Pursuit in Provence (A Jordan Mayfair Mystery)

by Phyllis Gobbell

  “I’m not judging you, Paul,” I said. “I just want to understand.”

  “Some people did judge our actions harshly. And Philippe paid dearly for his idealism—a prison term during which he became ill. He did not live long after prison.” Paul kept twirling the stem of his glass, looking thoughtful. A moment passed before he took up the story again. “I was in New York when he was arrested, and my family insisted that I stay there. Would I have gone to prison, too? The answer is no. Philippe made a grave mistake. He was trying to recover stolen art from Antonio DeMarco, and DeMarco used his political connections to assure my brother’s arrest. You have heard of the collector in Nice.”

  I caught my breath.

  “Yes. The man who sent Jef Cauvin to kidnap you. That is a man not worthy of trust.”

  “Paul, please—”

  He made a dismissive gesture. “It is not a problem.You and I do not view the world the same way. C’est la vie. I am just sorry that these things, so long ago, got in our way.” He motioned to the waiter for the check. “By the time we reach the police municipale, Inspector Bouvier should be there.”

  The music had stopped. The band was going on a break. The room grew noisy with the shuffling of feet and scraping of chairs. The front door opened. A few patrons departed, and others entered. For the first time since I’d been in Provence, it was raining.

  CHAPTER 41

  * * *

  Fifty years old, and I’d never been inside a police station in the United States. Here in Provence, I’d had that privilege three times in three days. The first time, waiting for Felicity to be questioned, hardly counted, but the times that did count, in Arles and in Fontvieille, had occurred within hours of each other.

  At the station in Fontvieille, Inspector Bouvier, his mouth turned down at the corners, was visibly less sympathetic than he’d been after Jef Cauvin’s attempt to kidnap me at the amphitheater. No wonder. He’d taken Paul’s call while he was on a date. Why else the French cuffs and gold cufflinks, the slicked-back hair, the spicy scent of aftershave? He’d also instructed me to leave crime solving to the police, but here we were again.

  I’d puzzled over how to explain what I knew about Gerard Llorca without implicating Bettina, but Paul took charge the minute we sat down with Inspector Bouvier. Probably painting the broad strokes at first, before he and the inspector engaged in a dialogue that sometimes, from their intonations, sounded like questions and answers and sometimes sounded like coercing, on Paul’s part. Only then did the frown that had pulled at the inspector’s heavy brows begin to smooth out. I listened to the music of the language I didn’t understand, irritated that they weren’t including me. But after some twenty minutes, the men stood up. Our meeting was over. Paul steered me to the door of the office, a firm hand on the small of my back. I got the message: No questions. The old boys’ club that I knew so well. Paul said, “Merci.” Thanking Inspector Bouvier just for his time, or was the inspector actually going to do something? I couldn’t tell.

  At the door, I turned from Paul’s guiding hand to face Inspector Bouvier. I wanted to say I might know a thing or two, but I didn’t. “Goodbye. I’m leaving in the morning,” I said.

  “It is too bad you do not have two more weeks in Fontvieille, Madame,” he said. “Perhaps you would solve all of our open cases, oui?” He touched his mustache. He might have been coaxing a little smile, barely discernible, but it was there.

  In the back seat of Paul’s Mercedes, I couldn’t help thinking of that other night, after I’d heard of Barry’s death: Paul’s insistence on seeing me safely to Felicity’s hotel, the exhilarating evening at Lassare behind us, his face close to mine, the whispers between us. The ride to La Regalido had felt too short, too short.

  So different tonight, with the crush of rain, the wipers making their monotonous arcs on the windshield, Paul and I reasonably close together but not touching, nothing intimate in our voices. The distance from the police station to our hotel seemed longer than it was. Too long.

  Inspector Bouvier would alert the security detail at the Château, and he was willing to send a gendarme to look around the hotel, Paul explained. I expressed my skepticism. Llorca would surely not go into the tunnel if a policeman was prowling around the grounds. Paul’s response was that, after all, Inspector Bouvier was acting on hearsay, and, therefore, we could hardly expect more. Unspoken was the reminder that had it not been for Monsieur Broussard’s influence, the inspector likely would have done nothing.

  “I suppose you had to tell him about Bettina,” I said. The names of Bettina and Jean-Claude were all I was able to understand from the exchange between Paul and Inspector Bouvier.

  “I had no choice but to tell him,” Paul said. “It’s only because of the young woman that we are able to provide information about the robbery that Llorca is planning tonight.”

  L’hôtel du Soleil came into view, like something in an impressionist painting, rain-washed, with its fuzzy lights. Moments later, we were in the lobby, not soaking wet, because the driver had provided umbrellas, but both of us brushing the dampness from our clothes. Bettina, at Réception, was handing out keys to the German entourage. I could see through to the dining room, which was not yet empty. I checked my watch. Twenty past eleven. It would be a while yet before we could expect Llorca to make his move. Bettina handed us our keys and said, Bonsoir, as if it were any other night. Good for her. She was playing her part.

  Paul regarded me with an earnest expression as we started upstairs. “Jordan, I do appreciate what you learned about Gerard Llorca, and no one wishes to stop another robbery of art more than I. But now we must leave it to the police. You must not put yourself in danger again in Fontvieille. Do you understand?”

  My first inclination was to bristle, but his mouth turned up just enough to amuse rather than provoke me. “You have no problem going to sleep and waiting till morning to hear what happened?”

  “I did not say I would sleep.”

  I confessed that Millie and I intended to watch from her room, where she had a view of the entrance to the old part of the hotel and had twice seen Llorca at two A.M. “The moonlight on his white hair made it seem like an apparition, floating through the cypress trees,” I said. “Tonight, with the rain, he can probably move through the trees without being detected.”

  “We can only hope the gendarme who is coming to patrol the grounds is more skilled in detection than you give him credit,” Paul said, with a trace of a smile.

  Given the light moment, I ventured to ask, “Will you call if you hear anything tonight? I won’t be sleeping. Please just let me know. I promise I won’t get in the middle of things.”

  “You can call me, as well, if the apparition shows,” he said.

  And then we parted ways, to our separate rooms.

  The night dragged. I threw the last of my belongings into my suitcase, leaving out only what I’d need in the morning. My ribs were too sore to do my exercise regimen. I’d silenced my phone at the bistro, not wanting to be interrupted. Now as I checked the phone, making sure I wouldn’t miss a call from Paul later in the night, I realized I had a message from Kyle that had come in during that time.

  “Jordan, I’m having dinner with these kids—do I sound like an old man or what? They don’t speak much English, and I don’t speak French, so we’re kind of struggling, but it’s fine. Anyway, did you know Felicity was having Barry’s body cremated today? She’d just come back from the mortuary when we talked. She’s going home tomorrow. Said they’d send her the ashes by FedEx. I just thought it was all kind of bizarre and wondered if you knew. I’ve got to go now.” Pause. “Jordan— well, take care of yourself.”

  This was shaping up to be an eerie night.

  Just past one A.M., I tapped on Millie’s door. She greeted me, saying, “I was just thinking, if you’re as keyed-up as I am, you might as well come on over.”

  The draperies were closed. A bedside lamp produced a dim light. Millie and I were at similar stages of
packing. She had an open suitcase on the bed, ready for last-minute items. She had not yet packed the makings for tea, which were spread out on her low table. She heated water in a cup and pushed it my way. I chose a tea bag, Cinnamon Zinger.

  “I’ve peeped around the draperies a few times,” she said. “I thought the rain might change things. Cause him to start earlier. Or he could give up the plan altogether.”

  “That’s a real possibility.” I wondered why Llorca had chosen this night in the first place. Wouldn’t it be less risky after Paul had gone back to Paris? I also wondered where Llorca went when he left the tunnel with the sketches. To a parked vehicle, I imagined, but parked where? Tonight he couldn’t go far on foot in the rain, even if he wrapped the valuable art in plastic and carried an umbrella. I contemplated out loud. Millie was an attentive listener, as always.

  “You never saw him come out of the tunnel,” I said. “It took us more than two hours, in and out. Llorca probably would’ve been exiting the tunnel just before dawn.”

  “About the time I was finally getting my REMs,” Millie said. Her eyes were bright with anticipation, as if she thought I was close to discovering some big clue. I was not.

  With a dismissive gesture, I said, “It’s up to the police now. Inspector Bouvier has warned me to stay out of it, and so did Paul, when I told him what Llorca was planning.”

  “So— you’ve spoken to Monsieur Broussard tonight?” Millie’s expression turned playful.

  “I have an update on Monsieur Broussard,” I said.

  “Since nine o’clock?”

  “Yes.”

  “Goody! You can tell me all about it while we watch.”

  Millie turned off the lamp. She opened the draperies and the French doors. We pulled chairs up to the opening, where we had a view over the slats in the rail of the balcony. The lights around the pool had been turned off. The old part of the hotel was visible as a solid dark mass.

  “This OK with you?” she asked, keeping her voice down. “I like the rain.”

  “Nice.” The rain, the hot tea, the soft darkness, and a friend. I would miss Millie.

  She settled in her chair with exaggerated fidgeting, as if she might be about to see a movie. “I loved the part where he rescued you today. So now are you going to tell me how you showed him your gratitude?”

  “Millie, you’re a hopeless romantic,” I said, taking my seat, shifting the chair a bit to get the best view.

  “I’m a fair judge of character, and I’ve never thought Monsieur Broussard was a thief.”

  “That is half true.” In the grayness that was near-dark, I could only imagine the baffled look on her face, but I heard her take a sharp breath.

  I reported the story Paul had told me.

  Millie was silent until I said, “Paul was adamant that he suffered no pangs of conscience for returning to families what was rightfully theirs. He didn’t do it for money. He believed it was the right thing to do.” I was paraphrasing, but I could have quoted him, word for word. His words would be playing in my mind for a long time.

  Millie’s response was a question. “Do you have any doubt that it was a noble thing for him to do?”

  I meant it when I said, “No.”

  “Good.” A pause, and she asked, “Does that mean you’re back on good terms with him?”

  I was glad to hear the gravity dissipating in her voice. “He did save my life,” I said.

  The rain seemed to have slowed to a drizzle. If anything, it was more opaque than the heavier rain, thick like a fog. Millie fixed another cup of tea for herself, using the light from one of the flashlights we’d carried into the tunnel. I was too waterlogged to have more tea.

  “It’s twenty till two,” Millie said, just above a whisper.

  “I don’t think we could see anything if he were out there right now,” I said.

  Conversation dwindled. Nothing moved out there in the fuzzy darkness. The minutes crawled by. And the drizzle continued.

  CHAPTER 42

  * * *

  “I have a bad feeling that Llorca has already made his move,” I said.

  “It’s just now two o’clock,” Millie said.

  “I’m not sure two o’clock means anything to Llorca. Only to us, because you said that was when you saw him the other times.”

  “But we’ve been watching. You think he got by us? And the policeman that’s out there?”

  “I don’t know what I think, except that we’re missing something.”

  I fumbled in my pocket for my phone and punched in Paul’s number.

  “No, I have no news,” he said. “I promised I would call if I had information.”

  But he did have one bit of information. Inspector Bouvier was at the hotel, waiting for the call from his gendarme who was outside in the rain, watching for Llorca. Paul was cloistered with the inspector and Jean-Claude in the downstairs office.

  The Réception area was dimly lit, no different from other nights. I knew this to be true because I’d dashed into the hotel to change my clothes at about this same time the night Barry Blake was murdered, when Jean-Claude was on duty. Seated behind the front desk, Bettina looked up from a magazine. I hadn’t paid attention before to the comfy-looking chair, with arms and a headrest. Good for dozing, given that someone stayed on duty throughout the night. No surprise that Bettina wasn’t dozing tonight.

  “Madame? What is it?” Bettina practically jumped to her feet.

  “Nothing’s happened, as far as I know. I just spoke to Monsieur Broussard. He’s with your father and Inspector Bouvier.” Paul hadn’t exactly invited me to join the men, but when I’d invited myself, he hadn’t told me I was unwelcome.

  “Yes, they are in the office.” Bettina’s eyes were wide and anxious. “Madame, what I said about Monsieur Llorca was the truth.You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I believe you, but I don’t know if we can believe what Llorca told you,” I said.

  I left her looking bewildered, and rounded the corner to the office.

  The room smelled of rich coffee and cigars. Jean-Claude hurried to welcome me and offered coffee or tea. Paul and the inspector, meandering around the room, holding china cups that looked too dainty for their large hands, extended greetings that were polite but less effusive than Jean-Claude’s.

  “Nothing for me, thank you. Forgive me for crashing the party,” I said. “I was going nuts, waiting upstairs.”

  “It is no party, Madame,” Jean-Claude said, with great feeling.

  The inspector, whose manner had been absolutely frosty when we were at the police station, smiled. “It is one of those odd American expressions, crashing the party,” he explained. Possibly the change in his attitude had something to do with the time he’d spent with Jean-Claude. The “hearsay” Paul had referred to would have carried more weight coming directly from Bettina’s father. Maybe the reality had sunk in: Solving a crime such as this one would be a great boost to the inspector’s career. Whatever the reason, if he minded losing a night’s sleep for this purpose, he wasn’t showing it.

  “Do you think the rain spoiled Llorca’s plans?” I asked.

  Paul answered while Inspector Bouvier was tapping his chin. “He has proven himself to be a clever thief. I wouldn’t think he’d let the fact of rain thwart his plans. No, he would simply make adjustments.”

  How convincing he was, speaking about the nature of a thief. But I refused to let that notion take root in my mind. Many years had passed since Paul had followed his conscience, if not the letter of the law, in recovering art confiscated by the Nazis. How had Millie put it? He had done a noble thing. If those long-ago activities provided any insight to help catch Gerard Llorca tonight, so be it.

  “Since you are here, Madame,” Inspector Bouvier said, with a penetrating gaze, “perhaps we should go over the facts again.”

  “Certainly,” I said, glancing at Paul, whose half-smile seemed to say, See, when you let me take charge, how it goes much better for you.


  We sat in wicker chairs around a low, glass-topped table, in a small sitting area much like the one in my room. The men set their cups on the table, where an ashtray held stale cigar butts.

  “When did you first go into the tunnel?” the inspector asked.

  I had to think hard about it. My days and nights were all mixed up. “Sunday night,” I said. The night before we went to Paris, I was thinking. “Millie and I—Millie O’Neill—we didn’t go far that night. But we could tell someone had been using the tunnel. There were footprints, not distinct footprints, but rocks had been kicked to the side to make a clear path. So we went back last night. Actually Wednesday night. Because this is already Friday, isn’t it?”

  “And you know for a fact that the tunnel led to the Château de Montauban?” the inspector said, not letting me get off target.

  “For a fact.” I explained that we’d actually reached the end and had found an entrance straight into the archives, through a closet with shelves.

  Paul made a sound, something between a groan and a sigh. He must have been thinking, How many times these last two weeks have I opened the door to that closet?

  “How long did it take you to go in and come out, Madame?” Inspector Bouvier asked.

  “More than an hour each way.” I added, “Millie probably remembers how long, to the minute. Should I call her?” Millie would be glad for any diversion.

  “It is not necessary.” The inspector stood up. No one spoke as he began to pace, his face set in deep concentration. Eventually, he checked his watch and turned to us. “It is not clear to me why Monsieur Llorca planned another robbery tonight, but I agree with you, Monsieur Broussard. The thief does not easily give up his plan that he has carefully crafted.” He frowned. “Unless he was forewarned that la police would be waiting for him.”

  Jean-Claude stiffened. “He was not forewarned, not by my daughter.”