The Dead Man’s Touch. Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #11. Chapter One. Louis Shalako.

Official portrait of Inspector Gilles Maintenon, head of the Special Homicide Unit.

Louis Shalako

 

 

Gilles had dressed very carefully, in the charcoal jacket, the crisp white linen shirt and the almost silvery tie with its small but tastefully visible fleurs de lis in a lighter grey. The trousers were only a shade lighter than the jacket, and the shoes were black of course.

The socks, black silk with little red death’s-heads on them.

This would be something of an occasion, otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered.

It was his first day back on the job, and of course Roger had to call first thing and ask him to come on down. Someone on the front desk must have tipped him off that Gilles was in the building. He’d barely gotten his hat and jacket off, and his phone was already ringing off the hook.

It was a warm summer morning, and he could already feel the sweat-stains in the armpits.

Repressing any irritation he might have felt, he moseyed on down there and was admitted into the inner sanctum without delay.

“Gilles. Welcome back—and congratulations on your recovery.”

They shook hands, briefly but warmly enough.

“You look good.”

“Thank you, Roger.”

He took a chair as the other shuffled file folders.

“Okay, Gilles. The only real reason I called you down here, is just to ask. Please try not to strain yourself. Concussions can be damned tricky things, and then there is the blood pressure and all of that sort of thing.” We wouldn’t want the poor boy getting an embolism of the brain or whatever. “Just promise that you won’t push yourself too hard, okay?”

“Okay. Fine. Be that way.” Gilles shrugged it off, but then he would—wouldn’t he.

Langeron pushed a button.

“Coffee?”

“Er, no, thank you.” Gilles made a face.

He’d already had about three this morning, feeling a bit stubborn as he was, and sort of making a point of not coming in until nine o’clock on the dot. His usual time was more like seven-thirty or eight. By this point in time, there wouldn’t be a single case-file on his desk, and there would be no point in following his usual routine, which normally gave him a little peace and quiet first thing, and time to read up and to think upon what comes next...in any given case.

“That’s fine, Gilles, I won’t keep you too long. Look, I’ve got three files here—all from other units, asking for some help. These cases are still warm. Which one do you want?”

“I’ll take all of them.” With a bit of a grimace, he pulled himself up from the depths of the chair, and a very nice chair it was, too.

“Well, don’t you even want to hear about them—”

“Not particularly.”

With a shake of the head, Roger Langeron handed off the folders and Gilles turned his back.

“Next time, I will offer a cognac, the very best Napoleon, expensive as all Hell, and serve me right, too.” The tone was rueful. “You could at least hang around for a while. I’ve got some pretty good cigars.”

Gilles spun back around, on his way out the door.

“Next time, I might even stay a little longer.”

That funny little grin and the glitter in those eyes helped, but only so much. The door was swinging shut—

“Yes. That’s our Gilles all right.” He picked up another folder and began to read.

Gilles poked his head back in and Roger looked up.

“Yes?”

“We can talk about early retirement.”

“Really? I don’t believe you.” Still, he was grinning now.

“I meant yours.”

Quietly, ever so gently, the door snicked shut.

“Huh. Huh—huh.”

***

 

Three flights of stairs, three up and three down.

Maintenon was still thinking of early retirement, in humorous terms to be sure. He still had a couple of years to go, and people had stayed on for various reasons. Whether that would be a privilege or a punishment was hard to say. Would he still be doing this into his seventies? It didn’t seem very likely, and yet it was hard to visualize much of anything else, either. He could always buy a small farm somewhere and learn how to grow cucumbers and such…Poirot had grown vegetable marrows as he recalled, without actually knowing or even caring what they were.

Entering the room, the only one there was LeBref, head down, making copious notes and with a phone jammed up to an ear…he put a palm over the mouthpiece.

“Oh, hey, Gilles, how’s it going.”

Gilles nodded and eyeballed the room, which seemed oddly different, even though the place looked just about the same. Sort of smaller than he had remembered it. It really was getting a little grubby in there, and the cobwebs in the corners were all too evident in the strong morning light…theoretically, the cleaners came through every night, in the early, pre-dawn hours. If so, they must be pretty blind. It’s either them, or us, or so he thought. Someone around here, was getting pretty damned blind—Roger’s palatial office stood in real contrast to this, naturally enough as he was commissioner. Even so, this kind of neglect carried a certain message too.

“It’s going all right.” Sitting down at his desk, somewhat unfamiliar after weeks or even months, he looked over at the coffee pot, which appeared to be empty.

Rising with a grunt, he grabbed the Pyrex pot and headed off down the hall to find some water. The actual percolator was aluminium, with a glass bubble on top so you could keep an eye on things. When he got back, the other fellow, Detective Joseph LeBref, a near-midget but not quite as people said, was gone. A man so short, his very name had been compressed, the proper form being Le Bref. Gilles spooned in the ground beans, added just a few grains of salt, added water, and set it to percolate on the gas-ring.

Sighing, he settled in to read—it struck him that the thin, padded seat-cushion, tied by ribbons onto a hard maple chair, had reached the end of its days and he’d have to get another one. He’d been gone damn near two months, and he had been taking good chairs, and soft seating for granted the last little while. The contrast between this and Roger’s chairs was stark. Had he really been sitting on that thing for the term of so many years, almost uncountable? He couldn’t recall, not in the whole history of the Unit, any instance of anyone ever getting a new chair or a new desk.

Thoughtfully, he pulled a pen and made a quick little note. If Roger really wanted to talk, then he might just be getting something of an earful. Some fresh paint, new desks, better chairs and such might do a lot for morale, and of course Roger was big on morale. Who wasn’t, right? Senior officers of the Sûreté talked about it all the time. He might have even done it himself.

Quite frankly, it might even be time to move—a room twice the size wouldn’t be nearly enough, not when you considered how busy they could be, and in fact, they’d been promised new blood, new faces and new bodies, and one wondered where they were supposed to put them all. Or even just to get them all. It was high time, too—he would tell Roger all about it when he was more in the mood.

The coffee was ready, the aroma permeating the room.

And now, it was time to open up that first file.

 

END

 

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Note. This blog is exclusively dedicated to The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mysteries. There are a couple of titles currently not linked, for a total of ten titles plus the original novella, The Handbag's Tale. Perhaps the author will get around to fixing it. The Dead Man's Touch, (provisional title), will be the eleventh in the series and we hope to have a pretty good manuscript in about three months.

Thank you for reading.