Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  For a moment, Gideon softened—a man of Montfort's stature and accomplishments and very real contributions to endure a trial for murder, to go to prison for the rest of his life!—but only for a moment. He brushed Montfort's hand away. His own hand, which had very nearly loosened, tightened on Montfort's arm.

  "You stood behind Jacques and crushed his skull," he said through set teeth. "You killed Ely." And you damn well cost me a bunch of neuro-axons I can't afford, let's not forget that. "You—"

  "Permit me, monsieur," said Sergeant Peyrol to Gideon. And to Montfort, quite sternly. "This won't do, monsieur. Come with me at once, please."

  Montfort, with a final, reproachful look at Gideon and a last, longing look at the open window and the empty space beyond, lowered his head and went with the sergeant.

  Julie came up to Gideon as the room began buzzing with excited whispers again. "Are you all right?"

  "Sure, I'm fine. I think I'd better go along with them to the mairie."

  She handed him a packet of tissues. "You might want to wipe your nose first."

  Chapter 25

  "Visitez… l'usine," Julie said, practicing her French by reading aloud from the sign in the window of a pâté shop. She brightened momentarily, having successfully translated it, but her expression changed as the meaning sank in. "Yuck, why would anyone want to visit a chopped-liver factory?"

  Gideon shook his head. "Got me."

  "It certainly couldn't be anywhere near as entertaining as what you've just been telling me about intestinal bacteria and decomposing brains."

  "Probably not as edifying either."

  They were on the main street of the village. When Gideon had returned from the mairie an hour before and had begun to fill her in, Julie had interrupted: "How about getting out and taking a walk while you tell me? I could use the fresh air—and it'd help to be rubbing shoulders with real, everyday, normal people who're talking about something besides murder for a change."

  Having spent most of the afternoon sitting in on Montfort's interrogation as a sort of interpreter of things scientific, he felt much the same way. Strictly speaking, Montfort hadn't been required to submit to being questioned until Joly got his warrant, but he'd waived his right to silence. With his frustrated attorney there but unable to convince him to shut up, he had woodenly answered question after question in a listless, unconcerned voice that had made Gideon's skin crawl; the voice of a man no longer part of this world.

  The first thing he'd done on getting back to the hotel was to stand under a steaming shower until his skin felt as if it had been wire-brushed. Then he'd put on fresh clothes. After that he'd wanted to be around some everyday people too, and they had strolled the length of the village, first south through the riverside park, where mothers with old-fashioned prams, youngsters on swings, and old men playing pétanque had restored their faith in normal—or at least normal-looking—people. Then back along the shop-lined main street with its tourists and shoppers, also reassuringly ordinary-looking.

  "All right, I understand about his having been frozen for the last three years," Julie said as they started walking again. "But why Montfort? How did you settle on him?"

  "Ah, that followed pretty naturally. It was something you said a few days ago. Do you remember telling me that it was Jacques who hired Madame Lacouture?"

  "Sure. From Paris, the same time he rehired Pru; his first week as director."

  "Right. And do you remember my telling you that she was the one who backed up Montfort's story about Bousquet phoning the institute?"

  Julie nodded.

  "Well, Montfort and Lacouture were the only ones who actually talked to him, and they both made it clear they had no doubt that's who it was, but—"

  "But Lacouture couldn't know that, could she?" Julie said excitedly. "If she didn't start until Jacques became the director, she wouldn't have been with the institute when Bousquet was working there, so she wouldn't have any idea what he sounded like. If somebody called and said he was Jean Bousquet—"

  "—and Montfort told her he was too-"

  "—then how would she know any better? She wouldn't—wait, who did make that call?"

  "I don't know. Somebody Montfort put up to it. I took off before they got around to that."

  "But why would he do that? I mean, if Bousquet was safely stored in a freezer somewhere, and they'd stopped looking for him, and nobody had any reason to think he was dead, let alone murdered, why would Montfort want to fabricate a call from him two months later, out of the blue?"

  "Because he got nervous. That was when Bousquet's ex-landlady found some more of her jewelry was missing, and concluded—incorrectly, we now know—that he must have been back in town. The idea of the police re-opening a search for him scared Montfort, so he concocted the call to head it off; if Bousquet was in Corsica, how could he be in Les Eyzies?"

  Their pace had gradually slowed, and Julie's increasingly perplexed frown indicated that she was having trouble putting everything together, for which he didn't blame her; it had certainly taken him long enough, and he had needed plenty of help too. "But what made Montfort freeze him in the first place?" she asked. "That's downright bizarre, to say the least. And why he—"

  "Look, instead of bouncing around all over the place, what do you say we sit down to a cup of coffee and just let me try to tell you what I do know in some kind of logical order?"

  "I'll vote for that."

  They had come abreast of the square, where there were a couple of pleasant, familiar cafés to choose from. "Which'll it be?" Gideon asked. "Café de la Mairie or Café du Centre?"

  "Which is the one the institute had its staff meetings in again?"

  "The Café du Centre."

  "The Café de la Mairie then," Julie said without hesitation.

  "I guess the best place to start—" Gideon began.

  "How about at the beginning?"

  "Sure, if I can figure out where it is."

  "Start with the hoax, the Old Man of Tayac. What was that all about?"

  "Good idea, everything followed from that. Well, what Montfort did—"

  "How about starting with why, not what?"

  "Hey, who's telling this story?"

  "Montfort was a great figure in the field, wasn't he? He was already established. What did he need with a clumsy stunt like that? Was it because he—"

  "Julie—!"

  She flinched. "Sorry, I'll be quiet, I promise. Sir."

  "About time too," said Gideon. He paused with his hands encircling a soup-bowl-sized cup of café au lait, "You know, that was the one thing I asked Montfort about: why. I had strict orders from Lucien to speak only if spoken to, but all he was interested in was the murders, not the Old Man of Tayac, and so I finally jumped in on my own and asked him what made him cook up the hoax in the first place."

  "And?"

  "He said: 'Il a bien fallu que quelqu'un le remette à sa place.' 'Someone had to put him in his place.'"

  "'Him'?" Julie set down her own cup. "Meaning Ely? I don't understand. I thought Ely was his protégé."

  "Oh, he was, he was. And to Ely, Michel Montfort was a god."

  "But…?"

  "But protégés and their gods have a way of eventually getting on each other's nerves. Look at it from Montfort's point of view. For twenty years he'd been the leading light of the sensitive-Neanderthal school. He was grooming Ely to be his inheritor, the man to whom he was going to pass the scepter. Only…"

  Only he wasn't ready to pass it yet. And lately it had been the dynamic, colorful, charismatic Ely, not the gruff Montfort, who'd been getting the speaking invitations and showing up in the journal citations. Montfort saw himself increasingly regarded as pedantic, old-hat, even passé; they'd all heard him before and now it was Ely they wanted to hear from. It was also Ely who was up for the directorship of the institute, and although Montfort had no designs on the job for himself, the idea of being subordinate to his ambitious, popular star pupil was more than he could bear.
The hoax was his way of humbling the upstart in general, and of sinking his chances for the directorship in particular.

  "Wait, how could it do that?" Julie asked. "I thought he already was the director."

  "Yes, by the time he found the bones he was, but you see, Montfort had planted them several months before that, when the competition was just getting started. He meant for him to find them then. But various things got in the way—the institute was in kind of a mess, and there was an important congress coming up—and Ely didn't have time to fool around at the Tayac site until later, after he was already in the job."

  "So Montfort just left the bones there for him to find later?"

  "Right. He couldn't keep Ely from being the director, but at least he could still 'put him in his place.'"

  "Incredible," Julie murmured. "It seems so… childish."

  "Childish, yes, but it worked. Once Ely dug up the bones and fell for them, Montfort turned around and made sure they were exposed as a fraud by writing that letter to Paris-Match—"

  "Wait a minute, you mean it wasn't Bousquet who wrote the anonymous letter? That was Montfort's doing too?"

  Everything had been Montfort's doing, Gideon told her; Bousquet had been a red herring—a patsy—from beginning to end. And it had worked right up until the very end, when Ely, finally beginning to suspect that his beloved Montfort, not Beaupierre, was the power behind the hoax, had confronted him—and wound up dead.

  "And Montfort just sat there and admitted all this?" Julie asked.

  "Yes. I thought his lawyer was going to have a stroke." Gideon slowly shook his head. "It was like watching a corpse talk, Julie. Ask him a question, he tells you the answer: 'Did you kill Jacques Beaupierre?' 'Yes.' 'Did you kill Jean Bousquet?' 'Yes.' 'Did you then keep his body in a freezer for three years?' 'Yes.'" Gideon shivered. "And if you didn't interrupt to ask him something, he'd just go on and on like a robot, in this creepy monotone. Mostly, all Joly had to do was sit back and let him tell his story."

  He had told it as if by rote, with barely a glimmer of human feeling. The confrontation with Ely had taken place one morning at one of the remote abris at which Ely was still desperately hoping to redeem himself. The more Montfort had denied having anything to do with the fake, the more deeply suspicious Ely had become. Near the end of his emotional rope—he'd submitted his letter of resignation only a little while before—he had grown more and more agitated, and Montfort, horrified at the prospect of exposure, had grabbed the nearby air rifle, pointed it in Ely's direction, and pulled the trigger.

  He'd realized at once that the body couldn't stay there. Remote as the site was, any search for Ely was bound to include the abris at which he'd been working, so he'd dragged the corpse through the brush to another one, a particularly well-hidden little cave in a nearby gully, and buried it there. Before the day was over, the scheme for the faked airplane crash had been developed and put into play. And by the next morning Ely Carpenter, actually lying under seven or eight inches of dirt in a little cave less than half-a-mile from Les Eyzies, had been officially lost at sea in the Bay of Biscay.

  "So it was actually Montfort in the plane?" Julie asked. "He was a pilot too?"

  No, it couldn't have been Montfort himself, Gideon told her, because he was still in Les Eyzies early the next morning, when he opened his door to a knock and found Jean Bousquet on his doorstep. Unknown to Montfort, Bousquet had been helping Ely, working in a clearing twenty yards away, putting dirt through a sifter, when Montfort had shown up. He'd heard the commotion and crept back in time to watch Montfort haul Ely's body off. Then, as he told Montfort, he had gone to his room in Madame Renouard's boarding house to think. He had spent the night in thought, and had at last come up with his master plan. Unfortunately for him, clear thinking wasn't his strong suit.

  He wanted 50,000 francs. If Professor Montfort would give him 50,000 francs he would leave Les Eyzies and go to Marseilles. He would give his solemn word never to say anything to anybody about what he had seen. But if Montfort refused, he would go to the police at once. What was Professor Montfort's reply to be?

  Naturally, Montfort shot him. With the only weapon at hand—the air rifle that he'd brought home from the abri, not knowing what else to do with it.

  "So there he was," Gideon said, "looking down at the second guy he'd murdered in the last twenty-four hours, this one bleeding all over his living room rug, and he felt as if he simply couldn't face the prospect of burying yet another body in another abri."

  "So he froze him instead?"

  "Well, as it happened, he already had a rented freezer in a cold-storage warehouse in Le Bugue—somebody used to give him the occasional haunch of venison or wild boar, and that's where he'd keep it— and the easiest, quickest thing to do seemed to be to drive there, dump Bousquet and the rifle into it, and lock it up tight."

  "And then what?"

  "And then figure out what to do, I suppose. But apparently he never could bring himself to deal with it, and the more time passed the harder it got. So since nothing was forcing his hand he just put it out of his mind, tried to pretend it never happened."

  Until last week, when things had suddenly changed. With Ely's body identified and Jacques showing clear signs of coming unglued, Montfort had had to get him out of the picture too, and it dawned on him that poor old Bousquet was his ticket for getting away with the whole mess. Out came the body, out came the rifle, and a day or so later, there lay the infamous Jean Bousquet on the banks of the Vézère."

  "The conscience-stricken victim of his own hand," Julie said softly, "after having done away with Jacques—and Ely, of course, by implication. The snake swallows itself. Go back a second, though. Why did Jacques have to be killed? Did he know something about the hoax?"

  He not only knew, Gideon told her, he'd taken part, providing Montfort with the fateful lynx bones from his museum. He'd been competing with Ely for the directorship at the time and knew full well that it would take a minor miracle for him to defeat the popular Carpenter. When Montfort, knowing his man all too well, casually suggested "a small prank" to bring Ely down a notch or two, Jacques thought he'd found his miracle. After a few days of waffling, he'd gone along with it, pilfering the bones from the museum—Montfort promised him the source would never be revealed, a promise he didn't waste any time breaking—turning them over to Montfort, and hurriedly stepping out of the picture. That had been the whole of Jacques' guilt, according to Montfort; the source of his "dreadful confession."

  "So he wasn't involved in Ely's murder," Julie said.

  "Nope, he was as much in the dark as anyone; he thought what we all thought—that Ely had gone down in his plane."

  "I'm glad. I didn't want Jacques to have anything to do with that."

  Gideon smiled. "I know what you mean. Anyway, whether Jacques put two and two together and figured out what the murder was about I don't know, but he surely realized there had to be some connection to the hoax. And he definitely knew Montfort was the one who'd engineered that."

  "So Montfort had to get to him," Julie said, slowly shaking her head. "Before he told you or Lucien."

  That was about it, Gideon told her. Later that morning, seeing Jacques whispering on the telephone, Montfort had casually wondered aloud within Madame Lacouture's hearing as to whom he might be speaking. When she told him that she had no idea—but that the call had been made to the Hotel Cro-Magnon—Jacques' death sentence was sealed.

  Montfort had followed him from the institute and trailed after him to La Quinze, done the deed, and then—"

  "—got Bousquet out of the freezer."

  "Yes, that night; like a three-year-old lamb chop. He thawed him out, more or less, in his bathtub—it couldn't have been an easy job, by the way, because the poor guy was bent like a pretzel from spending all that time in the freezer—and left him by the river, with the rifle under him, to be discovered by whoever happened by. It's really pretty brilliant, when you think about it."

  "It's rea
lly pretty depressing, when you think about it," Julie said. "Whew." She looked up at the sky. "The sun's over the yardarm and I could sure stand a glass of wine. How about you?"

  "You bet," Gideon said emphatically and glanced at his watch, "but let's have it at the hotel. Lucien promised to try to stop by at five. I told him we'd be in the upstairs lounge."

  Chapter 26

  By the time Joly had poured his second glass of Bergerac from the carafe on the sideboard, the first was having its mellowing effect. He sipped, rolled the wine luxuriously around his mouth, put down the glass, and smiled benignly at them, a man who had earned his ease.

  "I want to thank you—both of you—for your very great assistance."

  "Lucien," Gideon said, "I was on the phone to you the minute I figured out it had to be Montfort. You already knew. How?"

  In reply Joly passed him a photograph. "Does this person look familiar, Gideon? The picture's a few years old."

  Gideon looked at a murky photocopy of a shirtless, heavyset man sitting in a rowboat and squinting good-humoredly into the sun.

  Gideon handed it back. "Nope."

  Joly smoothed the photo on his thigh and with a few deft, precise squiggles of his pen, outlined a foppish goatee and began to fill it in.

  "Roussillot!" Gideon exclaimed, turning the picture toward him. "The fake Roussillot, the guy in St.-Cyprien!"

  "Yes," Joly said. "Not," he added pointedly, "that he bears much resemblance to the sketch you provided."

  "Well, hell, when did I ever say I was any good at—"

  "But who is he?"

  "His name is Paul-Marie Navarosse," Joly said, taking back the picture and admiring his artwork.

  "How did you find him?"

  By means, Joly explained, of dedicated, intelligent police work. As Gideon would remember, he had wondered from the beginning about Carpenter's airplane. What had really happened to it? Where was it now? One of his lines of investigation had involved contacting the aviation authorities for a list of persons who had registered the acquisition of a Cessna 185 in the twelve months following Carpenter's disappearance. There had been four of them, and when one—Navarosse—proved to be a small-time importer, a shady character who had twice been the subject of smuggling investigations (one conviction, overturned), Joly took a long, hard look at him.