The Art of Murder (14 page)

“
Yes, sirs! Coming right
up.”

“
The boss was upset.”
Levain’s surmise and an inquiring look brought a shrug from Gilles.
“Do you know what you want for lunch yet?”

“
I was counting on it.”
Again, Maintenon was lost in thought.

The menu was the farthest thing from
his mind. He was seated half-crossways on the chair, as if ready to
bolt for it.

“
Did he forget to ask where
we might be reached for the next little while?”

That brought him back to the present.
Maintenon smiled like a tiger confronting a sacrificial lamb, tied
to a stake in some jungle clearing.

“
You know me only too well,
Andre.”

“
Good.” Andre wiped up wet
rings with a napkin as he waited for refills. “That’ll keep him out
of our hair. How about a breakfast steak or something? A couple of
fried eggs?”

“
Sure.”

That was all Andre needed to hear, and
the boss settled deeper into his chair, accepting his lot at this
moment in time. Andre wondered what was really going through his
mind.

Chapter Nine

Madame Fontaine took their
hats wordlessly

Madame Fontaine admitted them, and took
their hats.

“
Alain is here.” Her words
had no inflection and her expression was unreadable, which spoke
volumes, but required interpretation.

“
In the salon?” Gilles had a
brief explanation for their visit all ready to go, but she didn’t
seem to care.

“
No.”

Gilles looked at Levain.

“
Where? The studio is sealed
off.”

She glared at a wall off to their left,
which was the shared wall of an adjacent building. Whatever the
message was, it was unpleasant. Then her head snapped right
back.

“
Gentlemen. The place is
yours, but please don’t remove anything without prior permission or
signing for it. Thank you.” She turned and marched out of the room,
presumably to the kitchen or her office, which was also on the
ground floor.

They would speak to her in a moment,
but this took precedence.

“
What in the hell was all
that all about?” Andre made for the elevator with Gilles trailing
along in a less hasty manner.

Andre changed his mind and leapt for
the bottom stair in an athleticism Maintenon could not
match.

“
She’s been talking to a
lawyer.” Henri squeezed past a grunting Gilles and pelted up the
stairs in pursuit of Levain.

The sound of pounding footsteps was
loud in his ears, but then it faded away.

Gilles could not help but agree. It had
to happen at some point. Depending on who it was, it could make
their lives very difficult. So far no one had really pushed them to
rule it suicide, but in his mind that was because accident was
extremely unlikely. As for Alain, they were about to discover
something about his true character.

“
The studio.” Levain’s words
echoed back to Gilles, who had a bit of a twinge in his knee but
was climbing along as best he could.

“
Of course.” Gilles kept his
anger in check, but it was apparent enough in his heated face and
sweating palms.

***

“
Nothing in this room was to
be disturbed.” Levain’s voice was harsh, unyielding.

“
I’m sorry.”

The tone of the younger man’s voice was
apologetic as Gilles arrived at the door to a frank look from Henri
and with a grimace of some pain on his own face. His knee was
giving trouble, and his jaw still throbbed unexpectedly from time
to time. He thought it was from surging blood pressure from
exertion and the more stressful moments. The notion that an angry
man should count to ten before speaking had taken on a personal
significance for Gilles.

“
All right, Andre. I suppose
it is understandable enough.” Gilles took in Alain Duval, who stood
a bare two metres into the room, as if frozen in the act of theft.
“Have you seen enough?”

With the key in custody, evidence in
the case, no one had locked the door and no one had thought to call
him or Levain. There was no sense in making a big thing out of it,
but Gilles seethed inside. Surely the tape barriers on the door
frame and the sign in the centre of the door should have been
sufficient to give any thinking person pause for reflection. While
there wasn’t much harm Alain could do, the room might yield further
secrets, if only they knew what to look for. Now anything that came
out of that room was tainted as far as credible evidence went.
Civilians knew nothing of the chain of custody, of course. Taking
it at face value, it was a perfectly innocent thing to
do.

Alain’s face was wet with tears, and
they seemed genuine enough.

“
How long have you been in
here?” Henri’s voice was gruff but not unfriendly.

“
Just—just a couple of
minutes.”

“
Did you touch anything?”
Gilles wondered at the truthfulness of the answers.

Alain shook his head. Levain hovered
there as if ready to strip-search him. Gilles shook his head,
barely perceptibly.

“
All right then, let’s seal
it up again and pretend that nothing has happened.”

“
That’s enough, Andre. Come,
young man, we’ll have a little talk down the hall.”

Alain followed Gilles willingly enough,
after one last backwards look at the thickly-padded swiveling
leather armchair his brother had died in and the rust-coloured
stains that showed the true violence of the event.

***

They had an impromptu interview in the
stuffy little den.

“
Did you and your brother
quarrel?” Alain sighed, unable to make eye contact, while Gilles
waited patiently.

“
Didn’t they tell you?
Didn’t she tell you?”

“
I had a tooth pulled the
other day. My wife died six months ago, and I have only just picked
out the stone for her grave.” Alain stared at Gilles as if he was
mad.

“
Oh, didn’t they tell
you?”

On those words, Alain flushed beet red,
and half rose from his seat. Either he was a bolter or a puncher.
Thinking better of it, he dropped back into the seat with a
curse.

“
I’m sorry, Inspector.” Then
he clamped his jaw shut with an act of pure will and just tried
breathing through his nose for a while.

There was a pause while he regrouped
psychologically.

“
I’m sorry, Inspector. I
just wasn’t thinking.” Alain glared at Gilles, then Levain, and
then Henri, who stood with arms crossed beside the desk.

“
You fellows can head down
to the kitchen and hang out there for a while.” Gilles nodded, and
put his fingers across his belly in a signal, a kind of body
language that was equally intelligible to the subject as
well.

Alain flushed again.

“
What can I do to assist you
gentlemen?” It came out better this time.

Henri headed for the door, and on an
encouraging nod from Maintenon, Andre got up and followed him
out.

“
All right, young man. Where
do you live? Are you married or single? Are you presently
employed?”

In a voice broken from time by strong
emotion, Alain opened up.

“
I live at number twenty-one
Rue Du Maurier. It is a flat, with three bedrooms, and yes,
Inspector, we did have a row. You see, Theo was a little bit
disapproving when I announced not so much my wedding, which I’m
sure he would have been delighted to attend, if only it didn’t take
so much time out of his busy work schedule, only it was sort of an
afterthought on my part, and he would have very much liked to have
been consulted…” He stopped on Gilles’ gesture.

“
All right, young man. I’ve
been around the block once or twice in my own short but busy life.
I would prefer if people speak for themselves, and in fact, we did
get a little something, a bit here and there from other witnesses.
Do you believe your brother was capable of suicide? What about his
feelings for you? Did he have regrets? Was he punishing you for
something?”

Alain sighed.

“
Yes, this is just going to
be great. Just you and me, Inspector. The fact is, I brought the
matter up for one reason. I thought he had a right to know. Also, I
had hoped for some adjustment in the financial assistance he had
been providing up until then. He was adamant in his refusal. Do you
want more?”

“
So you were living with
your wife.” Maintenon’s pen hovered over his notebook page. “Did he
cut you off?”

“
No, he did not cut me off.
But the idea that two can live as cheaply as one is pure
nonsense.”

While he had a good memory, and some
filtering was essential, he hesitated as to what to actually put
down on the page.

“
It’s one of those things. I
put it off, and put it off, and then when the baby came, I mean, I
really had no choice. Claire only knows what I have told her about
my brother, and she sort of pushed me.”

“
Ah, yes. The women, you
see, they rule the household, eh?”

Alain sighed again.

“
Something like that.” He
looked Gilles in the eye. “What do you want to know? I would sure
as hell prefer to answer specific questions, and if you could, ah,
sort of stick to a point? It’s not like I want to tell you my life
story.”

“
I’ll bet I could get you to
do it.” The look on Alain’s face was priceless, and Gilles grinned
in spite of himself.

It was exactly the right thing to do,
for all of a sudden the man, who must have been eight or ten years
the junior of the Duval brothers, flung his head back and laughed
outright.

Recovering, he shared a look with
Maintenon.

“
Thank you.”

“
No problem, young man. So
tell me about the wife and kid.”

It was a completely different man
facing him now. The laugh had brought his confidence back. Gilles
liked it much more than the downtrodden role he had been playing up
until now. The housekeeper said he was an aspiring actor, and while
she said it with a bit of a hiss, Gilles didn’t see it as
particularly far-fetched. It’s not like they weren’t out of work
most of the time, and Theo Duval was wealthy enough for it not to
be a real problem to shell out for a small monthly allowance. He
just wondered how Alain felt about it, deep down inside where it
really mattered.

The Duval brothers were a lot alike,
although the assertion might have been an unwelcome one to both of
them.

“
Claire and I have been
married a year and a half.” Again the young man blushed. “Amie is
going to be two years old in August.”

“
Ah.”

“
That was one aspect of our
quarrel.”

“
I can see how it would be,
for a man like Theo.” Gilles wasn’t trying to provoke
him.

He just wanted to see how he would
handle it.

“
No, that wasn’t it. He
wasn’t a strong moralist. But he thought I kept it a secret for all
the wrong reasons, like I didn’t trust his reaction or
something.”

“
Hmn. But you were
right.”

Alain nodded.

“
My brother wasn’t such a
bad person, Inspector. The fault was mine. I should have found the
courage to talk to him, but of course I was terrified of being a
father, and, and, getting married—”

“
And how old are you,
Monsieur Duval?”

“
I’m twenty-eight,
Inspector.” He grinned ruefully. “Okay, she’ll make a man out me,
Inspector. I can assure you of that.”

“
That’s the least of my
worries, Monsieur Duval. Ah, any idea of what’s in your brother’s
will?”

Sometimes this was enough to make even
an innocent, pure as the driven snow clam up, but Alain forged on
with total disregard for the confidentiality of such
matters.

“
As far as I know, my sister
Dominique and I are the only major heirs. There are some small
beneficiaries, here in the house. My brother was fond of the cook,
and of course Madame Fontaine has been here quite a long time. I
don’t know the actual terms of the will.”

“
You’ve never seen it, or
ever discussed it?”

“
Yes, we discussed it about
ten or eleven years ago.”

“
You mean when you came of
age?”

“
Yes. That was it. Theo
is…he was nine years older than I.” Alain put his hand on his face,
but he didn’t shed tears this time.

Alain had grown up in the shadow of a
successful, older brother, one with a very strong
personality.

He rubbed his eyes from the fatigue of
travel, and the stress of worrying about his family. The shock
would wear off, and he had their future to consider. Gilles
understood that well enough.