The Art of Murder Read online

  Jean-Phillipe pulled out a long white envelope, with the familiar black monogram on the upper left corner. A sharp hiss came from Levain. He laid it on the front of Gilles’s battered old desk.

  “Good luck to you, gentlemen.” With his legs comfortably crossed, Chiappe leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and endured, in spite of the need for disciplined behaviour, a brief wave of congratulation and hilarity amongst the employees.

  His right foot tapped lightly in air, which would have been interpreted as a state of high excitement, if only he had been a suspect.

  With hands still trembling slightly from shock, lack of sleep and sheer hunger, Gilles poked a finger in the loose corner of the flap and pulled it open. It was a search warrant for the Duval residence, duly signed, sealed and delivered. It must have been done very early this morning.

  “How?” His jaw hung slack for a moment, then his eyes came up to meet Chiappe’s huge grin.

  “How did you do that?” Chiappe didn’t need Henri’s translation to get the question.

  “Hmn.” Jean-Phillipe had a grin to beat all tomorrow. “Let’s just say that a certain injudicious individual, who is innocent until proven guilty, and who has a right to privacy, and bearing in mind that we don’t disclose information regarding private citizens…well, let’s just say that after last night, he owes me a favour. A big one.”

  “Whoa!” Le Bref saw the name on the warrant. “No, way.”

  “Yes. And I don’t like it very much when someone tries to assassinate one of my men.” Chiappe gave them each a glance in turn, biting his lower lip and looking pleased enough. “Now justify our faith in you and bring us back a killer—or sign the fuck off on this case. Comprenez vous?”

  “Yes, sir.” There was nothing further Gilles or the commissioner needed to add to that.

  No one dared comment.

  “As for manpower?”

  “Yes, yes, Gilles. You are never happy. Take what you need and get on with it.” The boss got up, exuding an air of triumph, and left them to get on with their day.

  To say the small office was a little noisier for the next few minutes would have been an understatement.

  ***

  Jules Charpentier was a most unhappy man. The warrant said ‘properties belonging to the late Theodore Duval, of the Rue Duvivier, Paris, France,’ which the judge may have interpreted as meaning the residence. Since Jean-Baptiste had enough foresight to put it in, Maintenon had the presence of mind to make full use of it. Charpentier, whose first thought was not for minority shareholders, did not have the presence of mind to call the company’s lawyer, although surely they must have had someone on retainer.

  They stood in front of his desk, in a room that paid no attention to luxury and where wall space was at a premium due to blackboards, permanently painted in rectangles in graphic display, with notes and numbers chalked in some cryptic manner only the initiated could comprehend. There were cork boards papered like the scales on a goldfish with orders and forms and schedules. The display was riddled with brightly coloured push-pins, and there were shelves from floor to ceiling laden with supplies of one sort or another. There was a portable blackboard on rollers, hastily scuffed clean and pushed back into a corner where a coat rack sagged under miscellaneous long smocks and coats. A boot-bench competed for floor space in amongst other, less easily-identified objects, perhaps spare parts or consumables for the production process, and there were stacks of filing boxes in a corner.

  The clatter of stamping machines, cutters, shears, choppers, grinders and the squawk of air powered tools was an omnipresent dull roar on the other side of a thin partition. There was a thumping vibration through the floor, and Gilles wondered how a man could focus with all of that going on but Jules probably didn’t even hear it anymore.

  “What is the meaning of this, Inspector Maintenon?” The harried plant manager was astonished that he and the affairs of the plant might somehow be involved in their investigation.

  “I would prefer not to execute this part of the warrant. May I discuss the company records with you?” Gilles tapped the document on Charpentier’s desk. “What is the payroll? How many employees are in the building? Is Monsieur Babineaux in his office today?”

  Charpentier gulped like a landed fish, his predisposition to jowls making itself evident in the slackness of his features.

  “I, I…I don’t know anything!” He realized the protest was impotent, and yet he still wanted to consult with someone.

  Of course he knew something, he must have at least some answers to the basic questions Gilles had asked.

  “I will decide what is appropriate.” Gilles’s jaw was set. “Could you at least answer a couple of questions without mindless argument?”

  Jules Charpentier reddened, clamping his mouth shut and glaring at the cluster of grim gendarmes behind the detectives in sheer resentment.

  “This is an outrage.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Gilles’ head and shoulders took on a posture that was a clear warning that he was running out of patience. Charpentier threw down his pen and abruptly shoved his chair back from the desk. It was on rollers, so he could scoot around the room without rising. He sighed deeply, bent at the waist and with his hands on his knees as if about to rise.

  “What do you want to know?” He shook his head in anger. “We have a hundred and fourteen employees present today. We have eight or nine in the administration of the plant. Some of those double in other areas, such as accounting and in our engineering and maintenance department. Their duties extend across product boundaries. Is that what you want? Did you really need a warrant for that?”

  “Apparently so, Monsieur Charpentier.” Gilles stuck his arm up and made a swirling motion with his hand. “All right boys, interview every single one of them.”

  Gilles regarded Jules calmly.

  “Do you keep the plant accounts separately from overall operations?”

  The man winced at the import of this, but nodded soberly, subsiding into a more stable emotional state.

  “Yes, we keep running totals on any number of items on a daily basis.”

  “Would you get them for us, please?”

  “Aw, no. No!” Charpentier knew exactly what all of this entailed, and reached for the phone with no hesitation. “Merde.”

  Time was the most precious element of all and he was going to lose a lot of it. The disruption to his production schedule could be extreme, and cooperation was the only option.

  “We will try to make this as easy as we can.” Gilles stared him down.

  “Thank you, Inspector.” Mouth set in grim lines from frustration, Charpentier was a very tired man all of a sudden.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The search took hours

  The search of the house took hours, with another half dozen officers involved. Since they had little idea of what they were looking for, other than a putative skeleton key, this involved a lot of taking things out, making an inventory, and putting them back again. The studio was reserved for a small, highly-specialized team, and extra care was taken by the senior officers in the case of Monsieur Duval’s more conventional business office and his rather formal-looking bedroom. This had clearly been designed with some attention to the pages of prominent home-décor magazines.

  Extra special care was taken with the private bathroom adjoining Theodore Duval’s bedroom suite. Their first priority was fingerprints, but as for why, no one could truthfully say. With this one last golden opportunity to find some evidence, they were under orders to make the most of it. Among other things, the contents of the bathroom medicine cabinet attracted close scrutiny. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in it that was remarkable either way. Apparently the man shaved, brushed his teeth, and got a headache once in a while. The most glaring omission was the lack of remedies for heartburn and upset stomach, or sleeplessness. This fit in with what they already knew about Duval. A box of condoms was no great revelation, and a rubber douche with
some requisite woman’s products under the bathroom sink didn’t require a whole lot of imagination to account for.

  Nothing was too small to be overlooked. With Maintenon starting his day out at the plant, this undertaking was under the supervision of Le Bref and the imperturbable Andre Levain. With a half a dozen officers under their employ, it shouldn’t take all day. Certain items were put aside, catalogued, and taken away for further analysis, but for the most part, the household was to be disturbed as little as possible.

  The crew started off in the servant’s quarters, up under the eaves, and worked their way down. Four and a half hours later, after a certain amount of boredom and routine, they found the other key to Duval’s studio in the back of a kitchen drawer. It was under a few other items. Carefully picking it up with tweezers, it was put in a labeled envelope with a kind of reverent contempt.

  It was a special drawer, and every kitchen seems to have one. The purgatory of the household, this one had odds and ends including parts of the head of a lamp, a putty scraper, a ball of twine, a small tape measure, and a three-fold menu from a local Chinese restaurant, and a hundred other things. There were copper objects that might have been plumbing parts, a box of washers for the kitchen taps, a tube of soldering flux, yellowing old papers, and a few other keys, some of a more modern type.

  They were all singles, and Madame Fontaine had no clear recollection of what they were for. A sweep of all the locks and cabinets of the home revealed that most of them didn’t fit anything.

  Among the loot were cancelled bus tickets, a half a dozen old shoe-horns, and a combination screwdriver, the kind where the butt of the handle unscrewed and removable tips were stored inside. Not surprisingly, it had the logo of Duval Industries embedded in the handle, which appeared to be of some modern synthetic material.

  “I wonder what the Inspector will say about that.” Le Bref gave a look of bafflement to Levain, who had some concerns of his own. “What are the odds of getting a print?”

  “He’ll probably going to say that we have no way of proving whether the killer put it back after committing the crime, which doesn’t necessarily make it completely irrelevant. And he’s already off on another tangent, knowing him. But it keeps us going in the meantime.”

  ***

  It was an early morning council of war. There were heated comments and voices tended to rise in equal proportion to the amount of resistance or opposition to any idea presented. There was Maintenon, silent through it all, and Andre, and Henri, who had strong opinions, which unfortunately were not very clearly expressed. There was Le Bref, and Chiappe, and several others.

  Finally Jean-Phillipe turned to Gilles, brooding behind his desk. He sat there chewing on his lip.

  “What do you think, Gilles?”

  It took a moment for it to sink in that the boss was talking to him.

  “Eh, what? Oh. Nothing, really.” Gilles uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in the seat and began scribbling furiously on a sheet of letter-sized paper.

  “What do you suggest we do next?” Chiappe had to account for all of these man-hours, and Gilles was on the spot.

  He watched curiously as Gilles wrote.

  “I would suggest…I would suggest that we are at an impasse. Perhaps if we let the case go cold for a while, and we do have other files. You can have most of the men back…”

  “What are you getting at?” Chiappe saw the good-news bad-news thing coming and wasn’t sure he liked it too much. “Just let it drop? What do we tell the press? Are you ready to sign off?”

  “No. We’ll tell the press what we want them to report.” Gilles slid the paper to a reluctant Commissioner. “We’ll say it is a probable suicide but there are unresolved questions and the case remains open-ended.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Le Bref chuckled. “I’ve got an idea, Gilles. Why don’t we mention that you’re ill or something and you can take a couple of days off? Seriously, you’ve been working too hard and not getting much in the way of results.”

  “Hmn!”

  “No, I mean it. Every other officer takes a normal vacation, yet you insisted the case—what was it, the counterfeiters—you insisted it was too important, and you had to stay around. That case was cut and dried, so much so that they took a plea. Months have gone by. Honestly, Gilles, a bit of a rest may spark that well-known inspiration of yours.”

  Gilles threw up his hands in resignation.

  The Commissioner studied the few lines of simple handwritten text. He nodded.

  “I know just who to give this to. They’ll never suspect it’s a plant.” He looked at Gilles and the others. “In the meantime, I get my gendarmes back, and you’ll just have to handle things on your own. See what you can find out about our mystery man, the one in the Seine.”

  There was a groan or two when he said that. More than one glance was exchanged. An extensive canvas of the funeral industry, taking in a radius of a hundred kilometres in every direction, was not a popular option. Cooperation from other towns wasn’t always a top priority for the local detachments. There was some jealousy involved. Paris cops were sometimes thought to be a little snotty among other detachments. They were no better trained, it was just that they got a lot of practice. He got up and stood in front of Maintenon’s desk. Gilles uttered a deep sigh of resignation.

  “Yes, yes, yes.” He grunted in disgust.

  Maintenon’s jaw was mostly healed, giving pain only when he bit down wrong on something sharp and hard. Even so, he was still having trouble sleeping at night, and the thought of enforced idleness was unwelcome. The other cases on his docket were all pretty routine.

  “Seriously, Gilles. Take a couple of days off.” He looked at Andre. “I thought you had some kind of an idea, on that one.”

  Levain shrugged expressively, as it was better than a straight answer when a man had nothing. With another glance at Gilles, the boss left to take care of his errand.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Yvonne wasn’t overly despondent

  Yvonne Verene did not give the impression of a woman bereaved. While she didn’t skip gaily along the street, neither did she seem overly despondent. She was attired in a navy blue skirt and a white blouse that belied her profession. She might have been a sales assistant in some bourgeois millinery shop. Her charcoal grey coat was casual and functional, made for cool-weather wear rather than show.

  Her daily routine began shortly before nine when she exited the small bed-sitting suite she inhabited in the Latin Quarter, and then went to the nearest Metro entrance in a rather anti-climactic fashion. They followed her down, first Le Bref, the near-midget who hadn’t actually been seen by Mademoiselle Verene at the scene. He hadn’t been involved with them at the time. As a bonus, he wasn’t too well known from the papers.

  Gilles followed fifty or sixty metres farther back, relying on Le Bref’s body language and well-rehearsed hand signals to avoid detection by the subject.

  After a few stations, she got up and left the train. Le Bref sat in the next compartment, with the subject, but Gilles could see him through the glass door panels as he was just on the right angle. When Le Bref gave him a quick glance and then rose in a rush to exit, Gilles went out the door of his own compartment at a casual pace, fairly well disguised by a rough working man’s cap, and a long white raincoat that he never would have chosen for himself. The shoes, with six or seven millimetre-thick soles and obvious steel toes, made the man. She brushed past him without a second look, intent on her own business. Le Bref touched the brim of his hat on the way by and Gilles inclined his head politely. Unfolding his newspaper, he watched her go up the stairs as his friend followed. Stuffing the paper back in his pocket, quickly rolled up for later, he followed as well.

  She was going somewhere different today. That much was clear.

  All the crew agreed that the seven days growth of whiskers he now affected made him look fifteen years older, considering the amount of white in his beard. That part shocked him, when
he saw the white in amongst the black. The odds were he could remain anonymous. It was Le Bref that he was worried about, but the man was a marvel to watch. They’d never been partners before, certainly not undercover like this, and Le Bref had a way of hovering in behind someone else, where with a little side-step, he could keep the subject under surveillance, and before the next stride, was completely obscured again. Gilles thought he was also using the windows very cleverly, especially the ones on the opposite side, but the thought came that she might do that as well. That would require a certain amount of paranoia, or experience or expectation on her part. If she was doing it, she was good. From this far back, she would never recognize him, and if she spotted the tail, then she was some kind of pro and that would say a lot about her.

  Yvonne entered a small shop, and Le Bref, convinced that she was completely oblivious to them, stepped right smartly up to the door and went in without a backward glance, trusting that Gilles would be properly deployed when he came out.

  Seeing something that would suffice, Gilles stepped into a recessed doorway, and intently examined the wares in a tailor’s window. With a couple of oblique panes of glass in the way, he could still see the ten or fifteen metres necessary. After a few minutes, Le Bref came out with a bundle wrapped up in brown paper under his arm and strolled past whistling a merry tune. He was headed back the way they had come.

  Gilles focused on where she ought to be, and was rewarded by the sight of her silhouette coming back out onto the street. Like Le Bref, she had a bundle as well now, although hers was larger. She continued in her original direction. As he swung out onto her tail, walking slower so as to drop back as they went and not look like he was in a big hurry to go somewhere, he wondered how he was going to justify a couple of pounds of summer sausage or whatever it was on the departmental expense account.