The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [91]
“Albert Merriman was a criminal, in the dirt of a dirty business. You think they’d chance killing a policeman?”
“Why don’t you take another peek at what’s left of Albert Merriman. Count the entry and exit wounds and see how they’re arranged. Then ask yourself the same question.”
48
* * *
VERA WAS waiting for the elevator when McVey and Lebrun came in. She watched them cross the lobby toward her.
“You must be Inspector Lebrun,” she said, looking at his cigarette. “Most Americans have quit smoking. The doorman gave me your card. What can I do for you?”
“Oui, mademoiselle,” Lebrun said, then reached over and awkwardly put out his cigarette in a stone ashtray beside the elevator.
“Parlez-vous anglais” McVey asked. It was late, well after midnight. Obviously Vera knew who they were and why they were there.
“Yes,” she said, making eye contact with him.
Lebrun introduced McVey as an American policeman working with the Paris Préfecture of Police.
“How do you do?” Vera said.
“Doctor Paul Osborn. I think you know him.” McVey was putting niceties aside.
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Vera glanced from McVey to Lebrun, then back to McVey. “Perhaps it would be better if we talked in my apartment.”
The elevator was old and small and lined with polished copper. It felt like a tiny room in which every wall was a mirror. McVey watched as Vera leaned forward and pressed a button. The doors closed, there was a deep whir, the gears caught and the threesome rode up in silence. That Vera was poised and beautiful and had been unruffled in the lobby didn’t impress him. After all, she was the mistress of France’s most important minister. That in itself had to be an education in cool. But inviting them to her apartment showed moxie. She was letting them know she had nothing to hide, whether she did or not. That made one thing certain. If Paul Osborn had been there, he wouldn’t be there now.
The elevator took them up one story. At the second floor, Vera pulled the door open herself, then led the way down the corridor toward her apartment.
It was now a quarter past midnight. At eleven thirty-five she had at last pulled the covers over a thoroughly spent Paul Osborn, turned on a small electric space heater to keep him warm, and left the room hidden under the eaves at the top of the building. A steep and narrow staircase inside a plumbing soffit led to a storage locker that opened into an alcove on the fourth floor.
Vera had just stepped out of the locker and was turning back to lock the storage closet when she thought of the police. If they had been there earlier, there was every chance they would come back, especially when they would have had no word of Osborn. They’d want to question her again, ask if she’d heard anything in the mean time, probe to see if maybe they’d missed something or if she was covering up.
The first time they’d come she’d told them she was on her way out. What if they were outside now, watching for her to come back? And what if they didn’t see her come back and later found her asleep in her apartment? If that happened, the first thing they would do would be to search the building. Certainly the attic room was hidden, but not so well that some of the older police who had fathers and uncles in the Resistance against the Nazis wouldn’t remember such hiding places and begin to look beyond the obvious.
Assuming she was right about the police, Vera took the service stairs to the street behind the building and telephoned the lobby from a public phone on the corner. Philippe not only confirmed her suspicions but read her Lebrun’s card. Warning him to say nothing if the police Came back, she’d crossed Quai des Celestins, turned down the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville and entered the Métro station at Pont Marie. Taking the line one stop to Sully Morland, she’d emerged from the station and hailed a cab back to her apartment on Quai de Bethune. The whole thing had taken less than thirty minutes.
“Come in, gentlemen, please,” she said, opening the door and turning