The Day After Tomorrow

59

IT WAS 9:20 before McVey heard anything about it. His sojourn to the Brasserie Stella on rue St.-Antoine two hours earlier had started off as a flop, nearly became a fiasco, then ended with a jackpot.

Arriving at 7:15, he found the place packed. The waiters were running around like ants. The maitre d’, seemingly the only one who spoke even a hint of English, informed him the wait for a table was at least an hour, maybe more. When McVey had tried to explain he didn’t want a table but only to speak to the manager, the maitre d’ had rolled his eyes, thrown up his hands saying that tonight even the manager couldn’t get him a table, because the owner was giving a party and taking up the entire main room—and with that he’d rushed off.

So McVey simply stood there with Lebrun’s police sketch of Albert Merriman in his pocket and tried to figure out another approach. He must have looked lonely or lost or both because the next thing he knew a short, slightly inebriated Frenchwoman in a bright red dress took him by the arm and led him to a table in the main room where the party was and began introducing him as her “American friend.” While he was trying to extricate himself politely, somebody asked him in broken English where in the States he was from. And when he said, “Los Angeles,” two more people started throwing questions about the Rams and the Raiders. Somebody else mentioned UCLA. Then an exceedingly thin young woman who looked and dressed like a fashion model slid between them. Smiling seductively, she asked him in French if he knew any of the Dodgers. The black man translated for her and stared, waiting for an answer. By now, all McVey wanted to do was get the hell out of there, but for some reason he said something like “I know Lasorda.” Which was true because Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda had been involved in a number of police benefits and over the years they’d more or less become friends. At mention of Lasorda’s name, another man turned around and in perfect English said, “I know him too.”

The man was the owner of Brasserie Stella and within fifteen minutes two of the three waiters who had wrestled Osborn off Henri Kanarack the night of Osborn’s attack were assembled in the manager’s office looking at the sketch of Albert Merriman.

The first looked at it. “Oui,” he said, then handed it to the second. The second studied it for a moment, then gave it back to McVey.

“L ‘homme.” He nodded. The man.

Los Angeles.

“Robbery-Homicide, Hernandez,” the voice had answered. Rita Hernandez was young and sexy. Too sexy for a cop. At twenty-five she had three kids, a husband in law School, and was the newest, and probably brightest, detective in the department,

“Buenas tardes, Rita.”

“McVey! Where the hell are you?” Rita leaned back in her chair and grinned.

“I am the hell in Paris, France.” McVey sat down on the bed in his hotel room and pulled off a shoe. Eight forty-five at night in Paris was 12:45 in the afternoon in L.A.

“Paris? You want me to come be with you? I’ll leave my husband, my kids, everything. Pleeeeze, McVey!”

“You wouldn’t like it here.”

“Why not?”

“Not one decent tortilla, at least that I’ve found. Not like you make, anyway.”

“The hell with tortillas. I’ll take a brioche.”

“Hernandez, I need a comprehensive sheet pulled on an orthopedic surgeon from Pacific Palisades. You got time?”

“Bring me back a brioche.”

At 8:53 McVey hung up, used his key to open the “honor bar” and found what he was looking for, a half bottle of the Sancerre he’d had when he’d stayed in the room the last time. Whether he liked it or not, French wine was beginning to grow on him.

Opening the wine, he poured half a glass, took off his other shoe and put his feet up on the bed.

What were they looking for? What had Osborn wanted with Merriman so badly that after the initial attack and Merriman’s escape he’d gone to the trouble and expense of hiring a private detective to find him?

It was possible that Merriman had somehow provoked Osborn in Paris. Maybe Osborn’s story about Merriman’s roughing him up in the airport and trying to take his wallet was true. But McVey doubted it, because Osborn’s attack on Merriman in the brasserie had been too sudden and too violent. Hot-tempered as Osborn was, he was still a physician and smart enough to know you didn’t assault people in public in foreign countries without risking all kinds of repercussions, especially if all the man had done was try and shake you down for your wallet.

So, unless Merriman had done something so outrageous as to provoke Osborn’s anger earlier that same day, it seemed reasonable to look for something else. Which was what his gut told him. That whatever was between them had happened in the past.

But why would a doctor in L.A. have a tie to a professional killer who’d faked his own death and been out of sight for almost three decades, the last ten years of it hiding in France as Henri Kanarack? As far as Lebrun had been able to find out, Merriman, as Henri Kanarack, had been clean the entire time. That meant that whatever relationship existed between Osborn and Merriman had to have begun when Merriman was still in the States.

Getting up, McVey went to the writing table and pulled open his briefcase. Finding the notes he’d made from his conversations with Benny Grossman on Merriman, he ran his finger down the page until he found the date Merriman was supposed to have been killed in New York.

“Nineteen sixty-seven?” he said out loud. McVey took a swallow of the Sancerre, and poured .a little more in his glass. Osborn was no more than forty, probably younger. If he knew Merriman in 1967 or before, he’d have to have been a kid.

Screwing up his face, McVey pondered the possibility Merriman could have been Osborn’s father. A father who’d deserted the family and disappeared. As quickly, he discarded it; Merriman would have had to have been in his early teens to father someone as old as Osborn. No, it had to have been something else.

He was thinking about the drug Lebrun’s men had found, the succinylcholine, and wondering what, if anything, that had to do with the Osborn/Merriman thing.

Thinking about it made him realize he hadn’t heard back from Commander Noble. True, it had been hardly twenty-four hours since he’d left London, but twenty-four hours should have been ample time for the Special Branch’s finest to uncover hospitals or medical schools in southern England experimenting with advanced techniques in radical surgery. The other obstacle, tracing back missing persons over years to find the one who matched the severed head with the metal plate in it, could take forever, and maybe they’d still come up with nothing.

And what about his request that Doctors Richman and Michaels go over the headless bodies for puncture wounds that might have been overlooked because of the various stages of decomposition of the bodies. Puncture wounds that might have been made by an injection of succinylcholine.

This was the kind of thing McVey disliked. He preferred working on his own, taking the time he needed to digest what was there and then acting accordingly. Still, he couldn’t complain about the team around him. Noble and his staff along with the medical experts in London were doing precisely as he asked. Lebrun, in Paris, was too. Benny Grossman had been exceedingly helpful in New York, and now hopefully Rita Hernandez in L.A. would come up with a solid background sheet on Osborn that might give McVey some inkling of what might have gone before, something that might explain his tie to Merriman

But that was the problem. Osborn and Merriman, the dead private investigator, Jean Packard, the tall man and his murderous exploits and the secretive goings-on involving Interpol, Lyon. That should have been one case, The headless bodies found scattered over northern Europe, and the bodyless head found in London, all ultra-deep-frozen in some kind of bizarre medical experiment, should have been another.

Something told him they weren’t, that somehow, in some way, the two wholly disparate situations were intertwined. And the coupling—though he had absolutely no evidence to back it up—had to be Osborn.

McVey didn’t like it. The whole thing felt as if it was getting ahead of him.

“Open up the Osborn/Merriman thing, and you’ll open up the other,” he said out loud. As he did, he noticed the big toe on his left foot was beginning to push through his sock. Suddenly, and for the first time in years, he felt very much alone.

It was then the knock came at the door. Puzzled, McVey got up and went to the door. “Who is it?” he said, opening it to the chain lock. A uniformed policeman stood in the hallway.

“First Paris Préfecture of Police, Officer Sicot. There’s been a shooting at Ms. Monneray’s apartment.”