Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (27 page)

Paulik brought in another chair from the waiting room and motioned for the students to sit down.

“I’ll stand, if that’s okay with you,” Yann Falquerho said. “I’m too nervous to sit, and this entire thing is all my fault.”

“Go ahead then,” Verlaque said. “I’ll sit and digest my lunch while you explain yourself.”

Yann looked at his friend and then the judge. “I should have told you about Brittany, I’m so sorry. It’s just that since my dad’s friend didn’t press charges…”

“You thought we might not find out about it,” Paulik finished his sentence.

“Yes, basically. But what that policeman didn’t tell your prosecutor dude…”

Verlaque cut in. “Prosecutor Roussel.”

“Yeah, him, was that that night, which was many years ago, I was with the toughies of the town, you know, the townies, the guys who live there all year round, and I was trying to be cool. They showed me how to hot-wire the car, but I was hardly paying attention, I was so scared, and I’m sure I couldn’t do it now, even if desperate.”

“Thierry?” Verlaque asked.

“We found Dr. Moutte together, as we said. He was already dead, and the night that Mlle Zacharie was hit by a car we were at home together, studying. It’s only November, and we have a whole year ahead of us. Despite the fact that two people have been killed, we still have to study.”

Verlaque nodded and thought to himself that this was the first time anyone was speaking some sense since the death of Dr. Moutte. Thierry and Signora Rocchia spoke sense, and he believed them.

“And I thought of something else,” Thierry continued. “Another friend called us that night, really late, wanting to know if we
would meet him at a pub. We didn’t go, we were too tired, but he spoke to both of us, if that helps.”

“Give us his name and number. What time was it, Thierry?”

Thierry looked at Yann, who shrugged. “I think it was around 1:00 a.m., because we both jumped when the phone rang and commented on how it was after midnight,” Thierry answered. “Listen, Judge, I know how serious all this is, I’ve even spoken to a priest about it…”

“You did? Which one?” Yann asked.

“Père Jean-Luc.”

“Boys? Could we stay on topic?” Paulik asked.

“Sorry. I spoke to Père Jean-Luc because I feel so terrible. I know what we did was wrong, breaking into the school, but that’s all we did. I swear,” Thierry said. Yann finally sat down, exhausted.

The office door opened and Yves Roussel walked in. “Well. Did you two confess yet? It would save us all a lot of time.”

“We didn’t kill anyone!” Yann said, and then fell back in his chair.

“You both can leave now,” Verlaque said, looking at Thierry and Yann. “Leave your friend’s name and number with Commissioner Paulik.” His cell phone buzzed with a text message and he glanced down at it, seeing it was from Marine. “Foligno, Umbria.” He looked at the time, 2:30.

Paulik left with the two students and Roussel sat down across from Verlaque. “What if they kill someone else? The little Marseillais was shaking in his boots.”

“Yves, come off it.” Verlaque stood up and grabbed his jacket off of the coatrack. “I saw no such thing. I’m going to Umbria. Now.”

“What? On a Thursday night?” Roussel asked as Verlaque gently led him out of the office.

“Tomorrow’s November the eleventh. It’s a long weekend for us,
but not for the Italians. I’ve done the drive before; it’s nine hours, including quick stops. Here…” Before Roussel could argue, Verlaque had handed the prosecutor the bags of mushrooms and locked the door to his office. Yves Roussel walked down the hall, his footsteps getting quicker as he looked through each bag. It wasn’t too late—he still had time to call his wife before she began making their Thursday night dinner. Later in the afternoon he could slip out to his butcher’s shop on the place des Prêcheurs and buy two
poires
, his favorite cut of beef. He had a Saint-Émilion Grand Cru in the cellar he had been saving; but what was the occasion?

Marine sat at her dining room table with a stack of papers to grade in front of her, with those essays written by her more promising and dedicated students on top. She had made a pot of green tea, whose health benefits she had read about but whose taste she still hadn’t come to love. Next time, she thought, better to make a pot of Earl Grey, which took her back to her student days in Paris, and she at least liked its taste. Every few months she went off coffee for a few days, swayed by reports of its dangers to one’s health. She put her pen down and thought of her trips to Italy, and how the Italians, or the French for that matter, despite a large daily intake of espresso, didn’t seem unhealthy. On the contrary. Tomorrow morning, she knew, she would go back to her old ways and sit in her armchair, hugging a cup of strong coffee and reading the front page of
Le Monde.

She forced herself to grade one paper and then took a stroll around the living room, dusting off Sylvie’s framed photographs with a tissue she had in her pocket. She could no longer afford to buy her friend’s photos; they went off to wealthy collectors in London and Zurich. As she straightened one of the photographs—an
eerily gloomy black-and-white of a church in northern Spain—she thought of Antoine. He had called out in his sleep that night, and had very clearly said the words “You’re dead, Monique.” It was not the first time he had done so, but last night’s words were very clear, not the usual nonsensical mumblings made by someone still asleep. His bad dream was as gloomy as Sylvie’s fuzzy church, where dark clouds swept across the sky and the foreground was barren, reminding the viewer that this country church, once the most important building for miles around, was now abandoned, no longer necessary, even unwanted.

“All these things left unsaid,” Marine said aloud. She had grown up with dark clouds, and as a child had been confused those times when her mother wouldn’t come out of her room and her father escaped to the garden, sneaking cigarettes that Marine knew he hid in the toolshed. The reasons why were explained to her on her thirteenth birthday, as if this knowledge was a gift for her newly acquired stature as an adolescent. Ten years before Marine was born she had had a brother, Thomas, who died of crib death when he was four months old. There had never been any sign of him in the house, nor would there ever be. At four months Charlotte had already been a full being, with hints of the same funny personality that she now had at ten. Marine couldn’t imagine her parents’ grief, and because of it she always felt like she was walking on eggshells around them, never knowing when the memories of Thomas would come back, sending her normally stiff mother off moaning to her bedroom. Sylvie had suggested on more than one occasion to Marine that perhaps her parents, and maybe even Marine herself, should seek counseling, but Marine knew that her parents would never agree to such a thing. Her father, a doctor, prided himself on never actually having to go to one; and her mother was keenly aware of and sensitive about
the price the French taxpayer paid for a doctor’s visit, let alone what a visit to
le psy
would cost.

Marine walked back to the table, took a sip of tea, and looked out of the window at Saint-Jean-de-Malte’s steeple. How bad could Antoine’s secret be, she thought. She looked at the church and thought of the centuries of pain and happiness it had seen, thousands of weddings and funerals and baptisms. Surely she could speak to Antoine about his demons, if that was even what the bad dreams were. Once in Cannes, late at night, he had tried to talk to her about his past, and then the phone rang, and the moment was gone. He loved her, he had made his declaration, and she was now determined to ask him about it, what Charlotte called “those sad-bad things.” She looked at her watch. It was 3:30 p.m.; she had lots of time to finish her grading and then as a reward walk over to Sylvie and Charlotte’s for a glass of wine. Sylvie was still angry at Antoine, and although Marine had originally defended her best friend, she understood Antoine’s masculine point of view too, as Sylvie had never given Charlotte’s father a chance to be just that—her father. Gustav was a photographer from Berlin, married, with two children who now must be in their twenties. Sylvie had never returned his letters, and he had no knowledge of Charlotte’s existence. Marine had suggested to Sylvie that this had been perhaps an unfair—even egotistical—move on Sylvie’s part, and Sylvie had responded to Marine’s suggestion that she write to Gustav with a weeklong silence. Since then Marine and Sylvie kept their conversations to nonconfrontational subjects: Charlotte, the changing face of Aix-en-Provence, French politics, art and music, general gossip, and books (Marine was currently reading a French translation of a laugh-out-loud novel by David Lodge, where the petty office politics of a university located in a small English city very much reflected those of
her own school; Sylvie was rereading Simone de Beauvoir’s
Les Mandarins
).

Marine had just finished correcting the second essay when the phone rang. She didn’t recognize the caller’s number and hesitated before answering; she sometimes had multiple calls a day telling her she had won a set of porcelain or crystal, all she had to do was to answer some questions…

“
Allô
?” she said, sounding as angry as she could.

“Marine? It’s Annie Leonetti. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

“Oh! Annie, hello. I was afraid you were going to be someone trying to sell me something I don’t need or want. Sorry.”

Annie Leonetti laughed and revealed that she too averaged two sales calls a day. “But I
am
trying to sell you something,” she said, “in a way, at least. I really enjoyed your comments during our lectures. I’m in the middle of a book on Sainte Dévote, as you may know, and need some of your legal history advice. Could I tempt you to dinner some night next week?”

“I’d be delighted,” Marine answered just as a knock was heard at her apartment door. “Next week then! Someone’s at my front door!” she said as she hung up, suddenly wondering if there were other intentions behind Annie Leonetti’s invite. She walked into the front hall and opened her door to see her mother. “Some kid downstairs let me in the building. They ought to be more careful,” Florence Bonnet said, kissing her daughter.

“Come in. You hardly look like a thief, Maman.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Are you being racist?”

Marine was shocked. “No, Maman! What I meant was female senior citizens wearing raincoats from the seventies usually don’t fit the profile.” Marine immediately regretted what she had said about her mother’s lack of fashion sense, but Florence Bonnet was so unaware of fashion that the comment went unnoticed.

“Well, I suppose you’re right. Listen, I don’t have much time as I’m late for a meeting at Saint-Jean-de-Malte—we’re finally buying a new organ and are having a brainstorming session on how to raise money. Someone actually suggested that we sell wine, red
and
rosé, with a drawing of the church on the bottle! Can you believe it?”

Marine cut in. “It sounds like a great idea. I’d buy the wine, as would all my friends!”

“Well, I’m not here to discuss the church,” her mother said, looking at her daughter, who was in turn thinking, But you’re the one who started the conversation about Saint–Jean-de-Malte. “I still haven’t heard from Judge Verlaque about that dossier I gave you.”

Marine frowned. “I’m so sorry, Maman! I only showed it to Antoine last night.” Marine wished that she could confide in her mother the way Sylvie did with hers. She wanted to tell her that Antoine—yes, he had a Christian name, although her mother never used it—loved her; he had finally declared his love. “I’ll ask Antoine about it this evening, I promise,” Marine said.

“If you would,” her mother said, turning to go. “As I told you the other day, someone has embezzled all the funds. Now I ask you, whom? I don’t trust anyone anymore.”

Marine’s cell phone began to ring and she kissed her mother and tried not to push her out of the door. “When it rains it pours,” Marine muttered and picked up the phone.

“It’s a long weekend and I miss Italy,” Verlaque said as Marine answered. “I owe you a long weekend. There’s work involved, but it is Italy…”

“Sounds great!” Marine screeched. “My mother was just here, asking about the file. We’ll talk in the car. I’ll go and pack my bag, and yes, I have to bring along grading. Are we going to Umbria by any chance?”

“Affirmative. I’ll pick you up in the car in a half hour? Can you be ready?”

“I’m packing as we speak.”

After six hours of highway driving and dozens of tunnels, they were finally close to their overnight stop. They had left Aix just before 4:00 p.m. and had been driving continuously, stopping only to switch drivers and drink a quick espresso. “Talking to Signora Rocchia on the phone reminded me of this little village at the end of a dead-end road on the sea,” Verlaque said as he directed Marine off of the highway and through a valley that led to Lerici and the coast. “I think her family house may be in the same village.”

“Do you want to see her?” Marine asked.

“Oh no, she closed up the house for the winter. But there’s this great small hotel, with a fabulous restaurant, that my grandparents loved. They started going in the early sixties, and then in the seventies took me and Sébastien. It was a real family affair, with mama up front in the hotel and papa in the kitchen. The decor was really classy 1960s Capri-style: lots of bright color, handmade ceramics, lots of Murano glass.” It now occurred to Verlaque that perhaps the hotel had been sold, or at least the decor changed, the golds and bright greens, blues and purples thrown out in favor of beige.

When they reached the top of the hill, the town of Lerici spread out before them, with its medieval castle guarding the town at the eastern tip and the sailboats bobbing up and down in the water. “The Bay of Poets,” Verlaque said. “The poet Shelley died here, just shy of his thirtieth birthday. He had gone out for an afternoon sail around the bay. The sea here is incredibly rough for such a peaceful place, Sébastien and I used to get freaked out by the waves.” Verlaque pointed to the sign for the village, another four kilometers along the sea. “Just follow the signs. Actually, pull over and I’ll drive from here…I want you to have the view.”