Skeleton Dance (29 page)

"Christ, could it really be true?" he murmured, bringing an inquisitive arching of her eyebrows from Julie and another reproving
s-s-s-t
from Émile.

Gideon patted Julie's knee and broke from his chair. A few seconds later he was at the telephone in the reception area, calling Joly's office in Périgueux and being told that the inspector had gone to Les Eyzies. A second call to the local
mairie
brought Sergeant Peyrol to the phone to explain that Inspector Joly was conducting an important investigation and couldn't be disturbed.

"Disturb him, Sergeant. He'll thank you, take my word for it."

"Lucien," he said when Joly picked up the receiver, "we've been on one hell of a wild goose-chase."

"No," said Joly crossly, "you don't tell me."

"Listen, when you read that description of Bousquet to us yesterday, the one that was filed when he disappeared, the one that mentioned the ring—"

"Gideon, I'm in the middle of something. Can't this wait?"

"I don't think so, no. The description—it said what he was wearing, didn't it? What exactly did it say?"

"About what he was wearing three years ago? Why in the name of God do you—"

"Just find it, will you, please? Humor me, okay?"

Joly muttered resignedly into the telephone. Papers were shuffled, probably more noisily than was strictly necessary. "All right, I have it here. ' Green-and-white plaid shirt with short sleeves, workman's blue trousers, moccasin-type shoes with no stockings.' All right?"

"And what—" He licked dry lips. Here came the crucial question. "—what was he wearing when you found him yesterday?"

"Yesterday?" Joly cried incredulously. "What was he wearing
yesterday
? What possible… what possible…"

The astonished silence told Gideon he'd guessed right. His chest expanded with the first deep, full breath he'd taken in the last five minutes. "He was wearing the same clothes, wasn't he?" he asked quietly.

"I… yes, that's right, the same clothes, but… Gideon, what's this about?"

"Things are even weirder than we thought, Lucien—look, I'm at the new institute headquarters up on the hill. Could you come on up here? I think you might be wanting to make an arrest. I'll meet you out front."

   "He was
what
?" Joly exclaimed a few minutes later, as they stood near the stone parapet that ran along the edge of the cliffside terrace.

"Frozen," Gideon repeated.

Joly was huffing, as was Sergeant Peyrol, both of them having tramped up the steep road from the main street, and while he caught his breath he glowered at Gideon almost accusingly. "Frozen," he said again, as if trying out something unappetizing on his tongue.

"Yes, I think so," Gideon said, treading softly; he was verging on snake-oil territory here. "My guess is he's been sitting in a freezer somewhere for the last three years."

Joly reflected for a moment, his lips slightly pursed. "Dead, we may assume?"

"I'd have to say that's a pretty safe guess, yes."

"Yesterday, if I'm not mistaken, you said he'd been dead three
days
."

"I was a little off," Gideon admitted.

Peyrol, who didn't speak English but could understand some, laughed, converted it to a polite cough, and resumed his stiff military posture.

"Gideon," Joly said, leaning on the parapet and looking out over the trim tile roofs of the village, "how certain of this are you?"

"Pretty positive. I should have realized it right away; I just wasn't thinking along the right track."

It was the peculiar way the body had begun to decompose that should have told him, he explained as concisely as he could. Under ordinary circumstances, large-scale decomposition would begin in the dark, moist interior of the body, with rapid growth of bacteria in the lower intestines, resulting in the all-too-familiar bloating, discharges, and putrid smells. From there, the putrefaction would work its way outward while maggots and the like attacked the outside at a slower rate and worked inward.

But Bousquet's body showed the reverse: the internal organs were fresher than the skin. That was what happened when a body was frozen; the freezing killed off all the intestinal bacteria. But later, when it was unfrozen, it would be the surface that naturally thawed first and was therefore the first to be available to new bacteria and other organisms. So decomposition proceeded from outside in—as it had in Bousquet's case. The skin was discolored, withered, sloughing off; the insides of the body had barely begun to break down.

Joly, having lit a
Gitane
, pondered this, continuing to stare across the Vézère valley. "Not all of the insides. I looked at Roussillot's report. It says the brain was considerably decomposed."

"The head is smaller than the body. It thaws faster."

"Ah."

"And don't forget the clothes, Lucien—the very same clothes he had on the day he disappeared. How else do you explain that? I'm telling you, the guy's been in cold storage for the last three years, right up until you found him yesterday."

Joly made a decisive movement with his head, turned from the parapet, dropped his cigarette, and ground it out with his heel. He briskly straightened his jacket, buttoned both buttons, and tugged on his cuff-linked sleeves. "Shall we go in? I believe it's time to make that arrest."

"Don't you want to know who did it first?"

It was an uncharacteristically smug remark, and Gideon got what he deserved. "Oh, I know who did it," Joly said casually. "What I didn't know was how."

   Inside, most of the crowd was milling about near the reopened bar. Audrey, who had finished her presentation a few moments earlier, was accepting congratulations and good wishes. Montfort was berating a small, miserable-looking man about some abstruse archaeological point. Julie was talking to Pru, Émile to one of the people from the foundation. With a quick glance around the room, Joly spotted his quarry. He strode purposefully over the wooden floor, his thin lips set, and waited until he was recognized.

"Yes?"

Joly drew his feet together and stood even a little straighter than usual. "Michel Georges Montfort, in accord with the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure I now place you under temporary detention until a warrant for your formal arrest and confinement on the charge of murder shall be obtained. Will you come with me now?"

It wasn't delivered loudly or even particularly doomfully, and yet it crackled through the room like a rifle shot. The babble of conversation stopped in mid-sentence. Without anyone's having turned in an obvious way to stare, everybody was avidly watching the two men. Gideon had a dreamlike sense of being part of some surreal drawing-room tableau. Cups were balanced on saucers, cigarettes on lips, breathing suspended. The only movement was on the part of the man Montfort had been talking to, who shrank inconspicuously away, or as inconspicuously as possible under the circumstances, his feet sliding noiselessly backward over the floor.

To someone watching the scene from off to the side or from any distance, it would have seemed as if Montfort received Joly's pronouncement with no emotion whatever. Certainly he didn't blanche, or gasp, or flush with outrage or astonishment, his mouth didn't twitch, his body didn't jerk. His one visible reaction was to slowly roll the small cigar he was smoking from one side of his mouth to the other while Joly was speaking. His thumbs, which had been lodged in the pockets of his vest while he had been holding forth, remained there as he studied the equally impassive police inspector and weighed his reply.

But Gideon, standing 20 feet away near the windows, with the light at his back, was looking full into his face and saw an extraordinary series of expressions shoot across it with lightning speed: astonishment, disbelief, calculation, resignation, and finally decision, all in the space of two or three seconds.

"May I get my things?" he asked

Joly inclined his head.

Montfort removed the cigar from his mouth and placed it in an ashtray on a nearby table, first tapping it to remove the ash.
As you see, I am in no hurry,
he seemed to be saying.
I am under no stress.

On the wall a few feet from Gideon was a coat rack with a wire shelf above it. Although it hadn't rained since the day before, the skies were mixed, and many attendees had brought raincoats or umbrellas and left them there. Montfort removed a brown raincoat from the rack and a large, furled black umbrella from the shelf. His eyes briefly met Gideon's, but now there was nothing at all in them; it was like looking into a statue's eyes. An ice-water chill trickled down Gideon's spine.

With the coat draped over his arm Montfort turned back to the noiseless room and stood there, coolly appraising the throng of rapt, appalled faces.

Joly only had so much patience. "If you please—" he began tartly.

Gideon must have glanced at Joly as he was speaking because he never saw the coat coming. He only knew that it had suddenly been thrown over his head, smelling of mildew and plunging him into darkness and that almost at the same time he took a heavy blow at the junction of his neck and left shoulder. He flung the coat off just in time to see Montfort lashing out again with the umbrella, a heavy, old-fashioned one with steel shaft and spokes. This time, throwing up his arm, Gideon caught it flush on the point of the elbow. Tears of pain jumped to his eyes, but still he managed to catch hold of it as Montfort raised it again.

"Michel, don't be stupid. What—"

Montfort was a heavy man with burly, powerful shoulders, and Gideon had had to pull hard on the umbrella to hold it back. Unexpectedly, Montfort let go. Gideon stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet, almost falling.

Montfort came after him. "Bastard!" he said, trying clumsily to shove him aside and get by. To the window, Gideon realized almost too late. To the open window, a hundred feet above the street. That's what this was about. Reaching out he managed to clamp his hand on Montfort's upper arm just as the archaeologist got a grasp on the window frame. Struggling, Montfort balled up his other fist and smashed it into Gideon's face like a man driving nails with a hammer. He felt blood spurt from his nose. The heavy, quivering fist was raised again and Gideon made a grab for that arm as well, using the thrust of his legs and the weight of his body to spin Montfort around and slam him hard against the wall beside the window.

The jolt seemed to take the fight out of the older man. "Gideon, don't let them do this to me," he whispered. Panting, he cast a terrified glance at the rapidly approaching Peyrol His once-ruddy face was drained of blood; gray-white below the eyes, sickly blue around the mouth. "How can I face this? I beg you—let me go, let me get it over with." One hand plucked ineffectually at Gideon's hold.

For a moment, Gideon softened—a man of Montfort's stature and accomplishments and very real contributions to endure a trial for murder, to go to prison for the rest of his life!—but only for a moment. He brushed Montfort's hand away. His own hand, which had very nearly loosened, tightened on Montfort's arm.

"You stood behind Jacques and crushed his skull," he said through set teeth. "You killed Ely."
And you damn well cost me a bunch of neuro-axons I can't afford, let's not forget that
. "You—"

"Permit me, monsieur," said Sergeant Peyrol to Gideon. And to Montfort, quite sternly. "This won't do, monsieur. Come with me at once, please."

Montfort, with a final, reproachful look at Gideon and a last, longing look at the open window and the empty space beyond, lowered his head and went with the sergeant.

Julie came up to Gideon as the room began buzzing with excited whispers again. "Are you all right?"

"Sure, I'm fine. I think I'd better go along with them to the
mairie
."

She handed him a packet of tissues. "You might want to wipe your nose first."

   "
Visitez… l'usine
," Julie said, practicing her French by reading aloud from the sign in the window of a
pâté
shop. She brightened momentarily, having successfully translated it, but her expression changed as the meaning sank in. "Yuck, why would anyone want to visit a chopped-liver factory?"

Gideon shook his head. "Got me."

"It certainly couldn't be anywhere near as entertaining as what you've just been telling me about intestinal bacteria and decomposing brains."

"Probably not as edifying either."

They were on the main street of the village. When Gideon had returned from the
mairie
an hour before and had begun to fill her in, Julie had interrupted: "How about getting out and taking a walk while you tell me? I could use the fresh air—and it'd help to be rubbing shoulders with real, everyday, normal people who're talking about something besides murder for a change."

Having spent most of the afternoon sitting in on Montfort's interrogation as a sort of interpreter of things scientific, he felt much the same way. Strictly speaking, Montfort hadn't been required to submit to being questioned until Joly got his warrant, but he'd waived his right to silence. With his frustrated attorney there but unable to convince him to shut up, he had woodenly answered question after question in a listless, unconcerned voice that had made Gideon's skin crawl; the voice of a man no longer part of this world.

The first thing he'd done on getting back to the hotel was to stand under a steaming shower until his skin felt as if it had been wire-brushed. Then he'd put on fresh clothes. After that he'd wanted to be around some everyday people too, and they had strolled the length of the village, first south through the riverside park, where mothers with old-fashioned prams, youngsters on swings, and old men playing
pétanque
had restored their faith in normal—or at least normal-looking—people. Then back along the shop-lined main street with its tourists and shoppers, also reassuringly ordinary-looking.

"All right, I understand about his having been frozen for the last three years," Julie said as they started walking again. "But why Montfort? How did you settle on him?"