Death at the Château Bremont

by ML Longworth

  Marine caught Antoine staring at her, and she nervously twisted in her seat. “You’d better chew some gum to hide the pastis and the wine,” she said.

  “I’ll just have a cigar after lunch, and that will fix all other lingering smells.” He smiled, and realized that in the short time they had been sitting there Marine had finished almost all the olives. He tried not to let it bug him, her lack of awareness while at the dinner table. Verlaque had very specific opinions about etiquette, and Marine’s small habits, like this one, had often bothered him when they were together. He asked her, “How have you been?”

  “Fine, Antoine, fine,” she answered, trying to sound lighthearted. “You know—work, research, grading papers, and too many aperitifs with Sylvie.”

  “Not much has changed then, has it?” Verlaque said, quickly realizing his blunder. For Verlaque had brought a welcome change into Marine’s small-town life—she had told him time and time again how happy she was that he had entered her little world in Aix. She had grown up there and sometimes winced when she saw familiar faces on the cours Mirabeau, faces that thirty years before were collecting bugs on the school playground. She had been shocked when she was offered a full-time teaching job in sought-after Aix; she so would have preferred Paris or Lyon.

  “No,” Marine said, smiling, pleased by his insensitivity. “Life is good.” His ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time hadn’t changed. Fucking confirmation, she could hear Sylvie’s voice, telling her, that you are better off without him.

  Verlaque sensed that Marine was beginning to get defensive, and he shifted the conversation. “What do you know about the family? Do people in Aix talk much about the Bremonts?”

  Before she could answer, the waiter came and they placed their orders. Verlaque tried not to wince when Marine took too long to make her decision, and then ordered an entrée and main dish that were not compatible—a fish soup with rouille paste followed by yet more fish and garlic, an aioli platter. He could not order for her, he knew from past experience: she would only get silent and sullen. Astounded, he wondered how could she eat rouille and aioli at the same sitting and still have taste buds left for dessert.

  He caught himself daydreaming, remembering a birthday dinner they once shared in Marseille’s most exclusive restaurant, Le Petit Nice, when every dish Marine ordered had foie gras. During one of their fights, Marine said that he was too bourgeois and that she was simpler than he was. Marine was at times—many times—a country girl, not even sure of how to order a meal in a restaurant. How funny it was that she was the one with the respected Provençal family—her parents both strict Catholics, her father a doctor and her mother a theology professor—and yet Marine seemed to know so little about manners and etiquette. He blamed it on socialism.

  “They’ve no money left, but I can verify that for you with Marie-Pierre,” Marine answered.

  She hasn’t properly tasted her wine, Verlaque thought. He had forgotten that Marine could drink any old plonk.

  “She’s your friend that works at the Crédit Mutuel?” Verlaque asked.

  “Yes, the Bremonts have had their accounts there forever. Other than that, there’s Étienne’s brother, but I’ve already told you what I know about him. The parents died a few years ago, months apart, both of cancer. They were heavy smokers. I can imagine that Étienne’s father didn’t leave much in the way of an inheritance.”

  Verlaque tilted his head and asked, “Why do you say that? He wasn’t a big spender, was he?”

  Marine struggled with the last olive, which was too slippery and kept managing to avoid her toothpick. “Oh, no. Quite the opposite. He was a philosopher. He wrote a few small volumes that I tried to read once, but they put me to sleep.”

  “More than law books do?” Verlaque asked, smiling. An image of Marine, asleep, with a Dalloz civil law test covering her perfect face, flashed through his mind.

  “Ha-ha. Yes, even more than law. And you enjoy reading law just as much as I do—that much I remember. Anyway, he just didn’t seem like he would be very money-minded, not someone who would set money aside for later, if you know what I mean.”

  “Why haven’t they sold the château? It must be worth a fortune, even if it is a ruin.”

  “I have no idea. Family pride? The château was always a sign of their nobility. Étienne’s mother was very attached to it—she was a great gardener. But now that the parents are dead, I don’t know. Maybe they—I mean Étienne and Isabelle—just didn’t care about the money. Étienne was really sensitive—maybe he wanted to hold on to the château for sentimental reasons. They lived in a great place in downtown Aix; they had four beautiful kids; they went to church on Sundays and the market on Saturdays—what more did they need?” Marine said.

  Verlaque wasn’t sure if this was a jab at him, at the chance he had turned down: a comfortable life with a beautiful woman, a professor to boot, and a life with children. He decided not to pursue it and went on with his questioning. “But the château would have been more of a burden to him than anything else, so why not sell it? I can imagine that his brother, François, would want the cash.”

  “I don’t know . . . The aristocracy is very attached to land. Sometimes it’s all they have,” Marine suggested. “Are you going to finish your duck?”

  Verlaque smiled. “Yes, I am, but thanks for offering to help.” Sometimes it was so easy between them. And when it was, like this, Verlaque forgot about the old fights, the biting words that had broken them. But too often, just like that—the moment was gone.

  Verlaque had forty minutes to kill before his appointment with Isabelle de Bremont. Enough time for a coffee and part of a cigar at Le Mazarin. He slipped into the tabac across from the café and bought a Cohiba Siglo II from the owner’s daughter, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, big-chested girl with whom all of the cigar smokers in town flirted. Their agreeable exchange was interrupted by Verlaque’s cell phone ringing, and, seeing the number, he stepped outside to take the call.

  “Mayor Tamain just called me,” a voice said in a high-pitched whine. “What’s going on up in Saint-Antonin?”

  Verlaque could hear noise in the background—voices and the tinkling of glasses. He answered, “I was up there yesterday and this morning. I just got back. Étienne de Bremont fell from an attic window, breaking his neck, sometime late Saturday evening.”

  “Terrible, terrible. It’s a blessing that both of his parents have passed on, non? Have you spoken to his wife?”

  “I’m on my way to a second appointment with her.”

  “Second?” the voice yelped. “Why do you need to visit her again? There’s no reason to remind the poor woman over and over again of what happened!”

  Verlaque closed his eyes, knowing that the prosecutor was right but annoyed at being told how to perform his job. “The Bley brothers have submitted a formal request for an inquest.” He also didn’t know how to explain to Yves Roussel that he was working on a hunch, roughly based on a few childhood souvenirs and a bit of film footage. “Mme Bremont was in no state to talk on Sunday. I need to ask her if her husband was depressed. I’ve ruled out foul play,” he said, lying, “but not suicide.”

  Roussel took what sounded like a long sip of something and said, “Suicide! If that’s what it was, you’ll keep that quiet, right? Nobody wants that posted all over town, and if those sleazes at La Provence get a hold of it, it will be front-page news. Putain!” Roussel seemed to then remember who he was talking to, and added, “I’ll be back in Aix tomorrow. Good luck with everything.”

  Verlaque mumbled good-bye and looked toward the cours Mirabeau, where the afternoon light shone through the branches and was dappled by the broad leaves of the plane trees. He looked up at the trees and sighed, putting his BlackBerry in his pocket: one of his first lessons on the job was to learn how to cooperate and work calmly with Aix’s prosecutor. Yves Roussel, despite, o
r perhaps because of, his small-town attitude, was extremely well connected, something highly desirable in a prosecutor, who represents the people. The son of a Marseille fisherman, he had by pure hard work finished Aix’s law school with average grades, but then excelled at his postdoctoral examinations in Bordeaux. The fact that his wife was the mayor’s cousin had also helped his career. To his credit, he had won, for the region, some high-profile cases, and two years ago, during a kidnapping incident, had become a national hero when a group of elementary school children and their teacher were held hostage by an armed lunatic. The then-commissaire, before Paulik’s appointment, had done all he could—both he and a forensic psychiatrist had talked to the man by telephone for three hours. Roussel, in frustration, walked through the police brigade and straight into the school, unarmed. Minutes later the two men were heard laughing, and less than an hour they walked out together, the kidnapper with tickets for the next Marseille soccer game in his pocket, which he had been promised in exchange for the release of the children and their weeping teacher. Verlaque knew that Roussel had been reprimanded by his superior in Paris for taking such a risk, but he had also been called by le président de la République, who had congratulated him.

  Loads of yellow pollen thickened the air, and people walked up the cours blowing their noses or rubbing their eyes. A group of tourists stopped in front of Le Mazarin to take pictures. “Frédéric, don’t they have cafés in the States?” Verlaque asked the waiter. “No,” the waiter replied, straight-faced, only his handlebar mustache twitching. “I really don’t think they do.” Verlaque sat down and ordered a coffee and thought of New York and California, two places that, for very different reasons, he loved. Trips to Chicago and New Orleans had been planned at various stages in his life but had never materialized. He was fascinated by Chicago—his favorite jazz musicians usually hailed from that city, and he was passionate about the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Verlaque’s cell phone rang. Paulik’s voice was on the other end. “We’ve done a check of François de Bremont, Judge. He’s clean, from what we can tell, but I haven’t checked everything yet. He’s part owner of a couple of mediocre restaurants in Nice and Cannes, and he makes money off a string of luxury studios he rents out. He gambles a fair bit in Cannes, but then everyone does on the Côte. We’re looking into his bank accounts now. The rest of the time he sails or plays polo. Never been married, no children. Spends a lot of time with blondes, really tall blondes.”

  “Poor devil,” Verlaque replied. “Maybe the blondes are opera singers, Bruno.”

  “Ha-ha. I seriously doubt it. Another thing—Bouvet called me from the lab. The only fingerprints in the attic were those of Étienne de Bremont, and there are a few of the caretaker’s, but not around the window. On boxes and stuff. The broom had no prints on it whatsoever—weird, non? Will you be back at headquarters this afternoon? François de Bremont said he would get to the office in Aix by seven this evening.”

  “I’ll meet you in my office just after six thirty,” said Verlaque before hanging up.

  Paulik was right, the clean broom was suspect. The caretaker had said he swept the attic regularly. So why didn’t the broom have his fingerprints on it?

  Verlaque finished his coffee, took a last drag on his cigar, and, carefully brushing off the ashes, put it in his leather cigar carrier, which was small enough to fit inside his jacket pocket. He left some money on the table and went upstairs to the toilets, checking his teeth and three-day growth in the mirror before he paid his visit to Mme de Bremont. He quickly left the café, not wanting to get caught having to drink another coffee and talk with any of his acquaintances that may have been standing at the bar. He walked down the cours Mirabeau, looking up at the addresses until he got to number sixteen. This was, of all the nasty things he had to do on the job, his least favorite task. Questioning the spouse of someone who was recently deceased—it was one of the few occasions in Verlaque’s life when his talent for seduction didn’t help him. People recognized early on that he had a gift for seducing people—men, women, old and young. Had he not studied law, he would have gone into business, sales most likely, but there were too many businessmen in the family already, and Verlaque yearned to break out of that mold. Since becoming the examining magistrate, he had rarely spoken to his parents, whom he imagined were still sitting at opposite ends of their immense dining room table, not talking, continuing the behavior he had experienced as a child.

  He rang the buzzer labeled “Famille Bremont,” and a maid came to the door. He introduced himself, as the maid had not been working on Sunday afternoon, when he made his first visit to number sixteen. She led him through the great foyer, with faded paintings on the walls and a massive stone staircase. Parked at the bottom of the stairs were two beat-up baby carriages and a soccer ball. They went up to the first floor and entered tall wooden doors that lead to the Bremonts’ apartment.

  This time he was prepared for the visual delight upon entering. The walls, fourteen feet high, typical for the first floors of Aix’s hôtels, were painted a smoky tobacco color that Verlaque had immediately liked. The walls were lined with oil paintings, big and small, children’s drawings, and a series of nineteenth-century etchings following some sort of mythological theme. The furniture was a bizarre collection of old and new. There was an Empire desk against the far wall that Verlaque particularly liked, various nineteenth-century cane-seated wooden chairs of the kind seen in many of Cézanne’s paintings, and two battered love seats, facing each other, which looked like they had been bought at Ikea not long before. A large wooden bookcase covered one wall—it was haphazardly arranged with old books, new paperbacks, dozens of seashells, feathers, bright red coral, and butterflies pinned to boards. He felt someone’s presence in the room and turned around to see a petite red-haired woman in her midthirties. “We lived for two years in Guadeloupe, when we were first married,” she said, almost whispering. “That’s when we collected all those things.”

  “It’s a beautiful collection,” Verlaque replied. Carefully walking up to the woman and offering his hand, he asked, “How have you been, Mme de Bremont?”

  “Terrible,” she replied. Her eyes and nose were red from crying.

  “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry to be back here so soon, but I need to ask you a few more things about your late husband.”

  Isabelle de Bremont looked surprised. “What do you need to know?” She gestured for him to sit down on one of the small sofas, quickly removing a plastic airplane before Verlaque sat on it. She took a seat opposite him. Verlaque noticed that her legs were bare and very freckled. She wore bright pink, expensive-looking, low-heeled shoes.

  “I want to try to understand how your husband fell from that attic window.” Seeing the fright in her green eyes, he quickly added, “The château at Saint-Antonin is well known, and I want to be sure there weren’t intruders—burglars, perhaps—that night, who may have frightened your husband or even pushed him.”

  She got up and walked across the room and sat down in an armchair, its upholstery faded and threadbare but its wood frame and proportions graceful. She continued, “I thought there weren’t any traces of an intruder, Juge. There were some kids, a few years ago, who tried to break into the château, but they were scared off by the caretaker.”

  “No, that’s true. Nothing was disturbed or stolen. But I’d like to understand why your husband was there. Did he tell you why he was going?”

  “Only briefly,” she answered. “He needed to look for some papers his parents kept, something like that. He left here late, around eleven at night.” Verlaque noted to himself that Étienne de Bremont may not have gone directly to the château.

  “But don’t you think it’s strange that your husband could fall out of a window in a place he knew so well, Madame?” Verlaque asked.

  Isabelle de Bremont looked straight at the judge and replied, “Yes, to be frank, I do thi
nk it’s strange. But life is like that, isn’t it? There are so many strange things that happen, so many things I find difficult to explain or understand. I think he could have just lost his footing, and that, perhaps, it was his time to go, his time to die. His destiny.” This seemed to Verlaque almost too easy a way to accept the death of one’s husband. Why wasn’t she jumping up and down, pounding her fists on the wall? That was the way that, last year, the wife of a convicted minor felon had reacted to the news that her husband had been killed. And then Verlaque saw the gold crucifix and baptismal medal hanging from Isabelle de Bremont’s slender neck. He glanced around the room and saw a replica of a Russian icon and, finally, yes, there it was: a crucifix above the salon doors. Faith was something he didn’t understand, but it might explain the woman’s silent acceptance of this atrocity.

  Verlaque was almost certain that the death wasn’t a suicide, but he still needed to ask. “I would also like to know if it is possible that your husband may have jumped out of the window by choice.”

  “No way, never,” Isabelle said flatly. “Impossible.” She wiped her eyes with an antique handkerchief—white cotton embroidered with poppies. Faith again, thought Verlaque. Suicide would be a sin.

  “Why did you refuse to sign the inquest demand?” Verlaque asked.

  Isabelle de Bremont looked at the judge as if the answer was an obvious one. “He fell,” she said, raising her hands in the air. “That’s it. I want his death put to rest.”