Skeleton Dance (23 page)

Roussillot chuckled with real amusement. "Narrow it down to less than an hour? You don't expect very much, do you?" He turned his twinkling gaze on Gideon and switched to English that was almost as fluent as Joly's but more heavily accented. "They think we're magicians, don't they? Alchemists. Where would they be without us, do you suppose?"

"Oh, all right, I apologize, Roussillot, don't get up on your high horse," said Joly. "It's only that I had hopes of eliminating at least one or two of them from suspicion."

"The institute people, you mean?" asked Gideon.

"Yes. After all, I was interrogating them one-by-one during the very time we're speaking of. But it's not possible, you see. How long would it have taken to come here from Les Eyzies, do this deed, and return? Forty minutes, no more. Less, conceivably. Any one of them would have had ample time to do it—before seeing me, after seeing me—with no one the wiser."

"I see what you mean." Gideon had a sudden thought. "You know, the baker out front might have spotted somebody. You might want to talk to him."

Joly gave him the Gallic equivalent of an are-you-trying-to-teach-your-grandmother-to-suck-eggs scowl, but Gideon was saved from whatever he was going to say by the appearance at the door of one of the investigators, a somewhat elderly plainclothesman named Felix, who was beckoning with a plastic-gloved hand. "We've found something, inspector. Come have a look."

Gideon followed Joly and Roussillot inside, to a corner of the exhibit area, where a display case had been pulled away from the wall to reveal a rock about the size of a misshapen softball lying on the floor. There was a smear of blood on it, and a clump of matted gray hair. Gideon turned away.

But Roussillot bent low to examine it more closely, then straightened up. "Well, I think we may assume we have our murder weapon, gentlemen." He clucked his disapproval. "A rock. Not the most elegant of choices."

"No, not just a rock,' Gideon felt compelled to say. "That's an Acheulian cordiform hand-axe; Middle-Paleolithic."

Joly, Gideon, and Roussillot looked at one another. The same thought crossed all their minds, Gideon knew, but it was left to Roussillot to say it.

"Well, you have to admit," he said, "for an archaeologist it's a hell of a way to go."

   "Gideon, it wasn't your fault. You're being… well, morbid is what you're being. Have some more
kir
."

The
kir
—white wine and black-currant syrup over ice; the region's warm-weather afternoon drink of choice—wasn't doing him much good but he took another sip anyway and settled further down in his chair, stretching out his legs and crossing his ankles. "Yeah, I know. It's just that… I was sitting right there in the garden fooling around with Lester's dumb flap copy, and all the time Jacques' messages were right there on the machine. If I'd only known he was trying to get hold of me—oh, hell."

"But how could you possibly know? Be reasonable, you're making it sound as if you went out of your way to shirk your responsibility. How could you conceivably imagine anything like this would happen?"

"I know, but I keep going over and over it in my mind. There were so many places where I could have kept it from happening. Why didn't I check our telephone messages when we first got back, for instance? I could have been at the museum by twelve-thirty. He wouldn't have been sitting there by himself all that time, waiting for me."

"But you might as well say, why did we go out at all, why didn't we just stay in the room, and then he would have gotten you on the phone the first time he called."

"That's true too. Or if we'd come back a couple of hours—"

"Here's Lucien," she said, pointing with relief to the inspector's long, angular figure bent almost double in climbing out of the low-to-the-ground Citroen he'd parked at the curb on the far side of the street. "Finally. Thank God, maybe he can talk some sense into you." She waved to him.

Having straightened up in his stiff, machinelike manner—something like a sofa-bed unfolding—Joly peered around, saw Julie's wave, and started toward them, looking worn. Gideon had left him in La Quinze a couple of hours earlier, and Joly had promised to join them when he was through, for an aperitif at the Café du Centre. With the day warmed by a golden late-afternoon sun, they'd been waiting for him on the café's patio, a pleasant terrace shaded by striped awnings and situated on one side of the village square, opposite what looked like a steepled country church, belfry and all, but was actually the
mairie
, Prefect Marielle's domain.

"Are those
kirs
?" Joly asked plaintively, dropping into a chair at their table. "I would kill for a
kir
."

"Not necessary," Julie said, signaling to the waiter that a
kir
was wanted for the newly arrived gentleman. She had picked up the French knack for saying a lot with an economy of gesture, Gideon noted admiringly.

"Lucien," she said, "will you please talk some sense into this man? He thinks he's responsible for Jacques' death. He thinks the reason Jacques is dead is because we didn't check our telephone messages."

"I didn't say that," Gideon said grumpily, "I only—"

"Jacques Beaupierre is dead because his murderer wanted him dead," Joly said wearily. "Do you really think that if he hadn't been able to kill him because you arrived on the scene—assuming of course that he didn't decide to kill you as well—that he would simply have dropped the idea, and forgotten all about it, and gone away somewhere?"

Gideon shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe he was killed to keep him from telling me what it was he wanted to tell me. If I'd been there for him and he'd already told me, the cat would have been out of the bag and there'd have been no point in killing him."

"It seems to me, Gideon, that you give yourself far too much importance in this. In my opinion, Beaupierre would have been murdered all the same, if not this afternoon, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the next day." The
kir
came and Joly drank greedily, the ice cubes clinking in the glass. "Aah, life returns, the tissues rejuvenate. Now, I grant you," he said with a pale smile, "it might not have been with an Acheulian cordiform hand-axe of the Early Paleolithic variety—"

"Middle Paleolithic."

"—but murdered he would have been. Besides, if he
was
killed to keep him from making his 'dreadful confession,' then why not hold me responsible too? If I hadn't permitted him to put off the time of his interrogation, he might never have called you at all, or gone to La Quinze. And yet I assure you I do not hold myself responsible."

Gideon puffed out his cheeks and blew out a stream of air. "Yes, okay, you're both right," he said, beginning to come around—in his head if not in his gut. "I guess I'm not making much sense."
"
Thank
you, Lucien," said Julie, raising her glass to him.

"Now then," Joly said, setting down his
kir
after another grateful sip, "to other matters. You remember the ring?" He turned civilly to Julie. "Perhaps Gideon hasn't yet mentioned this?"

"The opal ring? No, he told me about it. You found it near Jacques' body at the Musée Thibault."

"Exactly. And this ring preyed upon my mind. I felt sure I had come across some reference to a similar ring not long before. And at last, at
long
last, it came to me. Now listen to this." He took a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket, unfolded it, and set his reading glasses on his nose. "I translate," he said with a polite nod to Julie. It took him a moment to find his place. "Here we are. '… brown eyes, brown hair. When last seen, was wearing— ' No, never mind that… ah, here, here. Now listen to this. 'He also wore…'" Joly looked up to make sure he had the full attention of his audience and went on, emphasizing every syllable. "'…also wore on the little finger of his right hand an embossed, heavy gold ring with a stone of opal or sapphire with a horse's or dog's head embedded in it." He whipped off the wire frame glasses, put them in their hard black case, and clicked it closed.

"But what are you reading from?" said Gideon after a moment's startled silence. "Who's it talking about?"

"This," Joly said triumphantly, "is the report on Jean Bousquet that was filed at the time of his disappearance, presumably with the cameo brooch of Madame Renouard's grandmother."

"Bousquet!" the other two exclaimed.

"None other," said Joly, sitting back and radiating satisfaction. "Apparently he has found reason to revisit the Périgord after all."

"And you think he's the one who killed Jacques?"

"It's hard to imagine another explanation. Rings do not generally fall off fingers on their own."

"Bousquet," Gideon said again, mostly to himself. It was amazing how the name of this drifter who had spent only three months in Les Eyzies and hadn't been heard of for the last three years kept cropping up. First it was Bousquet who'd been murdered and buried in the
abri
, possibly by Ely. Then that was switched: it was Bousquet who had murdered Ely. Now it was Bousquet who had killed Jacques. Well, this time at least, they might have it right. The ring was hard to argue with; it was something you could hold in your hand, something tangible, not just another airy conjecture based on a rickety structure of hypothetical premises.

"Gideon," Julie said excitedly, "do you suppose that man in St.-Cyprien, the one who hit you with that fibula—"

"Femur, not fibula. I wish he'd hit me with a fibula."

"All right, femur—could that have been Bousquet too?"

"I don't know, it never occurred to me. You know, you might be right."

"He had such a ring?" Joly asked.

"If he did I didn't see it. But he did have brown eyes and brown hair."

Joly smiled. "So does everyone else in France. In any case, with Marielle's assistance we have mounted a search for him. There is unfortunately no photograph of him available, and the physical description tells us little, but many people in Les Eyzies have reason to remember him, including some on Marielle's staff. If he's still in the area, I should be surprised if we fail to find him. Of course, having achieved his end, he may already have left again."

"But what end?" Julie asked. Why would he want to come back and kill Jacques?"

"Ah, yes, as to that—"

"Inspector? They… they told me I might find you here." It was Audrey, strangely unsure of herself. "Is it true that Jacques has been… that Jacques is dead?"

Joly rose. "Yes, madame, I'm sorry." He placed a hand on her elbow. "Will you sit down?"

She appeared not to hear him. "There are… there are some things I should tell you that may be relevant…" She looked indecisively at Gideon and Julie.

"It's all right, madame," Joly said, "you can speak. But if you prefer, we can go—"

"No, what does it matter?" She nodded vaguely in their direction—almost like Beaupierre himself, as if, since she was going to be his replacement as director she intended to replace him in manner as well—and took the chair Joly was holding out for her.

In Gideon's mind, Audrey Godwin-Pope had always served as a model of calm, invincible self-certainty, and it was shocking to see her so rattled. Her thin, old-lady's cardigan sweater had been misbuttoned. Her chignon, always before a neat, businesslike bun, had loosened so that straggling gray tendrils floated free at the nape of her neck. And to make the picture complete, somewhere along the way she'd broken the nosepiece of her tortoise-shell glasses, inexpertly sticking them back together with a twist of Scotch tape. It was as if she'd changed overnight from the rock-solid Audrey he knew to somebody's hunch-shouldered, slightly dotty old hermit-aunt who lived in the attic bedroom.

"Audrey, would you like something to drink?" he asked softly.

"What? Yes, all right, whatever you're having. No, a vodka. With ice." But she'd never taken her eyes from Joly, and it was to him she spoke: "Inspector, I haven't told you before—I should have told you this morning…"

Joly waited, encouraging her with a friendly dip of his chin.

"You see… about a week before Ely left… that is, before he was killed… he told me that he knew… that he thought he knew who was behind the hoax, the Tayac hoax."

"Jean Bousquet!" Julie couldn't keep from whispering.

"Jean Bousquet?" Audrey said, glancing dully at her. "No, not Bousquet. I mean, yes, he thought Jean might have written the letter—the letter to
Paris-Match
—out of spite, but no more than that. Jean would have been incapable of more." Nervously, she appealed to Joly. "I did tell you that, inspector. You remember." The waiter placed her drink on the table; she didn't notice.

Joly nodded patiently, his graceful hands folded on the table.

"But as to who was
behind
it," Audrey said, "that was different. Ely thought it might be—he had no proof, you understand, but still he was sure that it was—or almost sure that it was—"

"Jacques Beaupierre," said Joly.

"Yes," she said, stopping short with surprise, "Jacques."

"And why didn't you tell me
this
earlier?" he asked without reproach.

Audrey discovered her vodka and drained it in a few absent-minded gulps. "You… you have to understand, Inspector," she said defensively, "by that time Ely wasn't the same person any more. He was like a wild man—vengeful, suspicious. I couldn't take what he said seriously. I mean, it was preposterous to think even for a minute that Jacques… surely you see that it would have been irresponsible—
wrong
—for me to go around repeating it?"

Her pleading look took in Julie and Gideon, and, indeed, Gideon could see it, could see why she hadn't mentioned Ely's suspicion to Joly, or to him, or to anyone else in all this time. In her place, he'd probably have done the same. But now, with the sudden knowledge—Audrey had found it out only this morning—that Ely had been a victim of homicide and not of a plane-crash, and with Jacques' death following only a couple of hours later, things were terribly different. What would have been unthinkable three years ago had come to pass; what would have seemed merely "preposterous" was now just one more not-so-unreasonable possibility. The question was…