Artist (19 page)

Cassie got out of the cab, rechecked the address, and paid the drive
r. The Rue de Mont wound its way through the eastern side of a Paris suburb, well away from traffic. Small single cottages lined the street. The house in front of her was painted white, latticework surrounding the windows. A neat, tidy place, as befitted a retired businessman. Jules Robert was home when she called in the morning, declined to see her, but changed his mind when she mentioned Antoine Watt and his son. She was walking to the front door when it opened. A silver haired man greeted her.

“
Miss Reynold, I assume. Come in. Come in. I’m afraid I can only spare you a few minutes. You’re lucky to have caught me here at all. I’m usually on the coast by this time.” His English was good, lightly accented, with perfect diction.

“I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Robert,” Cassie said. “But my business is important.”

“It must be to bring you all the way here from the southern part of the United States. Atlanta perhaps. No, more southerly than that. You have an accent you see, and I have an ear for accents.”

“New Orleans, to be exact,” Cassie said. “That’s remarkable.”

“One of my few remaining talents,” Robert said. “Come, come.”

The old man escorted her into a front room, pointed at an upholstered sofa. “Sit. I’ll take this one over here,” gesturing to a hard backed chair. “If I sink into that couch I’ll have a devil of a time getting back up. Now, I’ll begin by telling you that you have piqued my interest. What possible reason could you have to be asking about Antoine Watt and his son?”

“You should know first, that I’m with the U.S. Government. My concern is more with Viktor Watt, the son. We’re doing background and it extends back to his childhood. We thought you might give us some insight into his raising. What kind of man his father was, that kind of thing.”

“What kind of man was Antoine Watt. Humph.” Robert stiffened in his chair, looked out the window, struggling for words. Turned back. “Where are my manners? Would you like something to drink? Or eat, perhaps? I can have my girl make us some coffee.”

“No, thank you. I’m as pressed for time as you are. I have to be in La Havre tonight.”

“The same business?”

“Yes, a professor of Viktor Watt. I have an appointment with him in the morning.”

“A nice drive though. The countryside is beautiful that way. You didn’t come here to drive through France though, did you?”

Robert looked out the window again, seemed to come to some kind of decision. He laid his cane against the wall, put his hands on his knees. “Antoine Watt, in my opinion, was the worst kind of animal. I tried to get rid of him for years. His numbers were too good. It’s all about numbers, business is. Upper management couldn’t see past his production and I will say the man could sell. He brought in big contracts.”

“But?”

“He was a drunkard, a loathsome human being. Treated the people who worked for him poorly, treated everyone poorly who couldn’t help him. He treated me poorly despite the fact I was his supervisor. I tried to speak with him several times. He always laughed at me.”

“Did you ever meet his wife? Or Viktor. The son?”

“Yes, to my regret.”

“Why regret?”

Robert got to his feet, picked up his cane, took a few steps, turned back, a pained expression on his face. “Have you ever wished for power Ms. Reynold? I don’t mean power over other people, or maybe I do. What I mean is have you ever seen something you wish you could have changed, but didn’t have the courage to do it?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

“I think you do. Anyway,” Robert sat down again. “This was maybe 1970 or so. We were having a problem with one of our products. One of Watt’s customers was raising hell and I couldn’t get hold of him on the phone. This was when England was his primary territory, you understand. I was in London myself and I went out to his house. He was doing well by then, we both were. His wife answered the door, a lovely woman, I can’t recall her name.”

“Annette,” Cassie said.

“Yes, as I said, a lovely woman. But broken, if you know what I mean.” Cassie started to speak and he waved her off. “She answered the door and I could see the fear in her eyes. She was wearing makeup. If you looked closely, and I did, you could see the shadow of a very black eye underneath. She was still young then, we all were, but she moved like an old woman. Stiff, like she’d been in an automobile accident and was still recovering.”

“Watt beat her?” Cassie asked.

“He only beat her when he was home. I found out later from a friend of mine, a police sergeant who did some work on my house in his spare time. Watt beat his wife black and blue every time he was home from what the sergeant said.”

“Why didn’t anyone stop him?”

“Who knows? Nobody wanted to get involved. Myself included, to my shame.”

“And the boy?”

“Him, too. Annette escorted me to the sitting room, went upstairs to get Watt. While I was waiting the boy stuck his head in the room. Curious, I guess. I smiled and said hello. He started to smile back, a kind of timid little thing, when his father started to come down the stairs. Such a wave of fear passed over his eyes as I have never seen before, or since. Absolute terror. I’ve never forgotten it.”

“You think he beat the boy, too?”

“I’ll tell you one more Antoine Watt story and you decide what the man was capable of. This was in England also. I accompanied Watt on a sales call, a formality really. As I said, at the time our business was booming, he was making a lot of money. We all were. He had a new car, a Jaguar to be exact and we made the drive from London in the blasted thing.”

Robert leaned forward, reliving the event. “This particular customer was very old school, very refined, and both Watt and I were dressed well. We both carried walking sticks, very upper crust, ve
ry British, you know. I had the same stick you see here, although now I use it out of necessity. Back then, I could still get around. Watt had one too, solid oak, with a heavy silver head shaped like a lion.”

“The meeting went well, it always did when Watt was working. The man could flat out charm the pants off any customer he met. We finished, said our goodbyes, and went back out to the car park. As we were walking up, there was a small dog, sniffing around Watt’s brand new Jaguar. We were ten meters or so away when the dog, a puppy really, lifted his leg and urinated on the tire. I laughed, said something like ‘Well, so much for your new car” thinking it was funny. Watt beat that puppy to death with his walking stick. The first swing crushed the poor thing’s head, killed him right off. Watt hit him once or twice more, kicked the body out of the way.
Then he wiped the blood and brains off the end of the stick with his handkerchief, which he tossed on the ground afterward. He never said anything. We got in, started the car, and drove back to London. I don’t think we spoke the whole trip back.”

“Jesus,” Cassie said.

“Yes,” Robert said. “When I think of that little boy, and the mother, and what they must have gone through with him, well…is he married? Does he have any children?”

“Who?”

“The boy, Viktor, does he have any children?”

“No, why?” Cassie asked.

“Then maybe you can end it, Miss Reynold. The sins of the fathers I mean.”

Viktor Watt sat in the dark, waiting, watching through the window. West End attracted visitors every night of the week. Some came to look out over the water in the visitor
’s area, more to enjoy the restaurants and bars that stayed open until well past midnight. Watt was looking for anything out of place, watching for watchers.

Seeing Dupond and the other detective, lying in wait for him, shook him to the core. And what was that conversation in his office about? Stupid? The murderer was stupid? And the bit about being homosexual, how could they even dream that up? What was even more disturbing was the fact he had heard those words before, spitting from his father’s lips, sometimes at him, sometimes at his mother, more often both. He felt his hands tremble with anger. He would eventually have killed the old man himself, and his mother too, if they hadn’t died without his help. His father he would have killed for the beatings, his mother for watching, for not protecting her only son. A car passed, parked down the street. A couple got out, the girl laughing.

The problem was he never paid attention to his neighbors. They came and went. He didn’t know what cars belonged on the street overnight, which didn’t. He got up, found a notebook in his desk, started writing down every car he could see, where they parked. Smarter, he had to be smarter than them. They could watch him all they wanted. Viktor Watt was not stupid, nor crippled. He tore a page out of the notebook, and as he watched the cars come and go, he began to plan.

It was an hour to Charles DeGaulle to pick up a rental car, another hour to weave her way through Paris traffic. Cassie finally hit open road a little after noon, making her way west. Robert told her the countryside was beautiful and he was right. Open valleys, covered in summer green of constantly changing shade unfolded themselves in front of her. She committed again to coming back with Dupond after this was all over.

During the drive, she recalled her conversation with Wesling. At the time, Cassie was determined to take Watt out any way she could, legally if possible, by herself if things didn’t work out. It was an elemental problem. She couldn’t allow him to keep killing, no matter the cause, no matter how horrible his childhood had been. But who was she to act as judge and juror? At least when she was working for Wesling, the decisions were made for her. This one had to die, Cassie killed him, and that was that. She had no qualms over the killing of Lorie, hadn’t given it five minutes thought past her report to Wesling.

On the other hand, she was more qualified than most. Even if they scraped together some kind of case against
Watt, he might still go free. That was the way the system worked. If she was sure Watt was the killer, and she would be before it was all over with, then he had to go. If the case was weak, and he walked, she would find him. Satisfied, Cassie rolled through Louviers, passed south of Rouen, and by late afternoon was looking at the English Channel as she entered Le Havre.

Dupond had a single man out the next morning, waiting for Watt to leave for work. Another sat drinking iced tea in a diner down the road, two more at the campus itself, one for each exit of his building. With Slade and Flynn in the building itself, he felt confident Watt couldn’t get anywhere without being picked up. Nighttime was going to be a little tougher.

“You need Pavone out there,” Adan said. He was sewing a button back on to his coat, trying to make it last one more season. “The guy’s a genius. I swear, this one time I was working Camp St., trying to round up all the street people, some big shot was coming to town, and I rousted Pavone. I didn’t even recognize him and I saw the guy every week for a year and a half when we were both out in the Seventh.”

“I heard he’s a drinker,” Dupond said. “I can’t have a rummy working this. We have to keep tabs on Watt all night, make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Not anymore. He met this Christian chick when he was working downtown at one of the missions. He walks the straight and narrow now.”

“Pavone? We’re talking the same Pavone? The guy who nailed that Assistant DA in the broom closet at the courthouse?”

“I’m telling you, he’s straight now. I saw him at the St. Louis Cathedral about six months ago. His old lady was wearing a skirt that went down to her ankles and Pavone had on one of those red neckties you know? Like the guys who knock on doors?”

“Pavone’s a Mormon?”

“Something like that. Anyway, he quit drinking and he’s straight. He’s perfect for this. He’s like the The Invisible Man. The guy can be right in front of you and you won’t even notice him. He’s got this wino act, pours booze all over himself, doesn’t take a bath for a week. Set him up in that little park across the street from Watt’s and he can lie there all night. Won’t even move. Watt won’t think twice about it.”

“Okay, okay. Get him in here this afternoon. We set him up in the park with a radio. I want two cars set up in the Robert E. Lee parking lot, and another two down
there by the restaurants. Get a reserved radio channel, one Pavone can key in on with a handheld.”

“Will you
give the okay on overtime if it comes down to it? We’re talking an all nighter here.”

“Not a problem. I’ll okay anything reasonable. Just get it done. I want him locked up tight.”

Adan finished pulling the last thread, tied it off. “You know, if things get tight I can always sew Mardi Gras costumes for extra money. I’m pretty good at this.”

Dupond sighed. Murder, Mardi Gras, an
d Mormon wino’s. It was almost funny.

Professor Elan Traver lived on the eastern end of Le Havre, in an older neighborhood spared the flattening of the Second World War. Cassie parked her rental car down the block, walked back uphill to a brick and mortar building. A bronzeplaque on the wooden door said simply “Traver”. She knocked, waited, knocked again and was rewarded with the sound of feet tramping down the stairs. The door opened and a middle-aged man, maybe fifty she thought, stuck his head out, a boxer pup scrambling around at his feet. He said the same thing Jules Robert had said.