Murder in the Raw

by C. S. Challinor

  “Do you know much about boats?” Rex asked apprehensively.

  “I used to race cigarette boats.”

  “Is there anything you canna do?”

  Brooklyn seemed to give the question due consideration. “No,” he answered, and grinned as rain poured down his face.

  Pascal nosed the dingy behind the Belle Dame. Concentrating on maintaining his balance, Rex followed Brooklyn up the fiberglass steps at the stern, across a teak sundeck, and up a steep stairway to the pilothouse. Even at this high vantage point, spray lashed against the wrap-around tempered glass windows. The yacht dipped and reared like a horse on a carousel. Brooklyn hollered down to Pascal and turned the ignition key. The twin engines leaped to life with a tremendous roar. Added to the swaying motion, the smell of diesel made Rex nauseous.

  As they left the relative shelter of the bay, pushing out past the island to starboard, the heaving of the sea sucked at the hull, the waves around them roiling masses of foam. Rex felt uncomfortable just watching this stuff on TV from the comfort of his recliner. Would he were there now!

  Pascal, who had taken over at the helm, fought with the wheel in pursuit of the Moonsplash, which was outstripping them at forty-five knots on a course toward Pinel Island. From time to time, she disappeared from view amid twelve-foot cliffs of gray water. Distantly visible on shore, the palm trees bent sideways in the wind.

  “Is this a hurricane?” Rex yelled out to Brooklyn.

  “Just a squall. Don’t worry, just don’t go overboard.”

  “No chance,” Rex said, holding onto the console with white knuckles. “Are you sure we can catch up with them?”

  “This is a more powerful boat and Pascal knows these waters. Why don’t you go down to the cabin? I’ll call when we get near.”

  “That’s okay,” Rex said valiantly. How could he ever relate this adventure to Campbell if he had to tell him he’d been throwing up in the head?

  Water swept over the bow, splashing the glass. A sailboat out on the ocean was struggling to get its sails down. Pascal called the national police and alerted them to a possible emergency. “Gale force winds up to ninety kilometers an hour off La Plage d’Azur,” he reported, reading their GPS location.

  The police boat was already on another call, Pascal relayed afterward. All search and rescue boats were busy scooping up fishing vessels and yachts caught in the storm. He tuned in to the local VHF frequency, and they heard the crackling SOS from the sailboat. “Mayday … Mayday,” called an American voice. “We’re having problems.”

  Pascal turned to Rex. “Do we go pick dem up?”

  “Their mast’s gonna snap if we don’t,” Brooklyn said. “They could end up on the rocks.”

  Rex thought quickly. He couldn’t leave the sailboat and crew to their fate, but he couldn’t let a murderer get away either. “Aye, we’d better save that boat,” he agreed.

  Brooklyn nodded. “If we can get them on course headed into the bay, we can still go after the catamaran.”

  Suddenly, Pascal pointed. Rex stood on his toes to see over an intervening ridge of waves. The Moonsplash had capsized. Two figures bobbed about in the water in life preservers.

  “Them first,” he told Pascal.

  Within minutes, Rex and Brooklyn had hoisted the shivering couple out of the water onto the deck. Not a word was spoken between Brooklyn and Sabine. Rex explained who he was and why he was chasing them. The bedraggled young man with her looked about him like a caged animal.

  “I’ll take them below,” Rex told Brooklyn. “D’you think you can help those people get their sailboat ashore?”

  “Aye, aye, skipper.”

  “Here, take these life preservers in case Ms. Durand and her partner get any ideas about making a swim for it.”

  Sabine cast Rex a look of disdain. She had the beguiling eyes of a cat, though he couldn’t tell if they were more green or more blue. Duke Farley had been right: the girl did look good wet. Her delicate face, nude of makeup, appeared appealingly young. Beneath her life vest, a silk dress molded her small pointed breasts and slight hips. Both she and her partner were barefoot, dripping water as Rex ushered them into a Berber-carpeted cabin with fully equipped galley.

  He located a pile of beach towels in a closet and opened the door to one of the staterooms so Sabine could get out of her wet clothes. The man peeled off his T-shirt and waterlogged jeans. He was narrow in the shoulders, his dark hair a dramatic contrast to his face, which was still pinched and pale from shock. Why Sabine had chosen him over Brooklyn, Rex couldn’t imagine—but there was no accounting for taste where women were concerned, as he had recently discovered from personal experience.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” he prompted, since it had not been volunteered.

  “Jean-Luc Valquez. Thank you for saving us.”

  It speaks! Rex said to himself.

  Sabine stepped into the room, wrapped in a bright towel. “I will never get the tangles out of my hair,” she said, tugging a comb through a damp strand. She spoke with a slight London accent. Rex remembered she had worked and been schooled there.

  “Perhaps you could rustle up a pot of coffee,” he said. “It might take your mind off your hair.” He, for one, could use a cup of something hot.

  “This is a nice yacht,” she said, wandering into the galley. “It’s like a mini-condo. Yours?”

  “No. It belongs to a friend of Brook’s.”

  “A Frenchman.” Sabine waved a packet of French roast at him. “I remember now. An old salt by the name of Fabien.”

  “How did you get that cut on your wrist?” Rex asked.

  “I scraped it on some coral a few weeks ago while I was diving.”

  “Are you sure it wasna self-inflicted?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The strip torn from your white pareo has your blood on it.”

  “Strange.”

  “Not so strange when one realizes you staged your own death. I suppose you cast the rest of the pareo out to sea once you reached the catamaran.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Or else Jean-Luc here was onboard all along. You left a piece of your pareo on the beach along with your ankle bracelet.”

  Jean-Luc collapsed on a stool at the granite breakfast bar and sank his head in his hands. “I had nothing to do with any of this.”

  Sabine turned on him in a fury. “You bloody idiot. Idiot!” she repeated in French.

  “She told me to try and escape,” he told Rex. “We almost drowned.”

  “Are you Sganarelle?”

  Jean-Luc shrugged in submission. “It was her idea.”

  “Veux-tu bien te taire, espèce de grenouille?”

  “Did she just call you a frog?” Rex asked.

  Sabine smacked her forehead. “It’s the first thing I thought of. I don’t mean because he is French. I just meant a slimy little green reptile with bony legs. Cro-ak, cro-ack, cro-ack!” she said in her boyfriend’s face.

  “Ben, alors? Tu m’emmerdes avec tes histoires!”

  His French moved too fast for Rex to follow, but it didn’t sound polite. “How is the coffee coming along?” he asked brightly in an attempt to interrupt the domestic dispute.

  The noise and motion of the yacht had subsided. Rex looked out of a porthole near the ceiling and saw they were at anchor in the lee of the island. Pascal must be helping Brooklyn with the sailboat.

  “Sganarelle was a sort of code name, I take it?” he asked Sabine. “You could have used Clitandre, but that sounds even more literary, so you transposed the name of the miserly and possessive old man—your husband Vernon—onto the pretend doctor, your lover.”

  Sabine nodded, a faint smile on her shapely lips. “I’m impressed. How did you figure that one out?” She plunked a mug of coffee and a container of sugar in front of him on the counter.

  “I canna take credit. A friend made the connection.”

  “Surely not the boring Windbag Wins
low?”

  “That’s no way to speak about the man who took you in when you were a struggling young actress.”

  “Oh, please. I paid rent and, anyway, it was Elizabeth’s idea. I don’t suppose you have any idea who she is, do you?” She raised her delicate eyebrow at him in defiance.

  Rex must have looked blank.

  “So, she didn’t tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “She’s my mother. My natural mother, that is. She gave me up at birth. She was an art student in Paris from a good British family when it was still not respectable to have a child out of wedlock. I was adopted by a wealthy French couple and didn’t find out I wasn’t their biological daughter until Elizabeth breezed back in my life when I was eighteen and told me. I have never forgiven my adoptive mother for not telling me herself.”

  “What about your father?”

  “The one who adopted me? I was angry at him too, but not as much. As for my natural father, all I know is that he was a French actor and the love of Elizabeth’s life. But he is still a salaud for running out on her.”

  “But why Vernon? Why did you marry him?”

  “I thought he could take care of me.”

  “What happened when you went back there today?”

  Sabine leaned against the counter with her mug of coffee. “He looked like he’d seen a ghost when I walked through the sliding glass door.” She laughed. “The expression on his face was priceless. He was in a maudlin mood, sitting in an armchair listening to Broadway hits and knocking back the rum. I poured one for myself and launched into the role of Abjectly Sorry Wife.”

  “And you spiked his drink.”

  “He was pitiful when he realized what I’d done. We were in bed by then. ‘What in hell did you put in my rum?’” she slurred in perfect imitation of Vernon’s dry American accent.

  “‘Barbiturates,’ I told him. ‘Everyone will think you topped yourself.’

  “‘Bitch. You planned this all along.’ Then with his last gasp, he asked, ‘Why?’

  “‘Because you asked for it.’”

  Sabine paced the galley. “That’s what he said that time he slapped me at the Farley ranch: ‘She asked for it.’” Hate transformed her exquisite face.

  “There were other ways to get your husband out of your life, you know,” Rex told her.

  “Not Vernon. Believe me, I tried. He didn’t want to be twice divorced. Wouldn’t look good on him. And he’d have killed my career stone dead. He was a very vindictive person.”

  Rex chose to overlook the hypocrisy of that last statement. “And you really thought you’d get away with this elaborate plan?”

  The actress gave an elegant shrug of her shoulders. “I might have, had you not interfered.”

  “People would have figured it out eventually.”

  “A bit of gossip, some speculation. Nothing provable. The grieving husband drinks himself to death when the wife runs off with a younger man. All the media attention would make me even more bankable. I could have been offered a major movie deal. Now I’ll just have to settle for writing a book about my life.”

  “I’ll buy a copy,” Rex told her. “I’m sure it’ll make for a fascinating read.”

  A flash of wry amusement illuminated her face. “It will. But maybe you should wait for the movie. I wonder who they’ll get to play me?”

  “I’ve always liked Angelina Jolie, myself.”

  Jean-Luc snorted in derision from where he sat at the other end of the breakfast bar. “You have no sense of reality, Sabine. They will throw the proverbial book at you.”

  “And you are claiming you had no knowledge of any of this?” Rex asked him.

  “I helped her get away from St. Martin. She said she had to leave her husband but was frightened of telling him. I had no idea she was going to kill him. Quel cauchemar!” His voice broke on the word “nightmare” as his face fell into his hands.

  “His speciality is melodrama,” Sabine noted.

  “He’s an actor too?”

  “Yes, of course. Don’t you know anything? Mainly theatre. We were in an adaptation of Frenchman’s Creek, where he played the sensitive pirate Aubéry opposite my character, Dona St. Columb.”

  “A sensitive pirate?”

  “It was a stupid play,” Jean-Luc concurred. “Based on a stupid novel by Daphne du Maurier. ”

  “It was a huge success at the box office.”

  “Is that when you two met?”

  A frozen silence ensued. Rex deduced he had touched on a sensitive subject. At that moment, the churning vibration of the powerful propellers started back up and they began to move.

  Ten minutes later, they were in the bay preparing to embark in the dingy with Pascal. The sailboat was already tightly moored and peaceably cresting the waves, which had lost much of their furor. Brooklyn stood on shore, soaking wet, watching the four of them in the boat. Rex wondered what was passing through his mind as he waited for Sabine, and what sort of reception she would receive from the rest of the guests.

  Brooklyn escorted the boat party to the main building, where Greg Hastings met them in the lobby and distributed white bathrobes with La Plage d’Azur embossed in gold on the breast pocket.

  “Ms. Durand,” he murmured, clearly not sure how to address his previous guest and murder suspect. He looked Jean-Luc over with polite curiosity before making a brief call from reception. “Latour is attending to a traffic accident,” he informed Rex, “but will be over as soon as he can. Shall I inform the other guests of Ms. Durand’s arrival? I don’t think most of them are aware she is alive. I instructed the staff to keep mum.”

  “Not yet,” Rex said, reluctant to have the guests crowding in asking questions while he still had some of his own.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” Brooklyn finally asked Sabine.

  “I don’t have to answer to you.”

  The American threw up his arms in disbelief. “I would have thought you have a lot of people to answer to. We all went looking for you. The police were here.”

  “Am I under arrest?” she asked Rex. “Can you make a citizen’s arrest in a foreign country?”

  “Lieutenant Latour said to hold you for questioning,” Hastings cut in. “In connection with your husband’s death. I hope you understand.”

  “I had nothing to do with my husband’s death.”

  “Ms. Durand,” Rex objected. “You confessed on the yacht. Your plan was to resurface months later with your new beau and a watertight alibi and claim your dead husband’s estate. You hoped that the notoriety of the case would reignite your acting career.”

  “What do you mean, ‘reignite’?”

  “Well, it seems you haven’t been in anything lately.”

  “I’ve been resting. Mr. Graves put words in my mouth,” she told the manager, appealing to him with her cat eyes. “I did not have my own lawyer present. The trauma of nearly drowning when our catamaran capsized …” She put a hand to her throat, ever the consummate actress.

  “My poor dear. Perhaps a snifter of brandy?”

  “All round,” Brooklyn suggested.

  “Right.” Hastings paced off in the direction of his office.

  “Pascal and I swam to the sailboat,” Brooklyn informed Rex.

  “You’re soaked through. But you got her in okay. The passengers must have been right grateful.”

  “An older couple from Maine. They offered us the use of their St. Thomas villa whenever we like.”

  Sabine gazed at Brooklyn in overt admiration, probably thinking she would have had a better chance of escape with him. “You don’t really think I murdered Vernon, do you, Brook?”

  “Jean-Luc is a witness to your confession,” Rex reminded her.

  “I do not remember anything that was said, except that I had nothing to do with anything,” the Frenchman said.

  “You remember that much,” Rex remarked with a lash of irony.

  “I only helped Mademoiselle Durand escape from
her husband. You must believe me.”

  “It’s not for me to decide. For now, you must consider yourself a guest of the Gendarmerie.”

  “Take the young man to my office and keep an eye on him until the police arrive,” Hastings instructed Winston, returning with the security guard and a cut-glass decanter. “I left a glass of brandy in there for you,” he told Jean-Luc. “There’s a divan bed and a blanket. Make yourself comfortable. We’ll put Ms. Durand in the small office.” The manager led her behind reception.

  “How long will I be in here?” she asked Rex, glancing around the functional space. “Can I use the phone?”

  “Whom do you wish to call?”

  “My father in Paris.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Minutes later, from outside the room, he could hear her agitated voice talking in French. “I’ll go and see the guests now,” he informed Hastings.

  A throng of voices arose from the third cabana, occupied by the Winslows. Elizabeth was sobbing on the sofa. “I must go to her,” she cried into a handkerchief.

  Paul sat beside her, patting her hand. He looked up at Rex. “We saw you come back in the dingy with Sabine. Thought we had all better sit tight and wait for you, though it was all I could do to prevent my wife from running out to the beach in the rain.”

  “Is it true she had something to do with Vernon’s death?” Dick Irving asked from an armchair.

  So much for keeping the guests in the dark. The turn in the weather had prompted them to put clothes on, not that the air temperature had dipped significantly. It was probably a psychological reaction to the element of danger posed by the storm—or else they felt uncomfortable and vulnerable being naked in front of the authorities.

  “Duke spoke to one of the guards,” David Weeks said. “Seems the maid saw Sabine in the cabana at around the time Vernon died.”

  “Ms. Durand did say she spoke with her husband,” Rex confirmed.

  “How is she?” Elizabeth asked, her eyes red-rimmed from crying. “She must have got drenched in the storm. What happened to their catamaran?”