Death on a Starry Night

by Betsy Draine

  “Then why were they fighting?”

  “A falling out between conspirators?” He pulled his undershirt over his head.

  “I don’t see the connection,” I said. “Yves didn’t want Isabelle revealing information about their grandfather, so he had a motive to silence her, but what’s his link to Didier?”

  “Good question.” Toby sat back down on the bed and pulled off his socks. “Hey, you’re not really mad at me for taking a poke at Yves’s buddy, are you?” Now he was down to his briefs, and today they were powder blue. I suppose they use a different word to describe the color of men’s underpants. The point is, they looked adorable.

  “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “Look. Not a scratch.” He stood up and did a slow turn in a circle. “But you should see the other guy.”

  That made me smile in spite of myself. “Come here, you brute,” I said.

  One morning when Vincent was painting in the fields, he spoke to me about the doctor’s daughter. I wonder what she thinks of me? he said. Her name was Marguerite Gachet. She was closer to my age than his. I had only seen her from a distance but I thought she was pretty. I never see her by herself, Vincent said, but the doctor has invited me to their house tomorrow to paint her portrait. I will speak to her then. I want to paint her seated at the piano. She plays like an angel, you know.

  The next time I saw him, a few days later, he was downcast. Did you speak to her? Yes, I did. But she reported our conversation to her father, and he scolded me. He told me that I am a patient, not a suitor, so I am not to see his daughter alone. He thinks an emotional attachment would be harmful to me in my current condition. And harmful to Marguerite. The doctor says I must paint every day and think only of my work. Perhaps he is right. What could I offer any well-bred girl except misery? I must paint, only that. I must paint and paint and paint.

  7

  IN THE MORNING I phoned the lieutenant to tell her about the fight. She thanked me for my account and said, “In fact, I was planning to call you today. According to the conference program, you’ll be in Vence tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Yes, to visit the Matisse Chapel.”

  “Could you stop by the gendarmerie afterward? You can tell me more about what happened at Villefranche. Then I have something else to ask of you.”

  “Of course.” We agreed on a time to meet. What now? I wondered.

  I skipped breakfast in order to go over my paper before the morning’s session. Toby brought me a croissant and coffee. By the time we boarded the shuttle to the foundation, I was ready. A good night’s sleep had helped me focus. A little canoodling hadn’t hurt, either.

  The audience seemed larger than on previous days. The Maeght Foundation had been publicizing the sessions, and walk-ins from the museum had swelled our ranks. I scanned the room for Didier but didn’t see him. I did see Jacques and made a mental note to inquire about Daniel during the coffee break. My fellow panelists were Maggie and Benjamin Bennett. Maggie and I had been scheduled together, and Bennett was added, since his talk had to be canceled on the day of the police interviews.

  I knew my paper wasn’t groundbreaking, but I hoped the audience would find it interesting. My topic was “Vincent’s Quarrel with Impressionism.” People often think of his work as part of that movement, but there are notable differences in Vincent’s style. The Impressionists, for example, wanted to record visual data as accurately as paint would permit. Monet was fascinated by the play of light on surfaces and strove to reproduce the colors he saw with fidelity. But Vincent wasn’t interested in surfaces—he wanted to go deeper, to express emotion. He said in one of his letters that he wanted to use color arbitrarily in order to express himself more forcefully. He devised thick, swirling brushstrokes to achieve that end as well. And he succeeded brilliantly: no one in the history of painting has ever conveyed emotion with more power.

  I began with the most famous instance of his arbitrary use of color, the blood-red background of his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, painted after he cut himself. Since I knew that Maggie planned to talk about Vincent’s portrait of Mademoiselle Gachet playing the piano, I used a slide of that work as my main example. In that painting, Marguerite Gachet is shown in profile, her hands extended over the keyboard. Vincent depicts the wall behind her as covered by green wallpaper with a pattern of orange dots. On the floor beneath her feet is a carpet composed of red, green, and yellow strokes. But we know from photographs of the room that the actual wall was painted white, and the floor was bare; it had no carpet. Vincent was painting not what he saw but what he felt. In the end, I concluded, Vincent left Impressionism behind and created a new style, which evolved into Expressionism.

  I received a respectable round of applause, halfway between polite and gratifying. Fair enough. At the break, I made a point of finding Jacques. He was standing at the table in the back of the room where coffee and pastries were provided. We exchanged a few words about my paper, and I asked, “How’s Daniel this morning?”

  “Pretty sore, but I don’t think he was seriously hurt last night. I left him still in his bed.”

  “Did he tell you what happened? We don’t even know what the fight was about.”

  “I don’t either. But Daniel asked me to thank your husband for coming to his aid.”

  He moved off when a trio of American girls came over to talk to me. They were spending their junior year abroad in Aix and they’d just finished a course on Cezanne and Van Gogh. By the time I’d answered their questions, Montoni was calling the session back to order.

  “Eros and Empathy: The Depiction of Women in the Art of Van Gogh and Gauguin”—that was Maggie’s title. Her view was that Vincent never reduced women to mere sex objects; instead he identified with his female subjects. Maggie compared Vincent’s work to that of his friend Gauguin. She claimed that Gauguin’s languid Polynesian beauties were emanations of his fantasies, while Van Gogh saw women as sensitive beings like himself. As evidence, she showed us several of his moving sketches of the prostitute named Sien, whom Vincent rescued from the streets and lived with for a time. Even his nude drawings of her humanize her feelings. One called Sorrow has her sitting naked on the side of their bed, her head bowed on her arms, which are folded on her knees in a posture of dejection.

  The central part of Maggie’s talk focused on Vincent’s portrait of Marguerite Gachet playing the piano. She conjectured that he had fallen in love with the young woman by the time he painted her. Maggie used her pointer to call our attention to the artist’s depiction of a lone candle in a holder attached to the piano. She then compared that image to Vincent’s use of candles in the “portrait” of Gauguin’s chair, which he painted as a gift for Gauguin, who was coming to live with him in Arles. At the top left of that painting, a small metal wall sconce holds a single candle, surrounded by a ghostly halo of golden light. Maggie saw the isolated candle as a symbol of Vincent’s solitude. In contrast to this vulnerable candle on the wall, a large candle sits in a colorful ceramic holder on the chair reserved for Gauguin, waiting to welcome him.

  Maggie juxtaposed the two paintings on the screen. She was sure that, as in the portrait of Gauguin’s chair, the isolated candle on Marguerite’s piano symbolized Vincent’s intuition of her loneliness and his yearning for a relationship with her. The doctor may have understood Vincent’s meaning all too well, she added. In a letter to Theo, Vincent wrote that Dr. Gachet had agreed to permit him to paint two portraits of his daughter, one at the piano and another at the organ. But the second sitting never took place. Clearly, the doctor changed his mind. The audience loved the talk.

  Ben Bennett was the final speaker. His paper, as announced, was a refutation of the dramatic claim made by Van Gogh’s latest biographers that Vincent hadn’t committed suicide. The arguments he laid out were those he had shared with Toby and me over dinner. In the discussion afterward, he seized on Maggie’s suggestion of a thwarted love affair between Vincent and Marguerite Gachet. That, he declare
d, was exactly the kind of incident that might have pushed Vincent over the edge and prompted him to take his own life. And it made the new theory of an accidental shooting all the more unlikely.

  Judging by the question-and-answer period, our session had been provocative. Parts of the conversation carried over into lunch at the hotel. The three panelists sat together, joined by Angie, Shelley, and Emmet. He was poised on his chair next to Maggie, as usual, and he was acting the perfect gentleman.

  As soon as she sat down, Angie asked, “Was Dr. Gachet’s daughter in love with Van Gogh too?”

  “Nobody knows,” said Maggie. “But it’s interesting that she never married.”

  “I bet that’s because she was in love with Van Gogh. It was cruel of her father to keep them apart. And then Van Gogh committed suicide, like you said”—she looked at Bennett—“and the poor girl mourned for him the rest of her life. Don’t you think that’s what happened?”

  “It’s a reasonable assumption,” said Bennett.

  “That’s what love can make you do,” said Angie. “It can.”

  “Are you speaking from personal experience?” asked Shelley.

  “I’ve been in love. Plenty of times. But nothing good ever came of it.”

  Shelley snorted. “It rarely does.”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t say that.” Bennett elbowed his wife.

  “I wasn’t talking about us,” she replied, in a tone that suggested otherwise.

  “So is that why you’re going into a convent?” Maggie asked Angie.

  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” Angie said. “And I haven’t made a final decision.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Because if you go through with it, you won’t get another crack at love. Men aren’t all alike, you know. Although they’re pretty much alike when it comes to one thing.” Shelley gave a throaty laugh. “That’s what I like about ’em,” Maggie continued. “By the way, what do you hear from your dashing gendarme?”

  Angie blushed.

  “Maybe we should change the subject,” I suggested.

  “Yes, please,” Angie said. “Have you heard about the fight last night?”

  “What fight?” Bennett asked.

  “You tell them, Nora.” Angie pointed her fork my way.

  I don’t like being pushed into talking, but I had little choice. “We were in Villefranche last night and we ran into Yves La Font and Daniel. They were in a bistro talking with another guy, and a fight broke out. Daniel got the worst of it, from Yves.”

  “Until Toby came to the rescue,” Angie said.

  “No kidding? Was Didier hurt?” asked Bennett.

  “Jacques says not very.”

  “And what about La Font?”

  I started to say I didn’t know, but Angie talked over me. “How would we know? He made a quick getaway, into the old town.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘getaway,’” I corrected Angie. “That makes him out to be a criminal. He was escaping a fistfight. We aren’t even sure who started it.”

  Angie scoffed, puffing her cheeks. “He’s the violent type, if you ask me. Who’s the most likely to have killed his sister? Him, of course—to keep her from spilling family secrets. Isn’t that what we’re all thinking?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” I said.

  “Speak for yourself,” said Shelley. “This business of everyone being under suspicion is ludicrous. It’s time for the police to arrest that man and be done with it.”

  Maggie’s brows raised in mock shock. “Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”

  “Okay,” admitted Angie. “So the police need proof. I’m glad your paper’s done,” she said, looking at me. “Now you can concentrate on the investigation.”

  Bennett pulled himself up straight. “What have you got to do with the investigation?”

  Again, Angie talked over me. “Nora’s helping the police.”

  I tried to signal Angie to stop, but she plowed right ahead. “She’s wicked smart. We had no idea in the family. We couldn’t believe it the first time we heard Nora was involved in solving a case. She even saved me from a kidnapper last year. Why—”

  This time, I talked over my sister. “Angie’s being dramatic. Toby and I were trying to recover a lost painting, and things got out of hand.”

  Angie dropped her utensils with a clank. “Out of hand? I’ll say. When you’ve got a maniac pointing a gun at you, you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, dear, things are getting a little out of hand.’ You’re thinking—”

  “Come on, Angie. You saved yourself, remember?”

  Angie smiled, remembering the scene. “It wasn’t the first time I ever kicked a guy in the cojones.”

  “It’ll be the last time if you go into a convent.” Maggie couldn’t restrain herself. “You won’t get near any more cojones.”

  Angie ignored the quip. “What I’m saying is Madame Auclair particularly asked Nora to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior.”

  “The lieutenant asked all of us to do that,” said Maggie.

  “Yes, but Nora’s the only one who’s worked with the police before. The lieutenant knows that. I told her.”

  “Don’t make a big thing out of it,” I protested. “I agreed to report anything that might be helpful, that’s all.”

  “And to be her eyes and ears at the conference,” Angie asserted with sisterly pride.

  “Is that so?” Shelley said. “Like some kind of embedded reporter?”

  Her husband took a sharper tone. “An embedded reporter lets the troops know what he’s doing. An informer doesn’t.”

  “Now, Ben,” said Maggie. It was a mild admonishment, such as she’d use with Emmet if he whined at the table. “Where I come from people shoot informers. Nora’s not an informer. All she’s saying is that she’ll let the lieutenant know if she sees or hears anything odd. We all would, wouldn’t we?”

  “You could have said something about it sooner,” Shelley said to me. “I guess I better watch my p’s and q’s around you.” That stung.

  “Leave the woman be,” said Maggie.

  “Just saying,” Shelley said with a shrug.

  As lunch broke up, Shelley brushed past me and told Maggie she’d take a pass on the Renoir tour, which was scheduled for the afternoon. “I’m a material girl,” she said. “I’ve only just started on the village shops.”

  I was fretting about Angie outing me as a snooper. She resisted my invitation to go out for some sun on the terrace, on the excuse that she didn’t have her sunglasses. I was forced to say, “Angie, I need to talk with you.” She looked left and right, as if seeking an escape route—but she followed me out to the terrace, where we were, thankfully, alone.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “You don’t like me bragging about you.”

  “Of course I don’t. But that’s not the worst of it. I didn’t want to get dragged into this in the first place. But now you’ve completely destroyed my usefulness to Lieutenant Auclair. By the time we get in the van, everybody with ears will know what you said. They’ll be on their guard. Nobody’s going to act naturally around me now, least of all anyone who has something to hide.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You don’t seem to have any appreciation of the position I’m in. Believe me, I’m stressed out.” Angie gave me an inquiring look. She really didn’t understand. So I continued. “Look, the lieutenant put me in a bind. If I refused to help, I’d look like someone who didn’t give a damn about the murder. But if I started watching and reporting back to her, my colleagues would think I was a snitch. Now do you see my dilemma?”

  “Boy, you are stressed out.”

  “If I am, it’s your fault.” Angie flinched as if slapped and tears welled up. I got a hot feeling in the chest and knew I had to end this conversation quickly. I mumbled “sorry,” but she turned and walked away. I went back to our room.

  I lay down on the four-poster bed and hugged a pillow for comfort. Pretty
soon Toby came in and took the pillow’s place. I spilled my tale and Toby listened patiently. “All right. You need to patch things up with Angie. As for the others, forget them. Why should you care what they think? When this conference is over, people will remember only two things about it: the murder and their own paper. You’ll be a mote in their memory.”

  He was right about that. And he was right about my insecurity around my colleagues. Why should I be so worried about what people thought of me? Maybe it was time to say the hell with that. Bringing Isabelle’s killer to justice was more important than my social standing, and if I could help the lieutenant do that, I would.

  I reviewed what I had come up with so far. Nothing concrete. But I knew that Yves La Font and Daniel Didier had both been close to Isabelle, and both had a falling-out with her. Either one might have been angry enough to take her life. Who else had a personal connection with Isabelle? Ray Montoni may have spent more time with her than he let on. There was a vagueness in the way he spoke about how she was added to the conference program. Then again, the motive for the murder may have been professional, not personal. Bennett, for one, had a vested interest in hearing—or preventing—Isabelle’s talk. Her information might have undermined his chance for publication. There was also Bruce Curry’s behavior to consider, along with the fact that he provided the foxglove that was implicated in Isabelle’s death. Suspects weren’t lacking, but the way forward was unclear.

  Toby brought me out of my reverie with a squeeze and said, “Did you drift off ? Come on, it’s time to go see Renoir’s fleshy beauties.” He patted me on the rear and helped me to my feet. “Feel any better now?” Strangely enough, I did.

  On our way south toward Cagnes-sur-Mer, the sky was blue and cloudless. In the van, I sat next to Klara de Groot. “Shelley told me you’ve been helping the police,” she said right off the bat. “Have you learned anything useful to them?”

  So the word was getting around. “No, and I’m not a gendarme in disguise. My sister likes to exaggerate. I don’t know any more than you do.”