Skeleton Dance (25 page)

   For the Greater Cincinnati Elderhostel's "Footloose in France" tour group, Sunday was day nine of a twelve-day hike through the French countryside, and with 100 dusty miles on towpaths and country lanes behind them, they were a tanned, fit, seasoned crew of twelve. Still, with the morning temperature approaching eighty, with a median age of sixty-nine, and with all of them still damp and steaming from the rain shower they'd passed through an hour earlier, no one objected when Yvette, the French tour leader (looking cute as a button in her leather hiking shorts and mountaineer's boots), signaled that the mid-morning break was at hand.

"This place, how you like to stop here?" she asked in her delightfully mangled English. (Only the resolutely negative Mrs. Winkelman—at 83 it was allowable—contended that Yvette's accent was put on.) "The coffee and the juice, they wait themselves in the van, and also some nice French snacks. If you like, we go and sit beside the river, where there is a most nice view of Les Eyzies, the place of lunch for today. Then I tell you some of the facts of this most charming village."

But practiced open-country hikers that they were, they first split into two groups, the men making for the copse of stunted oaks on the left, the women for the one on the right. Five minutes later, perceptibly more relaxed and expansive, they lined up at the supply van, which had gotten there before them and had their juice, coffee, and pastries ready and waiting.

"Joe." Merle Nichols put her hand on the arm of her new friend Joe Pfeiffer, recently widowed, recently retired from the Dayton police department. "Is that a person down there?"

"Down where?"

"Nah, it's just a bundle of clothes or something," somebody said. "It probably washed up from somewhere."

Someone else thought it might be a drunk, someone else a hiker taking a nap. But no one moved any further down the gentle slope. They all stood there holding their cups and pastries, looking doubtfully at Joe, their expert in such matters.

"I'll go see," he said with a sigh. He had sighted it now, down by the riverbank under the willows, and it wasn't any bundle of clothes; the fourteen years he'd spent in homicide told him that much. And he was betting it wasn't a drunk or a sleeper either.

"Hey, buddy?" he called from fifteen feet away, although he would have been surprised to get an answer. "You okay?… hey, monsieur?"

He stood there for a moment longer, resisting the urge—an urge more deeply ingrained than he'd realized—to have a closer look, to take over, then turned on his heel, and walked back up to his silent, wide-eyed companions.

"Yvette, you better call the cops, the
gendarmes
. That guy's been dead a while."

"Oh, for the love of Mike," said Mrs. Winkelman to her neighbor. "Does this mean we don't get to have our tea?"

   The crime scene investigators grumbled at having to park the crime lab van alongside the highway and carry their equipment down to the riverbank (which meant they'd have to carry it back up afterward), but once there they got quickly and efficiently to work.

A twenty-by-twenty-meter area was cordoned off with tape and the nosy gaggle of American grannies and grandpas was helped on their way after a brief interrogation. A panning videotape of the over-all scene was made, and a diagrammatic sketch. The position of the body was measured and photographed. The cordoned-off area was then divided into five-by-five-meter sections and each of them meticulously searched by investigators working two at a time, one shuffling along with his eyes to the ground and the other taking notes. Two fairly distinct heel prints from a man's shoe—both probably from the same shoe—were photographed and cast in plaster of paris by the third member of the team. Various objects were diligently recorded, photographed, labeled, and bagged: several different kinds of cigarette stubs, including one with lipstick on it, a cigar wrapper, three ring-tabs from beer or soft-drink cans, burnt paper matches, a wadded-up facial tissue, two flattened cardboard drinking cups, odd bits of plastic and aluminum foil, a woman's imitation leather belt, worn-out and cheap, two rubber bands, a used adhesive strip decorated with Minnie Mouse pictures and with a little dried blood on it.

None of it was very promising; the typical detritus of a place that was an attractive spot for a riverbank picnic and also happened to lie within flinging distance of a highway. The one object of real interest—the investigators were practically slavering to get their hands on it—was a rifle, the wooden stock of which could be seen sticking out from under the right thigh of the corpse. But Joly and Roussillot were just getting started on the body, and until the two of them were through there was no hope of getting at it. And that wasn't going to be for a while; they were both sticklers for the rule book, as slow as boiled honey.

"Georges," Joly called to the lead investigator, "you've finished with the victim? We can shift him now?"

"Absolutely, inspector, everything by the book."

"We might as well turn him over then," Roussillot said.

The body, fully clothed, lay on its front between them at the foot of a knee high rock. The face was turned to the left, the arms caught underneath the torso, one leg extended and the other bent-kneed and drawn up to the side. It was plain to both men that it had been there for some time. Maggots wriggled in the nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, the ears. What skin could be seen was a pasty, greasy, coppery color, mottled with greenish veins. The clothes, still moist from the passing showers, looked as if they'd been out in the rain more than once. Joly, smothering a grimace, instinctively held his breath and kneeled to take hold of the shoulders and Roussillot of the legs.

Between them they rolled the flaccid body carefully and deliberately onto its back. They had both rolled over enough cadavers not to be surprised at the strange, heavy inertia of the dead, the seeming chill that seeped through the clothing.

"Ah," said Roussillot, "what do we have here?" He pointed with his chin at the black, ragged, hole, almost certainly a bullet hole, in the center of the man's chest, with a knot of maggots squirming about in it. The surrounding denim of his shirt was stained a rusty brown, with a few spatters and spots as far away as his sleeves. Not much blood, really, considering the size of the hole.

The rifle, which had been underneath him, had remained where it was, lying now a few inches away on the flattened, yellowing grass.

"Well, what do you think?" Joly asked, straightening up and brushing off the knees of his trousers, although he'd never quite let them come in contact with the earth.

"What do I think?" Roussillot paused to light a cigarette for Joly and one for himself and blew out a stream of smoke while he studied the corpse. "I think I see before me a reasonably well-nourished man in his forties, apparently a suicide, who's been dead anywhere from… let us say two days to a week. I think—"

Joly looked at him. "
Two days
, did you say? I should have said a week at a minimum."

Roussillot smiled tolerantly—a good way to get under Joly's skin although it was no doubt meant kindly. "My dear Joly, these things are not as clear-cut as you people like to imagine. You could well be right; it might be a week. Or it might be only two days. That is precisely why I said—"

"But look at the maggots, at the
skin
; it's already begun to slip in places."

"Yes, very true, but on the other hand, do you see any bloating of the abdomen, any copious discharge of fluids from the natural orifices? No; in fact there has been little if any distension of the gut. That, in my opinion, is far more significant, more reliable, and it sounds more like two days than seven, wouldn't you say? And surely you've noticed that the smell, while hardly agreeable, is by no means the overpowering odor one would expect from a corpse that's been lying out in the warm sun for a week."

"No, now that you mention it," Joly said thoughtfully, "it isn't." He was obscurely annoyed with Roussillot for pointing out something that he himself should have noticed.

"You have to understand, Joly, the variables of post-mortem change—or taphonomic progression, as we refer to it in my profession—are highly inconstant and rarely in agreement. That is the reason we offer our findings in terms of ranges and not of fixed times. In this case it may be that the warmth of the last several days has accelerated some decompositional processes, but not others. On the other hand, the location of the body in this relatively cool spot by the river may have contributed—"

"Yes, yes, I see," said Joly, whose supply of patience for being lectured, even in Roussillot's good-natured and inoffensive manner, was not especially large. "I presume you're willing to risk a more definitive determination of the cause of death, however?" With his cigarette he gestured at the dead man's chest.

"That hole?" Roussillot shrugged. "On the contrary, I wouldn't want to commit myself until the autopsy… however, I'd be willing to go on record to the effect that it probably did nothing for his health."

That made them both laugh—for men working around corpses it never took much—and cleared the air, and for a few minutes they both went about their tasks, smoking and pursuing their own thoughts; Roussillot kneeling beside the body (without regard for his trouser knees) and gently probing with a finger here and there, Joly bending over the rifle with great interest, but not touching it.

"Joly, wait!" Roussillot said suddenly, reaching out to grasp Joly's shoulder. "What's the matter with me? This is no suicide. Look at the wound, the gunshot wound."

Joly looked. "Yes?"

"Well, look at it! Wouldn't you assume that a man intent on putting a shotgun blast through his heart would place the muzzle of the weapon against his chest before pulling the trigger?"

"Yes, I suppose I would."

"Of course you would. But do you see any charring of the material, any soot, any residue at all that would mark it as a contact wound?"

"No, I don't."

"No. What's more, take a good, close look. Does that look like a shotgun wound to you?"

"No, it doesn't."

"Well, then, it couldn't very well have been made by a shotgun, could it?"

"No. What is your point, Roussillot?"

"What is my… what is my…?" It was gratifying to see, Joly thought, that Roussillot's skin could be gotten under as well. "My point, Inspector Joly," he said in a strained voice, "is that
this
wound… here… could not have been made by
that
shotgun… there."

"But this isn't a shotgun."

"Not a… not a…"

"Shotgun. I believe you've been misled by the barrels, which have a superficial resemblance to the arrangement of certain double-barreled shotguns—an over-and-under pattern, as we refer to it in my profession. If you look more closely, however, you'll see that there are actually
three
barrels. Only the top one is, in fact, a barrel—that is, the cylinder down which the projectile is propelled. The others—" He tapped them with a pencil. "—are air reservoirs."

"Air reservoirs?" Roussillot said, squinting through the smoke at him. "What kind of—"

"We see before us," said Joly, "a Cobra Magnum F-16 high-velocity air rifle."

Roussillot stared at it, and then at Joly. "The weapon used to kill the other one, Carpenter."

"Yes, three years ago."

"But how very curious." He grunted as he pushed himself to his feet. "Ah, when did my joints get to be older than I am?" He took a final drag on his cigarette, put the butt into an airtight metal case he carried with him, and continued to emit smoke for two more breaths while looking down at the body. "An air rifle," he said at length. "Of course. No primer, no gunpowder, no explosion, nothing to burn. That would explain the lack of soot, wouldn't you say?"

"I should think so, yes."

"So we're back to suicide. Felix!" he called. "Are you or are you not intending to bag the hands at some point?"

"And how was I supposed to bag them?" said the aggrieved Felix. "He had them under him, didn't he? And then I didn't want to interrupt you and the inspector."

Muttering, he knelt by the body's right hand, shook out a paper bag, produced a length of cord, and expertly began to slide the bag around the hand, when Joly intervened.

"One moment, Felix." He dropped to his knees beside the investigator, so intent on the yellowed, upturned hand that for once he gave no thought to grass stains. "Roussillot, what would this be?"

He was pointing at the base of the little finger, which was encircled by a sort of furrow, as if a tightly wound rubber band had been removed only a little while ago.

"Well, now…" Roussillot said, bending attentively over the hand. "Yes. You notice that the skin here is not only indented, but has a dry, withered appearance, quite different from the greasiness of the rest of the hand. As to its cause—"

"Could he have worn a ring there recently?" Joly asked impatiently.

"A ring? Why, yes," Roussillot said. "It could very well be that. It probably
is
that. The compression of the tissue would have… my God, Joly, you don't think—?"

   Gideon had started to nod peacefully off over Psalmanzar for the third time when Monsieur Leyssales knocked discreetly on the wall beside the open door. There was a telephone call for the professor. If he liked he could take it on the desk telephone in the lobby.

"Gideon, we have Bousquet," were Joly's first words.

"Congratulations, Lucien. When did you find him? Where?"

"This morning, on the riverbank a few miles below Les Eyzies, where he'd been for the last several days."

In Gideon's drowsy state of mind it took a few seconds to penetrate. "He's dead?"

"A suicide, it seems."

"It seems?"

"A figure of speech. There's not much doubt. He shot himself—with the same rifle that killed Carpenter."

"The same rifle that—why would he—what would he—"

"I have no idea."