The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  “I am shameless in the service of detection,” Magda said loftily.

  “That would be a great slogan for an agency. ‘Levis and Stevens: shameless in the service of detection.’ ”

  “Stevens and Levis, I think you’ll find.” Magda kept staring straight ahead, but the corners of her lips twitched.

  They stepped out onto a grand landing, all carved wood and high windows, but with a linoleum floor to deal with the heavy foot traffic. To the left a corridor stretched into the distance, occupied only by small trash cans that stood in front of most rooms waiting to be emptied. Room 512 was in almost the exact middle, its can neatly placed to the right of its door. Magda leaned against the wall just as she had in the hotel. “Go ahead.” She nodded at the door. “Do your thing.”

  “My thing?” They had been moving so fast to get to the Auberge, and then to manage to get into it, that Rachel hadn’t stopped to wonder what Magda had planned for when they actually reached Professor Dale’s room. “This is where she lives. You said we were going to scope out where she lives.”

  “We are. But we can’t scope it out if we can’t get into it. Go ’head.’ ” She nodded toward the door.

  Rachel marveled at her friend’s ability to let her memory burnish the past. It had taken her three tries to manage the key card door and she’d picked a key lock once, eighteen months before, but from the way Magda lounged against the wall, anyone would think Rachel was an experienced picklock with an extensive set of tools in her bag and a string of successful larcenies behind her. “No,” she said, feeling a sense of déjà vu. “Absolutely not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—because one lock a day is enough. One lock a life is enough.”

  And because, she couldn’t bring herself to admit to Magda, she liked Professor Dale. She hadn’t particularly cared about breaking into Robert Cavill’s room, because even if he wasn’t a murderer, he was loud and had an irritating laugh. But even though Aurora Dale was a suspect, she was also a sensible widow who contributed to her grandchildren’s school fees, valued fiscal discretion, and had never annoyed Rachel. Rachel couldn’t pop the lock of such a person and rifle through her belongings. But she knew that if she said any of that aloud, Magda would try to argue her out of it, making remarks about the detective’s objectivity and the need to check out every possibility, when all Rachel really wanted was to get out of the hallway before they were caught crouching in front of Professor Dale’s door.

  So instead she said, “Because this isn’t To Catch a Thief. I’m not going to go around breaking into any place we feel like exploring, like some sort of female Cary Grant.”

  “I should be so lucky,” Magda snorted. “And you’re remembering the movie wrong.” She rocked back to a sitting position, accidentally knocking over the trash can, and massaged her thigh muscles. “Cary Grant isn’t the thief. Grace Kelly and her mother think he’s the thief, and so do the police.” She righted the trash can and started putting its spilled contents back inside it. “But it’s actually his buddy’s daughter—”

  “Hush,” Rachel said.

  “Right, sorry.” Magda looked up. “You don’t want to know the ending. Do you want to watch it again? We could—”

  “Be quiet.” Rachel’s voice was urgent. “Be quiet and look.”

  She pointed at the trash that still lay on the floor: several balled-up tissues smeared with blotted lipstick; a few strands of dental floss; some crumbs of used eraser. And amid it all, nearly hidden by one of the tissues, lay the crumpled innermost portion of a ball of string.

  Rachel took her key ring out of her bag and handed Magda the tweezers from the Swiss army knife. “Here. Pick it up. And then we need to leave.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The length of string lay in a plastic baggie on Rachel’s kitchen table, where she, Alan, and Magda sat and stared at it. It was about four inches long, slightly unraveled at one end, cleanly cut at the other. It wasn’t wet; it wasn’t stretched. Rachel imagined a full ball of string with the piece that had been used to strangle Guy Laurent somewhere in its midst and this one, like a tangential witness to a crime, attached but far enough away to be innocent. She put out a finger and touched the plastic bag.

  “It’s a problem,” Alan said. “I don’t know how the police would deal with a breaking and entering that didn’t involve taking anything, but I’m sure they wouldn’t be pleased to find out that in a non–breaking and entering you’d still removed and held on to something that might be important evidence. Especially since, given that you obtained it by entering a building under false pretenses, and from her private trash, it might not be admissible now.”

  “We couldn’t just leave it there for housekeeping to dump out.” Rachel fought to keep her voice level.

  “That’s why I said it was a problem.”

  “Exigent circumstances!” Magda’s tone was triumphant. “And it was in a trash can outside her door, so I don’t think there was a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

  “I don’t think that comes into it, since you’re not police officers,” Alan pointed out.

  Magda looked personally wounded. “Well, no, we’re not.”

  “And I think if you’re just a private citizen, taking something from somebody’s trash can counts as stealing. I really don’t know, since I’m also not a policeman. Or a lawyer. In fact, I’m not even sure about reasonable expectation of privacy and so on—things may be different under French law. Why don’t you ask Benoît?”

  Benoît! Rachel hadn’t thought of Magda’s boyfriend since the dreadful moment when she’d worried that he and Alan might be secret sadists. Now that his name came up, though, she saw how perfect a resource he would be. He was a lawyer at one of the top legal firms in Paris. His advice would be sound.

  Alan and Rachel waited, staring at the string, while Magda called Benoît from their bedroom. When she returned, her face was sober.

  “So it is considered stealing,” Alan said.

  “It’s a problematic legal area.”

  Alan took a breath. “I know neither of you is going to like hearing this, but I think your best choice is to take it to Boussicault. Since both the string and your hotel adventure complicate the idea that Cavill’s guilty, he might be glad, even if it’s only because you make him aware of evidence he needs to refute.”

  Normally Rachel would have objected to the phrase your hotel adventure, but she had larger worries at that moment.

  “He won’t be glad,” she said. Boussicault had originally seemed to her to be a vaguely avuncular figure, but the exchange in his office the week before had somehow transformed him in her mind into a permanently grouchy father. When she imagined presenting him with the string and the story of their search of Cavill’s room, he moved from grouchy to enraged.

  “Okay, he’ll probably be angry,” Alan began, but her phone pinged a text, and he waited.

  She looked at the screen. “Speak of the devil. It’s Boussicault.” She read silently, then looked at Magda. “He wants us to come to the commissariat.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Two tiny black-and-white figures emerged from a black-and-white elevator into a black-and-white corridor. They briefly stood still in front of a door. Then one of them looked left and right, took something out of her shoulder bag, and appeared to bend over the doorknob. After some seconds—fewer than forty-seven, Rachel saw with pleasure—the door opened and they entered a room. The door shut behind them.

  Capitaine Boussicault tapped his mouse, and the video stopped. He turned the monitor back to face him, carefully aligning its base precisely with a dust-free square on his desktop before he spoke.

  “So you broke into Docteur Cavill’s room.” He looked at Rachel and Magda meditatively.

  Neither woman said anything. What is there to say? Rachel wondered. They had broken into Robert Cavill’s room. Besides, Boussicault’s remark didn’t sound like a question.

  “Did you think the police wouldn�
�t search the room? Did you think we wouldn’t ask to see the security readings?”

  Again there seemed to Rachel to be no good answer. She was hardly going to admit that yes, frankly, she hadn’t thought the police would go to Cavill’s hotel, since the engraving seemed like more than enough evidence on its own, or that she had forgotten all about the possibility of security cameras. And even now that Boussicault was asking questions, it still didn’t sound like he expected answers. She felt a sinking feeling in her stomach that she remembered from her one and only visit to the principal’s office.

  “But we didn’t find anything,” Magda said. “And not only is that significant to your investigation, but I don’t see how it affects your case if we went in but didn’t take or find anything.”

  The capitaine took a deep breath. “Did you wear gloves when you searched the room?”

  Magda shook her head.

  “So it is now covered in your fingerprints, which cannot be explained away because you had no reason to be there, and which raise the possibility that you planted anything there that we might want to use as evidence. And although you were right to deduce that the murderer presumably would still have the second illustration …”

  Magda straightened.

  “… you forgot that Docteur Cavill could easily have hidden it in the safe at his hotel, or in a bag left in a bus station locker, or in any number of places known to him and not to you. Which would render your search irrelevant.”

  Magda slumped down.

  Rachel felt that Boussicault was being overly harsh. All right, they’d been foolish, but that was no reason to be mean to her best friend. Plus, hadn’t they brought some actual evidence with them to this very meeting? And hadn’t they handled that evidence carefully, and fingerprintlessly? And, unlike evidence that by its absence apparently proved nothing, their evidence by its presence at least suggested something important. What would Boussicault say to that?

  She put the baggy with the string inside it on his desk. “Well, what about that? Is that irrelevant?”

  Boussicault peered at it. “What is that?”

  Rachel explained, and explained how they’d found it, ending triumphantly with, “And we held it with tweezers until we wrapped it in a tissue.”

  “And then put it in that baggy as soon as we got home,” Magda finished.

  The capitaine sat still for a long time, his eyes on the string. Then he picked up the baggy, held it to the light, then put it down again.

  “Well?” Rachel pointed at the string. “Doesn’t that open the possibility that someone besides Cavill is the killer? Isn’t that important? String was the weapon in Laurent’s murder!”

  “And we didn’t break, or enter, to get it,” Magda added. “We found it in Dr. Dale’s trash can.”

  “You found this string,” Boussicault clarified. Magda nodded eagerly. He looked back down at it, steepling his fingers in front of him. His voice didn’t rise as he spoke, but it grew progressively tighter and tighter. “This string, which you brought home—thus breaking the chain of evidence—and held in both a tissue and a bag from your home, thus opening it up to contamination? This string that a defense counsel could argue you stole, since you acquired it after entering a private residence under false pretenses, then rummaging around in someone’s rubbish without permission.”

  “We didn’t rummage!” cried Magda. “It fell into my lap.”

  The capitaine looked at Rachel and took a deep breath. “Madame Levis,” he said calmly, “I am angry. I told you that the police no longer needed your help, but it does not seem that you understood me. I fear that your success in the case of Edgar Bowen may have given you false ideas about what it means to be a detective. And I may also be at fault. By involving you in the earlier part of this investigation—although your work was very helpful—I think I made you feel a competency which you don’t possess. At least”—he seemed to try to soften the blow—“not yet.

  “Now, however, I must be plain. Your help is no longer helpful. In fact, now your help is interfering with an investigation and compromising evidence, both of which can be chargeable offenses.”

  He inhaled deeply once more, and his face softened. “I understand how frustrating it is not to know the end of a story. I promise I will contact you when I have closed this case. Meanwhile, relieve yourself of unnecessary exertion and go sit in some air-conditioned café where you can enjoy an apéro. I wish I could join you.” He half rose from his chair. “Merci.”

  He couldn’t have indicated the end of the meeting more clearly if he had ushered them to the door and shut it behind them.

  * * *

  On the street the heat hit like a cement wave, fueling Rachel’s fury. “We were patronized!” Her face blazed. “He patronized us!” It didn’t sound any better in the active voice.

  “And he kept our string!” added Magda.

  They stood, linked in frustration, until Rachel said, “Fine, let’s take his advice. Let’s go somewhere air-conditioned and have a drink.”

  They went to the same café they’d visited the last time they’d been dismissed from Boussicault’s office. Rachel asked for two glasses of red wine, still so angry that she inadvertently spoke in English, only realizing when she saw the blank look on the waiter’s face. “Deux verres de vin rouge,” she self-corrected, and when they arrived, she took a long swallow from her glass.

  “Whoa there, Nelly.” Magda held out a hand.

  “I know, I know. But—” Rachel took another, smaller, swallow, then put down the glass. “First of all, I hate to say it, but he’s right: I do want to know how the story ends, and I don’t want someone to tell me. I want to see it for myself.”

  “Or make it happen,” Magda pointed out.

  “Or make it happen.” Rachel took another sip. “But more importantly, we did a lot work for him. I found that sheet of Laurent’s, and that’s what linked the murder to the thefts!”

  “And you noticed the paper in Cavill’s jacket.”

  “And I noticed the paper in Cavill’s jacket.” She took a larger sip. “And what about LouLou? She must still be a suspect, especially if they don’t find that Cavill hid the illustration somewhere. She’s the next obvious suspect.” She finished her glass and gestured for another. “Who’s going to help her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The waiter put a fresh glass in front of Rachel. She took a mouthful from it, ruminating for a minute before she swallowed. “You know what?” she said.

  “What?”

  “We have to keep going.”

  “You’re kidding.” Magda put her own glass down in surprise. She was normally the one who said such things.

  “No, I’m not.” Rachel took another sip, then pointed at her friend with the glass. She had begun to feel that she was not quite herself, but at the same time she felt filled with powerful conviction. “We have to do it. We have to show him by succeeding. We have to do it for women everywhere!”

  If Magda felt this was extreme, she didn’t give any sign. Instead she said, “Okay.”

  It seemed to Rachel that her head contained a whirlwind of half-formed yet extremely good ideas. She tried to focus. One separated from the rest and burst to the front of her brain. She swatted Magda’s arm. “I know!”

  “What?”

  “You’re right; everyone in the reading room knows me now. But they don’t know you.” She swatted her again. “You could do it! You could go to the reading room and observe! You could be the detective.”

  Magda looked thoughtful, so she kept going.

  “Think about it: Cavill won’t be there, but the other two will. And now that Cavill’s been arrested, they’re bound to notice his absence, and if one of them’s the killer, then they might relax. They might give themselves away. You could go for a couple of days and keep an eye on them to see what they do. And in the meantime I could …” She found she couldn’t think of what she could do. She had suddenly run out of steam.

  “I�
��ll do it.” Magda spoke so quickly that she actually exhaled a little wine onto her lower lip. “I’ll absolutely do it. Can I start on Monday?”

  Rachel waved a hand. “You can start whenever you want.”

  “I want to start on Monday.”

  “Then you can start on Monday.” Rachel nodded, one firm jerk of decision. Then she stood up and walked, a little unsteadily but with a great sense of purpose, to the bar to pay the bill.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Long before her forty-third year, Rachel had come to understand that although each person is the star of her own life, she is at most a secondary character in other people’s. She knew that for someone out there she had at some point just been Girl at the Bus Stop or Woman Behind Me in Line. What she had never thought about, though, was what it would be like to know that you were a secondary character, to be left to while away the time as someone else took the starring role. She and Magda had agreed to meet after the Bibliothèque closed, and now she had eight hours of time to fill while life was happening to Magda instead of to her.

  Nonsense, snapped a voice in her head. What had happened to all her meditations on order, on the value of life? Magda might have her feet under the table at the Bibliothèque, but if she, Rachel, still felt there was something odd about the idea of Cavill as the murderer, and something worrying about LouLou’s interview, she didn’t have eight hours of free time. She had eight hours in which to join Magda in doing something about it.

  Like what? she asked.

  Like not wait around to see what suspicious things the others in the reading room might get up to, but investigate what they’ve already done.

  Fine, she thought. She would start by finding the answer to her easiest question, the one that had been bothering her for days now. How much does a man who monograms his cuffs pay for his jackets, and is it so little that he’d be willing to slash their linings? She opened her computer.

  Ede and Ravenscroft’s cheapest jacket cost 250 pounds, their cheapest suit cost 350 pounds, and in both cases those were sale prices. Without much effort she managed to find the exact mauve jacket that had been hanging in Robert Cavill’s wardrobe: it cost 450 pounds. At a bare minimum, allowing for sale shopping—although Cavill didn’t strike her as the sort of man who waited for a sale—the tweed Ede and Ravenscroft jacket he had worn in the interview cost 300 pounds; if he hadn’t bought it on sale, it had cost nearly twice that. Cavill was a spendthrift, but Rachel didn’t think even a spendthrift would willingly slash open the lining of his 500-pound sport coat. Her doubts about Cavill’s guilt grew.