There were two interrogations.
The informal one took place at the Gendarmerie.
Colonel Schneider studied me with the intensity of a psychopath. There were clots of blood on his clothes and in his cropped grey hair. Pieces of the gendarme had splattered as far away as the white stucco walls of Danielle Payton’s Japanese playpen. I looked at his eyes and tried not to shiver.
“How convenient for us that you’re already well-covered with bumps and bruises,” he mused softly. “No one will notice a few more, will they now?” He slapped me lightly across the face and stepped back against the wall, never taking his gaze from me. “But how extremely unfortunate for you.”
He nodded, and the beating began. The three gendarmes who administered it were young and willing but obvious amateurs. After a few initial blows that left me numbed and gasping with pain I was quickly smashed into oblivion.
I came out of it when water was splashed on my face, and I was dragged off the floor and this time tied to a wooden chair. Consciousness flickered on and off. My head lolled on my chest. Suddenly it was jerked up painfully. Schneider had grabbed a fistful of what hair remained on my head. He leaned over until his face was inches from mine.
“A taste of what you’re going to get,” he said bleakly. His eyes were those of a leather-freak we’d busted in Noe Valley who had strangled his biker playmate with a stainless-steel chain and tried to feed his body into the basement furnace.
“I want a lawyer,” I muttered between lips that felt like beefsteaks.
He laughed in harsh gasps. “A lawyer. Monsieur LaRoche thinks he’s still in America and wants his lawyer.” The other gendarmes stood grim and silent.
“Are you just going to beat me,” I managed, after enormous concentration, “or is there something you want to know?”
“You want to talk? In that case, I want to know the following: when did you kidnap the Payton woman, who are your associates, when and where did you kill her, where did you hide the million dollars, and why did you blow up one of my men? Not much, LaRoche, just that.”
My brain struggled to make sense of his words. They were so preposterous as to be incomprehensible.
“You’re crazy,” I mumbled, “absolutely crazy.”
He slapped me twice, stinging blows that clouded my vision. “We’ll see who’s crazy by the time you leave here!” he shouted. A gendarme stepped in from my left and raised his arm. I flinched and tried to hunch my shoulder to protect my face.
“That will suffice nicely, thank you,” said Commissaire Tama in clipped tones from across the room. The gendarme hesitated, startled. I looked up blearily. Tama was standing in an open doorway. He was still the fattest man I’d ever seen but he was the loveliest sight I had ever seen. “You exceed your authority, Colonel Schneider,” he said formally. “You may be certain that it will not be overlooked.”
Schneider took a step forward. “You—”
Tama held up a hand. “One more word, Colonel Schneider, and I will be on the phone to the Juge d’Instruction.” He handed Schneider a paper. “These, incidentally, are his written orders that the interrogation is to be conducted at the Commissariat by the Police Judiciaire. The Gendarmerie may designate a representative with observer status if it so desires.”
Schneider glared with naked hatred. “If I hadn’t had a beeper put on his car this morning—” he began, but Tama was unmoved. “Kindly untie those ropes and get him cleaned up. For your sake I hope he will not need an ambulance.”
“Good cop, bad cop, eh, Tama?” I muttered weakly as I staggered to my feet. “Next time you don’t have to make it so realistic.”
His icy smile had no trace of sympathy. “You were the one who said something about keeping out from under our feet, weren’t you? I wonder: do bugs complain when somebody steps on them?”
* * * *
For the formal interrogation they did it by the book.
“You recognized Susan West as soon as you got here.”
“You knew she’d been involved with kidnappings, didn’t you?”
“Maybe you’d known her in San Francisco, is that it?”
“Was it her idea or yours to snatch the Payton woman?”
“How much was your share going to be?”
“Did she fuck you, LaRoche? Is that how she got you interested? While her husband watched, maybe?”
“Kicked off the force for brutality, eh, LaRoche? No job, no money. So how could you afford a month in Tahiti?”
“Maybe you’d planned it with the Wests before you came down, huh?”
“Who did the snatch, LaRoche? You?”
“Whose idea was it to put the blame on the paratroopers?”
“Quite a gag, LaRoche, telling us how you saw the Payton dame on board their boat.”
“Almost as good as stealing their lighter and leaving it up at her house in the mountains.”
“When did you kill her, LaRoche?”
“What made you think of the paras, LaRoche? Maybe she’d told the Wests about them?”
“Maybe the Wests even knew that she’d mentioned them in her diary?”
“You really thought we’d think they were the kidnappers?”
“You think we’re idiots, don’t you, LaRoche? Answer me!”
“That made you laugh, getting yourself hired to find the broad you’d just kidnapped, didn’t it, LaRoche?”
“But you aren’t laughing so hard now, are you?”
“Who chopped off her fingers, you or West?”
“Who was the guy you hired to go to the bar and pick up that Hitler idiot to go get the ten million francs?”
“Thought you’d throw us off the track, didn’t you?”
“So why did you kill the Wests, LaRoche?”
“Maybe she wasn’t putting out for you, is that it?”
“Or you decided you wanted all the money for yourself?”
“Who took the photographs?”
“How did you kill them? Maybe your pal in the bar went to take care of them, huh?”
“Pretty smart, LaRoche. You’ve kidnapped the Payton dame, you’ve kept her alive and taken a bunch of photos, you’re sending us fingers, and then you decide to get rid of your partners.”
“Because you know we’re not gonna keep swallowing this gag about the paras, don’t you?”
“So you spring the paras and set up the Wests, don’t you, LaRoche?”
“Where were you hiding her, LaRoche?”
“Why didn’t you leave the gun you used to shoot them, huh?”
“That wasn’t very smart, was it, LaRoche, carrying a .25 around with you?”
“Especially when you go to say hello to your girlfriend in her hole, huh?”
“You’re lucky Schneider’s goon didn’t blast you on the spot when they found that gun.”
“They don’t like watching other gendarmes being blown to bits.”
“Funny, aren’t they?”
“Why did you dump her in the leach pit, LaRoche?”
“That was pretty dumb.”
“But you’re not as clever as you think you are, huh, LaRoche?”
“If you were, you might look up once in a while and see a helicopter following you around.”
“So what were you digging the Payton broad up for, LaRoche?”
“A guilty conscience, LaRoche?”
“Who killed her, LaRoche?”
“Was it you, LaRoche?”
“Did you fuck her first, LaRoche?”
“Why did you wire that suitcase, LaRoche?”
“Maybe you were going to try to blow up your partner, huh, LaRoche?”
“No more witnesses, eh, LaRoche?”
“Just you and one million dollars, right, LaRoche?”
“But why did you kill the Wests, LaRoche?”
“Maybe they’d guessed you were the kidnapper.”
“You’re the one who said Susan West was involved with kidnappings, aren’t you LaRoche?”
“Just another one of your little stories, wasn’t it, LaRoche?”
“They knew too much, didn’t they?”
“Maybe they were trying to blackmail you.”
“What made them suspicious of you?”
“You met the Payton broad at one of their sex parties, is that it, LaRoche?”
“What’s it like, fucking a hundred million bucks, LaRoche?”
“You figured you could get some of that for yourself, didn’t you, LaRoche?”
“And not just her pussy, eh, LaRoche?”
“A bad cop gives all of us a bad name, LaRoche.”
“Maybe we should give you back to Schneider’s goons.”
“Where did you hide her out, LaRoche?”
“That must have scared you, being asked by her daughter to go look for the woman you’d just kidnapped.”
“Is that what made the Wests start to wonder about you?”
“Why didn’t you kill her then and take the first plane out?”
“They still guillotine people, you know, LaRoche.”
“But you figured no one would be looking for you if you were muddying things up by pretending to look for somebody else, didn’t you?”
“Why did you go back to the leach pit, LaRoche?”
“When you saw that your gag about the paras wasn’t going to work, that’s when you decided to kill the Wests and set up those two hash-heads on the boat to be the fall guys, isn’t it, LaRoche?”
“You know, LaRoche, I can almost admire a guy like you. I mean, you didn’t kill anybody that didn’t need killing, and look at the brains you’ve used in this.”
“Anyone else would have just kidnapped the broad and killed her and tried to get away with some of the money.”
“But not you. You decided you could find someone else to take the heat.”
“So first you set up the paras.”
“And then the Wests.”
“And then those assholes on the boat.”
“Brains, LaRoche, brains.”
“Come on, LaRoche, tell us about it.”
“A story like that, it’s too good to keep to yourself.”
“You’re one of the great criminal geniuses, LaRoche, did you know that?”
“It’s true: a genius.”
“It’s just bad luck, getting caught the way you did.”
“Could have happened to anyone.”
“Who the hell cares about blowing up a fucking gendarme?”
“Nobody.”
“You told him not to pick it up.”
“Too bad it wasn’t Schneider, huh?”
“Yeah, no one’d miss that son of a bitch.”
“All we need is the million bucks and it’s wrapped up.”
“Did you really drive around to all those bars on a chopper with the million bucks in a suitcase?”
“Genius, LaRoche, that’s genius.”
“But we’ve got a witness, you know.”
“Two of them.”
“They saw you and the Payton broad, LaRoche.”
“It’s all tied up.”
“Just one little slip and…whammo!”
“Too bad, LaRoche.”
“Why don’t you tell us about it, Alain?”
“Sure, relax, it’s all over now.”
“A beer, a cigarette, maybe a sandwich, then…hell, we’ll just start taking it down, okay?”
“Whattaya say, Rocky?”
“Hey, Emile, go get us some eats.…”
After that they got started in earnest.