The Nice Detective - A Short Story

          A man of modest size, unobtrusive manners, degenerate humor, and picayune romantic fancies, Andre Ledru was as generic as a leaf dancing in an autumn breeze.  He was friendly.  It could never be fairly stated that Andre Ledru had a mean bone in his body.  He never stepped on a bug if he happened to see it in time.  He aways smiled at stangers.  He would swerve his car to avoid hitting a...  hitting anything.  Andre was just that sort of a person:  He avoided everything that could possibly lead to anything else.  Like the many people throughtout history possessing Andre's less than powerful curiousity and motivation, he relied on the vagaries of nature to see to it that the light of fortune shined warmly upon the odyssey of his life.  With this being the case, and vagaries being as capricious as they are, and having no notion of, nor interest in, their effects upon the self-obsessed minds of beasts and beings, Andre Ledru lived a less than firey existence.  That is, until one short episode on a far away shore, Andre Ledru's life was bland.  This story is about that one short episode.
 

          The Nice detective, Andre Ledru, could not sleep.  His hotel bed was large and soothing, but its sweat drenched sheets dappled his body with hot and cold.  He had a slight headache.  He couldn't get comfortable.  Thinking a book might take his mind off the pain, the hot and cold, the chills, the incessant desire to bite his nails or to scratch were he used to have a big toe on his left foot, he began to read.
          Reading didn't help.  The discomforts remained.  He couldn't concentrate on the story line.  He placed the book on the nightstand next to his stainless steel 357 Magnum with radium sights that glowed in the dark.  What a nifty gun, Andre thought.  A real man's man kinda gun.  His headache was forgotten for just awhile.
          I'm not the man I use to be, thought Andre.  But who is, he thought.  For Andre Ledru, the Nice detective, these thoughts held special meaning.  At an early age, Andre had started to shed the parts and pieces that made up his body.  It began when he lost his prepuce.  What a welcoming to life.  His parents were Jewish at the time.  They were, at one time or another, every religious persuasion known; never for longer than a year or so.  Unfortunately for Andre, they were Jewish when he was eight days old.  It cost him a bit of skin.  Andre once speculated that this might have started the whole thing rolling along; a seed crystal of sorts.  It most definitely started the ceremonious burying of each and every part Andre lost along the way.  Most people wait until death to part with their body, and then they are buried pretty much whole.  This was not for Andre Ledru.  Andre left a bit of himself in each of the many cities he lived in, and many he was merely visiting.
          Taking a deep breath, Andre stared at an unfamiliar ceiling.  What will it be today? he wondered.  He sighed while reaching for his travel-clock: 10:23 AM.  Massaging his feet, he moaned in lament.  His socks were damp from the night's feverish sleep; no, they were more than that; they were soaked.  Even while on vacation in tepid Tahiti, Andre Ledru wore socks to bed; it was a rule he began enforcing the day he lost the big toe of his left foot.  Andre Ledru was not a man to take a rule lightly.  But why were they so wet?  He changed his socks as he continued to wonder.


          Between his circumcision and the lose of his big toe, Andre had lost his baby teeth, his appendix, and his appetite on many occasions.  At age ten, while visiting an uncle who lived in Manchester, Andre, thinking it would be manly to strop leather and shave fuzz with a straight razor, lost his right earlobe.  It was fast, painless at first, and surprizing.
          Twelve years later, after graduating from university, Andre registered at the National Academy of Criminology.  He graduated from NAC two years later; twelfth in a class of twenty-four.
          With the greater part of his life before young Andre applied for a position as detective in his hometown of Nice.  He was hired.  By this time he had also lost his left index finger, his virginity, and his tonsils.
          Three years passed without much to-do.  Andre worked hard at being a detective; a Nice detective.  Outside of his number two molar, Andre lost only the hair off the top of his head.
    It was then that a deep darkness blanketed the fair city of Nice.  It was as though a plague had engulfed Nice in death and misery.  One crime followed another.  Four major homicides followed the robbery of Nice's main bank.  Because the bank robbery was the greatest theft in history, the senior detectives were assigned to worry over it; the homicides were left to Andre.  With great flare and speed, Andre solved the four homicides.  He did so without loosing any body parts; although he did loose his nerve twice.  He caught the eyes of his superiors when his successes began to shove the 'Great bank robbery' from the front pages of the local newspapers.  'Le Sauveur' was how the papers referred to Andre; seemingly capable of plucking clues from the stars.  It was at this point that Andre lost his mind.
          The stress of public expectations was more than he could bare.  He placed himself under the care of a physician who immediately prescribed tranquilizers and a long vacation far from France.  Floating through the enfeebled haze of a pharmacological tranquility, Andre flew to Tahiti and the heart of this short tale.


          After ridding himself of his damp nightclothes and very wet socks, Andre had room service make over his bed while he washed what remained of his body under a cool shower of water.
          Later, while taking breakfast in his room, there came a knock at the door.  It was a service clerk with a wire from Nice.  His immediate superior was informing Andre that the naked body of a vacationing businessman had been found on the beach near his hotel.  He went further to ask if Andre would take the time to help the local police with the case.  They were completely baffled by the murder.  They wanted to make the request personally, but were stopped by the local merchants who were opposed to the disturbing of their famous guest.  Hence, they took this circuitous tack.
    Andre phoned and agreed to help the local police.  It was a rule of Andre's to extend professional courtesy whenever asked.   However, not until he had finished his breakfast; another rule.
          An hour later, sporting Hawaiian print trunks, Gucci shades, a John Deere baseball cap, Birkenstock sandals over purple socks, and a t-shirt advertising 'The Amazing World of Jacques Cousteau' in orange dayglow letters, Andre appeared on the beach to look over the scene of the murder.
          The murdered man proved to be one Robert Monet, a Parisian orthodontist on vacation.  Monet was recently retired, had no family, few friends, and no enemies.  Monet was in Tahiti alone.  He had apparently left his room at around 3 AM to go for a swim.  His clothes were found neatly piled on the sand near his body.  They had not been rifled, nor had the tide come in to sweep them away.  The lack of tidal wash also left undisturbed the footprints of the victim along with those of his murderer.  Outside of the murderer's footprints, which were considered useless by the local police for the simple fact that the murderer had been wearing socks without shoes, there was only one clue: Monet had been killed by a single bullet through the brain.  The ballistic record proved of little help for the bullet was from a Luger, a very common make, a 357 Mag.  Over half the local police used this very model.  Even our Andre made it a rule to use this particular weapon.
          Then, to everybody's horror, Andre violently shoved a young officer about to pour a plaster of Paris casting of the murderer's footprint.  He shoved the young officer so violently that Andre lost his John Deer cap.  Plaster flew everywhere.  Many fine garments were soiled.  A shaking Andre bent over to examine the footprint.  Then, to mount one horror upon another, he slipped his Birkie from his left foot and firmly pressed it into the moist sand making an additional print alongside that of the murderer's.  They were identical: big toe missing and all.  It was then that Andre lost his composure.  He began to cry like a baby.  His crying had the depth and resonance of an adult male, but Andre cried with the abandonment of a child.
          Andre, Birkie in one hand, ran crying and stumbling toward his hotel.  Once there, he proceeded straight to his room.  Taking his Luger from atop the nightstand, loading it, folding it neatly in a pillow to muffle its loud report, holding three additional pillows at the gun's business end and pressing them all firmly against the bed, he cleanly shot the tip off the pinky of his left hand.  Andre's loss of composure had resulted in the fracture of a cardinal rule: never ever EVER shoot yourself.
          By the time what remained of Andre was released from the hospital, it was confirmed that the guilty bullet had been fired from his gun.  Being a somnambulist most of his life, Andre had played out the flip-side of his life as an enforcer of laws.  Upon returning to Nice, Andre reported to his superior, "I have the killer and the evidence but I lack the motive.  It was I, Andre Ledru, who killed the orthodontist Robert Monet.  I did it in my sleep."  Shortly after this startling evidence and confession, Andre was found guilty of the murder of Robert Monet.
          Sad for Monsieur Monet that he should die from somebody else's bad dream.  Such are the fortunes of life: some, like our dear Andre, loose their life a piece at a time, others have it taken away from them all at once.
          Andre Ledru was given a light sentence.  He was pensioned off to a small country house outside of Nice.  He lived another fifty years, loosing the underpart of his nose while shaving, his hearing, most of his teeth, his last remaining earlobe while trimming one of his sideburns, and seven wives.  He died in his sleep when he lost his breath for a very long time; many suspected suicide.
          Andre Ledru was buried in Nice, just north of Nice, Manchester, Cannes, New York, Rome, London, Berlin, San Diego, Toronto, Sydney, and, of course, Papeete.
 
 

                                              Thank you for reading my story.

                                     This story is based on an actual happening.
                                 The detective’s name was actually Robert Ledru.
                                                The victim was Andre Monet.
                                                              Google it.

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