“Put a star beside Manon’s name,” Florence said, rubbing her hands together. “This is getting so exciting.”
They went back to reading, Sylvie checking her watch. She had another thirty minutes.
“Wait a minute!” Marine said. “I’ve got more here: ‘M took some ribbon again. She thinks I don’t notice. Ha! But it was just a little scrap off the floor.’”
“The ribbon!” Sylvie exclaimed. “That’s how you got onto the Michaud track, right?”
“Exactly,” Marine said. “The girl in the painting is playing with a piece of gold ribbon.”
Anatole hit his forehead.
“What is it, Papa?” Marine asked.
“My time to make a phone call!” he said. “I should have thought of it an hour before. I’ll call Mme Michaud and ask her if her tante Amandine had any nicknames for Cézanne.”
“Brilliant, Dr. B!” Sylvie shouted.
He took out his small, out-of-date cell phone and slowly went through its address book until he found his ornery patient’s number.
“Use my landline, Papa,” Marine said.
“It’s a free call that way,” Florence added.
Dr. Bonnet quickly walked over to the telephone and dialed Mme Michaud’s number, while the three others turned in their chairs to watch him. Mme Michaud seemed to have answered on the third or fourth ring, and doctor and patient spoke of her aching legs and the weather. “Madame,” he finally said, “I’d like to thank you for loaning us your aunt’s notebooks. I just have a quick question, referring to some of Amandine’s notes. She doesn’t refer to Cézanne by name, even though you say he was a customer. Did she have a nickname for him? Do you remember it?”
Anatole looked down at the floor while the old woman answered. He turned to Marine, Florence, and Sylvie and gave them a thumbs-up, thanking Mme Michaud and hanging up.
“Le Fou is Paul Cézanne!” he cried.
“Manon and Cézanne, that’s it!” Marine said, clapping her hands.
“We did it!” Sylvie said.
“Not quite yet,” Florence said. “We don’t have her last name.”
“Right you are,” Anatole said. “Keep reading, everyone.”
“Amandine doesn’t seem to give the salesgirls’ last names,” Marine said.
“Yeah, that’s not important to her,” Sylvie said, snorting.
“Well, you never know,” Anatole said.
They kept reading for another twenty minutes until Sylvie looked at her watch again. “Just ten more minutes,” she said. “I can’t stop reading this stuff.”
“I know; it’s addictive,” Marine agreed.
They read on in silence until Sylvie shouted out, “Quel dommage! C’est horrible!” She tore off her reading glasses and put her head in her hands.
“What is it?” Anatole asked.
“There’s finally a date,” she said, shaking her head back and forth and running her fingers through her short hair. “And a year.” She put her reading glasses back on and read, “‘April 3rd, 1885. Morning off for Manon’s funeral.’”
• • •
Rebecca woke up and rubbed her neck. “Did I sleep long?” she asked. “My sore neck certainly feels like I did.”
“Yes,” Verlaque answered. “You slept through Burgundy and most of the Drôme. We’re almost in Avignon, so we’ll be in Aix soon.” Home.
While she had been sleeping he had been trying to connect to the Internet on his cell phone to look up photographs of Dr. Rebecca Schultz of Yale. The signal was finally strong enough somewhere south of Lyon, and he found three photos of her, taken for the Yale directory. It was definitely the woman now asleep in front of him. He took out his notebook and wrote, Why steal a Cézanne? R would have (1) a painting of C’s mistress, her pet project, but also (2) a Cézanne for herself, having been forced by the tax man to sell her parents’ collection.
He put his book down and mused, looking out the window at what was now very Provençal vegetation: white limestone cliffs, rocky sandy vineyards, groves of silvery olive trees. But why did Rebecca show up at the restaurant, painting in hand, terrified? Had it been a hoax? Was the painting still not safe? Was she planning on stealing it a second time? Or was the painting now sitting across from Officer Morice a fake? But she hadn’t seen the painting while she was in Aix; how could she have had a replica made in twenty-four hours? Unless she had an accomplice in Aix. Lydgate. Or his imposter, rather. He had seen it, and Verlaque had stupidly let him take photos. But she hadn’t known he would be going to Paris on the 7:05 train, so he had believed her when she said that the fact they had been on the same train was a coincidence. Unless she, too, had been on the motorcycle.
It was a good, very good, motive for murder, and one that had to do with honor: a tribute to Judy and Isaac Schultz.
Chapter Thirty-five
Love and Loss
Bruno Paulik was waiting for them on the quay. They said good-bye to, and thanked, Officer Morice, who handed Paulik the painting and turned around, walking toward the stairs that would take him up over the tracks to catch the next train back to Paris. Morice passed halfway on the overhead walkway and watched the judge and beautiful black woman walk toward the commissioner’s car, which was double-parked in front of the station. From here he could see Mont Sainte Victoire. He had once walked to the top of it, on a vacation with his Scout troop from Paris, when he was fifteen or sixteen. His troop master, still a friend, was a Cézanne freak and had told the boys that Cézanne painted the mountain more than one hundred times, never feeling like he got it right. “When you look at the mountain from afar,” he had said, “and the afternoon sun shines on it and breaks its rough surface into planes of color, you see that he did.” Morice grumbled to himself, Back to gray Paris, and walked away.
• • •
The police car was driven by a young moustached officer Verlaque had seen around the Palais de Justice. Paulik sat in the passenger seat and Verlaque sat in the back, next to Rebecca. Paulik’s cell phone rang and he mumbled yeses and nos, taking notes as he listened. “Parfait, Alain, merci,” he said, hanging up and turning around to face Verlaque. “Bingo on the motorcycle drivers,” he said. “Officer Schoelcher wasn’t making much headway until he thought to cross-check the owners’ names with their addresses.”
“And?” Verlaque asked, dreading hearing Pierre’s name.
“One moto owned by a guy named Eric Legendre fits the bill.”
“You’re not serious?” Verlaque asked. He thought of Mme Chazeau, who had referred to Eric Legendre as a bully.
Paulik turned to the driver and added, “We’ll drop the judge and professor off at the Palais de Justice and then head to twenty-three rue Boulegon.”
Rebecca grabbed Verlaque’s arm. “That’s where I’d seen him! He’s the neighbor! The night of M. Rouquet’s murder—”
“The guy who made us tea,” Verlaque said.
They passed a shopping zone full of oversize billboards, neon signs, and a McDonald’s. Rebecca watched it with interest, leaning on the car’s window ledge. “Wow,” she said. “This is worse than New Jersey.”
“You wouldn’t know,” Verlaque said. “You grew up in the Village and teach in Connecticut.”
She laughed. “Touché.”
Verlaque looked out the window at a block of apartments built so close to the highway he wondered how the residents could even carry on a conversation in their own flats. He thought of his parents’ luxurious life, so different, and so privileged that they didn’t even have to rent out their ground-floor one-bedroom apartment. “Bruno,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Who rents the storage space at twenty-three rue Boulegon? I know you told me . . .”
“The shop next door.” Paulik’s phone rang and he answered it.
“You know,” Rebecca said, turning to Verl
aque, “that couple on the rue Boulegon—the neighbors—they were hanging around when M. Rouquet let me in to his apartment. They were at their door when I went in, and when I left I felt like they were watching me, as if—”
“They were watching through the door’s peephole?”
“Exactly.”
Paulik snorted into the phone, laughed, and then said, “You made my day, Alain,” before hanging up. “That was Flamant,” Paulik said, turning back around. “They’ve got the guy pretending to be Lydgate.”
“Fantastic!” Verlaque said. “I was worried he had flown the coop.”
“He couldn’t have,” Paulik said, smiling.
“What do you mean?” Rebecca asked.
“Remember Lydgate’s alibi?” Paulik said. “The old farmer?”
Verlaque said, “Elzéard something.”
“Bois,” Paulik said. “Elzéard Bois. Well, the night of Rouquet’s murder, when he went to check on the man he thought to be Lydgate, Elzéard had been standing on the front steps, and Lydgate stood in the doorway and hadn’t invited him in. That bothered Elzéard, because he was usually invited in, for a nightcap, plus he really couldn’t see Lydgate—the imposter—very well.”
“Because of the dark,” Verlaque said.
“Right. So Elzéard’s been watching the place, becoming more and more suspicious, until he finally walks right up to the house, goes in, takes one look at the imposter, realizes he isn’t Edmund Lydgate, and knocks him out by hitting the back of his head with his hunting rifle. When Alain and the others got there, the imposter was tied up, sitting on a kitchen chair, swearing in English. Elzéard was sitting across from him, his rifle across his lap, drinking a fine Burgundy.”
“Does the imposter have a name?” Verlaque asked after he had stopped laughing.
“I don’t know yet,” Paulik replied.
“Bolibar,” Rebecca answered. “I’d bet my life on it.”
“I thought they got caught,” Verlaque said as they drove into downtown Aix. He quickly explained the story of the French American art handlers to Paulik.
“Only some of them went to jail, a few brothers and first cousins,” she answered. “The kingpin, Henri Bolibar, got off.”
“What did he look like?” Verlaque asked. “Enough to impersonate Lydgate?”
“It could work,” she answered. “He’d be about the same age, too.”
“Our motorcycle guy, Eric Legendre, doesn’t have the same name,” Paulik pointed out.
“What about her? His wife?” Verlaque asked. “The nosy neighbor.”
Paulik got back on the phone. “Salut, Jules,” he said. “Can you check the passport of Mme Legendre, please? What’s her maiden name?”
“They actually put maiden names on your passport here?” Rebecca whispered. “How archaic.”
Verlaque did his best Gallic shrug. “Mais oui.”
Paulik hung up. “Bolibar,” he announced. “Françoise Bolibar.”
• • •
“Our firm is representing the Bolibars,” Jean-Marc said, handing Verlaque a glass of whiskey.
“You’re kidding?” Verlaque asked.
“I wish I were. I’m having nothing to do with the case because of Pierre’s involvement,” Jean-Marc said. “The owner of my firm finally figured out that Pierre’s my partner.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It might have been,” Jean-Marc said, taking a handful of peanuts, “but I reminded him that I may be gay but I’m also faithful to my partner, unlike him at our last Christmas party. That ended the conversation. I’m also no longer with Pierre.”
Verlaque put his glass down. “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”
Jean-Marc waved a hand in the air. “No, it isn’t. Pierre should have been honest with me.”
“You had no idea he was collecting rent on the storage room?”
“No,” Jean-Marc replied. “Although I had wondered how he could afford Prada.” He managed a smile.
“How did he manage to rent the storage space that legally belonged to René?” Verlaque asked. “One of my officers looked up the deed.”
“Pierre told me he began using it years ago, to store his bicycle, and some boxes, and gradually took it over. René had no idea that he could be renting the débarras out. It didn’t occur to him that an empty room of four hundred square feet is worth some good money in downtown Aix. That’s what Pierre and René were arguing about after their last apartment owners’ meeting. At least he was honest about that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” Jean-Marc replied. “But there were other problems in our relationship. Anyway, he’s gone back to Toulouse to live near his family.”
Verlaque asked, “So what else can you tell me about the Bolibar clan?”
“Henri Bolibar, the old guy pretending to be Lydgate, is uncle to Françoise, but he claims he didn’t know that Eric and Françoise killed René. Henri was a part-time actor in New York; did a few television shows and theatre.”
“Then I don’t feel so bad for being duped,” Verlaque said. “He’s a fine cook, too.”
Jean-Marc laughed. “Eric Legendre and Françoise Bolibar moved to Aix a few months ago, hoping to stay cool after the fiasco in Long Island, but also hoping to make a few small thefts; there’s a lot of money, and antiques, between here and the Luberon. It was sheer coincidence that they landed at twenty-three rue Boulegon, although they admitted being charmed by living at Cézanne’s former address. As Pierre can confirm, the walls are paper thin between the two apartments, and they overheard René when he found the painting. He was jumping around and yelling—”
“Poor René,” Verlaque said, shaking his head back and forth.
“Françoise tried charming him,” Jean-Marc went on, “to get more information out of him, hoping to see the painting, but he wouldn’t budge, so last Friday night when he was out at the Bar Zola they broke into his apartment.”
“And he came home?”
“Yes,” Jean-Marc said. “There was a struggle; René threatened to call the police, and Eric Legendre threw him against the wall. René hit his head on the side of the fireplace—”
“And died.”
“In the meantime, they looked for the painting, but of course Momo had it. But they did find a spare set of apartment keys.”
“So they could go in and out of the apartment even when it was a crime scene.”
Jean-Marc poured them each some more whiskey. “Françoise had called her uncle Henri in New York and told him that René might have found a Cézanne. In the meantime, Henri found out that Lydgate was in the hospital—”
“Dr. Schultz’s parents never trusted Lydgate,” Verlaque confirmed. “The real one, that is.”
“That day you were in the apartment, with Pierre and Bruno Paulik,” Jean-Marc continued, “and you found the painting . . .”
“Across the street.”
“Right. Françoise Bolibar heard you guys run down the stairs, and watched you out her living room window run across to Momo’s and then walk out five minutes later with something rolled up under your arm, grinning like lunatics.”
“I thought we had been more discreet than that,” Verlaque said, wincing.
“So she immediately called her uncle, who caught the next flight over here,” Jean-Marc said. “It was easy to break into Lydgate’s house, or maybe he even had a key—we’re checking the locks on the farmhouse. It’s an isolated house, and Lydgate wasn’t there very often, and kept to himself—”
“Except for Elzéard Bois,” Verlaque said, laughing. “Wait a minute . . . what about Lydgate’s phone number that we found in René’s apartment?”
“Planted by Eric and Françoise the night they killed René, after you had all left. They had a spare key, remember?”
“They wanted to ge
t us up there, to Lydgate’s,” Verlaque mused.
“Right,” Jean-Marc said. “None of them had seen the painting at this point. It was a perfect way for Lydgate to try to get his hands on it. What will happen to the painting now?”
“Professor Schultz is examining it,” Verlaque said. “She believes that it’s a Cézanne. And then it’s being taken back up to Paris . . . not by me—”
Jean-Marc didn’t hide his smile.
“To be examined by more experts,” Verlaque went on. “This could take months, or years.”
“In the meantime,” Jean-Marc said, “we can have another sip of whiskey.”
“What are you doing this summer?” asked Verlaque. “July?”
Jean-Marc shrugged. “In August we were planning to visit Pierre’s sister who has a beach house in the Vendée. Now I have no plans. Why?”
“I’m hoping to throw a big party,” Verlaque said. “With Marine. I’ll keep you posted.”
• • •
Marine, her father, and Rebecca had been looking at the painting, not speaking, for almost thirty minutes. A fourth-year law student, recruited by Marine, was silently working at a nearby desk, cataloguing objects used in past investigations that had been left in the small windowless room, forgotten.
Rebecca Schultz had surprised Marine. She was beautiful, yes, but also friendly, open, and moved by the painting. Anatole Bonnet finally broke the silence by saying, “Now I know why Cézanne’s studio at Les Lauves always feels so sad.”
Rebecca said, “He had lost Manon, then his mother, then Zola. Zola sent Cézanne a copy of L’Oeuvre, Cézanne sent him a short thank-you note, and they never spoke again; he never forgave Zola for basing the unhappy artist in L’Oeuvre on himself. Three weeks later Cézanne married Hortense.”
“They weren’t married?” Marine asked. “They had a teenage son.”
“We refer to her as Mme Cézanne, even in the early portraits,” Rebecca said. “It just makes it easier. But no, they weren’t marrried.”
The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne Page 25