Death at the Château Bremont

by ML Longworth

  “The Bleys don’t agree with such a straightforward explanation of a sudden death.”

  “The Bleys?” Isabelle de Bremont hissed. “What do I care about the Bleys? What do they know about us? We saw them twice, maybe three times a year! I was his wife!”

  Verlaque remained silent. He had no way of knowing how close the Bleys were to Isabelle and Étienne de Bremont. But the speed of their inquiry request, just hours after the death was announced, had surprised him. He then answered, “Still, Madame, with all due respect, they have asked for an inquest.”

  A slight smile formed at the edge of her lips. “The Bleys are lawyers.”

  “Were you happy?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  The widow looked at him, slightly irritated. “We were very happy.” When Verlaque didn’t reply, she continued, “We had our problems, like many married couples—four children and no time to be alone together, money and business worries, that sort of thing. But he was happy recently, Étienne.”

  Verlaque picked up on the money and business worries and the word “recently.” He asked, softly, “His career, Madame? Was he satisfied?”

  Isabelle de Bremont looked at him steadily for a few seconds. “Yes and no,” she replied. “You see, he had been hoping to get into commercial cinema, but a few months ago he received news that the Parisian producers had pulled the funding for his latest project. Étienne had written the screenplay—it takes place in Saint-Antonin—so he was terribly disappointed. But not enough to . . .”

  “Didn’t he try to find other sources of funding?”

  “He had already tried, with no success. But in the past few weeks he seemed upbeat about it, and he began talking about the film again, as if it might happen.”

  “What was the film about?”

  “I don’t know . . . a story of lost youth, I think. I never read the script.”

  “Really?” Verlaque asked. “Weren’t you curious?”

  “I have four children, Judge.” She sighed, as if beginning to lose patience. Verlaque found it difficult not to not stare at Isabelle de Bremont. Her wavy red hair and freckled shoulders reminded him of both Isabelle Huppert and the women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings he loved to visit at the Tate Britain in London. Her ankles and wrists were fine and delicate, and matched her soft voice. He then asked, “Aren’t your three small children at the crèche?”

  Isabelle de Bremont sat up straight, her voice now raised. “Certainly not!” Although Verlaque didn’t have children, he knew that most of his friends put their children in state-funded day care as soon as they were potty trained. When he only nodded, she continued, “I don’t work, and so I don’t agree with someone else raising my children. So you see, Judge, why I don’t have the time to read every one of my husband’s scripts.” At that point she realized that she had referred to her deceased husband in the present tense, and Verlaque thought she might break down, but she continued staring at him.

  “Was he normally a bit clumsy?” asked Verlaque somewhat abruptly.

  “No, that’s the funny thing. He was very coordinated,” she answered, with a slight look of perplexity on her face. She too had been lost in thought. “Our eldest son, Raphaël, is just like him. Étienne was teaching Raphaël to climb mont Sainte-Victoire, you know—the south face that everyone climbs. But I’ve already gone over the accident, how it could have happened, a million times in my head, and now I just can’t think about it anymore.”

  She laid her head in her hands and began to weep. Verlaque started to walk across the room—he wanted to be near her; he wanted to be beside her, touching her. But a thin woman in her thirties came into the room at that moment and ran over to Isabelle, reaching her before he could.

  “Are you finally finished with the interrogation? This is the second time you’ve come . . . I really don’t understand. There were no robbers in the château Saturday night, right? So why do you keep harassing her?” the thin woman’s voice demanded.

  “No, there wasn’t any theft, but there may have been someone else with the count in the attic,” Verlaque answered. Both of the women looked at the judge, wide eyed.

  “What is that supposed to mean? Who else would have been there?” the second woman demanded.

  “I am suggesting that the count may have been pushed to his death. I’m sorry if this idea upsets you and your . . .” Verlaque answered, waiting for Isabelle to fill in the blank.

  “Sister,” the other woman answered. Then, remembering some kind of manners, she held out her hand and added, “My name is Sophie, Sophie Valoie de Saint-André. I’m Isabelle’s sister.”

  She was the kind of woman Verlaque disliked—too thin and brittle, too bourgeois. He noted that her posh surname was the same as one of his colleague’s, an examining magistrate in Marseille. It was very possible that this woman was related to the judge, and Verlaque silently noted to himself to check later. “Thank you both for your time. I’ll let myself out. Oh, Mme de Bremont—did your husband wear his glasses all the time?”

  “Only for reading, especially when he was tired,” answered Mme Valoie de Saint-André for her sister. A little too quickly, Verlaque thought. It was the response he had been fairly sure he would get. The fact that Étienne de Bremont was found dead with his glasses next to him bothered Verlaque. Strange place to read, a dark attic—the papers that he was looking for surely must have been kept in an office in the château? But then that young policeman had found the ancient receipt for two brioches . . . No, the papers must have been in the attic. He saw that Isabelle had already stopped listening.

  “And, Mme de Bremont, if you think of anything else that might be helpful, would you please call me?” Verlaque added, looking one last time at the redhead as he opened the doors to leave the now overcrowded room. “Yes,” she answered, looking up at him.

  No one moved to accompany Verlaque to the front door, so in the apartment’s spacious entryway he had time to gaze around. He saw an overnight bag sitting on the floor, next to the door, with the familiar blue TGV address label hanging from its leather handle. He quickly bent down and read Isabelle de Bremont’s name. Lifting the bag up slightly, he noted that it was full. Verlaque walked back into the salon, where he saw the two women in fast discussion with heads bent close together. “Now what?” demanded Isabelle de Bremont. Verlaque looked at her, surprised, but tried not to show it. He had expected that sort of voice from her sister but not the soft-spoken widow.

  “I noticed a full overnight bag in the foyer. Were you here this weekend, Madame?”

  “This is outrageous!” replied Sophie Valoie de Saint-André. “She told you she was. Étienne told her he was going to the château.” Verlaque now realized that Mme Valoie had been listening at the living room doors when was talking to her sister.

  Isabelle de Bremont stood up and looked straight at Verlaque. “Yes, I was here, with my sister, all night. Saturday night, I assume, is the night you’re asking me about. I used that bag last week, for a quick trip to Paris. I haven’t had time to unpack it.”

  “Right,” Verlaque replied. “Four children.”

  Isabelle de Bremont’s face fell for a moment, and then she ran her fingers through her hair and said, with a slight smile forming on her lips, “Please, let me show you out.” She walked through the living room and into the foyer with him, opening one half of the massive wooden doors. Whether she was conscious of it or not, she put her slender hand on his shoulder and said, “Merci.”

  Verlaque walked back up the cours feeling strangely attracted to Isabelle de Bremont, which was neither ethical nor comfortable, especially since he was certain that she was lying. He thought it unlikely that the overnight bag would have been left in the hall for days, especially since the Bremonts had a maid. Sophie Valoie was, conveniently, her sister’s alibi.

  He stopped and quickly rang Officer Flamant on h
is cell phone, remembering that Paulik was in court all day. “Salut, Flamant,” he said. “Could you call the SNCF and check train tickets purchased last week and this weekend from Aix to Paris, under the name of Isabelle de Bremont?”

  “There’s nothing I like better, Juge, than to make the SNCF employees work a little for me. The last time they went on strike, I missed my grandmother’s birthday in Lille. A month later, she was dead, and I missed her funeral. Another strike!”

  Verlaque smiled, not because Flamant had lost his grandmother, but because the officer felt comfortable enough to tell Verlaque the story. Verlaque then said, “But wait, she could have traveled under an assumed name.”

  “Possibly, but most people buy their TGV tickets on the Internet now, and when using them you have to show photo ID when you get on the train.”

  “Good point,” Verlaque answered. He remembered seeing a new Apple computer in the Bremont salon. Verlaque thanked the officer and rang off.

  He walked past Le Mazarin’s terrace and didn’t see anyone he knew—no, it was too early for aperitifs. The lunch with Marine had gone nicely, he thought. He had complimented her on her blue sweater and how it set off her green eyes. She appreciated that, he knew. She would go away thinking of him, hopefully thinking well of him. He realized now how important that was. At the same time he sighed aloud: he had wasted six months not explaining to Marine why he had left her, purposely hiding himself away, after Luxembourg and England, at the law library in Paris. Sometimes he wondered about it himself. There was no easy answer he could come up with. But perhaps they could be friends again? He’d invite Marine over for a dinner soon, on his terrace if the weather was fine. Strange that a death would bring them back together. Marine was so patient and diplomatic—so unlike him in that regard—and she didn’t judge. He once again made a silent vow to try to be more patient; it was his worst character flaw. He could see her now, closing her lovely almond-shaped eyes and listening to him talk, her head tilted to one side. Surely that was worth something. Maybe something worth holding on to after all.

  He stopped in the street to relight his cigar and realized that he was smiling to himself.

  Chapter Five

  “The lunch was just awful, such a typical Antoine Verlaque lunch!” Marine told Sylvie as they sat on Le Mazarin’s terrace. Arriving as they did at seven thirty, they had been lucky to get a table, squeezing in between an old woman who was feeding her miniature dog the bar’s curried chickpeas, which come, free of charge, with an aperitif, and a group of German tourists who were poring over maps. Marine sat with her arms folded, ready for the blast that would come her way from Sylvie.

  “He’s a big dick. Forget him,” Sylvie said. “Besides, you now have your twenty-seven-year-old boy toy.” Although the sun was setting, Sylvie Grassi still wore her sunglasses—black Armanis with huge, round lenses like the stars wore on the Côte d’Azur in the 1960s. Her hair was dark black, neatly cropped short, her eyes a pale blue. She preferred clothes that showed off the contrast between her hair and eyes—bold colors like apple green and neon pink. Approaching forty years of age, she had recently toned down her appearance, a bit, but she was still a familiar figure, walking around the streets of conservative Aix wearing designer Japanese clothing and carrying brightly colored handbags. She taught photography and art history at the Beaux-Arts school in Aix and had participated in numerous photography exhibitions around Europe. Thanks to the sales of her photographs, and to photography’s rise in status as an art form, she could afford designer clothes, and she had recently paid off the mortgage on her two-bedroom downtown flat. She had an eight-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who was Marine’s godchild; the father was a German photographer who had no idea that he had a child in Provence.

  “I thought I was doing a good job of forgetting him. And then he calls me out of the blue,” Marine said, sighing. She hated herself for uttering the words out loud, even to her best friend. She wished that they were untrue, but knew better.

  “But it wasn’t exactly out of the blue, was it? He asked you to go to Saint-Antonin to help with the investigation,” Sylvie answered. “Or was it for that?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows in question.

  “You think it was just an excuse to see me?” Marine asked.

  “What else?”

  “No, Antoine’s too selfish for that. I think he really did need me—in his ‘I don’t need to say please or thank you’ kind of way. He seemed really troubled by Étienne de Bremont’s death—about how Étienne could have fallen from an open window.”

  “What do you think?”

  Marine mulled for a moment. “I agree with Antoine. I can’t imagine anyone as sure-footed as Étienne falling from a place he knew so well. And suicide? That’s hard to imagine for anyone, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but you guys will need some hard evidence to prove that, won’t you?”

  Marine paused, embarrassed when Sylvie tried to become an expert at something she knew nothing about. “There was a Michaud receipt, for two brioches, that was found near where Étienne fell.”

  “Brioches?” Sylvie asked, drinking some wine, not taking her eyes off a group of three men who had just taken a table near to them.

  “Yes. The receipt dated from the fifties.”

  Sylvie turned her head away from the men and looked at her friend. “That is interesting.”

  Marine nodded and looked down at her hands. Sylvie sensed Marine’s sadness and tried to get her back on of the subject of the horrible lunch. She preferred trashing Antoine. “And then he took you out for lunch,” she said, encouraging Marine to continue.

  “Yes. And the whole time he kept staring at me—watching how I ate the olives—I was so nervous that I think I ate the whole bowl.”

  Sylvie laughed. “Marine! You didn’t!” The two women laughed out loud, and Frédéric, the waiter, came over to their table, resting the tray on his hip. “You two are constantly laughing. It’s good to see. Two more glasses of white?” he asked.

  “More white!” Sylvie hollered, pointing her finger in the air in mock pretension, and then added, “And a bowl of olives please, Fréd!”

  “I know that the whole time he was watching me, rating me,” Marine continued, ignoring the olive joke. “He’s such a food snob.”

  “He’s such a snob, period,” Sylvie said. “But your eating all the olives is way too funny. And it’s true—you don’t appreciate good wine and good food, and that’s always driven him nuts.”

  “This wine,” Marine said, holding up her glass, “is very fine.”

  Sylvie laughed. “You liar, you hadn’t noticed. It does happen to be a very fine wine—Château Revelette, a winery just north of Aix.” Sylvie took a sip and then added, “And with a very cute German winemaker-owner.”

  “Married?”

  “Yep, unfortunately,” and they both laughed, as they knew that Sylvie had a habit of getting tangled up with married men. Marine wanted to forget—Étienne’s death, Antoine, old memories, all of it—and laughing felt good. You ass, Marine, she told herself. What about Étienne? Poor Étienne. He’ll never again walk through the woods near mont Sainte-Victoire, never again see his children.

  Sylvie brought her back to reality. “Oh, Marine, I know that lunch today must have been hell for you. You know I never liked le juge, except when he bought some of my photographs,” Sylvie said, laughing. “It’s that stare of his—I never knew if he was rating me, as you put it, or trying to see through my clothes.”

  “What? He flirted with you?” Marine asked.

  “Oh no, don’t worry. He never flirted openly, but you know him, his whole thing is seduction—flattering and charming people, women and men, but at the same time never giving himself away. He says the right things about wine and cigars or soccer, if he’s with soccer types, or politics, if he’s with political types. All the while never letting any
one know the real Antoine, the Antoine he is when he is alone. The vulnerable Judge Verlaque.”

  “I know,” Marine replied, getting annoyed with Sylvie’s overly simple assessment of Verlaque. “I guess that’s what broke us up in the end. Even I couldn’t get near him. But you already know all this. Plus, he was constantly criticizing me, telling me what to do. He didn’t like how I dressed, what I ordered from a restaurant menu, and he never complimented me, except when we were making love, but then you have to compliment your partner, otherwise you’re a total jerk. He never said congratulations when I published a paper, only little critiques, little jabs. I guess in the end I never really got comfortable, and when he left me, it was almost a relief.”

  “It was hard work with him,” Sylvie offered.

  “Yes,” Marine replied, looking far away, lost in thought. “Hard work, but I can’t help thinking it would have been worth it in the end.”

  “The idiot,” Sylvie said, wanting to bring Marine back to the world of the living. “Forget about him. Let’s go up to Paris next month for my art opening, okay?”

  “Great, just what I need, to be surrounded by a bunch of gay guys,” Marine said, as she watched the crowds of people who walked up and down the cours, past the café.

  “No, not this time, the gallery owner is straight—an ex-businessman who made a ton of money in London and has semiretired to Paris and the Loire and sells photographs. He may have some friends there—you know, other rich, handsome Englishmen. I know you have a soft spot for the British, heaven knows why.”

  “Hmm, it’s starting to sound better. I could use my college English,” Marine said, laughing. “That’s another thing Antoine would chide me about—my bad English! You’re right. What a fuckup!”

  Sylvie reached across the wine-splattered table and grabbed Marine’s hand. “So what? Antoine is half British—of course he speaks perfect English! And, if I remember correctly, your Italian is pretty flawless. Just think,” she continued, “those London businessmen will go crazy over you at the gallery—a beautiful, young, well not so young, university professor, never married, with no kids, and a little French accent.” Sylvie said the words “little French accent” in her own heavily accented English. They began laughing, and Frédéric smiled at them from across the terrace. “Ladies! Keep it down!”