Cezanne's Quarry (9 page)

Martin was leaving the Picard house filled with a sense of purpose and direction, when the postman stopped him and handed him a letter. Martin recognized his mother’s handwriting at once and, with a sigh, put the envelope in his pocket. He did not need to open it to know what the message would be. His failures as a son and suitor were old stories.

When he got to the courthouse, things did not improve. Old Joseph was waiting to deliver a most unwelcome message.

“M. Franc told me to tell you that they were not able to find Paul Cézanne.” Barely had Martin digested this piece of bad news when he heard shouts coming from somewhere inside the Palais.

“I believe that’s the maid,” Old Joseph explained in an unnecessary whisper. “M. Franc said he was going to get her right away.”

Martin gave his frail clerk a weary pat on the back and walked out of his chambers in time to watch two gendarmes drag a woman by her arms and shoulders up the main staircase. Following this struggling trio, cap in hand, was Franc. “I won’t go. I have nothing to say. Don’t send me back. Let me go! Let me go!” The woman’s cries echoed through the cavernous building. Her limbs kept hitting against the hard edges of the stairs, adding to her anguish. There was no easy way to stop this brutal procession midstream, so Martin did not even try. At the top of the stairs, the journey became easier for the police as they hurried down the hall with their burden between them and threw her on the hard wooden bench in front of Martin’s office. She was still flailing, but her words had dissolved into sobs.

Franc caught Martin’s eye. “Arlette LaFarge.”

Martin stared at the small, sallow creature. A “true Parisian,” as the inhabitants of the capital liked to say, meaning that she was an offspring of the densely packed central quarters, raised without benefit of sunshine or fresh air. Her male relatives were a favored constituency of the Third Republic, the kind politicians called, with a mixture of affection and cynicism, the “little people.” What an appropriate name, Martin thought, for men and women shrunken and bent by ceaseless labors in dank, dark shops. Because of his friend Merckx, Martin had known many such laborers in Lille. As a judge, he had become well acquainted with their counterparts in Aix. The “little people” never liked his chambers very much.

Martin leaned over to address the sobbing woman. “Mme LaFarge. Mme LaFarge.”

She knelt down, clinging to his leg. “Don’t send me back, sir. Please. He’ll kill me. I know he will.”

“Who will kill you?” Martin forced the woman off of him and back onto the bench.

“He beats me terribly.”

“Who? M. Westerbury?” Martin was holding onto Arlette’s shoulders trying to get her to look at him.

The name caught her attention. “Oh, no, sir. Not M. Westerbury. No. Never. My husband, Jacques, who’s waiting for me in Paris.” She broke into sobs again. “Mme Solange promised, she promised I’d never have to go back.”

“The poor woman is terrified,” Martin said to Franc.

The inspector shrugged. “She doesn’t want to have to face a judge and tell the truth.”

“Did anyone threaten her?”

“No, no,” Franc seemed disgusted by the question. “We just told her she would have to tell us everything she knows. And that she would have to talk to you. And,” he added, directing his words toward Arlette, who had flattened herself against the marble wall, “she has chosen to tell us nothing, except to give us a description of the messenger that would fit about a hundred street urchins in Aix alone.”

Martin bent down to the woman. “Mme LaFarge, listen to me. Don’t you want to find the person who killed your mistress?”

She nodded, her eyes wide and frightened.

“Then you must talk to me. It is the law. I will not hurt you. I will not send you back to Paris.”

Her chest began to heave again. More sobs. And this was the woman who Martin had hoped would be his entrée into Solange Vernet’s world.

Franc cleared his throat to catch Martin’s attention and asked if they could speak in chambers. Martin was eager to speak to Franc as well, about why they hadn’t been able to find Cézanne.

Before Martin could open his mouth, Franc began. He was quite agitated. “Don’t be too easy on her, sir, I beg you. I just talked with Riquel. She came to the morgue late yesterday afternoon while me and my men were off searching the quarry. Apparently the Englishman told her that she could have ‘the honor’ of dressing the corpse. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think that Riquel played the fool. He left her alone with the body.”

“How did that happen?” Not that Martin could see the harm.

“According to him, she begged to be left alone ‘one last time’ with her mistress. And she wanted to look at the clothes she was murdered in, to fold them nice and neat for her mistress.” Franc’s voice was laced with sarcasm. “She said that her mistress was a
lady
,” practically spitting out the word, “and she wanted to treat her like one.”

Martin could not fathom why his inspector found the maid’s regard for her mistress so infuriating. If it was only because Solange Vernet had found a way to rise above her origins, then Franc, the ambitious, self-proclaimed man of the people, was a flaming hypocrite. And if it was something else, why should Franc care so deeply about whether or not the murdered woman had had lovers?

Franc took Martin’s silence as leave to continue his ranting. “By the time I got back to bring the evidence box to you, the Vernet woman was dressed in a fancy white nightgown—as if she were some pure young thing—and every piece of clothing had been smoothed out just as nice as you please. I only got all the details of the ‘final visit’ this morning when I asked Riquel about her reactions.”

After building up this head of steam, Franc suddenly stopped and waited for a response, making Martin feel like he was failing some sort of test.

“The note!” Franc finally exploded. “We haven’t found it yet!”

Evidently Franc had come around to the view that it really did exist. Or was he just frustrated by his own failures of the morning? “Surely you had searched through the clothes,” Martin said, trying to calm down his inspector.

“Yes, but don’t you see? These women have their ways, their secrets.” Franc held up his two thick hands. “I couldn’t search the way she could. They were hatmakers and dressmakers, remember? They know all the secret places where women hide things that they don’t want us men to find. And think, what if Westerbury asked her to try to find it for him?”

What if? “Even if it were true, what do you propose to do about it? Strip her?” Not in his office. And not while he was in charge of the case.

“That might not be such a bad idea.”

Martin did not want to quarrel with Franc. They needed each other. “Look,” he said, “let’s just think for a minute. Whose side would Arlette be on? Westerbury’s or Vernet’s? Surely she was not a love interest for Westerbury. How did she react around the body?”

“When she was done with her little game, she began to wail and keen. Riquel said that she threw herself on the corpse. He had trouble pulling her off. Then she kept holding onto Vernet’s hand, kissing it over and over again.”

Kissing those gray, swollen hands. Martin sucked in his breath. He hoped that the cool of the prison basement had slowed down Solange Vernet’s decomposition, and that the ministrations of Dr. Riquel had quelled the smell of rot and excrement. Still, Arlette LaFarge must have loved her mistress very much. Or had something to feel guilty about.

“I’m not at all sure she would risk being sent back to Paris or to prison for helping Westerbury,” Martin reasoned aloud in another attempt to try to steady his companion. “I’ll question her carefully about the note.”

Franc did not hide his skepticism very well. He was huffing and puffing like a bull in heat.

“I’m good at it too, you know. Questioning.” It was demeaning to have to assert himself to his own inspector. Martin fully expected Franc to explode when he laid out his plan. But he forged ahead anyway. “Moreover, I’m thinking of sending the maid home and questioning her in the apartment.”

“Back to the apartment!”

Martin held up his hand. “I’m
not
letting her off the hook. I’ve decided it would be a good idea for me to go there, to have my own look around. And she may feel more like talking, away from all this.”

“But then she’ll have even more time to make up some story,” Franc protested. Their eyes met for a moment, and then a glimmer of approval lit up the inspector’s face, blossoming into a smile. “Aha. So that’s it. You’re going to become a
real
investigating magistrate.”

Or one bursting with unseemly ambition
. Anyone who read the newspapers had heard of judges eager to make a mark by beating their prosecutors to crime scenes and breaking down the doors of suspects’ houses. That wasn’t Martin’s style. He didn’t want notoriety. Although from the look on his inspector’s face, it seemed that Franc might prefer working with a judge who did. “While you’re at it, you might as well consider going out to the Cézanne estate.”

“What?” Did the inspector think that Martin should be out hunting for suspects?

“I think Old Joseph already told you.” Franc began to talk very rapidly, as if to ward off any expression of Martin’s displeasure. “I went out early this morning. The ‘artist’ wasn’t around, and they had no idea when or if he will be. At least that’s what the women claimed. But do you want to know who had been there?” A superior grin spread across Franc’s grizzled face. “Our prime suspect, Westerbury. He was there last night, throwing stones at the windows and making a disturbance.”

Martin sank into one of the wooden chairs facing his desk. On top of everything else, Westerbury was running amok. This case was slipping out of his control.

“Look, I’ll take care of finding the Englishman. We can arrest him for disturbing the peace,” Franc said. “You don’t have to worry about that. And I assume you’ll let me keep him in jail this time.”

Still numb, Martin nodded his consent. Of course they’d hold Westerbury this time. The only real question was, why had he let the sniveling wretch go in the first place? To prove that French law was every bit as civilized as English? Martin scratched his beard in frustration. How stupid that seemed now. This was a murder case, not a patriotic civics lesson.

“And you, sir, you can deal with the Cézannes,” Franc went on relentlessly. “That’s a much more delicate situation. They’re rich and have a lot of connections. On top of that, the women told me the old banker is sick. I don’t think you want to be in a position of dragging any of them down here for questioning.”

“First, before anything else,” Martin said, pulling himself together enough to stop the flow of Franc’s presumptions, “tell me what happened when you went to find Cézanne.” Martin needed to drive home the point that he was not the only one making mistakes.

But the question did not even faze Franc. “It’s a big place. It would have taken a dozen men to search it. And if he slipped out the back. . . .” He shrugged. “There are lots of ways he could have hidden or gotten away.” The inspector seemed surprisingly unbothered by the artist’s evasions. It was as if Franc were certain that they already knew who the murderer was.

“So you’re not sure he wasn’t there?”

“No, but the women insisted. You could go with one of my men this afternoon.”

Martin rubbed his aching forehead. Not only might Cézanne have escaped, but he might have done so with the full complicity of his rich and influential family. Everyone in the courthouse would agree with Franc that Martin should tread lightly, that he should treat the Cézannes with more care and deference than a maid or a foreigner. Everyone except Martin. At least in this instance, Martin thought with a certain bitter irony, he would be treating the rich and influential family with the same courtesy that he planned to give the maid. Martin looked up at his inspector and agreed to visit the Cézannes.

“Good!” Franc’s dark, bullish mood had completely evaporated. He was almost bouncing on his toes. “Frankly, sir, now that you’ve thought of it, I think sending the maid home and going there is a good idea. See how they lived, and tell me if you don’t agree that there was something fishy going on.”

Instead of reprimanding Franc for not rounding up Cézanne, Martin found himself oddly relieved at having gotten the inspector’s approval. Franc, the man of experience, exuded righteous anger and confidence, while Martin was barely keeping his head above water. Without another word, he got up and went out into the hall where the maid and the gendarmes were sitting in a silent truce. He sent them all back to the Cours Mirabeau. Then he wrote out a warrant for Westerbury’s arrest, which he handed to Franc, and ordered his clerk to go to search through the police and municipal records for anything he could find on Paul Cézanne.

Alone in his office, Martin sat for a moment, staring into space, before reaching in his pocket to pull out his mother’s letter. He might as well read it, since the morning could not get much worse. He tore open the envelope and unfolded the sturdy cream-colored paper. Just as he expected, every line was calculated to make him cringe.

Lille

Feast of St. Helen

Dearest Son,

How I do miss my only child! And how I pray every night that you will be safe. So does Marthe. I saw her in the street last week with her sisters and, I fear, I must scold you. She says that you have only written her twice since Christmas. The poor dear did not complain, of course, but surely it is time that you made your intentions clear once and for all. Being the oldest is becoming such a burden to her. She fears that none of her sisters will feel free to marry until she does.

You know my feelings, dearest son. What a wonderful daughter she would make for me. And what a match for you! It’s not only the money, it’s the children. Coming from that large family, surely, she will give you many sons and daughters, and me, the greatest comfort for my old age, grandchildren.

But I not only scold. I bring news. As I write this Marthe is in Lourdes! She is taking three of her cases, a crippled boy, an old woman, and a poor, sick seamstress, on the famous white train from Paris. They are all hoping for a miracle. Marthe was so excited. I wish you could have seen her. She told me that more people than ever are going on the National Pilgrimage, and standing up for their faith. But, of course, you must know that. I am assuming they do have Catholic newspapers down there.

Marthe told me that she will ask our Holy Mother to protect you from the cholera. She did not say it, but I also think that she will be praying to get a marriage proposal soon. This would not be a miracle, just good sense and gratitude to a family that took us under their wing after your father died.

Enough preaching! My greatest wish is to see you again soon. Can’t you find some time this summer to come and visit your poor mother? If not, write! Tell me that you are well and happy. You are my greatest, my only joy.

Your most loving Maman