Where There's Smoke полностью

Lisette Rabillon is my housekeeper, sixty-three years old, tall and slender, with sharp-nosed French features, shrewd blue eyes, and a saucy manner unbecoming to her age. A tough and beautiful old broad, she had fought with the French Resistance in her youth, earning the nickname “La Dynamiteuse,” a testimony to her skill as a demoli­tions expert. In 1943 her husband had been taken as hostage when he refused to tell the names of the young Frenchmen who’d shot two German sentries. The com­mandant of the town ripped out his tongue and later stood him up against the wall of the church, where he was ma­chine-gunned to death before the eyes of Lisette and the gathered townspeople. (I’m willing to forgive Lisette her sometimes dismal view of mankind.) She was living at present with a man who taught French at one of the city’s universities, and who translated poetry and novels for a select few publishers. I had no reason to doubt that her re­lationship with the professor was hot-blooded and tem­pestuous.

She peered into the carton now, and said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“A crow,” I said.

“Where did you get him?”

“He dropped in unexpectedly.”

“Tell him to leave the same way,” Lisette said.

“He’s hurt.”

“He’ll die here and smell up the house.”

“We’ll see,” I said, and carried bird and box into the back room while behind me Lisette mumbled something about “des oiseaux sales.”

The apartment I live in is eight rooms long, and the room I use as a study is at the farthest end, overlooking the park. Lisette doesn’t much care for this arrangement because she has strict instructions never to let an unfamiliar stranger into the apartment, and this means she has to trot through the entire length of the place whenever she looks through the peephole in the front door and sees someone she doesn’t know. There’s only one large win­dow in the room I use as a study. It’s just opposite the door, and my desk is set at a right angle to it. The wall be­hind the desk and the one opposite it are covered floor to ceiling with bookcases and books. Very few of these books are novels (I despise novels), and none of them are mysteries (I abhor mysteries). When I’m sitting behind my desk, I’m facing one bookcase wall and another bookcase wall is behind me. The door is on my right, and the window is on my left and through the window I can see a magnificent view of the park and the buildings bor­dering it to the east.

I put the carton and the bird on one end of the desk now, and sat behind the desk and dialed Abner’s funeral home. There was something I wanted to ask him, some­thing triggered by the aimless woolgathering I’d done in the car before the crow decided to hit my windshield.

“Hello?” Abner said.

“Abner, it’s Benjamin Smoke. Have you got a minute?”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Is Mr. Gibson’s body back in the shop?”

“Oh, yes,” Abner said.

“Abner, is there anything wrong with the body?”

“Wrong?”

“Is there anything changed about it? Did anybody do anything to it, or take anything from it, or in any way tamper with it or damage it or ...”

“No, Lieutenant. It’s exactly as it was before it was stolen.”

“I see,” I said. “Thank you, Abner.”

I hung up and stared at the telephone. Abner was no longer my client, his missing corpse had been found, the case was closed—but there was still no solution to it. If the thief had shopped four other funeral parlors before finding the corpse he wanted at Abner’s, then why had he later discarded it in mint condition? In fact, why had he stolen it in the first place? I tried to find some joy in the knowledge that the theft had me completely baffled. In an attempt at self-deluding levity, I even told myself I could now go down to Abner’s funeral home and make a citizen’s arrest, charging him with violation of Section 1308 of the Penal Law: “A person who buys or receives any property knowing the same to have been stolen... is guilty of a misdemeanor if such property be of the value of not more than a hundred dollars.” Anthony Gibson’s corpse had become stolen property the moment the thief took it away in the dead of night. And Abner had received it this afternoon, and although the ninety-seven cents of elements in a human body had probably doubled or trebled with inflation, the stolen property was still worth much less than a C-note. You are guilty of a misde­meanor, Abner Boone, I thought, and tried to find some mirth in my observation. It didn’t work. Until I knew ex­actly why four other funeral homes had been broken and entered, until I knew what had motivated the thief to set­tle upon Anthony Gibson’s body and later discard it, I couldn’t honestly say I’d expended every effort before admitting defeat. Which meant that I had to check out the mortuaries on the list Henry had given me.