Authors: Scott Phillips
He chuckled. “Such as it is. Well, I knew anyway; so did all the neighbors. So, presumably, did Guiteau himself.”
“He never indicated any such thing to me.”
“But he wouldn’t, would he?”
“I suppose not.”
The inspector stood, moved to the window, and opened it up. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead. It’s not my apartment, of course.”
“No, of course.” With great deliberation he stuffed and lit a pipe and began puffing lungfuls of smoke out the window and into the cool Parisian air. “I hear stories about you.”
“What kind of stories?”
“All kinds. Mostly because people notice you. They tend to remember when the subject of an anecdote is a well-known personality. For example, there was a fight outside the nightclub downstairs, shortly after you moved in. Remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“Vaguely? You gave the boy a concussion.”
“He followed me into the building’s lobby and attacked me.”
“That’s not the way he tells it. Still, when he checked into the hospital later no one believed his story that he’d been beaten up by none other than Dr. Crandall Taylor.”
“One of the advantages of celebrity, I suppose.”
“Yes, I suppose.” He took a deep drag, and the smell of tobacco was quite comforting, bringing back memories of my grandfather and his brother, both smokers who went to early graves. “And of course we already know that when Bruno Guiteau tried to jump you, you gave him a very thorough beat-down in return.”
“As you point out, he did jump me.”
“Quite so, and he bears you no particular ill-will for it.” Holding the pipe in the vicinity of the window, he thumbed through a stack of reports. “And there’s this. A rather savage attack on a group of marginal young people down by the Seine. Now this, too, appears to have been a case of self-defense, but what’s interesting is that these kids swore that you were the one
who fought them so savagely. Naturally at the time no one took it seriously.”
“Seems everyone who checked into a hospital that week was blaming me for their injuries.”
He laughed. “Just so, just so. I took the liberty of looking into your background.”
“You should have called my press agent, she’d have sent you the whole package.”
“Yes, quite. I did go through a lot of the entertainment press. The tabloids, the TV magazines, that sort of thing. But I didn’t find much of use beyond your latest triumph on the stage. Congratulations, by the way. I understand your
Tartuffe
was quite well received in Chicago.”
“Thank you. I wish you could have seen it.”
“Where I struck gold was when I contacted the United States Embassy and requested your military records.”
I was a bit taken aback. “They handed them over as quickly as that?”
“Not so quickly. I’ve been working on this whole business since the day you were attacked. As I said, the divisionnaire . . .”
“Yes, his wife’s a big fan.”
“And what I expected to find was the usual military record for an artist. Training films, things of that nature. But you were a Green Beret, my friend.”
“I find it hard to believe that you got access to my military records in any legitimate manner that quickly.”
“Legitimacy is a flexible concept, monsieur, when it comes to police work and diplomacy. Let’s say that monsieur le divisionnaire’s concern for your well-being opened certain doors at the Quai d’Orsay, which in turn facilitated my queries via your Department of State.”
“I see.”
“It’s an interesting record. Nothing but praise from your superiors, the highest possible references from your superior
officers, and then—quite suddenly—a less than honorable discharge. No court martial, either. Seems they gave you a choice and you took the lesser of two evils.”
“I had no desire to spend the remainder of my hitch in military prison.”
“Quite understandable. And here you’ve managed to stay out of trouble since.”
“A lesson learned, Inspector. My temper cost me my military career.”
“And yet you’ve managed to parlay that loss into great success in another career, one that millions dream of.”
“I have no complaints.”
Having finished his bowlful, he tapped the ashes out onto the Boulevard St. Germain below. “Well, sir, I’ll bother you no more today. I’ll be in touch, and naturally, if anything happens out of the ordinary . . .”
“Naturally.”
•
•
•
Disillusioned though I was at the ease with which my government gave away my supposedly inviolate secrets, there was nothing in my military record that pointed to me as Claude Guiteau’s killer, and I was confident that if Inspector Bonnot had seen through me as a man capable of violence, it wasn’t necessarily a predictable leap to considering me an assassin.
•
•
•
I went to see a movie that afternoon, an American zombie movie in which a friend of mine played the key role of the town doctor. He had a couple of nice scenes after he’d turned into one of the undead, and I had a hearty laugh when he took
a large bite out of the shoulder of a young woman dressed as a police officer. When it was over I saw I’d had a couple of text messages from Fred, urging me to call him back as soon as possible.
With some trepidation I returned his call, only to find that he’d fucked Annick three times the night before. He was beside himself with joy, and I returned to the apartment rather pleased with my efforts as a matchmaker. I’d been friends with Fred for only a few weeks now, but his life as a depressive shut-in was a thing of the past.
I had dinner with Ginny at a seafood restaurant at the Place de l’Odéon. She was mad that the hotel had quashed her efforts to get the story of her ex-husband and stalker into the papers.
“Do you know what that kind of shit is worth in terms of Internet traffic?” she asked me between bites of sole meunière. “Never mind the fact that there was a cross-dresser aspect to it, which just makes it kinkier. But no, the hotel’s precious reputation is at stake, so they keep it quiet. And when I pointed out to them that I stood to lose money on the proposition, you know what they had the balls to do?”
“Offer you a settlement?” I guessed.
“Damn right!”
“I hope you took it.”
“Damn right I did. Shit, though, I got to get some publicity out of this stalking business.”
“So you think he broke in to steal your underwear?”
“No, that’s just an occasional thing when he gets high. Mostly he’s into all kinds of kinky shit, all over the place: nipple torture, electric shocks, breath play, adult diapers, you name it. And when I met him he was kind of a missionary-position type of guy, you know? I mean, I understand why he’s upset about us breaking up. I ruined him for regular women.”
“I can certainly understand that.”
“I fucking wish we could get him to do it again, just away from that tight-assed fucking hotel this time.”
I thought it over. “How would you like to attend a memorial service with me tomorrow?”
She almost had a bite of sole in her mouth, and she held it there suspended before her lips in a tentative state of delighted disbelief. “Babe, am I to understand that you are asking me out on a date to somebody’s funeral?”
“If you want to call it that, yes.”
She put the forkful of fish down and fell back laughing. “You are a class act.”
“So I guess that’s a yes?”
“Fuck, yeah. There going to be food?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of a wake. Just one thing,” I said. “If you wanted to let David know about it, how would you do that?”
“Ooohhh.” She nodded. “I can think of ways.”
“Good. Because the press is going to be there, and I can pretty much guarantee there’ll be cops as well.”
F
RED SHOWED UP FOR THE MEMORIAL AT THE Hanoi Hilton stag, since Annick hadn’t given Bruno the news yet; even if she had, they reasoned, it would have been poor form to rub his nose in it at his father’s memorial. Marie-Laure was there with her husband, and I was there with Ginny, who wore a form-fitting minidress through which her nipples protruded like gumdrops. The mood was festive, with a giant photograph of Claude printed on a banner hanging across one wall, the cage hanging over the dance floor minus its usual scantily clad occupant, like the riderless horse in a funeral cortege. The music was the standard horrible mélange of disco, classic rock, and techno-dance, and though Esmée was seated at a table dressed in a very sexy black outfit and playing the devastated widow very convincingly, she got up every few minutes to dance and managed never to lose her look of brooding grief, not even for the most frenetic numbers, not for a second.
A great many members of the press were there by invitation. It was commonly known that shortly before his death Claude had become passionate about the film he intended to produce for his wife to star in, and so making his memorial a media event seemed a fitting tribute to a man who had previously shunned the spotlight.
I was having trouble keeping my eyes on Ginny’s face while we danced, largely because of the effect of those lovely nipples. Which is funny, since I’d spent considerable time suckling them the night before and had spent half of our limo ride over playing with them. She was in her element, being watched by most of the men in the room and not a few of the ladies. Every time a flash went off she winked at me.
“I owe you big time, if this all gets onto Gawker or
E!
or
Entertainment Tonight
,” she said.
“It’s nothing. You get a message to David?”
“Called his brother in Oklahoma. Told him I wanted to see David, said I’d cooked up some real kinky shit he wasn’t going to believe.”
“Won’t he think that’s suspicious, your calling him up like that?”
“No,” she said. “I do shit like that all the time just to torture him. He’s in love with me, the poor dumb fuck.”
“Are you sure he’ll tell David?”
“Course he will. He tells David everything. He told David he’d fucked me, for example, which was one of the reasons David and I started having problems. Big fucking deal, right? I mean, they’re brothers.”
I saw Marie-Laure dancing with her husband on the other side of the dance floor. They were dancing a little less energetically than the rest of the crowd, and I wondered what he made of his wife’s life. He looked pretty miserable, but upon consideration so did she.
Soon Ginny was dancing with Fred, who looked the very picture of masculine self-confidence. As I stood at the bar I saw Annick at a corner table by herself trying hard not to watch him,
and a somewhat familiar-looking young man approached me and shook my hand.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about jumping you,” he said, and even with that rather obvious clue to his identity I was drawing a blank. Whoever he was, though, he was offering an apology, so I accepted it.
“The thing is, I’m kind of going crazy at the moment, and a lot of things just came crashing down around me at the same time. Like Annick cheating on me, Esmée cutting me off.”
Aha. So this was Bruno, without his dreads now, and looking rather natty. “I understand.”
“Do you? Sometimes I think if anything else goes wrong I’ll go crazy. Still, I know that attacking you was wrong. I’m planning on seeing a psychiatrist soon.”
“Your demeanor is very different than the last time we met,” I said.
“I’m heavily medicated at the moment, sir.”
I told him a truncated version of my army career and my discovery of acting as a form of therapy. He listened with interest, and then I clasped his shoulder.
“You’re a good-looking young fellow. Articulate. You have a decent voice. How’d you like to be in a movie?”
•
•
•
I had prepared two notes. Both of them read
WISHING SHE WAS YOU
. When I went over to present my official condolences to Esmée, I slipped her one, and brushing past Marie-Laure a few minutes later, I left the other clasped in her palm. But of course I was leaving with Ginny, and as we made our way past the members of the press both inside and out I said to several of them words to the effect that this Krysmopompas fellow was a chickenshit who lacked the balls to come after me, and that I didn’t expect to hear from him again.
W
E MADE A GREAT SHOW OF MOVING Ginny into a small but elegant boutique hotel off the Boulevard St. Germain, where her suite was smaller than its predecessor but filled with objets d’art and so many flowers my eyes began itching the moment we walked through the door. I made certain the press knew we’d be there, and sure enough when we stepped out of the limo there’d been a line of photographers and television cameras to publicize the event.
“You sure he’ll show?” I asked her.
“Unless he smells a trap, which I don’t think he will. Not when he thinks he’s going to help me make a snuff video.”
We looked around for the best place for me to hide and decided it was the walk-in closet. Ginny figured she’d have him thoroughly engaged in the sack before he wanted a proper tour of the suite around the room, and the slats in the door gave me a reasonably good idea of what was happening in the room outside.