Like Chauvin before him, Pelletier shook his head. “Guidry was more like the Old Man’s substitute for Antoine, and Marcel adopted him like he adopted the business. It was a good move, too. Guidry had what Marcel lacked-he liked people and they liked him. Marcel could use him to smooth things out.”
“That must’ve been handy when everyone thought Marcel had killed his own father,” I said, almost as an aside.
“We weren’t killed ourselves,” Pelletier conceded simply. “We took that as a plus.”
“That why you parted company with the Deschamps?”
“I shot my mouth off. Guidry was very nice about it, but I knew what would happen if I refused. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to stay anyway, and I couldn’t have left if they hadn’t let me. It was a one-time offer, and it suited me. I did all right afterward. It was a privilege to work with Jean Deschamps. It was a pleasure to leave his son to fend for himself. Not that he suffered any.”
“Nor did Guidry, from what we were told.”
“Pierre was justly recompensed, and I’m sure Michel will continue the tradition. If it weren’t for the blood connection, in fact, Pierre would probably run things. Not that he wants to-he likes being behind the throne.”
Once again, Lucien Pelletier had been staring into space as he spoke-an old man addressing the ghosts of his past. But at the surprised silence greeting his last words, he looked up and took us all in. “What’s the matter?”
Lacombe spoke directly to him, letting Paul translate for both sides. “You said Michel-did you mean Marcel’s son?”
“Yes.”
“Implying he’s about to take over?”
I noticed Rick Labatt sitting forward, his expression keen.
“Well, if not him, I don’t know who. God knows Marcel’s been doing his damnedest to train the little brat behind the scenes. Big mistake, if you ask me, not that I care anymore.”
“But why now?” I asked. “With the Angels and the Rock Machine about to rumble, Marcel should want to keep his hand on the tiller.”
Pelletier’s eyes widened and he let out another long, wet chuckle. “Boy, you do need help. Don’t you know? Marcel’s dying of cancer-has a few months to live, depending on who you believe. Fitting end to that bastard, rotting from the inside out.”
Chapter 10
Lacombe left the cookie-cutter neighborhood where Lucien Pelletier was living out his life and headed east toward downtown on Portland Boulevard-a broad new avenue north of and parallel to King Street, as fast, sterile, and empty as King was stop-and-go, cluttered, and tacky. Not for the first time, I wondered if Sherbrooke might be jamming the American city-center-to-strip-mall-to-suburbs phenomenon into too small an area-with jarring results.
“So, Rick,” Lacombe asked in a mocking voice from the front. “Did Intelligence know about Marcel’s medical condition?”
Labatt was obviously embarrassed. “We knew he hadn’t been seen in public much lately.”
“I guess not.” Lacombe was smiling, in fact not very concerned.
“It’s an interesting piece of timing,” I said. “Marcel’s father, long dead, is brought out of the freezer just as it’s revealed Marcel’s living on borrowed time.”
“You think there is a connection?” Labatt asked.
Paul Spraiger answered for me. “Jean’s body appeared for some reason-must’ve been a big one, since he’d been kept on ice for so long. Sounds reasonable this might be it.”
“But it is to the advantage of who?” Lacombe asked.
No one had an answer for him.
Reinforcing my earlier musing, Portland Boulevard ended abruptly in the town’s oldest section, called Le Vieux Nord, or the Old North End. Originally home to the high and mighty, it was a hilly, tree-shaded cluster of elegant, graceful homes harking back to Victorian times and earlier. Unlike Pelletier’s nearby neighborhood, this area reflected a passage of years without any town planner’s influence. The streets were meandering and narrow, and lined by everything from schools to churches to museums to regal homes. In the center of it all was the gorge connecting the two large rivers, blocked by several dams and overshadowed by factories both functioning and gutted, as impressive in their solidarity and antiquity as the squat, huge, and ponderous cathedral that sat like a sleeping hippopotamus on the hill overlooking it all. It was an industrial tableau of the nostalgic values of church, home, and business-all three equally worn down and neglected by time.
Lacombe pulled over on a side street next to a thick row of trees and killed the engine. “Let me show you something,” he said, swinging out into the cold, ebbing light.
He led us through a hole in the trees and out onto a cantilevered platform jutting fifty feet above a misty, boiling, ice-choked tumult of water. Below us and to the right were a dam and a hydro station. Beyond the dam in the distance, the flat expanse of the Magog River was visible under the Montcalm Bridge. But what made the scene remarkable was the absence of humanity’s touch. Despite the industrial accessories, the gorge itself was primarily wild-a deep cut through sheer rock, bordered by thick stands of trees. Looking downstream, and ignoring the cityscape peering through the denuded branches, I felt I was out in the mountainous wilds, at a secret, never-visited natural aquatic enclave. It was as startling and impressive as the cathedral just one block away. Once again, this town had taken me by surprise, throwing open yet another curtain-mere feet from its predecessor-to reveal a whole other face.
“This is the source of Sherbrooke’s existence,” Gilles Lacombe explained. “From here came everything. The first Abnaki visitors three hundred years ago and the Deschamps and the Hell’s Angels. It is not all the time you can point to one thing and say that.”
It was a curiously philosophical comment, especially in the context of our current conundrum. I sensed a yearning inside Lacombe to locate some similar touchstone in the case we were investigating with which he could restore order where only confusion was now apparent.
We stood there awhile, shivering as much from the sight of such frozen chaos as from the actual cold, and then Lacombe led us back to the van’s warm embrace.
“I now take you on a different tourist trip,” he said, starting up the engine and heading back into the Vieux Nord.
Five minutes later, he slowed opposite a large, old, dark brown house with a steep slate roof and heavy wooden beams crowning the doors and windows. It looked like what Hansel and Gretel’s witch might have called home had she suddenly hit the Lotto.
“This is the house of Marcel Deschamps,” Lacombe said. “It has ten bathrooms and two kitchens and all of that.”
I studied the house with renewed interest. There was no one in sight, no movement from behind any of the curtained windows. The snowy lawn was large but not vast, the house itself indistinguishable from its equally accessible neighbors. In short, it looked utterly normal-for the average eccentric rich guy.
“Okay,” Lacombe announced. “Now to the place of business of Monsieur Deschamps.”
We left the Vieux Nord for Wellington Street North, proceeded down its respectable corridor of boutiques, restaurants, businesses, and banks, and crossed King to Wellington South, discovering at the intersection, with a suddenness I was becoming used to, King’s San Francisco-style plunge toward the Aylmer Bridge across the St. François River below us.
Wellington South was instantly totally different. In a minor key, it reminded me of Boston’s old Combat Zone-gritty, gap-toothed, and cluttered with bars, discos, flophouses, cabarets, and a Salvation Army chapel. Craning through the window, I looked up at the apartments overhead and the tattered shades and greasy panes of human misery and hopelessness.