Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries)

by Longworth, M. l.

  “I’m going to sit down while you look,” Thierry said. As he came closer to the desk he stopped, realizing that something was missing. “Where’s his chair?” he asked. He walked around the desk. “Maybe he works on one of those ergonomic stools.”

  Yann laughed, picking up an unlabeled file that was on the desk. “I hardly think that Moutte shops at Ikea!”

  Thierry then gasped and jumped backward, bumping into a marble-topped console, causing a glass vase to tip and begin to fall over. Yann dropped the file and reached out and caught the vase, crying, “Merde, Thierry!” The vase looked like, to Yann, an art nouveau vase…from Nancy…? he thought to himself. He tried to remember the name of the turn-of-the-century glass designer who had made the vases his mother bought, with much difficulty, for very, very wealthy clients. The vases were always dark, smoky shades of green and brown and orange, with flowers and plants creeping up the side of the glass.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Thierry yelled.

  “Shush, dude! They didn’t hear you in the centre-ville!”

  Thierry turned away from the desk and faced the wall, leaning on his forearm, whimpering.

  “Hey,” Yann whispered, now concerned. He reached out to his friend and patted him on the back. “Okay, we can leave now.”

  Thierry remained motionless and slowly extended his arm behind his back, pointing to the floor behind the desk. Yann turned away from his friend. “Holy crap!” The doyen was lying on his back, his eyes wide open, beside his desk chair, which had been toppled over and was now lying on its side. “Let’s get out!”

  Thierry turned around and forced himself to look at Moutte’s body for a second, and then at his friend. “Yann! We can’t leave him!”

  Yann pulled at Thierry’s sweater. “Who are we gonna call? He’s dead! He must have had a heart attack. But we can’t get caught…we broke in here, remember?”

  “We can call Emergency on the way out!” Thierry pleaded, reaching for the phone. Yann put his hand on Thierry’s.

  “They’ll find him in the morning! Let’s go now! Come on!”

  “We could call and leave an anonymous tip,” Thierry suggested, becoming frantic, his voice cracking.

  Yann put his hands on Thierry’s shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. “Calm down. There’s nothing we can do for the old fart. We need to look after ourselves now and get out of here as quickly as possible. The janitor will find him in the morning. Okay? Let’s go!”

  Thierry looked at Yann, now convinced of his friend’s argument. If they were found in Moutte’s office, neither of them would win the Dumas. In fact, they would probably be expelled from the university. He would end up teaching high school French in a rough neighborhood in Marseille, as his father did. He looked down at the doyen again, horrified at the professor’s open eyes. Thierry Marchive would remember that stare for the rest of his life. Thirty years on, when he himself would be the chair of the Theology Department of a small American college, his four-year-old daughter would fall off of a swing, and for two or three seconds her eyes would stare vacantly at the big cloudless sky, until she caught her breath and Thierry, almost at the point of fainting, would cry tears of relief. He would see those eyes again, on a too-thin, too-nervous colleague, who, after his daily jog around the campus, would collapse of a heart attack in Thierry’s office.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said quietly.

  As they walked toward the door, Thierry stole one last look at the painting and realized why he thought it was so lovely: Saint Francis was smiling, leaning down as if speaking to the birds—not preaching. A large oak tree spread out over the group, protecting the saint and his friends, and tiny colorful wildflowers dotted the foreground. Yann sighed as he held the door open and ushered his friend through.

  “Gallé,” Yann whispered, frustrated that Thierry would find a kitsch nineteenth-century painting so enthralling.

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s just that vase that I saved from crashing. It’s an Émile Gallé.”

  Thierry didn’t reply. He thought it odd that his friend would comment on a vase when the head of the Theology Department was lying on his back, lifeless. And, unbeknownst to the two young men, the file that had slipped from Yann’s hand, now on the floor, did hold the name of the Dumas Fellowship’s recipient.

  Chapter Four

  With Every Job…

  The rain poured down steadily, as it had been doing since early morning. Bruno Paulik stood at his kitchen window and watched it crush the plants in his small backyard. It hadn’t rained in Provence for months—he couldn’t remember the last time it had—and now it was making up for lost time. It had just been announced on the radio that the residents of a village in Haute-Provence had been evacuated for fear of flash flooding. He thought of the gravel lane leading to his parents’ farm near Ansouis, in the Luberon Sud—far from the flooding, but still, after rains like this it would become a muddy swamp. The Range Rover that he had bought secondhand paid for itself on days like today: bad weather no longer meant that to see his parents he had to park on the departmental road, about three hundred meters from their stone mas; and in the four-by-four he could visit his father’s, and his wife Hélène’s, more isolated vineyards, although his father, now approaching eighty, preferred to walk. “I’ll walk while I still can,” he would mumble when offered a ride. But Paulik suspected that his father had other motivations—Alceste Paulik had recently found a Roman coin buried between a row of vines and was now obsessed with finding more. He showed the coin to whomever came into the house—from family members to the guy who came to read the electricity meter—and although the inscription was too worn to read, he was fairly certain that the bust, clearly visible, depicted Hadrian: bearded, with a long aquiline nose, wearing a toga and crown of laurel. Alceste Paulik had, overnight it seemed to his son, become a fanatic amateur historian, having Bruno drive him into Aix—his parents had never liked driving in “la grande ville”—so that he could borrow Roman history books from the library.

  “Papa!” Léa moaned, holding her small blond head in her hands. Bruno Paulik turned around and faced his daughter. “Solfège! Solfège! I hate it! Why do they make us do it? I can read music already!” She took her right hand off her head and shoved aside her papers, some of them sliding across the pine dining table and one or two falling on the floor. Paulik left the window and came and wrapped his arms around her.

  “You know that in order to go to the conservatoire in Aix, you have to take all of the music reading classes, even if you can already read music,” he said. When his daughter didn’t reply, Paulik continued, “Léa, you love singing, but with every job, no matter how much we love it, there come some tasks that we don’t like doing. But, in order to do our job really well, we also have to do some…” He searched for the right word, but the only thing he could come up with was, “shitty stuff.”

  “Papa!” His nine-year-old daughter couldn’t decide if she should laugh or groan. She chose the latter, and Paulik silently agreed with her. He saw the overly difficult but obligatory music theory classes potentially doing more harm than good. What a perfect way to kill a child’s love of music, Hélène had once said. And if he, Bruno Paulik, son of Luberon farmers, had been forced to take the same solfège classes that his tiny daughter was now taking, he would have, he was sure of it, given up his opera passion. Léa loved to sing—why couldn’t she just keep on singing, and take the theory classes when she was older?

  He bent down and picked up the fallen papers, and whispered, “Mint chocolate-chip ice cream.” Léa beamed and nodded, holding up two fingers, which meant that she wanted two scoops. Paulik got the ice cream out of the freezer and Léa reached up in the cupboard for two bowls. They were just finishing the bright green ice cream when the back door opened.

  “Maman!” Léa shrieked. “We’re having a solfège break with ice cream!”

  Hélène Paulik stared at her husband, pretending anger, and then laughed.
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  “Would you like some?” Léa asked. Hélène couldn’t understand how her husband and daughter could eat ice cream when it was cold enough to have a fire in the fireplace.

  “No, I think that a hot toddy is more what I need.” She leaned her back against the wall and struggled to take off her rubber boots.

  “Coming right up!” Paulik said, putting on the kettle. Léa walked over to the liquor cabinet and asked, “Rum, Maman, or whiskey?” The Pauliks looked at each other.

  “Do you think that it’s a good sign that a nine-year-old knows what goes in a hot toddy?” Bruno Paulik asked his wife.

  “Rum, sweetie!” Hélène replied. “Our daughter’s brilliant, what can I say?”

  “You look tired and wet,” Paulik said, bringing Hélène her favorite woolen poncho and draping it over her shoulders.

  “Both, but more wet, and frustrated. We had set aside this weekend to plow the vineyards…. You know what that’s like; you did it plenty enough for your dad.”

  “Why, Maman? Don’t the vines have enough soil?” Léa asked. Hélène moved over to her favorite armchair, beside the fireplace, and sat down. When the Pauliks had renovated their village house in Pertuis, they had kept only the supporting wall and made the ground floor as open as possible, the focus a large contemporary kitchen and a fireplace flanked with two large armchairs. Bruno Paulik’s parents had walked around in disbelief the first time they visited the house after the renovations had been completed. “Spécial!” the elderly Mme Paulik kept mumbling, running her hands along the stainless steel cabinets and work surface. She preferred oak.

  “In early November it’s a good time to move some extra soil over the bases of the vines. It protects them from frost,” Hélène replied, looking at her daughter. Hélène rubbed her feet and continued, now looking at her husband, “But with this rain…we ended up working in the cellars, racking the wine to be bottled. I think Olivier had just fought with his wife; you could have cut the silence with a knife. And, despite almost twenty years in this business, I’ll never get used to the cold, cold, cold of a damp wine cellar.”

  “Well, with any luck you should be able to do the plowing early next week,” Paulik replied. “The rain will be over by then, and the frost is still far away.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Hélène replied. “Still, Olivier is completely panicked.”

  “Olivier Bonnard likes to be panicked. It means he can avoid his wife. All things considered, you have a great boss. He lets you do what you want out there, and put your name on the wines. Most winery owners are too pigheaded for that.”

  “You’re right,” Hélène replied. “But one day, I’d love to own my own vines.”

  Bruno Paulik smiled and put a small wool blanket on his wife’s knees. With his salary as a policeman and the price of real estate in Provence, his wife’s dreams of being her own boss were hopeless.

  “Perhaps not in Provence,” Hélène continued, smiling. “Somewhere cheaper. Chile?” She shuddered and pulled up the blanket. “Could you put another log on the fire, Bruno?” He nodded and was walking toward the back door to get wood when his work cell phone rang.

  “Paulik here.”

  “Sorry to bother you on a Saturday, Commissaire Paulik,” the voice said.

  “It’s okay, Alain. What’s up?”

  “A professor has been murdered at the university,” Alain Flamant, one of the commissioner’s favorite policemen, replied. Paulik walked out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs to his small office. “What do we know?” Paulik asked, closing the door to his study.

  “The professor, Moutte, was found this morning by one of the university cleaning staff. She said it looked like a heart attack, but when she looked closer she saw that the side of his head had been bashed in. When the ambulance arrived and the paramedics saw the body, they called the police station right away. I got there as quickly as I could. The professor was hit on the head.”

  “Thanks. I’ll come in right away. Are you still there?”

  “Yes. It’s one of the humanities buildings, 124 rue Jules Dumas. Fourth floor,” Flamant said. “You’ll see the policemen…we have the whole building roped off.”

  “Wait for me, then. I’ll be there in about thirty minutes.”

  Downstairs, Léa let out a long sigh, slapping her pencil down on the table.

  “Léa!” Hélène said, sitting down beside her daughter.

  “But Daddy took the phone upstairs! That means he’ll have to go into Aix now!”

  “Probably, dear.”

  “But who will help me with my solfège? I’ll fail!” Léa said.

  “I’ll help you,” Hélène said, picking up her daughter’s music theory book.

  Léa looked at her mother quizzically, while Hélène Paulik pretended she didn’t see her daughter’s raised eyebrow.

  Chapter Five

  One in a Million

  “Listen to this,” Marine said. “‘Napoléon once said that the examining magistrate is the most powerful man in France.’”

  “How nice,” Verlaque mumbled, reaching across her for his reading glasses. “That makes my day.”

  “Stop it. I know you see the error!” she said.

  “That it was Balzac, and not Napoléon, who said that?”

  “Exactly! And why can’t my students write well? Napoléon ‘once said’? It’s not a fairy tale, it’s a historical essay! And what sources are they using for their research?”

  “The Internet, what else?” Verlaque suggested. “These kids don’t go to the library, and no one reads anymore. I see it all the time when I take the TGV up to Paris. Dimwits playing with their cell phones for three hours because they’ve forgotten how to read.” He had a sip of coffee and then added, “But, did Balzac really say that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, was it written down? Or did someone just overhear him mumbling that, as he was waiting for, let’s say, the men’s room at the opéra? How can we know for sure?”

  “You’re a pain in the ass.”

  Verlaque smiled and pulled Marine down under the covers. “I am ze most powerful man in France,” he said, joking, in English.

  Marine laughed and threw back the covers.

  “And I am an overworked teacher who has grading to do.”

  “Ah, come on! You knew that this weekend was this ‘Verlaque and Bonnet minibreak’! Why did you even bring papers to grade? Is it because you feel guilty over your ten-week summer holiday, ten more days in early fall, two weeks at Christmas, two weeks to ski in February, and then, worn out as you teachers must be, two more weeks off in April?”

  Marine sighed. “You know that I work over those holidays, researching and publishing.”

  “Yes, you do, but I don’t see any of your colleagues doing the same.”

  Marine laughed. “How would you know? Oh, I can’t believe we are arguing about this, on, as you say, our Verlaque and Bonnet minibreak!” Marine made to get up, but Verlaque leaped up, grabbing her white blouse that was draped over an armchair and waving it about.

  “I’m sorry! I’m an idiot!”

  “Yes, you are,” Marine said.

  “Great, we agree on something. Wanna come wine tasting with an idiot?”

  “Antoine!” she cried. “We went wine tasting, and buying, yesterday!”

  “But I only bought one case of that Visan wine, and I can’t stop thinking about it. All of my favorite grapes, all in one wine—Syrah, Mourvèdre, Cinsault…”

  “Yeah, yeah. And Carignan and Grenache.”

  Verlaque stopped waving the blouse and looked at Marine, blinking. “You were paying attention! I sometimes think you have a photographic memory.”

  Marine smiled at his compliment. Several of her teachers in high school and university had made the same comment, but she was, in fact, falling in love with wine. Her parents had never had any interest in grapes; it was a hobby that they associated with less intellectual pursuits, or with people who voted conse
rvative. Marine then thought of Verlaque’s antique Porsche, and the tiny thing that was a kind of half trunk.

  “You only bought one case because we already bought three in Châteauneuf-du-Pape and you have a small sports car. You need to buy a minivan.”

  “Did I just hear you correctly?” Verlaque asked, throwing the blouse on the bed. “A minivan? Me? Put your grading down and let’s go, or else we’ll stay in bed all morning, like yesterday. The maid was mad at us.”

  “Where are you going to put more wine?”

  “Delivery, my dear.” Verlaque walked over to the window and opened the heavy cotton drapes. “Mon Dieu,” he whispered.

  “What is it?” Marine asked.

  “Come over and look at our Provence,” he replied. Marine got out of the four-poster bed and shivered, running beside Verlaque, who put his arms around her. They both looked at the five-star view of the Luberon Mountains that were half-buried in fog, their tops, snowcapped, brilliantly lit up by the sun. The valley that ran between their hotel and the mountain was made up of thousands of mist-covered greens, the horizontals broken by the slim verticals of cypress trees.

  Just outside their door steam rose and danced around in the air, and both Marine and Verlaque took a few seconds to realize that the steam was coming from the blue heated lap pool.

  Marine looked at Verlaque and asked, “Fancy a quick dip?”

  “It’s November.”

  “Yes, but it isn’t raining like yesterday. And the pool’s heated. We could have a quick swim, come back in here and have a quick you-know-what, and then I’ll agree to go wine tasting with you, as long as we can visit the Roman ruins in Vaison.”

  “Yes to the swim, yes to the you-know-what, no to Roman ruins.”

  “What? Don’t you enjoy Roman ruins?” Marine asked.

  “Not really, no. I always find myself yawning, which makes me feel guilty. I understand their importance, but I can never see the beauty, or imagine the beauty, in a few knocked-over columns lying on their side.”