“Very well.”
Maintenon looked at Hubert.
“And that’s our motive?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Ah…the guy is demanding money. He might have phoned the house. It’s a big threat. Didier arranges to go and have a drink with him. That’s what he tells Monique—the real one. It’s just a guy from work, Honey. He’s changed clothes, he’s all set to do his gambit in the park—that shows real inspiration, Gilles. He’s got some crazy old stiletto—none of them are going to tell us that, are they? That’s because he had it, a souvenir or something, and of course Monique is dead. It was from the house in Paris. She can’t tell us anything now. So. Someone reports a body in the park. Off he goes. The suit is dark enough, he can go into a bar if needs be, but I think he met the victim near the river. The guy’s waiting for a payoff. One quick stab in the guts and in he goes. Didier dumps the body off the bridge. He could never carry a body there. We might look for car rentals, certainly no taxi would have taken him. Not with a dead body, and remained silent. We could ask around, but dead drunk passengers, ah…maybe. But he could walk to the Pont Tolbiac, or get there by cab fairly quickly. Keep his appointment.”
“I see. So he arranged to meet the blackmailer near the point of disposal. What then?”
“Well, sir, he did have a railway locker key in his possession upon his arrest. The locker was empty—he probably had a fresh suit in there. He changed in the rest room, and either ditched the black suit he was wearing, or took it with him on the train for disposal somewhere more suitable.” A dark suit wouldn’t show the blood.
“At first, he had no idea we would find out about the other wife—taking off, dead scared probably, he simply forgets or can’t quite bring himself to call the one in Lyon. When he doesn’t turn up as expected, she calls the police. Because honestly, there was nothing about our mystery man in the Lyon papers.” That had been checked with a long and involved set of phone calls to several Lyon newspaper offices.
Tailler had more, admittedly much of it speculation.
The beauty lies in the details—the Inspector’s own words or so it seemed.
It was night and the light in train stations often pretty garish. He could change in the restroom and sling it out the window, once on the train and out in the countryside between stations.
“That explains why our dead man was wearing a different colour of suit—according to Monique.” There were bloodstains on it, but mostly washed out by the cold water. “If the guy showed up in a blue suit, it sure as hell wouldn’t make much difference to Didier.”
“Ah, yes, Monique.” They were doing well. “Tell me more about her.”
“Okay. She’s the dead one at the Rive Gauche—”
Firmin’s left eyebrow, unseen by Tailler and Hubert but definitely in Maintenon’s field of vision, was climbing higher and higher.
“Ah.”
“Yes, sir. It has to be her. One thing we noticed, but didn’t properly remark upon, was how drawn she was the second time we saw her. But by this time it wasn’t her at all—it was Lucinde.”
Firmin laughed. He shook his head, and picked up a few papers, still listening though.
Emile shrugged, face reddening.
He gave Firmin a look.
“Yeah, but think. Every time we turn around, we’re being presented with another beautiful blonde—we’re so busy staring at their tits and their asses, we can’t see the forest for the trees kind of thing. No wonder we missed it.”
“Keep going, gentlemen.”
“And here’s another thing. Didier was just fucking praying that the body never surfaced. It’s his bad luck that it did, or his plan might have worked out fairly well.”
It was true enough, that bodies went into the river and were never seen again.
Maintenon had to admit, it was ingenious. And they were right—the blanks could be filled in with some intensive investigation, now that they knew exactly what they were looking for.
“Okay, sir. Interestingly, because we took the case over from Delorme, those boys never had the chance to show Didier’s picture around the hotel. They’ve never even seen it, although I’m sure they got the bulletin. It’s just one of those things. It would appear completely unrelated to them. Nothing but another pain in the ass missing-person report. And we were so excited, so busy, I guess, we never even thought of it.”
There was a long silence. Gilles closed his eyes, he appeared to be thinking deeply.
“So who is our mystery man?”
“I’m thinking someone connected to Lucinde. That whole set-up in Lyon stinks to high heaven. Since she is so obviously not his wife, and the other one, Zoe, wasn’t claiming to be, I have to wonder if we’ll ever know her real name. She had the newspaper clipping. I’ll bet that’s Monique in the picture—and she knows it, too. Zoe, on the other hand, good question. But think about it. This bozo, our mysterious victim, goes out of the country for a while. Maybe he’s in jail or something. He and Lucinde—I don’t know what else to call her, they’re estranged. But they’ve never really gotten divorced. Years later, he comes back, and he’d dead broke. Goes back to the old home town, you know. He probably wonders about the ex-wife. He’s hungry, he’s hurting. He makes inquiries. He sees them around. He learns they’re living as husband and wife…and he knows that just can’t be.”
“He was killed in Paris.”
“True—but that just shows he knows who Didier was. It shows that Didier was a good target for blackmail—Didier was a successful man with a good reputation. A guy with a piss-pot full of money. Life must have seemed very unfair to our blackmailer. And poor old Didier had a lot to lose, Inspector.”
Gilles looked at Tailler and Hubert.
“And how would you gentlemen like to proceed?”
Tailler looked at Hubert, who sat up straight and glanced down at his briefing notes.
“Let’s bring the ladies in on charges and see if we can shake anything loose. Hopefully, if they’re innocent, and yet know something, anything, they’ll talk. If they’re any kind of accessory, we’ll have them in custody. Let them feel the pressure for a while. They’ll talk.”
Levain piped up for the first time.
“Here’s what gets me. The ladies. How do you figure that part worked?”
Hubert nodded.
“He’s got all that figured out.”
Tailler glowed a little.
It shone out of him.
“Ah, yes, Andre. Monsieur Godeffroy could have told the one in Lyon that he and Monique were getting a divorce—he would say that she had gone to live with her mother or something like that. The wife went nuts. I stuck her in the asylum. My uncle Albert left me some money, but he’s a strict Catholic. If he hears I’m divorced, he’ll cut me off. Whatever. He would have told them whatever they needed to hear. He is nothing if not subtle. He would have ideas, this man. He might have suggested that he had to sell the place in Lyon to pay the ex-wife off. A lady living in Lyon might have been happy to move to Paris. A man like that would have thought of something convincing. She already knew she had a false passport, she was already in that so-called marriage, one she knew to be bogus. He would have been able to pull it off.”
“And the one known as Zoe, and now, as you say, claiming to be Lucinde?”
“Pretty much the same deal, Inspector. He would tell her, ah, that his wife had left him and why not come to Lyon? He would give her another big story. See, Inspector, she, she thinks he lives in Lyon. The guy lies like a rug. Seriously. Her employer says she just stopped coming to work one day. This was before, a few days before all of this started to happen. How much she knows, is anybody’s guess. The neat thing, Inspector, is that neither one of them really had to know anything.” He went on. “Psychologically, they were sort of screwed, sir. They knew what they were doing was somehow not quite right, in the social sense. It was not so much criminal in their eyes, it was merely unconventional, something of a potential embarrassment. This would leave them, es
pecially women of a certain class, a certain mindset, a kind of mental hostage to Didier. I suspect a very controlling influence. As soon as we started sniffing around, they knew something was up. But they had no choice but to keep playing their parts. Soon as we start sniffing around, they would become very protective of Didier—with nothing but their dignity to fall back on. They were also protecting themselves. Soon as they saw the body in the morgue, they must have been shitting bricks and wondering what the hell was going on.”
“The fact that they are lying about their names suggests something, otherwise. You still haven’t tied up all the threads yet, gentlemen. Although I admit you’re doing well. So why did one say the dead male was him, and the other one say it was?”
“Because they knew something was up—but we were telegraphing all our punches. They had no information, and each did the best they could in an unknown situation. It had to be one or the other, Inspector. The two women simply reacted differently, each in their own way.” Hubert looked pleased with this supposition.
Tailler wasn’t the only one who could speculate, his manner seemed to imply.
“So. We figure Didier had the germ of an idea, already. He’d probably met with the blackmailer at least once. Probably put him off, told him to go to hell. When the crunch came, he was desperate. The idea happened—I can’t put it any better than that, and he initiated a plan that was so crazy, so absurd, that it might have actually worked. More than anything, I think he just decided to kill the guy. And then make it work, somehow. Once Monique—the real Monique, saw the papers, she must have wondered. She must have seen the papers. She never let on to us, which was what killed her. At that point, she became a threat. There are two separate bodies, and we have two separate motives. Didier was just making it up as he went along, sir. Psychologically, there may be a term for it. Whatever it was, he must have had it real bad.”
Tailler stared at Gilles, who grinned slightly under the gaze.
“What was the clincher for me, sir. Didier nipped back to Molsheim, did some business—all confirmed by Gaston e Cie. He bought a shit-load of product, and in a very short time, apparently. He bought a ticket to Paris, and with a bit of quick thinking, called ahead and got Monique to meet him downtown for a romantic getaway. We’ve got the day, the time, the ticket-clerk, and the conductor. He had to get her out of the way first, then get the other ladies to move on short notice.”
They were convinced the ladies knew something.
“Well?” Hubert was on pins and needles. “Some of this might be backed up by their dental records. Now that we know what we’re looking for—and why we’re looking for it.”
“Well, what?”
Tailler’s beady little eyes were upon him.
“Can we bring them in, sir?”
Maintenon tipped his head on an angle and gave Levain and Firmin a look. There was a kind of unspoken consensus visible in their faces. Firmin shrugged and then shrugged again. Levain chewed on that blasted pencil…
He caught Gilles’ eye on him and stopped.
“Sure. Why not.” Maybe they could get to the bottom of this thing after all. “Let’s see what they have to say for themselves.”
A coffin only needed so many nails. As for the guillotine, that only took one little trip of the lever, and the sometimes surprisingly cheerful acquiescence of a jury of one’s peers.
“Hopefully you gentlemen can connect a few more of the dots.”
“Yes, sir.” Hubert grabbed the phone.
His first call would be Lyon. He and Tailler would pick up so-called Lucinde personally.
Gilles sat there watching through lidded eyes, hand clasped across his belly, which was beginning to rumble.
Both of them were very highly-talented detectives. They had a lot of potential. Talent was no substitute for hard work, observing proper procedures and that painstaking attention to detail.
Their case, while coming together, was messy—very messy.
Attention to detail had saved his own ass more than once.
It was a lesson that once learned, would never leave them.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It had suddenly come to Hubert. The solution to all of their problems.
It was just so damned simple.
Tailler was interviewing the one known as Lucinde. He was asking simple, innocuous questions about her hometown. She was putting him off as best she could. Her answers were very general, vague even. They were a little too vague for someone who had allegedly lived there in Lyon for many years.
Their voices were muffled on the other side of a panel of one-way glass.
The girl stood in breathless silence.
“Well?”
Hubert and Maintenon stood beside Ada Bellerose, brought in from Molsheim by Jeannine, back on the case, and LeBref, who barely came up to her shoulder.
She gulped, not really knowing what was going on.
“Can you tell us who that is, Mademoiselle?”
She cleared her throat.
“Yes. That—that is Zoe Godeffroy.”
Maintenon took her arm.
“Thank you, Mademoiselle. That will be all.”
Hubert tapped on the glass. Two faces turned to look at the mirror on their side. The lady was very pale as Tailler went back to the questioning.
***
“Monsieur Godeffroy.”
The gentleman had his lawyer present. Tailler and Hubert sat on one side of the table and the two of them sat on the other.
Hubert was letting Tailler handle this part. Emile had definitely earned it.
“It seems to us, gentlemen, that Monsieur Godeffroy has three options.”
Those blue-black eyes stared across the table as the attorney, a Monsieur Pichon, shifted in his chair. It was the face from the pictures, even some of the pictures of the other guy—the dead one.
The lawyer’s briefcase was on the table between them, unopened. His jacket, hand-stitched, looked thick and soft in a kind of multi-coloured grey weave of Italian make.
The attorney spoke.
“And what might they be?”
His intelligent glittered behind thin silver glasses. For professional reasons, he was completely composed, although his client bore the signs of nervousness.
“You can take your chances and go to trial.”
Tailler waited.
“You can go to trial, plead your innocence, and who knows—you might walk away a free man. Or face the guillotine.”
Tailler paused again, looking into those eyes.
“Or you can plead guilty, get up on the stand, and tell some big sob story. You can blame somebody else, claim self defense, whatever. Talk about the blackmailer threatening you. Hell, it might have happened, right? Even we can see that. Extenuating circumstances, throw yourself on the mercy of the court.” The gentleman might plead to manslaughter, or a homicide in the lesser degree. “At the very least, you avoid the death penalty. If you’re lucky. You might get parole in about forty years…”
“Or?”
Tailler relaxed.
“One of our concerns is for the ladies. Lucinde has children. They, at least, are real. With a little cooperation from you, sir, we could maybe let them off the hook—we could try and keep the children out of the limelight.” Tailler was hoping he would go for it. “They are your children after all.”
Didier’s face fell into his hands and he sobbed.
“We can recommend to the public prosecutor, twenty-five years, with the possibility of parole after twenty. Time off for good behaviour. Devil’s Island, which, on reflection, might be better than a metropolitan prison…n’est pas?”
He would at least get to see the light once in a while. He could have his own garden and grow vegetables, beets and things.
Tailler stopped. He swallowed. He looked down at the notes before him. Didier’s eyes had already fallen. The dead weren’t the only victims. There were also the living.
“May I speak with my client?”
Without hesitation, Tailler and Hubert pushed their chairs back. Hubert tapped on the door and there came the ringing of keys and the clunk of big tumblers.
It was in the lap of the gods at this point.
***
It was another morning, the start of another brand-new day. Over the course of time, busy as hell they were lately, they all blended into one, or so it seemed.
Tailler came in, with snow on the shoulders of his coat and on the wide brim and peak of his battered grey fedora. The radiators along the front wall steamed with a collection of hats and gloves laid there in the forlorn hope of drying out before they were needed again.
He hung it up, turning and rubbing his hands.
“What’s up?”
They were all mostly there, including Archambault, looking a pale and wan shadow of his former self, and even LeBref.
Levain looked up from his desk.
“Have you seen the papers?”
“Ah, yes, I have.” Tailler grinned and made a little mock bow.
Didier Godeffroy, having made an agreed-upon statement of the facts, had pleaded guilty before the court and had been convicted of two homicides. His written confession was very detailed, including the real names of Lucinde and her dead husband.
Didier Godeffroy was all over the front pages. Tailler and Hubert were there too, as well as some other important mentions.
Didier was awaiting his official sentencing, but there was little reason to doubt that he’d be on the boat to Devil’s Island in pretty short order. It was one for the history books now.
Gilles stood up from behind his desk.
“Congratulations, Emile. You gentlemen did a wonderful job.” Picking up a white pasteboard box from his desk, Gilles came over and lifted the lid.
“A baker’s dozen. Strawberry-filled, Emile. And they’re all for you.” There was white icing on top, and those lovely, colourful candy sprinkles.
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