and… I couldn't even think about what else. I rubbed my eyes. My eyes. Something about my eyes nibbled at the back of my mind. What? My eyes or someone else's? I had no clue. Literally.
'I need some chow and a cup of joe, Major, before I fall asleep in my tracks.'
'Let's check on Lieutenant Kazimierz first. I'd like to know when they're going to release him.'
I trudged after Harding, wondering who was going to release me, and what was it about eyes? Damn his eyes? The ayes have it? The eye of the beholder? I want to go home? I gave up and shuffled along to Kaz's room.
Kaz held up a slip of paper as we walked in with 'Carrefour' and 'Le Bar Bleu' written on it.
'I already told you the password and about the bar,' I said. I wasn't thinking quickly.
'You cracked the code,' Harding said.
'It's hardly a code at all,' said Kaz, sounding disappointed. 'It's more like an improvised shorthand. In a proper code, one doesn't leave spaces between the words. This is nothing more than a single letter displacement. B for A, C for B, and so on. DBSSFGPVS is Carrefour if you shift each letter one place.'
'Simple,' I said, now that I understood.
'Simple enough to be able to write and read it quickly if you know the secret, but still enough to keep prying eyes from understanding it right away,' said Harding.
Prying eyes. Eyes again. I almost had it… then Rita the nurse walked in, a ray of cheery sunshine, visiting her prince.
'Baron, time for your medicine! Excuse me, gentleman.' She set down her tray and gave Kaz four pills as she poured a glass of water. She did have very pretty green eyes. Green eyes like Jerome. Kaz beamed at the attention and scooped up the pills. His eyes were blue. Different eyes. That was it!
'What are all those for?' I asked.
'That's for his blood pressure, it's a little high,' she said chattily, pointing out different pills, 'and this is something to help him sleep.' The elevated blood pressure was probably due to his heart condition but I didn't want to say anything about that. Kaz was having an adventure, and would hate being sent back to a real hospital in England. I had to humor him.
'Chloral hydrate?'
'Why, yes, Lieutenant. You certainly know something about drugs. Were you a medical student before the war?'
'No, a student of human nature. How much longer is he going to be taking that penicillin?'
'I'll have to ask Doctor Dunbar.'
'Please do that. Now.'
'I have to finish-'
'Now!' Sometimes I surprise myself. I can actually sound like a tight-ass officer when I need to. Nothing to be proud of, but it got her out of the room.
'Jerome didn't die of complications. He was murdered, and we've got to get Kaz out of here.'
Harding and Kaz just looked at me like I was a blithering idiot.
'Now!' Why not try it on them?
'Explain yourself, Boyle!' Harding yelled without raising his voice.
'It's the eyes! I'm not a hundred percent certain, but one thing I do know is that a morphine overdose makes your pupils shrink down to a pinpoint. I've seen the look on the faces of addicts who checked out plenty of times. Jerome's eyes were just like that.'
'But Boyle, maybe it was just the light in the room,' said Harding patiently.
'No, it couldn't be. Listen, sir, I know you've seen plenty of dead men in the Great War. Probably a lot more than me, but my job is to study them when we find them murdered. One thing my Dad told me when he took me to my first crime scene was about the Dead Man's Stare.'
'The dead do look as if they're seeing something beyond us,' Kaz said quietly.
I took a breath before going on. I knew he was thinking about Daphne now and I hated to get clinical, but I had to.
'Yeah, and a lot of rookies get spooked by that. But he taught me that the pupils in your eyes widen right after death. It's the muscles relaxing or something like that. He said knowing why made it easier to look at them. It did.'
'Didn't Jerome's eyes look like that?' Harding asked, sitting down on one of the empty beds and folding his arms.
'They probably will soon. But the effects of the morphine trumped the natural process.'
'So he overdosed on morphine?' asked Kaz.
'No. Somebody gave him an overdose. Bit of a difference. That makes two people murdered in this hospital, both of whom knew about this missing notebook. And anyone can walk in here and give Kaz! whatever kind of pills or injections they want, night or day!' I tried to slow down. I knew I sounded hysterical, but things were beginning to fall into place.
I tried to be calm and rational. 'The notebook that Jerome and his?; pals lifted from Bessette must contain information about the smuggling operation. It points to the same place in Bone-Le Bar Bleu- as the matches and receipts I found in Bessette's office. And the same password shows up on Villard's travel orders to the supply depot at Bone. Don't you get it? Le Carrefour, the crossroads!'
'Bone is the crossroads of the smuggling operation,' Kaz said, 'and the contact is at this bar.'
'Could be,' said Harding. 'But how is Villard involved?'
'Remember, right after Villard shot Georgie, Jerome's brother? That German officer, Remke, was telling us that Villard had connections to the local underworld here. He's probably the connection between them and Bessette. That's why Bessette killed that French; Army captain last night. He must have been protesting the smugglings of drugs taken from the Americans.'
'Hold on a minute,' Harding said, as he rubbed his chin, and paced up and down the little room. 'You're saying that this whole operation to raid American drug supplies, including our top secret drug, penicillin, was organized within two or three days of the invasion? The Vichy French didn't know we were coming. Even if they did, how did they learn about our medical supplies? Or that we'd store them here? It doesn't make sense.'
I realized he had a point. How could they have known about any of this?
'There's always a black market when supplies are short. Maybe they guessed a lot of military supplies, German or Allied, were going to land here someday. In the meantime, they ran what they could through Bone. I'm sure supplies came in from Marseille all the time. Maybe they took a cut at the docks and sent heroin to France in return. Villard or Bessette had to have some angle.'
'It's a stretch, Boyle,' Harding said.
'It is a lot to assume, Billy,' added Kaz. I wasn't getting any support for my theory.
'If Dunbar is willing to release Kaz, can we at least get him out of here?' I asked Harding.
'Colonel Walton wants you to investigate Caselli's murder,' he answered. 'You'd do more good here.'
'But if the killing is linked to the smuggling operation, I ought to go to Bone.'
'Boyle, the fact that Villard has probably taken Diana Seaton to Bone wouldn't be influencing your judgment, would it?'
'I gotta be honest, sir. It has absolutely nothing to do with it. I think Kaz is in danger here and that Villard is behind the killings and theft. I say Bone is our best bet.'
I must've really been tired. I gave away the lie by saying I was going to be honest. But Harding hadn't sat through as many police interrogations as I had, and he didn't know that was usually the big tip-off. If you're honest, there's no need to announce the fact.
Chapter Thirteen
Hardingbought it, because half an hour later we had Kaz bundled into the jeep, with a supply of penicillin for the next five days, strict instructions for him to see a medic every day for his shot and to get his dressing changed, and a story ready for Colonel Walton about following up promising leads. Dunbar had checked Kaz out and
