Free The Art of Murder by Louis Shalako

nostrils.
Maintenon and Levain walked up the gravel drive towards a pair of
shirtless workmen who were sweating and grunting as they heaved on
the chains of an I-beam lifting device, trying to steady a slab of
black granite as it swung back and forth. Their contraption was
sturdy if obviously home-made. The stone looked to be several
hundred kilos in mass. Clearly there was some hazard, some
difficulty involved. It was all so prosaic.
    “ Hey, Charles.” Levain
stopped, and they waited for a moment to let them finish the
operation.
    “ Hey, Andre.”
    This involved setting the stone down on
a ramp, and pushing it up on wooden rollers all of fifty
millimetres thick and half a metre long, up into the back of a
battered Citroen C4. It had the rear seat removed for this purpose.
Gilles saw buckets lined up beside the car, all ready to go, with
smaller tools in them, and some shovels, long steel pinch bars, and
more rollers. There was a pile of sand and gravel in a corner of
the yard, and the shop was at the back, set well behind the house.
There was a painted wooden sign over the large door that was
visible from the street in daylight hours, but otherwise unlit. He
saw a black dog on the back porch and one floodlight set high on a
post in the farthest back corner.
    After a bored look, the dog put his
head down and blinked at them with a look of
resignation.
    The smell of cooking came from the
vicinity of the back door. Gilles grinned unexpectedly, and shoved
his hands into his pockets. There were birds singing from a shade
tree that grew in the next door neighbour’s yard. Birds were not
his strong suit, but they had a certain pugnacious
cheerfulness.
    “ Merde!” It wouldn’t do to
get a hand under the slab at the wrong time, but no damage done and
the fellow chuckled again just as quickly.
    The language was colourful but
succinct, and as his apprentice set to lifting the stone with a bar
and putting wooden wedges and props under it for security, the
sturdy proprietor of the place dusted off his hands and shook first
with Levain and then Gilles.
    “ And, what can I do for you,
sir?”
    Gilles eyes traveled up and down the
lines of stones displayed as they would be set, in that they all
sat on a base, although they had no names on them yet. One or two
in the front row did have names, and he realized they were all
finished and awaiting delivery. His eyes took in the stone laying
flat in the back of the Citroen. It had a name on it, an elderly
lady going by the dates. She had been predeceased by a husband and
an infant. Her child had died. She knew what tragedy was, he
thought. She understood loss.
    “ I want one like
that.”
    “ It’s for his wife.” Levain
beckoned Gilles to look at some of the others. “Seriously, Gilles,
you might want to look at more than one stone. Come on.”
    Maintenon reluctantly followed him
along the line of memorials, big, small, simple and ornate. None of
them had an actual price marked on them, but that wasn’t any real
consideration. He just wanted to get it over with.
    “ No. I think the first
one—and make sure he puts my name on there too, and my birthday.
Then when the time comes, it’s a simple matter to chisel in the
date of my decease.”
    “ Sure, boss. But please,
come on in and talk to the man.” Levain turned and led the way,
relieved to hear Maintenon’s footsteps crunching gravel behind. “I
don’t think he uses a chisel. It’s a sand-blaster now. You won’t
believe this, but he uses one cylinder of the car as a
compressor—”
    The boss had been a little funny
lately, but no one else could really do this for him. He had to
take charge himself.
    Gilles found the air inside the
workshop cool, a little damp and smelling oddly of something he
couldn’t quite place. He counted out the bills as the man pulled
out a book and took a pen out of the pocket from a shirt hanging on
a peg.
    Gilles gave her name, and the fellow
gave him a quick look.
    “ He’ll pay the