Her mobile eyebrows went up. "You know a lot."
"You don’t know what he meant? You don’t know the reason for the council?"
Again she grimaced. "I told you, they were pipe dreams. Who knows what Guillaume’s letter meant? But my husband-oh, it was very clear to him. Guillaume, in his old age, was full of remorse for cutting him out of his will back in the Dark Ages. He was going to make us millionaires." She laughed curtly. "Look, is it all right if I smoke?"
With gratitude, Joly approved her request. He lit her American Virginia Slim, then a Gitane for himself, and took a cardboard paperclip container from a drawer to use as an ashtray.
"Madame Fougeray, just why was your husband cut out of the will?"
"Hey, how old do you think I am?" she said with more distress than she’d shown over the murder of her mate not two hours before. "I was born in 1934. Claude robbed me from the cradle. I didn’t marry him until 1952. How could I know what happened at the manoir "-she said the word with derisive affectation-"right after the war?"
"Do you mean he never spoke of it to you?"
"Oh, he spoke of it to me all the time."
Joly wondered sourly if she were mimicking him. "And just what did he say?" he asked, his patience beginning to fray.
"Ah, just that the family turned Guillaume from him for no reason at all-only that they wanted to keep the estate among themselves."
"And do you believe that?"
"Of course I don’t believe it," she said contemptuously. "There’s more to it than that."
"But you don’t know what."
"No, why should I care? I told him we shouldn’t even come here. And now somebody’s killed him for his greed." She nodded to herself, blew out a haze of smoke, and ground out her barely smoked cigarette in the box. "I thank them."
Joly, who had a keen sense of propriety, was offended. "Madame," he said stiffly, "whom can you think of that might have wanted to kill your husband?"
Leona threw back her dark, tight-skinned head and laughed. "If you want to know all the people in the world who hated his guts, you’re going to have some long list." She stared at him hotly. "You can start with me."
Joly took a final pull from his own cigarette and put it neatly out. "Very well, madame," he said equably, "we’ll start with you."
By 11:30, Joly was tired and out of humor. He was getting nowhere, and each person he interviewed seemed more irritating than the one before. This, he knew, came largely from fatigue, but there could be no question that Jules du Rocher was a singularly unappealing young man, fat, pouty, and given to simpering, gossiping, and other disagreeable behaviors.
Joly interrupted him while he was expounding his theory that Ben and Sophie Butts might well have poisoned Claude Fougeray out of fear that he would challenge Guillaume’s will and deprive them of the valuable Rochebonne library. This thesis had been enthusiastically advanced following other helpful ideas pointing to the possible guilt of Claire, Ray, Leona, Marcel, and Beatrice.
"As to the reason Guillaume du Rocher called all of you together," Joly cut in wearily, "I suppose you have no idea."
"Oh, no," Jules replied, readily switching topics. "I know, all right."
Joly looked skeptically at him. "Oh?"
"He was going to sell the manoir to a hotel chain- Swiss, I think, or Swedish-and he wanted to tell the family about the arrangements."
"And how do you alone come to know this, monsieur?"
"He told me on the telephone last week. He said no one else was to know, so I didn’t tell anyone."
Under Joly’s steady gaze, his plump, smooth cheeks colored sullenly. "If you don’t believe me, you can check the telephone records. Well, can’t you?"
Joly nodded.
"And ask Beatrice. She put the call through. She told me he wanted to tell me what it was about. Go ahead and ask her, if you want to. Anyway, why should I-"
"All right," Joly said. "All right." Now that he thought about it, Bonfante, the attorney, had told him that a Swiss hotel concern had been after Guillaume for years to sell the place. He sipped at the coffee Beatrice had brought him ten minutes before; lukewarm then, cold now. "Why only you and no one else?"
Jules shrugged. "It’s the way he wanted it, that’s all. He told me lots of things before anyone else knew about them. I was his favorite, you know."
Joly let this improbability pass. "And why were the Fougerays, who were not his favorites, invited to this particular family council after all this time?"
"That’s just what I’d like to know," Jules said, and laughed as if he’d made a joke. He looked meaningfully at the small plate of butter cookies Beatrice had brought along with Joly’s coffee.
"Please," Joly said, gesturing at the untouched cookies. "Now, these‘arrangements’: What sort of arrangements?"
Jules stuffed two cookies into his mouth one after the other, tamping them in like tobacco into a pipe. He licked the residue luxuriously from his thumb and forefinger (leaving them glistening, Joly noted with displeasure) and sighed like a man who’d just gotten a desperately needed fix. "Something about investing the proceeds, or capitalizing the profits, or some such thing," he said, chewing. "I’m afraid I didn’t listen very carefully. I don’t have a mind for finance, you know. Poor Father will never understand it, but I live for the arts." He dropped his eyes modestly. "I’m a novelist. I’m working on a book now."
"Ah," said Joly, not caring to encourage this subject.
"It deals with the struggle of a banker’s son to actualize his spiritual potential in a world of crass materialism and greed," Jules volunteered.
Joly studied him for some sign of joking, but failed to find any. Jules’ eyes, which the young man seemed able to keep from the remaining two cookies only with difficulty, fell on them with a look of open longing.
Joly pushed the plate towards him. "Help yourself, please. I’m not hungry. Now, is there anyone else you can think of who might have wanted to kill Claude?"
Jules crammed the first of the cookies into his mouth and got his damp fingers securely around the second before answering with a smirk. "Is there anyone who didn’t?"
Twenty feet below Joly and Jules, in the ancient cellar, Gideon was working tranquilly in the warmth of the portable heater, using the ten-power magnifying lens he’d neglected to bring with him the day before. He had pulled the goose-necked lamp down to three or four inches above the tabletop and twisted the head so that the light shone horizontally across the bones, highlighting texture and irregularities. Hunched over them, the lens against his cheek and his face only a few inches from them, he slid each segment by, millimeter by careful millimeter. Claude Fougeray and Lucien Joly faded peacefully from his mind.
After an hour he finished his meticulous scrutiny of the vertebrae and straightened up with a grunt and a grimace as his own vertebral column creaked back into the unlikely S-shape that was its normal and precarious human condition-the penalty, as he told his students, for going recklessly around on your hind legs when you have a cantilevered spine begging for support at each end.
So far he’d found nothing. No skeletal oddities to make identification easier, no signs of cause of death. Only the tiny, scoop-shaped gouges of rodent incisors that had been chewing away for most of the forty-odd years the bones had been there. He stretched, groaned luxuriously, rubbed the back of his neck, and walked over to the work crew.
"Finding anything?" he asked Sergeant Denis.
Denis shook his head with disgust. "But if there’s anything here we’ll find it." His eyes flashed with determination.
Gideon accepted him at his word. Denis was obviously a man who took his work seriously. He had been down there all morning, closely overseeing the three-man work crew-who proceeded nonetheless at their own leisurely pace, ignoring with tolerant good humor the younger man’s exhortations towards speed and care. So far, moving outward from the original trench, they had taken up the big paving stones from about a third of the cellar floor and were now digging through the compacted, sour-smelling earth to a depth of about three feet. He watched them for a few minutes, long enough for the crick in his neck to smooth out, and went back to the table to get on with his own work.