The Art of Murder (22 page)

“
Interesting.” Emile’s look
was appraising, and fraught with unspoken suspicions. “Maybe they
have something going on, eh, Gilles?”

Gilles ignored it for the moment,
looking at Le Clerc.

“
What’s your first name
again?”

“
Claude.”

“
Ah. Yes, this is
interesting. The question is what to do about it.” They chewed on
it for a while as Gilles thought furiously.

“
Merde. With the two of
them, we have four men tied up, and they could be in there for
hours.”

“
And in the meantime,
Inspector?”

“
What in the hell am I
supposed to do with the five pounds of Kosher beef liver Le Bref
picked up on the way?” He offered it to Claude, but he waved it
off.

They chuckled at bit on hearing it, but
otherwise had no suggestions, although Emile had other
concerns.

“
What are we doing here,
just hanging around and talking about the weather?”

“
Claude and I will have
lunch and be back in half an hour or forty-five minutes. Le Bref is
just down the street, in a small cul-de-sac on this side. He’s in
between the first and second house. If they come out, beat it like
hell to the next block and then turn around and come back slowly.
If they are aware of the tail, we’re already blown, otherwise it
should work.”

They were both strangers to the case,
unknown to the suspects.

“
Well, there will be two of
us.” Emile looked around for a discreet vantage point, and at the
same time wondering how he was supposed to fit into the role of
aimless inactivity.

“
Oh, Lord, where in the hell
do we go to take a shit around here?” Emile’s question was a purely
rhetorical one, but not without practical impact.

Emile sighed at the prospect, as this
type of daylight surveillance was the worst, and the hardest to do
without alarming the subject. But if one or both came this way, he
had a plan, and if either of them went the other way, he would
follow them. As for hanging about on a street-corner trying to look
innocent, he would do his best. This part of the city was all
narrow blocks, with tall buildings, no trees, and vacant lots were
almost unheard of. Almost totally residential, there were no
businesses, where he could get in off the street.

He could only do it for so long, for
someone local and attuned to the area would surely remark on his
presence. His shoulders slumped at the necessity.

“
Oh, joy.” He thought of
something. “Got any smokes?”

Claude reached into a pocket and
quickly pulled out a packet.

“
I can get more.”

Gilles nodded at him and
Claude.

“
Come on. We’d better let Le
Bref in on all of this, or it doesn’t stand much of a
chance.”

“
What if one comes out and
then the other? What if they go in opposite directions?” One-man
tailing jobs were notoriously hard to maintain for any length of
time without blowing it.

Gilles pulled on Claude’s arm as there
was little more he could do and his stomach was
rumbling.

“
Follow whichever one comes
your way. When in doubt, improvise. Or even just break it
off.”

Emile’s resigned yet sardonic nod
expressed his feelings perfectly. He would just have to wait for
his lunch. Today, he was getting paid to stand around and smoke,
and trying to look like he didn’t have a care in the world. It
could have been worse.

Out of the blue, for no particular
reason, Emile gave a nasty grin.

“
What if three people come
out?”

Gilles ignored it.

***

Le Bref studied the girl, who sat with
a look of total revulsion at him and their surroundings. She had
been posing nude for Alexis, who was an indifferent painter of
misshapen forms in what were surely the most austere colours,
interspersed with small daubs in a rainbow of garish
hues.

The police knocking on the door and
boiling up the stairs and crashing into their intimate plans for
dinner, complete with a roast chicken and potatoes slowly cooking
in the kitchen set the rather negative tone of this
interview.

“
How long have you known
him?” Emile Niguet was the better looking and much easier-going of
the two. “Weren’t you supposed to be going with Monsieur Duval, and
wasn’t there some talk of marriage?”

She shrugged eloquently.

“
Since I met him.” She
glared in contempt at Robert Campon, ‘Le Bref’ to his
friends.

He studied her calmly.

“
When was that?”

She let out a breath and thought about
it. Yvonne weighed things up in her mind. He saw it as it
happened.

“
Theo and I were out one
night, and Alexis came to the club with a message for
him.”

“
How long ago was this? What
club?” Emile and Robert alternated questions.

It gave them a moment to think and to
observe.

“
Three, four months ago, I
think. I was wearing my stole.”

“
Ah.” This sort of reasoning
was perfectly clear to Emile, who glanced over at Le Bref to see if
he caught the significance.

Le Bref nodded slightly.

“
So when? Maybe January,
February, March? Something like that?”

She nodded soberly, more cooperative in
her outlook now. She didn’t seem afraid, only angry, and perhaps
highly-embarrassed by the situation.

“
So how long has this been
going on?” Le Bref just put it out there as naturally as could be,
and she looked away, blushing slightly, and swallowing.

“
Just…just a few days.” She
looked at each in turn, very briefly, and then dropped her
eyes.

Her voice was a low
monotone.

“
All right, Mademoiselle,
that’s certainly understandable enough. Your fiance, am I correct
in thinking that? He was dead, and Monsieur Ferrauld is a
nice-looking young man and everything. No, really, he seems quite
nice.”

Le Bref cut into these
pleasantries.

“
Were you going to have sex
with him? After a nice little roast chicken dinner?”

“
Go to hell.” She glared at
him from two and a half metres away. “It’s none of your business.
You are just pigs. All of you.”

They tried very hard not to
smile.

“
I’m sorry, young lady, but
it’s our job to ask these questions. How long had you been posing
nude for him? Not long, judging by that painting.”

“
No. This was only my second
time.” She shut up them, her mouth a firm down-curved line across
her face.

It didn’t look like they were going to
get much more out of her.

“
Why did Alexis kill Theo?
So he could have you? Is that it?” There were times when Le Bref
regretted the necessity.

This was one of them. She looked like
she had been slapped. Her jaw worked back and forth.

“
Va ta faire
foutre.”

In spite of himself he grinned, cruel
as it was. Yet in a way he was pleased, and liked her even more for
it. It was only too bad that he couldn’t say so.

“
Thank you Mademoiselle
Verene, that will be all for now.” Emile rose to open the door for
her and Le Bref jotted down the last sentence of his
notes.

“
I meant what I said.” She
was defiant and contemptuous.

“
We don’t take it too
personally, young lady.” Le Bref gave her a respectful nod.
“Neither should you.”

Wrapping herself in the remaining
shreds of her tattered dignity, she whirled and strode out into the
corridor with Emile.

***

Alexis was apologetic, and sweating
lightly. Andre and Henri were taking this one, as Gilles observed
from the other side of a one-way mirrored glass.

“
It’s strange.” Alexis was
in a far-off place as he sat there.

He didn’t seem too worried about being
in trouble.

“
What is?” Andre glanced at
his watch.

“
It’s like I fell in love at
first sight, you know? I mean, you hear about it, and people talk
about it. You read about it in books, I guess. But I never would
have believed it, and then one day there she was. There she was
with Theo, and it was like I could barely tear my eyes off of
her.”

“
I see.” Andre wrote
something as Alexis went on. “I went there to tell him about some
offer from some Swiss firm. Some deal, you know? He went out on his
own quite a bit. The body-guard thing was over-rated. I think he
just liked having someone capable around.”

“
Yeah. That’s one thing I
wanted to ask you about. If he never had any big threats, why did
he need a bodyguard at all?” Henri was shaping up
nicely.

It was the influence of being with more
experienced and competent detectives. His listening skills were
improving. While Gilles admired enthusiasm, it had to be backed up
with a little caution. Among other things, people had rights. It
was better to play dumb and just listen sometimes.

Passing the sergeant’s exam was the
beginning, not an end as so many saw it. He was fairly intelligent,
doggedly persistent, and he had a streak of niceness that engaged
the subject like a buddy trying to help out rather than an officer
conducting an investigation.

“
Oh, yes, we had threats.
It’s not that we didn’t take them seriously enough. He thought
having someone like me around was a deterrent to anyone but a
professional, and he just didn’t seem to acquire that sort of
enemies.”

“
Give me a couple of
examples. Please.” Andre of course had much more experience than
Henri, and he had a much more sophisticated way of following
up.

“
There was this one guy. He
was fired or something. He turned up at the house one day, shouting
and screaming, and demanding to see Theo. Monsieur Duval, Theo, he
came running to see what was going on and the fellow tore off his
shirt, beating on his chest sort of thing. I think Theo was
frightened by that one. I checked the man out later. He had, I must
say, a big chest and pretty big shoulders on him. He was strong,
you know? But it was Madame Fontaine that sent him
packing.”

This hadn’t been mentioned
before, but the police were familiar with people telling them what
they thought they ought to know, and little else. People kept a lot
back that they thought was unconnected. As often as not it
was
unconnected. It was
sheer instinct on their part.

“
Really?”

Alexis grinned.

“
Yes. She has her own
ways.”

“
What did she do?” Henri
yawned and looked at the clock, not coincidentally mounted above
the mirror.

Gilles let it go on.

“
She walked straight up to
him, put her hand in the middle of his chest, pushed him out, and,
ah, she said a few things as well. Not a swear word among them, but
it was effective enough.”

There was the sound of notes being
scratched on paper with dry ball-point pens. They were running out
of ink on this case and they had nothing to show for it so
far.

“
Any others spring to mind?”
Levain was wonderfully stubborn when it came to questioning
potential suspects.

“
Ah, there was a bomb threat
out at the plant, but that’s not my department. In my opinion, it
was just some nutcase making a phone call. They never found
anything on that one.”

“
When was that?” Henri
pounced like a cat.

“
Maybe a couple of years
ago.”

“
What about at the house?
Ever see any Moroccans around there?” Alexis just smiled at
Levain’s question and shook his head.

“
No, I don’t think so. Ah,
he had an anonymous letter once. I think we sort of concluded that
he had been in the society pages quite a bit, and we thought a
certain woman must have written it. Jealousy, the discarded lover
thing.”

“
Ah.” Henri never thought to
ask her name, and Levain apparently thought it
unimportant.

Gilles would have to put some thought
into it, but cleverly-planned murder seemed extreme in such cases,
and not with this modus operandi. It seemed unlikely. She would
have made an entrance. She would have made a melodramatic,
highly-operatic scene, and then shot him. Then she would have
fallen across the body and wept for their tragic fates. People like
that were famous for pre-trial jailhouse interviews and easy
convictions.

“
So tell us about the girl.
Tell us about your apartment. This is all so new.” Henri was
sticking to the basics of the program.

“
Yes, well. It was clear
that my employment is over soon. They really don’t need me, at
least the company doesn’t. They have their own security
arrangements out at the plant. It’s a contract job, uniformed stuff
and not really my cup of tea. The apartment is cheap. You saw the
place, right?”