Michael Collins - Shadow of a Tiger

“No,” I said. “He’s too cool, too trained.”

“Maybe,” Marx said, “but he’s a strange one. Mixed up. Maybe he wanted to be caught. We’ll ask the psychiatrists. He wanted Burgos dead, didn’t care if he was caught. To hell with the world. He’s got to be half crazy, Dan.”

“You said that about Jimmy Sung.”

“Sometimes we’re wrong, sometimes we’re right. Maybe Claude just doesn’t care what happens to him anymore, has a reason not to care. You might even know the reason, Dan.”

As I’ve said before, the police don’t miss much. Did I know a reason for Claude Marais not to give a damn anymore? Yes, I did, didn’t I? Li Marais. If he knew about us? Maybe if I’d been Claude, I’d want to be locked up too-after I’d killed a rat that had been chewing at me.

“What does Claude have to say this time?”

“Denies it,” Marx said. “But he admits the knife is his, and after he lost our man following him, he says he just went walking around. He even admits that as far as he knows, no one could have taken his knife.”

I had nothing more to say. What could I say? If it was a frame-up, I had no ideas about who. As far as Lieutenant Marx was concerned, he had his man this time. He took Paul (Fernand) Manet when he left. There was a technical charge of robbery, and a real charge of failing to report a murder. Manet’s masquerade was over.

It was late afternoon now, the sun bright on the hot city. But in her hotel suite, Li Marais sat in the dark behind the drawn shades. I sat facing her.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Yes.”

Her smooth face was like stone again. I moved in my chair. Her eyes flickered toward me.

“No, not now,” she said. “Not this time.”

“I didn’t come for that,” I said.

She nodded faintly. “This time they will not let him go.” A light breeze stirred the drawn shades, but not her face. Motionless in the shadows, she could have been a statue in some ancient temple. “Perhaps this time he does not want them to let him go.”

“Did he do it, Li? Both murders?”

The traffic down in the street was heavy and distant. In the hotel room the city seemed far away. When she spoke, her lips hardly moved, like a graven image with a tape recorder inside.

“When they came he did not protest. He could not say what he had done since he was released this morning. He had taken money from our bank, he will not say why. When could someone have taken his knife? Since he was first arrested, I left this suite very little. I am sure no one has been here except you. He is accomplished with his knife.”

“An expert,” I said. “He shouldn’t have hit a rib.”

“He has not used his knife in many years.”

“Li?” I said, “could he have killed Eugene? We know the exact time now: between eleven P.M. when Jimmy Sung left, and about twelve-twenty when Charlie Burgos must have found him dead. You said that Claude was here with you the night Eugene was killed-from before ten P.M., until he left about three A.M. Were you lying? The police have to think you lied. If you were telling the truth, we’ll go on fighting.”

“I did not lie. I did not tell the truth.”

“Not both, no. Li, I’ve got to know-”

She stopped me without moving. A silent force that filled the dim room. “To me he was here all the time that night. He was here when I went to sleep at eleven-thirty. He was here when I woke up at three A.M. to find him dressed and ready to go out. I did not question that he had not left. But we are not husband and wife, you understand? I was in bed in the bedroom. Claude was here in the living room on the couch. The door between us was closed. I was asleep.”

I understood the police now. Had Claude left this suite for very long, Li might have awakened and missed him. But he could easily have slipped out briefly. Ten minutes to the pawn shop at a fast walk, ten minutes back. I had been gone from the lobby by eleven-thirty that night. Claude could have gone to the pawn shop, killed Eugene, and been back in his suite by twelve-thirty or so. Easily, and Li not waking up at all.

“Is he sick, Li?”

“Yes. Of many things.”

“Then you think he did it? Killed them?”

“No, he did not kill them.”

“How do we prove that? How do we even know?”

“You cannot prove it.”

“Can you know, Li? Can you really be sure?”

“I am sure,” she said. She was the way I had first seen her that day in the pawn shop with Claude and Eugene-small, hardly there at all, almost translucent. “I remember the knife the evening we were here when he was first arrested. It was in his suitcase as it always was. I saw it. I do not remember seeing it again. I remember the hat badge that was found in the register. I remember it on his bureau among loose cuff links and old keys. I remember I saw it.”

“On what bureau did you see it? When?”

“In the bedroom. Earlier that same day it was found in the register. His hat badge.”

“That’s bad for him, Li.”

“Yes, bad.”

“What can we do, Li? They have the circumstances for Eugene, the knife for Charlie Burgos. Motive for both, and one killing proves the other.”

“You can do nothing, Dan.”

I heard something in her voice? What? Her voice that dismissed all effort to help Claude. Why?

“If Claude didn’t kill them, Li, he’s being framed. Who by, and why?”

For a moment she didn’t answer me. Then, “His uniform is in our closet. The image of France. I do not know why he kept it. For me, perhaps. I married him in it. Soon after we came here, Viviane asked him to wear it to the shop for Danielle. Once. With its medals, its boots, its beret, its elan. I remember how all the people stared. A French soldier.”

I waited, but that was all. I sensed that she was telling me something. What? I sensed that she was going to do something. What?

“Li? What are you going to do?”

“Wait,” she said. “I am going to wait.”

“Li,” I said, “I’ll go on trying. I’ll work on.”

“Yes,” she said.

The bedroom door was open, the bed ready. I had lost one woman this summer. We were both alone now, but somehow I knew that the bed was not ready for me this time.

“You want me to go, Li?”

She didn’t answer, fading away from me in the hot room, going from translucent to transparent, vanishing. Into another world, an alien world, where I couldn’t follow. Into an alien world where she would do something, but where I did not know what it would be. I sensed her slipping away, and her purpose, and there was nothing I could do except try to prove that Claude Marais was innocent. If he was.

I sensed that if I was going to help Li, I had to do it fast. Prove Claude innocent or guilty once and for all, and fast.

I looked for witnesses. All that evening and night. For anyone who might have seen someone else at the pawn shop on the night Eugene Marais died. For anyone who had seen someone else at the condemned house of Charlie Burgos this morning. I knocked on doors, buttonholed shopkeepers, and all I found was a woman who had seen a man at the condemned building around noon today. A shabby man with one arm. Me.

I couldn’t see Claude Marais until morning. I went home. My five rooms were hot and lonely. The extra loneliness of knowing that someone who had been there often would not be there again.

I sat with a beer and thought about what to do next. I could knock on more doors, ask more questions, go around it all again to see if I could have missed something.

I drank beer, and watched television, and went to bed.

Captain Olsen, Gazzo’s fill-in, was with Lieutenant Marx in his office the next morning. I could talk to Claude Marais at noon, not that it would do me any good.