A Stranger In Paris. Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9. Pt. 5. Louis Shalako.

As if life wasn't depressing enough.

Louis Shalako

Gilles put the phone down, after giving instructions to Doctor Poirier. The lady would be allowed to examine the body for birthmarks, although she said she couldn’t recall anything in particular—a mole on a shoulder, a small scar on the shin or a knee perhaps, (and half the young men in the world had such scars), and so, even if it was there, it could hardly be conclusive. Poirier would keep the face and hands bagged and covered, and sometimes that was the best that could be done, and horrifying enough under the circumstances. She’d said the young man hadn’t been particularly hairy.

Unfortunately, that lined right up with what the Doctor was saying, and the evidence of their own eyes. Again, totally inconclusive. It was also the sort of thing that would not be in the paper, for what that was worth. 

Doubts, doubts…always there were doubts. Without fingerprints, there wasn’t much point in checking police records or for military service. The name might be there…that name had to match up with a body, therefore fingerprints or a mug-shot were essential. It was low-priority work, and yet someone had to make the phone call…jot that down on the list.

And, as long as the lady was in a car headed to the morgue, Detective Hubert could nip around to her place and just see if that nasty old key fit in the front door-lock…according to her, this was Paul’s habitual mode of entry. No sneaking around back doors for them, apparently.

Ah, but Paul, rather their victim, had only had one key—there was her place and then that loft in Montmartre. It was truly unfortunate, but she’d only been there once and couldn’t really remember much. Certainly not the address, although it was just off of a main street. They’d gone there after a night on the town, and they’d both been quite tipsy. He didn’t inquire any further, the deepening colour on her cheeks had been enough. Such memories might help to keep her warm at night in her old age—another shitty little thought, but it was there nevertheless.

He looked inquiringly at Andre, just coming in the door with a certain look on his face. He’d been called out on some mysterious errand…

Looks like we got us another one...

The younger man hung up his coat.

“Okay, boss. It looks like we got ourselves another one—”

“Oh, really.”

Andre looked smug.

“Oh, yes, sir. Indeed we do.”

***

“Tell me more—”

“The only major wrinkle here is the lack of a weapon. It’s early yet, but the body was found Thursday morning. Time of death appears to be ten to fourteen hours previously. It was a chilly night, and wet, the low body weight, all of that affects rigour mortis. Face obliterated. Fingers and thumbs gone. Scene similar to our first victim. An alley, not much frequented except by the householders along the way. The trash disposal people, the odd wino, a homeless person maybe. Killed or dumped in the night, although the whole place is such a shambles it’s hard to read the blood spatters.”

Andre quickly gave his impressions, barely consulting his notes, which to be fair would be competent enough, and admissible as evidence in a court of law.

“Nice clothes, hair and teeth. Good shoes, not quite as nice as the last ones. Again, robbery does not seem to be a motive—” The victim had some cash on him, again no identification, rather expected considering the attempt (or presumed attempt) to make an ID difficult if not impossible.

All of those stab wounds—conforming, at first glance, to their previous victim.

“Go on.”

There was the smell of alcohol, enough that it would probably show up in autopsy results. 

There was the one poker chip, albeit a big one, five hundred francs, in the jacket pocket. It was either winnings, not even cashed in at the end of a night, or one hell of a big tip—

This one had been handled by a thousand people, which added up to about a million smudges.

That was the hell of such objects.

“Let’s have a look.” Gilles studied it through a magnifying glass.

Totally generic. One could buy them in almost any toy or department store in the city.

Compression-molded of clay and other materials, shellac for example, with their colourful inlays—the latest technology, light, colourful and almost indestructible according to the makers…Andre uttered a deep sigh.

No one was listening. It was like he was the only one really there.

“Hubert says the key didn’t fit. I guess you knew that—”

Maintenon: It's all bullshit.

Andre shook his head. It was like he just wasn’t getting through, sometimes.

“Madame made no comment on the circumcision…”

He sighed.

“Well, I mean, the question is motive. Why, Gilles, why?”

Maintenon nodded, eyes on the ceiling where the dead flies and cobwebs still held their sway after all of these uneasy years...a cob was a British spider, as someone had once put it.

He was still clutching the poker chip.

“Well, Andre. I should think that would be obvious.” The next words came in what was a bit of a bombshell. “I mean—well. It’s all bullshit, of course.”

***

And, of course, there had to be another woman—another bereaved—another lover.

She was waiting in the wings, a little less than forty-eight hours after filing her complaint.

“And the lady?”

“Mademoiselle Bernier.” She was waiting in one of their interview rooms.

“All right.” With a sigh, Gilles stubbed out his cigarette and heaved himself to his feet.

It was very quiet in the interview rooms, with barely a hum coming through walls, the occasional muffled voice in the hallway outside.

Maxine Bernier was different in some ways. Mid-fifties. Owned the home she lived in, tall, narrow and jammed in between all the others, but five floors including an unused loft. Never married. A sister in Orleans, a brother in the Levant, where he was said to be doing very well.

Prosperous enough, the clothes were much more sedate, perhaps that was the wrong word. 

The clothes were of good quality but sexless. This one would be a church-goer…a real do-gooder, unless he missed his guess.

She sat there, bolt upright on the hard wooden chair, hands clasped in her lap, feet flat in the low heels, on the floor, knees tightly together.

A good girl, in other words, with her education by nuns and staid, upright older virgins written all over her.

This one was already dressed for mourning, as if life wasn’t already depressing enough.

“So. Mademoiselle. What is this all about?”

In a soft yet precise voice, barely able to look him in the eye, she began.

“Jean…Jean didn’t come home at his usual time, and at first I thought he’d just missed the bus and that he’d be home soon enough.”

“I see.”

She nodded.

“Of course, after a time, it was getting late—and I just went to bed.”

“And he lives with you?”

“Er—yes. That is, he rents the flat above, but of course, he was—he is such a nice young man, and in some respects, he is almost a member of the family.” A family, which, upon inspection, would turn out to be a live-in maid, a cat or two, or three, and a bunch of faded pictures on the mantel-piece.

“Go on.”

She was blushing, but managed to look Gilles in the eye before quickly darting away again.

“Quite frankly, he has never stayed away, I mean overnight before. I’m worried that something terrible must have happened to him.”

“And what did Jean, er, do for a living? What is his last name, if you don’t mind?” The pen hovered over the page.

“Cariveau. Jean Cariveau. He is a machinist.” She mentioned the name of a company.

He’d never heard of it, but she gave him an address—the street name, at the very least, and police would undoubtedly check it out. Cariveau would have to take a bus, a tram, and the Metro to get all the way over there, to the industrial southeastern quarter, but it was a skilled profession. 

For such a young member of the working class, he’d be making real money, hand over fist, as she put it. It was worth an hour and a half or more of travel per day. His father, now deceased, had been a dock-worker along the quays, and his mother a seamstress. The mother, apparently, had liked books, that love of learning rubbing off on the son. He had two younger sisters, and a brother who lived in Marseille. They had been very proud of him, but their flat was small and so, looking to get out on his own, he’d answered an advertisement of Mademoiselle Bernier’s.

“It’s not that I really needed the money. But it seemed a shame, just to leave a perfectly good flat empty, and of course people are flocking to the city these days.” There was a small storefront on the street level, a man and his wife, green-grocers for the last twenty-four years, according to her.

The rent was helpful.

“Ah. I see. Thank you. Does he go out often?”

“Oh, no. Not really, although he does have a social life.” Many of his evenings, according to her, were spent in her flat, which was much bigger and nicer than his. “He enjoyed playing the piano, and of course he didn’t have one of his own.”

A musical connection, thin though it was. Gilles had a piano—Ann had wanted one, and so he’d reluctantly gone shopping with her. Anne had taken lessons as a girl. As it turned out, Gilles was the one who had taken some small interest, perhaps even exhibiting some talent.

“..and of course it’s so very difficult, cooking for one I mean.”

He still had it. It was still there, in the back room, and a place where he hardly ever went, except to look for the cat, or to open a window to catch a cross-breeze on the warmest summer nights.

The place was so quiet these days, to tinkle a few keys seemed a shameful disruption, and so he never did it anymore…the notion that half the street might hear him, had been more than enough to stop the impulse dead in its tracks.

“Was he good-looking? Or non-descript, perhaps?”

An innocent enough question, but the sudden blush said much.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose so—he was a, ah, very personable young man.”

“I see. So, he had working clothes, and street clothes?”

“Yes, of course.” She hesitated. “He’d just taken out life insurance.”

“What?” What? Heavy thumps from the hallway had half-drowned the lady out.

Apparently, someone was getting a new desk…something big and heavy.

“He’d just taken out life insurance. Oh, please don’t think what you are thinking—but, he was a very thoughtful young man. He’d heard someone, some speaker, on the subject. It might have been some magazine article. Anyhow, it was a good deal, according to him, and yet, he had to have some kind of beneficiary.”

“And so, he made you his beneficiary?”

“Er, yes, Inspector.” Shame flooded her cheeks. “I didn’t know what to think, but his poor mother—perhaps he knew something I didn’t, perhaps she was already provided for.”

“It’s all right, Madame. I understand.”

She put her head down and cried.

All one could do sometimes, was to wait them out.

END

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

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A Stranger In Paris. Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9. Pt. 4. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Dr. Poirier was young and brash, perhaps an understandable adaptation to his present employment.

A door slammed open, and then he was with them. A pathologist by nature, he’d been on the job since the retirement of the much-beloved Dr. Guillaume, now said to be enjoying his retirement on the nude beaches of the Cote d’Azur. As for Doctor Auger, new senior examiner, he was at a big coroner’s symposium in Lucerne, and hadn’t arrived back yet. He might even be having a good time—now, there was a thought.

“Ah. There you are. Inspector—Andre.”

“Ah, yes, here we are. The, uh, anonymous corpse from the Allee des Repulsives—”

It was a joke, and a lame one at that.

“Ha. Regarding our victim.” The young fellow grabbed a handle, number nine, depressing a catch in the mechanism, and pulled out a big silver drawer, all stainless steel and modern, sterile efficiency.

He pulled back the linen sheet.

They stood, listening.

“We’re still waiting on lab tests. However, we can safely say that a series of stabs to the face were not the primary cause of death, perhaps not even simple loss of blood. No, our victim was stunned or drugged into a stupor before the act was carried out.”

“Ah.”

“There is a contusion on the back of the head, which may have occurred when he was dumped, but more likely it was a deliberate blow.” The hair was still matted with dried blood. "He bled out on the ground, as you may have already surmised.”

A cold night. Shock. An unconscious victim, wearing thin clothing. Loss of blood, the time that passed, had all contributed to the demise of their subject. And yet—and yet, there was little doubt that homicide had been the intention all along.

He shrugged.

“We will have to probe in as closely as possible, and, hopefully, see just how far some of these wounds go, but in my initial assessment, not that far. You can kill a man, with a sharp object through the orbit of the eye, yet my instinct tells me otherwise, in this particular case—” Some of the cuts had penetrated bone, which would have caused death eventually.

Assuming no medical treatment and penetration of the meninges. Dr. Poirier would know more after cutting in, as he put it.

Hmn.

“…the victim was between twenty-eight and thirty-four years of age, a Caucasian male of good social background, judging from teeth and hands…” Their victim would have stood about one hundred eighty-five centimetres or a little over six foot.

He weighed in at just over seventy-six kilos buck-naked as the young man put it.

They listened, hearing nothing that was very new.

“He was in good health although sedentary in habits…not underweight, not overweight, but soft in muscle tone…”

He looked up.

“A man of some means, although that is just an interpretation.”

“Tell us about the teeth.”

“Well, yes, Inspector. They’re very clean—very well looked-after.” Very little plaque, and this in a smoker.

Only one or two missing. Definitely not working class or outright poor—

“Giving us one possible lead.” There were only so many good dentists in the metropolitan area.

“Yes. I would definitely say so.” He seemed pleased, in that they were following him so far.

“He hadn’t eaten in a while, I would say a late lunch maybe. The time of death was definitely between eleven p.m. and one a.m.” That was based on blood pooling in the lowest part of the body and the degree, or lack, of rigour mortis.

The body had been discovered late the next afternoon, as they already knew from the reports from the scene…

“The hair, recently cut, and a very nice job too. Fingernails, toenails, all point to a person of some means, and some sensibility. He hadn’t shaved since that morning, accounting for the two-day stubble.” It was known that a man’s beard continued growing for some time after decease, which would vary from individual to individual based on body chemistry and to some degree based on race, although racial science in general was something else—something almost completely bogus in the doctor’s words. “Other than that. No tattoos or hairy moles or roseate birthmarks.”

“So, in other words, people in races with less facial hair would vary. That seems fair enough.”

“Right, Inspector.” Useless information—there was nothing to indicate that their victim was anything other than Caucasian. “As you can see, this one has been circumcised.”

This did not necessarily indicate a Jew; as other races and religions also practiced it for reasons of personal hygiene…there was a modern movement towards it, in fact. If nothing else, it was one more detail.

All of this would be in the report, with no need to take notes, although a good memory helped.

There was more, of course. There always was. And none of it worth a damned thing until they had an I.D.

“All right. Now, what about the stomach contents?”

***

Madame was waiting on the long hard benches along the hallway when they returned to the office.

Rosine Daniau was a tall, slender brunette in her early to mid-forties. It would have been impolite to ask directly, although it was right there on her passport. She’d had the foresight to bring it along. No driver’s license, although she must have had a birth certificate to get the passport, or some other form of identification. Enough sworn affidavits, from the right sort of person, and you get could get one with no real documentation. If nothing else, another line of inquiry, perhaps—

She lived in the fashionable 6th Arrondissement, Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Clearly high-maintenance, but she also seemed to be the genuine article—her money stemmed from a father who had gone into the chemical service and supply industry just before the last war. With the rapid expansion of weapons manufacturing brought on by that event, he’d quickly prospered, joining that class of new money parvenus, very much taken with the good life and almost completely uncaring of the sneers of older, more established names.

She would be accepted now—

Tall but not too tall, shapely and yet not too shapely. She had good bone structure judging from the exposed collar-bones and then there was the elegant curve of the neck, set off by what looked like emerald ear-rings—small, but emeralds nevertheless. A larger stone hung on a pendant around her neck. That one must have cost some real money.

Deeply emotional, she’d turned in a missing-person report the stipulated forty-eight hours after her lover had gone missing.

He studied her, they all did, as she dabbed at the tears.

For her to take the extraordinary step of contacting police, well. It must have been extremely difficult for her.

From the elegantly coiffed tresses, smelling of something vaguely floral, to the dress from some house he didn’t immediately recognize, all tasteful black silk in a fine but tactile knit, to the shoes on her feet and the painted nails poking out the ends. Long, bare arms, once the mink slipped down, as it was meant to do…honey coloured skin and those big blue eyes. One could almost walk to the nearest news-stand and find the exact magazine. She did not exist in a vacuum, after all—

Every inch a lady, a modern one of the best sort, and with money, real money, written all over her.

Her Paul, a Monsieur Jean-Paul Saulnier, had disappeared Thursday night. He’d gone out early, and never came home. It was in about the right neighbourhood—Paul was known there, according to her, and she’d seen it in the papers on Saturday. Or Friday—whichever it was. Maintenon thought Friday, at least initially. There had been further, somewhat more lurid coverage, in the bigger, Saturday edition. Not that any new information had come forward—the newshounds were making the most of it, on a slow news day as it were. There really hadn’t been much there for them to print, purposely from his perspective. It was always best to keep their killer in the dark as much as possible. Her Paul—her Paul, had blue eyes, brown hair.

That matched with what little the police knew. 

Poirier had found enough ocular tissue to confirm that much. Their victim was male, if nothing else.

She was utterly convinced, of course, from the descriptions printed in the weekend newspapers.

Gilles wasn’t so sure, but he was prepared to listen…

“He was deeply devoted to me.” Her grief, while real, had some element of narcissism, a revelation that Gilles, more than ten years after the passing of his own beloved Ann, found a little uncomfortable.

What a shitty little personal revelation that was.

Dark, wet eyes glared at him, all of them.

“Paul did very well for me. In my investments. I tried to pay him for his time. But he would have none of it. Everything I gave him, a very small allowance, almost down to the last penny, went into savings—he lived most frugally in a loft in Montmartre, that is, ah, when he wasn’t with me.”

“I see.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “Of course, you will never understand.”

Not yet, anyways—

And yes, the dead—for them it was over, it is the living that must somehow soldier on. As he had—in his own case, as he was almost sure she would.

Yes, she would get over him, on some level, and relatively quickly. To a woman like this, a handsome young man would be a kind of fashion accessory. Proof that she still had that ineffable something.

The young fellow, from a remote village in the Jura, had few living relatives and had come to Paris to make his fortune—which, to hear her tell it, he had definitely been in the process of doing.

“Was Paul Jewish, by any chance?”

The question hadn’t embarrassed her. He made no mention of circumcision.

“What? No, no. Of course not. He was a good Catholic.” According to her, he occasionally took her to Mass, but not always.

Neither one of them was much of a church-goer.

“Can you think of anyone who might have wished him harm? Someone who might have had cause to hate, er, Paul?”

“No. Not at all. Everyone seemed to like him very much. He was a charming and agreeable young man.”

“No jealousy…perhaps from former lovers?” Yours or his, the unspoken words hanging in the air.

“No, not really—of course not. Paul had few friends, although he had some. He talked about them, so-and-so is writing this piece of music, or that other one who got a really good job—I think they call it a gig. He’s now first horn at a little club in Montmartre…” It really was quite good.

Everyone was raving about it—

“I see.”

“Paul was—or was becoming, a rather successful composer of light opera.” That, in addition to reading the papers and giving the lady some rather useful stock tips.

“Oh, really.”

“He hadn’t sold any real shows. He’d worked for other people, you understand. But he’d received quite a bit of interest and some positive criticisms of his own work, ah, from the sort of people that he admired…”

“Ah.”

She went on.

“Paul told me once that poor people study the sports pages and that rich people study the interest rates. Quite frankly, he has never steered me wrong. No, this was love, that which was between us, and yes, I know. I know what you, and the world must think. Or have thought—” More sobs.

So, the young man hadn’t been totally useless, then.

“Just to clarify. You made him an allowance, but other than that, he took nothing for his, er, work with your investments?”

She nodded, tears and snot still flowing.

“Can you think of any reason why he would be carrying such a large sum of money?”

“No. No, of course not. Paul had no real need of money.” Money wasn’t such a big thing with him, according to her. “I don’t know if it was even fame. More like, he just wanted to be good at it. To write good shows, shows that were worthwhile.”

It was just something he loved.

He nodded.

“We found one key in the victim’s possession. It strikes me that this might be, ah, the key to an identification.” Other than that, they had his clothes, particularly the shoes. She’d mentioned one or two shoe stores, where Paul might have bought them.

If she thought she was strong enough, she could come down to the morgue and have a look at the body.

Put in those terms, it was pretty stark.

The truth was, he had his doubts. In spite of all that she’d said so far.

END

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