The Art of Murder Read online

  It wasn’t just the physical damage to the tissues, there was also a lot of bruising. Other tissues were swollen and distorted.

  “I guess it could be him.” Alain shrugged in a kind of exhaustion. “It could hardly be anyone else.”

  He’d been though an emotional roller-coaster ride. It was the anticipation, the forewarning of what lay ahead. The long journey must have been a sleepless one, judging by the eyes.

  “Yes, well, look, it probably is him.” Levain stated the obvious. “He was in his house, in his studio, in his own suit, wearing his own watch, his shoes, and his own underwear. Sorry, but we’re all tired.”

  “I wish I could be of more help.” Alain sighed in futility. “We weren’t exactly close, these last few years, but of course we never know how much time we have left.”

  Gilles couldn’t have put it any better himself.

  “When was the last time you saw your brother?” Levain was poised with his pencil.

  “It would have to be a month, or maybe a month and a half ago.”

  “I suppose you’ll be going to the house.” Gilles wasn’t making a statement, and yet neither was it a question.

  “Yes, but first I’ll need to do something about my baggage. I came straight here from the Gare.”

  “Ah, yes. We also have another appointment, and a few other dockets to deal with this week.” Gilles extended a hand to Alain. “Our condolences on your loss, and if there is anything we can do, please let us know.”

  To no one’s surprise, tears welled up in Alain’s eyes, and he turned as if drawn by magnetic force to what remained of the person on the slab.

  “It’s probably him.” The sobs were torn from Alain, the words almost indecipherable. “Poor Theodore! He missed the point, in so many ways, and now he’s gone.”

  “The point?” Levain looked into Gilles’ eyes, knowing it was the details of personality revealed that he sought.

  “The point of life, Inspector. Theo…Theo had no idea of what life was actually about.” Alain broke up into an inconsolable grief, one perhaps explained by the worship of a younger for an older brother, no longer embittered by the long years of some personal misunderstanding.

  “We will be in touch, Monsieur Duval.” With a nod at Andre, Maintenon turned and headed for the door.

  His last sight of Alain was of the man bending over Guillaume’s desk, blinking through tears as he signed the paper.

  Chapter Eight

  “Ta da!”

  “Ta da!” Giroux stared triumphantly from the doorway. Andre and Gilles looked up from the endless written reports, wondering what had kept him.

  “The locked room puzzle, so beloved of fiction and readers of the mystery genre everywhere, is actually a bit of a myth.” He strutted into the room now, snapping the door closed quietly and carefully as was his habit. “The killer who uses it as part of a well-laid plan is fooling himself. That’s not to draw any conclusions about your current case. I am just stating a simple fact.”

  Giroux grinned fiendishly and laughed like a ghoul feasting on human flesh, which he was in some ways.

  “The problem with using another key to lock the door behind you after a successful murder is that there really isn’t room inside the lock mechanism. The butt end, which is the rounded-off portion of the key, sticks in too far. The keys hit each other and it’s simply impossible, hence the reliance on needle-nose pliers and the like. Once the lock is turned, the first key, the inner key, is locked in position. It has to be turned an equal distance in the opposite direction, and then returned to the vertical position in order to withdraw it. It cannot go too far in because of the metallic safety ring which all such keys should have. Otherwise it could go right through and stick out the other side. This one has some rings which are purely decorative, similar to the one at the Duval house. The tongue, to use a highly-technical word, is what actually engages the cam and moves the bolt. In our case, the key was in his pocket, an even simpler variation on the theme.”

  The key, along with others, was on a ring in Duval’s pocket, but Gilles let him have his moment. The weakness of skeleton keys was the small number of pins in the actual lockset. It was the possibility of another key that was of interest. Was Giroux nothing more than a hobbyist? He bit back a bitter laugh.

  “All right.” Gilles pondered the significance, but there was more.

  “Now, the other key, the one that has disappeared. If the end was sawed off, it would still be too long. The tongue would still be engaged with the cam. If it was still in the lock.”

  “Right!” Andre nodded as if this was some brilliant revelation.

  “Well, you’ve got our attention. Go on.” Gilles threw down his pen and tidied up the papers in front of him.

  He had them lined up in rows and piles depending on whether he had read them, had questions about them, or if they still remained to be read. Gilles rubbed tired eyes as Giroux continued his performance.

  “Sit down if you can bring yourself to do it.” Levain had only so much patience for the little peccadilloes of his brother officers.

  The technician had other ideas.

  Giroux went back to the office door and gave a series of taps. The door swung open, and an assistant, complete with a white lab smock and an upper pocket with a row of pens and pencils denoting that this was indeed another like-minded individual, entered the room pushing a trolley on which was mounted a framework and a two-thirds scale model of a door. The lock was remarkably similar to the one at the Duval residence. His name-tag was unreadable at even this short distance, but they all seemed to wear one.

  “Ha! Now I’ve seen everything.” Levain shook his head in admiration. “I always thought you were insane, but now I know for sure.”

  “All right, Albert. What do you have for us?” Gilles was interested in anything up to and including the most far-fetched fantasy by now.

  “Take a look at this.” Giroux handed each of them a small slender object.

  There was almost instant comprehension on the part of Gilles, who looked over at Andre, studying the short length of rubber tubing in his hand with a quizzical look. His face came up and the look on his face was priceless as his jaw dropped open and his head spun to Gilles.

  “No!”

  Gilles shrugged.

  “That’s just too easy!”

  “Maybe.” Gilles was interested in spite of himself.

  It certainly fell within the scope of professional interest, if little more.

  “I want to go back to the house. I want to check once more, to see if the lock has been oiled recently, or even if this trick works on that door. What do you think, Inspector?” Giroux had a look of triumph on his face.

  “Well, if we try for a search warrant, we’ll need something to put on the application.” Gilles bit his lip. “It’s something, anyway.”

  “No.” Andre didn’t believe it.

  “Give it a try.” Giroux beckoned and Andre reluctantly pulled himself up out of his seat.

  “All right. First give the end a lick, but don’t put moisture inside, only a little on the outside of the tube.”

  Andre complied with the instructions as Giroux made sure their test door was latched and the deadbolt was indeed set.

  “The rubber is tight in the hole.” Andre pushed the tube in from the outside, with a look of intense concentration on his face.

  “Huh. I can feel the end of the key…” He gave another little grunt. “Hmn. It’s on the end! Unbelievable.”

  With a quick and decisive gesture, he gave a little twist and the sound of the deadbolt being withdrawn was clearly audible from a few feet away where Gilles sat observing.

  “Nice!” Levain was indeed impressed.

  “Interesting.” The Inspector was still unmoved. “But can you close it? That’s the real thing here.”

  An even greater problem was how to get the key back into Duval’s pocket. Gilles let him have his fun anyway.

  “What’s important is that in
a lock of this age, there is sufficient slop for the rubber tube. Once I saw that go on, I knew we had it beat.” Giroux had been looking ahead, and still would be looking ahead—to an eventual trial date.

  Andre worked his wrist in the opposite direction.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it will go.”

  Giroux looked cross.

  “Merde. It worked in the lab. Isn’t that the way.”

  “You got it to lock in the lab? Merde is right!” Gilles was more animated now. “You try it, Albert.”

  Giroux took over from Andre but he couldn’t get it either now, in spite of jiggling and wiggling the door back and forth so the bolt aligned properly with the hole in the striker. Doors sagged on their hinges over time. Gilles knew that much. He had a couple of sticky doors at home, and one even had a bad lock. Where the key for it might be, was anyone’s guess. That was the usual way with interior doors, they were left unlocked for years at a time.

  Giroux said a bad word.

  “What’s happening is the tube is slipping.” He was undaunted, and reaching into a side pocket on his smock, he pulled out another devious device. “Take a look at this baby.”

  Andre gave it a quick look and handed it over to Gilles.

  “I made that in about five minutes.” Giroux was a proud craftsman.

  “Very nice.” It was a short piece of shiny chrome tubing, with very thin walls. One end was cut like the nib of a fountain pen.

  “It’s just a piece of tube.”

  The other end had a small hole drilled in it crosswise, and the nib end had two slots machined into it, slots of different widths and lengths.

  “Explain.”

  “Why, certainly, sir.” Giroux pulled something else out of his pocket. “This is our T-handle.”

  He stuck it through the hole in one end of his makeshift key, and inserted it into the lock from the outside. The sound of the bolt being driven home and then retracted, back and forth, back and forth several times was enough to convince Gilles and Levain that it was at least effectively possible. But this device was only useful if there was a key on the other side of the lock.

  “What about your pictures, and your examination of the actual mechanism?”

  “I would have to take that lock apart and examine it further before making any sort of determination. My photos were clear enough, but they really don’t show a whole lot of scratches from foreign objects such as bent needle-nose pliers. I would need microscopic analysis. But interestingly, I don’t see any marks from any kind of tool. Which is the real issue here.”

  So Giroux wasn’t a total fool then. He just liked a spectacle.

  “And the rubber tube?”

  “I think maybe we got the end, inside the tube, a little too wet. But it is so much less likely to have left marks. As for losing a bit of material inside the lock, I would have to look again. If there’s anything there, we can analyze the sample.”

  “I see.” Gilles chewed on that silently for a moment. “Albert, in your carefully studied opinion, how was that door locked?”

  “Most probably, with a proper key. One that fit.”

  “All right. Thank you, Albert, and I would appreciate it if we all kept this under our hats for a while.”

  Giroux’s eyes gleamed at them as he bobbed his head, shuffled his feet, and then hastily ushered his amiable side-kick out of the room, leaving behind two very thoughtful homicide detectives. His assistant grinned knowingly at them on the way out.

  “Well, at least we have something to put on that warrant now.” Levain seemed amused more than anything.

  “Yes, but that other key has been disposed of in some way. I’m almost sure of it. One reason for the experts, Andre. No man can know everything, but we needed to be sure.”

  Giroux, more than anything, had demonstrated the weaknesses in his thinking.

  Levain’s next comment, which dealt with motive, was apparently lost on deaf ears, but he didn’t mind. When the boss got that look on his face, it was usually bad news for some devious bastard somewhere. Every so often Levain had this terrible dream about the guillotine, when he was the one on the receiving end of it. The feeling of having your neck locked in the block was indescribable, the sound, the knowledge, was enough to make you sit up in bed and scream your damn fool head off.

  Why him, and not some devious murderer? That was just his bad luck.

  ***

  The place had a strange kind of charm, and Andre wondered what it might be like late on a Saturday night. Or better yet a Sunday morning, in the wee hours just before dawn. He wondered at the entertainment in such a small establishment. The end of the place was black, with another section painted a dried-up blood-red colour and then the front of the place had lighter paint on the walls. It might have originally been white, but the smoke of a million cigarettes had stained it a cream yellow colour. Posters lined the wall behind the patrons, and they could only see the art in the mirror over the bar, which, as was the usual in these places, was lined with easily a thousand different bottles and decanters, in about an equal number of sizes, shapes and colours. Underneath the bar was a line of shiny stainless-steel lockers which he assumed were jam-packed with rows of icy-cold bottles of lager, ale, Pilsner, and whatever else a thirsty refugee from the outside world might desire.

  A faint blue haze of tobacco and the lingering smell of fried onions reminded Andre of a thousand night shifts, and thousands of indifferently prepared meals that nevertheless were extremely welcome at the time. It was a refuge, in every sense of the word, with a row of newspaper boxes outside the door and a coin-operated vending machine with a dozen popular brands of cigarettes inside the front lobby. Up above they had a few rooms. One or two of the present patrons looked like they might live there. They had the look of men settling in for a day of reading the newspapers, some sporting gossip, and maybe even one or two small wagers.

  There were times when he thought of retirement, or even just quitting, and having a place like this of his own. It was a nice enough daydream, but he didn’t take it too seriously. What looked like an oasis of cool, quiet sanity in daytime might be tacky, noisy and rushed during the evening hours. You worked for your money in this world. Owning such a place would be long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror, he realized.

  Gilles conferred in hushed tones with the Commissioner from a coin-operated telephone kiosk at the back end of one of the long, narrow, glass-fronted storefront bars this quarter was famous for. The front half of the room was a low, lunch-bar type grille with nothing but short round stools, and the back half, empty now, had a dozen tables and a dance floor the size of a handkerchief. There was a stage the size of a billiard table, and a stand with a microphone. There was a black curtain at the back of the stage, and near that, a hall marked as a fire exit. There would be bathrooms back there, storerooms and the like. Andre sat with his powerful arms crossed, two tables from the end, facing the street entrance almost forty metres away. A cooling breeze gushed past him on its way out the open back door, where heat and brightness ruled, and he identified the sound of wind rushing through tree branches. The half dozen customers were at the end by the front door, either alone or in a clump of two or three individuals. A couple of young males were trying to appear unconcerned, but intelligence had it that certain goods and services might be available here whenever someone had time to look into it.

  As he recalled from the big Monday multi-departmental briefing sessions that Maintenon and he were obliged to attend from time to time, no one had done anything about it so far. Those two knew there were cops in the room, and yet he had the impression of coolness, most likely small-timers with nothing really big up their sleeves. Andre was perfectly comfortable. The beer was cold, and with a little fast talking Gilles might rustle up a search warrant for them after all. If he remembered, he would write up a quick memo for intelligence circulation. Nothing much going on here that you couldn’t find in a hundred other clubs within a kilometre’s
radius. How he knew that was another mystery. It stood to reason, though.

  The rumble of Maintenon’s voice came in short snatches.

  “Yes, Commissioner.” Levain grinned faintly.

  He could easily imagine the squawk the other was making.

  “With our new discovery thanks to Giroux, and the missing key, plus the book on hypnotism…Alain took off for Brittany two, sorry, three days before the incident. Then there’s…ah, what?”

  Levain made out some thin, scratchy sounds from the booth as Gilles held the thing away from his ear for a half a moment. Chiappe wasn’t easily fooled, he knew that much.

  “Yes, yes, but there is something else.” Gilles listened intently. “Listen. The chair Duval was in was not facing the desk. It was turned to one side. It was facing the door. Surely there must be someone who will sign it. Giroux wants to look at all the windows, there’s a whole row of them. The ledges are fairly wide, there are a couple of balconies on that floor, and on the corners of the building we have the usual drain-pipes…”

  Maintenon listened some more. Levain didn’t recall Giroux saying anything about windows. He chuckled quietly to himself. The boss knew the tricks of the trade, all right.

  “Yes, sir.” He hung up the phone abruptly.

  “Well?” Levain waited.

  “He says he will try.” Gilles inclined his head in polite inquiry. “What, did you drink mine too?”

  Andre allowed sharp tangy gas to escape through throat and nostrils. With a dainty flourish, he carefully wiped foam from his lush brown mustache.

  “Yes, but that’s okay, Inspector. I promise to make it up to you.” And with that, he gave an imperative wave at the barman, mindlessly occupied in the never-ending task of wiping the thoroughly-etched bar glasses, milky and almost opaque as they were, and as futile as that might be over the course of his lifetime.

  The man looked up with a semblance of interest on his pinched and sallow but otherwise unremarkable features.

  “Yes, sirs! Coming right up.”