A Noël Killing

by M. L. Longworth

  She stepped into the street and began to walk toward the Palais de Justice. She felt at once queasy, elated, and in shock. She had felt this way two other times in her thirty-seven years—when she knew that she would marry Antoine (although on their wedding day, in their beloved seaside Italian village that she and Antoine nicknamed Paradiso, she had felt extremely calm) and on the day she passed the bar.

  When she got to the front doors and the small glassed-fronted office of the security guards, she showed her ID and asked them to tell her husband that she would like to see him. The officer smiled, recognizing Marine, gave an obligatory glance at her identification, then put it in a tray with the cards of other visitors. He picked up the phone and spoke to Verlaque, but Marine couldn’t hear their conversation through the glass. She rocked back and forth on her tiptoes, impatient. The guard slid open a small glass window and said, “You can go on up, madame. He’s expecting you in his office. Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Marine said as she turned around and crossed the vast interior courtyard to a gray set of double doors. Up three floors, she thought she remembered, then left and down a hallway, until she reached Mme Girard’s office, which was connected to a small waiting room. She walked through, said hello to Mme Girard, and then saw her husband standing in the doorway of his office.

  “What a nice surprise,” he said. “Come on in. Bruno is here, too.”

  “Oh,” Marine said, trying to hide her disappointment. She walked into Verlaque’s office and gave Paulik the bises. She said, “I was in the neighborhood . . . at my doctor’s office on the rue Espariat, and thought I’d swing by.”

  “Huh?” Verlaque asked.

  “I’ll go,” Paulik quickly said.

  “No, you just got here,” Verlaque said, pulling out a chair from against the wall for Marine. “Marine will want to hear all this; chérie, we found the gun at the Perugia stand.”

  “Excellent! Did the Italians confess?” she asked.

  “Not yet, but Vittoria Romano is still downstairs and will confess soon. We’re waiting to hear if the gun’s been fired recently and if it matches the gun and bullets used on Père Fernand.” She knew that now was not the time to confess that she had dressed up in disguise and recorded Alain Sorba. She had the tape safe and sound in her loft office and could show it to Antoine later.

  “Père Fernand is out of danger,” Marine said. “My mother called me this morning, after my strange visit with France Dubois.”

  “Mlle Dubois did well to notice those hunting photographs,” Paulik said.

  “She’s very smart,” Marine said. “She speaks English and a bit of Italian and who knows what other languages, and she’s so discrete.”

  “Reverend Dave said she basically runs the APCA,” Verlaque said.

  Marine titled her head. Verlaque looked at his wife and said, “You have an idea, don’t you?”

  “Could you hire her here?” she asked. “To replace Mme Girard?”

  Verlaque smiled. “That’s not a bad idea.”

  Paulik laughed. “No chance.”

  “Why not?” Marine said.

  “Mme Girard started eons ago,” Paulik said. “Anyone you interview for the job will now have to come from our own HR.”

  “I’ll slip her CV on the top of the pile,” Verlaque said, smiling.

  Paulik guffawed. “Good luck! It’s not as easy as that. And you’d have to get Mlle Dubois’s application approved by that battle-ax who’s in charge of HR.”

  Verlaque swung his head around to look at Paulik, his smile gone. “Not her. On the first floor at the end of the hall?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “She terrified me when I got the job here,” Verlaque said. “My hand shook when I was filling out the paperwork.”

  Marine and Paulik laughed. Marine said, “Antoine, have Mme Girard print out the hiring instructions and bring them here.”

  Verlaque picked up the phone and did as he was told, and two minutes later Mme Girard appeared at the door wearing, Marine would have to tell Sylvie, a red knit Sonia Rykiel dress. “Here you go,” Mme Girard said, handing the papers to Verlaque. “And I’m sorry about all this.”

  “No, no, no,” Verlaque, Marine, and Bruno Paulik all protested at once.

  Verlaque said, “Mme Girard, you will be difficult to replace, but you deserve your retirement.”

  “Thank you,” Mme Girard answered. She turned to Marine and said, “Mme Bonnet, you look ravishing today.”

  Marine put her hands up to her neck. “Thank you.”

  “She does, doesn’t she?” Verlaque agreed. Something was bothering him, though. He remembered: Why was she at the doctor’s?

  Mme Girard left and Marine sat down with the paperwork and began reading while Verlaque and Paulik spoke of the Italians and now the complications involved with having foreigners, albeit EU member citizens, involved in a court case in France.

  “What are you doing, Marine?” Verlaque asked after a moment.

  “Looking for loopholes,” she replied.

  “I can do that—”

  “No need. Found it,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Section 3.6, ‘On hiring someone with external qualifications not found in the roster of available municipal employees,’” she read, bringing the sheet of paper up close to her face to read the fine print. “This is really interesting. The next point, section 3.7: ‘Language skills are one example of a quality an external candidate may be interviewed and hired for.’”

  “English!” Verlaque said.

  “Yes!” Paulik said in English, laughing and giving the air a fist pump. He continued, but in French, “We need someone who can speak English. When we deal with Interpol in Brussels, that’s often the common language everyone speaks even if there are four official ones.”

  Marine went on, “Listen to this. The interview may be held in the language the candidate is being hired for.”

  “I can interview Mlle Dubois in English!” Verlaque said.

  “Battle-ax wouldn’t understand a word,” Paulik said. “You could talk about what you had for breakfast.”

  “Well, I could be jumping ahead of myself. Mlle Dubois may be perfectly happy where she is now,” Verlaque said.

  “No,” Marine said. “She told me she was looking for a change, a new job. She talked about fixing up her apartment, things like that. Would you like me to phone her?”

  “Would you? Right now?”

  Marine smiled, knowing that once her husband had a thought, he couldn’t let it go. “Sure,” she said, stepping out of the office. She saw that Mme Girard was away from her desk so she quickly dialed France’s number. In less than two minutes she was back in Verlaque’s office.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I gave her your email address and she’s sending her CV.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

  “I should go,” Paulik said.

  “No, I’ll go,” Marine said, looking at her watch. “Antoine, dinner at seven sharp tonight. Sound good?”

  “Perfect,” he said, getting up to kiss her good-bye. “You know what? Let’s invite France Dubois to our place for Christmas.”

  Marine stopped at the door and turned around, smiling. She looked at Bruno Paulik, who stood with his hands on his hips and a quizzical look on his face.

  Marine said, “With our two families? Your uptight father and my bossy mother?”

  “She’s all alone.”

  “I’ll call her when I get home,” Marine said, giving her husband a kiss. “It’s a wonderful idea, Antoine.”

  “The spirit of Christmas!” Paulik said with forced glee.

  “Don’t you start,” Verlaque said, pointing his fountain pen at Paulik.

  His telephone rang and he quickly said to Mar
ine, “See you later!” and answered the phone, gesturing for Paulik to sit down. Marine waved good-bye, frustrated that she’d have to wait a few hours more, but it was better that way, she realized. She’d buy flowers and champagne on the way home. She walked out, closing the office door behind her.

  “It’s Bari,” Verlaque whispered with his hand over the receiver. Verlaque continued to speak into the phone using a mixture of English and Italian, and then hung up. “I had a hard time explaining in my pidgin Italian how we found the rifle. I had to make up the Italian words for tabletop and column by using the French word and adding an o and the end.” He glanced at Paulik, who in turn was looking out the window and smiling and then let out a little laugh. Verlaque asked, “What’s so funny?”

  “Those columns! Here I am, someone trained to watch people, look for clues, be diligent; like today, remembering that there should be four tabletops on those columns. We both saw it right away, didn’t we? But with my own family I can completely miss the signs.”

  “What are you going on about?”

  “I was so blind, for example, when Hélène was pregnant,” Paulik said, turning to look at his colleague. He gave Verlaque a raised eyebrow.

  “What kind of signs?” Verlaque asked. At least it was a story about Hélène, someone he knew well, and not one of Paulik’s numerous cousins from the Luberon.

  “Hélène was so tired all of a sudden. And she’s always been the first out of bed in the morning.”

  Verlaque rolled his fountain pen around on the desk. “What else?” he asked, his throat suddenly dry.

  “The most obvious one was the wine. She’d stopped drinking it. I’d offer her a glass and she’d put her hand over the glass and refuse. Hélène’s a winemaker, and I still didn’t put two and two together!” He almost added What an idiot I was! but he didn’t want to overdo it.

  Verlaque felt his forehead and upper lip begin to perspire. “Why didn’t she tell you? Didn’t you want kids?”

  “Oh, yeah, we both did. After we did that pros-and-cons list that I told you about, the pros column won out by a mile. But Hélène wasn’t sure yet at first. She wanted to be sure, you know, before she told me. A few days later she got the yes from her doctor . . . whose clinic is on the rue Espariat . . .” he said, adding a cough for extra effect, “and boy did we celebrate—”

  “Rue Espariat?” Verlaque got up, almost knocking his chair over. Paulik leaned back and watched Verlaque grab his coat and then do up the buttons, missing at least three of them. Paulik tried not to grin. “Where are you going?” Paulik asked. “Don’t you want to wait for the ballistics report? They’ll be calling any minute.”

  “You can take the call, Bruno,” Verlaque said, quickly tying his scarf around his neck. “I have to go. . . . Besides, we both know what the results are going to be.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Paulik said, getting up. He walked across the room and shook Verlaque’s hand, something they always did when a case was closed. “And it’s going to be good news, Antoine.”

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.