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

by Longworth, M. l.

  “Wow, you’ve never told me that before. Can I visit the ruins and you visit the medieval church? It’s Romanesque, if I remember correctly. My mother did a research paper on it once.”

  “Romanesque? It’s a deal. Then we’ll meet in that lovely square and have a coffee and recount our discoveries, having not been together for two hours.”

  They spent breakfast reading and slowly eating the restaurant’s home-baked bread and jams. Verlaque was rereading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, smiling at the writer’s descriptions of an obnoxious Gertrude Stein, the sort of middle-aged woman that he often observed at Monoprix or at the post office, who jumped the queue or gave her opinions loudly. His grandmother Emmeline had referred to their kind as “Miss Doggetts,” the name of a character in one of her favorite books. He had always meant to ask her what the book was.

  “How many times have you read that book?” Marine asked. Verlaque looked up over his reading glasses.

  “About a dozen, I would guess. I just bought this new edition when I was up in Paris last weekend.”

  “How was Paris, by the way? Did you see your parents?”

  “No,” Verlaque replied. Marine thought he had ended the conversation with that comment, but he continued, “I did see Sébastien.” Marine smiled and nodded, saddened by the fact that he would visit his real estate mogul brother but not his aged parents. She did not understand, but knew, from experience, not to ask. She made a mental note to call her parents later in the day—they had just returned from a two-week trek across Sardinia, their sole luxury being the rustic hikers’ auberges they were sleeping in instead of their usual tent camping. She looked around the hotel’s dining room—the pressed white linens and bouquets of fresh flowers—and was sure that her parents had probably never set foot in such a hotel.

  “I’ve finished my chapter and can’t drink any more coffee,” Verlaque said. “How about you?” Marine folded her copy of Le Monde and put it in her purse. Verlaque leaned forward and took the newspaper from her, seeing that she had marked certain passages with her blue pen. He laughed and said, “Do you always do this?”

  “Yes! It’s for my students. I like to bring up interesting, newsworthy topics in class, even if it’s off topic. I think that’s one of our roles as university professors. I only wish I could smoke and make great jokes in class as JP did.” Verlaque laughed, knowing how much Marine admired Jean-Paul Sartre, but also how much she detested cigarettes.

  “He was one in a million,” Verlaque said as he reached across and took her hand.

  They left the dining room hand in hand, passing in the hallway a wealthy American entering his room and then saying good morning to a maid, who smiled shyly. As they walked into their room, Verlaque had a sudden longing to be gone from that hotel and to be alone.

  Marine, too, suddenly wanted to be out of the hotel. She felt guilty, guessing that the room probably cost per night what many people in the village paid in rent per month. She could feel that Verlaque, too, was suddenly elsewhere, and she was a little peeved at him. When he had said that Sartre was one in a million, it would have been a perfect opportunity to add the line “And so are you.”

  Chapter Six

  The Unloving and Unloved

  Verlaque maneuvered his car around yet another roundabout of the industrial zone of Carpentras, anxious to be out of that drab town and on the Autoroute du Soleil, which on a Saturday might be busy. After receiving a phone call from Commissioner Paulik he had agreed with Marine—her purse full of postcards of Roman mosaics of birds—that she would spend the afternoon grading and he would return that evening, since Crillon-le-Brave was less than two hours away. He could question the deceased’s secretary and then speak with Paulik and Yves Roussel—the prosecutor had decided to proceed with a criminal investigation and had turned the case over to Verlaque by phone—and then be back at the hotel for dinner.

  As he smoked his cigar and listened to Gerry Mulligan’s baritone saxophone, he thought of Hemingway, his perfect sentences and his sorrow, as an old man—a year away from death—that he had cheated on and quit his first wife. The book was, if anything, a love letter to her. “Hadley,” Verlaque said aloud as he slowed down for the péage, putting his car in the automatic toll lane, having a Télépéage on his dashboard. His cell phone rang and he answered it, putting it on speaker.

  “Yes, Paulik. I just went through the toll at Lançon, so I’m about a half hour from Aix.”

  “Great. Let me fill you in a bit,” Bruno Paulik said, pausing to take a sip of lukewarm coffee that he had purchased out of a university vending machine. “Dr. Bouvet says that Moutte was hit over the head early this morning, sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. A maid found the body at 8:00 a.m. when she was cleaning. His office door was open and the lock wasn’t pried, so the murderer had a key, or was let in by Moutte, or the door wasn’t locked in the first place. There were four sets of fresh prints all over the office. One belongs to Moutte, two others we have no record for, and the fourth we’ve identified as belonging to one of his students, Yann Falquerho.”

  “Fast work. Falquerho has a record?”

  “He was a juvenile offender when he was seventeen, breaking and entering into his father’s men’s club, on a prank apparently. The charges were dropped, but the Parisian cops scared the pants off of him by throwing him in a prison cell overnight and taking his prints.”

  “I see. Isn’t that normal that this kid’s prints were in the office?” Verlaque asked. “He was his student, right?”

  “Yes and no. Georges Moutte was the doyen and so had little contact with the students. But Falquerho’s fingerprints were on the office doorknob, on files on Moutte’s desk, and on the stainless steel arms of his desk chair, which was toppled over when the professor fell. Roussel and I have already questioned Falquerho in his apartment. Another student was there too—Thierry Marchive—and the two of them immediately confessed to breaking into the doyen’s office late last night.”

  “What? Do they realize how bad this looks for them? How did they break into a university building, anyway?”

  “I checked the door where they entered. My daughter Léa could have broken in. And yes, the boys were very nervous…they couldn’t stop blabbing. One of them was going on and on about a painting of Saint Francis, and the other one telling us how he kept a vase from turn-of-the-century Nancy from breaking.” Verlaque listened but didn’t comment—the innocent were often very nervous under police questioning, but one of them had already broken into a building before. And it was strange that both boys would comment on objects in the office, as if that mattered, when their doyen was lying dead on the floor. Verlaque dragged on his cigar and guessed that the vase was a Gallé. Could a doyen afford one of those?

  “What did they say about the professor?”

  “That they saw him lying there, and thought he had had a heart attack. They fled, not wanting to be found in the office.”

  “I’m sure. What were they doing in there, anyway?”

  “Looking for the name of the winner of some fellowship award—they both applied for it. That’s what Roussel was raking them over the coals about. He accused them of killing the professor over this award.”

  “Merde, Roussel,” Verlaque hissed. “What an ass.” While there were things that Verlaque respected in Roussel—the prosecutor’s hard work and bravery—he was constantly frustrated by the prosecutor’s impulsiveness, and he hated Roussel’s tasteless jokes and general need to be the loudest in any room. Short man syndrome, Verlaque thought, doubled in a Marseillais. The second thought he tried to erase, wanting to be politically correct. After all, he did know a few men from Marseille who knew what it meant to be discreet.

  “Sir?”

  Verlaque shook some cigar ashes off of his jacket and answered into the speaker, “Sorry, Paulik. Please continue.”

  “I have a team going over Dr. Moutte’s apartment, and we’ve been calling all those who were at a party that he gave last night—Moutt
e’s secretary has a list. I’ve ordered those we’ve been able to contact to be present tomorrow morning in the school’s assembly hall at 9:00 a.m., even if it is a Sunday. Some people seem to have gone away for the weekend and we haven’t been able to reach them.”

  “Tomorrow morning’s perfect, thank you. Anyone else we can speak to on Monday. I’ll be in Aix any minute,” Verlaque said, and he hung up. He realized that he would not be able to return to Crillon-le-Brave this evening, so he would pay for Marine to take a taxi home. He had the sudden desire to go to Marseille, and he pulled the car over to look for the phone number of someone who was a new friend and a die-hard lover of Marseille, Olivier Madani. Verlaque got ahold of the filmmaker and suggested they eat at his favorite Marseille restaurant on the rue Sainte, run by a husband and wife team with, in a rare reversal of duties, the wife in the kitchen and the husband working the dining room as host. Each time Verlaque walked into the restaurant he felt like he was home—or a place he imagined felt like what a home should be: warm, dimly lit, with genuinely friendly owners. The restaurant’s patrons all seemed to know each other and hopped up and down, moving from table to table, as if eating could be a game of musical chairs. Verlaque loved the fact that he could walk up to the kitchen, which had a sliding window, poke his head in, and say hello to Jeanne and ask her what she was cooking for him that evening. Jeanne cooked with local ingredients using many family recipes, the food rich and heavy but refined at the same time. “Fancy comfort food,” Emmeline had called it when he took her there. Jeanne and Jacques were now old, and Jacques walked from table to table with the aid of a cane. Verlaque imagined that they would retire soon, and no doubt close the restaurant, which saddened him.

  The bit of sun he had seen over Mont Ventoux from their hotel room had now disappeared. He drove into Aix and pulled up in front of the address Paulik had given him, seeing that the name of the building matched the street name—Jules Dumas. He squeezed his dark green antique Porsche between two police cars. Three young men—students, presumably—came up to his car and walked around it. “She’s a beauty,” he heard one of them say. Verlaque got out of the car and nodded to the students, who smiled shyly then turned back to their diversion of watching the police go in and out of their college, the students slightly bored by the entire procedure but for some reason unable to move on.

  Bruno Paulik came out of the building’s art deco front door and strode toward his boss. The two shook hands and then the commissioner groaned.

  “What is it, Bruno?” Verlaque asked. Paulik rolled his eyes and Verlaque turned around to see a middle-aged man in a wheelchair speaking to two female students who were also mesmerized by the police activity.

  “Get out of here!” Verlaque said to the man, walking quickly toward him. The girls looked at the judge in horror.

  “Just you wait a minute!” the shorter of the girls, with a pierced eyebrow and a nose ring, said. “This man’s handicapped!”

  “This man has spent time in prison. Why don’t you two go to a café instead of hanging around here?” The taller girl, wearing glasses and dark, ill-fitting clothes, grabbed her friend’s arm and led her away.

  “Okay, Lémoine,” Paulik said, towering over the wheelchair. “You were given strict orders to stay away from schools and young girls!”

  “This is a university! These girls are now consenting adults,” Lémoine spat out.

  Verlaque walked over. “Do you remember me, Lémoine?” The man did indeed remember the judge who had given him a maximum prison sentence for two counts of misconduct—for verbally and physically offending two teenage girls just outside their junior high school.

  Paulik leaned down on Lémoine’s wheelchair’s armrests and began to shake the chair. He let go, and Lémoine began to furiously turn the wheelchair around. “I’m going! I’m going!”

  “I somehow thought he had disappeared from Aix,” Verlaque said, standing on the sidewalk so that Lémoine knew he was being watched until he had in fact disappeared, up the street and around the corner. Verlaque thought of Philip Larkin, who once wrote that human beings—rich or poor, beautiful or ugly—were bound to be disappointed by life. The poet cynically separated people into two groups: those unloving and those unloved. Lémoine was both, Verlaque decided. Verlaque’s parents were unloving, and his brother? Unloved.

  “I’ll bet he’s heading into the parc Jourdan,” Paulik said.

  “I hope not.” Verlaque thought that with the chill and the grayness of the afternoon there wouldn’t be many people—girls—in the park. “Are you coming back into the building?”

  “No, I’ve been here long enough. Dr. Moutte’s secretary is waiting for you, up on the fourth floor.” Paulik smiled slightly, which Verlaque thought strange, but he didn’t comment on it.

  “All right, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, back here.”

  Verlaque walked into the building and immediately remembered his university days, which had been good ones—away from all that had happened in Paris. Being a student was a luxury, ironically seldom appreciated by students: being permitted to read and write all day long. He walked up the stairs and crossed, coming down, a tall, blond policewoman with her hair tied up in a tight bun and wearing the faintest touch of pale pink lipstick.

  “Judge Verlaque,” she said, smiling and holding out her thin hand.

  “Good afternoon,” he replied, not remembering her name but looking her in the eye. She was not one of Larkin’s unhappy ones, surely? He continued up until he reached the fourth floor and walked down the hall, where he saw a policeman sitting in a chair beside one of the office doors. The young policeman, on seeing Verlaque, jumped up.

  “Judge!”

  “Hello. Sit back down. Has anyone thought to bring you a coffee?”

  The policeman looked up, stunned. “Um, well, no.”

  Verlaque smiled. “I’ll arrange it for you as soon as I get a chance. Sugar?”

  The policeman looked as if he had been offered champagne. “Um…one lump. If it’s no trouble.”

  Verlaque smiled and walked into the office, only to be met with a high-pitched “It’s about time!” He stuck his head back around the corner and looked at the red-haired rookie policeman, who lifted his shoulders and smiled, pointing a finger to his forehead, making a circular motion. Verlaque laughed out loud.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said as he went back in. The voice had come from a petite woman who was no more than thirty years old.

  “I’ve been waiting forever!” she complained. “On my day off! My boss is dead—murdered—and here I am, not being told anything!”

  “You’ll be given information soon enough. For the time being…”

  “Murdered!” she cut in. “And it’s a school day on Monday, and with all the work I have to do…waiting for midterm grades to come in, certain professors—always the same ones—taking the longest and giving me their grades at the last possible minute! And then the students want their results immediately, naturally. With all that…”

  Verlaque kept his temper. “Please be quiet.” The woman looked up at him, openmouthed. He took this as an opportunity to continue. “As you said, your boss has just been murdered, so have some respect for the dead and keep quiet and do as you’re told.” For further effect Verlaque leaned down on her desk, pressing his big hands into the cheap wood. He thought of Paulik leaning down on Lémoine’s wheelchair, but he knew that he didn’t have the same effect as the six-foot-two former rugby player commissioner.

  “Yes sir,” she replied, barely audible, her sigh accompanied by a nonchalant shrug, as if she understood why she was being reprimanded but could care less. She then pretended to flip through some papers and ignored Verlaque, until he said, “I know that you’ve toured the office with the other policemen, but could you take me through again, Mlle…?”

  She sighed again, flipped through a few more papers—of extreme importance, no doubt—and got up from her desk, silently making her way to Moutte’s office door.r />
  “Mlle Zacharie, Audrey,” she finally answered. She took a deep breath. “Nothing was taken, as I told the commissioner. The Gallé vase is the object of most value, and it’s still here.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same one?” he asked.

  The secretary laughed. “Yes, of course! And besides,” she added, rolling her eyes and placing her hands on her hips, “Gallé vases aren’t worth so much money that a thief would pay to have it replaced with a phony.” She added, uninvited, “I studied art history.”

  Verlaque said nothing, because he had no idea what a Gallé was worth. He did remember seeing Gallé vases at the Petit Palais in Paris, but would someone go to the effort of reproducing one? He thought, au contraire, that they were worth a lot of money.

  “Were you at this party last night?” Verlaque asked.

  “Bien sûr, as I told the commissioner, and I gave him the guest list.”

  “How long did you stay?”

  Mlle Zacharie put her hands on her hips.

  “Me? I left around 11:00 p.m.” Her voice had slightly wavered when she had answered Verlaque, and he registered it immediately. It could be nervousness, or guilt.

  “Did you go straight home?”

  “No. I met my boyfriend at the Bar Zola. We were there well past midnight, and then we went home.” Again, her voice cracked and she added, “We left the bar around 2:00 a.m., you can ask anyone who works there.”

  “And the doyen’s post…how long is it for? Four, five years?” Verlaque asked.

  Mlle Zacharie laughed. “Life. But I wouldn’t think that he was killed for…”

  “Good-bye.” Verlaque said with a note of severity. Not thanking her, he walked as slowly as he could out of her office. He couldn’t stand being in the presence of Mlle Zacharie any longer, and they would have some answers, hopefully, tomorrow morning.

  He then turned back and said, “Get my officer a coffee, with one sugar.”