Maintenon Mystery # 8, excerpt six.

Louis Shalako

With the local officers trying to get some decent plaster casts, which would keep them busy for a while, Maintenon took Tailler and went looking for Monsieur Delorme, and hopefully, Madame Roux.

There were a couple of males cycling past when they got to the cars, and their stares were eloquent enough. Two cop cars and black sedan all lined up in a row. Nobody around except a couple of perfect strangers…dressed in suits and ties.

Heat haze and thick humidity hung over the open clearing that was the park. There were very few people about, although the pool seemed as popular as ever.

With Delorme’s help and a bit of door-knocking, they finally found her cleaning one of the chalets.

She insisted on finishing up one or two things before she would talk to them, which made sense as the place was occupied and the people would return soon enough.

With her sitting uncomfortably in the back seat, they brought the lady back to the office building, where an equally-uncomfortable Delorme let them use his office. With an unreadable look, he closed the door behind him as Maintenon took a moment to turn down the radio. They watched him go into the kitchen, come out and go along the aisles in the small grocery section on the other side of the main room, taking stock with a pencil and notebook at the ready.

Gilles moved a cat, fat and lazy and not too worried about this one at all. Maintenon finally took a seat to observe the interview. As for the cat, it had another spot on the window ledge which was just as good. He’d even gotten this particular (and rather foolish) human to carry him over…life was good.

Madame Roux might have been beautiful once.

Tailler cleared his throat and began.

“So. Madame. Did Monsieur Dubzek have a lot of company?”

“Er, sometimes.”

“But not always?”

“Not every day or every weekend, no.”

“How do you like working here?”

“It’s all right.”

“They let you wear your clothes, eh?” She was in a more-or-less traditional maid’s costume, suitably dowdy, dull grey in colour and with a fairly low hem.

The shoes were very sensible.

A bit of colour slowly rose in her cheeks.

“Ah, yes, sir.”

“And why is that?”

Cold grey eyes regarded Tailler from across the table as Maintenon patiently listened.

“I suppose it’s because, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to get anybody.” No smile.

This was her answer and she was perfectly serious. The proper questions elicited the proper responses. The lady had been born not a kilometre away, and the farm was still in the family.

Her older brother had it.

“Hmn. What do you think about nudism? What do you think about all these naked people, eh?”

She flushed slightly.

“I try not to think too much about it.”

“So you’re not a big fan then. Why work here at all?”

“I suppose it’s because I needed the job.” She took a breath and opened up a little. “I have two daughters and I like to keep a roof over our heads and feed them, you know, things like that.”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s very hard sometimes. We really appreciate your help in this matter. So, where’s Monsieur Roux?”

“Killed in the war.” The tone was flat, unemotional.

“I’m terribly sorry to hear that. How old are your daughters?’

“Nineteen and twenty-two.”

“All right, we won’t keep you too long, then. So, in your own words, can you tell us about finding Monsieur Dubzek?”

“I suppose. I was cleaning the chalets. Mostly a quick dusting. I don’t wash the dishes, not unless specifically asked, and I don’t do their laundry, you understand.” There was a shack with coin-operated machines, even electric dryers.

There were so many chalets, and only so much time in a day.

If she did the dishes, a reasonable tip would be expected. Delorme had been in the business for over thirty years…

Delorme didn’t miss a trick, when it came to generating income—but then, the season was short, as one could imagine. Staff were not that well-paid either, and so one needed hours—and the odd little tip helped as well.

“So, in other words…”

She sighed.

“I opened up the front door with the master key. I have a box of soaps and cleaners, a sponge, scrub-brushes. Each cabin has certain essentials. The mop and the broom are kept in the small cupboard in the back hallway.” Guests sometimes had their own occasion to use them, and it didn’t make much sense to lug all that around by foot.

Basically, she’d taken her cleaning supplies into the kitchen.

With the light still off and the kitchen curtains partly closed, she’d almost tripped on the body.

She hadn’t screamed, and she was keeping her composure now.

“Was the inner back door closed?”

“No. It was wide open.”

“I see. I wonder if you can help us to identify any of these people.” Tailler had a stack of prints and getting up out of his seat, he went around to sit on her side of the desk. “First one. Do you know them?”

Her eyes flicked over the photo.

“No. Never seen her before.”

“So this one wasn’t a regular guest, then?”

“Not that I know of.”

“What about this one?”

“That’s the Lussier woman. Ah…Adelaide. They were in Number Eight, ah…earlier in the summer. They stayed a week.”

Tailler made a note of it: one positive identification so far.

“How many days a week do you work here?”

“Five or six days a week in summer. We go crazy in early spring, when we’re opening up. I don’t get hardly anything at all in winter.” She explained that most of the time, or a lot of the time, there was no one in the cabin when she went in.

If a cabin was unoccupied, she still went in and had a quick look, a quick dusting sometimes.

She opened up a bit more.

“That’s in the busy season. In winter, I work for anyone that needs it—”

Apparently she was a seamstress. She took in laundry, babysat for the neighbours and did whatever she could to get by. They had a vegetable garden out back, and she worked at it. It was a source of pleasure, one could tell by the way she spoke of it. It was something all her own, where she set the standards and had control over the operation.

One of her daughters was a secretary at a law office in a neighbouring village, (one much larger than St. Etienne with fourteen hundred souls), and the other one worked a counter at a local shop. They were lucky to have three bedrooms, and a bit of a garden out back. That was the beauty of village life, all that space out back.

They were getting by, but at some point the girls would marry, or move off somewhere…

Somebody might get sick. At some point, she was sure to be left on her own…it was very difficult to put anything away for a rainy day.

“I understand, Madame. All right, next picture.”

She shook her head.

Maintenon bit back a deep sigh.

This wasn’t going too far, but one never knew—they might get lucky.

One simply never knew.

She had at least a few names, mostly confirming ones they already had. Ordinary, bourgeois, naked, middle-class people.

It was right about then that the phone began ringing, and Tailler gave Maintenon a look. With Delorme out and about, the thing just kept ringing and ringing.

Gilles gave Tailler a nod and the younger detective picked it up as the lady patiently waited.

“Hello? Can I help you?”

Kornelia und Hartmut Häfele 

His eyes swung over to Maintenon.

There was this look on his face.

“It’s for you, Inspector.”

***

The call was from Levain, stuck in Paris holding the fort as the expression went.

“So, Gilles. In amongst the documents recovered from Dubzek’s apartment was a will.”

“Ah. Excellent—” There had been a desk, a filing cabinet, and a few boxes of old papers tucked onto the top shelf in a closet in Dubzek’s small study.

Rather than go through them at the scene, they’d been inventoried, photographed in their original positions, (with some identifying background shots, clearly of the flat in question), boxed up and brought back to the unit for careful scrutiny. It was all signed, sealed and delivered by agents of the state, duly authorized to do so…

Hubert, Firmin and others, rather than put it off, had cleaned off a couple of desks, laid it all out and gone through it methodically.

“Also. We have a title deed for the building—you remember the little sicko club he ran downtown for a while there.”

“Ah.”

Detective Andre Levain.

There was a short silence as Levain leafed through his notes.

“We’ve got his bankbook and it’s really something—poor old Marko was filthy, stinking rich.” There was this tone in Levain’s voice. “We’re talking a few million here.”

“Interesting.”

“Now we have the name of his doctor, his lawyer, and it turns out there’s a phone number for his mother in a notebook. Her name and address are there. She lives in Orleans, or a little village just outside of it. We made a quick call. That was a toughie, as she doesn’t read the Paris papers and, ah, yeah. I had to break the news. It’s never going to be easy, eh, Gilles? She was pretty broken up by it. She’s about eighty-seven. He owns that building too, a small retirement pension. When the old lady lost it, I ended up talking to a niece who was there at the time. He’s got a cousin managing it, but it’s very small and looking after it sounds pretty simple. It’s another angle. For one thing, she inherits the bulk of his estate. We have no idea who’s in her will. Right? There are one or two other names in there as well. There are some small legacies for people we think are cousins, nephews, nieces and things like that.”

“How do we know that?”

“They all mostly live down near Orleans.” Wills were very specific, they had to be, and their last known addresses would be in it.

How current those addresses might be was another question, but the will was only four years old.

“Ah. Okay. Excellent.” They could look into them later.

“No address for the priest.”

“Does he get any money?”

“Ah, no. Not at first glance, but the name didn’t pop up in the will, at least according to my reading of it.” That wasn’t to say Marko hadn’t promised him something, or even handed out cash to anyone in particular.

“There’s nothing in the phone book.” This was the proverbial little black book.

Marko’s had a dozen names in it, mostly grocers and bakers and butchers and the local dairy.

The only other names were a mother and the sister.

According to Andre, Dubzek had made some pretty substantial bequests to a half dozen charities, the Church, an orphanage, the St. Vincent de Paul, even a hospital in his neighbourhood. A children’s hospital! Nothing that would really threaten his fortune, or that of his heirs, but substantial enough.

“Hmn.” A guilty conscience, perhaps, trying to buy their way into heaven—or maybe just someone who knew the value of a dollar.

The bankbook didn’t show any unusual withdrawals, at least not recently. The book was half-full, going back seven months, and it looked like Marko went in once or twice a week to make withdrawals. The withdrawals were surprisingly modest for a man of such means.

Five hundred francs, last Thursday afternoon. That was the most recent. Sure, a lot of money, but the man was a millionaire going away for the weekend. He’d had over four hundred on him at the time of his demise.

“Okay.”

“So. We’re trying to get a handle on the priest. He’s not actually attached to any of the nearby parish churches, and one wonders how he comes into it.” They were talking to the Bishop, but with Church authorities fearing trouble, they were getting a bit of a runaround.

They were neither confirming nor denying, and asking plenty of questions of their own…

The line crackled, and Maintenon silently cursed. All of this would be written up for his perusal, but he needed to know.

Sooner rather than later.

 “…the tactics of delay, in other words, while they try and figure out what’s up with us…” Telling them about a priest’s possible involvement with the murder of Dubzek would only complicate matters that were already complex enough.

It was a process of negotiation, with the Church, with bishops and the like. If they got too pissed-off, there wasn’t a power in Heaven or Hell that could move them.

“Indeed. Keep working on that, and if you locate him, I want to be there when we talk to him.”

“Right. Anyways, how are things going down there?”

“About as well as can be expected.”

“When are you coming back? Chiappe wants a meeting on the Beaudoin file, and the trial date is coming up fast.”

“Yes, yes. Ah—we’ll try to get back this afternoon.” At this distance, it didn’t make much sense to stay overnight.

Officers could just as easily sleep in their own beds and save the department some money. A little bit of drive-time, even at time and a half, was a bargain by comparison.

“Right. Off we go then, Gilles. Have a good one.”

“You too, Andre. Say hello to the boys for us and I guess that’s about it for now.”

(End of excerpt.) 


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Maintenon Mystery # 8, Part Five. Louis Shalako.

Monsieur Laurent inherited the building from his sainted mother.

Louis Shalako

Dubzek’s apartment, completely unlike the cheerful chalet at the park, was a study in the macabre.

The walls were painted black, the wallpaper was charcoal grey. African masks hung on the walls.

There were shrunken heads in curio cabinets, primitive weapons hanging on the walls. There was what appeared to be a genuine voodoo drum. When given a shake, it rattled with something inside, according to Maintenon this would be bloodstained chicken feathers.

There was a piano in the study, and more bells, whistles and flutes above the mantelpiece in the room, smelling heavily of bookworms and the passage of time.

“Gilles.” It was Fabian Oliver, their fingerprint man.

“Yes? What have you got?”

“So far, we have the prints of five distinct individuals. Assuming the deceased, and one set definitely looks like his, even at first glance, and then a maid, and then the priest…that leaves two more sets unaccounted-for. Also, one set is quite small.”

“Meaning?”

They all knew what it meant, of course. A midget, a dwarf, an unusually small woman—or a child.

“Very well.”

The prints would be compared to samples from the nudist colony, and if they had even the slightest clue of exactly where to start on the rather voluminous files in the basement at the Qaui, eventually compared to those of a long list of known criminals.

“Gilles.”

“Yes?”

“Is it all right if we open a window in here?”

He glanced at Sergeant Oliver.

“I’ll do them next, sir.”

“Okay. As soon as he’s done, you can open a window. Tailler.”

“Tailler.”

“Sir?”

“Let’s see who else is home at this time of day.”

Notebook at the ready, Tailler followed him out the door, the inner knob of which had already been done, a mass of smears and finger-oils that would undoubtedly reveal much—and nothing.

Inspector Gilles Maintenon.

***

Seventy-one years old, Madame Danielle Hennequin had lived in the building for thirty-six years and the interior reflected that much. Not a smoker, there was still a thin film on the windows, probably from cooking and the fact she liked it warm. This was clearly her home, with a hundred pictures, all family portraits, on one wall of the salon. There was a parakeet eyeing them balefully from its cage and the twittering of budgies, who apparently were let out of the cage sometimes. They fluttered around, finally settling themselves down to watch the action from the top of the curtains.

Cheep-cheep-cheep.

Who are these fucking guys…???

There were the chintz curtains, lilies and irises and other flowers in vases. There was a crucifix and a picture of Jesus on the wall. Thinking of his own mother, Tailler wondered where the picture of the Virgin was—probably in the back hallway, outside of the actual bedrooms. Joseph making a fish trap, a cheap print, would be in the bathroom.

There was a faint and unidentifiable smell, and the signs of a cat or two besides.

The lady herself was tiny, less than five feet at a quick guess. One could follow the course of the conversation by the tempo of her knitting needles, first hot and then cold, first fast and then slow.

“Well. Thank you for speaking to us. How long have you known Monsieur Dubzek?”

“I suppose as long as he’s been here.”

The tone was slightly tart, an edge of patient humour evident. She looked up, briefly.

“Er, yes, of course.” Tailler was only stalled momentarily, having heard much worse over the years. “Would you say he was a quiet man? The door is right there. Could you hear him coming and going?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Tailler pretended to consult his notes as Maintenon and the Madame silently regarded each other, sharing some kind of unspoken bond that was denied to young people, or most of them anyways.

“Did he have a lot of company?”

“Not a lot, but some. Occasionally.”

“Did you ever meet any of them?”

“We were neighbours. He was always polite. I’ve never been in his apartment.”

“Ah. Had he ever been in here—”

She blushed a bit, hard to believe it still worked with that wrinkled skin, but she shook her head, and then reconsidered, her face coming up as she stared out the window. Her mind was still good and that was something.

“No, wait. He came in here one day when I needed something down from the cupboard over the ice-box.”

Old-fashioned, hardly anyone called it that anymore. Nowadays, it was a refrigerator. She had a kitchen-type ladder but at her age she was a bit creaky in the joints. To fall would be to lay on the floor all night until her help came in shortly after seven-thirty a.m.

“I heard him going out. This was just after he moved in here, and I thought, why not.”

Why not, introduce oneself and get an impression of the new neighbour. She didn’t actually say that, of course.

“Very well. Did he have a wife or a girlfriend, anybody like that?”

“Er. Not that I can think of—there were women, of course.”

"Women? Oh, yes, there were women."

 “Women?”

“Yes, women.”

“I see. What sort of, ah, woman?” Tailler was floundering.

Perhaps it was those beady if penetrating blue eyes, perhaps it was the budgies, twittering from above the window. It was also intolerably hot…

The lady frowned and a thin vertical line appeared above the bridge of the nose.

“Just…women.”

Tailler sought out Gilles for a quick and unspoken communication.

“Ah…when was the last time Monsieur Dubzek had company?”

“Hmn. I would say Thursday night.”

“You mean—”

“Yes. Just before he went away for the weekend.”

Tailler nodded sharply.

Right.

“Any idea who it might have been…”

“No, but I heard the knock on the door and male voices…”

“How many voices?”

“Just the two of them.”

“Okay.”

***

The fingerprints had been analyzed. The senior specialist, Sergeant Christiane Allard, had personally brought the report up to the squad-room. This was a tough industry, dominated by male arrogance, and she had worked her way up from beat-cop and the more usual policewoman duties, including some undercover work.

This was one tough and competent lady.

“…as expected, the fingerprints of the victim dominate both the crime scene and his home. We’ve identified those of Madame Roux in the cabin, and those of his cleaning lady, one Madame Paulette Boutin, who lives nearby and comes in twice a week to clean.”

Boutin had given the name of the priest and a few others. The priest was Father Bazin, a distant cousin of the victim.

Dubzek was apparently the sort of person who cooked for himself, or went out. Going by the contents of the kitchen drawers, the pantry and the refrigerator, the waste-basket, he might have been fairly competent in that regard.

The other thing was the pistol.

A 7.65 mm semi-automatic hand-gun had been found in his residence. His prints were on the weapon. The maid had said she knew about it, but thought nothing of it as it was nothing she hadn’t seen before.

The weapon was clean, it was loaded and the safety had been on. She was reading from other people’s notes at this point, and Maintenon and Tailler were listening intently, taking notes of their own.

“Now, for the photo album. There are a few prints, mostly the victim. One unidentified print is at least usable—if we ever get anything to compare it to.” The album had pictures of people fully clothed, for the most part, including a few fairly attractive women.

None of the photos were captioned, which was a problem. No names for the faces, in other words.

“Hmn. Interesting.”

So Dubzek had shown the album to other people. There was, once again, nothing really pornographic in there, although there were nudes. These weren’t particularly artistic, just ordinary people going about their day at the nudist camp.

They had found three rolls of new, unexposed film and two that had been exposed. The police lab was developing those and would report as soon as possible.

What was interesting was a box of negatives and prints. Among them were pictures of Madame Boutin, fully-dressed and engaged in her household duties. The negatives were numbered, and there was a half-smile, perhaps due to the flattery, in an early exposure.

She seemed rather embarrassed in the pictures, but she was getting paid by the hour either way.

One could only imagine the conversation.

“Very well. Thank you.”

The sergeant nodded, putting her copies back into the file folder.

“If there’s anything else, let us know.” With a swish of skirt, she was out of the door and going down the hallway.

Maintenon looked at Tailler, just getting off the phone.

“Sir?”

“Get a car. We might as well go back down there.”

(End of excerpt.)

Editor's note. This is a work in progress, with the first draft about half done. It's a bit thin in places and the story is still developing, which would be true in a real life investigation as well. If the reader is intrigued by the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, see the full list of titles here on Amazon.

Thanks for reading.