A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #4)

A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #4) Page 97

She looked at him closely.

“I know your type. You always take the best. You’re a little man with a little power and it’s made you a bully. I wonder where you get it from?”

She left.

Beauvoir shook his head. Just as he thought this Anglo-palooza couldn’t get any weirder, Sandra Morrow did this.

“Where were we?” asked Gamache, regaining his seat and taking a sip of beer.

“Cigarettes,” said Lacoste, watching to see if Sandra Morrow’s ragged little insults had resulted in even a flesh wound. But the chief looked superbly unconcerned.

“The Jubilee Tobacco case. I remember it,” said Beauvoir. “All that stuff came out about the shit the companies are putting into cigarettes. My mother actually quit after watching a report.”

“Smart woman,” said Gamache. “Lots of people quit.”

“And did that cause the crisis?” asked Beauvoir, lost again.

“No, they just turned to the developing world for their market. What brought Martin’s house down around him was the discovery that long after they knew they were in trouble they continued to sell Partnerships, to offset their losses with the tobacco companies. Thousands of people were ruined. The small investors.”

Beauvoir and Lacoste were silent, thinking about that. Beauvoir, having spoken to Martin from prison, was surprised. He didn’t seem like the sort to intentionally screw so many people, the small investors. Ma and Pop. Yet he had. Greed. That was the real jailer.

“Is it possible one of the Morrows, maybe even Charles Morrow, was a Partner?” Lacoste asked. “Maybe they lost a fortune.”

“David Martin said the Morrows are worth about twenty million.”

“Dollars?” asked Lacoste.

“No, dog biscuits. Of course dollars,” said Beauvoir.

“But maybe they were worth a hundred million before all this,” said Gamache.

“Could you check it out?” he asked Lacoste.

Soon they had every other guest on the suspect list.

“Haven’t exactly narrowed it down, have we?” Beauvoir smiled ruefully. “They all had the opportunity, they all seemed to have motives for killing each other.”

“Julia said she’d figured out her father’s secret,” said Lacoste. “I think that’s significant. I asked Clara about it.”

“And?” Gamache was curious.

“She wasn’t helpful, in fact she was slightly unhelpful.”

“Really?”

Beauvoir stared at the list. Then at the other board. On it was a list of clues, facts, statements. The men’s room graffiti. The two notes they’d found in the grate were tacked to it, and next to them a bird without feet.

And a series of questions:

Was the storm significant?

What had Julia figured out about her father?

Who wrote the notes in the grate?

Why did Julia keep the thank-you letters from long ago?

Who wrote the graffiti on the men’s room wall? Does it matter?

They had a long list for Who. For Why. But one word sat alone on the foolscap.

How.

How had that statue fallen? Nothing was written below the word, not even wild guesses.

“Oh, I have another name to add to the list,” said Beauvoir, scribbling the name slightly larger than the rest.

“Pierre Patenaude? The maître d’?” asked Lacoste.

“Of course him,” said Beauvoir.

“Why him?” asked Gamache.

“Well, he was out on the terrasse around midnight. He helped place the statue, so maybe he did something so that it would fall down. He worked in a cemetery as a kid, so he’d know about statues.”

“He’d know how to put them up, perhaps,” said Gamache reasonably. “But not how to bring them down. He probably only learned how to cut grass around them, anyway.”

“He has access to all the rooms,” said Beauvoir, trying not to sound increasingly argumentative. “He could’ve written the notes. Or maybe he didn’t even give them to her. Maybe he just wrote them and crumpled them up and threw them into the grate knowing we’d find them.”

Two silent, staring faces greeted this burst of genius.

“On purpose,” he stressed. Still they stared. “To misdirect. Oh, come on, he’s a great suspect. He’s everywhere and no one sees him.”

“You aren’t suggesting the butler did it?” said Gamache.

“It’s either him or the shopkeeper and his cleaning woman wife,” said Beauvoir, and cracked a smile.