He came on and said, “Nice piece in the Herald Tribune this morning.”
I felt a rush of pleasure, coupled with a need to belittle myself. “Thanks. I’m glad you liked it. I don’t think it’ll win any Pulitzers, though.”
“Probably not,” he agreed. I kicked myself for not leaving well enough alone as he continued. “I was looking for you. Chantal Legrand, the widow of the murdered guard, has agreed to come out of seclusion and meet with the press. I thought you’d want to go.”
“I certainly do.”
He gave me an address and said, “It’s an impasse off the Rue de Charonne. The best Metro is Ledru-Rollin. Starts in forty-five minutes.”
“Hope I can make it in time. I’m out in the sixteenth. I just got through at the Bellefroide.”
He chuckled. “The distance you’ll cover is more than just spatial. See you there.”
“Wait. You’re going yourself?”
“Slow news day. Ciao.”
I sprinted for the Metro and climbed out at the Ledru-Rollin station directly across town in the eleventh arrondissement with five minutes to spare. The Rue de Charonne was a plain, unprepossessing street, and I understood what Jack meant about the distance. Here were no designer clothing boutiques, expensive chocolatiers, glittering jeweler’s windows. Instead, you had the tabac, the smoky cafe, the hardware store. The neighborhood was by no means a slum, but it was obviously working class.
The Legrand home was located in the Cour St. Jean, which was one of many short passages that opened on the street and led to cobblestoned courtyards. In my search for the right one I investigated several, and the Cour St. Jean was much like the others— a furniture-maker’s workroom on the ground floor, peeling paint, empty window boxes, a rusting drainpipe. In a dim doorway at the end of the courtyard a man stood smoking a cigarette, a couple of cameras slung around his neck. Press photographers are instantly recognizable. When I said “Legrand?” he nodded and pointed up a staircase just inside the door.
The stairs were dark and dusty, no hint reaching them of the bright sun outside. A door at the top was open and a number of people— reporters, I assumed— were milling around in a small living room. A sofa and two chairs, obviously a “set,” were upholstered in a nubby brown fabric, and interspersed among them were tables holding china figurines and demitasse cups. An elaborate sideboard, with multiple drawers and a glass front revealing shelves of flower-painted dishes and a couple of trophies, dominated one wall. Lace panels hung in the windows.
A coat closet by the door stood ajar. As I hung up my jacket I spotted Jack. He ambled over, saying, “How do, Miss Georgia Lee.”
Jack had decided to make much of my being Southern, and I had been “Honeychiled” almost to death. One of these days I’d talk to him about it, but the right time hadn’t come. In the meantime, I tried to hold my own. “Hi, there, Yankee boy.”
His notebook was open, and a ballpoint was perched behind his ear. “You just made it. She’s coming out now.”
As he spoke, a woman I recognized from the televised snapshot as Chantal Legrand entered the room, accompanied by a stout woman in black. She was dressed simply, in a plain white shirt, navy blue skirt, and high-heeled navy pumps. Her face was pale and her hair, despite a couple of restraining combs, was a riotous chin-length mass of black ringlets. Even in those prim clothes, with her eyes red and swollen, she was undoubtedly one of the sexiest-looking women I had ever seen. Also, she was nowhere near fifty, the age of her murdered husband.
Jack and I exchanged glances. I was glad he was too much of a gentleman for low wolf whistles or lewd comments under his breath. We crowded with the others around the couch where Chantal Legrand was now seated, sipping water from a glass handed to her by the woman in black.
The first questions were predictable, her answers nearly inaudible. How did she feel? Shocked and sad. What sort of person was her husband? A wonderful man. Did she have any comment on the reports—
Her head went up. Her jaw tightened. “Yes.” she said. “It is because of those reports that I have agreed to see you today.”
Evidently, I’d missed something. I’d been so interested in my own piece in the Herald Tribune that I hadn’t slogged through the write-ups in all the French papers. “What reports?” I whispered to Jack, who made a shushing motion and didn’t even glance at me.
“Some of the newspapers have been unkind enough to imply that my husband might himself have been involved in the theft at the Musée Bellefroide,” she continued. “They say that the police are investigating the possibility that my husband Pierre was a party to the crime, that he was killed to keep him silent. I must defend him. Pierre was no criminal.”
Someone asked how she could be so sure. She raised her chin even higher and said, “I know because Pierre had already refused to steal the mirror. He told me he was approached some months ago by a person who offered to pay him to take it from the museum.”
This caused a fair sensation. A gabble of questions followed, from which I was able to gather that Pierre Legrand had told his wife only that someone wanted him to steal the mirror and that he had refused. He had given her no idea who it was. She assumed that the person who had approached Pierre had gone ahead with the theft and had indeed killed Pierre because he knew too much. Her husband was an honest man. Yes, they were poor, but they were honest. She had told the police her story. She didn’t know if Pierre had reported any of this to the authorities at the time, but she supposed he had not. He had probably imagined that once he refused to steal the mirror that would be the end of it.
She didn’t let things go on much longer before saying “Now, please excuse me” and getting to her feet. After cooperating with the importuning photographers for a few extra shots, she turned toward the hall from which she’d entered while the crowd headed for the door. Impulsively, I approached her and said, “Madame Legrand? I’m Georgia Lee Maxwell. I’m the reporter who was in the room at the Bellefroide when your husband was shot yesterday.”
She turned to me. Her dark eyes widened. After a long moment she said, “Oh, yes?”
“Yes. I just wanted to say—”
She clutched my arm, looking dazed. “But you must stay,” she said.
Should I tell you I hadn’t expected it, or should I be honest? I murmured something about not imposing on her grief, but my voice was so soft she probably didn’t hear me. I waggled my fingers in good-bye to Jack, who gave me a dirty look as he went out the door. A few minutes later Chantal Legrand and I were sitting side by side on the couch, sipping coffee and leafing through a photograph album she had taken from the top left-hand drawer of the sideboard.
In every picture, Pierre’s face looked ordinary. I had seen his dead body, but if he had been revivified I wouldn’t have recognized him on the street. I saw Pierre at age ten with his dog, Pierre in rugby uniform, Pierre in the army. There were also pictures of a tiny, perky-looking lady who wore, in styles that varied gradually with the years, a coat with a fur collar, orthopedic shoes and, occasionally, a hat sporting a feather.
“Pierre’s mother,” said Chantal. “His father died when Pierre was young.”
We came to a picture showing the woman sitting on the same couch where we now sat. She looked wizened, her head sinking into the muskrat, or whatever it was, of her collar. “She lived here with you?” I asked.
“Oh, no.” I heard a hint of relief in Chantal’s tone. “No, Pierre and I met and married only after she died. But the apartment is much as she left it. Pierre wouldn’t allow anything to be changed.”
The idea of Pierre Legrand, aging mama’s boy, fascinating a ripe beauty like Chantal was mind-boggling. “How long had you and Pierre been married?”
“Four years.” She turned the album pages until we reached the wedding photograph. There she was, her hair longer, her face fuller, in a snug-fitting white satin suit and hat with a short veil, holding a few lilies of the valley. She didn’t look more than nineteen in the picture. I guessed
her age now to be twenty-five at the outside. Pierre was beside her in a dark suit and tie, smiling. Ten or twelve people were ranged around them, from a snaggle-toothed little boy to the stout woman in black who was now puttering around in the kitchen, and who had turned out to be Chantal’s mother.
I said, “These people are your family?”
“Yes.” She pointed them out: “My mother, my nephew Daniel, my sister Lisette, my cousin Armand, my brother-in-law Jean-Luc—” Her finger hovered over cousin Armand, square-jawed and handsome, a cleft in his chin. She stared at the picture. “Yes, four years.”
“How did you meet?”
She closed the album. “I was a waitress in a brasserie near the Bastille. He was alone, his mother had died. He ate there many evenings. We got to know one another. It was like that.” Her mouth turned down delicately, to show that she knew it wasn’t an exceptional story. “But you must tell me,” she said. “You were there? At the Musée Bellefroide?”
“Yes.”
“And… what can you tell me? What can you remember?”
I was embarrassed to feel my eyes filling with tears. “I don’t remember it clearly at all. It was a blur. I barely saw your husband— Pierre— before they made us lie facedown.”
“And the others? The ones who …killed him?”
“They were disguised, you know. With ski masks and baggy jackets and gloves. It could have been anyone.” I had tried and tried, hoping for a clue, some identifying mark, but there just wasn’t one. “It happened very fast,” I said, feeling helpless and ashamed.
In the kitchen, her mother was humming. I recognized the tune as the theme song of a television commercial for instant soup. “What do you remember about his being asked to steal the mirror?” I said.
She shrugged. “Nothing more than I told already. I knew immediately, when he came home that evening, that something had happened. He was shaken, and excited as well. He wasn’t going to tell me, but I insisted.”
It was easy to imagine her wheedling the story out of the doting Pierre. “Did he say how the approach was made?”
“No, not even that. He just told me, ‘Imagine. Today someone asked me to steal an object from the museum.’ He was shocked by it, of course, but also proud of himself. He said, ‘I refused immediately and said it was out of the question.’ That was the part that excited him, I think.”
“Did he say it was the mirror that was to be stolen?”
“I had to beg him again to tell me. He finally said it was a mirror that had once belonged to Nostradamus. He said it was a strange thing to steal, since the museum had many objects that were more valuable. And that was all he would say, no matter how many times I asked. At last he got very serious and said he wasn’t telling me because the knowledge could be dangerous. And it was, of course. It killed him.”
Maybe it had. I couldn’t help thinking that she hadn’t convinced me Pierre was innocent. Apparently, he hadn’t told anyone but his wife about the approach. What was to prevent him from changing his mind? “Do you know why he didn’t tell Bernard Mallet?”
“I’m not sure. I can only say my husband didn’t care for Monsieur Mallet. He preferred to keep his distance from him.”
I wondered if anybody liked Bernard Mallet. The Speculatori hated him, Pierre Legrand didn’t care for him, and I wasn’t wild about him myself. I sensed that the interview was over and got up to leave. At the door, she said, “You will be investigating? Writing something?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“If you find out… anything… you must tell me. You will tell me?”
Her eyes pleaded. It was a reasonable request, but for some reason I felt uncomfortable, invaded. “Of course,” I said.
As I walked across the courtyard, a brown-haired man hurried toward me. He went through the doorway and I heard his footsteps mounting the stairs. The instant I saw him, I recognized Cousin Armand, from the wedding picture. The family was rallying around Chantal Legrand. I left the Cour St. Jean and turned down the Rue de Charonne toward the Metro.
Sphinx
Kitty was out when I got back to the office, and I remembered she had been going to a gala lunch where a new fragrance was to be introduced. On my desk was a memo from Jack, typed on the back of a press handout in his unmistakable multi-strikeover style:
To: GL
From: J
While you were scooping us all with the grieving widow, I called B. Mallet at the Bellefroide for comment. He says Legrand never told him about possible theft of the mirror, and he is plenty pissed off about it (all could have been avoided, ta da ta da). My verdict is that Legrand looks guilty as sin, but I’m not sure of what. Mallet sounds like a bomb about to explode. What did the lovely Chantal have to say, hm?
I found Jack at his VDT, behind a desk piled high with newspapers, press releases, styrofoam coffee cups, printouts of stories, books, letters, photocopies of who knew what. He was also smoking like a chimney. I never went to journalism school, but I assume they give courses in Desk Messiness and Advanced Nicotine Consumption. He looked away from the screen and said, “What say, Miz Maxwell?”
“Just call me Scoop.” I sat down in Jack’s visitor’s chair, on top of some back issues of Liberation.
He leaned back and crossed his feet on top of the pile on his desk. “So what did you get from Chantal after we ordinary mortals were ushered out?”
“Not a great deal. A look at the family photos. I gather Pierre lived with his mother in contented bachelorhood until she died. Then he recruited Chantal to take her place.”
“Yes? If he won that fair lady, Maman must have had a wad of francs stuffed in the mattress, don’t you suppose?”
I suspected he was right, but argued just to be contrary. “Don’t be so cynical. Chantal could have married him for love. And they were hardly living in luxury there in the Cour St. Jean.”
“That doesn’t mean Pierre didn’t come into a nest egg. The French are a thrifty breed. I’ll have somebody look into the whole situation. Inheritances don’t happen in a vacuum.”
“So you’re staying with it pretty closely.”
“Hell, yes.” He sat up and tugged meditatively at his drooping socks. “She’s really something, that Chantal.”
“Pretty, you mean?”
“Gorgeous. But I mean, why did she call that press conference this morning?”
“Well, to clear Pierre’s name—”
“She sure did that, didn’t she? He looks much more like a crook now than he did before.”
So he did. “Maybe she didn’t realize how it would sound.”
“Maybe. Maybe.” Jack turned to his VDT. “I’ll let you know if my legman comes up with anything interesting.”
I walked slowly back to my office. I was grateful for Jack’s willingness to share information, but it also made me uneasy. In the first place, his helpfulness made it obvious that he didn’t consider me any competition. But why should he? I wasn’t a wire service reporter. We would be working on two totally different kinds of stories: his reporting developments as they happened, and mine—
There was the rub, right there. My story. What story? Where would it be published, and in what form? Maybe I was wasting my time. Maybe I should be over on the Rue de Paradis, looking for good buys in porcelain for the next “Paris Patter.”
I sat down and stared out the half-open window at the bank across the street. Automobile fumes drifted in, along with a cacophony of horns indicating that traffic was blocked below. Jack had resources, as he’d just tacitly made clear with his reference to the legman. If Jack decided to pour everything into it he could probably blast me off the map, even though I had been on the scene and he hadn’t.
I stewed for a while before acknowledging one certainty: I was hooked on the story. No other reporter, neither Jack nor anybody else, had as much reason to be hooked on it as I did. I was going to write it, and if at the moment I didn’t have an assignment from anybody but myself, that was all right. Also, I was
going to be grateful for Jack’s help and stop being so territorial. Filled with an uplifting sense of resolution, I turned to my notes.
I worked for several hours, stopping only to eat a cup of yoghurt at my desk, typing separate pages of observations and questions about everybody involved:
The victim, Pierre Legrand: According to his wife, he had been approached about stealing the mirror and had refused. But the thieves had shown up at a time when the museum would, unofficially, be open early and the storage room unlocked. Someone must have alerted them. Could it have been Pierre, who was then shot so he couldn’t identify his cohorts?
The widow, Chantal Legrand: We had only her word that Pierre had been approached about the mirror. Arguably, her story had made him look worse. Had she deliberately cast suspicion? Why?
Bernard Mallet: The Bellefroide director continually denigrated the mirror. His sense of responsibility to the Musée Bellefroide seemed almost maniacal. He had been extremely anxious to keep me out that morning. Had he known something was about to happen? Why would he participate in a plot to rob the Bellefroide?
Clive Overton: The art restorer had been intensely nervous on the way to the Bellefroide, which meant he could have known something. But if so, why had he invited me to come along and insisted that I be let in?
The Speculatori: All I knew about them so far was that they wanted the mirror, and they hated Bernard Mallet. Which made them excellent candidates for having committed the crime.
And, of course, there were the criminals themselves: two cruel, anonymous figures in jackets and masks. I could picture them perfectly, and yet all I could really remember was their identical anonymity. Only one of them had spoken, briefly, and his voice had made no impression on me aside from the fact that it was masculine. There had been no smells, no expressions in the eyes, no characteristic gestures. It had been almost as if they weren’t human beings at all, and that made them even more frightening. And, of course, they weren’t necessarily connected with any of the other people involved. They could have done what they did on their own, for reasons that weren’t yet clear and might never be.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 5