A French Country Murder

by Peter Steiner

  Louis called at noon. “I have changed hotels. Here is my number. Do not call unless you have to, but if you have to, ask for Mister Twitchell in room 411.” Renard told him what he had discovered in Paris, that Chasen’s lover had been named or, more likely, had used the name Robert Pendergrass, and that he was a black man. He told Louis about the building with extra stories at 161 boulevard Raspail, and about the Advanced Projects Group of Rockville in Maryland. Louis wrote everything down, including the addresses.

  Renard had saved the worst news for last. Solesme Lefourier had just that morning been reported by her husband to be missing. It was probably nothing. This was, after all, not the first time Pierre Lefourier had called the police to report her missing. The old man sometimes panicked when she had only gone out. She would call a cab, or a friend would come pick her up, or she went out to run errands, or to shop. Occasionally she went to Tours. But her husband was accustomed to always having her there, so to him when she was not there, she was missing. Renard would always reassure the old man that she was safe, that they would find her. And she would always turn up a few hours later with a new dress or some rose bushes for the garden.

  Only this time she was an important witness to a serious crime. Renard cursed himself for having named her as a witness on the incident reports he had filed and which by now had crossed God only knew how many desks from here to Paris. Louis was silent at the other end of the line. Then he said, “Maybe they want to get to me through her.” He paused to calm his voice. Then: “I don’t know why else they would have taken her.” His voice was nearly steady again. Renard suddenly knew what Louis and Solesme were to each other. He cursed himself yet again, this time silently, for not having realized it before now. He was certain Isabelle would have known all along.

  “Or perhaps she has just gone shopping,” he said. He did not think this was the case, but he wanted to reassure his friend. He did not know what else to say. “I am looking for her,” he added.

  “If they have her, you will not find her, unless they want you to. If she turns up, or you learn anything, call me immediately.” Louis hung up the phone quickly, without saying good-bye.

  At that moment, Solesme was sitting in the backseat of a BMW like the one that had stopped at Louis’s driveway that night. For all she knew, it was the very same car. Three men had come for her. They were dark skinned. Two had thick mustaches. All three were dressed in dark suits and spoke in French that was heavily accented with the rolling r’s and clipped vowels of North Africa. All three were firm, but polite. They called her Madame Lefourier. They did not blindfold her or make any effort to conceal the direction they were taking.

  Once they reached the autoroute, they sped south. Solesme rode in the backseat between two of the men. If they had weapons, she could not tell. She asked them where they were taking her, but they did not answer. She asked why they were taking her, but again they were silent. She asked if they intended to kill her. One of them said, “No, madame.” The other said, “Not if you cooperate.”

  “What do you want?” she asked. They were silent. “My husband will be worried,” she said, but then was sorry she had said it. She found it curious that the three men spoke French, even when they spoke to one another.

  Solesme had never ridden in such a luxurious car before. The backseat was firm and comfortable, even to her twisted back. The ride was smooth and quiet. A few hours later in Libourne, just east of Bordeaux, they drove straight into a large garage. The garage was empty but for a white panel truck. They parked next to the panel truck and then two of the men helped her into the back of the truck and got in with her. The canvas seats were not comfortable. But they only rode for a half-hour or so. She could not be sure how long it was. Solesme usually wore a watch when she left home. But she had not been intending to leave home when the three men had come for her that morning.

  The truck stopped, the driver opened the back doors, and they got out and went into a farmhouse. The men put Solesme in a room on the second floor and locked the door. The room was sparsely furnished with a bed, a small table, and a chair. There were no lamps and no lightbulbs in the metal fixture that hung from the ceiling. She pulled the chair to the window and sat down to look out just as she was accustomed to do at home. If the men below heard her dragging the chair across the floor, they did not come up to investigate.

  Looking from the window, she saw only a dirt driveway threading its way through large oak trees. She did not see the panel truck anywhere, or any other cars. She heard birds singing. There were no other sounds. She noticed some neglected roses in the garden below. They needed fertilizing. And they had grown ungainly from not having been pruned the year before. She thought they were pink Anjous, a variety she had wanted to get for her garden. The pink Anjou was a difficult rose that required a lot of attention. But if you put in the effort, you were amply rewarded with large flamingo-pink blossoms that became a peachy golden at the edges.

  The door to the room opened, and a man she had not seen before walked in. “What is the point of planting a pink Anjou, and then neglecting it?” she wanted to know. The man looked puzzled. “That rose there,” she said. “It needs attention. It is a difficult rose to grow.” The man smiled uneasily and shrugged, still not completely understanding what she was talking about. He was larger than the men who had brought her. He had a broad flat face with full cheeks and a heavy brow. His hair was dark and curly and cut close to his skull. He had enormous hands which he kept clasping and unclasping. He smiled again.

  “Madame Lefourier,” he said, stepping closer and bowing slightly, “I apologize for the inconvenience of having brought you to this remote and inhospitable spot.” He swung his hand around to indicate the scene outside the window. “This is not the way we are accustomed to treating women in my country.” He responded to his apparent embarrassment with an exaggerated courtliness.

  Something in his manner made her stand and step away. “Do you intend to harm me?” she asked.

  “Madame, how could you think such a thing?” said the man, looking away from her gaze. He was like a child whose secret intentions had just been inadvertently discovered. The man gestured toward the chair, but she remained standing.

  “Very well,” he said. “As you wish. I do not want to harm you, madame. But, to be blunt with you, madame, as I see you are a person who prefers plain speaking, I will hurt you if it is necessary to do so, to discover from you what I need to discover. I regret to have to even mention it. What I need from you concerns your neighbor, madame, Monsieur Louis Morgon. Louis Morgon.” He said the name a second time as though she might possibly not recognize it.

  “Is Louis in some sort of trouble?”

  “Madame, I am afraid he is in a great deal of trouble. I am not at liberty to tell you the details of his difficulties. However, I can assure you they are most grave. Now, if you will, madame, where has Monsieur Morgon gone?”

  Solesme did not know where he had gone. He had not discussed his plans with her.

  “You cannot even speculate where he has gone?”

  “I could speculate, but it would be a wild guess.”

  “And what would be your speculation, madame?”

  “I would guess that he has gone to Washington, where he is from. But it is only a guess.”

  “Was he traveling alone?” asked the man, clasping and unclasping his large hands while he looked at her intently. She noticed that the knuckles were skinned and the nails were broken and dirty.

  Solesme did not know whether Louis was traveling alone. She had already said she knew nothing about his journey. Nor did she know when he was going to return, what he had taken with him, whom he had told of his journey. She did not know whether he had gone by way of Paris. In fact she could not answer any of the man’s questions to his satisfaction, which caused him to grow increasingly restless. He pulled on his fingers and rubbed his hands. He leaned in close as he questioned her so that she smelled the alcohol on his breath.

  Th
e man paced back and forth a few times. Then he asked, “Madame, have you ever seen me before?”

  “I do not know. Are you one of the men that stopped on the road outside my house one night not long ago?”

  He stopped pacing and asked without turning to face her, “What did you see that night, madame?”

  Solesme hesitated. Then she said, “It is as I have already told the police: I saw a car arrive and some people get out of it. Maybe it was the same car that brought me here. I saw them drive off a short time later. I tried to read the license plate but I could not. The car’s lights were off.”

  “Madame, do you know what it was the men did while they were there?”

  “I do not know for certain. That is to say, no one has told me. But if I had to guess, I would guess now that it had to do with the body that turned up on Monsieur Morgon’s doorstep. I would assume that they carried it up the driveway and dropped it there.”

  “Aha,” said the man.

  “Of course, no one expects to see dead bodies carried around, even at night. And it was dark. But I am guessing that is what went on.” Solesme looked up at the man questioning her.

  “Please, Madame Lefourier,” he said, bowing slightly and motioning toward the chair. “Please, madame, take a seat.” He raised his eyebrows. He smiled gently as he recognized her terror.

  XVIII

  THOUGH MILTON HAMSHER HAD LIVED IN THE SAME TWO ROOMS IN Northeast Washington for nearly fifteen years, there was hardly anything about the place to suggest that it might be home to any particular person. There were no photos anywhere, no mementoes. There were no pictures on the faded walls. The furniture resembled worn motel and office furniture, which, in fact, much of it was. The chairs and table, the couch, and the file cabinets had all been bought by Milton at warehouse sales around the city, but only when the particular piece he was replacing had been worn or damaged beyond usability, or, in the case of the many file cabinets, when the drawers of the cabinets he already had no longer held all the clippings, brochures, and files Milton continuously assembled.

  There were only two things that made the apartment uniquely Milton’s. One was, of course, the file cabinets which now went completely around three walls of the living room and which were in some places stacked on top of each other reaching to just under the ceiling. A stepladder stood ready to allow Milton to get to the topmost drawers. The other thing was the array of locks on the heavy front door. Louis counted six different locks which Milton unlocked and locked each time he or anyone else entered or left.

  Milton had picked up the phone as soon as Louis had begun to leave a message. But he had not spoken right away, causing Louis to wonder at first whether Milton’s machine was malfunctioning. But then Milton had spoken in that sweet, high voice: “Louis? Is that you?”

  “It’s me, Milton. It’s Louis. I’m in Washington. I’m here. I’d like to see you.” Without hesitation Milton had given him the address. “I’ll be right over,” Louis had said. He knocked and waited while Milton unlocked the many locks and opened the door. Milton’s body was old and stooped, his brown hair was thin. His blue eyes were watery and sad. He hardly ever smiled anymore, but on those rare occasions when he did smile, as for example now as he greeted Louis, years of pain and anguish dropped from his face, and he looked like a boy again. “Louis,” said Milton, turning to face Louis after he had locked the door. His arms hung at his side. Then he reached out, took Louis in his arms, and pressed his face happily against Louis’s shoulder.

  The two men had not parted as good friends. However, their affection for one another had remained undiminished. Their careers and their marriages had come apart at about the same time. So, back then just the sight of each man reminded the other of his own failures. The result was that they could hardly stand to be together.

  Unlike Louis who had fallen and landed more or less on his feet, Milton had fallen and then had continued to fall. There was a gathering air of desperation about him which made it unbearable for his friends to be around him. Milton’s already delicately balanced temperament was increasingly shaken by his suspicions and doubts—about himself, to be sure, but also about the world around him, about his former co-workers at the State Department, about his former wives, about his friends. He suspected nearly everyone of conspiring against him. He had lost his job because of the relentlessness of his suspicions. He had lost both his wives to divorce, Susan and then Tierney, because of his suspicions.

  It should not have been too surprising, given his commanding intelligence and his apprehensive and mistrustful nature, that Milton eventually found his way into conspiracy journalism. The first article he wrote in this vein was about the Kennedy assassination. The article was remarkable for its exhaustive detail and elegant arguments. It was picked up by a magazine in New York, and its publication single-handedly revived the then-flagging interest in that terrible event. Milton wrote on Iran-Contra, on the Persian Gulf War, on Whitewater, on the death of Vincent Foster, on Rupert Murdoch and Newt Gingrich, and on less known and more arcane conspiracies as well. His articles were always thorough to a fault. They were exhaustively researched and tightly reasoned. And, like all essentially religious arguments, in order to be absolutely convincing, each article depended in the last analysis on the author’s and reader’s shared and unassailable faith in the truth of the particular conspiracy being uncovered.

  Milton never wrote on assignment. The fact that somebody wanted him to write about a particular subject already aroused his suspicions and made it impossible for him to do so. Rather, he would simply appear one day at the editorial offices of the journal he had selected to receive his next article. He carried a metal attaché case with a thick manuscript padlocked inside. His articles were almost always printed by one journal or another. There were half a dozen journals he regarded as acceptable. The payment they offered, which was usually meager when measured against the time and energy Milton had devoted to researching and writing the article, allowed him to devote his energies to the next project.

  Louis listened with growing discomfort as Milton catalogued the apparently endless injustices and injuries he had suffered and continued to suffer at the hands of enemies, known and unknown. This very minute, he was under attack by a cabal of avaricious and unscrupulous editors. Not to mention his jealous detractors, those other conspiracy writers whose viciousness was outdone only by their resourcefulness in finding ways to close off publication outlets to him. Couldn’t they see that his work was published where theirs wasn’t because his research was superior where theirs was sloppy and less than complete? And, of course, there were his ancient tormentors, the functionaries he had offended in the United States government. They too were continually working to discredit him with the few editors who would still have anything to do with him.

  Louis was distressed at his friend’s state of mind. He was also startled and disturbed by the thought that he might himself not be so different from Milton. Wasn’t his speculation that Hugh Bowes was a murderer just as delusional, just as paranoid, as any of the theories Milton had cooked up? Couldn’t Louis be dismissed just as easily? And mightn’t he be just as wrong? From the sparse facts of the matter—that a body had been left on his doorstep—he had spun out what must certainly appear to most rational minds to be a preposterous scenario. It had certainly seemed preposterous to Renard and to Sarah.

  Louis sat on the battered dining chair and listened while Milton named one malevolent government official after another—names Louis had never heard, others he knew either by name or in person from his own time in government, even some of Louis’s old friends and colleagues, including Arnie Muller and Wally Steinberg, who were not in government at all, and never had been. Milton now referred to them as Arnold and Wallace, as though they were names on an indictment. Efforts to ruin Milton’s life had failed so far. But who knew how long they would continue to fail, given that his enemies had the full resources and power of the federal government at their disposal? As Milton n
amed each name, he pointed at a file drawer, suggesting by his gesture that all he had to do was pull open that drawer and he could spread the complete and incontrovertible proof of that particular person’s corruption and evil on the table before them.

  Louis realized suddenly that the name of Hugh Bowes was missing from Milton’s list of supposed enemies. It was a strange omission since the list seemed all-inclusive. Moreover Milton had been dismissed from the State Department, as Louis had, at a time when Hugh Bowes’s influence had already become pervasive. “And Hugh Bowes?” asked Louis.

  “Not Hugh Bowes,” said Milton, looking suddenly into Louis’s eyes, smiling and laying his hands palm up on the table before him. “Not Hugh.” Louis looked at Milton’s hands as though they held some writing it was absolutely necessary that he read but whose meaning eluded him. “Hugh is certainly”—he weighed each word—”the reason I am still doing my work today,” said Milton. “The reason I am still allowed to work. The reason I am still alive. He is powerful enough to offer me a sort of protection.”

  “Protection?” said Louis, leaning forward as though he might not have heard correctly. “What protection?”

  “Hugh Bowes cannot come right out and oppose the rottenness, the evil, the corruption, the people who are destroying the country. He would himself be destroyed in an instant, like that,” said Milton, leaning in toward Louis so that their faces were inches apart. He snapped the fingers of his left hand. “Like that. He is very powerful. But only as long as he operates within the system.”

  “But what protection?” said Louis, fearful not so much of the answer but of the madness it would signify.

  Instead of answering, Milton stood and dragged the stepladder across in front of the file drawers. After a brief search, he found the file he was looking for and placed it in front of Louis.

  “What is this?” asked Louis, gingerly touching the cardboard folder in front of him. It was labeled in ink in Milton’s squarish hand: H.B., MEMOS.