The Art of Murder Read online

  Stomach contents reflected the menu provided by Madame Fontaine for the night before, just as Gilles had expected.

  A full report would be forthcoming.

  Levain had learned to trust that look of Maintenon’s. When he appeared to be a million miles away, then somebody somewhere had better look out.

  “I’ve been thinking about that make-up.” In pure impulse, Gilles stared at Guillaume, and gave a quick and wild look at Levain. “This could all just be make-up. Window dressing. Think about it. We owe something, a little gratitude I might say, to our anonymous floater. Any firm identification of the deceased relies upon those closest to him. It’s always up to them, right?”

  Interesting.

  “Then we need more on him. Dental records, medical history, surgeries, his childhood afflictions, everything.” Doctor Guillaume shrugged in sympathy. “Find a record of his prints. That would settle it for me. Assuming they match, of course.”

  Gilles nodded at his thoughts.

  “There are fingerprints in his house.” Levain pointed out the obvious.

  “Yes, but…” Gilles hesitated.

  How should he put it?

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And we are going to need more manpower. For both of them, actually.”

  To fake a lot of fingerprints wouldn’t be easy. You would have to lug your victim, dead or alive, all over the house, and he quickly discarded the idea.

  Guillaume’s approving eyes gleamed in the lurid glare as he stared into Levain’s.

  “That’s why we keep him around, eh, Andre?”

  Levain shrugged. His head sank deeper into his collar, that was about it.

  “There’s never a shortage of overtime in this department.” Guillaume laughed and slapped his thigh with a sharp crack.

  Gilles was lost in thought. It could be a suicide, or was it just a bunch of window dressing for a homicide? Duval was a rich and important man, who held many patents. That’s what Rene had been trying to tell him without actually coming right out and saying it. He wasn’t trying to push a point of view. Rene just wanted him to trust his instincts.

  Chapter Five

  What was real

  What was real, was when you could forget, and those moments when you did forget, but there was always that moment when you remembered. There was always a lurch, a wrenching back from momentary pleasure into the pain of seeing her face again. Lately even her image was fading, which was cause for more heartache. There were times when he literally panicked, with his guts trembling and heart pounding and knowing that it was real, all real, and that life would never be the same again. He could not think her name without pain. It was his new reality.

  There were times when the solitude was comforting, and there were times when it was unbearable. It’s not that Andre didn’t understand, he understood as well as any man could. But there were things that must be borne, and they must of necessity be borne alone. It was a common fate, and an individual cross for each person to bear in their own way. Sooner or later, they all had to do it.

  The pair sat in a small, lower-level bistro that had the advantage of being quiet and out of the wind. The other customers, more intent on drinking than eating, ignored them. The blue haze in the air was close and warm, making strangers seem like intimate friends, names forgotten but faces remembered from some other time and place, far, far away and long, long time ago. They were all familiar types to someone who had walked a beat. Everyone had a role to play in life. That was the theory. The surprise was that he loved them so, and for no good reason. It hurt to think on it.

  “Listen, Inspector, there’s no good way to bring this up.” Andre sipped at his beer. “But the boys and I got to thinking…”

  “What’s this?” Gilles knew he had been sort of absent in spirit lately, and had wondered with a sense of guilt once or twice if it was affecting his job performance.

  Of course it had to.

  This was something he once would have sworn would never happen, but of course things did happen. Guilt was his constant companion these days, and what was one more thing? It was just icing on the cake. His life was shit, and he had nothing but cake to eat anymore.

  There was a brief rise in the volume of the background buzz in the room. A pair of fellows came in, voices raised and likely with pay-envelopes in their blue coveralls. They were greeted by some men at a big round table in the corner, who up until now had been more subdued.

  Gilles belatedly recalled that it was Friday, and not a bad afternoon. He found himself studying the stubbled faces, the strong hands and forearms on some of them. They had the brick-red faces and necks of the typical Poilu. It was a word fraught with meaning to Gilles and the blood-tattered remnants of his generation. No one ever really talked about the affection felt by men for each other on the eve of battle, the night before inevitable destruction and the bliss of their oblivion. They talked about everything else but the war at times like that, in his experience.

  Andre pulled a buff letter-sized envelope from his inner jacket pocket. He placed it flat on the table and shoved it across to Gilles.

  “They’ve delegated me to go with you. I’ve been press-ganged into it, and you know I wouldn’t lie to you.” Andre leveled a grin and a look. “We took up a collection. I know a place, a really good place, where we can get a tomb-stone.”

  Gilles nodded glumly.

  “Yes, yes, I know.” He sighed deeply.

  They would take a hand in it sooner or later, and this was better than simple badgering.

  “It’s been what, about four or five months? The ground has settled, and, spring is here, and honestly, Gilles, there’s a bit of a waiting list. It’s the practical thing. He has to make the monument, and then it gets put in the queue for delivery. You can expect some kind of delays. They try to stay out of the way of all the funerals, so he can only put them in on certain days. He does it in the mornings if he can. He does beautiful work, and I know. My father and mother are in the same cemetery, and he did the marker.”

  “Well, this certainly explains the liquid lunch, or puts it into its proper perspective.” Gilles scowled mildly at his drink.

  He looked up.

  “Thank you very much, incidentally.” Andre had twisted his arm, and didn’t offer to buy lunch all that often.

  Gilles had fallen for the trap. The soup was good, and the bread excellent. Soaked in the bowl, the bread made a surprisingly hearty meal. Of course his standards had fallen deplorably in terms of what made a meal these days. The lunch special meant a lot to men like Gilles. The place didn’t seem to matter very much. It could be anywhere. It wasn’t exactly bliss, nor was there a sense of fulfillment. But he felt half-human, and that was really something lately.

  “Hah! That’s the spirit, Inspector. That’s the spirit. Anyways, you’ll like him. He’s married to one of my cousins, and he’ll take care of everything. All you have to do is pick out a stone and give him the essential details.”

  “That’s very thoughtful, Andre. Thank you.” A terribly dark mood settled over Gilles, but then he shrugged it off as best he could and reached for the pill bottle.

  Gilles sloshed a couple down and slugged back the last third of a cold dark lager. Levain watched the performance wordlessly, not judging him.

  “Another drink, sirs?” The waiter hovered at Levain’s side.

  “Yes, and quickly.” Levain regretted putting Gilles through any more grief, but his wife had been gone for a while now, and quite frankly his old friend would be a lot healthier and probably a lot happier if he took care of one or two simple little things.

  He needed to confront some issues, rather than beat himself down. The procrastination he’d been displaying lately was out of Maintenon’s character, and it showed the boss’s state of mind or rather emotions.

  He’d heard the couple’s bedroom hadn’t even been gone through and cleaned out yet—the boss went home at the end of the day, and crawled into a bed that would be a constant remi
nder that she was gone. At this point, even her smell might still linger. It probably did. The old man smell would come sooner rather than later. Loneliness was almost a kind of an illness, in that it couldn’t go on for too long without proper treatment. If Gilles didn’t get some help, from somebody, almost anybody, serious consequences would ensue. Levain was sure of it. Among other things, Gilles needed to redecorate, and a couple of new shirts wouldn’t exactly hurt his chances of advancement. The poor fellow was looking distinctly seedy as of late.

  ***

  They were in a straggling neighbourhood of trades establishments behind a major thoroughfare. Gilles realized he was completely lost, not just in symbolic fashion but for real. He hadn’t been paying too much attention. He had other thoughts, most of them not good.

  The taxi sputtered off up the road, trailing dust from the wheels and throwing up a cloud that hung in the air, yellowing the sunshine and desiccating the nostrils. Maintenon and Levain walked up the gravel drive towards a pair of shirtless workmen who were sweating and grunting as they heaved on the chains of an I-beam lifting device, trying to steady a slab of black granite as it swung back and forth. Their contraption was sturdy if obviously home-made. The stone looked to be several hundred kilos in mass. Clearly there was some hazard, some difficulty involved. It was all so prosaic.

  “Hey, Charles.” Levain stopped, and they waited for a moment to let them finish the operation.

  “Hey, Andre.”

  This involved setting the stone down on a ramp, and pushing it up on wooden rollers all of fifty millimetres thick and half a metre long, up into the back of a battered Citroen C4. It had the rear seat removed for this purpose. Gilles saw buckets lined up beside the car, all ready to go, with smaller tools in them, and some shovels, long steel pinch bars, and more rollers. There was a pile of sand and gravel in a corner of the yard, and the shop was at the back, set well behind the house. There was a painted wooden sign over the large door that was visible from the street in daylight hours, but otherwise unlit. He saw a black dog on the back porch and one floodlight set high on a post in the farthest back corner.

  After a bored look, the dog put his head down and blinked at them with a look of resignation.

  The smell of cooking came from the vicinity of the back door. Gilles grinned unexpectedly, and shoved his hands into his pockets. There were birds singing from a shade tree that grew in the next door neighbour’s yard. Birds were not his strong suit, but they had a certain pugnacious cheerfulness.

  “Merde!” It wouldn’t do to get a hand under the slab at the wrong time, but no damage done and the fellow chuckled again just as quickly.

  The language was colourful but succinct, and as his apprentice set to lifting the stone with a bar and putting wooden wedges and props under it for security, the sturdy proprietor of the place dusted off his hands and shook first with Levain and then Gilles.

  “And, what can I do for you, sir?”

  Gilles eyes traveled up and down the lines of stones displayed as they would be set, in that they all sat on a base, although they had no names on them yet. One or two in the front row did have names, and he realized they were all finished and awaiting delivery. His eyes took in the stone laying flat in the back of the Citroen. It had a name on it, an elderly lady going by the dates. She had been predeceased by a husband and an infant. Her child had died. She knew what tragedy was, he thought. She understood loss.

  “I want one like that.”

  “It’s for his wife.” Levain beckoned Gilles to look at some of the others. “Seriously, Gilles, you might want to look at more than one stone. Come on.”

  Maintenon reluctantly followed him along the line of memorials, big, small, simple and ornate. None of them had an actual price marked on them, but that wasn’t any real consideration. He just wanted to get it over with.

  “No. I think the first one—and make sure he puts my name on there too, and my birthday. Then when the time comes, it’s a simple matter to chisel in the date of my decease.”

  “Sure, boss. But please, come on in and talk to the man.” Levain turned and led the way, relieved to hear Maintenon’s footsteps crunching gravel behind. “I don’t think he uses a chisel. It’s a sand-blaster now. You won’t believe this, but he uses one cylinder of the car as a compressor—”

  The boss had been a little funny lately, but no one else could really do this for him. He had to take charge himself.

  Gilles found the air inside the workshop cool, a little damp and smelling oddly of something he couldn’t quite place. He counted out the bills as the man pulled out a book and took a pen out of the pocket from a shirt hanging on a peg.

  Gilles gave her name, and the fellow gave him a quick look.

  “He’ll pay the balance after inspecting the memorial in place.” Levain seemed to know a little bit about it.

  “Maintenon?”

  “Er, yes.” Levain stepped in.

  “This is the fellow I told you about, Charles.” Charles nodded.

  “Oh, yes.” He went blank for a moment, but then he seemed to recall the incident. “And you want the black one? With a black base?”

  “Yes, and he wants you to deliver it.” Levain seemed to be in charge now, and Gilles let him.

  The man named a figure, and Levain shrugged, looking at Gilles. Gilles agreed, and the gentleman started putting figures together in a column on paper. It was a fairly simple sales contract.

  Levain told him the name of the cemetery, and that affected the price somehow as well. There were certain fees involved, peculiar to the different establishments around the city. Gilles thought he had paid all of them already, but apparently that wasn’t so. This was different from a funeral, the fellow explained, and some folks went years without a monument while the survivors saved their pennies.

  “For you, sir, I’ll let you have the base at half price.” Levain gave an encouraging nod.

  “Thank you.” Gilles accepted it at face value.

  It was only later, jammed side by side on the Metro when Levain explained that Charles’ wife’s cousin had been strangled by her no-good boyfriend, and that Maintenon was responsible for his apprehension and subsequent execution by guillotine. People often congratulated him upon the conviction of a killer. He never knew what to think or to say under those circumstances. There really was nothing valid to say—it sounded like moral condemnation, which he preferred not to do. Most perpetrators were as pathetic as they were dangerous. It was something that happened in the heat of the moment, which destroyed lives and changed people forever.

  “Who says justice is only for the rich, eh, Inspector?”

  Gilles grinned a little lopsidedly. He really was feeling better about things, and the ache in his jaw was finally fading.

  “We have an interesting errand for Monday.” Gilles’ voice was curiously flat, expressionless.

  “Which is?” Levain’s eyebrows rose at the answer.

  “We’re going to see a hypnotist.”

  Levain thought he was joking.

  “At your command, good sir.”

  “I’m serious, Andre. Anyway, it’s better than a dentist.”

  So he really was serious then.

  ***

  Locking the street door, for they lived above a small dress shop on a quieter side street not far from work, Andre took his bicycle and locked it up in the back room. He hung up his overcoat and put his plain old hat on a peg by the back door. The black rubber slip-ons were a struggle as usual, and as usual, the hard leather shoes underneath stank of moisture and old socks. It went with the job.

  Andre wearily climbed two flights up from the street, as the sounds of the heavy evening traffic and the clanging of trams faded. It was hot at the head of the stairs, the air permeated with an enticing aroma. There was a roast in the oven and boiled cabbage on the stove-top. It was a moist, buttery smell that brought an instant arousal to his famished stomach. It felt so good to be home. The door had squeaked on its hinges from the da
y they moved in. It still did, and he just couldn’t seem to get around to oiling them.

  “Daddy, daddy, daddy!” Maelys came running from the other end of the hall as he entered.

  What a day.

  “Nichol. Come and pry your daughter off me.” He chuckled as she came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron stained with flour and red juices, hopefully from some kind of pie.

  It was a joke just between the two of them.

  “That, my fine fellow, is not my daughter. She is obviously yours.” She smiled and pulled Maelys off her father. “Let him get his jacket off first, and then you can have him all to yourself.”

  They had a quick kiss for each other, and then he stripped off the jacket and ran his hand through his hair, much of which seemed to end up in his hairbrush lately, a little more of it going with every morning that came along. He bent and picked up his daughter, fickle as all kids were, and she struggled and wriggled in some spontaneous desire to run off again.

  He gave her a quick kiss and let her down. It was for the best anyway, as he was almost dead on his feet.

  “Vache sacrée.” Andre’s head swam and he looked for the antidote. “Holy, cow.”

  It was right there, an old and familiar friend.

  “Do you want me to draw you a bath?” She called from the kitchen as he slumped into his sagging brown armchair.

  Andre had only been home a few hours after his night shift, then off to find Maintenon again.

  “Naw. I’m having a drink.” Andre Levain was home, he had two whole days off and it was the weekend.

  This event was kind of a rarity in police work.

  “We can have a bath later.”

  Her giggle acknowledged the signal. They would have a nice, quiet weekend together.