In the morning, we found a note on the dining table:
Ms. Kitty and Ms. Georgia Lee—
Morning has broken and so, the office tells me, has the Rue de Castiglione bombing case. I’ve got to go. On the way out, I’ll tell the concierge that Kitty’s ex is back in town and that nobody, repeat nobody, is to be allowed upstairs. Will call later.
Love and smooches, Jack
“Typical,” Kitty said as we ate croissants and strawberry jam. “He’ll protect us until a hotter story comes along.”
“Has he always been this way?”
“Can’t you tell? He was born this way.”
“Is that why your relationship didn’t last?”
She raised her eyebrows. “He told you? What a beast.”
“He didn’t say a word. I already suspected, and when last night he asked if the coffee was in the same place, it was a clue.”
“Yeah. Well, ‘relationship’ is hardly the term to use. ‘Fling’ is more the term.”
I wish I could say I didn’t feel jealous, but I did. Kitty had everything: a gorgeous apartment, a fling with Jack, a cute pastry chef, Marc-Antoine, languishing after her. I had— I had Twinkie, who at this moment made a flying leap onto the table, skidded on a place mat, and upset the milk pitcher. As I mopped up I said, “You must be dying to get her out of here, with all these priceless statues around.”
“Not at all. Stay as long as you like.”
“Thanks, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be back at my place tonight.”
She consented to let me try another outfit today, and by searching far in the back of her closet I managed to put together an ensemble of apricot silk blouse, rust-colored pullover, and beige corduroy skirt which, although Kitty considered it hopelessly conservative, was more in keeping with my self-image. “At least wear a belt— no, not there, hip level,” she said. As I complied, she looked at me dubiously. “You’re sure about this?”
“Personally, I think rust is one of my better colors.”
“I don’t mean the clothes. I mean, are you sure you should go out?”
I wasn’t sure at all. If it worked, though, it would be the quickest way out of my dilemma, and I wanted to get out quick. “I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to sound convinced. “Can I borrow a pocketbook, too? The biggest one you’ve got.”
The biggest pocketbook Kitty had was a pigskin whopper the size of carry-on luggage. I put on my coat and slung it over my shoulder. I was ready. Once more into the breach. Then I could go back to Montparnasse, back home.
Cour St. Jean
I got out of the taxi on the corner of the Rue Charonne. I told myself I was taking a risk, but not a huge risk. If I’d called the police, they’d want to interrogate me, press me, maybe put me under garde á vue. Why would they listen to a bizarre theory that, from their point of view, was probably concocted to draw attention away from my own guilt?
The weather was glorious, as beautiful as the day Overton and I went to the Bellefroide, although colder. Winter would begin soon, and from all reports it would be gray, freezing, and long. Maybe I could do a “Paris Patter” about the joys of winter here, if I could discover what they were.
Soon I was crossing the cobblestoned courtyard of the Cour St. Jean. The bright sun seemed to accentuate its dilapidated appearance— the sagging drainpipe and peeling paint. The furniture-maker’s workroom was closed. Before I entered the gloomy hall I glanced up. I thought a lace panel moved in one of the windows above, but I wasn’t sure. I climbed the staircase and knocked on the door.
In a minute or two, Chantal opened it. Her black hair had its usual just-rolled-in-the-hay look, and she was wearing her typical severe white blouse, this time with khaki pants. She looked dewy and fresh. Whatever toll recent events had taken on everybody else, Chantal didn’t seem to have suffered.
She said, “I’m astonished to see you,” and she looked it. She continued, “I read in the newspaper that the police want to question you.”
I waved it aside. “That’s been cleared up. I’ve just spoken with them. As a matter of fact, the entire case is cleared up. That’s what I’ve come to tell you.”
She stood still, watching me. I peered past her shoulder. “May I come in?”
She didn’t move. “What do you mean, cleared up?”
“Why, they’ve arrested Bruno Blanc,” I said. I could feel my manner getting chirpy, as if we were talking over a back fence in Luna Beach. “He’s a member of a group called the Speculatori. He’s the one who approached your husband about stealing the mirror.”
“I see.” She stepped back. “Come in.”
In most respects, the room was as it had been before. The sideboard was in place, as was the brown furniture. The Virgin Mary was gone from the television set, though, and over the couch was a fringed throw printed with huge red poppies. She took my coat and hung it in the closet, and when we were seated she said, “Please. Tell me everything.”
I repeated essentially what I’d said at the door, with some expansion and embellishment. When I finished, she said, “So Bruno Blanc stole the mirror and killed Pierre?”
“His confederates did. You see, Pierre knew Bruno was after the mirror. Bruno asked Pierre to steal it. Pierre hadn’t told you who it was, right?”
She shook her head. “No. He never said.”
“So I guess Pierre was killed to keep him quiet.”
“I… what does Bruno Blanc say? Does he admit everything?”
“He’s claiming he didn’t do it, but the police believe they have a strong case.”
Chantal’s eyes were lustrous. “This is a relief,” she said. She stood. “May I offer you coffee?”
I was over-caffeinated, but this was one cup I wasn’t going to refuse. I had hoped she’d be cordial enough to offer, although if she didn’t I was prepared to demand it. “I’d love some. Thank you.”
As soon as she left for the kitchen, I crossed to the sideboard. I remembered from my previous visit that she’d taken the family album out of the top left-hand drawer. I pulled on the drawer. Stuck. Water was running in the kitchen. She might get the coffee started and then come back. Was the drawer locked? I jiggled it. No. Stuck.
I heard her footsteps moving across the kitchen. I heaved on the damn drawer and got past the rough place. There was the album. Cups and saucers clinked. I took the album out and got the drawer shut somehow. I’d heard, maybe read in Heloise, that candle wax on the runners would fix that kind of thing. I was back on the couch, having slid the album into Kitty’s capacious pocketbook, by the time Chantal returned with my fortieth cup of coffee in the past twenty-four hours.
Now, when all I wanted was to get the hell out, she unbent enough to chat. I told her, distractedly, how Bruno had abducted me. I said he had practically admitted the two murders to me. I said the desire for the mirror had driven him insane. All the time, I was scorching my tongue trying to get the coffee down so I could leave.
When the cup was empty I put it down and stood briskly, to forestall an offer of more. “I have to run,” I said, crossing to the coat closet. “Is this where you put my—”
I had the closet door open by that time. I stopped, reeled back. A tiny waft of Sphinx had hit me in the face. I gave her an involuntary and unwise glance of realization and started to cough.
I had blown it. I didn’t know whether the smell came from shoes, gloves, a scarf that had trailed in the cologne, but that odor was unlike anything else. And since Sphinx wasn’t yet on the market, she could only have picked it up in one place. The office, when she trashed it. She and—
She came up behind me, efficiently bent my arm back and clamped her hand over my mouth and called, medium-loud, “Armand!”
He emerged from the hall, handsome and square-jawed, a cleft in his chin, tousled brown hair: cousin Armand, whose photograph with Chantal’s wedding party was in the album now reposing in Kitty’s bag. That was the photo I wanted to show Perret, to see if Armand had been lurking near the r
ansom, and to Jane, who’d gotten a brief glimpse of a man picking up an envelope from Lucien near the Luxembourg fence.
“Why couldn’t you have stayed away, you fool?” Chantal whispered savagely in my ear.
Since her hand was over my mouth I couldn’t reply, and indeed I was asking myself the same question. It had seemed relatively easy. It had been relatively easy, until Sphinx felled me once again.
They didn’t talk. An exchange of glances was enough. They obviously had a contingency plan worked out. I hated to think of the implications for me.
I struggled as best I could, but they were an efficient team. They taped my wrists behind me, exactly as they’d done at the Bellefroide, and then gagged me with a large white handkerchief that must have been Armand’s, or maybe Pierre’s. By this time, Chantal was holding one of the black guns I remembered from the Bellefroide. They sat me at the dining table. Armand put on a jacket and a cloth cap and started for the door.
Chantal, watching me, said, “Wait.” Her face and neck were pink. She crossed the room to Armand and kissed him. It wasn’t a “Hurry back, dear,” peck, either. As I watched her press her hips against him I thought, She loves this. She wanted to get rid of her husband, but she stumbled across something that turns her on more than Armand or any man.
He finally disentangled himself and said, “Soon.” He went out and she returned to me. She slid into one of the other dining chairs and propped her elbow on the table, pointing the gun at me. She blotted her upper lip.
I sat still. I knew she’d shoot if I didn’t. I felt sure she was the one who’d pulled the trigger on both Pierre and Lucien. Especially Pierre, her husband. You refuse to look where the light falls, but persist in searching the shadows. Maybe it was just a lucky guess, maybe he really had a gift, but Bruno Blanc’s reading had given me the clue. I’d been looking, we’d all been looking, toward the mirror. We hadn’t stopped to consider the most simple possibility: that what had taken place at the Bellefroide was the premeditated murder of Pierre Legrand.
“I tried to be faithful to Pierre. I really did,” Chantal said.
I’ll just bet she had, but I wasn’t able to argue.
“Armand and I have loved each other since we were children,” she went on. “We’ve been lovers since we were, oh, ten or eleven. I’ve never loved anyone else.”
I gurgled, but she wasn’t interested in a response from me. “I thought Pierre would be good to me, but he was so harsh, so strict,” she said. “He was so— old. I loathed him.” She shivered, and I watched, cross-eyed, as the black hole at the end of the gun barrel moved rapidly back and forth.
“So I went back to Armand.” Her voice was insubstantial, a sigh. And she and Armand had plotted to kill Pierre. Chantal would inherit Pierre’s money, and all would be well in the Cour St. Jean.
“Pierre used to hurt me,” Chantal said. “He beat me, when I was bad.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, I was happy to kill him. I assure you I was.”
It was painful to think what hell her relationship with Pierre might have been. Maybe when she’d shot him, she’d found out for the first time what power meant. I tried to formulate an escape plan, but knowing that she was a cold-blooded killer with a gun in her hand was a deterrent to risk-taking. Maybe I’d have a better opportunity later.
She didn’t speak again. In about ten minutes I heard a car below, and footsteps on the stairs. Armand came in, looked at her, and said, “It’s downstairs.”
She stood and pulled me to my feet. She said, “Get her coat,” to Armand, and in a moment she was draping my camel coat, which now smelled ever so faintly of Sphinx, over my shoulders.
She put on a jacket and said, “I will remove your gag now, Madame Maxwell. We will go out to the car, the three of us together. If you scream, I will shoot you. Do you understand?”
I nodded, and Armand untied the handkerchief. I moved my aching jaw back and forth. I doubted that any pleading I might do would bring about a change of heart.
We left the apartment and descended the dusty staircase. Outside, a dark green car was parked in the courtyard. The sun was almost blinding. Our shadows glided over the cobblestones.
We were approaching the car. Armand was in front, Chantal close behind me, holding my arm. The door to the furniture-maker’s workroom stood ajar. It had been closed, hadn’t it, when I came in? I was almost positive it had.
We had just passed the workroom door when it burst open and banged against the wall. Two men carrying rifles rose from behind the car. A voice I recognized, in a conversational tone, said, “You will drop your weapons.”
The three of us turned. Standing in the furniture-maker’s doorway, his own gun drawn, the sun blazing down on his blond hair, stood Inspector Gilles Perret.
From the Medici Fountain
Dawn the next day was gray and windy, and in the Luxembourg Gardens yellow and bronze chrysanthemums swayed in stone urns. Dead leaves rode the ripples on the surface of the Medici Fountain. The fountain was cordoned off, and gendarmes stood on its perimeter, their capes fluttering. The few passers-by at this early hour seemed eager to get to other places. Kitty, Jack, Inspector Perret, and I stood near the rope, watching a young man in a wetsuit talking to one of the gendarmes.
The atmosphere was subdued, tense. Perret was passing the time while we waited by telling us, in a low voice, what he had learned since he showed up and saved me. Kitty had called him, so I now owed her my life, along with various other debts.
“Chantal has said nothing, but Armand”— Perret made a gesture of contempt— “He is so weak. The instant we separated them he began talking, blaming her for everything. He says it was her idea, that she did the shooting, that if he didn’t do as she asked he thought she would kill him, too.”
It was a sad end, I thought, to Chantal’s great love affair. “So killing Pierre was the purpose behind everything?” Jack said.
“Yes. The mirror was the excuse. Bruno Blanc had asked Pierre to steal it. Pierre refused, but he told Chantal the story, including the fact that it was Bruno who had asked him. Chantal recognized this as an opportunity.
“She found out from Pierre where the mirror was kept. When he told her that on a particular morning he had to be at work early because a visitor was coming, she thought that would be a perfect time. The museum would be open. Pierre would be there, but few others would. Chantal and Armand made their plans, with the result you know.”
I was watching the man in the wetsuit. He didn’t seem in a hurry to get into the frigid-looking water. Why did everything always take so long?
Kitty said, “But if they just wanted to kill Pierre, why all the business with the ransom?”
“Money,” Perret said. “They got rid of Pierre, which was the main purpose, but they also gained an artifact Bruno Blanc wanted badly enough to propose stealing it. They contacted Bruno, anonymously of course, and offered to sell it to him. They arranged for him to contact them by leaving messages at the Luxembourg fence. Bruno was desperate to have the mirror, but he had no money. He went to Lucien Claude to see if Lucien would help him, and he told Lucien everything. At that point, you, Madame Maxwell, entered with your offer of ransom from Madeleine Bellefroide.”
“And muddied the waters,” I said, looking at the waters of the fountain.
“Yes. Now two people wanted the mirror, but only one of them could pay for it. Bruno knew he couldn’t compete, but he also expected that the sellers didn’t care who got the mirror as long as they got the money. He asked them to tell him the details of the transfer, so he could seize the mirror himself. They agreed, thinking a diversion at that time was a good idea— which it did not prove to be.”
The man in the wetsuit was moving toward the steps at the pool’s far end. “What about Lucien Claude?” Jack said.
“Lucien wanted money, too. He thought he could get more if he found out whom he was dealing with and tried to blackmail them. He had Jane leave a message about the ransom by the fence in the Luxembourg. Then
he went there, waited until Armand picked it up, and followed him back to Chantal’s house. It was his misfortune that they spotted him and realized what he was doing. They called Lucien and told him to pick up the proof at the accustomed place, then waited for him and killed him. Meanwhile, the photo was already in the mail to you.”
Kitty said, “And the break-in at our office?”
“Chantal and Armand, enraged at losing the ransom.”
“Then what—” Kitty began, but at the same time a gendarme called, “Madame Maxwell!”
I ducked under the rope barrier and walked to him. “Can you show us exactly the place?” he said. He glanced at the man in the wetsuit, who was descending the steps. “She will show you!” he called.
I went to the spot, between two urns, where I’d dropped the mirror in, and said, “Right here.” If it was down there in the murk, there was no sign of it now.
The gendarme said, “Thank you. Stand back now, please.”
I moved away. The wet-suited man was wading now through thigh-deep water. He reached the place I’d indicated and began walking slowly from side to side, feeling around with his feet. I thought, What if it broke? Or could somebody have found it, fished it out? I said, “It would be close to the edge.” I could hear the anxiety in my voice.
He continued to move back and forth and then he said, “It’s here. I feel it.”
He sank into the water and felt around with his hands. A moment later, his head disappeared below the surface and then he came up sputtering. He shook his head vigorously, like a dog, and water drops flew. Then he brought his hands up. He was holding a round black object.
“Here it is!” one of the gendarmes shouted, and they crowded to the edge of the fountain to see. I wanted to run toward it myself, but I felt Perret’s restraining hand. “We will have it soon,” he murmured, and I remembered our bargain.
The atmosphere was like a party, with shouts of congratulations to the man in the wetsuit and, when he emerged, pats on the back, a blanket around his shoulders, and a drink of brandy. Then Perret left us to join the bureaucratic huddle at the fountain’s edge.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 21