Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (5 page)

“L
isten to this,” Marine said. “‘Napoléon once said that the examining magistrate is the most powerful man in France.’”

“How nice,” Verlaque mumbled, reaching across her for his reading glasses. “That makes my day.”

“Stop it. I know you see the error!” she said.

“That it was Balzac, and not Napoléon, who said that?”

“Exactly! And why can’t my students write well? Napoléon ‘once said’? It’s not a fairy tale, it’s a historical essay! And what sources are they using for their research?”

“The Internet, what else?” Verlaque suggested. “These kids don’t go to the library, and no one reads anymore. I see it all the time when I take the TGV up to Paris. Dimwits playing with their cell phones for three hours because they’ve forgotten how to read.” He had a sip of coffee and then added, “But, did Balzac really say that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, was it written down? Or did someone just overhear him
mumbling that, as he was waiting for, let’s say, the men’s room at the
opéra
? How can we know for sure?”

“You’re a pain in the ass.”

Verlaque smiled and pulled Marine down under the covers. “I am ze most powerful man in France,” he said, joking, in English.

Marine laughed and threw back the covers.

“And I am an overworked teacher who has grading to do.”

“Ah, come on! You knew that this weekend was this ‘Verlaque and Bonnet minibreak’! Why did you even bring papers to grade? Is it because you feel guilty over your ten-week summer holiday, ten more days in early fall, two weeks at Christmas, two weeks to ski in February, and then, worn out as you teachers must be, two more weeks off in April?”

Marine sighed. “You know that I work over those holidays, researching and publishing.”

“Yes, you do, but I don’t see any of your colleagues doing the same.”

Marine laughed. “How would
you
know? Oh, I can’t believe we are arguing about this, on, as you say, our Verlaque and Bonnet minibreak!” Marine made to get up, but Verlaque leaped up, grabbing her white blouse that was draped over an armchair and waving it about.

“I’m sorry! I’m an idiot!”

“Yes, you are,” Marine said.

“Great, we agree on something. Wanna come wine tasting with an idiot?”

“Antoine!” she cried. “We went wine tasting, and
buying
, yesterday!”

“But I only bought one case of that Visan wine, and I can’t stop thinking about it. All of my favorite grapes, all in one wine—Syrah, Mourvèdre, Cinsault…”

“Yeah, yeah. And Carignan and Grenache.”

Verlaque stopped waving the blouse and looked at Marine, blinking. “You were paying attention! I sometimes think you have a photographic memory.”

Marine smiled at his compliment. Several of her teachers in high school and university had made the same comment, but she was, in fact, falling in love with wine. Her parents had never had any interest in grapes; it was a hobby that they associated with less intellectual pursuits, or with people who voted conservative. Marine then thought of Verlaque’s antique Porsche, and the tiny thing that was a kind of half trunk.

“You only bought one case because we already bought three in Châteauneuf-du-Pape and you have a small sports car. You need to buy a minivan.”

“Did I just hear you correctly?” Verlaque asked, throwing the blouse on the bed. “A minivan? Me? Put your grading down and let’s go, or else we’ll stay in bed all morning, like yesterday. The maid was mad at us.”

“Where are you going to put more wine?”

“Delivery, my dear.” Verlaque walked over to the window and opened the heavy cotton drapes. “
Mon Dieu,
” he whispered.

“What is it?” Marine asked.

“Come over and look at our Provence,” he replied. Marine got out of the four-poster bed and shivered, running beside Verlaque, who put his arms around her. They both looked at the five-star view of the Luberon Mountains that were half-buried in fog, their tops, snowcapped, brilliantly lit up by the sun. The valley that ran between their hotel and the mountain was made up of thousands of mist-covered greens, the horizontals broken by the slim verticals of cypress trees.

Just outside their door steam rose and danced around in the
air, and both Marine and Verlaque took a few seconds to realize that the steam was coming from the blue heated lap pool.

Marine looked at Verlaque and asked, “Fancy a quick dip?”

“It’s November.”

“Yes, but it isn’t raining like yesterday. And the pool’s heated. We could have a quick swim, come back in here and have a quick you-know-what, and then I’ll agree to go wine tasting with you, as long as we can visit the Roman ruins in Vaison.”

“Yes to the swim, yes to the you-know-what, no to Roman ruins.”

“What? Don’t you enjoy Roman ruins?” Marine asked.

“Not really, no. I always find myself yawning, which makes me feel guilty. I understand their importance, but I can never see the beauty, or imagine the beauty, in a few knocked-over columns lying on their side.”

“Wow, you’ve never told me that before. Can I visit the ruins and you visit the medieval church? It’s Romanesque, if I remember correctly. My mother did a research paper on it once.”

“Romanesque? It’s a deal. Then we’ll meet in that lovely square and have a coffee and recount our discoveries, having not been together for two hours.”

They spent breakfast reading and slowly eating the restaurant’s home-baked bread and jams. Verlaque was rereading Hemingway’s
A Moveable Feast
, smiling at the writer’s descriptions of an obnoxious Gertrude Stein, the sort of middle-aged woman that he often observed at Monoprix or at the post office, who jumped the queue or gave her opinions loudly. His grandmother Emmeline had referred to their kind as “Miss Doggetts,” the name of a character in one of her favorite books. He had always meant to ask her what the book was.

“How many times have you read that book?” Marine asked. Verlaque looked up over his reading glasses.

“About a dozen, I would guess. I just bought this new edition when I was up in Paris last weekend.”

“How was Paris, by the way? Did you see your parents?”

“No,” Verlaque replied. Marine thought he had ended the conversation with that comment, but he continued, “I did see Sébastien.” Marine smiled and nodded, saddened by the fact that he would visit his real estate mogul brother but not his aged parents. She did not understand, but knew, from experience, not to ask. She made a mental note to call her parents later in the day—they had just returned from a two-week trek across Sardinia, their sole luxury being the rustic hikers’ auberges they were sleeping in instead of their usual tent camping. She looked around the hotel’s dining room—the pressed white linens and bouquets of fresh flowers—and was sure that her parents had probably never set foot in such a hotel.

“I’ve finished my chapter and can’t drink any more coffee,” Verlaque said. “How about you?” Marine folded her copy of
Le Monde
and put it in her purse. Verlaque leaned forward and took the newspaper from her, seeing that she had marked certain passages with her blue pen. He laughed and said, “Do you always do this?”

“Yes! It’s for my students. I like to bring up interesting, newsworthy topics in class, even if it’s off topic. I think that’s one of our roles as university professors. I only wish I could smoke and make great jokes in class as JP did.” Verlaque laughed, knowing how much Marine admired Jean-Paul Sartre, but also how much she detested cigarettes.

“He was one in a million,” Verlaque said as he reached across and took her hand.

They left the dining room hand in hand, passing in the hallway a wealthy American entering his room and then saying good morning to a maid, who smiled shyly. As they walked into their room, Verlaque had a sudden longing to be gone from that hotel and to be alone.

Marine, too, suddenly wanted to be out of the hotel. She felt guilty, guessing that the room probably cost per night what many people in the village paid in rent per month. She could feel that Verlaque, too, was suddenly elsewhere, and she was a little peeved at him. When he had said that Sartre was one in a million, it would have been a perfect opportunity to add the line “And so are you.”

V
erlaque maneuvered his car around yet another roundabout of the industrial zone of Carpentras, anxious to be out of that drab town and on the Autoroute du Soleil, which on a Saturday might be busy. After receiving a phone call from Commissioner Paulik he had agreed with Marine—her purse full of postcards of Roman mosaics of birds—that she would spend the afternoon grading and he would return that evening, since Crillon-le-Brave was less than two hours away. He could question the deceased’s secretary and then speak with Paulik and Yves Roussel—the prosecutor had decided to proceed with a criminal investigation and had turned the case over to Verlaque by phone—and then be back at the hotel for dinner.

As he smoked his cigar and listened to Gerry Mulligan’s baritone saxophone, he thought of Hemingway, his perfect sentences and his sorrow, as an old man—a year away from death—that he had cheated on and quit his first wife. The book was, if
anything, a love letter to her. “Hadley,” Verlaque said aloud as he slowed down for the
péage
, putting his car in the automatic toll lane, having a Télépéage on his dashboard. His cell phone rang and he answered it, putting it on speaker.

“Yes, Paulik. I just went through the toll at Lançon, so I’m about a half hour from Aix.”

“Great. Let me fill you in a bit,” Bruno Paulik said, pausing to take a sip of lukewarm coffee that he had purchased out of a university vending machine. “Dr. Bouvet says that Moutte was hit over the head early this morning, sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. A maid found the body at 8:00 a.m. when she was cleaning. His office door was open and the lock wasn’t pried, so the murderer had a key, or was let in by Moutte, or the door wasn’t locked in the first place. There were four sets of fresh prints all over the office. One belongs to Moutte, two others we have no record for, and the fourth we’ve identified as belonging to one of his students, Yann Falquerho.”

“Fast work. Falquerho has a record?”

“He was a juvenile offender when he was seventeen, breaking and entering into his father’s men’s club, on a prank apparently. The charges were dropped, but the Parisian cops scared the pants off of him by throwing him in a prison cell overnight and taking his prints.”

“I see. Isn’t that normal that this kid’s prints were in the office?” Verlaque asked. “He was his student, right?”

“Yes and no. Georges Moutte was the doyen and so had little contact with the students. But Falquerho’s fingerprints were on the office doorknob, on files on Moutte’s desk, and on the stainless steel arms of his desk chair, which was toppled over when the professor fell. Roussel and I have already questioned Falquerho in his apartment. Another student was there too—Thierry Marchive—and
the two of them immediately confessed to breaking into the doyen’s office late last night.”

“
What
? Do they realize how bad this looks for them? How did they break into a university building, anyway?”

“I checked the door where they entered. My daughter Léa could have broken in. And yes, the boys were very nervous…they couldn’t stop blabbing. One of them was going on and on about a painting of Saint Francis, and the other one telling us how he kept a vase from turn-of-the-century Nancy from breaking.” Verlaque listened but didn’t comment—the innocent were often very nervous under police questioning, but one of them had already broken into a building before. And it was strange that both boys would comment on objects in the office, as if that mattered, when their doyen was lying dead on the floor. Verlaque dragged on his cigar and guessed that the vase was a Gallé. Could a doyen afford one of those?

“What did they say about the professor?”

“That they saw him lying there, and thought he had had a heart attack. They fled, not wanting to be found in the office.”

“I’m sure. What were they doing in there, anyway?”

“Looking for the name of the winner of some fellowship award—they both applied for it. That’s what Roussel was raking them over the coals about. He accused them of killing the professor over this award.”

“
Merde
, Roussel,” Verlaque hissed. “What an ass.” While there were things that Verlaque respected in Roussel—the prosecutor’s hard work and bravery—he was constantly frustrated by the prosecutor’s impulsiveness, and he hated Roussel’s tasteless jokes and general need to be the loudest in any room. Short man syndrome, Verlaque thought, doubled in a Marseillais. The second thought he tried to erase, wanting to be politically correct. After all, he did
know a few men from Marseille who knew what it meant to be discreet.

“Sir?”

Verlaque shook some cigar ashes off of his jacket and answered into the speaker, “Sorry, Paulik. Please continue.”

“I have a team going over Dr. Moutte’s apartment, and we’ve been calling all those who were at a party that he gave last night—Moutte’s secretary has a list. I’ve ordered those we’ve been able to contact to be present tomorrow morning in the school’s assembly hall at 9:00 a.m., even if it is a Sunday. Some people seem to have gone away for the weekend and we haven’t been able to reach them.”