Talking to Ghosts

by Hervé Le Corre

  He could hear machinery, men’s voices, banging, a plank falling, an engine starting up. A voice yelled down the line asking who was calling. When Vilar introduced himself, the man told him he was looking for a quieter place to talk because just now he was on a building site. And suddenly the racket faded and he stopped shouting.

  Vilar explained to him that a studio flat in his building on the cours Balguerie had been rented by a woman engaged in prostitution, and that he needed more information because there was no record among Nadia Fournier’s papers of any rent having been paid.

  “That’s probably because I never received any rent for that studio, monsieur.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Because it hasn’t been rented for the past seven or eight months. I’ve been planning to do some work on it – the place is old-fashioned and doesn’t meet the typical standard of luxury in the area. So, to be honest, I’m wondering what you’re talking about.”

  There was no trace of irritation in Monsieur Vacher’s tone. He sounded polite and surprised, and Vilar decided to be tactful because he sensed something was about to open up beneath his feet. Perhaps, as he expected, some kind of pit with an unpalatable truth at the bottom.

  “I am in your studio right now, Monsieur Vacher, with two forensics officers, because the person who was living here was murdered two months ago. Which is another reason I find this story of a phantom tenant a little hard to credit.”

  “She was murdered in the flat?” Vacher shrieked.

  “No. But she was present in the flat on various occasions, as I said earlier.”

  “This is dreadful. The poor girl … But she hadn’t been squatting, there was no forced entry? Nothing damaged?”

  “The place is immaculate. There’s not so much as a fingerprint.”

  “But I don’t get it. A.C.I. didn’t get in touch with me, something they usually do if they’ve rented out one of my properties. Honestly, I don’t …”

  “A.C.I.? And who are they?”

  “Aquitaine Conseil Immobilier. They’re reliable people, they manage all my properties. You have to understand, when you’re a property owner …”

  “Thierry Lataste runs the company, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he’s the managing director. Do you know him?”

  “A little.”

  Vilar cut short the conversation so he could calmly think things through. Before hanging up, Vacher expressed the hope that all this was not going to cause him any problems. Vilar reassured him, slipped the mobile back into his pocket and stared, without really seeing, at the two technicians packing away their equipment.

  “We haven’t got much,” Lopez said. “Couple of hairs, half a thumbprint … We ran the forensics vacuum to pick up any trace evidence, but I tell you, I’d like the telephone number of their cleaning woman, I’d give her a couple of hours’ work around my house. Even cleaned the U-bend, if you can believe that.”

  When they were gone, Vilar sat on the edge of the bed and looked around him at the banal décor: the wall at the head of the bed plastered with a huge poster of mountains, the thin, rough, royal blue carpet, the two armchairs upholstered in bottle-green velvet.

  He stood up and covered the bed that his colleagues had unmade in order to run the vacuum cleaner. A telephone rang and rang somewhere in the building, but no-one answered. Outside the window he saw a small courtyard with a climbing rose. Virginia creeper covered one wall. Somewhere a pigeon was cooing. Vilar looked up at the misty sky where the sun was already beginning to swelter. The room was pervaded by a vague smell of dust, dirty laundry and other things he did not recognise. He tried to imagine how things would play out with Lataste, struggled to find the words that would shut him up, preferably in front of witnesses so he would be forced to back down. He called directory enquiries for the number of A.C.I. and dialled it to make sure that Lataste was there.

  He was working in his glass-walled office which looked out onto five or six cubicles, divided with partitions, within which people were busy making money for the business. He recognised Vilar immediately, blushed and leapt to his feet to come and meet him, hand outstretched, a cardboard smile pasted on his face. The policeman was about to take out his I.D. when Lataste moved to stop him, assuring him that he recognised him, that there was no need, glancing around him, but Vilar ignored the gesture and flashed his warrant card. “Commandant Vilar, police,” he said, and felt a wave ripple around the office and in each cubicle voices dropped to a whisper or fell silent, the click of fingers on computer keyboards slowed.

  Lataste led him into his office and closed the door. He offered Vilar a seat, sat down himself and the smile vanished from his face like a mask that had suddenly crumbled to dust.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  He seemed genuinely worried. He was better at feigning panic than nonchalance and Vilar felt like wiping the stage make-up from his face.

  “Did I hear you right?” he said. “You’re asking me what’s going on?”

  “Of course! You show up here unannounced, let everyone know you’re with the police, trying to embarrass me a little more, so I think I’ve got the right to know why, don’t you?”

  Vilar stared at him hard, at once puzzled and astonished. He did not know whether this guy had the nerve of a true gangster or whether he was completely reckless and stupid.

  “Are you familiar with a studio apartment at 145 cours Balguerie belonging to Monsieur Jean-Philippe Vacher? I’m guessing you remember Nadia Fournier, with whom you had a relationship for several months and who was murdered early in June? Well, this is what’s going on: we’ve just discovered that Nadia was using that studio flat to meet clients, because as I’m sure you’re aware she frequently worked as a prostitute. And we discovered that she paid no rent for that studio flat because, apparently, it was provided to her by Aquitaine Conseil Immobilier. And since I suppose you are the only person at A.C.I. who knew her, I have inferred, somewhat simplistically I’ll grant you, that you may have, let’s say, committed a breach of normal practice in your profession and loaned this studio, located in a building managed by you, to Nadia, so that you could meet her there and so that she could more easily carry on her professional activities. Do you have any comment you would like to make? Have I made any mistakes, left anything out?”

  He reeled off this long speech without pause, knowing that in doing so he was suffocating Lataste. The man had slumped back in his seat, arms clamped to the armrests, and was staring at the calendar hanging on the wall behind Vilar.

  “Monsieur Lataste?”

  “No, no mistake. It’s all true.”

  He took a paperclip from the desk which he began bending and twisting.

  “So what’s the problem?” he asked after a few seconds.

  Vilar shivered. An ominous shudder ran down his back and through his limbs. He wanted to step around the desk and slap this son of a bitch. Or maybe smash his face. Violently. Leave him bruised and battered on the floor, blood streaming from his mouth, his nose broken. He took a deep breath then got to his feet and opened the door.

  “The problem,” Vilar said in a loud, clear voice, “is that in the eyes of the law you are a pimp. To be more precise, you are the pimp of a murdered woman and that makes you an obvious suspect. And there’s more: I believe you lied to me during our first interview to conceal the fact you were implicated in this murder. That’s the problem. So now, you’re going to get up and come with me to the police station where I plan to detain you for questioning. Now, Monsieur Lataste, I’d be grateful if you could come with me without offering any resistance.”

  Vilar took out his handcuffs and showed them to the man who got to his feet, deathly pale, his face glistening.

  “Couldn’t you spare me that?” he whispered.

  Vilar gestured for him to put his hands behind his back.

  “I could, but I don’t want to. I don’t trust you an inch and the only respect I owe you is that set down by law for the treatme
nt of suspects.”

  The man turned around and proffered his wrists. Vilar snapped the handcuffs shut.

  When they got to the station, Vilar led Lataste to his office, empty at this hour, and handcuffed him to the wall, then went to ask where he might find Daras. He was told that she had rushed off to the quai de la Souys because the headless body of a woman had been discovered on the riverbank. Vilar remembered the body that had been found by a rambler by the river behind a shopping centre in Bègles. The woman, who was very young, had been decapitated, almost certainly with an axe given the deep impact wounds on her shoulders and upper back. They had still not managed to identify her. Daras had come to the conclusion that she was probably a prostitute from Eastern Europe, but their investigations among the pimps and the working girls in Bordeaux had led to nothing more than a handful of undocumented immigrants being deported, something even the requirements of an ongoing police inquiry had been unable to prevent.

  Vilar found Lataste leaning against the wall next to the metal ring to which he was handcuffed, massaging his wrist with a grimace of pain.

  “O.K.,” Vilar said. “Let’s get this over with quickly because I think you’ve wasted enough of my time already. Question one: why did you lie to me the last time we spoke?”

  “Because I was scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “Yes, scared. Do you never get scared?”

  “No. Never. Now answer my question: why did you lie?”

  “When I found out Nadia was dead, I knew my whole life could come crashing down. My wife, my kids … I knew I’d ruined everything and I was terrified of losing it all … I don’t know … I was trying to put on a brave face, slip through the net maybe.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “At thirty-six, you’re still behaving like a kid who thinks that if he covers his eyes no-one can see him, is that it?”

  Lataste looked down. He was still rubbing his wrists. Vilar got to his feet, removed the cuffs and offered him some water. He went to fill two cups from the water cooler humming in a corner of his office. Lataste drained his cup in one. He took two or three deep breaths, then tears began to roll down his cheeks. Vilar also drank, his throat felt dry and sandy, and he went back to the dispenser. Proffering another cup, he asked Lataste what was the matter.

  “Nothing,” he said with some effort, swallowing hard. “Just that cold water. It’s so simple, so good.”

  Vilar observed him and had the distinct impression he was witnessing a man in free fall. He had seen men fall before, but never from such a height. A slow-motion plunge that he could not bring himself to think of as tragic. He let Lataste finish the cup of water and decided not to wait until this guy collapsed in on himself like those fierce galaxies that become black holes.

  “Right now, you will certainly be charged with procuring, passively at least, since in the eyes of the law you were providing accommodation to someone working as a prostitute. Secondly, I think I can say officially you are a suspect in the murder of your lover Nadia Fournier. I have to agree with your observation that your life is completely fucked. Aggravated murder can get you fifteen years because, as it turns out, being her pimp is an aggravating factor in the crime. Do you understand?”

  Lataste nodded.

  “I know who killed Nadia,” he said so quietly, so quickly that Vilar, sitting up in his chair, had to ask him to repeat himself.

  “His name is Éric Sanz. He’s married. His wife’s name is Céline, he has a daughter called Manon.”

  Vilar picked up the phone and called Ledru.

  “O.K., I think we’ve got him. Éric Sanz. S-A-N-Z, yes. Can you check that immediately? And put out a call for a Céline Sanz.”

  He hung up. Lataste was now staring at him, his eyes still red.

  “Do tell me about it,” Vilar said, “and be very careful what you say.” He did not know how to breathe to remove the weight pressing on his chest. His heart was pounding so hard that he could feel it in his spine.

  “He’s this guy, he kind of stalked her. She’d slept with him once but when she told him it was over, he wasn’t having it. First thing I thought was that he was the one who had killed her. That’s why I was scared.”

  “He knew you? He was aware of your existence?”

  “In theory, no. Nadia said she had never mentioned me to him. But with a guy like that you never know. He could have decided – I don’t know – to cover his tracks, to get rid of anyone who could identify him, that kind of thing happens.”

  “How did she come to mention him to you? I thought she had her life pretty neatly compartmentalised?”

  “It’s complicated … I … She knew his ex-wife, Éric had nothing to do with her anymore, and she and the kid were having a rough time of it. Nadia asked me if I could find the wife somewhere to stay because they were living in a trailer in Mérignac. She had a job – I think she worked as a cleaner at the airport. Since I’ve got a mate who works at Habitat Girondin, I gave him a call and he managed to sort something. His company had just evicted a family with two years’ rent arrears in Mérignac, so as long as she was prepared to take the apartment as is, with no work done on it, he was prepared to let her have it straight away. And—”

  “This mate’s name?”

  “Why do you want to know? You’re not going to hassle him, are you?”

  “Like I said, we cross-check everything. Mate’s name?”

  “Jérôme Fontan.”

  Vilar wrote down the name on a piece of paper already criss-crossed with notes.

  “What did Nadia tell you about this guy Sanz?”

  “She said he was really violent, that he’d beaten her in the past … That he’d been banged up for it … For that kind of thing, I mean. She said he was a bit sadistic in his tastes. He liked to humiliate people, and when that wasn’t enough, when he got pissed off about something, he’d lash out. And he’d got the idea into his head that he was going to take her away somewhere, some island, and run a bar or a restaurant, I don’t remember. Some friend of his had money invested over there – Martinique, I think it was. He used to hassle her about that. She was completely petrified of him, she thought about leaving the area to get away from him, but it was difficult, what with her son. She managed to postpone this whole Martinique thing by saying she had to put her son first, and that seemed to work, Sanz didn’t push it, but she knew it wouldn’t last, that he’d always find some new way to try to persuade her. One day, he even told her that the kid was his son. It was another idea he got into his head. Apparently he wouldn’t stop talking about the kid.”

  Vilar tried to remember the face of the boy, Victor. He remembered the frail body lying in a hospital bed, the trembling figure standing next to the coffin as it rolled towards the crematorium furnace in the whirring silence. But no face appeared on the moving screen of memory.

  “What did Nadia think about that? Did she think it was possible?”

  “She never said anything to me. All I know is she got scared, she thought he was losing it, he was completely obsessed. I told Nadia I’d help her, told her I knew people all over the place and I could find her a place to live, even a job, in Brittany or Normandy for example, I’ve got a couple of friends in senior positions who would have been able to pull some strings. But she wasn’t sure. She was waiting until she’d saved enough money to leave and start over. Nadia liked to dream, she was always coming up with these hare-brained ideas. She thought it was possible to start your life over, to begin again from scratch. That’s what she wanted for the kid …”

  He trailed off, shook his head angrily, staring into space. He spoke of Nadia warmly, almost tenderly.

  “How did you feel when you heard that she’d been killed?”

  Lataste did not answer immediately. He snorted and shrugged.

  “I was afraid, I think. Not so much for me, I mean, not for my own safety, but for the life I’d built with Mireille, my daughters … I knew it was the
beginning of the end … That one way or another this whole affair would catch up with me.”

  “So why make things worse by withholding evidence?”

  “I don’t know. I panicked. I was trying to plug the holes on a sinking ship.”

  Vilar looked at the man slumped in the chair, hands folded in his lap, and remembered the arrogant executive who had welcomed him in his hallway that first time, who had tried to send him packing him like some vacuum cleaner salesman. He remembered the body in the morgue, and the man’s impassiveness even in the face of the cold rage and the contempt of his wife and he felt an urge to grab him by the scruff of the neck and slam him against the wall just as he had that day in order to take him down a peg or two. He forced himself to take a deep breath, to stare at a poster on the wall in which an emerald river snaked through thick jungle, and he told himself that one day he would canoe through that lush vegetation. So he stifled the rage welling inside him and found the strength to say in a flat voice:

  “If you’d said something sooner, a woman wouldn’t be in a coma in intensive care right now, an officer with the police judiciaire would not have been abducted; instead, we know that Éric Sanz abducted them. And I can tell you right now, that if anything fatal happens to either of them, you’ll pay for it, and you’d better hope you don’t run into me in a corridor, or even in jail, because I’ll smash your fucking face. Do you understand? Doesn’t matter that I’m police, doesn’t matter about the law, I’ll make you pay for your lies and your silence and I’ll do everything in my power to have you formally charged with procuring, for obstruction of justice and for sheltering a criminal, since by your silence, as you yourself just admitted, you protected him. And if either of the people I’ve just mentioned dies, we can add manslaughter. You were scared you might fuck up your life? Congratulations, job done.”