They were only going to let him get in so close. Hubert handed the baby back and Edmond took it professionally enough. There was something sticky under Hubert’s foot, but he tried not to let on and make a big deal of it. The guy had enough problems already, wispy hair all askew and no socks on his feet. The gentleman was in his pajama bottoms and a housecoat. Tailler lurked there, off in the background, trying to look big and friendly.
“Ah. There you go.”
Hubert surreptitiously checked his suit, but didn’t see any major stains or up-chucks.
The two men chuckled while Tailler seemed to be just looking around. This place, while nice enough for a small family, was nothing like either of the Godeffroy residences. It couldn’t have been half the size of either one of them. It was nowhere near as clean, and didn’t smell all that good inside either. Tailler sort of wondered what the lady of the house might look like—he suspected nothing much like either of their Madame Godeffroys. Not with three kids to show for it.
Hubert looked around. Small children will eavesdrop, and if those two hadn’t figured out how to open the bedroom door lock with a bent bobby-pin, then they would soon enough. They might even be working on that right now.
His childhood was gone, and yet he still referred to it.
“Was Didier a bit of a rogue? I mean, to your knowledge?”
Edmond looked completely mystified.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Well. His wife seems to think he has disappeared, and yet we hear from your employer, that he’s off on a sales trip down south. We’re wondering if this sort of thing was really in character for him? Can you tell us anything about, ah, any extra-curricular relationships, encounters maybe, that he might have indulged in. You know, along the way?” Hubert took a deep breath. “Did Didier and his wife ever, uh, feud about anything in particular?”
“Disappeared? Feud?” There was a half-gasp of disbelief.
“That’s what she thinks. We have a missing-person report and we have no choice but to take them seriously, n’est pas?”
Edmond’s face cleared.
“Yes, of course. Why didn’t you bloody well say so.” Now it was his turn to check for splashes on the upper chest.
He pulled a cloth out of a side pocket of his housecoat and wiped around the baby’s face and mouth.
“You guys know that secretary?”
Tailler’s jaw dropped.
“Mademoiselle—”
Edmond laughed.
“Yeah, he had her too. But no, I mean the one in Gaudet’s office.”
He sure had their attention now.
“What? You mean—you mean the Prideaux woman?” This was one of those things that had always amazed Tailler. “So he told you about all of this? Did you guys ever go drinking, stuff like that?”
Edmond nodded.
“Yeah, sure. Once or twice, anyways.”
“Did you ever try to, ah, you know—score, anything like that?” Tailler was genuinely curious, but it was also relevant.
“Oh.” Barrault took a hasty look at the far archway. “Ah, no. Never. Not me, that’s for sure.”
“His wife says you’re friends.”
“I suppose we are, yes. But we, ah, me—no. I’m, ah, I’m always home on time.” He smiled, albeit a little sadly.
What some men actually got away with, for however long or short of a time, really was a wonder sometimes. The Prideaux girl wasn’t blonde either, come to think of it. Didier was capable of branching out.
The detectives were an attentive audience.
Edmond beamed, it was like he just couldn’t wait to talk about it. This almost made sense, when one wondered just who the average young married fellow could call his friends. The scruffier ones from a previous life were often quickly weeded out, as Hubert well knew. He wasn’t even married yet. Talk got around. They didn’t dare open their mouths or even tell a joke hardly, for fear of distorted versions of those stories making the rounds. It always came back to haunt them, didn’t it? With a certain type of woman, once you were married, it was like you were Siamese twins, joined at the hip or something. The worst thing you could do to your wife was to embarrass her among her friends.
For a frazzled Edmond Barrault, a couple of young male cops with those open, sympathetic looks, might be a golden opportunity for a gossip. The thing was to show an interest and take his mind off his surroundings. With the wife sick, he wouldn’t be earning any money either.
The only problem was the baby had wet itself and it would take a minute to change.
Was that all? Hubert could have sworn it was much worse, but it might just be coming from the hamper down the hall.
Assuming they had the patience to wait him out, it appeared the gentleman would be only too happy to tell it.
***
The baby gurgled, chuckling quietly to itself in a small bed in the next room. They sat expectantly in the front room as their host hastily cleared a pile of clothes from one end of the couch.
Edmond had taken a quick phone call in monosyllables in the kitchen. He’d checked on the other two kids, and they were said to be playing quietly in their room. Either that or he’d put them down with a ball-peen hammer, or possibly sleeping-powder in the grape juice, thought Tailler.
“So Didier had some kind of relationship with this Prideaux woman?”
Edmond nodded happily.
“I almost admired him at times. There were times when I hated him, mostly at breakfast. You really have to admit. Most of us don’t have the nerve—the sheer, unmitigated gall. But that guy took the cake. He really did.”
“And what about the other secretary. She’s quite a bit older.”
“Oh, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “But a body like a hot tamale, eh?”
It was quite an expression, one neither man had ever heard. There was a moment while they considered it. Neither one of them had ever seen a tamale before, come to think of it.
The analogy was stillborn.
“And you’re sure?” Tailler needed the fellow to come out and say it. “I mean, seriously?”
It wouldn’t do to put words in the witness’s mouth and then go ahead and write it in your little notebook. It had to come from them, with as little prompting as possible.
“Oh, yes. They kept it quiet about the office, of course.”
Hubert wondered about that.
“So how did you know? Did you see them?”
“No, of course not. But Didier told me all about it. Yeah, they must be some pretty good actors. Both of them. When we were both in town, or when we were at a big show, a whole bunch of us, we talked quite a bit. Half-drunk a lot of the time. It really does go with the job, you know, although we all pretend it doesn’t. But yeah, I believed him.”
“You believed him?” Hubert’s eyes slid to Tailler, as usual taking his painstaking notes. “He wasn’t telling stories out of school, then?”
Edmond nodded.
“Well. That’s good enough for us.”
Edmond shook his head.
“You would have to see the guy in action. He was always hitting on them. Anything in a skirt. You might be surprised who responded sometimes. I’ve seen it myself.”
He flushed a bit, looking about. He meant he’d seen other males do it.
“Okay, Monsieur Barrault. I hope your wife gets better soon.” Hubert rose. “Didier didn’t have any regular girlfriends, a mistress here in town? Anything like that?”
“Oh, God! Probably. Knowing him, sure. Anyways, gentlemen, I really must get dinner going or the little beasts are going to tear me limb from limb.” A mistress would be nothing out of the ordinary, in some circles.
Barrault seemed to accept it all too readily.
“What’s your wife’s name, sir?”
“Rose.”
“And what hospital is that?”
Tailler patiently took it all down as quickly as he could.
“Okay, thank you.” Tailler tapped the final period and
closed his notes.
He was hit by an inspiration.
“A rose by any other name.”
“That, sir, is very true.” The fellow brightened and then he laughed.
Tailler seemed to have struck a chord there.
Sometimes it was best to leave it at that.
Leaving their business cards, the pair made a hasty exit.
The baby was crying again. Some kind of fight had broken out in the back of the house and there but for the Grace of God went them.
Chapter Thirteen
It was mid-afternoon when they got back. They were lucky to catch Maintenon at his desk. Technically he was entitled to two whole days off a week. He hadn’t been getting it lately, and he was owed half a day off here and there when he could squeeze it in. The department insisted that the time off must be taken, rather than paying time and a half when they didn’t have to.
Their immediate superiors would say you were a fool not to take the time, and if you didn’t, that was your problem because you weren’t going to get paid for it anyways.
The trouble was that the work also tended to fall behind. This merely compounded the problem. Things were going relatively smoothly with no more than the usual workload.
He’d been thinking of getting a proper haircut, and he really could use a couple of new shirts.
The state of his socks-and-underwear drawer, (every man had had one of those), wasn’t very good. There were things he might have been doing. For ages it seemed, he’d been thinking of doing this or that on an afternoon off. He could wander the Louvre, after all. People often did. They came from around the world and he’d never really been in the place. He hadn’t seen the inside of a cinema in years. At one time, he had lived for the movies far more than he had lived for books. He had lived for Ann, and a weekly trip to the cinema was a tradition from the early days of their marriage.
Maybe that’s why he never did it anymore.
“Ah, Inspector.”
Tailler dropped the briefcase on the desk.
Hubert was hanging up his coat.
“Well. This thing just keeps getting better and better.”
With a glance at Tailler, Hubert took up the report.
He explained about their visit to Monique and read back one or two quotes from the notes. He told the Inspector they had been to Gaston e Cie and outlined the information, such as it was, that they had obtained there.
When they got to the part about Edmond and the sort of things he was saying, the Inspector’s eyebrows began to rise in earnest.
Finally Hubert trailed off. Tailler was neatly stacking his notes, papers and photographs along the cleared front edge of his desk. He looked up, studying the Inspector.
“Hmn. We’re starting to get a profile of our, ah, alleged victim here.”
“Yes, sir. We agree. An interesting picture. What do we do now, Inspector?”
Gilles stared off out the window, hand coming up as he rubbed his stubbled jaws.
“Hmn. That’s a good question.” His eyes fell to the desk.
He picked up a couple of sheets stapled together.
“Lab report. Our missing corpse. Blood on the twig. Human blood. For sure.” The preliminary analysis was now backed up by further, extensive testing.
Tailler’s mouth opened.
“So, what we have, sir. Is a dead man, two wives, at least two possible girlfriends, a missing bigamist, philanderer and all around man about town, and not even the foggiest notion of what the motive for all of this might be?”
Unexpectedly, Gilles came out of his reverie.
He swiveled the chair.
“Ah, yes. Motive.”
Tailler sat up straighter, prepared to listen. Above and behind Maintenon, Hubert’s face was intent. He was practically tiptoeing about, allowing thoughts to roam freely and not distracting the process.
“There could be insurance.” Tailler had been doing some thinking.
Maintenon nodded. Hubert piped up.
“Or an inheritance—or just a hell of a lot of money in a bank account somewhere.”
“Or simple jealousy. One found out about the other.”
Maintenon looked around at Hubert.
“That one seems the most obvious.” Blood and violence, a crime of passion. “The money as an added bonus.”
Tailler had one.
“The guy got tired of it all and just wanted to chuck it. He finds some old bum somewhere, dresses him up in a good suit. He shoots him. Or stabs him. He’s going to stick his wallet in the pocket and chuck him off a bridge and into the Seine. Then you come along and muck it all up. Am I right, Inspector?”
“What, Emile? And then, suddenly realizing how just how mad it all is, he decides not to go through with the rest of the plan?” Hubert was grinning, but Maintenon took it seriously enough.
Let the ideas flow. The other thing was that neither one seemed all that thorough in any of their interviews. They had to start asking a lot more questions, as you didn’t always get a second chance.
“Yes, yes, stranger things have been known to happen.” Gilles took a breath. “Think, gentlemen, think. What would be the craziest idea a killer could come up with?”
“It shouldn’t be crazy unless the perp’s crazy.” One eye on Tailler, Hubert winked at Maintenon. “It really ought to be that simple. The lady figures out he’s a bigamist and kills him. She says he missing to cover her backside. The other one reports him missing. It’s a nice, simple theory. The only problem is if he’s not dead yet! The thing you want to do next is to take a really good look at Monique. Then, go back and study the other one.”
“The fact that he is still alive, allegedly, would appear to contradict that little theory.”
“Yes, sir.” Hubert spoke for the two of them.
Tailler was already intent on his notes, eyes going up, back and ultimately far away.
Gilles kicked back his chair.
“I will see you tomorrow.”
“Sir!”
“Yes, Emile?”
“Do we write him off then?”
“No. Not until you see the whites of his eyes.”
They heard him going off down the hall.
Tailler’s eye came around to Hubert.
“Wow. Just like that, eh?”
Hubert snorted.
At least they had a clue now.
‘We are all incompetent…’
One of the Inspector’s favourite sayings. Tailler had always thought it applied to the criminals. But it applied to everyone, in their own inimitable way. He wasn’t far wrong, either. Hopefully their killer wasn’t an exception to the rule.
Maintenon. What a crazy son of a bitch.
***
Tailler, home at the end of a long day, ran up the stairs two at a time. They had two floors. The upper one was all his these days. The space was now much too big. There was just the two of them and a couple of cats. This was where Emile, his two brothers and three sisters had grown up. He put the bags down on the counter beside the sink. People wondered why he ate like a horse at work.
There were times he came home and he was just so damned tired.
It was just him and Mama now.
There was the faint smell of food in the air, but there didn’t seem to be much going on in the kitchen. She had laundry hanging up from yesterday, on a small wire strung across the back window. He wished she wouldn’t do that, as it meant her climbing up on a chair, and he was rarely home these days. The curtains on the back of the kitchen were never closed, and the windows were open most of the time. He closed all but one, leaving it open a few centimetres so the felines could come and go.
“Is that you?”
She was in the salon, knitting steadfastly in the half-darkness, squinting and ignoring the fact that the sun had long since gone down.
“No, it’s somebody else.” She always looked up and smiled at this point.
Entering the room, he bent over and kissed her on the cheek. Her face was
getting wrinkled, liver-spotted and dry as some hairy and badly-scraped old parchment. It had actually taken a while.
It almost didn’t matter what he said. He wondered sometimes, how long she would sit there in the dark if he didn’t come home one day. It was a shitty kind of a question, admittedly.
It would take a while for her to catch on. Perhaps it would be more merciful that way.
Tailler snapped on the light beside her and then went over to close the curtains. With a row of big windows on the west side of the building, this and the bedrooms up above were the brightest in the house. They were usually the warmest, but there was a chill in the air. Predictably, she hadn’t asked their daily help Maria to light the fire. A lifetime of relentless frugality was just too much to overcome. She would be uncomfortable sitting there without a sweater, no matter how warm the room. It said a lot about her, for she couldn’t change. Sooner or later, human beings became slightly ossified.
Maria didn’t have a shred of initiative in her own right. Emile himself had a little too much of it perhaps—there were no happy mediums with the typical human creature. It was either the one or the other.
Maria got five francs, along with breakfast, lunch and tea, for the daily privilege of cooking, washing up and sitting with the old lady. The arrangement had gone on for two or three years now, and suited all parties well enough. A perfect stranger, she’d answered an advertisement in the paper. Her references checked out—Emile had made sure of that, and she was now something of a fixture in Mother’s life.
His salary and his mother’s small pension, typical for a military widow, were adequate. His father had taken a little time to enjoy life. In retrospect, that was wise enough. He was a good Catholic. He had always worked hard, always tithing a tenth to the Church. He had sired an impressive brood. Father had been killed in 1916. Verdun, the death of many a fellow. There might have been a few francs a month in company pension from before the war, but as far as Emile knew, no one had ever pursued it.
The loss of their father had formed his life in so many ways.
Devastating as that had been, he had been young, and resilient. He was almost the envy of his friends. His mother had that ribbon, the heavy medal hanging off the bottom end. Boys came over and they would sneak into her bedroom. He would pull it out. He would take it out of the box and show it to them in a kind of reverence. His father was a hero, and that counted for something. At least at first. They took turns. They would put it around their necks and look at themselves in the mirror. They were trying it on for size.
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