(The total absence)
Dr Eudo Lachapelle had landed in Canada from Belgium in lamentable disgrace. A scandal festered in his wake that in his new land would never be divulged.
He stepped onto a pier in Montreal seeking to remake his life, although surely not from scratch. To his dismay, he learned that he was not to be a licensed physician in his adopted country without returning to the study of medicine. The difficulty with that proposition, apart from the insult attached to his credentials, was poverty. He’d been permitted to exit Europe with his skin intact only after his properties had been sold and his accounts emptied. To enroll at a university in his new country seemed inconceivable when he had access to neither food nor shelter. His energies were invested in dashing from pillar to post for a snack and temporary lodging, and in railing against the system. With a flair for bluster, he complained to anyone in authority that his adopted land was passing up a singular opportunity for enrichment.
To many, Eudo came across as a bore; others responded with sympathy to his plight. He managed to endear himself to the men arbitrating his grievance at the Collège des Médecins du Québec. Still, rules were rules, and Dr Lachapelle floundered under the weightiness of the law.
Prematurely white-haired, with an impressive handlebar mustache, overly large brightly-rimmed eyeglasses, and an angular visage with outsized ears, he augmented the eccentricity of his appearance with a penchant for histrionics. The lack of care afforded him by his new compatriots, he stated without embarrassment, was reminiscent of Napoleon’s banishment to Elba. The assault on his intellectual integrity was depriving the Province of Quebec of its most learned and illustrious physician. He was willing to transform the study of medicine on this side of the Atlantic. A student again? He should be handed a professorship! He was not requesting that a jury of his peers bend rules to favor him: He insisted that the rules be incinerated in a public blaze.
In the meantime, he found shelter in a storeroom in the rear of a bar where he successfully cadged drinks. Still, no license.
Eventually, Eudo’s daily agitations elicited an offer of employment. While he would not be permitted to examine patients without taking the prerequisite study, he would be allowed to participate in the police laboratory and assist in their morgue. No living person would be entrusted to his care, but stewards determined that he was unlikely to do significant harm to the dead.
They were right.
Dr Lachapelle took to the cadavers with such relief that he never stepped into a classroom in order to be licensed by the Collège.
His eccentricities caused a few officers on the Night Patrol to pull their hair out – one attacked him with a femur – but Cinq-Mars enjoyed both him and his capable assistant, the skittish Huguette Foss. Hu had mousy hair pulled back along the side of her scalp and drawn forward over the shoulders and around her throat. Under her bangs, her face appeared encircled by an oval picture-frame of hair. On the street, her manner suggested the personality of a timid waif. In the lab, she was a crackerjack: quick, incisive, witty if anyone caught what she murmured under her breath; and with Cinq-Mars and others, flirty. In Émile’s and Huguette’s running repartee, they celebrated the mythic day when they’d be free to run away to Spain – Hu’s choice of country. Cinq-Mars was one of the few people aware that Eudo and Huguette were mutually exclusive, having once interrupted their congress in the lab. Perhaps the age difference of twenty-three years embarrassed them, or perhaps being friends only in public suited them, or it was a professional choice. Cinq-Mars played along with the charade.
As Émile entered the lab that night, Eudo shouted a joyous greeting. He was often boisterous in the eerie silence of the basement enclave. Oddly, Huguette had nothing to say, no quips, and bore out of the room as if Cinq-Mars had admitted a virus.
‘What hauls you down to our murky gloom?’ Eudo called out. ‘You’ve departed our company for the sunny side of the street. Abandoned your witches and ghouls, not to mention our preening prostitutes and midnight muggers, and our sweet drunken derelicts with their kitsch tunes. You have distanced yourself from the company of our manic murderers, Émile. For what? To investigate the theft of car radios? Hurry! A bracelet has gone missing from the tennis court! I had always assumed you were a vampire who sleeps in a coffin by day. Yet now, you stumble among the living wearing suntan oil.’
‘A vampire, Eudo? Nice.’
‘The nose, Émile. You have considerable Bela Lugosi in your face.’
‘Thanks again. What the heck happened to Huguette?’
‘She’s on a mission, Émile. What brings you down here, you betrayer of your nocturnal cohorts?’
‘Fingerprints,’ Cinq-Mars stated.
‘Whose?’
‘A murder took place last night. Town of Mount Royal.’
‘Night murders no longer concern you, Émile.’
‘When the sun came up, I was called to a home robbery.’
‘And the murder?’
‘Discovered by the light of day. Fingerprints were taken from both crime scenes.’
‘By the day squad, Émile, from the Mount Royal poste. Not by me.’
‘I know that. Eudo, the two crimes were not compared, one to the other. Could you do that for me? For old time’s sake?’
‘They should have been compared,’ Eudo grumbled.
‘Two investigations, two sets of detectives. That’s how it goes on the day shift.’
Eudo removed a hammer from a drawer and took it to a table where a lone bone fragment awaited inspection. He covered it in cloth, then smashed it.
‘What did you do that for?’
‘The exercise.’
‘Eudo?’
‘I can do the fingerprint comparison. Are they here, at this station?’
‘You’ll have to make a call. I memorized the file numbers.’
‘Did you?’ Eudo held up a bone fragment to a light. He nodded. Then looked over at his younger colleague. ‘You memorize file numbers. Which means what?’ He smiled. ‘You don’t have access to the files yourself.’
‘All in the pursuit of justice, Eudo.’
‘I’m up for that, some days.’ Putting the bone fragment down, he crossed his arms and tucked his fists under his armpits. ‘You didn’t need to make the trip, Émile. Any technician can help you. Tell your Uncle Eudo. What are you up to? Are you lonely for the nightlife? Do you miss us?’
First, Cinq-Mars asked, ‘Why did you smash that bone?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘I saw you.’
‘Oh that. Why are you investigating a homicide and not bicycle theft? What does that get you?’
‘I said. The homicide might be related to my burglary.’
‘Let the big shots from homicide investigate your robbery. Any other way around is backwards.’
‘I’m not stopping them. Why bash the skull? What does that get you?’
‘I was testing the hammer.’
‘Of course you were.’
‘This,’ he motioned with his chin to indicate the hammer, ‘is a ball peen. Over here,’ he returned to his drawer and lifted out different hammers for his show-and-tell, ‘I have a claw, a cross and straight peen, a cross-peen pin and, for the brute within us all, a club hammer. What are their various effects upon a skull, Émile? Now that I have met your criteria, tell Uncle Eudo what you’re up to.’
Cinq-Mars had a vague sense that Eudo Lachapelle was stalling. What was going on with him? Talking gibberish? Smashing skull fragments? Émile brought his own question forward again. ‘Last night, the dead man was sitting behind the wheel of a parked car.’
‘How was he killed?’
‘Knife to the chest.’
‘Knives do kill. They are dangerous that way.’
‘The thing is, on the passenger side door – on the interior panel – is a blood smear. Someone deliberately smeared the blood, most likely to obscure the fingerprints. In the opinion of the daytime tech, the smearing obliterated any chance of getting a print.’
‘But Mr Oh-So-Smart Guy, you think otherwise?’
‘Anyone who took the trouble to smear the prints had a reason. Such as, his prints are on file. I was wondering, even if there’s only a bit of fingertip showing and maybe a different side of the same finger somewhere else, perhaps a whole print can be stitched together? What do you think? If there are bits of several fingers, you could make a match that way, no?’
Eudo raised an eyebrow and prolonged the gesture.
‘What?’ Cinq-Mars questioned him. ‘A longshot, but doesn’t it make sense?’
‘Hate to tell you this, Émile.’ He picked up the cross-peen pin hammer and returned to his smashing table. Another skull fragment cracked under a blow. ‘The Mounties had a case where fingerprints were deliberately smudged. Their lab lifted a corner from this finger, a snippet from the hand, a tiny bit of the tip off the pinkie. Nothing definitive, but enough for the Mounties to make an arrest.’
‘That’s what I’m looking for.’
‘Is it? The match did not stand up in court. The technicians explained how the whorl off the side of the thumb, the tented arch off the tip of the forefinger, and the partial double swirl on the ring finger all pointed to the killer. How did the judge rule? Too great a chance for error. Threw it out.’
‘Eudo, that’s down the road. I want to know who to arrest.’
‘True. Fine. I’ll requisition the prints. Is the car, or the door panel, in our possession? Or only photographs?’
‘Both, I presume.’
He brushed his flowing mustache with the fingertips of both hands while deciding. ‘I’ll look. Render an opinion. Fair warning, I can only check fragments against local felons. Burglars. Murderers. A short list. With fragments, an extended check takes eons. Literally. Someday, I’m told, a machine to do the search will exist. Hard to imagine. The size of a bank. A computer, it will be called. By then I’ll be gone to my just reward.’
Suddenly, the lights went out.
‘What’s going on?’ Cinq-Mars asked.
‘Power outage. Happens often.’
He’d been downstairs in a power failure before. Why weren’t the emergency lights on? He heard a door opening. He turned. Lights were on in the hall. Shadows moved. A figure, then several, scooted through the door, bent over. Marauders in the morgue.
Lights snapped back on again and the roar that ensued practically lifted Émile Cinq-Mars out of his skin. There stood Huguette, an impish, devilish grin on her face, surrounded by about twenty elite detectives from the Night Patrol. They were roaring at him. No other word for it. Roaring. Cinq-Mars saw the beer, wine and whisky hauled in and ready to be poured.
Touton had given him a private send-off. These guys had missed out. Cinq-Mars could only pray he’d survive their turn.
One small mercy. The total absence of showgirls.