Game of Patience (26 page)

“You don’t understand,” Aristide snapped. “This woman is a witness in a case of murder. She may be in grave danger.”

“And what evidence can you offer me,” the inspector inquired, “that the lady didn’t simply decamp with a paramour?”

“Her paramour is outside in the antechamber, wondering where she can be!”

The inspector sighed. “Look, I’ll report it to Commissaire Hubert. Have the man leave a statement with me. I’m sure the commissaire will have someone sent over to ask Beaumontel about his wife.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. There’s not much more I can do. Runaway wives aren’t really our business unless the husband brings charges of adultery or desertion.”

And that would be all the help he would get, Aristide thought as he left Lafontaine behind with the commissaire’s secretary. A tight knot of apprehension was growing in his belly.

#

A note awaited Aristide at Rue Traversine two days later.

#

Citizen:

In accordance with your request to be kept notified of any new intelligence regarding the alleged disappearance of Citizeness Marie-Sidonie Chambly, wife of Citizen Beaumontel, it is my pleasure to inform you that a peace officer yesterday called upon the said Beaumontel. He found the citizen in a state of great agitation. The citizen gave a statement to the peace officer, the essence of which was that his wife had run away with a paramour, but upon being questioned further, could not provide any tangible evidence of her desertion, such as a letter in her handwriting informing him of the fact. The citizeness has been officially registered as a missing person and we are investigating Citizen Beaumontel’s movements.

Hubert, Commissaire, Section du Roule

#

Aristide muttered a curse under his breath and flung the letter onto the fire. After a few minutes’ debate with himself, he hurried to the Ministry of Justice, where a junior clerk told him that Lafontaine had stayed home that day by reason of pressing personal business. He went on to the Chaussée d’Antin and found Lafontaine prowling restlessly about his apartment.

“Show me where you waited for Citizeness Beaumontel in the gardens at Monceau.”

After a brief, silent journey in a fiacre to the edge of the city, they alighted at the eastern end of the English gardens, now national property, which had once belonged to the royal Orléans family. Lafontaine pointed to the long, curving line of columns just visible through the trees. “There, by the pond. That’s where we always met.”

“Show me.”

They followed a muddy bridle path across the lawn, past leafless thickets drooping sadly beneath the weight of raindrops in the autumn chill. A short distance away the architectural follies built for the late Duke’s amusement peeped out from amid the fading foliage: an obelisk, a pair of Dutch windmills, a Venetian bridge over the stream that fed the pond, a miniature pyramid, a small Roman arch, a number of lone columns and stone blocks carved in classical style scattered here and there. An artfully crumbling tower, two or three stories high, with a short section of castle wall clinging to it, frowned down upon Aristide. It looked more like a cemetery than a pleasure ground, he thought as they tramped past.

“I waited just here,” Lafontaine said as they approached the small, shallow ornamental lake and the broad semicircle of Corinthian columns that embraced one end of it. “I waited two hours.”

Aristide surveyed the landscape. Trees and bushes obstructed the view beyond the pond. “She would have been coming from the south, southeast, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes, she usually came that way.”

Aristide retraced his steps around the pond’s edge, turning southward until they stood among the counterfeit ruins. “So she would have entered the gardens there,” he said, gazing at a distant gate, “and walked along that path… .”

Dwarf trees and thick clumps of lilac bushes flanked the path. The Duke’s garden would be a fragrant, colorful haven when the trees blossomed, but in the sunless damp of late autumn it was deserted and desolate.

“Is it always this solitary here?” Aristide inquired.

“In winter, yes, aside from a few people out riding. That’s why we came here, because we weren’t likely to encounter anyone we knew.”

“So someone might have followed her here and no one would have noticed.”

Lafontaine turned haunted eyes to his. “Dear God, you think …”

Aristide pointed to the gate. “You’d better begin over there … look among the bushes, in the thickets. Shout if you find any trace of her, or anything out of the ordinary.”

He turned back and tramped through the underbrush, glancing from side to side. The shrubs and hedges were running wild. He doubted the gardens been properly tended since well before the Revolutionary Tribunal had dispatched the Duc d’Orléans, the dead king’s cousin, to the guillotine in 1793. The overgrown boxwood hedges, still a deep glossy green amid the fallen leaves, gave off a harsh, acid odor of damp and decay.

He emerged from a clump of wet bushes, shaking droplets from his overcoat, to find himself once again facing the stone garden follies. Sighing, he explored the lawn, finding nothing but a few sundry footprints, nearly obscured by the marks of many horseshoes, several days old and blurred by the last rain. His search took him past the obelisk to the pyramid, where a pair of stiff Egyptian caryatids, supporting a lintel stone, flanked the low entrance to the chamber within. The wooden door stood a trifle ajar. From behind it a faint, rank odor drifted to him on the damp air, the butcher-shop reek he had smelled not long ago at the Basse-Geôle. Seized with a sudden queasy twinge, he stooped and dragged the door open.

Sidonie Beaumontel lay on a bed of mold and rotting leaves with her hands folded on her breast, eyes closed, her muddy white gown arranged decorously about her limbs. But nothing could disguise the blue-black marks of groping, squeezing fingers about her throat.

#

“
Strangled,” said the police surgeon, backing out of the pyramid after a cursory examination. “She’s been dead a few days.”

“How much strength does it require to strangle someone?” Aristide asked him. He did not dare look inside the low stone chamber again.

“A fair amount. Strong hands. But this woman’s small, with a delicate frame. Perhaps not so much strength as usual for this one.”

“Could a slender man have done it?”

“I expect so, yes. Or even a woman, if she were young and vigorous.”

Aristide nodded and moved away from the pyramid and the thing within it. Commissaire Hubert fell in step beside him.

“So your suspicions were founded. You think she went out to meet Lafontaine on the twenty-eighth, and the murderer followed her here and seized his chance when he saw nobody was about?”

“Yes, I expect so. Then he carried her in there so she wouldn’t be found by the first matron out exercising her lapdog.”

“Lafontaine says they were to meet a little after three. The servants swore the last time any of them saw her was at about quarter to three, when she complained of a headache and dismissed them all for the afternoon. That lets Beaumontel out; he climbed into his carriage at half past two and spent the next five hours at a dinner party. His coachman and a dozen dinner guests can swear to where he was, and then his servants when he arrived home again.”

“It wasn’t the husband,” Aristide said. “Don’t waste your time.”

“The lover? We have only his word that he waited for her and she didn’t arrive. They might have quarreled.”

“If that was so, why would he have called my attention to her disappearance?” Aristide shook his head, with a glance at Lafontaine, who sat on a block of stone, head in his hands, shoulders trembling. “Look at him. Commissaire, she’s dead because she saw the man who committed the murders on Rue du Hasard. He murdered her to keep her quiet. It’s the only reasonable explanation. If only she’d dared to be honest with us!”

Commissaire Hubert sighed. “After the past few years, with everybody looking over his shoulder, would you?”

He returned home on foot to Rue d’Amboise, grateful for the touch of fresh air and fine rain on his face, and pushed open the front door.

“Ravel—”

He paused, hand still on the door handle, as Rosalie rose to her feet from a bench in the dim foyer. “Forgive me for intruding.”

“How did you get here?”

“I asked for you at the commissariat of the Butte-des-Moulins section. I badgered them until they gave me your address.” She met his eyes, then hurriedly looked away again. “Not so long ago, you called on me to apologize for your behavior. I should like to do the same. I behaved childishly on
décadi
. Please forgive me.”

“There’s little to forgive,” Aristide said. He drew a deep breath, trying to banish the stink of putrid flesh with the faint scent of pipe smoke and coffee and frying onions that always lingered on the staircase. Rosalie drew a step nearer.

“Are you quite well? You look pale.”

“I had the misfortune to discover a corpse today.”

“A corpse … ?”

“A witness. A woman who could have identified the man who killed Célie and Saint-Ange.”

She stared at him. “Tell me.”

Aristide seated himself on the stairs, glad enough to sit down, and repeated the tale Lafontaine had told him. “And then by chance she sees the murderer again,” he concluded, “a few days ago, at the Palais-Égalité. But the murderer has recognized her as surely as she’s recognized him, and fears she’ll betray him … so he hangs about and keeps an eye on her, undoubtedly follows her home to the faubourg Honoré, and watches for his opportunity. One day she slips out alone to meet her lover and the murderer follows her to the gardens, to a lonely spot where no one is about, and … he strangles her.”

“So another innocent person has died, in order to conceal this man’s guilt,” Rosalie said. “Oh, God, that poor woman … how I will rejoice when that man stretches his neck under the blade!”

“You still think it was Aubry, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. Have you examined
his
movements yet? Does he have an alibi for the day this woman disappeared?”

“Aubry’s disappeared, too. For all we know, he may be dead as well.” Aristide rubbed his eyes. The complexities of investigating a murder whose cast of characters was scattered across Paris had become hopelessly perplexing. In the cumbersome, decentralized system of police jurisdiction that had been the rule since 1790, it was scarcely clear who ought to take charge of an affair that had begun in one section, involving persons who lived in various sections, and a third murder committed in yet another.

“What do you mean, Aubry’s disappeared?”

A folded note on the hallway table, addressed to him in François’s familiar scrawl, caught his eye. He tore it open, read it, and glanced at his watch.

“Pardon me, I have to go.”

“Are you so eager to be rid of me now, after your persistent pursuit?”

“I don’t mean to be rude. I have to meet someone.” He thrust the note in front of her.

“Who’s this brandy seller?”

“Someone who may be able to give Aubry an alibi for the tenth of Brumaire.”

“I don’t believe it. What do you mean, he’s disappeared?”

Aristide paused. “Why don’t you come with me now and I’ll tell you what I know, and you can hear for yourself whatever it is this peddler has to say. Will that satisfy you?”

They hurried along the Boulevard, heads bent against the chilly breeze as Aristide told her about Aubry’s baffling disappearance. François was waiting by the empty pedestal at the center of the Place Vendôme, where once a statue of Louis XIV had stood.

“Are you sure this is the right peddler?” Rosalie demanded after Aristide had hastily introduced them.

“She’s the only woman who sells brandy on Rue Honoré,” said François. “All the other regulars are men. How do you want to work up to it? She’s the sort who’ll go deaf and dumb in front of the police.”

“Then the police won’t ask her any questions.” Aristide buttoned his overcoat to the neck, concealing the telltale black suit. “Here,” he added, thrusting a few sous into Rosalie’s hand, “we’re hunting for signs of a friend of ours, who vanished a month ago.”

The brandy seller, a weather-beaten woman who looked sixty and who Aristide guessed was probably thirty-five or forty, sat hunched on a disused mounting block, a little cask beside her, near the old Jacobin monastery. Silently pocketing the coins he gave her, she filled a small tin cup from the cask and handed it to him.

“Excellent brandy this,” he said, blinking back a few tears after the first burning swallow.

The brandy seller grunted and eyed the pastry shop across the street.

“Do you often come to this spot to sell?”

“Most days.”

“I ask because I’m looking for a friend who has unaccountably disappeared,” he continued. The woman said nothing. “He was last seen leaving a house just over there,” he added, pointing at the house to the right of the pastry shop, “and we wondered if you might have seen him. This was a month ago, so I suppose it’s too much to ask.”