Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

My God, he thought, ashamed and guilty, what if the situation had been reversed? What would he be feeling if it had been Julie who'd been hurt and he who'd received the call…?

He waited for the thickening in his throat to ease, and then he gave her a smile of his own, his first in a long time. "Don't you worry about it, I have brain cells you wouldn't believe; plenty to spare, enough for two people."

It was a pleasure to see her eyes come snapping alive again. "Now that," she said, "sounds more like the modest fellow I know and love."

She leaned over to kiss him, and as she did, they heard the sound of a car pulling up to curb below. Julie went to the window, came back, and kissed him again. "Maybe you ought to get some shoes on. L'inspecteur est arrive."

The Cro-Magnon's upstairs lounge was situated on a stairway landing in a corner just big enough for three comfortable armchairs and a coffee table. Being at the rear of the building, directly against the cliffside, it lacked, as did many of the other houses and shops, a conventional back wall. Instead, the smooth, curving limestone of the cliff itself served as the rear of the hotel. The effect, especially when coupled with the subdued lighting from two low-wattage table lamps, was of a cave, an abri with modern conveniences.

It was in this pleasant, restful niche-easy on Gideon's throbbing eyes- that they met with Joly over a pot of tea and a plate of fruit tarts brought upstairs by Monsieur Leyssales, the hotel's proprietor.

"The man you describe," said Joly, gravely stirring a second teaspoon of sugar into his second cup of tea, "is not Dr. Roussillot."

Gideon smiled, or tried to. "Gee, why am I not surprised?"

"He was completely unfamiliar to you?"

"Absolutely."

"You have no idea who he might be or why he was there?"

"Who, no. Why… well, why seems pretty obvious. To get the bones out of there."

"Gideon," Julie said tentatively, "don't get upset now, but who seems pretty obvious too-or rather who was behind it. It had to be somebody from the institute; somebody who was at the staff meeting."

"Well, no, I wouldn't say-"

"Yes, you would. There wasn't time for the word to get around to anybody else. You walked into that morgue just one hour after the end of that meeting, and this fake Roussillot was already there."

"Yes, but he wasn't at the meeting," Gideon said doggedly. "Or anywhere in the cafe; I would have remembered."

"Well, of course not. But whoever it was must have been afraid someone might recognize him if he showed up at the hospital himself, so he got somebody else-maybe a friend, maybe somebody he hired, who knows-to get rid of the bones for him. How hard would it have been-"

"All right, okay," Gideon said dejectedly, "you're right, I agree with you. I guess I just don't like to say it, even to myself."

"But what I find myself wondering," Joly said, "is how this person knew enough to pretend to be Dr. Roussillot. How would he know who Dr. Roussillot is?"

"Oh, that wasn't hard," Gideon said. "I walked right up to him and told him that's who he was: 'You must be Dr. Roussillot.' He was happy to go along."

"Ah." Pause. "And he struck you with the leg bone, the femur? There, behind the left ear, where that remarkable protuberance is?"

"I assume so. The last I remember, he had the bone in his hand. And that's where the lump is, so I suppose that's where he hit me-twice. There are actually two remarkable protuberances, not one."

Joly frowned at him. "What do you mean, you assume so? Don't you remember being struck?"

"No."

"But it may be important. Perhaps if you try to reconstruct-"

"Lucien, let me explain something to you. When people say they remember the blow that knocked them out they're either making it up or kidding themselves. A knockout blow is a concussion, and a concussion is an interruption of cortical electric activity that induces a retrograde amnesia which ninety-nine times out of a hundred obliterates any memory of the precipitating trauma and more often than not the events immediately preceding. Period, fini, end of discussion, subject closed, all right?"

"I…"

Julie smiled at the startled Joly. "He's a little touchy on the subject of concussions today."

"I don't wonder," Joly said peaceably. "All right, then, let's go over the rest of what we know, or think we know, one more time." He crossed his long, thin legs, first adjusting the trouser-crease, and propped his gold-rimmed cup and saucer on his knee. "Now. As Julie points out, we can tentatively assume that the person who attacked you and removed the bones learned where they were from someone who was present at the staff meeting when you announced their location."

"I didn't announce it, I just-"

"Second, I think we can proceed on the assumption that the bones were taken-and taken so quickly-in order to prevent your examining them, inasmuch as you yourself told them you would be doing so this afternoon."

Gideon was stretched out nearly supine in his chair, staring at his shoes. "This is really making me feel great, Lucien." He tapped his temple with a finger. "Really smart, you know?"

"Third, we can probably assume that the purpose of removing them was to prevent the possibility of your finding evidence of tuberculosis on the ribs and thus provisionally identifying the remains as Jean Bousquet's. We can assume this because you yourself told-"

Gideon waved a hand at him. "I know, I know. Boy, you really like to rub it in, don't you?"

"All right, then," Joly said, "given that much-"

Julie put down her tea. "May I say something, Lucien? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to assume that whoever took the bones did it to prevent Gideon from finding out it wasn't Bousquet?"

Joly frowned at her over the rim of his cup. "Wasn't Bousquet?"

"Well, say Gideon had looked at them and those marks on the ribs weren't there, it would mean-or at least it might mean-that it wasn't Bousquet at all, but someone else. And maybe somebody didn't want you to know that. Isn't that possible?"

"I suppose-"

"Possible but not probable," Gideon said. "I know these people; they think like scientists. They know perfectly well that whereas finding periostitis would be a positive sign of the disease and therefore a strong indicator that the bones are Bousquet's, not finding it wouldn't prove anything one way or the other-particularly because t.b. is a rare disease nowadays, and almost half of the very few people who do get it never develop those lesions anyway."

"Yes," Julie said, "but do the people at the institute know that?"

"They do now," Gideon said miserably. "That's another thing I happened to mention this morning."

"Considering that you spent only forty minutes with them," Joly observed, "you managed to impart a great deal of useful information."

Gideon slouched deeper into the armchair.

Julie poured more tea for the three of them, adding the sugar that Gideon asked for to settle his uneasy stomach. "Gideon, which one do you think was behind it? Any idea?"

"Not a clue."

"But obviously, one of them must know something about Bousquet's history that he wasn't telling."

"I think they all know something they weren't telling. Beaupierre almost gave it away at one point, but they jumped all over him, and he shut up like a clam, and so did everybody else."

"And you believe they were protecting a member of the group, one of their own," Joly said.

Gideon nodded. "Yes. Unless I'm way off-base, I think the 'co-worker' you told me about, the one that Bousquet had his "unpleasantness" with, is one of them. And they all banded together to protect whoever it is."

"Which inescapably leads us to wonder if this unnamed person may have murdered Bousquet over this unnamed unpleasantness?"