Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

"But what end?" Julie asked. Why would he want to come back and kill Jacques?"

"Ah, yes, as to that-"

"Inspector? They… they told me I might find you here." It was Audrey, strangely unsure of herself. "Is it true that Jacques has been… that Jacques is dead?"

Joly rose. "Yes, madame, I'm sorry." He placed a hand on her elbow. "Will you sit down?"

She appeared not to hear him. "There are… there are some things I should tell you that may be relevant…" She looked indecisively at Gideon and Julie.

"It's all right, madame," Joly said, "you can speak. But if you prefer, we can go-"

"No, what does it matter?" She nodded vaguely in their direction-almost like Beaupierre himself, as if, since she was going to be his replacement as director she intended to replace him in manner as well-and took the chair Joly was holding out for her.

In Gideon's mind, Audrey Godwin-Pope had always served as a model of calm, invincible self-certainty, and it was shocking to see her so rattled. Her thin, old-lady's cardigan sweater had been misbuttoned. Her chignon, always before a neat, businesslike bun, had loosened so that straggling gray tendrils floated free at the nape of her neck. And to make the picture complete, somewhere along the way she'd broken the nosepiece of her tortoise-shell glasses, inexpertly sticking them back together with a twist of Scotch tape. It was as if she'd changed overnight from the rock-solid Audrey he knew to somebody's hunch-shouldered, slightly dotty old hermit-aunt who lived in the attic bedroom.

"Audrey, would you like something to drink?" he asked softly.

"What? Yes, all right, whatever you're having. No, a vodka. With ice." But she'd never taken her eyes from Joly, and it was to him she spoke: "Inspector, I haven't told you before-I should have told you this morning…"

Joly waited, encouraging her with a friendly dip of his chin.

"You see… about a week before Ely left… that is, before he was killed… he told me that he knew… that he thought he knew who was behind the hoax, the Tayac hoax."

"Jean Bousquet!" Julie couldn't keep from whispering.

"Jean Bousquet?" Audrey said, glancing dully at her. "No, not Bousquet. I mean, yes, he thought Jean might have written the letter-the letter to Paris-Match -out of spite, but no more than that. Jean would have been incapable of more." Nervously, she appealed to Joly. "I did tell you that, inspector. You remember." The waiter placed her drink on the table; she didn't notice.

Joly nodded patiently, his graceful hands folded on the table.

"But as to who was behind it," Audrey said, "that was different. Ely thought it might be-he had no proof, you understand, but still he was sure that it was-or almost sure that it was-"

"Jacques Beaupierre," said Joly.

"Yes," she said, stopping short with surprise, "Jacques."

"And why didn't you tell me this earlier?" he asked without reproach.

Audrey discovered her vodka and drained it in a few absent-minded gulps. "You… you have to understand, Inspector," she said defensively, "by that time Ely wasn't the same person any more. He was like a wild man-vengeful, suspicious. I couldn't take what he said seriously. I mean, it was preposterous to think even for a minute that Jacques… surely you see that it would have been irresponsible- wrong -for me to go around repeating it?"

Her pleading look took in Julie and Gideon, and, indeed, Gideon could see it, could see why she hadn't mentioned Ely's suspicion to Joly, or to him, or to anyone else in all this time. In her place, he'd probably have done the same. But now, with the sudden knowledge-Audrey had found it out only this morning-that Ely had been a victim of homicide and not of a plane-crash, and with Jacques' death following only a couple of hours later, things were terribly different. What would have been unthinkable three years ago had come to pass; what would have seemed merely "preposterous" was now just one more not-so-unreasonable possibility. The question was…

Joly was looking at him. "You wanted to ask something, Gideon?"

"Yes, I do. Audrey, what made him think it was Jacques, do you know? You said he didn't have any proof."

Ely had worked it out, she explained disjointedly, by a process of elimination. There were only three people whose theories and reputations hung on the Tayac find: his own, Michel Montfort's, and Jacques'. Since he knew he hadn't done the faking, that left Michel and Jacques. Michel, he had reasoned, was extremely unlikely to have done it, having long ago proven himself a serious and objective scholar; moreover, unlike Jacques and Ely himself, his pre-eminence in the field was acknowledged-he didn't need Tayac. And that left Jacques.

Gideon couldn't help smiling a little. It was very nearly the same line of reasoning that Emile Grize had employed, only Emile had used it to eliminate Jacques and Ely and to finger Michel Montfort.

"Oh, and I'm forgetting the four metapodials," Audrey added. "That was the crucial point. They were from the Musee Thibault. Jacques was on the board there. He would have had easy access."

Gideon nodded. Jacques' access to the bones carried more weight with him than Ely's process of elimination.

"Madame," Joly said casually, "when was the last time you saw Jean Bousquet?"

She stiffened. "Jean! Why-it was years ago. When he disappeared, when he left."

"Have you heard anything to suggest that he might be back in this area?"

"Back? You mean now? No, why do you ask? You don't mean you think-"She goggled at him, a disturbingly un-Audreylike action, and tugged distractedly at her hair; more gray hairs came loose from the bun. "But why-but-"

"Thank you so much for your help, madame. Are you quite all right? Would you like me to have someone drive you home?"

"What I find myself wondering about," Joly mused after their second round of drinks had been delivered-Joly himself, who would be driving home to Perigueux for dinner, had switched to mineral water-"is the frequency with which she seems to have access to information possessed by no one else."

"I don't follow you," Gideon said.

"Consider. It was from Professor Godwin-Pope that we learned that Carpenter possessed an air rifle-and that he had even proudly showed it to her; it was from her that we learned he had taken to keeping it at hand when he was excavating; it is from her that we now hear that Carpenter had fixed Beaupierre in his mind as the villain of the Tayac debacle. Now why do you suppose Carpenter would choose to divulge these things to her, and only to her?"

"Why wouldn't he?" Gideon asked. "They were good friends. Audrey was the only other American on the staff aside from Pru, and I guess by that time the Ely-Pru thing was on the wane and maybe a little awkward. He probably just felt most comfortable with Audrey."

"Yes, perhaps," Joly said.

"Besides," said Julie, "you can't really conclude that she was the only one he told, can you? For all we know, maybe he told everybody else too, but Audrey's the only one who's come forward."

"Yes, that's so. It might be that I'm making something from nothing."

At their feet was an elderly, limping, white-muzzled dog that had been scratching steadily behind its ear for the last few minutes. It had been brought by a customer at another table but had found itself neglected once its owner started on his aperitif and opened his newspaper. Looking for company, it had wandered over to sit by the three of them instead, lolling its tongue, watching them talk, and occasionally giving a half-hearted wag of its tail between scratches. Now, apparently tired out by the effort, it stopped, looking up at Joly, who absently reached down to continue its scratching for it.

"What do you think," he said after half-a-minute or so of this obviously mutually agreeable activity, "of the following as a working hypothesis? Assume first that Carpenter was correct in his suspicion that Beaupierre was behind the fraud. He confronts him with it. Beaupierre, terrified at the prospect of exposure, murders him-or rather pays or otherwise convinces the willing Bousquet to do it and to help him with the concealment of the body. The deceptive flight of the airplane is arranged through parties unknown at present. And Bousquet, very likely with some financial assistance from Beaupierre, takes himself far, far away and settles in Corsica to make himself a new life."