When he arrives at the office Thursday morning, his temper is ragged. He has picked up word that Scheer is bragging about being back on the street before long. Obviously, the Commissioner has reported to his political acquaintance.
After scanning the Morning Report, he paws about in the three days’ worth of back paper work that has accumulated since Guttmann’s departure. Then he comes across a memo from Dr. Bouvier asking him to drop down to Forensic Medicine when he has a free moment.
As always, the smells of wax, chemicals, heat, and dust in the basement hall trigger memories of St. Joseph’s: moue, tranches, the Glory Hole, Our Lady of the Chipped Cheek…
When LaPointe enters his office, Bouvier is just drawing a cup of coffee from his urn, his finger crooked into the cup to tell when it is nearly full.
“That you, Claude? Come in and be impressed by one of my flashes of insight, this particular one focused on the case of one Antonio Verdini—alias Green—discovered one night in an alley, his body having acquired a biologically superfluous, and even detrimental, orifice.”
LaPointe grunts, in no mood for Bouvier’s florid style.
“My ingenious filing system”—Bouvier waves toward his high-heaped desk—”has produced the interesting fact that our Mr. Green’s uncommon appetite for ventilation was shared by”—he cocks his head in LaPointe’s direction and pauses for effect—”the victims of two other unsolved murder cases.”
“Oh?”
“Somehow I had expected more than ‘oh?’.”
“Which cases, then?”
“Men known to the department, and therefore to God, as H-49854 and H-50567, but to their intimates as MacHenry, John Albert, and Pearson, Michael X. This X indicates that his parents gave him no middle name, doubtless in a spirit of orthographic economy.” Bouvier holds the two files out to LaPointe and stares proudly at him with one huge eye and one nicotine-colored blank. The Lieutenant scans rapidly, then reads more closely. These are Bouvier’s personal files, fuller than the official records because they include clippings from newspapers, relevant additional information, and certain scribbled notes in his large, tangled hand.
One file is six years old, the other two and a half. Both stabbings; both males; both without signs of robbery; both at night on deserted streets.
“Well?” Bouvier gloats.
“Could be coincidences.”
“There’s a limit to antichance. Notice that both happened on the edges of what you call your patch—although I hear there is some difference of opinion between you and the Risen Cream as to the extent of that realm, and of its monarch’s authority.”
“What’s all this business here?” LaPointe puts one report on Bouvier’s desk, keeping his finger on a passage scribbled in the doctor’s hand.
Pressing the bridge of his broken glasses to hold them in place, Bouvier leans over, his face close to the page. “Ah! Technical description of the wound. Angle of entry of the weapon.”
“Identical in all three cases?”
“No. Not quite.”
“Well, then?”
“That’s where you discern the touch of genius in me! The angles of entry are not identical. They vary. They vary in direct proportion to the heights of the three men. If you insist on playing the game of coincidence, you have to accept that there were three killers of identical height, and who held a knife in the identical way, and all three of whom were most gifted in the use of a knife. And if you want to stack up coincidences with the abandon of a Victorian novelist, how’s this? Pearson, Michael X., made love shortly before his death. Once again, that nasty habit of failing to wash up. A professor at McGill, too! You’d think he’d know better. The other fellow, MacHenry, John Albert, was an American up here on business. There is every reason to believe that he also made love shortly before contributing his personal dust to the Universal Dust. He washed up within an hour of his death. Not a full bath; just the crotch area. There’s the American businessman for you! Time is money.”
“Can I take these with me?” LaPointe asks rhetorically, already on his way out with the reports.
“But make sure you bring them back. I can’t stand having my files in disorder!” Bouvier calls after him.
Read and reread, Bouvier’s dossiers rest on LaPointe’s desk, covering the unfinished paper work. He links his fingers over his head and leans back in his swivel chair to look at the large-scale city plan of Montreal tacked up on his wall, finger-smudged only in the area of the Main. His eye picks up the places where the three men were found—stabbed, but not robbed. The Green kid… there. In that alley almost in the center of the Main district. The American businessman… there. On a narrow street off Chateaubriand between Rue Roy and Rue Bousquet, on what LaPointe would call the outer edge of his patch. And that professor from McGill… there. Well outside the Main, on Milton Street between Lorne and Shuter, normally a busy area, but probably deserted at… what was it?… estimated time of death: between 0200 and 0400 hours.
Probably the same killer. Probably the same woman. Jealousy? Over a period of six years? Hardly what you would call a flash of jealous anger. One woman. One killer. Perhaps the woman was the killer. And… what kind of woman could unite a Canadian professor, an American businessman, and an illegal Italian alien with sperm on his brain?
The freshest of these old cases is thirty months old. All traces would be healed over by now.
He sighs and puts the files into a thick interdepartmental envelope to send them over to Gaspard in homicide. LaPointe can picture Gaspard’s anger when he discovers he has inherited a set of killings with a sex link. Just the kind of thing the newspapers salivate over. Unknown Knife Slayer Stalks… Police Baffled…
All the while he is eating in a cheap café, unaware of what is on his plate, all the while he walks slowly through the Main, putting the street to bed, LaPointe carries the details of the two files in the back of his mind, turning over the sparse references to personal life, looking for bits that match up with what he knows about Tony Green. But nothing. No links. He is standing outside his apartment on Esplanade, looking up at the dark windows of his second-story flat, when he decides to return to the Quartier Général and muck around with late paper work, rather than face a night alone with his coffee and his Zola.
“What in hell are you doing here?”
“Jesus Christ! You startled me, sir.”
“You leave something behind?”
Guttmann has been sitting at LaPointe’s desk, his mind floating in a debris of problems and daydreams. “No. I just remembered that you have a map of the city on your wall, and I still had my key, so…”
“So?”
“It’s about that packet of files you left for Sergeant Gaspard.”
With a jerk of his thumb, LaPointe evicts Guttmann from his swivel chair and occupies it himself. “I’ll bet he was happy to find three closed cases suddenly reopened.”
“Oh, yes, sir. He could hardly contain his delight. He was particularly colorful on the subject of Dr. Bouvier. He said he needed that kind of help about as much as starving Pakistanis need Red Cross packages filled with menus.”
“Hm-m. But that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing in my office.”
Guttmann goes to the wall map and points out light pencil lines he has drawn on it. “I got this weird idea in the middle of the night.”
LaPointe is puddling about in his paper work. “Joans aren’t supposed to have ideas. It ruins their typing,” he says without looking up.
“As it turned out, it wasn’t much of an idea.”
“No kidding? Let’s hear it.”