Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  Now Monsieur Duplin shrugged, saying, “We tried very hard to find them this afternoon. According to the concierge of Mr. Fayerweather, he and the lady had gone shopping. My men found several shops on the Rue Ste. Honoré where this was apparently true, with the sales people in a state of great fatigue and the stocks considerably depleted, but we were not able to locate Monsieur Fayerweather and Mademoiselle Bibi themselves. But my men are stationed outside, and if Monsieur and Mademoiselle arrive, as we fully expect them to do, they will be—” and he looked at Dr. Finney with phony apology “—intercepted.”

  “How come you didn’t intercept Hoopy here?” Mary Finney asked.

  Monsieur Duplin looked at me in real surprise and said, “Alas! That I neglected to do so has robbed me, I am afraid, of the completeness of my effect.”

  “You did pretty well,” Dr. Finney assured him. “Look, Monsieur Duplin, did something happen before or after you let me plan all this?”

  “Ah! Neither before nor after, dear Doctor. Or rather, both—and during. Please, dear Doctor—and Miss Collins—and Monsieur Taliaferro—shall we ascend to the cocktails? Your audience is waiting.”

  We began ascending to the cocktails, but as we went Dr. Finney said, “Audience or no audience, Monsieur Duplin, I’m not going to open my mouth until you tell me what this is all about.”

  “It is very simple,” he said. “We have, you see, discovered the murderer. Oh,” he said, holding a hand up palm forward in a modest disclaimer of our surprise, “it is not entirely that we discovered the murderer. In a way the murderer discovered himself—or should I say herself?—to us. In any case, we have him. Should I say her? We have the murderer, pronouns aside. And of course the murderer would make a poor dinner guest. But if the others came, you would be disturbed by the empty place, not so? And in this way we make a most severe test of your famous acumen. Because as you talk, we, of course, know the truth.”

  At this point Emmy gave a small shriek, as of a lady who remembers she has left her purse in a phone booth, or something of the kind. “Professor Johnson and Bijou!” she cried.

  “Professor Johnson and Bijou what?” asked Dr. Finney.

  “I hardly know how to say it,” little Emmy faltered, “but all these alibis in this case have been so—so much alike. Do you see what I mean, Mary? First Marie Louise and Luigi. Then Freddy and Bibi. Then Mrs. Jones and Tony. Then Audrey and René. And we haven’t given a thought to Professor Johnson all this time. And nobody knows where Bijou is. So why not Professor Johnson and Bi—”

  “Emmy, dear,” said Mary Finney. That was the beginning and end of Emmy’s analysis of the case.

  Dr. Finney stood at the end of the room, behind our table, like a great natural monument somewhat weathered and rusted by the nagging of the elements. She had been standing there for some time, describing her way of work, and the people and some of the events—the most pertinent events—that I have set down here. The coffee had long since gone, and the brandy was almost finished. There was a lot of cigarette smoke.

  “…and so I looked first at René,” she said, “because the major inconsistency was his. He wanted money, and he wanted money from a woman, and the best way to get the most money from a woman was to marry her. But he didn’t marry Mrs. Jones when she was begging for him, and he hadn’t married Audrey when all he had to do was raise his little finger. So, I thought, the crux of the whole thing lies there. The truth is, that while I like to sort of muddle along in a case without letting myself get sold on the idea that any one person is likeliest to be the guilty one before I’ve muddled and muddled a lot, I couldn’t help coming back to René and deciding it had to be him. But then that inconsistency got shot out from under me because Harry turned up with the information that René was married, to a girl named Gretel Gutzeit. If I’d been doing this more methodically and with more time, I’d have asked Monsieur Duplin to look up Gretel Gutzeit for me. But I suppose you did that anyway, didn’t you, Monsieur Duplin?”

  Monsieur Duplin grew red in the face but said nothing.

  “Anyway,” continued Dr. Finney, “whoever she is, Harry was able to look her up, and even to get a photograph of her. Why haven’t you asked Harry, Monsieur Duplin?”

  Monsieur Duplin cleared his throat uncomfortably, and said, “Until this moment, I did not know about this Gretel Gutzeit.”

  “I must have forgotten to mention it,” Dr. Finney said. “Things have happened so fast. Well, she was a very plain girl, apparently. At least Harry and Mrs. Jones had both seen her photograph, and she said it was of a very plain girl. But sometimes, of course, a girl can change quite a bit. Bibi for instance. From a photograph of Bibi pre-Freddy, you could hardly identify Bibi post-Freddy.

  “But, whoever Gretel Gutzeit was, it was obvious that Nicole knew something and I entertained the idea for a while that Nicole might have been blackmailing René. But that just added an inconsistency instead of explaining one. It was inconsistent enough that Nicole didn’t drink, didn’t have lovers, led a life of next to fanatic circumspection. Now if you’re doing that, for whatever reason, you’re not going to go in for the dangerous sport of blackmail. Nicole was a sensible, cautious, shrewd, essentially very conservative Frenchwoman intent on building a career and a profitable establishment. So I tried to forget the idea of blackmail, but I didn’t forget that Nicole knew something about Gretel Gutzeit or gutzeit something, and that it was so important to her that when she was dying, and in some frightful torment of confusion, of half-delirium, what she said before she died was gutzeit. It was a key word, and the one that came to the surface from all the complexities and concealments that she didn’t have the time or the clarity of thought to reveal to us.

  “So I tried to think of some way that Nicole could have been murdered by someone named Gutzeit. Who was Bijou? Who was Tony, really? It’s a German name—what about Nicole during the occupation? All that I wondered about. Suppose Audrey’s name was Gutzeit before she was married. I thought about that one. It’s possible to invent explanations. I invented them for all these circumstances. But I kept running into unexplained inconsistencies.

  “When Mr. Taliaferro relayed Tony’s story to me, I sat down to decide whether I believed it or not. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that Tony would have gone to sit in St. Sulpice, and also that he would have gone to look at a display of his and Nicole’s records in a gramophone shop, although not reasonable in cold weather. That church is an ice-box, too. I’m sure he’d done both of those things a dozen times, in good weather. And that was exactly the point. If he had wanted to invent an explanation of the way he had spent the crucial period when the murderer was in The Flea Club—and by the way, where was Bijou, since Tony had left her there?—the simple thing to do was not to invent something brand-new, but to repeat as having been true that morning, something which had been true on others. Much brighter than René’s effort to establish an alibi by telling Audrey to claim they had been at the Louvre at that hour in the morning even if the Louvre had been open. If it had been, of course, he’d have been a safely anonymous visitor among hundreds, according to his alibi, and only its inconsistency would have been suspicious. Monsieur Duplin,” she said suddenly, “you’re sure you know who did this?”

  “Yes,” said Monsieur Duplin, with weakening conviction.

  “Have you a confession?” Dr. Finney asked.

  “No—not exactly a confession. We have an accusation, supported by the strongest kind of evidence.”

  “Have you got a motive?”

  Monsieur Duplin hesitated for a long moment, and then said, “The motive you mentioned. Blackmail. It is a supposed motive. We deduce it, just as you did in the case of René. But it is not a proved motive. We do not have a motive we can prove. Not at the moment.”

  Dr. Finney grinned, and said, “Maybe I’ll help you out yet. How’s your German? What does gutzeit mean?”

  “ Jeepers!” I cried out, before I could stop. “It could mean fair weather, almost!”

/>   Dr. Finney ignored me, while I sat there sweating for Freddy. She said, “Literally, gut good, zeit time. Or, in French, bon temps. Which, when you remember that Nicole’s name was Marguerite Bontemps, makes the connection Gretel Gutzeit, Marguerite Bontemps. And in the disputed areas near the Franco-German border, families have changed their names back and forth between French and German more than once. I haven’t verified a thing, but I can make up a story like this:

  “There was once a girl named Gretel Gutzeit who because of circumstances which are explainable in a number of ways, especially since this occurred during the disturbed years just before and at the beginning of the war, contracted a marriage with a young man well above her station, called René Velerin-Pel, as we know. It’s conceivable that René could have fallen in love with Gretel. It’s certainly conceivable that in love or not, he could have seduced her. It’s conceivable that the marriage could have come about between the two young people in one way or another, especially given the immediate pre-war time of mobilisation and disorder. But it’s most conceivable of all that René would have regretted it and insisted upon its secrecy—wrath of his family and so on—hoping to wiggle out of it some way. Then he’s called to war, Gretel discovers her pregnancy, and sticks to her agreement of secrecy. She comes to Paris, and translates her German name to Marguerite Bontemps. But one thing she refuses to relinquish—her and her child’s legal hold on René. Maybe she asks him for money. He can’t give it to her, he’s afraid to tell his family. Perhaps he finds a little money for her from time to time, and helps tide her over the first years in Paris. After the war, even with René’s family bankrupt, Marguerite clings to the practical legal fact of her marriage, with all the tenacity of a woman hardened to battle with the world and unwilling to relinquish any bulwark against it. She probably keeps on getting money from René, when he had it to give, during the rough early days after the war. As both of them rise in their professions, and Marguerite Bontemps becomes Nicole, and René is in a position to acquire real money if he can divorce Marguerite and marry it, Marguerite wants her share. I’d say that she insists to René that she will give him a divorce for a certain settlement, which he is not able or not willing to meet. And all this time she is fanatically careful to lead a life of such public and indisputable decorum that René hasn’t a chance to divorce her and take her child. If that is blackmail of a sort, it is not criminal blackmail. And who could ever have recognised the night-club singer Nicole as the plain little Gretel Gutzeit of the photograph? Hair bleached, eyebrows shaved and re-located, and all the glamour make-up in general.

  “Then, I figured, René loses one more jackpot, Mrs. Jones, and sees himself in a position to lose what he thinks is the next best jackpot, Audrey. He’s getting desperate now, and comes to see Nicole that Tuesday morning at The Flea Club—not necessarily planning to kill her, although he’s wished her dead many a time—but determined to settle the business before he leaves. She is as obdurate as ever. Where is Bijou at that time? Nicole had sent Tony away because of Marie Louise and Luigi upstairs. She probably sent Bijou on an errand for the same reason. But before she can go upstairs to wake the children, René appears.” Dr. Finney turned towards Monsieur Duplin and said, “You have something to fill in with here? About Tony? Because if you haven’t, I think I have.”

  Monsieur Duplin made an indescribable gesture.

  Dr. Finney went on, “You see, Tony was inconsistent too. Why did he wait so long to explain to us what he had been doing? He wasn’t protecting his investment in Mrs. Jones, since he had left her long before the murder. Left her at six that morning. But when he thought she was going to stand in for him, giving him an alibi for the time of the murder, he was relieved. He didn’t want to tell what he had been doing. He had some other investment to protect, and I think it could have been something like this: It’s true he went to the Deux Magots; possibly he even went to St. Sulpice. But I don’t think he would have had time to do both, and certainly he didn’t go and stand in front of a store window he had seen before. I think he came back to The Flea Club, or started to, and saw René—if it was René—go in the cellar entrance. Nicole had got rid of Tony in a way which he himself said seemed odd to him at the time. And so, because of an instinct to spy—which after all was natural, to spy on his present mistress’s ex-lover—he hung around the end of the street where he could watch inconspicuously, keeping his eye on The Flea Club’s door, waiting for René to come out. He must have seen Emmy and Hoop and Professor Johnson and me go in, and then certainly he saw the police ambulance. Did he see René go out the boulevard entrance? Whether he did or not, he saw the rest of us come out, but not René, and when he learned what had happened to Nicole, he drew the obvious—and I believe the correct—conclusion.”

  “Why didn’t he see Marie Louise and Luigi come out the boulevard door if he was so alert?” I asked.

  “Because the police ambulance was at the cellar entrance taking all his attention, of course,” Dr. Finney said.

  I raised my hand and said, “May I say something more? I suggest that Bijou came back from her errand or whatever it was, and saw the police there too, and sank out of sight into whatever kind of place a person like Bijou can sink out of sight in, which should be almost any kind of place where there were enough people.”

  “Why should she want to sink out of sight? Are you entertaining the idea that Bijou had something to hide?”

  “No, I’m not. I knew Bijou and you didn’t, and I don’t think there’s a chance she had anything to hide. But it was too late for her to do anything for Nicole, and people like Bijou, really simple people who when you come down to it are at the mercy of the whole social system—where was I?—people like Bijou, I mean, are just plain afraid of the police. I think she would have let that sleeping dog lie.”

  “Maybe,” said Dr. Finney, “except that she didn’t have the chance. She did return from the errand, by the way—but earlier than your guess, and she went into The Flea Club just as usual.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well,” said Dr. Finney, “because she’s still there. This afternoon when I walked all over the place, looking into everything and trying to remember everything we did, the last thing I did was re-visualise all that happened when we went in with Professor Johnson. The pit where we found Nicole had been about three-quarters full of earth, if you remember. I looked into it and saw it was still about half full. And for the first time I asked myself why anybody eager to dispose of Nicole in a hurry would bother to half-fill that pit before he put her in it. So I dug and—Bijou’s there. Now you can figure anything you want to out of that, but I figure that when René—I always have to say if it was René—I figure that when René knocked Nicole on the head, not with the intention of killing her, I’m sure, but in a rage, he stood there aghast. Whether he thought he had killed her, or saw that she was still breathing—which is more probable—I don’t think he would have had the idea of finishing the job by burying her alive, as we interrupted him in doing. Perhaps he planned to leave her there, to die or to be discovered. It’s perfectly possible that he thought that if she recovered she wouldn’t give him away—and I even think it’s perfectly possible that she wouldn’t have. Among possibilities we haven’t even considered is the possibility that she loved the bastard. At any rate his course of action was decided for him when Bijou came in and discovered him standing there. She probably began screaming. There was only one way to cope with things now: he strangled Bijou. It was a quick, easy job for a strong and desperate man. He put her in the pit and threw in enough earth to cover the body thoroughly. What is he doing? Hiding her from Nicole, if Nicole recovers? I think it is at this point that he takes the cash out of the box and throws the box into the pit with Bijou, taking double advantage of getting away with a considerable sum of money, and hoping to present a misleading motive for the crime. Although I doubt that he thought of it rationally. We can think of René by this time as acting in a state close to hysteria. Frantic,
clutching at any straw that suggests concealment, he dumps Nicole into the pit andi begins to cover her, too, with earth, and he is in that process when he hears us coming, and leaves things as we found them.

  “Monsieur Duplin, I’m not certain just how you found René or who accused him, but I’m betting on Tony. But even without Tony, René would have given himself away eventually. He had already made one bad mistake. He had asked Audrey to supply him with an alibi for that morning, protesting his complete innocence, of course, and depending on her abject enslavement to make her accept whatever flimsy reasons he presented to her. And if Audrey has been a woman in hell, which she certainly has, it has been as much her suspicion of René’s guilt as the discovery of his marriage.”

  Dr. Finney sighed heavily and turned to Monsieur Duplin. “I should have called you right away about finding Bijou,” she admitted, “but if you want to prosecute me for concealment or something I plead for leniency on the grounds of a rushed schedule and only a slight delay. I only found her—” she looked at her watch—“a little more than four hours ago.” Sighing again, she said, “Well, it’s always fun until you catch them, then you’re awfully let down. I hate to see even a son-of-a-bitch in such bad trouble. Am I right, Monsieur Duplin? Is it René?”

  Monsieur Duplin rose, and Dr. Finney sat down. “Yes,” he said, “René.” He spoke deliberately, saying, “The Sûreté does not release a Tony as easily as I appeared to do this afternoon. He was of course followed. It did not take him long to go to René’s rooms. He went first to his own quarters, and there no doubt he picked up the knife, which of course he did not have when we released him and returned to him his things. Nor had he any money at that time—a little odd change left from whatever Nicole had advanced him. Certainly he went to René and demanded money for the concealment of his knowledge that René entered and left The Flea Club that morning. We arrived in time, possibly, to save Tony’s life. René of course claims that Tony attacked him with the knife, and that thus he was forced to shoot him. It is a stomach wound. Tony denies the attack, and truly there would have been no reason, except his own defence. René—who has been intercepted—does not know that Tony has told us he saw René at The Flea Club that morning. For a conviction we would have only the word of Tony—except that now, dear Doctor, you have also given us a motive, as well as the corpse of the woman Bijou. The affair, I believe, can be called settled.”