The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [92]
McVey closed the door behind them and followed. To the left, in the semidarkness, he saw what looked like a formal dining room. Down the hall to the right was an open door to another room, and opposite it another open door. Everywhere he looked he saw antique furniture and oriental rugs. Even the runner in the long hallway was oriental.
The living room was nearly twice as long as it was wide. A large Art Deco poster framed in gold leaf—a Mucha, if McVey remembered his art history—covered most of the far end wall. And the one word that sang from it was “original.” To one side, opposite a long white linen couch, was an old-fashioned armchair that had been completely redone. The curlicue design of its arms and legs was the same handpainted multicolor as the fabric and it looked, for all the world, like it could have been “ lifted straight from the set of Alice in Wonderland. But it wasn’t a prop or a plaything, it was an objet d’art, another original.
Beyond that, with the exception of half-a-dozen carefully placed antiques and the rich oriental carpet, the room was purposefully spare. The wallpaper, a fibrous gold and silver brocade, was untarnished by the grime that in a city the size of Paris sooner or later tainted everything. The ceiling and woodwork were off-white and freshly painted. The entire room, and the rest of the apartment, he imagined, had the look of meticulous daily care.
Glancing out one of the two large windows that overlooked the Seine, he could see Lebrun’s white Ford parked across the street. That meant that someone else, standing where he was, could have seen it too. Seen it pull up and the lights go out, but nobody get out. That is, until Ms. Monneray’s cab pulled up and she went inside.
Vera turned on several lamps, then looked up to face her guests. “Could I offer you something to drink?” she said in French.
“I’d rather get to the point, if you don’t mind, Ms. Monneray,” McVey said.
“Of course,” Vera said in English. “Please sit down.”
Lebrun walked over and sat down on a white linen sofa, but McVey chose to stand.
“This is your apartment?” he asked.
“It belongs to my family.”
“But you live here alone.”
“Yes.”
“You were with Paul Osborn today. You picked him up in a car about twenty miles from here, at a golf course near Vernon.”
Vera was sitting in the Alice in Wonderland chair, and McVey was looking right at her. If the police knew that much, McVey knew she would be too smart to deny it.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
Vera Monneray was twenty-six, beautiful, poised, and on her way to becoming a doctor. Why was she risking a hard-fought and important career by protecting Osborn? Unless something was going on McVey had no idea about, or unless she was truly in love.
“Earlier, when you were questioned by the police you denied having seen Doctor Osborn.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Vera looked from McVey to Lebrun, then back to McVey. “I’ll be honest and tell you I was frightened, I didn’t know what to do.”
“He was here in the apartment, wasn’t he?” McVey said.
“No,” Vera said, coolly. “He wasn’t.” That was a lie it would be hard for them to catch. If she told the truth, they would want to know where he went from here and how he got there.
“Then you won’t mind if we look around?” Lebrun said.
“Not at all.” Everything in the guest room had been Cleaned and put away. The sheets and bloody towels she’d used when she pulled the bullet from Osborn’s leg had been folded and stored in the attic hiding place, the instruments sterilized and put back in her medical bag.
Lebrun got up and left the room. In the hallway he stopped to light his cigarette, then walked off.
“Why were you frightened?” McVey sat down in a straightbacked chair across from Vera.
“Doctor Osborn was hurt. He’d been in the river most of the night.”
“He killed a man named Albert Merriman. Did you know that?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Detective, I told you he was hurt. It was not so much by the river, but because he’d been shot. By the same man who did