Real Change Is Incremental. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Real Change is Incremental.

 

If you moved to France, or Alaska, or Timbuktu, that is one big change, all at once. And yet, you would still be the same person, you’re just in a different location. You would adapt, but then you wouldn’t have much choice. Some of those changes might not be all that welcome, and learning a whole new language and culture would be a big challenge.

What if you stayed in the same old place? What if you stayed in the same old place, and what if that was kind of bugging you, and you acknowledged that you needed to make some changes? Perhaps even some big changes.

All real change is incremental. It takes a lot of small changes, very small in fact, over time, and sometimes it takes a very long time, before any real results can be seen.

In a previous story, On Frugality and Poverty Thinking, I talked about how I wanted to paint my apartment, which was getting pretty grubby after nine years of occupancy.

The trouble, of course, is that it’s a good idea to talk to the landlord. They might even say no. It takes fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of tools and materials, all of which have to come up three flights of stairs, all of which takes thirty or forty hours of labour…to slap a coat of paint on heavily-stained walls and to see it all come bleeding back through in a very short time.

And it’s a big change.

It all started off innocently enough. I took some spray cleaner, and did the experiment. I took a sponge, and some paper towels and I just tried to see if I could get some of that goop off of one small section of wall. The concern there, was what if it’s not working and you have to quit, and there would still be those swish marks on the wall where you have just moved it around a bit.

Yeah, but I already had that—I could hardly have made it any worse.

I could hardly make it any worse...

Quite frankly, I have tried to clean here and there a few times, and it seemed as if I was just pushing the grease around, although at least something might have come off. Yet it seemed to work fairly well this time around. It took about four (rather large) bottles of spray cleaner, and about four or five rolls of paper towels and a bit of Comet Cleanser, and a cheap sponge or two.

I did the whole job for less than forty bucks…all it took was time.

And effort, and I never missed a day, an hour and a half to two hours a day.

That, is really all it took.

And now, there is no longer any need to paint my apartment.

And I probably won’t wait nine years to do it again, either. And if I did paint, there’s a lot less crap to bleed through that fresh, new paint, right? It’s not going to need five coats of Killz or Zinsser stain-busting primer first.

Now that I know how freaking easy it is—

***

I did a half-hour of work the first day, and then I had to sit there at my writing desk for the rest of the day, with my eyes straying back to that one clean patch from time to time. The next day, I did maybe an hour and a half—and it was like my arm hurt a bit, like it was going to fall off or something, and yet I could see progress.

My arms never did fall off, and that’s a good thing because I still need them.

It took three sessions to do just one short wall across the front of the apartment, one with a window and a patio door. The square footage is not that great.

Looking around, it’s a pretty big job, so I focused exclusively on the living room and the dining nook. I started off with small sections, just trying to complete them, one at a time.

Having taken a little walk around the apartment, I counted fourteen empty light sockets, there’s another example. I bought five bulbs first time around. I bought four more as I washed walls. I spent two and a half weeks washing walls, which also involved moving furniture. The thing snowballs, to the effect that having pulled out a wall unit, a couch, a fridge or a stove, now it’s time to wash the floor as well. And having washed one part of the floor, it becomes immediately obvious that you might was well go on and wash the rest of it.

Now it’s time to wash the windows, and the door frames and the doors, and the bedroom walls, and the hallway, and the bathroom ceiling…every fucking bit of it was incremental, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s not even done yet.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I went out and bought a new shower curtain. Six dollars. I bought five more light bulbs…they’re less than a dollar each. We have spares in the cupboard. I just bought a couple of night-lights. Think about the psychology. I get up in the middle of the night to pee, and what do I see? Yes, I see that little bluish light in the bathroom. I see something else, too.

Stella, one of our interns here at Long Cool One Books.

Change.

I see change, and change is good. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I see a new bath mat, ($4.50, Dollarama), I see three new wash cloths, ($1.75), I see a new pair of shoes in the closet and maybe even some new socks and underwear in there too.

Looking into our crystal ball, I can see a couple of new towels in the near future. I can see myself pulling down these horrible old curtains and taking them on a little trip to the laundromat. There’s nine years of nicotine in those, and that’s just a fact.

It isn’t even all that expensive, especially as I don’t have to do it all at once. Just for background, I’ve just gotten off of ODSP, disability, after thirty years. Old Age Security and Canada Pension Plan, GIS and all of that results in a pretty substantial raise, which should tell you a little something about the Ontario Disability Support Program. The point is, we’re just a little bit scared to spend money, what with it being so fucking precious all of the time. The surplus is not large, and it could be squandered fairly quickly as well…by this time next week, ladies and gentlemen, I swear to God that I will probably have little wicker bowls full of potpourri, set out here and there, on the back of the toilet tank for example. I'll have them sitting on little lace doilies from Dollarama.

And it will be well.

I want to buy one of those plug-in air fresheners. Then, when I come home from work, the place doesn’t stink like dead tobacco smoke, or the bacon grease on the walls, or old-man smell coming off the bed sheets and pillow cases.

I deserve that much, but then I am prepared to do the work, and to spend the four bucks or whatever.

When the time comes, I’m going to take this old rag of a winter coat, I’m going to put it in the fire pit out behind my mother’s place and I’m going to burn it. Just one more little change, right…I absolutely promise to take a picture and tell you beautiful people all about it.

Right?

And that will be a very good day indeed.

 

END

 

On Frugality, and Poverty Thinking.

Poor old Louis has books and stories available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Dead Reckoning, Chapter Fourteen. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery, #10. Louis Shalako.

Margot: damned thorough.

Louis Shalako

He’d been praying for the room to be cleared, mostly, hopefully, by the time he returned after his interview with Internal Investigations.

It was not to be, and his heart sank. The whole damned bunch of them were there, and he was clearly going to be the object of their attentions.

Fucking Delorme, Langeron, Archambault, Margot, Firmin was back, LeBref. There was even a new face, a uniformed officer he’d frankly never seen before in his life. Admittedly they were a little short-handed right about now…two down and one to go, a very depressing thought, but the next guy to go was most likely going to be him.

“Good morning.” He put his hat on the rack.

“Sit down, please, Detective Hubert.” Langeron cleared his throat, glancing through the notes…

He looked up, from his perch on a corner of Hubert’s regular desk.

“Take Maintenon’s desk.” It made sense enough, he would be able to face them all at once.

“Yes, sir.” He was just dying for a crummy cup of coffee from the urn, and at some point Hubert might even run out of patience.

This was no time to push his luck.

It was all he could do, to clamp down on that tongue and avoid any little impulses…

“Smoke them if you got them.” Delorme didn’t smoke, so that was mighty big of him.

Hubert could forego the pleasure, at least for the moment.

Margot went first, with a little hitch in her voice that might have been humour, more likely simple disbelief.

“So, in your report, you mention…a bore, a witch, a hermit…and a Little Red Riding Hood?” The tone was neutral, her eyes dropped to the page, and then came up again.

Hubert flushed.

“Yes.” He almost choked on it. “And a ghost—”

Don’t forget the fucking ghost.

“Ah, okay. And you say the witch, for example, had a dream?”

“Yes. She claims that she saw his ghost, which sort of tells you something about her. She’s rather sly as well, all part of the, uh, the schtick. It’s all in the report. She says she saw Maintenon, clear as day, walking down the road. Early to mid-afternoon. It was getting warm and she was opening up a couple of the front windows. She didn’t think much of it at the time. She knew him when they were younger. She had heard he was in town. It’s that kind of a place. She says she recognized him immediately. Her description fits well enough, including the clothing and no hat, a point I pressed on her a little bit. A certain psychological profile, it’s like they just can’t help but to embellish. Claims not to have seen him around town on his visit, just to clarify. One wonders about the relationship, she was a little bit coy on that subject. They were young, right, one or the other may have had something of a crush. It was all hints, not too subtle with that one. Nothing really specific. She craves attention as much as anything. And she’s clever enough, in that people are willing to pay for the privilege of giving it to her. Anyhow. It was only after, ah, afterwards, when she heard about it through gossip or the newspaper or something—and she was confused in terms of the day and the date. That’s kind of understandable in a person of her age, and not regularly employed in the classic sense. Days may go by, and she might not even leave the house. I don’t know, but she would probably have to have a calendar in the kitchen or study or somewhere. She must have a clock on the wall somewhere. Anyhow, she calls Dampier to tell him all about it, that’s the senior sergeant down there, and he’s already convinced she’s crazy. It seems she might be something of a pest, and now, he has her halfway-convinced it was a dream. She says he’s an idiot.” He’d been careful with the interview, wondering just how suggestible she might be.

It was better if stuff came out freely, all on its own, with not a lot of detail supplied by the officers themselves…that one was right out of the manual.

“I see.”

“So, in logical terms, one, she had a dream, two, she saw a ghost, three, she saw Gilles walking down the road—with no hat, we might add, if we can even believe her, previous to his decease, but she is confused as to the exact time and date…or. Four. She saw Gilles exactly when and where she says she saw him. That one troubles me, but it also seems the least likely scenario.”

“So, she had a phone?”

“Yes. She does fortune-telling, Tarot, tea leaves…séances, palm reading. She has a crystal ball. She sees clients by appointment. The clients are very loyal…they swear by her. According to her. The police have tried to shut her down, fairly nicely as it would seem, and she simply defies them. Also, according to her. It’s no wonder they, ah, Dampier in particular, see her as more of a nuisance than anything.” It wasn’t the alleged witchcraft so much, as the fact that the lady was making money at it—that was the real problem.

Even in this modern age, there were still criminal cases before the courts upon occasion.

It was seen as more of a con, a confidence game, rather than as any legitimate service or business enterprise. The challenge, of course, lay in getting any kind of conviction, in an age when no one took it too seriously to begin with…caveat emptor, and with the customers being seen as fools with more money than brains. A fool and their money were soon parted—prosecutions cost money, and the penalty was peanuts, essentially. It was a question of cost-benefit analysis, which even the police and the courts had to take into account.

They were, after all, responsible to the taxpayers.

“Did you see the phone? Do you know where the phone is?”

Hubert was stumped. One had to admit, she was very thorough.

“I have no idea. This is all second-hand information at this point…”

“I see.”

“I can only hope that I do—but if her memory is correct, and if it was not a dream, then Gilles Maintenon was walking down her road, more or less about the same time he was supposed to be drowning in the river Pique.” And then there was the question of the exact time, where she was pretty fuzzy again.

He hadn’t been all that eager to play up the ghost in his report—but Hubert could also be thorough, although just this once he was having second thoughts. To leave stuff out of a report would be to go against all training and all doctrine.

“And what do you think, Hubert?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I really, really, just don’t know.” It wasn’t necessarily wise, but he just had to say it. “My instinct tells me that we can rule out the ghost...”

Margot nodded. A faint grin appeared and then faded again.

“Well, that seems fair enough.”

A fifth possibility had just occurred to Hubert.

“She might have been just plain lying.” You couldn’t rule out anything with someone like Dolores.

Margot nodded, pursing her lips.

Hmn.

“As for Maurice and his wife, there seems to be nothing much there. Gilles was staying at their house in Luchon. They’re not hurting for money, and Guillaume is their son. I would have liked to speak to Guillaume, but I am told he came to Paris. Another boy and girl live nearby. They were on our list, but it was a long list and we had to prioritize. We didn’t ever get to them. We weren’t getting anywhere. We ran out of time. Someone had to make some kind of a decision, and I guess it was my call. It is two and a half days on the train. It sounds like a joke—and it is, but we could have flown there faster.” Which wasn’t all that complimentary to the airlines, but fair comment nevertheless. “As for their grief, it seemed fairly muted, but Gilles had been away for a long time. To the wife, he’s merely the brother of her husband—and they haven’t seen him in years. As for Maurice, there seemed to be a lot of love in the family, and yet sometimes people have trouble showing it, or expressing it, or something. At social functions, the women hubble-gubble like geese, and hug like crazy coming or going. The men, they shake hands, grin and nod at each other and make lame jokes about the weather…”

They were anything but demonstrative. They were the stereotypical Frenchmen, certainly, but men, first and foremost.

“Did Gilles say or do anything unusual, anything out of character? What sort of things did they talk about?”

“Insofar as they hadn’t seen him in years, and according to him, both of them, letters and phone calls, Christmas cards, birthday cards, all that sort of thing, they were few and far between. Which we might have guessed for ourselves. Other than that, they talked about old times, reminiscing…” Mostly gossip, relatives near and far, people they knew, all that sort of thing. “One grandkid is having a baby, another one’s getting married, and do you remember old so-and-so? Well, he just died last winter and ain’t that a shame sort of stuff.”

“Okay. So. Tell us about your hermit.”

“Oh, God. I don’t know much, or even anything about him. No one seems to know his name. He's only a recent arrival. No one knows where he came from or how he came to be there. They can’t say exactly when he first showed up. The land is owned by private interests. There is some logging, and there are tracts, plantations, of new trees, rows and rows of new trees. They’re said to be about twenty-five years old, and not quite ready to harvest. We didn’t notice any such thing, but this is what we were told. It all looked like pretty regular forest to me. According to our source, no one from the company has been in there in quite some time.”

“You did try to speak to him?”

“Yes, yes. Of course. That one seems to be anti-social at the least. Possibly some sort of mental illness, or maybe just years of stubborn isolation. Other than that, we can only speculate.”

“Not quite a hunchback, you say.”

“Ah, ah, no. No, just the suggestion of…of, ah, something like that. Ah, scoliosis? Something like that? Just something about the posture.” He felt like an idiot, but there it was, right in his own notes.

Margot plodded on, the others silent but watching, always watching…

“And Sergeant Dampier provided you with the list of names and suggestions. Any idea of why this, ah, hermit?”

“Ah. Yes. Looking at the map, you can see how his little hole in the wall is barely six hundred metres from the riverbank, and the trail is perhaps a little longer, but easier, than the one LeBeaux and I went in on. Once we got to the top of the waterfall, it gets a lot steeper. You have to get down from there. Hard-packed dirt in places, muddy as hell in others. Also, there are little side-trails all over the place. But the point was, we have an unknown quantity, and we have no idea of whether he and Gilles had any kind of interaction…and he refused to even speak to us. He had that shotgun. It seemed understandable, considering his circumstances, and what we might presume to call his personality type.”

The absence of an actual body, Maintenon’s for example, was proving to be sheer hell in terms of any investigation…might as well shove that in there. But people did have rights.

The police could only push so hard. A local judge would never have given them any kind of warrant, bearing in mind they had exactly nothing on the man.

“I understand. Here’s another one. How does the hermit live? He can beg, he can work, he had chickens or so you say. He can line up at the back door of the parish church and get a handout, stale bread, powdered milk, cheese, half-rotten produce. Considering the area, and the shotgun, is he poaching. This might account for the, uh, shyness. It happens all the time. Yet there is that cash economy…a box of shells costs money. If he is a hermit, is he still going into the village or the town and cashing some kind of benefits cheque, oh, a military pension, subsistence payments or something?” That would at least get a name, and a name could be checked out—

Hubert had to admit, he had no answers. He hadn’t put all that much thought into it, it was the missing LeBeaux who had triggered this new set of questions, or were they a new set of assumptions. They’d already given up at that point…they’d been thinking of home.

Hubert had the wife to consider—

They were only assuming the man was a hermit, mostly because everybody—that is to say Dampier and perhaps some of Dampier’s other sources, were saying that he was, and sure enough, when they found him, the circumstances had seemed to confirm it by direct observation.

Oddly enough, he was finding that all of this proved nothing. He even began to relax, again, this was not personal. It wasn’t about blame. It was about that eternal search for truth, and the truth was, he had fallen down—badly.

It was a debriefing, nothing more and nothing less. As far as stories went, his was showing an awful lot of holes.

A person could learn a lot from a good debriefing.

“Okay. So, in light of Maintenon’s disappearance, and then LeBeaux goes missing. Ah…did it ever occur to you that he might not have gone voluntarily?”

No! It was like a punch in the guts.

He sat there with his mouth open.

This is no letter in the file, this is no reprimand...merde.

Merde.

This just kept getting better and better, all of the time, as one of them had said all too recently. That had been him, as he recalled. That was me, all right…fuck.

“Is it not possible that some party, or interested parties, caught up with him in the restroom, or at the end of an empty carriage, put a gun to his head or stuck a knife in his ribs and told him he was going with them?” Those eyes were damned intimidating. “He did leave his luggage, right. If you were asleep, he could have gotten that from the luggage car, right? All you have to do is ask, after all…”

Hubert was reeling.

“No. I had no reason to suspect anything of the sort…” A feeble answer, but it was the only one that he had. “He would have had to give his name…his ticket was all the way, ah, through…shit. It strikes me that LeBeaux hadn’t shaved for a day or two. I thought nothing of it at the time, but now I have to wonder…whether he had some kind of idea in his head even then.”

There would be questions if he asked for his luggage, which had a tag, a copy of the ticket attached for obvious reasons. LeBeaux wasn’t looking for that kind of attention, or so he thought.

Back to the cold sweat again—

“All right. Back to the beginning…”

Margot took a breath.

“Okay, you don’t know this, but our three victims, that is to say the bodies in the freezer in Maintenon’s apartment, were all deceased from natural causes…” And. “Does that suggest anything in particular to you…”

Hubert was about ready to scream, but that really would have meant the end of his job, which was looking more and more insecure with every passing moment.

“Oh, God. No. Not really—” He’d only just heard of it, for crying out loud.

This whole fucking mess had been his idea, there was no denying that.

“I just want to say, I take full responsibility.” For what exactly, at this point, he wasn’t too sure.

Dead silence.

He reached into his pocket, hand shaking, for the cigarettes.

“Okay. So, when you discovered that LeBeaux appeared to be missing, you phoned ahead from the next station and reported to us, and Detective LeBref answered the call, to be exact. Have you considered phoning down to Bagneres de Luchon, or are we holding off on that. What are your exact thoughts on that little matter…?”

“Oh, God. What in the hell would I tell them?” More than anything, but by that point, all Hubert had wanted was a little help and advice. “I’ve lost my partner, and if you don’t mind, won’t you please go around have a look. He’s fallen in love with Little Red Riding Hood and I really am worried about him—”

He sighed.

“I mean, seriously—”

Poor old Hubert was just sagging in his chair, what with all the lost sleep, the last night in Bagneres de Luchon, and the night before leaving, at home, and then on the train, and laying alone in hotel rooms, and worrying about LeBeaux, and then an hour and a half of interrogation downstairs, and now this, and it was all too much. He was only human.

Everyone had their limits. He was getting close to his own limits.

He let out a long, sad groan, shaking his head, knowing now, for sure, that his career was over—this was no letter in the file, this was no written reprimand, this was no demotion back to sergeant or constable. This was the end, and he knew it. He’d be selling insurance, all too soon now—

Margot looked around.

Just a few more questions...

“Can we get a cup of coffee for Detective Hubert, please.”

About three of them hopped up to obey—but to them, all of this would be fascinating enough. Seniority had won out, in that it was Roger who carefully put a brimming cup on the corner of Maintenon’s desk.

“All right.” Margot had more, plenty more. “Now tell us again, about this girl.”

“Ah…”

“Was she coming or going. Was this the same trail you mentioned, the one where you saw the hermit going along, or was this one different. Ah, Guillaume Maintenon showed up here, and Detective Archambault didn’t really know what questions to ask, although he did his best. You did not have access to Guillaume, but to your knowledge, did he, or they, by that I mean the police down there, recover or confirm, one, or possibly two sets of waders…their initial report was bare-bones, very thin. Ah, why do you think Gilles might have taken a weapon down there, let alone on a simple little fishing expedition…” Presumably, they were all friends down there…

“In your report, you mention a map. Do you still have it? It doesn’t appear to be in LeBeaux’s bags…”

And so it went, on and on and on.

 

END

Previous.

Chapter One, Scene One.

Chapter One, Scene Two.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three. 

Chapter Four. 

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six.

Chapter Seven.

Chapter Eight.

Chapter Nine.

Chapter Ten.

Chapter Eleven.

Chapter Twelve.

Chapter Thirteen.

 

Louis has books and stories available from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Reckoning, Chapter Thirteen. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #10. Louis Shalako.

...no law saying you have to sell insurance...

Louis Shalako

 

With the first train out leaving at five-thirty-five a.m., the pair had settled into their seats gratefully enough, worn out with walking, above all, not to mention all that fresh air and sunshine. Travel was exhausting in itself. It was almost inevitable, but Hubert had tossed and turned all the preceding night, mostly thinking about the case, or the lack of one, but also Emanuelle, and their baby, as yet, unborn. The situation had raised certain questions. There was no law that said he had to be a police officer. The money was all right, but one could make more elsewhere—maybe even a lot more, as long as a person had a few skills. No one was holding a gun to his head, no one could make a person do this against their will, and yet the truth was that he was fairly good at it. It was also true that no one could put a gun to his head and make him sell insurance, either. He might even be good at that, too, in fact he probably would be—he would also be home for dinner, on time, each and every night.

These thoughts brought little comfort. At some point you just know you’re not going to sleep, and yet to get up and do something was clearly impossible, what with being in a hotel room, and with poor old LeBeaux sleeping in the next bed. With the whole town closed down for the night, what were you going to do?

Where were you supposed to go? The true insomniacs had wrestled with that question over the ages, to his knowledge they’d never come up with any good answer.

Sure, he could get a job somewhere else, sacrificing all the things he had striven for, and he might not even regret it for the rest of his life—

Others had done it.

That much was true, but he wondered how they felt about it on some level. There was no going back, and that much was obvious, for there wasn’t much to be done about it later. It would be one hell of a decision. He’d invested years of his life into this job. At one time it had been all he had ever really wanted. And then he had met Emanuelle, in a kind of happy accident of life. And then there was the baby—Jean if it was a boy, and Monique if it was a girl.

Anyhow.

Lebeaux had said something about coffee, and Hubert had put his feet up on the opposite bench and had promptly fallen asleep.

"So, you fell asleep..."

Now, sitting in the little interview room, room four, first thing in the morning, after two and a half days of travel, it seemed he was in trouble. Deep trouble, mostly through no great fault of his own, but trouble nevertheless. He’d been mostly thinking about Delorme, or Andre Levain, but these guys were almost worse.

He was being interviewed by a Detective Fortier, and observed, by his silent partner Detective Bazin, the latter taking extensive notes as they went along.

“So. You say you fell asleep. You woke up, more than once, noting LeBeaux’s absence, and yet you did nothing about it?”

“Ah. I didn’t think too much about it. The first time, I didn’t even look at my watch. I just went back to sleep, thinking he was in the washroom or somewhere. It’s a long trip and I guess I thought he was up, maybe just stretching his legs.” On the way down, both of them, had, at times, taken a walk through the train, which had quickly worn out any charm it might have had.

It was better than just sitting there, perched on a hard wooden bench for hours and days at a time.

“I guess, if you manage to strike up some kind of a decent conversation, you could just drop into the next seat and pass the time with a perfect stranger or two. LeBeaux was sociable enough. I suppose I just didn’t worry too much about it.”

It was a very long journey and they’d had a lot of time to kill along the way, and only so many ways to do it.

During the innumerable stops, they could at least hop out and try the food stalls, new-fangled vending machines, or even go half a block up the road if the stop was long enough. The conductor would tell them roughly how long they had, and the train would whistle when they were about ready. All of those milk cans took time—far more than a half a sack of mail, a joke which had seemed funny enough at the time, although not so much right now. Fuck, to see them detach the caboose, tack on a couple of box cars to the rear of the train, throw up a ramp and then watch a fucking shepherd hustling forty or fifty sheep in there was something else. Reattach the braking-car, the caboose, and off you went, the problem was that it all took a hell of a lot of time.

“So, you figure he got out at the first stop.”

“He must have. He was on the train leaving the station. By this time we were more or less up to speed. We were just pulling into the second, or possibly the third stop—there’s a couple of stops pretty close together along there. I was still groggy from the nap. And that’s when I began to wonder just where in the hell he was. I don’t know how badly anyone would want to just jump off at any speed. You would need a damned good reason. Not unless they were suicidal. I searched that train, up and down, more than once. He sure as hell wasn’t on it. And of course, by this time, we were moving again. There’s nowhere to hide, that’s for sure. It may have been a mistake to leave him with a good chunk of the cash, but I had figured we might have to separate, down there in Luchon, in order to pursue our inquiries…” With the pair of them together, heading back the same way, there had been no real reason to ask for it back.

“Did you look in the women’s restrooms?”

“Er, no.” He did not say of course not.

There was no such thing in this present situation. The truth was, he probably should have, although it might have taken a bit of nerve, or maybe some help from the conductor. The problem was that he was confused, hit by a situation he did not clearly understand.

As for the money, they would render accounts, hand over their receipts, so to speak, back in Paris.

“Had he been behaving strangely? Was he showing any signs of stress?”

“Not so as you would notice…” Hubert uttered a deep sigh. “Fuck, no. It had to be the girl. I mean, he left his suitcase and everything. Near as I can make out, he waited for me to fall asleep. If I had been awake at the next station, well. He could have waited another hour, half-hour or whatever, and gotten out at any stop along the way. He could buy a ticket, take a taxi, or rent a car. He could go anywhere. But seriously, he was totally enamoured of that girl. It was like he wouldn’t stop talking about her. I should have caught on, really—our last night there, I was in the shower. When I came out, he was gone, out for a walk or so he said. I thought nothing of it. Only after he was gone…it was only then, when I realized he might have simply gone looking. Or even just asking around, someone around there would have to know about the, uh, girl. He didn’t even know her name, but it’s a small place.”

As for the girl, unforgettable. Half the town, the male half anyways, anyone who had gone through puberty and wasn’t totally fading into senility, would know that girl. It was a deduction, but a logical one.

He’d had two whole days to think about the pickle he was in. Unfortunately, there weren’t too many good answers.

“And you say nobody on the train seemed to recall seeing him go, is that correct? How many people did you speak to?”

“I spoke to the conductor, I spoke to the porter in charge of the baggage car, there’s mail and light freight in there too. The people in the so-called dining car, and at least a dozen civilians. That is to say, anyone at all that would respond. The civvies just shrugged, mostly. Raised their eyebrows and shook their heads. I’m a perfect stranger, asking a lot of crazy questions sort of thing. I went up and down that train, quite frankly, in something of a state, as I just didn’t know where he might have gotten off to…”

And, at every little station, every little stop, a few people got off, and a few more people got on, to the extent that it quickly became a whole new crowd of strangers, and none of them could have possibly known anything.

It was a sick kind of feeling in the guts.

The restrooms, men’s and women’s were right there at the end of the car, then there were the doors between carriages, and then, in between the carriages, the steps down, right and left. Whether the train was moving or at rest, he could have been gone in ten seconds, fifteen at the most. The luggage would have slowed LeBeaux down, perhaps that was it.

All of this was in his initial, written report and yet they kept coming back to it. The fact that he understood the technique and had used it often enough himself, wasn’t of much comfort. No, it was poor old Éliott LeBeaux that he didn’t understand.

As for Hubert, he could hardly fault himself, but they might think otherwise and probably would.

The actual investigation wasn’t so much their concern, they were exclusively concerned with the disappearance of LeBeaux. Police officer disappears on duty, and you’re the guy standing right next to him. Rubbing elbows with the man one minute, and now he’s gone. It was a very simple equation. It wasn’t personal, which was what they always said. When he got back to the room, it would be a different story, and a different kind of ordeal, and he had that much to look forward to.

“Okay, so how much money do you figure he had on him?”

“Oh, God. Close to a thousand at least—” Whether it was impulsive, or planned, it would be enough to get him quite a ways, yet he was almost bound to get caught. “We didn’t know what we might run into, or how long we might be down there.”

He would be caught, one way or another. Which was small comfort for Hubert. He had signed for the money as senior man.

“So, just a few more questions. Um, what sort of things did you guys talk about? In your off moments. Anything in particular strike you, after the fact so to speak?”

This guy had patience, and the other one had been dead silent, just listening, eyes non-committal, since the introductions. That one just sat there, legs crossed, hands in his lap, with a pencil and a notepad—and just listened.

For a moment, they exchanged a long glance.

"It had to be the girl."

“We’re not judging you—” It was only a matter of time, sure as hell, and someone would say it.

“No. Not really. We talked about the investigation. We talked about the job, in a more general sense. It’s a unique way of life as we all know. We talked about our friends and co-workers. My wife, his mother, my mother, his brothers and sisters, and all of that sort of thing. He still lives at home, and with the old man sick, he’s paying all the bills. That sort of thing, in fact he has to come back—sometime, one must presume. He seemed to be a pretty responsible person…otherwise, how did he ever make detective.” Hubert trailed off, knowing that shifting blame wasn’t much of an option for the senior man. “He really didn’t seem the type to just abandon the whole effing family like that…”

He blew out some air.

“Our most interesting conversation, at least from my point of view, was when we discussed the role of social conditions in crime. It’s not like we drew any Earth-shattering conclusions, but he is definitely intelligent. He has a sense of humour, which is helpful in this business.” He wasn’t going for irony, but they were asking for everything he had. “Ah, but mostly. He talked about the girl. Holy, unbelievable. But it really was like that.”

He felt somehow responsible, even though he knew he wasn’t, not really—although the whole thing had been his idea, he had no control over what other people said and did.

He kept that part to himself. It would just sound like belly-aching.

“All right, Detective Hubert. File your reports and thank you for speaking to us.” Bazin looked up from his notes. “Okay, we’ll get this typed up and you will have the opportunity to go over it. Ah, you can sign it later. And, ah, you will be provided a copy of the transcript for your own files.” A written record, of the questions asked and the answers given, and nothing more.

Something for the files.

Nothing personal.

“Thank you.”

The interview was over, and Hubert was covered in a cold sweat and he wondered if it was even possible to come back from something like this—to lose a partner wasn’t exactly unheard-of. People got hit by vehicles, fell down the stairs, got trapped in burning buildings in their heroics, or got shot or stabbed or knocked on the head from time to time, but this one was definitely different.

People don’t just disappear.

“I’ve been wondering about his mental health.” Hubert wasn’t quite ready to go, not just yet.

“Thank you, Detective Hubert, you may return to your duties now.” And that was it—these guys, Internal Investigations, weren’t going to tell him anything, anything at all and that was pretty plain.

There was nothing to do about it, except, to hope, to marvel, and to wonder.

He could say a little prayer, maybe—

That always helped.

 

 END

 

Previous.

 

Chapter One, Scene One.

Chapter One, Scene Two.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three. 

Chapter Four. 

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six.

Chapter Seven.

Chapter Eight.

Chapter Nine.

Chapter Ten.

Chapter Eleven.

Chapter Twelve.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

 

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Thank you for reading.