The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [5]
“Yes.” Maitrot leaned over and twisted his cigarette into an ashtray on the table between them. “Why did you do it?”
Osborn sat up straight and told the lie again. “I came into Charles de Gaulle Airport from London.” He had to be careful and not make any changes from what he’d said to his previous interrogators. “The man roughed me up in the men’s room and tried to steal my wallet.”
“You look fit. Was he a big man?”
“Not particularly. He just wanted my wallet.”
“Did he get it?”
“No. He ran away.”
“Did you report it to airport authorities?”
“NO.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t steal anything and I don’t speak French very well, as you can tell.”
Maitrot lit another cigarette and flipped the spent match into the ashtray. “And then later, by sheer coincidence, you saw him in the same brasserie where you had stopped for a drink?”
“Yes.”
“What were you going to do, hold him for the police?”
“To tell you the truth, Inspector, I don’t know what the hell I was going to do. I just did it. I got mad. I lost my head.”
Osborn stood up and looked off while Maitrot made a note in the folder. What was he going to tell him? That the man he had chased had stabbed his father to death in Boston, Massachusetts, the United States of America, on Tuesday, April 12, 1966? That he saw him do it and had never seen him again until just a few hours ago? That the Boston police had listened with great compassion to the horror tale of a little boy and then spent years trying to track the killer down until finally they admitted there was nothing more they could do? Oh yes, the procedures had been correct. The crime scene and technical analysis, the autopsy, the interviews. But the boy had never seen the man before, and his mother couldn’t place him from the boy’s description, and since there had been no fingerprints on the murder weapon, and the weapon nothing more than a supermarket knife, the police had had to rely on the only thing they had, the testimony of two other eyewitnesses. Katherine Barnes, a middle-aged sales clerk who worked at Jordan Marsh, and Leroy Green, a custodian at the Boston Public Library. Both had been on the sidewalk at the time of the attack and each had told slight variations of the same story as the boy. But in the end, the police had exactly what they had in the beginning. Nothing. Finally Kevin O’Neil, the brash young homicide detective who’d befriended Paul and been on the case from the start, was killed by a suspect he’d testified against, and the George Osborn file went from a personally handled homicide investigation to simply another unsolved murder crammed into central files alongside hundreds of others. And now, three decades later, Katherine Barnes was in her eighties, senile and in a nursing home in Maine, and Leroy Green was dead. That made, for all intents, Paul Osborn the last surviving witness. And for a prosecutor, any prosecutor, thirty years after the fact, to expect a jury to convict a man on the testimony of the victim’s son who had been ten at the time, and had glimpsed the suspect for no more than two or three seconds, would be lunatic. The truth was the killer had simply gotten away with it. And tonight in a Paris jail that truth still reigned because even if Osborn could convince the police to try to track the man down and arrest him, he would never be brought to trial. Not in France, not in America, not anywhere, in a million years. So why tell the police? It would do no good and might only complicate things later, if by some twist of fortune, Osborn was able to find him