Louis Shalako: 2023-01-01

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

A Stranger In Paris, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9, Pt. 26. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

In the pre-dawn gloom, Gilles had felt the first few pin-pricks of cold wetness, blinking a bit in denial perhaps, and the car headlights, the streetlamps just up the way now revealed the awful truth…

“Nom de Dieu. Are those snowflakes?” He settled into the back seat, grateful for the heater and the fact that Alphonse had probably been driving for fifteen or twenty minutes just to get here.

She was all warmed up, the windows were clear and the wipers in good condition, knowing Alphonse...this one time Gilles had gone looking for him and found him down in the garage, hood up, rag in hand, and the engine just gleaming, and Alphonse sort of drinking in the smell of grease, petrol, coolant, brake fluid, wet rubber and glass cleaner.

“Yes, it’s the season for it. I can’t wait until it’s all over you know—” He eyed Gilles in the mirror; presumably, he was talking about Christmas.

Maintenon knew the feeling, actually. He allowed himself a bit of a sigh.

“Boss.” Tires hissed on pavement, and one particular gust rocked the vehicle discernably.

“Yes, Alphonse.”

“I was up in the room the other day. Somebody said something and I’ve been thinking about it.”

Tires hissed on wet pavement.

The stoplights up ahead were just about to change, he somehow knew it, and Alphonse concentrated on the driving for the moment. Sure enough…he pulled to a stop, left turn signal going…there was nothing there at this time of day, but one just had to wait patiently. They were cops, after all. He’d composed his thoughts.

“No. It’s just that a few people saw the black car, right. When Hector was killed. And that’s about all they remember. They do all agree, right. Ah, but there was this one witness. A real aficionado, sir. If you know what I mean.”

An aficionado.

“And?”

“The witness didn’t just see the car, Gilles. He watched it. Fuck, he ogled it. He looked at it with envy and longing, and some sort of a future dream in his head. Yeah, if I know guys like that. If he ever won the lottery, I mean a real big one. He would try and replicate that car. He loved it, Gilles. Also. He gave a very precise and observant description, far more than any of the others.” Black on black, inside and out, the only other thing was the chrome, lots of it, and according to the gentlemen, probably the best looking car in town. Big, swooping exhaust pipes coming out on either side up front.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to go up to the unit and read that report, ah, again, Inspector.”

“Sure. No problem—”

But there was more.

“The thing is, Gilles. The guy said it turned right at the third intersection. That’s the part that I’ve been thinking about.” They were rolling again, pedestrians on the sidewalks somehow familiar and yet anonymous at the same time.

The snowflakes were getting thicker, and bigger, and yet the street was still just black and wet.

“Ah.”

“Basically, I want to read the report for myself. Rather than just some random remark in passing, and then. Then I want to look at the map, not just this pissy little thing in the glove-box.”

Which he had surely already done, thought Maintenon.

“Absolutely.”

He thought. Alphonse must know every street, alley and cul-de-sac in town by now.

“Do you want to go out there today?” Perhaps around lunchtime—

No irony there, it was just a thought.

I’ll buy you lunch—

But he didn’t say it.

“No, I want to think about this. It depends on the map and the report. Besides—you guys got the big shindig on tonight.”

Maintenon nodded.

Yes, he was going to need his energy. Quite frankly, he was planning a nap, whether at his desk and in his chair, or maybe even on one of the long maple pews lining the walls of the hallway outside their office. An emergency blanket and a couple of cushions under his head, the thought of sleeping in his shoes somehow better than taking them off…

The benches were just too big, or he’d have had one dragged into the Unit. There was a reason people like him kept a spare shirt and a razor in their desk drawer. Clean socks and a new toothbrush. More than one reason, when one thought about it. What he really should have done, was to sleep in—something which he seemed incapable of, these days.

He had a ton of time off coming to him, something he actually dreaded.

Fuck.

“Very well.”

***

Four of them piled into the limousine, courtesy of Roger, Langeron that is to say, as well as what Maintenon assumed was either his current mistress, or possibly the new wife.

Either way.

Of course, the department had to have at least one limo—maybe even more than one.

For the sake of cover, or rather the lack of it, something for the tabloids perhaps—anyways, just in case, Margot and Gilles were going together, in something vaguely resembling logic. Alphonse, up in the front seat, did not need a ticket although he’d be around, as he put it—he’d be keeping the engine warm and no apologies for that. Racking up the overtime hours in his own inimitable fashion.

A couple of other tickets, plus increased police foot patrols in the immediate vicinity, a pair of radio vans aimlessly cruising nearby, meant that their backsides were about as covered as they could possibly be under such circumstances, which were murky at best. Someone had phoned around, trying to locate spare tickets, from friendly newspapers, the radio news organizations. A few literary and arts magazines. That part of the plan would leak like a sieve, although it might be a few hours. The plan was to flood the place with off-duty cops…all under orders to stay as sober as possible, keep an eye on the crowd and be ready for just about anything. He hadn’t heard back on that one. It struck him that at least a few proper journalists would check it out—free food and drink being a powerful inducement, considering their long hours, poor pay and pounding out the next great novel in a candle-lit garret somewhere in their off hours. One or two of them might even get a story out of it.

“All right. We had best be going.” Cold as it was, Gilles was sweating.

“Have you seen this, Gilles?” Langeron proffered a file folder with a few typewritten sheets.

He reached up and snapped on the interior light.

“Oh, God.” Gilles groaned after about three lines.

More bullshit—a delivery van, a company name that no one had ever heard of, and it probably didn’t exist except in someone’s fertile imagination, and a bunch of severed fingers…fuck. Sitting there for an entire week.

Phone line disconnected at about the same time as the last killing. The phone company would soon give them an address, and it too would be empty and deserted, perhaps an empty desk, a chair and a lamp, all pulled out of dustbins or picked up for a few francs from a second-hand shop. The city had a few hundred such shops, a thousand, or so one must assume. There’s another thousand man-hours. It was easy enough to get a phone line installed, all it took was a name, an address and a deposit.

Fuck.

There it was, right at the very bottom. The suspect vehicle, likely stolen, had been worked over pretty thoroughly. Stolen plates, (they might get something there if they had the time), vehicle identification number missing…serial numbers ground off the vehicle frame, engine and transmission. It sounded like someone had been very thorough. It looked like a fairly professional job. Police technicians would take it down, piece by piece and bolt by bolt. Virtually all of the really expensive parts had a serial number, and the original manufacturer would be contacted. If there was anything there to find, they would find it.

His instincts told him otherwise.

“Just more confirmation. Or more nonsense.” Roger had a point. “Okay, so all of this is a presentation. We had no big idea that the killings were unrelated. That’s about the farthest thing from our minds. The odds of getting fingerprints would appear to be rather small, but then of our known or imaginary victims, none of that information is available anyways. What, then is the point? Other than the fact that they can run circles around the police, and not much more. Otherwise—”

Otherwise, why not muffle the voice and call in from a phone booth, or leave some bullshit manifesto at the front desk of a newspaper. It had been done before, as often as not some kid, a wino, dropping it off for a few francs and thinking they were doing someone a favour. Such places were busy enough, with enough background distractions, such a person could drop an envelope on the reception counter, give a quick nod and a wave, and fade back out into the street, never to be seen again…sooner or later, someone would pick it up and open it up, just to see what the hell it was.

So. Why not? Why not just throw one more fuck into the system.

Why not.

***

END

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Louis has books and stories on Google Play. Many of them are free.

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Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

A Stranger In Paris, Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9, Pt. 25. Louis Shalako.

A handsome guy, he's been letting himself go...

Louis Shalako

“Imagination, my dear Watson. Imagination, is where crimes are solved—and they are also conceived.” Conan Doyle, Maintenon was almost sure.

Maybe not the exact words, but close enough for the girls he went with these days...i.e., nothing. Another nonsense observation. There was more, of course—there always was.

He hadn’t read any Sherlock Holmes stuff since he was a boy, and there were so many of them—but Hound of the Baskervilles came to mind, perhaps one or two others. The Speckled Band, the League of Red-Headed Men, for example. There were none on his bookshelves, all of that, dog-eared pages and covers missing, had been put away so long ago in the past. But the books, the films, the short stories by crass imitators, radio shows, theatricals, hell, even musicals, it was all over the place. Translated into a hundred languages and exported all over the world.

His old books, mouldered away in the ancestral home, hopefully burned or tossed and not still stinking up an attic somewhere. A fictional character had become an icon, which was one shitty word for it in his opinion…admittedly, he didn’t have much to suggest as an alternative. At least one senior officer affected the very same hat, and people were careful not to mention it, or to stare at it, or laugh at it or to take any notice of it at all. It was just an affectation, and harmless enough for all of that. It was perhaps something else as well—like the rattle on the tail end of a copperhead. It was a warning in some ways. But these were stories of imagination, where the real, daily police work was dull, plodding, and methodical, it was all about procedures, and imagination was unlikely to rear its ugly head, if not actively discouraged in some circles. It was all about taking accurate notes, and spelling people’s names correctly, and getting the times and dates and addresses and occupations down properly. It had all been boiled down to standard operating procedure, and to deviate was to take a risk.

Imagination was risky.

And it was all too lacking, in some circles…

In the end, Gilles had picked up a copy at a bookstore on the way home, a patient Alphonse sitting in the car, smoking away and keeping the engine warm, as he put it. He could always read it and then donate it…somewhere. Trying to explain that one on the expense account would be a foregone conclusion and so, why bother.

Truth was, he probably couldn’t be bothered, and didn’t really need the money anyways.

Think of it as a treat.

He had found it. The relevant chapter, in Hound of the Baskervilles, when Holmes and Watson were walking across the moors; this after a disguised Holmes had been living in a pre-historic stone hut, a barrow, and somehow having his mail forwarded from London. Bullshit of the finest vintage, in other words—sure, there must have been general delivery, poste restante, in a nearby village, and yet a stranger going back and forth would have been observed, and a real object of interest to the locals. Sooner or later, you had to walk down a road, a street.

“This is why so many crimes go unsolved, Watson…because people insist on the facts when they prove nothing…”

Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? Police and the courts, the press and the general public, insisted on the facts and their assumed significance. He owed a lot to Conan Doyle, although much of it was pure bullshit. Sometimes they made up their own facts—that was especially true when the facts didn’t suit their opinions.

Wasn’t that what he had been saying all along. Fucking bullshit—

The whole thing was just pure bullshit, from beginning to end. And whoever had cooked this one up, for a committee seemed unlikely, or was it? Maybe it was more than one mind.

Whatever the case, that was one sick little imagination.

There was the sound of the key in the lock, and Sylvestre turned and left the bathroom, ready for breakfast and more amiable company...he looked at himself in the mirror. It might be time to close the door, although she wasn’t likely to come in here first thing.

Either he was late, or Sophie was unusually early…he’d left his wristwatch on the bedside table. He would have given his left testicle for another four or five years in bed, right about then. Ten years, that would just about do it.

He needed a shirt, and socks, and cufflinks, and a tie, and all of that other bullshit.

Merde.

Stop thinking like a Frenchman all of the time.

And when do I get around to shaving off this horrible little beard.

***

It was a black night, very black.

Raindrops still speckled the puddles and dripped from lampposts, tree branches and the corners of the eaves. It was a black night.

The constable’s feet were sore, wet, and damp. He’d been suffering from a bit of toe-rot lately, and that was just the truth. It was the wet, the weather and the black wool socks never really drying out. It was foot-fungus.

He stood there, studying it.

The vehicle was a small delivery lorry, red. Blood-red in this light. Originally based upon a sedan, but with some imagination, it had been adapted into a four-cylinder panel van with two back doors, an elevated roof and with nothing but sheet metal behind the passenger doors—that, and the name of the provender, in the present case, Delacroix et Cie, and then there were the flowers painted on there, and an address, and a phone number. There were any number of them in the city.

The vehicle had been there for a week. His own soggy tickets attested to that, his own notebook, and yes, a couple of days off there in the middle of the week due to shift changes and rotational scheduling and all of that.

And still, the vehicle was there. It was like they just couldn’t take a hint sometimes, or maybe they had simply gone bankrupt. If they’d run out of gas or had a breakdown, they would have moved the vehicle sooner rather than later…you could call the fucking cops and tell them all about it, and that might have saved you the ticket in the first place.

The actual address of the company, also painted on the side panels, was nowhere near this present location, and if nothing else, the constable was a logical thinker. He did have a phone number…right?

What in the hell was it doing there, admittedly not doing a whole hell of a lot of harm, but also, in violation of certain traffic and parking codes. As a bit of cold rain trickled down the back of his neck, standing there in the uncertain light of a yellowing streetlight, he noted that the back doors were ajar—not more than a few millimetres, six or seven at most.

That being said, it sure as hell hadn’t been like that yesterday.

Kids, thieves, drunks, cars were stolen all the time…the handle turned and he pulled the back door on the right side open…

***

The back of the vehicle didn’t even really smell, not after all this time. Towed to the police forensics garage, under the lights and what minimal heating there was in what was nothing more than a really big shed, it seemed as if at least one frozen fly had felt the warmth and come to life again.

It reminded the constable of the time he’d had the refrigerator door open and a fly went in and landed. With a sort of cruelty, he’d shut the door for a few minutes just to see what happened. Ten minutes later, feeling slightly guilty, he’d scooped the thing up and put it out the window, still alive, perhaps shivering in some insectoid manner. Maybe just grateful to get out of a hell that had frozen over; and all of that lovely food inaccessible.

Little bones, and a lot of them…shriveled meat, with the time, the temperature, with the loss of the blood and consequent drying of the tissues. The human body was ninety-nine percent water, after all. Ninety-eight-point-six, as he recalled from a failed attempt at medical school. Even so, one had to be objective.

The blood had pooled, not much of it really.

A flash bulb popped, the constable consulted his notes and then continued them along with the process of documenting his discovery. But the back of the little van was littered with fingers—just fingers. Chopped off, discarded, macabre as all hell. They were hard to count, stuck together in little clumps, singles, thumbs…he nodded sagely. Let the techs count them. They had their pictures.

He read the papers, of course. He knew something about it. Even if he hadn’t, this was going to be one hell of a report. He’d make sure of it.

Full of dead fingers...

Other than that, there was no way in hell one could get a decent set of fingerprints off of any one of them. That much was obvious, not all dried up and shriveled like that. Half frozen, freezer-burned. He was reminded of something, the shrunken heads of savages somewhere off in the south Pacific. The constable, soaked to the skin, ignored by all the auto mechanics and technical people, as another flashbulb popped, closed the notebook.

Overhead heaters blasted out their noisy hot air, and the floor steamed with moisture.

They were ready with their little bags and tweezers. Little labels and little envelopes.

It looked like another one of those nights—one of those nights where you come home, take off the heavy shoes, put up your stinky socks on the radiator, eat your dinner and don’t talk about the job with the wife and kids.

And that was just the truth.

***

END