The Storm Murders (25 page)

And yet, he perceived at one juncture, as they emerged from a brief flurry, that they were willing to give him the floor. They wanted to know who he was and what he was doing there. Despite his big-city reputation, these fellows seemed not to know of him, although the youngest, in his early forties, believed that he had heard the name. His surname was rare enough that the farmer might well have caught it on the news one day, and he was correct to apply it to this former cop. That’s all it took for Cinq-Mars to acquire significant status.

He explained his intentions in vague terms. His remarks were failing to provoke any outpouring of commentary, and when he was interrupted by a fresh arrival, he was obliged to begin again.

On this second go-round, he made sure to emphasize that, like them, he lived on a farm and that he raised horses.

“To eat?” Michel Chaloult teased him. The men chuckled to themselves.

“To race?” asked another man, perhaps more seriously, but perhaps not.

He knew better than to answer this challenge by saying
show jumping,
or worse,
dressage.
“I raise horses,” Cinq-Mars stated, “for men with deep pockets to buy for their spoiled daughters.”

They liked that. They laughed a lot.

“We don’t have any at the moment, but from time to time we raise and train—and sell, of course—polo horses.”

He was different from them, but he lived off the land, like them. They welcomed him into their rather squared-off circle.

They were now eight. The clumping of chairs formed more of a rectangle than a circle. A path remained free should an unsuspecting paying customer slip in at the wrong time to price a toilet. Cinq-Mars suspected that that seeker-of-toilets might then be blitzed with advice, if not become the recipient of a subtle and good-natured mockery. He, on the other hand, was actually seeking information, which was moderately suspicious to them all, so it would not be readily forthcoming. He tried a new tangent.

“Did you hear? The property is going up for sale.”

“What property?”

“The couple who were shot. The Lumens. Their farm.”

“You heard that?”

“Yeah. I did. Of course, I asked.”

“Who’d you ask?”

“They left the farm to a charity.”

“No relatives to inherit it?”

“Do you know of any?”

“No. Can’t say—Nope. Never heard of any.”

“Neither has anyone else,” Cinq-Mars let them know. “They left the farm to a hospital in the States. I talked to them. The hospital plans to sell. What else would they do with a farm in Quebec, eh? They’ll be cashing in sooner rather than later.”

“We were wondering about that.”

“I thought you might be. Do any of you expect to buy?”

The question instigated a renewed quiet, but this time it did not feel the same as one of their odd mute progressions. An uneasiness traipsed through and among the men, and they shot indiscriminate glances at one another.

Finally, a man spoke up. He was the only one among them who made a point of dressing to the role of a farmer, in coveralls and a heavy plaid shirt, with a pipe poking out from a pocket, and he was a man who possessed in spades the sharp features of nose and chin, cheekbones and forehead, associated with the Quebecois. The look allowed for a smidgen of Indian blood, mixed as well with a generation of Irish settlers’ blood at a time in history. This man, despite his clothing style, struck Cinq-Mars as being the sage one in their midst, the thoughtful man behind his plow. To emphasize what he wanted to say, he withdrew his unlit pipe from its dedicated pocket—they couldn’t smoke in here—to utilize as a pointer.

“Think about this,” he declared, and Cinq-Mars noticed that, for once, no one was speaking concurrently, that as long as this gentleman was pontificating on an issue everyone listened. “Michel Chaloult, he’s been working that farm, so he has first dibs. We won’t create a competition, taking money out of my mouth or his mouth or your mouth to drive up the price of the property. Farming does not pay so well these days that a poor man can afford fantastic prices for a mediocre patch.”

Others were nodding, learning how the affair ought to be conducted. “If somebody comes from the outside—” and the sage cast a rather pointed glance at Cinq-Mars, “who wants the property, then we have a right to respond. Maybe four of us will chip in to bid the farm, split it into quarters later. But for now, if Michel wants it, he’s earned the right to bid on it without the rest of us jacking up the price.”

É
mile Cinq-Mars was not concerned that the man had separated him out from the crowd and had voiced an underlying suspicion. He could work with that.

“That sounds like a good plan,” he said. “I’m personally not interested in the farm, but I’ll tell you something, I might be interested in the barn. So whoever buys the land, keep that in mind. If you already have a barn that’s good enough for you, you might have a buyer for this other barn. It’s not big, but I could use a well-built barn that’s not too big. And if you rent out the house to somebody from the city, they probably won’t need the barn either. So keep that in mind.”

The slight bobbing of heads continued as Cinq-Mars was being received into their enclave. He was here on police business, they knew, but they had also found common ground to share with him, which made him, if not one of their own, then at least one with whom they could exchange a laugh, or a covert drink, or an understanding. That made the whole police business a less formidable barrier.

They were not heavy drinkers, but a flask was passed around and Cinq-Mars joined the others for a nip. A Canadian whisky, he judged, nothing to write home about, but acceptable. Considering the environment, better than expected. He had anticipated nothing more than cider or coffee-flavored mud.

He finally got down to brass tacks. “I was wondering about Adele and Morris Lumen. Obviously, we want justice. But the police have discovered that it’s very hard to locate any information on them. They seem to have come out of nowhere. Is that your impression?”

“They left everything to a hospital, you said?” one guy asked. He stuck Cinq-Mars as being a hale man, without a lazy bone in his body. He suspected that the man had endured some stresses over time, probably a few sad losses, although he could not readily define why he thought that way, just a look around and within the eyes. A hunch, maybe. His teeth were his oddest feature, notable for the width of the gaps between so many of them even though he was not missing any. “I mean, that makes a kind of sense in a way. We never saw no family. No kids. Or grandkids. No parties. Never nothing like that.”

“They stuck to themselves, but they were friendly, too,” another man recalled. “The wife never entered the contests for the fair, you know, for the pies and that, but she came out to see the ladies just the same, to find out how they did, that sort of thing. She cheered them on.”

“The woman in particular, she liked to laugh.”

“She did. She had a big belly laugh.”

“She had a big belly.”

“You could hear her laughing across a room.”

“Across town.”

“He was quiet though, the man. Morris, his name.”

“Like a mouse.”

“He never laughed much. Don’t get me wrong. He smiled. Sometimes he even had a big grin on him. Like he was laughing on the inside. But he never came right out with it. He just kind of looked away when other people—or his wife herself—were laughing away.”

Cinq-Mars had the impression that these men discussed these matters previously, probably soon after the couple were killed, so in a way they were running down their remarks as if following a familiar script. He interrupted their loop. “So, you never saw people with them, other than folks from around here?”

They had to puzzle through the question.

“I wouldn’t never say never,” Michel Chaloult submitted. “When they first got here, you know we were checking them out. I was checking them out.”

“Only natural,” the sage man concurred.

“What did you see?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“At first, some men came around regular. Three guys once. A couple of guys quite a few times. Don’t know who they were. Haven’t seen them since.”

“They weren’t movers? Or tradesmen, fixing the place up?”

“In suits?” Chaloult asked, and he was pleased to draw a few chuckles from his pals.

“Okay, they were in suits,” Cinq-Mars noted, and to make it official he wrote that down on his pad.
Suits.

“They drove black cars. Not trucks or pickups. Newer cars. Fancy ones. The kind you don’t see plumbers or electricians driving to work.”

“Or movers,” another added, getting less of a laugh than Chaloult.

Black cars,
Cinq-Mars wrote down. “Only men. No women. Do you ever meet these guys?” he asked.

“Once,” Michel Chaloult told him. “That’s the time I started talking to him about working his farm. The wife—mine, I mean—she baked them a pie, and a dinner, some kind of casserole. New neighbors, we don’t get those too often, so that’s what you do. You bring over a casserole and you say hello.”

“You were introduced to these other men?” Cinq-Mars asked, trying both to keep him on point and to moderate his own rising excitement.

“Don’t ask me their names. But yeah, we were introduced. Nobody said what they were there for and I didn’t ask. I’m polite that way. I just presumed they were friends. They smiled. They were friendly in a way, but they didn’t stick around.”

“French names? English?”

“English. But the Lumens were English.”

“Could you describe the men?”

He could, and Cinq-Mars wrote the descriptions down, but he might as well have been describing any men on earth who had short hair, in one instance, or were bald, in the other. The bald guy had biggish ears, as Chaloult had noticed their size at the time. Big lips, too. Cinq-Mars worried that, over time, the image in his head had become a caricature or even a full-blown cartoon. The second man, the one with short hair, sounded remarkably indistinguishable from the majority of forty-year-old Caucasians on earth, but he looked rugged, he had a good stout chest.

“Anything at all that was unique?” Cinq-Mars pressed him.

Chaloult thought about it some more, rubbing the right side of his jaw and drawing his hand down over his Adam’s apple. “One thing,” he considered, and Cinq-Mars grew hopeful again. “He hadn’t shaved in maybe a day.” The former policeman fell back into a mild despair. “Oh!” the farmer chimed. Cinq-Mars looked up again, not wanting to become overly expectant, but not being able to help himself either. The man was poking at the side of his face. “He had this like—” He didn’t know how to describe it or the word was eluding his lips.

Ever positive, Cinq-Mars asked, “Scar?”

“No.”

“Wine-stain?” He knew that he was being excessively optimistic.

“What’s that?” Chaloult asked.

“A kind of birthmark, purple. Never mind. What do you remember seeing?”

“I forgot the word for what you call it.”

“Pimple?” someone in the group suggested.

Chaloult got upset with him. “I wouldn’t tell him about a pimple a man had four years ago! What the hell good is that?”

“What the hell good is it saying he didn’t shave for a day?”

Thank you,
Cinq-Mars thought.

“Oh shut up!”

“Describe it, Chaloult!”

The man didn’t want to do that. He knew the word and he wanted to bring it to the surface on his own. The other farmers seemed as frustrated with him as the investigator in the room. Cinq-Mars counseled, “Take your time.”

A man shot out, “Dimple!” and Chaloult just fumed.

“Relax,” quietly, Cinq-Mars encouraged him.

He was now squeezing his cheeks as if raising an idea flush to the surface.

Then he said, “I know what it was.”

Everyone waited.

“Rosacea.”

A few farmers were clueless.

“The curse of the Celts,” Cinq-Mars explained. “It’s called that sometimes. Red cheeks, as if the person has been drinking. But he hasn’t been, necessarily.”

“Splotchy skin, he had a case of it,” Chaloult recalled.

Of course, the man could’ve been drinking the night before or had his skin reddened by the sun or the wind, but Cinq-Mars faithfully wrote down
rosacea
on his pad. He asked for the men’s relative sizes and received back what he had already suspected, that they were of average height and build, although one was big through the chest.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

He sat there listening to the others discuss whatever came to mind. An exercise in random association. The couple came from the Maritimes, they all heard that, but no one heard either of the Lumens say it, yet one man was certain that they came from New Brunswick and another said Nova Scotia, which prompted a third to say that he was pretty damn sure they arrived from Prince Edward Island. One farmer’s daughter who worked as a waitress reported that the couple tipped more generously than most people. That instigated a discussion on what constituted a fair tip and Cinq-Mars let it play out. The longer they talked the poorer their prospective tips became. He waited for the right moment before asking his next crucial question.

“They lived on a farm,” he mentioned. “But Monsieur Chaloult, you did the work. Do you think they knew anything about farming? Or were they city folk who wanted to live in the countryside for a change?”

Michel Chaloult surprised him, and perhaps surprised them all, for the others seemed unaware that he held to this opinion. “They were farmers,” he declared emphatically. “Morris Lumen knew crops. Morris knew corn, for sure. I’d say that Morris knew as much if not more about farming than I do. For some reason I don’t understand, he decided not to do it anymore. Why does any man quit farming?”

Everyone proffered an answer to the question. “A physical infirmity, I suppose,” the sage man said, as if this was occurring to him for the first time.

“Or a physical calamity.”

“Stroke. Heart attack.”

“I hate those.”

“Doctor’s orders,” the man with the sadder eyes surmised. Then he issued swift invective. “Fuck doctor’s orders, I say! Up the arse!”