The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [114]
The man was the owner of Brasserie Stella and within fifteen minutes two of the three waiters who had wrestled Osborn off Henri Kanarack the night of Osborn’s attack were assembled in the manager’s office looking at the sketch of Albert Merriman.
The first looked at it. “Oui,” he said, then handed it to the second. The second studied it for a moment, then gave it back to McVey.
“L ‘homme.” He nodded. The man.
Los Angeles.
“Robbery-Homicide, Hernandez,” the voice had answered. Rita Hernandez was young and sexy. Too sexy for a cop. At twenty-five she had three kids, a husband in law School, and was the newest, and probably brightest, detective in the department,
“Buenas tardes, Rita.”
“McVey! Where the hell are you?” Rita leaned back in her chair and grinned.
“I am the hell in Paris, France.” McVey sat down on the bed in his hotel room and pulled off a shoe. Eight forty-five at night in Paris was 12:45 in the afternoon in L.A.
“Paris? You want me to come be with you? I’ll leave my husband, my kids, everything. Pleeeeze, McVey!”
“You wouldn’t like it here.”
“Why not?”
“Not one decent tortilla, at least that I’ve found. Not like you make, anyway.”
“The hell with tortillas. I’ll take a brioche.”
“Hernandez, I need a comprehensive sheet pulled on an orthopedic surgeon from Pacific Palisades. You got time?”
“Bring me back a brioche.”
At 8:53 McVey hung up, used his key to open the “honor bar” and found what he was looking for, a half bottle of the Sancerre he’d had when he’d stayed in the room the last time. Whether he liked it or not, French wine was beginning to grow on him.
Opening the wine, he poured half a glass, took off his other shoe and put his feet up on the bed.
What were they looking for? What had Osborn wanted with Merriman so badly that after the initial attack and Merriman’s escape he’d gone to the trouble and expense of hiring a private detective to find him?
It was possible that Merriman had somehow provoked Osborn in Paris. Maybe Osborn’s story about Merriman’s roughing him up in the airport and trying to take his wallet was true. But McVey doubted it, because Osborn’s attack on Merriman in the brasserie had been too sudden and too violent. Hot-tempered as Osborn was, he was still a physician and smart enough to know you didn’t assault people in public in foreign countries without risking all kinds of repercussions, especially if all the man had done was try and shake you down for your wallet.
So, unless Merriman had done something so outrageous as to provoke Osborn’s anger earlier that same day, it seemed reasonable to look for something else. Which was what his gut told him. That whatever was between them had happened in the past.
But why would a doctor in L.A. have a tie to a professional killer who’d faked his own death and been out of sight for almost three decades, the last ten years of it hiding in France as Henri Kanarack? As far as Lebrun had been able to find out, Merriman, as Henri Kanarack, had been clean the entire time. That meant that whatever relationship existed between Osborn and Merriman had to have begun when Merriman was still in the States.
Getting up, McVey went to the writing table and pulled open his briefcase. Finding the notes he’d made from his conversations with