The Marble Mask

Chapter 22

The mood in the air was refreshingly upbeat, especially after so many setbacks. We were sitting around our quasi-official table at the Commodore’s bar, Willy and I updating Paul, Gary, and Tom about our conversation with Amy Butynski.

“Assuming the box had Jean’s body in it,” Tom was asking, “who’s the connection between Mike Sawyer and Sherbrooke-Picard, Guidry, or Marcel?”

“Rule Marcel out,” I said. “He may be a crook and he may’ve benefited from his father’s death, but I think he was clueless here.”

“Joe thinks the ‘we’ in the letter was Picard and Guidry both,” Willy explained. “Could’ve been, too, with Guidry as the pig sticker and Picard the mastermind.”

“They set up Mike Sawyer in a fancy restaurant just so they could put a body in the freezer?” Tom asked incredulously. “Give me a break.”

Willy didn’t take offense, his optimism holding the upper hand for once. “Sawyer was probably only a money launderer at first. But the freezer was installed in late winter, just before a body in the snow would begin to thaw. It was luck of the draw. Jean Deschamps was indulging in chasing down his son’s supposed killer. He came to Stowe, perfect for Guidry because it was not only across the border, but where Sawyer had already been put in place. Guidry knocks the boss off and sticks him in the snow, while Picard pays Sawyer to order the freezer and-probably a few years after everything’s calmed down-lays the trail that eventually nails Marcel by salting Alvarez’s records, setting up that weird will, and planting the letter that led us to Marcel. A nice, neat, lawyerly approach.”

“But why bother?” Tom complained. “Why not just knock off both father and son and take over the business?”

Willy was beginning to lose patience. “Because it was a family business, duh, and to destroy that means to destroy the works. Besides, now Guidry moves up from chauffeur to right-hand man, and Picard becomes the consigliore, all because snotnose Marcel turns into this smoking son of a bitch who transforms Pop’s outfit into a multimillion-dollar hotrod. Everyone comes up roses, with the extra advantage that the first two have this rabbit in their hat they can use against Marcel whenever they want-which is when he comes down with galloping cancer and talks about handing everything over to his son, Michel, who is guaranteed to piss it all away.”

Tom was silent, considering Willy’s version of reality. Gary Smith, however, seemed won over. “I’ll be damned. That would explain why things have gone to hell since Marcel passed the polygraph, and why they tried to hit Joe for poking around beyond the trail they laid out.”

“I think it’s been more Guidry than Picard,” I said. “He’s the one with the street-brawler past. Could be the two of them are falling out, which would explain the stupidity of trying to shoot a cop.”

Gary Smith reached for his silent pager and looked at the display. “Be back in a sec,” he said and left the table.

Tom Shanklin didn’t look totally convinced but obviously had no counterarguments. “What’s the next move? See what the Canadians can make fit?”

“After meeting Butynski, Willy and I did just that-we called Lacombe to try some of this out. He already had a little on Sawyer, from Sammie’s call earlier, and confirmed that Sawyer was a bad boy up there before leaving for the U.S. during the war, which is why he didn’t get into the fighting, apparently. The kicker, though, is that he may’ve been here illegally all this time, which means we’ll have something to squeeze him with. I doubt he’ll want to go back to Canada to do time at his age, even with their soft sentencing.”

I took a swallow of my Coke and then asked Willy, “Where is Sammie, anyway?”

He curled his lip. “Obsessing, surprise, surprise. She’s still running that World War Two roster against the Stowe records.”

I saw Smith returning from the phone out in the hallway and could tell from his expression he wasn’t bearing good news.

He didn’t sit down. “I hope you didn’t plan to talk to Mike Sawyer again.”

No one said a word.

“He’s been found dead at home. Shot three times, with a frozen hot dog shoved down his throat.”

We drove to Sawyer’s house in a caravan, to find the Stowe PD had already cordoned off the area, laid out a narrow path into the building, and made sure that whatever evidence there was would be preserved. I’d already called the mobile crime lab, and since Waterbury was just down the road a few miles, their response time promised to be mercifully short.

In the meantime, donning white coveralls, a cap, and booties, I followed the access path into the house to see Mike Sawyer one last time.

He was still in the tastefully appointed living room, now oddly silent and somehow not smelling quite right. He was sitting in an armchair, his head thrown back grotesquely. The bullet wounds were to his chest, the dark stippling around the holes indicating the shooter had stood very close. The now thawed hot dog was there as advertised, protruding from between his lips, probably placed there posthumously as a statement to us-this was a man who was not going to speak. Ironically, I’d figured that would have been the case anyhow, despite my high hopes around the table at the Commodore. The one time I’d met Mike Sawyer, I hadn’t thought him easily susceptible to pressure. Killing him had therefore been totally gratuitous, which gave me a glimpse into the character of the shooter.

Three hours later we were back at the Stowe police department, with nothing much to work with. The neighbors hadn’t heard or seen anything. Sawyer had lived alone and had apparently let his killer in. There were no signs of a struggle or of anything being disturbed in the house, and while the forensics team had collected a fair amount, including an open package of frozen hot dogs in a sink, they’d found nothing immediately revealing except a large empty freezer in the basement-presumably Jean Deschamps’s arctic condo for the last few decades. Basically, we were left hoping that either the surveillance Lacombe had ordered on Marcel’s gang would reveal Guidry’s having left for Stowe, or that the Customs and Border Patrol people we’d alerted would get lucky and give us a call.

But we still hadn’t heard from either one.

It was therefore in a relative state of despondency that Sammie Martens found us, having at long last extricated herself from the town clerk’s office.

“No luck on the Sawyer shooting?” she surmised.

“Sure,” Willy came back. “We won’t have to worry about how to make him talk.”

She put a single Xeroxed sheet on the table before me. “Then maybe we should try this guy.”

I studied the document as she explained to the others, “Roger Scott. He’s lived in Stowe since the war, bought big early, held on till the land rush of the 1970s, and has been selling here and there for a bundle ever since. He’s also on the roster you gave me of the Special Service Force-the only one, so far as I can tell.”

She looked exhausted, her hair unwashed and lank, her eyes ringed with dark, puffy skin.

“Nice work, Sam. He must’ve been the man Jean Deschamps came down to visit,” I said.

She sat heavily in one of the chairs surrounding the conference table. “Wonder if they ever met?”

“We’ll find out tomorrow,” I told her, “after you get a good night’s sleep and I give that press conference announcing I have a secret.”

Tom Shanklin looked at me dubiously. “You still doing that-after Sawyer?”

“All the more reason. Sawyer’s death proves we’re on the right track. Someone-presumably Pierre Guidry-is running around trying to plug as many holes as he can. What better time to present him with another and force him into the open? Besides, I already told Lacombe I would.”

“How did the shooter know we were hot on Sawyer’s heels?” Willy asked.

“Sawyer probably called to report after our first visit,” Sammie proposed.

“Maybe,” Willy grumbled.

“What’re you thinking?” I asked him.

“That things are a little leaky in your pal Lacombe’s outfit. Seems like a lot of bad happens right after you tell ’em what’s doin’.”

I hated the idea of that.

He held up his one hand and began folding down his fingers, one by one. “The press tumbled to Jean Deschamps’s identity right after you hit Sherbrooke. The old gangster Lucien Pelletier was conveniently recommended to fill your ear about how Marcel was a son of a bitch who hated his father, while swearing Jean didn’t have Guidry along as chauffeur the day he vanished. The secretary-what’s her name, Marie Chenin-spilled the beans about Jean being lured down here by his son just before we could report the same news back to Sherbrooke. That guy in the motel knew exactly what door to knock on before he took a shot at you. And now Sawyer gets whacked before we get a chance to squeeze him. You can explain all that a bunch of different ways, but they make for a pretty interesting bundle, if you ask me, and most of them trace back to the Sûreté.”

“And to Jacques Chauvin,” Paul said in his typically quiet voice.

We all stared at him, while my private gloominess was suddenly given a reprieve.

“The old Sherbrooke cop we talked to almost as soon as we got there,” he reminded us. “He put us onto Pelletier. The first domino, if Willy’s right,” he added. “It looked to me like he had free run of the building.”

I saw Willy give Paul an appraising glance-a ringing endorsement from a hard-core independent like Kunkle, and one I was happy to second.

“Could be,” I conceded. “I’ll give Lacombe a heads up. It doesn’t alter the value of putting more heat under Guidry’s feet.”

“Sure,” Willy finally agreed. “What the hell? Worst that can happen is you die with your boots on.”

“By the way,” Paul added in the silence following that crack. “When you meet Roger Scott, you might want to ask him why Dick Kearley thinks he died from a dud mortar round while he was standing next to Colonel Frederick. Remember?”

The press conference setting me up as a target went off the next morning as planned, ostensibly to update the media on the Sawyer murder, and also to appease the governor, the commissioner, and my boss, Bill Allard.

I tried to do the latter first, explaining VBI’s role yet again and handing the mike to Frank Auerbach so he could say how happy he was with the teamwork. I also downplayed the attempt on my life in Sherbrooke, which had taken its time to filter down to the U.S., and highlighted the effectiveness of our working with the Sûreté, stating with confidence that the mystery of the “frozen man of the mountain,” as Jean was being called, would soon be solved.

The real point of the exercise, though, was brought up at the end, when the inevitable question was asked about how we were planning to arrive at that goal.

“At this time,” I answered in practiced bureau-speak, “we are following a number of solid leads, any one of which could give us the break we need.”

“Is there one you like better than the others?”

“You could say that,” I said coyly. “It’s pretty vague right now-more of a theory. I haven’t even shared it with my team.”

“Why not? Isn’t that a little unusual?”

“We all have ideas we chase down now and then on our own-saves on informational clutter. If this works out, though,” I added with a laugh, “you might end up with some interesting headlines.”

Afterward, Bill Allard was not amused. He called me on my cell phone five minutes after the story aired on the radio. “What the hell’s this private theory crap? You sounded like Sherlock Holmes, for Christ’s sake. The point of this unit is to support the locals, not hold out on them.”

“I’m not. Auerbach’s in on it. I wanted the opposition to think I know something I don’t. We’re hoping it’ll flush them out. I’m sending you my report by fax within the hour.”

The edge left his voice as he asked, “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Absolutely,” I lied. “It’s all under control.”

Even by Stowe standards, the house Sammie and I drove up to east of town later in the day was a standout. Most of the mansions-Gary Smith’s “starter castles”-were built of wood, designed ostentatiously but with a nod toward the surrounding countryside. This one was a pile of gray rock, complete with turrets, leaded stained-glass windows, and a front door big enough for a rider atop a horse. Castle it was, with nothing of the beginner about it.

We rolled to a stop in the front courtyard and admired a full view of Mount Mansfield across the Stowe valley, its recumbent profile clearly etched on the horizon. Cold, white, and distant, it brought to mind Jean Deschamps’s mask-like face staring up from the autopsy table.

“Geez,” Sammie commented, gazing at the house, “what the hell did he do to buy this?”

I swung out of the car into the crisp, freezing air. “Let’s see if we can find out.”

The front door opened almost as soon as I pushed the bell, revealing a starchy, round man in a dark three-piece suit. “You are the police?” he asked in a stiff, formal voice.

“Yes,” I answered, as we showed him credentials that he scrutinized carefully.

“Follow me.”

We did that, down a long, dark-paneled hallway lined with heavily framed oil paintings, to a pair of double doors that, once thrown open, led into a towering library with twenty-foot-high windows overlooking the valley below. I felt transported back either to the England of centuries ago, or to the Hollywood set of My Fair Lady. Sammie merely stared, her mouth unashamedly open. Sprinkled among the bookcases were inset curved display cabinets, softly lighted and closed off behind glass doors, holding a variety of precious objects from women’s ancient baubles to jeweled snuff boxes and ornate ivory calling-card cases. Perched above the carved mantelpiece, in an obvious place of honor, was a hideous-looking carved mask of what looked like a gargoyle, complete with devilish eyebrows and a snarling mouth. To my untrained eye the entire collection seemed of museum-grade material, and there was a lot of it.

“How may I help you?” came a voice hidden beneath the glare from the windows.

I spoke to the light, waiting for my eyes to adjust. “I’m Joe Gunther. This is Special Agent Samantha Martens-Vermont Bureau of Investigation. We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions.”

“You said that on the phone. Do you like objets d’art?”

I was beginning to make out a huge desk beneath the windows, and behind it the outline of a small, wispy-haired man. “Less the value and more how it looks.”

“Meaning you don’t like the mask.”

“What is it?”

“Very old, for one thing, and as you guessed, very valuable. An homage to Greek mythology. It’s a faun. Feel free to look more closely.”

I did so, moving from case to case as I might have at an exhibition. Special lighting made each object glow as if from within. I imagined that at night, with the room dark aside from these bright, shimmering pools, this library took on the feel of a magnificent tomb buried far beneath a pyramid.

“You been collecting long?” I asked.

“Most of my adult life.”

“What made you start?”

There was a pause, suggesting I might have overstepped some boundary.

“Surely, this is not why you asked to see me.”

“Right. Actually, we’re investigating the death of a man found frozen on the mountain.”

“The fifty-year-old corpse,” said the shadowy outline.

I walked up to the desk, trailed by Sammie and the butler. The voice emerged as a thin, pale invalid, sitting in a wheelchair, vaguely reminiscent of Marcel Deschamps. “You heard about that?”

“I subscribe to the local paper, Mr. Gunther.”

Uninvited, I sat in one of the large armchairs facing the desk, enjoying the slight squeak and smell of leather that accompanied the move.

Roger Scott waved a hand at the man behind us. “Go, Robert.”

We all patiently waited until Robert had closed the doors behind him.

“He the only one working here?” I asked.

“I have others. He’s the only one that lives with me. Why do you ask?”

I looked around. “Big house, a lot to run. I just wondered.”

“Because I’m in a wheelchair? The house was built to accommodate that. It’s much more efficient than it looks.”

There was a hint of pride there I decided to exploit a little. “It is amazing, and filled with beautiful things. How long have you lived here?”

“I moved in forty-one years ago, although I’ve added on as my income allowed.”

“But you were in Stowe before then, right?”

The pale face smiled. “I have a feeling you already know the answer to that. I came here right after the war and built a house nearby-on the same acreage, in fact.”

“You’ve done very well for yourself.”

“Meaning, where did I get my money? I inherited it, Mr. Gunther, and then built on it through some fortunate real estate deals. What does any of this have to do with the frozen man?”

“We think you knew his son,” I said. “Antoine Deschamps. You fought together in Italy.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d been anticipating, but I didn’t expect the burst of laughter I received.

“We all fought together-in Montana, in Burlington, in the Aleutians, and in Italy. That was one of the hallmarks of our unit.”

“The First Special Service Force.”

“Yes. Back then, people used to confuse the name with the Special Services branch of the Army-basically the music bands. That was on purpose, to help keep us under wraps. But it wasn’t a mistake anyone made twice.”

“Rough outfit.”

“Energetic, yes. We were a throwaway group-a suicide battalion, if you want to get melodramatic. We felt we had nothing to lose by enjoying ourselves while we were still alive.”

“And your Colonel Frederick encouraged that attitude?”

“Ah, you’ve been doing your homework. Probably rented that movie, The Devil’s Brigade.”

“No.”

“Just as well. Typical mythology, although it captured our reputation for doing the impossible.”

“How was Antoine Deschamps at that?”

Roger Scott shook his head slowly for a moment. “Not yet. I want to ask you a couple of things first, given the courtesy I’ve just paid you. Why is any of this relevant to the investigation of a man found frozen to death out there, even if his son and I did fight in the same unit?”

“We think Jean Deschamps came to Stowe to meet you. Did he?”

“No. What did he want? Details about his boy’s death?”

“You know about that?”

“Not really. I have to admit, I may have been leading you on a bit. I didn’t actually know Antoine Deschamps-not well, at least. We were in different regiments. I heard he was killed outside of Rome. I didn’t see it, though. I wouldn’t have been of much use to his father.”

“How do you know that’s why he came here?” I asked.

“It’s what a parent would want to know. Did he suffer? Was he a hero? Did he have any last words? I was ignorant of all that. I could have told him his son was an abusive, foul-mouthed, skirt-chasing, self-serving thief and a liar, but then so was I and every other Force-man. It’s what Robert Frederick trained us to be.”

“Actually,” I tried again, “I haven’t been totally candid. Jean Deschamps thought Antoine was murdered in Italy, not killed in combat.”

Scott absorbed that thoughtfully. “Could be. It was known to happen.”

“Was there anyone who springs to mind in that context? Someone who hated Antoine enough to want him dead?”

“Not that I knew of. Passions could run high, of course, and every one of us had been taught to kill a dozen different ways. Rumors were that about half of us had been pulled out of prison to quote-unquote volunteer, although I suspect that’s part of the mythology again. Still, there were some fierce fights, and I always suspected not all our casualties were combat-related.”

I waved my hand at the room around us. “You don’t seem cut from that kind of cloth.”

“I had a wild streak, but you’re right. I wasn’t alone, though. There were a lot of pretty regular people mixed in-teachers, musicians, cowboys, you name it.”

“How ’bout someone named Charlie Webber?” I asked.

Scott’s face hardened. “He was no poet. Why do you mention him?”

“How do you know about him?” I asked instead. “He was in the same regiment as Antoine.”

“Some were better known than others. You have to understand-the Force hovered between fifteen hundred and two thousand men. That’s small by Army standards, but it’s still a large number. And the turnover was impressive.” He paused, thinking back. “After a while, getting to know people proved to be counterproductive.”

“But you knew Webber.”

He refocused on us. “Yes. Charlie Webber. Few people didn’t. He died, too. Should’ve been from a bullet in the back, delivered by one of us, but instead it was from natural causes, as we used to refer to combat deaths back then. The man was a psychopath, in my opinion. Is he the one you think killed Antoine?”

“We heard they’d had a falling out at Anzio but then later became best buddies, glued at the hip.”

Scott shook his head. “I can’t imagine anything worse.”

“What did Webber do to you?” Sammie asked.

There was a long pause. “I hold him responsible for putting me in this chair.”

We didn’t say anything, prompting him to add, “In your research, did you ever hear mention of the Champagne Campaign?”

We both shook our heads, although Dick Kearley had spoken of it. “I thought not. Not a Hollywood-style story. After Italy was all but over-at least after the generals got their pictures taken in Rome-we were reassigned to southern France, first to take the Iles d’Hyères, and then to sweep along the French Riviera to Cannes, Nice, and the rest. The first part was tough, but then it got easy, and people like Webber became bored and restless. He’d been promoted, and the regiments had been mixed up enough that I was now serving under him. In any case, he was so focused on getting laid and drunk by then, he ordered us into a small hilltop village without reconnaissance. We were ambushed and shot up. I caught one in the spine, several others were killed. Useless casualties, all. Webber was supposed to be leading us, but of course, he was sacked out with some girl instead.”

“He didn’t get court-martialed?” Sammie asked, her sense of propriety offended.

“He was about to be, but then he was killed,” came the answer. “I think it was suicide, really. He didn’t want to go back to prison. Life was never going to improve beyond that point, where he could break every rule in the book in the name of patriotism, so he rushed a machine gun nest single-handed and was blown up by his own grenade. A hero’s death for a homicidal maniac. Another of war’s ironies.”

I caught the bitterness in his voice and reflected back on my own experience of combat and war-and to the men and women I’d known whose wounds, though less visible than Scott’s, had been far more crippling.

“You seem to have done well, nevertheless,” I said, giving vent to those thoughts.

He’d been staring at the marble mask over the mantel while he spoke, and now shifted his gaze to me. “Of course. Police officers. You probably both have military backgrounds. Someone like me must be like an alien from a distant planet, and not deserving of much sympathy-rich, pampered by servants, surrounded by beautiful things. It never occurs to you that can be as arrogant an outlook as any snobbery from a rich person.”

He pulled away from the desk and rolled around its edge, heading toward the double doors as he spoke. Hesitantly, we both rose and fell in behind him, realizing the interview had ended.

“It doesn’t matter,” he continued. “That’s the price of a democracy. Majority rules. If the little people decide the rich are useless assholes, regardless of what we may have done for their country or the welfare of its economy, then they’re right and we’re wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

He grabbed one of the doorknobs and retreated slightly, pulling the door open. “I’m assuming you have what you came for.”

Sammie stepped into the hallway, where Robert was waiting for us. I paused on the library’s threshold. “You were right that we did some homework before coming here,” I said. “Including interviewing a man who saw you killed by a dud mortar round as you sat next to Colonel Frederick.”

Scott merely tilted his head forward and tapped it with his fingertips. “Another combat death that wasn’t. Makes you wonder how many people died inside of coffins, simply because no one bothered checking for a pulse. It was a dud, and it knocked me out cold, but, as you can see, I survived.”

I couldn’t argue with the physical evidence, but as we drove back down the long, winding driveway past the wrought-iron gates, I wondered about the definition of the word “survival.”