The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [46]
“I beg your pardon!” Osborn said, trying to cover dismay with anger.
“You weren’t alone.” McVey didn’t give him the chance for a second denial. “Young woman. Dark hair. About twenty-five, twenty-six. Her name is Vera Monneray. You had sex with her during a cab ride from Leicester Square to the Connaught Hotel last Saturday night.”
“Jesus Christ.” Osborn was stunned. How the police worked, what they knew and how they knew it was unfathomable. Finally, he nodded.
“She why you came to Paris?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose she was sick the entire time you were.”
“Yes, she was . . .”
“Know her long?”
“I met her in Geneva at the end of last week. She came with me to London. Then went to Paris. She’s a resident here.”
“Resident?”
“A doctor. She’s going to be a doctor.”
Doctor? McVey stared at Osborn. Amazing what you find out when you just poke around. So much for Lebrun and his “off limits.”
“Why didn’t you mention her?”
“I told you it was personal—”
“Doctor, she’s your alibi. She can verify how you spent your time in London—”
“I don’t want her dragged into this.”
“Why?”
Osborn felt the blood start to rise again. McVey was beginning to get personal with his accusations and, frankly, Osborn didn’t like the intrusion into his private life. “Look. You said you have no authority here. I don’t have to talk to you at all!”
“No, you don’t. But I think you might want to,” McVey said gently. “The Paris police have your passport. They can also charge you with aggravated assault if they want to. I’m doing them a favor. If they got the idea you were giving me a hard time about something, they might look a little differently at the idea of letting you go. Especially now, when your name has come up in conjunction with a murder.”
“I told you I had nothing to do with that!”
“Maybe not,” McVey said. “But you could sit around a French jail for a long time until they decided to agree.”
Osborn suddenly felt as if he’d just been pulled out of a washing machine and was about to be shoved into the dryer. All he could do was back down. “Maybe, if you told me what you were really getting at, I could help,” he said.
“A man was murdered in London the weekend you were there. I need you to verify what you were doing and when. And Ms. Monneray seems to be the only person who can do that. But obviously you’re very reluctant to involve her—and just by doing that you are involving her. If you’d rather, I can have the Paris police pick her up and we can all have a chat down at headquarters.”
Up until that moment Osborn had been doing everything he could to keep Vera out of this. But if McVey carried through on his threat, the media would find out. If they did, the whole thing—his link to Jean Packard, his and Vera’s clandestine stay in London, Vera’s own story and whom she was seeing—would become front-page entertainment. Politicians could do what they wanted with starlets and bimbos and the worst that could happen would be that they’d lose an election or an appointment, while their consorts would be featured on the covers of exploitation papers in every supermarket in the world, most probably in a bikini. But a woman on the verge of becoming a physician was something entirely different The public didn’t like the idea of its doctors being that human, so, if McVey pushed it, there was every chance Vera would not only lose her residency but her career as well. Blackmail or not, so far McVey had kept what he knew between himself and Osborn and he was offering to let it stay that way.
“It’s—” Osborn started, then cleared his throat. “It’s—” Suddenly he realized McVey had inadvertently opened a door. Not only for the Jean Packard matter, but for Osborn to find out how much the police knew.
“It’s what?