Skeleton Dance (22 page)

"Oh lordy." Gideon put the sheet down, shaking his head.

"Hm?" Julie said from her wicker lawn chair a few feet away. "Did you say something?"

"No, that was only a muffled cry of anguish. I was looking over Lester's suggestions for flap copy."

She lowered the Patrick O'Brian paperback she was reading and looked sympathetically at him. "Not all that great, huh?"

They were in the side garden of the hotel, having come back an hour earlier from an after-lunch stroll along the river and a pause for coffee and pastry on the terrace of the Café du Centre. (With Joly interrogating the institute personnel, Gideon's interviews were necessarily on hold and they were in tourist mode again.)

"Aside from the fact that they're a tad on the sensational side," he said, "that they're just plain stupid, and that they don't have anything to do with what I'm trying to do in the book, they're fine. I just wish I hadn't been dumb enough to give him our fax number. I could have been carrying on in happy ignorance."

"Poor baby. I don't think writing for the masses agrees with you."

"The masses are great, I don't have any problem with the masses. It's Lester that scares me."

"Dr. Oliver—I didn't realize you had returned." It was Monsieur Leyssales, the hotel's bearded proprietor, calling from the doorway. "There were two telephone calls for you a while ago. I believe messages were left."

"Joly, maybe?" Julie said to Gideon. "Something may have turned up."

"I'll go see," he said, standing. He gestured at the faxed sheets. "Whatever it is, it has to be better than dealing with this." He turned. "If it's Lester, I can always say I never got the message."

Beneath its rustic exterior the Hotel Cro-Magnon was a thoroughly up-to-date establishment, boasting not only a fax machine but an elaborate voice-mail telephone-messaging system, getting through the intricacies of which took Gideon several minutes. When he finally pressed the right sequence of buttons, he was surprised to hear the more-distracted-than-usual distracted voice of Jacques Beaupierre.

"Gideon, I must talk to you… I thought perhaps, as a friend… may I speak with you confidentially?" Jacques could hardly be heard; Gideon pressed the telephone closer to his ear "Now? It's extremely important, I assure you, or I wouldn't… I haven't been completely truthful in the past, I'm afraid, and now I don't know how to… I'll wait for you here."

Click.

Vintage Beaupierre. Talk about what? Where was "here"? At least he knew when "now" was, but that was no thanks to Jacques; according to the voice-mail system, the call had come in at 11:50 a.m., about two hours before.

The second message was also from Jacques, a marginally more coherent postscript. "No, not here at the institute," he whispered. I don't know what I was thinking of. No, I'll meet you at… the Musée Thibault."

"Ah, you remember the name, after all," Gideon said to the recording.

"Yes, that's better, the Thibault. You know where it is, yes? In La Quinze? I'll go there now, this moment. You'll come, won't you? I'll wait for you. Gideon, there's been a… a misunderstanding.… I have a dreadful confession… that is to say, mm, ah…"

   La Quinze was less than eight miles from Les Eyzies, but it might have been on a different continent, a gray sprawl of nondescript buildings with mildewed, stuccoed walls clumped alongside the road. Unlike Les Eyzies—or St.-Cyprien, or most of the other villages of the Dordogne, for that matter—La Quinze had no flower boxes, no colorful awnings over the shops, no decorations, no trees, nothing at all to brighten the tired streets. Once upon a time the fortified church at its hub must have been imposing if not handsome, but it was sagging and decrepit now, with its roof partially caved in. Altogether, the place looked more like southern Sicily than southern France.

It was 2:15 by the time he located the museum, situated as it was at the rear of a building housing the village bakery. There he mounted two shaky wooden steps to a plain wooden door with a cardboard sign thumbtacked to it, identifying it as a
"musée d'histoire naturelle de la Dordogne"
and indicating that the regular hours were 10 a.m. to noon on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month, but that if the door were to be found locked at other times, the key could be obtained from M. Chatelard in the
boulangerie
out front.

It was a Thursday, but the door was unlocked. Gideon pushed it open to find himself in a room about thirty feet by twenty, crowded with the simple artifacts of Paleolithic men and the bony remnants of third interglacial and Würm glaciation fauna, housed in appropriately dusty glass display cases and scrupulously arranged in row after row after row, to illustrate patterns and progressions, developments and deviations; each item with its own lovingly handwritten label beneath it, in Latin and in French, most of them penned in faded brown script and curling with age.

It was, as a matter of fact, just the kind of good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense museum he liked: no buttons to push, no moving parts, no dumbed-down interactive frippery to get in the way of all that information, and as he closed the door behind him he drew a deep breath for the pleasure of taking in the clean, dry smells of stone dust, bone dust, and wood polish.

And stopped with his hand still on the door handle, apprehensive without knowing why. He sniffed again. There was the smell of stone dust and wood polish, all right, but of something else as well, something that didn't belong. The fragrance of roasted almonds from the bakery at the front of the building? He breathed it in. Yes, that was there too, but—

"Jacques?" he said, directing his voice toward the open door of what appeared to be a workshop-storeroom off the exhibit area, dimly lit by a couple of long, narrow windows near the ceiling.

No answer.

He called again, although no one in the adjoining room could have missed hearing him the first time. "Jacques? It's—"

He stopped, almost against his will placing the alien odor for what it was. Gamy, musky, sickish, his years of forensic work had made it unhappily familiar to him: the mingled smells of blood, of sphincters suddenly relaxed, of fluids and tissues that belonged by rights inside, not outside, the human body's fragile envelope of skin. He went to the open door. The grim smell grew worse, but all he could see was an empty room with unmatched storage cabinets along the walls and, drawn together in the center, two work tables strewn with stone implements and taking up almost all the floor space. A column of dust motes, caught in a shaft of sunlight, rotated slowly above the tables.

But the moment he stepped through the doorway he saw something more: there on the floor, at the back, partly hidden by the rear table, a blackish, viscous blotch soaking into the soft, splintery old floor.

With his stomach turning over, wishing himself anywhere but there, Gideon walked toward it, jumping when something crunched under his heel. Jerking his foot back he saw a pair of twisted, broken spectacles with heavy, black, 1950's-style frames.

Beaupierre's.

Steeling himself, knowing now what must lie on the floor, wedged into the space between the far side of the table and the wall-cabinet but hoping against hope that he was wrong, he went toward it, heavy-hearted and unwilling.

   Blinking in the sunlight, Joly emerged from the doorway of the Musée Thibault and avidly, gratefully lit up another
Gitane
, getting it out of the pack, into his mouth, and alight with what seemed one motion

"How's it going in there?" Gideon asked.

Joly flapped his hand:
wait, let me get in one good puff first
.

Gideon obliged. He'd already been waiting for over an hour as it was. When Joly had first arrived in response to his telephone call, along with Roussillot— the real Dr. Fernand Roussillot, deputy medical examiner of the regional directorate of judicial police—and three plainclothes investigators, they had wasted little time in unceremoniously hustling him out from underfoot. He had walked around the block, had stopped at a mean little bar for an espresso, had drunk it while the bristle-chinned regulars eyed him with mute, open suspicion, and had then returned to the museum, leaning against the well-equipped crime lab van from Périgueux that was parked in the alley beside it.

After a while Joly had come out for his first smoke and to ask for more details about Jacques' telephone messages. Gideon had told him everything he remembered. Unfortunately, he'd also had to tell him that he'd erased them without giving it a thought. And what did he suppose might have been the nature of Beaupierre's "terrible confession?" Joly had asked. Gideon had had to shake his head and say he just didn't know.

Joly had listened silently, with his head bowed, until Gideon had finished—or maybe until he'd finished his cigarette—and then had gone back inside without comment. Gideon had returned to leaning against the van and waiting some more. Waiting and thinking, or rather trying to think, but although his thoughts turned and turned, sifting over and over through the same dark, troubled catalogue of events, every time he seemed to come close to making sense of them the pattern fractured; his mind would shy and skitter away like a nervous horse.

Having gotten in his one good puff and followed it with a second, Joly was now ready to reply to Gideon's question. "Roussillot says the cause of death was a blow, or possibly more than one blow, to the left rear portion of the head," he announced, gushing smoke from mouth and nostrils.

Gideon grimaced. That much he'd been able to tell on his own.

"The blood spatter pattern makes it clear that he was struck down right there, where you found him. There are some signs of what may turn out to have been a struggle, but nothing much—no overturned chairs or broken glass. That suggests it may have been someone he knew and trusted."

"Struggle? You met Jacques; he was in his seventies, and not exactly what you'd call a fighting machine in any case. How much struggle could he have put up?"

"Yes, that's so." Joly took another pull, so hard that the cigarette sparked, and then handed Gideon a plastic envelope. Inside was a man's gold ring set with a square, blue-gray opal inlaid with a gold horse's head in low relief—or more likely an imitation opal and fake gold, since the band showed blue-green deposits on its inner surface and in the crevices of the setting. "Have you ever seen this before?"

"I don't think so."

"It didn't belong to Professor Beaupierre?"

Gideon shook his head. "Not as far as I know. He certainly hasn't been wearing it."

"It's not familiar to you at all? No one at the institute wears such a ring?"

"No, not that I noticed—and I think I would have noticed. Did you find it in there?"

"Under the table, less than a meter from the body."

"You think it might have come from the murderer then—gotten wrenched off in whatever struggle there was?"

"I do. It was in plain sight, not the sort of thing that would have lain there unseen for days." He slipped the envelope into an inside pocket. "We'll see." He took another long pull on his Gitane.

They both looked up as the shirt-sleeved Dr. Roussillot came out into the alley, wiping his hands on a paper towel. "You wouldn't happen to have another cigarette, would you, Joly? Mine must be in my coat."

When he had it going he expelled a double-lungful of smoke, closing his eyes and emitting a deep sigh of simple pleasure. Not only did the French get away with their fatted goose liver and
confit
, they smoked like characters in 1940's movies. And apparently got away with that too. "Aaahh. Well, then: time of death was between two and four hours ago."

Gideon had been prepared to dislike Dr. Roussillot on sight, partly on account of Joly's earlier description of him ("stiff-necked, fussy, punctilious"), but mostly—illogical as he knew it was—because of the whack on the head he'd taken from the other "Dr. Roussillot" in St.-Cyprien. But the genuine article had turned out to be a merry, freckled, comfortably overfed man of forty who, while demanding enough in his instructions to his subordinates, seemed anything but stiff-necked. Possibly this had something to do with his being a self-described fan of Gideon's, having read "with great pleasure and enormous profit" his recent series of papers on the assessment of post-cranial skeletal trauma in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
.

And when Gideon had apologized for stepping on Jacques' glasses and otherwise trampling the crime scene, Roussillot had stopped him at once. "It's nothing, nothing at all. Completely understandable under the circumstances. I beg you, don't give it a thought."

An offended Joly had stared at him. "That's not what you say when it's one of my men that does it."

"But none of
your
men," Roussillot had said simply, "is Gideon Oliver." From then on he and Gideon had gotten along fine.

"And that's the best you can do?" Joly asked the pathologist now. "Two to four hours?"

"Ah, well," said Roussillot, seemingly without taking umbrage, "there's laboratory work yet to be done, of course. We've taken serum and vitreous humor samples, and we'll see what the gastric contents have to tell us, and so on, but no, I don't expect to be able to do any better than that."

"But we already knew that much, damn it," muttered Joly. "We knew
more
than that."

They knew because he and Gideon had worked it out by simple arithmetic. Jacques had telephoned Gideon a little before noon. Inasmuch as it would have taken no more than fifteen minutes for him to drive to La Quinze, he might have arrived as early as 12:15. When Gideon got there a little over two hours later he was dead. Necessarily, then, it was impossible for him to have been murdered before 12:15 or after 2:15. And the state of the spilt blood when Gideon had found him—dry where it was thinly spattered, still viscous where it had puddled—indicated that it hadn't happened either much after 1:45 or much before 12:45. A one-hour time span.

"I was hoping you could narrow it down for us a little more," a displeased Joly said.