Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (19 page)

“What if I do,” the barman replied, not looking up.

“His girlfriend’s boss at the university was murdered late Friday night, and they claim they were here.”

“They were. He came around 10:00 p.m. and she came later,
toward midnight. But I told that to the cop that came in here yesterday.”

“Audrey Zacharie was hit by a car last night. She’s dead.”

This time the barman stopped pouring. “Audrey? Dead?” He leaned his muscular forearms on the bar and hung his head. “Who hit her?” he asked, finally looking up.

“We don’t know. Hit-and-run.”

The barman turned to his colleague and asked him to finish pouring. “Can we talk outside?” he asked.

Outside there were green plastic chairs and small tables that the bar used for when there were too many patrons. “They were both here on Friday night, that I can assure you. But what I didn’t tell the cop this morning is that they had a big fight, right at the bar, we all heard. Michel had been in here too long, I should have cut him off.”

“What did they fight about?” Paulik asked.

“I was trying not to listen, so I didn’t get the details. But he accused her of having a boyfriend on the side. He was madder than hell. He has a wild temper…we had him work a few nights here, but he got into an argument with a customer, so we had to let him go. On Friday night he threatened to clobber Audrey if he found out that she had a lover. That doesn’t mean that he was behind the wheel of that car, but I think you should know about their fight.” The barman got up, signaling that he had said all he had to say, and they walked back into the bar.

An old Rolling Stones song was playing, and Verlaque looked around at the people in the bar, a mixture of liberal arts students and older men who could actually remember buying
Beggars Banquet
when it had come out. Verlaque paid for the beers and they found a table in the back, under a black-and-white photograph of Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, and Léo Ferré, three
giants of French music, sitting around microphones as they did a radio talk show sometime in the 1960s, bottles of beer and ashtrays piled high with cigarette butts covering the table. “I’ll go and repay Michel Gasnal a visit tonight, before his parents arrive,” Verlaque said after he had taken a sip of his Guinness. The first sip was always bitter, the second less, and by the third, all the bitterness was gone.

V
erlaque rang the doorbell for the second time that evening at number 17. Michel Gasnal answered, letting out a weary “
Oui
?” and Verlaque presented himself. The door buzzed open and he walked up the stairs to the second-floor landing, where Michel Gasnal was standing in his doorway. “Again?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, but I have a few more questions that I’d like to ask before your parents arrive.”

Gasnal said nothing but moved aside so that the judge could enter the living room. This time Verlaque took the time to look around, spotting the expensive stereo that Paulik had seen, and on the floor beside an armchair, a new pair of Swiss leather shoes. Michel Gasnal once again sank down into the sofa, too tired to care why the judge was paying a second visit. Verlaque looked above the young man’s head and saw a framed poster of a Cézanne still life. Audrey Zacharie had studied art history, he remembered, and it saddened him to see that she had tried to make the dark apartment a home.

“The barman at the Bar Zola has confirmed your presence on Friday night,” Verlaque said.

“I told you,” Gasnal whispered.

“But he also told me that you and Mlle Zacharie had a terrible fight and that you accused her of having a boyfriend and then threatened her.”

Gasnal closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “That doesn’t mean I ran her over.”

“I know, Michel, but I need to know everything I can about Audrey’s last days. Do you understand?”

The young man leaned forward and rubbed his fingers through his hair. “You’re right. Sorry.” He slowly sat up, like a bored student who has been accused of not paying attention in class.

Verlaque relaxed and sat back in the armchair. “Why did you accuse Audrey of having a boyfriend, Michel?”

“She was acting even more erratic and uptight than usual,” Gasnal answered, sighing. “She would get phone calls during the evening and then rush out and be gone for hours. I didn’t know who it was until she started receiving, or buying, these really pricey items. I saw you looking at the stereo…that was one of her gifts. She said that it was on sale. Have you ever seen them do sales at Bang and Olufsen? And these shoes,” he continued, picking one of them up and then letting it fall back to the ground. “They must have cost her two hundred euros.” Verlaque looked at the brand; he knew that they cost over four hundred.

Gasnal continued, “She told me that a great-aunt had died and left her money, but I didn’t believe her. She had never talked about any aunts, great or otherwise. When she started talking about buying this apartment, I got worried. How were we going to do that, with no down payment? So I started putting two and two together, right? She adored that boss of hers, Moutte. He couldn’t
do anything wrong, and was brilliant, had such good taste, blah blah blah. She told me a few months ago that he had made a pass at her and that she shrugged it off. We had a good laugh about it and went to the Bar Zola and had a couple of beers. But it became obvious to me that she took him up on his offer, and that he…”

“Repaid her in gifts? Or money?”

“Yeah. I mean, wouldn’t you have drawn the same conclusion?”

On his way home Verlaque got a text message from Yves Roussel. He waited until he was in his living room, with his shoes and socks off and a glass of chilled Meursault in his hands, before calling the prosecutor.

“Yves,” he said when Roussel answered the phone. “Am I disturbing your dinner?”

“No, I’m still waiting for it! My wife was busy spending all my money at the shops in Marseille today and dinner’s late!”

Verlaque closed his eyes and took a sip of wine. “I just came back from a visit with Michel Gasnal.”

Roussel jumped in. “No alibi, right?”

“That’s correct. He was asleep in front of the television.” Verlaque then told Roussel of the argument between Michel Gasnal and Audrey Zacharie in the bar.

“Ha!” Roussel said. “Gasnal is known for his temper; he threatened her in front of witnesses; let me see, what else is working against him?”

“They’d recently come into some cash,” Verlaque said. “A Bang and Olufsen stereo; handmade shoes…”

“Oh, so he’s a thief too? How do a waiter and a secretary get stuff like that? And who would even buy a stereo that’s made in Sweden?”

“Denmark. Gasnal claims that Mlle Zacharie had the money;
she said it was an inheritance, but he didn’t believe her,” Verlaque said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t believe her, or him! I’ve put more officers on the stolen car search, and when we find it I’ll bet you ten-to-one we’ll find M. Gasnal’s fingerprints all over it. Ah, the little woman is finally home. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

M
arcel Dubly watched the TGV race by in the distance. He hadn’t minded the trains’ appearance in the early 1980s in his more distant pasture, as some of his neighbors had. The SNCF had given the farmers money, which had allowed him to fix the roof of his barn, buy more cattle, and renovate his kitchen and bathroom, much to the delight of his wife and four children. More important, he found some sort of reassurance in the train’s passing every few hours; the same kind of reassurance he got from his white Charolais cows giving birth each spring, the changing of the seasons, and the weekly cattle auction in nearby Saint-Christophe-en-Brionnais, where he either participated as a seller or as a judge. There would be pastis in a bar afterward and then a long drawn-out lunch with a few of his fellow farmers, some wine growers, and one or two politicians, every Wednesday, rain or shine. He watched the train racing up to Paris, imagining its passengers working in front of their laptops and then rushing off in taxis to
meetings, and then rushing back down south, eating a sandwich on the train for dinner. He had been south once, somewhere near Avignon, when a childhood friend had married a girl from a Provençal village. He and his wife had gone to the wedding, and while he found the people friendly enough, the food was a bit too light for his tastes and he left the wedding hungry. “Stop exaggerating,” his wife had told him, laughing. They had laughed in the car all the way back to their hotel, he remembered now. He leaned on his walking stick and turned to head back up to the house. It wasn’t that he needed a walking stick—at fifty-two he was in great shape—it was just a habit, and he liked tapping the ground, his ground, the ground of his ancestors, with the end of the stick as he walked. There was less laughing in his house these days; his wife seemed tired, and anxious for the children—none of them were proving to be good students, nor did they show any interest in staying in Burgundy—and he thought that over lunch he should try to make her laugh.

Verlaque awoke at 6:30 a.m., hungry. He realized that he had had only two pints of beer the night before and nothing to eat. He threw back the duvet and walked into his bathroom. When renovating the apartment, he had asked the masons to destroy the wall between the bathroom and master bedroom and replace it with glass. He had never regretted the decision, although it had been a fight with his general contractor, who thought the idea insane. The toilet was in another room, with a small sink, and the bathroom had a pedestal sink and old-fashioned bathtub that the interior architect had bought in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. They had kept the nineteenth-century floor—another fight—and Verlaque loved the leafy pattern of green-and-gold glazed earthenware tiles. He ran the bath and went into the kitchen, turned on his espresso machine,
and checked his phone messages. There was a text message from Marine:
bonne nuit…we’ll talk later
, and another from Paulik confirming their rendezvous in front of Verlaque’s apartment at 7:10 a.m.

At 7:08 a.m. Bruno Paulik rang the buzzer on the street and in less than a minute Verlaque was downstairs and in Paulik’s Range Rover. “Good morning,” the commissioner said as he maneuvered his way off the cobblestone square. “I have good news. Léa got sixteen out of twenty on her
solfège
test and has been admitted to the next music grade.”

“Hey, that’s great!” Verlaque answered, turning to look at Paulik. “With sixteen she gets a special mention, right?”

“Yeah, but she’s been so turned off by the whole thing that I’m not sure the special mention will mean anything to her. And here,” Paulik said, handing Verlaque a bag. “My mother left these on my doorstep yesterday.”

Verlaque opened the bag and peered inside. “Cannelés!”

“You went to law school in Bordeaux, right? I thought you might miss them.”

“I love these! Thank you, I do miss them and I sometimes buy them in Aix, but they’re never as good as when made by a Bordelais.” He tore open the cannelé and bit into the soft inner cake made of rum and vanilla. Crusty and caramelized on the outside and soft and gooey on the inside, it was perfect. “When did your mother move from Bordeaux to Provence?” Verlaque asked.

“Just after the war. Her father was a vineyard specialist, and land in the Luberon was dirt cheap back then. He could have stayed in Bordeaux, always working for others, or have his own vines. When they saw the barren land they had purchased with all of their savings, on the day of a mistral, my grandmother cried and started walking back to the closest village, Ansouis, hoping to
catch the next bus back to Bordeaux. But they settled in, with lots of ups and downs, as most immigrants do. And now our family is one of the old Luberon families. But my grandmother always cooked Bordelais specialties, my grandfather planted cabernet sauvignon despite sneers from the locals, and my mother goes on baking cannelés.”

Verlaque smiled at the image of Paulik’s grandmother walking up a dirt road, head down, fists clenched; and at the thought that Paulik’s family considered themselves immigrants. “Did you go to university, or straight into the police force?” he asked.