The Twenty-Year Death (20 page)

The large man struggled on the desk, wriggling his shoulders. “I’ve never seen you before in my life, and I wish I never did.”

Pelleter brought his hand up to his bruised cheek, reassuring himself with the tender throb that was there under pressure. He looked over the prisoner, thinking. The warden’s wife stood, so stunned that she was speechless. Servières was writing it all down.

“Where’s Passemier?” Pelleter said suddenly.

“He wasn’t home.”

Pelleter turned to the warden. “Does he have a car?”

“No.”

Letreau stepped forward, reasserting his command. “Put these men in the holding cell. Everyone else must have something to do. So start doing it.”

The stunned atmosphere began to retake its normal shape. Letreau trailed his prisoners further into Town Hall.

Lambert joined Pelleter, who had not moved since asking about Passemier.

“We need to find the other guard. He attacked me last night.”

“I’d wondered what happened to your face. I figured you’d fallen while shaving.”

Pelleter gave that as much of a smile as it deserved. There was yelling from the back corridor now, and the warden’s wife was arguing with two of the other officers, asking where her husband had been taken.

“Inspector.” It was Rosenkrantz.

Pelleter raised an index finger to hold him off and continued talking to Lambert. “See if you can get Letreau. Tell him we need to start a stakeout. The train station, all of the major roads out of town. If Passemier’s still here, we don’t want him to get away.”

Lambert began to go, but stopped when the chief inspector spoke again.

“And we’ll need a warrant. I want to search the man’s house.”

“Inspector, I wanted to thank...”

Pelleter let his raised hand drop. Rosenkrantz had stepped up to the booking desk. He held Clotilde so close that she had to stand at an angle to walk. Her hand lay flat on her husband’s chest.

“Inspector...you were as good as your word, and I want you to know I’m grateful. For everything you did.”

The words seemed to carry an extra weight, as though he meant to thank Pelleter for more than just his wife’s return. Had he told Clotilde of his binge the other night? Probably not.

“No need to thank me,” Pelleter said. “Anyway, it’s not over yet.”

In Verargent, searching for missing children could be done on anyone’s authority. Arranging the complicated machinations involved in tracking down a fugitive—the necessary roadblocks, the search warrant for his home, informing the railroad—required the approval of the town magistrate.

The portion of Town Hall used for the administrative operations of the town distinguished itself from the police station with high ceilings. The light fixtures hung on long cords overhead, casting self-important shadows.

Pelleter paced in the hall outside the magistrate’s office. Letreau was inside. Pelleter imagined he was taking great care to show that all actions had been taken under his authority, embarrassed now at how flustered he had been in the preceding few days. In the meantime, he had had the sense to set up the roadblocks first and to get the paperwork done afterwards.

Pelleter cast an impatient glance at the closed office door with each pass. The bruise on his face seemed alive with worry, three pinpricks of red in the center of the wound. He had sent Lambert to the train station in anticipation of the midday train to the city. Servières had gone with Lambert, certain that the story was with him.

Pelleter stopped in front of the magistrate’s door, willing it to open. Letreau’s officers were in the process of cutting off the
main routes of escape, but something worried him. It was not that they might be too late. If Passemier had been planning to run the night before, then following and attacking Pelleter would have been counter to his plans. It was the attack itself that bothered him. People made rash decisions when they felt cornered. Passemier was violent and a murderer and he had already shown what something as simple as an informal interrogation would drive him to. If they cut off his escape routes, what would be his next move?

Pelleter touched the bruise on his cheek and rolled his shoulders, satisfying himself that the pain was unchanged. Madame Pelleter would have scolded him for playing with his wounds.

The door to the magistrate’s office opened and Letreau emerged holding up a sheaf of papers. “Let’s go,” he said.

Pelleter caught a glimpse through the door behind the chief of police, but it opened only onto an outer office where a secretary sat at a desk. The town magistrate was hidden away in some interior office, doubly protected from the town he administered.

The two men headed towards the connecting hall that led back to the police station.

“Where are we going?” Pelleter said.

The chief inspector was not surprised when Letreau answered, “Rue Victor Hugo.”

In daylight, the Rue Victor Hugo showed itself to be little more than an alley, similar to the one where Rosenkrantz had gotten drunk in the basement pub. At some time after the alley had formed between the surrounding buildings, an attempt had been made for drainage by lining the center of the cobblestone path with a concave well of brick. The project had been ill conceived, however, since puddles lined the edges of the alley even
five days after the rain. Pelleter saw that he had been lucky not to break an ankle on his chase the night before.

The concierge for Passemier’s building lived two buildings away on the corner of Rue Victor Hugo and another alley that had not been deemed worthy of a name. She was a worn, middle-aged woman doing the washing outside her door in a large tin tub with a washboard.

“Have you been up there yet?” she asked, not stopping her washing.

“An officer was there earlier, and no one answered,” Letreau explained. “You see we have the warrant. We just need you to let us in.”

She was unconvinced. “I don’t know anything about a warrant. I’ve been concierge of this building, that one, and that other one,” she pointed with her chin, “for seven years now, and I’ve never seen anything about a warrant. Monsieur Passemier works out at the prison as a guard.”

Letreau blew out his cheeks, and then opened his mouth to speak, but Pelleter stepped forward. “Madame, I appreciate your caution. If all concierges were as cautious as you, then perhaps the police wouldn’t have as much work as we do.”

The woman narrowed her eyes, unsure if he was truly complimenting her or mocking her.

Pelleter wondered how close this spot was to where he had been beaten the night before. The concierge might have been one of the many nonexistent witnesses. “We don’t think that Monsieur Passemier is home or that there is any trouble in your building. But we need to ask Monsieur Passemier a few questions, and we were hoping that something in his apartment would tell us where he had gone.”

The concierge regarded Pelleter for another moment, pausing
in her scrubbing and blowing a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. She looked at Letreau. “That paper means I don’t have a choice, does it?”

Pelleter tried a kind smile and nodded an apology.

She began scrubbing again and nodded with her head towards the open door behind her. “All the keys are on the ring just inside the door. It’s got the number on it.”

Letreau went forward to find the keys, and Pelleter said, “Thank you.”

They waited awkwardly a moment while the woman continued washing, before Letreau came back with a key ring.

The two lawmen went partway down the alley, further from the main street that led to the hospital. The concierge watched them.

When they got to the door, which was a few steps below street level, they found it partially ajar.

“Guess we didn’t need the key after all,” Pelleter said.

“Damn it,” Letreau said. He looked at Pelleter. “What do we do?”

Martin had not said that the door had been opened, so either Passemier had been home when the officer had knocked and had since left, had come and gone in the meantime and forgotten to close the door, or the prison guard was home now and didn’t expect to be there long.

Pelleter pulled out his revolver, and, taking a deep breath, Letreau did the same. Then Pelleter pushed his way in.

“Hello!” Letreau called.

The apartment had the mustiness of a below-ground room. Pelleter wondered if it flooded when it rained, like the baker’s basement.

“I guess you don’t make much as a prison guard,” Letreau said, looking around.

“Or he didn’t have much reason to spend money on anything,” Pelleter said.

The flat was furnished with the barest of necessities, a few chairs, a table, a single shelf with assorted books. Everything was neat, because there was nothing to make it cluttered.

A hall opened off to the right at the back of the room, and there was an opening to the left. Pelleter nodded to the left at Letreau. Letreau turned for the opening, and Pelleter went towards the right.

The hall led to two small rooms, one that opened immediately to the right off of the hall and the other that opened straight ahead. The room to the right was a storage area. The man had accumulated some things over his lifetime, but whatever they were he had boxed away and stacked in this small space. Pelleter opened one of the boxes nearest to him and found that it was filled with newspapers. Another one had dime novels.

The room straight ahead was the bedroom. It was as spare as the others, but a chest of drawers had been emptied, the drawers left open. The bed cover had been thrown back from the bottom as though Passemier had retrieved something from below the bed. That would have been his suitcase. The night before he had planned to fight, but something had changed, and he was now clearly on the run. Had Soldaux been able to tip him off? Maybe it had just been his intuition.

Pelleter went back out into the living room and found Letreau holding a gray cat with a white speck off-center above its nose. “Look who I found enjoying a saucer of milk in the kitchen.”

Pelleter stepped over to the kitchen and glanced in. It was only large enough for a stove and an icebox. A layer of grime coated everything. A single skillet hung from a nail on the wall, and the saucer of milk was on the floor. It was still mostly full. Passemier must have left only moments before. That was why the door was open. If he wasn’t coming back, then the cat needed a way to get out.

“The warden said that Passemier didn’t have a car,” Pelleter said, back in the living room. “How would he have gotten to work?”

“Many of the guards share a ride.”

“So we need to get a list of which guards have cars, and start checking them. He’s definitely running for it.” They had to keep moving. He took out his notebook, wrote something there, and tore off the sheet. Then he went for the door. “Come on.”

Once outside, he put the note between the door and the jamb, closing the door and locking it. In the distance, the faint sound of the midday train’s whistle sounded. The two men shared a look, but said nothing.

They stopped back at the concierge’s where the woman was still at her washing. There were a few more articles of clothing on a line overhead, but otherwise no time might have passed.

“Here are the keys and a friend,” Letreau said, taking both into her apartment.

“What are you doing with that? I can’t have a cat in there!”

“Did you see Passemier in the past half-hour?” Pelleter asked.

“No. I thought you said he wasn’t home.”

“Let the police know if he comes back. He’ll know you have his cat, we left a note.”

“Is he dangerous?” the concierge said, for the first time showing real concern now that she had been given a responsibility.

The two men turned without answering.

“What am I supposed to do with the cat if he doesn’t come back?”

Letreau had given his men orders to report in every hour. When he and Pelleter returned to the police station they found that nothing had changed. Lambert had also reported. The midday train had passed without incident. Letreau went to find out from the warden which of the guards had cars, and who Passemier was most likely to trust.

Pelleter sat in one of the waiting room chairs, pulling on his lips, and occasionally putting his fingertips to the bruise on his cheek. All eyes in the police station were on him, but he ignored the attention. He was bothered by a sense that they were on the wrong track, that Passemier, while brutal, was not stupid, and that he would know not to trust any of the other prison guards. After all, while the lines were perhaps hard to see at times, in the end, the prison guards were on the side of the law, not crime.

The chief inspector bowed his head. He thought of the saucer of milk laid out for the cat. Passemier was not a sentimental man—the meager furnishings in his apartment indicated that—but he was a responsible man. Perhaps that was why he had stayed to the last minute, out of an obligation to see the whole thing through.

And that saucer of milk had still been full. The man was still close. They could not afford to search a list of people. They needed to know where he was going, and be certain of it.

Pelleter rolled his shoulders, the bruise on the top of his spine turning white hot for a moment, and he winced. The Verargent gendarmes continued to watch. He imagined them
thinking, This is a real policeman. Injured in the line of duty and still going on. But what was the alternative?

Pelleter looked back towards the hall leading to the holding cell. Where was Letreau?

Pelleter reviewed the precautions they had taken, roadblocks and the train station. The Perreaux boys had been found in the middle of a field. Why wouldn’t Passemier just walk around the roadblocks that way and try to catch a ride further on down the road?

Letreau arrived with the list. “There are only ten of them, and two are at the prison now. I just called.”

“Good,” Pelleter said. “Put some men on it. Then get the word out. We need to organize a search, like you did for the children, and we need to do it now.”

Letreau puffed out his cheeks, “Right.”

“He was still in town within the hour.”