Game of Patience

by Alleyn, Susanne

  “It wasn’t the husband,” Aristide said. “Don’t waste your time.”

  “The lover? We have only his word that he waited for her and she didn’t arrive. They might have quarreled.”

  “If that was so, why would he have called my attention to her disappearance?” Aristide shook his head, with a glance at Lafontaine, who sat on a block of stone, head in his hands, shoulders trembling. “Look at him. Commissaire, she’s dead because she saw the man who committed the murders on Rue du Hasard. He murdered her to keep her quiet. It’s the only reasonable explanation. If only she’d dared to be honest with us!”

  Commissaire Hubert sighed. “After the past few years, with everybody looking over his shoulder, would you?”

  CHAPTER 20

  He returned home on foot to Rue d’Amboise, grateful for the touch of fresh air and fine rain on his face, and pushed open the front door.

  “Ravel—”

  He paused, hand still on the door handle, as Rosalie rose to her feet from a bench in the dim foyer. “Forgive me for intruding.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I asked for you at the commissariat of the Butte-des-Moulins section. I badgered them until they gave me your address.” She met his eyes, then hurriedly looked away again. “Not so long ago, you called on me to apologize for your behavior. I should like to do the same. I behaved childishly on décadi. Please forgive me.”

  “There’s little to forgive,” Aristide said. He drew a deep breath, trying to banish the stink of putrid flesh with the faint scent of pipe smoke and coffee and frying onions that always lingered on the staircase. Rosalie drew a step nearer.

  “Are you quite well? You look pale.”

  “I had the misfortune to discover a corpse today.”

  “A corpse … ?”

  “A witness. A woman who could have identified the man who killed Célie and Saint-Ange.”

  She stared at him. “Tell me.”

  Aristide seated himself on the stairs, glad enough to sit down, and repeated the tale Lafontaine had told him. “And then by chance she sees the murderer again,” he concluded, “a few days ago, at the Palais-Égalité. But the murderer has recognized her as surely as she’s recognized him, and fears she’ll betray him … so he hangs about and keeps an eye on her, undoubtedly follows her home to the faubourg Honoré, and watches for his opportunity. One day she slips out alone to meet her lover and the murderer follows her to the gardens, to a lonely spot where no one is about, and … he strangles her.”

  “So another innocent person has died, in order to conceal this man’s guilt,” Rosalie said. “Oh, God, that poor woman … how I will rejoice when that man stretches his neck under the blade!”

  “You still think it was Aubry, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. Have you examined his movements yet? Does he have an alibi for the day this woman disappeared?”

  “Aubry’s disappeared, too. For all we know, he may be dead as well.” Aristide rubbed his eyes. The complexities of investigating a murder whose cast of characters was scattered across Paris had become hopelessly perplexing. In the cumbersome, decentralized system of police jurisdiction that had been the rule since 1790, it was scarcely clear who ought to take charge of an affair that had begun in one section, involving persons who lived in various sections, and a third murder committed in yet another.

  “What do you mean, Aubry’s disappeared?”

  A folded note on the hallway table, addressed to him in François’s familiar scrawl, caught his eye. He tore it open, read it, and glanced at his watch.

  “Pardon me, I have to go.”

  “Are you so eager to be rid of me now, after your persistent pursuit?”

  “I don’t mean to be rude. I have to meet someone.” He thrust the note in front of her.

  “Who’s this brandy seller?”

  “Someone who may be able to give Aubry an alibi for the tenth of Brumaire.”

  “I don’t believe it. What do you mean, he’s disappeared?”

  Aristide paused. “Why don’t you come with me now and I’ll tell you what I know, and you can hear for yourself whatever it is this peddler has to say. Will that satisfy you?”

  They hurried along the Boulevard, heads bent against the chilly breeze as Aristide told her about Aubry’s baffling disappearance. François was waiting by the empty pedestal at the center of the Place Vendôme, where once a statue of Louis XIV had stood.

  “Are you sure this is the right peddler?” Rosalie demanded after Aristide had hastily introduced them.

  “She’s the only woman who sells brandy on Rue Honoré,” said François. “All the other regulars are men. How do you want to work up to it? She’s the sort who’ll go deaf and dumb in front of the police.”

  “Then the police won’t ask her any questions.” Aristide buttoned his overcoat to the neck, concealing the telltale black suit. “Here,” he added, thrusting a few sous into Rosalie’s hand, “we’re hunting for signs of a friend of ours, who vanished a month ago.”

  The brandy seller, a weather-beaten woman who looked sixty and who Aristide guessed was probably thirty-five or forty, sat hunched on a disused mounting block, a little cask beside her, near the old Jacobin monastery. Silently pocketing the coins he gave her, she filled a small tin cup from the cask and handed it to him.

  “Excellent brandy this,” he said, blinking back a few tears after the first burning swallow.

  The brandy seller grunted and eyed the pastry shop across the street.

  “Do you often come to this spot to sell?”

  “Most days.”

  “I ask because I’m looking for a friend who has unaccountably disappeared,” he continued. The woman said nothing. “He was last seen leaving a house just over there,” he added, pointing at the house to the right of the pastry shop, “and we wondered if you might have seen him. This was a month ago, so I suppose it’s too much to ask.”

  The woman grunted again.

  “He’s young,” Aristide said, slipping a five-sou piece into her grimy palm, “and astonishingly good-looking. Dark hair. You’d almost think he was a woman. And he was in some distress, I believe.”

  The brandy seller bit the coin, slipped it somewhere beneath her layers of ragged shawls, and pondered a moment. “I seen him.”

  “You have?”

  “Least I remember some young gent, wearin’ good clothes, with a face like a little girl. Them fine gents, they got their own brandy in cut-glass decanters in their fancy houses, and they don’t buy from me, but he did. Last month, I s’pose. All in a pother he was.”

  “He was upset?” said François. “I feared as much.”

  “White as a sheet he was, and shaking like a leaf. He had three glasses. Then he looked better and he took himself off.”

  “I think our friend was last seen in the morning,” François said. He took the cup, finished off its contents, and passed it back to the brandy seller along with a double sou.

  “Evening,” said the woman, shaking her head. “I was pickin’ up t’go home. There wasn’t nobody much about on foot after lamplighting, but then he comes.”

  “And did he come out of that house?” Aristide inquired, pointing again at the house next to the pastry shop.

  “That? No. Happen he came from over yonder, I think.” She jerked a dirty thumb eastward. “He come up the street, lookin’ like I don’t know what, stumbling like, and all of a sudden he sees me and he says, ‘Give me a glass, right away,’ and he swallows it down in one gulp, and then another, and then he goes and leans himself against the wall.”

  “Like this, you mean?” François leaned back nonchalantly against the monastery’s doorsill, once entrance to the notorious Jacobin Club, as the breeze whipped at his bushy brown hair.

  “T’other way round; he had his back to me. Still in a bad way, he was. He leans his face on his arm, like he’s hidin’ his eyes. Then after a while he collects himself and he has a third glass, and a little color comes back i
nto his cheeks, and he pays me right enough and goes off.”

  “And this was around the time of lamplighting?” Rosalie said.

  “Aye, just past dark.”

  Aristide pressed another double sou into her hand and beckoned the others away. “Just past dark two décades ago … it’s dark at half past five now, so on the tenth of Brumaire darkness must have fallen at a few minutes to six. Say Aubry appeared no later than a quarter past six.”

  “It would take no more than ten minutes or so to walk here from Rue du Hasard,” Rosalie said. “He still could have done the murder.”

  François nodded. “You said the police surgeon swore they were shot before eight o’clock. Maybe Aubry doesn’t know that any competent doctor can tell within two or three hours when someone died.”

  “This alibi of his is no alibi at all,” said Rosalie. “And she said he was visibly upset. Like a man who’s just murdered the woman he loves, in a fit of passion, and stumbled out of the house in a daze. It’s perfectly obvious.”

  Abruptly François stopped, so absorbed in thought that Aristide was obliged to tug him from the path of a speeding carriage. “I’ve just thought of something—come on, let’s get out of this cold. I could use a bite to eat.”

  They found a secluded table in a near-deserted eating-house, far from the talkative cluster of friends by the hearth and the man reading aloud from a newspaper about General Bonaparte’s victories in Italy. Aristide cupped cold hands around a bowl of steaming lentil soup and turned an inquisitive gaze toward François, who washed a mouthful of soup down with a gulp of beer and proceeded.

  “Ravel … citizeness … what about this? Imagine, first of all, that Grangier’s mistaken or confused about his identification. People make mistakes all the time, and you say he’s a bit of a drunk.”

  Rosalie frowned. “Well?”

  “Grangier hears footsteps running up the stairs. Ten minutes later a young man rushes down the stairs and out the front door. Then twenty minutes later the young man returns, still in a terrible hurry, and runs upstairs again. Grangier doesn’t hear him run down again, so he must have gone down quietly. What if Aubry followed the girl to Saint-Ange’s apartment, went upstairs, found them already dead, and raced downstairs to get help and raise the alarm?”

  “But he didn’t,” said Rosalie. “Raise the alarm, that is.”

  “Then he has second thoughts about it; he fears he’ll be accused of murdering them himself, which is right enough. So he races back, to see if anything can be done for them. They’re dead, beyond help, and he stumbles downstairs and out to the street.”

  He glanced from Aristide to Rosalie. Rosalie sat motionless, her untouched glass of red wine before her. “If Grangier was indeed mistaken about who he saw,” she said at last, “and he did see Aubry, then why shouldn’t Aubry have been the murderer? That’s the simplest explanation, after all.”

  “You’re forgetting the round hat,” Aristide said between mouthfuls of the thick soup.

  “Hat?” Rosalie echoed him.

  “Grangier saw a young man wearing a round hat. He may not be sure of Aubry, but he’s definite about the hat. And Aubry told me himself that he doesn’t wear low-crowned round hats, that he doesn’t own any, because he dislikes them.”

  “Well, of course he’d deny it,” she snapped.

  “It’s the sort of thing his servant can confirm in an instant. So unless he deliberately donned someone else’s hat on the spur of the moment to disguise himself, which seems far-fetched, I fear he told the truth there. François, I think you’re making it too complex. We have no evidence at all that Célie had two passionate admirers. And if it wasn’t a jealous lover, who else would have wanted to murder her?” He sighed, scowling, and pushed his empty bowl aside. A pack of dog-eared old playing cards lying on a nearby table caught his eye and he fetched them and began to lay them out one by one.

  “In any event,” said Rosalie, “if Aubry had really been up there, and found Célie and Saint-Ange dead, but didn’t kill them himself, don’t you think he’d have told Ravel as much after the magistrate let him go?”

  “Not necessarily,” said François. “Ravel works for the police, after all. Better to stick to his story that he was never there. If it weren’t for that damned hat—”

  “Never mind,” Aristide said. “We’ve learned what the brandy seller had to tell. It doesn’t clear Aubry, but neither does it condemn him. What about the prostitute, this Émilie?”

  Rosalie glanced at him. “Who’s Émilie?”

  François shook his head, ignoring her. “Sorry. No luck.”

  “You claimed that all the whores in a quarter know each other,” Aristide said. “They certainly do at the Palais-Égalité.” He gathered up the cards and laid them out again.

  “So they do. And they don’t know any Émilie who hangs about the Pont-Neuf except for a mulatto girl who was right there and ready to talk.” François grinned, took a long swallow of beer, and continued. “Pretty girl, that one. She swore she damned well wasn’t writing letters to any gentlemen—she can barely write her own name. Besides, she was home sick with a fever for most of that week. The other girls backed her up; some of them visited her.”

  “Well, the woman may not be from that quarter after all, in which case we’ll have a devil of a time finding her—”

  “Or she may not exist.”

  “If Aubry is lying about this ‘Émilie,’ then who wrote to him?”

  “God knows.” François finished his glass of beer. “You won’t mind paying for another, will you? Waiter!”

  Aristide turned over the seven of hearts from his hand, set it on a six, looked over the tableau for a moment, chose between two eights before him, and swiftly moved a dozen more cards to their respective foundations. “If the person who wrote to Aubry wasn’t Émilie the prostitute, then who was he or she, and why is Aubry lying about him? I don’t like loose ends. We’d better return to the theory that the letter told him something damning about Célie.” He laid the last three liberties and geniuses in place and leaned back in his chair, gazing with mild triumph at the four neat piles of cards. “I prefer to see patterns work out as they should.”

  “People aren’t as predictable or logical as a pack of cards,” Rosalie said softly.

  “You think not? Nine times out of ten, they are. Perhaps ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

  “Well, you were so sure about Aubry, weren’t you?” François remarked.

  “That, I confess, is worrisome. I would say Aubry, given his past, and suitable provocation, was behaving quite predictably by murdering his sweetheart while in a deranged passion. But it’s possible he’s the hundredth case.”

  “And the porter’s eyewitness testimony?”

  “Oh, he was being completely true to his caste, his age, and his occupation! He won’t swear either way to what he saw because, as he admitted readily enough, he’d had a few glasses of eau-de-vie at the time, and can’t be sure if he was seeing straight. What’s more predictable than that?”

  François yawned and watched, chin on fist, as Aristide began to lay out another round of patience. “Ravel,” he said suddenly, “we’re missing something important here, you know. Do we know exactly what it was that Aubry’s mysterious letter told him?”

  “If, as you suspect, ‘Émilie’ is a myth? That Célie had deceived him, of course. What else would send him racing out like that?”

  “But that’s only a guess, isn’t it?”

  Aristide slowly nodded.

  “Now, a letter did exist, because Aubry’s porter saw it and handed it to him,” François continued, “and Aubry admits getting it, and Brelot told us that soon afterwards something upset him; we agree on that much, don’t we?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What else might it have been about? If it wasn’t any nonsense about forged notes, nor yet about Célie’s reputation?”

  Aristide dropped the cards on the table.

  “My God
, what was I thinking?” He shot to his feet and paced across the sawdust-strewn floor and back, thrusting empty chairs aside.

  “Never take anything on face value, never assume!”

  He threw himself into the nearest chair. “The letter arrives. Aubry puts it in his pocket, goes upstairs and into his study—and a bit later he runs out, ‘looking like death,’ as Brelot put it. That’s all we know for fact. Everything else is just guesswork. Right?”

  “Right,” said François. Rosalie nodded, watching Aristide intently.

  “So if ‘Émilie’ is a myth,” Aristide continued, “what was the letter about, and why did he rush out in such distress and haste? I’ve assumed all along that this letter-writer told Aubry something damaging about Célie, that Célie had been lying to him, or that she wasn’t what she seemed. But we don’t know that; the letter is undoubtedly ashes, and only Aubry knows the truth, and he’s keeping it to himself. What other intelligence could this letter have told him that could have upset him so much?”

  “Something about the girl, surely.”

  “François—do you think—could it have told him that Célie was already dead? That the person who wrote the letter had shot Célie?”

  “The letter arrived at … when, about four o’clock?” François objected. “Your police surgeon said they weren’t killed before four or so at the earliest.”

  “Then what if it was a threat, a cruel taunt? Something aimed deliberately at Aubry, a message telling him that the writer was about to harm Célie, the person who meant the most to him in the world?”

  They looked at each other, saying nothing. A burning log broke apart in the fireplace with a small hiss and crackle.

  “That really doesn’t seem very likely,” Rosalie said. “Why would anyone do something like that? It’s as good as a sworn confession. And why would Aubry have burned the letter?”