The Art of Murder

The Art of Murder

Louis Shalako

This Smashwords Edition copyright 2014
Louis Shalako and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-0-9916716-3-2

The following is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or
events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters
and incidents are the product of the author’s
imagination.

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Chapter One

A Floater in the
Seine

“
Hey, Andre.” De Garmeaux
nodded at the floater. “Anything special?”

“
Nah.” Sergeant Andre Levain
shrugged. “It’s just another poor and anonymous soul who couldn’t
take it anymore.”

A small group of onlookers on the
street above stood in contrast to the pedestrians with umbrellas
open and faces to the wind, refusing to even acknowledge their
presence as they scurried past to their workplace. A line of
buildings, windows impenetrable due to glare and grime, ignored the
disruption and reflected and amplified shouts, bicycle bells and
car horns. A few bleary-eyed faces were visible in a brightly lit
café on the far side of the street as they read the papers and
sipped scalding coffees.

It was another morning in Paris. Life
had its logic and a certain pace in spite of all distractions. A
barge headed past downstream. The faces in an open window ignored
the event and the spectacle, intent upon their own business
undertakings.

Andre shivered involuntarily. The
slanting grey rain hissed down, making puddles jump and splatter
with its violence. The river, serene in its relentless push to the
sea, made its own contribution to the wetness of the sounds all
around them as it lapped at the shoreline and gurgled past small
rocks at the edge. His shoes squelched as he shifted from side to
side on the narrow shore. There was a smell of rotting fish in the
air, suggestive of darker events.

This weather always made his knees
ache. The dead man bobbed face down in one of the recurrent eddies
along this stretch. They looked on as one of the attendants reached
with a borrowed boathook and dragged it closer. The junior was
reluctant to grab it, but he waded out into the shallows when it
hung up on a snag. They were all soaked anyway, even the boys in
uniform with their glistening slickers, always dripping down the
necks in his recollection. Even so, he wished he had one
now.

Grabbing the corpse by the collar, the
attendant dragged the thing up as high as it could go. Heavy and
limp, probably weighing fifty or a hundred kilos more due to the
passage of time and resultant soakage, he was going to need
help.

This one didn’t look likely to come
apart at the seams, and that was always a blessing. Andre pushed
the sodden fedora up on his forehead, where it chafed from sheer
weight and a long night.

“
So where’s Gilles?” Hubert
De Garmeaux and Maintenon went back a long time.

They were on the beat together. It was
hard to visualize either one of them as a young man of twenty. De
Garmeaux was tolerable, unlike some others, and treated Andre with
familiarity. It was a kind of professional friendship. You would
never know, with De Garmeaux, whether he really liked you or not.
He gave no one any cause for complaint, whether they were a
colleague or a customer. His partner, whom Andre didn’t know, stood
gazing silently at the far side of the river, oblivious to the
proceedings.

“
The dentist.”

“
Yes, it would take a lot to
keep him away.” De Garmeaux gave a nod of sympathy.

“
Hah!” Andre grinned. “What
are the odds this bugger is going to have a wallet?’

“
Slim to none.” De Garmeaux
was probably right. “What are you doing here?”

“
Swapped shifts with
Couteau. His sister’s getting married.” De Garmeaux
nodded.

“
Just your luck.”

“
I’ll be home in a couple of
hours.” Andre was philosophic about the extra shift, and he might
need a favour someday.

The money wasn’t everything.

“
Something’s got him real
good!” The fellow, Jacques, wrestled with the weight.

It was probably a submerged tree trunk,
whole and entire, with the stub of one stout branch sticking
out.

Whether it was suicide, accident or
murder, these folks never seemed to make it easy for the police.
Genial cursing came from Francois, the senior attendant, as he
waded into the chill green water. His arms held high, he sighed
deeply when his crotch submerged. With a hold under the armpits,
one on each side, they dragged the decedent in and unceremoniously
flopped him down beside the stretcher. They looked down at
themselves, and Andre saw the younger one’s knees knocking from the
cold. Excess water flowed out from their shoes. Their lips moved,
but they had some sense of propriety, mostly for the sake of the
audience. They kept it quiet as they got a proper grip on ankles
and shoulders. An officer moved in to assist Jacques at the heavy
end.

“
Ready?” The younger fellow
nodded, giving a flick of the head and a brief grin. “Heave, ho. Up
we go.”

They put it down again at the base of
the concrete seawall.

Andre Levain nodded grimly at the
macabre cheerfulness of the meat-wagon boys. When they got home
from work, no one ever asked how their day had been. They probably
had an answer. It’s just that no one ever asked.

“
I keep thinking Gilles will
be along shortly.” De Garmeaux waited for them to carry it up the
embankment, an affair replete with more carefully studied cursing,
not so good-naturedly now, for the mud and the filth on their
obligatory hard leather shoes was as slippery as hot oil on
marbles.

An officer up above had a rope tied to
the guard rails, and that probably wasn’t going to help much as no
one had a free hand, but Andre was used to seeing such
things.

After he and De Garmeaux made it up,
they looped the rope around the bar at the top of the stretcher for
additional pull from above. With a turn around the upper railing,
it was a bit like a pulley. One man would take up the slack, and
they could stop in place if necessary. With pushing and shoving
from a pair of uniformed officers below, and the two attendants
braced by whatever footholds and cracks in the sloping concrete
abutment that they could find, the corpse was carried up to street
level.

“
Let’s have a quick look,
then.” De Garmeaux studied the face and then shrugged. “Have you
ever noticed they always lay them face-up?”

Andre rewarded De Garmeaux with an
appreciative grunt.

“
It’s more comfortable that
way.” Andre was hardened, impervious to the coarse humour of his
brother officers.

“
Oh, look, it’s my uncle
Raoul.” De Garmeaux’s tone was priceless, and one of the huddling
gendarmes, face haggard in the early light, laughed out
loud.

The onlookers muttered softly in the
background, as Andre smiled for the first time since coming on
shift at eleven-thirty last night. Jacques, having borne the brunt
of unpleasantness this morning, squatted by the body and began
checking the pockets for personal articles.

“
He’s got a watch.” He
checked more pockets, pulling out coins and some small bills from
the gentleman’s right front trousers pocket.

He pulled a silvered flask from inside
of the jacket breast pocket.

“
That’s a nice
coat.”

He looked sideways at the senior police
officers.

“
Good shoes.”

“
Thank you, Jacques.”
Bending, De Garmeaux pulled one off and took a serious look at
it.

“
Well, it’s not a robbery,
anyway.” Levain pulled out his notebook. “No wallet
yet?”

“
No. Gin.” Jacques’ nose was
legendary, although he could be a pest at times.

De Garmeaux put the booze aside with
the watch and the money. The man had no rings, but the cufflinks
looked nice, perhaps even expensive. Jacques gave the flask a
longing glance, but knew better than to say anything untoward. He
kept digging, but it was Hubert who struck pay dirt.

“
He’s got a wallet, but no
identification.” De Garmeaux grimaced. “Odd.”

“
Huh.” Andre was
unmoved.

“
Yes, thank you, Jacques.
Francois.” De Garmeaux’s eyebrows rose at the thought of the heap
of missing persons reports, a heap replenished every single
morning, in every town of any size or significance across the
entire country. “Oh, boy.”

The boys put him in the back of their
little van, bickering back and forth about which of them was wetter
and more miserable. The voices of the crowd, and the people
themselves, faded away. There was nothing more to see.

The hiss of the rain and the pushing of
the wind through the sycamore branches, barely showing the first
hint of green buds breaking open, lifted his hair and warmed his
neck as a thin shaft of April sunshine cut across the city from the
east.

***

The whine of the drill faded. Doctor
Etienne spent an inordinate amount of time poking, prodding and
peering into his mouth. He gave a grunt of approval at the
appearance of his own work. Gilles lay in a puddle of sweat,
fingers stiff and cramped from gripping the armrests.

“
That should be
sufficient.”

“
Thank you, Doctor.” Gilles
made as if to sit up, but Doctor Etienne, not the most fashionable
dentist in town but highly recommended, put his hand on his chest
in restraint.

“
What? There’s more?” Gilles
stifled a groan.

After screwing up his courage in spite
of a life-long distaste for doctors in general and dentists in
particular, he had been prepared to bolt if things got too bad.
After the pin-prick of the needle, the pain was less than expected,
but it turned out after some years that he was a gagger—an
additional complication that he wasn’t aware of until the
appointment. It might not have been so bad, if only the man didn’t
have such a damnably complete set of tools, which he seemed to use
and just as quickly abandon with cheerful dispatch. Etienne placed
a thing, some gauzy cylindrical object between the upper molar and
the new empty socket in his lower jaw.

“
Bite down gently on
this.”

Gilles subsided into the chair, glad
that the ordeal was over. He watched as the doctor put tools and
things on a tray, wrote in a file, and hummed a busy little tune,
of which he seemed completely unaware.

“
I’ll want you to come back
in ten days.” Critical blue eyes gazed at him over the gauze
mask.

“
Of course.” Gilles wondered
what it was about.

It must have been ten years since he’d
been in, but the pain of a rotten tooth was driving him mad. What
blessed relief.

“
I always do a quick check
to see if it’s healing correctly. Now, I’ll just put in a couple of
stitches.”

Gilles endured it, tempted to check his
watch, but since there was nothing he could do to speed the process
along, there was little point. There were a few little jabs of pain
in spite of the anesthesia, and then it was finally
over.

The doctor stepped in a certain place
and the chair lowered. Doctor Etienne extended a hand and helped
Gilles up from the seat, then carelessly tossed aside his mask.
Gilles, focused on the thickly numbed patch in his jaw, was
nevertheless pricked in the lower back by small aches which he put
down to tension and cramp. There might have been a little old age
in there as well. His lips were rubbery and barely
manageable.