The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries

by Michaela Thompson

  AVENUE GABRIEL

  Think of ghosts, and the image you conjure is the standard Halloween version: filmy, white, briefly glimpsed in a dark place, leaving the suggestion of a chilly breeze behind. Yet a ghost can be more subtle. A ghost can be felt but not seen, present but not acknowledged. It can exist in pauses and silences, inhabit a gesture or an expression, liquefy in a tear. So a ghost can pervade and control.

  There’s another kind of ghost, too, which is the kind I was.

  I didn’t want to be one. It was going sour already. I should never have accepted, but money is a potent argument. My friend, Kitty de Villiers-Marigny, tried to cheer me up.

  “It’s a free trip to Provence. How bad can it be?” she said.

  I slid down in my chair to rest on the base of my spine, a posture I used to assume at the age of six when Mama served okra for dinner. On the table in front of me now was a brioche at which I had, uncharacteristically, only nibbled, and an unfolded piece of paper with a few lines of typing on it. The paper was a letter I’d received yesterday from New York. “I wish I’d never gotten into it,” I said.

  All the windows to Kitty’s balcony— an entire wall of them— were open to Paris in May. Above the spreading green leaves and candle-like white blossoms of chestnuts in full flower I could see the frivolous-looking wrought iron roof of the Grand Palais. Muted traffic noise from the Champs-Elysées across the park drifted in and combined with the sound of a voice crooning Portuguese endearments in the kitchen.

  Kitty shook her abundant red hair in a gesture of dismissal. I thought she was more worried than she let on, but maybe it was projection. She was wearing a crinkly, elasticized mini-dress in shocking mauve, with a cluster of artificial cherries pinned to her bosom, and against all odds she looked smashing. Kitty dressed for success, but success at what remained a question. Next to her outfit, my cotton sweater and plaid traveling slacks looked like something from the previous century. “It’s probably sour grapes from a writer who lost out on the job,” she reassured me.

  The letter I’d gotten said, “A killer shouldn’t profit from her crime. If you help Vivien Howard, you’re a killer, too.” I hated anonymous communications. Especially when they hit a nerve.

  “The deal was written up in a couple of places. I guess it could’ve made somebody mad,” I said, whistling past the graveyard.

  “Sure it could. You got a plum!” Kitty’s enthusiasm was a shade too hectic.

  “There’s a law about criminals profiting from books about their crimes. The Son of Sam law,” Jack Arlen said. He poured himself more coffee and started on his third brioche. Nothing was spoiling his appetite.

  Leave it to Jack. Jack’s sleeves were rolled up, his tie loosened. There were a few gray bristles on his cheek where he’d missed a spot shaving, and his abundant salt-and-pepper hair could’ve used a serious trim. From looking at him, you’d never have guessed that within an hour he would be face-to-face with the president of France, albeit at a press conference.

  I rose to the bait. “Vivien Howard is not a criminal. She was never even indicted, much less tried, much less convicted. She had an alibi, the evidence was all circumstantial…” If I said it vehemently enough, maybe I’d convince myself.

  “Right, Georgia Lee. You’ll have to take that point of view if you’re going to write it her way.” He grinned wickedly and patted me on the arm. If he got me mad enough, maybe I’d quit being upset about the damn letter. “If you help Vivien Howard, you’re a killer, too.” Great.

  I pulled a bite from my brioche and dribbled honey on it. I was going to write it Vivien Howard’s way. That’s what I was being paid for, wasn’t it?

  The Portuguese crooning in the kitchen went up a delighted octave. My tortoiseshell cat Twinkie must have done something darling, like twitch the end of her tail.

  Kitty, Jack, and I had met for a good-bye breakfast at Kitty’s apartment on the Avenue Gabriel, an occasion that would have been more festive if my hate mail hadn’t cast a pall. In truth, I’d been shaky about the project even before, but my doubts had been overwhelmed by rampant greed. Vivien Howard was determined to work with me and nobody else. She’d stamped her foot until she got what she wanted. And the South of France was supposed to be beautiful this time of year.

  “You have last-minute jitters,” Kitty said.

  “Who wouldn’t?” said Jack. “Going down there to spend a month with a murderess.”

  I was too edgy for teasing. “Look, Jack. If you’ve got proof she did it, call the New York police. If you don’t, I suggest you shut your big fat—”

  “Whoa, Sweetheart! Relax.”

  I relaxed, or made an attempt to. Outside Kitty’s window, the chestnut leaves rippled slowly in a languorous breeze. Paris had never looked more beautiful. And here I was leaving for Provence, to spend a month with a— with a woman named Vivien Howard, preparing to ghostwrite Vivien Howard: My Story.

  Inarticulate murmurs of approval came from the kitchen. Twinkie had probably consented to nibble on some foie gras if Alba, Kitty’s housekeeper, fed it to her by hand. The empty cat carrier stood open in a pool of sunlight on Kitty’s Oriental rug. Twinkie would be at least as well off here as she was in the Montparnasse studio we shared. I wished I could stay here with Kitty and eat foie gras, and let Twinkie take the T.G.V. to Provence to be a ghostwriter.

  “Maybe she did kill him,” I said fretfully. “The creep who wrote the letter seems to think so.”

  Having undermined me, Jack now hastened to shore me up. “As far as the law goes, she’s clean as a whistle. Some chump is pissed off because she got a fancy book deal.”

  “Yeah.” A former anxiety, displaced since the letter arrived, resurfaced. “I don’t even know if I can work this way— I’ve never done it before.”

  “Look.” Jack leaned forward, “pep talk” written all over him. “You’ve got your recorder and tapes, right?”

  “Check.”

  “You’ve got your typewriter, paper, notebooks, and pencils.”

  “Yep.”

  “You’ve got a fat file of clippings, and you’ve read them all.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Last but not least, you’ve been paid a fair amount of dough up front.”

  “True.”

  “So what you do”—he hitched himself closer—“you turn on the tape recorder, ask her some questions, listen to what she has to say, and write it up.”

  Kitty snorted. “Inside tips from the grizzled veteran journalist.”

  In fact, all three of us were veteran journalists, although Jack, ten years or so older than I, was more grizzled. He was right, too. I, who had celebrated my mid-life crisis by quitting my job as society editor of a Florida newspaper to move to Paris and live in genteel poverty writing the “Paris Patter” column for Good Look magazine, and who had further managed to become notoriously involved in theft and murder within months of my arrival, should be able to handle a ghostwriting assignment. Not to mention a crummy letter telling me that if I did the job I was a killer.

  “At least they’re Americans. No language barrier,” I said, trying to buck myself up.

  “You’ll love Provence. It’s wonderful,” Kitty said. She’d been a high school cheerleader in Ames, Iowa, and still had the attitude.

  Twinkie emerged from the kitchen and sat next to her carrier, washing her face. Sunlight gleamed on her broad back and washed over the open glass shelves covering one wall, where a collection of pre-Columbian statues brooded. These had been assembled by Kitty’s estranged husband, the renegade aristocrat Luc de Villiers-Marigny, apparently on the basis of prominent sexual apparatus.

  Jack lit a cigarette, a nasty habit he had, and stretched luxuriously, freeing his shirttail. “So where is your Dark Lady hiding out exactly?” he asked.

  The sobriquet came from New York magazine, which had run as a cover a close-up of Vivien with the superimposed words “Carey Howard’s Dark Lady.” It seemed that Carey, Vivien’s violently deceased
husband, had wooed her with Shakespeare’s sonnets. Judging from the photo, the adjective could refer only to her black hair, since her face, far from swarthy, was very pale. She looked every day of her age, which, I had excellent reason to know, was forty-five. I knew her age, her birthday, the ages and birthdays of her son and daughter, and a lot of intimate details of her personal life that, under normal circumstances, would have been none of my business. I knew more about Vivien Howard, whom I’d never met, than I knew about Kitty, who was my office mate in a broom closet on the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, and best friend. What I didn’t know was what nobody (who was telling) knew: Did Vivien kill her husband?

  I answered Jack. “Where will we be? In the Vaucluse, near the foot of Mount Ventoux. Staying in a converted farmhouse outside a village called Beaulieu-la-Fontaine.”

  “Cozy. She owns a farmhouse in Provence?” As he spoke, Jack was glancing at his watch.

  “I gather she borrowed it.”

  “Who’ll be there?” Kitty licked honey from her fingers.

  “Vivien and the lover—”

  “The same lover? The artist?”

  “Same lover, Ross Santee. The daughter, Blanche—”

  Jack was getting to his feet, not listening. “Look at the time. I’m due at the Elysée at nine.”

  Since the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French president, was only a block from Kitty’s sumptuous digs, he’d be able to make it. He grabbed his jacket, gave me a hug, and kissed the top of my head. “Knock ’em dead. Don’t give them a chance to do it first,” he said, and then he was out the door.

  “Take care,” I said, too late for him to hear me. Jack’s goading, slightly sadistic teasing was typical of the cranky mood he was in these days. As Paris bureau chief of the Worldwide Wire Service, he was taking a lot of out-of-town assignments. Kitty and I knew his marriage was shaky, but he never talked about it. He hadn’t mentioned a girlfriend, but chances were he had one somewhere.

  “What time is your train?” Kitty asked.

  “A little after ten.” My bags and coat were by the door.

  “Another cup?”

  “Half.”

  She poured and said, “Twinkie and I will be fine. Don’t worry about us.”

  “I won’t.”

  The letter and envelope lay on the pink flowered tablecloth amid the white porcelain. She picked them up and looked them over again. The message was typed. The address was typed. “Mailed from New York,” she said.

  “Where all of them are from. Where the murder took place.”

  She folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and handed it to me. “If you want out because of this, go ahead and quit. Nobody would blame you.”

  “I’d have to pay the money back. The agreement says if the project falls apart because of me, I have to pay my part back. If she pulls out, I get to keep it.”

  “So pay it back. No amount of money is worth your peace of mind.”

  Her sentiment was laudable, but when the check arrived I had paid off several bills that had been making me go dry-mouthed every month. I had also had my Florida condo repainted and taken care of roof damage caused by a near-hurricane, two items my tenant, usually a sweetheart, had been screaming about. I had also allowed myself the luxury of a trip to the dentist. “Pay it back” was easy for Kitty to say.

  Besides, I’d rather have money and peace of mind both, but if I can’t, I’m willing to put up with a little distress in return for cash. “I guess I’ll go ahead,” I said.

  Kitty nodded. She’d known I would. “Do you want a guidebook to Provence?”

  “I’ve got one.”

  I’d read it, too. I knew I was going to one of the most picturesque parts of France. I knew about printed cotton fabric, and Cavaillon melons, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine, and garlic, and the bitter north wind called the mistral, and olive trees, and lavender fields. I knew about the medieval fortress at Les Baux, and the Pont du Gard, and the Roman amphitheater at Nimes, and van Gogh in Arles, and the bridge at Avignon. I knew about the troubadours and the Courts of Love. Spending time in Provence was a wonderful idea, but not necessarily under these circumstances.

  I drank the last of my coffee and stood up. Twinkie was dozing, paws curled under her chest. I scratched behind her ears. She wasn’t one for emotional partings.

  I stepped out on the balcony and saw, miraculously, the taxi I’d ordered slide to the curb below. I waved to the driver and turned back to Kitty. “He’s here.”

  “Listen. Write me. Or call. Or whatever,” she said.

  We hugged, I slipped on my coat and picked up my bags. Before I got in the cab I looked up. She was watching from the balcony. She waved. I waved. And then, like it or not, I was on my way.

  ON THE T.G.V.

  The big clock in the domed tower of the Gare de Lyon said I had plenty of time to make my 10:23 train, but trips panic me, and this one more than most. I strained forward in the back seat, using body language to urge the taxi through the traffic to the side of the station where passengers for the T.G.V., the Train à Grande Vitesse, were supposed to enter. When we pulled up I scrambled out before we’d completely stopped, flung money at the driver, and in seconds was bolting into the station, my shoulder bag and my typewriter, in its canvas carrying case, hanging off my shoulders, a damnably heavy suitcase in my hand, and my totally unnecessary coat dragging behind.

  I checked the board, discovered my train was leaving from Track C, and after a few arm-wrenching maneuvers and a short escalator ride, was on the platform searching for car seventeen. Naturally, it was at the far end of the sleek, bullet-nosed orange train. I dashed up to it, stowed my suitcase inside the door, shoved everything else up on the overhead rack, and collapsed in my assigned seat to stare moodily out the window for fifteen minutes while my fellow passengers strolled up in leisurely fashion and exchanged extended farewells with those they were leaving behind. I didn’t stop churning inside until, at exactly 10:23, we pulled out of the station.

  I began to breathe again. This was my first ride on the T.G.V., the high-tech wonder that would deposit me in Avignon in less than four hours. The die was cast. Around me people were unfolding newspapers, unwrapping bars of chocolate, snapping open briefcases, making the comforting arrangements that people make when settling in on a trip. The railway yards, bright in the sun, flowed past the window. “If you help Vivien Howard you’re a killer, too.”

  I had never wanted to be a ghostwriter. Some months before, unexpectedly, Loretta Walker had phoned me from New York. Loretta, a former colleague at the Bay City Sun, had ascended to become executive editor of Good Look magazine. In that post, she oversaw my “Paris Patter” column with a jaundiced eye. But this call wasn’t a request that I drop Parisian cookware and do Parisian Tex-Mex restaurants, or put together a column on the ten most chic unknown dressmakers in Paris and turn it in in three days. Instead, she told me an editor at a major publishing house had called her to ask if I ever did ghostwriting.

  I was surprised. “Ghostwriting? Me? Why?”

  “She said they like ‘Paris Patter.’ ” This opinion, Loretta’s tone implied, put the editor’s sanity in the “doubtful” column.

  “That’s nice. Is it a Paris book?”

  “I don’t know. I got the idea they’d heard about the other business, too.”

  “I see.” The “other business” to which Loretta referred was my entanglement with Nostradamus’s mirror and the murders that accompanied its theft from the Musée Bellefroide, a notorious incident that had taken place shortly after I moved to Paris. Although not all the publicity I got was negative, Loretta preferred to gloss over the episode. “And you have no idea who I’d be ghosting for? What kind of book it would be?”

  “She wouldn’t say, but my impression is it’s a hot topic. Shall I give you her number?”

  Naturally, I took the number. It would’ve been against my religion not to take the number.

  I thought the would-be author mig
ht be a show-business figure recounting struggles against drugs and booze, or some politician’s estranged wife eager to ruin him by telling all. My mind was so far from the criminal angle that when the editor, a woman called Brenda, said “Vivien Howard”, I didn’t immediately recognize the name.

  Then it dawned on me. “Didn’t she kill her husband a couple of years ago?” I blurted over the transatlantic wire.

  My question was followed by seconds of hissing, which proved the line was still open even though no response had been forthcoming. I had recognized my faux pas by the time Brenda said, carefully, “I grant you that’s what a lot of people thought at the time.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Vivien realizes that opinion is widespread. It’s one reason she wants to do this book. To tell her side.”

  “Of course. Naturally. I’m so sorry—”

  Surprisingly enough, we made it over that hurdle. Vivien really wanted me. She insisted on having me. She liked my writing. She planned to be in France. While we negotiated, a couple of letters were exchanged. Vivien felt the murder of her husband, Carey, was only one chapter in a saga about how the press could ruin a person’s life. The editor, Brenda, seemed to believe the role of the murder should be a bit more prominent. I figured it would all come out in the wash. I also figured I wouldn’t see an offer for this much money again soon. Only after the deal was struck did I get cold feet. After yesterday’s hate mail, my feet were frigid indeed.

  We were in the suburbs now, high-rise apartment buildings and older stone villas whipping past the window. The miniature poodle sitting beside me on his mistress’s lap closed his eyes and curled up for a nap. The T.G.V. has fold-down tables like those on an airplane. I folded mine down and got a manila envelope out of my roomy shoulder bag. I could go over the file once more before Avignon. I wondered for the zillionth time why Vivien Howard really wanted to write this book and why she’d insisted on having me write it with her. Maybe those answers, too, would come out in the wash.