Game of Patience (11 page)

“They’re needed as evidence,” Brasseur said.

“You’ve got the others. Proof enough that Saint-Ange was in a dirty line of work.”

“What if this Beaumontel woman had something to do with the murders? You can’t just go handing her back the evidence.”

“Honestly, she seemed scared to death, but I doubt very much that she had a hand in the murders. Even though Saint-Ange was making her life hell, I can’t see her shooting him, or even persuading anyone else to do it for her. That timid sort of woman is the perfect victim; she’d never dare take the offensive. And you wouldn’t be able to make her testify at anyone’s trial—that would reveal her little amour, and she’s far too frightened of her husband to ever admit anything. She’d willingly risk prison first.”

Brasseur grunted and extracted six letters from the packet before handing it back to Aristide. “We’ll keep back a few of them, then, just in case. You can always give them to her later.” Aristide nodded, thrust the packet in his coat, and went outside.

#

“
You!” Sidonie Beaumontel gasped, stopping short in the glover’s doorway. “How did you find me?”

“You gave me your address, if you remember,” said Aristide. “I simply followed you here when I saw you leave the house. I have something of yours that you’ll be glad to get back.” He reached into his coat but she thrust her hands in front of her, palms outward, her glance darting anxiously from side to side.

“Stop! Not here. Someone might see me.” She hurried out to the busy Rue du Faubourg Honoré, Aristide following a few paces behind. Three streets farther on, she paused and turned. He passed the letters to her and she swiftly crammed them into her reticule. “How can I thank you?”

“My pleasure, citizeness. I suggest you burn those as soon as you can.”

She nodded. “I won’t be such a fool a second time.”

“Good day, citizeness.” He tipped his hat and turned, pausing as she spoke again.

“Citizen—have they found who—who did it?”

“The murders? Not yet.”

“Do you—have you any idea … ?”

Her cheeks were flushed and her hands moved in nervous birdlike little jerks.
She knows something,
Aristide thought.
And she did have reason to wish him dead
… .

“We’re looking for a man in his twenties, long, dark hair, slender.” He watched her, unsurprised by her tiny gasp as he repeated the description of the stranger. “Do you know such a man? Have you seen him at Saint-Ange’s apartment?”

“No …”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She glanced at him, clutching at her reticule. “I’m sorry,” she said abruptly. “I wish I could help you.”

Aristide wondered suddenly if the dark-haired young man could have been her illicit lover. Frederic—no, Fernand, that was the name; though she had been careful not to mention his surname. Fernand, in penning letters to his mistress, had taken care to sign them only “Your friend” or simply “F.” Here, perhaps, in fearing for her safety should her husband learn of their affair, was a man with cause to murder Saint-Ange… .

“Citizeness,” he said, “I must speak with your friend.”

“My friend?”

“You know who I mean. The man whose Christian name is Fernand.”

She paled and shrank back. “Must you?”

“It’s essential. I need his name and address.” She hesitated and he continued, merciless. “I don’t like forcing you to this, but we have to pursue every angle. The police still have six of his letters to you. Once we’ve investigated your friend and cleared him of suspicion, we’ll return them to you, but not before.”

“But—you don’t think
he
—he looks nothing like the man you described—”

“Can you sleep easily, knowing that an innocent young woman may have died in order to conceal your love affair? Wouldn’t you rather know he had nothing to do with it?”

She swallowed and nodded. “All right. Fernand Lafontaine, number twelve, Chaussée d’Antin. But you’ll find him at the Ministry of Justice; he’s one of the chief clerks. Please, I beg you—give me back those letters as soon as you’re able; and whatever you do, just don’t let my husband know of any of this… .”

She scurried away. Aristide gazed after her, frowning.

What is it she’s not saying?

#

He pondered Sidonie Beaumontel’s behavior as he strolled back eastward along Rue Honoré, dodging smart carriages on their way outside the city to the parklands of Monceau or the Bois de Boulogne. Was she simply fearful that, having had a powerful motive herself to be rid of Saint-Ange, she might be suspected of his murder?

Or had she seen something once, or someone, during a previous visit to Saint-Ange’s apartment? Something or someone she had noticed without meaning to, something that had meant nothing at the time?

A quarter hour’s brisk walk took him to the Place Vendôme and the Ministry of Justice. After showing his police card to several undersecretaries and officials, he at last came face to face with Lafontaine in a sumptuously gilded and mirrored office, a relic of the old regime.

“I don’t believe I’ll have to inconvenience you for long,” Aristide said, eyeing him. Sidonie Beaumontel’s lover was somewhere between thirty-five and forty, lean, tall, and red-haired. It was remotely conceivable, Aristide thought, that Lafontaine might still be the murderer of Saint-Ange and Célie Montereau, but it was impossible that he should be the slight, dark young man whom the porter had seen on the stairs. “Where were you on the afternoon and evening of the tenth of this month, three days ago?”

“This past
décadi
?” Lafontaine echoed him. “I was … I was outside Versailles, visiting my sister at her country cottage. What’s this about?”

“Your sister can vouch for your whereabouts?”

“Of course. So can her husband, and their cook. You say you’re an agent of the police? What on earth do you want with me?”

“Louis Saint-Ange,” Aristide said, watching him closely. Lafontaine merely gazed at him, puzzled.

“Who is Louis Saint-Ange?”

Either Lafontaine was an exceptional actor worthy of the Comédie-Française, Aristide thought, or else Sidonie had kept her predicament from him. “I expect Citizeness Beaumontel will tell you shortly,” he said. “If you’ll give me your sister’s name and address, we’ll no longer trouble you.”

Lafontaine’s brief statement in his pocket, Aristide left the ministry, thinking hard. All the likely trails that led from Saint-Ange seemed to be petering out to nothing. Perhaps they had been deceived in thinking that Saint-Ange had been the murderer’s target, and Célie Montereau merely an unlucky bystander.

The girl had been concealing a damning secret, a secret that might have inspired murderous rage in one who felt betrayed in love or honor. Might the truth, he wondered, be the other way round?

“
Brasseur,” Aristide said the following morning, after a peace officer had been dispatched to interview Lafontaine’s sister and brother-in-law, “I’d like to see Saint-Ange’s apartment again, and ask his servant some questions. I think we’re following a false scent here.”

“If you want,” grunted Brasseur, fetching the key from a drawer, “but why do you say that?”

“Our ‘leads’ seem to lead nowhere. I think you’ll find that Lafontaine was speaking the truth and has a sound alibi. Have you found any evidence at all that Saint-Ange had a mortal enemy who also had the opportunity to murder him that day?”

Brasseur shrugged. “Several people who wished him in Hell, but …”

“Have you interrogated all the people whose letters and papers he was holding hostage? Did any of them seem capable of murder? What about his mistress?”

“I can’t say they did,” Brasseur admitted. “His mistress is right out of it; she went straight to her own apartment to meet another gentleman friend, and we’ve got the friend’s sworn statement, and her maid’s, that she was very much occupied from half past four till the next morning.”

“And Saint-Ange’s victims?”

“Well, one of the women had already had it out with her husband and they’re divorcing; another fellow, a bank clerk who’d embezzled to spend money on a high-class whore, he drowned himself in the river a fortnight ago. Not that that bothered Saint-Ange much, I suppose,” he added sourly. “The others were all rich women who’d been indiscreet at one time or another. One of them seemed like the sort who might turn to murder, but she’d been with a whole raft of friends all that day who can swear where she was. The rest, I expect they were just like your Beaumontel woman: born victims, timid, terrified that their husbands should find out. They’d never have told anyone about Saint-Ange, much less shot him themselves.”

“So that leaves us with the other alternative, doesn’t it?”

They walked the short distance to the Palais-Égalité, collected the manservant Thibault, who had found work in the household of a nearby bachelor, and continued to Rue du Hasard. The porter Grangier, Aristide noticed, was now perched dutifully on a stool in the foyer, though slouched back against the wall and comfortably snoring.

No one interrupted them as they climbed the stairs to Saint-Ange’s apartment. Brasseur peeled the official seals from the door and unlocked it.

“We’ve been pursuing the idea that someone must have come here with the intention of killing Saint-Ange, as he richly deserved,” said Aristide, as he strode through the foyer and into the salon. “That Saint-Ange was the target, and the first to die, and that Célie Montereau was merely an unlucky bystander. But what if she wasn’t?”

“That changes matters,” Brasseur agreed. “We know she had something to hide, after all. But how do you prove it?”

“Well, I don’t know if anything can be proven yet, but … Thibault, I want you to think back. Try to remember exactly what you did and saw when you came in that morning and found the bodies.”

Thibault scratched his head and gazed around him. “All right, well, I came up the stairs …”

Aristide nodded. “Go out to the landing, please, and do exactly what you did then.”

Thibault obediently returned to the landing. After a moment Aristide heard him say, “I took out my latchkey, but then I found the door was open, so I came inside. I thought Saint-Ange had forgotten to lock it the night before, since that’s part of my job, of course.” He tiptoed into the foyer and shut the door behind him. “Then I went along here and into the salon, to light the fire. I’d built a fire the day before, but the weather was fine and he’d said it wasn’t necessary to light it. But I knew he’d want a fire when he woke up and took his breakfast. So I came in here,” he continued, entering the salon, “and there was the young lady, lying right in front of me.” He knelt near the center of the carpet. “I touched her to see if there was any help for her, but she was cold as a stone … then I saw him, over behind the sofa. I could just see his boot sticking out.”

“Célie Montereau was lying right in front of you?” Aristide echoed him. “Show us exactly where she was lying.”

“Here,” the manservant said, gesturing. Brasseur nodded.

“That’s what Didier said, more or less.”

“But Didier moved the body, like a fool,” said Aristide. “Thibault, would you lie on the carpet in the position in which you found the young lady? It seems ridiculous, I know, but this is important.”

Thibault grinned weakly and obeyed. “She was lying on her back, so.” He arranged himself, knees slightly bent, arms askew, one hand raised near his head.

“And this is precisely where she was lying, and her position, to the best of your recollection?” Aristide said. “Her head here, and feet there?”

“Yes, citizen.”

“Célie was shot first,” Aristide said to Brasseur. “She had to have been.”

“We ought to have seen it,” Brasseur agreed.

“If she’d been a witness to that struggle between Saint-Ange and the attacker, she might have run for it immediately and escaped; or she might have frozen, cowered, tried to hide as best she could. But instead she’s right here, nowhere near any piece of furniture large enough to have hidden her or protected her. She was standing when she was shot, and she saw her murderer. Brasseur, be the murderer and come in here from the foyer. You’re holding a pistol at your side.”

Brasseur retreated and then advanced, holding an imaginary pistol. Aristide stood in the center of the room, his back to him. “Célie is pleading with Saint-Ange to take pity on her. There is a rap—or pounding—on the door. Thibault is out. Saint-Ange sets his glass of wine down on the buffet, goes to the door himself, and opens it. Célie turns toward the newcomer, as anyone does when someone enters a room.” He turned to face Brasseur and raised both hands to his face in a fearful gesture. “Probably she recognizes him, takes a step toward him. Shoot me.”

Brasseur raised his arm and crooked his finger. “Bang.”

“The pistol is four or five feet away,” said Aristide, “impossible to miss, but not close enough to leave powder burns on her gown. She is shot through the heart and dies within seconds.” He took one halting step rearward, recoiling from the pretended force of the shot, and collapsed backward to land crumpled on the carpet, knees bent and hands outflung.

“That’s it,” Thibault exclaimed. “That’s how she looked. Right there.”