by Gerald Jay
Molly’s first thought on opening her door was that they hadn’t cleaned her room yet or she’d entered the wrong one, but the clothes on the floor were unmistakably hers. The bureau drawers were open and everything had been dumped out. Her heart pounding, Molly scoured the small room as if there was actually somewhere in it for someone to hide. Fortunately everything she had of importance was in the bag on her shoulder—her wallet, her tape recorder, her passport, her return plane ticket.
Then she remembered the jewelry. She ran to the suitcase on the floor beside the armoire. Like a dummy, she hadn’t locked it. She opened the small zippered compartment inside and there were her parents’ familiar rings and watches just where she’d left them. Removing the jewelry, Molly put all of it in her shoulder bag.
Then, one by one, she picked up her clothes, folded them neatly, and tucked them back into the drawers. She felt violated at having someone rummaging through her things, felt almost like crying but angry enough to smash whoever it was. No wonder Favier provided a blackjack in every room. As far as she could tell, however, nothing was missing. If they didn’t take the jewelry, what were they after? Molly wondered if someone was trying to frighten her, scare her away, because if so they were doing a good job. And who the hell was it?
She was about to go down to report the break-in when the telephone rang. It was an excited Kevin. She couldn’t recall ever being so glad to get a phone call. Kevin wanted to know why he hadn’t heard from her.
“I was getting worried about you. Didn’t you get my messages?”
“What messages?”
He said he’d called three times and each time left a message with the guy who answered the phone. “What the hell kind of hotel is that you’re staying at?”
“I’m beginning to wonder.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. It’s just that—”
“What’s going on there, Molly?”
She told him what she’d found when she came back to her hotel room. “I know I shouldn’t have been so upset, but it’s been a tough day.” She described her meeting with Ali Sedak, who she didn’t like and didn’t trust, but she felt even more strongly now after seeing him that he wasn’t the murderer. Then she told him about the rock-throwing anti-Sedak rally she’d gotten caught up in and René Arnaud, the local FN leader, grabbing and shaking her like a martini.
“The son of a bitch! I wish I’d been there with you.”
“Oh Kevin! So do I …”
“How can I just drop everything, Molly? We’re set to open in two days. The rest of the cast is counting on me.”
“I understand.”
“I’d feel like such a bastard.”
“Of course. Don’t mind me. Forget it. This business is taking more out of me than I realized.”
“Small wonder. You poor kid. Do you have any idea when you’ll be back?”
“Not too much longer, I hope. I don’t think I’d last. Miss you, Kev.”
She didn’t like herself at all trying to play for sympathy. After washing her face, she put on some fresh lipstick and looked herself over in the mirror. “Okay, Molly,” she said, “now snap out of it.”
Favier was seated at the front desk when she came downstairs.
“Someone broke into my room while I was out.”
He was no more alarmed than if she’d asked for another hanger.
“It’s not possible, mademoiselle. No one comes into my hotel without my knowing about it. I am always right here.”
“You weren’t there when I came in.”
“Even a camel pees once in a while. So, what are you missing?”
“Nothing, as far as I can tell.”
“Voilà! Then how do you know someone was in your room?”
“How do I know?” Molly was fuming. “I know because I found the drawers open and my clothes all over the floor. That’s how!”
“Perhaps you simply forgot to put them away before you went out.”
Molly’s eyes went through him like a drill. “Someone was in my room.”
“Well, maybe in hotels in your country, but in all my years in Taziac there has never been a robbery at the Fleuri. Even one in which nothing was missing. You are slandering my hotel, mademoiselle.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“Allow me to make a suggestion. If you’re not happy here, I suggest tomorrow you find another hotel more to your liking. Okay?”
33
AN INTERIM REPORT
Mazarelle had come into the commissariat early to use his computer and had just finished his interim report. Tired, he sat back in his desk chair and lit his pipe; the tobacco flared up and glowing shreds of Philosophe showered down on his lap. He brushed them off and, though not especially eager to read what he’d written, reached for the pages in the printer’s out tray. Of all the many areas of police work, probably his least favorite was preparing reports. The only cop he ever knew who actually enjoyed writing them was Fabriani the fussbudget, his old boss in Paris, but Fabriani was always a little strange. One of a kind. Someone who, despite the daunting odds against it, still expected the world to stand at attention for him. They had made allowances for each other.
A copy of his report would go to Christine Leclerc and, if the investigating magistrate approved, to the procureur. Though he’d discussed his progress on the case with each of them on the phone and in person, they now insisted on something in writing before proceeding to trial.
“This is what we now know,” his report began. “The accused, Ali Sedak, a thirty-three-year-old French citizen, was born in Algeria. As a teenager, he was often in trouble there with the law. His antécédents judiciares included robbery, resisting arrest, and drug possession. Arriving in France in 1985, the Sedaks settled in Toulon in the high-crime quarter by the waterfront known as Chicago. His father soon abandoned the family, returning to North Africa. Ali was left behind with his five brothers and sisters and an alcoholic mother who could barely speak French. He grew up on the streets of Toulon, fending for himself. With the exception of two suspended sentences for brawling and drug possession, however, he seems to have kept his nose clean.”
After sketching in the background of the accused, Mazarelle outlined the case against him:
Ali Sedak had been working off the books as a handyman at L’Ermitage, which is managed by an English company named Vacation Villas in France that had rented the property to four foreigners for the month of June. On the twenty-fourth, the night of the crime, one of them who was helping Ali with his work—Schuyler Phillips—was killed in a barricaded, hidden room in the barn. The missing murder weapon was most likely a twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun, based on the number and size of the lead pellets medical examiner Dr. Langlais removed from the body, the nature of the wounds, and two small fiber wads discovered on the floor. A weapon answering to that general description has been found in an adjoining house, and we are currently in the process of locating the English owners in order to gain permission to have it tested.
Phillips’s wife and friends were killed soon afterward. The murder weapon used in each of these three crimes was an old World War II bayonet belonging to Sedak, and allegedly used by him in his work. His blood as well as that of his victims was found on it. All three were bound hand and foot with blue tape, the kind Sedak used in his work. Their hands behind their backs, they were each tied in identical fashion—the tape being wound over and under each victim’s wrists—and, most likely, by the same person. Though technicians found a number of smeared fingerprints on this tape, only two were clearly identified: one of a right index finger on the tape binding Monsieur Reece and one a right thumbprint on the gag in his wife’s mouth. Both prints matched those of the accused.
There were two cigarette butts and a cigar stub on the blood-streaked tile floor in the kitchen, where the cleaning woman Georgette Chambouvard had dropped an ashtray. DNA tests revealed that the cigar had been smoked by Reece. The cigarettes were Marlboro Lights,
one of which had been smoked by Madame Phillips and the other by the accused, which would seem to place Ali Sedak in the house on the night of the murders.
In the days leading up to the killings, the accused has admitted that he personally used a large amount of hashish every day, mixing it with tobacco. He also had many gambling debts. It was during this period that Reece reported the theft of his Visa card and 2,500 francs to the police. The Visa was soon recovered at the BNP in Bergerac, where it was seized by the ATM machine after someone had tried and failed several times to enter the correct PIN. When placed in the garde à vue cell, Sedak revealed that he’d stolen Reece’s credit card.
The morning of the day of the murders, according to the owner of the Café Valon in Taziac, Sedak was there playing pool with Eugène Rabineau. Rabineau—a dealer known locally as Rabo—confirmed this and said that later they went to smoke dope and talk. He said Ali mentioned the rich Americans vacationing at L’Ermitage but nothing more. The dealer told us that he left for Marseilles that afternoon on business and didn’t return until the next day. His story is still being checked by my investigators.
Early on the following morning, at 1:24 of the twenty-fifth, 2,000 francs were withdrawn by someone using Monsieur Reece’s MasterCard from the Banque Crédit Agricole in Taziac. He was photographed by the ATM surveillance camera wearing a blue bandanna around his head like that worn by Ali Sedak. A half hour later at the BNP branch at Eymet, he used the same card to get 4,300 francs and the Visa of Madame Phillips to withdraw 7,000 francs. That same morning at about the same time two brief phone calls were made on Phillips’s mobile to the Sedak house. This mobile was later found in the trunk of Sedak’s car. As to the money, it may have been used to buy the five kilos of hashish later seized at his house, though Rabineau emphatically denies having sold it to him.
The inspector then proposed a theory. He suggested that in its origin Sedak’s plan was not murder but theft, and drug related:
If the crimes committed on the evening of the 24th began as robbery, they quickly escalated to murder when Phillips, a big man, put up resistance. After that, apparently the sudden return of his wife and friends sealed their fate.
The principal question is how could one man have murdered all four of these people. A reasonable answer is that he couldn’t. The dealer Rabineau, despite his alibi, may well have been involved. The wife of the accused, Thérèse, has been questioned, and there is no doubt that she lied about events surrounding the night of the crime. She has no witnesses to corroborate her story that she didn’t go out that evening or the next day because her baby was ill. Although the .22 rifle owned by the Sedaks hadn’t recently been fired, PTS examiners found that it does have both her and her husband’s fingerprints on it. There is, however, no trace of her presence at L’Ermitage.
On the other hand, is it possible that Sedak could have committed these murders by himself? Perhaps. If he shot one of the victims before the return of the others, he would have been confronting three unsuspecting people. Perhaps they thought their companion had gone somewhere with Sedak. They might well have been sitting at the dining room table, waiting for his return, when Ali appeared. Faced with what they believed was a loaded shotgun, they would have followed his orders to lie facedown on the kitchen floor with their hands behind their backs. He could have taped Monsieur Reece’s wrists and ankles first because he posed the greatest threat to him. But after binding only the wrists of both the women, Ali could have gotten Madame Reece to her feet, walked her quickly into her bedroom, pushed her facedown on the bed, and then gagged her and taped her ankles. After that, he could have done the same to Madame Phillips, leading her up the stairs to her bedroom in the tower. With the three of them at his mercy, the rest would have been easy.
Mazarelle signed the report and tossed his pen on the desk. It was okay as far as it went, but there was still too much left to the imagination to satisfy him. Sitting back, he puffed away at his pipe and watched the smoke rings popping out of his mouth like quoits. Oh yes, they probably had enough evidence there to convict. And yet he’d an uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong. Was it the tenacity with which Ali, right from the start, had insisted on his innocence? People who knew him, like Chambouvard and his daughter, agreed that it was possible he stole the credit cards, the money, but not the rest. Even those like Mickey, at the Café Valon, who tagged him a prick didn’t believe that he was a monster.
Mazarelle kept thinking of his call yesterday to Toulouse to find out how PTS was doing with Ali’s car. He’d been trying to push Didier—the head of operations at PTS—for the results, but he was a hard man to rush. It was what Didier said just before he hung up that troubled the inspector. He’d wondered why in a crime so blood-soaked and violent, his men hadn’t found a single bloody handprint or footprint in the kitchen or, for that matter, anywhere in the house. And only two dry prints on the smudged tape, prints as sharp as if they had been carefully planted there.
The ringing of his telephone startled him. Lucille said Mademoiselle Reece was downstairs to see him. Should she send her up? Mazarelle slipped the report into his top drawer and emptied his pipe into the ashtray. Then quickly straightened out the small bowl of daffodils on his desk that Duboit’s wife, Babette, had sent him. He wondered how the blockhead had explained the scratches on his cheek to her. Babette was no fool.
The sound of her footsteps on the stairs announced Mademoiselle Reece, who strode into his office as if she had been there a hundred times before. A little angry about something, he guessed, but it did good things for her complexion. Mazarelle had been right about the way a beauty like that lit up a room when she entered it. Her green and yellow scarf a perfect match for her jacket and his daffodils. Before she could say a word, he pulled over a chair and invited her to sit down.
“I’ve got good news for you,” he said.
“I could use some good news.”
Mazarelle reported that he’d spoken to the medical examiner. Dr. Langlais would be finished with his tests in a few days. He’d be free to release the bodies of her parents then, and she could take them back with her to the United States.
Molly thanked him. “But right now I need a place to stay in Taziac.” She assumed correctly that he’d seen the papers or heard from his men all about her scene with Arnaud yesterday at the demonstration, so she skipped that. She told him what had happened when she got back to her room at the Fleuri.
“I don’t know who ransacked it, but I can’t stay in that hotel another day.”
Mazarelle’s face darkened and heavy wrinkles appeared to weigh down his forehead. Mademoiselle Reece seemed to have an uncanny knack for swimming into shark-infested waters. She definitely needed a safe place to stay. He ran the back of his finger over his mustache and thought, Why not? She could be his guest. Why didn’t he think of it before? He’d plenty of room in his house, and he’d be able to keep an eye on her at the same time. It made perfect sense. But then again, he reconsidered, an attractive young woman might not understand his motives. Looked at that way, in fact, Mazarelle didn’t even trust them himself. Reaching for the phone, he dialed someone he could trust.
“But of course,” Louise Charpentier said, when told who it was who needed a roof. She had felt personally outraged about the murders and greatly admired the young woman’s pluck when she’d seen her picture in the morning paper and read that she’d called René Arnaud a facho. Besides, she didn’t think Ali Sedak was the killer either, regardless of the evidence. Racism, pure and simple, she called his indictment. Nevertheless, in the end she trusted her friend Mazarelle to do the right thing. “Bring her right over, mon ami.”
34
THE ALTAR OF THE BLACK BISON
Everyone in Taziac knew Madame Charpentier. It wasn’t that she was loved or respected or even that after more than four decades she still made and sold the best bread in town, which she did. In fact, as an outspoken Communist in conservative Taziac, she was if anything a pain in the ass, but
she was Taziac’s pain in the ass. Louise Charpentier was as much an institution in the village as its Gothic church or its spring basket festival or Gaston Amiel, its legendary pétanque champion.
And everyone knew her story. As a teenager during the war, she became a hero of the Resistance. Working as a courier, she traveled by train carrying secret messages taped to her back. She had many close calls, actually seemed to live a charmed life until her husband returned, wounded and depressed, from captivity, having lost an eye.
Louise Charpentier’s hair had been white as flour for as long as anyone in Taziac could remember. Short and brushed straight back off her forehead as if she wanted to see everything and was ready to meet the world head-on. But her face, on the other hand, was remarkably youthful for a woman in her late seventies, who had worked all her life and been through what she had. Work was something Madame Charpentier took great pride in. She was a Communist of the old school, a Communist like Maurice Thorez.
Age had done little to cool the passions of Louise Charpentier, but these days she didn’t always have the energy to argue. Although she stood silently to one side behind the counter of her boulangerie, leaning on her cane and listening to the chatter of the customers as Gabrielle filled their orders, it was clear who was in charge. Madame Charpentier was a personage.
Her eyes brightened when the inspector came through the door and she raised her eyebrows when he wrapped her in his arms, kissed her on both cheeks. Complimenting her on the bright blue blouse she was wearing.
“I see you have a new man in your life.”
“Make that two,” she said drily. “They don’t come the way they used to.”
Mazarelle rolled his eyes. “I should have known.”