Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

Gideon, whose forte had never been chemistry, wasn't sure that he understood it much better in English than he had in French, but at least now he thought he could make enough sense of the process to describe it for Lester's masses.

When they went back to Madame Lacouture's office to return the key, she was just hanging up her telephone and she held up one hand to forestall them while she scratched some neat, quick notes in a record book on her desk, talking to herself while she did: "Eleven-thirty-five," she murmured in French, "Professor Barbier for Dr. Godwin-Pope… concerning… newly found bison figures at… Les Combarelles."

She pecked the final period with satisfaction, closed the book, and looked up at Montfort. "You're finished with the key?"

"Would I be handing it to you if I weren't? Now then, Gideon-"

"Madame," Gideon said, his eyes never having left the record book, "is that a log of telephone calls?"

She eyed him with misgiving. Apparently his rise in status hadn't necessarily extended to the asking of questions. "Yes," she said suspiciously.

"And do you log in all calls?"

"She does indeed," Montfort answered for her, "with the frightening efficiency of a machine. She always has, and she always will. Some day, God willing, we may even find a use for it."

As far as Gideon was concerned, with any luck that day had arrived. "Would you mind looking to see if you have a record of a call from Jean Bousquet?" he asked. "It would have been roughly three years ago. I'd like to know the date."

Montfort rolled his eyes. "Are we back to that again? Why do you keep-" He interrupted himself. "Never mind, I don't want to know. It would have been in October or November," he told Madame Lacouture. "You may remember the call. As I recollect, you said he was somewhat abusive."

A spot on either side of Madame Lacouture's throat turned crimson. "I remember," she said shortly. "I'll get the log."

It took her three seconds to retrieve the appropriate volume from a file cabinet. "Jean Bousquet's call was made at two-fifteen in the afternoon, on the twenty-fourth of November," she said, reading from it with satisfaction. "He was telephoning from Ajaccio. The subject was the provision of a character reference from Director Beaupierre, who was unavailable at the time. I transferred him to Professor Montfort instead."

"Well, there you are then," Montfort said. "The twenty-fourth of November. That would have been, oh, a good two months after the last we saw of him. Are you satisfied?"

"Look, I don't mean to keep hammering on the point-but you're absolutely sure it was Bousquet himself on the line? Positive?"

"That it was Bousquet? Yes, of course I'm positive. One couldn't mistake his offensive manner of speaking. Would you like me to swear to it? To attest to it in writing? In blood, perhaps?"

Madame Lacouture closed the log book with a snap. "Is that what you wanted to know, Professor Oliver?"

"It sure is, thank you," Gideon said, and welcome news it was, because, irrespective of whether those dog-chewed bones had or hadn't been Bousquet's, it established for a fact that he could hardly have been murdered by Ely Carpenter. Not when he was still alive two months after Ely's death.

And as for Joly's suggestion that the story of Bousquet's phone call might have been a concoction in its entirety, that, he thought, was now out of the question. The idea that all five of them-Montfort, Beaupierre, Audrey, Pru, and Emile-had conspired in a lie to protect Carpenter, a man who had yet to be accused, from being implicated in the possible murder of an unidentified victim who might or might not be Bousquet was barely believable as it was. To add to that the now-required assumption that the iron-sided Madame Lacouture was in on the plot, even to the extent of falsifying her telephone log, was beyond credibility.

No, whoever killed Jean Bousquet-if those bones were Jean Bousquet's-it wasn't Ely. A hoaxer he might well be; that was yet to be seen. But a murderer-no.

"Speaking of Bousquet," Montfort said as they headed back into the hallway, "how did your examination of the skeleton go in St.-Cyprien? Did you find your diffuse periosteal rib lesions?"

Gideon weighed his reply. "My examination," he said, "was inconclusive."

Not for the first time, Gideon found himself wondering why the French weren't obese. There were plenty of scientific and pseudo-scientific explanations as to why they weren't all lying prostrate on the sidewalk with heart attacks despite all that duck grease and goose liver, but why weren't they fat? They deserved to be fat. The croissant Emile was chewing on, one of two on his plate, probably had a quarter-of-a-pound of butter in it, and it was very likely his second breakfast of the day, a particularly annoying French custom. But like most of his countrymen he was as thin-bellied as a snake. True, you did see occasional genuine tubbies lumbering along the streets, but when you got close enough to hear, they invariably turned out to be speaking English or German.

Delicately, Emile wiped his chin. "So," he said with what Gideon took for a droll wink, "you would like to know who perpetrated the Tayac hoax. Wouldn't we all?"

"I guess we would at that," Gideon said, perfectly willing to let him be arch if he wanted to. Having struck out three times in a row trying to get Beaupierre, Pru, and Montfort to take even a wild guess, he'd worried that he might be in for more of the same with Emile, but he'd barely sat down in the paleopathologist's cubicle and asked his first question before Emile had put a cautionary finger to his own lips.

"Why don't we go out and talk about it over a decent cup of coffee?" he'd said with a meaning-laden glance (the walls have ears! ) at the thin partitions.

They had gone, not to the Cafe du Centre, the staff's usual gathering place, but a block in the other direction, to what passed for the downscale end of Les Eyzies, to a small, nameless corner bar ("Bar," said the sign painted on the window) full of stagnant cigarette smoke and blue-frocked, stubble-jawed road workers on their morning break, some drinking coffee, most drinking red wine. There, at a sticky table in the back, they had made clumsy small talk for a few minutes over Gideon's cafe au lait and Emile's cafe noir and his pair of croissants. But now the small talk was over. Emile finished the first croissant, moved the plate aside, straightened his bow tie-drooping orange clocks a la Dali on a field of sickly green-and leaned forward with his elbows on the table.

"I have no empirical data, you understand. Only my own suspicions-firmly based, however, on what I trust is a solid framework of logical premises and inductive inference, rigorously applied."

"I understand," Gideon said. Joly's remark about professors and speech-making came back to him.

"Very well, then." Emile pressed his lips together and worked them in and out like an athlete preparing for a lip-wrestling competition.

Gideon stretched out his legs, settled back in his chair, and moved his coffee within easy reach. This was going to take a while.

"Montfort," Emile said.

Gideon almost tipped over the coffee. " Montfort! But Montfort's the one who exposed it. He wrote the definitive paper."

"Correction. Michel did not expose it. An anonymous letter to Paris-Match exposed it. Only after it was exposed and therefore no longer possible to credibly defend did he write his oh-so-illustrious definitive paper."

"Well, that's a point, I guess, but-well, of all the people to possibly suspect… Ely was his protege, his-"

"If you've already made up your mind on the matter," Emile said stiffly, "I can't help wondering why you want my opinion."

"No, no, I haven't made up my mind, Emile. I don't even know where to start, and I do want your opinion. You just caught me by surprise, that's all. I'm sorry. Okay, I'm listening. What possible reason would Montfort have for planting those bones?"