Speak Softly My Love (15 page)

“
And you’re sure?” Tailler needed the fellow to come out and
say it. “I mean, seriously?”

It
wouldn’t do to put words in the witness’s mouth and then go ahead
and write it in your little notebook. It had to come from them,
with as little prompting as possible.

“
Oh, yes. They kept it quiet about the office, of
course.”

Hubert
wondered about that.

“
So how did you know? Did you see them?”

“
No, of course not. But Didier told me all about it. Yeah,
they must be some pretty good actors. Both of them. When we were
both in town, or when we were at a big show, a whole bunch of us,
we talked quite a bit. Half-drunk a lot of the time. It really does
go with the job, you know, although we all pretend it doesn’t. But
yeah, I believed him.”

“
You believed him?” Hubert’s eyes slid to Tailler, as usual
taking his painstaking notes. “He wasn’t telling stories out of
school, then?”

Edmond
nodded.

“
Well. That’s good enough for us.”

Edmond
shook his head.

“
You would have to see the guy in action. He was always
hitting on them. Anything in a skirt. You might be surprised who
responded sometimes. I’ve seen it myself.”

He
flushed a bit, looking about. He meant he’d seen other males do
it.

“
Okay, Monsieur Barrault. I hope your wife gets better soon.”
Hubert rose. “Didier didn’t have any regular girlfriends, a
mistress here in town? Anything like that?”

“
Oh, God! Probably. Knowing him, sure. Anyways, gentlemen, I
really must get dinner going or the little beasts are going to tear
me limb from limb.” A mistress would be nothing out of the
ordinary, in some circles.

Barrault
seemed to accept it all too readily.

“
What’s your wife’s name, sir?”

“
Rose.”

“
And what hospital is that?”

Tailler
patiently took it all down as quickly as he could.

“
Okay, thank you.” Tailler tapped the final period and closed
his notes.

He was
hit by an inspiration.

“
A rose by any other name.”

“
That, sir, is very true.” The fellow brightened and then he
laughed.

Tailler
seemed to have struck a chord there.

Sometimes it was best to leave it at that.

Leaving
their business cards, the pair made a hasty exit.

The baby
was crying again. Some kind of fight had broken out in the back of
the house and there but for the Grace of God went them.

Chapter Thirteen

It was
mid-afternoon when they got back. They were lucky to catch
Maintenon at his desk. Technically he was entitled to two whole
days off a week. He hadn’t been getting it lately, and he was owed
half a day off here and there when he could squeeze it in. The
department insisted that the time off must be taken, rather than
paying time and a half when they didn’t have to.

Their
immediate superiors would say you were a fool not to take the time,
and if you didn’t, that was your problem because you weren’t going
to get paid for it anyways.

The
trouble was that the work also tended to fall behind. This merely
compounded the problem. Things were going relatively smoothly with
no more than the usual workload.

He’d
been thinking of getting a proper haircut, and he really could use
a couple of new shirts.

The
state of his socks-and-underwear drawer, (every man had had one of
those), wasn’t very good. There were things he might have been
doing. For ages it seemed, he’d been thinking of doing this or that
on an afternoon off. He could wander the Louvre, after all. People
often did. They came from around the world and he’d never really
been in the place. He hadn’t seen the inside of a cinema in years.
At one time, he had lived for the movies far more than he had lived
for books. He had lived for Ann, and a weekly trip to the cinema
was a tradition from the early days of their marriage.

Maybe
that’s why he never did it anymore.

“
Ah, Inspector.”

Tailler
dropped the briefcase on the desk.

Hubert
was hanging up his coat.

“
Well. This
thing
just keeps getting better and better.”

With a
glance at Tailler, Hubert took up the report.

He
explained about their visit to Monique and read back one or two
quotes from the notes. He told the Inspector they had been to
Gaston e Cie and outlined the information, such as it was, that
they had obtained there.

When
they got to the part about Edmond and the sort of things he was
saying, the Inspector’s eyebrows began to rise in
earnest.

Finally
Hubert trailed off. Tailler was neatly stacking his notes, papers
and photographs along the cleared front edge of his desk. He looked
up, studying the Inspector.

“
Hmn. We’re starting to get a profile of our, ah, alleged
victim here.”

“
Yes, sir. We agree. An interesting picture. What do we do
now, Inspector?”

Gilles
stared off out the window, hand coming up as he rubbed his stubbled
jaws.

“
Hmn. That’s a good question.” His eyes fell to the
desk.

He
picked up a couple of sheets stapled together.

“
Lab report. Our missing corpse. Blood on the twig. Human
blood. For sure.” The preliminary analysis was now backed up by
further, extensive testing.

Tailler’s mouth opened.

“
So, what we have, sir. Is a dead man, two wives, at least two
possible girlfriends, a missing bigamist, philanderer and all
around man about town, and not even the foggiest notion of what the
motive for all of this might be?”

Unexpectedly, Gilles came out of his reverie.

He
swiveled the chair.

“
Ah, yes. Motive.”

Tailler
sat up straighter, prepared to listen. Above and behind Maintenon,
Hubert’s face was intent. He was practically tiptoeing about,
allowing thoughts to roam freely and not distracting the
process.

“
There could be insurance.” Tailler had been doing some
thinking.

Maintenon nodded. Hubert piped up.

“
Or an inheritance—or just a hell of a lot of money in a bank
account somewhere.”

“
Or simple jealousy. One found out about the
other.”

Maintenon looked around at Hubert.

“
That one seems the most obvious.” Blood and violence, a crime
of passion. “The money as an added bonus.”

Tailler
had one.

“
The guy got tired of it all and just wanted to chuck it. He
finds some old bum somewhere, dresses him up in a good suit. He
shoots him. Or stabs him. He’s going to stick his wallet in the
pocket and chuck him off a bridge and into the Seine. Then you come
along and muck it all up. Am I right, Inspector?”

“
What, Emile? And then, suddenly realizing how just how mad it
all is, he decides not to go through with the rest of the plan?”
Hubert was grinning, but Maintenon took it seriously
enough.

Let the
ideas flow. The other thing was that neither one seemed all that
thorough in any of their interviews. They had to start asking a lot
more questions, as you didn’t always get a second
chance.

“
Yes, yes, stranger things have been known to happen.” Gilles
took a breath. “Think, gentlemen, think. What would be the craziest
idea a killer could come up with?”

“
It shouldn’t be crazy unless the perp’s crazy.” One eye on
Tailler, Hubert winked at Maintenon. “It really
ought
to be that simple. The lady
figures out he’s a bigamist and kills him. She says he missing to
cover her backside. The other one reports him missing. It’s a nice,
simple theory. The only problem is if he’s not dead yet! The thing
you want to do next is to take a really good look at Monique. Then,
go back and study the other one.”

“
The fact that he is still alive, allegedly, would appear to
contradict that little theory.”

“
Yes, sir.” Hubert spoke for the two of them.

Tailler
was already intent on his notes, eyes going up, back and ultimately
far away.

Gilles
kicked back his chair.

“
I will see you tomorrow.”

“
Sir!”

“
Yes, Emile?”

“
Do we write him off then?”

“
No. Not until you see the whites of his eyes.”

They
heard him going off down the hall.

Tailler’s eye came around to Hubert.

“
Wow. Just like that, eh?”

Hubert
snorted.

At least they had a
clue
now.

‘
We are all incompetent…’

One of
the Inspector’s favourite sayings. Tailler had always thought it
applied to the criminals. But it applied to everyone, in their own
inimitable way. He wasn’t far wrong, either. Hopefully their killer
wasn’t an exception to the rule.

Maintenon. What a crazy son of a bitch.

***

Tailler,
home at the end of a long day, ran up the stairs two at a time.
They had two floors. The upper one was all his these days. The
space was now much too big. There was just the two of them and a
couple of cats. This was where Emile, his two brothers and three
sisters had grown up. He put the bags down on the counter beside
the sink. People wondered why he ate like a horse at
work.

There
were times he came home and he was just so damned tired.

It was
just him and Mama now.

There
was the faint smell of food in the air, but there didn’t seem to be
much going on in the kitchen. She had laundry hanging up from
yesterday, on a small wire strung across the back window. He wished
she wouldn’t do that, as it meant her climbing up on a chair, and
he was rarely home these days. The curtains on the back of the
kitchen were never closed, and the windows were open most of the
time. He closed all but one, leaving it open a few centimetres so
the felines could come and go.

“
Is that you?”

She was
in the salon, knitting steadfastly in the half-darkness, squinting
and ignoring the fact that the sun had long since gone
down.

“
No, it’s somebody else.” She always looked up and smiled at
this point.

Entering
the room, he bent over and kissed her on the cheek. Her face was
getting wrinkled, liver-spotted and dry as some hairy and
badly-scraped old parchment. It had actually taken a
while.

It
almost didn’t matter what he said. He wondered sometimes, how long
she would sit there in the dark if he didn’t come home one day. It
was a shitty kind of a question, admittedly.

It would
take a while for her to catch on. Perhaps it would be more merciful
that way.

Tailler
snapped on the light beside her and then went over to close the
curtains. With a row of big windows on the west side of the
building, this and the bedrooms up above were the brightest in the
house. They were usually the warmest, but there was a chill in the
air. Predictably, she hadn’t asked their daily help Maria to light
the fire. A lifetime of relentless frugality was just too much to
overcome. She would be uncomfortable sitting there without a
sweater, no matter how warm the room. It said a lot about her, for
she couldn’t change. Sooner or later, human beings became slightly
ossified.

Maria
didn’t have a shred of initiative in her own right. Emile himself
had a little too much of it perhaps—there were no happy mediums
with the typical human creature. It was either the one or the
other.

Maria
got five francs, along with breakfast, lunch and tea, for the daily
privilege of cooking, washing up and sitting with the old lady. The
arrangement had gone on for two or three years now, and suited all
parties well enough. A perfect stranger, she’d answered an
advertisement in the paper. Her references checked out—Emile had
made sure of that, and she was now something of a fixture in
Mother’s life.

His
salary and his mother’s small pension, typical for a military
widow, were adequate. His father had taken a little time to enjoy
life. In retrospect, that was wise enough. He was a good Catholic.
He had always worked hard, always tithing a tenth to the Church. He
had sired an impressive brood. Father had been killed in 1916.
Verdun, the death of many a fellow. There might have been a few
francs a month in company pension from before the war, but as far
as Emile knew, no one had ever pursued it.

The loss
of their father had formed his life in so many ways.

Devastating as that had been, he had been young, and
resilient. He was almost the envy of his friends. His mother had
that ribbon, the heavy medal hanging off the bottom end. Boys came
over and they would sneak into her bedroom. He would pull it out.
He would take it out of the box and show it to them in a kind of
reverence. His father was a hero, and that counted for
something
. At least at
first. They took turns. They would put it around their necks and
look at themselves in the mirror. They were trying it on for
size.