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

by Longworth, M. l.

  “No, I hope he’ll make it. How long has Ossart been up there?”

  “Since I got here, thirty minutes or so. He’s called out a couple of times, threatening to jump. We cleared away the mothers and children from the playground, but as you can see there’s still a crowd,” Paulik said, motioning with his shoulder behind them. “They’re mostly members of the oustau who refuse to leave.”

  Verlaque half-turned his head to listen to an elderly couple whom he guessed were speaking in Provençal, a language he had never heard spoken.

  “Mon Dieu!” the woman behind Verlaque yelled, forgetting her enthusiasm for the lost language of southern France. Verlaque and Paulik looked up and Claude was teetering over the edge of the bastide’s red tile roof, swaying as if in a trance.

  “Where’s the bloody psychologist?” Verlaque whispered. “Claude,” he called, stepping forward. “Enough, Claude! Enough deaths.”

  “Right. What’s one more?” the youth asked, quietly but loud enough for Verlaque to hear.

  Thoughts raced through Verlaque’s head: what could he say? He thought of pointing out to Claude that a jump off a three-story building might not kill him, but paralyze him instead, like Lémoine. Instead he called up, “Claude, I’m coming up. I don’t want these people to hear our conversation.”

  Without looking up Verlaque walked into the bastide and headed up the stone steps to the first floor and kept walking up the second flight until he got to an open window that looked out over the park. “Merde,” he whispered aloud. Claude had once again gotten himself up onto the roof by way of a window and his muscular arms. Verlaque then gasped and stepped back as Claude’s upside-down head appeared in the window, reddened and wild looking. “It’s harder getting up here than it looks,” Claude said.

  “Claude, can’t you come inside and we can talk quietly here?”

  “So you can convince me to turn myself in? Whatever for?” And he disappeared.

  “Then I’ll have to come out and join you on the roof,” Verlaque said. He took off his shoes and socks to get a better grip, and took off his jacket and laid it on the floor. He thought very quickly that what he was doing, risking his life, and Claude’s, was absolutely insane, but before the other half of his brain had a chance to argue back he was out on the stone ledge, standing up, with one hand on the roof tiles above him, the other on the red shutter. He looked at the shutter and saw its wrought-iron handle, about eight inches in length, and put his bare foot on it and with a groan lifted himself up and onto the roof.

  “Impressive for a fat guy,” Claude said. The student was sitting cross-legged, watching Verlaque.

  “Thanks,” Verlaque said once he had caught his breath. He had scraped his forearm and ripped his shirt getting up onto the roof, but otherwise felt fine. He sat down facing Claude and said, “This is a strange place for a conversation.” Verlaque had almost used the word “interrogation.”

  “You called Moutte to meet you at his office last Friday night?” Verlaque asked.

  “Yes, from a phone booth on the rue Mistral, on my way home from the gym. I saw those idiots Thierry and Yann and then turned around and called Moutte.”

  “And Lémoine saw you in Moutte’s office from the park, didn’t he? Was he blackmailing you?” Verlaque asked.

  “Of course he was! He and that know-it-all Audrey Zacharie. I gave them one payment, and then got so angry I arranged to meet Audrey in this park. But then I saw what happened,” he said, closing his eyes, “and she couldn’t come…she was dead…but I didn’t do it!”

  “Claude, what happened Monday night?”

  “I called her and told her to meet me here in the park. I lied and said I had the next installment of money for her and that creep Lémoine. I knew the route she would take, so I waited for her on the boulevard Roi René, but all I wanted to do was scare her, you know, not kill her, and as she crossed the street a car came screaming up from the back near the train station, and it hit her.” He put his head in his hands. “They hardly even slowed down.”

  “So you left,” Verlaque said.

  Ossart nodded.

  Verlaque didn’t add how very un-Christian it was of Ossart to have left Mlle Zacharie lying there in the middle of the street, but he didn’t have to. The remorse was written all over the young man’s face. But did he have any remorse for killing the doyen?

  “Why did you kill Dr. Moutte, Claude?”

  “Because of everything he stood for—the wealth, the opulence, the lies,” the youth answered, as if bored. “He told Dr. Rodier that the position was his, only to change his mind at the party.”

  “But you didn’t know that on Friday night.”

  “Yes I did. I overheard Dr. Rodier call his slutty ex-wife from a phone booth just after he left the party.”

  “The same phone booth on the rue Mistral?” Verlaque could see it, the one he and Marine joked about as being one of the last in town.

  “Yes. I was on my way to the gym, and I hid in a dark doorway. Dr. Rodier deserved that post, he walks the talk…he lives as the men he studies. He’s pure.” Claude went on, “The Dumas was promised to me by the dearly departed Moutte on Friday afternoon. And when I got to his office late Friday night he had changed his mind. My parents thought I couldn’t do anything, unlike my business-school brothers. I needed that scholarship to show everyone. He had promised. And then he saw the ivory sculpture in my gym bag and he went crazy. He said that it was Italian, Pivano, or something, but it wasn’t, Dr. Rodier told me that it was a reproduction. We fought over it, and I hit him. At first lightly, and then I gave him three hard bangs. It was quick; much kinder than the slow agonizing deaths that Henry VIII subjected priests to.” And that Sir Thomas More subjected Protestant preachers to, Verlaque silently added.

  Ossart started losing his concentration, and got up when he heard voices below.

  “Claude, come back here,” Verlaque said, slowly getting to his haunches in case he had to run to catch Claude.

  The student looked over the edge of the roof and turned back toward Verlaque and laughed. “They’ve put one of those stupid white trampolines down. And if I were to jump off in another direction? Off the back of this glorious building that protects a language that no one speaks anymore?”

  Verlaque smiled, pretending to be amused. “You’re right, you could jump off from any direction; but suicide is a sin, Claude, and you’re a believer.”

  Claude Ossart looked at Verlaque with a sad face, before changing his expression into a serious one. “Yes. ‘I killed in order to save myself.’ Saint Bernard said that.”

  “But your killing was different, Claude. Saint Bernard said that about the Crusades. He also wrote that the soul which sins shall die. Do you want your soul to die along with your body?” Verlaque silently thanked Florence Bonnet, who had once quoted Saint Bernard during an uncomfortable family dinner, for Claude seemed to be listening intently.

  Claude sat down. “I’m so tired,” he whispered, and he lay down on his side, putting his head down on the red roof tiles.

  “Should we wait for the firemen to extend a ladder, Claude? I don’t feel like crawling back in through the window, tubby guy that I am.” Verlaque inched over toward Claude and saw that the youth had closed his eyes. Once again that day, Verlaque put his arm on a man’s shoulder, and whispered, “The bad dream is over, Claude.”

  Chapter Forty

  Still Hoping to Be Appointed the New Doyen

  It was close to nine o’clock when everyone had left the park and its gates were locked. Verlaque left his car where it was and called Marine as he walked around the hotel and crossed the busy ring road. “Any food in the house?” he asked when Marine answered the phone.

  “There is, in fact. There’s a chicken in the oven. I was hoping you might be free to join me. Where have you been?”

  “I’ll explain when I get there,” he answered. He looked up at number 11 as he walked around the Quatres Dauphins fountain, wondering to himself which o
ne of the professors would be living upstairs in a few months. His money was on Rodier. “Could you do me a favor and light a fire? I’m chilled.”

  “I’ve already lit one, with the help of those little white waxy cubes. I must have put four or five in the fireplace.”

  Verlaque smiled and was about to hang up when he said, “Marine, there are things I need to tell you, but not tonight…I’m just too wiped out. But I will, and soon, I promise.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Marine answered, but she secretly worried that perhaps Antoine would never tell her about his bad dreams and Monique. She opened the oven and reached in to baste the chicken, and then she poked the potatoes and carrots with the tip of a knife…they were ready. She opened a bottle of red Burgundy that her caviste on the rue d’Italie had recommended. It was a good domaine, from Mercurey, that he assured her was almost as good as its more expensive Burgundian cousins while being a third of the price. She still couldn’t bring herself to pay the prices that Antoine did for a bottle of wine. She sat down in her favorite armchair and waited for the doorbell, realizing that she was a domestic creature after all. She would be so happy to spend the rest of her days like this, waiting, with dinner in the oven, for Antoine to walk through the door; or, to have him be the one to greet her after a day of lecturing. He was the better cook, after all.

  “I didn’t even bother to pour myself a cup of policeman coffee after tasting yours,” Bruno Paulik said as he walked into Verlaque’s office on Monday morning.

  “You did the right thing. Come, let’s get ourselves some espresso from my machine, then we’ll go and talk to Claude Ossart. I had his apartment searched yesterday, and they found the statue, bloodstained, still in his gym bag.” Neither man admitted to the other that they had each slept almost twelve hours on Saturday night and had done nothing productive on Sunday except Paulik phoning his parents.

  “How is Claude doing?” Verlaque asked. “Do you know?”

  “Yeah, I went down to the holding rooms on my way in. He ate a big breakfast, apparently, and seems calm. His parents are arriving from Paris this afternoon, and Bernard Rodier is already down there, waiting his turn to speak to Claude.”

  “Let’s go then. We can talk to Dr. Rodier before we see Claude.”

  Yves Roussel burst into the room, almost upsetting Paulik’s coffee over his clean white shirt. “We found the BMW,” he said, pacing around the office. “And the brats who did it.”

  “Is it the car that killed Mlle Zacharie?” Verlaque asked.

  “Yes, no doubt about it. They left the car in a forest near Rians, a hunter found it early Sunday morning. I sent a crime team to Rians and they worked all day and were able to lift some fingerprints off of the car that match the prints of two repeat offenders from Marseille. And then, guess what, the punks laid low all last week and then late last night tried to blow up a bank machine in Gardanne and were caught by two patrolling policemen. It’s the same guys. I’m going to Gardanne right now to bring them back here and then read them the riot act.” Roussel paused, out of breath. “How’s the kid downstairs?”

  “We’re going down to talk to him now,” Verlaque answered.

  “Good luck,” Roussel said. “I’m off!”

  Bernard Rodier was sitting stiffly, in a clean pressed beige suit, on a wooden bench against the stone wall of the Palais de Justice’s cellar. He quickly got up when he saw the judge and commissioner. “I need to see Claude. When I got your message last night I couldn’t sleep. I came here as soon as they would let me in.”

  “Come into this room with us,” Verlaque said, holding the door open to a small office.

  Paulik told Rodier what he had told Verlaque: that Claude seemed calm and had eaten.

  “What bothers me most is that Claude killed for me,” Rodier saturday, taking out a handkerchief and patting his forehead.

  “Don’t torture yourself,” Verlaque said. “We had a long talk Saturday night, on the roof of the Provençal language institute. Claude killed for himself first, and then for you.”

  Bernard Rodier looked up in surprise, either from Verlaque’s cold answer or the fact that the conversation had taken place on top of a roof. “Did he kill the girl too?” Rodier whispered, this time with less narcissism.

  “No,” Verlaque said. “He saw it happen, but it wasn’t him. Claude called Mlle Zacharie to meet him at the gates of the parc Jourdan. He knew where she lived and the route she would take, and he was waiting for her on the boulevard Roi René when he saw her get hit. She, and a man named Hervé Lémoine, were blackmailing Claude.”

  “Poor Claude,” Rodier mumbled.

  “I beg your pardon?” Verlaque asked. “He did kill Georges Moutte, and he threw Lémoine, who’s a paraplegic, down some stairs. Now, I’d like to ask you about an ivory sculpture, which was used as the murder weapon.”

  Bernard Rodier looked genuinely surprised. “Giuseppe’s reproduction?”

  “Is that what he told you? That it was a reproduction?”

  Rodier nodded quickly. “Yes, a nineteenth-century reproduction. Is it no longer in my office? I hadn’t noticed!”

  “No. Claude removed it a week ago Friday when you had him clean up your room. He told me on the roof the other night that he packed up all of the books from two of your shelves and then ran out of boxes. He was late for a meeting with Dr. Moutte, and so threw the statue in his gym bag, thinking he’d ask Audrey Zacharie for a box, but then he forgot all about it. The statue isn’t a reproduction; it was carved by Andrea Pisano in the mid-fourteenth century.”

  Genuine shock lit up the handsome face. “I had no idea!”

  There was a touch of impatience in Verlaque’s voice. “That’s clear to me.” He thought about just how apt Marine’s description of Rodier as “naive” was.

  Seeing the frustration set in on the judge, Paulik spoke. “I’m afraid it will be hours before you can talk to the boy. Why don’t you go home, and I’ll call you when you can come in.”

  Rodier stood up and smoothed out the creases on his pants. “Fine, fine. I’ll do that.”

  They accompanied the professor to the stairs that led up and out into the November day. Without speaking they turned around and headed toward the interrogation room where Claude was now waiting for them. Opening the door, Verlaque saw that the half-crazed wisecracker from the rooftop was now a pale, quiet young man.

  “Good morning, Claude,” Verlaque said as both he and Paulik sat down. “I know that your father has arranged for you to have a lawyer, and he’s on the train with your parents right now, so it’s your legal right not to say anything to us until you see Maître Blanc.”

  “I think I told you too much already,” Ossart answered. “I’ll wait for my lawyer now.”

  “Your apartment was searched yesterday and we found the statue,” Verlaque said. “In your gym bag, like you told me.” Verlaque didn’t tell Ossart that there was dried blood still on the statue. He then told Ossart that the BMW that killed Audrey Zacharie had been found, and the youth put his head in his hands. Verlaque glanced at Paulik, who remained motionless, staring at Ossart. They agreed later that neither were sure if Ossart had called the young woman Monday night “just to talk,” as he had said, or to kill her.

  “Would you mind just telling me why you broke into the doyen’s apartment?” Verlaque asked. “That’s the only bit I can’t work out.”

  Ossart shrugged. “I wanted to throw you off of my trail; make it look like theft. I threw a big vase on the floor and was about to wreck the place when a noise in the hallway freaked me out. I quickly left by the window and then so did the cat who had followed me in.”

  “All right,” Verlaque said, and he got up to leave. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Do you think if that sculpture hadn’t been in his gym bag that Georges Moutte may be alive today?” Paulik asked as they walked down the hall.

  “Perhaps, and Audrey Zacharie too.”

  Paulik’s cell phone rang and he answered it
as they walked up the stairs together. “You’re kidding?” he asked the caller, and then grimaced. Paulik hung up and then said to Verlaque, “Well, Hervé Lémoine is feeling fine and back to his old tricks.”

  “What?”

  “He insulted one of the nurses. She’s filed a complaint.”

  “What an ass!” Verlaque exclaimed. “I should have left him lying there!”

  “But you wouldn’t have,” Bruno Paulik said. “Even if you knew what I just told you.”

  Epilogue

  Thierry Marchive walked as quickly as he could without breaking out into a sweat. It was a difficult balance to achieve, and one he had been working on since hitting puberty, for he was often late, and he was a natural sweater. The last thing he wanted was to show up at the Bar Zola with perspiration marks under his arms. He got to the cours Mirabeau and looked at his watch…he should be at the bar now, and it was still another five minutes’ walk. Just then a Diaboline, one of Aix’s electric minibuses, pulled up behind him to let two elderly passengers out and two in. He jumped on behind them and put fifty centimes in the cashbox. He sat opposite the man and woman, both in their seventies, or even eighties, he wasn’t sure, and smiled. Normally he would have been embarrassed to be taking the Diaboline, but this evening he didn’t care. He couldn’t be late. The bus made its way, painfully slowly, but at least he could stop sweating, up the rue Clémenceau, through the small place Saint-Honoré, and then continued up the rue Méjanes. Thierry pulled the cord to signal a stop and jumped out at the cross street of Méjanes and Fauchier, thanked the driver, and said good evening to the elderly couple, who returned greetings and waved.

  The Bar Zola was packed. It was a Friday night and it was too cold for most people except the most hardy—usually students from northern France—and he slipped past the crowd that always seemed to be blocking the front door. He smiled to himself as Leonard Cohen was playing, and he thought of Yann and felt the tiniest bit of guilt that he hadn’t told his friend of this evening’s meeting. Yann would have teased him, and besides, he didn’t really know himself why he had been summoned here. He would fill in Yann tomorrow, over breakfast.