The Day After Tomorrow

60

MCVEY Looked at the .45 automatic Barras had so neatly laid on a linen napkin on Vera Monneray’s dining room table. Taking a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket, he stuck it in its snout and picked it up. It was a U.S.-made Colt, at least ten or fifteen years old.

Laying it back on the table and retrieving his pen, McVey glanced around at the activity. Sunday night or not, the Paris police had managed to fill the place with tech experts.

Across the hall, in the living room, he could see Inspectors Barras and Maitrot talking with Vera Monneray. Standing to one side was a uniformed policewoman. Sitting on the Alice in Wonderland chair was the doorman whom everybody was suddenly calling Philippe.

Going into the hallway, McVey saw a wiry, bespectacled member of the tech crew scraping dried blood off the wall. Farther down, a balding photographer finished taking pictures, then a man who looked as if he could have been a professional wrestler moved in to delicately pry a spent bullet out of the splintered top of a cherry table.

Eventually, most of what was going on would provide a reasonably accurate picture of what had happened here. But for now, to McVey at least, the .45 on the dining room table was the thing.

A little palm-sized gun he could understand. A .25 or a .32 caliber. A Walther maybe, or an Italian Beretta. Or, more likely, a French-made Mab would be the arm of choice a ranking member of the French ministry might tuck away for his girlfriend to use in an emergency. But a U.S. Colt .45 automatic was a man’s gun. Big and heavy, with, a nasty recoil when it was fired. Right off, it didn’t fit.

Moving past the photographer, who was now working the open door into the outer hall, McVey glanced into the living room. Barras had evidently just asked Vera Monneray something because she shook her head. Then she looked up and saw McVey watching her, and immediately turned back to Barras.

The first thing Barras told McVey when he’d arrived was that François Christian had been notified and had spoke with Vera on the telephone but that he would not be coming over. That was Barras’ way of posturing. Letting McVey know there were bigger things at work here and that McVey best take a backseat to the proceedings, especially as far as Mademoiselle Monneray was concerned.

If Lebrun were here it might be different, but he wasn’t. He’d left town late in the day on personal business—no one, not even his wife, seemed to know what it was or where he had gone—and was unreachable, even by electronic page. That’s why McVey had been called. Obviously reluctantly, because Barras and Maitrot had been on the scene immediately after the shooting as part of the stakeout team, and it hadn’t been until two hours later that Officer Sicot had been dispatched to McVey’s hotel room.

McVey wasn’t surprised. It was the same with police agencies everywhere. Cop or not, if you weren’t one of theirs, you weren’t one of theirs. You wanted to be on the inside, you had to be invited, and that took time. So, for the most part, you were treated cordially but you were on your own and sometimes the last guy on the wake-up call.

McVey walked back off down the hall and into the kitchen. A city wide alarm had been put out for a tall, blond man about six foot four, wearing gray slacks and a dark jacket, who spoke French with a Dutch or German accent. It wasn’t much, but it was something. At least, unless Vera were making it up, which he doubted, it was proof the tall man existed.

Passing through the kitchen, he walked through an open door and into the service stairwell. Tech crews were working the stairs and the landing two floors down where a service door opened to the street. Taking stock as he went, McVey walked down the stairs to the landing and glanced out through the open door to where uniformed police were standing guard outside.

Vera had told Barras and Maitrot that she’d come home from the hospital after experiencing severe menstrual cramps. She’d come in, taken some special painkiller she kept at home, and had lain down. A short time later she began to feel better and decided to go back to work. She’d called Philippe for a taxi and when he told her it had arrived, she’d gone out into the hallway for her purse, wondering why it was darker than it should be, and realized the light in the living room had been turned out. That was when the man grabbed her.

Pulling free, she’d run into the dining room for the gun François Christian had put there for emergencies. Whirling, she pointed the gun and fired several shots—she didn’t remember how many—at the tall man, who fled out the service door and down the back stairs to the street. She went down after him, thinking maybe she’d shot him, and that’s where Barras and Maitrot had found her, by the door with the gun in her hand. She reported hearing a car drive away but did not see it.

McVey stepped outside into the glare of blue-white police worklights and saw the tech crew measuring rubber tire marks in the street, parallel to and almost directly across from the door he’d just exited.

Easing off the curb, he walked into the street and looked off in the direction the car had gone, then followed the line of the car’s escape route until he was out of the spill of the worklights and in darkness. Another fifteen yards and he turned back. Squatting down, he studied the street. It was blacktop over cobblestone. Lifting his head, he brought his eyes level with the worklights farther down. Something glinted in the street five yards away. Standing, he walked over and picked it up. It was a sliver of shattered mirror, the kind of exterior mirrors that are on automobiles.

Slipping it carefully into the breast pocket of his jacket, he walked back toward the lights until he was exactly opposite the service door, then looked over his shoulder. Across the street, the windows of other apartments were ablaze with light, and the silhouettes of residents watching what was going on in the street.

Keeping in line with the service door, he crossed to the building on the far side of the street. The only illumination here was from a streetlight, a dozen paces away. Avoiding a freshly painted iron spike fence, McVey walked up to the building and studied its brick and stone surface as carefully as he could in the available light. He was looking for a fresh chip in the stone or brick, a spot where a bullet fired from across the street at a passing car might have hit. But he saw nothing and thought maybe he was wrong, that maybe the piece of mirror hadn’t been shattered by a gunshot after all; maybe it had been lying in the street for some time.

The tech crew in the street had finished their measurements and were going back inside, and McVey was turning to join them when he noticed the top of one of the decorative iron spikes on the freshly painted fence was missing. Walking behind the fence, he hunched over and looked at the ground behind the missing spike. Then he saw it, lying in the shadow of a rainspout at the edge of the building. Moving over, he picked it up. The front half of the spike had been crushed and bent by some heavy impact. And where the object had struck it, the fresh black paint was shiny steel.