Murder in the Rue Dumas: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mysteries) by M.L. Longworth Read Free Book Online

Verlaque turned around to see a middle-aged man in a wheelchair speaking to two female students who were also mesmerized by the police activity.
    “Get out of here!” Verlaque said to the man, walking quickly toward him. The girls looked at the judge in horror.
    “Just you wait a minute!” the shorter of the girls, with a pierced eyebrow and a nose ring, said. “This man’s handicapped!”
    “
This man
has spent time in prison. Why don’t you two go to a café instead of hanging around here?” The taller girl, wearingglasses and dark, ill-fitting clothes, grabbed her friend’s arm and led her away.
    “Okay, Lémoine,” Paulik said, towering over the wheelchair. “You were given strict orders to stay away from schools and young girls!”
    “This is a university! These girls are now consenting adults,” Lémoine spat out.
    Verlaque walked over. “Do you remember me, Lémoine?” The man did indeed remember the judge who had given him a maximum prison sentence for two counts of misconduct—for verbally and physically offending two teenage girls just outside their junior high school.
    Paulik leaned down on Lémoine’s wheelchair’s armrests and began to shake the chair. He let go, and Lémoine began to furiously turn the wheelchair around. “I’m going! I’m going!”
    “I somehow thought he had disappeared from Aix,” Verlaque said, standing on the sidewalk so that Lémoine knew he was being watched until he had in fact disappeared, up the street and around the corner. Verlaque thought of Philip Larkin, who once wrote that human beings—rich or poor, beautiful or ugly—were bound to be disappointed by life. The poet cynically separated people into two groups: those unloving and those unloved. Lémoine was both, Verlaque decided. Verlaque’s parents were unloving, and his brother? Unloved.
    “I’ll bet he’s heading into the parc Jourdan,” Paulik said.
    “I hope not.” Verlaque thought that with the chill and the grayness of the afternoon there wouldn’t be many people—girls—in the park. “Are you coming back into the building?”
    “No, I’ve been here long enough. Dr. Moutte’s secretary is waiting for you, up on the fourth floor.” Paulik smiled slightly, which Verlaque thought strange, but he didn’t comment on it.
    “All right, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, back here.”
    Verlaque walked into the building and immediately remembered his university days, which had been good ones—away from all that had happened in Paris. Being a student was a luxury, ironically seldom appreciated by students: being permitted to read and write all day long. He walked up the stairs and crossed, coming down, a tall, blond policewoman with her hair tied up in a tight bun and wearing the faintest touch of pale pink lipstick.
    “Judge Verlaque,” she said, smiling and holding out her thin hand.
    “Good afternoon,” he replied, not remembering her name but looking her in the eye. She was not one of Larkin’s unhappy ones, surely? He continued up until he reached the fourth floor and walked down the hall, where he saw a policeman sitting in a chair beside one of the office doors. The young policeman, on seeing Verlaque, jumped up.
    “Judge!”
    “Hello. Sit back down. Has anyone thought to bring you a coffee?”
    The policeman looked up, stunned. “Um, well, no.”
    Verlaque smiled. “I’ll arrange it for you as soon as I get a chance. Sugar?”
    The policeman looked as if he had been offered champagne. “Um…one lump. If it’s no trouble.”
    Verlaque smiled and walked into the office, only to be met with a high-pitched “It’s about time!” He stuck his head back around the corner and looked at the red-haired rookie policeman, who lifted his shoulders and smiled, pointing a finger to his forehead, making a circular motion. Verlaque laughed out loud.
    “I beg your pardon?” he said as he went back in. The voice had come from a petite woman who was no more than thirty years