ERIC VINCENT

EXPLOSIVE DELIRIUM

Explosive delirium

Site: http://ericvincent.no-ip.org/

© Eric Vincent 2006. All rights reserved. All resemblance with situations or characters having existed, existing or to come, would be fortuitous.

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Chic suburb, moonless night and defect of streetlight: ideal conditions to operate. The robber grasps the forged iron grid, hoist himself, steps over and jumps on the tarred alley. He approaches silently his prey, an imposing Parisian style home. Armored door, six anchorage points, two supplementary bolts and alarm macaroons, the snags accumulate at the doorstep of the building. His receivers pay him to bring back some loot and his experience allows him to abolish these difficulties. He drags a scanner, a laptop computer and paraphernalia of mechanical tools out of his rucksack. First of all, the electronic system. The pages of an electronic file parade, he stops at the fifteen page. Identified alarm system: Cobra models 800 titanium, four frequency bands, silent transmission to police, multiple sirens able to wake a cemetery up. The top of the top about home protection! He knows the parade. The scanner coupled to the laptop sweeps the frequencies. A "home-maid" integrated card gives out codes of remote control, until the Cobra 800 switches on Off mode. Two small dry squeaking indicate that his major worry is adjusted. With his perfect tools made to pick the locks, the door doesn't resist more than five minutes to the cat burglar. Abundance of grease and regulating of the hinges at the micrometer coalesce that it opens up without the least grinding, without one ounce of hissing. He puts his nocturnal vision system under tension and closes the entry door. He is inside. According to the informants who carried up their crop of observations to his backers, the mistress of house is mad of jewelry, and not some fake. The shopping of the family rather takes place at Vendôme place than in general stores surface of popular districts. It’s a precious clue. The hall is sprinkled of painting masters copies and of numbered lithographs, without interest. Sometimes, he discovers unknown names for the layman but worthy of interest for persons who want to bet on the future of artists painters. He is not here to clutter himself with canvases having an uncertain value. He wants jewelry, money, bearer securities: only portable things. He examines the walls with care, searching the unavoidable strongbox. Nothing in the hall! He decides to precipitate his research, taken by a bad presentiment. He has flair to guess shenanigans, traps and his sixth sense never lied to him. He spins in the lounge. The main room is the more used to seal a reinforced safe. Bingo! A banal paint, parallel to the wall, betrays the hiding place. He conjures the trompe l’oeil and discovers a stainless steel strongbox made by the ancient and venerable Fichet institution. He savors his find: an electronic model, the easiest to pirate. The size of the cube curbs his joy: ridiculous. He executes a nosey program which controls the components. The numbers are displayed one by one, the securities jump, the jaws loosen themselves. The loot is displayed without complex to the greedy hands. A wad of banknotes, large denominations. Fifty thousand Euros, at the very least. "Not bad!" There is nothing else the cavity, such as if the metal cube, nearly in evidence, played the role of the red cloth agitated to lead him in mistake. Where is the rest of the money? A big boss of the finance world who frequents the jet set, who slaps an average of ten

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thousand Euros each evening, between gastronomic restaurant and private club, doesn’t wait at the automatic cash point like the other persons. He necessarily hides more than fifty thousand Euros in his shack. And what about lady's adornments? Where are they? His stomach twists of anguish. Damned interior small bell ringing like a madwoman! Why? He doesn't know how to bring logical explanation to the irrational. No… There is one explanation. The bazaar he must pinch is lodged at the floor, in a bedroom, with sleepers. A financier is a stressed man and has got a light sleep. He doesn't have the choice: he doesn’t want to be content with a gratuity. He starts silently his progression toward the floor. He knows precisely where to go. He localized the room by dint of locations the previous days. On the left, the three kids bedrooms. On the right, the parental suite overlooking the garden. He enters. *** Walls of concrete covered with carpets, tinted glass, and ministerial office made of mahogany: a sterilized professional setting. Cramped in his armchair, the man fixes a luminous screen, devastated. He is sent packing, slaughtered on the altar of the profit. Everyone will have his turn! In the name of the profitability, he signed the professional death sentence of hundreds counter clerks, exchange brokers, industrious and devoted employees. Everyone will have his turn! The killer of employment is sacrificed, his scandalous emoluments are abrogated, his Gold, Imperium and Select cards are blocked and his existence is striped. Everyone will have his turn! There is always someone more powerful, more silvery and greedier. The shareholders! Strong men make irruption on his, armed of wagons and cardboards. He protests, they don't listen him. They are elected to empty his office, to recover the furniture, to archive the files. A technician interferes between the big arms and withdraws all telephony and computer cables and connectors. The screen dies and his virtual files powder in thousands of octal dusts. The tooting of the telephone resounds like the knell and gets lost in echoes without end. Everyone will have his turn!! The programmer's sentence slaps him with violence. He holds on to the keyboard, the keys dissociate from the basis and scatter themselves on soil. He throws himself on the ground to gather them, vile and spineless. Miserable… He fights the movers; he harangues them, with the look and then, with the fists. His strokes rain without effect, he fights uselessly, his adversaries don't feel the shocks or the mercy. Everyone will have his turn!! The space empties itself, the office turns to inhuman cold. The assistants he exhausted during the last years engulf themselves in the free doorway. Motherhoods, refusal of sofa promotion, impermeability to the overtimes without compensation, all pretexts were good to hunt them, without shame, without remorse. - Everyone will have his turn! They scream in choir, like avenger wolves. Their rage appeased, they tear him until he groans, he implores. Soil escapes under his feet, the ivory tower crumbles, his empire disables itself and lets him fall in the emptiness. He is condemned. Cowardly, he closes the eyes. He reopens them. It’s dark. He is in his bedroom.

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A nightmare, again a dirty nightmare! He inspires deeply and blocks his lungs, to the lookouts. He feels a presence. There, at some meters in front of him, frozen, suspended. A gesture from the intruder; the sleeper stretches the arm forward, a lightning bang tears the space. Screams of the woman, the children and the husband! Light on, they discover an inert body, face against soil. The wall decoration has been redone with a red color. Panic screams, incomprehension, it is not anymore a nightmare. It is worse. *** Nailed on a chair of the kitchen, he closes himself at the merry-go-round stunning of the men in dark holdings. The police rushed a cohort of scientific specialists and investigators. A squad of sergeants is assigned to hold the curious from afar. A banal burglary, at the Ladurée de Hautefeuille’s house, in a chic district, can be sufficient to put good use for the VIP and jet set press. Charles is stunned, deadened and shattered: he gave the death. Even though the intruder came to rob him, even though he would have got a simple knife, his acts didn't deserve such a sentence. How did he reach this situation? But how?! Clementine regrouped the children in the games room and tries to preserve them from the tumult. Edouard, the older, tempted to enter the parental room to discover the dead but his mother sequestrated him like his two sisters. They are invisible but Clementine will be interrogated, like the three youngsters, it is sure. What will they say? How will they describe him? Won't they take advantage to describe the absent and flighty husband, the brutal and inflexible father? A young man in inexpensive navy blue costume comes in front of him. Charles needs a half-a-dozen of seconds before acknowledging receipt of his presence. Curly, brown and grizzled hair, the policeman seems younger than his police captain rank let it suppose. The policeman doesn't take offense for as much: he sizes up his “customer”. When he feels him able to listen, he introduces himself: - Captain Pelletier, Criminal Investigation Department. The owner of the manor opens an eye on the plastic-coated card, crossed by three blue white and red large lines. He sighs for a long time, taking the opportunity to come back smoothly to the reality. - Are you in state to speak? Charles whispers: - Yes… - I have some questions to ask you. Are you Charles Ladurée de Hautefeuille? - Yes. - What’s your birth date? - February 29, 1972 in Bordeaux. - Is this house your unique place of residence?

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- No. We have a flat at Cannes, a chalet at Courchevel and a property with dependences and grapevines in management near from Bordeaux. - And some parents? - My parents died. The cop ogles the bourgeois and flinches a little: - Deceased? You are only 34 years old and… - An accident. A tragic accident took them away. - Sorry. The Captain doodles, Charles shrugs the shoulders. What importance can he find to the death of two unknown persons? - Are you able to describe me what happened? - From what moment? - Like you want. - Hey well… I was sleeping. More precisely, I made a nightmare. - Does it occur often? - I beg your pardon? What’s the link? The Captain feels an old reflex of causticity in the banker's tone. - Answer rightly to the question. Under his charming airs, the Captain goes right to the goal. His opinion is already made: he doesn't believe the burglary thesis. Then, how will he swallow an enormous snake? - Yes, it occurs often. I have a stressful and demanding job. I manage hundreds of millions of Euros. - I understand. Therefore, after the nightmare? - I woke up suddenly. - Did you scream? The point-blank questions destabilize Charles and yet, he doesn't have anything to feel guilty. He is a burglary victim; he defended himself, nothing more! So… The inexplicable tragedy: his first direct death on the conscience. He carries on: - Maybe. - Yes or no? This cop is a pit-bull! The kind of man who left a poor environment with the strength of work and who fights against all managers like him! - I think I screamed. My wife will confirm my numerous nightmares and the calls of distress coming with them. I should have uttered a scream, what froze the burglar. I should have taken three or four seconds to feel that there was someone in the piece.

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- To feel? - Yes, to feel. To discern, to detect, how can I tell it you? It is like when you perfectly know the sound of a motor, you are able to determine a nuance that indicates a dysfunction. I felt that the room didn't have the same resonance than usually. Pelletier notes scrupulously each detail. The abundance of notes worries Charles. It is only a burglary that turned badly for the thief! Why this circus? Why these go and come on the drama scene, all this scientific staff spreading? What are they looking for? “The weapon!” The answer stings his neurons. They look for the weapon he took to kill the intruder. He must give them what they want. Here is the problem! - Okay. Then? - Then… Then… Captain, the problem is that then, I… I… I can’t tell it because you won't believe me. - I don't have preconceived ideas. Report the facts. - Hey well… I stretched the hand toward this shade and… a deflagration occurred. - Did you shoot him? - Yes but without weapon. - Without weapon? - The gunshot came from my finger. *** The call 312 of May 26 complicates itself. It is now about the business 312 of May 26, the Ladurée de Hautefeuille / Gardani business. Rafael Gardani, famous scoundrel, working in solo and on order, has been identified. He is a break-ins specialist; nothing can stop him and especially not the sophisticated and modern protections for which he feels a particular affection. At least, he felt. The medical expert analyzes what remains from Gardani, relieved of a good part of his rib cage and of the totality of the vital digestion organs. Instead of the native of Naples, there is now a crater worthy of the Vesuvius. The routine questions turned to a tight cross-examination. Captain Pelletier sleeps 3 hours per night, never more. The sleepless nights don't cause him any worry. He put Charles in police custody and has 48 hours to make confess him a history that yours up. Then, he doesn’t want to lose one second. Behind his office, he leads the dance while playing the cat and the mouse game with the burglarized schemer. Behind a window without silvering, doctor Wacholski, psychiatrist detached at police's services, observes and records the least facts and gestures of the accused person. - Listen, I know I killed a person tonight. The vision of this jagged man obsesses me. But I only defended my life. - I have no doubt about your sincerity. But the victim was not armed. He only had simple screwdrivers and a cutter. The French law considers self-defense when both parts use equal means to struggle. Nevertheless, with a big name of the Bar, a good pleading, your virgin criminal record, and the fact that Gardani was not an angel, you should incur the

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minimum, or even an acquittal. You only have to give us your weapon, we compare the calibers and the prints of the bullets and all corroborates. - It is the problem. I don't have a gun at home or elsewhere. I am allergic to weapons. I only held once during my life. It was during my military service, a practice shooting. My single experience: disastrous. - Disastrous? - I was terrorized by this weapon; I didn't respect the security rules. I have been ejected from the session and have been forbidden for the continuation. You can verify my story at Mérignac Air Force Base, during 1984. - It will be done. Pelletier stays impassive facing Charles' arguments. He carries on: - If you don't possess a gun, who lent you one of it? The accused loses temper: - But no one! - Calm down. Seat again. - Okay! No one lent me a gun. I kill myself to tell you that I have a pathological fear of guns. I cannot conceive to touch these things. And the shot that brought this man down didn't leave from a gun but from my finger. I saw it, indeed! Shrug of the policeman, dubitative frown of the eyebrows. He inclines the head slightly toward the window without silvering and lowers the lids twice. Five seconds later, a lieutenant knocks at the door. - Come in! - We need you two minutes, boss. - I leave you. The tone is humble but Charles is viscerally persuaded that he darkens fallen head in a dead end and that the cop only has to release an order to throw Charles in jail. He is out, burned. In the finance world, one night in jail means perpetuity radiation. Then, a murder… The policeman is right: a bullet ejected at several hundred meters per second speed, against a screwdriver or a cutter, it is criminal. It is incomprehensible and yet, it is what really happened. He doesn't possess any gun and never possessed some. Not after what happened in Gironde. His finger shot without feeling receding and without harvesting the least residual of powder. The police didn't find the weapon in the house, nor in the garden, nor could have thrown as far that he because it doesn't exist. And what about his wife, Clementine? She really confirmed his story and affirmed that he didn't have a weapon between the hands when she lit light! It is a proof he says the truth! ***

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The psychiatrist is formal: Charles is not mad. Despite the flagrant inconsistencies of his speech, the man is not delirious. Disturbing revelation of the practitioner! The medical examiner’s find reassures him: - I extracted the bullet and sent it to ballistics. You will have my report in one half-hour and the one of our scientific friends in one hour. - At least, the projectile is not ghost. - Does he still affirm that the bullet left his finger? - Yes. Did you notice some marks on the bullet? - Yes and perfectly visible. It is the 44 caliber. If the weapon is recorded, the computer files will speak. - I hope. The accused man is immobile, as poured in concrete. The captain has only to jostle him a little bit and his fanciful reason will be smashed to pieces. It is only a question of time. *** The hours are parading. The police cells are a stink, an aberration of the hygienic rules. Charles hopes this story is only a phantasmagoria produced by the complex chemistry of his brain. The cop obsesses and harasses him; he alternates phases of isolation, of silence and periods of pressing and embarrassing questions. And in all legality, he deprives him of any family visit and of any contact with his experienced and well-known lawyers. A few score of meters farther, four levels above the prisoner, the young policeman tortures his scalp while scraping it with rage, as taken by a compulsive obsessive trouble. The weapon has been identified. Charles says the truth: it is not his gun. It belongs to Vladimir Ienessei, executor of the Muscovite Mafia, dixit the Russian police. Since thirty minutes, he knows that the Smith and Wesson, model number 629, caliber number 44, with a steel finish, was used to kill two dealer competitors two days ago. Ienessei was caught in the meantime and his gat, the proof, is under seal in an armored cabinet of the Moscow main police. - A crazy story! The lieutenant Marron is not wrong. How could a gun leave a closed cabinet located at 2500 kilometers from Paris to shoot a bullet in a crook's chest and to go back as soon as possible to the Muscovite capital? It is yet the unique reality: a projectile misses in the cartridge clip of the Russian. Between the murder and the weapon identification, it hardly flowed out two hours. There was no night flight between Paris and Moscow, even no flight with stopover. And it was necessary to pass the customs, to go to the embarking, to transfer between the crime scene and the airport, to make some in the same way between the Russian airport and the police. Impossible!. The first policemen were at the Ladurée de Hautefeuille house ten minutes after the murder. Impossible! Charles could not lie. Yet, the weapon is well real, even though the narration appears absurd. He wants to know everything about this man: his habits, his friends, his schedule, his relationships, his character. His colleagues peel the financier's life. The reports don't stop

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falling on the cop's office. An anecdote keeps his attention: the death of Charles' parents. The accused man spoke of a "tragic accident." His father killed his mother during a hunt, an accidental and deadly shooting. One week later, he returned the weapon against him and died. Pelletier understands Charles' aversion for the guns and other rifles. But this tragedy made him inherit the blooming vineyard domain and allowed him to appease his expensive passions. Money also served him to maintain some mistresses loving luxury and money. A lucrative parental death, a life of wild, luxury and lust, it could have justified a swindle to the inheritance. But for Gardani, he doesn't understand. What mobile could have pushed Charles to bring the burglar down? A juicy contract? Ridiculous! His skin even is not worth a gratuity. To embarrass his backers? Under the condition to discover their identity and to blemish their reputation. And it doesn't hold standing. "I grind myself the brains for nothing. The facts, just the facts: he surprised a burglar, killed him. The bullet is real, the weapon is real. I ignore by what trick he succeeded in using this gun lost in Russia but the fact is indisputable, ballistics is not mistaken. A burglary turned badly, final point." The captain doesn't believe the faintest word of his hasty findings. His instinct orders him to dig, to search. He raises the eyes toward the lieutenant and delivers his orders: - Search his office at the bank. Return his life with a bulldozer. And pass our thief's existence to the sieve: if these two have a common life dust, I want to know it. - Yes, boss. Lieutenant Marron distributes work, the deputies speed up. The investigation stagnates and carries on in the same time. The excitation moves up a peg. *** Mrs. Estelle de la Ferrière, member of the Bar, splits the space filled with smoke of the police station while displacing the volutes. Her fairness and her ingenuousness are only appearance; in the courts, her implacable indictments and her quibbling foxiness were worth her the nickname of “praying mantis”. She became friend with her equals to eat them greedily better when they turned their back. Her emoluments align on her vivacity. She wants to see her milk cow customer: Charles. All media are warned; radio, television and press are going to camp in front of the police station. Due to a lack of information, they will make information… according to the speech she will give them. Pelletier is warned: the storm is going to unleash itself on him if he doesn't stick his suspect with a file made of concrete. He tries bluff and drives her back. She chooses retirement and rushes toward the floor of reports to deliver them her show. The time is counted for the policeman and this story of murderous finger disturbs him deeply. He feels he will have to let the business down. He slaps the door of his office. He loses his composure. This gesture worries his men; they aren’t used to see him acting like this. He pushes on the intercom call button: - Marron, bring up Ladurée, please.

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He is going to cook him, until he changes his version of the facts. *** The accused is like a dry prune, shortened on his too large chair, chained to the cast iron radiator. He dies of thirst and hunger. An infamous sandwich and an insipid coffee didn't satisfy hiss needs. He stagnates among the cops for fourteen hours, harping on the same diary. He played everything: the despair, the arrogance, the superior air, the repentance, the ignorance, the turpitude; nothing availed. Pelletier stayed as inflexible as a Vopo of the past German Democratic Republic facing the runaways abhorring the wall of the shame. - I am going to summarize your situation. You explain how you obtained a weapon to knock the burglar and all this down will pass for the disproportionate self-defense, either you persist in sustaining your fantastic version and there, you risk to be interned in a psychiatric establishment with a heavy condemnation. Your wild story could let hear that you conceal the real mobile; it doesn't escape and it won't escape the judge, trust me. If you reveal the trick for the gun, you attest the hypothesis of the burglary that turns to the drama and the jurisprudence is relatively lenient in this case. You have all interest to explain me how you made. - I keep telling you again and again: I don't know. I saw the stroke leaving from my finger, how to tell it to you otherwise! It is stupid, insane but it is what I saw. And yet, I don't have a weapon! - I know. - Then? You… what? Do you know that I don't have a weapon? - Yes. - Hey well then! Since I don't have a weapon, it is well the proof that my story is true! - You don't have a gun but it is a very real revolver that made a hole in the Gardini’s carcass. - Whom does it belong to? - ToValentin Ienessei. - I don't know this man. - I would have guessed it. Do you speak Russian? - Yes. Why? Is he Russian? - A Muscovite, more precisely. He has been arrested two days ago by the Russian police. His weapon is under sealed over there. It served to shoot Gardani. - What? But… it is impossible! It doesn't hold standing! - Not more that your hallucination. How do you explain that? - It is… it is… crazy! The tetany watches the financier. His stupid alibi flies into pieces; the stroke didn't leave from his finger but from a stamped and registered revolver. He must prove that he covered five thousand kilometers in less than one second to accomplish the irreparable: a highly unlikely demonstration. Tenor of the bar or not, he will get nicked. He will be dragged in the mud. He won't survive. ***

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The outcome approaches, Pelletier smells it. Charles is decomposed; he is going to crack up: it is a question of minutes. The good old methods to make confess an accused: the cross-examination, the bombardment with questions, the crosschecks, the pressure, the investigating of the private and professional life, searching of the least flaw. Who didn't go through a stop, didn’t the food during a lunch or listened some illegal music? No citizen is morally blameless. Marron charges down in the office; his cheeks are red, the eyes misted by the emotion. He has got an indication. Charles is unable to show more concern; he is close to be collected with a tea spoon. The inspector deposits a handwritten note under the eyes of his boss. Facing the stared look, he hands a layer of it with a banking excerpt. Pelletier enlivens rouses and relives. He holds a tie between Gardani and Ladurée de Hautefeuille. - Do you know the gymnasium-club "the Golden Muscles?" The accused flushes to become nominee guilty. He swallowed repeatedly before releasing a shy "yes". - Are you an adept of room sport? The weak constitution but developed of the prisoner's belly can raise some doubts about the efficiency of the sporty trainers. - Not really. Sometimes, I trained but it’s not my pleasure. - For what reasons? - Sometimes, I come with my wife. - Is there you met Gardani? - I beg your pardon? - You understood me. The victim needed to keep an impeccable health. He trained five times per week, two hours per day. He would be stupid to tell me you never crossed him. - I never saw him. - Of course. I lacked a mobile. I hold it. I ignore neither why you shot him, nor how but the relation is established. I just have to send you in front of the judge. The case is solved. Marron! - Yes, chief? - Put him in the cooler. - Immediately, chief. "Good job, boys!" Pelletier feels happy to have illuminated enough zones of shades to stick this lawyer with long teeth. This pestilence with black dress and fishnet stockings sabotaged four businesses; it holds his revenge. Ladurée de Hautefeuille lets them to drag out of the office, stupefied, stunned, without protesting. An innocent shouts his innocence; a guilty party accepts. He knew his victim and dove in a trap. For what motive? "The woman!"

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The wife was an accustomed of the club. Did she have a relation with Gardani? A coming down to the gymnasium-club and the tongues are going to come untied. If he bet rightly, Charles constructed his crazy story to cover a vengeance. Deliberate murder means the perpetuity reclusion, assorted of twenty incompressible years. Pelletier picks up his phone and compose the judge's number. *** During the morning, the inspector Marron and men in uniform passed the office of Ladurée de Hautefeuille to the gnarl. The search proved to be fruitful: Clementine photos, in outrageous unequivocally stance with Gardani, demonstrate that the theory of vengeance is standing up. In the financier's professional case, the policemen found the invoices of a private detective. Charles suspected a link between his wife and the crook, he called on an investigator's services, has him caught red-handed. Then, he concocted an infernal plot to bring the lover to burglarize his own home. The murder weapon is identified; but the sleight of hand to displace the gun in a reduced lapse of time remains to be solved. Only Charles keeps the secret. He denies the evidence but his wife's crossexamination, indispensable to corroborate the theory, didn't take some hours: she confessed her link with Gardani and specified her initial deposition. According to her, her husband didn't wake up while screaming. He didn’t have any nightmare. It is possible he was awake since quite a lot of time. Besides, she doesn't have the certainty that he disappeared of her view during a few score of seconds, in the panic that followed the deflagration. These details destroy Charles' odd alibi. The transfer to the jail is signed. Police's bus is advanced. Handcuff and framed by two strong men, the accused is linked to the van. He screams: - Clementine! His wife is in sobs, she swears: - You didn't make that, Charles! No! Not you! *** The court room is totally full. The past and present professional setting, moved by wagons, came to see the magnate of the finance disassembled by the district attorney. The virtuoso of the criminal code, the champion of the jurisprudence, the fairy of the discharges, Mrs. Estelle de la Ferrière, is laminated by the incoherence and the persistence of her prestigious customer. Her adversary is not a beginner, nor an angel. This time, the cops didn't omit a procedure and supported the file. The district attorney holds enough to carve Estelle in pieces. For him, no doubt is permitted and the jurors appear conquered. He drives the nail and asks for the maximal penalty. The jury's impassiveness is not appropriate. On the nine members, six have already been fired under futile pretexts or to increase the dividends of shareholders. The killer of employment, the gravedigger of enterprises, the lemon presser, is a perfect target. Mrs. Estelle de la Ferrière examines her notes. Among the elements, there is the ballistics report. A detail should have titillated the mind of the investigators. The angle of shooting

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specifies that it came more or less from the center of the bed. Charles Ladurée is not left but right-hander. Sleeping on the right of his wife, the shoot should come from the right of the bed. Why would he have shot with the left hand? Why use his non usual hand, risking missing his target? Why did policemen find the least trace of powder on his fingers, as much on the left than on the right? Why did the accused affirm to see the shoot without any guarantee to have pressed clearly the trigger? Why did policemen find no Charles print on the weapon whereas the Russian police found some after the arrest of Ienessei? Why did Charles want to face the lying detector, even while knowing that this analysis doesn't have any legal value in France? Why does Ladurée deny to have recruited a detective to follow his wife whereas he agrees to have seen Gardani one or two times? So many shade zones, ideal to get a discharge! Estelle closes again the file and get involved in a weak indictment, worthy of a law-school first year student sketch. Her colleague and nevertheless adversary astonishes himself; to get involved in the battle without the desire to fight is not in the habits of the brisk lawyer. She leaves to lose; she forgets to retort his mistakes, to the flagrant hiatuses of his too furious, imperfect diatribe. Game, set and match by abandonment, the victory has a bitter taste. The jurors and the judge leave the room in order to deliberate. The consultations don't eternalize themselves. Thirty minutes after their disappearance, the temporary executors of the justice come back. - Guilty! The qualifier falls on nine occasions. Perpetuity, safety, applause, the monster is thrown in pasture with the teeming and harmful plebs of the prison universe. Estelle, under the fire of the media spotlights, announces the call procedure. Without conviction. The crowd disperses itself; it had its sickening emotion dose. *** A bottle of Coca-Cola, carefully managed, can prove to be deadly. The shard served to decide the veins. While the medical service of the jail exerted to plug the open vessels urinating abundantly, the rest of the glass, crushed to the mortar, ingested with a glassful of water, made its work slowly: perforation of the stomach and the intestine. The medical profession exerted to suppress the bleedings relates while a second precaution transformed the tentative insidiously in success. One week of incarceration, it is everything that Charles will have supported. End of story? No… Chic suburb, moonless night and defect of streetlight: ideal conditions to reach the Ladurée de Hautefeuille manor. Clementine placed the children in the family, far from the tumult, the flashes of the sensationalist press. Two o’clock a.m., all is quiet. The Spirit Lotus parks to a few score of meters far from the house. A feminine silhouette gets out like a meteor, flexible and feline. She slips in the obscurity, anxious not to be noticed by an insomniac or a night owl. She threads the alley and rushes to the door. Useless to ring, she introduces her own key. She enters the hall and climbs to the floor. The parental room is occupied, the bedside lamp is on. She pushes the door. Clementine, wearing a

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mallow satin baby doll nightgown, back to a pillow, a book between the hands, raises the eyes: - It’s you? - Yes. - Then? - He committed suicide. - I told it to you. He would not support the incarceration. His father didn't bare "the hunt accident" that I arranged. They have suicide in blood, in his family. Dishonor floods them, they don't tolerate their mistakes, not more that those of their employees. How did he make it? Did he hang himself? - No, he opened his veins and swallowed some broken glass. - Original, ingenious even. Come in bed. Estelle comes, withdraw her stirrup pants, her tight-fitting top and faces in the most perfect nudity. She slips herself under the tepid bed sheets and coils up against her mistress. - You inherited his small empire, my beauty. - Thanks to your allegation without burst. - Thanks to your powers. Even though these stupid of cops had peeled the ballistics report, even though they had suspected you to have shot instead of Charles, they could never have raised the least print, the least trace of powder on your fingers. You had the whole time to achieve the perfect crime, to place the proofs of your link with Gardani in his strongbox, to bring up the plot to make accuse him of murder. - It is the advantage to be able to steal the time. - And what about the children? How can you help them from inheriting? - They don't represent an obstacle. They will inherit an empty shell when their real mother will accidentally die. We will have taken care of the money. I will take the necessary time to create new identities for us and we will pluck other pigeons. - Brilliant! You are brilliant. Estelle deposits a wet kiss on the lips of her mistress. A landscape of coconut trees, rocked by the surf of the Indian Ocean, replaced the decor of the Parisian bedroom. Furniture made of rattan, multicolored pareos as curtains, falling screen around the colonial style bed. - One week of holidays for us, darling! Seven days only for us, offered by the thief of time. ***

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