Skeleton Dance (11 page)

Whooh!

The sound startled, then steadied, him. His body and his mind began to come together. He waited for the white flash of pain to dim and for the billows of nausea to recede, then gingerly reopened his eyes. He was looking at a ceiling bank of blue-white neon lights shielded by metal grills. When they began a slow, circling tilt from left to right he shut his eyes again and kept them shut while strength and consciousness flowed—trickled—back into him.

Where was he? What had happened to him? He'd had a quick lunch with Julie in Les Eyzies, he remembered that. They'd taken marinated roast-beef-and-tomato sandwiches, bottles of
Orangina
, and paper cones of French fries to a bench near the river and he'd told her about the unexpected direction the staff meeting had taken. Then, while she went back to the hotel to put her feet up for an hour before going off to her symposium, he'd driven to St.-Cyprien to finish his examination of the bones, and there he'd met—

The bones! His eyes flew open. The ceiling started its tilt again but this time he stuck it out, staring hard at the lights and willing them to be still. When they settled down to no more than a shimmering wobble, he gathered himself together and pulled himself slowly up with the aid of the autopsy table. For the first time he was aware of a jack-hammer pain behind his left ear, just above the mastoid process. He put his fingers on the spot and winced when they touched a tender, walnut-sized knot. At least he now knew what had put him on the floor in the first place.

He also knew, even before he'd made it to his feet, what he would find, and find it he did. The bones were gone, the satchel was gone, Dr. Roussillot—the so-called Dr. Roussillot—was gone.

But the
macaroni au fromage
carton was still there. Grasping the table hard for support he stared at the empty box until his blurry vision cleared a little more. And in one of its corners, caught under a flap of cardboard, he saw a single tooth, a familiar one with a dull gray filling, a first bicuspid that had come loose from the mandible; all that was left of the skeleton from the
abri
.

As he got his fingers clumsily around it, the walls began their slow wheeling again, the edges of his sight to grow dark. Clutching the table Gideon let himself back down to the floor, making it just as the black, sick void reared up and engulfed him again.

   "I talked to the doctor," Julie said. "The tests were all negative, nothing broken. It was just a simple concussion. He was really happy with the results."

"Oh, just a simple concussion, is that right?" Gideon said, slumped in an armchair, with his head leaning back and a damp towel thrown across his eyes. "Just a little neuroaxonic fragmentation? Merely some cortical ischemic necrosis, is that all? Just some trifling disintegration of the midline reticular nuclei here and there? Oh, I'm delighted to hear he's happy."

"Something tells me you're not in a very good mood."

"No? Well, you wouldn't be either. What else did he say?"

"He said you'd probably be feeling worse before you felt better—"

"He got that right."

"—but a good night's sleep should take care of it. He left you some sleeping pills. If you still feel funny tomorrow, he wants you to go back and see him again."

"Right, sure." He took the towel from his eyes and threw it ill-humoredly onto the high-backed sofa, squinting at the bright afternoon light streaming into the room.

"He gave you some pain pills too; want them?"

"No, I don't want to get dopey. God."

"Gideon, are you sure you wouldn't rather be in bed?"

He shook his head, a mistake.

"Should I have some food sent up? Or we could go downstairs if you feel up to it."

"No, I just want to sit here and whine."

She was quiet for a while. Then she said: "I think I know what your problem is. It goes back to your college days, when you used to box. You got knocked out four times, after all—"

"Three," Gideon growled. "Two, if you don't count TKO's."

"—and you're probably just wondering how many more brain cells you can afford to lose. Am I warm?"

She said it lightly, a throwaway pleasantry accompanied with a smile, but her voice was taut, and Gideon was abruptly aware of how drawn her face was, how anxious her eyes, how flat and yellowish the area under them. Until now he'd been too wrapped up in his own misery to notice, but he noticed now. He'd taken a knock on the head, yes, but it was Julie who'd gotten the telephone call that told her her husband had apparently had some sort of seizure and was in the hospital undergoing head X-rays, Julie who'd had to make the frightened taxi ride to St. Cyprien, Julie who'd held his hand and made small jokes while he lay with his head immobilized in a metal cage, waiting to be slid into the ominous, clanking MRI machine. And since then it had been Julie who'd continued to make small jokes and small talk in that strange, tight little voice, jollying him along while he'd sat ungratefully around, first in the hospital, and now in their hotel room, doing little more than grumbling that he felt rotten.

My God, he thought, ashamed and guilty, what if the situation had been reversed? What would he be feeling if it had been Julie who'd been hurt and he who'd received the call…?

He waited for the thickening in his throat to ease, and then he gave her a smile of his own, his first in a long time. "Don't you worry about it, I have brain cells you wouldn't believe; plenty to spare, enough for two people."

It was a pleasure to see her eyes come snapping alive again. "Now that," she said, "sounds more like the modest fellow I know and love."

She leaned over to kiss him, and as she did, they heard the sound of a car pulling up to curb below. Julie went to the window, came back, and kissed him again. "Maybe you ought to get some shoes on.
L'inspecteur est arrivé
."

   The Cro-Magnon's upstairs lounge was situated on a stairway landing in a corner just big enough for three comfortable armchairs and a coffee table. Being at the rear of the building, directly against the cliffside, it lacked, as did many of the other houses and shops, a conventional back wall. Instead, the smooth, curving limestone of the cliff itself served as the rear of the hotel. The effect, especially when coupled with the subdued lighting from two low-wattage table lamps, was of a cave, an
abri
with modern conveniences.

It was in this pleasant, restful niche—easy on Gideon's throbbing eyes— that they met with Joly over a pot of tea and a plate of fruit tarts brought upstairs by Monsieur Leyssales, the hotel's proprietor.

"The man you describe," said Joly, gravely stirring a second teaspoon of sugar into his second cup of tea, "is not Dr. Roussillot."

Gideon smiled, or tried to. "Gee, why am I not surprised?"

"He was completely unfamiliar to you?"

"Absolutely."

"You have no idea who he might be or why he was there?"

"Who, no. Why… well,
why
seems pretty obvious. To get the bones out of there."

"Gideon," Julie said tentatively, "don't get upset now, but
who
seems pretty obvious too—or rather who was behind it. It had to be somebody from the institute; somebody who was at the staff meeting."

"Well, no, I wouldn't say—"

"Yes, you would. There wasn't time for the word to get around to anybody else. You walked into that morgue just one hour after the end of that meeting, and this fake Roussillot was already there."

"Yes, but he wasn't at the meeting," Gideon said doggedly. "Or anywhere in the café; I would have remembered."

"Well, of course not. But whoever it was must have been afraid someone might recognize him if he showed up at the hospital himself, so he got somebody else—maybe a friend, maybe somebody he hired, who knows—to get rid of the bones for him. How hard would it have been—"

"All right, okay," Gideon said dejectedly, "you're right, I agree with you. I guess I just don't like to say it, even to myself."

"But what I find myself wondering," Joly said, "is how this person knew enough to pretend to be Dr. Roussillot. How would he know who Dr. Roussillot is?"

"Oh, that wasn't hard," Gideon said. "I walked right up to him and told him that's who he was: 'You must be Dr. Roussillot.' He was happy to go along."

"Ah." Pause. "And he struck you with the leg bone, the femur? There, behind the left ear, where that remarkable protuberance is?"

"I assume so. The last I remember, he had the bone in his hand. And that's where the lump is, so I suppose that's where he hit me—twice. There are actually two remarkable protuberances, not one."

Joly frowned at him. "What do you mean, you assume so? Don't you remember being struck?"

"No."

"But it may be important. Perhaps if you try to reconstruct—"

"Lucien, let me explain something to you. When people say they remember the blow that knocked them out they're either making it up or kidding themselves. A knockout blow is a concussion, and a concussion is an interruption of cortical electric activity that induces a retrograde amnesia which ninety-nine times out of a hundred obliterates any memory of the precipitating trauma and more often than not the events immediately preceding. Period,
fini
, end of discussion, subject closed, all right?"

"I…"

Julie smiled at the startled Joly. "He's a little touchy on the subject of concussions today."

"I don't wonder," Joly said peaceably. "All right, then, let's go over the rest of what we know, or think we know, one more time." He crossed his long, thin legs, first adjusting the trouser-crease, and propped his gold-rimmed cup and saucer on his knee. "Now. As Julie points out, we can tentatively assume that the person who attacked you and removed the bones learned where they were from someone who was present at the staff meeting when you announced their location."

"I didn't
announce
it, I just—"

"Second, I think we can proceed on the assumption that the bones were taken—and taken so quickly—in order to prevent your examining them, inasmuch as you yourself told them you would be doing so this afternoon."

Gideon was stretched out nearly supine in his chair, staring at his shoes. "This is really making me feel great, Lucien." He tapped his temple with a finger. "Really smart, you know?"

"Third, we can probably assume that the purpose of removing them was to prevent the possibility of your finding evidence of tuberculosis on the ribs and thus provisionally identifying the remains as Jean Bousquet's. We can assume this because you yourself told—"

Gideon waved a hand at him. "I know, I know. Boy, you really like to rub it in, don't you?"

"All right, then," Joly said, "given that much—"

Julie put down her tea. "May I say something, Lucien? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to assume that whoever took the bones did it to prevent Gideon from finding out it
wasn't
Bousquet?"

Joly frowned at her over the rim of his cup. "Wasn't Bousquet?"

"Well, say Gideon had looked at them and those marks on the ribs
weren't
there, it would mean—or at least it might mean—that it wasn't Bousquet at all, but someone else. And maybe somebody didn't want you to know
that
. Isn't that possible?"

"I suppose—"

"Possible but not probable," Gideon said. "I know these people; they think like scientists. They know perfectly well that whereas
finding
periostitis would be a positive sign of the disease and therefore a strong indicator that the bones are Bousquet's,
not
finding it wouldn't prove anything one way or the other—particularly because t.b. is a rare disease nowadays, and almost half of the very few people who do get it never develop those lesions anyway."

"Yes," Julie said, "but do the people at the institute know that?"

"They do now," Gideon said miserably. "That's another thing I happened to mention this morning."

"Considering that you spent only forty minutes with them," Joly observed, "you managed to impart a great deal of useful information."

Gideon slouched deeper into the armchair.

Julie poured more tea for the three of them, adding the sugar that Gideon asked for to settle his uneasy stomach. "Gideon, which one do you think was behind it? Any idea?"

"Not a clue."

"But obviously, one of them must know something about Bousquet's history that he wasn't telling."

"I think they
all
know something they weren't telling. Beaupierre almost gave it away at one point, but they jumped all over him, and he shut up like a clam, and so did everybody else."

"And you believe they were protecting a member of the group, one of their own," Joly said.

Gideon nodded. "Yes. Unless I'm way off-base, I think the 'co-worker' you told me about, the one that Bousquet had his "unpleasantness" with, is one of them. And they all banded together to protect whoever it is."

"Which inescapably leads us to wonder if this unnamed person may have murdered Bousquet over this unnamed unpleasantness?"

It was, of course, the question that had been on Gideon's mind all afternoon, ever since he'd come to on the floor of the morgue, and he'd yet to reach an answer. "Lucien, I just don't know. Anything I'd say would be a guess."

"Then guess."

"All right, my guess is no. Or if one of them actually did—which is hard for me to make myself take seriously—I don't think that's what it is that the others know. I got the feeling that what they know is merely that he or she had some kind of trouble with Bousquet and they're worried that it's going to make difficulties for him, or her, with the police. With you. That's all."

"If that's all," Julie said hotly, "why did they steal the bones and almost kill you doing it? Is that supposed to make things less difficult with the police?"

"I don't know that either."

There was a long silence, and then Joly said: "I have something interesting to tell you. I had an informative conversation with Madame Renouard a little while ago."