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was one in a million, it would have been a perfect opportunity to add the line “And so are you.”

Chapter Six

The Unloving and Unloved
    V erlaque maneuvered his car around yet another roundabout of the industrial zone of Carpentras, anxious to be out of that drab town and on the Autoroute du Soleil, which on a Saturday might be busy. After receiving a phone call from Commissioner Paulik he had agreed with Marine—her purse full of postcards of Roman mosaics of birds—that she would spend the afternoon grading and he would return that evening, since Crillon-le-Brave was less than two hours away. He could question the deceased’s secretary and then speak with Paulik and Yves Roussel—the prosecutor had decided to proceed with a criminal investigation and had turned the case over to Verlaque by phone—and then be back at the hotel for dinner.
    As he smoked his cigar and listened to Gerry Mulligan’s baritone saxophone, he thought of Hemingway, his perfect sentences and his sorrow, as an old man—a year away from death—that he had cheated on and quit his first wife. The book was, ifanything, a love letter to her. “Hadley,” Verlaque said aloud as he slowed down for the
péage
, putting his car in the automatic toll lane, having a Télépéage on his dashboard. His cell phone rang and he answered it, putting it on speaker.
    “Yes, Paulik. I just went through the toll at Lançon, so I’m about a half hour from Aix.”
    “Great. Let me fill you in a bit,” Bruno Paulik said, pausing to take a sip of lukewarm coffee that he had purchased out of a university vending machine. “Dr. Bouvet says that Moutte was hit over the head early this morning, sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. A maid found the body at 8:00 a.m. when she was cleaning. His office door was open and the lock wasn’t pried, so the murderer had a key, or was let in by Moutte, or the door wasn’t locked in the first place. There were four sets of fresh prints all over the office. One belongs to Moutte, two others we have no record for, and the fourth we’ve identified as belonging to one of his students, Yann Falquerho.”
    “Fast work. Falquerho has a record?”
    “He was a juvenile offender when he was seventeen, breaking and entering into his father’s men’s club, on a prank apparently. The charges were dropped, but the Parisian cops scared the pants off of him by throwing him in a prison cell overnight and taking his prints.”
    “I see. Isn’t that normal that this kid’s prints were in the office?” Verlaque asked. “He was his student, right?”
    “Yes and no. Georges Moutte was the doyen and so had little contact with the students. But Falquerho’s fingerprints were on the office doorknob, on files on Moutte’s desk, and on the stainless steel arms of his desk chair, which was toppled over when the professor fell. Roussel and I have already questioned Falquerho in his apartment. Another student was there too—Thierry Marchive—andthe two of them immediately confessed to breaking into the doyen’s office late last night.”
    “
What
? Do they realize how bad this looks for them? How did they break into a university building, anyway?”
    “I checked the door where they entered. My daughter Léa could have broken in. And yes, the boys were very nervous…they couldn’t stop blabbing. One of them was going on and on about a painting of Saint Francis, and the other one telling us how he kept a vase from turn-of-the-century Nancy from breaking.” Verlaque listened but didn’t comment—the innocent were often very nervous under police questioning, but one of them had already broken into a building before. And it was strange that both boys would comment on objects in the office, as if that mattered, when their doyen was lying dead on the floor. Verlaque dragged on his cigar and guessed that the vase was a Gallé. Could a doyen afford one of those?
    “What did they say about the professor?”
    “That they saw him lying