Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (21 page)

“Like a prison?”

“More like a castle with an extra-wide moat. It’ll be somebody closely associated
with one of the two families, the Derivals or the Le Clares. You’ll have to find
someone from each family who isn’t in shock and ask. Say you’re trying to help,
but don’t promise too much.”

“Who is this recluse?”

“A long shot. And maybe an alternative to a senseless killing.”

“Assuming I trace him or her, what do we do then?”

“We storm the castle.”

5.

 
The castle turned out to be a Beaux-Arts tower with a beautiful view
of New York’s Central Park and security like the U.S. Mint’s. Harry and I were
actually patted down between the first set of guarded lobby doors and the
second. After that indignity, we had a moment to ourselves.

“They have a lot of doormen to tip at Christmas,” I observed while we waited.

“These aren’t doormen, Owen. I’ve never seen security like this. They must have
an ex-president living here.”

“Lincoln, I hope.”

As that remark suggested, I was feeling a little nervous. For one thing, my best
suit, still wrinkled from the wedding reception, looked shabby next to Harry’s.
And even his was no match for the opulent inner lobby, which reminded me of one
of the quieter galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“My dad never heard of this Crevier guy,” Harry said, “which is pretty amazing.”
It was. Harry Ohlman, Sr., now retired, was a famous collector of gossip. “I
still don’t know how you suddenly turned into Nero Wolfe, Owen. How you figured
out from your armchair that this guy existed. That’s not your style. You usually
go door-to-door bothering people until one of them knocks you on the head.”

That wasn’t a fair description of my investigative technique. But Harry’s Nero
Wolfe allusion was apt. I had made the kind of deductive leap that gentleman
specialized in. And, like him, I’d been reluctant to explain myself to my Archie
Goodwin, Harry. It had been more than wanting to hold on to a slight advantage
too. I’d found the line of thinking that had led to my leap too disturbing to
discuss.

My hand had been forced by the speed of events. On the evening of the day when
I’d given Harry his impossible assignment, he’d called me at my apartment to say
that the person I’d hypothesized not only existed but wanted to see us the next
morning. I’d confessed all then. Harry now knew as much as I did, though he
seemed reluctant to believe that.

One of the lobby elevators opened its doors. The car contained two large men,
neither a born smiler. They motioned us inside.

“Here’s where I get knocked on the head,” I whispered.

Our escorts neither hit us nor spoke to us. I guessed that we were bound for the
penthouse, but we actually stopped halfway up the tower.

There we were greeted by a man of about five foot six who seemed to be trying to
make it to six even by stretching his neck. Something about his rigid posture
made his plain brown suit resemble a uniform, though that suggestion might
actually have come from the old scar tissue on one of his cheekbones. He looked
like he badly wanted to pat us down again. Instead, he showed us into an
apartment.

Based on the lobby, I expected it to be a scaled-down Versailles. It turned out
to be very ordinary and even underfurnished. The man who lived there didn’t need
much furniture, as he took a seat with him wherever he went. I saw the marks it
had made on the hallway carpet as we entered, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by
the identity of our host. It was the wheelchair-bound man Kit Derival had fussed
over in the receiving line.

“Mr. Ohlman?” he said. “Mr. Kane, is it?” The gravel in his voice had come right
out of the river Seine.

“Keane,” I said.

“Pardon. My name, as I believe you know, is Anton Crevier. Please sit down,
gentlemen. I once enjoyed having men stand in my presence. Those days are
gone.”

In those bygone days he’d been broad-shouldered, I decided, basing my guess on
the amount of padding some nostalgic tailor had put in the shoulders of his suit
coat. Under the shock of gray hair I’d noted at the wedding, Crevier had a
jowly, drooping face that seemed to be suspended from his straight, unkempt
brow. His small black eyes moved from one of us to the other as he extracted a
cigarette case from his pocket. He offered the case to us first, and we both
declined, Harry with visible regret. The scarred lackey lit the cigarette
Crevier had selected and then placed himself behind the wheelchair, ready to
jump on any grenades that happened by.

“My good friends the Le Clares called me with terrible news yesterday,” Crevier
said. “The most terrible news. Their beloved daughter and her husband dead,
murdered for their traveler’s checks. A few hours later, they called me back.
They had been contacted by a friend of Kit’s, who told them that I might have
something to do with the killings. They were most upset, as was I. I have passed
a bad night, gentlemen. I am hoping you will be able to explain this business to
me before I have to pass another.”

Harry said, “We were looking for an alternative explanation for the crime.
Owen—Mr. Keane—may have come up with one.”

“And you two are what? Investigators?”

“I’m a lawyer. Mr. Keane is . . . someone who sorts things.”

Overnight parcels, if we were being literal. Crevier looked to me with higher
expectations. “Yes?” he prompted.

“Do you have an enemy?” I asked. “One who would do anything to get to you?”

“All men have enemies, Mr. Keane, unless they are saints. Perhaps especially if
they are saints. Why are we discussing my enemies? Why not yours or Mr.
Ohlman’s? Why not the Le Clares’, since it was their daughter who was
killed?”

“The Le Clares, Mr. Ohlman, and I don’t fit other . . . requirements,” I said.
Crevier’s face seemed to droop even more, and I hurried on. “You may recall
something the minister said during the ceremony: Those gathered there were a new
community created by Kit and Emile’s love.”

“I remember.”

“I think those words inspired the crime. I think someone in that community was
desperate to recreate it. There was one sure way to accomplish that. He or she
could kill Kit and Emile, either making it look like an accident, which would
have taken time to plan, or like a random killing committed during the
commission of a robbery. The marriage community would then be reunited for a
double funeral.”

“Why would anyone go to those lengths, Mr. Keane?”

“That’s what I asked myself next. It had to be that a guest at the wedding saw
someone very important to him, saw him so unexpectedly that he was not prepared
to act. Before he could gather himself, this unexpected person left. So I had
one characteristic of the murderer’s real target. He didn’t attend the
reception.”

“I did not,” Crevier said.

“This target had to have some other characteristics to explain what happened in
Quebec. Even if he’d given the murderer the slip after the wedding, it should
have been possible to trace him through the Derivals or Le Clares without
resorting to violence. That didn’t happen, so the target had to be
unapproachable through any conventional means, someone who lived behind a wall
of security that the murderer couldn’t breach, someone who had to be tricked
into the open.

“I asked Mr. Ohlman to inquire about such a person. If there hadn’t been one, I
would have accepted the killings at face value. But there was one, Mr. Crevier.
You. So I have to ask you again, do you have a mortal enemy?”

The old man drew deeply on his neglected cigarette. “To answer that, gentlemen, I
must tell you a story.”

6.

 
“Are you familiar with the Algerian War of Independence?”

I would have had to say not very. Luckily, Harry was tired of sitting out the
hand.

“It was an uprising against French colonial rule back in the fifties,” he
said.

Crevier nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Some of us did not consider
Algiers to be a colony. We thought of it as part of France. It seems an odd
conceit after all this time. But the belief was strong enough then to support
the fighting for years. By nineteen sixty-one, however, the French people had
had enough. They voted in favor of separation with Algiers. Some elements of the
French army refused to accept this decision. They seized control of Algiers in
April nineteen sixty-one. I was a member of that group. The man you are
seeking—if Mr. Keane’s conclusions and mine are correct—was another.

“The putsch lasted but a few days. General de Gaulle rallied the nation against
us, and key army units refused to follow us. The generals and colonels in
command of the insurrection fled or were arrested. I myself was almost
killed.

“I had decided to surrender to the civilian authorities and return my troops to
the flag of France. My second in command, a major named Burnon, urged me instead
to join a group of officers who planned an underground resistance. Burnon had
lost a brother in the fighting and become a fanatic. When I refused to join him,
he shot me, condemning me to this chair. Nevertheless, with the help of Tritt—”
he indicated the man behind him with a wave of his cigarette— “I escaped Algiers
with my life.

“I came to the United States, hoping for a cure for my legs that did not come. I
stayed because I had friends here, some ex-patriots, some American. I had served
as a liaison to the Americans in North Africa in the war against the Nazis.
Those old comrades proved more faithful than Burnon.”

“What became of him?” I asked.

“He joined the OAS, the terrorist organization formed by survivors of the Algiers
putsch. When the OAS was crushed, there were rumors that Burnon had been killed,
but I never believed them. I believe he has been living in exile all these
years, as I have, under a false name, as I have, enduring God knows what
indignities and privations for which he now blames me. He must have formed some
connection to the French ex-patriot community here, which is natural enough. By
an unhappy chance, he was also a guest at the wedding.”

Harry said, “You saw him there?”

“No. Believe me, gentlemen, when I say that if I had known Burnon was there, if I
had guessed that he posed the least threat to those children, I would have acted
to save them.”

“We can still get the guy,” Harry said. “We’ll give the police what we know.
They’ll go over the guest list, narrow it down, and nail him.”

“They never will,” Crevier said. “If Burnon was responsible for that horror in
Quebec, you must believe that he has cut himself free of whatever identity he
has been living under, so he could melt away at the first suggestion that the
police had uncovered his plans. They could establish his discarded persona but
never put their hands on the man. There is only one way to do that,
gentlemen.”

He handed me the punch line with a glance.

“Go ahead with the funeral,” I said.

“Yes. Go ahead with the funeral. I will attend. That will draw Burnon out of
hiding.”

Tritt didn’t like the idea, or so I concluded from a tightening of his mouth and
a darkening of his skin that made the scar on his cheek glow white. Harry didn’t
like it either, and he spoke up.

“We could be adding to the list of innocent bystanders. Suppose he puts a bomb
under the church.”

“Not Burnon. He will shoot me face-to-face as he did thirty years ago. He will
sacrifice his own life to do it.”

“It’s hard to stop an assassin who’s willing to sacrifice himself,” I
observed.

“I am a soldier, Mr. Keane. Danger is part of my profession. I would face this
danger just to avenge those two young people. But I also have a motive of my
own. You have observed, perhaps, the manner in which I live. Not uncomfortably,
thanks to some investment advice, but not freely. There has been a price on my
head since nineteen sixty-one, placed there by the government I once served. All
these years, I have waited for the knock on my door and the hand on my
collar.

“Now that has changed. Not long ago, an amnesty was passed in France for the
officers who led the putsch. I have made inquiries since and learned that, if I
desired to return to my native land, I would not be molested. My dream is to go
back to the village where I was born and live quietly and simply, without locked
doors around me. But until Burnon is caught, my plans must wait. I dare not
leave this prison I have made for myself while he is free.

“So, gentlemen, how do we proceed?”

He addressed the question to me, but Harry answered. “We contact the authorities
down in Somerset County. And we make our plans.”

7.

 
Harry had likened my original deduction, the one that led us to
Crevier, to the work of Rex Stout, but I stepped from that tower thinking
instead of the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Of
The Sign of Four
and “The Crooked Man” and the others in which some ancient crime, committed in
an exotic place, is recounted and accounted for in the present.

I would have shared this reflection with Harry, but he was, as usual, all
business now that there was business to conduct. “We’ll have to get in touch
with the police in Quebec,” he said as we waited for the tower’s doorman to snag
us a cab. “They’re the ones who’ll end up with Burnon, assuming we get him
alive.”

“Assuming we get him period,” I said. “I don’t think we surprised Crevier today.
I mean, when we told him why we were there, he looked sadder, but he never
seemed shocked.”

“The Le Clares told him yesterday about my call, Owen. So he had all night to
work it out. We just confirmed his worst fears this morning. Don’t feel bad if
he reached the same conclusion you did. He had a lot more pieces of the puzzle
to work with. Burnon, for one.”

The doorman landed our taxi, and we headed off at the usual breakneck pace.
Today, it seemed justified. We had plans to make, as Harry had said. That is, he
and the other responsible adults did. That Harry had been referring to a group
that didn’t include me when he’d used the second person plural was brought home
to me when he asked if I wanted to be dropped at Penn Station or the Port
Authority Building.