Skeleton dance

Chapter 16

It was the first time Gideon had ever seen Joly's jaw drop, a sight made even more memorable by the unlit cigarette pasted to his upper lip. He shook out the match he'd just lit. "What did you say?"

"I said," Gideon replied, "that these bones aren't Jean Bousquet's, they're Ely Carpenter's."

"Not…" Irritably, Joly plucked the jiggling cigarette from his lip, gestured with it at the paltry assemblage on the table, and stared indignantly at Gideon. "From these? But, really, how can you expect me… how can you…?"

Gideon picked up the fractured thumb bone and showed it to Joly. It was this that had cinched it, he said, shamelessly taking his own sweet time. (This was another one of those all-too-rare moments, another rabbit out of the hat, and it would have taken a stronger man than Gideon to keep from milking the situation at least a little.) A fracture of that particular kind, on that particular bone, a longitudinal torsion fracture of the first metacarpal, was so closely linked to one particular cause that it had a name: anthropologists called it "cowboy thumb."

A better name might have been "rodeo thumb," he pointed out, because these days it didn't usually happen out on the range but during saddle-bronc-riding competitions at rodeos, when contestants instinctively grabbed for the saddle horn while they were in the process of being ejected from their saddles. And although hanging on for dear life to a relatively fixed point while the rest of the body was flying head-over-heels ten feet above the ground probably saved a good many heads, ribs, arms, and legs, it was unlikely to do anyone's thumbs any good. All too often, they wound up with ugly longitudinal torsion fractures of the first metacarpal.

"Just like this one," he concluded, handing it to Joly. "You were right about Ely's not going down in that plane, Lucien. The plane crash was a sham, all right, but it wasn't Carpenter who pulled it off. He was right here; he never left. That's his left thumb you're holding."

"Mm." Joly gave it barely a glance, and a doubtful one at that, before putting it on the table.

"You don't buy it?" Gideon asked, a little deflated in spite of himself.

Silently, Joly rolled the unlit cigarette back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. "It's not that I doubt you Gideon-not necessarily-but there are others I have to convince, and to take such a leap- such a leap-on the basis of a single small bone…"

"What difference does it make how big it is? Would you be more comfortable with it if it was some kind of skull fracture?"

Joly shrugged.

"The point is, it's almost certainly a rodeo injury, so unless you think there might be any other ex-rodeo cowboys around- missing rodeo cowboys, that is-that just about has to mean it's Ely Carpenter."

"We don't have rodeos in France," a grumpy Joly said. "Not your kind of barbaric rodeos, riding wild bulls and such things. "

"Well, then-" He blinked. "What did you just say?"

Joly looked at him. "I merely said we don't-"

"Of course!" Gideon exclaimed, his mind racing. "Why didn't I-"He reached excitedly for the right ulna. "That does it!"

Joly took the bone from him and turned it uncomprehendingly from one side to the other. "And what's wrong with this one?"

"Nothing; that's the point."

Ordinarily it would have been another golden opportunity for showboating, but Gideon, taking his cue from a low warning rumble somewhere in Joly's chest, explained succinctly what it was that he himself had only just realized. It was Joly's mention of wild bulls that had done it. Gideon had been to a couple of rodeos in Arizona, and he remembered that in bull-riding competition, bareback-riding rules allowed only one hand to come in contact with the rigging that was cinched to the bull. The other had to wave free. That meant that one forearm, and one forearm only, suffered hard, repeated pounding, rodeo after rodeo, against the bull's spine and the cowboy's thighs and pelvis. "And that," he told Joly, "was more than enough to account for the inflammation in the left ulna but not the right.

Joly squinted at him. "And you're positive nothing else could account for it?"

"No, of course I'm not positive-how could I be positive of that?-but I sure can't think of anything else that makes sense under the circumstances, can you?"

"Nothing comes immediately to mind," Joly allowed, apparently on the edge of being persuaded.

"All right, then. That makes two rodeo-related injuries found in a body buried here in rural southwest France-where there aren't any rodeos-approximately three years ago. And if we take into account the fact that Ely Carpenter, former rodeo competitor, disappeared from sight, from this very area, three years ago and his body was never found, what would you say the odds are against its being anybody but him? A thousand to one? A million to one?"

Joly picked up the metacarpal and studied it again, silently shaking his head.

"I hope you'll put that someplace safer than Marielle's back room," Gideon said. "Safer than the St.-Cyprien morgue too."

Joly nodded. "These will go to Perigueux with me this afternoon." He wrapped the metacarpal in a paper napkin, put it carefully in the folder with the rest of the fragments, and rewound the string around the grommets, then continued to sit there, motionless and contemplative. "So then, what happened to the plane?" he murmured at last.

"What do you mean, what happened to it?"

"Where is it?"

"Well-what you said. The pilot probably landed it in some farmer's field in the dark."

"And then what? Where is it now?"

"Who knows? Gotten rid of some way or another. Maybe it really was ditched in the ocean to get rid of it."

"A $150,000 airplane? I think not."

"All right, the black market, then. What difference does it make?"

"Perhaps none. Still…" He sank into another long, heavy silence, emerging to mutter: "Did we have it backwards then? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter, and not the other way around?"

"Maybe, but I don't see why you want to limit it to Bousquet."

"Yes, you're right about that," Joly agreed. "All right, whom would you suggest?"

"Well, remember, this thing happened while feelings about the Tayac hoax were still running pretty high. There was a lot of tension in the air, a lot of anger and recrimination."

With his eyebrows lifted, Joly studied him. "You think he was killed over the hoax, then."

"No, not necessarily over it. I'm just suggesting that there's a link between the two."

"And your basis?"

"Look, murders and hoaxes aren't exactly everyday occurrences, and here they are happening at the same time, in the same little town, involving the same people. The probability of their being two completely separate, completely unrelated incidents seems pretty remote to me. There has to be a connection."

The unlit cigarette that Joly had been playing with finally came apart in his fingers. He made an annoyed clicking sound, tongue against teeth, and scooped the tobacco into an ashtray, automatically taking another Gitane from the pack, but not lighting that one either.

" Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem, " he intoned in bishoplike cadence.

Gideon couldn't help laughing. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. In other words, always choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. Occam's Razor, the law of parsimony. What made it funny was that he knew exactly where Joly had gotten it-from Gideon himself at the forensic seminar he'd conducted in St. Malo.

"Well, what do I know, Lucien," he said good-naturedly, "I'm just the guy who looks at the bones."

"The bones," Joly repeated, shaking his head slowly back and forth. "Cowboy thumb," he muttered, his tone somewhere between wonder and reproach. "The things you tell me."