Skeleton Dance

eliminating at least one or two of them from suspicion.'

'The institute people, you mean?” asked Gideon.

'Yes. After all, I was interrogating them one-by-one during the very time we're speaking of. But it's not possible, you see. How long would it have taken to come here from Les Eyzies, do this deed, and return? Forty minutes, no more. Less, conceivably. Any one of them would have had ample time to do it—before seeing me, after seeing me—with no one the wiser.'

'I see what you mean.” Gideon had a sudden thought. “You know, the baker out front might have spotted somebody. You might want to talk to him.'

Joly gave him the Gallic equivalent of an are-you-trying-to-teach-your-grandmother-to-suck-eggs scowl, but Gideon was saved from whatever he was going to say by the appearance at the door of one of the investigators, a somewhat elderly plainclothesman named Felix, who was beckoning with a plastic-gloved hand. “We've found something, inspector. Come have a look.'

Gideon followed Joly and Roussillot inside, to a corner of the exhibit area, where a display case had been pulled away from the wall to reveal a rock about the size of a misshapen softball lying on the floor. There was a smear of blood on it, and a clump of matted gray hair. Gideon turned away.

But Roussillot bent low to examine it more closely, then straightened up. “Well, I think we may assume we have our murder weapon, gentlemen.” He clucked his disapproval. “A rock. Not the most elegant of choices.'

'No, not just a rock,’ Gideon felt compelled to say. “That's an Acheulian cordiform hand-axe; Middle- Paleolithic.'

Joly, Gideon, and Roussillot looked at one another. The same thought crossed all their minds, Gideon knew, but it was left to Roussillot to say it.

'Well, you have to admit,” he said, “for an archaeologist it's a hell of a way to go.'

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Chapter 20

* * * *

'Gideon, it wasn't your fault. You're being . . . well, morbid is what you're being. Have some more kir.'

The kir—white wine and black-currant syrup over ice; the region's warm-weather afternoon drink of choice—wasn't doing him much good but he took another sip anyway and settled further down in his chair, stretching out his legs and crossing his ankles. “Yeah, I know. It's just that . . . I was sitting right there in the garden fooling around with Lester's dumb flap copy, and all the time Jacques’ messages were right there on the machine. If I'd only known he was trying to get hold of me—oh, hell.'

'But how could you possibly know? Be reasonable, you're making it sound as if you went out of your way to shirk your responsibility. How could you conceivably imagine anything like this would happen?'

'I know, but I keep going over and over it in my mind. There were so many places where I could have kept it from happening. Why didn't I check our telephone messages when we first got back, for instance? I could have been at the museum by twelve-thirty. He wouldn't have been sitting there by himself all that time, waiting for me.'

'But you might as well say, why did we go out at all, why didn't we just stay in the room, and then he would have gotten you on the phone the first time he called.'

'That's true too. Or if we'd come back a couple of hours—'

'Here's Lucien,” she said, pointing with relief to the inspector's long, angular figure bent almost double in climbing out of the low-to-the-ground Citroen he'd parked at the curb on the far side of the street. “Finally. Thank God, maybe he can talk some sense into you.” She waved to him.

Having straightened up in his stiff, machinelike manner—something like a sofa-bed unfolding—Joly peered around, saw Julie's wave, and started toward them, looking worn. Gideon had left him in La Quinze a couple of hours earlier, and Joly had promised to join them when he was through, for an aperitif at the Cafe du Centre. With the day warmed by a golden late-afternoon sun, they'd been waiting for him on the cafe's patio, a pleasant terrace shaded by striped awnings and situated on one side of the village square, opposite what looked like a steepled country church, belfry and all, but was actually the mairie, Prefect Marielle's domain.

'Are those kirs?” Joly asked plaintively, dropping into a chair at their table. “I would kill for a kir.'

'Not necessary,” Julie said, signaling to the waiter that a kir was wanted for the newly arrived gentleman. She had picked up the French knack for saying a lot with an economy of gesture, Gideon noted admiringly.

'Lucien,” she said, “will you please talk some sense into this man? He thinks he's responsible for Jacques’ death. He thinks the reason Jacques is dead is because we didn't check our telephone messages.'

'I didn't say that,” Gideon said grumpily, “I only—'

'Jacques Beaupierre is dead because his murderer wanted him dead,” Joly said wearily. “Do you really think that if he hadn't been able to kill him because you arrived on the scene—assuming of course that he didn't decide to kill you as well—that he would simply have dropped the idea, and forgotten all about it, and gone away somewhere?'

Gideon shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe he was killed to keep him from telling me what it was he wanted to tell me. If I'd been there for him and he'd already told me, the cat would have been out of the bag and there'd have been no point in killing him.'

'It seems to me, Gideon, that you give yourself far too much importance in this. In my opinion, Beaupierre would have been murdered all the same, if not this afternoon, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the next day.” The kir came and Joly drank greedily, the ice cubes clinking in the glass. “Aah, life returns, the tissues rejuvenate. Now, I grant you,” he said with a pale smile, “it might not have been with an