Her phone pinged again, and she saw that Angel had sent her a photograph from the event so that she could see what people were wearing. She had captioned it, “Hats!!”
Eulalie heaved a sigh. Then she opened her closet and stood on a chair to reach the hats wrapped in tissue paper at the back. What other twenty-eight-year-old even owned a hat? Only one whose grandmother had very old-fashioned ideas about what a lady should and shouldn’t have in her closet.
She found a white, shallow-crowned, wide-brimmed hat with a pale-green trim that matched her shoes. She plonked it on her head and looked in the mirror.
At an angle, chérie. With the brim tilted down towards your right shoulder.
She could hear Angel’s voice as clearly as if she were standing in the room with her. She sighed again and adjusted the hat to what her grandmother would consider an appropriate angle.
The hat wouldn’t survive a trip on the Vespa, so Eulalie took a cab instead.
The Queen’s Town public library was a large and gracious building at the upper end of Lafayette Boulevard. Built in the French-Colonial style, it was all columns and porticos, with tiny, ornamental balconies jutting out from every upper window. In front of it stood the classically landscaped library gardens.
Eulalie could see several giant SUVs parked in front of the gardens and a bevy of women in brightly colored dresses moving around on the lawns. She paid the driver and picked her way carefully along the paved pathway, wondering why she found it easier to balance on a roof parapet, eighty feet above the ground, than in a pair of high heels.
Two women sat at a table at the entrance to the gardens taking money and issuing tickets. Eulalie handed over her $50 with only a small pang. Then she stood and took stock of the situation before plunging into it.
Her grandmother was standing holding court at the champagne-tasting table. No doubt she was enlightening the ladies about the subtle differences in the mousse-de-champagne between the Veuve Cliquot Blanc and the Rosé.
It was undeniably helpful to have a grandmother like Angel who fitted effortlessly into all spheres of Prince William Island society. She was as at home in French society as she was in English society, moving easily between the elevated world of charity luncheons and fundraisers and the urban underworld of club owners and minor criminals. Angel was as welcome at a meeting of the Council of Elders in the deep forest as she was at a Businesswomen of Prince William Island meeting. All doors were open to her. At every social gathering, people were pleased and honored for her to attend.
Eulalie knew that being the granddaughter of Angel de la Cour had opened doors for her and helped her set up her business. It was partly thanks to her grandmother that she was now in a position to afford a full-time staff member to keep her office open during business hours. She made another mental note to advertise for a secretary.
Also holding court next to the food table was Stella Faberge. She was dressed in filmy shades of grey and black, as befitted her recent widowhood. A number of women were clustered around her, obviously commiserating. She nodded and accepted their words graciously.
Eulalie took a firmer grip on the little pale-green clutch purse she was carrying. Then she straightened her back and walked down the pathway towards the library gardens.
Her grandmother was the first to see her. She came gliding across the grass to greet her.
“Mon ange! You look très chic. Thank you for coming along to support our little benefit. Every bit helps. Let me introduce you to the ladies. I’m sure you know some of them already.”
Eulalie spotted a woman she had investigated for insurance fraud only a year earlier, and gave a nervous smile.
“I’m not sure your friends will be delighted to see me, Grandmère. Well, not all of them, anyway.”
“Nonsense.” Ever strategic, Angel bypassed the group of women she had been speaking to and led Eulalie straight to where Stella Faberge was standing.
“You must try the strawberries and cream, my love. Such an English tradition, isn’t it? But quite delicious, of course. Do you know Lulu Hamilton? And Bella Rivers? And I believe you met Stella Faberge the other day. Ladies, may I present my granddaughter, Eulalie Park. One of our younger business owners. We must try to persuade her to join the association.”
The women welcomed Eulalie graciously. Even Stella Faberge, she was surprised to see. Far from avoiding her, the woman seemed positively eager to talk to her.
“Ms. Park here is conducting a private investigation into my husband’s death,” she told the assembled women. “Have you made any progress, Ms. Park?”
“I’m investigating the Russian connection, Mrs. Faberge. I think you were the first to point me in that direction, weren’t you?”
“Ah, yes. The Leonov Corporation. My husband’s biggest business rivals.”
“I have to thank you for that tip.”
Stella Faberge’s smile became warmer.
In Eulalie’s experience, everyone had an idea about which direction your investigation should be taking. As long as they thought you agreed with them, they became quite chatty and confiding, believing they could control you.
“If I warned Marcel once, I warned him a thousand times not to do business with the Russians. There was that terrible scandal just a few years ago when a whistle blower was poisoned for exposing company secrets.”
Eulalie accepted the glass of champagne Angel handed her. She took a tiny sip, but resolved to keep a clear head during this interview. The other ladies drifted off into separate conversations, encouraged by Angel. It was a good time to get Stella Faberge on her own.
The older woman took a sip of her wine and looked around at the manicured gardens.
“I wouldn’t even have come out today if my friends hadn’t convinced me that I was doing no one any good by moping around at home. Besides, it’s for a good cause, and I accepted the invitation months ago. Marcel wouldn’t have wanted me to turn into a recluse. That wasn’t the kind of man he was.”
It was the perfect opening.
“What kind of man was he, Mrs. Faberge? What made your husband tick? What was his strongest motivation, do you think?”
She didn’t even have to think about it. “To leave a legacy. To be known as the best in a particular field.”
“The best, or the only?”
Stella Faberge smiled. “Why, yes, you’re quite right. It sounds as though you have got to know Marcel rather well during the course of your investigation. It wasn’t enough for him to be the best in a particular field – he wanted to be the last man standing. He didn’t want to beat the competition, he wanted to eliminate them. I suppose some would say it was a character flaw, but I found it attractive. Why, if I had so much as looked at another man, I do believe Marcel would have had him eliminated too. It wasn’t enough for me to have chosen him. The competition had to cease to exist.”
“There’s something attractive about a powerful man, isn’t there?” said Eulalie. “A real alpha male.”
Stella Faberge’s eyes filled with tears. She took a tissue out of her purse and dabbed delicately under her lashes. “Sorry about that. You made me miss him so intensely for a moment.”
“How did your husband feel about delegating, Mrs. Faberge?”
“Now, that was one of his weaknesses, I must admit. He was fine with delegating menial tasks, but if it was something important, he had to do it himself. There were those who found it frustrating, but I saw it as just another example of his massive competence.”
“That must have been hard for someone like Jean-Luc Hugo - his deputy CEO. Did your husband see him as a right-hand man or just an employee?”
Stella held out her champagne flute for a refill as a waiter went past.
“Marcel’s management style came in for a lot of criticism. Hugo was supposed to be his deputy, but Marcel treated him as an underling. Rightly so, in my opinion, but of course Mr. Hugo wouldn’t see it that way.”
“Why rightly so?”
“The
man was puny and inadequate next to my husband. Marcel threw him in the shade. There was no comparison. Mr. Hugo might have had a certain superficial competence, but he didn’t have the charisma and leadership qualities of Marcel Faberge.”
“Would you say he resented your husband?”
Mrs. Faberge hesitated for so long that Eulalie knew she was trying to think of the most strategic answer rather than the truest one.
“I’m sure on some level he wished Marcel would give him more responsibility, but I don’t think he was ever hungry for it. He was so much in my husband’s shadow, it’s hard to think of him as a person with agency in his own right.”
“And what about the horseracing?” Eulalie took a bowl of strawberries and cream that Angel handed her. She tasted the strawberries and found them delicious. “What was his motivation in becoming a horse-owner at this stage of his life?”
“For him it represented the ultimate test of success. According to Marcel, a good horse will always run faster than a bad one. As long as you buy the best horses, and hire the best trainers, grooms, and jockeys, you should always come out on top. It was like a puzzle he was trying to solve. Of course, in real life, horseraces are unpredictable, and that was something he couldn’t accept. He believed that if you did everything right, things should always go your way. I believed it was good for him to learn that he couldn’t control everything. It was teaching him about patience and humility, but he didn’t see it like that.”
Eulalie thought about Faberge’s attempts to fix the race by poisoning Legs-Alone. There wasn’t much patience or humility in that. He was not a man who left things to chance.
“What about the range of anti-ageing products he was going to launch?” she asked.
“Oh, he was very excited about that. He was always looking at opportunities to tap into the gentrification of Queen’s Town. He believed he could make a killing from his organic products. The only thing that worried him was getting to the youth lily before anyone else did. He wanted to have it locked down as his brand as soon as possible. The way he worried about it, you would have thought there were competitors hot on his heels.
“And were there?”
“Not as far as I know. If there were, I never heard about it. But Marcel was obsessed with the idea that someone was going to find a plantation of youth lilies before he did and make a fortune out of his idea.”
“Eulalie, mon petit chou.”
It was Angel.
“Oui, Grandmère?”
“I am going back to the restaurant now in order to be in time for the lunchtime service. Would you care to accompany me? We can have lunch together. I have a lovely minestrone and some rye bread.”
Eulalie’s visions of a large cheeseburger flickered and died. But the minestrone at Angel’s Place was delicious and her stomach readjusted its expectations. She thanked Stella for her help, and allowed herself to be carried along in her grandmother’s wake, as Angel distributed goodbyes and double-cheek kisses to everyone. Soon they were in the back of a cab heading back to Angel’s place.
“You should dress like this more often, chérie.” Angel patted her knee. “You look lovely.”
“It’s not very practical in my line of work.”
“Did you get what you wanted from Stella?”
“To some extent, yes. I have a better idea about the kind of man Marcel Faberge was. I’m starting to get a feeling for how he would react in certain situations. I also get that she’s angry with him.”
Angel’s perfectly shaped eyebrows rose. “Indeed?”
“Definitely. There’s a kind of suppressed rage there that’s getting her through these early days. She can’t have a funeral for him because the police won’t release the body yet, but instead of being crushed and broken, she’s tripping on adrenaline. She’s very, very mad at him about something. I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.”
“Mad enough to have killed him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. The timing doesn’t work, though. She was in the apartment barely long enough to find the body and rush out screaming to her friends. Every piece of evidence confirms that. Dr. Autry, the medical examiner, says Marcel Faberge was dead before his wife even opened the door.”
“Was she angry enough to have hired someone to do it for her?”
Eulalie nodded slowly. “I thought of that possibility, and it’s something I’ll look into. The only problem with that theory is that this wasn’t a professional hit. It was a botched job. Something went wrong – something that caused the murderer to grab a knife from the kitchen and plunge it into Marcel’s chest. I still need to figure out what that was.”
They got to Angel’s Place at twelve-thirty. Eulalie sat down in her favorite corner at the bar and took out a notebook from her clutch purse. Angel disappeared into the back to check on progress in the kitchen. While Eulalie waited for Gigi to bring her lunch, she thought about her plans for the afternoon. The best time to find out who her Russian attackers were was towards evening. That left her with a few hours to kill. Perhaps she would use them to do some work on Bibi’s disappearance. Chief Macgregor and Detective Wright were working on it, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that Bibi’s time was running out.
“Hey, G,” she said as Gigi put a bowl of soup down in front of her. “Let’s say for argument’s sake, three Russian thugs came after me the other night. I want to find out who they were, maybe speak to one of them. How would I go about that?”
The young waitress stood with the tray balanced on her hip while she thought about this.
“You’ve asked around in the Russian community?”
“I asked at the Leonov Corporation. I know these guys have done jobs for them before, but this time they seem to be working for a different boss. The Leonovs won’t tell me who they are.”
“Do you want them to come after you again?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes.”
“Then insult their mothers, their sisters, or the size of their you-know-whats. It works every time.”
“You mean I should go around Finger Alley trash-talking them?”
“Sure. That’ll smoke them out.”
“Thanks, Gigi. That’s a really good idea.”
“Any time.” She went back to the kitchen.
Gigi Bartineau was as honest as the day was long, but she had a string of brothers who were constantly in and out of prison for some minor crime or other. If anyone knew how small-time criminals’ minds worked, it was Gigi.
The minestrone was thick and tasty, and the rye bread had just come out of the oven, so Eulalie didn’t mourn her burger too much. After lunch, she went home to change out of her garden party outfit. Heels and a clutch purse would be no good to her where she was going now.
Chapter 19
If you wanted to access the marginalized communities of Queen’s Town, Finger Alley was a good place to start.
Eulalie wasn’t sure whether you could call the place she was going to now a community. It was more like a loose association of reprobates who at one time or another had been connected to the village in the deep forest.
The villagers were often compared to the Amish of Pennsylvania because of their refusal to adopt any of the conveniences of modern life. It was a fair comparison. Like the Amish, they were a stable community, with most members living out their whole lives there. But also like the Amish, they had the occasional defectors.
There were no penalties for those who left the village. Most people stayed because they wanted to – it was the only home they had ever known, and they were happy there. When people left to join the outside world, they didn’t necessarily become outcasts. Angel and Eulalie had left sixteen years earlier, but still had close ties to the village and were welcome back at any time. Angel still had an ex officio seat on the Council of Elders and was frequently consulted about village matters.
But occasionally people left in less friendly circumstances. Sometimes, they had committed a crime and didn’t want to fac
e whatever penalty the Council wanted to impose on them, or they had cut ties with their families in a painful and traumatic way. Each person who left had their own story – their own reasons for leaving.
Many ex-villagers integrated seamlessly into modern life - as Angel and Eulalie had done. Others struggled to find their place. Some bore grudges against the village, while others tried to exploit their connection to the forest by offering themselves as guides or by selling supposedly ‘authentic’ products from the village.
The Council of Elders kept tabs on the troublemakers as much as possible, relying on allies like Angel to keep an eye on what they were up to. Eulalie knew of a small group of ex-villagers who lived in a run-down apartment building just off Finger Alley. If she were a criminal planning to abduct a child from the village, this was where she would come for help and advice.
Presumably, the police had already been here asking questions, but she was sure they wouldn’t have got any useful answers. The villagers were close-lipped people, no matter how estranged they might be from their origins. It was a hard habit to break.
The building Eulalie was looking for was at the far end of Finger Alley, past Mo’s Bar, and all the other little businesses that catered to Queen’s Town’s underworld. It rejoiced in the name of Majestic Towers, but there was nothing majestic about it. It was a three-story tenement building with many broken windows and a general air of neglect. The only upside was that there was no doorman for Eulalie to worry about getting past. The front door was supposed to be on an electronically controlled lock, but she gave it a hard shove and it swung open immediately.
She took the stairs two at a time up to the second floor. Her first port of call was apartment 212. She knocked, but there was no response.
The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 1 Page 17