Death in the Vines: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal Mystery

by M. L. Longworth

  “No problem,” said Flamant, already on his way out the door.

  “Judy Cruises. What a strange name,” Verlaque said, reading the papers with his reading glasses. “Aren’t they usually called Sunset, or something to do with the color of the sea?”

  They walked out and saw Jules Schoelcher. Paulik pulled him aside and told him to arrange interviews at the hospital for Monday morning.

  “Who can drive us?” Verlaque asked. At that moment, he and Paulik saw Roger Caromb standing by the coffee machine, obviously—judging by his hand gestures and their laughter—telling a joke to three or four other officers who were gathered around him.

  “I have another one!” Roger said. “How do blondes…” He saw Verlaque approaching and stopped.

  “Officer Caromb,” Verlaque said, “how fast can you drive?”

  Roger Caromb sucked in his stomach and puffed out his chest. “Like the wind.”

  “Let’s go, then. We need to be in Toulon by two-thirty p.m.”

  Roger Caromb, once he found out where they were going, did not have to drive quickly or dangerously; his grandmother lived in Toulon, and he knew not only where the port was but how to get there by the back streets. They arrived at the port as the ship was coming into the harbor, and parked the car in front of the Coast Guard office. Verlaque had called ahead from his cell phone, and the harbormaster was waiting for them, a tall, tanned man who looked as if he spent much time outside. “The captain has notified me that the young man in question will be the last off, with the captain and first mate,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Verlaque said.

  The men stood in front of the office’s picture window and watched the ship get closer to the port. “It’s massive,” Paulik said.

  “Actually, the Judy is a small cruise ship,” answered the harbormaster. “She holds only seven hundred passengers. The big cruise ships pack in as many as three thousand.”

  Roger Caromb squinted and then pointed out the window. “Colorful ship,” he said, smiling. “I like the rainbow on the stern side.”

  The harbormaster smiled. “It’s always a bit of a lark when the Judy comes into port,” he said. “They’re a great bunch of…guys…and gals, I shouldn’t forget! We’re in the twenty-first century, aren’t we? I didn’t know what to think the first time she set sail from here, oh, back four years ago now. But, like I say, they’re a great bunch. Never had any problems.”

  Verlaque looked at the harbormaster, perplexed. He glanced at Paulik, who looked equally confused and then shrugged.

  The ship came into port, blowing its horn. One of the port’s crew came running into the office and yelled, “Judy’s here! Let’s go!”

  The harbormaster turned to the three Aixois and said, “Let’s hope they’re still dressed up! They usually are!”

  “Dressed up?” Roger mumbled to himself. They walked out of the office, down a flight of steps that ran alongside the building’s exterior, and out onto the pier.

  The ship blew its foghorn again, and a loud cheer went up from the ship’s passengers, who were gathered along the upper deck, waving. The passengers slowly began filing off, some still cheering and others singing. The sun shone in Verlaque’s eyes; he held his right hand up to his head to shield them.

  “Cheerio, mate!” a sailor said as he walked by, returning Verlaque’s salute.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t saluting…” Verlaque began to reply to the sailor, but then stopped. He realized that the sailor was not a sailor but a passenger in disguise, for dozens more sailors came down the plank, arm in arm with priests, bishops, football players, firemen, and policemen. Roger Caromb saw the policemen and waved excitedly. Paulik and Verlaque burst out laughing.

  “The rainbow,” Verlaque said.

  Paulik laughed. “Judy.”

  “Garland?” Verlaque asked.

  “Yeah, she’s a gay icon,” Paulik replied.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Most of the passengers were men, but some women disembarked too, arms linked with other women, some dressed in costume and some hardly dressed at all. Verlaque nudged Paulik and they looked over at Roger Caromb, who was now staring straight ahead, watching the crowd, his mouth open. Once again they burst into laughter.

  “That’s why Edmond Martin didn’t tell his parents,” Verlaque said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “This is a gay cruise.”

  Both men coughed, in an effort to get serious quickly, before speaking to Edmond Martin. When they scanned the crowd, they thought they recognized the young man from photographs; he was dressed as a monk, walking ahead of two uniformed men, who they assumed were the captain and first mate, not fellow passengers in disguise.

  “Should we go back up into the office?” the harbormaster asked, now standing beside them. “I see the captain and first mate now; the man dressed as a monk must be your M. Martin. You may use my office.”

  “Thank you,” Verlaque said. A scantily clad man, wearing a chef’s toque and apron but not much more, walked by and winked at him.

  A few minutes later, they were in the office, with Edmond Martin standing before them.

  “What’s going on?” Martin asked, wringing his hands, the sleeves of his long white cloak swaying as he did so.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news,” Verlaque said. “Please, sit down.”

  “My family?” Edmond Martin asked, jumping up out of the chair.

  “No, no,” Verlaque assured him.

  Martin sat back down and stared at Verlaque with what looked like terror in his eyes. “What is it, then?”

  “It’s Suzanne Montmory.”

  “Suzie?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mlle Montmory died yesterday afternoon of heart failure.”

  Edmond Martin’s face went white. “But that’s impossible,” he said. “She’s so healthy.” He shook his head back and forth. “No,” he repeated. “It’s absolutely impossible. You must have the wrong girl. Suzie’s in great shape.”

  Paulik looked at Verlaque. “It’s more complicated than that,” Paulik said, leaning over the harbormaster’s desk toward the young man. “On Wednesday night, sometime between four and seven-thirty p.m., Mlle Montmory was raped and viciously attacked in her flat, left for dead. She survived overnight in the hospital, but unfortunately slipped away on Thursday afternoon.”

  “Oh my God!” Martin tried to yell, but only a hoarse whisper came out of his mouth, for he had begun weeping. Verlaque reached across the desk and passed a box of Kleenex to Martin, at the same time looking at Paulik with an expression that said, “There’s no way he did it.”

  “I’m sorry, Edmond,” Verlaque said. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes,” the young man said, wiping his tears and blowing his nose. “Thank you. I have a lift back to the Marseille airport with some friends from the cruise; they’re waiting for me in the parking lot. We all fly out early tomorrow morning, so we’re staying in an airport hotel tonight.”

  “Your parents have been trying to get hold of you in Montreal to give you the news, and Commissioner Paulik visited them yesterday.”

  “You did?” he asked, looking frightened.

  “I had to find out where you were,” Paulik said.

  “I was a suspect?”

  Paulik nodded.

  The ship’s captain then stepped forward and handed Verlaque a sheet of paper. “I can testify that M. Martin boarded the ship last Sunday here in Toulon and did not step off it, except for an afternoon’s shopping trip in Cannes, until today.”

  “Thank you,” Verlaque said.

  “You won’t tell my parents that I was on this cruise?”

  “No,” answered Verlaque. “But they now know you were in Provence, so perhaps this is a good time to tell them…your news.”

  “No,” said Martin. “I’d be disowned.”

  “You may be mistaken,” Verlaque said. “I’m sure they would get over it.”

  “No, not them.”

&nbs
p; “Wouldn’t you sleep better at night?” Verlaque asked.

  “Perhaps,” Martin replied. “But I’d have no more family, and no inheritance.”

  Chapter Eleven

  A Changed Village

  It was strange, Pauline d’Arras thought, that a village could look as familiar as it had fifty years previously, and yet so very different. The buildings themselves were still the same, all made of the local golden stone quarried just outside of town; the quarry and its porous yellow stone had given the village its wealth. The main road hadn’t changed either; it still veered eastward at the cave cooperative and then descended gently northward out of the village, until it reached the vine-covered plains outside of town. Of course, it was rather hard to change buildings and roads unless war destroyed them, thought Mme d’Arras as she sat on a bench under a plane tree. Or as the earthquake had. Its date came to her easily: 1909; fourteen villagers killed.

  A young mother walked by, dressed in what Mme d’Arras considered a “risqué” outfit, the skirt much too short for a woman of her short and stocky build. The woman spoke impatiently to her son—who looked too big to be in a stroller, and too big to have a pacifier in his mouth. He had an Anglo-Saxon name, although they were clearly French. That was what had changed, Mme d’Arras now realized: the people, and the shops. Fifty years ago, even thirty, she could have sat on this bench and known almost everyone in the village. And they her: the villagers would have passed by and bowed their heads and said, “Good afternoon, Mlle Aubanel.” They might have even chatted about the hot September weather, and passed their hello on to Pauline’s sisters. Natalie was two years older than Pauline, and Clothilde two years younger.

  “Good Clothilde,” Mme d’Arras mumbled to herself. It was time she got to the chapel and made inquiries as to where Clothilde was these days, because she couldn’t remember. In the church there would be some relief from the heat, and Pauline d’Arras was glad that she had made this trip. She got up off the bench and walked down the main street toward the church. With its rounded Romanesque apse, it was one of the first buildings one saw when coming into the village from the south, from Aix. By the time she got to the chapel, she was tired and regretted buying the bottle of wine at the cave cooperative; she didn’t have a taste for wine, so Gilles always chose it. She set her purse down at her feet and looked at the chapel. It was unadorned—Mme d’Arras liked that—and a tall cypress tree was planted on either side of the building. There were no sculptures or adornments of any kind; the only ornamentation was a bell in a small tower at the top of the church’s pediment. The wooden front door was unlocked, as Mme d’Arras had assumed it would be. She didn’t realize that most village churches in France were now locked during the day—for fear of vandalism and robbery—but the church’s cleaner was inside and had left the door open.

  The Aubanel family pew had been near the left front, in the third row, and Mme d’Arras went there now and sat down. The cleaner looked up from where she had been mopping the altar, nodded, and continued her work. Inside, the chapel was drastically different from its rough-hewn stone exterior—the whitewashed walls were smooth, and the ceiling was painted a bright blue that early-twentieth-century restorers seemed to prefer. Mme d’Arras leaned forward and played with the little brass hook that used to hold their hats and her mother’s purse; it slipped from her hands and snapped back against the wooden pew in front of her with a loud bang. The cleaner looked up again, and Mme d’Arras quickly got to her feet, made the sign of the cross once she was in front of the altar, and left.

  From the chapel it would be an easy walk to her childhood home. She reached into her purse and set the bottle of wine against the church’s stone wall. Either she could come by and pick it up later or a villager, or the cleaner, would take it. Let them have it: she had only purchased it because of the bus driver.

  The path that led from the church toward the Hôtel Bollène was shaded; large bunches of valerian lined the path, and butterflies circled in and out among the hearty purple flowers. At the bottom of the path she frowned, and stopped. On the other side of the street should have been her friend Philomène’s house—a pretty 1920s house built after the Great War, where Philomène had lived with her mother and two maiden aunts. They had become friends when singing in the choir. Beside the house was a footpath that Pauline and her sisters had always taken to their family home. She hadn’t been there in years, and the last time Gilles had driven, and she mustn’t have been paying attention, because Philomène’s house and the path were gone, replaced by a string of detached modern bungalows with small alleys—used for parking—paved between them. Poor Philomène, thought Mme d’Arras. A radio or television—she wasn’t sure which—was blaring from one of the tacky little houses, and she shuddered, moving on. She didn’t remember that Philomène had married one of the Joubert boys and they had moved to Aix shortly after their marriage, and that Philomène still sang, but in the choir at Saint-Jean de Malte.

  Mme d’Arras walked up the street a bit, but the new houses went as far as she could see. She was suddenly very tired, and it was still hot. She had no idea what time it was, but she knew that she should go back to the bench and wait for the bus if she was ever going to get home before dinner (it was, in fact, already 7:15 p.m.). She had turned around, deciding that she would visit her childhood home another time, when the loud music stopped and the front door of one of the little houses opened (she made clicking sounds with her tongue as she noted that its yellow trim badly needed touching up). She jumped back and, out of instinct, held her purse close to her chest.

  “Hello,” a man said quickly, closing the door behind him. “What a surprise.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be,” she replied. “This is my village.”

  “Oh, is it?” he asked.

  “I grew up here,” she went on. “And this was Philomène’s house.”

  “Oh, was it?” He tried to smile. “Have you been standing here long?”

  Mme d’Arras sighed. “Of course I haven’t. Why would I, when Philomène obviously no longer lives here?” She was angry at this man, angry that her village had changed so much (and without her knowledge or consent), angry that Philomène’s house was gone and that she no longer saw her old friend (truth was, Pauline d’Arras was too much of a snob to socialize with Philomène Joubert, a woman who for forty years had proudly worked as a secretary in one of Aix’s high schools, her husband a printer).

  He took a step forward, and Mme d’Arras stepped back, alarmed. “I’m only opening the car door,” he said. “Did you drive here?”

  “Of course not. I don’t drive.”

  “Let me take you back to Aix, then,” he said, motioning to the passenger seat. “We must go quickly or we’ll be caught in traffic.” He noticed that she was fanning herself with the back of her hand. “The car’s air-conditioned,” he added.

  “All right,” she said. “I have to get back to make our dinner.”

  “Of course,” he said, looking at his watch. “Let’s hurry along, then.” He gave her his elbow, walked her around to the passenger side of the car, and helped her in, holding her purse as she swung her legs into the car. Now he moved swiftly around the front of the car to the driver’s side, got in, started the car, and backed out—too quickly, and without even looking, thought Mme d’Arras. “We can take the scenic route, through the forest,” he said. “The route nationale will be too busy.”

  Mme d’Arras was too tired to contradict him. Because he barely slowed down at the stop sign, she had to tilt her head to get one last look at the chapel and its rounded apse. She glanced over at him; he was no longer smiling, just looking straight ahead, both hands firmly on the steering wheel.

  Chapter Twelve

  Too Bling for Me

  What do you think?” Marine asked. She was standing in her living room, hands on hips, wearing a blue silk wraparound dress with green high-heeled sandals.

  “You look so great, perhaps we should just stay in this evening,”
Verlaque replied, setting down his book, the better to concentrate. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. He got up off the sofa and walked over to Marine to kiss her on her forehead, having almost to get on tiptoes to do so.

  “Of course I do,” she answered. “I said so.”

  “And you won’t mind a dozen or so cigar smokers?”

  Marine laughed. “A dozen cigar smokers outside, on a warm late-summer evening? No. It will be better than getting stuck with you smoking in your Porsche with the windows rolled up.”

  “Hey! That’s unfair,” Verlaque said. “I always open the windows.”

  Marine smiled. “You’re right. It was only once, and that was because it had started to rain. Well, you’ve promised me good food and fine wines this evening, so let’s get going before I change my mind. The other wives and girlfriends will be there, right?”

  “Twice a year it’s permitted,” Verlaque answered. “But only twice a year. And Pierre and Jean-Marc will be there, of course.”

  “But they’re a couple! Isn’t that unfair?”

  “No, because Pierre and Jean-Marc are both members,” Verlaque said, getting his jacket from the coatrack in the front hall. “Besides, I’m not sure if the other guys have figured out their relationship yet.”

  Marine put on some lipstick before the front hall’s mirror. She pinched her lips together and said, “I’m sure the other guys have figured it out. They’re not thick.” She smiled at Verlaque, and he laughed, knowing he was being teased. When he had been told, by both men, of their love for each other, it had come as a complete surprise. “Who’s hosting the cigar club’s dinner tonight?” she asked.

  “Jacob,” Verlaque said. “He’s part Egyptian, part French. And he works in the City in London.”

  “London? Why so far away?”