The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  “Sir?”

  Pelleter readjusted his stance. “That’s the second theory I’ve heard already today. The first was that your wife killed her father and then ran off.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Have you checked with the conductor? Has she taken a train?”

  “I checked. She hasn’t. Who said she killed her father?”

  “And the car?”

  “I have it. But she could have hitchhiked out of town. That doesn’t mean anything. I think she’s been murdered. Now who’s saying this other nonsense?”

  The officer who had been taking Rosenkrantz’s statement gave up, and sat back down at his desk.

  “Servières. He’s going to put it in the Vérité. He’s right outside.”

  Rosenkrantz scowled. “I’ll...” he started, and then hurried through the front door.

  “Good work,” Pelleter said, smiling at the officer at the desk.

  The yappy dog barked, the sound cutting through the small station.

  Letreau appeared at the door to his office. He looked haggard, as though he had not slept the night before, his hair out of place and his clothes wrinkled. “What is going on out here?”

  Pelleter went over to Martin, taking his oilcloth notebook from his pocket.

  Letreau saw the inspector, and joined him at the front desk, but when the dog barked again, he turned and yelled, “Get that animal out of here!”

  The woman holding the dog immediately turned her tirade on Letreau who found himself pulled into the argument.

  Pelleter had Martin copy the prisoner numbers from his notebook. It was obvious from the care that Martin took making the notes that he was proud to have been singled out by the inspector for this task. When he finished writing the numbers, he looked up at Pelleter expectantly, like a disciple given precious time with the master.

  “I want you to go back to the prison,” Pelleter said. “Look up everything there is on these five prisoners. Check Meranger too. See if there’s anything unusual in the files.”

  Letreau rejoined them. “It’s been like this all morning. Rosenkrantz left?”

  “I sent him after Servières.”

  Letreau tilted his head in a confused question.

  Pelleter patted him on the shoulder. “It’s going to be all right. We’re on the path now.”

  This made Letreau only shake his head in disbelief. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Martin was still looking up at Pelleter, waiting for more orders.

  Pelleter nodded his head towards the door. “Go on.”

  Martin clambered to his feet.

  Pelleter stopped him. “And tell Fournier I’ll be out there shortly, and that he should have all of his men available to me, even those who are not on duty. I want them all out there.”

  Martin waited a beat to see if there was going to be anything else, and then he rushed out the door.

  “Now, I’m really confused,” Letreau said. “You’re ordering my men?”

  “I hope you don’t mind. I’ve got an idea, and I’m ready to put it to the test. We’ll head out to the prison shortly.”

  “Back to the prison?”

  “Come, let’s walk by the baker’s house first.”

  Letreau shook his head. “You really are ahead of me. Between this and the children, I haven’t been able to get a moment’s rest, and you look happier than a kid on Christmas.”

  “Well, we still have to see. We still have to see. How are the children?”

  “Marion...Madame Perreaux...is in a worse state than they are. The boys just have a fever. Nothing a few days in bed won’t cure.”

  “Good,” Pelleter said, his expression serious. “Good.”

  Outside, the weather was the kind of inviting spring weather that fell into the background just because it was so perfect. Verargent continued to look like a picturesque town, a completely different place than the rain-drenched community that Pelleter had found when he first arrived.

  Before they had even left the square, Monsieur Benoît appeared.

  “Inspector. Chief. Something must be done about this... Everyone wants to hear how I found the body. There is a crowd in my store.”

  “That’s good,” Letreau said.

  “Yes. Good.” The baker hunched his shoulders, and his eyes wandered to the side. “But I know how this is. If you don’t find the murderer, then soon my name will be the only one attached to this thing, and people will think of my store and they’ll think of a dead body, and then business will be bad, very bad.”

  Pelleter said, “We are on our way to your house now, for another look at where you found the body. We’re taking care of this. It will all get resolved.”

  Benoît looked at Letreau. “Yes?”

  Letreau said, “Enjoy the extra business. Doesn’t your wife need your help?”

  Benoît looked behind him, back towards his store. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes.” He paused. “And you will find this murderer. My name...” He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and rushed back towards his store.

  Letreau shook his head when he left. “The whole town is crazy.”

  Pelleter didn’t respond, but started north.

  “I thought you already examined the baker’s street when you searched for the Perreaux children.”

  “I did.”

  “Then what do you expect to find?”

  Pelleter smiled, lighting a cigar. “Fresh air and pleasant company.”

  Pelleter walked on. His principal purpose was to give Martin time to get to the prison so that Fournier could round up his men. The assistant warden had made an effort the night before. It was only fair to give him warning this time.

  They came to Benoît’s house. In the intervening days, the street had returned to what it had always been, simply a quiet residential street. A stranger to the town walking by this spot would never know that only days before a man’s body had been found here in the gutter. There was nothing to see.

  Pelleter smoked his cigar as he paced the street, observing the ground, and the houses around just in case there was something he had missed. If his plan didn’t work, he could always interrogate all of the neighbors to see if they had seen anything that night. But it had to work. He had gone to sleep wondering how Meranger had gotten out of the prison, and he woke up even more convinced that if he could answer that, then he’d have the whole thing.

  He continued to pace and smoke until he had smoked his entire cigar. Then he looked up and said, “Okay.”

  “Did you find anything?” Letreau said.

  He nodded as though the trip had been very fruitful. Then he looked at Letreau. “Let’s go to the prison.”

  The now familiar sight of Malniveau rose up before them. The sunny weather might light the walls, but it did little to make the prison appear other than what it was, a dreary place for the confinement of souls.

  They waited for the outer guard to open the main gate.

  “I don’t understand why we’re here,” Letreau said. “Martin can handle going through paperwork well enough on his own.”

  “We’re not here to go through paperwork,” Pelleter said, staring straight ahead as the inner courtyard was revealed through the opening gate. “We’re here to have a lineup.”

  Letreau inched the car forward, and the walls of the prison closed around them. There were more vehicles parked in the small courtyard than there had been on their previous visits, and Letreau had to maneuver the car along one of the walls and onto a small patch of crabgrass.

  “You can’t really expect to interrogate all of the prisoners,” Letreau said, getting out of the car.

  “Not the prisoners.”

  A look of understanding softened the features of Letreau’s face. Then he frowned. “Fournier’s not going to like that.”

  “That’s why I gave him some time to get used to the idea.”

  Inside, Fournier was not happy to see them at all. He could not bring himself to look at
Pelleter, forgetting himself one moment, and then hurriedly averting his eyes the next, using his ever-present clipboard as a shield.

  Pelleter outlined his plan. “I want to interrogate each and every one of the prison workers—the guards, the infirmary staff, the office workers, the cafeteria people, everyone. We’ll take them one at a time. The room where I saw Mahossier on Wednesday should be fine. Just line them up outside.”

  “This is an insult to my people,” Fournier said, looking at his clipboard. “And a disruption to the entire prison.”

  “At least one of your people has something to do with this. It’s the only way the dead prisoners could get transported out of the building.”

  “I still don’t understand how there could be dead prisoners I don’t know about.”

  “But there are, so let’s get started.”

  “When the warden...”

  Pelleter raised his eyebrows at this, and Fournier didn’t finish. The assistant warden waited another moment to show that he wasn’t being bullied, and then he set off to make the arrangements.

  A guard let Pelleter and Letreau into the interrogation room. An extra chair was brought from another room, and the inspector and the chief of police sat side by side on one side of the table, leaving the chair across from them blank. Pelleter put his notebook and pencil on the table in front of him, opened to a new page, but he didn’t reach for it once the interrogations began.

  “Please, sit down,” Pelleter said, to the guard who had led them in.

  The guard looked confused, and he checked behind him to see if somebody else was standing there.

  Pelleter indicated the chair, and nodded his head. “Might as well start with you.”

  The guard rubbed his palms on his pants legs, and then sat down heavily in the chair across the way, slouching in the seat with his legs spread under the table. He looked at a point just to the right of the inspector’s head.

  Once the inspector began, his questions came quickly, his expression serious.

  “What’s your name?” Pelleter asked.

  “Jean-Claude Demarchelier.”

  “How long have you worked at Malniveau prison?”

  “Since I got out of school.”

  Pelleter raised his eyebrows.

  “Three years.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  The guard shrugged. “It’s a job.”

  “But they don’t pay you enough.”

  The guard shrugged again.

  “Perhaps you look to make a little extra money on the side. Help get things for the prisoners. Maybe help hide things that need to be hidden.”

  The guard looked directly at Pelleter then, shaking his head in wide sweeps, “No. Never. Nothing like that. I just do my job, and go home. That’s it.”

  “But when you’re asked to do something you know is against the rules, you help out. Maybe it’s an important person asking you. Fournier. The warden. You don’t want to lose your job.”

  “Never,” the guard said, and he looked at Letreau for help, to confirm what he was saying, but the chief of police sat impassive, watching. The guard looked to the door. It had been left open. Then he looked back at his interrogators. “I just do my job.” His expression was pleading. It looked as though it would not take much to make him cry.

  “Okay, you can go.”

  The guard sat for a moment, unsure if he had heard correctly. Then he sighed, and got up. He started for the door, but Pelleter stopped him.

  “Before you go, just write your name down in this notebook.”

  The guard turned back, and he bent over the table in order to write. His handwriting was large, like a schoolboy in elementary school. He finished hurriedly, and left.

  Letreau turned to Pelleter. “Do you really think that you’re going to find anything this way? He could have been lying.”

  “He wasn’t lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “This could be a big waste of time. Maybe we should be looking for Madame Rosenkrantz. Benoît is right. It’ll only be a matter of time before the town grows nervous with the thing.”

  “Call in the next person.”

  Letreau stood up, and went to the door. He came back with another guard. When he sat down, he leaned over to Pelleter and whispered in his ear, “They’re lined up all the way down the hall.”

  That interrogation went much the same way as the first, as did the next one, and the one after that. Pelleter found a rhythm, and he asked the same questions again and again, even if he adjusted his tone and manner to fit each of the people he was interrogating. Soon the list on his notepad extended to a second column.

  Fournier came by once, and he stood in watching some of the interrogations from behind the inspector. But soon after, he left, and Pelleter continued to have prison employee after prison employee brought in. He thought once that he might have found something, and he pushed, but it was only that the man brought in cigarettes for some of the prisoners. One of the cafeteria workers admitted to bringing home some of the food to feed her family and cut back on grocery costs.

  None of them responded to the question of whether or not a superior had asked them to do something against the rules. Everyone had a different opinion about the number of prisoners who had been stabbed and how many had actually been killed.

  After four hours, Pelleter held up his hand for a break.

  “I told you this would get us nowhere.”

  “On the contrary.”

  “You think that you’ve learned something from this?”

  “How many more are out there?”

  “A lot? At least thirty.”

  “Then we’re not done.”

  Pelleter lit a cigar, and took several puffs in contemplative silence. He glanced at the notebook on the table with the varied handwriting covering the page. Another list of names. So many names, but none of them were the right one.

  The smoke from his cigar floated to the ceiling and formed a cloud with the smoke from his previous cigars. The interrogations were exhausting, but he was convinced that he would find something. One of these people had to know something about removing the bodies. He just had to find which one.

  He waved to Letreau to let the next one in. Letreau brought in a young guard, and they each took their respective seats. The guard was no more than twenty-two, and the scruff that he must have considered a beard was still patchy in parts, the space under his lower lip completely bald.

  “What’s your name?” Pelleter began.

  “Jean Empermont.”

  Pelleter frowned. “You’re the guard who marked Meranger as present the morning after he was killed.”

  The man looked down at his hands, which were in his lap. “Yes,” he said, almost so quietly as to not be heard.

  11.

  Getting Somewhere

  Fournier had said that the man had been reprimanded, and Pelleter would not have been surprised to find that Fournier knew all too well how to dress a man down. He softened his tone.

  “How long have you worked here?”

  The man was slow to answer, and at first it seemed as though he might not. At last, still looking at his hands, he said, “It will be a year next month.”

  “And before this?”

  “Nothing...I tried university, but I was no good at it...I helped my father with his painting business...then this.”

  All the time the man had not looked up. Here was a man who was familiar with failure. Who, in his short years, had tried his hand at several things, but always seemed plagued by ill-luck. He no doubt felt as though this new failure would soon lead to his termination, an action for which Fournier was no doubt simply awaiting the warden’s return, and that he would once again be forced to make a fresh start of things.

  Pelleter sat forward, eager but also gentle. “Can you tell me what happened Wednesday morning?”

  “Nothing!” the man burst out. Then he looked up to see what effect this ejacula
tion had had, panicked that he had damaged his case by showing his exasperation. “Nothing,” he repeated quietly, his eyes pleading. He took a deep breath. “Each guard is responsible for roll call on his cell block. But it’s almost a formality in the mornings because where would the prisoners have gone? I guess they could have died.”

  He stopped short, realizing what he had said.

  Letreau shifted in his seat beside Pelleter, but the inspector stayed still, watching the guard intently.

  He started again, holding his hands palm up. “We don’t even let them out of their cells at that point. Each guard has a list, and he walks along the block, calling the names, and the prisoners respond. Then you mark them as here. I guess we’re supposed to look through the windows, but nobody does. I went along the block. I called Meranger. Somebody said, ‘Here,’ and I marked him as present.”

  “They said it from inside the cell?”

  “I thought so.” He dropped his hands to his sides, and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Who told you to mark him as here?”

  “No one.”

  “Fournier?”

  The guard shook his head, confused. “No. No one. Somebody said here. It was just like every day.”

  “The warden?”

  Letreau coughed suddenly, and turned in his seat.

  “No.” The guard’s eyes were wide. “No. He said, here. I marked him here.”

  “Okay,” Pelleter said, and sat back. He put his cigar in his mouth, but found that it was no longer burning. He tapped the gray bud of ash from the end of the cigar onto the floor.

  “Okay?”

  “Oh. Write your name on the notebook, and let in the next person.” Pelleter was relighting his cigar.

  The guard reached for the notebook as though he were waiting for some kind of trap. But as he wrote, Pelleter looked off into the distance, as though he had already forgotten that the man was there. The guard left on silent feet.

  “Pelleter—” Letreau started, but the next guard had already come in.

  He was a large man—over six foot—and older than most of the other men they had seen so far, at least as old as the inspector, with hair graying at the temples. He sat up straight in the chair, pushing out his broad chest over his rounded belly, and met Pelleter’s eyes. “I’ve got nothing to say,” he said.