Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (6 page)

“Tomorrow morning’s perfect, thank you. Anyone else we can speak to on Monday. I’ll be in Aix any minute,” Verlaque said, and he hung up. He realized that he would not be able to return to Crillon-le-Brave this evening, so he would pay for Marine to take a taxi home. He had the sudden desire to go to Marseille, and he pulled the car over to look for the phone number of someone who was a new friend and a die-hard lover of Marseille, Olivier Madani. Verlaque got ahold of the filmmaker and suggested they eat at his favorite Marseille restaurant on the rue Sainte, run by a husband and wife team with, in a rare reversal of duties, the wife in the kitchen and the husband working the dining room as host. Each time Verlaque walked into the restaurant he felt like he was home—or a place he imagined felt like what a home should be: warm, dimly lit, with genuinely friendly owners. The restaurant’s patrons all seemed to know each other and hopped up and down, moving from table to table, as if eating could be a game of musical chairs. Verlaque loved the fact that he could walk up to the kitchen, which had a sliding window, poke his head in, and say hello to Jeanne and ask her what she was cooking for him that
evening. Jeanne cooked with local ingredients using many family recipes, the food rich and heavy but refined at the same time. “Fancy comfort food,” Emmeline had called it when he took her there. Jeanne and Jacques were now old, and Jacques walked from table to table with the aid of a cane. Verlaque imagined that they would retire soon, and no doubt close the restaurant, which saddened him.

The bit of sun he had seen over Mont Ventoux from their hotel room had now disappeared. He drove into Aix and pulled up in front of the address Paulik had given him, seeing that the name of the building matched the street name—Jules Dumas. He squeezed his dark green antique Porsche between two police cars. Three young men—students, presumably—came up to his car and walked around it. “She’s a beauty,” he heard one of them say. Verlaque got out of the car and nodded to the students, who smiled shyly then turned back to their diversion of watching the police go in and out of their college, the students slightly bored by the entire procedure but for some reason unable to move on.

Bruno Paulik came out of the building’s art deco front door and strode toward his boss. The two shook hands and then the commissioner groaned.

“What is it, Bruno?” Verlaque asked. Paulik rolled his eyes and Verlaque turned around to see a middle-aged man in a wheelchair speaking to two female students who were also mesmerized by the police activity.

“Get out of here!” Verlaque said to the man, walking quickly toward him. The girls looked at the judge in horror.

“Just you wait a minute!” the shorter of the girls, with a pierced eyebrow and a nose ring, said. “This man’s handicapped!”

“
This man
has spent time in prison. Why don’t you two go to a café instead of hanging around here?” The taller girl, wearing
glasses and dark, ill-fitting clothes, grabbed her friend’s arm and led her away.

“Okay, Lémoine,” Paulik said, towering over the wheelchair. “You were given strict orders to stay away from schools and young girls!”

“This is a university! These girls are now consenting adults,” Lémoine spat out.

Verlaque walked over. “Do you remember me, Lémoine?” The man did indeed remember the judge who had given him a maximum prison sentence for two counts of misconduct—for verbally and physically offending two teenage girls just outside their junior high school.

Paulik leaned down on Lémoine’s wheelchair’s armrests and began to shake the chair. He let go, and Lémoine began to furiously turn the wheelchair around. “I’m going! I’m going!”

“I somehow thought he had disappeared from Aix,” Verlaque said, standing on the sidewalk so that Lémoine knew he was being watched until he had in fact disappeared, up the street and around the corner. Verlaque thought of Philip Larkin, who once wrote that human beings—rich or poor, beautiful or ugly—were bound to be disappointed by life. The poet cynically separated people into two groups: those unloving and those unloved. Lémoine was both, Verlaque decided. Verlaque’s parents were unloving, and his brother? Unloved.

“I’ll bet he’s heading into the parc Jourdan,” Paulik said.

“I hope not.” Verlaque thought that with the chill and the grayness of the afternoon there wouldn’t be many people—girls—in the park. “Are you coming back into the building?”

“No, I’ve been here long enough. Dr. Moutte’s secretary is waiting for you, up on the fourth floor.” Paulik smiled slightly, which Verlaque thought strange, but he didn’t comment on it.

“All right, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, back here.”

Verlaque walked into the building and immediately remembered his university days, which had been good ones—away from all that had happened in Paris. Being a student was a luxury, ironically seldom appreciated by students: being permitted to read and write all day long. He walked up the stairs and crossed, coming down, a tall, blond policewoman with her hair tied up in a tight bun and wearing the faintest touch of pale pink lipstick.

“Judge Verlaque,” she said, smiling and holding out her thin hand.

“Good afternoon,” he replied, not remembering her name but looking her in the eye. She was not one of Larkin’s unhappy ones, surely? He continued up until he reached the fourth floor and walked down the hall, where he saw a policeman sitting in a chair beside one of the office doors. The young policeman, on seeing Verlaque, jumped up.

“Judge!”

“Hello. Sit back down. Has anyone thought to bring you a coffee?”

The policeman looked up, stunned. “Um, well, no.”

Verlaque smiled. “I’ll arrange it for you as soon as I get a chance. Sugar?”

The policeman looked as if he had been offered champagne. “Um…one lump. If it’s no trouble.”

Verlaque smiled and walked into the office, only to be met with a high-pitched “It’s about time!” He stuck his head back around the corner and looked at the red-haired rookie policeman, who lifted his shoulders and smiled, pointing a finger to his forehead, making a circular motion. Verlaque laughed out loud.

“I beg your pardon?” he said as he went back in. The voice had come from a petite woman who was no more than thirty years old.

“I’ve been waiting forever!” she complained. “On my day off!
My boss is dead—murdered—and here I am, not being told anything!”

“You’ll be given information soon enough. For the time being…”

“Murdered!” she cut in. “And it’s a school day on Monday, and with all the work I have to do…waiting for midterm grades to come in, certain professors—always the same ones—taking the longest and giving me their grades at the last possible minute! And then the students want their results immediately, naturally. With all that…”

Verlaque kept his temper. “Please be quiet.” The woman looked up at him, openmouthed. He took this as an opportunity to continue. “As you said, your boss has just been murdered, so have some respect for the dead and keep quiet and do as you’re told.” For further effect Verlaque leaned down on her desk, pressing his big hands into the cheap wood. He thought of Paulik leaning down on Lémoine’s wheelchair, but he knew that he didn’t have the same effect as the six-foot-two former rugby player commissioner.

“Yes sir,” she replied, barely audible, her sigh accompanied by a nonchalant shrug, as if she understood why she was being reprimanded but could care less. She then pretended to flip through some papers and ignored Verlaque, until he said, “I know that you’ve toured the office with the other policemen, but could you take me through again, Mlle…?”

She sighed again, flipped through a few more papers—of extreme importance, no doubt—and got up from her desk, silently making her way to Moutte’s office door.

“Mlle Zacharie, Audrey,” she finally answered. She took a deep breath. “Nothing was taken, as I told the commissioner. The Gallé vase is the object of most value, and it’s still here.”

“You’re sure it’s the same one?” he asked.

The secretary laughed. “Yes, of course! And besides,” she added, rolling her eyes and placing her hands on her hips, “Gallé vases aren’t worth so much money that a thief would pay to have it replaced with a phony.” She added, uninvited, “I studied art history.”

Verlaque said nothing, because he had no idea what a Gallé was worth. He did remember seeing Gallé vases at the Petit Palais in Paris, but would someone go to the effort of reproducing one? He thought,
au contraire
, that they were worth a lot of money.

“Were you at this party last night?” Verlaque asked.

“
Bien sûr
, as I told the commissioner, and I gave him the guest list.”

“How long did you stay?”

Mlle Zacharie put her hands on her hips.

“Me? I left around 11:00 p.m.” Her voice had slightly wavered when she had answered Verlaque, and he registered it immediately. It could be nervousness, or guilt.

“Did you go straight home?”

“No. I met my boyfriend at the Bar Zola. We were there well past midnight, and then we went home.” Again, her voice cracked and she added, “We left the bar around 2:00 a.m., you can ask anyone who works there.”

“And the doyen’s post…how long is it for? Four, five years?” Verlaque asked.

Mlle Zacharie laughed. “Life. But I wouldn’t think that he was killed for…”

“Good-bye.” Verlaque said with a note of severity. Not thanking her, he walked as slowly as he could out of her office. He couldn’t stand being in the presence of Mlle Zacharie any longer, and they would have some answers, hopefully, tomorrow morning.

He then turned back and said, “Get my officer a coffee, with one sugar.”

She opened her mouth to protest and he added, “Now. And for tomorrow’s meeting, I’d like you to make a list of the faculty, staff, and graduate students’ contact information—photographs of them would be a big help—and get class schedules.”

Mlle Zacharie banged a book on her desk, causing the young policeman in the hallway to grin from ear to ear. What a snob! she thought to herself. It was obvious to her that the judge saw her as a lowly secretary, not someone who had done graduate work in art history. She sighed as she remembered that today was Saturday and she had to make her weekly visit to her parents and watch them fawn over her older sister Lisa’s perfect baby, and worry aloud whether Lisa and her husband, both doctors, were getting enough sleep. Her parents never asked her about Michel, her boyfriend, nor did they ask her if she was getting enough sleep, or had enough to eat (no on both counts). At least today she would have something dramatic to tell them. The baby getting a new tooth was nothing compared to a murder.

Her parents regretted that she had not continued her studies, that she knew, but to pass up full-time work in Aix would have been foolhardy. Besides, she needed the money; Michel didn’t make much as a waiter, and working at the university at least meant that she was among her peers. Michel was certainly not an intellectual, but they seemed to be destined for one another. It had been advantageous working for the doyen, and she had not been looking forward to his replacement, whomever that would be. Mlle Zacharie sat down and ran her hands over the top of the glass paperweight the doyen had given her for her birthday, and she realized that she would miss that silly old man.

Verlaque walked out into the early evening and it began to drizzle. Mlle Zacharie could be a beautiful girl, he thought, but her sour
personality ruined any softness around the edges she might have. Was she unloved, or incapable of loving? The dancerlike policewoman on the stairs? Loving. He forced himself to think of that morning in the hotel room, but he could no longer hear Marine’s voice, and he had a gut feeling that he had said something wrong. The bells of Saint-Jean-de-Malte began to ring in the distance, and he walked on, pulling the collar of his coat up around his neck.

“T
his room is bigger than my apartment!”

“Hardly!” Marine answered.

“I’m exaggerating, of course, but the bed is huge. There’ll be lots of room for us three tonight!” Sylvie Grassi said, fluffing her pillow and lying on it with her hands behind her head.

“With me in the middle!” cried her nine-year-old daughter, Charlotte. “I’m so lucky!” Charlotte had been raised by Sylvie alone, and for the first two years of her life had slept with Sylvie in her double bed. Marine’s parents had been aghast; when Marine had tried to explain Sylvie’s reasoning, she had remembered that the subject of babies and sleep was taboo in her family, and so had to quietly listen to both parents complain of spoiled children.

Charlotte hugged her mother and godmother, hopped off the bed, and went into the marble bathroom to explore, and Sylvie gave Marine an earful.

“He is so undependable. You always come last.
Last
. He’d better take you on a replacement weekend.”

“Sylvie, I’m not a prima donna,” Marine replied, turning on her elbow to look at her friend. “I don’t need to be pampered. He has an important job, one of the most important jobs in the region. I understand that he has things hanging over his head all the time. Professors do too…always grading to be done, class prep, papers to publish. We choose our careers and then have to make the best of it.” Marine wanted Sylvie to lay off Antoine, so she delivered the news. “Besides, today’s call came from his commissioner. There was a murder late last night in Aix.”