“Well, gentlemen,” Lacombe said, closing the door on our guest. “Was that of help?”
“Not much,” Gary admitted. “Thanks for setting it up, though.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We learned a bit about the family dynamics. It’s a start, anyhow. Maybe we ought to ask you, Gilles, what if anything you want to do about this?”
Lacombe sat back down thoughtfully as Gary Smith shot me a quick hard look. “The Deschamps family is a very big deal for us,” he said. “Especially if the conflict between the Angels and the Rock Machine takes place. It would be nice to have a …” he glanced at Paul Spraiger. “Pince-à-levier?”
“Crowbar,” Spraiger explained.
“Yes. A crowbar we could use to get more inside. I would like to explore the situation. In fact, I would like to make a task force, since we are several jurisdictions. This way, we would all know what is happening.”
Gary was visibly in need of getting something off his chest. “Can I ask a question?”
We all looked at him silently.
“I know I’m the odd guy out here-the small-town cop who’s never been across the border. But this is my department’s case,” he looked straight at me, “unless that support role pitch you gave us was a crock.”
I shook my head. “Nope-that was straight.”
Lacombe smiled broadly, leaned forward, and patted Smith on the knee, catching him off guard. “I understand your worries,” he assured him. “You are feeling on the bottom of the totem. It is why I proposed the task force. You have a dead body, we have a crime family we are wanting to open up. I hope this way we all get a reward. I would like to invite everyone-someone from the Sherbrooke police, all of us here, and a procureur de la couronne to work with yours-a prosecutor. Also, if you are agreeable, a member of the RCMP. They would be interested in the federal offenses, like narcotics and smuggling. But only,” he repeated, “if that is no bother to you.”
Lacombe paused to reflect and then added, “I am saying this because I do not wish the Deschamps to slip away. It is a very old murder that seems the most weak link, and I do not think we should place all the eggs in that one basket. A task force will approach from all angles. Am I saying this wrong?”
Gary shook his head slowly. “No, I get the point.”
I considered Gary’s seemingly small-minded objection in a wider context and said in part to help him out, “Rumor is the SQ and the RCMP don’t get along very well.”
“There was a time, perhaps,” Lacombe conceded. “New attitudes are making it easier. But you are right-there is still some rubbing.”
“What happens if we shut them out?” I asked for argument’s sake.
“They will bang on the door. The name Deschamps is in their computers, too.”
I looked at Gary Smith and raised my eyebrows inquiringly.
“The more the merrier,” he said with a weak smile.
Lacombe nodded, apparently satisfied. “Very good. Now, I would like to ask you more about what you found that brought you here.”
Gary picked that up. “Not much-basically his driver’s license, his clothes, a ring from his finger, a few odds and ends from his wallet, and an autopsy report. I called my office to see if anything else had come up from the computer search we ordered, but so far there’s nothing to indicate he was ever in the United States, at least not legally.”
“Which brings up an interesting point,” Paul Spraiger said. “Jacques Chauvin listed all the people who might’ve had it in for Jean, including some unnamed competitor. Who’s to say that competitor wasn’t an American? We’ve been assuming the body was dropped from a plane that flew in from Canada, but there’s nothing to prove that.”
“Nothing is right,” added Gary. “The office also said that an analysis from the various radars covering the Stowe area over the last two months came up empty, meaning either there was no plane or it flew into the drop zone at under two thousand feet.”
“Okay,” Paul said. “If we’re playing ‘what if,’ I was struck by the fact that Marcel reached the top over two conveniently dead people.”
Lacombe looked startled. “You mean he had his brother killed in the war?”
Gary merely shrugged, but I was impressed. It upped the ante on my own ruminations.
“Chauvin said the two brothers got along-were slated to share the business,” Paul protested.
“Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. Gary might have something-not necessarily that Antoine was murdered, but that his death changed what the Old Man had in mind. If something happened between Marcel and Jean after Antoine’s death that Marcel felt threatened his ascension, he might have had his father killed. It wouldn’t be the first time ambition was thicker than blood.”
Paul voiced the obvious next step, easing away from too much hypothesizing: “Sounds like we ought to have a little walk down memory lane with Lucien Pelletier.”
Chapter 9
We were back in Gilles Lacombe’s minivan, joined this time by Rick Labatt-one of his intelligence officers. The Deschamps family’s current activities were one of Labatt’s pet projects, so while he couldn’t add much to Jacques Chauvin’s history lesson, he was eager to be part of Lacombe’s new task force and heading off to visit an old Deschamps associate like Lucien Pelletier.
His English syntax was better and less accented than his boss’s. “I wish I could tell you that finding Jean Deschamps fits a change in the family’s operations,” he said from the back seat. “But as far as we can tell, everything is running as usual.”
“How good is your information?” I asked him.
Labatt was young, wiry, and energetic, very expressive with his hands, but to that question, he gave but a rueful look. “You are right, of course,” he admitted. “It is not very good. The Deschamps are careful that way. We have never put anyone inside their organization. We watch, we listen when we can, we look at surveillance photos, but we don’t know very much. It is why I am excited about this happening with Jean.”
“Do the Deschamps compete head-on with the Angels?” Paul asked.
Labatt shook his head. “No, no. Well, maybe a little in the places where there is more room, like smuggling drugs. But locally, the Deschamps, for example, control all the auto theft. The Angels don’t do that. Also, there are bars that are run by one, where the members of the other do not go. It is very strictly followed.”
“And you’ve never gotten close to nailing Marcel,” Gary stated.
“That is correct. He is very protected. We nibble at the edges. We take down a chop shop here or there, capture a runner along the border, arrest a few prostitutes. But we can only go so far up the line. Then we run out of what the judge wants to see. We know who’s responsible, but we cannot prove it.”
We had driven in the same general direction of the restaurant but then veered off into a neighborhood of upscale, tastefully appointed modern homes, each planted in the middle of a three-quarter acre lot, facing a sinewy street and looking new and artificial enough to have been made of plastic parts. Even the snow resembled powdered sugar.
“There it is.” Lacombe pointed ahead to a house on a corner. “Chauvin told me Pelletier lives with his daughter, who doesn’t know his history. I will make up a story for her.”
We got out of the van after Lacombe parked it on the street, looking like a hit squad ourselves, but I left it to Lacombe to spin his tall tale to the sixty-something woman who answered the door, and tried to appear as innocent as I could.
Eventually, after some fussing from the daughter about coffee and cookies, and a bit of chicanery from Lacombe about the need for privacy, we found ourselves in an upstairs bedroom with a large old man who sat in his oversized chair like a walrus in a cave opening.
He spoke no English, so we repeated the routine we’d followed in Lacombe’s office. But no playacting was necessary. Immediately following his daughter’s departure from the room, Lucien Pelletier shot Lacombe one quick, hard question.