The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe (35 page)

“You never asked her about her past?”

“She lied. Told me her parents lived in Martinique when in fact her mother lived with a man in Abymes.”

“Why did you stay with her if she was a liar?”

“Those were things I found out later. I thought I could get her to love me. I thought her selfishness was an act, a pretense, a way of protecting herself. If only I could get through that outer barrier, then she could be a real woman, the kind of woman I wanted to love.”

“Agnès didn’t have real emotions?”

“Just two things she was interested in—clothes and traveling. Once we went to Martinique together and I had promised to take her to Tarpon Springs.”

“Where?”

“Tarpon Springs in Florida. My mother has a sister there who married a Greek fisherman. He owns the biggest sponge company in America.”

“But you never went?”

“We quarreled and Agnès went off to Sainte-Anne. She found a little concrete shack there and later Marie Pierre moved in with her. In a way, her departure was a relief—in physical terms. We’d lived in
my flat, we’d slept in the same bed but never a centimeter of skin. Agnès would always go into the bathroom in her nightdress and come out fully dressed. Yet for all that …” Olivier Rullé faltered.

“Yet for all that?”

“In a couple of months I will be thirty-one. A grown man of thirty. Agnès gave nothing and she took everything but when she moved out, it was as if I’d died. A grown man and at night I was a little boy crying into my pillow.”

“Did Agnès Loisel take drugs?”

He shook his head. “She wasn’t like that.” Olivier Rullé had moved from his chair and now sat on the edge of a large mahogany desk. “She spent her time preening herself—like a cat that incessantly licks itself. She wasn’t vain or anything. She didn’t admire herself in the mirror. She was careful about what she ate, about her weight and three times a day, she’d disappear into the bathroom for ten minutes to clean her teeth. She had several toothbrushes—and got me to buy her more.” He shook his head. “Funny, isn’t it?”

“What’s funny?”

“I’m not particularly generous by nature. Like most people, I’m selfish and I used to think women were less selfish than men but that was before I met Agnès. She only had to ask for something—a new dress or a pair of pretty shoes or a necklace—and I’d give it to her. I’d take her to the shop and buy precisely what she wanted. Yet that didn’t stop her going off and finding a flat of her own, going out to work and living with Marie Pierre.”

“She left Marie Pierre, too.”

“Agnès needed a man—she liked men, but she couldn’t keep one. A man’d’ve meant sharing her body. And Agnès couldn’t bear having anybody touch her.”

“That’s not what Marie Pierre said.”

The light skin seemed to flush. Then Olivier Rullé let out a sigh. “Perhaps not.”

“A woman who doesn’t like men?”

“Agnès liked being with me. Just she didn’t want me to touch her.”

“You never asked her why?”

He was silent for a moment. “Agnès was not a stupid girl and she respected knowledge. I think that’s why she went to bed with me in the first place—attracted to intellectual men.”

“You’re intellectual?”

“I’m not a bricklayer,
madame le juge
. I make no claims to being intelligent but I have my
baccalauréat
. Whereas Agnès had nothing—nothing. She couldn’t even spell. Basic things; things most people learn by the time they’re in
cours élémentaire
, by the time they’re eight or nine. She couldn’t spell and she never learned to spell my name. I suspect she was dyslexic.”

“Why?”

He raised an open hand as proof of his bewilderment. “Agnès was a prisoner of her ignorance. She talked of going to university—but she’d left school without a diploma, even if she pretended she had her
certificat
. Agnès Loisel could never be happy. She said it herself. There were times when she could be very realistic.”

“And you believed her?”

“Women don’t tell lies in bed.”

Anne Marie laughed.

“Unlike you,
madame le juge
, I slept with the girl.”

“Because you slept with her, she didn’t lie?”

“No hope, no ideals and certainly no human warmth. When I asked her if she wanted to have children one day, she looked at me as if I were talking a foreign language and when I told her that other women had children to cherish and to love, Agnès simply replied it was a bad idea to love.”

“Why?”

“I talked about all those things. Love, affection, caring for other people—things you take for granted, things you learn at your mother’s knee—and Agnès just laughed. Tapped her forehead and gave me her pretty smile and said I was crazy and then she’d turn away. No point in loving anybody, she said, because afterwards you’d only be
disappointed. Everybody’ll let you down; sooner or later, everybody will disappoint you.” He put his hand to his face and rubbed it. “Isn’t it strange?”

“What?”

“A warm bed, a mother’s kiss. You take it all for granted. Then you grow up, you get a job, you become a man. You go out into the world and without even being aware of it, you’re looking for affection. I can’t live without it—I need to give it and to take it. In a way, I’m envious of Agnès.”

“She doesn’t sound a very enviable person, Monsieur Rullé.”

“Agnès could never cry as I cried over her. When she hurt me, when she failed to turn up, when she turned her back on me—I was like a whimpering child again.”

“You seem to have got over her.”

“She’s still part of me.”

“Agnès’s dead.”

“Agnès shared my life for several months, she moved into my life and now she’s dead and that … And that …” Again the young man rubbed his face.

Neither Anne Marie nor Trousseau spoke.

“And now it is too late because she’s dead.” Olivier Rullé got up and returned to behind the desk. He ran the back of his hand against his nose.

“Did she take drugs?”

Trousseau coughed, crossed his legs, straightened his tie.

“She was addicted to clothes. She could spend hours poring over the 3Suisses catalog. She wanted to be pretty, at all costs, and she loved to wear good clothes. Obsessed with lingerie—she got me to buy La Perla and Aubade that cost a fortune. That’s why she looked after her body. After all, with men she couldn’t know the kind of bodily satisfaction that other women enjoy.”

“Where are her parents?”

His thoughts were elsewhere. The eyes focused slowly. “Her mother’s still here but Agnès refused to talk about her.”

“And the stepfather?”

“A violent man—and a drinker.” He held up his finger. “Why do you ask me about drugs,
madame le juge
?”

“Perhaps Agnès took an overdose.”

“What makes you think that?”

“We have no cause of death. We suspected rape—but forensic tests say the bruising on her body occurred after death and not before it. And there were no traces of sperm.”

“Times when I think that I was almost capable of rape. I was frustrated—frustrated by her refusal at any sort of intimacy.”

“You didn’t rape her?”

“I’m lucky,
madame le juge
. My parents love each other—a marriage made in heaven. If they can spend thirty years together without ever resorting to violence, I don’t see how I can justify violence on a woman—on a woman or indeed on anybody.” His smile was wise, but there were now wet traces down his cheek. “One of my rules—perhaps the most important—is that to deserve respect, you must give it. Violence’s the antithesis of respect.” He went to the refrigerator and took out the bottle of Contrexéville. “Sure you wouldn’t like something to drink? Coca-Cola?”

Anne Marie shook her head.

He drank swiftly. “Drugs.” Olivier Rullé looked at Anne Marie and her
greffier
. “She hated herself—deep down in the stoniness of her heart, she hated herself. Her selfishness was a kind of revenge.”

“Why would Agnès Loisel hate herself?”

“Agnès never knew affection. Nobody had taught her to love herself. No matter how hard she tried to be selfish, way down there was self-loathing.”

Trousseau coughed again.

“The first time we ever went to bed together …” His voice trailed away.

“Yes?”

“It’s not important.”

“What happened the first time you went to bed with Agnès?”

He smiled sheepishly. “She’s dead, isn’t she? It doesn’t really matter.”

“What happened?”

He sighed. “It was as if there was no life in her body. Letting me do with her body whatever I chose. She was elsewhere … as if her soul was hovering above her and calmly watching what was happening. When a man touches a woman, there are normally responses.”

“I hope so.”

“When I took off her top—I remember quite clearly, she was wearing an ochre-colored Naf Naf top. I took it off and there were marks, lots of marks. I asked her about them but Agnès shrugged and didn’t answer. Scars that must have been a couple of weeks old; ugly blemishes on her beautiful skin.”

“What caused them?”

Rullé looked evenly at Anne Marie. “She must’ve done it to herself with burning cigarette ends. Trying to punish herself. Or perhaps even trying to escape.”

“Escape?”

“Her life was an escape. She ran away from me for Marie Pierre, she ran away from Marie Pierre to go to Paris. At sixteen she’d run away from home. Agnès was running away from life. You ask me if she took drugs. The simple answer is no—Agnès enjoyed nice clothes and nice jewelry too much, but I think that there were times when …” He put a hand to his eyes.

“Go on.”

“Other girls talk about babies, about life, about the future. Agnès talked about death. She talked about it a lot; she wanted to escape. Not the occasional joint or a bottle of whiskey. What Agnès wanted was the final curtain, fast, painless and for keeps. That was her style,
madame le juge
. Escape from life, escape from the threat of love.”

Détection
, 9.xii.1989

… not in Detroit or Chicago, but surprisingly in Duluth and to a lesser extent, Atlanta
.

However, one of the most interesting cases of dumping, as the practice is now called by North American enforcement agencies, comes not from one of these urban centers but from the relatively rural environment of Maui in Hawaii
.

One morning in 1986, Mrs. Carnegie reported her daughter missing to the local police. At about the same time, a member of the public informed the police that he had found the documents belonging to Miss Daphne Carnegie scattered across the road outside his house. Called to the scene, police officers found the car of Miss Carnegie, abandoned and out of gas
.

The previous evening the young woman had been at Maui Community College (see photo) until 8:30. She had never turned up for her rendezvous with her boyfriend at a nearby mall for nine o’clock
.

Her boyfriend waited patiently for half an hour, then phoned the girl’s house at ten o’clock from a local bar. Mrs. Carnegie’s mother informed him that the young woman had not yet returned home. The boyfriend waited until the early hours of the morning, finally returning home at two in the morning
.

The body of Miss Carnegie was found three days later, naked and in a state of decomposition, in a cane field. The corpse was autopsied immediately at Oahu, where the forensic physician could identify no cause of death. There was semen in the vagina but no signs of violence. Toxicology tests proved negative, and the police authorities were faced with the riddle of a healthy young woman, just twenty years old, dying without any apparent reason
.

The semen was not that of the boyfriend, who had already been arrested. He was released when his alibi was corroborated by several customers of the shopping mall bar
.

The death of Miss Carnegie remained an unsolved mystery for two years, until the arrival of New York forensic pathologist, Dr. Baden (see
Détection
N° 203, 257), who suspected a case of dumping
.

According to Dr. Baden, the toxicology tests in Hawaii were good as far as they went, but they did not go far enough. Dr. Baden knew urine could not give satisfactory answers and that cause of death would be found in autopsy tissues. After death, the body’s enzymes continue to break down cocaine, hydrolyzing it into benzoylegonine, which is even harder to find than cocaine. In testing for benzoylegonine, only the best equipment can give satisfactory results. Thanks to North American efficiency, Dr. Baden was in luck. Although Miss Carnegie had now been dead for over two years, the decomposed tissues had never been destroyed because the case had not been solved
.

Dr. Baden sent sample fluids to the director of the Chemical Toxicology Institute in Foster City, California. This private laboratory specializes in drug identification and, in particular, the body’s metabolism of cocaine. Using ultramodern equipment, the California institute was able to identify benzoylegonine in the sample
.

And thus, the so-called murder was explained. For some reason, Miss Carnegie had not met up with her boyfriend but had spent her time free-basing, i.e., inhaling cocaine among friends, most probably at a party. Unfortunately, the young woman killed herself with an overdose. Her friends, not wanting to go to the police and risk arrest for the use of illegal drugs, found themselves encumbered with a corpse they did not know how to get rid of
.

Consequently, they hastily dumped the body in a cane field and tried to disguise Miss Carnegie’s death as a murder. Without Dr. Baden’s vast experience, her mysterious death would have been attributed to a sexual predator
.

A similar case, closer to home, is the embezzler of Saint-Michel-en-Grève (Côtes d’Armor) who was found naked …

“You read
Détection
, Luc?”

“You want me to put the
New England Journal of Medicine
in my waiting room?”