dining room. Down the hall to the right was an open door to another room, and opposite it another open door. Everywhere he looked he saw antique furniture and oriental rugs. Even the runner in the long hallway was oriental.

The living room was nearly twice as long as it was wide. A large Art Deco poster framed in gold leaf—a Mucha, if McVey remembered his art history—covered most of the far end wall. And the one word that sang from it was “original.” To one side, opposite a long white linen couch, was an old-fashioned armchair that had been completely redone. The curlicue design of its arms and legs was the same handpainted multicolor as the fabric and it looked, for all the world, like it could have been “ lifted straight from the set of Alice in Wonderland. But it wasn’t a prop or a plaything, it was an objet d’art, another original.

Beyond that, with the exception of half-a-dozen carefully placed antiques and the rich oriental carpet, the room was purposefully spare. The wallpaper, a fibrous gold and silver brocade, was untarnished by the grime that in a city the size of Paris sooner or later tainted everything. The ceiling and woodwork were off-white and freshly painted. The entire room, and the rest of the apartment, he imagined, had the look of meticulous daily care.

Glancing out one of the two large windows that overlooked the Seine, he could see Lebrun’s white Ford parked across the street. That meant that someone else, standing where he was, could have seen it too. Seen it pull up and the lights go out, but nobody get out. That is, until Ms. Monneray’s cab pulled up and she went inside.

Vera turned on several lamps, then looked up to face her guests. “Could I offer you something to drink?” she said in French.

“I’d rather get to the point, if you don’t mind, Ms. Monneray,” McVey said.

“Of course,” Vera said in English. “Please sit down.”

Lebrun walked over and sat down on a white linen sofa, but McVey chose to stand.

“This is your apartment?” he asked.

“It belongs to my family.”

“But you live here alone.”

“Yes.”

“You were with Paul Osborn today. You picked him up in a car about twenty miles from here, at a golf course near Vernon.”

Vera was sitting in the Alice in Wonderland chair, and McVey was looking right at her. If the police knew that much, McVey knew she would be too smart to deny it.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

Vera Monneray was twenty-six, beautiful, poised, and on her way to becoming a doctor. Why was she risking a hard-fought and important career by protecting Osborn? Unless something was going on McVey had no idea about, or unless she was truly in love.

“Earlier, when you were questioned by the police you denied having seen Doctor Osborn.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Vera looked from McVey to Lebrun, then back to McVey. “I’ll be honest and tell you I was frightened, I didn’t know what to do.”

“He was here in the apartment, wasn’t he?” McVey said.

“No,” Vera said, coolly. “He wasn’t.” That was a lie it would be hard for them to catch. If she told the truth, they would want to know where he went from here and how he got there.

“Then you won’t mind if we look around?” Lebrun said.

“Not at all.” Everything in the guest room had been Cleaned and put away. The sheets and bloody towels she’d used when she pulled the bullet from Osborn’s leg had been folded and stored in the attic hiding place, the instruments sterilized and put back in her medical bag.

Lebrun got up and left the room. In the hallway he stopped to light his cigarette, then walked off.

“Why were you frightened?” McVey sat down in a straightbacked chair across from Vera.

“Doctor Osborn was hurt. He’d been in the river most of the night.”

“He killed a man named Albert Merriman. Did you know that?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Detective, I told you he was hurt. It was not so much by the river, but because he’d been shot. By the same man who did kill Albert Merriman. He was hit in the back of “the thigh.”

“Is that so?” McVey said.

Vera stared at him a moment, then got up and went to a table near the doorway. As she did, Lebrun came back. Glancing at McVey, he shook his head. Pulling open a drawer, Vera took something from it, closed the drawer and came back.

“I took this out of him,” she said, and laid the spent bullet she’d recovered from Osborn’s thigh in McVey’s hand.

McVey rolled it around in his palm and then held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “Soft point. Could be nine millimeter—” he said to Lebrun.

Lebrun said nothing, only nodded slightly. The nod was enough to tell McVey he agreed, that it could be the same kind of slug they’d taken out of Merriman.

McVey looked at Vera. “Where did you do the surgery?”

Say whatever comes into your head, she thought. Don’t flinch. Make it simple. “By the side of the road, on the way back to Paris.”

“Which road?”

“I don’t remember. He was bleeding and almost delirious.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know that, either. . . . You seem to not know more than you know.”

Vera looked at him but didn’t back down. “I wanted to bring him here. More truthfully, I wanted him to go to a hospital. But he wouldn’t. He was afraid whoever tried to kill him would come after him again if they knew he was alive. It would be easy enough in a hospital, and if he was here, he was afraid I might get hurt. That’s why he insisted we do what we did. The wound wasn’t deep. It was a relatively simple operation. As a doctor, he knew that. . . .”

“What did you use for water? You know, to keep everything clean?”

“Bottled water. I carry it with me in the car almost all the time. These days many people do. Even in America, I think.”

McVey stared at her but said nothing. Lebrun did the same. They were waiting for her to continue.

“I left him at the Gare Montparnasse about four this afternoon. I shouldn’t have, but he would have it no other way.”

“Where was he going?” McVey asked.

Vera shook her head.

“You don’t know that, either.”

“I’m sorry. I told you he was concerned about me. He didn’t want me involved any more than I already was.”

“He could walk?”

“He had a cane, an old one that was in the car. It wasn’t much, but it kept the pressure off his leg. He’s healthy. That kind of wound will heal quickly.”

Vera watched McVey get up and cross the room to look out the window.

“Where were you this evening? From the time you went out until now?” he said with his back to her, then turned to face her.

To this point, McVey had been direct, but for the most part he’d kept it friendly. But with this question his tone changed. It was hard, even ugly, and decidedly accusatory. It was something Vera had never encountered. This was no Hollywood movie cop he was the real thing, and he scared the hell out of her.

McVey didn’t have to look at Lebrun to know what his reaction would be. Horror.

And he was right. Lebrun was horrified. McVey was asking her point blank if she’d been having a clandestine rendezvous with Francois Christian. The trouble with his reaction was that Vera saw it too. It told her they knew about her relationship with François. It also told her they didn’t know about the breakup.

“I’d rather not say,” she said without expression. Then, crossing her legs, she looked at Lebrun. “Should I get an attorney?”

Lebrun was quick to answer. “No, mademoiselle. Not now, not tonight.” Standing, he looked at McVey. “Already it is Sunday morning. I think it is time we go.”

McVey studied Lebrun a moment, then gave in to the Frenchman’s deep sense of propriety. “Just let me finish a thought.” He turned to Vera.

“Did Osborn know who shot him?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you what he looked like?”

“Only that he was tall,” Vera said politely. “Quite tall and slim.”

“Had he seen him before?”

“I don’t think so.”

Lebrun nodded toward the door.

“One more question, Inspector,” McVey said, still looking at Vera. “This Albert Merriman or Henri Kanarack as he called himself. Do you know why Doctor Osborn was so interested in him?”

Vera paused. What harm would it do to tell them? In fact, it might help if they understood the pressure Osborn had been under, make them realize he’d only been trying to question Kanarack, and had nothing at all to do with the shooting. On the other hand, the police had taken the succinylcholine from Osborn’s hotel room. If she told them Kanarack had murdered Osborn’s father, instead of being sympathetic, they would assume he’d been out for revenge. If they did and connected the drug, and then discovered what it was used for, they might go back over Kanarack’s body and discover the puncture wounds.

Right now, Osborn was only a fugitive but if they had reason to go back and found the puncture wounds, they could, and probably would, charge him with attempted murder.

“No,” she said, finally. “I really have no idea.”

“What about the river?” McVey pressed.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Why were Osborn and Albert Merriman there?”

Lebrun was uncomfortable and Vera could have turned to him for help, but she didn’t.

“As I said before, Detective McVey—I really have no idea.”

Sixty seconds later Vera closed the door behind them and locked it. Walking back into the living room, she turned out the lights, then went to the window. Below, she saw them come out and cross to the white Ford parked across the street. They got in, the doors closed and they drove off. When they did, she let out a deep sigh. For the second time that evening she’d lied to the police.