Old Bones (16 page)

"Thank you," he said politely. "Of course I’ve already begun canvassing local suppliers of cyanide, but I must admit that I hadn’t thought of all this."

"You would have," John said magnanimously. "You’ve just been up to your ears."

"Very true. Oh, and you’ll both be interested to know that Claude’s death by cyanide poisoning has been confirmed. Potassium cyanide, in solution in the wine. The level in his blood was nearly five percent; it’s a wonder he lived as long as he did." He bowed lightly in Gideon’s direction. "It might well have gone undetected, Dr. Oliver— er, Gideon. Cyanide poisoning is easy to miss unless one is looking for it. It’s a good choice for murder, as a matter of fact."

"Well, thanks, uh, Lucien; there was that bitter-almond smell. Pretty hard to miss."

When Joly had gone back into the study, John turned slowly to Gideon.
"‘Lucien’?"
he said wonderingly. "
‘Gideon’?
What’s going on?"

"You just have to know how to handle him, John."

"Maybe," he said, nodding. "But you know, I think the guy’s finally starting to appreciate us."

On their way out they found Ray moping aimlessly around the courtyard, kicking at pebbles. It seemed as good a time as any to bring up something that Gideon had been wanting to ask him.

"Ray," he said without preface, "what was Guillaume doing out in Mont St. Michel Bay when he died?"

"Guillaume?" Ray’s sandy eyebrows rose. "Looking for shells. I thought you knew."

"I heard, but how do you
know
that’s what he was doing?"

"He told us—the night before, at dinner. He said we’d have our meeting the next day, but it’d have to wait until the afternoon. It was going to be the first good day for collecting since October, and he was going to be out in the bay all morning. Why do you ask?"

"Look," Gideon said, "does it make sense to you that he’d let the tide catch him by surprise? Would a guy as clear-headed and systematic as that go out there without checking a tide table?"

Ray frowned. "I suppose it
is
a little surprising, but— well, you know, everybody says he’s been getting absentminded; he’s almost eighty. I mean he was."

"Did he seem to be getting absentminded to you?"

"I don’t know. Maybe a little, but he was as intimidating as ever; I can tell you that." He peered worriedly up into Gideon’s eyes, then John’s, then Gideon’s again. "Gideon, you’re making this sound awfully… sinister. Why, you’re saying that Guillaume’s death wasn’t an accident either, aren’t you?"

"I don’t know, Ray," Gideon said kindly. "The police don’t find anything suspicious in it, if that makes you feel better."

Ray sighed. "This is all extremely traumatic."

Gideon nodded sympathetically. Not as traumatic as it was going to get, an uneasy hunch told him.

   "DOC," John said as Gideon drove slowly between the gateposts and swung the rented Cortina to the right, the headlights picking out the trunks of the roadside plane trees like twin rows of colorless concrete pillars, "you’re doing it again."

"Doing what?" Gideon wondered blamelessly.

"Sticking your nose into something that isn’t your business."

"Me? Surely not."

"Look, if you think there’s something funny about Guillaume’s death, just tell Joly. Don’t run your own private investigation."

"I already told him. He doesn’t agree."

"But you know a little more now. Maybe—"

"John, no offense, but I’ll take care of this myself. Don’t worry, when and if I have something to tell Joly, I’ll tell him. I’m not doing this to get in his way, you know."

"I know. You’re doing it to find an excuse to avoid going to any more lectures on sarcosaprophagous bugs. Jesus, I didn’t know I could say it." He laughed and stretched. "Hey, tomorrow’s Sunday. No school. We got any plans?"

"Nothing firm. We were going to spend some time in St. Malo—the old part: walk the ramparts, see Chateaubriand’s tomb, Jacques Cartier’s tomb…"

"Tombs," John grumbled. "Great. Sounds like your kind of holiday."

"All right, what do you say if between tombs we drop in on Dr. Loti? He lives in St. Malo."

"Who’s Dr. Loti?"

"He’s the one who came out to look at Claude’s body. He was also Guillaume’s doctor, and I thought I might ask him a question or two. Want to come along?"

"What happened to taking care of this by yourself?"

"I didn’t say I couldn’t use a little moral support from my friends. Besides, I know you; you think there’s something weird going on too."

John considered the idea for some seconds. "To tell the truth, Doc, I don’t. But what are friends for?"

   THE next morning, as they breakfasted in the dining room of the Hôtel Terminus, a
commissaire
of police from one of the southern provinces came up to shake hands with them.

"I’m very sorry," he said to Gideon in correct but tentative English. "I cannot stay for the second week. I have enjoyed the program very much."

"Problems back home?" John asked, policeman to policeman.

"Letter-bombs," he replied gravely. "Two last week to local politicians."

"Anyone killed?"

"Both recipients were killed. And two bystanders injured. It’s terrible; like a plague. Like guns in America. France is afflicted with it."

"I didn’t know that," Gideon said.

"Oh, yes. Everywhere: Paris, Marseilles, even St. Malo. These damned…" His pale, lined face flushed angrily, then set. He bowed and left.

Gideon drank the last of his coffee. "Whose turn?"

"Yours," John said, and slid the bill to him.

Gideon signed it, put down his room number, and the two of them walked out to the hotel lobby.

"Letter-bombs suck," John said.

"I’m not too keen on them myself."

"No, I mean there are some kinds of killers you can almost sympathize with. But shredding a guy’s face through the mail, when you can be a thousand miles away…not giving a damn if someone else opens it up and gets his eyes blown out or his hand torn off—you just spend another ten bucks for a couple of ounces of commercial explosive and a cheap detonator, pack it in a manila envelope, and send off another one. Ah, it sucks."

"John, I agree with you. You don’t have to get graphic."

When they stopped at Reception to leave their keys, the man at the desk pulled a thick, plain manila envelope out of a rack behind him. It was heavily stamped, but there was no return address. Just "M. Oliver, Hôtel Terminus, 20, rue Nationale, 35400 St. Malo," penciled on the front.

Gideon and John glanced at each other and laughed with a marked lack of conviction.

"Uh, when did it come?" Gideon asked. "I wasn’t expecting anything."

"It was in this morning’s mail. An express delivery. Is something wrong?"

"Wrong?" Gideon said. "No, of course not." He lifted the envelope—gingerly—and carried it carefully from the desk, resting it on both palms like an unstable soufflé. It was stiff and heavy, about a quarter of an inch thick.

"John," he said, walking very slowly and keeping his eyes on the envelope, "am I being overly paranoid?"

"I don’t know about‘overly,’ but, yeah, I’d say you’re being paranoid. Who’d want to kill you?"

"That’s what Ray said about Claude Fougeray," Gideon muttered.

"Come on, you’re just spooked because of what that French cop said. Let’s get out of here. We’re supposed to be in that doctor’s office in twenty minutes."

"No, wait up a minute." The bar, which extended into the lobby, wasn’t open yet. Gideon set the envelope face up on one of the round, plastic-topped tables and looked at it. John was right; if not for that brief discussion with the
commissaire,
he would already have torn it open and been on his way to St. Malo. All the same…

"John, let’s say I thought this thing might be a bomb—"

"For the sake of argument, you mean."

"Right. Is there any way I could check it out, or would I just have to put it in the bathtub and turn on the water? Or call the police?"

"No, there’s a kind of commonsense standard routine you go through, if it makes you feel any better. You look at the point of origin and the sender. If they’re unusual—"

"It doesn’t say who the sender was. The point of origin’s Marseilles, according to the postmark." He frowned at John. "Marseilles?"

"Okay, so who in Marseilles would want to send you a letter-bomb?"

"Nobody. Nobody in Marseilles would want to send me anything. I don’t know anyone in Marseilles."

"Mm," said John. "Well, moving right along, you check the handwriting on the address. If it looks disguised—"

"Block letters," Gideon said grimly.

John laughed. "Okay, block letters. Boy, you really think someone’s trying to blow you up, don’t you? Well, you could check it for flex."

"Flex?"

"You bend it—but only a little. A lot of these things have spring tension mechanisms in them, and they feel kind of springy. Sometimes you can even hear the metal creak."

Gideon delicately picked up the envelope by two corners, lifted it to the level of his ears, and very gently—

"Hey!" John shouted, "Go bend that thing somewhere else! What are you trying to do?"

Gideon put it back down and gave John what he thought was a first-class imitation of Inspector Joly’s Jack Benny gaze. "I thought," he said, "that this was mere paranoia on my part."

"I just think," John mumbled, "that if you’re really that worried about it, maybe you ought to call Joly’s office."

"If
I’m
worried about it," Gideon said with richly satisfying contempt.

JOLY was at Rochebonne, and neither Denis nor Fleury was at the
hôtel de police.
The sergeant on duty was not so much unsympathetic as incurious, reeling off bored, monotonic questions like a recording: Has someone threatened you? Do you have reason to think someone wishes to harm you? What reasons do you have for thinking this package might contain a bomb? The answers did nothing to arouse his interest, and Gideon was told he needn’t bother to bring the object to Dinan. Merely leave it with Sergeant Mallet at the
hôtel de police
in St. Malo. The sergeant would be happy to take care of it, and the police would be in touch with
le professeur
in due course.

Glad it had not been Joly he’d talked to, Gideon hung up sheepishly and thought seriously about opening the damn envelope and forgetting about Sergeant Mallet. But in the end, having set (he thought) the wheels of the
Police Judiciaire
in motion, he felt it would be better to follow through.

The envelope was duly left at the police station with Sergeant Mallet, or rather in his absence with a harassed young policeman who was trying to mediate a noisy argument between a stall-owner from the Place Poisonnerie and a motorist who had allegedly run over a fish. (Gideon might have mistrusted his translating abilities but for the indisputably flattened sea bass on the counter.) And by

9:30 a.m., only half an hour late, they were in Dr. Loti’s office in St. Malo’s elegant old Place Guy-la-Chambre, just inside the ramparts at the St. Vincent Gate.

   DR. Loti’s consultation room was a Frenchman’s version of Norman Rockwell’s idea of what a doctor’s office ought to look like: ageing books, heavy old mahogany furniture, a few comfortably faded red-plush chairs stuffed with horsehair, a worn, good carpet on a gleaming wooden floor, a big desk of golden oak. Pierre Loti himself looked something like an elderly Michelin Man, large and cheerful, with a round, pneumatic-looking torso. He sat behind his desk, fingers interlaced comfortably on his vest-clad abdomen, leaning back in his wooden swivel chair and staring at the ceiling while he talked. And talked.

"Forgetful?" he said. "Do you mean, was he senile? Did he have Alzheimer’s disease? Did he lose track of where he was, so that he had to be led home? No-no-no-no." His wattles jiggled as he shook his head.

"On the other hand, it’s true that he’d been getting a little absentminded with time, yes. A little impatient with the needs of others, a little set in his ways. A man of a certain age has a right to it, don’t you think so?"

"I certainly do," Gideon said politely. Dr. Loti was no more than five years younger than Guillaume had been, if that.

"Certainly," Dr. Loti agreed. "But you know, a good many people don’t know the difference between a mind that’s empty or confused, and a mind that’s truly‘absent’; that is, somewhere else, concentrating quite efficiently on some abstract or distant problem and ignoring the immediate trivialities of the moment." He nodded, tilting himself a little further back in the chair, pleased with the way he’d put it.

So was Gideon, who tucked this appealing perspective on absentmindedness away for the next time he had to defend himself for unthinkingly dropping a batch of letters he’d just received into the next mailbox he passed. That or something equally trivial.

"In that sense of the word," Dr. Loti rambled on, "yes, I think you could say Guillaume was absentminded. Enough so, regrettably, to cause his death."

"You think he was concentrating so hard on his collecting that the immediate triviality of the incoming tide caught him by surprise?"

Dr. Loti chuckled softly. Not many people can chuckle convincingly, but Dr. Loti was an exception. His eyes closed and his shoulders shook, and a low rumble vibrated comfortably out of his belly. "Well, yes, I do. Of course. What else?" In half an hour, this was his most succinct response.

"What’s going on?" John asked Gideon. "You going to let me in on this?"

"Sorry," Gideon said. The physician’s maundering French, punctuated by throat-clearings, chuckles, and snufflings at a cigar that was out more than it was lit (Dr. Loti seemed to enjoy it either way) had been taxing his

ability to understand, and he had neglected to translate for a few minutes. He summarized briefly.

John shrugged. "Makes sense."

Yes, it did. On logical grounds he still had little reason to think there was anything more to Guillaume’s death than everyone said there was. There was only the intuitive, nagging feeling that it just didn’t sit right; strolling out into the most dangerous bay in Europe without a tide table simply didn’t sound like Guillaume du Rocher, regardless of where his mind happened to be at the time. It wasn’t much to go on, even with the provocative but conjectural questions Julie had raised.