“You must be Inspector Lebrun,” she said, looking at his cigarette. “Most Americans have quit smoking. The doorman gave me your card. What can I do for you?”
“
“
“Yes,” she said, making eye contact with him.
Lebrun introduced McVey as an American policeman working with the Paris Prefecture of Police.
“How do you do?” Vera said.
“Doctor Paul Osborn. I think you know him.” McVey was putting niceties aside.
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Vera glanced from McVey to Lebrun, then back to McVey. “Perhaps it would be better if we talked in my apartment.”
The elevator was old and small and lined with polished copper. It felt like a tiny room in which every wall was a mirror. McVey watched as Vera leaned forward and pressed a button. The doors closed, there was a deep whir, the gears caught and the threesome rode up in silence. That Vera was poised and beautiful and had been unruffled in the lobby didn’t impress him. After all, she was the mistress of France’s most important minister. That in itself had to be an education in cool. But inviting them to her apartment showed moxie. She was letting them know she had nothing to hide, whether she did or not. That made one thing certain. If Paul Osborn had been there, he wouldn’t be there now.
The elevator took them up one story. At the second floor, Vera pulled the door open herself, then led the way down the corridor toward her apartment.
It was now a quarter past midnight. At eleven thirty-five she had at last pulled the covers over a thoroughly spent Paul Osborn, turned on a small electric space heater to keep him warm, and left the room hidden under the eaves at the top of the building. A steep and narrow staircase inside a plumbing soffit led to a storage locker that opened into an alcove on the fourth floor.
Vera had just stepped out of the locker and was turning back to lock the storage closet when she thought of the police. If they had been there earlier, there was every chance they would come back, especially when they would have had no word of Osborn. They’d want to question her again, ask if she’d heard anything in the mean time, probe to see if maybe they’d missed something or if she was covering up.
The first time they’d come she’d told them she was on her way out. What if they were outside now, watching for her to come back? And what if they didn’t see her come back and later found her asleep in her apartment? If that happened, the first thing they would do would be to search the building. Certainly the attic room was hidden, but not so well that some of the older police who had fathers and uncles in the Resistance against the Nazis wouldn’t remember such hiding places and begin to look beyond the obvious.
Assuming she was right about the police, Vera took the service stairs to the street behind the building and telephoned the lobby from a public phone on the corner. Philippe not only confirmed her suspicions but read her Lebrun’s card. Warning him to say nothing if the police Came back, she’d crossed Quai des Celestins, turned down the rue de l’Hotel de Ville and entered the Metro station at Pont Marie. Taking the line one stop to Sully Morland, she’d emerged from the station and hailed a cab back to her apartment on Quai de Bethune. The whole thing had taken less than thirty minutes.
“Come in, gentlemen, please,” she said, opening the door and turning on the hallway light, then led the way into the living room.
McVey closed the door behind them and followed. To the left, in the semidarkness, he saw what looked like a formal dining room. Down the hall to the right was an open door to another room, and opposite it another open door. Everywhere he looked he saw antique furniture and oriental rugs. Even the runner in the long hallway was oriental.
The living room was nearly twice as long as it was wide. A large Art Deco poster framed in gold leaf—a Mucha, if McVey remembered his art history—covered most of the far end wall. And the one word that sang from it was “original.” To one side, opposite a long white linen couch, was an old-fashioned armchair that had been completely redone. The curlicue design of its arms and legs was the same handpainted multicolor as the fabric and it looked, for all the world, like it could have been “ lifted straight from the set of
Beyond that, with the exception of half-a-dozen carefully placed antiques and the rich oriental carpet, the room was purposefully spare. The wallpaper, a fibrous gold and silver brocade, was untarnished by the grime that in a city the size of Paris sooner or later tainted everything. The ceiling and woodwork were off-white and freshly painted. The entire room, and the rest of the apartment, he imagined, had the look of meticulous daily care.
Glancing out one of the two large windows that overlooked the Seine, he could see Lebrun’s white Ford parked across the street. That meant that someone else, standing where he was, could have seen it too. Seen it pull up and the lights go out, but nobody get out. That is, until Ms. Monneray’s cab pulled up and she went inside.
Vera turned on several lamps, then looked up to face her guests. “Could I offer you something to drink?” she said in French.
“I’d rather get to the point, if you don’t mind, Ms. Monneray,” McVey said.
“Of course,” Vera said in English. “Please sit down.”
Lebrun walked over and sat down on a white linen sofa, but McVey chose to stand.
“This is your apartment?” he asked.
“It belongs to my family.”
“But you live here alone.”
“Yes.”
“You were with Paul Osborn today. You picked him up in a car about twenty miles from here, at a golf course near Vernon.”
Vera was sitting in the Alice in Wonderland chair, and McVey was looking right at her. If the police knew that much, McVey knew she would be too smart to deny it.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
Vera Monneray was twenty-six, beautiful, poised, and on her way to becoming a doctor. Why was she risking a hard-fought and important career by protecting Osborn? Unless something was going on McVey had no idea about, or unless she was truly in love.
“Earlier, when you were questioned by the police you denied having seen Doctor Osborn.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Vera looked from McVey to Lebrun, then back to McVey. “I’ll be honest and tell you I was frightened, I didn’t know what to do.”
“He was here in the apartment, wasn’t he?” McVey said.
“No,” Vera said, coolly. “He wasn’t.” That was a lie it would be hard for them to catch. If she told the truth, they would want to know where he went from here and how he got there.
“Then you won’t mind if we look around?” Lebrun said.
“Not at all.” Everything in the guest room had been Cleaned and put away. The sheets and bloody towels she’d used when she pulled the bullet from Osborn’s leg had been folded and stored in the attic hiding place, the instruments sterilized and put back in her medical bag.
Lebrun got up and left the room. In the hallway he stopped to light his cigarette, then walked off.
“Why were you frightened?” McVey sat down in a straightbacked chair across from Vera.
“Doctor Osborn was hurt. He’d been in the river most of the night.”
“He killed a man named Albert Merriman. Did you know that?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Detective, I told you he was hurt. It was not so much by the river, but because he’d been shot. By the same man who did kill Albert Merriman. He was hit in the back of “the thigh.”
