by Aaron Elkins
"But how could you possibly know? Be reasonable, you're making it sound as if you went out of your way to shirk your responsibility. How could you conceivably imagine anything like this would happen?"
"I know, but I keep going over and over it in my mind. There were so many places where I could have kept it from happening. Why didn't I check our telephone messages when we first got back, for instance? I could have been at the museum by twelve-thirty. He wouldn't have been sitting there by himself all that time, waiting for me."
"But you might as well say, why did we go out at all, why didn't we just stay in the room, and then he would have gotten you on the phone the first time he called."
"That's true too. Or if we'd come back a couple of hours—"
"Here's Lucien," she said, pointing with relief to the inspector's long, angular figure bent almost double in climbing out of the low-to-the-ground Citroen he'd parked at the curb on the far side of the street. "Finally. Thank God, maybe he can talk some sense into you." She waved to him.
Having straightened up in his stiff, machinelike manner—something like a sofa-bed unfolding—Joly peered around, saw Julie's wave, and started toward them, looking worn. Gideon had left him in La Quinze a couple of hours earlier, and Joly had promised to join them when he was through, for an aperitif at the Café du Centre. With the day warmed by a golden late-afternoon sun, they'd been waiting for him on the café's patio, a pleasant terrace shaded by striped awnings and situated on one side of the village square, opposite what looked like a steepled country church, belfry and all, but was actually the mairie, Prefect Marielle's domain.
"Are those kirs?" Joly asked plaintively, dropping into a chair at their table. "I would kill for a kir."
"Not necessary," Julie said, signaling to the waiter that a kir was wanted for the newly arrived gentleman. She had picked up the French knack for saying a lot with an economy of gesture, Gideon noted admiringly.
"Lucien," she said, "will you please talk some sense into this man? He thinks he's responsible for Jacques' death. He thinks the reason Jacques is dead is because we didn't check our telephone messages."
"I didn't say that," Gideon said grumpily, "I only—"
"Jacques Beaupierre is dead because his murderer wanted him dead," Joly said wearily. "Do you really think that if he hadn't been able to kill him because you arrived on the scene—assuming of course that he didn't decide to kill you as well—that he would simply have dropped the idea, and forgotten all about it, and gone away somewhere?"
Gideon shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe he was killed to keep him from telling me what it was he wanted to tell me. If I'd been there for him and he'd already told me, the cat would have been out of the bag and there'd have been no point in killing him."
"It seems to me, Gideon, that you give yourself far too much importance in this. In my opinion, Beaupierre would have been murdered all the same, if not this afternoon, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the next day." The kir came and Joly drank greedily, the ice cubes clinking in the glass. "Aah, life returns, the tissues rejuvenate. Now, I grant you," he said with a pale smile, "it might not have been with an Acheulian cordiform hand-axe of the Early Paleolithic variety—"
"Middle Paleolithic."
"—but murdered he would have been. Besides, if he was killed to keep him from making his 'dreadful confession,' then why not hold me responsible too? If I hadn't permitted him to put off the time of his interrogation, he might never have called you at all, or gone to La Quinze. And yet I assure you I do not hold myself responsible."
Gideon puffed out his cheeks and blew out a stream of air. "Yes, okay, you're both right," he said, beginning to come around—in his head if not in his gut. "I guess I'm not making much sense."
"Thank you, Lucien," said Julie, raising her glass to him.
"Now then," Joly said, setting down his kir after another grateful sip, "to other matters. You remember the ring?" He turned civilly to Julie. "Perhaps Gideon hasn't yet mentioned this?"
"The opal ring? No, he told me about it. You found it near Jacques' body at the Musée Thibault."
"Exactly. And this ring preyed upon my mind. I felt sure I had come across some reference to a similar ring not long before. And at last, at long last, it came to me. Now listen to this." He took a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket, unfolded it, and set his reading glasses on his nose. "I translate," he said with a polite nod to Julie. It took him a moment to find his place. "Here we are. '… brown eyes, brown hair. When last seen, was wearing— ' No, never mind that… ah, here, here. Now listen to this. 'He also wore…'" Joly looked up to make sure he had the full attention of his audience and went on, emphasizing every syllable. "'…also wore on the little finger of his right hand an embossed, heavy gold ring with a stone of opal or sapphire with a horse's or dog's head embedded in it." He whipped off the wire frame glasses, put them in their hard black case, and clicked it closed.
"But what are you reading from?" said Gideon after a moment's startled silence. "Who's it talking about?"
"This," Joly said triumphantly, "is the report on Jean Bousquet that was filed at the time of his disappearance, presumably with the cameo brooch of Madame Renouard's grandmother."
"Bousquet!" the other two exclaimed.
"None other," said Joly, sitting back and radiating satisfaction. "Apparently he has found reason to revisit the Périgord after all."
"And you think he's the one who killed Jacques?"
"It's hard to imagine another explanation. Rings do not generally fall off fingers on their own."
"Bousquet," Gideon said again, mostly to himself. It was amazing how the name of this drifter who had spent only three months in Les Eyzies and hadn't been heard of for the last three years kept cropping up. First it was Bousquet who'd been murdered and buried in the abri, possibly by Ely. Then that was switched: it was Bousquet who had murdered Ely. Now it was Bousquet who had killed Jacques. Well, this time at least, they might have it right. The ring was hard to argue with; it was something you could hold in your hand, something tangible, not just another airy conjecture based on a rickety structure of hypothetical premises.
"Gideon," Julie said excitedly, "do you suppose that man in St.-Cyprien, the one who hit you with that fibula—"
"Femur, not fibula. I wish he'd hit me with a fibula."
"All right, femur—could that have been Bousquet too?"
"I don't know, it never occurred to me. You know, you might be right."
"He had such a ring?" Joly asked.
"If he did I didn't see it. But he did have brown eyes and brown hair."
Joly smiled. "So does everyone else in France. In any case, with Marielle's assistance we have mounted a search for him. There is unfortunately no photograph of him available, and the physical description tells us little, but many people in Les Eyzies have reason to remember him, including some on Marielle's staff. If he's still in the area, I should be surprised if we fail to find him. Of course, having achieved his end, he may already have left again."
"But what end?" Julie asked. Why would he want to come back and kill Jacques?"
"Ah, yes, as to that—"
"Inspector? They… they told me I might find you here." It was Audrey, strangely unsure of herself. "Is it true that Jacques has been… that Jacques is dead?"
Joly rose. "Yes, madame, I'm sorry." He placed a hand on her elbow. "Will you sit down?"
She appeared not to hear him. "There are… there are some things I should tell you that may be relevant…" She looked indecisively at Gideon and Julie.
"It's all right, madame," Joly said, "you can speak. But if you prefer, we can go—"
"No, what does it matter?" She nodded vaguely in their direction—almost like Beaupierre himself, as if, since she was going to be his replacement as director she intended to replace him in manner as well—and took the chair Joly was holding out for her.
In Gideon's mind, Audrey Godwin-Pope had always served as a model of calm, invincible self-ce
rtainty, and it was shocking to see her so rattled. Her thin, old-lady's cardigan sweater had been misbuttoned. Her chignon, always before a neat, businesslike bun, had loosened so that straggling gray tendrils floated free at the nape of her neck. And to make the picture complete, somewhere along the way she'd broken the nosepiece of her tortoise-shell glasses, inexpertly sticking them back together with a twist of Scotch tape. It was as if she'd changed overnight from the rock-solid Audrey he knew to somebody's hunch-shouldered, slightly dotty old hermit-aunt who lived in the attic bedroom.
"Audrey, would you like something to drink?" he asked softly.
"What? Yes, all right, whatever you're having. No, a vodka. With ice." But she'd never taken her eyes from Joly, and it was to him she spoke: "Inspector, I haven't told you before—I should have told you this morning…"
Joly waited, encouraging her with a friendly dip of his chin.
"You see… about a week before Ely left… that is, before he was killed… he told me that he knew… that he thought he knew who was behind the hoax, the Tayac hoax."
"Jean Bousquet!" Julie couldn't keep from whispering.
"Jean Bousquet?" Audrey said, glancing dully at her. "No, not Bousquet. I mean, yes, he thought Jean might have written the letter—the letter to Paris-Match—out of spite, but no more than that. Jean would have been incapable of more." Nervously, she appealed to Joly. "I did tell you that, inspector. You remember." The waiter placed her drink on the table; she didn't notice.
Joly nodded patiently, his graceful hands folded on the table.
"But as to who was behind it," Audrey said, "that was different. Ely thought it might be—he had no proof, you understand, but still he was sure that it was—or almost sure that it was—"
"Jacques Beaupierre," said Joly.
"Yes," she said, stopping short with surprise, "Jacques."
"And why didn't you tell me this earlier?" he asked without reproach.
Audrey discovered her vodka and drained it in a few absent-minded gulps. "You… you have to understand, Inspector," she said defensively, "by that time Ely wasn't the same person any more. He was like a wild man—vengeful, suspicious. I couldn't take what he said seriously. I mean, it was preposterous to think even for a minute that Jacques… surely you see that it would have been irresponsible—wrong—for me to go around repeating it?"
Her pleading look took in Julie and Gideon, and, indeed, Gideon could see it, could see why she hadn't mentioned Ely's suspicion to Joly, or to him, or to anyone else in all this time. In her place, he'd probably have done the same. But now, with the sudden knowledge—Audrey had found it out only this morning—that Ely had been a victim of homicide and not of a plane-crash, and with Jacques' death following only a couple of hours later, things were terribly different. What would have been unthinkable three years ago had come to pass; what would have seemed merely "preposterous" was now just one more not-so-unreasonable possibility. The question was…
Joly was looking at him. "You wanted to ask something, Gideon?"
"Yes, I do. Audrey, what made him think it was Jacques, do you know? You said he didn't have any proof."
Ely had worked it out, she explained disjointedly, by a process of elimination. There were only three people whose theories and reputations hung on the Tayac find: his own, Michel Montfort's, and Jacques'. Since he knew he hadn't done the faking, that left Michel and Jacques. Michel, he had reasoned, was extremely unlikely to have done it, having long ago proven himself a serious and objective scholar; moreover, unlike Jacques and Ely himself, his pre-eminence in the field was acknowledged—he didn't need Tayac. And that left Jacques.
Gideon couldn't help smiling a little. It was very nearly the same line of reasoning that Émile Grize had employed, only Émile had used it to eliminate Jacques and Ely and to finger Michel Montfort.
"Oh, and I'm forgetting the four metapodials," Audrey added. "That was the crucial point. They were from the Musée Thibault. Jacques was on the board there. He would have had easy access."
Gideon nodded. Jacques' access to the bones carried more weight with him than Ely's process of elimination.
"Madame," Joly said casually, "when was the last time you saw Jean Bousquet?"
She stiffened. "Jean! Why—it was years ago. When he disappeared, when he left."
"Have you heard anything to suggest that he might be back in this area?"
"Back? You mean now? No, why do you ask? You don't mean you think—"She goggled at him, a disturbingly un-Audreylike action, and tugged distractedly at her hair; more gray hairs came loose from the bun. "But why—but—"
"Thank you so much for your help, madame. Are you quite all right? Would you like me to have someone drive you home?"
"What I find myself wondering about," Joly mused after their second round of drinks had been delivered—Joly himself, who would be driving home to Périgueux for dinner, had switched to mineral water—"is the frequency with which she seems to have access to information possessed by no one else."
"I don't follow you," Gideon said.
"Consider. It was from Professor Godwin-Pope that we learned that Carpenter possessed an air rifle—and that he had even proudly showed it to her; it was from her that we learned he had taken to keeping it at hand when he was excavating; it is from her that we now hear that Carpenter had fixed Beaupierre in his mind as the villain of the Tayac debacle. Now why do you suppose Carpenter would choose to divulge these things to her, and only to her?"
"Why wouldn't he?" Gideon asked. "They were good friends. Audrey was the only other American on the staff aside from Pru, and I guess by that time the Ely-Pru thing was on the wane and maybe a little awkward. He probably just felt most comfortable with Audrey."
"Yes, perhaps," Joly said.
"Besides," said Julie, "you can't really conclude that she was the only one he told, can you? For all we know, maybe he told everybody else too, but Audrey's the only one who's come forward."
"Yes, that's so. It might be that I'm making something from nothing."
At their feet was an elderly, limping, white-muzzled dog that had been scratching steadily behind its ear for the last few minutes. It had been brought by a customer at another table but had found itself neglected once its owner started on his aperitif and opened his newspaper. Looking for company, it had wandered over to sit by the three of them instead, lolling its tongue, watching them talk, and occasionally giving a half-hearted wag of its tail between scratches. Now, apparently tired out by the effort, it stopped, looking up at Joly, who absently reached down to continue its scratching for it.
"What do you think," he said after half-a-minute or so of this obviously mutually agreeable activity, "of the following as a working hypothesis? Assume first that Carpenter was correct in his suspicion that Beaupierre was behind the fraud. He confronts him with it. Beaupierre, terrified at the prospect of exposure, murders him—or rather pays or otherwise convinces the willing Bousquet to do it and to help him with the concealment of the body. The deceptive flight of the airplane is arranged through parties unknown at present. And Bousquet, very likely with some financial assistance from Beaupierre, takes himself far, far away and settles in Corsica to make himself a new life."
Gideon noticed that Julie, who had laughed at the notion of Beaupierre as a murderer the previous afternoon, wasn't laughing now.
Neither was he. "You know," he said thoughtfully, "that could explain why he had the nerve to call the institute for a job reference a few months later. He knew Jacques wasn't about to turn him down. But of course Jacques wasn't in and it was Montfort he wound up talking to."
Joly inclined his head. "Yes, that might be so. Now… where was I?"
"He settles in Corsica," Julie said.
"Yes, thank you, he settles in Corsica and the incident fades away. Three years pass, we arrive at the present. Carpenter's murder comes to light." Joly continued scratching rhythmically away at the dog while he spoke. "Beaupierre becomes anxious, he becomes conscience-strick
en, the urge to confess seizes him, as his telephone calls to you suggest. And Bousquet, understandably fearing that he is about to give everything away, silences him in the most direct and certain way possible." He looked down at the dog. "So, what do you think of my theory, chien? Does it strike you as an idea worth pursuing?" The dog gazed back up at him with rheumy eyes. "Yes, I believe you do," Joly said.
"Well, I'm not so sure I agree with him," Gideon said. "I can see where you're coming from, but how could Bousquet possibly know whether or not Jacques was getting faint-hearted? In fact, how could he know so quickly that we'd ID'd Carpenter? It just happened yesterday. And nobody else knew about it until you told them this morning at, what—ten o'clock? And by two, maybe by one, Jacques was already dead. Pretty fast work for someone who hasn't been in the neighborhood for three years."
Joly brushed this aside. "We've had telephones in France for some time now, you know. Someone could easily have been in touch with him, perhaps Beaupierre himself."
"What for? To inform him he was getting cold feet and was about to go and confess everything?"
"Now wait a minute, Gideon," Julie said, "that's not as ridiculous as it sounds. I didn't know Jacques very well, but, yes, he struck me as the kind of person who might very well have wanted to give Bousquet a chance to confess on his own before implicating him."
Gideon nodded. "Okay, I'll give you that much but—sorry to be the one who's always saying it—aren't we making a lot of assumptions here? All we know for sure is that Jacques is dead."
"No," Joly said, "we know that he was murdered. And we have good reason for concluding it was Bousquet who did it. And we also know that Carpenter was murdered. And we know that someone went to considerable effort to keep you from examining his remains. And we know that at the time he was killed there was considerable bad feeling between him and Bousquet. And we know, or believe we know, that he suspected Beaupierre of having implemented the fraud that had caused him so much grief. That's a great deal to know. Well, you ingrate," he said as the dog heaved itself up at its master's whistle and limped off without a backward glance.