The Art of Murder Read online

  She would bring him a glass of wine when she got a minute. It was all he needed, really. The pair of them would be in bed by ten o’clock, and according to her usual testimony, he would be snoring five minutes later. But he had a funny feeling they might be in for a little treat tonight, and he was quite looking forward to it. They were still young enough and their marriage still fresh enough, that sex had not become a weapon or a bone of contention. For that he was grateful. Maelys was a sound sleeper, which seemed to help. At four years of age, Maelys was still totally innocent of guile, although lately she was learning to manipulate her parents to some extent. For the most part, she was completely absorbed in her dollies and her tea-set. Having a daughter was pretty much the only thing in the world that could have made him read up on the subject of children and child-rearing. At first it had been God-awful, but Andre was a quick convert to the joys of being a father.

  He yawned in a kind of surprise, discovering a smile to go with it which made his fact twist, stiff and awkward in its involuntary contractions.

  “Aw.” It had been a long time since he had enjoyed a good Saturday morning lie-in.

  He only hoped nothing came along to spoil it. Reaching for the paper, he put his feet up. Fatigue flushed over him in a wave that when it ebbed, drained much of the day’s stress and worry from his tense frame. The room was warm, although windows opened a few centimetres to let in some air promised a cool breeze later. Andre absently reached for his pipe, but laid it aside again as he was too tired to mess with it. It was like he just didn’t care, besides, he must have had fifty cigarettes in the last twenty-four hours. It was a special kind of taste in his mouth.

  That wouldn’t all come off in the shower. He longed for his toothbrush, such a simple little thing. People all said the same things. In the long hours of the night shift, they longed for their beds, their armchairs, and their toothbrushes. They longed for a drink, or even just a hot meal and a friendly face. They longed for their wives, their kids and their homes.

  He looked at the bottles on the sideboard. It was just ten feet away. Inertia defeated him. Maybe he didn’t need it after all. The smell of cabbage was making him ravenous, and it would be a nice change from their more usual staple diet of anything and everything that went with carrots. These days, it was like everything seemed to go with carrots. There was also the promise of pie in the air, baked this afternoon most likely.

  There was something about pie that made everything else all right.

  Chapter Six

  His life had changed.

  In the early days, he never would have brought a valise bulging with work home with him. Back then, his life was compartmentalized. His life had changed, to the extent that he dreaded coming home. Weekends were the worst. All around were objective reminders of his past bliss and present suffering. He lived to work, and he worked to keep on living. It was his escape and his only acknowledged reality. Nothing else existed for him.

  There was a book in the parlour. It bulged with the names, addresses and phone numbers of hundreds of people, their old friends, newer friends, aunts, uncles, cousins and acquaintances. There were tradesmen, doctors, and priests. Every one of his wife’s relations was in there. It wasn’t that Gilles didn’t like many of them, although that could be said of some more than others. But they were their friends—not so much his friends. They were the sort of friends that couples had, and not so much the kind scruffy old bachelors had. This was especially true for those with a miserable outlook and nothing but sentimental and often poignant memories to share in a world where life moved on at a frenetic pace.

  Seated at his desk in the study, patiently built-in as he recalled, in the spare bedroom that had never been needed for a child, he pulled out the brown envelope with a number of snap-shots, some studio portraits, and other, more candid shots of Theodore Duval. They were provided under some protest by Madame Fontaine, and Gilles had been pressed to sign a receipt for them. Out of sensitivity, he obliged the old girl, but even so. Her cooperation might be priceless, one never knew.

  Gilles found some pictures more helpful than others. For one thing some were small, faded, low-key photos that had either been left in sunlight or not developed properly to begin with. He was much younger in the faded ones. That must be it. He was younger and not quite so well-off. He wasn’t nearly so sleek-looking.

  Gilles wondered if Duval had developed them himself. The young Theo Duval must have been interesting. He wondered what drove people sometimes. A man of real potential, but how often was that actually realized? Life often intervened, and not always for the best. Sometimes death intervened as it had for Duval. So few men ever actually achieved their true potential. Gilles understood it to some extent, having once turned down promotion himself to stay in the homicide bureau. To Duval, it must have seemed the perfect life so far. Either he hated himself for some reason, or someone else had hated him enough to kill him.

  Theodore was a tall, athletic, good-looking man with not just money, but also a kind of cachet. He was the sort of man who dashed off to St. Moritz in a sports-car on sheer impulse, often with a bimbo of one sort or another along for the ride. There were a few pictures of him on skis. Again, this was a much younger man, smiling into the lens. They would have champagne in a bucket between the seats. Taking his magnifying glass, he peered into the life of Theo Duval, trying to get a feel for the fellow. It was like he had everything, but of course sometimes that wasn’t enough. There was always the possibility of a mental affliction, but somebody would have mentioned it. At one time, Gilles might have found a shred of jealousy for the likes of Duval, for just as any young man, he had railed against injustice more than once. He thought of it as a kind of injustice of abilities, which sort of put it into its proper ludicrous perspective. No two people can have the same life. That much was obvious. A poor man lived a long life of misery, and Duval’s reward for his talent and diligence was to be murdered, or to go mad and kill himself. He was in the prime of life. Such was Fate, and of course it made no real sense.

  Such a senseless crime.

  “Monsieur Maintenon?”

  Gilles was so startled he made some kind of exclamation, almost flinging the glass in a spasm of the arm. The lamp on the side table tottered dangerously, and she stepped forward and steadied it.

  “Oh, I am so sorry.” She put her hands up to her face in a look of sheer horror. “Please forgive me, Monsieur.”

  “Yes, yes. I’m fine, I was just lost in thought, er, Madame Lefevre. Please don’t worry about it.”

  He had recovered, but she was still agitated. Gilles really should try to get her name right in his head.

  “Monsieur, I wasn’t expecting you home quite so early, if at all. Pressures of work and of course I understand, but there are some leftovers, and I was wondering if I might heat something up for you?” The woman was practically wringing her hands in hopes of being of service.

  She must be going mad around here. It came to him like that. There must have been a little more life in her previous employment. As he recalled, they were a family of seven who had moved all the way across town or something. Children often meant so much to the domestic help. Sometimes that love made up for a lot.

  At the time, she seemed quite happy for the position, and he was grateful enough to settle the household chores on her narrow but no doubt capable shoulders. The place seemed well looked-after, now that he took a moment to think it through.

  “Oh, yes. Please. That’s a very good idea.” Gilles stomach rumbled and there was a veritable squirt of juices in his mouth. “I am so sorry. I know I should give you a little more notice, but my schedule…”

  It had little to do with his schedule, and much to do with the fact that he just didn’t want to come home these days. He suspected that she knew as much, but pretended out of politeness to accept it at face value. This one, Madame Lefevre, had been with him for three or four months. His first hire lasted about three weeks, and then she stopped showing up for wor
k. He had muddled through on his own for a while, subsisting on tinned pate, sardines, a lot of crackers and of course cheese and baguettes. He’d subsisted on Napoleon brandy, cigars, plus whatever was left in the cupboards, and that was the truth of it.

  “It will just be a half an hour or so.” Nodding, the lady sort of shuffled and backed out of the room and went to get him some dinner.

  “Hmn.” Gilles wondered if he should give her a raise or something, then went back to studying the pictures of Theo Duval.

  If any one of them could be said to be his favourite, or perhaps more accurately the most different in mood and composition, the most revealing of the man, for it showed him in a different light, it was a candid society-page snapshot taken of Duval and a young lady, not Mademoiselle Verene, at a café or bistro. It would be interesting to know who the lady was.

  Not a newspaper clipping, it was an original print. The blacks were still dark and he took it to be much more recent.

  Something in the cold sophistication and yet intimate heads-together pose struck him that there was much about Theodore Duval that he didn’t know, and that so far the picture drawn of the man and his life was all being provided by parties who might conceal or disguise some aspects of his character. In the case of a housekeeper, there would definitely be some things she never saw—like what happened in a small private club in the wee hours of the morning.

  The same might be true of the girlfriend or fiance.

  At this point in time he was equally torn between suicide and murder. Maybe he was looking at it the wrong way. Maybe there was no big crisis, no sudden bumps in the road of life for Theodore Duval. But, did that hold true for the people around him? If there really was no motive for the suicide, did the same hold true for homicide?

  He made a note to find out more about Monsieur Duval’s legal affairs, including his heirs, beneficiaries, and any bequests. He also wanted to know more, much more about the people around him.

  There were one or two questions about the missing key. How long had it been missing? Was the time frame twenty years, or two months? That would make a big difference in his mind. It might not prove anything either way, but it would give them an excuse to ask more questions. If Duval locked himself in the studio for any reason, the theoretical killer would have had to gain entry one way or another. They might have noticed the spare and picked it up beforehand with just such an eventuality in mind. It was possible Duval had admitted them and then re-locked the door. In which case, how did they re-lock the door? It was possible they had brought their own key.

  It was a pretty puzzle.

  The way it looked right now, sooner or later there would be pressure to shit or get off the pot from higher authority. Time was a luxury they did not have. Placing a hand across the bottom half of the face, he studied the bone structure of the eyes and forehead. He looked at the way the hairline receded, yet there was the distinct widow’s peak. The temples and side-burn areas looked very much like the man on the slab in the morgue. They had all agreed at the time, and he still thought so now. His height was right, his weight was right, and his eyes were the right shape and colour. There seemed little doubt that the man on the slab was indeed Duval.

  That was the part that didn’t make sense. Why would he do it? For that they had no answer, and some reasons to doubt it. Even without the housekeeper’s insistence, it would have been a hard sell. Policemen were notoriously suspicious of anything that couldn’t be rationally explained.

  Why was his instinct screaming at him not to buy it? Also, men had gone to elaborate lengths to disappear before, for all sorts of practical and more romantic reasons, and he wasn’t ruling anything out just yet. The real question there was motive.

  Theodore Duval had every reason to live, no good reason to die, and even less reason to fake his own death and disappear for good.

  ***

  “Well, Inspector. It’s just as we surmised, but here is confirmation. Monsieur Duval never did military service, and no, he has never been picked up in a raid or booked on even the slightest charge.” Levain looked sympathetic, but he got paid either way and would follow Gilles’ lead.

  “Argh. Hmn.” Gilles stuck his hand up under his chin, going back to the reports from the scene. “Yes, but there’s that damned book…”

  Andre said nothing. It was just a book on hypnotism, and not even worth bothering about in the normal scheme of things.

  “It gets worse. Guillaume says he had no mortal diseases, smoked lightly, and as far as he knows has never had any kind of major surgery. We’re still waiting on the dental records, but from fragments and whole specimens recovered, Duval looked after his teeth. The body in the morgue admittedly had expensive dental care. My feeling is that there’s not much in it, but we can hope for a break.”

  “Have we received any calls yet?”

  Levain knew what he meant.

  “No. But the boss knows we’re waiting for Alain.” He looked at his watch.

  Alain Duval, finally located at his wife’s parents’ home, in a small farm village in Brittany, had readily agreed to return to Paris to identify the body as next of kin. Maintenon was all ready to pounce on the poor fellow, with a list of about forty questions to start with. No doubt more would occur to him, but with a little luck the brother would provide a different perspective on Duval’s past, present, and what might have been his future. It was an interesting point. Had Duval been destined for something that someone else might have wanted to prevent? If so, no one had seen fit to mention it so far. Some men were award hounds, but Duval hadn’t been up for any industrial or business awards so far. It was like he could care less. Some people took a real hand in soliciting nominations, he knew that from a previous investigation.

  Validation for Duval would come from his work, and from his obvious financial success.

  “Yes, I wonder what good he will do us.” Gilles seemed morose, not his usual self, and Levain for one hoped he would get his confidence back sooner rather than later.

  It was kind of hard to live with sometimes. He had to baby the Inspector along, some days, and Levain found it an annoyance at the worst of times. Gilles seemed to be taking a real interest in the case and that was good. Any change was for the better, at this point.

  “All right, boss. The gun was his gun, and everyone says it was in the desk drawer. There was the safe, which is behind a picture in his bedroom. At one time, the gun was kept in the safe according to Alexis. Not much in there, a few of the usual odds and ends, such as the deed to the house, and enough cash to run the place for a month or two without actually going to the bank. Some un-cashed cheques, none more than a month old.” Levain waited, but Gilles didn’t have any questions. “Then at some point, he put it in the desk drawer. Maybe a couple of years ago, maybe longer.”

  “Giroux says there is no sign of anyone using pliers or other tools before he got there, no marks on the key, and all of that. The housekeeper said she asked about keys when she first took the job, what, eight or nine years ago. There was some discussion, or so she says. But they never got around to calling the locksmith or having it replaced.”

  “If someone locked the door from the outside, they didn’t use Duval’s key.”

  It was the obvious conclusion, and there were no major objections to that. The windows were all latched, and they had screens in them. The screens were in good condition.

  Levain glanced at the file.

  “Normally, at the end of the day, he locked up his studio and probably put the key-ring on top of his dresser in his bedroom. She says that as well.”

  The key ring would be detached from his trousers, as a man like Duval didn’t wear the same pair of pants for days at a time. He probably changed them twice a day, with one pair for work and something a little more dressy for evening.

  “Yes.” Gilles was aware of all this. “More than anything, we need to stay away from the phone for a while, and hope for some inspiration.”

  “I hear you, Inspect
or.” Levain would run a certain amount of interference for them, but he could only play so dumb for so long, or fail to carry out one too many instructions and they would both be in trouble.

  “I know what you are thinking.”

  “What am I thinking?” Gilles’ raised eyebrows showed that while it was not unwelcome, Levain had surprised him with this one.

  They exchanged a disturbing glance. It was as if Gilles had just awoken.

  “You’re thinking, why don’t we just say suicide, and let it drop? And you can’t do it, can you, Inspector?”

  Merde! But Levain was right. He just couldn’t do it. He trusted his instincts far more than all of their statements, all of the evidence, and all that had been learned so far.

  “Very well, then. Murder it is.” Gilles reached for the phone.

  “Is it just that simple, Inspector?” Levain was astonished.

  Gilles ignored him.

  He could forestall higher authority and make them sweat a little for a change.

  “What are we doing, boss?”

  “I’m going to ask Jean-Baptiste to see if we can get a search warrant on the Duval house and holdings.”

  “But we can’t do that! What is he supposed to tell them? What grounds?”

  “I want to make a big fuss over that missing key.” Levain’s jaw dropped even further upon hearing this.

  “And the fact that the gun was once kept in the safe, and ended up in the desk?”

  “Yes, we can throw that in as well.”

  Levain nodded thoughtfully. There were still possibilities. It would look like they were doing something.

  “And now, get Henri or Joseph, or somebody, I don’t care who, to bring the car around. We have an appointment.”

  As Gilles waited for Chiappe, Andre reached for his own phone.