Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "May I ask how you come to know this? Is it common knowledge?"

  "In our family? I don’t think so. I certainly have never talked about it; except with my husband, of course." She glanced challengingly at him, but there was nothing to read in his eyes. "However, I happen to have a friend in Rennes who keeps me informed. You can rest assured that it’s true."

  "I have no doubt of it." He stood up. "Thank you for your help." Joly was known among his colleagues for his abrupt interview terminations, which often shocked informants into giving more information than another twenty minutes of questioning might bring. He walked around the desk to the door of the study and opened it.

  Mathilde watched him without getting up.

  "Is there something more you wish to tell me?" he asked with a small smile.

  "How," she replied, "is this to be paid for?"

  The smile disappeared. "Pardon, madame?"

  "Am I expected to maintain the people you’ve ordered to remain here? Food is not free, and I’m sure you’re aware that it’s going to be some time before the estate is formally settled—"

  "I didn’t order them to stay here, I asked for their cooperation," Joly said, drawing a finer point than he liked. "But I’m sure that if you speak with Monsieur Bonfante he’ll arrange something."

  He sincerely hoped so. A complaint from the commanding Mathilde du Rocher to Monsieur Picard, the public prosecutor, was not something he wanted to think about. And now that he had a fresh murder on his hands, things would be getting even worse; there would be a juge d’ instruction riding herd on him as well. Pity the poor French detective. Did John Lau appreciate how simple his life in the FBI was? Joly doubted it.

  He bowed Mathilde out, went back to the desk and jotted a few more sparse notes on the lined pad on which he had put down a word or two from time to time. Then he turned to the list of names at the front, placed a check mark before Mathilde’s, as he had already done before those of René, Beatrice, and the resolutely taciturn Marcel. With a finger to his lips he studied the remaining names, then got up again and called to Fleury.

  "Will you have Madame Fougeray come down, please?"

  ANOTHER formidable woman, Leona Fougeray. Not in Mathilde’s way: Mathilde was imposing the way a cannonball is imposing—heavy, dense, solid. Leona had the formidability of an arrow, or better yet a poison dart—quick, thin, brittle, full of venom. Vivid as a magpie in a black-and-white-striped suit with enormous square shoulders that made her neat, dark head look tiny, there was not even a pretense of the mournful widow about her; no hint of tremor, no tastefully restrained anguish over the fact that her husband’s body had been carted off to the police morgue barely half an hour before. In fact, she had spewed a stream of abuse each time Joly had mentioned Claude.

  "No, how do I know what my husband meant?" she said, her Italian accent strong despite a quarter-century in France. "I haven’t paid attention to him for years. Half the time he was raving from wine, the other half he was raving just from natural stupidity."

  "Perhaps," Joly said, "but his remarks this time were very specific." He glanced at his notes. "At the reading of the will he claimed that Guillaume had planned a new will, did he not? He said that was the purpose of the council."

  She turned down her mouth. "He said, he said. Pipe dreams. How could he know what Guillaume planned? You think Guillaume confided in him? If he did he’d be crazy. For forty years we never heard from him; not once. You know the first time I ever saw the great Guillaume? Last Sunday." She shrugged. "Not such a treat."

  "Your husband also said—to you, before Guillaume died—that the others had a surprise coming, that he knew some things they didn’t know."

  Her mobile eyebrows went up. "You know a lot."

  "You don’t know what he meant? You don’t know the reason for the council?"

  Again she grimaced. "I told you, they were pipe dreams. Who knows what Guillaume’s letter meant? But my

  husband—oh, it was very clear to him. Guillaume, in his old age, was full of remorse for cutting him out of his will back in the Dark Ages. He was going to make us millionaires." She laughed curtly. "Look, is it all right if I smoke?"

  With gratitude, Joly approved her request. He lit her American Virginia Slim, then a Gitane for himself, and took a cardboard paperclip container from a drawer to use as an ashtray.

  "Madame Fougeray, just why was your husband cut out of the will?"

  "Hey, how old do you think I am?" she said with more distress than she’d shown over the murder of her mate not two hours before. "I was born in 1934. Claude robbed me from the cradle. I didn’t marry him until 1952. How could I know what happened at the manoir"—she said the word with derisive affectation—"right after the war?"

  "Do you mean he never spoke of it to you?"

  "Oh, he spoke of it to me all the time."

  Joly wondered sourly if she were mimicking him. "And just what did he say?" he asked, his patience beginning to fray.

  "Ah, just that the family turned Guillaume from him for no reason at all—only that they wanted to keep the estate among themselves."

  "And do you believe that?"

  "Of course I don’t believe it," she said contemptuously. "There’s more to it than that."

  "But you don’t know what."

  "No, why should I care? I told him we shouldn’t even come here. And now somebody’s killed him for his greed." She nodded to herself, blew out a haze of smoke, and ground out her barely smoked cigarette in the box. "I thank them."

  Joly, who had a keen sense of propriety, was offended. "Madame," he said stiffly, "whom can you think of that might have wanted to kill your husband?"

  Leona threw back her dark, tight-skinned head and laughed. "If you want to know all the people in the world who hated his guts, you’re going to have some long list." She stared at him hotly. "You can start with me."

  Joly took a final pull from his own cigarette and put it neatly out. "Very well, madame," he said equably, "we’ll start with you."

  BY 11:30, Joly was tired and out of humor. He was getting nowhere, and each person he interviewed seemed more irritating than the one before. This, he knew, came largely from fatigue, but there could be no question that Jules du Rocher was a singularly unappealing young man, fat, pouty, and given to simpering, gossiping, and other disagreeable behaviors.

  Joly interrupted him while he was expounding his theory that Ben and Sophie Butts might well have poisoned Claude Fougeray out of fear that he would challenge Guillaume’s will and deprive them of the valuable Rochebonne library. This thesis had been enthusiastically advanced following other helpful ideas pointing to the possible guilt of Claire, Ray, Leona, Marcel, and Beatrice.

  "As to the reason Guillaume du Rocher called all of you together," Joly cut in wearily, "I suppose you have no idea."

  "Oh, no," Jules replied, readily switching topics. "I know, all right."

  Joly looked skeptically at him. "Oh?"

  "He was going to sell the manoir to a hotel chain— Swiss, I think, or Swedish—and he wanted to tell the family about the arrangements."

  "And how do you alone come to know this, monsieur?"

  "He told me on the telephone last week. He said no one else was to know, so I didn’t tell anyone."

  Under Joly’s steady gaze, his plump, smooth cheeks colored sullenly. "If you don’t believe me, you can check the telephone records. Well, can’t you?"

  Joly nodded.

  "And ask Beatrice. She put the call through. She told me he wanted to tell me what it was about. Go ahead and ask her, if you want to. Anyway, why should I—"

  "All right," Joly said. "All right." Now that he thought about it, Bonfante, the attorney, had told him that a Swiss hotel concern had been after Guillaume for years to sell the place. He sipped at the coffee Beatrice had brought him ten minutes before; lukewarm then, cold now. "Why only you and no one else?"

  Jules shrugged. "It’s the way he wanted it, that’s all. He told me lots of thin
gs before anyone else knew about them. I was his favorite, you know."

  Joly let this improbability pass. "And why were the Fougerays, who were not his favorites, invited to this particular family council after all this time?"

  "That’s just what I’d like to know," Jules said, and laughed as if he’d made a joke. He looked meaningfully at the small plate of butter cookies Beatrice had brought along with Joly’s coffee.

  "Please," Joly said, gesturing at the untouched cookies. "Now, these‘arrangements’: What sort of arrangements?"

  Jules stuffed two cookies into his mouth one after the other, tamping them in like tobacco into a pipe. He licked the residue luxuriously from his thumb and forefinger (leaving them glistening, Joly noted with displeasure) and sighed like a man who’d just gotten a desperately needed fix. "Something about investing the proceeds, or capitalizing the profits, or some such thing," he said, chewing. "I’m afraid I didn’t listen very carefully. I don’t have a mind for finance, you know. Poor Father will never understand it, but I live for the arts." He dropped his eyes modestly. "I’m a novelist. I’m working on a book now."

  "Ah," said Joly, not caring to encourage this subject.

  "It deals with the struggle of a banker’s son to actualize his spiritual potential in a world of crass materialism and greed," Jules volunteered.

  Joly studied him for some sign of joking, but failed to find any. Jules’ eyes, which the young man seemed able to keep from the remaining two cookies only with difficulty, fell on them with a look of open longing.

  Joly pushed the plate towards him. "Help yourself, please. I’m not hungry. Now, is there anyone else you can think of who might have wanted to kill Claude?"

  Jules crammed the first of the cookies into his mouth and got his damp fingers securely around the second before answering with a smirk. "Is there anyone who didn’t?"

  TWENTY feet below Joly and Jules, in the ancient cellar, Gideon was working tranquilly in the warmth of the portable heater, using the ten-power magnifying lens he’d neglected to bring with him the day before. He had pulled the goose-necked lamp down to three or four inches above the tabletop and twisted the head so that the light shone horizontally across the bones, highlighting texture and irregularities. Hunched over them, the lens against his cheek and his face only a few inches from them, he slid each segment by, millimeter by careful millimeter. Claude Fougeray and Lucien Joly faded peacefully from his mind.

  After an hour he finished his meticulous scrutiny of the vertebrae and straightened up with a grunt and a grimace as his own vertebral column creaked back into the unlikely S-shape that was its normal and precarious human condition—the penalty, as he told his students, for going recklessly around on your hind legs when you have a cantilevered spine begging for support at each end.

  So far he’d found nothing. No skeletal oddities to make identification easier, no signs of cause of death. Only the tiny, scoop-shaped gouges of rodent incisors that had been chewing away for most of the forty-odd years the bones had been there. He stretched, groaned luxuriously, rubbed the back of his neck, and walked over to the work crew.

  "Finding anything?" he asked Sergeant Denis.

  Denis shook his head with disgust. "But if there’s anything here we’ll find it." His eyes flashed with determination.

  Gideon accepted him at his word. Denis was obviously a man who took his work seriously. He had been down there all morning, closely overseeing the three-man work crew—who proceeded nonetheless at their own leisurely pace, ignoring with tolerant good humor the younger man’s exhortations towards speed and care. So far, moving outward from the original trench, they had taken up the big paving stones from about a third of the cellar floor and were now digging through the compacted, sour-smelling earth to a depth of about three feet. He watched them for a few minutes, long enough for the crick in his neck to smooth out, and went back to the table to get on with his own work.

  His slow, tedious examination of the hand and foot bones produced nothing but more mouse nibbles. The same for the sternum, clavicles, and scapulas. He was almost finished with the ribs, and had about given up hope, when he finally found something. It was on the fifth rib of the left side, midway along its length; a crease across the narrow top of the bone, about an eighth of an inch deep. It wasn’t a normal indentation, and it wasn’t an anomaly either, like a sternal foramen.

  And it sure as hell hadn’t been made by a mouse. Not scoop-shaped, this time, and not one of a parallel row of two or three. Just a single notch that didn’t belong there, all by itself, with a distinctive V-shaped cross-section and edges of telltale sharpness and clarity.

  A knife wound. And from the broad, wedge-like shape of the notch it had been a large knife with a blade that thickened markedly as it neared the haft. Single-edged too; otherwise it would have nicked the underside of the rib above it as well. Most likely a big kitchen utility knife or a chef’s knife. Or maybe a wartime bayonet, given the time. And of course the breadth of the V made it clear that it had been no mere prick, but a deep, murderous thrust between the ribs.

  Without doubt, it would have punctured the left lung, and then…He chewed thoughtfully on his cheek. Now exactly where the hell would a knife slipped in over the middle of the fifth rib go? It was hard to visualize; not as obvious as it seemed. The middle of a rib is not in the middle of the chest, but far around to the side; closer in fact to the back of the body than the front.

  With the fingers of his right hand Gideon found the angle of Louis, the easily palpable bump on the upper segment of the sternum. That was where the second rib attached, and from there he counted downward to the fifth. Then he worked his way slowly along it, probing with some difficulty through the thick pectoralis muscle that covered it.

  In the far corner—the very far corner, as far from the moldering remains on the table as they could get—the workmen were sitting on the floor, leaning comfortably against the wall and watching him. Freed from the eagle-eye of young Sergeant Denis, who had gone off to lunch, they had produced a meal of their own: tumblers of red wine from a plastic, screw-top liter-bottle, an aromatic, crumbly goat cheese, and hunks of bread torn from a couple of baguettes. For the moment, however, they had suspended conversation and even swallowing to watch with rapt gazes as the American fingered his way so engrossedly across his own chest.

  Gideon nodded at them and groped onward. The middle of the rib was higher than he’d remembered—it was easy to forget how sharply the ribs curved upward, front to back—and directly under the arm. Deep in the armpit, in fact. Seemingly a hard place to reach with a knife, but not, he had learned in these last few years, an uncommon site for a stab wound. The victim throws up his hand to ward off a thrust or a blow, the delicate, vulnerable axilla is left unprotected, and the knife strikes home. There was almost no other way to open the armpit to attack. That meant, of course, that there had been a struggle involved here, or at least that the victim had tried to fend off his attacker.

  He folded a piece of paper and inserted the sharply creased edge into the cut in the bone. Judging from the downward, slightly forward angle, the blade would have entered at the tangle of nerves and veins that made up the brachial plexus and then sliced through the thin, ineffective barriers of the serratus anterior and intercostal muscles, nicking the rib on the way. Then into the left lung and through the tough pericardium.

  And finally, inescapably, deep into the pulsing, muscular sac that drove the entire circulatory system: the left ventricle of the heart. Death, certain and immediate.

  He turned again to the brown rib on the table and grazed his thumb delicately along it. Three inches farther forward, on the same surface, there was something else: a tiny burr, so inconspicuous he’d missed it before. Once more he leaned over the bone with the magnifying glass.

  "So? Is it as fascinating as all that?"

  Gideon started. Absorbed, he had forgotten that lunchtime had come and gone, forgotten to be repulsed by the grisly scenario he was constructi
ng, forgotten pretty much where he was, and he hadn’t noticed Joly come downstairs, walk across the room, and stand for some time observing him. Looking up, he was startled to see that Denis had returned too, and the workmen were busy digging again.

  Joly’s head was tilted slightly back as usual, the better to stare down his nose.

  "Well, I’ve been able to come up with a little," Gideon said.

  "Ah?" Joly’s raised eyebrow was a terse expression of skepticism. Restrained, polite, even tolerant, but skepticism all the same.

  "He was murdered—"

  The smallest of smiles from Joly. "Ah," he said again, and took off his glasses to polish them with a crisply folded handkerchief.

  "Stabbed to death," Gideon said. "By a right-handed assailant. During a struggle." He hesitated, then finished up: "With a kitchen knife," he said confidently. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

  Joly slowly refolded his handkerchief, as if it were very important that it be done along the original crease, and put it back in his pocket. "All this from a single rib?"

  "That’s right, Inspector." Well, more or less. Some of it was a little on the speculative side, but Joly’s air of amused superiority was getting under his skin a little, and he thought a show of strength was called for.

  Joly lit a cigarette and sucked in a long pull, studying him all the while. "Perhaps we might go over it one point at a time?" he asked nasally, while ropes of blue smoke poured from his nostrils. "Stabbed, you say. The rib shows some sort of scratch?"

  Gideon showed him the nick. Joly looked at it for a long time, using the magnifying lens. Unlike Gideon, he didn’t hunch over it, but stood rigidly erect, head lifted, and gazed down his nose at it as he did at all things. Then he went on to examine the rest of the rib and some of the other bones as well. The cigarette was a third of the way burned down before he said anything.

  "I see many nicks and cuts…"