Aaron Elkins: Skeleton dance

"So it was actually Montfort in the plane?" Julie asked. " He was a pilot too?"

No, it couldn't have been Montfort himself, Gideon told her, because he was still in Les Eyzies early the next morning, when he opened his door to a knock and found Jean Bousquet on his doorstep. Unknown to Montfort, Bousquet had been helping Ely, working in a clearing twenty yards away, putting dirt through a sifter, when Montfort had shown up. He'd heard the commotion and crept back in time to watch Montfort haul Ely's body off. Then, as he told Montfort, he had gone to his room in Madame Renouard's boarding house to think. He had spent the night in thought, and had at last come up with his master plan. Unfortunately for him, clear thinking wasn't his strong suit.

He wanted 50,000 francs. If Professor Montfort would give him 50,000 francs he would leave Les Eyzies and go to Marseilles. He would give his solemn word never to say anything to anybody about what he had seen. But if Montfort refused, he would go to the police at once. What was Professor Montfort's reply to be?

Naturally, Montfort shot him. With the only weapon at hand-the air rifle that he'd brought home from the abri, not knowing what else to do with it.

"So there he was," Gideon said, "looking down at the second guy he'd murdered in the last twenty-four hours, this one bleeding all over his living room rug, and he felt as if he simply couldn't face the prospect of burying yet another body in another abri."

"So he froze him instead?"

"Well, as it happened, he already had a rented freezer in a cold-storage warehouse in Le Bugue-somebody used to give him the occasional haunch of venison or wild boar, and that's where he'd keep it- and the easiest, quickest thing to do seemed to be to drive there, dump Bousquet and the rifle into it, and lock it up tight."

"And then what?"

"And then figure out what to do, I suppose. But apparently he never could bring himself to deal with it, and the more time passed the harder it got. So since nothing was forcing his hand he just put it out of his mind, tried to pretend it never happened."

Until last week, when things had suddenly changed. With Ely's body identified and Jacques showing clear signs of coming unglued, Montfort had had to get him out of the picture too, and it dawned on him that poor old Bousquet was his ticket for getting away with the whole mess. Out came the body, out came the rifle, and a day or so later, there lay the infamous Jean Bousquet on the banks of the Vezere."

"The conscience-stricken victim of his own hand," Julie said softly, "after having done away with Jacques-and Ely, of course, by implication. The snake swallows itself. Go back a second, though. Why did Jacques have to be killed? Did he know something about the hoax?"

He not only knew, Gideon told her, he'd taken part, providing Montfort with the fateful lynx bones from his museum. He'd been competing with Ely for the directorship at the time and knew full well that it would take a minor miracle for him to defeat the popular Carpenter. When Montfort, knowing his man all too well, casually suggested "a small prank" to bring Ely down a notch or two, Jacques thought he'd found his miracle. After a few days of waffling, he'd gone along with it, pilfering the bones from the museum-Montfort promised him the source would never be revealed, a promise he didn't waste any time breaking-turning them over to Montfort, and hurriedly stepping out of the picture. That had been the whole of Jacques' guilt, according to Montfort; the source of his "dreadful confession."

"So he wasn't involved in Ely's murder," Julie said.

"Nope, he was as much in the dark as anyone; he thought what we all thought-that Ely had gone down in his plane."

"I'm glad. I didn't want Jacques to have anything to do with that."

Gideon smiled. "I know what you mean. Anyway, whether Jacques put two and two together and figured out what the murder was about I don't know, but he surely realized there had to be some connection to the hoax. And he definitely knew Montfort was the one who'd engineered that."

"So Montfort had to get to him," Julie said, slowly shaking her head. "Before he told you or Lucien."

That was about it, Gideon told her. Later that morning, seeing Jacques whispering on the telephone, Montfort had casually wondered aloud within Madame Lacouture's hearing as to whom he might be speaking. When she told him that she had no idea-but that the call had been made to the Hotel Cro-Magnon-Jacques' death sentence was sealed.

Montfort had followed him from the institute and trailed after him to La Quinze, done the deed, and then-"

"-got Bousquet out of the freezer."

"Yes, that night; like a three-year-old lamb chop. He thawed him out, more or less, in his bathtub-it couldn't have been an easy job, by the way, because the poor guy was bent like a pretzel from spending all that time in the freezer-and left him by the river, with the rifle under him, to be discovered by whoever happened by. It's really pretty brilliant, when you think about it."

"It's really pretty depressing, when you think about it," Julie said. "Whew." She looked up at the sky. "The sun's over the yardarm and I could sure stand a glass of wine. How about you?"

"You bet," Gideon said emphatically and glanced at his watch, "but let's have it at the hotel. Lucien promised to try to stop by at five. I told him we'd be in the upstairs lounge."

By the time Joly had poured his second glass of Bergerac from the carafe on the sideboard, the first was having its mellowing effect. He sipped, rolled the wine luxuriously around his mouth, put down the glass, and smiled benignly at them, a man who had earned his ease.

"I want to thank you-both of you-for your very great assistance."

"Lucien," Gideon said, "I was on the phone to you the minute I figured out it had to be Montfort. You already knew. How?"

In reply Joly passed him a photograph. "Does this person look familiar, Gideon? The picture's a few years old."

Gideon looked at a murky photocopy of a shirtless, heavyset man sitting in a rowboat and squinting good-humoredly into the sun.

Gideon handed it back. "Nope."

Joly smoothed the photo on his thigh and with a few deft, precise squiggles of his pen, outlined a foppish goatee and began to fill it in.

"Roussillot!" Gideon exclaimed, turning the picture toward him. "The fake Roussillot, the guy in St.-Cyprien!"

"Yes," Joly said. "Not," he added pointedly, "that he bears much resemblance to the sketch you provided."

"Well, hell, when did I ever say I was any good at-"

"But who is he?"

"His name is Paul-Marie Navarosse," Joly said, taking back the picture and admiring his artwork.

"How did you find him?"

By means, Joly explained, of dedicated, intelligent police work. As Gideon would remember, he had wondered from the beginning about Carpenter's airplane. What had really happened to it? Where was it now? One of his lines of investigation had involved contacting the aviation authorities for a list of persons who had registered the acquisition of a Cessna 185 in the twelve months following Carpenter's disappearance. There had been four of them, and when one-Navarosse-proved to be a small-time importer, a shady character who had twice been the subject of smuggling investigations (one conviction, overturned), Joly took a long, hard look at him.

What he learned made him suspicious enough to have the plane impounded for examination. And despite a few deceptive alterations and papers by the dozen seemingly proving that it had been bought from a Tunisian clock manufacturer named Sadiq who had owned it for the previous six years, an exacting physical examination proved beyond any doubt that it was Carpenter's old Cessna, the plane that had supposedly been rusting on the muddy bottom of the Bay of Biscay for the last three years.