Death in the Vines: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal Mystery

by M. L. Longworth

  “You’ll see.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Verlaque pulled his Porsche through a set of tall black gates that had been left open for the party.

  “This is beautiful,” Marine said, sticking her head out of the open window. “It seems like a silly thing to say, but I love this driveway!”

  Verlaque smiled and rolled down his window. He loved Marine’s enthusiasm, even for a driveway. Birds were singing, flying between the plane and pine trees that lined the drive. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ve been here before, but only at night. Now I see what you’re talking about.” The driveway wasn’t paved; two narrow strips of paving stones guided the car’s wheels. Between the strips and on either side was bright-green grass, so that the overall effect one saw when approaching the house was not concrete, or stone, but verdure. Something about the cicadas’ chants, the warm evening, and the hazy greens made Verlaque’s eyes water. The car slowly bumped along the path until it stopped at the end of the drive, in a large graveled parking area.

  Pierre’s meticulously cared-for Deux Chevaux was dwarfed by much larger cars, mostly German-made, and three or four SUVs. Pierre and Jean-Marc were just getting out of the little blue car; they walked over to Verlaque and gave him the bise. The three men peered into the front seat of a new silver Porsche Cayenne. “Whose car is this?” Pierre asked. “I don’t recognize it.”

  “It’s Christophe Chazeau’s,” Verlaque replied. “He told me about it when I bumped into him at the Café Mazarin.”

  Jean-Marc toured the car. Marine watched the men and smiled. “You’re like teenagers,” she called. Pierre shrugged and said, “They’re beautiful objects, what can I say?”

  Verlaque kicked at some mud on the left rear hubcap. “Christophe needs to get his new beauty washed.”

  “Hey, what’s wrong with Marine?” Pierre asked.

  Verlaque turned around and saw Marine staring up at the house.

  “Marine!” Jean-Marc called. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Shhh!” Marine said, walking toward them. “They’ll hear!”

  “You like houses, we like cars,” Verlaque said.

  “Impressive place, isn’t it?” Pierre said.

  “Yes, impressive, but not imposing,” she answered. “I think this is the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”

  The three men turned instinctively away from Marine and looked up at the three-hundred-year-old mas. The farmhouse, despite its size—Pierre mumbled that it must have twelve bedrooms—was unpretentious. It looked as if it had begun as a small manoir, or the farmhouse of a wealthy farmer, and been enlarged over the decades and centuries in a most harmonious way. The stone was rough, exposed, the shutters all painted a light gray. The plants were Provençal: a myriad of greens and grays, dotted by tall, skinny cypress trees. The foursome made their way around to the back of the house, where they could hear music, laughter, and voices. A dozen or so couples were gathered around a long, sleek swimming pool. The north end of the pool was protected from the wind by a five-foot-high stone wall; above the wall rose hills that were covered in vineyards. To the west was another, steeper hill, this one terraced with plants: small rounded box hedges, rosemary, thyme, lavender, and here and there Mediterranean flowers that loved the sun, weren’t picky about soil and rainfall, and could withstand Aix’s cold winters.

  “They’re all white,” Pierre said, looking at the plants with Marine. “The flowers, I mean.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “That’s what makes the garden so pleasing, so easy on the eye.”

  “And tasteful,” Pierre said, winking.

  “Well, well, well,” said Fabrice, the cigar club’s president and the owner of plumbing stores that stretched across Provence, as he approached Pierre and Marine. “Lovely to see you, Marine.” He switched his large drink from his right hand to his left so that he could shake Marine’s hand.

  Marine instead leaned over and gave him the bise.

  “Is your wife here?” Pierre asked.

  “No,” Fabrice replied. “Our eldest daughter is about to go into labor any day. My wife won’t leave the house until she gets the phone call. How about you, Pierre?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come here with anyone special?” Fabrice asked. He leaned over and poked Pierre’s side with his elbow. “Any nice young girl you’d like to introduce to us? Eh?”

  “I came with Jean-Marc,” Pierre said calmly.

  Fabrice nodded and looked perplexed, but then smiled. “I knew that.”

  “Hello, Fabrice,” said Verlaque, who had just come up and slipped his arm around Marine’s waist.

  Fabrice leaned forward and said excitedly, “There’s a guy making mojitos in the pool house. They’re even better than mojitos I’ve had in Cuba!”

  “Sounds great. Let’s go and get some,” Verlaque said to Marine.

  Fabrice took one last loud sip from his straw and said, “I’ll join you! Looks like I need another one.”

  On the way to the pool house, they met Jacob and his wife, Rebecca. Introductions were made, and Rebecca said, “Help yourself to anything—the apéritif is self-serve, but we’ll sit down to dinner. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run in and get some more tapenade.”

  “She makes it herself,” Jacob said, beaming.

  “Really?” Marine asked, impressed. She had tried making tapenade only once; she found pitting the olives too tiresome.

  “Here’s this evening’s first cigar,” said José, another member, as he handed Verlaque a small square wooden box. “It’s a Limited Edition Upmann.”

  Verlaque introduced Marine. “My wife, Carmé, wants to meet you,” said José. “She’s over there, wearing beige pants and a white blouse. She teaches Spanish at the university, and I told her that you teach law.”

  “That would be great,” Marine said. “Tell Carmen I’d love to gossip about the university.”

  José and Verlaque laughed. “I’ll tell her. By the way, it’s ‘Carmé,’” José repeated. “That’s Catalan for ‘Carmen.’” José left to serve more cigars. Verlaque snipped off the end of the Upmann and, patting his jacket pockets, realized he didn’t have a lighter. As he turned to his right, he saw a flame approaching his cigar, held by a man he didn’t know.

  “Thank you,” Verlaque said, lighting his cigar. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Antoine Verlaque.”

  “Hello,” the man said, shaking Verlaque’s hand. “Philippe Léridon.”

  “This is Marine Bonnet,” Verlaque said.

  “Very pleased to meet you,” Léridon said, smiling. “Do you smoke cigars too?”

  “Oh no,” Marine answered. “I’m here as part of the wives-and-girlfriends club.”

  Léridon laughed.

  “And you?” Marine asked. She tried not to stare, but she recognized him. From where? Aix was so small, it could just be that they once stood in the same line at Monoprix.

  “I was invited this evening by Christophe Chazeau,” Léridon said.

  Verlaque said, “Listen, you two stay here and chat, and I’ll get us some mojitos before Fabrice drinks them all.”

  Marine didn’t show her frustration at being abandoned, forced to make small talk with someone that she and her best friend, Sylvie, would have classified as a “kek.” Philippe Léridon was very much a Mediterranean male: too much gold jewelry, too tanned, and showing off his abdominal muscles by wearing a very fitted white shirt unbuttoned too far down. Her awkwardness was cut short by the arrival of someone she had once met briefly at the Café Mazarin. “Hello, Christophe,” she said. “Nice to see you here.” Then it clicked; she remembered where she had seen Philippe Léridon. It was in a queue, but not at Monoprix—at the post office. “Nice to see you too,” he said, giving Marine the bise. She noticed that both men wore thin Hermès belts, which she had always disliked. She listened while they spoke of Christophe’s new car.

  Verlaque returned with two mojitos, one already half finished. Marine laughe
d, and Verlaque shrugged, smiling. “How goes it, Christophe?” he asked.

  “So-so,” Chazeau said. “Family troubles.”

  “Join the club,” Verlaque said. “Is everything okay?”

  “My aunt Pauline has been causing us all grief. She keeps wandering around Aix and having to get taken home hours later by a kind stranger.”

  “Is that your aunt?” Verlaque asked. “Pauline d’Arras?”

  “The same.”

  “Your uncle came into the Palais de Justice claiming that she was missing. I was told that she turned up a few hours after, safe and sound.”

  Chazeau nodded. “Yes, that’s about the whole story. And I just found out tonight that she’s been giving my buddy Philippe here a hard time.”

  “Ah bon?” Verlaque asked.

  “We’re neighbors,” Léridon explained. “I’ve been doing extensive renovations on my house, and I’m afraid it’s been making a lot of noise. Plus, the jackhammering has caused some minor cracking in Madame’s kitchen walls, which I’ve offered to repair.”

  Marine looked at Léridon, annoyed at the way he had emphasized the words “extensive” and “minor.” “Where’s your house?” she asked.

  “It’s the Hôtel Panisse-Passis, on the Rue Émeric David,” Léridon said. “Do you know it?”

  “Oh yes,” she answered. “I’m a native Aixoise.” She tried not to show her disappointment; it had always been one of her favorite hôtels, very faded and elegant. “But your insurance will cover her damage, right?”

  “Yes, of course. But Mme d’Arras still won’t speak to me; and when she does, she threatens to sue me.” Now it all clicked for Marine: the old woman in the post office, the queue jumper, was Christophe’s aunt, and she remembered Madame’s heated conversation with Philippe.

  “Is she capable of that?” Verlaque asked.

  “Oh yes,” her nephew answered. “My aunt is a very sour person, and misery enjoys company.”

  “That’s a funny thing to say about your aunt,” Marine put in boldly. Verlaque finished his drink with a loud slurp, and she looked crossly at him.

  “I know that it sounds unkind, but the truth is, we’re all a little fed up with her at the moment,” Chazeau went on. “She calls my mother late at night, accusing her of all sorts of nonsense that went on long ago. My mom gets off the phone and is really shaken up. I think that the only person who can stand my aunt right now is her husband, and of course Coco, her dog.”

  Dinner was served in the dining room, which Marine estimated was bigger than her living room, dining room, and kitchen combined. Some village girls had been hired to help serve, and hovering between the kitchen and dining room was a middle-aged couple that Rebecca told Marine had been with the family for more than thirty years. “They’re like family,” Jacob said over coffee on the terrace after dinner. “They helped us raise our three graces—that’s what we call our daughters. Wherever we go, Tony and Margritte come with us. We would be lost without them.” Marine smiled, warmed by the obvious affection Jacob had for the couple.

  After dinner, Verlaque and Fabrice sat on chaises longues, smoking cigars. Fabrice fussed with his chair’s back, trying to get the angle just right. “There we are,” he finally said, crossing his outstretched feet and putting his head back to smoke. He took a sip of Tony’s homemade limoncello and smacked his lips, looking over at Verlaque. “That new chap, Léridon, seems like an okay guy.”

  “You think so?” Verlaque asked. “Too bling for me. I’m not sure we should vote him into the club.”

  Fabrice glanced at Verlaque. “You’re too hard on people. Give the guy a break.”

  Verlaque stayed silent.

  “Did you know that Pierre came with Jean-Marc this evening?” Fabrice asked.

  Verlaque puffed on his cigar. “I know; we ran into them in the parking lot.”

  Fabrice uncrossed his legs and put a foot on either side of the chair, shifting it with his legs to get closer to Verlaque, trying not to spill his limoncello.

  “Would you like me to hold your limoncello while you do that?” Verlaque asked, laughing.

  Fabrice handed Verlaque his liqueur glass, struggling to move his chair sideways. Verlaque in turn struggled to hold both limoncello glasses and his cigar at the same time.

  “You know what I think?” Fabrice asked when his chair was next to Verlaque’s. He leaned in as close as he could to the judge without having his chair capsize.

  “No, what?”

  “That they’re a couple.”

  Verlaque took a sip of his limoncello. “I think you’re right, Fabrice. Very astute of you.”

  Verlaque stayed silent, waiting for Fabrice to speak next, unsure what the club’s president would think of a gay couple in their midst. He could trust Fabrice Gaussen with his life, but he also knew that Fabrice came from a Marseille working-class family, and in his professional life among plumbers and construction workers had probably never come across homosexuals. The cigar club was also, Verlaque had to admit (remembering the expensive cars in the parking lot that evening), fairly macho. But there were many exceptions to the cliché that cigar smokers were rich, conservative men; the proof was Pierre and Jean-Marc, and the club’s sole female member, Virginie, a pharmacist, who was absent from this evening’s party.

  “And do you know what else?” Fabrice asked.

  Verlaque gave out a long, exaggerated sigh. “No, what, Fabrice?”

  Fabrice looked across the terrace at Jean-Marc and Pierre, who were deep in conversation with Marine and Carmé. “I think it’s great that we have a…gay…couple…in our club, and for that reason we can have some bling guys too. It takes all kinds, right?”

  “It takes all kinds to do what, Fabrice?” Verlaque asked, laughing.

  Fabrice tapped Verlaque’s chair with the bottom of his shoe. “You know what I mean! It…it…takes all kinds of fish to make a bouillabaisse!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Philomène Arranges the Flowers

  Victor Bonnard lay in bed, his hands behind his head, and looked up at the ceiling. When he was nine years old, he and his father had pasted glow-in-the-dark stars all over the ceiling. He looked up at the Big Dipper and wondered when he should take the stars down; he was eighteen years old, after all. Someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” he said, not taking his eyes off the ceiling.

  “I realize it’s not yet ten a.m.,” Olivier Bonnard said, walking through the door and sitting on the edge of the bed. “But you didn’t get to go out clubbing last night, so you should be in fine shape.”

  Victor lay still and looked at the stars.

  “Did you know that when I was your age we also went to La Fantaisie? I’m sure it still looks the same inside; only the music has changed.”

  “Yeah, no more Beatles.”

  Olivier playfully cuffed his son on the side of his head. “I’m not that old!” Bonnard looked at his son, admiring the fine aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and freckles the boy had inherited from his mother. “Still mad at me?” he asked.

  “Yup.”

  “I’m really sorry for what I said the other day.”

  “You should be.”

  “What was I to think?” Olivier said to his son. “Not many of us have a key to that cellar. I was in shock.”

  Victor turned his head so that he could look at his father. “All right, then. But you must know that I would never, ever take your…our…wine.”

  “All right,” Olivier said. “And if you needed money, for whatever reason, you would ask us. Right?”

  “Of course!”

  A vehicle pulled into the estate’s graveled courtyard, and both Olivier and Victor jumped up to look out of Victor’s bedroom window. “Ah, it’s just Rémy, coming to get Dad for his boules game.” Both men watched Albert Bonnard walk quickly to the postman’s battered van, cradling a leather duffel bag in his arms.

  “He sure loves those boules,” Victor said, laughing. He fell back onto the bed and pulled t
he covers up to his chin.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Olivier said, sitting back down on the edge of the bed. “Hélène’s husband, Bruno, called me yesterday. You remember him, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Big scary-looking, rugby-playing cop.”

  “Policeman,” Olivier said. “Yes, that’s him. He told me that his boss, Antoine Verlaque, visited a wine thief in Paris and got some information that may help us.”

  Victor sat up. “Really? Cops—policemen—visit wine thieves these days?”

  “He’s a reformed thief, actually, and now helps the police solve cases when expensive wines have been stolen.”

  “And what did this guy say?” Victor asked.

  “That the thief will be back.” Olivier Bonnard stood up and put his hand on the doorknob. “So get up and get dressed.”

  “Are we going on watch or what? I need to eat breakfast. What’s the rush?”

  “Because I just checked the cellar,” Olivier said. “And more wine is gone.”

  Marine knew that she was a lousy Catholic. She sometimes wished that she could have the unquestioning faith that her parents had; she liked the mystery of the church, and the ceremony, but wasn’t a big enough believer to attend Mass on a regular basis. Was this just an excuse? Was she just too lazy to get out of bed on Sunday mornings? No, she thought not. She disagreed with the pope’s stand on birth control and abortion. The irony was that she felt so good in churches. She loved their stark stone walls; the golden light streaming in through high windows, as it did this Saturday morning; and she loved the song and the time to meditate. She had been half relieved when Verlaque said he was going into the Palais de Justice to work this morning; she knew that she would come to Saint-Jean de Malte straightaway. Shiny brown chestnuts had fallen from the trees in the square, and she gently kicked them aside as she walked toward the church. There were new all-glass entry doors, and Marine vaguely remembered her mother telling her about their cost and the trouble the monks had had finding exactly the right kind of door. The inside of the church smelled of incense, as it always did, and the beauty of the church took her breath away. Everything was golden, she realized, as she sat down and looked all around the church. The stone walls were gold, as were the light shining in from the south windows, the gilded pulpit and statues of Mary, the polished brass contemporary light sconces, even the woven cane seats. She twisted around so that she could see the new organ, largely funded by wine sales that her parents had organized: it too was golden, sculpted from a pale-blond wood—perhaps birch?—with shiny stainless-steel pipes that soared up toward the ceiling. She realized that the triumph of the church lay in its being beautiful in its entirety. No one object stood out—say, a famous painting or an exquisite sculpture. The whole church, the package, was perfect.