Chapter 44
The two police officers who showed up on the Geniots’ doorstep were dead ringers for Laurel and Hardy.
One was portly, with a superficially open and friendly expression that belied the dangerous gleam in his dark eyes.
His colleague was tall and thin, with gentle features that contrasted with a bearing that was clearly meant to be intimidating.
Sylvain opened the door and frowned, despite their comical resemblance to Laurel and Hardy, when he saw their uniforms. His throat tightened with apprehension. What now?
“Monsieur Geniot?” Laurel asked.
He paused before nodding his head in assent: at that moment, he would have given anything not to be Monsieur Geniot.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions about this person,” Hardy went on, thrusting a photo of Nora’s husband under his nose. “Gérard Depardieu. Do you know him?”
Sylvain’s heart seemed to stop beating. As he looked at the picture, he tried to figure out why they were there; he had no idea how to respond or what attitude to adopt.
“I know him by sight,” he said, cautiously. “He’s my neighbor’s estranged husband.”
“Indeed he is,” Laurel confirmed. “Might we come in for a few minutes?”
Reluctantly, Sylvain stepped aside to let the two officers into the house, and gestured them toward the living room. Then he went into the kitchen, where Tiphaine and Milo were finishing their lunch.
“Could you come here for a moment, Tiphaine?”
She gave him a questioning look, which he answered with an imperious glance. She put her sandwich on her plate and stood up. Her face was drawn, betraying the sleepless night she had just spent. When she saw the two men in the living room, she frowned and turned to Sylvain for an explanation.
“They want to ask us some questions about Nora’s husband,” he said, looking for a reaction from Tiphaine. She looked genuinely surprised.
“Nora’s husband?”
“Monsieur Gérard Depardieu,” Laurel clarified.
“What do you want to know?” she asked, slightly too aggressively for Sylvain’s taste.
It was Hardy who spoke this time. “Did he come to see you yesterday afternoon?”
Tiphaine and Sylvain glanced at each other.
“Yes,” Sylvain said before Tiphaine could respond.
“Why do you want to know?” asked Tiphaine.
“What time did he leave?” said Hardy, ignoring Tiphaine’s question.
“About six thirty, six forty-five maybe,” replied Sylvain, a little disconcerted by his wife’s reaction.
“What was the reason for his visit?” said Laurel.
“I’d like to know the reason for your visit,” said Tiphaine angrily.
“Tiphaine, please,” said Sylvain.
“No one has seen or heard from Monsieur Depardieu since he left your house,” explained Laurel in a deadpan tone of voice. “You are, until proved otherwise, the last people to have had any contact with him.”
Sylvain felt the earth open up beneath his feet.
He turned to his wife with an expression of shock and incredulity.
Tiphaine stood there in stunned silence, looking at the police officers as if she were trying to see through a joke, or dismantle a hoax.
But her oversincere expression only increased Sylvain’s alarm: she’d actually done it!
That was why she hadn’t come up to bed last night.
He’d thought she was sending him a message, telling him she was ending their relationship, both physical and emotional—if there was anything left to end.
But there had been no message! The reason she hadn’t come to bed was simply that she’d been busy with something else.
Sylvain had an inkling of what she might have done.
He could barely contain his anger, and still less keep from letting it show. He was seething.
Laurel asked again, “What was the reason for his visit?”
Again, Tiphaine and Sylvain looked at each other, this time with a kind of artificial politeness, each clearly wanting to leave the other one to speak. Seeing that neither was going to answer, Hardy chose for them:
“Madame Geniot, can you tell us?”
Tiphaine looked thoughtfully at Hardy for a few seconds. Then she said, in a voice that managed to sound both outraged and dignified, “Gérard Depardieu came to beat the shit out of my husband because he’s been sleeping with his wife. His ex-wife, whatever. Our neighbor.”
Laurel and Hardy were speechless. Sylvain felt like he had just taken a deep breath into his lungs after having held his breath for several minutes.
There was an embarrassed silence, which Laurel eventually broke with a change of subject, a kind of diversionary tactic to try to fix the situation. Instead he made it worse.
“Did he seem to be in any particular frame of mind?”
“Why, yes, he did!” said Tiphaine with an ironic laugh, as if he had put his finger on an important element of the mystery. “He was nervous. That would be one way of putting it.”
“I mean . . . apart from the situation with your husband,” said Laurel, only making things worse.
“That was all he wanted to talk about, officer. His entire being seemed to be focused on his loathing of my husband. I have to say I was tempted to give him a helping hand. But rest assured, he left our house in perfect health.”
Hardy interrupted her. “You have a son, I believe,” he said.
“We do.”
“Was he at home when Monsieur Depardieu came to the house?”
“He arrived home just as he was leaving.”
“Would it be all right if we asked him a few questions?”
“Ask him as many questions as you like. But I would ask you not to mention the reason for his visit. Our son knows nothing about the affair. I’ll ask him to come down.”
Without waiting for them to respond, she called up to Milo, who was in his room. The boy came down to the living room. He cast a doleful look at the police officers, then smirked as he took in their startling resemblance to Laurel and Hardy.
Hardy asked him three questions: had he ever seen the man in the photograph he showed him; had he seen him here the previous evening; and, if so, what time had the man left.
Milo’s honest answers were fluent and natural.
His testimony corroborated that of his parents.
Moreover, the absence of emotion with which he evoked the facts added to the overall credibility of their collective version.
Tiphaine stood there, arms crossed, with an almost victorious smile on her face, her eyes fixed on the two men.
As soon as Milo finished talking, she took them to task.
“I have a question for you, if I may. If we are indeed the last people to have been in contact with Gérard Depardieu, how come you know he was here?”
“Why don’t you ask your son?” Hardy replied.
Tiphaine and Sylvain both turned to Milo, who, finding himself the center of attention but with no idea why, instinctively adopted a defensive attitude.
“I didn’t do anything wrong! I just went over to Nora’s!”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see Inès. She told me Inès was at her father’s house, and I said he’d just been at ours.”
“Why did you want to see Inès?” Tiphaine asked, fully aware she wouldn’t get a straight answer.
“What does it have to do with you?”
“Watch your mouth, Milo!” said Sylvain.
“Well,” said Hardy, as he and his colleague, hot on his heels, turned to go. “We’ll leave you to settle this among yourselves.”
“We may be in touch with you again,” said Laurel as the two men took their leave. “And if you do hear any news about Monsieur Depardieu, you can contact us at this number.” He handed his card to Tiphaine and the two men left.
As soon as the front door closed behind them, Milo demanded an explanation.
“What’s going on? Why are they asking questions about Inès’s dad?”
“He’s disappeared,” said Sylvain darkly, giving Tiphaine an accusatory glare. “No one’s heard from him since he left here last night.”
The implication, if she got it, didn’t get a rise out of Tiphaine, who contented herself with a glower directed at Sylvain. Milo, however, looked stunned.
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“Disappeared!” Sylvain repeated with a touch of irritation. “He didn’t go home last night. Vanished into thin air! No more Inès’s daddy.”
“What? How’s that possible?”
“Well, that’s the six-million-dollar question,” Sylvain said, giving Tiphaine a meaningful look.
“Why did you go to see Inès?” Tiphaine repeated, ignoring Sylvain’s insinuation.
“It’s none of your business,” he said, turning heel and going back up to his room, taking the stairs three at a time. Tiphaine and Sylvain didn’t move. Sylvain turned to his wife, who didn’t give him time to open his mouth.
“I know what you’re thinking. And I don’t give a damn. Whatever’s happened to that piece-of-shit attorney, it’s nothing to do with me. But don’t think I’m going to waste a second of my time trying to prove that to you.”
And she turned and went back into the kitchen, leaving him standing there, open-mouthed. After a minute or two he sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands.
Did Tiphaine have anything to do with Gérard Depardieu’s disappearance? She had seemed genuinely surprised when she’d heard there had been no news of him since he’d left their house the previous day. But he knew his wife. He knew what she was capable of.