“Or maybe she knows the cops are here and doesn’t want to answer her door.”
“Why would she want to do that?”
“The mirror, of course,” Joanne said. “Somebody’s going to have to pay for it.”
“Ma’am, you’ll just have to take that up with her yourself in the morning,” Officer Hyde said.
“Can’t you just go in and see if she’s there or not?” Joanne asked.
“No, ma’am, we can’t do that.”
“For all we know, she’s in there lying in a pool of blood,” Joanne said.
“Ma’am, why would you say that? Did you hear any noises, anything like that?”
Joanne thought it over before replying.
“No,” she said finally, with some reluctance. “But that doesn’t mean anything. The mirror did get busted.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Officer Cubellis said, patiently. “But that doesn’t give us the right to break into that apartment. Think about this: You and Mr. McGrory are in here, watching a Stan Colt movie on TV. Lots of shooting, women screaming, explosions. Particularly at the end. The lady in the next apartment hears this and gets worried and calls 911. When the movie is over, you and Mr. McGrory go out for a hamburger. So when the police get here, there’s no answer. And they break in. And then you come home, and find the police in your apartment, and the door broken in.”
“Who would have to pay for the broken door if something like that happened?” Joanne inquired.
“The police…” Officer Cubellis began, and then changed his mind about the ending, “… would have to make the lady next door pay for the broken door,” he said. “Because she was the one who wanted the police to break in.”
“Jesus Christ, Joanne!” Herb McGrory said. “Officers, I’m sorry we put you to all this trouble.”
“No trouble at all, sir. That’s what we’re here for,” Officer Hyde said.
“I’m sure you’ll be able to work things out about the mirror, ” Officer Cubellis said.
Officers Cubellis and Hyde left the McGrory apartment, got into their patrol cars, and put themselves back into service. Officer Hyde filled out a Form 75–48, an initial report form for almost all police incidents. On it he stated that the McGrory mirror had been broken, and that Mrs. McGrory believed the occupant of the adjacent apartment was somehow responsible. An initial investigation of the adjacent apartment revealed that there was no response at that location and the premises were locked and secured.
When it was 2:23 A.M. in Philadelphia-the time that Officers Hyde and Cubellis reported to Police Radio that they were back in service after the “Disturbance, House” call-it was 8:23 A.M. in the village of Cognac-Boeuf, a small village in the southwest of France, not far from Bordeaux.
Despite the name, no cognac was distilled in the area, and the local farmers raised only enough milk cows for local consumption. Although sheep were still grown in the area, even that business had suffered from the ability of Australian and Argentine sheep growers to produce a higher grade of wool and a better quality of lamb at a lower price.
What once had been a bustling small village was now just a small, out-of-the-way village catering to what small farmers were left and to retirees, both French and from as far away as England, Sweden, and even the United States of America.
The retirees sold their houses or apartments in Hamburg or Copenhagen, and spent the money to buy-at very low prices; nobody but retirees had use for them-ancient farm-houses with a hectare or two of land, spent enough money to make them livable, and then settled down to watching the grass grow.
The Piaf Mill, for example, which sat on a small stream a kilometer from Cognac-Boeuf, had been purchased, with 1.7 hectares of land, six years before by a Swedish woman, Inge Pfarr Stillman, and her husband, Walter, an American, using the money-about $80,000-Inge had gotten from the sale of her apartment in Uppsala, near Stockholm.
It had gradually become believed that Walter Stillman, a burly man who wore a sloppy goatee as white as what was left of his hair, was a retired academic. He was obviously well-educated, and it was thought he was writing a book.
The mill, now converted into a comfortable home, was full of books, and every day the postman on his bicycle delivered yesterday’s International Herald-Tribune from Paris, and once a week, the international editions of Time and News-week.
Most afternoons, Stillman could be found in Le Relais, the better of Cognac-Boeuf’s two eating establishments- neither of which had won even one of Michelin’s stars- often playing chess with Pere Marcel, the parish priest, and drinking the local vin ordinaire.
The people of Cognac-Boeuf-in particular the shopkeepers-had come to call Stillman, respectfully, “M’sieu Le Professeur.”
His name was actually Isaac David Festung, and he was a fugitive from justice, having been convicted of violation of Paragraph 2501(a) of the Criminal Code of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for having intentionally and knowingly caused the death of Mary Elizabeth Shattuck, a human being, by beating and/or strangling her by the neck until she was dead.
M’sieu Le Professeur’s true identity had come to light two years before when, at sunrise, a dozen members of France’s Gendarmerie Nationale had appeared, pistols drawn at the Piaf Mill’s door. When Madame Stillman opened it to them, the gendarmes had burst in and rushed across the Mill’s ground floor to the stairs, then up the stairs to the loft. There they found-naked under a goose-down comforter in bed-a man who, although he insisted indignantly that he had never even heard of anyone named Isaac Festung, they arrested and placed in handcuffs.
After a brief stop at the constabulary office in Cognac-Boeuf to report the suspect was in custody-there was no telephone in Piaf Mill, and the radios in the gendarmes’ Peugeots were out of range of their headquarters-the man, still denying he had ever even heard of Isaac Festung, was taken in a gendarmerie car to Gradnignan Prison in Bordeaux, fingerprinted, and placed in a cell.
Forty-five minutes after that, a technician of the French Surete, sent from Paris, after comparing “Stillman’s” just-taken prints with a set of prints of one Isaac David Festung, furnished via Interpol by the office of the Philadelphia District Attorney, declared that it was his professional opinion that they matched beyond any reasonable doubt.