Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) (8 page)

“That’s disgusting. She’s a third his age.”

“Oh, you’re an expert, I see.” Thierry leaned back on his desk chair and rubbed his stomach. He was in fact very hungry, but nervous too. “Listen, Yann. I really think you should tell the judge that you weren’t in the pub with me the whole time.”

Yann stared at his friend and then let out a nervous laugh. “Thanks, Thierry!”

“I just think we should be honest!”

“I am being honest. I felt light-headed from all the wine and beer and wandered outside. I walked down the rue d’Italie and threw up into a potted tree, then fell asleep on a bench in front of Saint-Jean-de-Malte. I was gone, what, forty minutes?”

Thierry picked at threads on the old blanket that covered his desk chair. “And you left me all that time alone with those American girls.”

“You’re too shy with girls. I did you a favor. And when I came back, I was in fine form, right?”

Thierry nodded, rubbing his stomach. “I think there’s some dried pasta in the cupboard.”

Yann stood up and looked at his friend. “Please tell me it’s De Cecco.”

“It’s De Cecco.”

Yann clapped his hands and opened the door, grabbing the familiar blue bag of his favorite pasta. “You do listen to me!”

“It really is superior,” Thierry replied, running his hand through his hair in mock pretension.

“Sauce? Do we have sauce?”

“There you’re in luck too. No sauce, but there’s a bottle of my uncle’s olive oil. It’s under my bed. I’ve been saving it.”

Yann ran to Thierry’s bedroom and fell down on his knees and rummaged under the unmade bed. “Your uncle with the olive orchard in Allauch?” he called.

“Yes! Full of the flavor of Marcel Pagnol’s stories, or so my uncle always claims.”

After finding slippers and one tennis shoe, Yann found the olive oil and hugged the bottle.

“Just don’t ask me for wine,” Thierry said, getting up to help.

“Ah. The sadness.”

“I’m sorry about the pasta,” Marcel Féau said as he cleared away the dishes.

“It wasn’t that bad,” replied his wife.

“That’s very kind of you, but it was overcooked, and I know how fussy Corsicans are about their pasta.”

Annie Leonetti rested her head back against the kitchen wall. “I hardly noticed, to tell you the truth. And the kids gobbled it down. Where did they learn to put ketchup on pasta, by the way?”

“My parents’ house,” Marcel replied, pouring his wife a cup of herbal tea. He braced himself for a discourse on the poor eating habits of his parents, who as retired French civil servants had more money than they knew what to do with. They obviously didn’t spend it on food—as Annie complained about regularly—and Marcel often wondered if his father had a secret gambling habit,
or if his mother had been a victim of some Internet scam. But Annie stayed quiet for some time, until she finally said, “It is terrible about Professor Moutte’s death, but I can’t help but not feel too saddened by it. Terrible for a theologian to admit that, isn’t it?”

“Theologians aren’t immune to impure thoughts,” her husband replied, putting a packet of cookies on the table. “Besides, Moutte wasn’t the most likeable man in the world. He treated you and Bernard horribly, waiting until the last minute to retract his retirement promise, teasing you the whole time with the suggestion that you had the job. I’m sure he did the same to Bernard.”

“Yes, I’m quite certain he did, judging by Bernard’s behavior at the party. You don’t think…?”

Marcel looked at his wife, surprised. “Annie, I can’t imagine
anyone
doing such a thing, and I’m surprised that you would think so of Bernard.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right. More likely it was Rocchia.”

“Annie!”

Annie laughed and took a cookie and dipped it into her tea. “I was feeling quite cocky up until Friday night. I was sure I had the job, and I had mentally moved us into the Quatre Dauphins apartment.”

“Ah,” Marcel said, frowning. “The kids would have left a trail of water from the pool into the house all summer long. Think of the mess.” Annie laughed and reached over the table, taking her husband’s face in her large brown hands and giving him a kiss.

V
erlaque arrived late at the restaurant, having toured each level of the underground parking garage only to find, on the bottom floor, what he was fairly certain was the very last spot. He had then run up the stairs of the garage that emptied into the immense place aux Huiles, then run up more stairs that led to the rue Sainte, the restaurant just on his right. Opening the restaurant’s door was always a delight—a haven away from the busy Marseille port and its bars spilling out onto the sidewalks, most of them televising a soccer game at full volume.

Jacques saw him and walked, as quickly as his cane would take him, toward Verlaque.
“Monsieur le Juge!”
he exclaimed, slowly lifting his right hand up to shake Verlaque’s.

“M. Jacques!” Verlaque exclaimed. He knew the couple’s family name, but had always referred to them as Jacques and Jeanne.

“M. Madani is already seated, with a view of the old port.” This was Jacques’s regular joke, as the restaurant had no windows
overlooking the port, but one long fresco of the port that took up the entire west wall—where the view would have been, had there been windows. The painting was too bright, the perspective all wrong, but Verlaque loved it. He made his way to the table, smiling at two young women as he passed their table.

“I’m dying over this whiskey,” Madani said, taking Verlaque’s hand and shaking it.

“Jacques has a new one?”

“Bruichladdich,” Madani answered. “I’m sure I’m butchering the name. Jacques says it’s new—well, it was old, but the distillery closed and so the head whiskey maker went out and raised just enough money to save it. A labor of love, according to Jacques.”

Verlaque sniffed the golden whiskey and asked, “Islay?”

“Yes,” answered Jacques, who was now at their table.

“Were you Scottish in another life, Jacques?” asked Madani, laughing and looking over Verlaque’s shoulder at the dozens of whiskey bottles displayed behind the bar.

“Oh yes, I think so,” the restaurateur replied, with a seriousness that surprised the two diners. Jacques stared off for a moment, as if he were imagining the island of Islay, before saying, “Jeanne has grilled shrimp tonight, with an artichoke tapenade, as an entrée. As a main dish she made her daube, which I know you love, Judge, served with pasta.”

Verlaque did love Jeanne’s beef stew, which she made with Camargue bulls’ meat, a generous helping of orange zest, and tomatoes that she had canned over the summer. But he could never understand the Provençal preference for noodles with stews. “Sounds great, but I’d like potatoes instead of pasta.”

Jacques smiled. “Jeanne made the pasta,
Monsieur le Juge.
”

“In that case, pasta, please. And I’ll start with the same whiskey that my filmmaker friend here is drinking.”

Jacques motioned to the barman to pour another whiskey and then looked down at their table, leaning even more heavily on his cane. Madani and Verlaque exchanged looks and Verlaque nodded, winking. Madani understood the cue and said, “Jacques, would you like to sit down and join us for a whiskey?”

Jacques looked around at the restaurant, full but with the other diners already happily eating.

“Well, I think I might! Just for a minute or two!” With surprising quickness he pulled out a chair from a neighboring table and sat down.

Just before Verlaque began to break the golden crust of his lavender crème brûlée, his cell phone rang. He immediately answered it, seeing that the caller was Dr. Emile Bouvet, his coroner. He got up and took his phone into the men’s room. “Yes, Emile.”

“Sorry to bother on a Saturday night, but I have some interesting news for you.”

“Go on.”

“Dr. Moutte was hit on the side of the head, as I’m sure the commissioner told you.”

“Yes,” Verlaque answered quickly, not hiding his impatience.

“The object was wood,” Bouvet continued, enjoying drawing out the suspense.

“Go on, Emile,” Verlaque said.

“And old.”

“An antique?” Verlaque asked.

Bouvet smiled, delighted to hear the impatience in the judge’s voice. “You could call it an antique. I’m with an old friend in the lab right now, who specializes in dating these kinds of things.”

“So what does your friend say?” Verlaque breathed heavily into the phone. It surprised him that there would be a dating specialist
living in Aix, but perhaps, like so many people did nowadays, he commuted from Aix to Paris on the TGV. “You are going to tell me, right? What does he say? Fifty? One hundred years old?”

Bouvet laughed. “
She
says,” he answered slowly, smiling as he looked across the stainless steel table at Dr. Agnès Cohen. “Judging from the sliver we extracted from the guy’s hair, seven hundred years old.”

T
hey met at the Quatre Dauphins fountain. “Fancy meeting you here,” Paulik said. Verlaque smiled and shook his commissioner’s hand.

“I left the car in the garage. Since it isn’t raining, I thought that the walk would clear my head.”

Bruno Paulik nodded, thinking to himself that Verlaque had probably left his dark green 1963 Porsche in the garage for other reasons—yesterday the commissioner had seen university students walking around the car, peeking inside with cupped hands and whispering with excitement.

“I just dropped Léa off at the
conservatoire
for a Sunday rehearsal, and there was a rare empty parking spot in front,” Paulik said, as if needing to explain why he too had been staring at the sixteenth-century fountain whose four fat dolphins spat out water.

“Ah, how is
solfège
going?” Verlaque asked.

“Moments of panic, soothed by mint chocolate-chip ice cream.”
Verlaque laughed and the two walked on, talking of the weather, Paulik’s father’s newfound enthusiasm for ancient Rome, and a banking machine that had been blown up at 5:00 a.m. that morning, giving the thieves easy access to whatever money hadn’t been burned in the explosion. Moments of silence were not uncomfortable, Verlaque noted to himself. He was happy to have a colleague with whom he could speak of history or music so easily. Conversations with Parisian colleagues usually began with real estate prices.

After ten minutes of pleasant walking, they arrived at the humanities building. Verlaque looked up at the gray exterior, built in a hurry sometime in the 1930s and in dire need of a paint job. The windows looked as if they hadn’t been washed in years, but up on the third floor someone had made an attempt to cheer up their office or classroom with planters, hung crudely to the metal shutters with wires. French
facultés
—unlike the elite, much smaller
grandes écoles
, which both Verlaque and Marine had attended—were open to any student who passed the high school baccalaureate exams. Because of this there was overenrollment and the
facultés
were underfunded, but the bright pink pansies above him, blooming despite their surroundings, reminded Verlaque that many students, underprivileged or otherwise, did benefit from this free-of-charge, nonelitist system. It touched him, all of a sudden, being French, a feeling that usually came over him in restaurants and museums, not in front of a
faculté
.

Two young men, one tall and slim and the other short and stocky, ran past Verlaque and Paulik, both boys trying to squeeze past each other to be the first one in the door, but both getting stuck and then having to step back in order to let out the ballerinalike policewoman Verlaque had seen yesterday. She smiled when she saw the judge and commissioner, and the boys hurried into the
building, the taller one pushing his friend through first and following behind.

“Officer Cazal, good morning,” Paulik said, shaking her hand. Verlaque and the policewoman said hello and the three walked into the building. “We’ll be in room 103, the third door down on the right,” she said, smiling at both men but her gaze lingering on Verlaque. “Everyone is here now; we were waiting for the boys to arrive.”