Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (17 page)

“Did he give you its name?” Verlaque asked as he washed the arugula.

“Yeah, he did, but I don’t know if I can find it. I wrote the name down on a scrap piece of paper and put it in my purse but I can’t remember which one. I’ll look though. It might be in the pink Fendi,” Sylvie said, winking at Marine. Sylvie made a very good living from her art photography. She was represented by a gallery in Paris and one in Berlin. Besides putting money aside for her Charlotte, she also had a passion for handbags.

Verlaque didn’t tell the women what Giuseppe Rocchia had said on the telephone earlier that day: Commissioner Paulik had asked Rocchia if he had seen Georges Moutte recently, and the Italian said that they had only met once, at a conference in Munich. If Moutte knew the city of Perugia well, then it was very likely that he had met with Rocchia there. And Marine’s mother had told Verlaque that both of the scholars were glass collectors. At any rate, Rocchia was now on his way to Aix, at Verlaque’s request.

“By the way, Sylvie, thieves are making their rounds on the roofs of Aix, so make sure you close your windows at night and when you’re out,” Marine said. Sylvie also had a top-floor apartment, just around the corner from Verlaque’s.

“
Merde
! Charlotte’s with a new babysitter tonight! I’m going to phone him right away.”

“Him?” Verlaque and Marine asked in unison.

“Yeah. He put a flyer in my mailbox, looking for part-time work. He’s saving up for his big Che trip around South America.”

“Arnaud!” Verlaque and Marine shouted at the same time.

Sylvie tilted her head toward the ceiling. “You two are so annoying.” She helped herself to the red wine that Verlaque had just opened. “Wow,” she said, looking at the label of the 1998 Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “You know, I do feel terrible for Georges.”

Marine and Verlaque looked at each other but neither spoke.

“Really I do!” Sylvie insisted. “In the end we didn’t have that much in common, but he was nice to me, if a little silly.”

“
Who
was the silly one?” Verlaque said.

Sylvie and Marine looked at Verlaque in surprise. “I beg your pardon?” Sylvie asked, setting down her wine.

“You heard me,” Verlaque answered. “Sleeping with an old man?”

“That’s none of your business!” Sylvie yelled.

Verlaque stayed calm despite how much he, at times like this, detested Sylvie Grassi. “It’s now my business, since he’s dead.”

“At least he was
kind
!” Sylvie answered, glancing at Marine.

Verlaque sighed and looked at Marine too. “Yeah, I’m a mean bastard, but you always come back.”

Sylvie grabbed her purse and Marine followed suit, picking her briefcase up off of the floor. She saw the yellow envelope that her mother had given her and shoved it back into the case. “I’m going with Sylvie,” Marine said. Before Verlaque could speak both women were on the landing and then heading down the four flights of winding stairs. He heard the front door bang as the oven timer went off.

V
erlaque was asleep when the telephone rang. He had been dreaming of his mother and of Monique, and the telephone rang in his dream. “It’s Monique,” his mother told her thirteen-year-old son. “She needs you.” And so the young Antoine quickly got out of bed, throwing on his jeans, a polo shirt, and a pair of moccasins. A taxi would be waiting downstairs to take him across the Seine, from the Verlaque family mansion—not yet cut up into apartments—through the gates of the Louvre and around the place du Carrousel, long before I. M. Pei’s
Pyramid
would grace the square, across the pont du Carrousel into the sixth arrondissement to Monique’s apartment. It would have been a short walk for a thirteen-year-old, but Monique was impatient.

He quickly sat up, relieved that he could see his Soulages painting glowing in the moonlight despite its color—black—applied in thick strokes across the immense canvas. It was the first thing he had bought when his grandmother Emmeline died. The
art gallery had been on the rue de Seine, curiously across the street from Monique’s former apartment.

“
Oui
,” he grunted into the phone, unhappy to be woken from a deep sleep by a telephone but relieved that he was no longer thirteen.

“Apologies, sir,” Bruno Paulik said. “Bad news.”

Verlaque got up and took the phone with him, walking down the hallway toward his kitchen and flipping on the lights that lit up the white marble kitchen counter.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Mlle Zacharie, sir. She was hit by a car about two hours ago. Hit-and-run…no witnesses.”

Verlaque drew a deep breath and then asked, “Is she dead?”

“Yes. It was instant, so they tell me…it happened on the boulevard Roi René, beside the retirement homes.”

Verlaque thought of how many times he had crossed that part of the ring road that circled Aix’s
vieille ville
and of how cars raced up three lanes of traffic after rounding the corner of the avenue Victor Hugo. “Are you at home?” Verlaque asked.

“Yes. Do you want me to come in?”

“No, no; there’s no point. Try to get some more sleep, and I’ll see you at the Palais de Justice later this morning.”

At 9:00 a.m. Verlaque almost collided with Paulik in the lobby, who jumped back, trying to steady his coffee, which swirled around in its white plastic cup, narrowly escaping his white shirt.

“Sorry! Why don’t you dump that stuff and I’ll have Mme Girard make us a real coffee in my office?” Verlaque suggested.

Paulik didn’t say anything but replied by pouring his light brown coffee into a potted palm tree. “No one has come forward yet about the hit-and-run. It happened around 11:00 p.m., which
isn’t so late,” he said. “You’d think there would have been people around.”

Climbing the stone stairs that led to the upstairs offices, Verlaque suggested, “If it was intentional, the driver could have been waiting at the side of the road for a moment when there were no other cars. Plus the residents of that old folks’ home on the south side of the boulevard were probably all tucked in for the night.”

“As were the residents in the old folks’ home on the other side of the street,” Paulik added.

“There are two retirement homes?”

“Yes,” Paulik answered. “But the one on the south side is decidedly more upscale.”

“Don’t tell me you have a great-aunt or -uncle in one of them.”

Paulik laughed. “No, sir. I don’t.”

Mme Girard was at her desk when they walked into her office. She stood up, as was her habit, when she saw them. “Good morning,” she said. “Prosecutor Roussel has just been here, and Officer Flamant left a message. I took it down for you,” she continued, handing Paulik a piece of paper.

“Thank you, Mme Girard,” Verlaque said. “Would you mind making us two espressos? We’ll try those new Brazilian capsules I ordered, the light brown ones.”

“Certainly,” she answered. Verlaque watched her walking away, so self-assured and in her usual office uniform of a short skirt, silk blouse, and Chanel-like wool jacket. He knew that her husband was a well-off real estate agent who owned his own firm and that Mme Girard—somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties—didn’t have to work. But she loved her job and once told Verlaque that if she didn’t work she would spend too much time at her tennis club. He admired her for that—his own mother had
never worked but always seemed tired and anxious. His grandmother had busied herself with painting, volunteering to teach English at the local primary school, and hosting simple but elegant parties for the family business. Verlaque sat behind his desk as Paulik silently read Flamant’s message, and he thought of the family business and its head office, which had been near the parc Monceau, and was now an embassy for a small Middle Eastern country. How he had loved to visit his father and grandfather in that building, greeted with a huge smile and flourish of his hat by Roger, the concierge who had watched over the premises for over forty years. Roger’s wife doted on the young Verlaque brothers, serving them slices of warm apple tart from her kitchen that looked onto the cobbled courtyard.

“The phone call we think enticed Moutte to go to his office late Friday night can’t be traced,” Paulik said, looking up from the note.

Verlaque looked away from the window. “What do you mean?”

“All we can determine is that it came in on a trunk line from Italy,” Paulik said. “But the caller ID was blocked.”

Mme Girard brought in two espressos on a tray, with a bowl of sugar and two tiny silver coffee spoons. The cups and spoons Verlaque had brought from Normandy, but he suddenly remembered that they had been used at the family business. Emmeline must have taken them with her when the company was sold. He put the cup up to his mouth, glad to feel the unusual but comforting sensation of the matte, almost rough-textured porcelain against his lips.

Verlaque swallowed and leaned back in his chair, eyes closed.

“This wasn’t an accident, was it?” Paulik asked.

“I doubt it,” Verlaque answered. “Mlle Zacharie was really high-strung, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah. Nervous about something? Did she know who killed her boss?”

“Let’s interview her family. Did she live with her parents?”

“No. Flamant has written down the name of her boyfriend. They lived together on the rue…” Paulik grabbed the paper from Verlaque’s desk and read, “Bédarrides. Number 17. Her boyfriend is a waiter, Michel Gasnal.”

“Let’s go and talk to him…at their apartment.”

“Right. I’ll get Flamant to contact him and arrange a meeting for today.” Paulik finished the coffee and held the cup, tiny in his big, thick hands, and looked at the dancing women that surrounded the cup, their garments flowing in white porcelain relief against a cobalt-blue background. “Are these from Greek mythology?” he asked.

Verlaque smiled. “Yes, they’re the dancing hours. It was a favorite Wedgwood pattern. The cups came from our family business; they were used when we had important guests at the Paris office. I’ve only just remembered that now.”

Bruno Paulik smiled. He loved families and stories about families. “Does the family business still exist?” he asked, although he knew that it didn’t.

“No, it was sold seventeen years ago, when my grandfather died.”

Paulik took a sip of coffee and gently put the blue cup down on its saucer. “What was the family business, sir?”

“I wish you’d call me Antoine, Bruno. Flour. We owned flour mills.”

The commissioner looked at his boss, thinking of the importance, and money, behind a family that owned flour mills, in a nation that adored—no, worshipped—bread and pastries.

“Oh, I see,” Paulik said. “That explains why you’re such a gourmet,” he added, smiling.

“And gourmand,” Verlaque said, laughing. “Yes, the importance of good food, and good ingredients, was drilled into us at an early age.”

“How big was the company, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Second. We were the second biggest.”

“In France? Wow,” Paulik replied, whistling.

“No, Bruno. The second biggest in the world.”

M
me Girard knocked twice on Verlaque’s office door. “
Oui
,” he called out. She opened the door just wide enough to slip her elegantly coiffed head in the door. “Dr. Giuseppe Rocchia is here, Judge Verlaque.”

“Great. Please send him in.”

Both Verlaque and Paulik rose to their feet as Mme Girard led the theologian into the room and made introductions. “Would you like a coffee, Dottore?” she asked before closing the door.

Giuseppe Rocchia held up his hand. “I never drink coffee outside of Italy, but thank you,
chère Madame.
” She smiled and quietly closed the door, and Verlaque could only imagine the grimace she was now making. He thought the Italian’s comment offensive but wise. When he drove to Italy, especially along the Ligurian coast with Marine, they would only stop the car once they had crossed over from France into Italy, celebrating by standing at the bar in a highway gas station, reveling in the good coffee.

“Did you just arrive in Aix this morning?” Verlaque asked the dottore.