The Art of Murder (13 page)

“
Ha! Now I’ve seen
everything.” Levain shook his head in admiration. “I always thought
you were insane, but now I know for sure.”

“
All right, Albert. What do
you have for us?” Gilles was interested in anything up to and
including the most far-fetched fantasy by now.

“
Take a look at this.”
Giroux handed each of them a small slender object.

There was almost instant comprehension
on the part of Gilles, who looked over at Andre, studying the short
length of rubber tubing in his hand with a quizzical look. His face
came up and the look on his face was priceless as his jaw dropped
open and his head spun to Gilles.

“
No!”

Gilles shrugged.

“
That’s just too
easy!”

“
Maybe.” Gilles was
interested in spite of himself.

It certainly fell within the scope of
professional interest, if little more.

“
I want to go back to the
house. I want to check once more, to see if the lock has been oiled
recently, or even if this trick works on that door. What do you
think, Inspector?” Giroux had a look of triumph on his
face.

“
Well, if we try for a
search warrant, we’ll need something to put on the application.”
Gilles bit his lip. “It’s something, anyway.”

“
No.” Andre didn’t believe
it.

“
Give it a try.” Giroux
beckoned and Andre reluctantly pulled himself up out of his
seat.

“
All right. First give the
end a lick, but don’t put moisture inside, only a little on the
outside of the tube.”

Andre complied with the instructions as
Giroux made sure their test door was latched and the deadbolt was
indeed set.

“
The rubber is tight in the
hole.” Andre pushed the tube in from the outside, with a look of
intense concentration on his face.

“
Huh. I can feel the end of
the key…” He gave another little grunt. “Hmn. It’s on the end!
Unbelievable.”

With a quick and decisive gesture, he
gave a little twist and the sound of the deadbolt being withdrawn
was clearly audible from a few feet away where Gilles sat
observing.

“
Nice!” Levain was indeed
impressed.

“
Interesting.” The Inspector
was still unmoved. “But can you close it? That’s the real thing
here.”

An even greater problem was how to get
the key back into Duval’s pocket. Gilles let him have his fun
anyway.

“
What’s important is that in
a lock of this age, there is sufficient slop for the rubber tube.
Once I saw that go on, I knew we had it beat.” Giroux had been
looking ahead, and still would be looking ahead—to an eventual
trial date.

Andre worked his wrist in the opposite
direction.

“
I don’t know. I don’t think
it will go.”

Giroux looked cross.

“
Merde. It worked in the
lab. Isn’t that the way.”

“
You got it to lock in the
lab? Merde is right!” Gilles was more animated now. “You try it,
Albert.”

Giroux took over from Andre but he
couldn’t get it either now, in spite of jiggling and wiggling the
door back and forth so the bolt aligned properly with the hole in
the striker. Doors sagged on their hinges over time. Gilles knew
that much. He had a couple of sticky doors at home, and one even
had a bad lock. Where the key for it might be, was anyone’s guess.
That was the usual way with interior doors, they were left unlocked
for years at a time.

Giroux said a bad word.

“
What’s happening is the
tube is slipping.” He was undaunted, and reaching into a side
pocket on his smock, he pulled out another devious device. “Take a
look at this baby.”

Andre gave it a quick look and handed
it over to Gilles.

“
I made that in about five
minutes.” Giroux was a proud craftsman.

“
Very nice.” It was a short
piece of shiny chrome tubing, with very thin walls. One end was cut
like the nib of a fountain pen.

“
It’s just a piece of
tube.”

The other end had a small hole drilled
in it crosswise, and the nib end had two slots machined into it,
slots of different widths and lengths.

“
Explain.”

“
Why, certainly, sir.”
Giroux pulled something else out of his pocket. “This is our
T-handle.”

He stuck it through the hole in one end
of his makeshift key, and inserted it into the lock from the
outside. The sound of the bolt being driven home and then
retracted, back and forth, back and forth several times was enough
to convince Gilles and Levain that it was at least effectively
possible. But this device was only useful if there was a key on the
other side of the lock.

“
What about your pictures,
and your examination of the actual mechanism?”

“
I would have to take that
lock apart and examine it further before making any sort of
determination. My photos were clear enough, but they really don’t
show a whole lot of scratches from foreign objects such as bent
needle-nose pliers. I would need microscopic analysis. But
interestingly, I don’t see any marks from any kind of tool. Which
is the real issue here.”

So Giroux wasn’t a total fool then. He
just liked a spectacle.

“
And the rubber
tube?”

“
I think maybe we got the
end, inside the tube, a little too wet. But it is so much less
likely to have left marks. As for losing a bit of material inside
the lock, I would have to look again. If there’s anything there, we
can analyze the sample.”

“
I see.” Gilles chewed on
that silently for a moment. “Albert, in your carefully studied
opinion, how was that door locked?”

“
Most probably, with a
proper key. One that fit.”

“
All right. Thank you,
Albert, and I would appreciate it if we all kept this under our
hats for a while.”

Giroux’s eyes gleamed at them as he
bobbed his head, shuffled his feet, and then hastily ushered his
amiable side-kick out of the room, leaving behind two very
thoughtful homicide detectives. His assistant grinned knowingly at
them on the way out.

“
Well, at least we have
something to put on that warrant now.” Levain seemed amused more
than anything.

“
Yes, but that other key has
been disposed of in some way. I’m almost sure of it. One reason for
the experts, Andre. No man can know everything, but we needed to be
sure.”

Giroux, more than anything, had
demonstrated the weaknesses in his thinking.

Levain’s next comment, which dealt with
motive, was apparently lost on deaf ears, but he didn’t mind. When
the boss got that look on his face, it was usually bad news for
some devious bastard somewhere. Every so often Levain had this
terrible dream about the guillotine, when he was the one on the
receiving end of it. The feeling of having your neck locked in the
block was indescribable, the sound, the knowledge, was enough to
make you sit up in bed and scream your damn fool head
off.

Why him, and not some devious murderer?
That was just his bad luck.

***

The place had a strange kind of charm,
and Andre wondered what it might be like late on a Saturday night.
Or better yet a Sunday morning, in the wee hours just before dawn.
He wondered at the entertainment in such a small establishment. The
end of the place was black, with another section painted a dried-up
blood-red colour and then the front of the place had lighter paint
on the walls. It might have originally been white, but the smoke of
a million cigarettes had stained it a cream yellow colour. Posters
lined the wall behind the patrons, and they could only see the art
in the mirror over the bar, which, as was the usual in these
places, was lined with easily a thousand different bottles and
decanters, in about an equal number of sizes, shapes and colours.
Underneath the bar was a line of shiny stainless-steel lockers
which he assumed were jam-packed with rows of icy-cold bottles of
lager, ale, Pilsner, and whatever else a thirsty refugee from the
outside world might desire.

A faint blue haze of tobacco and the
lingering smell of fried onions reminded Andre of a thousand night
shifts, and thousands of indifferently prepared meals that
nevertheless were extremely welcome at the time. It was a refuge,
in every sense of the word, with a row of newspaper boxes outside
the door and a coin-operated vending machine with a dozen popular
brands of cigarettes inside the front lobby. Up above they had a
few rooms. One or two of the present patrons looked like they might
live there. They had the look of men settling in for a day of
reading the newspapers, some sporting gossip, and maybe even one or
two small wagers.

There were times when he thought of
retirement, or even just quitting, and having a place like this of
his own. It was a nice enough daydream, but he didn’t take it too
seriously. What looked like an oasis of cool, quiet sanity in
daytime might be tacky, noisy and rushed during the evening hours.
You worked for your money in this world. Owning such a place would
be long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror,
he realized.

Gilles conferred in hushed tones with
the Commissioner from a coin-operated telephone kiosk at the back
end of one of the long, narrow, glass-fronted storefront bars this
quarter was famous for. The front half of the room was a low,
lunch-bar type grille with nothing but short round stools, and the
back half, empty now, had a dozen tables and a dance floor the size
of a handkerchief. There was a stage the size of a billiard table,
and a stand with a microphone. There was a black curtain at the
back of the stage, and near that, a hall marked as a fire exit.
There would be bathrooms back there, storerooms and the like. Andre
sat with his powerful arms crossed, two tables from the end, facing
the street entrance almost forty metres away. A cooling breeze
gushed past him on its way out the open back door, where heat and
brightness ruled, and he identified the sound of wind rushing
through tree branches. The half dozen customers were at the end by
the front door, either alone or in a clump of two or three
individuals. A couple of young males were trying to appear
unconcerned, but intelligence had it that certain goods and
services might be available here whenever someone had time to look
into it.

As he recalled from the big Monday
multi-departmental briefing sessions that Maintenon and he were
obliged to attend from time to time, no one had done anything about
it so far. Those two knew there were cops in the room, and yet he
had the impression of coolness, most likely small-timers with
nothing really big up their sleeves. Andre was perfectly
comfortable. The beer was cold, and with a little fast talking
Gilles might rustle up a search warrant for them after all. If he
remembered, he would write up a quick memo for intelligence
circulation. Nothing much going on here that you couldn’t find in a
hundred other clubs within a kilometre’s radius. How he knew that
was another mystery. It stood to reason, though.

The rumble of Maintenon’s voice came in
short snatches.

“
Yes, Commissioner.” Levain
grinned faintly.

He could easily imagine the squawk the
other was making.

“
With our new discovery
thanks to Giroux, and the missing key, plus the book on
hypnotism…Alain took off for Brittany two, sorry, three days before
the incident. Then there’s…ah, what?”

Levain made out some thin, scratchy
sounds from the booth as Gilles held the thing away from his ear
for a half a moment. Chiappe wasn’t easily fooled, he knew that
much.

“
Yes, yes, but there is
something else.” Gilles listened intently. “Listen. The chair Duval
was in was not facing the desk. It was turned to one side. It was
facing the door. Surely there must be someone who will sign it.
Giroux wants to look at all the windows, there’s a whole row of
them. The ledges are fairly wide, there are a couple of balconies
on that floor, and on the corners of the building we have the usual
drain-pipes…”

Maintenon listened some more. Levain
didn’t recall Giroux saying anything about windows. He chuckled
quietly to himself. The boss knew the tricks of the trade, all
right.

“
Yes, sir.” He hung up the
phone abruptly.

“
Well?” Levain
waited.

“
He says he will try.”
Gilles inclined his head in polite inquiry. “What, did you drink
mine too?”

Andre allowed sharp tangy gas to escape
through throat and nostrils. With a dainty flourish, he carefully
wiped foam from his lush brown mustache.

“
Yes, but that’s okay,
Inspector. I promise to make it up to you.” And with that, he gave
an imperative wave at the barman, mindlessly occupied in the
never-ending task of wiping the thoroughly-etched bar glasses,
milky and almost opaque as they were, and as futile as that might
be over the course of his lifetime.

The man looked up with a semblance of
interest on his pinched and sallow but otherwise unremarkable
features.