The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [88]
Suddenly he glimpsed his pants hanging over the back of the chair by the window table and lunged for them. As he did, his bad leg gave way and he cried out. For a mordent he glimpsed the ceiling. Then the floor hit him in the back. For a moment he just lay there. Then he heard someone sob and his vision blurred and he couldn’t see. “I just want to go home. Please,” he heard someone say. There was confusion because the voice was his own, only it was much younger, and it was choked with tears. Desperately he rolled his head, looking for Vera, but he saw nothing but unfocused gray light.
“Vera—Vera—” He cried out, suddenly terrified something had happened to his eyes. “Vera!”
Somewhere, somewhere near, he heard a thumping. It was a sound he didn’t recognize. Then he felt a hand slide through his hair and he realized he was leaning against her breast and what he was hearing was the beat of her heart In time he became aware of the rhythm of his own breathing. And he had the sense that she was on the floor with him, and had been for some time. That she was holding him and rocking him gently in her arms. Still his vision hadn’t cleared and he didn’t know why. It was then he realized he was crying.
“You’re certain this is the man?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“You, too?”
“Oui.”
Lebrun dropped the Paris police mug shots of Osborn on his desk and looked at McVey.
The detectives had left the park by the river and were on their way back into the city when the call came in. McVey, listening to the French, had heard the names Osborn and Merriman but couldn’t understand what was being said about them. When the transmission was finished, Lebrun signed off and translated.
“We ran Osborn’s photo alongside the Merriman story in the paper. The manager of a golf clubhouse saw it and remembered an American that looked something like Osborn had come out of the river near his golf course this morning. He’d given him coffee and let him use the phone. He thought it might be the same man.”
Now, with the identification of the photos, there was no question that it was indeed Osborn who had come out of the river.
Pierre Levigne, manager of the clubhouse, had been reluctantly dragged in by a friend. Levigne had not wanted to get involved, but his friend warned him that this was about murder and that he could get in a great deal of trouble if he didn’t report it.
“Where is he now? What happened to him? Who did he call?” McVey asked, and Lebrun translated in French.
Levigne still didn’t want to talk, but his friend pushed him. Finally he agreed, but on the condition the police keep his name out of the papers. “All I know is that a woman came to pick him up and he went off with her.”
Two minutes later, thanked and praised for their keen sense of civic responsibility, Levigne and his friend left, escorted out by a uniformed officer. As the door closed behind them, McVey looked at Lebrun.
“Vera Monneray.”
Lebrun shook his head. “Barras and Maitrot have already talked to her. She hadn’t seen Osborn and never heard of Albert Merriman or his alter ego Henri Kanarack.”
“Come on, Lebrun. What’d you think she was going to say?” McVey said, cynically. “They get a look around her apartment?”
Lebrun paused, then said, matter-of-factly, “She was on her way out for the evening. They met her in the lobby of her building.”
McVey groaned and looked at the ceiling. “Lebrun. Forgive me if I’m stepping all over your modus operandi, but you’ve got Osborn’s picture in the paper and half of France shaking the walls to find him and you’re telling me nobody bothered to check out his girlfriend’s apartment!”
Lebrun answered by not answering. Instead he picked up the telephone and ordered a team of inspectors to search the area where Osborn came out of the river for the murder weapon. Then he hung up and deliberately lit a cigarette.
“Anybody happen to ask where she was going?” McVey was trying to control his temper.
Lebrun looked at him blankly.
“You said she was going out.