The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  She lifted her hips slightly and slid off the last piece of my sanity. I stood, staring stupidly, as my mind screamed that Jeanne was “nekkid” on the bed in front of me. I urged myself to move lest she become uncomfortable, but I did not, and she did not. Finally, I managed to situate myself behind her.

  “Merci,” she said. I had a feeling she was not thanking me for continuing the massage. Her butt was most decidedly not skinny, and after thirty minutes of groaning, most of it mine, it was no longer hurting either. After I cleaned up and she slid herself under the covers, I heard her voice, soft as the whisper of brushes against a high hat. “Next time, I won’t need to start out with the bikini, n’est-ce pas?”

  Answering, “Oui,” took all my remaining strength.

  Dark slept like a baby that night. I, on the other hand, tossed and turned. It wasn’t just the residual energy from my ill-advised massage. I had the feeling our case was about to get a lot uglier and in a hurry.

  ***

  I’ve eaten out a lot in my life, and experience says that 60 minutes is about normal for a meal with two people. It’s an excellent rule of thumb as long as neither of the people is Jeanne Camille Dark. Her breakfast consisted of a cup of café au lait, a croissant, and a glass of orange juice. My breakfast was eggs, sausage, bacon, pastry, and a healthy dose of shaking my head at my finicky partner. Normally, I would have grabbed a cup of decaf and some toast, but after watching Dark nurse her coffee and scan the menu for fifteen minutes, I decided I may as well make breakfast my big meal of the day. Around the third time I sighed at her, she told me to go ahead and order.

  “None of the choices is the right color,” she said.

  It worried me that I knew exactly what she meant. The woman was invading my psyche. I’d already finished eating by the time she’d stopped nursing her massive coffee, which she drank out of an oversized cup the size of a soup bowl. She sat that way, legs crossed, sipping tar-black coffee with ruby lips, and perusing her menu behind opaque sunglasses that covered the top half of her face, while her dainty, porcelain tureen covered the lower half. She called it German style. I called it damned fascinating. Her German-style café au lait was followed by five minutes of her trying to explain to the waiter what a tartine is and settling, begrudgingly, on a croissant. The waiter set a record for bringing her food, lest Dark change her mind before he could return. She ate the thing in layers after painting on a thin coating of butter with the delicacy of a neurosurgeon. I wanted to grab the croissant from her and jam the bloody thing down her throat, but I restrained myself. Eventually, I began the enjoy the theater of a Jeanne Dark meal. I’d never seen a human her size butter a croissant. It was like watching a child sprinkle sugar on a piece of candy. She would pull off a strip of the bread, apply the soft butter, and adorn it with the barest dab of jelly. Only then would she bite it, her eyes closed, tongue gently brushing the tip of her two fingers. Then came her low, guttural, quasi-orgasmic groan, followed by another peeling off another layer. Right there I decided to invite her to my mom’s for Christmas dinner to see if she could beat Grandma’s record of two hours, fifty-three minutes for the longest time spent at the dinner table.

  The one productive thing about our long breakfast was that it allowed us to talk and consider our next steps. We’d received an encrypted email from Hardesty telling us we were assigned to Samuels indefinitely. I responded to his email, copying Samuels and Dark, telling him I would be back in Washington later that night. The email was Dark’s idea, and it got his attention. Fifteen minutes after tapping send, we were sitting in the hotel room talking into my cell on speaker. I didn’t need Dark’s unusual talents to hear the red-faced anger in Hardesty’s booming voice.

  “Cain, I need you on this case. I don’t have time for a freaking mutiny.”

  For some reason that set Dark to giggling.

  I frowned at her. “There’s no mutiny,” I said. “I’m simply resigning.”

  There was around ten seconds of silence. Dark was smiling and counting with her fingers. When she got to ten, she pointed to the phone. Right on cue, Hardesty spoke, as Dark mouthed his response. “Why?”

  “Truth?” I replied. “Dark doesn’t trust Samuels.” I paused long enough to let him spin that through his spider’s web of a brain. “Look, I realize you work for the woman, but I have to go with my partner’s instincts.”

  Just as Dark had predicted, Hardesty’s ego inflated like a pufferfish and he went on a five-minute rant explaining that he and Samuels were “roughly counterpoints.” However, it had the desired effect, as he agreed that we would remain independent and report solely to him.

  “One last question,” I said. “You wanna tell us now how you knew we’d be required here eight weeks ago when our subject only arrived recently?”

  “Classified,” Hardesty answered.

  “Ah,” said Dark. “There was a previous victim.” She turned, speaking to me. “He must have died before we could be sent.”

  “How did you know …?”

  I delighted in disconnecting the call in the middle of his sentence. Having manipulated the little puff ball into giving us precisely the arrangement we’d sought all along, we set off to New Scotland Yard for a meeting with Inspector Arnold. He’d dragged in Rosie for questioning, and by his expression when he met us, it wasn’t going well. Rosie sat in the interview room alone, dressed in a fitted black dress that came to mid-thigh with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was holding a cigarette, pausing from her cancer quest only long enough to cross and uncross her black-stockinged legs. Arnold’s two junior inspectors’ eyes swept from side to side with each crossing. Mine did too, but I was more discrete.

  “Let me guess,” Dark said, “she isn’t being very cooperative.”

  “To say the least,” replied Arnold. “She hasn’t insisted on having a solicitor present, but she may as well have for all the good it’s done us.” He turned toward the one-way glass that peered into the interrogation room and scowled. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Her alibi looks strong.” He turned from us to the window. Rosie tilted her head back and blew a stream of smoke into the ventilation system. “Now, how the fuck did she get cigarettes in here? I can’t even smoke in here.” He spun and gave his junior detectives a glare that caused them to wilt into their suits.

  I made a mental note never to mistake his gentle demeanor for weakness again. From the two cops’ reaction, it was clear that our suspect was skilled enough that she’d manipulated a couple of pros into bending the rules. My interest in her grew. “What precisely was her alibi?” I asked, following Arnold’s gaze to Rosie once again. She looked straight into the one-way mirror and re-crossed her legs once more. The girl was getting to me with those legs.

  “France,” Arnold said. The left corner of his lip was upcurled. She was getting to him too, but not in a good way.

  “Oui?” Dark queried. She’d looked bored until Arnold said the magic word. With the reference to her homeland, she moved to the window next to the detective. “Why was she in France?”

  “She won’t say. However, she did manage to produce a passport and travel documents that show she entered France five days ago and only returned yesterday at noon.”

  “More than covering the period the monkshood would need to take effect,” Dark said. She extended her neck and closed an eye. I knew right away her wheels were spinning. “It is very convenient that she would choose then to leave the country, no?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Arnold said. “Doesn’t matter though, it means I can’t link her to Rao’s death, unless the lab reports come back with something that changes the timeline. I’ll have to let her go, for now.”

  “What about her mother?” I asked.

  “Rosie would have insisted she go with her,” Dark said, not even bothering to lift her gaze from the girl through the glass.

  Arnold combed a hand through his shock of white hair and shook his head. “I won’t even bother to ask how you knew that.”<
br />
  She turned to him, nodding toward Rosie as she spoke. “The girl is very much the alpha female. Since I do not believe in coincidences, it is simple reasoning to assume she would have thought to protect her mother from suspicion by taking her along as her stepfather died.”

  “Mrs. Rao didn’t strike me as the type to take a sudden vacation trip with a restaurant to run and a dying husband in the hospital,” I said.

  “No, she is not,” agreed Dark. She looked at D.I. Arnold. “I assume you spoke to Helen and got her side of the story.”

  “We spoke to her and confirmed she was in Paris. That’s about it, however. She’s even more closed mouthed than her daughter. Damned pain in the arse, those two.”

  I was about to jump in and ask if we could talk to Rosie when Dark suddenly turned, walked out of the room, and into the adjoining interview room. Arnold glowered at me as if I’d let go of the leash. All I could do was shrug.

  “What the bloody hell does she think she’s doing? Get her back here!” His growl was lower than an English bulldog’s.

  “Dark is good at detecting deception. So am I. That’s why they sent for us.” I thought it was a good time to reintroduce the man to the fact that we were, in fact, invited.

  “I don’t mind a bit of help, but I won’t have rogue quasi-police interfering with an interview.”

  I bit my tongue. I never met a cop who didn’t think he was a natural at detecting when a suspect was lying; I also never met one whose ability advanced beyond random guesses. In fact, in the only long-term study ever done, over a twenty-year span with 20,000 subjects, around one-quarter of one percent of people turned out be significantly better at detecting liars than random chance would explain. True, not a lot of these were cops and Secret Service types, but it showed that most people who think they’re great at spotting liars are fooling themselves. Arnold, however, didn’t strike me as the self-deceptive type. I pegged him as that rare sort who’d be aware of his own limitations. Right on cue, his bluster faded, and he waved me toward the door. As soon as I grabbed the knob, he pointed a long, gnarled finger at me. “If she strays too far, I’ll toss you both out on your bums, understood?” I nodded and entered the room behind Dark.

  I introduced myself as an adjunct to Scotland Yard, making a point of stating my expertise was deception detection. You’d think I’d want that to be a secret, but you’d be wrong. As I said, the art of spotting liars is tricky at best and often crap. The only reason anyone can do it, and the sole reason lie detectors work is that people are stressed when they lie because they’re afraid of getting caught. Psychopaths aren’t, and so spotting their lies is nigh unto impossible. Rosie was calm—too calm. My gut told me she didn’t give a damn about lying to the cops because she figured they weren’t smart enough to find her out if she did. I needed her to be just a little afraid that Dark and I could.

  My partner was dressed in a black and gray herringbone coat, a scarf the color of her eyes, her black cloche hat and gold sash, and a pair of enormous sunglasses that looked as if she’d entered a time warp and stolen them from 1963. Beneath that, were you able to see it, she wore a simple pair of gray slacks and a black turtleneck. In her full regalia, she sat opposite our suspect, her legs crossed, staring at the girl, while saying not a word. Rosie sat with her legs crossed in the opposite direction as Dark’s, with the black stockings she wore showing off every well-defined muscle. They sat that way, in a mute estrogen standoff, with the only movements being Rosie’s twiddling her long nails with her thumb and Dark’s bouncing her top leg to some inner jazz rhythm. It was Audrey Hepburn versus Lucy Liu, to the death. Were I not on the clock, I would have pulled up a reclining chair, torn into a bag of buttery popcorn, and enjoyed the show.

  Despite my partner’s eyes boring holes in her cheeks, Rosie’s eyes never left her ruby-tinged fingernails—that is, until I entered and sat next to Dark. On some unspoken cue, Rosie lifted her head, focused her brown gemstones on me, and spoke. “You two a couple or do I get to make you a happy bloke at some point?” There wasn’t a hint of a smile, as if she’d done no more than to ask me to validate her parking ticket. She was trying to rattle me, I assumed. It would take more than that. I glanced at Dark, whose expression hadn’t changed. “We’re partners,” I answered. I wasn’t sure why I did, other than leaving the question lingering felt uncomfortable with Arnold listening in.

  “Good,” Rosie said, “I like making people happy.” She smiled in the way I imagine a black widow spider smiles when her mate arrives.

  “I’m sure you do,” I answered. Rosie’s eyes had not left mine, and frankly, they were arousing more of my interest than they should have.

  Dark interrupted, to my relief. “You didn’t kill your stepfather, but you wanted to,” she said.

  Rosie stopped looking at me long enough to cut her eyes at my partner. “That a question?” she asked.

  “Non.”

  The girl stopped looking at me completely then. She turned in her seat toward the table, setting both feet flat on the floor and leaning forward on her elbows. “I had nothing to say to those other cops, and I’ve nothing to say to you,” she said.

  “I don’t recall asking you to say anything,” Dark replied.

  Rosie waited four beats, and when my partner said nothing else, she spoke. “If you don’t have any questions for me, can I leave now?” She turned toward the room’s mirror and gave a palms-up gesture with her hands, as if to repeat the question for Arnold’s benefit. It was her way of telling us she knew he was back there. It confirmed for me that her leg-crossing show had been for our benefit. The girl was channeling Sharon Stone’s interview scene straight out of Basic Instinct, except this time with hose and garters. That was as high up her anatomy as I dared think about. “Charge me and get me a solicitor, or let me go,” she said.

  “Pretty familiar with police procedures, are you?” I asked.

  “No, just familiar with American cop shows. They’re always the same—bad cop, sexy cop. Only the sexy cop doing the interview changes.” She cut her eyes toward Dark when she said, “bad cop” and gave me a sexy cop smile that made me itch. “Maybe that’s why I like you so much,” she added, and exhaled her noxious smoke toward me.

  I made a point to look at her legs, and nodded. “I see you’re familiar with cop movies too.”

  I got a wicked smile in return. This was a dangerous girl. The room reeked of her venom and her perfumed musk, as if she were indeed a predatory spider and I was dancing right along the edge of her web, tracking her pheromones. I found myself hoping we were wrong and she had nothing to do with this case. I’d had quite the history with dangerous girls, an affliction I’d not yet overcome. This one was my type.

  “I’m not a killer, but I am dangerous,” she said, letting just the tip of her tongue protrude through her smoky, pink lips. I reacted with measured nonchalance, as I was beginning to get used to having my mind read. “You wanna be safe forever, or are you gonna call me when this is over?” She drew her lips into the merest smile imaginable. “If you’re sweet to me, I’ll let you play bad cop.”

  “Ah, Lolita is all grown up,” Dark said, her voice a soft, cynical song. It startled me, as I was in a staring contest with our subject and had momentarily forgotten Jeanne was there. The change in Rosie’s visage was subtle, but noticeable. “I thought he’d raped you, but I guess I was wrong.” My partner didn’t pull her punches.

  “Fuck off,” Rosie said, all pretense of cool sexuality gone. She turned the side of her chair to the table and folded her arms in front of her. She’d positioned the table and her back between herself and Dark, and her feet were now aimed directly at the door. They were defensive gestures that meant Dark’s attack was working.

  Dark continued as though she were unaware Rosie had spoken. “It was fun at first, I suppose, and mostly your idea. Perhaps your mother was not paying you enough attention, or maybe you just wanted to test your sexuality. But eventually, your stepfather wore down, and y
ou began a sexual relationship.” Dark leaned in toward Rosie, whose face had twisted into an ugly scowl. “How old were you when it started? Sixteen, fifteen?”

  “I was eighteen you cow! I weren’t some little whore, you know?”

  Dark sat back in her seat. “I know that. And it wasn’t your fault. It never was.”

  Rosie dabbed her eye with the back of one knuckle and turned away from her adversary’s gaze. They sat that way for a time, with Rosie stealing glances at Dark over her shoulder as if she were afraid Dark might shoot her at any moment. For the first time since we’d entered, she looked very much like a young, overdressed girl.

  “You are not as hard as you pretend,” Dark finally said, breaking the stalemate.

  Rosie spun toward her and jabbed a red-tipped finger in her direction. “You don’t know me! You don’t know nuffin’ about me.” An angry dab of spittle formed at the corner of her mouth.

  Dark leaned in close enough to Rosie to make the girl visibly nervous. “I can read you.” Jeanne’s voice was soft, almost soothing, but emotionless, as if she were merely stating her name.

  “What … what you mean, you can read me?” The slight stutter betrayed the girl’s nervousness. Dark was getting to her. Despite my belief my partner was mostly bluffing, I found myself starting to be impressed.

  “It is simple, really. I can feel your emotions here.” Dark pointed toward her solar plexus. “I feel a young girl, becoming a woman for the first time, with a man she trusted.” Rosie met Dark’s eyes. Their faces were almost touching. “But he betrayed that trust, didn’t he?”

  Rosie blinked, her eyes glistening, and reared back in her chair, aiming herself again at the door. “What are you, some kind of psychic freak?” she asked. Dark sat back in her chair, but said nothing. Her eyes never left the girl. Rosie wiped her eyes and partly turned toward Dark. She was silent, but her expression spoke volumes. My partner had stepped right through the woman’s defenses as though they weren’t there.