“My God.” The tight feeling returned to the pit of her stomach. “She’s been molested?”
“That was my understanding. Do you think I didn’t enjoy the idea that her life—in one stroke—was going to change for the better?”
“She needs psychiatric help, Roger. She’s in bad shape.”
“No, my darling, she’s in very good shape now. She’s in your hands, isn’t she?”
“You think you played God. You think you actually did a good turn?”
“I must say, I do. Your parents needed someone to help assuage their guilt over their daughter’s disappearance and subsequent death—”
“What do you know about what my parents need?”
“You’d be surprised the things I have to know in my business. And little ‘Nicole’ needed people to love and care for her. And not just anybody. As you pointed out, she needs special care now.”
Maggie shook her head. “And Laurent? Where does he fit in to all this?”
Roger shrugged and took a sip of his wine. “He was my partner, that’s all. A good chap, Laurent. He knew Elise and Gerard—”
“Don’t lie to me, Roger! I know Laurent is Gerard’s brother.”
“You’re not going to let me finish a full sentence, are you?” He smiled at her. Maggie glared at him. “All right, so of course he knew them. Anyway, that’s the connection. Laurent knew about the girl and Elise’s family having money.”
“Laurent knew so much,” Maggie said bitterly.
“Hmmm? Well, he’s quite a capable chap, if you know what I mean. And very likable.”
“For a criminal.” She watched the sea of faces at the surrounding tables, faces laughing, smoking, pouting, shoving huge amounts of rich food into moving, chewing mouths.
“Great fun to work with too,” Roger continued. “Good sense of humor. Haven’t you found that? Aren’t you two—as the French so politely put it—folie à deux? Involved? I thought you were. Laurent gave me the impression that you were.”
“He did?”
“He most certainly did. It’s not true?”
“I don’t know what’s true. Nicole’s dead, Elise is dead. And Laurent is a very mysterious equation to me. He lied to me.”
“Dear girl. That’s the nature of his business. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t care for you, or love you, come to that.”
“How very strange you people are.”
“‘By ‘you people,’ I take it you mean non-Americans?”
“He could lie to me, cheat me, intend to continue lying and cheating me—and still love me?”
“Sounds jolly rude when you put it like that. But I dare say he’s not interested in cheating you again. As for the lying, well, once you start, it’s bloody difficult to pack it up if you see what I mean. He can’t very well come clean on Nicole, now can he? I’m sure he doesn’t relish living a lie the rest of his life with regard to her.”
“But he could do it.”
“Maggie, life isn’t perfect. Or haven’t you come to that yet?”
“I could have you arrested.”
“Well, that’s very nice, I must say.”
“You cheated my family out of thirty thousand euros.”
“I’m not going to give it back, if that’s where this is leading.”
“I don’t know what to make of you, Roger. I sort of like you, but you’re a definite felon.”
“You Americans and your backward charm. Look, Maggie, I’ve been honest with you, haven’t I? Why not go back to Atlanta, go back to Laurent, and pick up the reins again? Let Nicole go on being Nicole and enjoy the fact that you and your family are doing your best for one of the world’s downtrodden.” He shrugged again. “I really don’t see what else is to be done.”
“Why did you bring me to Cannes to identify that body?”
“I was told it needed to be identified as Elise Newberry and I was paid to contact the family in order to make that happen. I don’t know beyond that.”
“Was it your idea to find and give us Nicole?”
Bentley shrugged. “My job is to see opportunities where others see utilitarian necessity or fate.”
“You’re good at your job.”
“Thank you. So does your family know yet about Nicole?”
“We didn’t have her tested.”
“No? Well, I’m not surprised. I could see from the start you were not the sort to love a child and then toss her to social services when she turned out not to be blood related.”
“Shut up, Roger.” Maggie turned away and looked once more at the frenetic crowd. This is where Elise sat, she thought. This is where Elise felt at home and happy. This is where Elise met Gerard.
She took a sip of her wine, aware that he was watching her closely. Still holding her glass, she looked at him with resignation. “A good year, I suppose?” she asked wearily.
“Of course, my dear,” he said, reaching for his own wineglass. “Wouldn’t expect anything less from ol’ Roger, would you?”
She noticed that his eyes seemed to twinkle with real pleasure.
Her meal, which Bentley paid for, was a simple egg omelet with a healthy serving of the ever-present pommes frites. The omelet—fluffy, light, with barely a hint of the cheese, green pepper or ham that had gone into it—was, without doubt, the most exquisite thing Maggie had ever tasted.
Later, when she happened to see the bill the waiter planted in front of Bentley, she began to understand where her father’s money went during Elise’s first year in Paris. Her omelet had cost nearly ninety-five dollars.
After she left the restaurant, Maggie walked down the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Remorse had not been Bentley’s tendency. He made no apologies for his behavior or his profession. On top of that, he behaved as if he genuinely liked her. She wondered if that was compatible with the kind of person he was or the business he was in.
She wondered the same of Laurent.
And so this was Laurent’s work too. She had been afraid to ask Roger—in case he told her the truth—exactly how far he and Laurent were willing to go in their chosen profession. Where did murder fit in? Blackmail? Kidnapping?
She still didn’t have the stomach to call Michelle. If it meant she didn’t speak to Gerard before she left town, well, she wasn’t sure she cared anymore.
In any event, tonight was not a night for negotiating grimy Metro stations with their late night clientele graduating from panhandling to a more forceful rendition of acquiring a stranger’s money. She watched the golden glow of the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the distance from the back seat of a taxi. She wished she could see it without the veil of gloom wrapped around her.
In spite of the wine at dinner, she was sober and dispirited as she paid the taxi driver and ascended the entry steps to Hotel de L’Etoile Verte. The middle-aged man who handed her key at the desk seemed weary and world-soured.
“You have messages,” he said, pulling out two pieces of paper with her room key.
She felt a sharp pang. Laurent had called. She had deliberately turned off her phone so as not to spend the day looking at his texts and missed calls. She trudged to the hall elevator, shoving Laurent’s message into her purse. The second communication was from Michelle, asking Maggie to call her.
Not much of an investigative trip, really, Maggie thought as she punched the up arrow button for the elevator. I found out everything except what I was looking to find. She knew her parents must be wondering why she hadn’t called them. She could almost feel Laurent’s message in her purse vibrating insistently. She would have to talk to him eventually.
But God, not yet.
She was about to push the elevator button again when the doors jerked open. She stepped aside to let the occupant out, and when they didn’t exit she looked up to see the sole occupant staring menacingly at her from the elevator’s interior.
Gerard Dubois.
27
He stood in the elevator for a moment, then stepped clumsily out and stood in front of her. Magg
ie could smell the alcohol rising from his rumpled clothes like steam. He looked at her through rheumy eyes as though he didn’t know who she was.
But he knew.
“So, you’re back,” he slurred, blasting her with a vaporized mixture of cheap wine and garlic.
She made a face and took a step away from him.
“Whatza matter?” He leaned toward her in a threatening sway, as if he might topple over onto her at any moment. “You are in Paris to see me, non?” He licked his lips and grinned obscenely. “I am here.”
Maggie was immediately visited by a vision of awful similarity: Laurent standing in her mother’s garden, his hands open in a disarming gesture, his eyes full of love and relief to see her.
So, I am here.
She pulled her eyes away from the tottering, malodorant wretch blocking the lift doorway. As she did, she realized what she had known all along—Gerard was the key. He was always the pivot around which all the pain and confusion spun.
“Over here,” she said to him, jerking her head to indicate the lobby.
“You are afraid of me, little peony?” Gerard sneered, but he followed her.
Maggie walked to the worn settee in the lobby and sat. He heaved himself down next to her.
“Madame Zouk told me where to find you,” he said, his foul breath blasting into her face.
“I don’t believe you.”
“How are you thinking I am finding you, eh? The bitch told me where you were!” He smiled, displaying yellow teeth.
She willed herself to appear more in control than she felt. She took a long breath and exhaled slowly. “Did you kill my sister?”
He shoved his face close to hers but she did not retreat. His pupils were the size of pinpricks. “I will answer your questions, but you must pay me twenty thousand euros. Tonight.”
“Sure. Fine. I’ll go to the ATM right after we talk. Let’s start with an easy one. Who was the body I identified in Cannes?”
Gerard looked at her suspiciously and then shrugged. “A friend of mine who had an accident.”
“Nadia Golchek.”
He blinked at her with surprise. “How do you know that?”
“It doesn’t matter. How did she die?”
“I told you. An accident.”
“I saw the bullet hole, Gerard. I’m prepared to give you the money you want, but I need accurate answers to my questions.”
“We were drunk. It was unintentional.”
“Unintentional.”
“What difference does it make? The case is closed. The police don’t care anyway.”
“I thought it was her father not the police that was the real worry.”
Gerard’s eyes flashed at her in wary fear. “He believes she is still missing.”
“No, I’m pretty sure after all this time he knows she’s dead, Gerard. He just doesn’t have proof. I’m also pretty sure people like that don’t care about having all the facts before they reach out to the guilty party.”
Gerard began to sweat.
“So you and Nadia got drunk and somehow she got shot in the head—”
“We were playing Russian roulette.”
“Charming. And then you remembered who she was and how her dying on your hands was probably going to get you killed, so you put Elise’s bracelet on her, dumped her in the harbor, waited three days so she’d be good and unidentifiable, then called in a missing persons on Elise.”
He looked at her with amazement. “C’est ça.” That’s right.
“And when they wouldn’t let you formally ID her, you called Roger.”
“I called someone who knew him.”
I wonder who that might be.
“That bastard, Bennett! He stole my money! I will rip his entrails from his body and make him eat them in front—”
“You’re pissed off because he took your game a step further by selling my family a fake kid in place of Nicole and you didn’t think to do it. Yeah, it sucks to be stupid.”
“I will kill him.”
“Which brings me to the twenty thousand euro question.” Maggie swallowed hard. “What happened to Nicole?”
“She is here in Paris. For a thousand euros I will bring her to you.”
“Cut the crap, Gerard.” Her hands tingled with her loathing. “I know the real Nicole is dead. I want to know, did you kill her?”
His eyes locked with hers. Then, his shoulders slumped forward and Maggie had an awful moment when she thought he was going to weep.
“It was an accident,” he said. Maggie willed herself not to breathe.
He pulled out a crushed pack of Gitanes and stuffed a bent cigarette into his mouth. She waited while he lit it.
“I was drunk. She fell off the boat sometime in the night.”
Maggie listened to his words, her heart pounding in her chest.
“Nicole and I lived on a little boat after I took her away from Elise.” He blew a smoke ring at Maggie. “One night, she is falling over the side.” He made a graceful gesture with his hands to indicate the soft fall of Nicole over the side of the boat. “Pshhht!” He simulated the sound of a small weight spilling into the stagnate water. “In the morning we are finding her little body.” He dragged harshly on the filter. “It was very sad.”
“Did Elise know?” Maggie began to feel cold and distanced from the lobby at the L’Etoile Verte, as if what she was hearing was from a television show, something unreal and unrelated to her. Her mind fought to stop the image of the four-year-old girl sinking to her death in the night-dark Mediterranean Sea with no one to know or care.
He made an abrupt gesture, as if waving away a fly. “She did not ask.”
Maggie shook her sadness away. No time for that, she told herself fiercely. “You were at my apartment the afternoon Elise was killed. Do you admit that?”
“Of course. I came to remind her she was to get money for me. Drug addicts are so forgetful.”
“How did you know where I lived?”
“I followed you when you drove away with her.”
Maggie felt her skin crawl. “Why should I believe you did not kill her?”
“Mademoiselle,” he said sarcastically, his tongue flicking out over the end of his cigarette like a snake’s. “How would it help me for there to be two bodies identified as Elise Newberry, eh? You think I’m stupid?” He held Maggie’s gaze.
“Well, why did you bring her home in the first place? I mean, as soon as you did we knew the remains we had weren’t hers.”
“I did not care what you thought.”
“I bet you figured you needed to get Elise out of France before somebody found out she wasn’t really dead. Which would make somebody wonder who really was dead. The cremation of Nadia was a nice touch, by the way.”
He shrugged. “Paperwork mistakes happen all the time.” He dug in his jeans pocket and pulled out a wax paper packet half the size of a deck of cards. He placed it on the sofa between them.
“What’s that?” Maggie looked at the packet, then reached out to pick it up.
He grabbed her wrist and held it firmly. “It’s extra.”
She wrenched her hand away, forcing her dinner to stay in her stomach. Gingerly, she picked up the little packet. Inside was Elise’s gold charm bracelet. A pony, a tiny artist’s easel, a piano, a miniature book. Both girls had been given charm bracelets when they turned ten. Maggie lost hers on a Girl Scout camping trip the following year. Their mother had added to Elise’s bracelet over the years until Elise moved away.
The gold-braided bracelet made a soft tinkling sound in Maggie’s hands, every loop filled with a tiny, bobbing gold charm. She kept her eyes on the bracelet. “Where did you get this?” Her voice sounded hoarse, full of emotion even to her.
“A friend of mine returned it to me.”
A friend at the Medical Examiner’s office.
Maggie looked at the bracelet. How was it possible that Elise had kept the bracelet? Through crack houses, whorehouses, and slums. All thes
e years. And something so bourgeoisie at that. A blatant reminder of her boring, civilized Southern past.
She looked at Gerard, her fingers closing loosely around the packet of charms. “Why did you take it from her?”
He smiled. “Because it was important to her. She is always loving her beautiful bracelet. It is from when she was a little girl, non?” He grinned at Maggie, as if expecting her to agree with him.
She tossed the bracelet back into his lap. “Keep it.”
“Only five hundred more,” he said, frowning at her.
“I don’t want it.”
Gerard looked at her with a stunned expression on his face. “I cannot take less than five hundred euros!”
“Sell it on the street. Wear it yourself. I think we’re done here.”
“Mademoiselle.” His face turned into a wheedling mask of pathos and urgent need. He placed the bracelet delicately on Maggie’s knee. “Three hundred euros.”
“Let me ask you, Dubois, did you ever hit my sister? I mean, not that it matters. You did every other imaginable thing to her.”
“I...no, I did not hit—”
“Liar!”
“I am not lying!”
Maggie stood abruptly, causing the charms to tumble to the rug in a muffled jangle. “You beat my sister, pimped her, got her hooked on drugs and now you expect me to pay you?”
“You promised you would pay me!”
Whatever drugs he’d done prior to coming to the hotel were obviously on the verge of kicking in. Gerard sat transfixed, staring at Maggie as she stood over him.
“Let me guess. You need money to leave France to escape a certain Russian father who wants to nail your gonads to the top of the Eiffel Tower.” She glanced at the hotel desk. The clerk appeared totally disinterested.
“Oui, mademoiselle.” Gerard scooted himself closer to Maggie. “It could mean my life.”
He closed his eyes softly and seemed to go into a trance. Maggie bent down, picked up the bracelet and slipped it into her purse. Gerard’s eyes fluttered open.
“Time to go,” she said to him.
“Eh?” He snorted and looked around the lobby and seemed to have trouble focusing.
Murder in the South of France: Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series) Page 23