Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  He wiped his fingers on a napkin, carefully and one at a time, like someone polishing silverware, before picking up his glass again. "I'm sure you can see," he said, having swallowed, "that all these things cannot possibly be unrelated."

  "You're sure I can see?" Gideon said, smiling. "What happened to "Non sunt multiplicanda?"

  "I've concluded that I was wrong," Joly said generously, "and you were right."

  "Interconnected monkey business triumphs again," Julie said, producing a curious stare from Joly.

  "Oh, yes—you were right about something else too," said the inspector as they walked across the square with him to his car. "Julie, do you remember suggesting the other day that the single tooth left behind in the St.-Cyprien morgue might be used for dental identification?"

  "Sure, but we didn't know what dentist to contact because we didn't know Jean Bousquet's dentist, or even if he had a dentist—" She stopped. "Wait a minute… of course… it wasn't Bousquet, was it? It turned out to be Carpenter, and—"

  "And Carpenter did have a dentist, and his dentist has positively identified the work as his own and the tooth as his patient's lower right first bicuspid. So we may say at last that the remains from the abri have been positively identified. They are Ely Carpenter's."

  "But we already knew that," Julie said. "Gideon identified them yesterday."

  "But not positively."

  "Of course, positively. He said so."

  "I really appreciate that, honey," Gideon said, unexpectedly touched, "but unfortunately judges and juries—and especially defense counsels—tend to be more skeptical than you are, and I'm not sure that a lecture on cowboy's thumb would've convinced them. A deposition from Carpenter's dentist will."

  "And you'll also be interested in this," Joly said when they reached the Citroen. He reached into the ever-productive inside pocket of his suit coat and brought out a single sheet of paper. "It's a photocopy of his dental chart."

  Gideon scanned it. "What am I supposed to be looking for?"

  With his pen Joly pointed to the upper right first molar, through which an X had been drawn—dental shorthand for a missing tooth. "The very first day you were here, in the abri, you predicted, from the jawbone, that this tooth would be missing. I confess, with shame in my heart, that I doubted you."

  "You mean I was right?" Gideon cried impulsively. "Hey, how about that!" Quickly, he recollected himself. "I mean," he said with a modest shrug, "there really wasn't anything to it."

  But he couldn't keep a straight face, and they all burst out laughing. It had been a long time they'd had anything to laugh about, and as they saw Joly off the three of them were still chuckling.

  Chapter 21

  The next morning Audrey was appointed acting director. Her first formal action was to declare the institute closed until the following Monday out of respect for Jacques (and, Gideon thought, to give herself a three-day weekend to pull herself back together before taking over the director's chair). The break suited Gideon and Julie, who agreed over breakfast that they could both stand some time off from bones, murders, hoaxes, and Paleolithic prehistory—all of which were placed off-limits for the long weekend. Gideon didn't quite see why Paleolithic prehistory had to be included, but he was game to go along anyway.

  They rented one of the plastic kayaks lined up at the foot of the bridge and paddled happily on the Vézère, going nowhere, until mid-afternoon, when the unusual humidity and a developing warming trend strengthened to the extent that any form of physical effort lost its appeal. Afterwards, when the darkness cooled things down and revived their appetites they ended the day feasting again at the restaurant Au Vieux Moulin, where they'd eaten with Joly that first night.

  The following day, Saturday, was largely taken up with Jacques' funeral, held a bare twelve hours after his body was released by the police, (Madame Beaupierre, who seemed more consumed with embarrassment than with grief over her husband's murder, wanted it over with as quickly as possible) and with a stilted, uncomfortable funeral buffet at the Beaupierre's house near the Font de Gaume cave. Although Jacques' colleagues, along with the Olivers, had been invited to both functions, they were treated with icy reserve by the widow.

  After these strained and uncomfortable events Gideon, who was feeling the lingering effects of the concussion more than he wanted to admit, slept away the afternoon while Julie drove a few miles up the Vézère to tour the celebrated Grotte du Grand Roc with its stalagmites, stalactites, and other natural grotesqueries.

  On Sunday a huge, black thundercloud began to build up in great, roiling columns a little after dawn. They took one look at it from bed, closed their eyes again and slept late, not awakening until 9:00, when Audrey telephoned to tell them that the dedication of the institute's new quarters, which had originally been scheduled for the next day but had been tentatively postponed upon news of Jacques' death, would take place as scheduled after all. It had been decided that the new building was to be designated the Centre Préhistorique Beaupierre in honor of its fallen director. Dignitaries from the Université du Périgord and the Horizon Foundation would be in attendance, and Gideon and Julie were cordially invited to the ceremonies.

  Gideon cordially accepted for both of them, after which they went downstairs for a satisfying "English" breakfast of bacon and eggs, then set themselves up in the Cro-Magnon's downstairs lounge, a cozy, overstuffed room that looked as if it should have had Charles Dickens—or more appropriately, Gustave Flaubert—seated at the writing desk, lost in reflection and chewing pensively on his quill.

  Instead it was Julie who took over the desk to work on a quarterly report on park security problems that she'd brought with her while Gideon worked on his laptop, polishing his chapter on the bizarre case of "George Psalmanzar" the eighteenth-century "Formosan" who had flummoxed the British scientific world of his day by inventing not only himself but an entire, highly detailed Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, complete with imaginary customs, language, clothing, and religion. (They lived to be over 100, they drank snake blood, they sacrificed 18,000 children a year to their gods, they beheaded and ate wives who committed adultery.) It had been swallowed hook, line, and sinker; "Psalmanzar"—nobody ever learned his real name—became a respected friend of Samuel Johnson's and was given an appointment to Oxford as—what else?—a lecturer on Formosan history.

  With the lounge all to themselves, rain thrumming on the windows, a pot of hot coffee on a nearby sideboard, and a mantel clock ticking lazily away, they looked forward to passing a quiet and companionable Sunday.

  For the Greater Cincinnati Elderhostel's "Footloose in France" tour group, Sunday was day nine of a twelve-day hike through the French countryside, and with 100 dusty miles on towpaths and country lanes behind them, they were a tanned, fit, seasoned crew of twelve. Still, with the morning temperature approaching eighty, with a median age of sixty-nine, and with all of them still damp and steaming from the rain shower they'd passed through an hour earlier, no one objected when Yvette, the French tour leader (looking cute as a button in her leather hiking shorts and mountaineer's boots), signaled that the mid-morning break was at hand.

  "This place, how you like to stop here?" she asked in her delightfully mangled English. (Only the resolutely negative Mrs. Winkelman—at 83 it was allowable—contended that Yvette's accent was put on.) "The coffee and the juice, they wait themselves in the van, and also some nice French snacks. If you like, we go and sit beside the river, where there is a most nice view of Les Eyzies, the place of lunch for today. Then I tell you some of the facts of this most charming village."

  But practiced open-country hikers that they were, they first split into two groups, the men making for the copse of stunted oaks on the left, the women for the one on the right. Five minutes later, perceptibly more relaxed and expansive, they lined up at the supply van, which had gotten there before them and had their juice, coffee, and pastries ready and waiting.

  "Joe." Merle Nichols put her hand on t
he arm of her new friend Joe Pfeiffer, recently widowed, recently retired from the Dayton police department. "Is that a person down there?"

  "Down where?"

  "Nah, it's just a bundle of clothes or something," somebody said. "It probably washed up from somewhere."

  Someone else thought it might be a drunk, someone else a hiker taking a nap. But no one moved any further down the gentle slope. They all stood there holding their cups and pastries, looking doubtfully at Joe, their expert in such matters.

  "I'll go see," he said with a sigh. He had sighted it now, down by the riverbank under the willows, and it wasn't any bundle of clothes; the fourteen years he'd spent in homicide told him that much. And he was betting it wasn't a drunk or a sleeper either.

  "Hey, buddy?" he called from fifteen feet away, although he would have been surprised to get an answer. "You okay?… hey, monsieur?"

  He stood there for a moment longer, resisting the urge—an urge more deeply ingrained than he'd realized—to have a closer look, to take over, then turned on his heel, and walked back up to his silent, wide-eyed companions.

  "Yvette, you better call the cops, the gendarmes. That guy's been dead a while."

  "Oh, for the love of Mike," said Mrs. Winkelman to her neighbor. "Does this mean we don't get to have our tea?"

  The crime scene investigators grumbled at having to park the crime lab van alongside the highway and carry their equipment down to the riverbank (which meant they'd have to carry it back up afterward), but once there they got quickly and efficiently to work.

  A twenty-by-twenty-meter area was cordoned off with tape and the nosy gaggle of American grannies and grandpas was helped on their way after a brief interrogation. A panning videotape of the over-all scene was made, and a diagrammatic sketch. The position of the body was measured and photographed. The cordoned-off area was then divided into five-by-five-meter sections and each of them meticulously searched by investigators working two at a time, one shuffling along with his eyes to the ground and the other taking notes. Two fairly distinct heel prints from a man's shoe—both probably from the same shoe—were photographed and cast in plaster of paris by the third member of the team. Various objects were diligently recorded, photographed, labeled, and bagged: several different kinds of cigarette stubs, including one with lipstick on it, a cigar wrapper, three ring-tabs from beer or soft-drink cans, burnt paper matches, a wadded-up facial tissue, two flattened cardboard drinking cups, odd bits of plastic and aluminum foil, a woman's imitation leather belt, worn-out and cheap, two rubber bands, a used adhesive strip decorated with Minnie Mouse pictures and with a little dried blood on it.

  None of it was very promising; the typical detritus of a place that was an attractive spot for a riverbank picnic and also happened to lie within flinging distance of a highway. The one object of real interest—the investigators were practically slavering to get their hands on it—was a rifle, the wooden stock of which could be seen sticking out from under the right thigh of the corpse. But Joly and Roussillot were just getting started on the body, and until the two of them were through there was no hope of getting at it. And that wasn't going to be for a while; they were both sticklers for the rule book, as slow as boiled honey.

  "Georges," Joly called to the lead investigator, "you've finished with the victim? We can shift him now?"

  "Absolutely, inspector, everything by the book."

  "We might as well turn him over then," Roussillot said.

  The body, fully clothed, lay on its front between them at the foot of a knee high rock. The face was turned to the left, the arms caught underneath the torso, one leg extended and the other bent-kneed and drawn up to the side. It was plain to both men that it had been there for some time. Maggots wriggled in the nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, the ears. What skin could be seen was a pasty, greasy, coppery color, mottled with greenish veins. The clothes, still moist from the passing showers, looked as if they'd been out in the rain more than once. Joly, smothering a grimace, instinctively held his breath and kneeled to take hold of the shoulders and Roussillot of the legs.

  Between them they rolled the flaccid body carefully and deliberately onto its back. They had both rolled over enough cadavers not to be surprised at the strange, heavy inertia of the dead, the seeming chill that seeped through the clothing.

  "Ah," said Roussillot, "what do we have here?" He pointed with his chin at the black, ragged, hole, almost certainly a bullet hole, in the center of the man's chest, with a knot of maggots squirming about in it. The surrounding denim of his shirt was stained a rusty brown, with a few spatters and spots as far away as his sleeves. Not much blood, really, considering the size of the hole.

  The rifle, which had been underneath him, had remained where it was, lying now a few inches away on the flattened, yellowing grass.

  "Well, what do you think?" Joly asked, straightening up and brushing off the knees of his trousers, although he'd never quite let them come in contact with the earth.

  "What do I think?" Roussillot paused to light a cigarette for Joly and one for himself and blew out a stream of smoke while he studied the corpse. "I think I see before me a reasonably well-nourished man in his forties, apparently a suicide, who's been dead anywhere from… let us say two days to a week. I think—"

  Joly looked at him. "Two days, did you say? I should have said a week at a minimum."

  Roussillot smiled tolerantly—a good way to get under Joly's skin although it was no doubt meant kindly. "My dear Joly, these things are not as clear-cut as you people like to imagine. You could well be right; it might be a week. Or it might be only two days. That is precisely why I said—"

  "But look at the maggots, at the skin; it's already begun to slip in places."

  "Yes, very true, but on the other hand, do you see any bloating of the abdomen, any copious discharge of fluids from the natural orifices? No; in fact there has been little if any distension of the gut. That, in my opinion, is far more significant, more reliable, and it sounds more like two days than seven, wouldn't you say? And surely you've noticed that the smell, while hardly agreeable, is by no means the overpowering odor one would expect from a corpse that's been lying out in the warm sun for a week."

  "No, now that you mention it," Joly said thoughtfully, "it isn't." He was obscurely annoyed with Roussillot for pointing out something that he himself should have noticed.

  "You have to understand, Joly, the variables of post-mortem change—or taphonomic progression, as we refer to it in my profession—are highly inconstant and rarely in agreement. That is the reason we offer our findings in terms of ranges and not of fixed times. In this case it may be that the warmth of the last several days has accelerated some decompositional processes, but not others. On the other hand, the location of the body in this relatively cool spot by the river may have contributed—"

  "Yes, yes, I see," said Joly, whose supply of patience for being lectured, even in Roussillot's good-natured and inoffensive manner, was not especially large. "I presume you're willing to risk a more definitive determination of the cause of death, however?" With his cigarette he gestured at the dead man's chest.

  "That hole?" Roussillot shrugged. "On the contrary, I wouldn't want to commit myself until the autopsy… however, I'd be willing to go on record to the effect that it probably did nothing for his health."

  That made them both laugh—for men working around corpses it never took much—and cleared the air, and for a few minutes they both went about their tasks, smoking and pursuing their own thoughts; Roussillot kneeling beside the body (without regard for his trouser knees) and gently probing with a finger here and there, Joly bending over the rifle with great interest, but not touching it.

  "Joly, wait!" Roussillot said suddenly, reaching out to grasp Joly's shoulder. "What's the matter with me? This is no suicide. Look at the wound, the gunshot wound."

  Joly looked. "Yes?"

  "Well, look at it! Wouldn't you assume that a man intent on putting a shotgun blast through his
heart would place the muzzle of the weapon against his chest before pulling the trigger?"

  "Yes, I suppose I would."

  "Of course you would. But do you see any charring of the material, any soot, any residue at all that would mark it as a contact wound?"

  "No, I don't."

  "No. What's more, take a good, close look. Does that look like a shotgun wound to you?"

  "No, it doesn't."

  "Well, then, it couldn't very well have been made by a shotgun, could it?"

  "No. What is your point, Roussillot?"

  "What is my… what is my…?" It was gratifying to see, Joly thought, that Roussillot's skin could be gotten under as well. "My point, Inspector Joly," he said in a strained voice, "is that this wound… here… could not have been made by that shotgun… there."

  "But this isn't a shotgun."

  "Not a… not a…"

  "Shotgun. I believe you've been misled by the barrels, which have a superficial resemblance to the arrangement of certain double-barreled shotguns—an over-and-under pattern, as we refer to it in my profession. If you look more closely, however, you'll see that there are actually three barrels. Only the top one is, in fact, a barrel—that is, the cylinder down which the projectile is propelled. The others—" He tapped them with a pencil. "—are air reservoirs."

  "Air reservoirs?" Roussillot said, squinting through the smoke at him. "What kind of—"

  "We see before us," said Joly, "a Cobra Magnum F-16 high-velocity air rifle."

  Roussillot stared at it, and then at Joly. "The weapon used to kill the other one, Carpenter."

  "Yes, three years ago."

  "But how very curious." He grunted as he pushed himself to his feet. "Ah, when did my joints get to be older than I am?" He took a final drag on his cigarette, put the butt into an airtight metal case he carried with him, and continued to emit smoke for two more breaths while looking down at the body. "An air rifle," he said at length. "Of course. No primer, no gunpowder, no explosion, nothing to burn. That would explain the lack of soot, wouldn't you say?"