Garnier studied the bodies again and then looked back at me. “How long have you been here?”
“Only a few minutes. Before that I spent about three hours at the house of a couple friends. Jules and Anne Cardinal. They live close to Roquebrune, raise flowers there for the wholesale market in Nice. They’ll confirm how long I was with them and when I left.”
Garnier and Thibaut took me back into the living room. Thibaut used the phone there to make two calls.
One was to the gendarmerie in Roquebrune, asking them to check me out with the Cardinals.
His other call was to the Gendarmerie Nationale’s regional headquarters, to report the double murder to its commanding officer. Thibaut was instructed to hold me, stay put without touching anything, and wait for the team of investigators that would arrive shortly to take over.
That was what Thibaut and Garnier had expected and hoped to be told. The La Turbie gendarmerie consisted of a total of only four men, none of whom had the training to carry out a murder investigation.
I waited with them, remembering the Anne-Marie I’d known when we’d first met in Paris—before she’d come down here and I’d introduced her into the Vaillant family. I tried not to think of her as she looked now, lying empty on the floor in the other room.
Chapter 7
It was almost two in the morning when I was taken to Nice for a formal interrogation. But not to the headquarters of the Gendarmerie Nationale.
Its Commandant had sent his Brigade de Recherche team to La Turbie: doctor, photographer, ballistics expert, fingerprint technicians, and a pair of detectives experienced in homicide cases. But at the same time the Commandant had, as required by law, notified the Procureur de la République of the La Turbie murders.
A Procureur is in charge of all public prosecutions. His first duty, on being notified of a crime, is to assign a juge d’instruction—an examining magistrate—to supervise the investigation. A juge d’instruction doesn’t take part in any trial. He is in charge of the case beforehand, from the very start, with a combination of powers that has no equivalent in American or British law.
The police do their work under his control and turn their findings over to him. He combines these with the results of his own questioning of suspects and witnesses. He is the one who ultimately decides if someone should be charged and brought to trial. If he does so decide, those in charge of the trial usually assume the defendant must be guilty.
The juge d’instruction assigned to the La Turbie double murder, influenced by the fact that the case involved a high-prestige family—as well as a former police officer had begun exercising his authority immediately.
Among his many powers was the right to decide which police he wanted to handle the investigation. He’d had previous success working with Commissaire Justin of the Police Judiciare, at the Nice headquarters of the Police Nationale. So it was Commissaire Justin who was instructed to take over this investigation. The team of gendarme specialists already at work on it were ordered to give him their full cooperation.
The Police Nationale is a civil service, under the Interior Ministry. The Gendarmerie Nationale is military, under the Ministry of Defense. At their upper levels these two parallel law enforcement agencies are extremely jealous of each other. But at lower levels their cops often work hand in hand without a problem. In this case they would have had no choice even if they hadn’t liked doing so. The gendarmes began giving Commissaire Justin copies of their preliminary findings. And he sent one of his Police Judiciare inspectors to bring me in for interrogation.
I didn’t mind the change. The P.J. inspector was Laurent Soumagnac. He was thirty-four, with Oriental eyes and a long, wiry figure. A methodical detective whose careful, pragmatic intellect I’d learned to respect. The eyes, and perhaps the patience behind them, were from his Vietnamese mother.
One reason he’d been chosen to handle my interrogation was that he already knew a lot about me. The apartment he shared with his wife Domiti and their daughter Charlotte was in Cap d’Ail, the village just above my house. In the past year we’d begun telling each other our life stories over drinks in the Cap d’Ail cafes.
A neighbor and, if not yet exactly a friend, not an enemy, either.
But that wouldn’t keep him from squeezing me as hard as he had to, if he caught me holding out on him. Which I intended to.
* * * *
Laurent Soumagnac’s tiny office was ten blocks from the beach, in the central commissariat of Nice. A five-story building of white stone with old-fashioned wooden shutters and a couple of big palm trees overcrowding the small garden in back. His office was on the fourth floor. Its window looked across Avenue Foch at three of Disney’s dwarfs posing on top of a garden supplies shop.
Soumagnac sat me down on a hard metal chair and settled himself on its mate behind his desk. The city outside was very quiet. Nice is the fourth largest city in France and the capital of the Riviera. But at that hour all you heard was the sound of an occasional car, echoing loudly through the dark, empty streets.
I watched Soumagnac assemble three sheets of paper and two carbons and begin rolling them into his typewriter. For detectives everywhere, knowing how to type fast has become more essential than being able to shoot fast. Glancing at the other desk that filled most of the rest of the office, I asked: “Where’s Ricard?” Yves Ricard was the P.J. inspector Soumagnac usually teamed with.
“Interrogating your friend, Frank Crowley.”
“I didn’t know you’d found him.”
“Hour ago. Coming back to that photography studio of his. Said he went for a night drive up in the mountains. Where nobody saw him, naturally.”
“Got any evidence it’s a lie?”
Soumagnac turned his slanty eyes on me. “I’m supposed to be questioning you. Let’s get at it. The basics first. Most of those I already know.”
He recited aloud as he typed them: “Name of witness: Pierre-Ange Sawyer. Occupation: private investigator. Previously: police detective in Chicago, narcotics agent of U.S. government in Washington, and European investigator for U.S. Senate. Present business address: same as home, called La Ruyne, on Chemin Serriers below Cap d’Ail. Also sometimes works in Paris, where keeps apartment.”
He paused and asked: “Paris address?”
I gave it to him.
He typed it and resumed: “Father of witness American, killed in liberation of France, 1945. Mother French, a decorated Resistance hero, now respected scholar in Paris. Making witness citizen of both France and America.”
“Wrong,” I cut in. “Just American.”
He looked at me, startled. “I thought you had dual citizenship.”
“No. I was born in Spain, not France. My mother escaped across the border when the Gestapo seized most of her Resistance group. She registered me as an American citizen, in memory of my father.”
“You could easily obtain French citizenship, too, because of your mother.”
“I’ve just never gotten around to it.”
Soumagnac nodded wisely: “I understand. This way, if you get in trouble here, with someone like me, for example, you can always cry to the American consulate for help.”
I just smiled at him. It was true that some cops hesitated to be as rough with me as they might have otherwise, out of fear of triggering an international problem between France and the U.S. I never told any of them that my relationships with certain departments of the American government were no longer entirely cordial.
Soumagnac returned to typing the basic facts on me, including my movements up to the moment I entered the Crowley house and found the bodies. He told me that Jules and Anne Cardinal had confirmed my statement about the time I’d spent with them the previous evening—and that I had left them only about fifteen minutes before the gendarmes discovered me in the Crowley house with the bodies.
“Of course,” he added, “they could be mistaken about the exact timing involved. Or even be lying, out of friendship for you.”
&
nbsp; “Possible, but not very. That’s why you’re listing me as a witness, not as a suspect.”
“For the moment you are only a witness, true. But that can change at any time. It depends entirely on what the juge d’instruction decides. Do you know him?”
“I know his name. Xavier Escorel. I’ve heard he’s pretty young.”
Soumagnac nodded. “Twenty-seven years old. Only two years out of magisterial school. But he belongs to an important and influential family. Which explains why he has been getting the cream of the cases lately. Young—and extremely ambitious. Intends to become a Procureur de la République, and probably will. Escorel is very clever—and vicious. A real cunt.”
Everything in French has a gender, from flowers to machine guns. A vagina is assigned the masculine gender, and a penis is feminine. You figure it out. I’m half-French, and I’ve never been able to.
“Escorel smells the kind of publicity he adores in this case,” Soumagnac continued. “One victim and her relatives by marriage belong to the family of Mona Vaillant, a name known all over the world. He intends to name a guilty party as swiftly as possible. And to assemble a dossier that insures conviction.”
“You said a guilty party,” I pointed out. “Not the guilty party.”
“That is what I said,” he agreed. “I also tell you that Escorel will see to it that anyone who tries any tricks that interfere with his work will be brutally punished. So I warn you: Be very careful to give completely truthful answers to the questions I ask next.”
* * * *
He began by asking about my connections with every member of Mona’s family—and for an account of my recent meetings with each of them. Plus what I knew of their interrelationships.
I pointed to the lavender-colored folder on his desk. It contained the preliminary findings and interrogations of the team sent by the Gendarmerie Nationale. “You already have my answers to those questions in there.”
“I’m a slow reader,” Soumagnac said. “Comes of being born in Saigon and not getting to a school in France until I was eleven. It’s easier for me if you give me the answers verbally.”
He probably knew by heart every word of the dossiers in the lavender folder. What he was after were any inconsistencies that might crop up during the verbal repetition of my statement. I made sure I didn’t give him any.
I told him about seeing August Pilon with Mona on Sunday morning—and about Anne-Marie joining Crow for lunch. Those were facts that would almost certainly surface during questionings of Crow and Mona.
There were a number of things I didn’t tell him.
One was that Gilles and his wife Anne-Marie hadn’t cared much for each other anymore. Another was that I was fairly certain Anne-Marie had played around.
Nor did I mention that Mona was angry with Crow for giving up his business. Nor that Nathalie was upset enough with him to make me think her business trip to Paris was more like walking out on him.
Soumagnac sensed the areas where I was holding something back. He kept returning to those points, approaching them in different ways. But none of his attempts pried loose anything that could provoke him into getting really tough with me.
I had more practice in lying than he had in catching me at it.
“Obviously,” he said, on one of his return approaches to a shaky area, “Pilon was working on something for Madame Vaillant.”
“If he was, I don’t know anything about it.” That was close enough to the truth to get by, no matter what Mona said.
“Come on, Sawyer. What else would she be doing with him?”
“Maybe he was drumming up business. Trying to persuade her to contact him if she ever needs any kind of investigation done. Or to recommend him to other people.”
“She already has a friend who is a private investigator.”
“Maybe he didn’t know that.”
Soumagnac went through the rest of his list of questions and took down my answers. Finally, he leaned back in his chair and folded his lean arms across his chest.
“Tell me,” he asked in a more informal tone, “what do you think Anne-Marie Vaillant and August Pilon were doing in that house? And why were they killed?”
“I haven’t been thinking of much of anything else since I found them,” I said. “And I haven’t come up with an answer to either question.”
Soumagnac smiled at me disbelievingly. “You’re an experienced detective. You must have some ideas on it. Just between us.”
I smiled back: “Laurent, don’t practice your Oriental wiles on me. We both know that nothing I say in this office is just between us.”
He almost laughed. “My Oriental wiles don’t seem to be working too well. Perhaps I’m tired. One point: According to your statement, the Crowleys kept an emergency house key hidden under a tile at the corner of their patio. Did Anne-Marie Vaillant know about that?”
“I know it, so I guess she did too.”
Soumagnac nodded to himself, thinking about it. “I’ll tell you how it looks to me. First of all, that Opel Kadett in the Crowley carport belonged to August Pilon.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do. And it’s the only car there. So apparently he drove Anne-Marie Vaillant to the Crowley house. And she used that emergency key to let them in. They were naked when they were killed. The bed is all messed up. Obviously they were in bed together. Somebody came in and didn’t like finding them that way. Somebody in love with either Anne-Marie Vaillant or August Pilon, say. That somebody had a gun and was furious enough to use it.”
“You use the words apparently and obviously too much,” I said. “They’re just another way of saying you’re only guessing. Your theory doesn’t feel right, and you know it.”
Soumagnac unfolded his arms and leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, all attention. “Tell me what you don’t like about it.”
“First of all, if Anne-Marie and Pilon wanted to hop into bed together, why in hell would they pick a bed in the Crowleys’ house to do it? Pilon was a bachelor with his own apartment.”
“Some people get an extra sexual thrill out of making love in odd places. Especially places where there is some danger of being caught at it.”
I let that one pass for the moment. “Secondly, the way they were shot wasn’t the work of someone crazy with anger. It was a neat, professional killing.”
Soumagnac shook his head. “Being angry doesn’t rule out knowing how to shoot straight.”
“Something else was going on there,” I told him flatly. “You can smell it, too.”
“Now you’re the one leaning on guesswork. And it’s no better than mine.”
The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up and listened for a time. Then he said, “Thanks… No, nothing new here. I’ll let you know.”
He put down the phone and looked at me with genuine sympathy. “Your friend Frank Crowley owns a pistol.”
“A lot of people do. Like most of them, he has a permit to keep a weapon in his house.”
Soumagnac nodded. “For protection of domicile. But Monsieur Crowley’s pistol is not where he says he always keeps it.”
I already knew that, and I could guess the rest.
“His missing gun is a Czech-made M-27 that fires 7.65mm cartridges,” Soumagnac said. “The bullets that ballistics just removed from the two bodies are that caliber.”
Chapter 8
“Crow didn’t kill them,” I told Soumagnac.
“That is what you wish to believe,” he said gently.
“I know he didn’t. Go with your own theory. That this was a passion killing. Crow didn’t have any motivation for it.”
“He was seeing his sister-in-law, one of the murder victims, alone. You saw them together yourself, yesterday in Beaulieu.”
“Having lunch together. I was in a bar with Anne-Marie’s husband that morning. That doesn’t mean we’re going to bed together. Anne-Marie and Crow were part of the same family. Friends, nothing more. He wasn’t in love with her.
He’s too much in love with his own wife.”
Laurent Soumagnac turned back to his machine and swiftly typed the gist of what I’d said. Then he said, “I’m adding your opinion of that to your statement. Though it’s only that: an opinion. Colored by friendship. Are you saying that your friend never played around with other women?”
“If he did, I don’t know of it. And if he did, it was just that: playing around. Not anything serious. The way he feels about Nathalie, he couldn’t fall for anybody else.”
Soumagnac typed it, but looking like he was only doing so to make me feel better.
I said, “There’s another reason I know he didn’t kill them. He’s not the kind of man to kill anybody unless forced to. In self-defense, or to save somebody he cared for. Crow is a gentle person.”
He didn’t type that. Instead he looked at me and said, “He was a combat soldier in Vietnam. With you. Are you trying to tell me he never killed anybody?”
“What somebody does in combat has no relation to how he’ll act in civilian life. You know that. I’ve seen the way you’ve handled an armed thief who didn’t want to be taken in. And I’ve seen you curl up like a worm when your wife Domiti bawls you out.”
Soumagnac actually blushed. “I won’t type that up, if you don’t mind. All right, I understand you want to save your friend. And there’s no proof yet that he did do the killing. But if you don’t like my theories about what happened, you’d better give me something that contradicts it.”
“All of you are too convinced that it was a passion killing to look beyond that,” I told him. “Because it looks like a passion killing. Try thinking about what happened from a different angle. One of August Pilon’s enemies. Private detectives collect a lot of those. Find one with a reason to kill him. And kill Anne-Marie because she was a witness—”
Soumagnac finished it for me, poker-faced: “As well as to make it appear to be a passion murder. Someone who threatened them with the gun first, to make them strip, for the same reason.”
“My theory is as good as yours,” I told him.
“No, it’s not. We’re not all potato-heads here, you know. We have considered that possibility. Along with the possibility that the murderer was someone who wanted to frame Frank Crowley. Someone with a business grudge against him, for instance. But we haven’t found one bit of evidence to lend credence to either possibility.”
Back in the Real World Page 4
