16, 1942, the Gestapo and the Paris police rounded up twelve thousand or so Jews, imprisoned them like sheep in the sports stadium-the Velodrome d’Hiver; to us: Vel d’Hiv. Non-French Jews, mostly German and Polish refugees. They were there a week, a hell, before they were sent to the worst hell of Auschwitz. It is not an episode most Frenchmen over forty-five want to talk about.” She reached for the wine bottle. “Four thousand of those Jews were children.”
She poured her glass of wine. Not new, no, one of thousands of such episodes in those barbarian years of the Third Reich, and that was why the silence of the neat living room in Sheepshead Bay was so brutal-I could imagine the scene, visualize it from a million other stories, reports, pictures. I could see and hear the bewildered suffering of those refugee children.
“Were Paul Manet and Eugene involved somehow?” I said.
“Eugene was not himself. We are half-Jewish, Eugene was at least, but French Jews were not affected. Some… friends were.” she drank. “Paul Manet risked his own life to warn many of the refugees, and rescued some. He is not a Jew, and it was a great risk in those days.”
“Eugene did nothing? Took no part?”
“He did nothing,” the widow said.
“Paul Manet would have no hatred against him, blame him for anything? Eugene had nothing against Manet?”
“I cannot think what. Few ordinary Frenchmen were part of it that night. Eugene did nothing bad, and Paul Manet was a hero. What could there be?”
She had no reason to be lying. Eugene Marais was dead, if he had done anything on that long-ago night to cause his murder now, she would have no reason to hide it and protect his killer. Or would she? Some guilty secret so bad…? No, Eugene Marais had not been a man to evade his own guilt.
“Does Danielle think Jimmy Sung guilty?” I said.
“How can I say what Danielle thinks?” Viviane Marais said.
“Has she seemed to doubt Jimmy’s guilt at all?”
“No, she has not. She has said nothing. Why?”
“I’m pretty sure Charlie Burgos tried to have me beaten up to get me off the case, and he’s got Danielle up- tight about something. If he didn’t rob the shop, kill Eugene, and you didn’t try to stop Danielle seeing him, what interest does he have in it all? Could he have been the one Eugene was meeting that night?”
“I have no idea, Mr. Fortune.”
I rubbed at my stump, it was aching. “All right, you’re sure Jimmy Sung isn’t a thief, not the type. But what facts do we have to support that? Some concrete proof it wasn’t Jimmy?”
“Jimmy cares nothing about money, really. Eugene paid him well, too much, and often Jimmy would leave on payday without his money. As long as he had money in his pocket for his bottle that night. Also, he worked in the shop, hein? He knew where any money was, how much there was in the shop. Would he not have gone straight to the money first? He had, too, the combination of the safe. Would he not have opened the safe at once?”
“Unless he knew Eugene was dead as soon as he hit him, and panicked at once,” I said, and answered my own question before she could. “No, then he would have just run, no point to taking anything at all. And the killer didn’t know Eugene was dead, or he wouldn’t have tied him to that chair.”
“No, Jimmy never needed money that much, Mr. Fortune,” Viviane Marais said.
“Everyone needs money that much, Mrs. Marais,” I said.
9
The six-story old-law tenement off Ninth Avenue wasn’t a lot different from my building. No shabbier than most buildings in Chelsea, and in some ways a lot cleaner-the steps swept and washed, the outer door painted, even a few geraniums in sidewalk boxes now wilted in the heat.
Jimmy Sung lived on the fourth floor, the stairs swept and dusted. I knocked, expecting no answer. But I got one. A woman opened Jimmy Sung’s door. A plain woman, almost ugly, and bone thin. A cheap print dress hung on her bones like a sack, and she wore old sneakers for shoes, but her skin was bright and clear for her age-maybe fifty-and there was a snap to her brown eyes that said she wasn’t a woman who gave up on life easily. A vigor in her, tenacious, despite the fact that she had been crying.
“Yeh?” A wary voice, protective. She dabbed her eyes.
“This is Jimmy Sung’s apartment?” I said.
She nodded. “He’s in jail. No key. Go-”
“I know where he is,” I said. “My names Dan Fortune, a private detective working on the Marais murder.”
“What’s to work on?” she said, but she left the door open as she walked back into the apartment.
I followed into a windowless living room smaller than my own-and a lot neater. An almost bare room, clean and scrubbed, like the cell of some ascetic monk. A day-bed couch without cushions, the wall for a back rest; two high-backed wooden armchairs of the kind they sell for rustic lawn furniture; one lamp from some junkyard; a wooden table and three kitchen chairs. The woman didn’t sit, she leaned against a wall, lit a cigarette, one eye half closed against the smoke that drifted up.
“Nobodies like Jimmy are always guilty,” she said, her open eye fixed on my face. “Isn’t it over? Sure it is.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Some of us aren’t so sure.”
“Forget the forgotten,” she said. “Mentally homeless, the only world left is inside. They turn the key, the end.”
“You’re his woman?”
“Marie Schmidt. Drunky Marie. I’m not even my own woman.” She took the cigarette from her lips, picked tobacco. “Yeh, I’m his woman. I told them about that Buddha. My big mouth. You really think he’s got a chance?”
“If he didn’t do it. I’ll need help.”
“Help? What, witnesses to say he was somewhere else? All the people who remember a drunk Chinese on the street? His business partners, wife, children, friends, alumni brothers? How about a magician?”
“Did anyone see him that night?”
She laughed. “Nobody ever sees him. Just a Chink. Six years in a damned insane asylum because he couldn’t speak-”
“I know about that,” I said.
“Okay, you know. It was never much different for Jimmy outside that booby hatch. Who knows him? Who talks to him? The neighborhood Chink. Most people act like he’s got no real right to speak English or be alive here. No big discrimination, you know, no real bigotry. Just that he doesn’t really exist, they don’t even see him. All except Mr. Marais, he was nice, a friend. So it got to be him they say Jimmy killed!”
She stopped, sighed, found an ashtray for her cigarette. “That Buddha, you know? He put it back there in the bedroom the day after Mr. Marais was killed-to honor Mr. Marais, he said. He said Mr. Marais gave it to him, and he put it in the bookcase and lighted incense in front of it. He sat down on the floor looking at it for an hour without saying anything.”
She was silent as if seeing Jimmy Sung silent in front of the small Buddha. “I never saw it before, and I told the cops. I don’t know how long Jimmy had it, but the cops say it proves he just got it from the shop the night of the murder. If he got it that way, you’d think he’d hide it, not bring it out.”
“You would,” I said, “if he’s sane. Is he sane?”
“Who is?” she said. “He’s not crazy, Fortune. Not perfect, but not crazy more than anyone. He gets moody, who doesn’t? Sometimes when he’s drunk he gets mad and says I got the wrong eyes, I’m not a Chink. Hell, I get mad and call him a Chink. That doesn’t make me crazy or a murderer.”
“You live here, Marie?”
“Here? Hell no!” She looked for another cigarette, lit one. “Like I said, who’s perfect? He’s a Chink, I couldn’t live with him, you know? Maybe I’m ashamed, but he’s all I’ve got, and I want him back.”
