“Well, sir, it was about that time that I went off to school and discovered that other kids had daddies. Before that, I had never thought about it. Living alone with Yo-Yo was simply how one lived. I neither had a daddy nor lacked one. Then the teasing about being a redhead began. And little boys wanted me to go behind the bushes and pull down my pants to show them my red hair. I couldn’t understand. You see, I didn’t have any hair, let alone red.
“So life went along, and went along, and went along. Then when I was about ten or eleven, the Great Myth began. One day after school, I was crying with anger and frustration and there was a ring of kids around me, chanting ‘Redhead, wet to bed… Redhead, wet to bed!’ And I screamed at them to cut it out, or else! Or else what, one of them asked, logically enough. And another asked why I didn’t run home and tell my father on them. And everyone laughed—we have to save the children, Lieutenant; they’re our hope for the future—so I suddenly blurted out that I would too tell my father, if they didn’t leave me alone! And they said I didn’t have a father. And I said that I did too! Sergeant LaPointe was my father! And he would bash any son of a bitch who gave me trouble!”
There is a thud and a tinkle of glass, then silence.
“Oops. I have knocked over my glass in my efforts to decorate my fable with… whatever. How graceless of me.”
LaPointe keeps his eyes on the fire. It would be unfair to look at her just then. He hears her walking behind the bar, the crisp crunch of glass under her shoes. He hears the squeak of the cork in the Armagnac bottle. When she speaks again, she has assumed a gruff, comic tone.
“Well, sir, that was the winter when I had a father… or, to be more exact, a daddy. You screwed Yo-Yo two times that winter, and both times I was awake when you came to the flat, and you chatted nonsense with me before she put me to bed. Your uniform smelled like wool, which wasn’t so strange, considering the fact that it was made of wool. But it smelled good to me… like my blanket. Like the blanket I pressed against my nose when I sucked my thumb. At ten, I still sucked my thumb. But I’ve given that up in favor of cigarettes. Thumb-sucking causes lung cancer.
“And every day that winter, on my way home from school, I made a big loop out of my way so I could pass your apartment on Esplanade. I used to stand there, sometimes in the snow—grab the image of a little girl standing in the snow! Doesn’t it just rip you up?—and I would look up at the windows of your apartment on the third floor. By the way, your apartment is on the third floor, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he lies.
“I knew it. Infallible instinct. I knew you would live on the top floor, looking out over the world. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if all those afternoons I had been looking up at the wrong apartment? Wouldn’t that be an ironic blast?”
He nods.
After a silence, she puffs out a sigh. “Thank God that’s out of me! Pal, you have no idea what a zonker it was when you walked in here this afternoon. Talk about ghosts! I didn’t really have an appointment tonight. I was walking up on the Main—the first time in years. I dropped in at a bar or two and had Armagnac, because that was your drink. And I walked around the old streets, over past your apartment, trying to decide if I should unload all this crap on you. And finally I decided that I wouldn’t. I decided to keep it to myself. Sic transit all claims to being mistress of my fate.”
LaPointe has nothing to say.
“Well!” She brings him an Armagnac he doesn’t want and sits on the divan beside him. “Presumably you didn’t come here to hear all this psychological vomit. What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”
It isn’t an easy change to make, and LaPointe sips his drink slowly before he begins. “There have been three men killed… probably by the same person.”
“And a neurotic man-hater seems a likely suspect?”
He ignores this. “Two of them trace to you. When was the last time you saw Antonio Verdini?”
“I checked that little fact in my diary. I thought you might ask. By the way, I’ll let you read my diary if you want. I suppose you’ll want the names of the men I’ve screwed. In case the killer was one of them. Maybe jealousy, or something like that. Although I can’t imagine why any of them would be jealous. After all, my door’s been open to just about anyone who knocked. I view my body as something of a public convenience.”
LaPointe doesn’t want to get mired again in her self-pity; he holds to the line of questioning. “When was the last time you and Verdini made love?”
“A week ago tonight. He didn’t leave until about midnight. It was a longish number. He was showing off his endurance, which, by the way, was something—”
“All right.” LaPointe cuts her off. He doesn’t care about that. “That checks. He was killed that night, shortly after he left here.”
“Hey… maybe I can put you on to something. He might have been just boasting, but he said he had to leave early because he was going to screw some dancer… no. No, a dancer’s kid. That was it.”
“I know about that. He never got there.”
“Too bad for the kid. He was a good plumber.”
LaPointe regards her flatly. “Why don’t we just stick to the questions and answers, Mlle. Montjean?”
“My hearty attitude toward sex doesn’t impress you, Lieutenant?”
“It impresses me. But it doesn’t convince me.”
“Hey! Wow! The wisdom of the streets! Mind if I take a note on that?”
“Do you want your ass spanked?”
“Whatever turns you on, Daddy!” she snaps back. She’s an experienced emotional in-fighter.
He settles his patient, fatigued eyes on her for a moment before continuing. “All right. Now, this professor at McGill. Tell me about him.”
She chuckles. “You hold your cool pretty well, LaPointe. Of course, you’ve got the advantage of being sober. And you’ve got another edge. Indifference is a mighty weapon.”
“Let’s just hear about the McGill professor.”
“Mike Pearson? He was in charge of the Language Learning Center. That’s where I got my idea of setting up this school. The high-saturation methods we use here were developed by Pearson. I took my M.A. under him… literally.”
“Meaning that you and he—”
“Whenever we got a chance. Even while I was a student. The first time was on his desk. He got semen on papers he was grading. Do you know the root of the word ‘seminar’? He was my first conquest. Think of it, Lieutenant! I was a virgin until I was twenty-four. A technical virgin, that is. Before that, I was what you might call manually self-sufficient. My analyst has given me some textbook crap about protracted virginity being common in cases of sexually traumatic events in childhood. He went on to say that it was typical that the first man should be a teacher—a father figure, an authority figure. Like a cop, I guess. That anus of an analyst always plays doctor after we’ve screwed. It’s his way of taking an ethical shower. Think of it! A virgin at twenty-four! But I’ve made up for it since.”
“Would your diary tell me the last time you and this Pearson were together?”
“I can tell you that myself. Mike’s stabbing was in the papers. He was killed not twenty minutes after leaving here.”
“Why didn’t you inform the police?”
“Well, what was the point of getting involved? Mike was married. Why did the wife have to know where he spent his last night? I didn’t dream his getting killed had anything to do with me. I thought he was mugged, or something like that.”