Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

After a while Joly had come out for his first smoke and to ask for more details about Jacques' telephone messages. Gideon had told him everything he remembered. Unfortunately, he'd also had to tell him that he'd erased them without giving it a thought. And what did he suppose might have been the nature of Beaupierre's "terrible confession?" Joly had asked. Gideon had had to shake his head and say he just didn't know.

Joly had listened silently, with his head bowed, until Gideon had finished-or maybe until he'd finished his cigarette-and then had gone back inside without comment. Gideon had returned to leaning against the van and waiting some more. Waiting and thinking, or rather trying to think, but although his thoughts turned and turned, sifting over and over through the same dark, troubled catalogue of events, every time he seemed to come close to making sense of them the pattern fractured; his mind would shy and skitter away like a nervous horse.

Having gotten in his one good puff and followed it with a second, Joly was now ready to reply to Gideon's question. "Roussillot says the cause of death was a blow, or possibly more than one blow, to the left rear portion of the head," he announced, gushing smoke from mouth and nostrils.

Gideon grimaced. That much he'd been able to tell on his own.

"The blood spatter pattern makes it clear that he was struck down right there, where you found him. There are some signs of what may turn out to have been a struggle, but nothing much-no overturned chairs or broken glass. That suggests it may have been someone he knew and trusted."

"Struggle? You met Jacques; he was in his seventies, and not exactly what you'd call a fighting machine in any case. How much struggle could he have put up?"

"Yes, that's so." Joly took another pull, so hard that the cigarette sparked, and then handed Gideon a plastic envelope. Inside was a man's gold ring set with a square, blue-gray opal inlaid with a gold horse's head in low relief-or more likely an imitation opal and fake gold, since the band showed blue-green deposits on its inner surface and in the crevices of the setting. "Have you ever seen this before?"

"I don't think so."

"It didn't belong to Professor Beaupierre?"

Gideon shook his head. "Not as far as I know. He certainly hasn't been wearing it."

"It's not familiar to you at all? No one at the institute wears such a ring?"

"No, not that I noticed-and I think I would have noticed. Did you find it in there?"

"Under the table, less than a meter from the body."

"You think it might have come from the murderer then-gotten wrenched off in whatever struggle there was?"

"I do. It was in plain sight, not the sort of thing that would have lain there unseen for days." He slipped the envelope into an inside pocket. "We'll see." He took another long pull on his Gitane.

They both looked up as the shirt-sleeved Dr. Roussillot came out into the alley, wiping his hands on a paper towel. "You wouldn't happen to have another cigarette, would you, Joly? Mine must be in my coat."

When he had it going he expelled a double-lungful of smoke, closing his eyes and emitting a deep sigh of simple pleasure. Not only did the French get away with their fatted goose liver and confit, they smoked like characters in 1940's movies. And apparently got away with that too. "Aaahh. Well, then: time of death was between two and four hours ago."

Gideon had been prepared to dislike Dr. Roussillot on sight, partly on account of Joly's earlier description of him ("stiff-necked, fussy, punctilious"), but mostly-illogical as he knew it was-because of the whack on the head he'd taken from the other "Dr. Roussillot" in St.-Cyprien. But the genuine article had turned out to be a merry, freckled, comfortably overfed man of forty who, while demanding enough in his instructions to his subordinates, seemed anything but stiff-necked. Possibly this had something to do with his being a self-described fan of Gideon's, having read "with great pleasure and enormous profit" his recent series of papers on the assessment of post-cranial skeletal trauma in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

And when Gideon had apologized for stepping on Jacques' glasses and otherwise trampling the crime scene, Roussillot had stopped him at once. "It's nothing, nothing at all. Completely understandable under the circumstances. I beg you, don't give it a thought."

An offended Joly had stared at him. "That's not what you say when it's one of my men that does it."

"But none of your men," Roussillot had said simply, "is Gideon Oliver." From then on he and Gideon had gotten along fine.

"And that's the best you can do?" Joly asked the pathologist now. "Two to four hours?"

"Ah, well," said Roussillot, seemingly without taking umbrage, "there's laboratory work yet to be done, of course. We've taken serum and vitreous humor samples, and we'll see what the gastric contents have to tell us, and so on, but no, I don't expect to be able to do any better than that."

"But we already knew that much, damn it," muttered Joly. "We knew more than that."

They knew because he and Gideon had worked it out by simple arithmetic. Jacques had telephoned Gideon a little before noon. Inasmuch as it would have taken no more than fifteen minutes for him to drive to La Quinze, he might have arrived as early as 12:15. When Gideon got there a little over two hours later he was dead. Necessarily, then, it was impossible for him to have been murdered before 12:15 or after 2:15. And the state of the spilt blood when Gideon had found him-dry where it was thinly spattered, still viscous where it had puddled-indicated that it hadn't happened either much after 1:45 or much before 12:45. A one-hour time span.

"I was hoping you could narrow it down for us a little more," a displeased Joly said.

Roussillot chuckled with real amusement. "Narrow it down to less than an hour? You don't expect very much, do you?" He turned his twinkling gaze on Gideon and switched to English that was almost as fluent as Joly's but more heavily accented. "They think we're magicians, don't they? Alchemists. Where would they be without us, do you suppose?"

"Oh, all right, I apologize, Roussillot, don't get up on your high horse," said Joly. "It's only that I had hopes of eliminating at least one or two of them from suspicion."

"The institute people, you mean?" asked Gideon.

"Yes. After all, I was interrogating them one-by-one during the very time we're speaking of. But it's not possible, you see. How long would it have taken to come here from Les Eyzies, do this deed, and return? Forty minutes, no more. Less, conceivably. Any one of them would have had ample time to do it-before seeing me, after seeing me-with no one the wiser."

"I see what you mean." Gideon had a sudden thought. "You know, the baker out front might have spotted somebody. You might want to talk to him."

Joly gave him the Gallic equivalent of an are-you-trying-to-teach-your-grandmother-to-suck-eggs scowl, but Gideon was saved from whatever he was going to say by the appearance at the door of one of the investigators, a somewhat elderly plainclothesman named Felix, who was beckoning with a plastic-gloved hand. "We've found something, inspector. Come have a look."

Gideon followed Joly and Roussillot inside, to a corner of the exhibit area, where a display case had been pulled away from the wall to reveal a rock about the size of a misshapen softball lying on the floor. There was a smear of blood on it, and a clump of matted gray hair. Gideon turned away.

But Roussillot bent low to examine it more closely, then straightened up. "Well, I think we may assume we have our murder weapon, gentlemen." He clucked his disapproval. "A rock. Not the most elegant of choices."

"No, not just a rock,' Gideon felt compelled to say. "That's an Acheulian cordiform hand-axe; Middle-Paleolithic."