"Right. He couldn't keep Ely from being the director, but at least he could still 'put him in his place.'"
"Incredible," Julie murmured. "It seems so… childish."
"Childish, yes, but it worked. Once Ely dug up the bones and fell for them, Montfort turned around and made sure they were exposed as a fraud by writing that letter to Paris-Match -"
"Wait a minute, you mean it wasn't Bousquet who wrote the anonymous letter? That was Montfort's doing too?"
Everything had been Montfort's doing, Gideon told her; Bousquet had been a red herring-a patsy-from beginning to end. And it had worked right up until the very end, when Ely, finally beginning to suspect that his beloved Montfort, not Beaupierre, was the power behind the hoax, had confronted him-and wound up dead.
"And Montfort just sat there and admitted all this?" Julie asked.
"Yes. I thought his lawyer was going to have a stroke." Gideon slowly shook his head. "It was like watching a corpse talk, Julie. Ask him a question, he tells you the answer: 'Did you kill Jacques Beaupierre?' 'Yes.' 'Did you kill Jean Bousquet?' 'Yes.' 'Did you then keep his body in a freezer for three years?' 'Yes.'" Gideon shivered. "And if you didn't interrupt to ask him something, he'd just go on and on like a robot, in this creepy monotone. Mostly, all Joly had to do was sit back and let him tell his story."
He had told it as if by rote, with barely a glimmer of human feeling. The confrontation with Ely had taken place one morning at one of the remote abris at which Ely was still desperately hoping to redeem himself. The more Montfort had denied having anything to do with the fake, the more deeply suspicious Ely had become. Near the end of his emotional rope-he'd submitted his letter of resignation only a little while before-he had grown more and more agitated, and Montfort, horrified at the prospect of exposure, had grabbed the nearby air rifle, pointed it in Ely's direction, and pulled the trigger.
He'd realized at once that the body couldn't stay there. Remote as the site was, any search for Ely was bound to include the abris at which he'd been working, so he'd dragged the corpse through the brush to another one, a particularly well-hidden little cave in a nearby gully, and buried it there. Before the day was over, the scheme for the faked airplane crash had been developed and put into play. And by the next morning Ely Carpenter, actually lying under seven or eight inches of dirt in a little cave less than half-a-mile from Les Eyzies, had been officially lost at sea in the Bay of Biscay.
"So it was actually Montfort in the plane?" Julie asked. " He was a pilot too?"
No, it couldn't have been Montfort himself, Gideon told her, because he was still in Les Eyzies early the next morning, when he opened his door to a knock and found Jean Bousquet on his doorstep. Unknown to Montfort, Bousquet had been helping Ely, working in a clearing twenty yards away, putting dirt through a sifter, when Montfort had shown up. He'd heard the commotion and crept back in time to watch Montfort haul Ely's body off. Then, as he told Montfort, he had gone to his room in Madame Renouard's boarding house to think. He had spent the night in thought, and had at last come up with his master plan. Unfortunately for him, clear thinking wasn't his strong suit.
He wanted 50,000 francs. If Professor Montfort would give him 50,000 francs he would leave Les Eyzies and go to Marseilles. He would give his solemn word never to say anything to anybody about what he had seen. But if Montfort refused, he would go to the police at once. What was Professor Montfort's reply to be?
Naturally, Montfort shot him. With the only weapon at hand-the air rifle that he'd brought home from the abri, not knowing what else to do with it.
"So there he was," Gideon said, "looking down at the second guy he'd murdered in the last twenty-four hours, this one bleeding all over his living room rug, and he felt as if he simply couldn't face the prospect of burying yet another body in another abri."
"So he froze him instead?"
"Well, as it happened, he already had a rented freezer in a cold-storage warehouse in Le Bugue-somebody used to give him the occasional haunch of venison or wild boar, and that's where he'd keep it- and the easiest, quickest thing to do seemed to be to drive there, dump Bousquet and the rifle into it, and lock it up tight."
"And then what?"
"And then figure out what to do, I suppose. But apparently he never could bring himself to deal with it, and the more time passed the harder it got. So since nothing was forcing his hand he just put it out of his mind, tried to pretend it never happened."
Until last week, when things had suddenly changed. With Ely's body identified and Jacques showing clear signs of coming unglued, Montfort had had to get him out of the picture too, and it dawned on him that poor old Bousquet was his ticket for getting away with the whole mess. Out came the body, out came the rifle, and a day or so later, there lay the infamous Jean Bousquet on the banks of the Vezere."
"The conscience-stricken victim of his own hand," Julie said softly, "after having done away with Jacques-and Ely, of course, by implication. The snake swallows itself. Go back a second, though. Why did Jacques have to be killed? Did he know something about the hoax?"
He not only knew, Gideon told her, he'd taken part, providing Montfort with the fateful lynx bones from his museum. He'd been competing with Ely for the directorship at the time and knew full well that it would take a minor miracle for him to defeat the popular Carpenter. When Montfort, knowing his man all too well, casually suggested "a small prank" to bring Ely down a notch or two, Jacques thought he'd found his miracle. After a few days of waffling, he'd gone along with it, pilfering the bones from the museum-Montfort promised him the source would never be revealed, a promise he didn't waste any time breaking-turning them over to Montfort, and hurriedly stepping out of the picture. That had been the whole of Jacques' guilt, according to Montfort; the source of his "dreadful confession."
"So he wasn't involved in Ely's murder," Julie said.
"Nope, he was as much in the dark as anyone; he thought what we all thought-that Ely had gone down in his plane."
"I'm glad. I didn't want Jacques to have anything to do with that."
Gideon smiled. "I know what you mean. Anyway, whether Jacques put two and two together and figured out what the murder was about I don't know, but he surely realized there had to be some connection to the hoax. And he definitely knew Montfort was the one who'd engineered that."
"So Montfort had to get to him," Julie said, slowly shaking her head. "Before he told you or Lucien."
That was about it, Gideon told her. Later that morning, seeing Jacques whispering on the telephone, Montfort had casually wondered aloud within Madame Lacouture's hearing as to whom he might be speaking. When she told him that she had no idea-but that the call had been made to the Hotel Cro-Magnon-Jacques' death sentence was sealed.
Montfort had followed him from the institute and trailed after him to La Quinze, done the deed, and then-"
"-got Bousquet out of the freezer."
"Yes, that night; like a three-year-old lamb chop. He thawed him out, more or less, in his bathtub-it couldn't have been an easy job, by the way, because the poor guy was bent like a pretzel from spending all that time in the freezer-and left him by the river, with the rifle under him, to be discovered by whoever happened by. It's really pretty brilliant, when you think about it."
"It's really pretty depressing, when you think about it," Julie said. "Whew." She looked up at the sky. "The sun's over the yardarm and I could sure stand a glass of wine. How about you?"
"You bet," Gideon said emphatically and glanced at his watch, "but let's have it at the hotel. Lucien promised to try to stop by at five. I told him we'd be in the upstairs lounge."
Chapter 26