Véronique grew somber. “Actually, he wrote a beautiful tribute to her. And at the end bid her adieu.” She got up and poured another glass of champagne for herself and took a glass from the cabinet for Olivier.
She is behaving as though she lives here, Olivier thought.
“Olivier, murder isn’t that real to most of us. When I was in Africa I heard of genocide happening there, but we live in a paradise and it seems unreal. I am sensitive to what you’re going through, but it’s as foreign as those deaths on another continent.”
His head was throbbing and he put down the glass of champagne. “I’m going to finish unloading some papers from my car. I warn you, I have a great deal of work to do. It won’t wait.”
“I can tell you have one of those headaches. I could help you get rid of it?” She glanced toward the stairs and a crosscurrent of thoughts left him speechless again. One was that he couldn’t have Max and Véronique meeting here this evening. He decided he would cancel Max tonight, and after dinner would come clean with Véronique and tell her the truth.
He had a few hours to determine what the truth was. It was one thing to have had a night with someone, and quite another to think he had initiated a new relationship, a relationship that would never work because they lived and worked on different continents. He anticipated from Véronique a full-blown tantrum, and a threat to return to drugs, but so be it.
“We need to talk, Véronique.”
“Can we talk over dinner? I’m dying to try that place in Saint-Epernay, C-Commune.”
Perfect. He might even get drunk. “Okay. I need to work and then we’ll go out. A couple of detectives might be coming by to go over some papers.”
“I saw the photo of the blond who took down Hans Keller. She’s way too sexy to be a cop.”
He turned and walked out to the car and picked up a set of folders and took them into the garden where he could think. If what Véronique had said about the blog was true, it explained how Geneviève and Hans Keller knew each other before the murder. They had the same grandfather. It was hard to wrap his head around that. He knew he was engaging in speculation, but he couldn’t help but think that perhaps it was Geneviève who brought Keller into the rarified atmosphere of the French administration. It could also explain why Hans latched onto Marc so quickly. Geneviève must have fed Ted the information that he put on his blog. She was in the business of reinventing herself, and perhaps this was her new method. She was already becoming a sympathetic character to Ted’s readers, and it would be easy to enter the fracas of the murder as a tragédienne. It was no secret to many that she coveted a significant role at de Saint-Pern.
Olivier wished that Max was here, sitting across from him and discussing what he was thinking. He couldn’t put her off another second. He dialed the Marceau house and couldn’t help but smile when she said hello. “I hear the interview went well.”
“I think so. Delphine and Hans definitely hooked up, as we say. I can tell you all about it when I come over. The Marceaus invited Ted to dinner, so it will be after that.”
“Max, I have to cancel tonight. I have an unexpected visitor…an old friend…”
The silence lasted too long. He wondered how she knew. “I see.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow.” He went inside. Véronique was watching a film. She waved and turned back to her story. He dialed Abdel’s number and when he answered, said, “I’ve had a change of plans…I have an unexpected visitor…”
“I’m almost there,” Abdel said.
This time Olivier hesitated, unsure if he wanted to expose his duplicity to the upright Arab whose opinion he valued. But what excuse would he give for cancelling? “In that case, come ahead. Véronique is here. We can spend some time working on the case and then I will take her to dinner.”
Abdel didn’t say anything, even if he thought it. Olivier poured another glass of champagne and observed Véronique from across the room. He studied her thin, child-like arm that rested on the top of the sofa, and her hair that was a raging mess, which on her looked quite divine. With no make-up, her face was almost plain, and far more beautiful than when she was peering out from magazines with so much makeup he could hardly recognize her. She had told him that he was the only honest man she’d ever met, and that troubled him now.
Abdel came to the door and Olivier met him in the driveway before he could be distracted by a conversation with Véronique. “The papers are in the car. I’ve already taken a box to the garden and we can work there,” he said. “Let’s go through these quickly if possible. They’re mostly old documents from Charles de Saint-Pern, which I think are quite irrelevant to the current business and the murder. Then we can move into more recent documents.” They began the process, with only the sound of birds flying around, settling into their nests before dark, as accompaniment.
They had been at it for at least an hour when Abdel called out, “Monsieur! Here’s a paper dated almost thirty-one years ago. A document signed by a Tristan de Saint-Pern.”
“Charles’ father. Let me see.” He opened the page wider and scanned it quickly. A woman named Louise Abel was a signatory. How odd. He went back to the top. Tristan de Saint-Pern was giving Louise Abel the sum of five hundred thousand francs. The document went on to list conditions: she must move out of Champagne forever, she agrees to release Charles de Saint-Pern from all paternal duty of the child, and agrees to not list him as the father on the birth certificate, and she must forfeit all rights to any part of the de Saint-Pern Company. The terms continued on to the next page. Olivier sat, stunned. He wondered if Léa had ever gone into these files. Did she know that her husband had a child somewhere?
Just then he saw Véronique ambling toward them, ravishing in tight jeans, stilettos and a red silk top, smoking a cigarette and smiling. She tossed her hair back and put her hand out to Abdel, who stood quickly to shake it. “I remember you,” she crooned to him and Abdel returned her greeting, and her smile.
“It’s nine o’clock, Olivier,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
“The hour of entre chien et loup,” he said. Between the dog and the wolf. When Abdel and Véronique gave him inquisitive glances he explained that it was the hour when dark descended, a melancholy time for many. He thought he was describing himself in the moment. “We’ll wrap up here in five minutes,” he said to Véronique, and took his vibrating cell phone out of his pocket and answered.
“It’s Legrand.”
“Ah, monsieur. You have news?”
“I’m ruling Antoine Marceaus’ death a homicide. The indentations and bruises from a blunt object helped a great deal in making my decision. It seems pretty clear to me that he entered the river drunk and each time he tried to return to shore he was pushed back with the handle of the blunt object. Rather brilliant detecting on your assistant’s part.”
“Thank you for allowing us to observe.”
“It was a good partnership. I’d like to propose that we work together more often.”
“Let’s have a meeting. I’ll make sure this request goes to le ministère. Merci.”
He told Abdel that Antoine’s death was a homicide, then poured out the story on Ted Clay’s blog that Véronique had told him about. They looked again at the document signed by Tristan de Saint-Pern and Louise Abel to see if there was any connection forming.
“I can find the blog in an instant on my laptop,” Abdel said. “But we’ll have to go inside.”
“Did anything jump out at the interview with Delphine Lecroix other than her dalliance with Monsieur Keller?”
Abdel said that nothing seemed too odd, except that Monsieur Durand had a plastic bag with him when he went to his mother’s room, and that Detective Maguire had been very thoughtful about that on the ride home. Olivier smiled, imagining her creating an entire scenario, as though she were writing a screenplay.
“
Anything else?”
“I think she’ll be surprised to learn that you have company.”
“Véronique will be leaving in the morning and I’ve already told Max that I had an unexpected guest arrive. It really shouldn’t be any great concern.”
“At the risk of jumping in where I do not belong, I hope you do the right thing where Detective Maguire is concerned.”
Olivier was already entering the house, and was embarrassed when Véronique bounced over and bestowed a playful kiss on his cheek in front of Abdel. As he turned away from her he said to Abdel, “Let’s meet at eight tomorrow.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Max had excused herself when Olivier called and quietly gone to her room and closed the door before a maelstrom of thoughts threatened to overtake her. She scrawled her raw emotions in her journal, filling it with expletives, then adding, Véronique is there with him at this very moment, dancing around the kitchen, rolling around in the sheets with him, drinking champagne.
The room couldn’t contain her. She stepped into her sneakers and ran down the stairs; pausing for a moment, she decided to run to the river, and took off at a slow trot. The trees became a blur, and she ran faster along the trail that went through the forest, until she couldn’t feel her body. The endorphins had kicked in as she arrived at the river, and she stopped, panting. A blue heron flew up, startling her. She didn’t know she was crying until the panting had become loud gasps. The emotions that had engulfed her were surprising. She had had flings before and had moved on without emotion when they ended.
It took some time, she had no idea how long, before the gentle flow of the river lulled her into a state of quiet. The bliss she had experienced with Olivier the night before was self-contained, already a memory. It had nothing to do with commitment, or with the future in any way. She understood that when her mother had met Hank they had fallen in love, and she was the result of that union. Her mother had given up her inheritance and her family in order to be with a man who had little understanding of her culture, and could only offer her an unconditional love.
Max realized that she quite possibly had fallen in love with Olivier, though her girlfriends would laugh at her if they heard her speak that way. Even if he felt the same way, she had to be practical about the fact that they lived on two separate continents. Hank had guided her through the labyrinthine trails of detective work, but Juliette was her heart’s guide, and she knew what she would say: the moments they had shared was all there was, and it had to be enough. And on a more practical level, she would remind her daughter that Olivier had a girlfriend when Max arrived on the scene, and that that was part of the equation, even as they felt the intense attraction to each other.
Hank would tell her to put all of her energy into the investigation. She thought back to when Ted had arrived earlier in the evening and showed her his most recent blog entries. He confessed to her that the mystery woman he referenced was indeed Marc’s mother. Geneviève Durand had to have some underlying purpose in revealing all of this to Ted, and having it publicized. Max was nervous for Ted, knowing that Geneviève could be leading him into a trap. What was she after? If she could prove her lineage, would she expect some sort of compensation from Hans’ family?
“Max?” Chloé came and sat beside her. “I saw you run out the door, and figured you’d headed this way. Ça va? Are you okay?”
“I am now. Olivier doesn’t know that I know, but Véronique is with him. He called and canceled our plans to meet tonight…”
“Merde alors! If you want to run away I’ll go with you. Marc and Hans aren’t speaking because Hans accused Marc of taking his money. Marc is mad about the information Ted has put on his blog about the ‘mysterious woman’ who everyone thinks is Marc’s mom. And my mother just accused me of taking the dress that she plans to wear to Antoine’s service, forgetting that I’m quite a bit smaller. And if we don’t make it in time for dinner I anticipate a catastrophe!”
Max jumped up. “Let’s go. I needed to sort out my feelings. But I need to focus on the investigation.”
“Later tonight we’ll go to c-Commune, a great little champagne bar in Epernay. Marc will join us.”
“I’m not opposed to drowning my sorrows in champagne.”
Jacques and Marie-Christine could not have been more gracious, Max thought, as the five of them gathered around the table. Max had noticed that tension rarely showed up at the table here, other than the night when Geneviève and Ted arrived late. Mimi had made roast pork which was served with a chilled pinot noir, the red grapes used to create champagne.
Jacques opened a bottle of the Marceau’s Hortense when Mimi brought in the requisite plate of cheeses. Ted explained to Marie-Christine and Jacques that his blog was receiving a lot of attention lately because of the story about Hans Keller and his family. There’s another story, he told them, that I uncovered about a woman who had an affair with Hans’ grandfather. Marie-Christine was fascinated and wanted to know more, but Ted said that they would have to go to his blog site and read about it. It was much too long a story to tell over dinner.
“You will also see from reading my blogs that your Hortense is my favorite champagne,” he added. Max had willed herself not to allow her thoughts to go to Olivier, though she wanted desperately to share with him what was going on with Ted’s blog. Abdel was a computer whiz, though, and would fill him in on the details.
Ted’s role in Léa’s life wasn’t mentioned at the table, nor was either family death, or even Ted’s brief time spent in jail. These were topics that were subconsciously banned from civil discourse. Max had no intention of bringing up her attendance at Antoine’s autopsy, nor did she mention the visit to see Delphine, and she certainly had no desire to bring up Olivier’s name.
Max thought Ted and Chloé were amusing as they discussed various places they liked in Paris and the latest films. Marie-Christine turned to Chloé during a lull in conversation and said, “Chérie, that dress I was asking you about was in your room. Thrown into the corner.”
“Maman! This is absurd. Your dress is much too big for me.” She lowered her voice, “Mimi may have made a mistake and put it there when she was organizing clothes for the cleaners. She is getting older, you know.” Marie-Christine pursed her lips, but seemed to accept the explanation.
Chloé rushed off to call Marc, and Jacques lifted a glass to Max and said, “It means a lot to us to have you here. I don’t know how to appraise your detective work because you share nothing with us, but you are a good support for our daughter.”
Jacques said to Ted, “Why don’t we adjourn to the billiard room and I’ll challenge you to a game before you leave?”
They all followed Jacques into the vast room upstairs that not only contained a billiard table but a reading area. A table was set up with a large, uncompleted puzzle on it. Marie-Christine came also, which was a surprise, and sat with Max on the sofa. On the table in front of them was a stack of photograph albums.
“May I look?” Max asked.
“Of course.”
Max smiled at seeing pictures of Chloé as a child, and exclaimed over one of Léa as she remembered her. A gorgeous woman admired by all. Recent articles and photographs of Léa had been chunked into one of the albums. “I haven’t had time to sort them out,” Marie-Christine said. Max glanced at the recent article that in its headline referred to Léa as “the grape goddess” and wondered if the vast public would ever get enough of scandals of the wealthy and famous.
She stopped at seeing a photograph of Charles in front of his plane. There were photos of him with dignitaries, at a wine tasting in Bordeaux and one of him labeled “Le Petit Prince,” the same one that hung in Marc’s room, and probably in hundreds of other little boys’ rooms. Max was about to close the album when a photograph of Charles surrounded by a crowd caught her eye. “He seems quite special,” she said to Marie-Christine, w
ho leaned over to examine the picture.
“Special in our language doesn’t imply something good,” Marie-Christine said. “In fact, it is the opposite.”
“He was magnifique, then?”
She laughed. “We would say simply pas mal. Not bad.”
Max studied the woman in the photograph gazing up at him. “Did he know Geneviève Durand?”
“No, no. Certainly not. Let me see.” Marie-Christine slid the album onto her lap. “These are old photographs that were Charles’ before he ever married Léa.” Mimi entered with coffee on a tray and set it down. “Mimi, come look at this photograph.” Then to Max, “Half of Paris was at that event where ten people received awards from the administration for their contributions to France. Oh, there’s Charles’ father, Tristan, in the background. I recognize him.”
“He was a baron?”
“Yes, and really of the old school. Tradition above everything else. He adored Léa, thank God. He had a heart attack two years ago and that was when Léa really had to start running the company, though she was doing most of the work before that.”
Mimi had been studying the photograph. “The woman is Louise Abel.” Ted and Jacques had put down their cue sticks to listen to Mimi. “I used to go to Aube to see my sister Josette and I remember the family. This photo is of Louise.”
“She bears a strange resemblance to Marc’s mother, it’s true,” Marie-Christine said.
“It was the photo that shows her profile that caught my eye,” said Max.
“Louise was from a very bad family,” Mimi said, pulling the album closer to her. “One of the worst. Her sister was murdered and everybody thought her father killed her but they couldn’t prove anything. This one, Louise, had a lot of boyfriends according to Josette, who was a little obsessed with the family after the murder. Then Louise got lucky. The de Saint-Pern boy, Charles, became attached to her.” She looked up from the album, “I’m talking about a long time ago, thirty years ago. Louise was slightly older than Charles. Of course he was very sheltered and probably had never had a date. They were still kids.”
Champagne: The Farewell Page 24