Murder in the Rue Dumas : A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (9781101603185)

by Longworth, M. l.

  The commissioner and judge looked at the girl, trying to hide their surprise.

  “Go on, Garrigue,” Verlaque said softly.

  “It’s none of my business, but we always had a rule in our house: no phone calls after 9:00 p.m. And the doyen was an old man.”

  “And so he took the phone call?” Paulik asked.

  “Yes, but in another room,” she confirmed. Verlaque thought Garrigue very wise for her age—he realized that her answer to the question was her way of saying that she couldn’t hear the conversation, and that she probably would have listened had she been able.

  “Did the doyen seem nervous after the phone call?”

  “Nervous? Not really, more like impatient. It was clear that he wanted us out of the apartment, but Dr. Leonetti kept chatting on and on, so I just slipped out without saying good-bye.”

  “Did you go straight home?” Verlaque asked. Garrigue Druon was visibly surprised by the question.

  “Well yes! It was almost midnight! I share a flat on the rue de Tanniers with a law student. I woke her up when I came in. She had put her purse right in front of the door and I tripped over it.”

  “Fine. Thank you, Garrigue. If you could just leave your address and the name of your roommate with Officer Cazal before leaving, that would be great. And good luck with the fellowship,” Paulik said.

  Garrigue nodded and quickly got to her feet, looking relieved that the interview was over, but also looking much more confident than she had when she had first entered the room.

  “Thank you,” she added before closing the door behind her.

  Paulik turned to Verlaque and said, “She’s a clever girl, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Verlaque answered. “She knew that we were asking for an alibi and gave us a sure one. Tell Officer Cazal to talk to the roommate as soon as possible.”

  “Do you think that the shy, good-girl stuff is faked?”

  “It’s impossible to tell, isn’t it? But Officer Cazal can ask Garrigue’s roommate that same question.”

  “Was that true about your uncle?” Verlaque asked.

  Paulik looked surprised. “Of course.”

  “He made honey and the whole bit?”

  “Yeah,” Paulik answered defensively. “Lavender honey, mostly, but my favorite was chestnut. You couldn’t believe how that tasted in my mother’s madeleines.”

  “Spare me the Proust,” Verlaque said, smiling.

  Paulik smiled and said, “Before Léa was born, I wanted to call her Garrigue.”

  “Really?” Verlaque said. “I love those hearty plants. I sometimes miss them when I go to Normandy. So why didn’t you?”

  “Hélène thought that Garrigue sounded like a hippie name.”

  There was a knock on the door and Officer Cazal came in and introduced Yann Falquerho, who stood awkwardly behind her. “Come in, Yann,” the commissioner said.

  The tall, thin student sat down quickly and Officer Cazal softly closed the door.

  “You’re in big trouble,” Paulik said.

  “I know,” Falquerho replied, looking steadily at the commissioner.

  “Thanks to a Parisian policeman who was doing his job, we have your fingerprints on file. You were caught breaking into a private club, non?”

  Yann Falquerho winced. He hated to think of that night and had since avoided that street in the eighth arrondissement where his father’s automobile club was located, which was most inconvenient as it was on the same street as one of his favorite bistros.

  “I was afraid you’d find out about that,” he finally answered.

  “It certainly doesn’t help your case,” Paulik said. “It will be up to the university to decide whether they are going to proceed with pressing charges.”

  Yann closed his eyes and remained silent.

  “Dr. Leonetti’s on our side,” he finally said.

  “That’s neither here nor there. You must realize the importance of what’s happening right now. You break into an academic building, and the same night your doyen is murdered.”

  “We didn’t do it!”

  “So how about telling us what happened, step-by-step,” Verlaque ordered. He looked at Falquerho’s thin blond hair, straight and neatly kept, but as he turned, Verlaque saw a gray patch on the left side, about the size of a large coin. It reminded him of something, or someone—he couldn’t put his finger on it yet. Perhaps someone he had known in Paris? The gray patch of hair was distinctive and made the boy look older; without it Yann would have looked more like a high school student than a doctoral candidate.

  “Well, as you know, we were invited to Moutte’s…I mean Dr. Moutte’s…party. We had a fair bit to drink, as it was a boring party and there was this really decent red from Bandol…”

  Verlaque looked down at his paperwork and tried not to smile.

  “…and then we left around 11:00 p.m. to go and try our luck at the Anglo pubs.”

  “Try your luck?” Paulik asked.

  “Girls…American students. They’re nuts for the French guys. Or so we’re told, but we’ve never been that successful, to be honest, that night included. So we had a few beers, and that combined with the red wine…”

  “You were drunk,” Verlaque finished Yann’s sentence. He then remembered the gray patch: Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. Verlaque’s grandmother Emmeline had given the book to him the year he lived with her in Normandy, when he was fourteen. “You should be reading books like this, instead of…” she had quietly said, and then she had hugged him.

  “Yes, sir. Even more than drunk. And it was my idea…I take full blame…to break into the humanities building. The Dumas means a lot to us, you may not understand…”

  Paulik was tired of being instructed by opinionated theology students, professors, and the secretary.

  “I think we do understand its importance…”

  “I had it in my thick head that I just had to know who had won the fellowship,” Falquerho continued, cutting Paulik off and not seeming to pause for a breath. “I don’t know why. I get these ideas in my head sometimes and I can’t stop myself.”

  “And so you broke into one of the side doors, in the alley.”

  “Piece of cake, way too easy, sir.”

  “And then?”

  “We walked upstairs, and when we got to Moutte’s office we found the door open…I mean, not locked.”

  “And the file?”

  “We didn’t find the right file, and we were just about to look around the desk when we saw the doyen lying there, eyes wide open, but dead.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police? Or an ambulance?”

  “Totally my fault, again. Thierry is a real scholar, please don’t blame him. I just want to get an MBA…”

  “You’re off topic, Yann,” Verlaque said.

  “Right. Sorry. We didn’t call an ambulance because we thought the doyen had had a heart attack, and it was obvious there was nothing to do for him. And we didn’t want to get caught in the building.”

  “Do you have witnesses who saw you and Thierry in town? After the party and before you…broke into the faculté?”

  Yann Falquerho smiled for the first time.

  “As luck would have it, we do. Claude Ossart, a fellow grad student, was coming home from the gym when we were leaving the party, and we talked for about five seconds. That’s all you ever get out of Claude. Five seconds…”

  “Anyone else? I’m sorry, Yann, but five seconds isn’t quite long enough to establish an alibi. No one in town, at one of the pubs?”

  Yann Falquerho paused, and then continued, “Well, the bars were really busy, so I’m not sure that any of the barmen would remember us. I can’t say I even remember any of them, you know, the wine…”

  “Bandol,” Paulik said.

  “Yeah. Hey, wait, we did manage to talk to two American girls for about an hour, or two-beers’-length time. But I have no idea what their names are and I can’t remember which of the foreign programs th
ey’re in.” He shrugged. “They wouldn’t give us their cell phone numbers.”

  “Do you remember what they look like? In case you saw them again in town?”

  Falquerho smiled. “Yeah. The small blond one I do.”

  “Keep your eyes peeled for them, then. That will be all, Yann, and if you think of anything that may be important, will you call us?”

  “Yes, sirs.” Falquerho stood up and looked at both Verlaque and Paulik. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  Verlaque stayed sitting but answered, “As I said, it’s more up to the university than to us. If you cooperate and tell us the truth, that may help your cause. But I can’t promise anything.”

  Falquerho nodded. “Thank you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rue Saint Lazare

  Marine sat down on a bench in her apartment’s front hall and laced up her running shoes and put her high heels in a market bag. She then stepped out onto her terrace to check the weather. It was cold, as she had thought it was, with a slight wind. She took a few seconds to look at the steeple of Saint-Jean-de-Malte, gray on this November morning, as were her plants. It was always hard to imagine the riot of colors the plants would produce in the spring and summer, and she already longed to see the bright pink oleander flowers and the purple lavender.

  She had returned in the early afternoon from Crillon-le-Brave, much to the whining of Sylvie, who begged to stay longer; but Charlotte had a Victor Hugo poem to memorize for the next morning, and Marine had promised to visit her mother for afternoon tea. Verlaque hadn’t called the night before. She left the flat and walked down her street, turning left on the rue 4 du Septembre. Sunday afternoons were the quietest time in Aix, the best time, she thought, to walk the streets. Saturdays had become so busy that she now strolled about on Sundays. She stopped and gave a bise to a colleague who was on his way into town, seemingly just strolling as she liked to do, and she apologized that she didn’t have time to talk to him as she didn’t like to be late for anybody, especially her mother. Her colleague laughed, appreciating the joke. He had never met Dr. Florence Bonnet but knew of her reputation.

  In a few seconds Marine was at the bottom of the street, waiting for the light to change so that she could cross the busy périphérique, the ring road that circled the old town. The wall that had once been there in the Middle Ages was long gone, but a section still survived north of the vieille ville near the Roman baths. It was hard to imagine that Aix had been a fortified town and the 1950s apartment building across the street was sitting on land that had been farmed less than two hundred years ago. The wall had been defensive, protecting Aix from invaders or la peste, including one particularly devastating plague in the early seventeenth century that had arrived in Marseille by boat and had killed thousands there. The town fathers of Aix had been warned and the city gates were closed, no one allowed in or out until the plague ran its course or went somewhere else. Since Aix’s citizens were instructed not to leave their homes, even for Mass, over ninety oratories were built, religious statues placed in niches that were carved into the corners of the buildings’ facades. The oratories enabled the faithful to pray by leaning out of their windows, without having to leave their house and perhaps get infected, or infect a neighbor. The plague passed, and Aix was saved, not a soul lost.

  The city celebrated, and in thanks a local baker invented a sweet made from almond paste and candied melon, coated it with glazed sugar, and called it a calisson. The lozenge-shaped candy was to Marine’s parents, and many Aixois of their generation, venerated, and much debate went into which baker now produced the best.

  She was still thinking of the plague when she walked past the rectorat that housed the region’s education offices. The building was one of Aix’s supreme eyesores, built in the 1970s using cheap materials that were now showing their age and poor quality. Marine thought it sad that the institution that made decisions about children’s education should be housed in such a building when other agencies, like the association of notaries and the bureau of commerçants, were located in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architectural gems. Her mother was on a committee—one of her many—hoping to demolish the building and open a competition to contemporary architects to design and build a replacement, but after years of meetings the city still hadn’t accepted their proposal.

  She passed under the railroad tracks and then turned left onto her parents’ street, Saint Lazare, and walked past the houses that she knew by heart. When she was growing up the families had been mostly civil servants; the housing was cheap and conveniently located near the university, rectorat, and downtown. Now the neighborhood, and especially this street, was a desirable one, and her parents had new English neighbors who were both physicists trained at Oxford and employed at a nuclear research center north of the city. She walked by and saw a newer model Audi parked in the driveway and then arrived at her parents’ house, their car recently purchased as well, but a Citroën. Her mother opened the door before Marine had rung the bell. “Bonjour, chérie,” Florence Bonnet said, holding out her cheek for the bise.

  “Bonjour, Maman.”

  “Come in, I’ve just made a pot of coffee and I’m heating up some croissants left over from breakfast.”

  Marine smiled and took off her jacket and placed it on the coatrack. The sight of the coatrack piled with her parents’ coats and scarves made her miss them, and she was happy to have arranged this snack with her mother, despite the fact that the coffee would be too weak and the croissants would have been purchased yesterday, or even the day before, at a supermarket. Marine’s mother, the oldest of six girls, was of a generation that rejoiced at the emergence of the supermarket, or the gigantic hypermarchés, in France. Antoine had told her it was called “one-stop shopping” in English, and although she understood why people went, she hated it. The few times she had been to a hypermarché, the store was so big and the lines so long that she suspected her multistops along the rue d’Italie were actually quicker. But she was spoiled too: she was an only child—no five siblings, or four like her father had—and she had no children and worked close to home.

  “Come in, chérie, I have lots to tell you,” Mme Bonnet said, pulling out a chair at their kitchen table. “The shit has really hit the fan at the university.”

  Marine almost laughed, surprised to hear her mother cuss. “Yes, it’s been terrible. Dr. Moutte’s murder, right in your building on campus.”

  “Your…Antoine…was asking me lots of questions this morning.”

  “He had to ask everyone questions, Maman. Did he ask you if you had any idea who might have done this?”

  “Yes, but I told him I couldn’t imagine anyone killing Georges, or anyone killing another person, period. He kept going on and on about the Dumas, without saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’”

  “I’m sorry. He gets a little serious, I would imagine. It was a murder. Could it have been love gone wrong, Maman?”

  Florence Bonnet dropped her spoon loudly on the table and then picked it up and set it on her plate. “Why would you ever think such a thing?”

  “Dr. Moutte was a handsome man; he may have had a lover? Non? Someone his age, perhaps divorced but elegant. Lovers’ quarrels can lead to murder.”

  “No! Get your mind out of the gutter! That’s your friend Sylvie’s influence!”

  Marine set her coffee down and sighed. She had wanted to come here and for once not have an argument about Antoine or Sylvie. Florence Bonnet saw the frustration on her daughter’s face and decided to divulge some information, although normally such gossiping was against her nature.

  “During the party on Friday evening,” she said, leaning over the wooden table, “I did see Georges’s secretary, a mousy little know-it-all, flirting with him.”

  “Really?” Marine asked. She highly doubted her mother knew what flirting looked like. “Go on,” she said, pretending to be only half-interested.

  Mme Bonnet spread more apricot jam on her croissant and
continued. “Yes, she was whispering in his ear, with her eyes half-closed, and then laughing. She did it a few times.”

  Marine thought that did in fact sound like flirting. How odd. Moutte must have been in his seventies.

  “Could Mlle Zacharie have been cozying up to Dr. Moutte to win him over, perhaps get something out of him? Money?” Marine asked.

  “What would she need money for?”

  “To live!” Marine regretted that her voice was raised and tried to speak more calmly. “She must make minimum wage, Maman.” The elder Bonnets were blissfully unaware of the soaring cost of living, low wages, and the price of real estate. They were thrifty too, and had a hard time imagining that others were not—that people could desire things they thought frivolous: nice cars, meals out, designer clothes. “I highly doubt she would be sexually interested in such an old man,” Marine said.

  “You said earlier that Georges may have been murdered because of a lover’s quarrel,” Mme Bonnet reminded her daughter.

  “Yes, by a lover of his own age and social background, yes, it’s highly plausible.”

  “Well, there’s more to the story that I should tell you. Wait till you hear. Let me pour you some coffee.”

  Marine moved her chipped coffee cup across the table. Her mother was being uncharacteristically diffident, and nervous. “More to the story? Did you tell Antoine this?” Marine asked.

  “I have only just found out. Besides, he…your judge…I can only stand him in small doses. I could smell the stale cigar smoke on him. Frimeur!”

  “Maman, Antoine’s not a show-off just because he smokes cigars. There are some guys in his cigar club who are not at all rich, nor are they show-offs. Anyway, I don’t want to have this argument. What’s your news?”

  “We just had an emergency Dumas committee meeting, to discuss the next recipient—I’m pleased to report it’s someone I like very much—only there are a few problems,” Mme Bonnet reported, dipping her croissant into her coffee and then biting into it. Marine watched the butter slip off the croissant and into the hot coffee, leaving an oily slick on the surface. “We, as a committee, can only recommend the Dumas recipient. This final decision has always been the doyen’s. And with Georges dead…”