Skeleton dance

Chapter 10

"I talked to the doctor," Julie said. "The tests were all negative, nothing broken. It was just a simple concussion. He was really happy with the results."

"Oh, just a simple concussion, is that right?" Gideon said, slumped in an armchair, with his head leaning back and a damp towel thrown across his eyes. "Just a little neuroaxonic fragmentation? Merely some cortical ischemic necrosis, is that all? Just some trifling disintegration of the midline reticular nuclei here and there? Oh, I'm delighted to hear he's happy."

"Something tells me you're not in a very good mood."

"No? Well, you wouldn't be either. What else did he say?"

"He said you'd probably be feeling worse before you felt better-"

"He got that right."

"-but a good night's sleep should take care of it. He left you some sleeping pills. If you still feel funny tomorrow, he wants you to go back and see him again."

"Right, sure." He took the towel from his eyes and threw it ill-humoredly onto the high-backed sofa, squinting at the bright afternoon light streaming into the room.

"He gave you some pain pills too; want them?"

"No, I don't want to get dopey. God."

"Gideon, are you sure you wouldn't rather be in bed?"

He shook his head, a mistake.

"Should I have some food sent up? Or we could go downstairs if you feel up to it."

"No, I just want to sit here and whine."

She was quiet for a while. Then she said: "I think I know what your problem is. It goes back to your college days, when you used to box. You got knocked out four times, after all-"

"Three," Gideon growled. "Two, if you don't count TKO's."

"-and you're probably just wondering how many more brain cells you can afford to lose. Am I warm?"

She said it lightly, a throwaway pleasantry accompanied with a smile, but her voice was taut, and Gideon was abruptly aware of how drawn her face was, how anxious her eyes, how flat and yellowish the area under them. Until now he'd been too wrapped up in his own misery to notice, but he noticed now. He'd taken a knock on the head, yes, but it was Julie who'd gotten the telephone call that told her her husband had apparently had some sort of seizure and was in the hospital undergoing head X-rays, Julie who'd had to make the frightened taxi ride to St. Cyprien, Julie who'd held his hand and made small jokes while he lay with his head immobilized in a metal cage, waiting to be slid into the ominous, clanking MRI machine. And since then it had been Julie who'd continued to make small jokes and small talk in that strange, tight little voice, jollying him along while he'd sat ungratefully around, first in the hospital, and now in their hotel room, doing little more than grumbling that he felt rotten.

My God, he thought, ashamed and guilty, what if the situation had been reversed? What would he be feeling if it had been Julie who'd been hurt and he who'd received the call…?

He waited for the thickening in his throat to ease, and then he gave her a smile of his own, his first in a long time. "Don't you worry about it, I have brain cells you wouldn't believe; plenty to spare, enough for two people."

It was a pleasure to see her eyes come snapping alive again. "Now that," she said, "sounds more like the modest fellow I know and love."

She leaned over to kiss him, and as she did, they heard the sound of a car pulling up to curb below. Julie went to the window, came back, and kissed him again. "Maybe you ought to get some shoes on. L'inspecteur est arrive."

The Cro-Magnon's upstairs lounge was situated on a stairway landing in a corner just big enough for three comfortable armchairs and a coffee table. Being at the rear of the building, directly against the cliffside, it lacked, as did many of the other houses and shops, a conventional back wall. Instead, the smooth, curving limestone of the cliff itself served as the rear of the hotel. The effect, especially when coupled with the subdued lighting from two low-wattage table lamps, was of a cave, an abri with modern conveniences.

It was in this pleasant, restful niche-easy on Gideon's throbbing eyes- that they met with Joly over a pot of tea and a plate of fruit tarts brought upstairs by Monsieur Leyssales, the hotel's proprietor.

"The man you describe," said Joly, gravely stirring a second teaspoon of sugar into his second cup of tea, "is not Dr. Roussillot."

Gideon smiled, or tried to. "Gee, why am I not surprised?"

"He was completely unfamiliar to you?"

"Absolutely."

"You have no idea who he might be or why he was there?"

"Who, no. Why… well, why seems pretty obvious. To get the bones out of there."

"Gideon," Julie said tentatively, "don't get upset now, but who seems pretty obvious too-or rather who was behind it. It had to be somebody from the institute; somebody who was at the staff meeting."

"Well, no, I wouldn't say-"

"Yes, you would. There wasn't time for the word to get around to anybody else. You walked into that morgue just one hour after the end of that meeting, and this fake Roussillot was already there."

"Yes, but he wasn't at the meeting," Gideon said doggedly. "Or anywhere in the cafe; I would have remembered."

"Well, of course not. But whoever it was must have been afraid someone might recognize him if he showed up at the hospital himself, so he got somebody else-maybe a friend, maybe somebody he hired, who knows-to get rid of the bones for him. How hard would it have been-"

"All right, okay," Gideon said dejectedly, "you're right, I agree with you. I guess I just don't like to say it, even to myself."

"But what I find myself wondering," Joly said, "is how this person knew enough to pretend to be Dr. Roussillot. How would he know who Dr. Roussillot is?"

"Oh, that wasn't hard," Gideon said. "I walked right up to him and told him that's who he was: 'You must be Dr. Roussillot.' He was happy to go along."

"Ah." Pause. "And he struck you with the leg bone, the femur? There, behind the left ear, where that remarkable protuberance is?"

"I assume so. The last I remember, he had the bone in his hand. And that's where the lump is, so I suppose that's where he hit me-twice. There are actually two remarkable protuberances, not one."

Joly frowned at him. "What do you mean, you assume so? Don't you remember being struck?"

"No."

"But it may be important. Perhaps if you try to reconstruct-"

"Lucien, let me explain something to you. When people say they remember the blow that knocked them out they're either making it up or kidding themselves. A knockout blow is a concussion, and a concussion is an interruption of cortical electric activity that induces a retrograde amnesia which ninety-nine times out of a hundred obliterates any memory of the precipitating trauma and more often than not the events immediately preceding. Period, fini, end of discussion, subject closed, all right?"

"I…"

Julie smiled at the startled Joly. "He's a little touchy on the subject of concussions today."

"I don't wonder," Joly said peaceably. "All right, then, let's go over the rest of what we know, or think we know, one more time." He crossed his long, thin legs, first adjusting the trouser-crease, and propped his gold-rimmed cup and saucer on his knee. "Now. As Julie points out, we can tentatively assume that the person who attacked you and removed the bones learned where they were from someone who was present at the staff meeting when you announced their location."

"I didn't announce it, I just-"

"Second, I think we can proceed on the assumption that the bones were taken-and taken so quickly-in order to prevent your examining them, inasmuch as you yourself told them you would be doing so this afternoon."

Gideon was stretched out nearly supine in his chair, staring at his shoes. "This is really making me feel great, Lucien." He tapped his temple with a finger. "Really smart, you know?"

"Third, we can probably assume that the purpose of removing them was to prevent the possibility of your finding evidence of tuberculosis on the ribs and thus provisionally identifying the remains as Jean Bousquet's. We can assume this because you yourself told-"

Gideon waved a hand at him. "I know, I know. Boy, you really like to rub it in, don't you?"

"All right, then," Joly said, "given that much-"

Julie put down her tea. "May I say something, Lucien? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to assume that whoever took the bones did it to prevent Gideon from finding out it wasn't Bousquet?"

Joly frowned at her over the rim of his cup. "Wasn't Bousquet?"

"Well, say Gideon had looked at them and those marks on the ribs weren't there, it would mean-or at least it might mean-that it wasn't Bousquet at all, but someone else. And maybe somebody didn't want you to know that. Isn't that possible?"

"I suppose-"

"Possible but not probable," Gideon said. "I know these people; they think like scientists. They know perfectly well that whereas finding periostitis would be a positive sign of the disease and therefore a strong indicator that the bones are Bousquet's, not finding it wouldn't prove anything one way or the other-particularly because t.b. is a rare disease nowadays, and almost half of the very few people who do get it never develop those lesions anyway."

"Yes," Julie said, "but do the people at the institute know that?"

"They do now," Gideon said miserably. "That's another thing I happened to mention this morning."

"Considering that you spent only forty minutes with them," Joly observed, "you managed to impart a great deal of useful information."

Gideon slouched deeper into the armchair.

Julie poured more tea for the three of them, adding the sugar that Gideon asked for to settle his uneasy stomach. "Gideon, which one do you think was behind it? Any idea?"

"Not a clue."

"But obviously, one of them must know something about Bousquet's history that he wasn't telling."

"I think they all know something they weren't telling. Beaupierre almost gave it away at one point, but they jumped all over him, and he shut up like a clam, and so did everybody else."

"And you believe they were protecting a member of the group, one of their own," Joly said.

Gideon nodded. "Yes. Unless I'm way off-base, I think the 'co-worker' you told me about, the one that Bousquet had his "unpleasantness" with, is one of them. And they all banded together to protect whoever it is."

"Which inescapably leads us to wonder if this unnamed person may have murdered Bousquet over this unnamed unpleasantness?"

It was, of course, the question that had been on Gideon's mind all afternoon, ever since he'd come to on the floor of the morgue, and he'd yet to reach an answer. "Lucien, I just don't know. Anything I'd say would be a guess."

"Then guess."

"All right, my guess is no. Or if one of them actually did-which is hard for me to make myself take seriously-I don't think that's what it is that the others know. I got the feeling that what they know is merely that he or she had some kind of trouble with Bousquet and they're worried that it's going to make difficulties for him, or her, with the police. With you. That's all."

"If that's all," Julie said hotly, "why did they steal the bones and almost kill you doing it? Is that supposed to make things less difficult with the police?"

"I don't know that either."

There was a long silence, and then Joly said: "I have something interesting to tell you. I had an informative conversation with Madame Renouard a little while ago."

"Madame Renouard…" Gideon repeated, searching his mind. "That's…?"

"Bousquet's landlady, who was able to enlighten me in the matter of his relations at the institute. If we assume that her account is reliable, Bousquet did indeed have difficulties-I mean to say, extreme difficulties-with one particular member of the staff." He broke a plum tart in two, delicately inserted one piece into his mouth, and used a napkin to carefully wipe powdered sugar from his lips and fingers.

Gideon fidgeted. "So, who?"

Joly disposed of the rest of the tart and swabbed down his lips and fingers again while he chewed and swallowed. "As a matter of fact, it was Ely Carpenter."

"Carpenter! " Gideon exclaimed unwisely, cringing at the bright flash of pain behind his eyes.

"Carpenter," said Julie more softly. "Now that raises some interesting questions."

"For example," Gideon said, thinking aloud, "was Bousquet somehow tied in with the hoax?"

He was indeed, said Joly. According to Madame Renouard, Carpenter had somehow come to the conclusion that Jean Bousquet was the writer of the anonymous letter to Paris-Match that had first exposed the Tayac fraud. In what had apparently been an intense public scene at the institute, Carpenter had accused Bousquet to his face and Bousquet had hotly denied that he'd had anything to do with it. Carpenter had gone further, suggesting that Bousquet had somehow been involved with the scheme from the beginning-the planting of the bones, followed by the subsequent expose-all with the intention of humiliating him, Carpenter.

"But what reason could he have?" Julie asked. "Bousquet was just a temporary workman, wasn't he? Why would he want to humiliate the director?"

There again, the all-knowing Madame Renouard claimed to have the inside story: not long before, it had been discovered that one or two Paleolithic stone implements had disappeared from the institute's storage area. On investigating, Carpenter had concluded that Bousquet had sold them to tourists-another accusation that Bousquet had angrily rejected-and issued Bousquet a formal reprimand and warning. The injured Bousquet had made no secret, at least not to his landlady and his fellow boarders, of his resentment.

"I've seen the letter to Paris-Match," Joly said. "It is not the language of an educated man, and certainly not that of a professional archaeologist."

"So you think it might be true-that Bousquet wrote it?" Gideon asked. "I think it shouldn't be dismissed as a possibility. Nor should the possibility that he was behind the hoax."

Julie shook her head. "I don't know. Could somebody like that know enough to really take in an expert, a genuine archaeologist? It's hard to believe."

"It is," Gideon agreed. "On the other hand, if you think about it that's exactly what Bones to Pick is about: the amazing capacity of even the most learned experts to turn into gullible chumps if they want to believe something."

"That's so, but whether Bousquet was or wasn't the perpetrator is irrelevant to our purposes," Joly said. "The fact that Carpenter thought it was true still remains." He paused to let this sink in. "You see what it means, don't you?"

Gideon slowly nodded. "It means I probably got it wrong. They're not protecting one of themselves, they're protecting Carpenter, or rather his memory. They're afraid he's going to be accused of killing Bousquet."

"Well, maybe he did kill Bousquet," Julie said. "He's dead. Somebody killed him."

"Yes, that's the point I was about to make," Joly said. From a pocket of his suit coat he took the small leather-bound notebook he carried and with the aid of a moistened forefinger turned to one of its pages. "Consider these facts: The hoax was first exposed by means of the letter on the first of September. On the twenty-fifth Carpenter suddenly submitted his resignation and, without waiting to learn if it was accepted, flew off into the night sky toward Brest, a journey he didn't live to complete. On the twenty-eighth of the same month, Madame Renouard notified the police that Bousquet had not been seen for three days-since the twenty-fifth of September, to be exact. Do you not find it suggestive that-"

"Forget it, Lucien," said Gideon, "you're definitely on the wrong track there. Bousquet was still alive long after Carpenter died. Ely couldn't have killed him."

Joly's eyebrows went up; his mouth pursed. He waited for Gideon to continue.

"He called the institute a month or so later to ask for a job reference. They told me this morning. From Corsica, they thought."

"And how would they know where he was calling from?"

"Well, that's what he said, I suppose. But wherever he was calling from, he was definitely alive, so that lets Ely out."

"Unless," Joly said after a moment's thought, "the account was concocted for your benefit."

"Why would they do that?"

"For the reason you suggested: to prevent suspicion from attaching to Carpenter."

"I really don't think so," said Gideon, but with something less than total conviction, "but-anyhow, aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves? Let's not jump-"

Julie interrupted. "No, it's a point. You told us they all obviously liked Carpenter and would've wanted to protect him, right? So isn't it at least possible-"

"Look," Gideon said, "we don't even know for sure that those bones are Bousquet's. I mean, I think they are too-we sure don't have any other candidates, do we?-but unless we get them back, which seems pretty unlikely, there's no possible way to prove it."

"But isn't there?" Julie said through a mouthful of plum tart, then paused to gulp some tea to get it down. "What about that tooth that was left in the box? It has some dental work on it, doesn't it? I can remember a dozen cases where that was all you needed for a positive identification."

"Right," Gideon said. "All we had to do was ask the right dentist to see whether they matched the files of one of his patients. But to find the right dentist you have to have a pretty good idea of who the victim is so that-"

"Which we do. Jean Bousquet."

"Sure, but who was Jean Bousquet's dentist?"

"Why should that be so difficult to find out? He must have had a dentist. Someone did that work. And you said there was a crown too, on another tooth."

"But not somebody from around here," Gideon said. "The crown had a lot of wear on it; it was in his mouth a good ten years, probably more. And Bousquet was a drifter; who knows where he was ten years ago?"

"Not I," Joly agreed sadly.

"Oh," said Julie.

"Of course it's always possible he did go to a dentist while he was here," Gideon said, "and that dentist might be able to help."

"Yes, I'll see," Joly said, but they all knew there wasn't much hope of that. Drifters, whether French or American, didn't typically make regular visits to the dentist, and Bousquet had spent only three months in Les Eyzies.

"So," Julie said brightly after a solemn pause during which the only sound was the clinking of china cups on china saucers, "where to from here?

"I was thinking," Gideon said. "Tomorrow I start my interviews on the hoax. I ought to be able to pry a little more out of them about what was going on at the time without too much trouble."

Julie stared at him and then at Joly. "He's got to be kidding."

"Thank you, Gideon," Joly said politely, "but I have my own resources."

"Sure you do, but you said I could do it more subtly than you could before; why not now?"

"Why not…" Julie put down her cup with a bang. "Because they've already fragmented your… your stupid neuroaxons, haven't they? What do you expect them to do next? Politely ask if you wouldn't be good enough, old chap, to stay out of it?"

"Julie makes a good-" Joly began.

"Now be reasonable, people," Gideon said. "Let's look at this objectively. No one had any intention of killing me or even injuring me-"

"No? What was it then?" Julie asked. "Some form of ritual greeting known only to Middle Paleolithic archaeologists? 'Salutations, O fellow archaeologist.' Bop!"

What he'd meant, he explained, was that it was obvious that no one had gone to the St.-Cyprien morgue with the objective of doing him harm. The purpose had clearly been to remove the bones so that they couldn't be identified, nothing more. Gideon had had the misfortune of walking in at the wrong time. The tap on the head he'd received "Tap on the head!" Julie exclaimed to Joly. "That wasn't what he was calling it an hour ago."

– had been a desperation measure, nothing more. "And if the guy had wanted me dead, why didn't he finish the job then, instead of leaving me on the floor unconscious?"

"Maybe he thought you were dead."

"No, he wouldn't have thought I was dead. And anyway, I'm not any kind of a threat to anybody any more. With the bones gone what could they have to worry about from me? Besides, my asking everybody questions is perfectly natural. They're all expecting it. That's what I'm here for, remember?

Pretty impeccable logic, he thought, but Joly seemed doubtful and Julie wasn't buying it at all. "I'd say the issue is moot," she said. "How do you expect to interview anybody tomorrow? You can't even blink your eyes without wincing."

"Granted, but tomorrow, if I'm feeling better-"

"I'll tell you what," Joly said thoughtfully. "I expect to be busy with other things tomorrow in any case-I want to chat with some of Bousquet's acquaintances, and with the receptionist at the St.-Cyprien hospital, and so on. Assuming that you're physically able, I don't think it would be a bad thing at all if you went ahead with your scheduled interviews."

"Fine."

"But only on the condition that you don't play at detective. You're to stick to the subject of your book and not raise questions about Bousquet and his troubles with Carpenter or anyone else, or about the missing bones; that's my job. On the other hand, if information presents itself without provocation on your part, well and good; I'll be interested to hear."

"Deal."

"And it would be wise to make no mention of the episode at St.-Cyprien. Only the guilty party is likely to know of it, and it might be that he would say something to give himself away."

"Good point, I agree. Julie, what about you? If you'd really feel better if I didn't-"

"Do you really promise to do what Lucien asked you to? Stick to the Old Man of Tayac?"

He raised his hand. "Word of honor."

"Okay, good, I'll go along with it as long as you promise not to do anything dumb. You might have brain cells to spare, but I only have one husband, and I'm not interested in being in the market for another."

"I'm relieved to hear it."

She stirred her tea and laid down her spoon. "On the other hand, another day like today and I just might change my mind."