by West, CJ
So I wanted a fling. That doesn’t mean I killed him.
The red marks on her wrists were still there, proving she’d been tied up. She could tell the gendarmes everything and they’d believe she was a victim. They’d search every winery within fifty kilometers and put Randy and his friend in jail. At least then, Henri could look down and see them punished, but his wife’s reputation and that of his family would be ruined.
Deirdre’s reputation in Piolenc wouldn’t matter much longer. Her only choice was to step aside and let Philippe take over the farm. If there was a scandal, it would envelop the Deudon family and the two men. Deirdre would be forever scorned, but the money would help her start over in New York where she’d be protected by a great ocean and a language barrier she’d never torn down.
She wondered if Randy would follow through on his threat. She decided he would. If it was up to him, she’d be in the ashes next to Henri. Randy was a madman and she wondered how she’d ever been attracted to him.
The telephone number for the gendarmes was sitting next the phone. She picked it up for the ninth time. She’d tell them as much of the truth as she could. She’d leave out the younger guy, the sex, and Henri. Other than that, the truth. The paper was damp and wrinkled, but the number was clear. She dialed and a young woman answered on the third ring.
“Bonjour la Gendarmerie Departmentale. Ligne enregistrée.”
“English please.” It was embarrassing that she hadn’t learned more French in seven years. Henri had learned English for her, and the language barrier made ignoring Henri’s parents easier when he wasn’t around to translate.
“Certainly madam. Do you have an emergency?”
“No. Well, I’m not sure.”
“How can I help you?”
“My husband is missing.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Last night around supper.”
“Ma’am, it’s seven o’clock. I’m sure he’s fine. Why don’t you—”
“You don’t understand. We have a farm, animals to feed. We’ve been married six years and he’s never been out all night.”
“Maybe he had too much wine. Phone us later if he doesn’t arrive.”
“Have you had any car wrecks overnight? Maybe he’s in a hospital.”
“No, nothing like that.”
The woman didn’t mention the fire. Better that she didn’t.
“His name is Henri Deudon. Isn’t there something you can do?”
“I speak to other officers, but I am sure he is fine. Relax for now. He will be home soon. Do not worry.”
“You will call if you learn anything?”
“Oui. Right away. You relax. Call tonight if he is not home.”
The phone settled on the cradle capping a solid performance. She hadn’t blundered yet. They had his name, so when they found him, they’d know she’d already called. She was surprised by her quick thinking. More questions would come and when they did, she’d be face to face with the officers. She’d have to convince them and the inlaws she was innocent and that would be difficult. She reminded herself that she was the victim. It was going to be ok. She’d leave the farm soon.
Henri’s killer was going to walk away, but she wouldn’t risk changing her story now. Lying to the dispatcher was like branding the words in her memory.
She wondered if the gendarmes would catch them on their own. If this was Paris, the Judicial Police might, but the gendarmes didn’t have a chance.
The inlaws would call in an hour or two when Henri didn’t stop by. “He’s missing,” she rehearsed. “He didn’t come home last night.”
They were going to be shocked.
Chapter Six
The volunteers were a rowdy bunch who enjoyed zooming around town, sirens blazing, whenever they were on official business. Knowing this, Lieutenant Laroche parked twenty meters beyond their vehicles at the end of the drive. He didn’t want any more crime-scene dents. Laroche left his car, clipboard in hand, and walked quickly for a man of fifty-two, a hat covering his bald crown. With his long strides and trim figure, he could easily be mistaken for a man in his forties.
He stopped where the driveway met the road and squatted over a set of tire tracks burned onto the pavement. A wide circle of melted rubber surrounded one squiggly track that headed west. The tire marks seemed fresh, but Laroche couldn’t believe an arsonist would be so crass. He told himself the tracks had been there for days, but he’d have Rowley test their composition nonetheless.
He walked up the long gravel drive, past overgrown clumps of shrubs fighting each other for sunlight. The few original plantings that remained had spread far beyond their plots. Some were fifteen feet tall and nearly as wide; none had been pruned in years. In contrast to their vigor, the shrubs around the foundation were charred and leafless. The wide, straight trunk of a lone pine tree stood five meters high beside the house. The upper half of the tree was gone and Laroche assumed it had fallen onto the roof and been consumed by the fire. A dozen similar-sized trees lay horizontal, in an unruly clump beyond the scorched area. Laroche nodded his approval to himself as he walked. The volunteers had kept the flames from jumping up into the branches and riding the wind across the valley floor.
Laroche could see the men resting now, huddled at the back of an engine having a smoke and undoubtedly sharing stories about the blaze. After being called out of bed in the middle of the night, these same men would be back to work tending shops, fixing cars, and laboring on farms by midday. Their flat, yellow hoses were strewn all around them and Laroche wondered how quickly they had run out of water to fight the flames. There were no hydrants out this far and no lake to draw from. They could have called in more engines and shuttled back and forth to a water source, but that hadn’t happened. The fire had won.
Laroche tried to remember what the house had looked like. He’d passed it a thousand times, but the view from the road had been obscured by trees for the last several years. He couldn’t remember being called here or who the last occupant was; strange for Laroche, who had a story about nearly every home he visited. Looking at the rubble, he thought this might be the last story for this house.
Plastic water bottles littered the site in surprising numbers. The ground around the house had been turned to mud by spraying water and trampling boots. The walls were just eight feet high at their highest point. The roof and the second floor, if there had been one, were completely gone.
Rowley, in his knee-high, yellow boots, stood precariously balanced in the middle of the building as if walking a high-wire. He tossed a few roof shingles and broke away brittle timbers from a part of the structure that had been somewhere overhead. His balance faltered and he stepped back, his foot plunging through the burned-out floor boards. He teetered there a moment, dropping the timber in his hands and waving his arms to center his weight. With the floor broken away, Laroche could see he was balancing on the last solid part of the floor, the center support beam.
“Prudent. J'ai besoin de votre rapport,” Laroche called to him.
“Laroche très Humanitaire.”
“Que quoi parti?”
“Tout a fondu. C'était très chaud ici hier soir.”
Rowley went back to work tossing debris in either direction and studying something in the rubble. Whatever it was, it was too charred to make out from where Laroche stood. Curiosity wasn’t going to draw him into the wreckage. He’d worked twenty-three years with Rowley and trusted him to uncover anything in the rubble worth finding. He’d also learned that fifty-year-old men can easily break a leg in a building like this one.
Laroche made a wide circle around the structure and studied devastation unlike anything he’d seen in thirty years as a gendarme. Most fires burned a side of a building or maybe a floor and left a blackened shell standing. There was almost nothing left of this one. One section of wall had collapsed out on the grass, but most of the building had fallen in on itself and been reduced to ash.
Something clinked
under his feet. Looking down, he saw tiny fragments of glass scattered on the ground. Scanning in a wider arc, he saw larger shards shimmering ten and even twenty meters from the remains. The windows had exploded outward. An explosion smacked of arson, as did the scant remains of the building.
He was at once excited and dejected. Laroche yearned to lead an investigation, to outwit criminals in the interrogation room and uncover the motives and evidence that would put them away. He lamented that he’d never been accepted to Special Investigations, but left to rot out here in the countryside. The evidence hinted at arson or murder. If the captain concurred, the Judicial Police would snatch the case away. Laroche would be reduced to running errands for younger officers who hadn’t lived long enough to see what he’d seen. Rowley had been more fortunate. His talents centered him in every fire investigation in the district.
Laroche kicked the fragments aside and lowered his head, listening to the men in the driveway. They talked about the flames and the heat. They didn’t talk of suspicions and causes, they talked of the struggle. They had battled mightily against a virulent opponent that only abated when it ran out of fuel. All their sweat and water saved the garage and barn, but only because they were sufficiently detached. They had lost the house, but they consoled themselves that the gap they cut in the trees had saved the surrounding forest.
Laroche agreed. He continued to circle the remains, wondering.
As he stepped back on the driveway, a tan sedan caught his attention. It was outside the garage and in front of the fire engines. It had been there overnight, not an official car, but an odd place for an owner to park. It was set back a few meters from the garage and the house, farther than someone would choose to walk, like another car had been parked beside it. So many feet had tramped through the space, it would be impossible to prove there was another car, but it seemed to fit with the tire marks out on the street. Laroche wondered about the driver of the sedan. He scanned the emergency vehicles for a blanket-wrapped victim, but found none.
Rowley pulled himself out of the rubble, took off his long black coat, and hopped up on the trunk. This was the hottest fire Rowley had ever seen, the cause would be nearly impossible to determine. The news buoyed Laroche.
Someone had been on the second floor when the fire started. Sometime later, a mattress had fallen and covered the head and shoulders, which were all that remained of the body. Rowley could only speculate that it had been a man based on the size of the skull. The cause of death would be impossible to determine. The intense heat had melted his belt buckle into a brass blob. The pelvic bones and even the femur were ash. There was a puddle of green glass beside the body, possibly three or four wine bottles melted together. Rowley supposed he could have been drinking, fallen asleep, and gotten overwhelmed by the smoke.
They wondered aloud whether he’d been living here or if he’d used the house for a rendezvous of some sort. Laroche shared his thoughts about the position of the sedan with Rowley. The idea intrigued him and he agreed to test the tire marks. Neither of them had ever known a woman to spin her tires long enough to leave that much rubber. If the tracks were made the night before, the victim’s guest was another man, probably young with a flashy car. Laroche imagined himself finding and arresting this man for arson and murder.
First, he’d have to learn what they were doing here and what caused the fire. Rowley joked that the men were gay, hiding away from their wives. They were hiding something. Whatever it was, the house wasn’t going to provide many clues.
The house wasn’t providing many clues to the cause of the fire either.
Some part of Laroche was glad. The glass on the lawn suggested an explosion, but without evidence of arson, it was a routine fire investigation, clearly Laroche’s jurisdiction. He suppressed a smile as he listened to Rowley bemoan his futile search for accelerants. It was as if the whole house caught fire at once, something Rowley had never seen except in a chemical explosion. Since there was no clear starting point, and since so much of the material had burned, Rowley doubted he would ever know what caused the fire.
Laroche finished his notes and walked back to the barn to give himself a private moment to consider what he was about to do. It wasn’t exactly suppressing evidence. Rowley had no evidence. It was his insight that led him to suspect arson. The captain had never supported Laroche’s hunches before, so he felt himself entitled to keep his thoughts about this case to himself.
Laroche stepped through the barn door, mouth agape. The entire rear wall was gone, replaced by a huge green canvas. The barn had been turned into a private hangar with an odd-looking Cessna facing the canvas exit. The plane was covered with black and green blotches on top and blue and grey underneath, making it virtually invisible when it was airborne. The identification numbers on the tail and wings had been painted over. Laroche looked over his shoulder to see if anyone had followed him in.
The airplane was the evidence of foul-play he knew he’d find if he dug deep enough. Painted the way it was, these men were running drugs or smuggling something. Now the situation demanded a Judicial Police investigation, but Laroche wasn’t ready to give this case up yet. Rowley hadn’t mentioned the plane and the captain wasn’t much for crime scenes anymore. This was the opportunity Laroche had hoped for. Breaking a smuggling ring would make Laroche’s career.
He nearly tripped over a full can of gas as he walked around the plane.
Now he was confused.
A moment earlier he had been convinced the fire was set, but the full gas can made no sense. Gasoline was the universal accelerant. From the moment he had stepped on the fragments of glass, he’d expected to discover the house had been splashed with ten or twenty gallons, the explosion caused when the flames reached a puddle. But no arsonist would refill the can before lighting the fire. He’d toss it into the flames and run. Laroche was sure the fire had started some other way, but he couldn’t imagine how.
Standing in the doorway he made his decision. Excited at what he would discover over the next few weeks, he wondered if the poor guy inside was handling some sort of volatile chemicals and got careless. Easing outside, he checked the yard to be sure no one saw him leave the barn.
Back at the house, Laroche worried he was risking his reputation on nothing more than a carelessly discarded cigarette. Still, the thought of involving the Judicial Police made him cringe. His report would be bland and routine. He’d raise no suspicion until he knew what the men had been doing. Even then, he might continue on his own if he could keep his work from the captain.
He started with the car.
Its owner had known machines. No one else could afford to maintain such an ancient vehicle. The carpets were grimy and threadbare after almost two decades of use. The vinyl seats were cracked and duct-taped back together in dozens of places. Laroche doubted that any of the gauges in this contraption worked. He opened the glove box and found papers that identified the owner as Henri Deudon, a farmer Laroche had heard of but never met.
He’d make a few calls to find Mr. Deudon’s dentist and he’d visit the widow by midday. With the house burned, Deudon’s partner might never come back. The widow could be his only hope.
Chapter Seven
Charlie ignored his father’s snicker at Randy and took his usual seat halfway between his parents. Charles and Elizabeth always faced each other from opposite ends of the long, mahogany table even though it sat twelve comfortably and the arrangement made passing awkward. The artificial formality grated on Charlie. He remembered meals in Westport at a modest table that barely fit the essentials. Now it seemed his parents couldn’t eat without Rosalie as a go-between.
Charlie was embarrassed to watch his father overreach for an image appropriate to his new station in life. He donned thousand-dollar suits and carefully-knotted four-hundred-dollar ties, but at his core, he was a commoner. His blunt retorts sent several tasting patrons steaming for the exits and his heavy handedness with employees alienated Charlie from the rest of the staff b
ecause he was a Marston.
Elizabeth, in contrast, adapted to their new circumstances as if she’d been born an aristocrat. She spoke the gentle tones of a kindergarten teacher and chose her words with the finesse of a skilled politician. She exuded elegance from her long thin features and her warm disposition was the perfect balm to soothe the tempers Charles aroused. Her ability to salvage the relationships Charles jeopardized accounted for more of their success than Charles would dare to admit.
Randy bounced around behind her, waving his arms and bobbing his head more than enough to draw everyone’s attention. Something about the Marstons’ wealth annoyed Randy and he went to great lengths to irritate Charles in return. He referred to the empty chairs around Charles as “ego space.” It didn’t matter that Charles had started a family winery from nothing and turned it into a multimillion-dollar business. The one time Charlie tried to explain, Randy exploded into a four-minute tirade about thieving capitalists. When he had finished, Charlie was convinced Randy was the antithesis of his father. He’d never sustain the hard work and commitment it took to succeed.
The clomp of Randy’s boots echoed on the marble with a defiant rhythm. His black jeans and the green-winged monster on his Metallica T-shirt clashed hideously with a backdrop of original landscapes and two hundred year old furnishings. But his clothes weren’t nearly as offensive as the long scraggly hair and thick whiskers that covered him from his cheeks down below his Adam’s apple.
Charles stiffened as Randy sat. He had railed against Randy’s dress and his conduct several times, but Randy seemed to be the one thing at the chateau Charles couldn’t control. He pretended to ignore Randy unless they were trading insults, but the sight of him made his teeth clench and the muscles in his shoulders tighten.
Charlie wondered what Randy would look like with a respectable haircut. A decent young kid maybe. Clean-shaven and shadeless, he might pass for a banker. But he never took off the shades and somehow he always had at least three days of stubble, but never a beard.