The Marble Mask (12 page)

“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.

It made for a fitting contrast with the house we’d left just minutes before, purchased with the proceeds generated from the appetites this neighborhood fed all too well.

Lacombe continued south, to where Wellington became Queen, and then drove a very short distance past a sign announcing our entrance into Lennoxville. “Look to the right,” he said, slowing down.

Around a gentle corner, we slowed before a driveway cutting above us into an embankment, and blocked by a reinforced steel gate topped by gleaming razor wire. Behind it was a large, new, red-roofed house festooned with security cameras and a bouquet of oversized searchlights. It was difficult to see clearly, blocked off as it was by the wire, a row of tall hedges, and a cinderblock wall. But it looked like an armed outpost in the middle of enemy territory.

“Hell’s Angels headquarters,” Lacombe told us, “with bulletproof glass in all the windows. They are the other lords of Wellington Street.”

We continued into Lennoxville village, a pleasant cluster of old red-brick buildings reminiscent of what we’d left in Vermont, and pulled over in front of a small restaurant/bar. Lacombe led the way to a corner table near the back. He and Labatt ordered wine. Spraiger, Smith, and I chose coffee.

“I thought you might find that of help,” Lacombe said. “It gives an idea of how both parties see the world. While they share the dark culture of Sherbrooke, you can see they are very different. One is old, traditional, built like the Mafia. The other is angry, violent, paranoid, and quick for the action. I showed you that because I think you should see how their peace is fragile, even though it has lasted for many years. It is like the two legs on a ladder.”

He nodded toward his younger colleague. “Rick is telling me the Rock Machine is now wanting to kick one of the legs. I am worried that what you have brought me with the news of Jean Deschamps is the destruction of the other.”

I remembered how Paul had said earlier that one of the virtues of the Angels was that they policed their own—implying the local cops had learned to live with that arrangement, however reluctantly. It underscored Lacombe’s remark about having all the crooks suddenly thrown into a competitive free-for-all.

Gary Smith had obviously come to the same realization.

“We can’t do anything about the guys in the bunker,” he said, his enthusiasm in contrast to his earlier reserve. “But we can research the hell out of the Deschamps family. If we move fast enough and get lucky, maybe we can take that one leg down piece by piece without too much bloodshed. Then you can concentrate on the Angels.”

Lacombe shook his head. “I think time will not be enough. Have the American press spoken of Jean Deschamps?”

“They haven’t identified him yet,” I said. “But it won’t be long before word leaks out.”

“That is what I thought. I would like to tell Marcel and his lieutenants of the news face-to-face, to see their reaction. We would not be prepared as with your research, Gary, but we might learn more in exchange. Is this acceptable?”

Smith raised his coffee cup to him. “Works for me.”

· · ·

I felt uncomfortable walking up to the home of an unknown man whom I suspected of patricide. It was not the standard—or the smart—way to go. The trick to interviewing potential suspects was to know in advance what they might say. Yet I couldn’t fault Lacombe for his reasoning. I, too, wanted to see what Marcel would say about his father’s sudden reappearance. And I recognized that time was against us.

We were met at the door by the first indicator that this wasn’t just another millionaire’s mansion: a very large man with the face of an ax-murderer. He and Lacombe exchanged a few guttural comments in rapid
Joual,
during which Lacombe produced his shield, before the door was unceremoniously closed in our faces.

“Trouble?” Gary asked, angered by the lack of respect.

Lacombe’s expression was benign as he turned up his collar against the cold. “No. He is just asking his boss about us.”

I was struck once more by the difference in law enforcement styles on either side of the border. Not only was it wine for meals, dapper clothes on the job, and a lack of body builder types around the station house up here, but there was an attitudinal contrast as well. In our conversation with Pelletier, our discussions about crooks, and even in the way Lacombe accepted having a door slammed in his face, there was a lack of the kind of pseudo-military rigidity that so often stamped American cops. Not only had we yet to know our host’s official rank, but I’d noticed as well that he didn’t bother carrying a gun.

The butler/bodyguard returned several minutes later, accompanied by a slighter, much older man with little hair, thick glasses, and impressively expensive clothing. Lacombe and he obviously knew one another, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries. Thanks to Paul’s quietly translating for Gary and me, we gathered that he was the family’s longtime lawyer, Gaston Picard.

As we were escorted down a long, high-ceilinged hallway, cluttered with antique knickknacks and a couple of chandeliers, Gary leaned toward me and whispered, “They know we were coming, or d’you think they keep the lawyer upstairs?”

We ended up in an oversized, high-ceilinged library, wood-paneled, filled with leather furniture, and girdled by a balcony running around three of the walls, the fourth being occupied by an enormous stone fireplace, complete with burning logs and surmounted by a regal oil portrait of the man I’d seen as still as a marble statue on the medical examiner’s table.

Gaston Picard waved us toward a selection of armchairs and sofas and said in perfect, slightly British-tinged English, “Please, gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable.” He then stared at me, his eyes magnified by his glasses, and extended a hand in greeting. “I understand you are from Vermont’s new Bureau of Investigation.”

The hand was manicured, soft, and slightly moist, like a young girl’s.

“Yes, that’s right. Joe Gunther.” I introduced Paul and Gary, whom he also greeted with Old World formality. I noticed that wherever possible, he’d accented his appearance with daubs of gold jewelry—ring, watch, key chain, and tie pin.

“I am Gaston Picard, Mr. Deschamps’s attorney. I gather you have something you wish to discuss with him.”

I glanced around, waiting for either Lacombe or Gary to fill in, but both of them had obviously decided, as they had with Pelletier earlier, to let me carry the ball.

I was not, however, going to play with Picard. “That’s right,” I said without further explanation.

In the slight pause that followed, the dandified lawyer smiled humorlessly. “I see. Is this request of an official nature?” He held his hand out. “Accompanied by a warrant, for example?”

I’d expected that. “No. But if you choose to throw us out, I think you’ll discover later that your boss will be royally pissed off at you.”

His eyebrows rose, as much at my choice of words as at their meaning, the first of which I’d used in reaction to his oily manners. “Then you are offering something of use perhaps? Or of value?”

“Information of value, yes—something he’d like to know as quickly as possible.”

Picard nodded officiously. “Excellent. Then I will tell his secretary to put you on the very top of the appointment calendar. I take it I can reach you through le Capitaine Lacombe?”

I smiled at this first use of Lacombe’s title, realizing now how he’d rated that exclusive parking spot in the Sûreté’s basement. But I didn’t move from my comfortable seat, nor did any of my colleagues, despite Picard’s taking several steps toward the door.

“You can reach us that way if you choose to in the future. Right now, you better get Deschamps and tell him we’re here. I would guess that in his present condition, he’s come to appreciate the high cost of wasted time.”

Picard was obviously taken off guard. I decided to try to nudge him a little harder.

“Especially,” I added, pointing to the portrait above the mantel, “when what we have to say directly involves old ghosts.”

He hesitated a moment, ducked his head slightly, and said, “Very well. I shall return in a moment.”

He wasn’t gone thirty seconds before the silent giant of before appeared through a different door, pushing ahead of him a cart filled with coffee cups and a silver urn, which he abandoned in our midst like a sacrifice.

Lacombe didn’t hesitate, rubbing his hands and examining some cake slices he found under a silver dome. “Would any of you like this?”

Gary and I passed. Paul, after a pause, took him up on the offer and joined Labatt and his boss in coffee and cake both.

They’d just finished snacking when the double cherry doors swung back and Gaston Picard reappeared, pushing an old man in a wheelchair before him, and accompanied by another—tall, dark, broad-shouldered, and watchful—who struck me as something more than a bodyguard.

We all rose to our feet. Marcel Deschamps sat like a pampered scarecrow dressed in fine clothing, his skin stretched and pale to translucence, his few remaining strands of white hair sticking like cotton candy to his skull. The only sign of vitality—strong and unyielding—were his eyes. Black-rimmed and hollow, they gleamed with intelligent ferocity. Despite the overall frailty of the package, those eyes confirmed the ruthlessness Lucien Pelletier had described.