Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (20 page)

“Straight in,” Paulik answered, steering the car onto the highway while eating his cannelé. “I would have liked to have gone to university, but it was never an option in my family. It never would have occurred to my parents, God love them, nor to anyone at my high school. I was too impatient then too…I just wanted to work…to support my habit.”

Verlaque laughed. “Opera is almost as expensive as drugs but at least it won’t kill you.”

“Why is Moutte’s lawyer in Paris?” Paulik asked. Verlaque took this as a cue that he no longer wanted to talk about himself or his family.

“Moutte was born in Paris. The lawyer seems to be an old family friend, a certain Maître Fabre. He has an office in the seventeenth arrondissement, Batignolles, very close to where my grandparents used to live, near the boulevard de Clichy.”

Bruno Paulik nodded but didn’t say what he was thinking: that Antoine Verlaque had always seemed like a
rive gauche
kind of guy, one of those Parisians who rarely crossed north over the Seine. And the boulevard de Clichy was the last place he thought Verlaque’s grandparents would have lived. It was a noisy, dirty street, full of cheap clothing shops and kebab stands. Paulik veered the
car off of the highway, and as they approached the newly built Aix TGV station, Verlaque sighed. “It’s discouraging to see all of these illegally parked cars,” he said.

“I know, but I can’t say that I blame them,” Paulik answered. “The new station is a beauty, but there isn’t enough parking, and it’s too expensive.”

They parked in the day parking lot, lucky to find one of the last spots, and Paulik took the parking ticket and put it in his wallet. As they walked into the station Paulik asked, “Do we need to buy train tickets?”

“No, Mme Girard had already left the office for the day so I bought some on the Internet. I wanted to be sure to get seats, and in first class.”

The train pulled up from Marseille after a few minutes and the passengers, mostly business people at that hour, calmly got on, found their seats, and pulled out newspapers or their laptops. They were halfway, somewhere in southern Burgundy, around 9:00 a.m., racing by too quickly to see Marcel Dubly, when Paulik received a phone call and quickly got up to take the call in between cars so as not to disturb his fellow travelers. Verlaque looked out at the green hills—his face almost pressed against the glass—where vineyards and pastures were divided by hedgerows and each village had its own Romanesque church. It was easily the most beautiful part of the voyage, and it annoyed him to see his fellow passengers with their window shades drawn.

“That was Roussel,” Paulik reported when he came back about five minutes later. “No leads on the cash machine explosions, but that old train station on early Tuesday morning had a janitor inside. He had gotten there after 10:00 p.m. to clean as he’s moonlighting…he has a day job cleaning the junior high school.”

“Was he hurt?”

“Just a broken arm…he fell back from the force of the explosion but luckily wasn’t next to the machine when it happened.”

“Did he see anything?”

“No. He scared the pants off of the thieves, who were more surprised than he was to find someone in the station. He cried out as they were digging around in the rubble for cash…he said it took him a few minutes to realize what was going on, and it pissed him off that they steal money while he has to work two jobs. They took off when they realized they weren’t alone, and he heard a car but by the time he had dragged himself off of the floor and run outside, they were gone.”

The Gare de Lyon seemed about twenty degrees colder and damper than the Aix train station had. Both Verlaque and Paulik pulled their scarves up around their necks. They stood in the queue for a taxi and jumped quickly in when it was their turn, anxious to get warm. The taxi raced along the Seine, heading west to the seventeenth arrondissement, and both men silently looked out the window onto the gray beauty of a Parisian morning.

“I’ve never been in the seventeenth,” Paulik said as they drove through the elegant eighth arrondissement.

“Most people haven’t,” Verlaque said. “That’s one of the reasons I like it so much. There are no monuments or museums, so the only reason to go is if you live, or have business to do, there. Take the rue des Batignolles,” Verlaque instructed the cabbie. “I’d like my colleague to see the church.”

The taxi drove along the neighborhood’s main street, Paulik noting that the street was full of the kinds of businesses that made big city living manageable: food shops, wine merchants, pharmacies, the occasional clothing or shoe store, and the practical shops too: cobblers, hardware stores, dentists’ and doctors’ offices.
The rue des Batignolles ended at the small white neoclassical church that sat on a semicircular cobbled square that was lined with a few cafés and small shops.

“Nice,” Paulik muttered. “It feels like a village.”

They drove around the church and turned right up a street and then left, finally dropping Verlaque and Paulik off at 17 rue Nollet. “Thanks,” Verlaque said, paying the driver and giving him a generous tip.

The offices of Maître Fabre were surprisingly dingy. Verlaque and Paulik didn’t have to wait in the small dark waiting room as they seemed to be either the first, or the only, clients so far that morning. A thin, white-haired man opened his office door when Paulik coughed.

“Judge Verlaque?” he said, peering out of his door as if frightened or surprised at having visitors.

“Yes, Maître Fabre. And this is the commissioner of Aix-en-Provence, Bruno Paulik.”

They shook hands and he stepped aside, allowing them into his office. The large, high-ceilinged room had been decorated in the late 1940s, and for Verlaque it suited the old-fashioned feel he got whenever he was in this neighborhood. Two leather club chairs, both ripped in places, faced the maître’s large oak desk. A ceiling light made of what looked like Murano glass, more appropriate in a widow’s dining room than in a law office, hung above the desk. There were yellowed framed prints of Paris hung on the walls and thick flowered curtains on the two tall windows that looked over the rue Nollet. The walls had that yellow patina that Verlaque knew interior decorators envied, and when he saw the crystal ashtray piled high with cigarette butts, he knew where the patina came from.

“I have the will here,” Maître Fabre said as he opened the file with his aged, spotted, shaking hands.

“You were childhood friends with Dr. Moutte?” Paulik asked.

Fabre looked at the commissioner with yellowed, sad eyes. “Yes. We grew up in this neighborhood together. This was my family’s apartment…my father ran the pharmacy downstairs. Georges grew up on the rue Batignolles. We were altar boys at the church and, when we were sixteen, were both accepted at Louis le Grand.”

Verlaque smiled. “I went there too.” Maître Fabre looked at the judge and tried to smile, but it seemed as if the effort to smile hurt. Paulik looked over at the judge and he smiled in place of the lawyer. He hadn’t known that Verlaque went to the most prestigious
prépa
in France.

“Who killed Georges?” Maître Fabre asked, looking at Verlaque.

“We don’t know yet,” Verlaque answered. “Do you have any ideas?”

Fabre shrugged. “No. I hadn’t seen Georges for quite some time. We used to dine together when he would come to visit, once a year or so. But my wife died last year, and I haven’t been too well since.”

Verlaque nodded and said nothing. Maître Fabre seemed to be grieving and it made a knot in Verlaque’s stomach that surprised him.

“Well, his will is very straightforward,” Fabre said, pulling out the first of the typed papers. “Georges has donated all of his assets to the theology school in Aix. He has requested that the scholarships continue but that the name be changed to the Dumas-Moutte Foundation. I don’t yet have all of the financial information, as my old friend seemed to have bank accounts in Paris, Aix, Geneva, and Boston, and various investments, but in his accounts in Paris alone there are over two hundred fifty thousand euros.”

“Thank you,” Verlaque said. “Two hundred fifty thousand
euros sounds like a lot of money for a college doyen to have in a Parisian bank account.”

“So it would seem,” Fabre answered. “But Georges had been the doyen for a long time, and he told me that his rent was paid for by the foundation. He never was a spendthrift, so if a man of seventy-two puts his earnings in a bank account, or invests them, over a fifty-year career, it would easily add up to even more than that amount.”

Verlaque frowned and said nothing, forcing the maître to add, “You seem to believe that Georges was up to no good.”

“I’m trying to understand why he was murdered,” Verlaque answered, leaning forward. “He must have spent a lot of money on his glass collection. What do you think? Did he buy his glass legally, to your knowledge?”

Fabre paused. “I couldn’t say.”

Verlaque couldn’t tell if the lawyer was protecting his boyhood friend, or he really didn’t know.

“He told me over dinner once that he bought some glass at auction houses here in Paris, and that he often sold it to Americans, where a revival of French art nouveau glass has emerged,” Fabre said. “It seems like an awful lot of money to spend on flowered vases, but there you are.”

“Do you know if Dr. Moutte made trips to Italy, perhaps to buy glass? Near Perugia?” Paulik asked.

“That I can answer in the affirmative. Georges spoke specifically of Perugia, and Umbria in general. He loved a small town that makes majolica…”

“Deruta,” Verlaque offered.

“Yes, that’s it. And he mentioned another town, specifically with a glassworks. I remember at the time thinking it odd that he would visit a modern glassworks, but he said that an Italian colleague did business there and once took Georges along with him.”

“Can you remember the name of that town?” Paulik asked.

Fabre frowned and rubbed his long hands together. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I want to say that it begins with an ‘F,’ but I’m just not sure.” Fabre leaned back and closed his eyes, clearly exhausted from his first meeting of the day. As there was no secretary in the front office and the place was deadly still, Verlaque imagined that Georges Moutte may have been Fabre’s last client.

Fabre suddenly opened his eyes and slowly leaned forward, handing Verlaque a photocopy of the doyen’s will. “I’ll let you know as soon as the rest of Georges’s financial holdings have been released to me.”

“Thank you,” Verlaque and Paulik said in unison as they got up to leave.

“We’ll let ourselves out,” Paulik added, handing the lawyer their business cards.

“If you would,” Fabre said, leaning back once more. A shaking hand reached for an engraved silver lighter and he lit up a cigarette.

“F
ancy a short walk before lunch?” Verlaque asked Paulik when they were out on the street.

“Sure. It’s not yet noon. Where to?”

Verlaque pulled a cigar out of his leather holder and snipped the end off and then lit it. He began walking. “Just up the rue Brochant and then we’ll cross over Clichy and go see my grandparents’ place.”

“Sounds great,” Paulik said. He was curious to see a street on the other side of Clichy where the wealthy Verlaque grandparents had lived. He couldn’t imagine it in a neighborhood north of Clichy.

When they arrived at the avenue de Clichy, Verlaque pointed to an elegant café on their left. “Coffee here, €1.20. In the sixth, where my brother lives, €4.50.”

They crossed the busy avenue and it looked as Paulik thought it would: kebab shops, what seemed to be too many cheap luggage
stores, a fruit and vegetable stand, and hairdressers that specialized in wigs and hair extensions. They walked along Clichy for a block, Verlaque happily puffing on his Cohiba, until they arrived at a small crepe restaurant.

“We turn right here,” Verlaque said. Paulik followed the judge and saw a large green metal gate, the center big enough to allow a car to pass through, which was closed, but on either side were smaller pedestrian gates, which were open.

“A private street!” Paulik exclaimed. “I’ve heard about these existing in Paris.”

Both men passed through the gate and looked up the cobblestoned street. It was lined on either side with elegant houses, each one fronted with mature trees and gardens. The street went on for what looked like two city blocks.

Paulik stood with his hands on his hips. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“It’s an oasis, isn’t it? The land was given to the city of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. The only stipulation from the land donor was that houses be built, not apartments, each one with a large front garden that would be planted with at least three trees.”

Paulik looked up and saw that most of the houses still had at least two trees. The small metal gates that fronted each house, and the antique street lanterns, made the street look like it belonged in a wealthy town in Normandy, or Poitou, at the turn of the century. “Sheer Marcel Proust,” Paulik said.

Verlaque smiled, took a puff of his cigar, and began walking. “Isn’t it? That’s why my grandmother wanted to live here so badly.”