Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  The pathologist, after respectfully waiting to see if Gideon now chose to assume the lecturer's mantle, happily took it back on his own shoulders.

  "As you know, professor, we cannot assume that we are seeing a precise representation of the angle traveled by the pellet because we have no way of allowing for the movement of the thorax and its contents during life as a result of breathing, or of the possible distension of the viscera by food or liquid, or even of the effects of gravity, inasmuch as the body is now on its back rather than upright, as it presumably—but not necessarily—was at the time of the shooting. Nevertheless, we do have before us a reliable, if approximate, indication of the pellet's path. And as we see, it flew straight back, never deviating from the medial plane, but inclining slightly upward, that is to say, in a dorso-superior—"

  "Roussillot, will you never get to the point?" Joly said. "And can a man smoke a cigarette in here?"

  "No, he may not," said Roussillot. "Now, to continue—and I apologize for stating what I know must be obvious to you, professor—a man intent on killing himself with a rifle is likely to do it in a seated position with the butt of the rifle propped on the ground—and with good reason. Shooting oneself while on one's feet would be awkward in the extreme. Holding it out without support would put a strain on the arms. It would produce unsteadiness. Would you agree?"

  He waited for a reply, but Gideon had largely stopped listening. He was silent, working things out for himself, staring at the angled probe, barely hearing Roussillot. Still, a part of him sensed that he'd been asked a question. "Hm," he said vaguely.

  "All right, then," said the easily satisfied Roussillot. "He sits—and by the way, allow me to point out that the body was found at the base of a boulder which would have made a suitable chair—he sits, enabling him to rest the stock of the weapon near his feet. If he has chosen, as in this case, not to blow out his brains but to explode his heart he places the muzzle firmly against the center of his chest, where he believes his heart to be, and where indeed it is. He takes a breath, he makes his goodbyes, he quiets the welling panic, the doubts that rise in his breast like swirling—"

  "Roussillot, for God's sake," Joly snarled.

  "Ah, the man, like others of his kind, has no sense of drama, of romance," said Roussillot with a good-natured sigh. "In any case, our subject eventually pulls the trigger. The path of the projectile is naturally front-to-back and upward through the body…" He gestured at the probe, still in the wound. "As indeed it is with our friend Bousquet. And there is my argument. Death by his own hand. Would you agree, professor?"

  "What?" said Gideon, surfacing.

  "Do you agree with Roussillot's reconstruction?" Joly asked, eyeing him closely.

  "No," Gideon said, "I don't."

  Chapter 23

  "You don't?" Roussillot cried, his voice breaking.

  "Well, what I meant," Gideon stammered, thinking that he'd been too blunt, that he'd stung Roussillot's professional pride, "was only that—"

  But he'd misread the pathologist. Roussillot was delighted. "You see?" he crowed to Joly. "Didn't I promise you he'd find something?" And to Gideon with every sign of genuine and unselfish enthusiasm: "All right, colleague, tell us, where has my reasoning gone wrong? What was my fatal mistake?"

  It wasn't his reasoning that had gone wrong, Gideon told him gently, but his method. Roussillot had made a mistake that many a forensic pathologist—many a forensic anthropologist, for that matter—had made before him: he had thought the matter through, he had analyzed it piece-by-piece and step-by-step… but he hadn't gone one step further and physically reconstructed it, he hadn't tried to go through the actual motions to make sure that what had worked out so neatly in his mind would work out equally well in the real world.

  "Why don't we run it through for ourselves and see what we come up with?" Gideon said.

  "One moment," Roussillot said. A pale-green sheet lay furled at Bousquet's feet. He pulled it up and decorously covered the body with it, an act that Gideon appreciated. "Now then," he said, glowing with anticipation.

  Gideon pointed at the rifle, propped in its corner. "Can I demonstrate with that?"

  Joly nodded. "Ballistics has finished with it."

  Gideon reached for it. "We're positive this thing isn't loaded, right?"

  "Neither loaded nor charged," said Joly. "It's perfectly safe."

  "Okay," Gideon said. "As you rightly said, Dr. Roussillot, if I want to kill myself with this, the chances are I'm going to sit down to do it, so—" He pulled a folding chair out from its place along the wall and set it down in an open space on the floor. "Now—" He was seized with a sudden inspiration. "Would you mind being our victim?" he asked, offering both the chair and the weapon to the pathologist.

  "Certainly," a beaming Roussillot said, taking the Cobra. "What would you like me to do?"

  "Just sit down and… shoot yourself."

  "Delighted."

  "Lucien, you wouldn't happen to know whether Bousquet was right- or left-handed, would you?" Gideon asked.

  "As it happens, I would. We have some examples of his handwriting—receipts and the like—and they all show a backward-leaning slant; quite characteristic and unmistakable."

  "Backward leaning—so he was left-handed?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm right-handed," Roussillot said. "Shall I use my left hand to pull the trigger?"

  "No, just do it the most natural way," Gideon said. "We'll extrapolate."

  Roussillot, openly enjoying himself, settled his rounded form in the chair, rested the butt of the rifle on the floor in front of him, found that it was too close to allow him to set the other end against his chest, and moved it out another foot. "Like this? Which finger shall I use to pull the trigger?"

  Gideon shrugged. "Just do what comes naturally."

  Roussillot readjusted the rifle and leaned forward to reach the trigger.

  "Wait!" said the keenly watching Joly. "It's upside down."

  "Well, yes," Roussillot said defensively, "it's only that it seems more natural that way. The rifle balances itself more comfortably. Also it makes it easier to pull—that is, to push—the trigger—" Abruptly, he realized what Joly was driving at. "The muzzle-stamp on his chest—it's not upside-down, it's right-side-up—the gunsight is above the muzzle!"

  "That's right," Gideon said, having scored his first point. "People who shoot other people do it that way, right side up; that's why the sight is where it is. But people who shoot themselves do it this way, the way you're doing it. It's possible to do it the other way, but the odds are against it."

  "The odds?" said Joly. "Gideon, if that's what you're basing—"

  "Give me a chance to finish," Gideon said. "Would you continue, Dr. Roussillot?"

  "Continue what?" said Roussillot, who had begun to get up, thinking the demonstration was done.

  "You haven't actually shot yourself yet."

  "Yes, please shoot yourself, Roussillot," Joly said.

  The pathologist sat down again, rearranged the rifle the way it had been before—upside down, butt on the floor, muzzle against his chest—and once more leaned forward to get to the trigger. It was a longer reach than he'd estimated and he had to shift himself to the front of the seat and hunch over the barrel to make it.

  "I find that the most natural way would be to do it with my thumb," he observed, "like this. I place my thumb inside the trigger guard. With my other hand I keep the muzzle against my chest. I lean over still a little more and push—"

  "Stop," Gideon said. "Hold that position if you can, just like that."

  Roussillot froze, except for his eyes, which he screwed up to look at Gideon.

  "Okay," Gideon said. "If you fired right now, what path would the pellet take?"

  "It's somewhat hard to tell from this position," said Roussillot, "but, frankly, I have no reason to think it would be any different from—"

  "No, you're wrong," Joly said excitedly. "I can see. It would enter on a down
ward path, not an upward one! By heaven, Gideon!"

  "Downward?" exclaimed a flabbergasted Roussillot. "But how can that be? The butt rests on the floor, the barrel inclines upward—"

  "Yes, yes," Joly said, "but you incline forward and your body is hunched, curved, crouched over the weapon. The path through your body would be slightly downward, I assure you." He looked at Gideon, his piercing eyes alight. "This changes everything. It means—"

  "May I straighten up now?" asked Roussillot, his voice a little choked from hunching over.

  Gideon put a hand on his shoulder. "Hold it just a second longer if you can, doctor. I want you to see something else. You notice that to reach the trigger you had to rotate—"

  "I see!" Joly said, too impatient to let him finish. "By reaching with his right arm he turns his body counterclockwise a few degrees, so that when he pulls the trigger the muzzle is pointing not straight back through his chest at his spine, but slightly right-to-left—which is therefore the path that the projectile would necessarily follow."

  "Why, yes, you're right," Roussillot said with dawning appreciation. "I can see that now; it's quite obvious, really. And in the case of a left-handed man it would be reversed. The projectile would travel from left to right.

  " But in Bousquet's case," said Joly, "it did neither; it flew straight back." He had forgotten about Roussillot's no-smoking rule and lighted up. Roussillot, engrossed with trajectories, failed to notice.

  "That's right," Gideon said. "Add that to the facts that it was angled up, not down, and that the muzzle-stamp was wrong-way-around. Three separate things, and they all point away from suicide."

  "And toward homicide," Joly said.

  "And so one more lovely theory falls victim to squalid fact," said Roussillot, laughing with satisfaction as he straightened up and propped the rifle back in its corner. "Remarkably done, Professor Oliver."

  "Oh, it's not that remarkable, really," said Gideon honestly. "It's just that I happened to be part of a case that was a lot like this a few months ago. The King County medical examiner walked me through it just the way I did with you."

  "How wonderful it must be to live in America," Roussillot said. "So many murders, so much to be learnt."

  Gideon laughed. "That's one way to look at it."

  "And now," said Roussillot, slipping on a pair of plastic gloves and picking up a scalpel, "I think we'd better get started, don't you?"

  "Good heavens, look at the time," Joly exclaimed, looking at his watch. "Much to be done, much to be done. Well, I'll leave the two of you to it, then," he said, making for the door. "A policeman's time is not his own."

  Chuckling, Roussillot watched him go. "Amazing, isn't it, how chicken-livered they can be when it comes to opening someone up?"

  "Amazing," Gideon agreed, looking enviously after the departing Joly.

  Roussillot returned to the autopsy table, adjusted the microphone, folded the sheet back down, and flicked on the spotlight above the head of the table. Bousquet's greasy, yellow-gray torso and ruined head jumped into brilliant focus.

  "Colleague, would you care to make the first incision?" Roussillot asked with a sweet smile, offering the knife.

  "Uh, no, thanks. If it's all the same to you, I'll just watch," Gideon said. "From back here."

  "But you said his fingerprints were on the rifle," Julie said, starting up the car.

  "They were. But that doesn't mean he was alive at the time."

  "It doesn't? Can you do that? Put a dead person's fingerprints on something? And get away with it, I mean?"

  "There's no way to tell he was dead, as far as I know, as long as the fingertips have some oil or perspiration on them. Or grease, or blood, or anything else that'll leave a mark, for that matter. This was a set-up, Julie, arranged to look like a suicide. I'm sure of it."

  "Wow," she said softly. "But doesn't that mean—" She paused and threw a worried glance at him. Gideon was sprawled in his seat, his head tipped back against the headrest and his legs extended to the extent that the Peugeot would allow. "Gideon, you look utterly washed-out."

  "I don't like autopsies. I'm not too keen on dead bodies, in general."

  "You're sure in a funny line of work, then."

  "I sure am. You think maybe Uncle Bert was right? That I'd have been better off in cost-accounting?"

  "No, I don't. Look, why don't you put back the seat and take a nap for a while? Just relax, it'll do you good. You think you're all recovered from the other day, but you're not, trust me. Give those neuroaxons a rest. I'll wake you up when we get to Les Eyzies."

  "You know, I just might do that." He adjusted the back of the seat to as close to horizontal as it would go and settled back. The clouds had closed in again and with them had come the rain, a cooler, thinner rain, pattering on the car's roof and running down the windshield in irregular rivulets. He watched them for a while, then closed his eyes to the steady, lulling whish-whish of the wipers.

  "Doesn't that mean what?" he said, putting up the seat half-an hour later and finding that they were on the outskirts of Les Eyzies, just crossing the little bridge over the Vézère.

  "Feeling better?"

  "A lot better," he said truthfully, the sights, smells, and sounds of the autopsy having receded. "You started to ask me something before: 'Doesn't that mean… ?'"

  It took her a moment to remember. "Oh, yes, I was thinking that if the suicide was a set-up, then how do we know that the business with the ring wasn't a set-up too?"

  "That's exactly what I believe it was. I don't think it came off during a struggle, I think it was planted there. I don't think Bousquet killed Jacques at all. I don't think he killed anyone."

  "But how would they have gotten hold of his ring?"

  "Easy. They just took it off his cold, dead finger. You see, I think Bousquet was probably killed before Jacques was—which, may I point out, would have made it particularly hard for him to murder him. "

  "Come again? I thought you said Bousquet had only been dead a couple of days. And Jacques was killed Thursday—one, two, three days ago."

  "No, I said Roussillot finally came to the conclusion that he's been dead a couple of days. I came to a different one. I think it's been a good three days—more likely four or five."

  "But Roussillot's a professional pathologist."

  "That's true enough. And I'm just a lousy skeleton detective."

  "No, you know what I mean. I'm not surprised that you'd know more about bullet trajectories and so on, but wouldn't he know more about the time-of-death aspect—decomposition, bodily changes—than you do?" She glanced at him. "Or don't you think he's competent?"

  "No, he's competent enough."

  "So how can you be that far apart? A two-or-three-day difference of opinion wouldn't be a lot if you were talking about a corpse that'd been out there for a month, but this is a fresh one. The indicators should still be pretty definitive."

  She clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh, my God, listen to me, I'm actually learning this stuff."

  "And you're absolutely right," Gideon said. "The indicators ought to be more definitive. They usually are. But this is just one of those cases where they're all over the map. He's looking at one set, I'm looking at another one."

  "I don't understand."

  "Well, what we found… are you sure you want to hear this?"

  "Yes, I do," she said staunchly. "I want to know what's going on too, and if you can stand watching an autopsy, I guess I can stand hearing about one. And better before dinner than during." She pulled the car to the curb near the center of the village, shut off the ignition, and turned attentively toward him, her elbow on the steering wheel. "Proceed. Only no gratuitous repulsiveness, please."

  Gideon was no more in favor of gratuitous repulsiveness than Julie was and explained, as non-graphically as he could, that the timetables of the various processes of decay and putrefaction, by which the time of death was usually estimated, were seriously out of whack in Bousquet's case. The with
ered, puttylike skin and the advanced decomposition of the brain (when the skull had been sawn open there had been little more than gray-brown slush inside, he didn't bother to tell her) went along with his estimate of four or five days. On the other hand, the relative freshness of the abdominal organs—minimal bloating, color change, or odor—supported Roussillot's estimate of only two days. And that was it, in a nutshell. Roussillot was inclined to go with the insides, Gideon with the outside and with the brain.

  "You know, there's something familiar about all that," Julie said. She'd relaxed; apparently she'd been expecting something worse. "Weren't you involved in something similar once?"

  "No, I'd remember it if I had."

  "Hm. But it's pretty unusual, isn't it? To have differences like that?"

  "Unusual yes, but it happens. Maybe one part of the body was mostly in the shade and another part in the sun, or some parts, being in contact with the ground, stayed cooler, or maybe the funny weather, hot in the daytime and chilly at night, had something to do with it. Or it could have had something to do with what he'd been eating—all kinds of things come into play. I could easily be wrong; Roussillot could easily be right. We'll just have to wait and see what the lab comes up with."

  "Right, good thinking, I'm for that." She plucked the key out of the ignition. "Okay, have we finished talking about people's insides?"

  Gideon laughed. "Is it safe to go get something to eat, you mean? I think so, yes."

  The rain had slackened off again and the filtered late-afternoon sunshine had brought some life back into the village streets in the form of strollers and shoppers. A few feet from their car, waiters on the sidewalk terrace of the Café de la Mairie were drying chairs and tables, and it was there that they went, neither of them being in the mood for a full-fledged French dinner.

  They were halfway through the spécialité de la maison—soupe Périgordine, a rich, garlicky broth swimming with beans, potatoes, and lettuce, with an egg whipped into it and two round slices of bread floating on top—before the subject of Jean Bousquet came up again.