The Corpse with the Silver Tongue

by Cathy Ace

  “Yes. Good. I will be there in twenty minutes—it is a date!” replied Beni, and he hung up.

  I’ll admit I was smiling as I finished my coffee and water. I suspect that I over-tipped quite a bit, but, in my own defense, I was feeling rather pleased with myself. I wanted to get going quickly so I could make full use of the Four Star public facilities at Le Meridien before Beni arrived to whisk me away in his flash car. I trotted off toward the glittering sea, knowing that I was going on a date . . . even if it had taken an octogenarian getting a broken hip to make it happen. Yes, I know it was a bit “Tamsin-y” of me—but a girl’s got to make the most of the opportunities that present themselves.

  Seventeen minutes later—yes, I was clock-watching—I stood outside the swanky entrance to the glamorous hotel that my university couldn’t have afforded for me to stay at for half an hour, let alone five nights. Beni arrived in his magnificent convertible, its roof down, his sunglasses glinting with gold embellishments, dark hair blowing in the breeze, shirt collar open wide and showing off his perfect tan. He screeched to a halt, leapt out of the car, and opened the passenger door for me, then closed it carefully, as though as though I were a precious cargo. I could get used to this, I thought. I smiled and buckled up. His driving, as well as the law, made this a necessity.

  As we pulled away, I knew I would remember that moment forever. It was one of those feelings you get only ever get a few times in your life. Something has allowed you an insight into another world not as an outsider, or an observer, but as a participant. It was heady stuff, and I could feel the excitement in the pit of my stomach as Beni Brunetti and I swept toward the Palais on that stunning May morning.

  When we squealed to a halt at the giant black gates, Beni hopped out to press the buttons for Tamsin’s apartment. She buzzed us in. Instead of pulling up in front of the main entrance to the beautiful old building, Beni swung to the right, along the driveway heading back down the hill, but now inside the walls of the gardens surrounding the apartment building. He took it slowly, which was a relief, giving me a chance to look around as we descended. I hadn’t had an opportunity until then to see the gardens that were Gerard’s life’s work. Soon we were parked, and Beni rushed to open my door once more. Yes, I waited for him to do it—well, it was such a treat! We began the walk back up the hill toward the front entrance to the building.

  “Is this where you had to park last night?” I asked to get the conversation started.

  “No, farther on. It goes all the way around the bottom of the gardens, but it is one way only, so it can take a while,” he replied, seemingly lost in thought.

  About a quarter of the way up, Beni placed his hand lightly on my arm and said, “Come this way. Let us walk through the gardens, then you can see how beautiful they are, how lush and how well tended.” I was surprised to hear him speak with such interest of something other than an ancient relic. I’m pretty interested in gardening, but in the passive sense. I like to see them and visit them, rather than work in them. I thought I might be in for a treat, in more ways than one.

  We stepped over a low wall that ran between the driveway and the garden proper. We were transported from a world of grey stone walls, brown pea-gravel, and blue sky into a green cocoon that immediately felt cooler and gentler. Huge palms towered above us, and at our feet was a surprise—grass. All around us were beds demarcated by low, well-trimmed box hedges, and inside each bed was a mass-planting of one species, some of which I recognized. Roses, some sort of Shasta daisy, and bougainvillea occupied sunny beds, while shadier beds housed red and apricot astilbe and—good grief . . .

  “Look—foxgloves!” I cried involuntarily.

  Beni jumped. I apologized and took his arm.

  “I’m sorry—it’s just that I thought it would be too dry and too sunny to grow foxgloves in this climate.”

  “You are correct. I know that Gerard has tried very hard to grow these flowers. He tends them with much care. Do you like foxgloves?”

  “Why, yes, they’re a favorite of mine. They seem to be blooming much earlier here than they do in the area where I live,” I remarked.

  “It is warm here through the winter. I think they awake more quickly and grow more vigorously here.” He smiled back at me. “I, too, like these. Farther up Gerard has some yellow ones. Shall we look?”

  I was intrigued. “I didn’t know there were yellow foxgloves. Yes, I’d love to see them.” We moved off at a slightly quicker pace.

  As we walked, the thought occurred to me that maybe a killer trying to find digitalis didn’t have too far to look after all. I managed to put aside that macabre thought for a moment or two and was able to enjoy the buds that were just bursting open on a bed of yellow foxgloves. I wondered if I’d be able to find them back in Vancouver—I made a mental note to check. In the meantime, I allowed myself a moment or two to turn and look back down onto the whole canvas of the gardens. My word, Gerard had done a good job! It was true that now he was aided by a group of much younger men, but the vision had been his, the planning was still his and—oh, the poor man. I could imagine how he must have felt about the big hulk of a swimming pool being sunk into this wonderful creation.

  “Do you know where they plan to build the pool?” I asked Beni, not expecting him to know much about it.

  “But yes,” he replied. “You see the beds near the bottom corners that have the olive trees in them?” I nodded. “You see the beds about half way up with, on the right, the red roses and on the left, the white roses?” Again, I nodded. “Those would be the four corners of the pool. A retaining wall would be built on this, the higher side, and the pool will be sunk into the cellars that are below the gardens.”

  “Why are there cellars down there?” I couldn’t imagine.

  “When the Palais was built it was as a hotel. The guests would demand the finest wines, so they built a web of cellars to keep large amounts of wines at the right temperatures. They built the cellars out of stone blocks above the ground, before they built the Palais, then they covered the tunnels they had built with the soil they removed when they dug the foundations for the hotel itself.”

  “What a clever idea,” I commented. “It seems it was all very well planned.”

  “Yes, the architect of this building was a very clever man, and he had used this method in other places before he did it here.”

  As we turned our backs on the main gardens and continued through a couple of cool arbors quite close to the residents’ parking area at the front of the building, I observed, “You seem to know a lot about the history of this building. Why is that?”

  “Ah, it is old, and I like old things. And it is beautiful, and I very much like beautiful things.” His words seemed to be laden with hidden meaning: I was hoping his emphasis was on “beautiful,” not “old”; and maybe, even if he meant both, then I was in with a chance!

  “It’s not really your era, Beni, surely . . .” I couldn’t shut up, could I?

  “No, this is true. At one time I thought I might come here to live, so I read about the place, and spoke to a few of the older residents about it.”

  “Did you know about the remains that were found when they were digging the foundations for the building?” Had Beni made the connection between the different phases of the life of the stolen necklace?

  “I have heard some rumors, but I think that this is all. Often there are rumors about buildings such as this one—of how many men died building them, or of things that were found at the time. I do not believe everything I hear,” he replied quite jovially. I wondered if that joviality was just a bit forced, or if his eyes were creasing up because we were back in the sunshine again. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but the magical walk through the greenery was over, and we had to face the obnoxious Tamsin.

  Ah well—I told myself that into every life a little rain must fall. It had been a very informative morning, and fun too, with Beni playing his part of the dashing Italian romancer to the hilt, and me getting
all googly in the car. I had to put my game face on and get ready to take another chance to poke around the apartment where Alistair had died—I knew I hadn’t seen it all. I wondered how I could convince Tamsin to give me a guided tour. It might not be easy, but I was ready to give it a go.

  As we mounted the steps to the imposing front door, I couldn’t help but imagine poor old Gerard tumbling down them in the early hours of the morning. They were good, solid, wide steps, and I wondered how he’d managed it. He’d had a poor night’s sleep the night before, and a long day, and it was very late at night, so maybe he’d just lost his balance and slipped on the edge of a step . . . those steps he’d been climbing his whole life. Maybe I was beginning to see crimes where none existed, so I told myself to concentrate on the crimes I knew were real enough.

  “You do not speak much, Cait, but I believe you think a great deal,” observed Beni as Tamsin buzzed us into the building.

  “If you keep your mouth closed, people might think you’re a fool, but if you open it, they might know you are,” I replied, quoting my mother. I even used her voice—we’d always sounded alike, and the words echoed in the voluminous hallway. It freaked me out a little.

  “Ha! This is very true,” replied Beni, laughing, his booming voice overwhelming the echoes of my mother’s warning.

  His laughter carried us up in the elevator to the third floor, where we were met by Tamsin’s pinched little face peering around her own front door. She motioned to us to come quickly, and we reluctantly did so. She stood there in her bare feet, wearing more black garb of some sort: maybe she was going to take a Victorian stance on mourning dress, and wear nothing but black, ever again. She slammed the door behind us, dragged us into the kitchen and finally spoke.

  “I’m sure I’m next! They’ll get me next, I know it!” She looked terrified.

  Ah, so that was it. Tamsin had decided that there was a “they” and that “they” were out to get her.

  Beni took a deep breath and adopted his “uncle full of bonhomie and comfort” voice. He reassured Tamsin that she would be just fine, that no one was out to get her, and reminded her that while there had indeed been two murders, Gerard’s misfortune was just that—an accident, and she wasn’t to let it upset her. I was gobsmacked that it took a slip-and-fall to reduce her to a gibbering wreck, as opposed to her husband’s cold-blooded murder but was probably just me being “judgmental” again.

  “Have you eaten today?” asked Beni solicitously.

  “I ate bread. With Alistair gone there didn’t seem to be any point making toast, so I just ate bread . . .” Her whiny voice trailed off pathetically. Good grief—is it such an effort to put bread into a toaster and push a button?

  “I will make you food,” said Beni, taking control. He moved Tamsin to one side and pulled open the door to the refrigerator.

  “There’s not much there, I checked yesterday,” I commented. “There’s enough cheese in there to probably feed the entire building, and there were eggs. I’m assuming it’s all still there.” I couldn’t imagine that Tamsin would know what to do with an egg, other than eat it once it had been prepared for her.

  “I don’t know what’s there, and I don’t care . . . What’s the point of it all? He’s gone, and I’m all alone. I don’t think I can go on . . .” Again, she did that trailing off thing with her voice. I ground my teeth. It was safer than letting my mouth form words.

  “It is noon already—we will all have lunch,” declared Beni, as though Tamsin and I were in the apartment next door. “I shall cook. You ladies, you will let me do this!”

  I wasn’t going to object, nor, clearly, was Tamsin. I saw a chance and jumped at it.

  “Hey, Tamsin—if we’re banished from the kitchen, what if you show me around the apartment? I’d love to see it all. I bet it’s pretty special upstairs, eh?” I tried to jolly her along. It was hard work, and I wasn’t sure I was that good an actress, but she bought it—or else she too was gritting her teeth and just being polite to me in front of Beni. Either way, I didn’t care, so long as I got to see the rest of the place. I wanted to see what hiding places there might have been for that necklace, and I wasn’t going to achieve that by only ever seeing the kitchen, balcony, downstairs, and bathroom. I’d already laboriously recalled those areas in my mind’s eye to establish where the wretched thing might have been secreted, with

  no luck.

  “Oh, alright,” Tamsin replied, very quietly for her.

  I walked out of the kitchen and asked, “Is it okay if we go upstairs?”

  “Yes, feel free, but it’s just the TV room, and our bedroom and bathroom. It’s not very exciting, you know.”

  The sight that met my eyes at the top of the stairs might not have been very exciting, but it wasn’t something I had expected. I took a moment to take it all in. The rooms looked as though a bomb had exploded in the back of a truck full of clothes, which had been left to lie where they fell. I swear every surface was littered with clothing of one type or another. The floor, the sofa in the TV room, the TV itself, the bed and the chairs in the bedroom, the floor of the bathroom, the bath, and even the toilet—all covered in skirts and pants and blouses and shirts, scarves and tops and sweaters and dresses and more skirts. If you could wear it, it was there.

  Shoes, sandals, and boots, either singly or in pairs, were dotted in among all the clothes, making crossing the floor something of a challenge. As I walked I picked up and gathered a pile. Tamsin, proceeding beside me, opted for the “kick it to one side” routine. I wondered if that was how this mess had started, and pondered how long it might have been there. I figured that Alistair probably wouldn’t have stood for it, so maybe she’d managed to create all this chaos since his death. If it hadn’t been so frightening, it would have been impressive.

  The only reason I wanted to see upstairs was to evaluate possible hiding places. Given that I could only see Tamsin’s detritus, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to get much out of this particular foray. Just as I was planning a strategic retreat, Tamsin called to me from the bedroom, asking me to come to look at something. Dreading what it might be, I entered the room reluctantly, cautiously navigating through the mess on the floor, to find her holding a silver-framed photograph of her and Alistair. It looked like it had been taken on their wedding day. He was smiling like the cat that’s got the cream, and she was gazing winsomely at the camera, with a circle of flowers in her hair and a rock the size of Gibraltar on a heavy chain around her neck. I didn’t dare think it was a diamond, but it certainly looked like it.

  Tamsin was looking at the photograph with what I could only describe as true love in her eyes. She said, “Ally liked giving me necklaces—he said I had a pretty neck. He got that one from a man in South Africa and gave it to me for our wedding. It’s in the bank now. He never let me wear it. I might get it out and wear it to his funeral. It’s so pretty.”

  As I looked at her I knew that the love on her face and the wistfulness in her voice weren’t for Alistair—they were for the jewelry.

  “Do you know how he gave it to me?” she asked.

  “No,” I said sweetly, shaking my head with disbelief. She seemed to think I was encouraging her.

  “He had the caterer make a raspberry jelly for me—or do you call it ‘Jell-O’ because you’re a Canadian now? You’re weird, you know, sometimes you sound Welsh and sometimes you sound . . . well, almost American . . . It’s like you’re a fake—you know, what Ally would have called ‘jumped up’ . . . Why do you talk like that? Is it so you sound more clever?”

  Good grief, this woman didn’t need anyone or anything else to distract her—she could do it to herself, very easily.

  I replied as calmly as possible. “I guess it’s because I can’t quite shake off my Welsh accent, or the British words I grew up using, but sometimes, having lived in Canada for more than ten years, my new vocabulary and accent kick in. It’s not something I’m conscious of—it just happens. I suppose that somet
imes it depends on who I’m speaking to: you’re English so I suppose I might use the word ‘suppose’ instead of ‘I guess’ . . . or maybe not. Does that help?”

  Tamsin thought for a moment, then replied, “No, not really. I don’t understand. Anyway, like I was saying, raspberry is my favorite flavor, and it was a ‘very special’ dessert for the feast we had the night before our wedding. At least, that’s what Alistair called it . . . and he hid the necklace in the jelly, so it was very special . . . I found it with my spoon! Oh, it was fun! It was a bit messy too, of course, but Ally cleaned it all off for me and then put it around my neck. I wore it for the wedding. After that he made me put it in the bank. I’ve got another one—look!”

  Out of a drawer in her bedside table, Tamsin pulled what looked like the necklace in the photograph. “Ally said he’d spent a small fortune on the real thing so it was worth spending a few bob on a fake that was good enough to fool pretty much everyone. Wasn’t he clever! I feel different when I know I’m wearing the real one. And the pearls too.” With that, she pulled a jumble of strands from the same drawer. “And the black pearls.” I suspected that she could have gone on for a while: Alistair might, for all I knew, have been some weird sort of fetishist, considering what a fuss he’d clearly liked to make of his wife’s neck.

  “He loved my neck,” cooed Tamsin, cupping tangled jewelry in her tiny little hands and sliding them over her aforementioned body part.

  “Lunch!” called Beni from below us, and she dropped the lot on the bed and took off. My God, her attention span lasted about as long as that of a two-year-old.

  I looked at what she’d carelessly discarded and wondered how much of it was real and how much was fake. It started me thinking about Alistair and his patterns of behavior. I was sure I’d just learned something very useful—and it wasn’t that Tamsin was disorganized, messy, or easily distracted—because I’d known all that before we’d come up to see her boudoir.