The Art of Murder (20 page)

“
Yes, sir.” There was
nothing further Gilles or the commissioner needed to add to
that.

No one dared comment.

“
As for
manpower?”

“
Yes, yes, Gilles. You are
never happy. Take what you need and get on with it.” The boss got
up, exuding an air of triumph, and left them to get on with their
day.

To say the small office was a little
noisier for the next few minutes would have been an
understatement.

***

Jules Charpentier was a most unhappy
man. The warrant said ‘properties belonging to the late Theodore
Duval, of the Rue Duvivier, Paris, France,’ which the judge may
have interpreted as meaning the residence. Since Jean-Baptiste had
enough foresight to put it in, Maintenon had the presence of mind
to make full use of it. Charpentier, whose first thought was not
for minority shareholders, did not have the presence of mind to
call the company’s lawyer, although surely they must have had
someone on retainer.

They stood in front of his desk, in a
room that paid no attention to luxury and where wall space was at a
premium due to blackboards, permanently painted in rectangles in
graphic display, with notes and numbers chalked in some cryptic
manner only the initiated could comprehend. There were cork boards
papered like the scales on a goldfish with orders and forms and
schedules. The display was riddled with brightly coloured
push-pins, and there were shelves from floor to ceiling laden with
supplies of one sort or another. There was a portable blackboard on
rollers, hastily scuffed clean and pushed back into a corner where
a coat rack sagged under miscellaneous long smocks and coats. A
boot-bench competed for floor space in amongst other, less
easily-identified objects, perhaps spare parts or consumables for
the production process, and there were stacks of filing boxes in a
corner.

The clatter of stamping machines,
cutters, shears, choppers, grinders and the squawk of air powered
tools was an omnipresent dull roar on the other side of a thin
partition. There was a thumping vibration through the floor, and
Gilles wondered how a man could focus with all of that going on but
Jules probably didn’t even hear it anymore.

“
What is the meaning of
this, Inspector Maintenon?” The harried plant manager was
astonished that he and the affairs of the plant might somehow be
involved in their investigation.

“
I would prefer not to
execute this part of the warrant. May I discuss the company records
with you?” Gilles tapped the document on Charpentier’s desk. “What
is the payroll? How many employees are in the building? Is Monsieur
Babineaux in his office today?”

Charpentier gulped like a landed fish,
his predisposition to jowls making itself evident in the slackness
of his features.

“
I, I…I don’t know
anything!” He realized the protest was impotent, and yet he still
wanted to consult with someone.

Of course he knew something, he must
have at least some answers to the basic questions Gilles had
asked.

“
I will decide what is
appropriate.” Gilles’s jaw was set. “Could you at least answer a
couple of questions without mindless argument?”

Jules Charpentier reddened, clamping
his mouth shut and glaring at the cluster of grim gendarmes behind
the detectives in sheer resentment.

“
This is an
outrage.”

“
Yes, it is.”

Gilles’ head and shoulders took on a
posture that was a clear warning that he was running out of
patience. Charpentier threw down his pen and abruptly shoved his
chair back from the desk. It was on rollers, so he could scoot
around the room without rising. He sighed deeply, bent at the waist
and with his hands on his knees as if about to rise.

“
What do you want to know?”
He shook his head in anger. “We have a hundred and fourteen
employees present today. We have eight or nine in the
administration of the plant. Some of those double in other areas,
such as accounting and in our engineering and maintenance
department. Their duties extend across product boundaries. Is that
what you want? Did you really need a warrant for that?”

“
Apparently so, Monsieur
Charpentier.” Gilles stuck his arm up and made a swirling motion
with his hand. “All right boys, interview every single one of
them.”

Gilles regarded Jules
calmly.

“
Do you keep the plant
accounts separately from overall operations?”

The man winced at the import of this,
but nodded soberly, subsiding into a more stable emotional
state.

“
Yes, we keep running totals
on any number of items on a daily basis.”

“
Would you get them for us,
please?”

“
Aw, no. No!” Charpentier
knew exactly what all of this entailed, and reached for the phone
with no hesitation. “Merde.”

Time was the most precious element of
all and he was going to lose a lot of it. The disruption to his
production schedule could be extreme, and cooperation was the only
option.

“
We will try to make this as
easy as we can.” Gilles stared him down.

“
Thank you, Inspector.”
Mouth set in grim lines from frustration, Charpentier was a very
tired man all of a sudden.

Chapter
Fourteen

The search took
hours

The search of the house took hours,
with another half dozen officers involved. Since they had little
idea of what they were looking for, other than a putative skeleton
key, this involved a lot of taking things out, making an inventory,
and putting them back again. The studio was reserved for a small,
highly-specialized team, and extra care was taken by the senior
officers in the case of Monsieur Duval’s more conventional business
office and his rather formal-looking bedroom. This had clearly been
designed with some attention to the pages of prominent home-décor
magazines.

Extra special care was taken with the
private bathroom adjoining Theodore Duval’s bedroom suite. Their
first priority was fingerprints, but as for why, no one could
truthfully say. With this one last golden opportunity to find some
evidence, they were under orders to make the most of it. Among
other things, the contents of the bathroom medicine cabinet
attracted close scrutiny. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in it
that was remarkable either way. Apparently the man shaved, brushed
his teeth, and got a headache once in a while. The most glaring
omission was the lack of remedies for heartburn and upset stomach,
or sleeplessness. This fit in with what they already knew about
Duval. A box of condoms was no great revelation, and a rubber
douche with some requisite woman’s products under the bathroom sink
didn’t require a whole lot of imagination to account
for.

Nothing was too small to be overlooked.
With Maintenon starting his day out at the plant, this undertaking
was under the supervision of Le Bref and the imperturbable Andre
Levain. With a half a dozen officers under their employ, it
shouldn’t take all day. Certain items were put aside, catalogued,
and taken away for further analysis, but for the most part, the
household was to be disturbed as little as possible.

The crew started off in the servant’s
quarters, up under the eaves, and worked their way down. Four and a
half hours later, after a certain amount of boredom and routine,
they found the other key to Duval’s studio in the back of a kitchen
drawer. It was under a few other items. Carefully picking it up
with tweezers, it was put in a labeled envelope with a kind of
reverent contempt.

It was a special drawer, and every
kitchen seems to have one. The purgatory of the household, this one
had odds and ends including parts of the head of a lamp, a putty
scraper, a ball of twine, a small tape measure, and a three-fold
menu from a local Chinese restaurant, and a hundred other things.
There were copper objects that might have been plumbing parts, a
box of washers for the kitchen taps, a tube of soldering flux,
yellowing old papers, and a few other keys, some of a more modern
type.

They were all singles, and Madame
Fontaine had no clear recollection of what they were for. A sweep
of all the locks and cabinets of the home revealed that most of
them didn’t fit anything.

Among the loot were cancelled bus
tickets, a half a dozen old shoe-horns, and a combination
screwdriver, the kind where the butt of the handle unscrewed and
removable tips were stored inside. Not surprisingly, it had the
logo of Duval Industries embedded in the handle, which appeared to
be of some modern synthetic material.

“
I wonder what the Inspector
will say about that.” Le Bref gave a look of bafflement to Levain,
who had some concerns of his own. “What are the odds of getting a
print?”

“
He’ll probably going to say
that we have no way of proving whether the killer put it back after
committing the crime, which doesn’t necessarily make it completely
irrelevant. And he’s already off on another tangent, knowing him.
But it keeps us going in the meantime.”

***

It was an early morning council of war.
There were heated comments and voices tended to rise in equal
proportion to the amount of resistance or opposition to any idea
presented. There was Maintenon, silent through it all, and Andre,
and Henri, who had strong opinions, which unfortunately were not
very clearly expressed. There was Le Bref, and Chiappe, and several
others.

Finally Jean-Phillipe turned to Gilles,
brooding behind his desk. He sat there chewing on his
lip.

“
What do you think,
Gilles?”

It took a moment for it to sink in that
the boss was talking to him.

“
Eh, what? Oh. Nothing,
really.” Gilles uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in the seat
and began scribbling furiously on a sheet of letter-sized
paper.

“
What do you suggest we do
next?” Chiappe had to account for all of these man-hours, and
Gilles was on the spot.

He watched curiously as Gilles
wrote.

“
I would suggest…I would
suggest that we are at an impasse. Perhaps if we let the case go
cold for a while, and we do have other files. You can have most of
the men back…”

“
What are you getting at?”
Chiappe saw the good-news bad-news thing coming and wasn’t sure he
liked it too much. “Just let it drop? What do we tell the press?
Are you ready to sign off?”

“
No. We’ll tell the press
what we want them to report.” Gilles slid the paper to a reluctant
Commissioner. “We’ll say it is a probable suicide but there are
unresolved questions and the case remains open-ended.”

“
What the hell does that
mean?” Le Bref chuckled. “I’ve got an idea, Gilles. Why don’t we
mention that you’re ill or something and you can take a couple of
days off? Seriously, you’ve been working too hard and not getting
much in the way of results.”

“
Hmn!”

“
No, I mean it. Every other
officer takes a normal vacation, yet you insisted the case—what was
it, the counterfeiters—you insisted it was too important, and you
had to stay around. That case was cut and dried, so much so that
they took a plea. Months have gone by. Honestly, Gilles, a bit of a
rest may spark that well-known inspiration of yours.”

Gilles threw up his hands in
resignation.

The Commissioner studied the few lines
of simple handwritten text. He nodded.

“
I know just who to give
this to. They’ll never suspect it’s a plant.” He looked at Gilles
and the others. “In the meantime, I get my gendarmes back, and
you’ll just have to handle things on your own. See what you can
find out about our mystery man, the one in the Seine.”

There was a groan or two when he said
that. More than one glance was exchanged. An extensive canvas of
the funeral industry, taking in a radius of a hundred kilometres in
every direction, was not a popular option. Cooperation from other
towns wasn’t always a top priority for the local detachments. There
was some jealousy involved. Paris cops were sometimes thought to be
a little snotty among other detachments. They were no better
trained, it was just that they got a lot of practice. He got up and
stood in front of Maintenon’s desk. Gilles uttered a deep sigh of
resignation.

“
Yes, yes, yes.” He grunted
in disgust.

Maintenon’s jaw was mostly healed,
giving pain only when he bit down wrong on something sharp and
hard. Even so, he was still having trouble sleeping at night, and
the thought of enforced idleness was unwelcome. The other cases on
his docket were all pretty routine.

“
Seriously, Gilles. Take a
couple of days off.” He looked at Andre. “I thought you had some
kind of an idea, on that one.”

Levain shrugged expressively, as it was
better than a straight answer when a man had nothing. With another
glance at Gilles, the boss left to take care of his
errand.

Chapter Fifteen

Yvonne wasn’t overly
despondent