Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

It was, of course, the question that had been on Gideon's mind all afternoon, ever since he'd come to on the floor of the morgue, and he'd yet to reach an answer. "Lucien, I just don't know. Anything I'd say would be a guess."

"Then guess."

"All right, my guess is no. Or if one of them actually did-which is hard for me to make myself take seriously-I don't think that's what it is that the others know. I got the feeling that what they know is merely that he or she had some kind of trouble with Bousquet and they're worried that it's going to make difficulties for him, or her, with the police. With you. That's all."

"If that's all," Julie said hotly, "why did they steal the bones and almost kill you doing it? Is that supposed to make things less difficult with the police?"

"I don't know that either."

There was a long silence, and then Joly said: "I have something interesting to tell you. I had an informative conversation with Madame Renouard a little while ago."

"Madame Renouard…" Gideon repeated, searching his mind. "That's…?"

"Bousquet's landlady, who was able to enlighten me in the matter of his relations at the institute. If we assume that her account is reliable, Bousquet did indeed have difficulties-I mean to say, extreme difficulties-with one particular member of the staff." He broke a plum tart in two, delicately inserted one piece into his mouth, and used a napkin to carefully wipe powdered sugar from his lips and fingers.

Gideon fidgeted. "So, who?"

Joly disposed of the rest of the tart and swabbed down his lips and fingers again while he chewed and swallowed. "As a matter of fact, it was Ely Carpenter."

"Carpenter! " Gideon exclaimed unwisely, cringing at the bright flash of pain behind his eyes.

"Carpenter," said Julie more softly. "Now that raises some interesting questions."

"For example," Gideon said, thinking aloud, "was Bousquet somehow tied in with the hoax?"

He was indeed, said Joly. According to Madame Renouard, Carpenter had somehow come to the conclusion that Jean Bousquet was the writer of the anonymous letter to Paris-Match that had first exposed the Tayac fraud. In what had apparently been an intense public scene at the institute, Carpenter had accused Bousquet to his face and Bousquet had hotly denied that he'd had anything to do with it. Carpenter had gone further, suggesting that Bousquet had somehow been involved with the scheme from the beginning-the planting of the bones, followed by the subsequent expose-all with the intention of humiliating him, Carpenter.

"But what reason could he have?" Julie asked. "Bousquet was just a temporary workman, wasn't he? Why would he want to humiliate the director?"

There again, the all-knowing Madame Renouard claimed to have the inside story: not long before, it had been discovered that one or two Paleolithic stone implements had disappeared from the institute's storage area. On investigating, Carpenter had concluded that Bousquet had sold them to tourists-another accusation that Bousquet had angrily rejected-and issued Bousquet a formal reprimand and warning. The injured Bousquet had made no secret, at least not to his landlady and his fellow boarders, of his resentment.

"I've seen the letter to Paris-Match," Joly said. "It is not the language of an educated man, and certainly not that of a professional archaeologist."

"So you think it might be true-that Bousquet wrote it?" Gideon asked. "I think it shouldn't be dismissed as a possibility. Nor should the possibility that he was behind the hoax."

Julie shook her head. "I don't know. Could somebody like that know enough to really take in an expert, a genuine archaeologist? It's hard to believe."

"It is," Gideon agreed. "On the other hand, if you think about it that's exactly what Bones to Pick is about: the amazing capacity of even the most learned experts to turn into gullible chumps if they want to believe something."

"That's so, but whether Bousquet was or wasn't the perpetrator is irrelevant to our purposes," Joly said. "The fact that Carpenter thought it was true still remains." He paused to let this sink in. "You see what it means, don't you?"

Gideon slowly nodded. "It means I probably got it wrong. They're not protecting one of themselves, they're protecting Carpenter, or rather his memory. They're afraid he's going to be accused of killing Bousquet."

"Well, maybe he did kill Bousquet," Julie said. "He's dead. Somebody killed him."

"Yes, that's the point I was about to make," Joly said. From a pocket of his suit coat he took the small leather-bound notebook he carried and with the aid of a moistened forefinger turned to one of its pages. "Consider these facts: The hoax was first exposed by means of the letter on the first of September. On the twenty-fifth Carpenter suddenly submitted his resignation and, without waiting to learn if it was accepted, flew off into the night sky toward Brest, a journey he didn't live to complete. On the twenty-eighth of the same month, Madame Renouard notified the police that Bousquet had not been seen for three days-since the twenty-fifth of September, to be exact. Do you not find it suggestive that-"

"Forget it, Lucien," said Gideon, "you're definitely on the wrong track there. Bousquet was still alive long after Carpenter died. Ely couldn't have killed him."

Joly's eyebrows went up; his mouth pursed. He waited for Gideon to continue.

"He called the institute a month or so later to ask for a job reference. They told me this morning. From Corsica, they thought."

"And how would they know where he was calling from?"

"Well, that's what he said, I suppose. But wherever he was calling from, he was definitely alive, so that lets Ely out."

"Unless," Joly said after a moment's thought, "the account was concocted for your benefit."

"Why would they do that?"

"For the reason you suggested: to prevent suspicion from attaching to Carpenter."

"I really don't think so," said Gideon, but with something less than total conviction, "but-anyhow, aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves? Let's not jump-"

Julie interrupted. "No, it's a point. You told us they all obviously liked Carpenter and would've wanted to protect him, right? So isn't it at least possible-"

"Look," Gideon said, "we don't even know for sure that those bones are Bousquet's. I mean, I think they are too-we sure don't have any other candidates, do we?-but unless we get them back, which seems pretty unlikely, there's no possible way to prove it."

"But isn't there?" Julie said through a mouthful of plum tart, then paused to gulp some tea to get it down. "What about that tooth that was left in the box? It has some dental work on it, doesn't it? I can remember a dozen cases where that was all you needed for a positive identification."

"Right," Gideon said. "All we had to do was ask the right dentist to see whether they matched the files of one of his patients. But to find the right dentist you have to have a pretty good idea of who the victim is so that-"

"Which we do. Jean Bousquet."

"Sure, but who was Jean Bousquet's dentist?"

"Why should that be so difficult to find out? He must have had a dentist. Someone did that work. And you said there was a crown too, on another tooth."

"But not somebody from around here," Gideon said. "The crown had a lot of wear on it; it was in his mouth a good ten years, probably more. And Bousquet was a drifter; who knows where he was ten years ago?"

"Not I," Joly agreed sadly.

"Oh," said Julie.

"Of course it's always possible he did go to a dentist while he was here," Gideon said, "and that dentist might be able to help."

"Yes, I'll see," Joly said, but they all knew there wasn't much hope of that. Drifters, whether French or American, didn't typically make regular visits to the dentist, and Bousquet had spent only three months in Les Eyzies.