Lacombe laughed while Paul translated. “He wants to know what he’s done to deserve so many lousy cops.”
“Tell him he’s lived too long,” I said.
Pelletier let out a wet, gurgly chuckle that ended in a prolonged coughing fit.
“Then it’s a good thing you dropped by,” Paul said on his behalf, “’Cause I’m about to get that over with.”
Gary Smith sat on a chair just off to Pelletier’s side. “We’re here for a history lesson,” he said. “About the early days of the Deschamps family.”
The old man studied him a moment. “Why?”
“It’s an American case. We think we have something that goes back to World War Two.”
Pelletier smiled and nodded. “Ah-when Jean ran things.”
“Yes. What was he like?”
“Very tough. A man of his word.”
“You got to know him when?” I asked.
“Nineteen thirty-one. Back during Prohibition. I was still a teenager. Deschamps was a big cheese in the business, with lots of trucks and warehouses. He was moving thousands of bottles a week by then. I broke into one of his depots to steal a few cases. I didn’t see why he should have all the fun and profit. And he caught me-personally. The Old Man himself. He’d seen me casing the place earlier and kept an eye out for me. He let me break in, waited till I had my arms full, and then stuck a gun in my ear.”
Pelletier laughed again with the same wet, racking results. We all waited until he’d regained his breath and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. “It was lucky for me,” he resumed. “If it had been one of his boys, I would have died that night. People disappeared all the time when they ran afoul of the Deschamps. But the Old Man took a shine to me. I don’t know why. He said he liked people with balls, and who planned before they acted. I didn’t think I’d done too well in that department, but I wasn’t going to argue. So he hired me instead of killing me.”
“Just like that?” Gary asked incredulously.
Pelletier smiled ruefully. “He did say he’d kill me if I crossed him. I guess he knew I’d never do that.”
“What did you do for him?”
“Not much at first. I worked in the warehouse I’d tried to rob. Eventually, I moved up to driving trucks-”
“Across the border?” Gary asked.
“Not at first. It was pretty legitimate to start with. I’d drive to just shy of the border and leave the truck. When I came back, it would be empty. Later, I found out what happened to the stuff.”
“Which was?”
“It depended. Sometimes it went onto the backs of men or horses or horse-drawn sleighs; other times, it was switched over to an American truck. About a year after Jean Deschamps didn’t kill me, I was doing work like that, going across the border.”
“What about after Prohibition?”
“Things were changing even before then. The Mounties were feeling the heat from the Americans. A lot of our men were getting caught. The Old Man had almost gotten out of the liquor business by 1933. By the Depression, we were moving other things-anything that had a market value.”
“But you were doing more than smuggling by then, no?” Labatt asked.
“Of course,” Pelletier admitted but then fell silent. “It’s more than a history lesson you want,” he said after a pause. “What is this American case?”
Lacombe cleared his throat and tried to address his problem. “Monsieur Pelletier, this conversation is just that. It is not being taken down as evidence. Whatever you might have done will not come back to haunt you through us.”
But the loyalty born all those years ago was unaffected by either threats of reprisal or promises of anonymity. This man’s feelings for Jean Deschamps clearly mirrored a son’s for his father.
I tried a different approach. “You must have gotten to know his two sons pretty well.”
“Jean had them doing other things,” he said. “But we saw them around. Antoine made it a point to get to know us. He was a nice kid. Jean was a broken man after he died.”
“In Italy, during the war?”
“Yes.”
I thought I’d try exploiting the prejudice that had influenced our coming here. “Still, he had Marcel to lean on. That must’ve been a comfort.”
Lucien Pelletier didn’t answer at first.
“Marcel was next in line,” he finally said, blatantly restraining himself. “He’s done a good job.”
“Actually,” I added, pretending not to have noticed his reluctance, “it’s kind of ironic when you think of it. First Antoine dies, breaking his father’s heart, then Jean disappears, which must’ve been equally hard on Marcel. Tragic, in a way. He was pretty young then, wasn’t he?”
“I never saw Marcel feel anything about anybody,” he said bitterly.
“But his own father,” I exclaimed, feigning surprise.
Pelletier finally opened up. “He didn’t care. He took over the family like he’d been born to the job. Didn’t give a shit about a damn thing except his own ambition.”
“What happened to Jean?” I asked suddenly.
There was dead silence in the room. Pelletier had been staring at the floor through most of the conversation. This time, he looked straight at me, his eyes moist. “I don’t know.”
“He just vanished?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“We think he went for a drive. He took the car. We never saw him or it again.”
“I thought he had a chauffeur.”
“He did, but he didn’t use him all the time. Sometimes, when he wanted to be alone, he’d drive himself.”
“So he was feeling reflective the day he disappeared?”
“I didn’t think so. I thought he was acting like he did when a deal was about to go down-energized. Restless and distracted. I’d seen it before. Like before a big job.”
“You must have had some ideas about what happened. What did you all think?”
“We knew he’d been killed. He’d been so close to it so many times before-robbing banks, muscling the competition, fighting off the law…” He suddenly straightened with pride and added, “On both sides of the border.”
“What was done to find out?” I asked.
“We put pressure on people like never before. But quietly, without noise. That was Marcel’s doing, and at first I was impressed. I thought, ‘Just like the Old Man-strong and tough. Get the job done right without fanfare.’ Only later did I think he only did it that way to make things easier for himself afterward.”
“So no one else would know?”
“Right.”
“But none of you knew, either,” I protested. “You just thought he’d been killed. If he had been, wouldn’t someone have bragged about it?”
“That’s what we were waiting for. It never happened.”
“And so things kept going as if nothing had changed?”
“Yes, to the outside world. People asked after a while, when they noticed the Old Man wasn’t around anymore. First, we were told to play dumb, then to say he’d retreated to a life of contemplation. What a laugh. Before anyone put two and two together, Marcel was fully in command. The time to exploit any weakness had passed.”
“Mr. Pelletier,” I said, leaning closer to him, “I hate to circle the same point, but didn’t it seem odd that no one took credit for killing the legendary Jean Deschamps?”
“Not in the long run,” he said.
I let a long pause follow and then said softly, “Because you all assumed he’d been killed by his own son.”
“Yes.”
“Had you ever sensed Marcel had that in him?”
He surprised me then, giving me a look of utter bewilderment. “Never. He was a cold boy and a heartless man, with none of his father’s knowledge of human nature. He hadn’t had to carve his way up from the bottom, so he didn’t know how to lose as well as to win. But I never saw him disagree with his father, never caught him looking at him angrily when his back was turned. He was like a machine, before and after his father’s death. That’s one reason the transition was so smooth.”
“But we’re missing two people in all this, aren’t we?” I asked. “What about Pierre Guidry and Gaston Picard, Jean’s right-hand boys? We heard Guidry especially moved up the ladder after Jean died.”