Skeleton Dance

'Tell you in my own words, you mean?'

'Yes, exactly.'

'But this time you'll pay attention?'

Gideon laughed. “On my honor.” He held up a ready notebook and pen to prove it.

Watching and listening to Montfort expound was a pleasure. He became a different man. The years dropped away from him as he spoke and gestured, and the old energies, the old enthusiasms of the scientist in his element visibly rekindled. And the process of inference and deduction he described really was dazzling, involving microscopic study, fluorine tests, crystallographic analysis, spectroscopic examination, and solid reasoning. In the end he had shown conclusively that the museum's identification numbers on the bones had been removed with abrasive and that the holes had been bored with a modern, carbide-tipped steel drill bit, then further abraded with a bone awl and smoothed with a rawhide thong to make them look authentically Paleolithic. Afterward, the bones had been soaked in an acid iron sulfate bath to disguise the giveaway light color of the abraded surfaces, then drenched in a dichromate solution to speed the oxidation of the iron salts.

Gideon, whose forte had never been chemistry, wasn't sure that he understood it much better in English than he had in French, but at least now he thought he could make enough sense of the process to describe it for Lester's masses.

When they went back to Madame Lacouture's office to return the key, she was just hanging up her telephone and she held up one hand to forestall them while she scratched some neat, quick notes in a record book on her desk, talking to herself while she did: “Eleven-thirty-five,” she murmured in French, “Professor Barbier for Dr. Godwin-Pope . . . concerning . . . newly found bison figures at . . . Les Combarelles.'

She pecked the final period with satisfaction, closed the book, and looked up at Montfort. “You're finished with the key?'

'Would I be handing it to you if I weren't? Now then, Gideon—'

'Madame,” Gideon said, his eyes never having left the record book, “is that a log of telephone calls?'

She eyed him with misgiving. Apparently his rise in status hadn't necessarily extended to the asking of questions. “Yes,” she said suspiciously.

'And do you log in all calls?'

'She does indeed,” Montfort answered for her, “with the frightening efficiency of a machine. She always has, and she always will. Some day, God willing, we may even find a use for it.'

As far as Gideon was concerned, with any luck that day had arrived. “Would you mind looking to see if you have a record of a call from Jean Bousquet?” he asked. “It would have been roughly three years ago. I'd like to know the date.'

Montfort rolled his eyes. “Are we back to that again? Why do you keep—” He interrupted himself. “Never mind, I don't want to know. It would have been in October or November,” he told Madame Lacouture. “You may remember the call. As I recollect, you said he was somewhat abusive.'

A spot on either side of Madame Lacouture's throat turned crimson. “I remember,” she said shortly. “I'll get the log.'

It took her three seconds to retrieve the appropriate volume from a file cabinet. “Jean Bousquet's call was made at two-fifteen in the afternoon, on the twenty-fourth of November,” she said, reading from it with satisfaction. “He was telephoning from Ajaccio. The subject was the provision of a character reference from Director Beaupierre, who was unavailable at the time. I transferred him to Professor Montfort instead.'

'Well, there you are then,” Montfort said. “The twenty-fourth of November. That would have been, oh, a good two months after the last we saw of him. Are you satisfied?'

'Look, I don't mean to keep hammering on the point—but you're absolutely sure it was Bousquet himself on the line? Positive?'

'That it was Bousquet? Yes, of course I'm positive. One couldn't mistake his offensive manner of speaking. Would you like me to swear to it? To attest to it in writing? In blood, perhaps?'

Madame Lacouture closed the log book with a snap. “Is that what you wanted to know, Professor Oliver?'

'It sure is, thank you,” Gideon said, and welcome news it was, because, irrespective of whether those dog- chewed bones had or hadn't been Bousquet's, it established for a fact that he could hardly have been murdered by Ely Carpenter. Not when he was still alive two months after Ely's death.

And as for Joly's suggestion that the story of Bousquet's phone call might have been a concoction in its entirety, that, he thought, was now out of the question. The idea that all five of them—Montfort, Beaupierre, Audrey, Pru, and Emile—had conspired in a lie to protect Carpenter, a man who had yet to be accused, from being implicated in the possible murder of an unidentified victim who might or might not be Bousquet was barely believable as it was. To add to that the now-required assumption that the iron-sided Madame Lacouture was in on the plot, even to the extent of falsifying her telephone log, was beyond credibility.

No, whoever killed Jean Bousquet—if those bones were Jean Bousquet's—it wasn't Ely. A hoaxer he might well be; that was yet to be seen. But a murderer—no.

'Speaking of Bousquet,” Montfort said as they headed back into the hallway, “how did your examination of the skeleton go in St.-Cyprien? Did you find your diffuse periosteal rib lesions?'

Gideon weighed his reply. “My examination,” he said, “was inconclusive.'

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 14

* * * *