A Doll's Foot Ch. 04-05

"But I live here. Those are my friends. My bodyguard. I need to get some clothes."

"Which apartment?"

"Four A."

"Wait here." The cop went over to where her friends were and returned with someone dressed in a suit much too heavy for summer, and a little alpine hat.

"He's right out of the Pink Panther," Beatrice whispered. "All he needs is the trench coat."

"Bonjour. I am Inspector Javert."

"Javert? Like in Les Miserables?" Beatrice took a fencing pose, en garde, nearly toppling over in the fuck-me shoes, and pointed a finger at him. "J'accuse!"

"That's Zola, not Hugo," Nestor said. "But strangely enough it was the Dreyfus affair, and Dreyfus was the name of the inspector in the Pink Panther. But really, you should mind your manners." Be a nice little fuck toy. Don't embarrass me.

"It's all right," the inspector sighed. "I've been living with it for a long time. Since primary school. I think it's what inspired me to become a detective. In any case, as a formality. I will need to see some identification. I assume your real name is not Melanie?"

Oh, the gall! Well, she probably had it coming. "Of course not. Are you a fan?"

"Somewhat." He said it without a trace of shame, as if watching her get fucked or helping Marissa get fucked was just like watching the local team lose another football match. Who knows, maybe they had the cam shows up in the sports bars, drunks placing bets. Had he ever sent in a tip? Or bought a video? Probably not.

Beatrice had slung the little beaded purse on her hip. She retrieved her CIE from it and handed it to the cop.

"And your client?" Her client. Not father, boyfriend, casual acquaintance. No question why he had been walking hand in hand with a naked teenager. One wearing fuck-me stilettos, with rumpled hair, engorged breasts, and a dripping pussy. The quick shower had not been enough to calm her down.

"Scan this." Nestor held out his phone.

"Oh. Oh my. It's an honor to meet you, sir. Hopefully you can give us assistance in some way."

"What's he talking about?" Beatrice whispered. "You aren't a medical doctor. Are you?"

"Nope. I have no idea."

They walked up to the bench, to find that Andre was not suffering from a stroke. Andre had a neat little hole in his left temple. And a missing foot.

"There you are at last," Marissa fretted. "We've been waiting for you to take statements. So we can go upstairs."

"We used Andre's phone to call the police," Rocco added. "It had fallen on the ground. But we didn't want to leave until the police had arrived."

"As soon as I get your statements you are free to go," Javert said. "However, I would prefer that you remain at home this afternoon."

Another ambulance arrived. Two men and a women emerged from it, opening the back to get out a huge piece of black plastic.

"They needed a bigger body bag," Marissa said. "They couldn't get the zipper to close." There was no more conversation for a few minutes as the three EMTs and a couple of the cops struggled to get the corpse into the bag, to drag the bag to the ambulance, to use their backs to pry it into the patient compartment, which was sagging a bit as the vehicle departed.

"We will now take statements." Javert pulled out an ancient little tape recorder. "Before we begin, I must advise you, that even though these statements are taken merely as witnesses to the event, they may possibly be used as evidence against you. So I would ask each of you to recite this disclaimer."

When they had finished that, he spoke into the recorder. "Monsieur Rocco Bucante will now give his statement."

"Risa and I had joined my sister and her friend for lunch at the hotel where he was staying. We returned to find Andre seemingly unwell. So we called for an ambulance. When the EMT folks arrived, they discovered the wound to his head."

"And the missing foot?" Javert prompted.

"Yes, the foot. We had not noticed the foot was gone. It's not the sort of thing you would look for. So they contacted the police."

"Mademoiselle Rossini. Do you have anything to add to your partner's statement?" Her partner. What an odd way to put it, Beatrice thought. Although, technically, Rocco and Marissa were living together, they were fucking, they'd been fucking for a long time. But Marissa was her girlfriend, not her brother's boyfriend.

"Just that Andre is, was, our bodyguard." Marissa stopped talking, started to cry. "First Anna, now this."

"Anna? What does Anna have to do with it?"

"Nothing. Forget I said that."

"Very well. Mademoiselle Bucante - for the record, not the wife of Rocco. His sister."

"Step sister," she corrected. "No actual relation." Why was Nestor giving a little smile at that? A little smug 'I've got a secret' smile. "Well, I only arrived at the scene quite recently, as you know. I can confirm that Rocco and Marissa were having lunch, I guess actually it was breakfast, over at the hotel. On the veranda. There's a waitress, her name is Rachel, who can confirm that we all were there."

She was waiting for the inquisition. Why was she having breakfast, at lunchtime, with a much older man? In the nude, apparently. Maybe it was so obvious it wasn't worth asking. Instead, "do you have anything you can tell us about Andre?"

"No one seems to know much about him. He came along with Anna. I assume if you're a fan you know who Anna is? He was her bodyguard or something of the sort. I don't know if they were fucking. How they could be fucking. Maybe he lay on his back. But would his prick stick out far enough past his gut?"

"Really, little sister. You should not be speaking ill of the dead."

"You're right. I'm sorry." Beatrice actually crossed herself in penance, then sighed. "He stayed on for a while after Anna left, but really we could not afford him and he was bored. He was going to start a bouncer job next week. I wonder what happened to the foot?"

"It was, of course, a prosthetic foot?" Javert asked if they would surely know that.

"Why?" The thought had not occurred to her. "It could be. He was always wearing that black bouncer suit. Thank God. I would hate to think what his flesh looked like."

"No trace of blood. None from the wound to his head, either. We were searching for a while but no ballistic evidence to be found."

"Anna told me that he had been a soldier. A mercenary. That he had been injured and after he recovered he couldn't fight any longer so he became her bodyguard."

That from Rocco was enough to infuriate his sister. "Anna told you this? When? How? She was such a secretive little bitch."

"Oh, pillow talk. You know, people will tell you things in that lovely interlude after they've just been fucked and they're falling asleep."

The little smirk that Nestor gave at that was not at all reassuring. What had she revealed to him, in that same state herself last night, so thoroughly fucked, so very tired? Had that been the whole point of the evening, to strip away her defenses along with everything else? Not that there was much strip away, or much to reveal, that he didn't seem to know already.

"Maybe Andre was a mercenary in Africa," Nestor said. "Some of the warlords are hiring Russian mercenaries to gain control of one of those pitiful ex colonies, or to keep control."

"Rape?" Marissa asked. "Genocide? Human trafficking?"

"The mercenaries actually keep the lid on some of the atrocities. As for the trafficking, have you noticed there are a lot of pretty black girls wandering around town?"

"A glut of them. Dio mio, is that why Andre came here? I always wondered what he was doing on the phone all day." Then Beatrice began to worry. About something else, as if there wasn't enough already. Maybe Andre had been in Africa? What did Nestor know about Andre? Why had Andre been so quick to bring Nestor upstairs? And at the exact moment when only she would be available? Pawns in a chess game, one with rules and objectives they did not, could not perhaps, understand.

"Well," Javert said, "that's an interesting thought. The EU in its wisdom has intervened to rob us of any control of the situation. We are not allowed to challenge the right of these migrants to annoy our tourists. Or to offer services to them. Or to clutter our morgue. I hope there's enough room left for your bodyguard."