Page 56 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

bureaucrats. He certainly wasn’t expecting a lowly PCV to come
calling there.
At ten o’clock sharp Labelle Gramercy arrived at my office,
escorted from the lobby by a Marine whose cap brim barely came
over her shoulders.
“Good morning, Mr. Tate. Any news?”
“Not really. I did hear that Ben Dover and Frank Bean have
agreed to mourn their loss jointly without recriminations. That is very
good news, from my point of view. Sally Furth’s body will be taken
home on Sunday. The ambassador,” I said with the barest irony, “has
an unbreakable alibi; he also was not arranging a rendezvous with
Miss Furst in the guest rooms of the hotel. Other than that, I haven’t
heard anything. Should I have?”
She sat down and took out her notebook. My attempt at humor
had fallen flat. “I’m authorized to say that the Jolibanan authorities
will be contacting you later this afternoon. They have their own
formalities to observe, and the ambassador will have to sign some
papers. But you are probably well aware of that protocol. We need to
get down to the embassy motor pool as soon as possible, but let me
tell you a couple of things first.”
“By all means,” I said gravely, already feeling my control of the
situation slipping away. Being on my own turf, backed by the full
panoply of the American diplomatic establishment, did not help. She
gave no sign of being impressed by the embassy’s inner sanctum,
which few Peace Corps volunteers ever saw, no more than she
afforded me, one of its high priests, anything beyond perfunctory
respect. And I could not help reflecting that the attainment of age did
not automatically confer a mantle of authority upon the attainee.
“I have a fairly clear chronology of events,” she began, ticking off
lines on a page of her notes. “Sally Furth showed up at the party at
about eight p.m. Prior to that she had traveled from her apartment—
actually a couple of rooms over a Lebanese bakery near the Grand
Marche—to the Peace Corps office in the Quartier Ancien and
stopped there briefly. The night gardien was certain of the time,
because he goes on duty at seven-thirty. He doesn’t know if anyone
else made contact with her there at that time. Then she proceeded to
the Quartier Nouveau. While at Lon Durer’s she spoke with an
undetermined number of people and probably consumed a beer or

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