The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  These thoughts absorbed her so much that as she came out of the Notre-Dame des Champs Mètro station, it was as if she woke up. The Boulevard Raspail stretched ahead, its thin trees the full green of summer and its grayish-cream buildings wavering in the heat. It had been a long time since Rachel had observed Paris rather than moving through it, and it was for a moment both completely new to her and completely familiar. O so dear from far and near and white all / So deliciously you, she found herself thinking, although she hadn’t read Mallarmé for years. No murder should go unpunished in the middle of such beauty.

  Chapter Eight

  The Rachel who arrived at Chez Poule on Saturday with Alan and Magda was not the sweaty, thirsty, frustrated hymnist of three Wednesdays before but a focused, determined, attentive Police Consultant (in her mind the title was capitalized). In this guise she saw that despite its location, the café wasn’t aimed at scholars or tourists. The menu in its plastic cover listed almost entirely dishes designed to see their eaters through an afternoon of heavy labor: tarte flambée, choucroute of sausages with sauerkraut and bacon, thick stews and soups. The dining area was a dim cave, its walls and ceiling stained by tobacco smoke so ingrained that it hadn’t faded at all in the twelve years since the smoking ban. She knew that these days it was trendy to find such places charming, to relabel their insalubriousness as retro chic, but she didn’t think that would be possible with this place. It was and always would be a dive.

  A waiter appeared. “What can I get you?” He wasn’t exactly smiling, but he wasn’t completely antagonistic. Rachel felt hopeful about her information-gathering.

  To increase her chances, she ordered something to eat. After all, it was lunchtime. “I’d like the choucroute and a Coca Light, please.” She smiled warmly.

  “Stella Artois.” This was Alan’s standard weekend lunch drink.

  “Café noir,” said Magda.

  The waiter took their menus and began to leave, but Rachel’s voice stopped him. “This place is charming.”

  He seemed surprised at this description, but said, “I’ll tell the owner you said so.”

  “Have you worked here long?”

  He seemed even more surprised. “Two years.”

  “And you work this shift often, the lunch shift?”

  “Why?” Now he was suspicious.

  “No reason. Just—”

  “You haven’t come to talk about that mec in the toilet, have you? It was almost three weeks ago. Isn’t it old news by now?”

  Rachel felt the situation beginning to slip out of her hands. She tried to claw it back. “No, no, I haven’t come to talk about that. As a matter of fact, I work near here. At the Bibliothèque.” She couldn’t see how to transition smoothly from explanation to question, so she just slogged on. “My colleagues recommended I try this place. Maybe you know them? A tall woman with long black hair and a man with a beard and a tattoo here?” As she touched her forearm to show the location of Giles’s tattoo, Rachel realized how hopeless this was. They must have hundreds of customers a day. How would this man recognize Giles and LouLou from such vague descriptions? She should have borrowed the capitaine’s photos of them—except that then she would have had to tell him what she planned to do.

  Unsurprisingly, the waiter said, “I don’t remember anyone like that.”

  His tone suggested Rachel wouldn’t be presenting Capitaine Boussicault with any new information from Chez Poule. Still, she tried once more. “Funnily enough, they did work with the man who died here. They all worked together. Maybe they all used to come in for lunch together, too?”

  He gave her a long, level look, then said with precision, “No.” He walked away.

  Rachel flushed with embarrassment.

  “Nice work, Jessica Fletcher,” Alan said. She flashed him a look similar to the one the waiter had given her. “Sorry. But I still don’t understand what you’re trying to do here. And I don’t see why you had to bring me.”

  He had a point. After all, she and Magda had been successful the previous year without his help. But when he’d found out then that she’d been investigating without telling him then, he’d been furious—and justifiably so, she saw now. As a result, she’d decided that this time he should know everything, right from the start.

  Also, she needed his help.

  “I was trying to find out if LouLou and Giles used to come here but don’t anymore,” she explained. “Obviously that didn’t go the way I hoped. But I’m also trying to get a sense of the scene of the crime, because I”—she remembered Magda—“because we don’t really have that. And I brought you because the scene of the crime is a men’s room.”

  “But you’ve already been in it!”

  “I wasn’t really paying attention to my surroundings then.” The waiter reappeared and put their drinks down. She smiled feebly at him, but he just turned and walked away. “And now I can’t go in without attracting notice.”

  “But you can,” Magda chimed in, turning to Alan. She added helpfully, “Because you’re a man.”

  “So I’m here as your proxy.” Alan sighed. “Well, if that’s the case, I better drink up so the whole investigation doesn’t founder on my inability to play my vital role.” He took a huge swallow of his Stella Artois.

  Rachel put her hand on his raised arm. “Slow down. We don’t want to be conspicuous.”

  No one pointed out that it was probably too late for that. In fact, no one said anything. Alan took a second swallow, then another, then another, then drained his glass. The waiter brought Rachel’s choucroute and left again. At last Alan stood up. “Aux armes, citoyens,” he said, and walked toward the back corridor.

  Rachel ate and Magda fiddled with her coffee cup. The silence between them felt natural, then strained, then endless. At last, Alan reappeared and sat down. The women waited, but he said nothing.

  Finally, “What was it like?” Rachel asked.

  He shrugged. “It was like a men’s room. An ordinary, slightly run-down men’s room.”

  “But we’ve never seen a men’s room, so we don’t know what that means. Describe it.”

  “Okay.” Alan ran his hand through his hair, then took the last forkful of Rachel’s choucroute. “As you come in—well, as I came in—the urinals are right there, against the back wall. There were four.”

  “I hate the word urinal,” Magda said.

  Rachel nodded. “Me, too.”

  “And stall. I mean, stall is okay if it’s a barn stall, but as a bathroom word it’s just horrible.”

  Alan cleared his throat. “Excuse me.” The two women looked at him. He took a breath and picked up his thread. “So the ur—they’re on the back wall. And next to them, to the right of them, are the, er—” He glanced at Magda and said with a slight upward intonation, “Cabins?” She nodded. “Directly opposite those are the sinks.”

  Rachel cut in. “Could you make us a floor plan?”

  Alan knew she liked to see things in front of her. A few swift strokes and a rudimentary map drawn on a napkin lay on the table. She and Magda bent over it.

  “Interesting,” said Rachel.

  “What?” Magda squinted.

  “Boussicault said the evidence showed that Laurent was dragged into the stall after he was killed. And remember he was found with his fly unzipped? Put those two together, then add the fact that these”—she tapped the sketched urinals—“are next to the, uh, cabins, and we can assume that he died while or shortly after he was standing here.” She put her finger on the space in front of the urinals. “That would mean there are two ways it might have gone down.” She felt a thrill as she used the phrase. Who was being a Dashiell Hammett character now? “Someone could have walked up on him from behind, or they could have come up over the side of the first cabin.”

  “Oh my God, like in Blow Out. Remember John Lithgow—”

  “I remember.”

  Too late, Magda recalled that the image of John Lithgow looming over a stall divider to garrote a pro
stitute quite literally haunted Rachel’s dreams. “Sorry.” She added, as if offering consolation, “Or the murderer could have killed Laurent while he was washing his hands.”

  “But you wouldn’t wash your hands before you zipped your fly.” Rachel looked at Alan. “Or would you?”

  Alan shook his head. “I can’t speak for every man, but I wouldn’t, no.”

  “And what about other men you’ve been to the bathroom with? Would they?”

  He gave a snort of laughter. “Now here I can speak for every man. We don’t go to the men’s room ‘with’ ”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“other men. While you’re in there, the goal is not to look and not to listen. Even if you’re talking to another man, you just stare at the wall.”

  Not for the first time, Rachel was struck by the complexity of men’s relationships with each other. God knew they spent enough time worrying about the comparative size of their genitalia, but given an opportunity to compare, they actively avoided it! She recognized, however, that this was not the time to explore that piece of illogic. “Okay, then we’ll just have to rely on your general feeling. Do you think he would have washed his hands before he zipped his fly?”

  “No. But I also don’t think anyone killed him over the side of a stall.”

  “Why not?”

  “Think about it. The only plausible way to do that would be to stand on the toilet seat and brace your feet. But if you did that, the pressure would push the seat off the toilet bowl, in which case you’d be thrown off balance and probably put at least one of your feet in the toilet, which would make you break your grip on your—what was it?—your piece of string. No”—he shook his head again—“you couldn’t complete your murder standing on a toilet.”

  Rachel admired his reasoning skills. “An excellent point. Okay, so we can safely assume that he was killed either before or after he peed.”

  “But,” Magda jumped in, “the capitaine told you he had recently emptied his bladder. So it had to be after.” She turned to Alan. “Was the floor wet?”

  He frowned. “No. Why?”

  “Because the capitaine also told Rachel that the string the police found was wet, and they thought it was from being on the floor. But he didn’t mention anything about scuff marks on the floor, which you’d expect to find if the killer had fought not to slip on a wet floor. If the floor was wet during the murder, then the killer would need to be heavier than if the floor was dry, because a lighter killer would slip, which would leave scuff marks. More body weight would help keep the killer planted. So if the floor was wet, but there were no scuff marks at the scene, then we can deduce that the killer is pretty heavy, and that narrows down our suspects.” She shot Rachel a look. “Makes it more likely that it was a man, for example.”

  The women waited.

  “The floor was dry.” Alan grimaced. “Sorry. I really am. But it was.”

  “Okay. Okay. So we can’t rule out anybody based on the floor.” Rachel groped for an alternative scenario. “But …”

  “Well, the floor is dry today,” Magda interrupted. “We don’t know what it was like on the day Laurent was killed. They could have had a leak that’s been fixed since then.”

  She stood and walked to the bar. She smiled at the patron, pointed to their table, and wrote in the air with two pinched fingers. The patron nodded, then nodded again as Magda kept talking, then shook his head, then shook it more vehemently. Magda returned.

  “What was that about?”

  “I asked for the check.” Magda resumed her seat. “Then I asked him if there’d been a leak in the men’s room.”

  “You just asked? Without any excuse?”

  Magda nodded. How did she do it? Rachel wondered. When Maga asked strangers bizarre questions, they just answered them. They didn’t say “No” and walk way; they didn’t even look irritated. But, she pointed out to herself, Capitaine Boussicault had asked her, not Magda, to help him. She felt comforted. “What did he say?”

  “He said no. They had the plumbing overhauled last year, and the whole system is brand new.” She lowered her voice. “I think he thinks I’m an inspector.”

  Rachel tried to arrange her thoughts so they worked as neatly as Alan’s and Magda’s. “Well, if the floor was dry and the string was wet, that means the killer must have wet the string beforehand deliberately.”

  “Maybe he peed on it.” Magda looked pleased by this idea. “You know, to show contempt for the victim.”

  Alan was dubious. “He’d have to have good aim. Not to mention considerable dexterity, since he’d need to hold the string in one hand and his penis in the other, then pee in a straight line.”

  Unlike the previous moment, this was the sort when her husband’s reasoning skills irritated Rachel. She liked the idea of a killer so filled with contempt that he urinated on his weapon—it sounded like something out of a Jim Thompson novel. Also, it would mean that the killer was a man, which might mean it was Giles. “Maybe he put the string on a counter,” she said.

  Alan laughed. “Okay, maybe. But I think if you’re the sort of killer who goes in for symbolism, surely killing someone in a men’s room is enough of a symbol of contempt. Or why not just pee directly on the body? Still scornful; much easier in terms of aim.” When Rachel wrinkled her nose disgustedly, he said, “You wanted a man along on this visit.”

  “Okay.” Magda spoke across them. “No peeing. Which makes sense if it’s LouLou, anyway. So let’s say the killer wet the string for practical purposes. What purposes?”

  “Can string hold a fingerprint?” Rachel wondered. “He could have wet it to avoid that. if wetting would do that. Or to make it stronger? Is wet string stronger than dry string?”

  Magda and Alan had no answers.

  The waiter slapped the receipt down on the table and scurried away, casting one final angry glance behind him.

  “I’ll buy a ball of string on the way home.” Magda reached in her bag to pay the check.

  Chapter Nine

  Rachel and Magda spent their Sunday afternoon wetting string and garroting Rachel’s couch cushions. They found no difference in strength between dry string and wet string, and an evening spent searching the Internet didn’t answer the question of whether string could hold fingerprints, or whether wetting it would make any difference to that. So it was a glum Rachel who made her way to the Bibliothèque on Monday. So much for ordering the world, she thought. She’d started with a body in a bathroom, and now she had a dislikable victim, a mysteriously wet piece of string, an angry waiter, and at least two potential murderers. If anything, she was disordering the world, especially since, she now had to admit, her belief that Giles was the murderer was largely based on the fact that the murder had happened in a men’s room.

  The day seemed determined to deepen her gloom. The reading room’s patrons requested only the heaviest books, and all requested them at once; a wheel broke off one of her trolleys and she had to reattach it with tape; it turned out that the peach she’d included in her lunch was mealy. Rachel couldn’t have been called a cheerful optimist at the best of times, and by six o’clock her back ached, her thumb had been jammed under a trolley wheel, and she had been denied dessert. She was beginning to regret deeply that she had ever agreed to help with the investigation.

  So it gave her some pleasure to find Giles and LouLou arguing in the employee lounge. If she was going to be unhappy, she didn’t see why she had to be unhappy alone. Also—her spirits lifted a little—who knew what the argument might reveal? It had been three days since she’d seen any sort of development in the case, but arguments, like anger, encouraged revelations. She pricked up her ears.

  “It’s rightfully mine,” Giles was saying.

  “I don’t see why. You haven’t been promoted.” LouLou’s voice was impatient.

  “Not officially. But you were hired after me, so if either of us is going to get moved up, it’s going to be me.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that. It’s no
t like a tapis roulant: one goes and the next in line takes his place. Anyway, even if you were moved up”—LouLou’s tone suggested depthless scorn at this idea—“there’s no reason why you would move into his locker. Yours is exactly the same.”

  They were fighting about a locker? Rachel moved farther into the room. Giles and LouLou stood in front of the double row of employee lockers, Giles with his hand on the handle of the central one in the upper row. It wouldn’t take much of a detective to figure out that this must be the locker in question, and not much more of one to work out that the “he” in question was Guy Laurent. So they were fighting over Guy Laurent’s locker. For a moment Rachel felt like laughing.

  “The symbolism is obvious,” Giles said patiently. He looked pained at having to argue with LouLou, but he also looked like he wanted to win. “Laurent was assistant head, and now that he’s gone I will be made assistant head, and I should have the assistant head’s central locker!”

  LouLou snorted. She did not look pained. She looked derisive, determined, and very angry. “What is it about you men and your need to be superior?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t make everything about gender,” Giles said plaintively. “Gender is just a construct.”

  LouLou snorted again. “Only the privileged gender would say that. Why don’t we talk to Docteure Dwamena about your little masculine primacy issue? Why don’t we see what another woman has to say about it?”

  “Bien sûr.” Giles stuck his chin out. “Why not right now?” He picked up his messenger bag and slung it over his shoulder, gesturing for LouLou to precede him through the door. She did, but as she passed his outstretched hand, she gave an instinctive jerk.

  They were gone so quickly that Rachel wasn’t sure they even noticed her.

  She sat down in one of the lounge chairs. What a mess, she thought. She had no idea if LouLou had ever been romantically interested in Giles, but he had at least some sort of affection for her. Yet here they were, Giles fighting for every crumb that could demonstrate his superiority and LouLou angry at every man on the planet, and all because of the nasty machinations of Guy Laurent. Just for a moment she wondered if it was all an act. Maybe Giles and LouLou had committed the murder together. Except that she couldn’t see LouLou letting down her guard enough to work with Giles, or Giles giving her a moment in the planning process in which to speak.