The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  The streets grew narrower as we ascended. At last we passed under a rustic archway with poppies sprouting between its stones and emerged on an open plaza in front of the church. The church had a no-nonsense look, heavy and buttressed, which made the onion-shaped, wrought iron bell tower whimsically unexpected. Around the tower, swallows wheeled and dove.

  Behind the church, the summit of the hill was covered with wildflowers and weeds. “I’ll bet the view is great from there,” said Ross, and a minute later he was climbing.

  I clambered up behind him. From here we had a three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep of the valley. We tried to find Mas Rose, but never did. “Maybe it’s gone,” said Ross, straining to see. “Disappeared without a trace, like Brigadoon. And we’re free.”

  Before I thought about it, I said, “Ross, if it’s that bad, why don’t you leave?”

  He looked away. “I can’t.”

  Suddenly, the rain let loose. Laughing, we hurried through the dripping weeds and down the clay path to the church. Half-drenched, we took refuge on the church porch, in the slight shelter of an overhang above the locked doors, and huddled together to escape the downpour. I felt Ross’s heart beating under his damp shirt. I was dizzy, and this was stupid. When we found Pedro’s body, I’d plucked Ross’s wet shirt away from his chest. Remembering, I shuddered.

  Ross drew me closer, and I held on to him. I should move away. Getting wet wasn’t such a big deal. “Why is this happening?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. We stood kissing, clinging together, until the rain stopped. It lasted long enough to leave us predictably racked and tormented. Walking down the cobbled streets where the gutters were now gushing, we didn’t talk until Ross said, “We have to finish this the way it should be finished.”

  “How? Do they have hot-sheet motels in Provence?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  Back on the main street, I checked the Auberge de Ventoux. Alexander’s cycle was in front. The sun was out now, and a waiter was toweling off tables and chairs at the Relais de la Fontaine, a few doors from the hotel. A handful of people had ventured out for a drink already.

  One of them was Alexander.

  He was sitting near the cafe wall, half-hidden from my view by the waiter, and he was with somebody. I craned my neck. It was a woman wearing blue slacks, her face hidden by a floppy white straw hat. She and Alexander leaned toward one another, deep in conversation. I nudged Ross. “Isn’t that Alexander at the cafe? Who’s he with?”

  Ross gave a cursory glance. “Some unlucky woman. Probably just picked her up.”

  I wondered what Vivien would think, but I didn’t feel like bringing her name into the conversation. I watched Alexander until we reached the car. He never looked our way.

  A Message

  Back at Mas Rose, I indulged in a dreary orgy of self-recrimination. Letting myself be seduced by Ross was unprofessional, unethical, and probably a few other “un” words as well. I had known I shouldn’t go to the village with him, yet I’d leapt at the chance. “Finish this the way it should be finished?” Forget it.

  I found Pedro’s tape, jammed it in the recorder, and yanked on the headphones. Presumably, although the proposition got shakier by the day, I still had a book to write. In the intervals when I wasn’t making out on church porches like a randy teenager, I could get some work done.

  The transcribing calmed me. Listening to Pedro with my fingers rushing over the typewriter keys, making the stops and starts necessary to get it down accurately, didn’t leave room for stray guilt. Hearing Pedro’s voice, I could picture him so clearly, with his tan, salt-and-pepper curls, and neck chain. How odd it seemed for him to be alive then, and dead now. Death was too abrupt, I mused.

  If you don’t like it, write a letter to the editor, I advised myself sourly. Pedro said, “Jeez. I’ve got to get downstairs,” and I heard the click indicating the recorder had been turned off.

  My hand was traveling toward the stop button when I heard another click on the tape, and Pedro’s recorded voice spoke again. He said, “Why don’t you ask Vivien where her son was the night Carey was killed?” Then another click, and I was listening to dead air.

  I sat immobile, my finger hovering over the button, staring at the recorder as if it had started to play the “Marseillaise.” What had I heard? I recovered the power of movement and pushed the stop button, rewound, and listened again. The words were a rushed growl, but it was unmistakably Pedro. Ask Vivien where her son was the night Carey was killed.

  Unsorted images and ideas tumbled in on me: the scene Marcelle had overheard between Vivien and Pedro, when Vivien was crying; Blanche telling me Pedro had been fired because Vivien was broke; Pedro’s uneasiness when I asked him why he’d continued working for Vivien. “It’s a good job. She needed somebody,” he’d said.

  Ask Vivien where her son was. I’d ask her. I certainly would.

  I rewound and listened to the entire interview again, including Pedro’s addendum. When had he put it on? He would’ve had plenty of opportunity. I didn’t— couldn’t— lock my door. All he had to do was come upstairs and walk in. Now I understood why he was so curious about when I’d transcribe it. I’d said I would do it the next day. He didn’t live long enough to know I hadn’t kept my word.

  How long had Pedro been threatening to implicate Alexander in Carey’s murder? Probably since Vivien told him he was fired. The message to me was, I guessed, the most daring and decisive step in a war of nerves. If she did what he wanted— pay him off, reinstate him— he could back away from what was, after all, only an insinuation. If she didn’t, he’d give me the full story— or so he must have threatened.

  Now the full story was ashes, along with Pedro himself.

  I listened to all the empty minutes until the end of the tape to be sure he hadn’t put on other messages. He hadn’t. I rewound and ejected it, took a blank label, pasted it over the one where I’d written “Pedro Ruiz,” and replaced the tape in its plastic case.

  I didn’t think anyone concerned suspected what Pedro had done, or the tape wouldn’t be here. Still, I had to take care of it now. I couldn’t lock my door, but I could lock my suitcase. I took it out of the closet. I put the tape in a compartment of my folding cosmetics holder, put the holder in the side pocket of the suitcase, locked the suitcase, and put it back in the closet. From the closet, the tape seemed to be sending out powerful, if invisible and inaudible, signals. Anybody would notice them. I had a hard time convincing myself otherwise, a measure of my paranoia.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the closet when Vivien knocked. I’d divided my time today between kissing her lover and incriminating her son, and I must’ve looked wild. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “I’m ready to work now. Sorry I’ve been tied up.”

  She didn’t seem to have noticed anything special about the closet. I said, “All right.”

  “Come to my room. It’s too rainy to sit outside.”

  We set up in the solarium. Ask Vivien… “We were talking about the night of the murder,” I said.

  She stirred restlessly. “I thought we’d finished with that.”

  “Almost.”

  With the air of getting through it as quickly as possible, she said, “I got home from Ross’s place around midnight. The police were there. I wouldn’t say where I’d been. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Blanche had come in from the movies a little earlier.”

  I nodded. “What about Alexander?”

  Tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepened. “Alexander?”

  “Where was he that night?”

  She looked puzzled. “California. That’s where he lives, you know. San Francisco.”

  “You called and spoke with him right away?”

  “I called. He wasn’t there, so I left a message on his machine. He phoned back the next morning.”

  “Where had he been?”

  “He spent the nigh
t with— a friend.” She sat back and crossed her arms.

  I was about to ask who the friend was when she said, “I don’t see the point of this. Didn’t Alexander apologize to you for the way he acted yesterday?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I hope you’re not going to harass him. He’s opposed to the book as it is.”

  Harass him? I responded sharply. “I know he is. I’m curious about why.”

  She was digging her fingernails into her arms. “This isn’t pertinent.”

  “It’s important to know the whereabouts of the major characters.”

  We stared at each other. “I can’t work anymore today,” she said, and she watched me with folded arms until I left.

  Relais De La Fontaine

  Alexander returned soon after my contretemps with Vivien. From my window, I watched him get off his cycle and walk to the house with his easy, long-legged stride. He looked energetic, powerful. Powerful enough to murder not once but twice and get away with it. Unless I did something.

  What did I have? A sentence spoken by a dead man; my awareness of his lie about when he arrived in France; his effort to bribe me out of writing the book.

  The sky had cleared. That was fortunate. I had decided to return to Beaulieu-la-Fontaine, and Ross wouldn’t be driving me this time.

  As I left, I avoided looking at Blanche’s closed door. I hadn’t talked with her about The Book of Betrayal. I’d do it as soon as I got back.

  I was half a mile down the road when I heard thumping footsteps and turned to see Ross, out for a run. I hardened myself against his importuning me to roll around with him in damp bushes, but he didn’t, waving as he went by without slowing down. His torso and legs were golden from the sun, I couldn’t help noticing, as he rounded a bend and vanished from my view. I imagined, even hoped, he would come back and honed my arguments against further involvement in case he did, but it was wasted energy.

  When I arrived, Beaulieu-la-Fontaine was in the grip of its midafternoon somnolence. I walked past closed shops to the phone booth in front of the post office, and in a couple of minutes was listening to the phone ringing at Worldwide Wire Service, miles to the north, in Paris, my hometown.

  I was steeled for the news that Jack Arlen, my dear friend the bureau chief, was in Brussels or Barcelona or some even more distant locale. When I asked for him, though, the receptionist said to hold on, and after a gratifyingly short interval, he greeted me.

  “Georgia Lee! Come home, baby. All is forgiven.”

  “Don’t tell me you miss me, Jack.”

  “Nothing as radical as that. But it’s your turn to buy a round at the Café de la Paix.”

  “You’ve started hobnobbing with the tourists?”

  “Kitty and I have to console ourselves for your absence somehow.”

  “I’m touched. Listen, Jack—”

  “Yes, dear heart. What favor are you calling to ask me for?”

  Leave it to Jack. “Why do you think that? Why couldn’t I be checking in to see how you are?”

  “I’m doing great. Thanks for checking. ’Bye.”

  “Jack!”

  “So what is it?”

  “Does Worldwide have a San Francisco bureau?”

  “Silly question. Sure.” The answer was muffled. I knew exactly what he was doing. Lighting a cigarette.

  “I need to know what kind of investigation was done of Carey Howard’s stepson, Alexander McBride, at the time of the Carey Howard murder. Alexander lives out there.”

  “I guess I can ask them to check the files.”

  “I’d appreciate it, but I might need more than that.”

  “More?” He implied even that was damn plenty.

  “There probably won’t be much in the file. Alexander wasn’t important in the case. It could take one of your people talking to the policeman who looked into it.”

  “Goodness me. Well, I expect all they do in the bureau out there is sit around channeling, getting in touch with former lifetimes. This will keep them busy in the here and now.”

  “I want to know how strong Alexander McBride’s alibi is for the night of the murder.”

  “I’m beginning to be sorry I brought up the subject of favors.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t sniffed a story here, Jack.”

  “I haven’t hung up on you, have I? My nostrils are twitching. Is there one?”

  “Could be. Don’t blow it for me, all right? Keep it vague.”

  “You’re talking to Jack Arlen. They’ll think they’re digging this out for a survey on police procedures in the eighties.”

  After we firmed up a few details I asked, “How’s everything in Paris?”

  “Right as rain, right as rain,” he said, but all of a sudden he sounded dispirited. I thanked him profusely and we said good-bye.

  I stepped out of the booth. Jack was a joker, a womanizer, a man who valued a story more than money or love. He was also sweet, moody, and racked with midlife discontent. I missed him a lot.

  Preoccupied, I wandered down to the Auberge de Ventoux. Alexander’s cycle wasn’t there, which was no surprise since I knew he was back at Mas Rose. I had to go back, too, and have my deferred talk with Blanche. I dawdled past the sidewalk tables at the Relais de la Fontaine. I wouldn’t even have glanced over if a carrying female voice hadn’t said, “I’d like another beer, please.” Not only was the request made in English, the accent had originated in my own native part of the world, the Southern United States, or close to it.

  My head whipped around. A woman was sitting at the same table near the wall where I’d seen Alexander sitting with someone earlier. Alexander’s companion had been wearing pale blue slacks, as was this woman. She was also wearing high-heeled white sandals and a tight white knit top with a revealing scoop neckline. Alexander’s companion had been wearing a floppy white straw hat. I spotted the hat on the pavement next to the woman’s chair. I made an abrupt ninety-degree turn and zeroed in on a table near hers. She was currently the only patron, so finding a place was easy.

  Seated, I eyed my compatriot. Scribbled postcards were spread on the table in front of her, and a ballpoint pen and a pair of glasses lay next to an overflowing ashtray. Had she been sitting here during the several hours since I saw her with Alexander? You can do that in French cafés. You see people nursing a beer or a coffee and reading a book, or writing.

  My discreet preliminary survey told me this woman was handsome, carcinogenically tanned, forty, and fighting it. Her blond-streaked brown hair had been crimped with a perm that in my opinion wasn’t worth the fortune it had probably cost, since it made her small, sharp features look smaller and sharper. She had on all the makeup the magazines say we’re supposed to wear, but tastefully applied. Her eyes were pale blue, their expression glazed enough that I thought she had consumed quite a few drinks since I saw her before.

  The waiter brought her beer and stepped over to see what I wanted. I forgot French, gave full play to my drawl, and said, loudly and distinctly, “I’d like a beer, please,” managing to turn “beer” into a two-syllable word. The waiter looked confused, as well he might, so I pointed to the woman’s glass and said, “One of those.”

  “Oui, Madame.” He took off, leaving me to smile prettily at her as she took in the fact that I was from God’s country.

  It wasn’t lost on her. She leaned forward and said, “Well, hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Where’re you from?”

  I wasn’t about to say Paris. “Luna Beach, Florida.”

  “My God, that’s where my ex-husband lives.”

  This was indeed a stunning coincidence. “In Luna Beach?”

  “No, no. Florida. Fort Lauderdale.”

  “No kidding,” I marveled.

  “Yep.” She nodded decisively several times. We were practically sisters already.

  My turn. “Where’re you from?”

  “Texas, originally, but I’ve lived in California for ten years.”

&
nbsp; “Really. You like it out there?”

  We got acquainted through half a beer, at which point she invited me to join her at her table. When I pulled up my chair she said, “What’s your name?”

  “Uh—Rita.” I don’t know why I said Rita. This woman looked like she would have a friend named Rita. “What’s yours?”

  “Missy. Missy Blake.” Missy was searching for something in her white straw pocketbook. She pulled out a tapestry cigarette case and a gold-rimmed black holder. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

  At this juncture Missy could do no wrong. “Not at all. Go ahead.”

  “Thanks. That’s what I love about France. Everybody smokes over here.” She fitted a cigarette into the holder and searched further in her bag. “What are you doing in France, Rita?”

  “Sort of— vacation. You?”

  She looked up from her search and rolled her eyes. “It’s a long story.” She bent her head to her bag again, said, “There you are, you buggers,” and pulled out a matchbook with a cover of shiny red foil. She lit the cigarette, drawing through the holder until her cheeks hollowed, and tossed the matchbook on the table. “A long story,” she repeated.

  I leaned forward, willing her to tell me the long story. The bright matchbook caught my eye, and I glanced down at it. Stamped on the cover in white was the legend, “Bingo’s Buckaroo BBQ.”

  “Sounds interesting, Missy,” I said.

  Bitter Experience

  Missy took another massive drag on her cigarette and expelled smoke toward the main street of Beaulieu-la-Fontaine. “Let me ask you something, Rita,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you ever been involved with a man younger than you? I mean— quite a bit younger?”

  I didn’t want to muddy the waters, so I said, “Not really.”