Social Crimes

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  After freshening up from the long flight, I wandered downstairs. The main salon, overlooking a barren back garden, had high ceilings and pale gray boiserie. The decor was an eclectic mixture of fine family heirlooms and exotic junk Eugenie had picked up on her travels. The combination of paisley shawls thrown over well-worn velvet couches, peacock feathers stuck behind ancestral portraits, and cheap bric-a-brac elevated by its proximity to fine antiques attested to the artistic, offbeat sensibility of the occupant. As always, the apartment had a rich musky aroma from the perfumed paper rings Eugenie burned on her lamp bulbs.

  I was dozing on a bottle green velvet divan when Eugenie burst into the room, crying, “Jo, ma chère! Je suis ravie de te voir!”

  I, too, was delighted to see my old friend. Though we’d spoken on the phone many times, we hadn’t seen each other in person since well before Lucius’s death. I reflected on how much my life had changed since our last meeting.

  Though Eugenie still moved with the graceful agility of a ballerina, she looked older. She’d had what the French call a coup de vieux—a sudden aging that is particularly noticeable in women who have looked much younger than their years for a long time. Her features, prominent to begin with, now jutted out on her face like crags on a cliff, coarsening the bold, chiseled beauty that had once captivated men and women alike. Her body was still lithe and, as always, she was chicly dressed in an original way where nothing matched but everything went together. She was wearing a striking gold necklace that I recognized as one of her own design.

  Feli came in carrying a brass tray with two steaming toddy glasses and a plate of miniature croissants. The sweet concoction of hot tea mixed with strawberry preserves warmed my insides and revived me a little. Never one to beat about the bush, Eugenie got straight to the point.

  “My darling Jo, you look beautiful but exhausted. Tell me how you are.”

  “Lousy,” I confessed.

  “Are you still decorating?”

  “I’d like to be. But my business is ruined. I have one client left.”

  “But why? Just because of those awful people? Clients get upset all the time. It’s not so tragic.”

  “I know, but when you’re just starting out . . . The perception is that I cheated a pair of decent, rich out-of-towners.”

  “Jo, anyone who knows you knows that you couldn’t cheat anyone.”

  “Let’s just say that Mrs. Dent is a woman who will never comprehend the subtlety of hand-painted silk. She wants gold brocade. And her husband is a psychopath. I found out that lawsuits are his avocation.”

  “And all this because of Monique de Passy?”

  “Hey, she’s a Countess. They’re from Cincinnati. What can I tell you?” I spooned up the preserves from the bottom of my glass. “The knives are out for me anyway,” I said, savoring their sweet, warm taste. “One thing you never really realize when you’re so insulated is how envious people are.”

  “Envy makes the world go ’round, darling,” she said. “It’s a marvelous spectator sport. Cheap and you can do it anywhere!” Eugenie rubbed her hands together as if she were about to dig into a feast. “Now Jo, I have found out a great deal about your Countess,” she with a derogatory inflection. “She is a very dangerous person.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re telling me? Are we old and good enough friends so that if I tell you something, I can trust you not to repeat it?”

  “Ça va sans dire, Jo. I’m not June Kahn,” Eugenie said with a little chuckle. Everyone who knew June knew she was about as discreet as the Internet.

  “You know how everyone thinks that Monique was Lucius’s mistress and that’s why he left her a fortune? Well, according to her, he wanted to divorce me and marry her so she could have his child.”

  Eugenie’s jaw dropped slightly. She set her glass back down on the tray. “His child? Mon Dieu! How old was he? Seventy?”

  “Exactly. She told me she was pregnant and that she had a miscarriage after he died.”

  “You believed her?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows? Would I have believed Lucius capable of what he did to me? Nate Nathaniel confirmed it. Nate was his great confidant, as you know. It’s so hard to tell.”

  Eugenie looked at me with a compassion tinged with irritation. “Jo, I have seen you in the library of the Louvre, poring over ancient inventories to confirm the authenticity of an inkwell. I have traveled with you to the far corners of Europe to check out the provenance of a painting. Why are you so willing to accept the word of a confidence woman? How do we really know he wanted to marry her and that she was pregnant? Because she says so? Please.”

  “She obviously convinced him.”

  “A gorgeous young woman can convince an old man of anything.”

  “I know, but what does it really matter now? The point is he left her the money.”

  “Bastard. Why didn’t you fight the will?”

  “I talked to five lawyers. They all told me I’d lose. I probably would’ve contested it if I’d had the money. But I just couldn’t afford to lose.”

  “Are you sure that’s the only reason?”

  I looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “The last time you were here you told me you felt guilty being so fortunate in life when other people had nothing, you remember?”

  “You think subconsciously I believe I got what I deserved?” I said.

  “We all suffer from that a bit, no? We have nice comfortable lives so we must pay for them in some way.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You are not in a Kafka novel, my darling. You are not guilty of anything except having been a good wife to that shit of a man.”

  “He always promised he’d take care of me. That was my mistake—wanting, needing to be taken care of. That’s why I loved my decorating business so much, because it was mine. No one else’s. No one gave it to me. And now she’s taken that away, too.”

  Eugenie sipped her tea. “There is someone who wants very much to meet you,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Anne-Marie de Passy. Her brother, Michel, was married to Monique.”

  “The one who died.”

  “You will love this old woman. She’s fascinating. And the stories she tells about her sister-in-law—my dear!” Eugenie rolled her eyes.

  “They can’t be any worse than mine.”

  “That is exactly why you two will adore one another. Nothing bonds people more quickly than a common hatred.”

  At this moment, I was tempted to confide in Eugenie, telling her all my suspicions about Monique’s involvement in Lucius’s death. But I decided it was wiser not to mention it.

  “Where did you meet this woman?” I inquired.

  “Michel de Passy owned an art gallery here, you know. Friends of mine knew him. I didn’t know he had a sister until recently, however. She’s quite a recluse. But I found her and I went to see her. She would like to meet you.”

  I was eager to meet Anne-Marie de Passy, thinking what a lift it would be to sit down and have a discussion with someone else who knew Monique’s treachery firsthand. I had an inkling I was entering further into that dangerous realm of obsession where one is attracted to the thing one most despises, and where, if one isn’t careful, one can become both the hurricane and the house it destroys. The truth is, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was talk about Monique, to hate her out loud.

  Eugenie refused to accompany me to the meeting she arranged with old Mademoiselle de Passy. “She will tell you more if you see her alone,” Eugenie said.

  Anne-Marie de Passy lived in a tiny apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, opposite Monsieur Poilâne’s Boulangerie, one of the oldest bakeries in Paris, famous for its crispy apple tarts and tasty baguettes baked in pre-Revolutionary ovens. She occupied cramped quarters in the back of a seedy, ancient house. The small living room had no light and smelled of cats. Indeed, several scraggly looking felines drifted around in corners like gray dustballs as she poured
me tea into two exquisite porcelain cups whose pattern I recognized. Finely painted nymphs and satyrs danced around a luminous indigo ground. I asked her if they were copies of the famous service that Hetlinger, the head of the Sèvres factory, had designed for Marie Antoinette in 1782.

  “They are not copies,” she said tersely.

  I was impressed. Only the Queen of England possessed a complete set of this quality. For me, it was like drinking from the Holy Grail.

  Anne-Marie de Passy, however, was clearly not interested in the cups or anything else except her erstwhile sister-in-law. Monique had become the obsession of her life, as she was now threatening to become the obsession of mine. I quickly learned that she hated Monique with a passion so deep that when she talked about her for any length of time she began to tremble with an involuntary, deep-seated rage.

  “You have come to talk to me about the woman who led my brother into hell,” she began. “You must understand that Michel and I were extremely close. I brought him up when our mother died. I adored him, but he was a weak man, susceptible to two things: beauty and drugs. Monique supplied him both in abundant quantities.”

  The old spinster, who spoke a cultivated English with almost no French accent, sounded more like an upper-class Brit than a native Frenchwoman. She described Monique as a scheming predator who had married a much older man for his social position and all the family treasures she could steal, a picture that only reinforced my own jaundiced view of the Countess.

  “How did your brother meet her?” I asked.

  “God knows. But he hired her to work in his art gallery. I loathed her from the moment I set eyes on her. She fooled everyone but me. I knew her type. I understood instantly she was after Michel, not because she loved him, but because he was rich and well connected. I also knew that she would get him in the end because he was so weak and so terrified of getting old. She was very beautiful, very manipulative, and very evil.”

  “Oh, I know. She fooled me,” I said. “Did she ever talk to you about her own family background?”

  “What background?” she scoffed. “Elle n’est pas née.” I knew the French expression, which literally meant, “She isn’t born.” It was used to describe people who come from families of no particular distinction.

  “How long were Monique and your brother married?”

  “Three and a half years. Then he died,” she said, visibly deflating. “He didn’t really want to marry her, you know. But she tricked him. She told him she was pregnant and that she was going to have the child with or without him.”

  I blanched at this revelation. “That’s exactly what she told my husband—that she was pregnant with his child.”

  De Passy gave a grim little chuckle. “I’m not surprised. She was not only a sexual predator but an emotional predator as well.”

  “Did she have the baby?”

  “What baby?” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “She was never pregnant. It was all a story. I found out she couldn’t have children, the merciful result of a botched abortion when she was twenty-one. God forbid there should be another one like her roaming the earth.”

  I was stunned. “How did you find all this out?”

  “I hired a private detective, my dear. Naturally, I wanted to protect my darling brother’s interests, as well as my own . . . She was called Monique Bourot, a little girl from Normandy. She was like Emma Bovary, only sadistic and adept at getting what she wanted. She was married twice before Michel, once to a musician when she was very young, and once to another rich older man.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “She divorced the musician. But the rich older man died.”

  “How?”

  “We were never quite sure. There was an official inquiry, but it was hushed up for some reason. The detective tried to find out more, but you know, in France, all these things are very difficult to learn.”

  “Did your brother know about all this?”

  “Indeed he did. I showed him the report and begged him not to marry her. But she had an amazing hold on him, undoubtedly sexual in nature. These things always are. And, of course, it was compounded by the drugs. Michel was quite literally possessed by her. After he read the report, he ordered me to leave his house. Can you imagine? Me, his own sister, who had been like a mother and a father to him. Me, whom he adored and who was trying to protect him. We didn’t speak for nearly two and a half years—not until he started having trouble with her. Then he came back to me,” she said proudly.

  I could hardly believe my ears. Though the facts were different, the essence of the old woman’s story was amazingly similar to my own.

  “Do you still have that report?”

  “No. I threw it away.”

  “What about the private detective? Is he still around? I wonder if I could talk to him.”

  “I have no idea. I don’t care anymore.”

  “Do you remember the name of her second husband?”

  “He was called Pierre Marcel and he owned quite a lot of property in Neuilly.”

  “Is that where she lived with him?”

  “Yes. Rue Parmentier. But what’s the point of dwelling on this? I found out everything it was possible to find out about her. And now, quite frankly, what does it matter? There is nothing to be done.”

  The frail woman leaned down and plucked a cigarette from a malachite and gold box on the coffee table. She offered me one. I declined. She pulled a reedy black holder from her pocket and slid the cigarette into it with her long bony fingers. The process took some time because she was arthritic. She lit the cigarette with a gold lighter and took several puffs, seemingly caught up in a web of memory.

  I studied her face. She was a wizened older woman with faint claims to an aristocratic pre-Revolutionary beauty. Her profile was pure ancien régime—a prominent nose angled upward, a haughty forehead, high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and a thin strip of a mouth. Her pale blue eyes were clouded with cataracts and sadness. Her velvety white hair was swept up in a wispy, lopsided chignon fastened with tortoiseshell pins.

  “Monique bled my brother dry financially, sexually, and emotionally. She used him and he refused to see it.”

  “How did she use him?”

  “She spent all his money. She met the best people in Paris. She always wanted to be on the top.”

  “Of what?”

  “La bonne société. High society, you call it.”

  “Your brother died of a heart attack, I understand.”

  “That is what they said, but—” she paused to exhale a long stream of smoke. “I am certain she had something to do with it. She took everything of value from him: his manhood, his self-respect, and I believe, ultimately, his life.”

  My stomach lurched. “Do you have any proof?”

  “Just a moment,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray.

  She stood up with some effort and left the room, returning moments later with something in her hand. She sat down again.

  “Michel was a drug addict. She knew it, but she did nothing to prevent him. On the contrary . . . I cannot prove that she gave him an overdose to kill him, but I am certain something like that happened,” she said, handing me a vial containing packaged tablets.

  It was a prescription in Monique’s name for something called Rotinal.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a drug like Valium, only many, many times more potent and highly addictive. Illegal in America, I believe. A sex drug,” she said in disgust. “Michel once told me it was like making love wrapped in a cloud. But my doctor told me that more than four will give you a seizure and put you under the ground.”

  I examined the vial. Monique’s name was typed out on the label.

  “It’s in Monique’s name.”

  “Exactly. She said she took them for anxiety, but she was too calculating to be anxious. I know she got them to give to my brother, to addict him, and worse. I told the police my suspicions, but they did nothing.”<
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  I tried to hand the vial back to her.

  “No, no, please keep it,” she said, refusing to take it from me. “I was going to get rid of it anyway. I don’t dare have it around anymore.”

  The tone of defeat and melancholy in her voice told me she had perhaps been tempted to use the pills on herself.

  “What makes you think Monique killed your brother?” I asked, tucking the vial away in my purse.

  “Michel was planning to leave her and she would have been left with nothing,” she said matter-of-factly. “One day my brother came to see me. He was very upset. He showed me a letter he had found. He discovered she was having an affair.”

  “Yes. With my husband.”

  “It could be. Michel told me he was an American.”

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  She shook her head. “If he did, I don’t remember it. Michel was quite a narcissist when it came to women. He tolerated a great deal from them, but never infidelity. If they betrayed him, he left.”

  “You don’t, by any chance, have that letter, do you?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, motioning to a far corner of the room. In the gloom I saw a pile of boxes and books and old photograph albums stacked up high against the wall. A cat jumped down from the heap. “All those things belonged to Michel. I salvaged them from his apartment. She must have thought they were worthless, which is why she left them behind. To me, however, they are precious because they are a record of my brother’s life. It’s all I have left of my family.”

  “If you ever do find that letter, I’d be very curious to see it.”

  “You are welcome to look for it yourself. I will never have the energy.”