Aaron Elkins: Skeleton dance

"All right, I understand about his having been frozen for the last three years," Julie said as they started walking again. "But why Montfort? How did you settle on him?"

"Ah, that followed pretty naturally. It was something you said a few days ago. Do you remember telling me that it was Jacques who hired Madame Lacouture?"

"Sure. From Paris, the same time he rehired Pru; his first week as director."

"Right. And do you remember my telling you that she was the one who backed up Montfort's story about Bousquet phoning the institute?"

Julie nodded.

"Well, Montfort and Lacouture were the only ones who actually talked to him, and they both made it clear they had no doubt that's who it was, but-"

"But Lacouture couldn't know that, could she?" Julie said excitedly. "If she didn't start until Jacques became the director, she wouldn't have been with the institute when Bousquet was working there, so she wouldn't have any idea what he sounded like. If somebody called and said he was Jean Bousquet-"

"-and Montfort told her he was too-"

"-then how would she know any better? She wouldn't-wait, who did make that call?"

"I don't know. Somebody Montfort put up to it. I took off before they got around to that."

"But why would he do that? I mean, if Bousquet was safely stored in a freezer somewhere, and they'd stopped looking for him, and nobody had any reason to think he was dead, let alone murdered, why would Montfort want to fabricate a call from him two months later, out of the blue?"

"Because he got nervous. That was when Bousquet's ex-landlady found some more of her jewelry was missing, and concluded-incorrectly, we now know-that he must have been back in town. The idea of the police re-opening a search for him scared Montfort, so he concocted the call to head it off; if Bousquet was in Corsica, how could he be in Les Eyzies?"

Their pace had gradually slowed, and Julie's increasingly perplexed frown indicated that she was having trouble putting everything together, for which he didn't blame her; it had certainly taken him long enough, and he had needed plenty of help too. "But what made Montfort freeze him in the first place?" she asked. "That's downright bizarre, to say the least. And why he-"

"Look, instead of bouncing around all over the place, what do you say we sit down to a cup of coffee and just let me try to tell you what I do know in some kind of logical order?"

"I'll vote for that."

They had come abreast of the square, where there were a couple of pleasant, familiar cafes to choose from. "Which'll it be?" Gideon asked. "Cafe de la Mairie or Cafe du Centre?"

"Which is the one the institute had its staff meetings in again?"

"The Cafe du Centre."

"The Cafe de la Mairie then," Julie said without hesitation.

"I guess the best place to start-" Gideon began.

"How about at the beginning?"

"Sure, if I can figure out where it is."

"Start with the hoax, the Old Man of Tayac. What was that all about?"

"Good idea, everything followed from that. Well, what Montfort did-"

"How about starting with why, not what?"

"Hey, who's telling this story?"

"Montfort was a great figure in the field, wasn't he? He was already established. What did he need with a clumsy stunt like that? Was it because he-"

"Julie-!"

She flinched. "Sorry, I'll be quiet, I promise. Sir."

"About time too," said Gideon. He paused with his hands encircling a soup-bowl-sized cup of cafe au lait, "You know, that was the one thing I asked Montfort about: why. I had strict orders from Lucien to speak only if spoken to, but all he was interested in was the murders, not the Old Man of Tayac, and so I finally jumped in on my own and asked him what made him cook up the hoax in the first place."

"And?"

"He said: 'Il a bien fallu que quelqu'un le remette a sa place.' 'Someone had to put him in his place.'"

"'Him'?" Julie set down her own cup. "Meaning Ely? I don't understand. I thought Ely was his protege."

"Oh, he was, he was. And to Ely, Michel Montfort was a god."

"But…?"

"But proteges and their gods have a way of eventually getting on each other's nerves. Look at it from Montfort's point of view. For twenty years he'd been the leading light of the sensitive-Neanderthal school. He was grooming Ely to be his inheritor, the man to whom he was going to pass the scepter. Only…"

Only he wasn't ready to pass it yet. And lately it had been the dynamic, colorful, charismatic Ely, not the gruff Montfort, who'd been getting the speaking invitations and showing up in the journal citations. Montfort saw himself increasingly regarded as pedantic, old-hat, even passe; they'd all heard him before and now it was Ely they wanted to hear from. It was also Ely who was up for the directorship of the institute, and although Montfort had no designs on the job for himself, the idea of being subordinate to his ambitious, popular star pupil was more than he could bear. The hoax was his way of humbling the upstart in general, and of sinking his chances for the directorship in particular.

"Wait, how could it do that?" Julie asked. "I thought he already was the director."

"Yes, by the time he found the bones he was, but you see, Montfort had planted them several months before that, when the competition was just getting started. He meant for him to find them then. But various things got in the way-the institute was in kind of a mess, and there was an important congress coming up-and Ely didn't have time to fool around at the Tayac site until later, after he was already in the job."

"So Montfort just left the bones there for him to find later?"

"Right. He couldn't keep Ely from being the director, but at least he could still 'put him in his place.'"

"Incredible," Julie murmured. "It seems so… childish."

"Childish, yes, but it worked. Once Ely dug up the bones and fell for them, Montfort turned around and made sure they were exposed as a fraud by writing that letter to Paris-Match -"

"Wait a minute, you mean it wasn't Bousquet who wrote the anonymous letter? That was Montfort's doing too?"

Everything had been Montfort's doing, Gideon told her; Bousquet had been a red herring-a patsy-from beginning to end. And it had worked right up until the very end, when Ely, finally beginning to suspect that his beloved Montfort, not Beaupierre, was the power behind the hoax, had confronted him-and wound up dead.

"And Montfort just sat there and admitted all this?" Julie asked.

"Yes. I thought his lawyer was going to have a stroke." Gideon slowly shook his head. "It was like watching a corpse talk, Julie. Ask him a question, he tells you the answer: 'Did you kill Jacques Beaupierre?' 'Yes.' 'Did you kill Jean Bousquet?' 'Yes.' 'Did you then keep his body in a freezer for three years?' 'Yes.'" Gideon shivered. "And if you didn't interrupt to ask him something, he'd just go on and on like a robot, in this creepy monotone. Mostly, all Joly had to do was sit back and let him tell his story."

He had told it as if by rote, with barely a glimmer of human feeling. The confrontation with Ely had taken place one morning at one of the remote abris at which Ely was still desperately hoping to redeem himself. The more Montfort had denied having anything to do with the fake, the more deeply suspicious Ely had become. Near the end of his emotional rope-he'd submitted his letter of resignation only a little while before-he had grown more and more agitated, and Montfort, horrified at the prospect of exposure, had grabbed the nearby air rifle, pointed it in Ely's direction, and pulled the trigger.

He'd realized at once that the body couldn't stay there. Remote as the site was, any search for Ely was bound to include the abris at which he'd been working, so he'd dragged the corpse through the brush to another one, a particularly well-hidden little cave in a nearby gully, and buried it there. Before the day was over, the scheme for the faked airplane crash had been developed and put into play. And by the next morning Ely Carpenter, actually lying under seven or eight inches of dirt in a little cave less than half-a-mile from Les Eyzies, had been officially lost at sea in the Bay of Biscay.