Speak Softly My Love (20 page)

“
In short? We just keep going?”

“
Exactly. Er. As best you can. Things will change in five
minutes or five hours. That’s just the way it is in homicide—” He
loosened his tie. “I’ll, uh, be back with you as quick as I can.
But use your heads. We want to find this man, and maybe we have. Or
maybe we haven’t. And so far—so
far,
we have no idea of what’s
really going on here.”

He
patted Jeannine on the shoulder, and followed his partner, who
would have presumably headed for their regular
squad-room.

“
Sir.”

He
stopped.

“
Yes?”

“
What if we need to go to the bathroom?”

“
Then find one of those too.” He cleared his throat. “Okay.
You get a break every two hours, five or ten minutes, no more. You
are not goofing off. One at a time. You are under my authority and
Detective Etienne Hubert as well. Don’t let anyone take you away
from this duty. You guys are mine, okay? Tell them to come and see
me first, n’est pas?”

Three
sober and serious faces looked at him and nodded.

“
Yes, sir.” At this stage of the game they were just parrots,
really, two of them anyways.

The two
dumb ones.

Jeannine
had just saved their asses.

Chapter Sixteen

“
Oh. Sorry.” Hubert almost rammed the door into the back of
Inspector Maintenon.

Maintenon turned and looked at him inquiringly.

“
You guys are back pretty quick.”

Levain
spoke up.

“
Not much to it. Whole thing solved in five minutes. By the
time we got there, a witness had coughed up a name. They saw the
whole thing.” Uniformed gendarmes went straight to the fellow’s
front door, where he was apparently waiting for them to
arrive.

He had
surrendered peacefully enough. He was still being processed and
would quickly become another statistic.

“
Well, that’s handy.”

Tailler
was standing there, chewing his lip as Gilles took his hat off and
hung up the jacket again, moving at a measured pace and clearly
with his thoughts elsewhere.

Finally
he turned.

“
So. How are we doing?”

“
Oh, yeah.” Tailler nodded firmly. “We got a hit,
Gilles—Inspector. We never would have expected it, but Jeannine,
one of the lady cops, actually spoke to the guy.”

“
Oh, really.”

Tailler
stood there with this lost expression, not quite wringing his
hands, but clearly a little stunned by the development. After all
they had put into it.

Hubert
quickly explained how Jeannine had handled it, to an approving nod
from Levain.

“
Okay.” Maintenon went to his desk and sat. “So. What do we do
now?”

Tailler
nodded. He licked his lips and tried to think it
through.

Gilles
leaned back, put his hands behind his head. His eyes closed. Hubert
thought he’d better help his friend.

“
He was located in Chalons de Champagne. We have our people
calling around, sort of backtracking. We’re trying to get
confirmation of his movements—cities, hotels, wine producers, that
sort of thing.”

Gilles
gave Tailler a nod. In the background, Hubert waved a piece of
paper. It looked like LeBref or somebody had taken a
message.

“
According to the Army, Didier has never done military
service.”

He got
nothing but a blank look from Emile in return.

Hmn.
Maybe it wasn’t that important after all.

“
Sir. We think maybe it’s time. Time to ask Monique to
identify the body—if that’s all right with you?”

Gilles
nodded, without opening his eyes. They all saw it.

“
So in other words, play dumb? We know nothing until someone
tells us otherwise…?”

Maintenon nodded again.

“
Hmn.”

A wise policy.

“
Ah…yes, sir.”

“
We have one or two other questions we’ve been meaning to ask
her. Also, we might get a few more people sent up over the course
of the day. For our little phone project. Then we have this
itinerary from Monique to check out.” That one went back a month or
a bit more. “Oh, and Didier has never done military
service.”

Hubert
looked at Tailler with a raised eyebrow.

“
I think that’s about it.”

Gilles
nodded.

“
Very well.” He sat up and opened his eyes, blinking and then
giving them a quick rub with long fingertips.

Maintenon looked at the clock and then he looked at the
coffeepot. There was never going to be enough time in the day. He
looked at Hubert, still standing there as Tailler dropped down into
his desk chair in anticipation, one way or another.

“
Very well, gentlemen. Carry on.” His eyes fell.

Gilles
lifted the cover of a dusty buff file folder. He took out the first
page and began to read.

Tailler
opened up one of several notebooks lying on his desk.

He was
looking for her phone number.

“
Monique, Monique…Monique.”

***

They
were playing their cards very close to their chests.

Hubert
had been the one who called Monique Godeffroy. She sounded cold,
and distant on the phone. He told her very carefully that they
needed to speak to her and asked if she had any major appointments
for the day.

When she
said that she didn’t, he arranged for the two of them to go around
straight away. How in the hell he had become second banana was a
good question, but Tailler was the one with all the ideas
today.

When she
answered the door, their initial impression of the woman was
confirmed. Monique would spend forty-five minutes in front of the
mirror every morning, regular as clockwork, every day, no matter
what happened. It would have killed her not to. It was like she had
just spent forty francs, not on her shoes but on the feet
themselves.

Tailler’s own feet, encased in those hard leather
clod-hoppers all day long, pounding hard pavement as often as not,
could, on occasion, be a bit gruesome. Her toes looked like little
candies to his suddenly depraved eyes—he had no idea of what was
happening to him lately, and there were times when the bizarre
juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements was just
too much.

It was
just too much to bear sometimes.

It’s not
that Tailler didn’t feel terrible for her. Obviously, he
did.

Of
course he did. He very much did.

The
trouble was that little element of doubt.

He was
also a cop, and this whole thing stank to high heaven.

Does the Pope eat fish on Friday?

He sure as hell does.

It’s just that simple sometimes.

Even a
missing husband wasn’t enough to interfere with what was clearly a
strong need to present a carefully-composed face to the world. Not
for one such as Monique. In a way, it wasn’t very likeable. It was
merely beautiful to look upon. Tailler knew he would never really
understand.

He
doubted if anyone ever had, but her hair was a silken cloud, her
lips were ruby-red and her teeth still sparkled.

“
Thank you for seeing us so promptly, Madame.” Hubert took off
his hat and stepped over the threshold.

She led
them into the salon. Tailler jumped right in with the questioning
before she could properly get them seated. The two detectives
remained standing as if time were precious, which it was,
actually.

“
Madame Godeffroy, we were wondering if Didier had a passport.
He must have traveled outside of the country from time to time.”
Tailler’s tone was pleasant.

The
longer they could keep her mystified the better.

“
But yes, of course.” She stood there in forlorn, hopeless
beauty.

She had intuitively picked up a hint of
something,
right out of thin
air.

They
stared right back.

“
Would you like me to get it for you?”

“
Ah, yes, please. Really, it’s strictly routine,
Madame.”

The lady
turned and stepped out of the room. They could hear her rummaging
in a desk or dresser in a room somewhere near the back, on this
floor still.

There
was a little flip of the guts when she came back and she had the
passport in her hand.

They
desperately tried not to let on. Tailler nodded
encouragingly.

Tailler
extended his hand and she gave it up readily enough. He took a
quick look at it, various dates and stamps going by in a blur as he
riffled through the pages. Monsieur Godeffroy had been to Italy six
or seven weeks previously. Nothing unexpected.

“
If you don’t mind, we’d like to hang onto this for a while.”
Tailler uttered a deep sigh. “Monique. I’m afraid we might have
some bad news for you. And yet we don’t really know. In such
matters, it is always best to be sure.”

She
looked like a scared rabbit.

He slid
the passport into his right-hand jacket pocket as her eyes
followed.

Her hand
went up to her mouth. Her eyes were wide with shock, and somehow
she knew—just like the other one, Lucinde.

She
knew.

“
It’s Didier.”

“
We don’t know that for sure, Madame.” Hubert to the rescue,
but there were only so many ways they could play it.

Tailler
pulled out the morgue photo, their best one, and showed it to
her.

She gave
a quick sob, and then slowly subsided onto the couch.

Tailler
turned abruptly, going to the window. He put his hands behind his
back, striking a pose of commanding rigidity.

He’d
been sort of wondering how to act.

This
would have to do.

Hubert
settled down beside her, knees close to hers and taking her lovely
hand into his own. Those lush, curving eyelashes batted back tears.
Her scent washed over him.

“
This is very hard for you. But we need to have someone,
someone who knows Didier very well, to come down and have a look at
the body. Honestly, we can’t even really say if it
is
Didier—your husband.
There’s no identification. The trouble is, Monique, that it
might be
, and we really
need to know for sure. You’re the only one that can help
us.”

Tailler
turned, sighing again, as Monique Godeffroy’s face fell into her
hands and those lovely shoulders with their perfect, bird-like
bones, heaved and shook with the shock and the grief.

With a
look at Tailler, biting his lip and kind of hating himself for that
moment, Hubert reached over and put an arm around the
lady.

“
It’s all right. Just take all the time you need.”

She
wept, falling over against him and there wasn’t much either one of
them could do about that. He had a left hand so he brought that one
up as well.

He had
to admit, it was stimulating.

“
There, there.”

Tailler’s guts were tight. There was such a thing as duty.
Unpleasant as that might be sometimes.

“
We have a car waiting outside, Madame Godeffroy. Is there
someone we could call for you?” The lady was dressed well enough,
he suggested rather gruffly, as if overcome with his own
emotions.

It might
even be true.

“
We could call a friend. You don’t have to go through this
alone.”

Tailler was all mixed up inside, at least to a certain
extent. It wasn’t easy for any of them, but they still
didn’t
know.
Telling her that seemed to help, for she sat up
again.

Hubert
patted her wrist.

“
We really
don’t
know. We really
do
need your help.”

She
looked at poor Hubert with tears streaking her mascara and leaving
two big trails down her cheeks.

“
Thank you, gentlemen. I shall be quite all right.” The lady
would do her best.

Hubert
stood as Tailler turned and headed for the front
hallway.

“
Okay. Let’s see about finding you a coat.” Some kind of a
hat, maybe.

***

“
It’s not him.” The lady sniffled, then her face turned and
there was this look.

“
What?”

She
smiled. Teeth showed. She giggled and sniffled some
more.

The lady
sagged in relief.

“
Are you sure about that?”