Devil's Breath

by G. M. Malliet

  “They are actors, most of them,” said Patrice. “Or connected in some way to the profession.”

  “Figures,” said Max.

  “How so?”

  “It would be a much more straightforward case if we weren’t surrounded by so many people whose job it is to dazzle and blue the facts and skirt the truth. A murder involving a team of accountants would make a nice change.”

  “Nicely put,” said Patrice. “Although why you think accountants are so blameless is beyond me. The man who does my taxes is a complete rogue. Anyway, that is precisely why you’re here.”

  “By the way, does the baron have a Christian name?” Max asked.

  “The baron? Yes. It’s Axelrod. She is Emma.”

  “Nice. The baroness—would you say she was an intelligent person? A thoughtful one?”

  “No. But she is full of thoughts,” said Patrice. “Most of them silly thoughts. I don’t think she ever read an entire newspaper in her life. She seems to have formed her world view by reading Vogue and gained her insights into the human condition from ads in Country Life. He is the brains of the pair, not that that is saying much.”

  Turning to face Cotton—no mean feat, as it meant shifting two stone to point vaguely in his direction—she said, “I have seen Max unravel the most tightly wound alibi; whatever Axelrod and the fair Emma may have been up to, Max will suss it.”

  Cotton nodded. “I know. There was one case he solved with an apple.”

  “Really? An apple? How did—”

  “Please,” Max cut in. Time was of the essence, and Cotton would have ample opportunity to regale Patrice with details of his old cases once this one was wrapped up. Max suspected that Cotton had begun making notes on the crimes they had worked on solving together, with an eye to publishing the cases as stories one day. That Cotton might see himself as a sort of Watson in the making. Good luck finding a publisher, thought Max. Most of their cases, while true events, contained elements so bizarre as to qualify them only as potboilers. “Who else do we have?”

  “There’s Maurice,” said Patrice. “‘Stylist to the Stars,’ as he himself would not blush to tell you. He was quite close to Margot; I’ve seen for myself he’s pretty wrecked by her murder. He’s taken to his room here at the hotel and hasn’t been seen about by anyone except the room service staff. When I put questions to him, he tried to conduct the interview with blinders on.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A sleep mask, you know. He declared that the news of her death had torn his soul from his body and daylight now blinded him. Or something.”

  “Like a vampire.”

  “Actually, he seems to be rather sweet and to all appearances, genuinely devoted to Margot, if rather frustrated by her antics. I totally get that. Anyway, I finally convinced him I had to be able to look him in the eyes while I interviewed him. Although, of course, he thought we were just having a chat for old times’ sake, not an interview. I didn’t tell him the real reason for my involvement in all this. There’s no need, since I’ll be off the case soon enough, anyway.”

  “How do you mean, frustrated by her?”

  “Smart Women, Foolish Choices. You know. Margot was low on survival skills, not to mention common sense.”

  “I gather,” put in Cotton, “that if one of her ex-lovers were on board, he might disagree with that assessment.”

  “Oh?” said Max. “One lover out of how many?”

  “How many stars are there in the night sky?” asked Patrice. “And a few husbands, too. Each one a bigger loser than the last, to hear Maurice tell it. And I will. Let him tell you, I mean.”

  “What about the crew?” Max asked. “Any connections there to Margot, or to the events surrounding her death?”

  “Well, the crew wasn’t exactly locked in the hold the whole trip,” said Cotton, “but they alibi each other. We’ve made certain of that, of course, or as certain as can be. There are twelve of them all told, counting the captain, and they include the first mate, a couple of engineers and deckhands, a chef and sous-chef, and a stewardess-slash-yoga instructor. The latter is Delphine Beechum and she’s the only one who routinely interacted with the passengers. Upstairs and downstairs, you know. She denies it but she may have had a bit of a flirtation going with Margot’s true love Jake. They are closer in age and somehow they managed to give the impression to some of the others that something was going on there. Meaningful, longing glances exchanged before descending into down-dog pose, that sort of thing.”

  “But personally, I think Delphine flirts just to keep in practice,” said Patrice. “I can’t see her going for Jake in a big way.”

  “Was Margot typically part of the yoga practice?” asked Max.

  “Good heavens, no,” said Patrice. “Yoga at sunrise was not Margot’s strong suit, although overall she was rather fit—apart from the drinking, I mean. I would turn up each day just to keep an eye on how things were progressing but in truth with this stomach I could only just about manage corpse pose. Such a dreadful play on words, all things considered now, but that’s what it’s called.”

  “So Margot’s failure to appear that morning—”

  “Meant nothing whatsoever. In fact, it is difficult to say when the alarm might have been raised under normal circumstances—she was fully capable of sleeping ’til after two some days. That’s if they were simply standing around wondering when she might appear, which to all appearances they were not. The captain heard about a body washing ashore over the radio and decided to do a room check and a head count. That was when the alarm was raised. The crew did a thorough search and realized Margot was nowhere on board. This was well before the noon hour.”

  “The papers had it slightly wrong, then,” said Max. “They had what they rather coyly kept calling her ‘companion’ noticing her missing.”

  “Not exactly correct,” said Cotton. “Just in the area of correct. Typical.”

  “You can forget most of what you read about the case in the papers,” said Patrice. “The majority of them paid lip service to her demise and then just skipped ahead to rehash old gossip from the movie magazines. And much of that gossip was second-hand rubbish. I would imagine Jake is busy recasting himself as something of the alert hero in this particular film. He’s not troubling himself with playing the distraught hero, however. That would be punching well above his weight, anyway.”

  “Another thing,” Cotton put in, opening up his laptop. “If we go by the tide tables, we’re figuring she probably went in the water between eleven p.m. and midnight. It’s another factor that meshes more or less with what they were able to discern from the stomach contents and with what we were able to wrest from the coroner. Remember, he said an hour or two on either side of midnight.”

  “I just keep thinking it’s unlikely she’d be wandering the ship on her own so late,” said Max. “Her companion Jake—he noticed nothing amiss earlier in the evening?” Max asked.

  “So he claims,” said Cotton. “But I don’t honestly think he was paying much attention. And in his favor, he’s not pretending he ever doted on her every move. So, where should we start? With him?”

  Max shook his head. “Jake can wait. I’d rather start with someone who knew her well and liked her in spite of her flaws. We can work outward from there to her known enemies, if she had any. It sounds as if the someone who liked her was the stylist. Perhaps if nothing else Maurice can explain to me just what it is a stylist does for a living. But I’ll also want to see the ship itself. I want to get a feel for the setup there.”

  “We’ll have to go out on a boat tender. Perhaps tomorrow—I’ll see what I can arrange and when. The port here isn’t deep enough for the Calypso Facto to dock.”

  Patrice spoke from deep within the banks of pillows on her chair. “I’ll sit that one out, if you don’t mind. From now until this baby arrives, I’m staying on dry land.”

  Chapter 15

  MAURICE, ACT II

  Max found Maurice Brandon in room 202 of
the hotel. He had, he explained to Max, been “positively horizontal, trying to come to grips with what had happened to poor, dear Margot.” The blackout shades in the room were drawn and Max, not asking permission, walked over to pull them open.

  He explained his mission to Maurice, eliding over his role for MI5—in fact, failing to mention it entirely. It wouldn’t do to get everyone too excited until he knew exactly what he, Patrice, and Cotton were dealing with here. And at the mention of MI5, in his experience, witnesses could become either recalcitrant or overly cooperative, making up stories in a desire to “help” the authorities. He had never completely understood this proclivity but people did so love to be in the limelight, helping to catch the bad guy.

  Having coaxed Maurice out of his bed and jolted him into cooperation with a few probing but gently phrased questions, Max found he now had only to sit back and listen. He first persuaded Maurice to splash some water onto his face, throw a jacket on for warmth, and join him in a stroll outside and away from his room. He imagined the hotel maids were anxious to get in there to do their jobs.

  The hotel boasted an Italian-style rose garden with a number of quiet pathways that led up to the woods ringing the back of the hotel. The main garden was reached via a terrace, artfully constructed to look as if it were following the natural contours of the land. Max imagined that in summer the flowerbeds would offer a full riot of color, the blooms nurtured by the mild coastal temperatures. At night the gardens would be illuminated by lights hidden beneath trees and bushes, making them the perfect setting for a midnight tryst. The two men passed tennis courts and an indoor and outdoor swimming pool to their right, finding in the center of the garden an oasis of scented peace in which to talk. No one was about.

  Four chairs formed a semicircle at the foot of a marble statue of Neptune; Max took a seat and gestured Maurice into the chair opposite. Max had suspected the change of scene would do much to restore Maurice’s equilibrium. He saw he was right. Maurice looked about him, breathing in the exotic scents of foliage.

  He now was more than willing to talk; it was, in fact, as if he had waited his whole life for this moment. But after five minutes, Maurice had said little that could pertain to the murder, as far as Max could tell.

  “Margot applied makeup like someone who was going blind in one eye,” Maurice was saying. “I begged her—I simply begged her!—to let me help with her daytime makeup. On the set, I could get some control over her, of course, but in her private life? Noooo. No! I could only wait and hope for turquoise eye shadow to come back in style. Which of course it never never never will. And—”

  “I see. It must have been trying,” cut in Max, hoping to stem the flow. “So you—”

  “And as for the eyeliner—well, there was no pot of shiny black eyeliner left in any drugstore in the land once Margot had passed through town. The cheaper, the better—she probably bought it in bulk. Appalling taste, she had, like a teenager experimenting with makeup. No sense of style what-so-freaking-ever. Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra was an exercise in understated nuance by comparison. Poor Margot, if only she’d lived, I feel I could have brought some influence to bear. Don’t get me started on the hair extensions.”

  “I won’t,” said Max. “Tell me—please—how long you knew Margot? How did you two meet?”

  Maurice settled back into an open, reminiscent posture, crossing one trendily coutured leg over another, and tipping his bald head back to gaze at the sky as he collected his thoughts. He was wearing hip-hugging trousers of a stretchy leatherette fabric in a color Max was sure Maurice would call “eggplant.” Max was not entirely certain Maurice was the last word in understated nuance himself, but still Max would trust him to have his finger on the pulse of whatever Paris and Milan had decreed for the fashion world this season.

  Maurice took a deep breath, dropped his gaze to meet Max’s, and said, “She was just a girl starting out when we met, so this was thirty-five years ago. Thirty-five years! No, I tell a lie, it was more. More like forty years—I can’t get over it. We actually shared an apartment for a short while. It didn’t last, of course. Too much drama. But one feels one gets to know a person well over that first cup of coffee in the morning and that last drink at night. I am probably one of the few people on earth besides her mother who has seen Margot without her makeup, and wearing a pink chenille bathrobe. That’s how much she trusted me, to let me see her at her worst and know I’d never write a tell-all. Of course, in those days she had that perfect alabaster skin, and dark lashes out to there, so she could get away with very little makeup. Some redheads are cursed in the eyelash department, not to mention the freckle aisle. That’s when you get that albinoish Game of Thrones look if you’re not careful.” Another deep sigh, this time accompanied by a shake of the head. “She didn’t take care of her complexion over the years—I told her and told her that hard liquor sucks out the collagen and if you’re going to sunbathe you’ll end up looking like a roasted turkey—and of course the last little nip-and-tuck left her mouth looking so stretched she could play the terrified ingénue in a fright film without actually having to act. Which of course would have been a blessing by that point, too. I doubt she could even blink for some months after that last surgery. The doctor was later struck off the list, you know. Quite the scandal. She—”

  “You say, ‘It didn’t last, of course.’ Sharing the apartment with her. ‘Too much drama,’ you said. Why is that? What was the drama about?” Part of the technique any interrogator kept in his arsenal was simply to repeat back the suspect’s own words. It focused their minds wonderfully to realize someone was actually paying attention to what they said.

  Maurice returned his gaze to the view of clouds passing overhead as he grappled to frame his answer. Finally he looked at Max and said, “There is no diplomatic way to put this. Margot liked men. Lots of men; the more the merrier. Tall, short, handsome, ugly—it didn’t seem to matter. One guy she dated looked like the sort of troll you’d find under a bridge in a fairy tale, I’m not exaggerating. She would come home from a party, three sheets to the wind, with some guy in tow who could have been a professional burglar or drug dealer by the look of him. She liked a bit of rough, in other words. I hope I’m not speaking too frankly, um—what is your name again?”

  “Max Tudor. Please just call me Max. I’m not with the police in any official capacity as a detective, you understand. I’m not attached to the force. You’re not obliged to talk to me. It just may help catch her killer if you do.” He felt he couldn’t emphasize his non-status enough, but Maurice seemed to accept his presence without question. He found Max to be agreeable company and he was, as Max had noted, eager to talk, anyway. Max could have added that in his line of work as a vicar he’d been rendered fairly shockproof. The more the years passed, the more he had come to realize how true that was. His work for MI5 was practically a ladies’ auxiliary tea party by comparison. One met all sorts of people as a vicar, people who had made all manner of poor choices in their lives and were struggling with the consequences. Or people who had in all their innocence been flattened by random tragedy. Those sorts of people were the reason churches—and temples and synagogues and religion in general—existed in the first place. The rich, complacent, and happy didn’t need a lot of consoling, nor did they tend to heed advice, anyway. Not until it was their turn on the wheel of fortune.

  “No worries,” said Maurice nodding. “You’re just here to help—I do see.” He seemed to assume Max was some sort of trained psychologist come to calm the traumatized witnesses. Max decided to let him go on believing that for now, batting away the twinge of conscience that whispered how easily he had resumed his deceptive MI5 ways. It was all, he told himself firmly, in the greater cause of justice.

  “Of course,” Maurice continued. “Well, if any of the men Margot dragged back to the apartment were going to amount to something one day, they hadn’t got started yet. A couple of times, things actually went missing from the place. Spare change. My checkbo
ok. One time a frying pan—” and here he held up a hand to ward off questions. “Don’t ask, no idea. But the next time something like that happened I told her it had to stop. I wasn’t exactly celibate myself but I was choosy who I brought home, who I got involved with. Hollywood is a small town but it’s not like a small town in Kansas—that’s where she was from, Margot. She simply didn’t have those filters that said, ‘This man is cray-zy. Do not go near him. Do not, above all, sleep with him.’ To her it was all ‘Experience, Darling!’: Live life to the full, my cup runneth over, my candle burns at both ends, and et cetera and so on. She was a hopeless romantic, Margot. Hopeless. She seemed to think it was all research for some future movie role. I didn’t try to change her or fix her or even advise her to carry mace with her at all times if she was going to date these bozos. I simply had to protect myself. I called a final come-to-Jesus roommate meeting with her after some jerk stole my first edition Jack Kerouac one night. Some screenwriter she’d met along the way. Oh, and by the way, he’d dropped ash on my new living room carpet. I smoke myself but I hate smokers when they’re inconsiderate, don’t you? Anyway, that really was it for me.”