Mean Evergreen (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Twelve)

by A W Hartoin

  “But?” I pulled the blanket up around my chest. So close. Too close.

  “But,” Thyraud said, “there must be another factor in your escape.”

  “Other than Moe killing him?” I asked.

  “What did that Jens Waldemar Hoff want from you? It saved you until Mr. Licata arrived. Using the panic button to locate you was brilliant by the way. ”

  “And here I thought it was useless.”

  “It told him you went in the Pantheon,” said Thyraud. “He didn’t need more. So? What was Hoff after?”

  “You’re not the only one that thinks I’m useful.” I told him about Stella’s package and the dead end, leaving out the clues that Josiah Bled had left. Need to know and all that.

  “You don’t look surprised,” I said. “Did you know about Stella?”

  “We knew that they were after something from the Bleds. What it is remains a mystery,” he said. “Unless…”

  “Sorry. Not a clue.”

  “Small enough to be inside a liquor cabinet,” said Thyraud, his brow furrowing. “A work of art?”

  “A small one.” I showed him the dimensions of the cabinet.

  “Very intriguing. Why would the family leave this object hidden for so long?”

  “No one knows, not even the living Bleds. Agatha and Daniel knew about the liquor cabinet and were bringing the knowledge with them to the Bleds. When The Klinefeld Group killed them, the chain was broken.”

  “So the location of the object was passed down through your mother’s family, not the Bleds, but the Bleds, and then your parents had the object,” said Thyraud, tapping again. “A kind of double security.”

  “I think so, although my father may know something. He was the last person to see Josiah Bled alive, but he’s never going to say anything. He has an NDA.”

  “Your father wouldn’t betray a confidence anyway,” said Thyraud.

  “Very true. He’s made close to the vest a lifestyle,” I said. “What about the Hoff that killed Nadelbaum. Who is he really?”

  “We have no idea. He had no identification and his fingerprints aren’t on file with anyone anywhere. He was a professional hitter. We can tell that from the Panthéon video.

  “There’s video?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s how we verified your story and Mr. Licata’s.” He paused and then said, “You look concerned.”

  “Moe really isn’t going to have any trouble?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “The video is definitive?”

  “We have chosen to see it that way. Hoff was going to shoot you and Moe Licata, the elderly American sniper, shot him. It didn’t hurt that Hoff had already shot Nadelbaum and misdirected the police in order to pursue you. No one is questioning if it was necessary.”

  “You’ve seen to that?” I asked.

  “I have,” said Thyraund. “We’ve put Hoff’s picture out through Interpol and all other channels for identification,” said Thyraud.

  “Are you confident?” I asked.

  “No. If he has turned up on anyone’s radar, he will have looked completely different.”

  “Swell.”

  My monitor started dinging as my pressure got dicey again. Thyraud reached over and pressed my call button. “Until we meet again, Miss Watts.”

  “You sound so sure,” I said.

  “I’ve been doing this a long time.” He nodded at me and turned to go, crossing paths with Moe, who burst in with one hand on his weapon under his coat. “What happened? Who are you?”

  Thyraud calmly stepped into the doorway and said, “She will explain.”

  He slipped out and Moe came to my bedside. “So?”

  “That was our get out of jail free card,” I said.

  “He smells terrible.”

  I started laughing and my pressure popped back to normal just as a nurse rushed in. I calmed her down while Moe loitered by the window, up to something no doubt.

  When the nurse left, he handed me an envelope. “From Madison. She copped to everything. Full confession. The embassy is handling her transfer back to Germany.”

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “An apology.”

  I laid it on my lap and pushed it away.

  “You’re not going to open it?” Moe asked.

  “Maybe later.”

  “Understood.”

  He stayed by the window, watching me with a kind of evaluation in his eyes. “How are you feeling? Not forgiving, I take it.”

  “That’s going to take a while,” I said.

  “Not for everyone though.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You have a visitor,” said Moe. “But I’m worried about your blood pressure.”

  “Do they want to kill me?” I asked.

  He smiled. “That’s the very last thing on his mind.”

  “Do I want to see them?”

  “Hard to say, but I recommend it.”

  I crossed my arm over my cast and braced myself. “Let’s do it then.”

  Moe opened the door and said in a very gameshow-type voice, “Disgraced boyfriend, come on down.”

  Chuck popped his head around the door frame. “Surprise.”

  I was shocked into silence for a long moment and then said, “How did you get here so fast?”

  “I was over the English Channel when you were being held at gunpoint,” he said, still not coming in.

  “He comes bearing gifts,” said Moe.

  I gave my boyfriend the stink eye but said, “Bring it on.”

  Chuck came in just like his poodle did after he’d stolen something off the table. He was a bad boy and he knew it, but he came with flowers, so that was something.

  “I’m going for coffee,” said Moe. “Anything I can get you?”

  “Can you see if they’ll take this cast off? I’m over it,” I said.

  Moe nodded and closed the door behind him, leaving me and Chuck eyeing each other.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have sent me to your girlfriend’s house without a warning and then tried to say she wasn’t a serious girlfriend,” I said. “You were engaged.”

  “I completely own that.” He gave me the flowers. “I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to her if I told you and I knew you needed that in.”

  “You’re not wrong.” I smelled the flowers and they were pretty fragrant considering it was the dead of winter.

  “Am I forgiven?” Chuck asked, trying not to give me that big cheesy smile of his.

  “Are you going to stop eating eggs and taking supplements and gassing me out of the house?”

  Chuck put a hand on his chest and feigned dismay. “Are you putting a price on forgiveness?”

  “You bet.”

  “Okay. I’ll stop it.”

  “It’s not working anyway,” I said, keeping my joyful smile to a minimum.

  “Way to rub it in,” he said. “Are we good?”

  “I heard you came bearing gifts,” I said. “Plural.”

  “I was wondering if you noticed that.”

  I held out a hand and he opened the carryon he’d dragged in. “I thought you’d want to see this ASAP.” Chuck got out a folder and set it in my lap. “Stevie’s doing better and you got him to thinking.”

  “About what?” I asked with fingers dancing along the edge of the thick paper.

  “His grandfather. When he got home, he went and found all those dragon books he told you about. There were ten in all and that was in one of them.”

  I opened the folder and the breath just whooshed out of my lungs. Constanza Stern, Big Steve’s mother, looked up at me. Like the painting of Stella in the Bled Mansion, the portrait was done in rough quick strokes but the style was wholly effective, showing her thin, starved face in painful angles, surrounded by thick, tangled dark hair. Her eyes, like Stella’s drew me in. They were haunted but defiant. Constanza was not beaten, far from it.

  “I had it scanned,” said Chu
ck. “The Girls have the original for safekeeping.”

  “Why not Stevie?” I asked without thinking.

  “It’s Stevie. He forgot about it for twenty years. He’s afraid he’ll forget again.”

  I held up the thick card stock the portrait had been printed on. “It’s the same artist, but watercolors.”

  “That’s what we thought, too,” said Chuck. “Check out the flowers she’s holding.”

  I already was. Stella had been holding an Arbutus flower, unusual to say the least and it meant I love only you. Constanza held a bunch of what looked like wildflowers, nothing that I recognized. It couldn’t be easy like a rose or something.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Wait for it.” Chuck paused for effect until I smacked his leg. “Tarragon.”

  “No. Really?”

  Tarragon was the name embossed on Stella’s scrapbook, the one The Girls’ mother Florence had kept on all her war activities. No one knew why in the world an herb was on there instead of her name.

  “Do tarragon flowers have a meaning?” I asked.

  “Not like other flowers, but sometimes the meaning is said to be little dragon, a sort of messed up version of an Arabic word for tarragon.”

  “What’s the Arabic word?”

  “Tarkhum,” he said.

  “Look at those eyes,” I said. “Little dragon isn’t far off.”

  “You could say the same about Stella and Tarragon is on her album.”

  “Code name?”

  “Sounds right to me,” said Chuck and he got a twinkle in his eyes. I waited for the sleazy smile that sometimes followed it, but it didn’t show up.

  “What? Oh!” I flipped the paper over. It was blank, but there was another sheet, mostly blank, except for the faint scrawl of Sinclair and the year 1944.

  “Sinclair again,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “Beats me. Look at the flower again.”

  I flipped back to the portrait and looked closely, squinting. It took me a minute to find what was hidden there, but I did find it. Stella’s portrait had DH8, which was the code for Berlin’s notorious House prison, but this was a name. Lilliana was written in the petals of the tarragon flowers.

  “What does Stevie think?” Then I laughed. “I never thought I’d ask that.”

  “Lilliana’s her name, her real name. He thinks his grandfather told him that, but he’d just forgotten,” said Chuck.

  “Lilliana and tarragon. The same person? Two people?,” I asked. “What did Big Steve say?”

  “Stevie didn’t tell him. He’s afraid it’ll ruin their fresh start.”

  “I don’t blame him. How’s he doing?”

  “Okay. Can’t remember to take his pills without being reminded, but he’s trying,” said Chuck. “Our vermin love him and he’s staying at our place.”

  I made a face. “Do you think he’ll remember to feed them?”

  “Mr. Cervantes is going to help. When I left, Aunt Miriam was there and they were all going to watch some horror flick,” he said.

  “Better them than me,” I said.

  Chuck brushed a frizzy curl off my cheek. “Am I forgiven?”

  I grabbed his jacket and pulled him down for a kiss. “Absolutely. But no more springing old girlfriends on me. Tell me about everyone.”

  “That could take a while,” he said and was a little embarrassed about it.

  “Don’t I know it. You were a slut.”

  “I was not.”

  “Oh, come on. You dated everyone I know.”

  “Only because you wouldn’t go out with me.”

  “You were irritating,” I said.

  “I’m still irritating and yet here we are,” he said, breaking into the sleazy smile I knew so well.

  The door opened and a pretty nurse, who couldn’t take her eyes off my boyfriend asked, “You would like your cast off?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She put me in a wheelchair while Moe came in and started plotting our evening in Paris.

  “Don’t get too excited,” I said. “I’ve got a plan.”

  Chuck sighed. “I was afraid of that. Can’t we just go to the Eiffel Tower like regular people?”

  “We’re not regular people,” I said.

  “You got that right,” said Moe and he rubbed his hands together. “Where are we going?

  “Elias Bled’s apartment.”

  “Oh, God,” said Chuck. “Why?”

  “I have to check something,” I said.

  “Call Monsieur Barre. He’ll do it.”

  The nurse pointed my wheelchair at the door and Moe hurried to open it. “Why doesn’t the slutty boyfriend want to go see Elias Bled?” Moe asked.

  “I’m not slutty and nobody wants to go to that apartment,” said Chuck.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” I said with a smile. “Elias is dead and still hanging around.”

  “Haunted apartment in Paris,” said Moe. “I didn’t have that on my bingo card. Let’s do it.”

  “No,” said Chuck, but I was out the door. It was a done deal.

  Monsieur Barre was not happy with me. The old guy did his best not to let us inside the elegant address on the Île Saint-Louis. I had to threaten to call Isolda and that did the trick. He opened the enormous door and stepped back, eyeing my clothes and hat. I’d never known Monsieur Barre to be anything less than perfect. All three of his hairs were perfectly placed on his bald head and his three-piece suit immaculate. I sometimes questioned whether the building manager slept in a suit. The Girls and I had roused him at all times of day and night over the years and he was always wearing one.

  “You decorated,” I said, peeking behind me.

  “Naturally,” he said primly. “It is Christmas.”

  I hooked arms with Moe and left the unwilling Chuck behind as I crossed the grand foyer with its beautiful tree done up with all silver decorations. Evergreen garlands were roped around the staircase’s wrought iron and there was mistletoe hanging from the chandelier. Perfect. Storybook.

  Monsieur Barre did his best to get in front of us but couldn’t quite make it. I wasn’t sure how old he was, but he knew Stella during the war, so that tells you something.

  “Mademoiselle, what happened to your beautiful clothes?” he asked. “Madam Ziegler worked so hard to make you presentable.”

  “It didn’t take, my friend,” said Moe.

  “Yes, I see this.”

  We reached the stairs and Monsieur Barre poked the arm of my puffer coat. “What is this thing? Why do you wear it?”

  “It fits,” I said.

  He frowned.

  “It’s supposed to look like this.”

  “This is a terrible thing that you are wearing. You are a Bled. Appearances matter.”

  “Huh?” Moe looked at me.

  “I’m not a Bled,” I said quickly. “I’m a goddaughter. It’s not the same.”

  “It is the same and why are you here? You will only make him angry,” said Monsieur Barre. “We had such trouble the last time you came.”

  “Ghosts don’t like you?” asked Moe. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Elias likes me just fine. Nothing happened.”

  Monsieur Barre started wringing his hands. “There was such banging and wailing. It went on and on. Our other residents threatened to leave.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Nobody’s moving out of this address. You’ve got a waiting list for buyers. People have been on that for twenty years.”

  “Thirty,” the manager said smugly.

  I held out my hand. “Key please.”

  “You will not rile him up?”

  I had no clue what riled up ghosts or Elias in particular, but I said, “I will not. Ten minutes. Fifteen tops.”

  Monsieur Barre pulled out the big brass key but held it out of reach. “You will go shopping and rid yourself of that hideous coat?”

  I will not.

  “Yes.”

  “I do not believe yo
u.”

  “That is because I’m lying.” I grabbed the key and dashed up the stairs, leaving the men complaining in my wake.

  I made it to Elias’ round foyer on the third floor, gasping, to face the two doors. They were both Elias’. Like any Bled, he took up all the space, whether it made sense or not.

  I stuck the key in door A and turned it before I changed my mind. Elias had been fine last time. I’d seen him on the bridge below, where he was rumored to have thrown himself in over the loss of the prostitute, presumably Giséle aka Gladys, my great-great-grandmother. It’d been a surreal experience, but not threatening. Chuck had seen him in the apartment and had never quite gotten over it.

  “Elias,” I called out. “It’s me again. Don’t freak out. I’m just going to look at something.”

  Silence.

  I heard Chuck call out for me to wait, but I didn’t wait. I never wait. I walked in and was amazed at the transformation. All the stacks of art that had been leaning against the walls were gone. Elias was an avid collector and had money to spare. When he disappeared, his mother Brina ordered the apartment left intact for when he returned. He never did, but the family honored their matriarch’s wishes, until I got into the act. A Bled family friend, Serge Dombey of the Orsay museum, and I cooked up a plan to catalog Elias’ collection and look for early sketches of the impressionists. Then The Girls decided to have the entire collection looked over. There was quite a bit of work to be done, conserving and cataloging. As far as I knew Serge was still at it.

  Without all the art, I could see the space better. The sunburst pattern from the foyer floor was repeated inside and gleamed with a fresh cleaning. The walls had marks where all the canvases had been and nothing was going to get a hundred years of stain out of the silk wallpaper.

  “Wow. This is different,” said Chuck, coming in behind me.

  “Different than what?” Moe asked. “This is…like stepping back in time.”

  “You are,” I said. “1910 original condition.”

  “The rich are eccentric. Why keep it all here?”

  A tremendous banging erupted in the kitchen and Moe jumped a foot.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Guess,” I said with a smile.

  Moe put his nose up and sniffed. “Is that…bacon?”

  “Not real bacon. More like a memory of bacon.”