The Art of Murder Read online

  Le Bref strode past him at a good clip, ignoring his presence. Gilles dropped back further.

  Yvonne went past the next Metro entrance, paused in front of a flower seller’s display, and then after dallying for some time, checking her watch at least once that Gilles saw, she went another half block, turned a corner, and by the time Gilles got there, she had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.

  Maintenon took a quick glance at the street sign screwed high on the side of a corner grocery store, and with a jolt of recognition, realized that this was a fairly long block, and that she must have gone into one of the tall and narrow pension-type apartments that lined both sides of the narrow but rather quiet thoroughfare.

  “Merde.”

  Le Bref was at his shoulder.

  “I see a kid, Inspector.” He proffered a coin. “Shall we give it a try?”

  Gilles shrugged.

  “I don’t see why not. We have nothing to lose at this point.”

  “Kid! Kid!” Le Bref’s hoarse whisper could be heard a mile away, as Gilles grimaced in embarrassment.

  Le Bref waved him over and the youngster complied.

  “Yes?” The kid’s natural caution showed through his slightly-cocky demeanor, but he was a big strong boy and probably thought he could look after himself.

  “I’ll give you five francs—no, ten—if you can answer a question for me.”

  The kid’s eyebrows rose, his internal bug-like antenna quivering at the obvious temptation. He had some smarts. He stayed out in the light at the opening of their alley, which was dead-ended and arrived at a cellar door and some dustbins, sheltered and cold on this side of the street all year long.

  Le Bref handed it over.

  “It’s no big thing, but did you see a tall blonde lady, pretty and young, come into this street or go into any of these houses? She was wearing a scarf, and a mid-length coat, and stockings but, ah, shoes with sort of flat heels…she had a shopping bag, pretty heavy.”

  “No. Sorry.” The kid stood looking at the money for a second.

  “Aw, for crying out loud.” Le Bref was flustered at giving up money for that.

  Gilles gave the kid a wry grin.

  “That’s okay, he’ll get over it. Thank you.”

  The youngster, easily up to Gilles’ shoulder and sturdy-looking in his hand-me down trousers and jacket, had this odd look that came across his features suddenly.

  “There’s some kind of artist guy who lives just over there. He’s new here.” The fellow pointed up at a set of small windows on the top floor, about three doors down on the opposite side. “Maybe she’s a model or something.”

  Le Bref gave him a significant nod. It was something to go on, and the girl didn’t vapourize into thin air.

  Gilles dug hastily in his pocket and came up with a couple of small bills. Taking the smaller, he handed it over with a sense of glee.

  “Can you do us another favour?” Le Bref flashed him his badge.

  The boy was a little staggered, but recovered quickly.

  “Maybe.” His wits were still with him.

  “I want you to go somewhere and get yourself something to eat. Stay there for a while, and don’t talk about us, okay?”

  The kid was gone in a heartbeat.

  “Don’t forget to put that on your expense report.” Le Bref wasn’t kidding.

  This sort of thing could add up after a while.

  “Say look, Gilles. I’m all right here on my own. I wouldn’t mind Henri if you could send him back.”

  Gilles glanced at the doors across the way, all residential and all locked up as tight as a drum. The street was quiet, and it was still fairly early in the morning.

  “I’ll call in and find somebody to relieve you. There’s a place around the corner.” Gilles thought for a second. “How long after she turned the corner before you got there?”

  There was a brief hesitation.

  “Twenty seconds. She couldn’t do it, Gilles. My hearing is good, and she was in that coat. She had a package with a fair amount of weight.”

  Gilles took an oblique look to the other end of the street. Even if it had been thirty or forty seconds, the distance was simply too great, and not silently at that. There were no dustbins, and no obviously-discarded packages littering the ground. Shoes with thin, flat soles would only be painful to run in, and to be observed by a tail in this type of behaviour could lead to immediate arrest and a thorough questioning. She didn’t impress Gilles as being stupid, far from it.

  The house across the way, on the other hand, was at least within the realm of possibility.

  “What’s in the package?”

  Le Bref handed it over before responding.

  “Five pounds of freshly-killed kosher baby beef liver.” Le Bref grinned at the look on Gilles’ face. “It’s okay, Gilles, I can always eat it. Marie is a wonderful cook.”

  Gilles sighed deeply, and lowering his head, stepped out and turned to their left.

  “Hey Gilles!”

  He glanced back.

  “Get a job, Maintenon.” Le Bref put his back to the wall, and sank down into a crouch like a tired old man basking in the hot Mexican sun.

  The only thing missing was a serape and Sombrero.

  “I’ll buy you a beer later.” Gilles headed back to find a phone.

  ***

  Gilles found a corner grocer’s with a pay phone uncomfortably close to the counter, up front right by the door. While it was a courtesy and a convenience, it wasn’t very suitable for confidential talk.

  “Henri?”

  “Yes? Oh, hey! Boss! You’re not going to believe this!” His voice was uncomfortably loud in Gilles’ ear, but his natural inclination was to jam the thing in tighter to his head to drown out the sound, wincing as he did so.

  “No need to shout, I can hear you just fine.” Putting his hand over the mouth-piece, he nodded at the store-keeper. “It’s my mother, she’s half deaf, you know?”

  The fellow nodded knowingly, but didn’t move a muscle as he sat on a high stool and read the paper, spread flat on the counter in front of him. While business was slow, a couple of shoppers moved in a desultory fashion along the aisles of foodstuffs.

  “Boss, the boys followed Alexis to another apartment. He went in and hasn’t come out, and he never mentioned it to anybody. Not as I recall.” Henri was breathless, his excitement getting the better of his breathing. “Isn’t he still living at the house?”

  They had sort of assumed that he was. This was the trouble with losing contact with the principals in the case, however briefly.

  “Hmn. Very well. Where is this place located?” Gilles waited, presumably Henri had it written down. “What time was that, exactly?”

  “It was maybe twenty minutes ago. It was…” He carefully read out the address twice, so that

  Gilles could make a note of it, but it was hardly necessary.

  It was right around the corner, where he had just left Le Bref.

  He hung up on Henri’s breathy speculations and bolted for the door.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On a hunch

  Instead of going back to where Le Bref was, on a hunch Gilles continued in the opposite direction, made a left at the next street, and went all the way to the end of the block, a distance of about a hundred metres. Then he went left again, to the next intersection, where there were a couple of familiar figures loitering like the street-corner thugs that plagued certain neighbourhoods.

  It was a fellow by the name of Le Clerc and Le Bref’s partner Emile Niguet.

  “Well, well, well. There goes the neighbourhood.” Le Clerc bid a caustic greeting, and Gilles waved like he lived there.

  “Hmn. So which one did he go into?” Gilles stepped forward a half-metre and took a quick glance up the street.

  He had a funny feeling that he knew already.

  “Third from the far end, other side of the street. It’s the faded yellow-painted stucco one. Somebody, we think it
was him, opened up all the windows within four or five minutes of his entry. Top floor.” Emile was more businesslike now.

  “Did you see the girl go in?” They looked at each other.

  “No.” Le Clerc stepped backwards, craned his neck, glanced at the far end of the street, and explained. “Le Clerc went to find a phone, and I didn’t want him spotting me. What time did she get here?”

  “Maybe a half an hour, now. No, it’s only ten or fifteen minutes.” Everyone checked their watches.

  “Interesting.” Emile’s look was appraising, and fraught with unspoken suspicions. “Maybe they have something going on, eh, Gilles?”

  Gilles ignored it for the moment, looking at Le Clerc.

  “What’s your first name again?”

  “Claude.”

  “Ah. Yes, this is interesting. The question is what to do about it.” They chewed on it for a while as Gilles thought furiously.

  “Merde. With the two of them, we have four men tied up, and they could be in there for hours.”

  “And in the meantime, Inspector?”

  “What in the hell am I supposed to do with the five pounds of Kosher beef liver Le Bref picked up on the way?” He offered it to Claude, but he waved it off.

  They chuckled at bit on hearing it, but otherwise had no suggestions, although Emile had other concerns.

  “What are we doing here, just hanging around and talking about the weather?”

  “Claude and I will have lunch and be back in half an hour or forty-five minutes. Le Bref is just down the street, in a small cul-de-sac on this side. He’s in between the first and second house. If they come out, beat it like hell to the next block and then turn around and come back slowly. If they are aware of the tail, we’re already blown, otherwise it should work.”

  They were both strangers to the case, unknown to the suspects.

  “Well, there will be two of us.” Emile looked around for a discreet vantage point, and at the same time wondering how he was supposed to fit into the role of aimless inactivity.

  “Oh, Lord, where in the hell do we go to take a shit around here?” Emile’s question was a purely rhetorical one, but not without practical impact.

  Emile sighed at the prospect, as this type of daylight surveillance was the worst, and the hardest to do without alarming the subject. But if one or both came this way, he had a plan, and if either of them went the other way, he would follow them. As for hanging about on a street-corner trying to look innocent, he would do his best. This part of the city was all narrow blocks, with tall buildings, no trees, and vacant lots were almost unheard of. Almost totally residential, there were no businesses, where he could get in off the street.

  He could only do it for so long, for someone local and attuned to the area would surely remark on his presence. His shoulders slumped at the necessity.

  “Oh, joy.” He thought of something. “Got any smokes?”

  Claude reached into a pocket and quickly pulled out a packet.

  “I can get more.”

  Gilles nodded at him and Claude.

  “Come on. We’d better let Le Bref in on all of this, or it doesn’t stand much of a chance.”

  “What if one comes out and then the other? What if they go in opposite directions?” One-man tailing jobs were notoriously hard to maintain for any length of time without blowing it.

  Gilles pulled on Claude’s arm as there was little more he could do and his stomach was rumbling.

  “Follow whichever one comes your way. When in doubt, improvise. Or even just break it off.”

  Emile’s resigned yet sardonic nod expressed his feelings perfectly. He would just have to wait for his lunch. Today, he was getting paid to stand around and smoke, and trying to look like he didn’t have a care in the world. It could have been worse.

  Out of the blue, for no particular reason, Emile gave a nasty grin.

  “What if three people come out?”

  Gilles ignored it.

  ***

  Le Bref studied the girl, who sat with a look of total revulsion at him and their surroundings. She had been posing nude for Alexis, who was an indifferent painter of misshapen forms in what were surely the most austere colours, interspersed with small daubs in a rainbow of garish hues.

  The police knocking on the door and boiling up the stairs and crashing into their intimate plans for dinner, complete with a roast chicken and potatoes slowly cooking in the kitchen set the rather negative tone of this interview.

  “How long have you known him?” Emile Niguet was the better looking and much easier-going of the two. “Weren’t you supposed to be going with Monsieur Duval, and wasn’t there some talk of marriage?”

  She shrugged eloquently.

  “Since I met him.” She glared in contempt at Robert Campon, ‘Le Bref’ to his friends.

  He studied her calmly.

  “When was that?”

  She let out a breath and thought about it. Yvonne weighed things up in her mind. He saw it as it happened.

  “Theo and I were out one night, and Alexis came to the club with a message for him.”

  “How long ago was this? What club?” Emile and Robert alternated questions.

  It gave them a moment to think and to observe.

  “Three, four months ago, I think. I was wearing my stole.”

  “Ah.” This sort of reasoning was perfectly clear to Emile, who glanced over at Le Bref to see if he caught the significance.

  Le Bref nodded slightly.

  “So when? Maybe January, February, March? Something like that?”

  She nodded soberly, more cooperative in her outlook now. She didn’t seem afraid, only angry, and perhaps highly-embarrassed by the situation.

  “So how long has this been going on?” Le Bref just put it out there as naturally as could be, and she looked away, blushing slightly, and swallowing.

  “Just…just a few days.” She looked at each in turn, very briefly, and then dropped her eyes.

  Her voice was a low monotone.

  “All right, Mademoiselle, that’s certainly understandable enough. Your fiance, am I correct in thinking that? He was dead, and Monsieur Ferrauld is a nice-looking young man and everything. No, really, he seems quite nice.”

  Le Bref cut into these pleasantries.

  “Were you going to have sex with him? After a nice little roast chicken dinner?”

  “Go to hell.” She glared at him from two and a half metres away. “It’s none of your business. You are just pigs. All of you.”

  They tried very hard not to smile.

  “I’m sorry, young lady, but it’s our job to ask these questions. How long had you been posing nude for him? Not long, judging by that painting.”

  “No. This was only my second time.” She shut up them, her mouth a firm down-curved line across her face.

  It didn’t look like they were going to get much more out of her.

  “Why did Alexis kill Theo? So he could have you? Is that it?” There were times when Le Bref regretted the necessity.

  This was one of them. She looked like she had been slapped. Her jaw worked back and forth.

  “Va ta faire foutre.”

  In spite of himself he grinned, cruel as it was. Yet in a way he was pleased, and liked her even more for it. It was only too bad that he couldn’t say so.

  “Thank you Mademoiselle Verene, that will be all for now.” Emile rose to open the door for her and Le Bref jotted down the last sentence of his notes.

  “I meant what I said.” She was defiant and contemptuous.

  “We don’t take it too personally, young lady.” Le Bref gave her a respectful nod. “Neither should you.”

  Wrapping herself in the remaining shreds of her tattered dignity, she whirled and strode out into the corridor with Emile.

  ***

  Alexis was apologetic, and sweating lightly. Andre and Henri were taking this one, as Gilles observed from the other side of a one-way mirrored glass.

  “It’s stra
nge.” Alexis was in a far-off place as he sat there.

  He didn’t seem too worried about being in trouble.

  “What is?” Andre glanced at his watch.

  “It’s like I fell in love at first sight, you know? I mean, you hear about it, and people talk about it. You read about it in books, I guess. But I never would have believed it, and then one day there she was. There she was with Theo, and it was like I could barely tear my eyes off of her.”

  “I see.” Andre wrote something as Alexis went on. “I went there to tell him about some offer from some Swiss firm. Some deal, you know? He went out on his own quite a bit. The body-guard thing was over-rated. I think he just liked having someone capable around.”

  “Yeah. That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. If he never had any big threats, why did he need a bodyguard at all?” Henri was shaping up nicely.

  It was the influence of being with more experienced and competent detectives. His listening skills were improving. While Gilles admired enthusiasm, it had to be backed up with a little caution. Among other things, people had rights. It was better to play dumb and just listen sometimes.

  Passing the sergeant’s exam was the beginning, not an end as so many saw it. He was fairly intelligent, doggedly persistent, and he had a streak of niceness that engaged the subject like a buddy trying to help out rather than an officer conducting an investigation.

  “Oh, yes, we had threats. It’s not that we didn’t take them seriously enough. He thought having someone like me around was a deterrent to anyone but a professional, and he just didn’t seem to acquire that sort of enemies.”

  “Give me a couple of examples. Please.” Andre of course had much more experience than Henri, and he had a much more sophisticated way of following up.