Read Online Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) by M.L. Longworth - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: M.L. Longworth
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Bouvet, his coroner. He got up and took his phone into the men’s room. “Yes, Emile.”
“Sorry to bother on a Saturday night, but I have some interesting news for you.”
“Go on.”
“Dr. Moutte was hit on the side of the head, as I’m sure the commissioner told you.”
“Yes,” Verlaque answered quickly, not hiding his impatience.
“The object was wood,” Bouvet continued, enjoying drawing out the suspense.
“Go on, Emile,” Verlaque said.
“And old.”
“An antique?” Verlaque asked.
Bouvet smiled, delighted to hear the impatience in the judge’s voice. “You could call it an antique. I’m with an old friend in the lab right now, who specializes in dating these kinds of things.”
“So what does your friend say?” Verlaque breathed heavily into the phone. It surprised him that there would be a dating specialistliving in Aix, but perhaps, like so many people did nowadays, he commuted from Aix to Paris on the TGV. “You are going to tell me, right? What does he say? Fifty? One hundred years old?”
Bouvet laughed. “
She
says,” he answered slowly, smiling as he looked across the stainless steel table at Dr. Agnès Cohen. “Judging from the sliver we extracted from the guy’s hair, seven hundred years old.”
Chapter Eleven
Meeting Florence Bonnet
T hey met at the Quatre Dauphins fountain. “Fancy meeting you here,” Paulik said. Verlaque smiled and shook his commissioner’s hand.
“I left the car in the garage. Since it isn’t raining, I thought that the walk would clear my head.”
Bruno Paulik nodded, thinking to himself that Verlaque had probably left his dark green 1963 Porsche in the garage for other reasons—yesterday the commissioner had seen university students walking around the car, peeking inside with cupped hands and whispering with excitement.
“I just dropped Léa off at the
conservatoire
for a Sunday rehearsal, and there was a rare empty parking spot in front,” Paulik said, as if needing to explain why he too had been staring at the sixteenth-century fountain whose four fat dolphins spat out water.
“Ah, how is
solfège
going?” Verlaque asked.
“Moments of panic, soothed by mint chocolate-chip ice cream.”Verlaque laughed and the two walked on, talking of the weather, Paulik’s father’s newfound enthusiasm for ancient Rome, and a banking machine that had been blown up at 5:00 a.m. that morning, giving the thieves easy access to whatever money hadn’t been burned in the explosion. Moments of silence were not uncomfortable, Verlaque noted to himself. He was happy to have a colleague with whom he could speak of history or music so easily. Conversations with Parisian colleagues usually began with real estate prices.
After ten minutes of pleasant walking, they arrived at the humanities building. Verlaque looked up at the gray exterior, built in a hurry sometime in the 1930s and in dire need of a paint job. The windows looked as if they hadn’t been washed in years, but up on the third floor someone had made an attempt to cheer up their office or classroom with planters, hung crudely to the metal shutters with wires. French
facultés
—unlike the elite, much smaller
grandes écoles
, which both Verlaque and Marine had attended—were open to any student who passed the high school baccalaureate exams. Because of this there was overenrollment and the
facultés
were underfunded, but the bright pink pansies above him, blooming despite their surroundings, reminded Verlaque that many students, underprivileged or otherwise, did benefit from this free-of-charge, nonelitist system. It touched him, all of a sudden, being French, a feeling that usually came over him in restaurants and museums, not in front of a
faculté
.
Two young men, one tall and slim and the other short and stocky, ran past Verlaque and Paulik, both boys trying to squeeze past each other to be the first one in the door, but both getting stuck and then having to step back in order to let
“Sorry to bother on a Saturday night, but I have some interesting news for you.”
“Go on.”
“Dr. Moutte was hit on the side of the head, as I’m sure the commissioner told you.”
“Yes,” Verlaque answered quickly, not hiding his impatience.
“The object was wood,” Bouvet continued, enjoying drawing out the suspense.
“Go on, Emile,” Verlaque said.
“And old.”
“An antique?” Verlaque asked.
Bouvet smiled, delighted to hear the impatience in the judge’s voice. “You could call it an antique. I’m with an old friend in the lab right now, who specializes in dating these kinds of things.”
“So what does your friend say?” Verlaque breathed heavily into the phone. It surprised him that there would be a dating specialistliving in Aix, but perhaps, like so many people did nowadays, he commuted from Aix to Paris on the TGV. “You are going to tell me, right? What does he say? Fifty? One hundred years old?”
Bouvet laughed. “
She
says,” he answered slowly, smiling as he looked across the stainless steel table at Dr. Agnès Cohen. “Judging from the sliver we extracted from the guy’s hair, seven hundred years old.”
Chapter Eleven
Meeting Florence Bonnet
T hey met at the Quatre Dauphins fountain. “Fancy meeting you here,” Paulik said. Verlaque smiled and shook his commissioner’s hand.
“I left the car in the garage. Since it isn’t raining, I thought that the walk would clear my head.”
Bruno Paulik nodded, thinking to himself that Verlaque had probably left his dark green 1963 Porsche in the garage for other reasons—yesterday the commissioner had seen university students walking around the car, peeking inside with cupped hands and whispering with excitement.
“I just dropped Léa off at the
conservatoire
for a Sunday rehearsal, and there was a rare empty parking spot in front,” Paulik said, as if needing to explain why he too had been staring at the sixteenth-century fountain whose four fat dolphins spat out water.
“Ah, how is
solfège
going?” Verlaque asked.
“Moments of panic, soothed by mint chocolate-chip ice cream.”Verlaque laughed and the two walked on, talking of the weather, Paulik’s father’s newfound enthusiasm for ancient Rome, and a banking machine that had been blown up at 5:00 a.m. that morning, giving the thieves easy access to whatever money hadn’t been burned in the explosion. Moments of silence were not uncomfortable, Verlaque noted to himself. He was happy to have a colleague with whom he could speak of history or music so easily. Conversations with Parisian colleagues usually began with real estate prices.
After ten minutes of pleasant walking, they arrived at the humanities building. Verlaque looked up at the gray exterior, built in a hurry sometime in the 1930s and in dire need of a paint job. The windows looked as if they hadn’t been washed in years, but up on the third floor someone had made an attempt to cheer up their office or classroom with planters, hung crudely to the metal shutters with wires. French
facultés
—unlike the elite, much smaller
grandes écoles
, which both Verlaque and Marine had attended—were open to any student who passed the high school baccalaureate exams. Because of this there was overenrollment and the
facultés
were underfunded, but the bright pink pansies above him, blooming despite their surroundings, reminded Verlaque that many students, underprivileged or otherwise, did benefit from this free-of-charge, nonelitist system. It touched him, all of a sudden, being French, a feeling that usually came over him in restaurants and museums, not in front of a
faculté
.
Two young men, one tall and slim and the other short and stocky, ran past Verlaque and Paulik, both boys trying to squeeze past each other to be the first one in the door, but both getting stuck and then having to step back in order to let
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