Deschamps’s almost hairless eyebrows shot up. “Innocent? You are thinking I killed my own father? Despite all your obvious homework, you’ve got much more to do. Why would I kill a man I loved? More important from your perspective, why would I kill a man whose position I was slated to inherit soon in any case? He was my tutor and I was his heir, especially after my brother died in the war. What you are suggesting is ludicrous.” His breathing had turned raspy and I noticed a damp sheen covering his forehead.
“We wouldn’t expect you to say otherwise,” Gary told him.
Deschamps lost patience, waving a hand in the air. “Enough. This conversation is concluded. Please leave. Pierre will show you out.”
Picard grabbed the handles of Marcel’s wheelchair and turned him around to face the door. But my attention was on Pierre Guidry.
He’d been behaving like a palace guard throughout the conversation, his hands clasped behind him, standing at parade rest, his expression impassive. At Marcel’s dismissive order, however, I thought I saw his lips compress slightly and his jaw tense, although when he stepped forward to escort us out, he merely looked like a faithful colleague sharing his boss’s outrage.
It had come and gone in the flicker of an instant, and I couldn’t be sure of what I’d seen in his eyes. Only my suspicions remained.
Chapter 11
“What’s it like up there?” Sammie asked on the phone.
I was sitting on my motel bed, my shoes off, leaning back against a pile of pillows, the TV on but muted before me. It was almost midnight. “Pretty nice. Middle-class industrial town with no pollution and no pretensions. So far, that fits the cops, too. Nice, laid-back bunch. Turns out Lacombe’s the head Sûreté guy. He set up a task force right off the bat. We had our first meeting an hour ago-Sherbrooke police, us, the Sûreté people, and some guy from RCMP intelligence. Went well. We visited Marcel Deschamps at his home earlier and suggested he killed his old man, just to see what would happen. He threw us out. Lacombe’s put surveillance teams on him and a bunch of his top people. We’ll keep track of all contacts made for the next week and run them through the computer up here. If we did stir them up, maybe we can make sense of the flurry. Marcel’s dying of cancer, so time’s against him. He already looks like death warmed over.”
Willy Kunkle’s voice came over the speaker phone as if filtered through an empty can. “You think he did it?”
I paused a moment, remembering Marcel’s reaction. “I’m not so sure. He denied it, of course, but he looked pretty surprised. You two find out anything new?”
“We got jack,” Willy said bluntly. “This cancer thing got anything to do with our finding the Popsicle?”
“It’s got to,” I agreed. “I just don’t know how.” I then filled them in on all we’d learned, including Marcel’s comment that he’d had no reason to kill a father who was shortly planning to put him in charge, and Pelletier’s saying that in the long run everyone had just assumed patricide.
“Anyhow,” I finished, “it looks like the Deschamps family’s made a fortune illegally peddling across the border. I know you got nowhere running Jean’s name through the system, but try Pierre Guidry, Lucien Pelletier, and Gaston Picard.” I gave them spellings and dates of birth. “They’re all old-timers, so maybe one of them got nailed for something in the U.S. during their younger years. Give ’em a shot and see if we get lucky.”
“Will do,” Sammie said. “By the way, we got the final autopsy report. Stomach contents were the only unusual thing: a combination of venison, raccoon, and bear meat.”
I whistled. “Jesus. What the hell was he doing? Living in the woods?”
“If he was,” Willy put in, “he wasn’t going hungry.”
The red light on the side of the phone began flashing. “Someone just called in with a message. I better get off and find out what’s up. Let me know if you hit anything with those names.”
“You got it.”
“Oh, hey, Sammie?” I suddenly asked.
“Yeah?”
“How’re you two getting along with Tom Shanklin? Any friction?”
“I try to keep him away from Willy so he won’t quit law enforcement altogether,” she said. “But he seems pretty mellow. We haven’t done a whole lot as a team, though.”
“Right. Just being a mother hen. I’ll talk to you later.”
I hung up, dialed the operator, and got a message to call Lacombe. He answered on the first ring.
“I was wondering if you would like to see how we in Québec work a crime scene. We just have a report of a murder on La Rue Galt Oueste-one of the Deschamps family.”
“There’s a coincidence. Sure, I’d love to be included.”
“A car will pick you up in five minutes.”
Galt Street West was another of Sherbrooke’s major arteries but on the older, poorer south side of town. There were no malls or motels or American greasy spoons here. Where I was deposited by a Sûreté squad car fifteen minutes later was working-class residential-rows of plain brick apartment buildings stained by time and neglect, the layers of stacked balconies, typical of virtually every Québec city, sagging and in need of paint.
A pleasant young man in a parka greeted me as I stepped into the slush piled on the sidewalk. “Mr. Gunther? Le Capitaine Lacombe asked me to escort you to him.”
I followed him into the nearest building, noticing that while the majority of uniforms belonged to the Sherbrooke police, the Sûreté was clearly represented. Lacombe had briefed us earlier that in a town this size, the Sûreté played mostly a support role, appearing only when requested. I assumed the exception here meant the task force’s mission was playing front and center.
In fact, when I reached a dingy apartment two flights up, Lacombe was accompanied by Rick Labatt and André Rousseau, the intelligence officer from the RCMP.
Lacombe turned at my entrance and motioned to me to join them in the kitchen across from the living room. “Joe. I am sorry it is so late, but as I said on the telephone, I thought you would find this interesting.”
On the kitchen floor, spread-eagled like a butterfly pinned down for display, was a large barefoot man resting in blood extending like wings to either side of him. A good portion of his skull was missing. Surrounding him like carefully moving ghosts, a forensics team clad in protective clothing went through the motions I knew all too drearily by heart.
Lacombe made the introductions. “This is Monsieur Jean-Luc Tessier. He was a Deschamps enforcer-a big cheese, correct? It looks like he was shot in the head, from behind with one bullet.”
I glanced back at the living room. “No obvious struggle. Was the door forced?”
“No. We are thinking that he knew who killed him.”
“And trusted him,” Labatt added, pointing at the corpse. “He turned his back on the man, maybe to make some coffee.”
“He live alone?” I asked, noticing the coffee maker on the counter ahead of the corpse, still half full and with its red indicator light on.
Lacombe smiled. “Yes. You are wondering how we found him so fast. The neighbor became angry at the television sound. When the Sherbrooke police got here, it was very, very big.” He put his fingers in his ears.
“But the noise came suddenly, just before the neighbor complained?”
Lacombe nodded.
“Meaning whoever killed him cranked up the volume to attract attention afterward,” I surmised. “It couldn’t have been that loud when he knocked on the door and Tessier went to pour coffee-it wouldn’t make sense. No gunshot heard?”
All three of them shook their heads. The comfortably bilingual Mountie-Rousseau-said, “Tessier was one of Marcel’s chosen men. He’d been with him twenty years and in the last eight or ten handled all the key dealings with rival operators. A hard man-loyal and savvy.”