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

by Longworth, M. l.

  “Audrey Zacharie was hit by a car last night. She’s dead.”

  This time the barman stopped pouring. “Audrey? Dead?” He leaned his muscular forearms on the bar and hung his head. “Who hit her?” he asked, finally looking up.

  “We don’t know. Hit-and-run.”

  The barman turned to his colleague and asked him to finish pouring. “Can we talk outside?” he asked.

  Outside there were green plastic chairs and small tables that the bar used for when there were too many patrons. “They were both here on Friday night, that I can assure you. But what I didn’t tell the cop this morning is that they had a big fight, right at the bar, we all heard. Michel had been in here too long, I should have cut him off.”

  “What did they fight about?” Paulik asked.

  “I was trying not to listen, so I didn’t get the details. But he accused her of having a boyfriend on the side. He was madder than hell. He has a wild temper…we had him work a few nights here, but he got into an argument with a customer, so we had to let him go. On Friday night he threatened to clobber Audrey if he found out that she had a lover. That doesn’t mean that he was behind the wheel of that car, but I think you should know about their fight.” The barman got up, signaling that he had said all he had to say, and they walked back into the bar.

  An old Rolling Stones song was playing, and Verlaque looked around at the people in the bar, a mixture of liberal arts students and older men who could actually remember buying Beggars Banquet when it had come out. Verlaque paid for the beers and they found a table in the back, under a black-and-white photograph of Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, and Léo Ferré, three giants of French music, sitting around microphones as they did a radio talk show sometime in the 1960s, bottles of beer and ashtrays piled high with cigarette butts covering the table. “I’ll go and repay Michel Gasnal a visit tonight, before his parents arrive,” Verlaque said after he had taken a sip of his Guinness. The first sip was always bitter, the second less, and by the third, all the bitterness was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Payment for Services

  Verlaque rang the doorbell for the second time that evening at number 17. Michel Gasnal answered, letting out a weary “Oui?” and Verlaque presented himself. The door buzzed open and he walked up the stairs to the second-floor landing, where Michel Gasnal was standing in his doorway. “Again?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, but I have a few more questions that I’d like to ask before your parents arrive.”

  Gasnal said nothing but moved aside so that the judge could enter the living room. This time Verlaque took the time to look around, spotting the expensive stereo that Paulik had seen, and on the floor beside an armchair, a new pair of Swiss leather shoes. Michel Gasnal once again sank down into the sofa, too tired to care why the judge was paying a second visit. Verlaque looked above the young man’s head and saw a framed poster of a Cézanne still life. Audrey Zacharie had studied art history, he remembered, and it saddened him to see that she had tried to make the dark apartment a home.

  “The barman at the Bar Zola has confirmed your presence on Friday night,” Verlaque said.

  “I told you,” Gasnal whispered.

  “But he also told me that you and Mlle Zacharie had a terrible fight and that you accused her of having a boyfriend and then threatened her.”

  Gasnal closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “That doesn’t mean I ran her over.”

  “I know, Michel, but I need to know everything I can about Audrey’s last days. Do you understand?”

  The young man leaned forward and rubbed his fingers through his hair. “You’re right. Sorry.” He slowly sat up, like a bored student who has been accused of not paying attention in class.

  Verlaque relaxed and sat back in the armchair. “Why did you accuse Audrey of having a boyfriend, Michel?”

  “She was acting even more erratic and uptight than usual,” Gasnal answered, sighing. “She would get phone calls during the evening and then rush out and be gone for hours. I didn’t know who it was until she started receiving, or buying, these really pricey items. I saw you looking at the stereo…that was one of her gifts. She said that it was on sale. Have you ever seen them do sales at Bang and Olufsen? And these shoes,” he continued, picking one of them up and then letting it fall back to the ground. “They must have cost her two hundred euros.” Verlaque looked at the brand; he knew that they cost over four hundred.

  Gasnal continued, “She told me that a great-aunt had died and left her money, but I didn’t believe her. She had never talked about any aunts, great or otherwise. When she started talking about buying this apartment, I got worried. How were we going to do that, with no down payment? So I started putting two and two together, right? She adored that boss of hers, Moutte. He couldn’t do anything wrong, and was brilliant, had such good taste, blah blah blah. She told me a few months ago that he had made a pass at her and that she shrugged it off. We had a good laugh about it and went to the Bar Zola and had a couple of beers. But it became obvious to me that she took him up on his offer, and that he…”

  “Repaid her in gifts? Or money?”

  “Yeah. I mean, wouldn’t you have drawn the same conclusion?”

  On his way home Verlaque got a text message from Yves Roussel. He waited until he was in his living room, with his shoes and socks off and a glass of chilled Meursault in his hands, before calling the prosecutor.

  “Yves,” he said when Roussel answered the phone. “Am I disturbing your dinner?”

  “No, I’m still waiting for it! My wife was busy spending all my money at the shops in Marseille today and dinner’s late!”

  Verlaque closed his eyes and took a sip of wine. “I just came back from a visit with Michel Gasnal.”

  Roussel jumped in. “No alibi, right?”

  “That’s correct. He was asleep in front of the television.” Verlaque then told Roussel of the argument between Michel Gasnal and Audrey Zacharie in the bar.

  “Ha!” Roussel said. “Gasnal is known for his temper; he threatened her in front of witnesses; let me see, what else is working against him?”

  “They’d recently come into some cash,” Verlaque said. “A Bang and Olufsen stereo; handmade shoes…”

  “Oh, so he’s a thief too? How do a waiter and a secretary get stuff like that? And who would even buy a stereo that’s made in Sweden?”

  “Denmark. Gasnal claims that Mlle Zacharie had the money; she said it was an inheritance, but he didn’t believe her,” Verlaque said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t believe her, or him! I’ve put more officers on the stolen car search, and when we find it I’ll bet you ten-to-one we’ll find M. Gasnal’s fingerprints all over it. Ah, the little woman is finally home. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The 7:43 to Paris

  Marcel Dubly watched the TGV race by in the distance. He hadn’t minded the trains’ appearance in the early 1980s in his more distant pasture, as some of his neighbors had. The SNCF had given the farmers money, which had allowed him to fix the roof of his barn, buy more cattle, and renovate his kitchen and bathroom, much to the delight of his wife and four children. More important, he found some sort of reassurance in the train’s passing every few hours; the same kind of reassurance he got from his white Charolais cows giving birth each spring, the changing of the seasons, and the weekly cattle auction in nearby Saint-Christophe-en-Brionnais, where he either participated as a seller or as a judge. There would be pastis in a bar afterward and then a long drawn-out lunch with a few of his fellow farmers, some wine growers, and one or two politicians, every Wednesday, rain or shine. He watched the train racing up to Paris, imagining its passengers working in front of their laptops and then rushing off in taxis to meetings, and then rushing back down south, eating a sandwich on the train for dinner. He had been south once, somewhere near Avignon, when a childhood friend had married a girl from a Provençal village. He and his wife had gone to the wedding, a
nd while he found the people friendly enough, the food was a bit too light for his tastes and he left the wedding hungry. “Stop exaggerating,” his wife had told him, laughing. They had laughed in the car all the way back to their hotel, he remembered now. He leaned on his walking stick and turned to head back up to the house. It wasn’t that he needed a walking stick—at fifty-two he was in great shape—it was just a habit, and he liked tapping the ground, his ground, the ground of his ancestors, with the end of the stick as he walked. There was less laughing in his house these days; his wife seemed tired, and anxious for the children—none of them were proving to be good students, nor did they show any interest in staying in Burgundy—and he thought that over lunch he should try to make her laugh.

  Verlaque awoke at 6:30 a.m., hungry. He realized that he had had only two pints of beer the night before and nothing to eat. He threw back the duvet and walked into his bathroom. When renovating the apartment, he had asked the masons to destroy the wall between the bathroom and master bedroom and replace it with glass. He had never regretted the decision, although it had been a fight with his general contractor, who thought the idea insane. The toilet was in another room, with a small sink, and the bathroom had a pedestal sink and old-fashioned bathtub that the interior architect had bought in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. They had kept the nineteenth-century floor—another fight—and Verlaque loved the leafy pattern of green-and-gold glazed earthenware tiles. He ran the bath and went into the kitchen, turned on his espresso machine, and checked his phone messages. There was a text message from Marine: bonne nuit…we’ll talk later, and another from Paulik confirming their rendezvous in front of Verlaque’s apartment at 7:10 a.m.

  At 7:08 a.m. Bruno Paulik rang the buzzer on the street and in less than a minute Verlaque was downstairs and in Paulik’s Range Rover. “Good morning,” the commissioner said as he maneuvered his way off the cobblestone square. “I have good news. Léa got sixteen out of twenty on her solfège test and has been admitted to the next music grade.”

  “Hey, that’s great!” Verlaque answered, turning to look at Paulik. “With sixteen she gets a special mention, right?”

  “Yeah, but she’s been so turned off by the whole thing that I’m not sure the special mention will mean anything to her. And here,” Paulik said, handing Verlaque a bag. “My mother left these on my doorstep yesterday.”

  Verlaque opened the bag and peered inside. “Cannelés!”

  “You went to law school in Bordeaux, right? I thought you might miss them.”

  “I love these! Thank you, I do miss them and I sometimes buy them in Aix, but they’re never as good as when made by a Bordelais.” He tore open the cannelé and bit into the soft inner cake made of rum and vanilla. Crusty and caramelized on the outside and soft and gooey on the inside, it was perfect. “When did your mother move from Bordeaux to Provence?” Verlaque asked.

  “Just after the war. Her father was a vineyard specialist, and land in the Luberon was dirt cheap back then. He could have stayed in Bordeaux, always working for others, or have his own vines. When they saw the barren land they had purchased with all of their savings, on the day of a mistral, my grandmother cried and started walking back to the closest village, Ansouis, hoping to catch the next bus back to Bordeaux. But they settled in, with lots of ups and downs, as most immigrants do. And now our family is one of the old Luberon families. But my grandmother always cooked Bordelais specialties, my grandfather planted cabernet sauvignon despite sneers from the locals, and my mother goes on baking cannelés.”

  Verlaque smiled at the image of Paulik’s grandmother walking up a dirt road, head down, fists clenched; and at the thought that Paulik’s family considered themselves immigrants. “Did you go to university, or straight into the police force?” he asked.

  “Straight in,” Paulik answered, steering the car onto the highway while eating his cannelé. “I would have liked to have gone to university, but it was never an option in my family. It never would have occurred to my parents, God love them, nor to anyone at my high school. I was too impatient then too…I just wanted to work…to support my habit.”

  Verlaque laughed. “Opera is almost as expensive as drugs but at least it won’t kill you.”

  “Why is Moutte’s lawyer in Paris?” Paulik asked. Verlaque took this as a cue that he no longer wanted to talk about himself or his family.

  “Moutte was born in Paris. The lawyer seems to be an old family friend, a certain Maître Fabre. He has an office in the seventeenth arrondissement, Batignolles, very close to where my grandparents used to live, near the boulevard de Clichy.”

  Bruno Paulik nodded but didn’t say what he was thinking: that Antoine Verlaque had always seemed like a rive gauche kind of guy, one of those Parisians who rarely crossed north over the Seine. And the boulevard de Clichy was the last place he thought Verlaque’s grandparents would have lived. It was a noisy, dirty street, full of cheap clothing shops and kebab stands. Paulik veered the car off of the highway, and as they approached the newly built Aix TGV station, Verlaque sighed. “It’s discouraging to see all of these illegally parked cars,” he said.

  “I know, but I can’t say that I blame them,” Paulik answered. “The new station is a beauty, but there isn’t enough parking, and it’s too expensive.”

  They parked in the day parking lot, lucky to find one of the last spots, and Paulik took the parking ticket and put it in his wallet. As they walked into the station Paulik asked, “Do we need to buy train tickets?”

  “No, Mme Girard had already left the office for the day so I bought some on the Internet. I wanted to be sure to get seats, and in first class.”

  The train pulled up from Marseille after a few minutes and the passengers, mostly business people at that hour, calmly got on, found their seats, and pulled out newspapers or their laptops. They were halfway, somewhere in southern Burgundy, around 9:00 a.m., racing by too quickly to see Marcel Dubly, when Paulik received a phone call and quickly got up to take the call in between cars so as not to disturb his fellow travelers. Verlaque looked out at the green hills—his face almost pressed against the glass—where vineyards and pastures were divided by hedgerows and each village had its own Romanesque church. It was easily the most beautiful part of the voyage, and it annoyed him to see his fellow passengers with their window shades drawn.

  “That was Roussel,” Paulik reported when he came back about five minutes later. “No leads on the cash machine explosions, but that old train station on early Tuesday morning had a janitor inside. He had gotten there after 10:00 p.m. to clean as he’s moonlighting…he has a day job cleaning the junior high school.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “Just a broken arm…he fell back from the force of the explosion but luckily wasn’t next to the machine when it happened.”

  “Did he see anything?”

  “No. He scared the pants off of the thieves, who were more surprised than he was to find someone in the station. He cried out as they were digging around in the rubble for cash…he said it took him a few minutes to realize what was going on, and it pissed him off that they steal money while he has to work two jobs. They took off when they realized they weren’t alone, and he heard a car but by the time he had dragged himself off of the floor and run outside, they were gone.”

  The Gare de Lyon seemed about twenty degrees colder and damper than the Aix train station had. Both Verlaque and Paulik pulled their scarves up around their necks. They stood in the queue for a taxi and jumped quickly in when it was their turn, anxious to get warm. The taxi raced along the Seine, heading west to the seventeenth arrondissement, and both men silently looked out the window onto the gray beauty of a Parisian morning.

  “I’ve never been in the seventeenth,” Paulik said as they drove through the elegant eighth arrondissement.

  “Most people haven’t,” Verlaque said. “That’s one of the reasons I like it so much. There are no monuments or museums, so the only reason to go is if you live, or have business to do, t
here. Take the rue des Batignolles,” Verlaque instructed the cabbie. “I’d like my colleague to see the church.”

  The taxi drove along the neighborhood’s main street, Paulik noting that the street was full of the kinds of businesses that made big city living manageable: food shops, wine merchants, pharmacies, the occasional clothing or shoe store, and the practical shops too: cobblers, hardware stores, dentists’ and doctors’ offices. The rue des Batignolles ended at the small white neoclassical church that sat on a semicircular cobbled square that was lined with a few cafés and small shops.

  “Nice,” Paulik muttered. “It feels like a village.”

  They drove around the church and turned right up a street and then left, finally dropping Verlaque and Paulik off at 17 rue Nollet. “Thanks,” Verlaque said, paying the driver and giving him a generous tip.

  The offices of Maître Fabre were surprisingly dingy. Verlaque and Paulik didn’t have to wait in the small dark waiting room as they seemed to be either the first, or the only, clients so far that morning. A thin, white-haired man opened his office door when Paulik coughed.

  “Judge Verlaque?” he said, peering out of his door as if frightened or surprised at having visitors.

  “Yes, Maître Fabre. And this is the commissioner of Aix-en-Provence, Bruno Paulik.”

  They shook hands and he stepped aside, allowing them into his office. The large, high-ceilinged room had been decorated in the late 1940s, and for Verlaque it suited the old-fashioned feel he got whenever he was in this neighborhood. Two leather club chairs, both ripped in places, faced the maître’s large oak desk. A ceiling light made of what looked like Murano glass, more appropriate in a widow’s dining room than in a law office, hung above the desk. There were yellowed framed prints of Paris hung on the walls and thick flowered curtains on the two tall windows that looked over the rue Nollet. The walls had that yellow patina that Verlaque knew interior decorators envied, and when he saw the crystal ashtray piled high with cigarette butts, he knew where the patina came from.