The Paris Directive

by Gerald Jay

  Based upon the following:

  1. the ferocity of the three murders,

  2. the fact that nothing appears to be stolen (note Monsieur Reece’s obviously expensive wristwatch and the gold rings of the two women in the photographs),

  3. the sudden disappearance of Monsieur Phillips,

  4. Phillips’s use of the antidepressant fluoxetine, along with a number of other prescribed drugs, and

  5. my interview of Georgette Chambouvard …

  I strongly suspect that this is a crime of the heart. The work of a jealous husband and a sick mind. We have sent out a missing person’s alert for Monsieur Schuyler Phillips on le réseau Rubis. When we find Phillips, I believe we will have our murderer.

  Except for Béchoux’s signature—with its elaborate Spanish rúbricas—Mazarelle found the report unimpressive, long on romantic speculation and hot air, otherwise bare-bones. Not even a mention of Ali Sedak, despite the fact that he too seemed to have disappeared.

  Turning to the photographs in the envelope, the inspector laid them out on his desk. The faces contorted in pain, the bound, bloodied bodies twisted like roots. Awful. How could anyone human have done this? Transformed breathing flesh into bloody knots. The ferocity of these killings was as gruesome as anything Mazarelle had ever seen in Paris. It gave him once again that weird mix of excitement, fear, revulsion, and overwhelming anger—the addictive cocktail of feelings that comes from murder.

  He wondered how Phillips alone, one man with only a knife, could have controlled three adults. It was possible, he supposed. He’d seen psychos with incredible strength, ordinary-looking people possessed by demons who could hold off a half-dozen officers trying to subdue them. If it were Phillips by himself, he must have gone through the house with the fury of a cyclone. No, on second thought, more like a human neutron bomb that destroys life but leaves property untouched. In any event, it seemed unlikely to Mazarelle that the captain was right, but he’d know more once they’d tracked Phillips down.

  15

  L’ERMITAGE, TAZIAC

  As their car groaned up the hill to L’Ermitage, Duboit reassured the inspector once again that he’d replaced the gendarmes guarding the crime scene with two of their own men. Mazarelle feared it was by no means a sure thing. But as they got out of the car, he was pleased to see Thibaud and Lambert. Maybe Bernard was growing up. The two of them sitting in front of the side door goofing off. Better there, at least, than inside tracking through all the rooms and tampering with the evidence. The house was wreathed festively in yellow police tape marking it as a crime scene. Ducking under the tape and approaching the door, Mazarelle nodded at the two men.

  “Anything new?”

  They shook their heads. Lambert held the door open for him. As Mazarelle pulled on his latex gloves, he asked Bernard, “And yours?”

  Duboit fumbled in his pockets as if he expected to find them. Then he looked at Mazarelle sheepishly.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t forget your shorts,” griped the inspector. Reaching into his pocket, he produced another pair of latex gloves. “Here, take these. Come on.”

  The hallway with its barometer on the wall, antique piano, immaculate tessellated black-and-white tile floor, and vase of dazzling sunflowers was an interior decorator’s notion of country living. Just the way Mazarelle remembered it. Nothing seemed to have been touched.

  Preoccupied, he wasn’t even aware of the smell at first. Then it seemed inescapable to him. Though Béchoux’s report said all the bodies had been removed from the house for autopsy, the queasy, sickeningly sweet odor of death still hung in the air as if oozing out of the walls. An early warning system that set Mazarelle’s stomach churning. Not for the first time he thought how odd it was that he’d chosen to make his living doing something that involved a smell that so repelled him. In a way perhaps this made him a little better at what he did. For eons past, an aversion to the putrid odor of rotting flesh had helped the human species survive. Mazarelle hoped it would continue working as well for him.

  “Let’s look at the kitchen.” The inspector led the way inside.

  “Merde!” muttered a stunned Duboit. He stood in the doorway beside his boss, his latex-gloved hands out of sight behind his back. He could feel them shaking. Even with Reece’s body removed, the spattered, congealed blood clung to the walls and windows like death itself. With the windows shut, the close, fetid smell made it difficult to breathe.

  Mazarelle stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and tried to crawl in after them. He wondered if he was getting too old for this job but shook off the idea, concentrating on the chalk outline of the dead body, the telltale patterns of the victim’s blood. He thought of early pictures of martyred saints with their throats cut or beheaded, the blood pouring freely out of the wounds, spurting high in the air. The focus on their sacrifice. Not here.

  He imagined the bound Monsieur Reece, propped up against the sink before the fatal blow. The blood splattered on the kitchen walls in a medium-high-velocity spray pattern had been thrown there by the killer’s knife. Mazarelle sensed the frenzy of an obsessive ego reveling in the act. It seemed to him much too personal and violent a crime to be motivated by greed or politics, unless of course the man he was after was simply mad.

  Mazarelle wondered if it was no accident that Reece was driving his friend’s Mercedes when it crashed. The only accident may have been that he’d survived. “It was a miracle Ben wasn’t killed,” Phillips had told him. “A miracle.” Wasn’t that what he called it? In any event, Reece hadn’t escaped this time. Perhaps, as Béchoux said, love and jealousy were at the heart of this case after all. How French, he thought glumly.

  “Look there!” Duboit pointed to the set of knives hanging on the bloodstained wall. “Over there. One of them is missing.”

  Mazarelle hadn’t noticed the empty holder. “You’re right, Bernard. Good work. It could be what we’re looking for. Now let’s see if we can find it.”

  Béchoux’s techies had been all over the room, leaving behind their trail of white powder. He told Bernard to check with Captain Béchoux about fingerprints.

  As the inspector opened the cabinets under the sink, he was annoyed to discover a half-filled garbage bag that had obviously been overlooked. Picking gingerly through the coffee grounds, apple cores, and remnants of coq au vin, he removed the crumpled papers and flattened them out. One was a bill from Chez Doucette for 1,047 francs. Dated June 24, it was for three menus and one coq au vin, three Badoit, two bottles of Nuits-Saint-Georges, three crêpes, and a lemon tart. It looked as if on the night of the murders they had all dined at Doucette’s and one of them had brought home leftovers. Either that or …

  “What’s that?” Bernard gazed at him expectantly.

  “The time they left Chez Doucette—ten fifty-one p.m.”

  Not surprisingly, the uniforms had missed a thing or two. Mazarelle told Bernard to check the room thoroughly, see what else he could find. Meanwhile, he said, he was going out to look over the terrace before they went through the rest of the house. He didn’t say that what he really wanted was some fresh air. He had an urgent need to clean out his head, put a pipe in his mouth, get the dizzying smell of death out of his nose.

  Lighting up—his wooden match flaring in the summer breeze despite his cupped hands—he remembered the last time he was out here with the four of them. Clearly they were people of wealth able to afford foreign travel and rent luxury cars, houses of distinction. How civilized it had all seemed, how comfortable they were with one another despite their disagreement about the ATM pictures. He’d detected no underlying friction between any of them. But Mazarelle knew well that unlike Maigret, Poirot, or the other literary detectives, observation had never been his strength. Perhaps that was the difference between fiction and the real world. Most often, he found his intuition much more reliable. Martine had once told him that in some ways he was more like a woman than she was. It was a compliment, she said, and may have meant it. Martine, ho
wever, had a wicked sense of humor that on occasion truly surprised him.

  Lost in thought, Mazarelle wasn’t prepared for the scream, a sudden, loud, jagged cry that hit his ear like a chain saw. Up on the roof, a huge black crow flapped down on the red tiles and snapped its wings closed like an umbrella. High above in the seamless blue sky, a broad, cottony contrail lazily drifted apart, the plane that made it nowhere to be seen. It was a disappearing act worthy of Phillips. On the other hand, the inspector wondered, why did he leave his car and plane ticket behind? Patience, Mazarelle, patience, he cautioned. All in good time.

  It was after he’d gone through the rest of the house with Bernard that the inspector began to consider the possibility of theft more strongly. The bedrooms had not been turned upside down by any means, but it was clear that someone had been through the drawers looking for something. Of course it might have been the gendarmes, but even they wouldn’t have been so sloppy. Mazarelle, who didn’t like to carry his cell phone, asked Bernard for his.

  “My mobile? Sure, boss, you want it?”

  He dialed Dr. Langlais, the forensic pathologist in Bergerac, who handled autopsies for the police. When Langlais got on the phone, the inspector told him what he wanted. Langlais didn’t recall, but he said he’d check Reece’s pockets. It took a while until he finally came back.

  “No,” he said. “Keys but no wallet. Anything else?”

  “The murder weapon. How would you describe it?”

  “I think there were two.”

  “Huh—?”

  “One maybe a large double-edge hunting knife—very long. The other smaller, sharper, and pointed like a dagger.”

  “And the time of death?”

  “All three died about the same time. Based upon the temperature and rigor of the bodies when I examined them the following day, I’d say they probably died some time before midnight of the twenty-fourth. But I can do better than that for you after I’ve run the potassium tests on their eyes. I’ve got a lot more work to do.”

  The inspector paused. “Anything unusual about the bodies?”

  “The violence.” The doctor’s answer came back with the speed of a blistering net volley return. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Whoever killed them was right-handed and incredibly strong. A killer in complete command of his weapons. In each case, he cut through the carotid arteries and the trachea in a single blow. The murdered man’s throat was torn open so deeply that his head was nearly severed from his body. The chest wounds delivered so powerfully that four of his ribs were fractured. But that wasn’t enough for this killer. There were twenty-three stab wounds in the male victim alone. A few no deeper than pinpricks. He seemed to want to torture his victims first, as if he relished inflicting pain on them. Or perhaps he was after information and didn’t want to kill them immediately.”

  “What about the women?”

  “They weren’t raped, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What about their legs? The cuts?”

  “Their Achilles tendons were sliced in two. They couldn’t run away even if they wanted to.”

  “Their feet were taped together,” the inspector reminded him.

  Langlais didn’t like being corrected. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and hung up.

  If it was information that the murderer wanted, what information was he after? The missing wallet of Monsieur Reece pointed Mazarelle in a familiar direction. Phillips wasn’t the only one who had disappeared since the murders.

  “Where are we going now, boss?” Bernard asked.

  “I’m going to see Georgette Chambouvard. As for you, my friend, you’re going to stay right here and go over every inch of this place inside and out until you find me a couple of murder weapons. I’ll be back.”

  On the way out, he told Thibaud and Lambert to be on the lookout for Ali Sedak, the handyman. “If he shows up, keep him here. I’ll be back soon.”

  Madame Chambouvard announced that Georgette would be down in a little while. Her daughter hadn’t been feeling well ever since she discovered the dead body. And madame herself hadn’t slept a wink. Who would believe such a horrible thing could happen in Taziac?

  “And such nice people. Do you know yet who killed them, Inspector?”

  “Not yet.”

  She asked if he cared for a cup of coffee and led the way into the dining room. It was small, spartan, and subfusc with a dark wooden chest for dishes and a heavy wooden table and chairs. The one picture on the wall was a framed sepia-colored marriage photograph—the bearded groom seated stiff as cardboard, his bride standing beside him. From the sunlit adjoining kitchen with its white walls wafted the delicious aroma of peaches stewing on the stove. Mazarelle had often seen madame in the village. As for her daughter, he didn’t actually know her but had heard stories. A promising triathlete who had been dumped from competition for taking andros and EPOs as freely as vitamins.

  Georgette, when she came down, was as tall as her mother. She had lines under her eyes, her face was drawn. She shook the inspector’s hand and huskily complained that she had already told the police all she knew. Mazarelle noted the deep voice; her thin, muscular arms; the acne on her cheeks. At least she hadn’t yet lost her hair to the steroids or, worse yet, gotten cancer. He felt sorry for the intense young woman, hoped that she wasn’t still taking the little blue pills in pursuit of her dream.

  Mazarelle said he’d only a few more questions, but before he could ask the first she began talking nonstop—describing how she had found the house locked up when she arrived, the shutters closed, and thought that everyone was still asleep. How she’d gone in through the back door and started to work, cleaning up the dining room table where the four of them had been drinking, and how it wasn’t until she went into the kitchen and found Monsieur Reece on the floor, trussed up like a turkey, his blood-smeared face staring up at her with one ear hanging down by a thread, that she’d raced to get help.

  The inspector, who had heard the outside door slam and the heavy footsteps approaching, turned to see Chambouvard in the doorway. He made a lot of noise for a man his size. Working in the field, the farmer had spotted the police car turning into his driveway and hurried back to the house. He’d had enough of the gendarmes hassling his daughter, first about drugs and now this. They were nosy, pushy, and always ended up costing him time or money or both.

  “What now?” he demanded.

  “It’s okay, Papa. Only a few questions.”

  “Why don’t you go find the murderer and leave us alone?”

  The inspector rubbed his mustache and shook his head like a man with few options. “I can do this one of two ways. Either here or at the commissariat in Bergerac. Which would you prefer, mademoiselle?”

  “Okay, okay.” Her father knew when he was beaten. “Get on

  with it.”

  Mazarelle wanted to know whether Ali was working that morning at L’Ermitage when Georgette arrived. She said she didn’t see him, and as for the day before, she had no idea because she wasn’t there. He came and went as he pleased.

  Chambouvard interrupted. “I know when he left. I was on my tractor working late that night in the fields and saw his car leave about ten or ten thirty.”

  “Could it have been a little later?”

  “Maybe. I don’t wear a watch and I don’t punch a clock. But one thing I know for sure is that old white bug he drives.”

  Mazarelle turned to Georgette and asked if there were any hunting knives at L’Ermitage. She folded her arms defensively and told him no knives, no guns. The only knives were the ones in the kitchen.

  “How did the two couples get along?”

  “If you mean was anything going on between them the answer is yes. I’d say so. Monsieur Reece and Madame Schuyler loved the sun. They were always up at the pool together, sunning themselves.”

  The inspector’s bushy right eyebrow rose like a circumflex.

  “So what?”

  “Naked.”

  The way she said it
clearly indicated that she didn’t care to say any more on the subject or need to—especially while her father was watching her like the pope. Interesting, Mazarelle thought, but hardly decisive. He chalked it up to a romantic young woman and an overheated imagination thunderous with heavy breathing. The last question he asked before leaving was whether Georgette happened to notice if any of the four visitors owned a cell phone.

  “Monsieur Schuyler. His wife complained about it all the time.”

  16

  CHEZ DOUCETTE, TAZIAC

  The restaurant’s parking lot was almost empty when Mazarelle pulled in. The last two lunchtime customers were just leaving, one man holding the other by the arm and talking nonstop as they stood in the sun out front beside the small stone fountain. The inspector had picked a good time to speak to Doucette. He found him in the back room with his wife, rubbing his eyes. Looking up, Doucette quickly put his glasses back on and, seeing who it was, took the inspector’s hand. He asked how he was and poured him a glass of wine. His wife nodded a silent greeting.

  Though Sandrine Doucette had nothing against the policeman, she’d never cared for his wife. They had gone to high school together and Sandrine thought Martine was a snob. Too good for Sandrine and her friends and Taziac. And wild too. It didn’t surprise her at all that as soon as Martine got knocked up, she’d dropped out of school and left for Paris to get an abortion. She had always talked about living in Paris. What Sandrine didn’t expect was that one day she’d marry a cop and come back.

  Mazarelle took the bill out of his pocket and asked Doucette if he recalled the four foreigners. Of course he remembered them. They were good customers who’d come several times since they arrived in Taziac. Lovely people. He called their deaths a tragedy and an awful thing for the village. The frightening news all over the newspapers, the TV. He’d heard that reservations had already been canceled at the Fleuri, which was the only hotel in town. Though Chez Doucette was a popular restaurant, he was sure business would suffer if the killer wasn’t caught soon.