Murder on the Ile Sordou

by M. L. Longworth

  Verlaque looked down at the passorts but remained silent, not questioning Marine’s hunch but thinking of his parents: if he called them every other month it was progress. “During tonight’s party,” he asked, his voice suddenly raised with excitement, “were you within earshot when Clément was getting people together to play cards?”

  “I was at the bar,” Marine said, “chatting with Marie-Thérèse and Serge. Serge gave us a crash course on making the perfect martini.” She rubbed her head. “The first one was a good idea . . .”

  Verlaque flipped through the passports until he got to the one he was looking for. “Voilà,” he said, opening it. He looked at the photo, and date of birth, and pointed to the person’s name.

  Marine said, “So what? Lots of people go by their second name.”

  Verlaque continued pointing to it. He told her about their conversation during the party.

  “Oh my,” Marine said. “You don’t think?”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Swimming

  Antoine Verlaque left Marine in the Jacky Bar, where Émile and Marie-Thérèse had made coffee for everyone. Verlaque assured Marine that Bruno Paulik was on his way; Paulik and another officer from Aix had spent the night at a hotel in Marseille, because of the storm, and he had called Sordou at 8:30 a.m., confirming what Verlaque and Marine had guessed. Verlaque ordered the staff and guests to stay in the bar until he returned. Marine tried to argue but he assured her that there was no danger, believing it himself. Alain Denis had died for a specific reason—“you have to let them go”—and there would be no more deaths. And swimming would have something to do with it, of that Verlaque was almost certain.

  “What do I say about the two people who are absent?” Marine asked looking around. “And you?” Marine asked.

  “You’ll think of something,” Verlaque said, gently brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. “Thank you for thinking to call your father this morning,” he said. “You were one step ahead of me.”

  “No, we were side by side,” Marine said.

  “Like Sartre and Beauvoir.”

  Verlaque walked out of the hotel and stood at the top of the steps, looking out at the sea. He could see the police boat speeding toward the mouth of the harbor. Bruno would be on board, grasping at the railing trying not to get sick. Verlaque smiled—although he knew he was being mean-spirited—and he turned right and began walking along the path that led to the cove. They would be there, waiting for him.

  As he began the walk down the steep hill he could hear the boat come into the harbor and its engine turn off. Small white stones popped out from under his feet and about halfway down he almost slipped, swearing under his breath. He didn’t know why he was rushing; only a knot in his stomach told him to hurry. He got to the stony beach and saw a figure sitting on the flat rocks to the west. Verlaque crossed the beach and hopped up on the first, lowest rock making his way over a succession of rocks until he got there. From the back he couldn’t tell who it was, and then the man turned around and said hello. Verlaque stood beside Bill Hobbs and looked down. A neat pile of clothes was folded on the next rock over, topped with a black Moleskine and the Frank O’Hara book of poems. Verlaque fell to his knees. “How long has he been out there?” he asked.

  “Long enough,” Bill Hobbs replied in accented but very good French.

  “Poor Eric,” Verlaque said. “I was worried he might do this. He was a cancer patient of Marine’s father, at the hospital in Aix. Dr. Bonnet told Marine this morning that he told Eric that he didn’t have long to live; perhaps weeks, or months.” Verlaque noted that he referred to the poet by his first name, as if they had been friends.

  “He’s at peace now,” Hobbs said. “I didn’t know he was ill.”

  “Late last night,” Verlaque said. “I took a good look at your passport and thought you were the murderer.”

  “No.”

  “But you’re a part of the story,” Verlaque suggested. “Your wife, does she—?” Verlaque said, shielding his eyes from the sun so that he could look at Bill Hobbs.

  “Know I’m half French? No,” he answered. “When we met, I never spoke of my childhood,” he said. “It was partly because of my mother’s terrible death, which I told Shirley happened in the Pacific off of the coast of Seattle.”

  “But it was at Sordou,” Verlaque said. “With Élodie, the love of Eric’s life.” Verlaque remembered Eric Monnier, on the boat ride over, mentioning a woman that Marine reminded him of. But he hadn’t said her name. And had he known that Verlaque was an examining magistrate, he probably wouldn’t have even mentioned her.

  “Yes,” Bill quietly said. “Élodie too.”

  “Was it Alain Denis’s fault?” Verlaque asked.

  “Mostly,” Hobbs said, his voice quivering. “We were diving in those days.”

  “You all knew each other?”

  “Yes, our families all had cabins on Frioul,” Hobbs replied. “My mother grew up in Marseille. She met my father, who was an American soldier, during the liberation of Marseille in 1944; he took her back to the U.S., but we came back here every other summer.”

  Verlaque stayed silent, not wanting to stop Hobbs’s story. He reached out and touched the book of poems.

  “Alain would come over to the islands with buddies from the swim club,” Hobbs went on. “We were diving, as I said, without equipment. . . . None of us had enough money for masks, and Alain was such a good swimmer he didn’t need one.”

  “What were you diving for?” Verlaque asked.

  “Amphoras.”

  “Greek?”

  “Mostly,” Hobbs answered. “The Greek ones got us the most money at any rate; and the Etruscans’. There was some sleazy Armenian guy up near the Cours Julien who would give us a bit of cash for them and then send them on their way around the world. A bit of cash. That’s what we were doing it for; teenage thrills, and a bit of cash.”

  Verlaque looked down at his shoes.

  Hobbs said, “Alain had discovered a bunch of amphoras here, just on this side of Sordou. We’d go out a few times a week, whenever we could get an older cousin or someone to bring a boat out. We had to be careful. But one time my mother and Élodie decided they wanted to come; they thought we were just swimming over here, you see.”

  “Your French is good after all these years,” Verlaque said.

  Hobbs laughed a bit. “It’s tiring to speak it,” he said in English. “You caught me understanding the French, didn’t you?”

  “More than once,” Verlaque said. “But it bothered me that you knew the word for ‘whip.’ And yesterday one of our policemen found a record of the accident in an archive in Paris; Élodie’s name didn’t ring a bell with me, but your mother’s name certainly did: Cécile-Marie Hobbs. It was then that I remembered seeing your passport: Cyril William Hobbs. I have an uncle named Cyril, but Cyril is also an English name, so it didn’t seem odd to me at the time. Lots of people prefer using their second name.”

  Hobbs smiled. “And I’m no Cyril. Besides, after the drowning, my father and I wanted to erase France from our lives.”

  “I understand.”

  “It has nothing to do with this beautiful country,” Hobbs continued, switching back into French. “It just hurt too much. On était blessé.”

  “And Alain Denis would have called you Cyril in those days?”

  “Oui, bien sûr,” Hobbs replied. “That’s how I was sure he wouldn’t recognize me this week. The fact that I was going by Bill would have thrown him off, and I’m not as slim as I once was.” He patted his stomach and tried to smile.

  Verlaque nodded. “But Eric?” he asked. “Did M. Denis recognize him?”

  “If he did, he didn’t let on,” Hobbs said. “We were quite sure that the film-star snob wouldn’t acknowledge someone from his past, if he did recognize Eric, or even me. Not until Eric sen
t him a note, getting him to go down to the cove.”

  “What happened that day in 1957?”

  “With Maman and Élodie along, we knew there would be no amphora searching,” Hobbs said. “We came out to Sordou with a cousin of Eric’s driving the boat, and we dove off the boat to show Maman and Élodie an underwater cave we liked. Neither of them was as strong a swimmer as us—we had plenty of practice after all—but we knew they could make it to the cave with our help. We swam under the water—getting to the cave took about a minute—and Maman and Élodie were enchanted. There was a small stone projection you could sit on, and there was about a foot of air above your head. But just after we arrived, Eric got bit by a jellyfish; I told the women that I’d head back up to the boat with Eric—we always had a bottle of vinegar on board for stings—and I’d be right back. Alain was to stay with them.”

  “But he didn’t,” Verlaque said.

  “No, left them there alone,” Hobbs replied, his voice once again cracking. “He was supposed to stay; if he had, they would have . . .” He swallowed, and then went on, “Just around the corner from the cave was our amphora spot; Alain couldn’t resist going and getting one . . . either to sell, or to show off in front of the women. So he swam away. He later told us that the amphora had been stuck, so it took longer than usual to get it out. And when I got Eric back to the boat he started throwing up; his cousin was freaking out and wanted to take him back to Frioul, where a Marseille doctor had a vacation house. I begged him to wait, so I dove back under to return to the cave. But the water was murky; that was a bad sign . . .” He stopped again, looking down at his knees. “Someone had stirred up the sea bottom, and you couldn’t see a thing. Usually we used the light from the sun on the water’s surface to guide us. But that water was gray-black.”

  “Did you have to turn around?”

  “Yes,” Hobbs whispered. “A few seconds later Alain popped his head out of the water, with the bloody amphora in his hands. But the women never came back up.”

  “My God,” Verlaque said, staring out to sea.

  “We figured they panicked,” Hobbs said. “It was such an easy dive down to the cave—easier than they both had expected—that they decided to swim back up to the boat on their own. Maybe that’s what they thought we had agreed upon.”

  “And they somehow swam the wrong way and agitated the sand?”

  “Or Alain did, trying to get the amphora loose,” Hobbs answered. “It’s so easy to get turned around down there, if you can’t see.”

  “Why now?” Verlaque asked. “That happened so long ago.”

  “There was a botched attempt, when we were in our thirties,” Hobbs said, almost laughing. “Eric followed Alain to the Venice Biennale; but there were too many security guards around. Alain was a huge star then.”

  “You stayed in touch all this time?”

  “Yes, easy to do when neither of us has moved in forty years,” Hobbs said. “We were careful never to e-mail; I would phone Eric sometimes, or he me, pretending he got the wrong number if Shirley answered. Since that time in Venice, I had hoped that Eric had given up with his idea of killing Alain. But then in May he saw Alain on television. Eric said that Alain was vague about the island he would be vacationing on, but a few days later Eric read in La Provence that the hotel was opening again.”

  “And he called you and said that M. Denis would be vacationing in Sordou,” Verlaque suggested.

  “Yes,” Hobbs replied. “We already had our flights for a trip to Provence. Shirley loves it and the older I get the more I want to come back here; I never could when my father was still alive. Coincidently, Shirley saw photographs of a similar type hotel in Capri in some decorating magazine, and so I said that I’d treat her for our anniversary. I’ve done well in the plumbing trade. Stores all over Washington State.”

  Verlaque smiled; the president of his cigar club was also independently wealthy thanks to “the plumbing trade,” as Hobbs called it. “Design magazine, Bill.”

  “Touché,” Bill said, trying to smile. He continued, “So the visit here was perfect; Shirley would be thrilled, and I could talk Eric out of murdering Alain.”

  “That’s what you were discussing on the dock that evening?” Verlaque asked.

  “Yes,” Bill answered. “And Eric was being flippant; I half-believed he wasn’t going to go through with his plan. I had no idea he had written Alain a note.”

  “Did you hear the shot?”

  “I thought it was Prosper,” Bill said. “I honestly thought that I had convinced Eric not to do it; but he couldn’t forget about what happened in 1957. Eric said that he recognized me straightaway that first day on the boat, and he was envious of our happiness; Shirley was squealing about the waves. It’s too bad he couldn’t just forget, as I did. But having a family helps with that, don’t you think?”

  Verlaque looked at the sea and then at Hobbs. “I would imagine, yes,” he said.

  “I hadn’t seen Alain pass by the dock, so when Eric said he needed a walk, it didn’t worry me,” Hobbs said. “But now I realize that Alain must have gone to the cove on the path behind the hotel.”

  Verlaque remembered Mme Poux’s story of Alain Denis walking behind the hotel, in view of her laundry room. As a paranoid star, Denis purposely strolled around in the less visited corners of the island.

  “It was only the next morning, when that sweet waitress found Alain’s body, that I knew.”

  Verlaque took a deep breath, and began, “You realize that you—”

  “Withheld valuable information,” Hobbs cut in. “As they say on television. Eric was my friend. It takes effort to stay in touch—over an ocean—and over fifty years. I know it was wrong what Eric did,” he said, “and for years I wanted to do the same thing to Alain.” He held up his shaking hand and said, “Fortunately for this, I couldn’t have fired a trigger. But I didn’t do much to stop Eric, either.”

  • • •

  Marine ran down the hotel’s steps when she saw Antoine Verlaque and Bill Hobbs walking toward the gardens. Antoine carried something in his arms. She walked quickly, as if in a dream, surrounded by the reds and pinks and purples of the flowering plants so carefully chosen by the Le Bons. Palm fronds brushed up against her bare legs, almost scratching them, but she ignored it. The brilliant afternoon sun made the colors pale, as if filmed in the early 1960s. The closer she got, she saw that Antoine held a bundle of clothes, and a black book. Her heart sank. “Eric,” she said when she got up to the men. Verlaque nodded and stepped aside so that Shirley Hobbs, who had been behind Marine, could hug her husband.

  “What happened, Bill?” Mrs. Hobbs asked.

  Bill Hobbs looked at Verlaque, who answered, “Eric Monnier shot Alain Denis and today committed suicide by drowning.”

  Shirley Hobbs held her hand to her mouth. “How did you know, Bill?”

  “Shirl,” he slowly began. “Let’s go up to the hotel. There’s a lot I need to tell you.”

  “Did you know Eric?” Shirley asked. “From your Marseille days?”

  Marine shot Verlaque a look.

  “How did you know?” Bill Hobbs asked his wife, wide-eyed.

  Shirley laid her hand on Bill’s shoulder. “It was getting harder and harder for you to pretend you didn’t understand French,” she said. “But I’ve known for years; I found your mother’s birth certificate once. It was when we bought our first house, in the sixties, and you still needed all that kind of information to get a bank loan . . . remember?”

  Bill nodded. “I tried to hide it from you.”

  “You were so nervous and excited about the house,” Shirley said. “You accidently left it out.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “No, what for?” Shirley said. “I knew that it must have something to do with your mother’s tragic death—which I then realized must have been here, in France
—and the memories were too painful. I respected you and your father too much to pry.” Shirley’s expression then turned sad, and she looked at Verlaque and asked, “Will Bill get charged for withholding evidence?”

  “Yes,” he answered. As much as he wanted to protect Bill Hobbs, his work as a judge came first. “But the charge will be much more benign than had Bill assisted in the murder,” he added.

  • • •

  Two hours later Bill and Shirley Hobbs were packed, and standing on the dock about to get into a police boat with Bruno Paulik. “When does your elder son arrive at the Marseille airport?” Verlaque asked. “Jason, right?”

  “Tomorrow at noon,” Shirley said. She looked at her husband, who had turned silent, and was standing at the edge of the dock, staring down at the water.

  “I’ll arrange to have an officer pick up your son,” Verlaque said.

  “That’s very kind.”

  “I’ve also talked to Bill about a lawyer I once worked with in Paris, who may agree to work on Bill’s defense,” Verlaque said. “If that’s okay by you; your husband told me that money wasn’t a problem. Oddly enough, Niki Darcette knew the lawyer when she was young.”

  A young police officer gave Shirley Hobbs his elbow, helping her onto the boat. Bill Hobbs followed, holding his trembling hand up to Verlaque in a wave.

  “Will you stay on the rest of the week?” Paulik asked his boss.

  “Yes,” Verlaque replied. “Mme Denis and Brice are leaving in a few minutes. . . . Hugo’s taking them to the Marseille train station to catch the Paris TGV, along with the Viales. But we’re staying, and so is Sylvie.”

  “Have fun, then,” Paulik said over the sound of the boat’s motor.

  “Just look straight ahead at the horizon, Bruno,” Verlaque said, rubbing his stomach.

  • • •

  The rest of the staff and clientele were waiting in the Jacky Bar, and Verlaque took a deep breath before going in. A police officer had accompanied the Hobbses back to their room so that they could pack; Verlaque had made sure that they passed through the main doors, avoiding the bar. He knew that the minute he walked into the bar he would be bombarded with questions. He opened the door and walked in, and to his surprise, the bar was quiet. He could see by the look on everyone’s face that they already knew of Bill Hobbs’s involvement.