Perforating Pierre (Jane Delaney Mysteries Book 3)

by Pamela Burford

  Did I say something disparaging about girlish obsessions before? I take it back.

  We piled in, with Sexy Beast and me riding shotgun next to Ariel. SB commenced his usual car-whining, which I ignored.

  “Assuming she’s taking him to her place, it’s that way.” I pointed toward the modest residential area on the edge of town where Chloe lived.

  The girls shook their heads in unison. “That’s not where they went.” Ariel pulled out of the lot and drove in the opposite direction.

  Mandy leaned in from the backseat. “They were headed toward the center of town, but that’s all we know. Their car, like, disappeared around the corner.”

  Chloe could be taking him anywhere, I thought as I pulled out my phone and tried calling Victor. He didn’t answer, and I didn’t dare leave a message, not wanting to alert Chloe that I was on to her. As divorced from reality as she was, who knew what she might do if she felt cornered?

  Now Phoebe leaned forward. “Shouldn’t we, like, call nine-one-one?”

  And waste time trying to explain the situation to a skeptical dispatcher—skeptical and tipsy if Chief Larson’s mistress was on duty that day—then hope she’d eventually get around to sending someone?

  “Damn!” I blurted, making the girls jump. Why hadn’t I grabbed Sergeant Howie Werker? He was right there at the auction. Because I was rushing to catch up with Victor and Chloe outside the restaurant, that’s why.

  “Should I turn here?” Ariel’s voice was tight. “Where should I go, Jane?”

  “I don’t know. Phoebe, yeah, go ahead and try nine-one-one.” While she did so, I called Howie’s phone. No answer. I groaned. The raucous auction was in full swing. He probably couldn’t hear his phone. I left a message, telling him it was a matter of life and death—trite but true—and begging him to call me back.

  In the backseat, Phoebe was becoming increasingly frantic as she tried to communicate with the police dispatcher. “I don’t know where she’s taking him,” she shrieked, “but she’s driving a green Mini Cooper with a white top, which has to be super easy to spot. If you just— Ma’am, I— Would you just listen—” Phoebe put her hand over the mouthpiece and informed us, “This woman’s either drunk or super high.”

  Where would Chloe take him? What would she be trying to accomplish?

  “Oh!” I sat up straight, nearly pitching Sexy Beast off my lap. “I think I know where they’re going. Turn left here. Here!”

  Tires squealed and car horns honked as Ariel obeyed, bumping over the curb and nearly clipping Russell Appell’s florist van.

  “Phoebe, tell the dispatcher to send the cops to Dewatre!” I said.

  “Too late, she hung up.”

  “Call her back! Keep trying!” To Ariel I said, “Dewatre is Swing’s restaurant. You know how to get there?”

  “Sure.” She lead-footed it, swerving in and out of traffic, blowing through red lights, and almost turning us into a window display at Vargas Sporting Goods. Miraculously, Sexy Beast stopped whining, whether from sheer terror or lack of oxygen due to my death grip, I couldn’t say.

  I tried Howie again. After the voice-mail beep, I screamed into the phone, “Howie, I need you at Dewatre! Chloe killed Swing and now she’s got Victor. Hurry!”

  As we neared Dewatre, I said, “I’m figuring Chloe would take him in through the alley in back, so let me out in front.” I tossed my phone to Ariel. “Keep trying Howie. Also Detective Hernandez, she’s in my contacts.”

  “How will you get in?” Ariel asked.

  I jangled a keyring. I’d neglected to give it back to Victor after that day I’d let Denny into Dewatre. “Victor carries another set,” I said. The restaurant’s manager had recently returned it to him.

  As we pulled up in front of the restaurant, I saw that the crime-scene tape had been removed. The broken window had been replaced and was now covered with brown paper.

  Mandy touched my shoulder. “We’ll go with you. You shouldn’t go in there alone.”

  “No way, you guys keep trying to get help,” I said as I let myself out of the car. If my hunch was right and Chloe and Victor were in the kitchen, I might be able to quietly sneak in through the front and surprise her. For sure I couldn’t do that with this trio in tow. Also, there was no way I was going to expose teenage kids to that kind of danger.

  Sexy Beast had picked up on my anxiety. He leaned on the car window, staring after me, making odd guttural sounds, the canine equivalent of the advice we yell at the screen during horror movies. Are you nuts? Don’t go in there alone! The crazed killer is going to get you!

  My fingers trembled as I turned the key in the lock. The dining room was dim and sad looking. Victor had had it cleaned, but evidence of the firebombing and water damage remained, along with the lingering smell of scorched furniture. I heard nothing as I made my way toward the kitchen. Was my guess wrong? Had Chloe taken Victor somewhere else?

  Light shone through the windows set into the double doors to the kitchen, just as on that terrible morning when I’d found Swing lying dead. My heart was a jackhammer. I approached from the side and took a peek inside. Nothing. Could the light have been left on by the cleaning crew?

  Very slowly I pushed on the door, grateful for the silent, well-oiled hinges. The first thing I noticed was the rotten-egg smell of natural gas, the kind that fueled Dewatre’s big commercial stove.

  Someone was speaking. It was Chloe, her tone quiet and conversational. “…loved me to distraction. He wasn’t very good at expressing it, though.” A little laugh. “Well, you know Swing. He never wore his heart on his sleeve. I didn’t mind. I always knew how he felt.”

  I still didn’t see her as I eased the door closed and silently crossed, hunched over, to the U-shaped work station. She must be sitting on the floor somewhere behind it, but where was Victor?

  The oven hissed. The smell of gas was getting stronger by the second.

  “We only made love the one time,” Chloe was saying, “but it was… oh, it was magical.”

  Magical. The same word she’d used to describe Swing’s proposal. Which never happened. Had they actually had sex or was that, too, all in her head? Slowly, on all fours, I crept alongside the work island.

  “I knew he wanted me to move to Crystal Harbor, to be closer to him,” she said. “Oh, he didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. The depth of our bond… well, words weren’t necessary.”

  I looked around for a potential weapon and came up empty. The knife rack was on the other side of the kitchen. There were a few heavy pans, as well as a hefty stone mortar and pestle, but they were out of reach.

  “It didn’t have to end the way it did.” Chloe’s tone was wistful. “We were so happy. But then that ridiculous accusation. Some of his things had gone missing. I said, don’t you remember? You left them at my house!” Her sigh was one of affectionate exasperation. “As if I have any use for his robe. His deodorant, for heaven’s sake. Well, you and I both know how absentminded your brother could be.”

  Absentminded? Not the Swing I knew. I imagined Chloe relied on various fictions to help her rationalize anything that contradicted her demented worldview. I continued to silently crawl along the work island, wondering what would happen when she realized I was there.

  “Swing demanded to know where his great-grandmother’s ring was, can you imagine? So I told him—it’s safe at home in my jewelry box, silly, just where I placed it the night you proposed.” Her voice softened. “Well, except for when I’d take it out and try it on, of course. I understood why we couldn’t make our engagement public, but I don’t mind telling you, it sometimes stung that he had to keep pretending to be this big playboy.”

  I crept another couple of inches. Suddenly a foot came into view, clad in an elegantly casual lace-up shoe I recognized as Victor’s. I swallowed hard. He was lying precisely where his brother had lain three weeks earlier, and he wasn’t moving.

  The floor beneath him was pristine. Denny and his team
had done a superb clean-up job. Anyone viewing this room for the first time would have no inkling of the horror that had occurred here a few weeks earlier. I doubted any residual odor remained, but if so, it was masked by the sulfurous stink of the oven gas that was rapidly filling the room.

  Chloe’s voice cracked. “He fired me as his agent. I mean, we’re engaged to be married and he tells me he no longer needs my services? I was obsessed with him, that’s how he put it. He sounded so… so kind, like I was some kind of underling and he was trying to let me down easy.” A watery, uncomprehending chuckle. “It made no sense. He’s my fiancé and he… he thinks he can just dismiss me? Like some incompetent busboy?”

  I leaned forward until I could see the lower part of Victor’s legs. Still no movement. I hoped to God I wasn’t too late.

  “I didn’t plan it,” Chloe continued, “it just happened. One moment we’re standing right here, in this exact spot, and I’m trying to make sense of all this… well, frankly, all this incomprehensible nonsense, and the next moment Swing is on the floor, and the blood… I don’t remember grabbing the knife. I was just so upset. Well, you can understand, can’t you?” Her tone hardened. “No, I guess you can’t. Somehow you figured out what happened and you went straight to Detective Cullen. You told him I did it. Why did you do that, Victor? Don’t you get it? Swing would have wanted me to protect myself, no matter what.”

  She’d said something similar at Murray’s Pub the evening she turned the ring over to Victor, when she was trying to justify signing her fiancé’s estranged former partner as a client before Swing was even in the ground. I know for a fact he would have wanted me to take care of myself.

  “What’s done is done.” Chloe was weeping now. “Nothing can bring Swing back. But he loved me and he’d never want anything bad to happen to me. That’s why I blamed it on SEAR. They’re terrible people anyway. They might not have killed Swing, but you can’t deny they deserve to be punished. It’s why I called Swing’s phone after I left here that day—to make it look like I had nothing to do with…” A sniffle, then her voice once more turned to steel. “It’s why I have to do this to you, Victor. He would have wanted me to. Goodbye.”

  I took this as my cue, springing from my hiding place in the same instant that Chloe stood up and started for the back door. I took advantage of her momentary surprise to lunge at her, but she spun away and grabbed something from the steel counter behind her: one of those long butane lighters, the kind people use to light grills. I imagined Swing and his staff had employed it for flambés.

  “I’ll do it!” she warned, her finger on the lighter’s trigger. “This place is filled with gas. If I light this, the explosion’ll take out the whole building.”

  I knew she was right. I took a placating step back. Victor lay between us, pale and still. Thankfully, I could see his chest rise and fall with his breathing.

  “We need to get out of here, Chloe,” I said. “Even the oven’s pilot light could set off that gas.”

  “I turned off the pilot light. That wasn’t the plan.”

  “What,” I said, “it’s supposed to look like suicide by asphyxiation? Why would Victor do a thing like that?”

  “Guilt,” she said. “He killed his brother and could no longer live with himself. That’s the conclusion the authorities will draw—or would have, before you butted in.”

  “You can’t really believe that.” I aimed for a calm, reasonable tone. “After a couple of hundred people witnessed you leaving the Harbor Room with him today? They saw the condition he was in. You really think they’d fail to do a tox screen and identify whatever you put into his wine?” I’d already decided she must have roofied him. The dizziness, the disorientation—he was under the influence of one of the so-called date-rape drugs.

  “You’ve ruined everything.” Her eyes were wide and panicked. A dark flush stained her face and throat. “I had it all under control and now you’ve ruined everything.”

  So much for calm and reasonable. I tried a different tack, forcing calm into my voice. “I want to help you, Chloe, really. Between the two of us, I think we can find a way out of this. You’re right, Swing wouldn’t have wanted anything bad to happen to you. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted you to blow yourself up. I know that’s not what you want either.”

  “What choice do I have?” she shrieked, gesturing with the lighter. “If I let you walk out of here, I spend the rest of my life behind bars. I’d rather die right here, right now. I don’t have to light the gas. Just breathing it will kill us soon enough.”

  Victor muttered something in French. I looked down and saw that his eyes were half open. He was coming around.

  I took one more stab at calm and reasonable. “Actually… and I know the gas smells poisonous, that’s because of an additive they put in it for safety, because normally it’s odorless. But the thing is, breathing it is not going to do us in all that quickly.”

  “You’re lying. People commit suicide this way all the time.”

  “They used to,” I said. “When’s the last time you heard of it happening? It’s not the same gas they used back then.” This is true, one of the countless, quirky, normally useless bits of trivia I acquire in my everyday role as Death Diva. The natural gas piped into today’s stoves is far less lethal than the coal gas of yesteryear. Make no mistake, it’s still plenty dangerous. Eventually you will expire from breathing it, if you don’t die of boredom first.

  Telling her that had been a gamble. Chloe could very well decide that, what the heck, since breathing the gas was unlikely to result in a swift and painless end, she might as well ignite it and end it all that way. As agitated as she was, I could see her impulsively flicking that lighter. After all, this was a woman with a history of losing control without warning, with deadly consequences.

  Deadly for others, that is. I didn’t doubt that if she could do it remotely, Victor and I would already be toast. Logically, her fierce self-protective instinct should keep her from blowing us all up.

  However, the woman was nuts, and nutty people weren’t known for logical decision making.

  Victor struggled to sit up. “Jane…?” he mumbled. “Où sommes-nous?”

  While I found this evidence of his being not dead comforting, Chloe apparently viewed it as proof that her cunning plan was well and truly doomed—and by extension, so was she. Judging by her expression of panicked horror, she could have been witnessing a zombie rising from its grave. While she stared at Victor, I focused on her right index finger, the one that was beginning to tighten on the lighter’s trigger.

  Chloe wasn’t the only one with a healthy self-protective instinct. Acting on pure, dumb reflex, I launched myself at her. As the two of us went down, I grasped her right wrist, twisting it for all I was worth. Her scream of pain and outrage bounced off all that steel and tile, making my ears ring. Her grip on the lighter slackened just enough to let me send it skidding across the floor tiles. It ricocheted off the massive refrigerator and landed a safe distance away.

  For a relatively small woman, Chloe was surprisingly strong. I was having difficulty subduing her. I blamed it on all the adrenaline coursing through her system. That plus the element of surprise must explain how delicate little Chloe Sleeper had been able to plunge that big knife deep into the chest of a man much larger and stronger than she.

  She liked surprises, did she? I hauled back and punched her in the jaw. Her head bounced against the tiles and she went limp. She wasn’t unconscious, just dazed. In that instant the back door to the alley banged open and Ariel, Phoebe, and Mandy swarmed into the kitchen.

  They took in the situation in a heartbeat. Ariel promptly grabbed a cast-iron griddle press and sat on Chloe, holding the heavy utensil inches from her noggin and daring her to make the teeniest move.

  Meanwhile Mandy and Phoebe were all over Victor, checking him, with admirable thoroughness, for injuries and helping him to sit.

  “Ew, what’s that smell?” Phoebe said.

 
“Don’t worry.” I turned a valve on the oven, shutting off the flow of gas. I switched on the exhaust hood and opened the door wide. “It’ll dissipate soon.” As grateful as I was for the girls’ intervention, the grownup in me felt compelled to add, “I thought I told you guys to wait outside.”

  “We heard you scream,” Mandy said.

  “That wasn’t me, it was her.” I jerked my chin toward Chloe.

  Ariel said, “We were waiting in the alley in case you needed us.”

  “Is Victor going to be okay?” Phoebe half-supported him as he rubbed his face and blinked at his surroundings.

  “I think so,” I said. “He wasn’t drunk, she roofied him.”

  The girls let Chloe know what they thought about that. They called her a bunch of bad names, several of them delightfully inventive. Meanwhile Chloe lay mute and defeated, glumly staring at the hefty griddle press poised to bash in her pretty cranium.

  I said, “Any of you have your phone on you? We’ve got to—” I broke off at the sound of a siren. Correction, sirens, as in a whole screaming flock of them, getting louder by the second.

  “Oh yeah,” Ariel said. “That Howie guy finally called back.”

  18

  The Elephants in the Backseat

  “YOU SURE YOU have everything?” I asked as Victor descended the stairs with his leather duffel.

  “If I forgot anything,” he said, “I’ll just have to come back for it.”

  “Anytime.” I turned away so he wouldn’t see the conflicted feelings chasing one another across my face. “Your flight is at six twenty-five?”

  “Yes.”

  I’d only asked him the same question about a dozen times. It was three-thirty in the afternoon on October ninth, ten days since Chloe had nearly blown us up in the kitchen of Swing’s restaurant and one month to the day since I’d walked into said kitchen and found Victor’s brother lying in a pool of his own blood.

  When had I stopped thinking of Swing as my late friend and started thinking of him as Victor’s late brother? So much had happened during the past month. I hadn’t mentally compartmentalized it all. I suspected it would be a long process, and wouldn’t begin in earnest until Victor was back in Paris and I was once more alone in this big house. Well, not alone precisely. I had my pack-mate, Sexy Beast, for company.