The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [47]
“The reason I hired a private investigator,” Osborn said. It was a deliberate lie but he had to take the chance. The police would have been through every piece of paper Jean Packard had in his home or office, but he knew Packard wrote almost nothing down. So they had to be looking for any lead they could find and they didn’t care how they did it, even to sending an American cop to shake him down.
“She has a lover. She didn’t want me to know. And I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t followed her to Paris. When she told me I got mad. I asked her who he was but she wouldn’t tell me. So I decided to find out.” As clever and tough as he was, if McVey bought his story, it meant the police didn’t know a thing about Kanarack. And if they didn’t know, there was no reason Osborn still couldn’t go on with his plan.
“And Packard found out for you.”
“Yes.”
“You want to tell me?”
Osborn waited just long enough for McVey to get the idea it was painful for him to talk about it. Then he said, softly, “She’s screwing the French prime minister.”
McVey looked at Osborn for a moment. It was the right answer, the one he’d been looking for. If Osborn was holding something back, McVey didn’t know what it was.
“I’ll get over it. One day I’m sure I’ll even laugh about it. But not now.” Osborn’s reply was reasonable, even sentimental. “That personal enough for you?”
24
* * *
MCVEY LEFT the hotel and crossed the street to his car with his gut telling him two things about Osborn: first, that he had nothing to do with the London murder, and second that he really cared about Vera Monneray, no matter whom she was sleeping with.
Closing the Opel’s door, McVey put on his seat belt and started the engine. Turning on the wipers against what seemed an incessant rain, he made a U-turn and headed back in the direction of his hotel. Osborn hadn’t reacted any differently than most people do when questioned by the police, especially when they’re innocent. The emotional arc usually went from shock, to fear, to indignation and most often ended either in anger—sometimes with threats to sue the detective, sometimes the entire police department—or in a polite exchange where the cop explains his questioning was nothing personal, that he just had a job to do, apologizes for intruding and leaves. Which is what he’d done.
Osborn wasn’t his man. Vera Monneray he might put in his book as a long shot, someone with medical training; and along with it probably some surgical experience. In that respect she fit the profile and she had been in London; when the last murder had taken place, but she and Osborn would be each other’s alibi for what they’d done there. They might have been sick, as Osborn said, or they might have spent the entire time diddling each other, and if she’d gone out for an hour or two, no one at the hotel had seen her, and Osborn, because he thought he loved her, would: cover for her even if she had. Moreover, he was sure if he: ran her she’d almost certainly come up clean with no pOlice record at all. Pushing it any further it would only serve to put Lebrun in a bad light and could end up embarrassing not only the entire department but probably the whole of France.
The rain came down harder and McVey worried that he knew no more about the headless slayings now than he did when he’d started more than three weeks ago. But unless you got a break fast, that was usually the way. It was the thing about homicide. The endless details, the hundreds of false, leads that had to be followed, gone back over, followed again. The reports, the paperwork, the countless interviews that intruded on strangers’ lives. Sometimes you got lucky; mostly you didn’t. People got angry with you and you couldn’t blame them. How many times had he been asked why he did it? Gave his life to this kind of ugly, infuriating and morbidly gruesome job? Usually he just shrugged and said that one day he woke up and realized that’s what he did for a living. But inside he knew, and that’s why he did it. He didn’t know where it came from in him or how he got it. But he knew what it was.