Murder Without Pity (2 page)

He rested his eyes, feeling fatigue made heavier from little sleep as a result of the terror of his captivity. He had closed them for only a second when he heard a bossy knock on his door. Glancing across, he saw a shadow against the pebbled glass pane. Before he could reply, a second rap knuckled loudly, followed by an imperious rattling of the doorknob.

“One moment!” he shouted. “I heard you the first time.” Not bothering to straighten his tie, he pushed himself up, grabbed his cane that leaned against his trash basket, and limped over to the entrance, where he jerked open the door, agitated.

A stranger stood before him, straight-backed, in an overcoat with a muffler around his neck like a fashion model. He would have looked appealing except for a scar, slashed from the right of his lip to his jaw, which hinted at violence.

“Monsieur Cassel?” the man asked.

Stanislas shied back a foot as he nodded. That scar, the outcrop of brows—the resemblance to his grandfather was unmistakable.

“I’m Monsieur Louis Boucher.” His smile died.

From further down the hallway, a trolley clanked as a clerk pushed his load of dossiers along. From somewhere outside the Annex burst police klaxons. Stunned at the familial similarity, Stanislas ignored the noise, wondering half in jest where were the Germans to protect their man. But this was contemporary Paris, he reminded himself, not that of the Occupation. Collabo Marcel Cassel was dead from assassination, and Louis Boucher had said something more.

“I said, I must protest your summons. Why have you called me here?”

“You’re a witness to a murder,” he heard himself reply.

“I’m quite aware of that as your judicial police explained when they questioned me at my apartment. And I’ll tell you exactly what I told them: I witnessed nothing. That Monsieur Pincus begged for money. I shooed him away. End of story. I know nothing whatsoever about his murder.”

A gendarme, guarding Stanislas’s office a few steps away, glanced at him. He shook away any assistance. He could handle the witness. “A seat,” he insisted with as much courtesy as he could manage. Overlooking Monsieur Boucher’s early arrival he stepped aside for the man, who, after some hesitation, entered, followed an instant later by Christophe, shaking his head over their querulous visitor.

Squeezing behind his desk, which angled to the right of Stanislas’s, Christophe latched the top to his teapot, before flipping on his computer. From a shelf beside the doorway, Stanislas snatched a placard with HEARING IN PROGRESS. ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN printed in black. He looped it over the doorknob, after which he closed shut his office door and retreated to his chair.

Boucher studied the district map of Paris on the wall to his left, next the desk piled with dossiers, finally Stanislas. “Attack, attack, attack, that’s your profession’s slogan. Politicians, business leaders, ministers, no one is safe from your questions and indictments. And in the end, we have what? Reputations ruined. You understand the police checked my alibi?”

“Monsieur Boucher, the law considers anyone a witness who can aid a dossier’s progress. You were the last one to see the victim alive. I must clarify just a few points to your police testimony about him. This shouldn’t take long.”

“That beggar?”

“Call him what you want. The president of this tribunal has charged me with investigating his death.” He nodded at Christophe to swear him in.

Boucher grunted displeasure as he seated himself in the chair across from Stanislas. Then he tugged off his gloves, finger-by-finger as though he were the interrogator, and raised his right hand.

Would he give his version of that Wednesday morning, 13 September? Stanislas asked after Boucher finished taking the oath. Boucher adjusted a cuff with a tug of distaste. He radiated too much confidence for a witness called in for questioning, Stanislas decided. The man knew how to handle himself in the presence of authority. In the margin of his legal pad, he scribbled a note to investigate Boucher further.

Several minutes of testimony passed, with Stanislas dictating Boucher’s version to his clerk. And afterwards, the questions.

“Why did you look around after you locked your gate the morning of his murder?” Stanislas asked.

“I’ve already explained that to the police.”

“I want you to tell me.”

“Because I heard footsteps and a shout of ‘Excuse me, monsieur!’”

“Was that the only reason?”

“But of course. Why else would I have turned?”

“Because Monsieur Pincus called out your name for some reason.”

“That’s absurd.”

“You still deny, as you did to the police, any acquaintance with him?”

“He was a beggar from out of nowhere, who confronted me.”

“You’re familiar with the proprietor of the Café Flaubert?”

The mention of the café’s owner softened Boucher’s sharp features. It seemed to bring him a warmth lacking in the austere office and to promise diversion from the questions. “Of course. A friend of many years.”

“According to this witness’s police testimony, Monsieur Pincus ordered a white coffee there at 7:30 on the morning in question. However, he barely drank it after the waiter had served him. The proprietor further stated the deceased appeared restless, that every few minutes he checked his pocket watch, and that he seemed to be waiting for someone. Was he waiting for you?”

“Waiting for me?”

“And when you didn’t show, he decided to go to you.”

Boucher exploded in laughter. “This man appeared to do this. He seemed to do that. Such fruitless speculation. For all we know, he may have been sulking over a lost love. I assure you, I never saw this beggar until that morning, and I thought no more about him until the police called later. It’s a simple story.”

“My police have located another witness.” Stanislas watched Boucher’s reaction to his blunt statement. “Also out that morning like you. This witness thinks the deceased might have shouted a name.”

“Name? I heard nothing of the sort.”

“Very well. Two last questions. Do you have German friends?”

“No.”

“German acquaintances?”

“None that I’ve kept in touch with for years.”

“You understand you’re under oath?”

“Monsieur Cassel, I move in my own circle, French.”

“Then who is Luc?”

“Sorry?”

“Luc, who is he?”

Boucher crinkled his forehead in puzzlement. “If I’ve any friend by that name, he’s kept himself hidden because I’ve never met him.”

Steady voice, eyes aimed at him, and no pause throughout the hearing to invent. The signs of innocence in a witness who, nevertheless, may have given doubtful testimony now on record. The first interrogation was over, Stanislas decided. The investigation into Monsieur Léon Pincus’s murder had started.

CHAPTER 3

A CALL FOR MONSIEUR BOUCHER

The telephone in the apartment above rang for the sixth time. Its stifled urgency through the front door pressed down on Boucher in the lobby. He paused in fear at the stairs, one foot on the marbled step, eyes on the first floor, praying the ringing would stop. There’s another meeting to discuss the financing, he thought, and immediately changed his mind. It’s that examining magistrate working late, and he’s summoning me for a second hearing. For a moment Boucher imagined himself back in that investigator’s office. “
My police have located another witness.
This witness thinks the deceased might have shouted a name
.” Who was this witness? he wondered. A neighbor in this quarter with a vengeful memory of the war years?

A door closed on a floor above. He gazed up to locate the sound’s location. From the second floor, he guessed. From that retired cardiologist he had often argued with over politics? He looked old enough to have lived through the Occupation. Had that neighbor slipped up, made the fatal error of an amateur spy, nudged his door shut a little too hard after observing him for that judge? And his phone was once more ringing. An anxiety from alibis falling apart slowed his climb when he began trudging up the stairs.

To his relief, the ringing ceased as he switched off his security system beside the front door. The magistrate must have given up. It started again though once he stepped inside his foyer. The magistrate was persisting.

Enough torture, he told himself. With several steps, he was inside his bedroom. He lunged for the phone on his night table and ripped it from its jack with one vicious yank, then flung it toward his bed that was covered with newspapers. It landed on that morning’s edition crinkling the headline, ARMY TO HELP POLICE QUELL GROWING RIOTS. Peace finally, he thought.

The ringing continued, this time from his library. His cell phone, of course, he realized. He had forgotten about it. He banged open the louvered doors to his bedroom, stalked down the hallway past his dining room into the darkened library. He fumbled to his left, felt the dial, twisted. The room brightened from the chandeliers.

He focused ahead. There, just as he thought, in the middle of the room lay the locus of his anxiety, in the sofa. His cell must have slipped between the cushions when he had sat down earlier that day. When he was able to relax. Before that interrogation and the fears it had caused.

He rushed ahead, kicking aside a footstool in his path. He reached the sofa, pitched the cushions onto the rug, clawed through the underside, gripped the cell, smashed down the OFF button. Finally no ringing from either phone and absolute quiet.

Except that now one fear had loosened another. “
Sooner or later you awake to the screams
,” he recalled poor old Kleist whimpering. Would he also hear them? Would they make him let slip a word or gesture at any second interrogation?

He caught his fingers shaking. The trembles, he hadn’t suffered from them since his trial. More than fifty years without them, and now they had returned. He should have stayed home that Wednesday morning instead of going for his walk. He tried to banish evidence of his nerves and clasped his hands behind him. “
My police have located another witness
.” Would he finally crack and confess after these many years?

He felt a sudden urge to smoke. He patted his suit pockets and found no cigarettes. He crossed to his writing desk near the sofa, yanked a side drawer out to its full length, pushed around its contents. No Benson & Hedges. He slammed the drawer, yanked back its twin. Nothing.

He glanced to his right. There on a round table beside family photographs lay a packet. He shakily tapped out the last one. He lit up and sat down on the edge of a chair, when he noticed
Paris Today
on the carpet where he had flung it that morning. The weekly lay flipped open to its lead story, “Some Collaborators of Yesterday: Where Are They Now?” He, a civil servant during the war, had lived in blissful obscurity, invisible for decades afterwards till that scandal sheet had run that investigative piece. And after that, that Pincus fellow had shown up. Damn it!

He jammed the cigarette into a tray, stood, and wandered over to one of the tall windows. On the balcony, tendrils of vine in half shadow coiled around a pot’s neck.

And beyond the railing in the parking island in the street below, something flickered. The movement was fleeting, yet solid, definitely someone.

He squinted across the field of mist for a glimpse of the threat beneath the foliage. A heckler had returned to hurl rocks? That examining magistrate had put him under surveillance? Yes, he decided, that criminal investigator had ordered him watched. The mist swirled, thickened, and thinned. He bobbed his head left and right for a clearer view, but couldn’t pick out anyone below.

Maybe that judge had put him under surveillance for days, and he hadn’t realized his jeopardy. He could recall nothing alarming. Yet in the past few days, a police professional, he felt certain, had no doubt slipped behind him under cover of this fog and now stood practically outside his window.

He crossed to the bar next to the hallway entrance, poured half a glass of brandy, drank several contemplative sips. He wouldn’t flee. That would imply guilt. He would remain in Paris and continue his routine. Rise at six as usual. Take his morning strolls. Visit the Café Flaubert afterwards. And plead ignorance at any second questioning. “
Monsieur Examining
Magistrate, I fully understand I’m under oath. I don’t care what the witness claims. I repeat under oath the deceased did not, let me repeat, did not shout my name
.”

That’s how he’d act, innocent until the end. Lies and half-truths were the only way out of this danger.

BENEFIT AT THE HOTEL

“No rest this Friday evening, Monsieur Judge?”

“The Hotel Eden tonight.” Stanislas pulled the Peugeot’s rear passenger door shut.

“Ah, the glamorous Eden. The hideaway of some rich and famous, I’ve heard. A social obligation?”

With his rotund chest, the chauffeur looked to Cassel more like a bon vivant than a policeman assigned to drive and protect him. “It’s a charitable affair. Another magistrate got the flu and asked me to stand in.” He watched the grimy outpost of the Justice Annex vanish into fog that had massed into drizzle. His driver switched on the wipers. An ice wind from the Seine behind them fluttered leaves like ashes through a streetlamp’s glow as they passed through the white night onto Rue de Rivoli.

A charitable affair indeed, he thought. With Occupation survivors included, something he didn’t need after that ten-hour work day. He, grandson of a collabo, as an unintended guest. How many had that scoundrel sent to their deaths? He had no desire to be reminded of that treachery. He should have asked the nature of the benefit before accepting. He’d leave after staying a respectable hour or two.

“I start overtime tomorrow, protecting another judge too.” The driver glanced in his rear view mirror at Stanislas. “The rest of the time I’ll help patrol some hot quarters. Good-bye plum desk job; hello stress.”

“You’ll be back to your usual work in no time.”

“That’s what my wife thinks. The riots protesting that police shooting will blow over. The demonstrators and demagogues will go home. Lots can happen before that occurs.” He glanced in the mirror again, this time beyond Stanislas. “There he is, on schedule. Our escort. We’ll get you there in one piece,” and he returned his attention to driving.