The Art of Murder (24 page)

“
God, I hope he didn’t paint
in here.” Le Bref said little, studying the painting, which
appeared to Andre’s eyes as a crude still life of flowers, a
bottle, and a vase.

“
Is that an onion?” Andre’s
joke fell on deaf ears. “Everybody wants to be an artist these
days.”

Finally Le Bref spoke.

“
Well, the man has some
talent.” He looked up at an astonished Andre. “Actually, it’s a
little out of date in terms of style. He clearly admired Cezanne,
or imitated him a little too much. But it’s a common thing to show
our influences in our early works.”

“
Hmn. I read somewhere that
writers talk mostly about themselves at first.”

“
Maybe. Maybe.” Le Bref
grunted as he studied it.

He put it down and rifled through the
stacks of paintings leaning back on one another, and pulled another
one out.

“
Hah! It’s me!” Le Bref was
delighted with it.

Andre took a closer look.

Sure enough, it was signed ‘Ferrauld’
and everything.

“
This is a midget and you’re
not…quite.”

Le Bref’s quick grin showed there were
no hard feelings. This was actually a better painting in Andre’s
opinion. At least some attention had been paid to what the subject
actually looked like, rather than some raw and violently emotional
impulse driving every brush-stroke and choice of pigment or
hue.

“
My crazy brother-in-law
asked me to pose naked for him once.”

Andre’s jaw dropped.

“
I hope you told him to go
to hell.” He was firmly convinced.

“
After seeing his style, I
wasn’t too worried about anyone recognizing me.” Le Bref was cool
on the subject. “It was an easy hundred francs, and you can’t
complain about that.”

“
Huh. Anyhow, Monsieur
Ferrauld said he has paintings in a shed, and here they are. What
it proves, I don’t know, but this much is true.”

“
At least he has an outlet.”
Le Bref’s crooked grin reminded Andre of Maintenon when he was on a
roll.

“
Yes, and that Yvonne is a
beautiful woman.”

Le Bref gave him an odd
look.

“
Did he really impress you
that way?”

“
What? Oh, God, I don’t
know. I was just saying.”

Le Bref didn’t say it, but there was a
strange similarity in the two men—Ferrauld and Andre. They were
both big, strong boys with rugged good looks and some indefinable
air that a guy like him would have cheerfully killed for, perhaps
when younger, once upon a time.

One of the greatest things about men
like that was that they so seldom knew it. It helped with the
charm, at least if you weren’t a woman. Otherwise they probably
wouldn’t have any friends. It was like God compensated for these
little inequities in life by making strong men blind to both their
strengths and their weaknesses, and weak men blind to their
shortcomings and blinder still to the futility of temptation. It
made weak men blind to their strengths, which was sad. But it was
all according to God’s plan, apparently.

Outside, birds fluttered momentarily in
front of the window, startling in their sudden movement. A figure
in gossamer-white, flowing chiffon loomed up on the path through
the garden, with two cats following along close beside, tails
curled like question marks.

“
Here comes the lady of the
house.”

“
Yes.” Andre glanced at his
watch. “There is only so much time to go around. We’ll put a seal
on the door and ask her to respect it.”

Le Bref waggled his head back and forth
gently, his thoughts somewhere else.

“
Do you think Gilles really
has something?” Andre was taken aback by his question.

“
Oh, God. I sure hope so.
But honestly, if he does, he hasn’t told me a thing.”

Le Bref nodded in a philosophical
manner and kept further comments to himself.

***

“
Roger is right. This man is
a prodigy.” Emile looked up from the accounts, with a stack of
documents on each side of a small clear spot.

He was using a spare desk off to one
side, and it had not been properly cleared.

Gilles waved him off impatiently, the
ear-piece rammed in tight to his head. There was some kind of
personality conflict going on in the hallway right outside of his
door and he wished they would stop it. His eyes lit up for a
second.

“
Monsieur Babineaux?” He
nodded briefly in disappointment. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

Putting a hand on the mouthpiece, he
shook his head.

“
Of course.” His raised his
eyebrows in the direction of Emile and rolled his eyes around.
“Yes?”

“
It’s nothing, really.”
Emile closed the book in disgust, and surveyed the pile of papers
and folders to his left.

His mouth worked and his eyes were
bleary.

“
Get a sandwich or
something.” Gilles’ suggestion was a reasonable one, but Emile
thought if he went through enough files, it would be time to go
home or something.

Maintenon smiled in
sympathy.

“
Yes? Hello? Monsieur
Babineaux?” He swung his feet down to the floor and reached for his
pen.

“
I had one or two questions
for you, and I didn’t want to disrupt your work any more than
absolutely necessary.” He listened for a moment. “Yes, yes. No, I
won’t take up too much time.”

There was a pause while the sounds of
complaint came faintly on the air.

“
Of course, of course. It’s
just that I was wondering about the hiring of Alexis Ferrauld as
Monsieur Duval’s bodyguard…what? Oh, really. Interesting. Yes,
thank you. There was something else. I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten it
for the moment.”

There were more brief tinny-sounding
noises audible to Emile.

“
I see. Thank you. Ah, well,
I shall let you go, then. Oh! I’m sorry. Do you know if Alexis was
ah, painting back then?” He listened closely, making small notes,
and then Gilles sat with the thing in his hand for a
moment.

Emile wondered if the other man had
rung off, otherwise he would hear everything. He got up, took the
handset, listened briefly, and then stuck it on the receiver unit’s
cradle.

“
What?”

“
He says he knew Alexis from
before. Monsieur Ferrauld was a private security officer, but they
lost the contract at year’s end. He lost his job. In fact, Alexis
came to him for a reference, and he says he gladly gave it to
him.”

“
So? That doesn’t really
prove anything. What else?” Emile was only half interested. “And
the painting thing?”

“
Says he was a kind of a
figure of fun back then, although he was mostly on night shifts and
Babineaux was management. He worked in the accounts office of
course.”

“
Gilles.” Emile had a
thought.

“
Yes?”

“
I wonder what their books
look like. Did they go under, and if so, why? And if maybe
Babineaux and Ferrauld know more about each other than they told
us.” These were very good points, but Gilles didn’t want to call
Babineaux back right away.

Somewhere the books of the defunct
company would be filed, with a trustee.

He’d ask Alexis next, and see what he
had to say about it. Maybe they would contradict each other. That
was the problem with a conspiracy every time. They were usually
based on easily understood and easily remembered cover stories, but
they were thin on details. When people started making up details to
support the cover story, they would inevitably diverge from what
their accomplices were supplying in terms of detail. One man
claimed a red hammer and the other one claimed it was a blue
hammer, that sort of thing. It opened up more questions, which
forced the error of more made-up details, and more blunders. It was
the thin end of the wedge.

What seemed like an interesting line of
inquiry would take some ingenuity on his part. The real killer, if
there was indeed such a person, would have to have certain
suspicions of their own. If suicide was the official conclusion,
then the police should have gone away long before this.

It wasn’t much to go on. Gilles jotted
it down, while it was still fresh in his mind. The company name
would have to be checked. More man-hours on what was rapidly
becoming a fruitless enterprise.

“
So. When the lawn furniture
company that Babineaux worked for went out of business, he applied
to Duval Industries and several other firms. But Alexis was with
Duval for quite some time, and Babineaux said he totally forgot all
about it, until he showed up one day in company with Duval. It’s an
interesting coincidence, if nothing else.”

“
You’d think there would
have been some warning signs.” Emile was just being
obtuse.

“
What?”

“
Never mind.”

Just then the door popped open and Le
Bref and a gendarme came in laden with a big package.

“
Where’s Andre?” Gilles was
waiting for him to come in right behind them, but no.

“
He’s off on his own
somewhere.” The gendarme propped the package up on a desk by the
wall, and began tearing the brown paper wrapping off of
it.

“
What do we have here?”
Gilles didn’t know if he was impressed, or what, but clearly poor
old Alexis had been spending at lot of time at the Louvre, making a
bad copy of a Poussin or someone that Gilles vaguely remembered
from a school book a long, long time ago.

***

Andre sat comfortably in the chair
provided and of course the Swami was at his desk. It was a fantasy
of a room, just exactly what a man needed to relax in, a room all
to himself. He wondered how the female clients felt about it, or
what a lady doctor’s office should look like.

“
And the dream?”

The Swami nodded and with no
hesitation, jumped right into his interpretation.

“
I’ve never run into exactly
this variation before, but it’s certainly understandable enough.”
He cleared his throat. “For one thing, in your profession, to make
a mistake is tragic. You carry a lot of responsibility on your
shoulders on a daily basis, and yet you probably never think
consciously about it. But your subconscious is working all the
time—and it thinks about it quite a bit. You also mentioned the
tension in your belly, even when you’re at home or out with the
family on other occasions.”

“
So you’re saying I’m afraid
of making a mistake?” Andre sat and breathed deeply, trying to
extend the warm, cottony-soft calm he felt right now.

What all the other reports said was
apparently true. Even in the depths of a trance, which felt real to
virtually every subject interviewed, they all said the same thing.
You retained a sense of self, and a kind of awareness of your
surroundings. He could confirm that. He had heard traffic outside
the building even as he sank deeper and deeper into a pit of
helplessness. There was one brief jab of panic at losing control,
and then you sort of went with it out a kind of curiousity—you
wanted to see if he could really do it. You wanted to see what
happened next, as long as it didn’t go too far.

The fact that it was real, and that he
could do it to you was the revelation, hence the moment of panic.
And yet subject after subject reported that they felt safe enough
in the trance. They were convinced they retained some ultimate
control. Andre wondered at the rapport of the man, and why people
would actually trust a perfect stranger. But they did, and so had
he.

“
I think there’s more. There
is a kind of guilt there as well.”

“
Guilt?” Levain was
genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know. If I made a mistake, which I’m
sure I must have at some point along the way, I can’t quite
recall…”

“
I’m sure you’re a fine
police officer, and there are many checks and balances in the
system. That’s why you have a partner and supervision. You gather
evidence, and somebody else prosecutes. Otherwise, you would
probably go mad with self-doubt. But no, I think you have a sense
of guilt because deep down inside you know that you cannot know
everything, and you cannot keep up with everything. You must learn
to forgive yourself, and to accept your own inadequacies, for
surely we all have them.” The Great Swami, composed, sure of his
powers and completely in his element, sat there beaming in approval
at a slightly confused Andre Levain. “And yet you also know the
price of a mistake can be very high for the suspect, or person
under scrutiny. You might feel guilt at a failure, an unsolved
case, rather than the conviction of an innocent person.”

“
And that’s it?” Andre’s
voice still had a dreamy quality. “We have plenty of unsolved
cases, that’s true.”

“
I’m sure of it. And just
for the record, I have planted a post-hypnotic suggestion, just a
little thing, that you will no longer suffer the dream. I sincerely
believe that you will forget quite quickly that you ever had such a
dream.”