Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #14)

by Louise Penny

  It was always an odd feeling, walking around a person’s home uninvited. Seeing it as they’d left it in the morning. Not realizing they’d never return. Not realizing it was the day of their death.

  There was something solid, comfortable, restful about this place. It was a home, not a trophy.

  The colors were muted. A soft blue-gray for the walls. But there were touches that seemed almost playful.

  A lime-green geometric print on the curtains in the master bedroom. Vintage Expo 67 posters were on the walls of the hallway.

  Some clothes were tossed casually on a chair in the bedroom. There were balled-up tissues in the wastepaper basket. Some loose change sat on the chest of drawers, along with a framed photo of Baumgartner with his children. A boy and a girl.

  On the bedside table, there was a nonfiction book about American politics and a copy of L’actualité newsmagazine.

  Taking out a pen, Beauvoir pulled open the drawer. More magazines. Pens. Cough drops.

  He closed the drawer and looked around for evidence of someone else living there. Or visiting. Overnight.

  No one else’s clothes, or toothbrush, seemed to be there.

  If Baumgartner had a partner or a lover, there was no evidence.

  Beauvoir walked down the hall and turned the corner into the room Baumgartner used as a study. And stopped dead.

  He didn’t know much about art. Did not recognize any artist. With one exception. And that exception was on the wall, over the fireplace in the study.

  It was a Clara Morrow. And not just any “Clara,” it was a copy of her painting of Ruth. But not just Ruth.

  Clara had painted the demented old poet as the aging Virgin Mary. Forgotten.

  Embittered.

  A clawlike hand gripped a ragged blue shawl at her neck. Her face was filled with loathing. Rage. There was none of the tender young virgin about this grizzled old thing.

  Ruth.

  But. But. There. In her eyes. Was a glint, a gleam.

  With all the brushstrokes. All the detail. All the color, the painting, finally came down to one tiny dot.

  Ruth as the Virgin Mary saw something in the distance. Barely visible. Hardly there. More a suggestion.

  In a bitter old woman’s near-blind eyes, Clara Morrow had painted hope.

  Beauvoir knew that most people who looked at the painting saw the despair. It was hard to miss. But what they did miss was the whole point of the painting. That one dot.

  The few who got it, though, never forgot it. Dealers and collectors then went back and discovered more treasures in Clara’s odd, sometimes fantastical, sometimes deceptively conventional portraits.

  But it was Ruth who’d made her reputation and career. Ruth and a dot of light.

  Beauvoir nodded to the portrait and heard the old poet snarl, “Numbnuts.”

  “You old hag,” he murmured.

  The agents, working in the study, looked at him, but he just gave them a curt nod to continue.

  Chief Inspector Beauvoir walked around the room, trying not to get in anyone’s way. He paused at the mantel, to look at the photographs.

  Baumgartner with friends. With politicians. At business banquets. More photos of his children. One of Baumgartner and his now ex-wife. They looked good together. A confident and attractive couple. Then Jean-Guy picked up a small picture in a silver frame. It was black and white. This must have been his parents.

  The father was slender, handsome, unsmiling. Severe. A tough man to please, Beauvoir guessed.

  And his son took after him, at least in looks. In personality too? It didn’t seem so, from the pictures. He was almost always smiling in them.

  But then Anthony Baumgartner was good at hiding what he was really feeling. That much had been proven.

  Beauvoir’s attention shifted to the other person in the photograph. The Baroness.

  She was, by just about any measure, ugly. No way around that. With a round body and sagging spaniel eyes and a complexion that even in the old photo looked blotched.

  But she was smiling and had a look of near-permanent amusement about her. There was a gleam in her eyes too. And Beauvoir found himself smiling back.

  The Baroness, despite all appearances, was far more attractive than her husband.

  Though there was also a slight haughtiness, a suggestion of cunning, in that face.

  Hugo Baumgartner obviously took after her.

  And Caroline Baumgartner? More the father than the mother, though the Baroness’s haughtiness was there. But what passed for cunning in the mother came out as cruelty in the daughter.

  The photographs were interesting—revealing, even, in some ways—but what he was really interested in was on the desk. Baumgartner’s laptop.

  “Finished?” he asked the agent who’d been sitting at the desk, going over the papers.

  “Oui, patron.”

  He got up and relinquished the chair to the boss.

  Beauvoir sat in front of the blank screen.

  There were papers to the left of the computer. With numbers. And a few letters.

  They weren’t to Baumgartner but from him. Signed by him. Ready to be mailed out, presumably.

  Beauvoir read one. It seemed a fairly standard explanation of investments and the state of the market.

  The other papers looked like financial statements.

  He opened the desk drawers. More paper. Stuffed in there.

  “You’ve been over these?”

  “Oui.”

  Beauvoir pulled the papers out and began going through them. The mess in the drawers was in contrast to the neat desktop. Many people’s lives were like that. The neat room and the messy closet. The well-ordered counters and the chaos in the cabinets.

  But he also knew that, as homicide detectives, what they were looking for often lived in that gap, between the public and the private.

  As they went through Baumgartner’s life, that cavern, between public and private, would begin to narrow. Squeezing out whatever lived inside.

  Now Beauvoir scanned each piece of paper, smoothing out the wrinkled ones and placing them to the right of the laptop.

  He was looking for one specific thing.

  When he’d finished, he turned to the laptop and considered it.

  Baumgartner, like most people, almost certainly protected his devices with a security code. His iPhone had been found that afternoon in the wreckage of his mother’s home. Smashed. But there were hopes some information could still be retrieved.

  Beauvoir knew that almost everyone did four things, when faced with modern technology. First they created passwords. Then they forgot them.

  Then, on being forced to create new ones, they simplified and went with only one, which opened everything. And then they wrote it down. And hid that paper somewhere.

  That way they only had to remember the place, not the password.

  Beauvoir grunted as he got onto his knees, then lay on the carpet, staring at the underside of the desk. Nothing. Rolling over, he got to his feet.

  “Did you find anything that might be a code for the laptop?” he asked the team.

  “Nothing,” the lead agent said.

  “Well,” said another, “there was one thing. There’s a piece of paper behind the painting of the crazy old lady.”

  Beauvoir felt his heart speed up as he walked over to take a look. Sure enough, there was a piece of paper Scotch-taped back there. With a number. And the words “Virgin Mary.”

  “Merde,” he whispered.

  Beauvoir had learned enough about paintings, and the art world, to know this was a numbered print of the Virgin Mary. And that was the number.

  Sitting back down at the desk, his eyes settled once again on the papers Baumgartner had left beside his laptop.

  Getting up, he walked down the hall to the master bedroom.

  “Agent Cloutier? Would you join me, please?”

  “D’accord, patron.”

  The woman, in her late forties, looked both reliev
ed and worried to be called away by Chief Inspector Beauvoir.

  * * *

  “Hugo?” said Gamache.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re being very quiet.”

  “I have nothing to add. My sister’s doing a good job, as is Adrienne. I can’t think of anyone who’d want to hurt Tony.”

  “What do you do for a living, monsieur?” Inspector Dufresne asked.

  They’d already established that Caroline was a real-estate agent. Successful, she said. In the top five percent.

  They’d later learn that was true. After a fashion. Top five percent in her company, in her area. Who specialized in condos. For young families.

  Which put her in the bottom five percent of agents in Québec.

  “I’m an investment dealer,” said Hugo.

  “The same as your brother?” Dufresne asked.

  “Yes.”

  But Gamache had noticed the very slight hesitation and tucked it away.

  “You work together?”

  “No. Different firms. I work for Horowitz Investments.”

  Gamache’s expression didn’t change, but he took this in.

  This was the same firm he and Reine-Marie used for their investments. While Montréal-based and founded by Monsieur Horowitz decades ago, it was now global, with offices in New York and Paris.

  “And what do you do there, sir?” asked Dufresne.

  “I’m a senior vice president. I have a portfolio of clients whose wealth I manage.”

  Hugo smiled, which, perversely, made him look even uglier. Like a jack-o’-lantern.

  Without consciously realizing it, Gamache had put Hugo Baumgartner down as a bit of a rustic. If he worked at Horowitz Investments, it was in some support role, doing it affably, if somewhat lackadaisically.

  Without ambition. Though perhaps not without resentment against a brother who’d fallen into a bucket of good luck at birth. While Oog had fallen into something else.

  Gamache now smiled to himself. Humbled, yet again, by a mistake. How often had he warned agents against making assumptions? Leaping to conclusions.

  And here he was, having done exactly that.

  It never occurred to Gamache that this rough-hewn man might be a wealth manager, looking after tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

  A phone call would have to be made.

  But that was far down the list of things that occurred to the Chief Superintendent at that moment. Another question was forming, just as Beauvoir appeared down the hallway and caught his eye.

  “A word?” Beauvoir mouthed.

  Gamache was torn. He wanted, needed, to ask the question, but he also knew that Beauvoir would never interrupt unless it was important.

  “Excusez-moi,” said the Chief. He got up and nodded to Dufresne to continue.

  * * *

  “Find something?” Gamache asked as he accompanied Beauvoir down the hallway.

  “I’ll let Agent Cloutier explain.”

  Beauvoir’s voice, while low, was excited.

  Gamache turned the corner into the study and came face-to-face with maniacal Ruth. His brows rose, and then his gaze continued on, to the woman sitting at the desk.

  She turned and immediately got up upon seeing Gamache.

  “Patron.”

  “Agent Cloutier.” Gamache nodded. “Tell me what you have.”

  She was a fairly recent transfer from the financial division of the Sûreté. A bookkeeper. A bureaucrat. Not a field agent. Indeed, her accounting wasn’t even forensic. She worked on the Sûreté’s own budget.

  But Chief Superintendent Gamache had been impressed with her, and after discussions with Chief Inspector Lacoste he’d arranged a temporary transfer to homicide. To see if it was a fit.

  There was a whole division for financial crimes, but money, hidden or otherwise, was so often the motive for murder that Gamache felt it would help to have someone with financial expertise specifically assigned to homicide. And Lacoste had agreed.

  Isabelle had been happy with Cloutier. Cloutier, though, had a very different reaction. Being called to a murder scene, or even being assigned to search a victim’s home, was not simply foreign to her. She felt, at the age of forty-eight, as though she were experiencing an alien abduction.

  She was not happy.

  And even less so at this moment, as she faced the big boss. The head alien. Though he didn’t look alien at all. But then, her whirring mind said, they so rarely did.

  She had been grief-stricken, horrified by the raid that had so badly wounded her boss, Chief Inspector Lacoste.

  She’d also been terrified at the thought that these things happened. That she herself could have been on that raid. Not realizing they’d have ordered the headquarters cat to arm up before they got to her.

  But still. It was brought into stark relief that the Sûreté wasn’t figures on a ledger. A matter of funding, or cutting, this department or that.

  Lives were at stake. Lives were lost.

  And she wanted nothing to do with taking or, worse still, giving a life.

  She’d never met Chief Superintendent Gamache and had no idea he’d been behind her transfer and had been watching her progress, or lack thereof.

  Gamache himself had had to admit that the transfer had not been a great success. It was clear she was unhappy, and a discontented agent never did her best work. Cloutier had been on the verge of being transferred back to the accounts department when the raid happened. And everything changed while, at the same time, staying the same.

  The great Sûreté du Québec was in stasis until the leadership issue was resolved. For the moment Agent Cloutier was stuck. And Acting Chief Inspector Beauvoir was stuck with an agent who’d gnaw off her own arm if it would get her out of homicide and back into accounts.

  But for now she was theirs. And there. In Baumgartner’s home. Staring at the Chief Superintendent. Almost mute. But, sadly for her, not quite. A slight babbling was escaping her, an excruciatingly slow leak of lunacy.

  Chief Superintendent Gamache saw this and tried to help, by guiding her.

  “What did you find, Agent Cloutier? Was it in those papers?”

  He pointed to the pile on the desk.

  “Those and these.” She pointed to the same stack of papers, confusing Gamache and herself. “Well, these are those, of course. Ha. Yes, well. Definitely something, but not definitive.”

  Inspector Beauvoir, watching this, sighed.

  What he didn’t know was that not that long ago Gamache himself had sounded almost exactly like Agent Cloutier, while on the phone to Vienna.

  He might’ve sounded like an idiot, but Gamache knew he wasn’t one. Just as he knew that Agent Cloutier wasn’t.

  “Is it to do with Anthony Baumgartner’s personal finances?” Gamache threw her a lifeline.

  He could see that the papers contained a lot of figures.

  “Yes. No. I don’t really know.”

  Now they all stared at one another, and Beauvoir thought maybe he should take away her gun. Not that she was likely to shoot anyone. Not on purpose. Really. Maybe.

  Gamache smiled. “Let’s sit.”

  He waved her to the comfortable chair behind the desk and dragged up two others for himself and Beauvoir.

  “Now, Agent Cloutier, tell us what first caught your eye?”

  “This.” She picked up one of the papers before the laptop. “These look like financial statements, from Taylor and Ogilvy.” Her voice was growing more confident. “I take it he worked for them?”

  “Oui.”

  “It’s unusual, even unethical, for a money manager to bring home private and confidential papers,” she said. “It’s one thing to have them on a computer, which is protected by codes, but a printout? That anyone could read? I’m presuming Monsieur Baumgartner was senior enough to know that.”

  “Then why would he?” asked Gamache.

  “I don’t know for sure, of course,” she said. “But there’re two possi
ble reasons. He was behind in his work and figured no one would notice or care. Or he was up to something.”

  “That something being . . . ?”

  “Before I go into that, there’s something else odd,” she said. “About the papers.”

  She paused, letting her two patrons think about it.

  “They’re papers,” said Beauvoir, getting there first. Getting it. “Wouldn’t he be working directly on the laptop? On an electronic file?”

  “You’d think so, yes. Assembling statements. Writing cover letters. Not working on hard copies.”

  “But I get my statements by mail,” said Gamache. “Not emailed.”

  “Yes, for security most are still mailed out,” she said. “Email can be hacked. But the mailing’s the last step, normally done by an assistant. There’s no reason for Monsieur Baumgartner to have the actual printouts. And certainly not at home. They’re of no use to him.”

  “No legitimate use,” said Beauvoir.

  “Exactly.”

  “So what’s the illegitimate use?” Gamache asked.

  “He’d have these statements here at home”—she looked toward the tidy pile on the desk beside the laptop—“because he didn’t want anyone else to see them. And certainly not his assistant, who’d know immediately that something was up.”

  “And what was ‘up’?” Beauvoir asked.

  “Until I can get into his computer, I won’t know for sure. But it’s easy enough to see that they’re addressed to different people and show portfolios in the millions. Transactions were done. Stocks bought and sold. These look like legitimate statements.”

  “But aren’t?” said Gamache.

  “They might be,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”

  Chief Superintendent Gamache nodded. Financial crimes came under the Sûreté jurisdiction. Every year they uncovered a number of offenses. Some petty and downright stupid. Some close, but not quite crossing a line. A line Gamache had privately told the Premier should be changed.

  Others, though, didn’t so much cross the line as tunnel under it. Deep. Dark. Long-standing.

  And when they were found, personal savings crumbled. Retirement funds disappeared. People were ruined. Often elderly people who could never recoup.