I half expected Willy to blurt out he had no intention of becoming an archive rat chasing down old army records, so I was surprised when he said instead, “If the letter was a frame, we could do more than just follow Jean’s footprints. We could also go after whoever planted the letter.”
“How?” Sammie asked. “It was buried in a suitcase covered with mildew-probably been there almost since Jean was killed.”
But I understood where he was headed. “The Alvarez will,” I murmured.
“Right. We found it through old-fashioned legwork, but that geezer secretary was ready if we hadn’t. Why would there be a restriction on the barn behind the B-and-B, and a further one telling any new owners they couldn’t mess with its contents? It had to be to preserve the suitcase and its smoking-gun contents.”
Sammie understood now. “Trace the will’s executor and maybe we find our bad guy.”
“Okay,” I concluded. “New attack plan. Since they’re used to me up there, I’ll go back to Sherbrooke and collect what I can on Antoine Deschamps, especially on when he was in Italy. Willy, you came up with the Alvarez angle; chase it down. Sam and Tom, we need to find out who was in Stowe and what it was like in 1947-the movers and shakers, the oddballs, the busybodies. Check the town hall, the newspaper files. Willy covered some of that ground already, so get ideas from him. Neither the state police nor the town cops were around back then, or just barely, so either the constable records or the sheriff’s office might have something. Arvin Brown seemed on the ball-maybe he could tell you more, or give you names of people who might. Also, let’s see if we can find out what Gaston Picard was doing here just before Jean’s body popped up. He claims he was playing tourist. Maybe somebody saw him around town-sure as hell someone did business with him. Check all the local lawyers, Realtors, banks, anyone else you can think of.”
We all rose to our feet as if summoned by a signal. “Any of you needs help, let out a shout. That’s the whole idea behind this unit-we have the resources, the manpower, and the network. Let’s put it to use and see if it works the way it’s supposed to.”
We filed out of the bar, Willy, I noticed, giving Sammie’s shoulder a quick squeeze-the first outward sign of affection I’d witnessed so far. There was no telling how the Canadian prosecutor was going to fare with Marcel Deschamps and the pending lie detector test. But for the first time since this all began, I wasn’t that concerned. We finally had something we could work on independently-and I could feel the longed-for adrenaline at last taking hold.
Chapter 17
Lacombe seemed bemused by my request. “You would like to see the papers on Jean’s son’s death in Italy? Why?”
We were sitting in his favorite restaurant for lunch, he eating seafood and drinking a beer, I nursing a Coke and a ham sandwich, wondering why they’d loused it up with some fancy cheese.
“I wish I could tell you,” I admitted. “Call it a hunch I can chase down while we wait for Marcel to decide about the polygraph. It’ll probably be a waste of time, but it occurred to us we might’ve let a few details slide after we found that letter from Marcel to his father, like what the old man was doing in Stowe in the first place. I’m hoping those old papers might help.”
I was purposefully downplaying my interest. This wasn’t my turf. If Lacombe liked what he heard, I was fearful he’d take control of it, leaving me as empty-handed as before. I didn’t ponder the irony that VBI had been created precisely to overcome such territorial self-interest-I was too busy both licking my wounds and hoping to earn my paycheck.
I should have known better than to play cute with him. He gave his trademark gentle smile and said, “They sound like the key to your lock.”
Old-fashioned guilt got the better of me. I still couldn’t shake the trouble I’d caused this man all too recently. “We’re pretty interested in them. For the sake of argument, we’re pretending the letter never existed.”
“Because maybe it existed to make us happy only?” he suggested.
“Right.”
He mulled that over a moment, chewing thoughtfully. “This is interesting. You are thinking the letter was not written by Marcel and that it wasn’t sent to Jean-that it came to be after Jean was killed.”
“Maybe,” I stressed. “It’s a little like deciphering a logic problem, because even if Marcel wasn’t the author, it still might’ve been written to bait Jean, especially if Jean thought Marcel was in Stowe when he received it. We need to know for a fact that Jean knew Marcel’s whereabouts when he left for Stowe. If we find a witness to Marcel being in Sherbrooke, for example, then we’ve also got proof that the letter was a complete fabrication, designed solely for us. Which is why the barn and its contents were preserved by the Spaniard’s will-to create a credible time capsule fingering Marcel.”
Lacombe smiled broadly. “Incroyable. This is very good.”
“Only if you’re interested in establishing an alibi for your prime suspect,” I said. “Is there any chance we could find out which outfits Antoine was with in Italy, along with their rosters?”
He laughed softly. “You are a strange policeman.”
I was tucked away in the Sûreté’s property room in the basement, wedged into a corner at a small desk under dubious lighting, side by side with Paul Spraiger, a pile of yellowed correspondence spread out before us.
“Anything?” I asked him after he put the last sheet down.
“Same as the English stuff you read-pointed questions from Jean Deschamps, vague and meaningless gobbledygook from the bureaucrats: ‘We’ve examined our records pertaining to the death of Antoine Deschamps and have found nothing to indicate anything at variance with the initial findings earlier forwarded to you,’ blah, blah. Amazing how no matter the nationality, the bullshit smells the same.”
“What about the private papers?”
He sighed and shook his head. Our research fit into two categories. Correspondence to and from various government agencies in both languages, and letters written between Jean and several of his son’s co-combatants, all in French. “There’s nothing here,” Paul conceded. “Every one’s a dead end. Either the writer didn’t know Antoine Deschamps, except maybe slightly or by name, or he wasn’t around when Antoine was killed and doesn’t have any details.”
I picked up the official report of that death and scanned it once more. Antoine Deschamps was killed in action in Italy on June 4, 1944, outside Rome during offensive maneuvers against an entrenched enemy force. His personal effects were collected and his body shipped home to his family. From what I could decipher from the bored euphemisms of such documents, he was shot during an assault, like so many others-plain and simple.
“We’re missing something,” I said.
“Could be Jean just couldn’t accept the truth,” Paul countered. “His whole life was based on an-eye-for-an-eye. An old-fashioned combat death was probably unacceptable.”
I shook my head. “No. I mean literally. We’re missing something. Even if he did go around the bend and invent a suspicious death, why aren’t there any letters here from people who were with his son when he died?”
“He was just beginning to dig into it.”
“I know,” I argued, “but still, what do you do when you organize something like this? You make lists-who to contact, their addresses, their old unit affiliations. You start with letters from the son, picking up names of buddies who were with him. Any letters from Antoine?”