by Howard Engel
“You could write standing on your head, Goofo, if you wanted to.”
“Did you hear that Wad captured Jack de Paris this afternoon? Almost singlehanded.”
“Waddington did what?” I repeated what I’d said and added a few details. “That’s amazing,” Georgia said. “I never took him for a real he-man at all. I thought he was bluff from head to toe. Well, Goofo, I’d better get my opinions dry-cleaned.”
If Georgia let the matter drop there, Wilson wanted to hear about it all over again. He became as excited as a racing fan at the track with a wad on the dark horse.
“We’ve got to get over there and congratulate him! Come on, Georgia. Drink up and put your hat back on.”
Wilson made his excuses to the others at the table and settled with the waiter for his share of the expected bill. The women at the table scarcely interrupted their conversation. Perhaps they had never heard of Jack de Paris. It was certain the name Waddington was unknown to them. Wilson sent a waiter out into the avenue Jean Jaurès to flag down a taxi. He returned after three minutes, smiling.
Twenty minutes later, Wilson, Georgia and I were coming down the stairs from the Waddington apartment on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Mme. Rohrbach was there minding Snick. She had no idea where the Waddingtons might be. Discouraged, we looked along both sides of boulevard Montparnasse into the bright interiors of the cafés. No sign of the Waddingtons. But we did meet with some of his old gang: Lady Biz and George Gordon were sitting at the Rotonde. They had heard the news and decided to join us in running down the hero of the hour, or at least one of the heroes of several hours ago. When I think about it now, I might have made a better case for my share of the victory, but I was perhaps depending on Wad to share the laurels with me.
We found him, as you might well have expected, at the Dingo, telling his story while Hash and Julia looked up at him from each side. Youpi, the wife of the owner, herself brought the drinks. Freddy left the bar for a moment and slipped into a chair near Anson and Tolstoi to hear better. Arlette La Motte looked equally rapt by the story. Julia was looking up at her god and Wad was playing the scene to her. Hash was quiet and tense. At our appearance, Wad interrupted his tale.
“And here’s the man himself!” he said. “If Mike, here, hadn’t been there, I would never have thought of tackling the fellow. Michaeleen gave me the moral support that was needed. He even lent his belt for tying up the man’s legs, so that when the police finally came, we had a neatly trussed bundle for them. If there wasn’t the formality of a trial to go through, they could have taken him to the boulevard Arago just as he was: properly pinioned for the national barber.”
There was a little fuss as we arranged the seating. Biz sat near Anson, who gave her a friendly peck on the cheek. George demanded his favourite Scotch from Freddy, who got up to see if there was any. For the moment, the resentment and bitter feeling between Wad and his gang was forgotten. From his perch on the edge of the table, Wad was certainly enjoying himself. For the benefit of the newcomers, he went back on his track to first of all discover what they knew and then to paint the picture for them again, beginning with the mobs of police in the Place de Rennes in front of the station. He was a wonderful storyteller. At times he seemed to be inside the consciousness of the fugitive. He contrasted him with a charging bull during a corrida. He seemed to favour the dumb charging of the animal over the devious movements of the killer. Certainly he didn’t miss a possibility in telling the story. I found that he made it more exciting to hear about than to have actually been present at. All eyes were on him as he spoke. Nobody saw Harold Leopold slip into the Dingo and come up to the table. Nobody saw that he was holding a gun in his hand until he’d fired off a round into the floor.
CHAPTER 26
Now hold on, Hal! Let’s talk this over, damn it!”
“What’s the point, Wad? You’ve done what you pleased with our lives. Why should I care about yours?”
Freddy had been making slow movements, trying to move as far as possible away from the centre of Hal’s focus. Then the gun went off again and everybody sat dead still.
“I’m not joking, everybody! Nobody’s going to get hurt if he sits still. My quarrel is with Waddington, nobody else. But I don’t want anybody to move until I’m finished. Sorry, Freddy. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Just stay seated and we’ll all get along just fine.” He leaned his back against one of the tables, then ordered Youpi to get him a drink with no “funny business.” She complied, making slow movements as she reached for the glass and bottle. There was a sound of glass clinking against glass as she poured.
“This is a damned lousy way to act, Hal. Why don’t you and I settle this between ourselves? You don’t need to hold all of these people.” Wad was sounding like his version of the taking of Jack de Paris. There was more Douglas Fairbanks than Waddington in his manner.
“You’re very glib for a dead man, Waddington.”
A highlight of sweat had appeared above Wad’s eyebrows. When he spoke, he kept hitching the right side of his mouth up into that boyish smile of his. His moustache seemed to quiver as he talked.
“I hope you’re not still angry about that book of mine, Hal, because I’ve had second thoughts about that.”
“Keep talking. Not that I’m going to believe you, Wad. A rat will try to lie his way out of a tight corner.”
“Well, you can decide whether I’m lying or not. Look, I’ve had nothing but abuse from you people since I wrote that damned book. At first I thought I could ride it out, that the wind would change, but I was wrong. Then I started seeing it from your side. You have to give me credit for that, George. I tried to see how I would like it if Jason Waddington exposed me as a drunken bankrupt.”
“Steady on, old man. There are friendlier ways of saying that.”
“And I was worried about the ethics of showing Biz going off with you, Hal, and then going off with a bullfighter.”
“Bullfighter?” Biz looked open-eyed with surprise.
“Yes. I didn’t tell you about that part. You see, I am a bloody writer of fiction. I do have to make up some of it. That’s why you run off with a bullfighter. You would have liked him, Biz. Only the best for you.”
“Get back to the point, Wad. You’re drifting.”
“Right. Well, you know the next step, Hal, because I have you to thank for it. You set me up with your publisher in New York. That excited me. After all, being published in Paris is one thing, but New York means the best-seller lists and money and financial independence. If you’ve got a minute, I could say a word or two about what I think about the life we’ve been leading for the last five years. Poverty stinks, Hal. You’ll never know that. Even George, here, with all his problems, won’t ever know what it’s like to sleep on the floor and eat the way Hash and I have since we got married. You don’t know what it’s like to save centimes and cadge drinks.”
“What’s this got to do with me? Keep talking, but make sense.”
“It’ll just take another minute, Hal. You see, with your publisher in New York, I could have been set up for life. Never have to worry again about who was going to redeem the pile of saucers on the table at the Dôme, never have to avoid the look in Mme. Select’s eye.”
“You’re wasting time again,” Hal said, raising the muzzle of the gun.
“Boni and Liveright brought out my first book in the States. All thanks to you, Hal. The contract was for three books. If I sent them the Spanish book you’re all so set against, it would probably come out in the spring. But you didn’t want that. After a lot of thought, I put together a book that Boni and Liveright will reject. A different book.”
“Reject? How the hell do you know that?”
“Put a lot of rough stuff in it, did you, old man? Lots of bums and —” Biz grabbed George’s arm and he shut up.
“What I put in the book was a satirical description of their top writer. They can’t publish that, and that voids the contract. Sherwood Anderson is their ace wri
ter of the moment, now into the tenth printing of his last book. Are they going to let some upstart from Oak Park spoil that, Hal? You give me the answer.”
“Why are you doing this for us?”
“I could say it’s because of friendship, but you wouldn’t believe that. So maybe you’ll believe me when I say it’s for business reasons. I don’t want to become known as a writer who kidnaps his friends into his novels. I’d be isolated. Nobody’d ever talk to me again. Mike, you reminded me about that, and it made me think.”
“So, you want us to believe that you purposely scuttled your book because of us?”
“I didn’t say that, Hal. What I said was that I didn’t want to get a bad name in the business. Damn it, I don’t want to earn my reputation in the law courts. I don’t want to be the best-known writer ever to be convicted of criminal libel. I want my stuff to be judged as a book, not as a slice of your life or anybody else’s.”
“So the Spanish novel is not going to be published?”
“I can guarantee that Boni and Liveright will wash their hands of me. My satire on Anderson’s a contract-breaker, Hal. You know what that is.”
“They’re not the only American publishers, old man,” said George.
“They are the only ones who’ve ever heard of me. You’ve got as much chance of being taken on by one of the others as I have. Do you think that I’d pass up a sure thing hoping to make a better deal elsewhere, George? You’re a gambling man. Are they odds you’d like to play?”
Hal had steadily been lowering his gun. At last it was no longer pointing at Waddington’s liver. He looked as though he was beginning to believe Wad’s account of his motives. The rest of the group looked convinced as well. There was a moment when the room seemed to draw a collective breath. And then suddenly a hand reached out and took the gun out of Hal Leopold’s hand. It was Léon Zamaron. Nobody had seen him come into the room. Nobody knew how long he had been standing behind Hal or how much of what had passed he had witnessed. He removed the ammunition and returned the gun to its owner.
“My friends, may I suggest that we all sit down,” he said. I could make out the shape of a plainclothes policeman standing near the door. He wasn’t as obvious as his Toronto counterpart might have been, but he was not hard for any journalist, even a neophyte, to spot.
“M. Briggs,” Zamaron said to Freddy. “Why don’t you pour for each of us a drink?” Zamaron nodded to several of us, and to me as well. Slowly, he manoeuvered a chair so that it joined the group at the table. If this were just a matter of laying a firearms charge against Hal, why didn’t he get on with it? I wondered.
“By now, no doubt, you know of the great success of Messieurs Ward and Waddington. Of course, they are to be congratulated for the capture of this desperate wanted man, whom we now know to be called Christian Caron. We are slowly putting together a picture of the man’s life and the workings of his mind. This, happily, is none of my concern. It is in the excellent hands of my police colleagues.” Zamaron was leaning back in his chair, speaking in a brand of French he reserved for foreigners. His idioms were clear and focused, his selection of words and constructions perfectly clear, even to George, who often had difficulty expressing himself in what he called “that objectionable jargon.” Freddy brought drinks to the table.
“Are we all under arrest, M. Zamaron? Why is that man standing at the door?” Arlette demanded in a staccato voice that sounded like fingernails on slate. This was the first time she had spoken in some time.
“Mlle La Motte, please try to understand my position. I have for many years carried responsibility for the good behaviour of foreigners. The Prefect of the Seine appointed me himself. On the whole, since the war, you have made my job easy. Once in a while, however, I must stop looking at my beloved paintings and become a policeman again. Au fond, I am an agent, a sergent de ville, a gardien de la paix, a flic, no? We may be as common as the sparrows on the boulevards, but we all have our jobs to do. Mine is to try to find out what I can about the murder of Laure Duclos, whom you all knew.”
“But you have Jack locked up at the commissariat. Isn’t that enough?”
“Unfortunately, M. Pease, it would appear that the brutal murder of Mlle Duclos was not the work of Christian Caron.”
“And may a chap ask how you know this?”
“Lady Leighton, in the Paris police we have produced no geniuses, unless you count Vidocq, the first thief-taker known to French history, but we are not all stupid, either. Rather, we muddle along. Sometimes we are lucky, as in the killing of Laure Duclos, whose death was superficially made to look like the work of M. Jack. The killer of Mlle Duclos, fortunately for us, did not know all of the details that we have found at the scenes of the other killings. Details — I will not mention them in appreciation of the fact that there are ladies present — that group all of the murders together as the work of one madman. Perhaps we will prove that madman was M. Caron. But, one of those crimes was not the work of this madman, whomever he proves to be! Because the same details were not present. These details constitute the fingerprints of our killer. When they do not appear . . .” Here Zamaron shrugged, letting us finish the sentence for ourselves. Anson and Arlette sipped their drinks. Biz whispered with George. Julia looked frightened, not for herself, but on behalf of Waddington, judging from the object she most often regarded.
“Tell me, M. Ward,” the Commissioner continued, “how is it that without our special knowledge you too began to believe that Jack was not the killer of Mlle Duclos?”
I was surprised that he brought me into it. I cleared my throat and began trying to sort through the ideas I’d had at the time.
“I had no proof, Monsieur le Commissaire. I had what we call ‘a hunch.’”
“Entirely respectable as a tool of the mind, Monsieur.”
“It seemed odd to me that someone who was a known blackmailer should so handily turn up as the random victim of a crazed murderer. It was too pat.”
“I sympathize with your hunch. But one must remember that in all detective work, the most obvious thing is very often what has happened. It is not very helpful to writers of novels or to playwrights, but that is the banal truth of police work.” He nodded at both Waddington and Wilson O’Donnell when he mentioned writers. The O’Donnells had not spoken since Hal Leopold began waving his gun around. Georgia’s eyes were bright with excitement; Wilson looked as if he were losing blood rapidly through an unseen wound.
“Thank you, Monsieur. I’ll remember that. I also remember what Dr. Tyler told me the night we carried Mr. O’Donnell home from a party. He said that Laure was an opium user. That connected her with a much bigger world than the tight little colony here in the Quarter. The drug business is centred on the Right Bank. The dealers that Laure knew might have killed her for any of a dozen reasons: she might have owed them money, she might have threatened them with blackmail.”
“So, you discarded your theory about the murder having been committed by one of her Montparnasse friends?”
“How well informed you are, M. Zamaron!”
“Alas, the paid informer is not a well-respected part of Anglo-Saxon culture, M. Ward. But since at least the days of Pépin the Short, the world here in France revolves around them. I make no apologies for French traditions, Monsieur. Did you replace your dead hypothesis with a more lively one?”
“Not exactly. I revived the dead one when I discovered that Arlette, our charming friend here, was related to Jean-Paul La Motte, the chief source of drugs, who works at Le Trou dans le Mur on the boulevard des Capucines.” Everybody looked at Arlette, who opened her mouth as though she were about to speak and then changed her mind. She began looking at her well-lacquered fingernails and avoiding all attempts to exchange glances.
“You see, Arlette joined the two worlds together again. There was no longer a Left Bank and a Right Bank focus to the crime. It was the same focus. The part of the story that involved drugs was simply part of whatever happened on Montparnasse among
the people Laure was blackmailing.”
“We know that she was blackmailing M. Waddington,” Zamaron said, trying to be helpful.
“Now, look!” Wad cut in, “I don’t have to listen to my private life being dissected in public!” He was on his feet and looking very much like an outraged Rotarian, pinched for drinking after licensed hours in a strange town. “If you want to arrest me, go ahead! But I don’t have to sit here and take this!”
“M. Waddington, would you care to spend time with us at the commissariat? The questions will be the same — I promise you that — but the setting will be less agreeable.” Wad exhaled loudly, crossed his arms over his massive chest and at last sat down without saying another word.
“Continue, M. Ward.”
“It’s not my wish to get any of you into more trouble than you’re already in. Please believe me,” I said. “M. Zamaron?”
“Oui, Monsieur?”
“You are looking for a murderer, is that not correct?” Zamaron nodded. “Then we are not at all interested in smaller things: the smoking of opium, the reasons for blackmail and so on?”
“That is correct. What we say in this pleasant room will stay in this room. Only the murderer needs to be wary. But, I assure him, or her,” he said significantly, “that we will find you out whatever the cost. A little lost privacy is a small thing, a bagatelle, as you say in English.”
“If that is clear, Arlette,” I continued, “let’s begin with you. We are talking about murder and nothing but murder, you understand? Does your brother deal in drugs at Le Trou dans le Mur?”
“I don’t have to answer that.”
“Your family loyalty is admirable, Arlette. I’m sure we are all touched by it, but it isn’t helping us find our killer.”
“Try to think of me, Mademoiselle, not as a policeman, whose ears prick up at every breach of the Code Napoléon. Think of me as a specialist in murder. It is only facts about murder that interest me.”
