“You’re not dying.” Eulalie’s voice spoke close to his ear, making him jump and sway. He tried to turn himself around to see the owner of the voice, but gravity wasn’t co-operating.
“I know who you are, you crazy bitch. Why are you doing this to me? Let me down.”
“With pleasure.”
Eulalie released some rope through the pulley system she had created, and he plunged three or four feet before it caught again.
His screams were supersonic.
“No, no, no! Please! Please.”
“I want information, Antoine. Do you think you can help me out with that?”
“Yes, anything. Anything!”
“Cooperative. I like that. Tell me about Emma Egger, Antoine. Blonde woman. Wore diamonds to the grocery story. Married into the Eggerton dynasty?”
“I know who you mean,” he said tetchily. “What’s she got to do with me?”
“Her husband thinks the murder was an outside job – that someone was after her jewels and killed her in the process. What have you heard about that?”
Antoine made little choking sounds as the rope swayed under its own momentum.
“That’s garbage. It was an inside job. Everyone knows that. Even your friends at the police know that. The husband is lying.”
Eulalie let out a couple more feet of rope to the accompaniment of many falsetto screams.
“I’d hate to think you were fibbing to me, Antoine. If I find out that you were, I’ll be back to give you another taste of bungee jumping.”
“I’m telling the truth!” His voice was hoarse from screaming. “I thought your boyfriend was supposed to be some kind of whizz kid. Why would he be wrong about this?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. But thanks, Antoine. You’ve been a big help.”
“Don’t leave me here!”
“Sorry, Antoine. But you shouldn’t have killed Louis Popov. In fact, you should give up this sideline you’ve got going as a gun for hire. You wouldn’t want to make Angel come after you, would you?”
She made an adjustment to the pulley system and he dropped another few feet. Then she turned and left his apartment the conventional way – through the front door.
Chapter 4
When Eulalie stepped out of Majestic Towers and into the street, she found the Chief of Police Donal Macgregor standing at his ease with one shoulder propped up against the side of the building. He was looking up at the dangling form of Antoine swaying gently in the breeze above them.
“Was that really necessary?”
He pushed away from the wall and turned to face Eulalie.
“Maybe not,” she conceded. “But it was fun.”
Angel had once said of the new chief of police that she could eat him up with a spoon, and that’s exactly what Eulalie was thinking now. He had taken off his jacket and was all broad shoulders, nipped-in waist, and powerful thighs.
“What’s the plan here?” he asked. “You’re not going to leave him up there forever?”
“Eventually he’ll ripen and drop.”
“That’s a joke. It’s based on a fruit analogy.”
“It is indeed.”
“If you’re not going to get him down, I’ll have to call the fire department. That’s a waste of their time and resources.”
“You worry too much. Look.” She pointed up at the hapless Antoine. “Every time he wriggles, the rope lets him down a little bit more. Eventually it will lower him all the way to the sidewalk and some good Samaritan will come along and untie him. Look there.” She indicated the furiously swaying Antoine. “He’s already getting the hang of it.”
Chief Macgregor watched the slow descent of his department’s number-one suspect in the Popov murder, and nodded. Together they turned and walked back up Finger Alley towards Lafayette Drive.
“Would you join me for an early dinner?” he suggested as they stepped into the evening twilight of Lafayette Boulevard.
“Only if we don’t have to go to Roots and Shoots.”
Chief Macgregor looked at his watch. “No, they closed nearly an hour ago.” He thought for a moment. “And that was another joke. You knew they were closed, but you wanted to tease me about what you consider to be my excessive preoccupation with physical health.”
Eulalie turned her head in his direction. Then she lifted a forefinger and trailed it down the curve of his biceps.
“From where I’m standing, your physical health is just fine. You won’t hear any complaints from me.”
He thought about that too.
“Now you’re flirting with me. And not for the first time either. Normally I dislike personal interactions that aren’t clear, but I don’t dislike that.”
Eulalie smiled. When they had first got to know each other, he had told her that he had high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome. She saw it in the way that he found certain human interactions opaque and difficult to fathom. But she also saw it in his incredible conscientiousness and attention to detail. It was part of what made him such a good cop and all-round intriguing human being.
“Would you mind if I tucked my hand into your arm while we walk?”
“I’d like that.” He crooked his elbow for her to slide her hand in against his body. “My aversion to touch doesn’t apply to you. I don’t know why.”
“I have some theories.”
“You mean that because I’m sexually attracted to you, that feeling overrides my normal dislike of physical contact?”
“That’s what I mean.”
He considered this. “I think you’re right.”
They decided on Angel’s Place for dinner. Gigi hustled them away from the bar and towards a table for two in the restaurant.
“We don’t want to be any trouble,” said Eulalie. “The bar would be fine.”
Gigi shook her head. “Your grandmother would skin me alive if I put you and the chief at the bar. You stay where you are if you don’t want to get me into trouble. Now what can I get you to drink?”
Eulalie considered herself off duty, so she ordered a carafe of the house white. Chief Macgregor ordered a glass of water with ice.
“Coming right up. Then I’m going off shift. Time to hit the books. I’ve got a big test coming up on Thursday.” Gigi went off to fill their order.
“Don’t you drink at all?” Eulalie asked. The Frenchwoman in her was shocked at the idea.
“A small single-malt whisky in the evenings sometimes.”
“Spoken like a true Scotsman.”
“Indeed, I believe it to be a culturally determined preference – just like your affinity for wine.”
Gigi came back to take their food order. Eulalie asked for the beef medallions with asparagus and béarnaise sauce. Chief Macgregor chose the chicken-and-vegetable stir-fry that Angel kept on the menu for health-conscious tourists. Gigi told Eulalie that Angel was still busy with a client in the back room but would be along shortly.
Chief Macgregor gazed at the neon image of a woman in a turban peering into a crystal ball. Under it was a bead curtain that led to the back room.
“Your grandmother is a fortune-teller?” he asked
Eulalie shifted in her seat. “No, she’s not. I mean, obviously she doesn’t literally tell fortunes, because that’s impossible. She’s more like … a counsellor. People come to her with their troubles and she tries to help them.”
“My question has made you uncomfortable, but I don’t understand why.”
“I have no patience for that kind of hocus-pocus. It’s nonsense and I wish my grandmother would stop indulging in it. She’s taking people’s money under false pretenses.”
“That depends. If she does have some degree of psychic ability, then she isn’t.”
Eulalie sighed. “Obviously she doesn’t because there’s no such thing. She can’t have psychic powers because they don’t exist.”
“Generally, I would agree with you, but this is Prince William Island, and there are documented cases of strange things happening. T
ake you, for example.”
“What? No. Leave me out of this.”
“Last month,” he said patiently, “you helped us find a little boy who had been kidnapped. You had a dream about where he was. You knew he was being held at the docks near a construction site. We found him thanks to your tip-off.”
“It wasn’t a dream exactly. And it definitely wasn’t psychic powers. It was more like … intuition.”
He looked at her curiously. “You seem upset.”
Eulalie pulled herself together.
“Never mind that now,” she said. “There’s something else I need to speak to you about. We have another overlapping case.”
“I know. That’s why I came to find you at Majestic Towers. Mark Egger informed me that he no longer cares how I conduct the investigation into his wife’s murder because he has started his own investigation. He told me that he has hired you and that he presumes I will extend every courtesy to you in your investigation.”
“He thinks it was an intruder who murdered his wife.”
“Yes, he told me that too. That’s why I went to Finger Alley. I figured you would be there if you were looking into that angle.”
“You figured right.”
“What did you find out?”
“If it was an intruder, he’s not part of the Queen’s Town underworld. I spoke to both Jimmy the Knife and to Antoine. Neither of them had heard anything about an intruder at the Egger house. They seem to think Mark Egger did it himself.”
Chief Macgregor sipped his water.
“We’re looking at him,” he said. “We’re looking at him very hard indeed. The timing doesn’t quite work, unless the family are lying to us, which is always possible. The Eggers had just finished a large family dinner. Some of them were having coffee in the blue drawing room when they heard a scream and a thud. They can’t quite agree on who was in the drawing room at the time, but three of them place Mark Egger on a sofa with a coffee cup in his hand at the moment of his wife’s murder.”
“Why weren’t they all in the drawing room?”
“It sounds like an informal situation, with people drifting in and out from their own quarters.”
“I thought this was the family home of Mark and Emma Egger? You’re making it sound like Southfork Ranch from Dallas.”
Chief Macgregor thought for a moment. “That’s a television program.”
“It is. About an extended family that all live together on the same estate. I didn’t realize the Eggers had that kind of setup.”
“The oldest brother, Joe, and his family are staying with them because their house is being renovated. The middle brother, Richard, and his family were visiting for dinner, but they’re apparently used to treating each other’s houses as their own. The father, Josef, is living with Mark’s family because he’s not well and needs constant care. So, he was also there. Then there was Mark’s late wife’s sister who is visiting from America. They are also staying with Mark and Emma.”
“The place must be a rabbit warren.”
“It’s big,” Chief Macgregor conceded. “But more of a mansion than a warren. If you factor in the children, there were eighteen family members present in the house at the moment of the murder. Nine of them were adults, including the victim herself. In addition, there were three full-time staff members, plus the caregiver who looks after old Josef Egger.
Eulalie raised her eyebrows. “What a nightmare. You must be up to your ass in interviews.”
“It’s a lot to get through, but we’ve managed to interview everyone at least once.”
“And did that narrow down the list of suspects?”
“Only to the extent of excluding the eighty-five-year-old father who suffers from dementia. And some of the kids too. There’s a lot of rage in this family. A lot of anger. Most of it is directed against Emma, with some spilling over to Mark for having brought her into the family.”
“Why don’t they like her?”
Chief Macgregor shrugged. “I’m getting better at identifying emotions, but I can’t always trace them to a cause. Some of what the family said seemed too trivial to be real, but I don’t know. My strength as an investigator lies in disconcerting people. They find me odd, so they end up blurting out things they should have kept quiet about.”
Their food was arriving. Eulalie knew she had to get her request in quickly. Chief Macgregor didn’t enjoy conversation while he ate.
“Are you willing to share information with me? It will be reciprocal of course. Anything I find, I’ll share with you. We worked well together once before.”
“Yes, we did, and there’s also your status as a consultant to the police department to be considered. I’ll send you what we’ve got, just please make sure it stays confidential.”
Chapter 5
Eulalie woke up the next morning with the awareness of having not slept well. She’d had uneasy dreams. She couldn’t remember them clearly but knew they had been about the unhappiest time in her life.
When she was twelve, she had left the deep forest to come to Queen’s Town so that she could be formally educated. Leaving the only home she’d ever known had been much harder than either she or her grandmother anticipated. Most of the children at Queen’s Town Middle School had been welcoming and kind, but those who weren’t had made her life a misery. She remembered them referring to her grandmother as a witch.
She remembered them giving her nicknames like ‘Monkey’ and ‘Loony Lovegood.’ She hadn’t understood their cultural references - had never read Harry Potter. But she understood the meaning behind their teasing. She was weird and different and creepy. Everything that had made her special in the deep forest now made her an outcast.
Eulalie set the shower to maximum to blast away the bad memories that her dreams had brought to the surface. Then she self-medicated with carbs in the form of a huge bowl of frosted cornflakes. To cheer herself up even more, she put on a new outfit.
She had found the pants on a trip to Port Louis in Mauritius. A new outdoor-living store had opened up there. They were made of a new kind of fabric that was crease resistant and held its shape no matter how much of a battering you gave it. They were perfect for Eulalie because she often gave her clothes a considerable battering.
The stretchy top was a cheerful primrose that lit up her face and made it look as though she’d had a full night sleep. Instead of her signature blazer, she put on a tiny cardigan. It was probably more suited to a lady’s lunch than to interviewing suspects, but it was undoubtedly cheering. She tamed her hair into a long braid and went downstairs to face the day.
One advantage of living above her office was that she didn’t have a long commute. Eulalie was already at her desk working by the time Lorelei Belfast came in at eight forty-five.
“The way I’m feeling, the coffee machine won’t cut it today,” she said as Mrs. Belfast went to turn it on. “Why don’t you take some money out of petty cash and go across the road to La Petite Patisserie and get us each a coffee and a pastry?”
Mrs. Belfast smiled. “I like this job already. Why does coffee taste so much better when you’ve got a day’s work ahead of you? Those few days when I was unemployed, my morning coffee somehow didn’t taste the same. I kept asking myself why I was even bothering with it.”
She crossed the road to the little bakery that was a constant temptation to anyone who worked within its radius.
Eulalie was pleased to see that Chief Macgregor was as good as his word. He had emailed her a zipped folder containing the murder book for Emma Egger. Then he’d sent her a text message containing the password she needed to unzip the folder. She decided to start with the autopsy report.
Emma Egger’s death might have been instant, but the moments leading up to it were not peaceful. Her body was full of scrapes and abrasions caused by the parapet of the widow’s walk that she had been pushed over. Some of her fingernails were slashed down to stumps where she had scrabbled at the parapet trying to get purchase. This corresponded
with blood streaks and tissue that had been found on the parapet itself.
This evidence put paid to any theory that Emma had jumped or that she had fallen accidentally – possibly after sitting on the parapet in a post-dinner alcoholic haze.
No, she had been pushed. And not just once, but repeatedly as she had fought for her life. This hadn’t been an impulsive shove, instantly regretted. This was a very determined person who had fought an adult woman hard to force her over the edge. Just thinking about it gave Eulalie chills.
Emma’s last meal had consisted of a seafood starter involving prawns and crab. Then she had moved on to grilled salmon and green beans. If there had been dessert or bread, she had declined it.
Eulalie looked at her weight-to-height ratio and saw that she had been on the thin side. Most likely a lifestyle choice, if her last meal were anything to go by. The only area in which she was not abstemious was her alcohol consumption. She had polished off three glasses of white wine and a double tot of Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic that evening.
Even if that were her usual nightly consumption, she would have been slightly fuddled after dinner. Apart from signs that her liver had taken some punishment over the years, she had been in good health at the time of her death.
The cause of death was listed as an in-driven skull fracture and massive internal hemorrhaging into the abdominal and thoracic cavities.
Eulalie winced. What it basically amounted to was that she had burst like an overripe fruit against the paved courtyard. It would have been clear to anyone watching from above or from ground level that she had died instantly.
Moving on from the autopsy report, Eulalie read the interviews with the four servants. They were the only adults in the house who were cleared of suspicion. The Eggers had installed CCTV cameras in the kitchen, laundry, scullery, and entrance hall presumably to monitor the servants’ activities. Time-stamped footage showed the three full-time staff members hard at work in the kitchen and scullery at the moment of the murder. It also caught Josef Egger’s caregiver eating dinner at the kitchen table.
The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries Page 26