Maintenon: The Dead Man's Touch, Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #11. Chapter Twenty-Six. Louis Shalako.

Tits and all.

Louis Shalako

“My instincts are killing me.”

Gilles glanced over from the passenger seat.

“Your instincts are supposed to keep you alive.”

“Huh.” They’d been lucky enough to find a parking spot, and not too far down the street.

There were already a couple of patrol cars parked in front, a pair of officers inside each. A couple of radio calls, a quick authorization from Roger, and that was all it took sometimes. There would be a car with another pair of officers outside the back door as well. With a little luck, someone might even try and bolt for it—

The early afternoon was perhaps not that busy in the restaurant trade, mid-week, but whatever traffic was there, was about to be disrupted. At the sight of Maintenon, doors opened and officers stepped out. It was time. Constable Lacorse, slammed a car door, spoke to the other officer, and then rendezvoused with the pair.

“Sir.”

“Constable.”

“Stick with the Inspector, right.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

It was an odd feeling, to wield any kind of power, at least in Édouard’s experience. He wasn’t too sure how he felt about it. He’d figure that part out later.

It could be worse—

Another car was just pulling up, and that was good as they would need someone on the front door. It was Pelletier who gave them their instructions, and then turned back to Gilles.

Just inside the cool interior of the Hemingway Room, they paused.

“Good morning, Monsieur Beaudoin. Would Monsieur Faubert be in attendance this fine afternoon…”

“Yes, I believe he is in his office.” He blanched a bit, as three or four uniformed officers brushed past and fanned out through the interior, including the kitchen area.

Édouard held up the envelope as Beaudoin stood there blinking.

“Search warrant. Don’t worry, we’ll serve that on Monsieur Faubert. It’s good to see you don’t have too many customers just now, in any case, we’ll take their names and usher them out as politely as possible. We appreciate that this is an inconvenience, and we may have a few questions for you, Monsieur.”

“Sir.” Édouard handed the envelope to Gilles. “I’ll just do that little thing now, sir.”

He turned and headed for the kitchen, which was back and to the right as things went.

Gilles headed for the door to their front office area, this was along the wall to his left.

Beaudoin stood there wringing his hands and looking unhappy…

The secretary or book-keeper looked shocked, putting her hand up to her throat, shaking her head, seemingly unable to speak. Monsieur Faubert was livid.

“What in the hell is the meaning of this?” The face was flushed, the words coming through loud and clear. “I demand to call my lawyer.”

“Go right ahead. I’m sure Monsieur will otherwise cooperate, otherwise the charge would be obstruction of an officer in the course of their duties. If you wish to use the phone, Constable Lacorse would be only too happy to accompany you…” They could see it sitting there on his desk through the open door, but letting him go off alone under such circumstances would be a bonehead move in pretty much any police training manual.

There might be a weapon in a desk drawer, only one of several considerations. There might also be evidence in one of those desk drawers, and there might even be a hot cup of coffee sitting there, all too close to hand…all those documents, right.

The man was furious, positively growling, biting back on further talk.

“Ah. Madame, would you please take a seat on the couch there. We’ll be going through the files and we may have further questions for you.”

Pale, but calm and dignified, she rose from the desk, and complied with the request.

Another officer came in, he had a certain look on his face…

“Sergeant Pelletier would like to speak to you for a moment.”

“I’ll be right there. Constable Lacorse is in charge here, and I want you to stick until I come back.”

“Understood, Inspector.”

I'll be damned.

***

“Well. I’ll be damned.”

“It’s like the idiot emptied the fucking waste basket from his office, and never even thought about it.”

“Hmn.” But there they were—an original set of time cards, and a set of the schedules, and there were some in black ink, and what looked like two, not one, colours of blue ink on the rest.

The same held true for the schedules, replete with pin-holes in the corners where they’d been pinned to a bulletin board in the back room somewhere…these were real all right. The idiots hadn’t thought of that, and neither had the cops. A bit of a sobering thought. A little damp from the dew, and with a few grains of something to do with food waste here and there, but legible.

They also corresponded perfectly with the dates in question.

“So. Do we take him downtown, Gilles?”

“Sure. Why not.” He thought, briefly. “I’ll stay here. You take one of the constables and the car. I’ll catch a ride with someone, and meet you back there as soon as possible. We might just want to impound the damned garbage bins…every stinking one of them, and we’ll have to get a shit-load of boxes loaded.”

Judging by the state of the bins, along with those of some neighbouring buildings, garbage day couldn’t be too far off.

“You’re going to empty the filing cabinets?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll make a show of going through them—we’ll put anyone we’re not detaining under supervision in the front corner of the dining room.” His jaw sort of dropped as something struck him. “Depending on just how dumb they are. We’ll check the invoices to see if they bought a couple of brand-new carving knives lately.”

Pelletier grinned at that one.

“Heh-heh-heh.”

Normally Gilles wouldn’t explain things quite so explicitly, but sooner or later, Édouard would have to be able to operate on his own, and he would, as a sergeant have to give orders, the proper orders, also all on his own.

It was another teaching moment. Speaking of which—

“Okay. You mentioned pressure points. When the original officers were finding it hard to take this case seriously. How hard were they going to push…without a body or two? As you said, what if it was just an elaborate prank. What if it wasn’t? We do have our duty, body or no bodies…yet. Also, if it was a prank. Just a prank, and maybe they weren’t taking it quite seriously enough. I mean the bad guys. Maybe they figured it just wouldn’t go anywhere, and at first they were right. We keep coming back, and maybe they get a little antsy. Well, now they’ve given us a pressure point, and now we know they were taking it seriously…and it is in our mandate to dig deep, very deep.” This was, after all, the Special Homicide Unit, originally constituted for this very reason.

All those long years ago.

There might have been more, for example beginning with the boss-man and working their way down. This was a ‘technique’ as Gilles called it. One tool of many. Presumably, the lesser players would have a lot less to lose by talking. Someone like Faubert would figure that out pretty quickly. He clapped Pelletier on the arm.

“Okay. Let’s go break the bad news to the Monsieur.”

“I want Fritz too.”

Hmn.

“Okay. We’ll do it that way then.”

“It’s in the manual. We ask them the same set of questions and follow up with all kinds of detail. Sooner or later, they run out of stuff they’ve rehearsed…their cover story breaks down and they begin to contradict each other. They either dry up, or start making things up.” And Fritz would pretty much have to be in on it…sooner or later, they’d be questioning him anyways. “Human beings lie to gain, to cover…or to protect.”

Sooner or later, the police would ask a question they simply could not answer—

“…right.” Right out of the manual, in other words.

But then Gilles already knew he’d read it.

It was another thing to remember it, and it was another thing altogether to understand it, to truly get it, and then you had to make it work for you.

And the next time around, it might be Pelletier writing the manual…

“All right, Sergeant Pelletier. Let’s do this.”

“We’ll take them guys separately, and we won’t let them see the other one…” Two separate cars, the second one leaving after some interval of time.

Also in the manual—

And good for him, too.

“Right.”

***

...when you get a minute...

He was back at the room, their prisoners were in holding cells and undergoing their initial interviews.

He was letting Pelletier and Janine handle it.

It was time to follow up on a shit-load of loose ends, and Gilles had been putting some thought into that. There was also the fact they were expanding the Unit, and getting a much larger room. This had turned into something of a juggernaut, which was not without its advantages.

Women were, still, even in this modern age, under-represented; not just in police work in general, but in the higher echelons for sure, and then there was the homicide business.

It was like the car—once you had it why would you give it up.

He’d asked for constables. Why not just hang onto the ones he already had—tits and all. That meant Janine and Hermione. He’d find work for them, any kind of work and after a while it would stick out of sheer bureaucratic inertia. People would get used to it. This would serve more than one end. One, he had diversified the Unit, two, he had a couple of fresh constables, and three—Janine had sufficient seniority to be eligible for the sergeant’s exam. She’d also impressed him on a previous case, as for Hermione, she seemed bright enough and she was available. Other than that, she wasn’t doing much of importance right now, and he’d have a talk with Roger when he had time. If the department really needed administrative staff, let them grab themselves a few of the newbies, was the thinking there. As for the department, in a more general sense, putting an attractive young woman out on foot patrol, all alone and in the quiet hours of the might, well. It might be something of a moral question—what if something real bad happened to her.

This sort of shit would always be unwritten, and this sort of question would not be in the manual.

And, as long as they had one car, why not try for another—using somewhat unconventional means, also bearing in mind that the department was unlikely, certainly in any kind of a time-frame, to purchase and allocate six, brand-new police cars, which would in any case take time to be built and fitted out with all the standard equipment.

Why not let the street patrols take those beautiful new machines, and grab a few old dogs from the motor pool…they might even be glad to give them up.

That would take some thought, but he’d be sending off Pelletier with somebody or another. He’d phone Simard and get something. Let somebody else tackle those files, those sacks of trash for a while. As for Gilles, he had one or two things on his mind and he might as well tackle that.

When he got a minute—

END

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