“Oh? And what do I stink of?”
“Nutmeg and citron and cool mountain forests,” she said, and his eyes weren’t just green, they crinkled at the corners and were flecked with red, grey, and brown, and his mouth twisted sideways when he smiled. With his thick mop of dark hair and square practical hands, she was glad Luc would have no trouble finding a new wife once she’d gone.
“Hmm.”
He stuffed his square practical hands in his pockets and whistled “Mambo Italiano” under his breath as they sauntered past the bustling vineyards down the hill towards the river. Since the Domaine was only a fifteen-minute walk from the house, they hadn’t bothered with the car, and Marie-Claude was wrong about the cardigan. She hadn’t needed it at all.
“I don’t suppose this sudden obligation to duty has anything to do with the sister?” he asked after working his way through “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Smile,” and “Hernando’s Hideaway.”
“Madame Montaud wasn’t having an affair with her cellar master,” Marie-Claude said, wondering at what point her arm had become linked with his. “She ordered far too many evening gowns for an illicit liaison.”
More likely she was being courted discreetly, preferring to wait and see how things developed before going public with the relationship.
“Loose women aren’t taken seriously in business,” she pronounced. “But her sister, Madame Delaville, now that’s a different story.”
Husband reeking of stale booze and smoke, choosing all her clothes? She’d lost count of the number of times she’d seen him sitting in Madame Garreau’s plush armchair, squat and potbellied like a cocky little toad, while his wife paraded in unflattering suits with slow and mechanical precision.
“Natalie Delaville is a woman of loose moral standards?”
“Exactly the opposite,” Marie-Claude said, turning the key in the shop. “Her husband has the word bully all but etched on his forehead, but the more I think about it, the more I remember that her chin hasn’t drooped quite so much lately, there’s been colour in her pale cheeks, and miracle of miracles, Madame Delaville actually called in half a dozen times on her own over the past month. I want to look up what she — voilà!”
“Well?” Luc held out his hands in exasperation. “Are you going to tell me what the little mouse bought?”
“Certainly not.” Such matters were private! “But I can tell you that the dresses were feminine and flattering, and I can tell you whose account they were charged to, as well.” She shot her husband a sideways glance. “Alexandre Baret.”
“All right...” Luc rubbed his jaw in thought. “But is this actually getting us anywhere?”
“It explains his unease and reluctance to provide an alibi.”
“Because he was protecting Natalie Delaville.”
“Absolutely.” She locked the door and tested the catch. “Now all we have to do is prove how that bitch killed Martine.”
“Metamorphosis is a wonderful thing,” Luc observed, stretching his pace to match hers. “One minute she’s a mouse, the next she’s a bitch — what? What have I said?”
“Honestly!” Marie-Claude stopped outside the baker’s and shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know where you get your ideas, sometimes! Not Madame Delaville, Luc. She didn’t kill Madame Montaud.”
It was Madame Baret, of course. Alexandre’s wife.
“And she killed the wrong woman.”
As the hills slowly turned to russet and gold and the French populace finally came to terms with defeat in Indochina, the Empire State Building had been eclipsed as the world’s tallest structure, civilization was facing extinction from something called Rock and Roll, and Luc had been proved right about Suez, especially in light of that botched attempt on the Egyptian president’s life.
“By the way, Marie-Claude, I received a letter from the commissioner this morning.”
More and more these days Luc had taken to joining her on walks along the towpath, although sometimes their route took them through the town hall park or onto the islands, where they would take a picnic providing they wrapped up warm.
“He writes that he has finally rounded up everyone involved in the blackmail and extortion ring. Some seven police officers are awaiting trial, he says, and commends me for a job well done.”
“That the letter?” Marie-Claude tossed it into the Charente, where a squadron of ducks came steaming in, mistaking it for a bread roll. “You know my opinion of the commissioner.”
“For the life of me, I can’t imagine why.”
“He said I was truculent, selfish, and a pain in the cul.”
Luc laughed. “Well, if you overheard that much, you’d have also heard him qualify his statement by adding that you were spirited, funny, and I was lucky to have you.”
Couldn’t agree more, sir, Luc had replied, and damn those horrid children upstairs for drowning out the commissioner’s words.
“He congratulated me on the Montaud murder, as well.” Luc stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Being a high-profile case, I suppose word found its way back to his desk, but what I’m getting to is that he ended by saying that, now the corruption ring’s been wrapped up and my life is no longer in danger, there’s a job for me in Paris, should we want it.”
“You never told me your life was threatened!”
“Hell hath no fury like a chief inspector jailed. So then. Do we? Want that job, I mean.”
“It might have been high-profile, but it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, Luc.”
All those late nights in the distillery, indeed! I did not conduct an affair down here with Madame Montaud, the cellar master had insisted, that’s simply too sordid to contemplate. Quite right. It may have been his employer’s sister he’d been carrying on with, not his employer, but he wouldn’t have dreamt of taking the delicate, browbeaten Natalie to the distillery had it not been the only place where they could meet and not be either seen or overheard. His office was too close to the main works. They dared not be seen in public. So they either sat down there, talking long into the night, or they sneaked off in his car to plan their new life together, and what a lot of planning there was. For all that cellar masters are handsomely paid and live in grand houses, they still don’t live like the Montauds! There would be no majestic mansion for Natalie once she left Delaville. No parklands, no servants, no prestigious balls. Alexandre had wanted her to be one hundred percent sure before making the leap. He knew there would be no going back.
For her part, of course, Madame Baret hadn’t believed for a second that her husband had been required to work late.
In the way of deceived wives everywhere, she followed him, saw the lights in the distillery, knew about the bed, heard him whispering on the telephone in the hall. She’d had no trouble tracing the number to the Domaine and knew immediately who he was carrying on with. (Who else was there, for goodness’ sake? Hardly that pale, downtrodden sister!) So, again in the way of deceived wives everywhere, she hoped and then prayed the affair would blow over. Until the day she overheard him talking about their new life together...
From that moment on, revenge was all that consumed her. Revenge on the woman who had destroyed her life. Revenge on the man who discarded her.
“The marble bust might look like the instrument of a crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment decision, grabbing the first object to hand,” Marie-Claude said as they paused to watch the churning waters of the millrace merge with the stately river. “But equally it smacked of a squeamish reluctance to be facing the victim.”
A uniquely feminine approach to murder. As was the cold-blooded planning.
“It was easy enough to get a set of her husband’s keys cut.”
“One of the locksmiths confirmed it straightaway, but as evidence it was still far from conclusive.”
“No, but it all mounted up.” She kicked the fallen leaves as she walked. Alder, willow, and poplar. “Madame Baret’s mistake was planting the desk key in Martine’s pocket.”
<
br /> Good heavens, women as elegant as Madame Montaud don’t use pockets! They tuck such things away tidily in their Chanel handbags, which meant someone had used that key to get into her desk and replaced it in a hurry. And if it wasn’t to take something out, then it must be to put something in.
A quick check of the keys proved that the letter had been typed on the Barets’ private typewriter, not in the office at the Domaine, but it had been a clever move on Madame Baret’s part. If the head of a cognac house wanted rid of their cellar master, this would not be made public knowledge. A gentleman’s agreement between the two parties, however bitter underneath, would not show on the surface. Both had too much invested in the business to jeopardise their reputations.
“She was smart about fingerprints, too.”
Taking care the only ones lifted were her husband’s, and who would think anything odd about seeing a lady of quality going round in evening gloves?
Whatever excuse she’d used to lure Madame Montaud down to the cellars, she must have thought it was her lucky day when Martine agreed so easily. But then, of course, she didn’t know she was setting a trap for the wrong woman.
“Too smart about the fingerprints,” Luc said. They had stopped to watch one of the wooden, flat-bottomed gabarres pass through the lock, laden with casks lashed with ropes. “That was one of the things that bothered me from the outset. That if Martine Montaud was exerting so much passion in the cellar master’s quarters, why weren’t hers there, too?”
“She misjudged the calibre of Madame Montaud’s jewellery, as well.”
How cold must her heart have been as she stood over the corpse, unscrewing the emerald cluster? Extracting the key from Martine’s handbag, placing the letter of dismissal in her desk, replacing the key in Martine’s pocket, then walking out as if nothing had happened, secure in the knowledge that her husband would not plead crime passionel. Why should he, after all? The man was innocent.
“Never mind Madame Baret,” Luc said. “Just tell me whether we want that job in Paris.”
Marie-Claude watched the gabarre sail round the bend and disappear from sight. Above, the sun shone through the falling leaves and blackbirds foraged in the litter. Next week Dial M for Murder would be running back to back with Rear Window and in subtitles, plus she still hadn’t finished those curtains for the bathroom, the cellar really needed a new blind, the old one was a disgrace, the bedroom could use fresh wallpaper, ditto the salon now she came to think about it, and she’d promised Madame Garreau two more days a week with the winter collection.
“Maybe when the rains come,” Marie-Claude said slowly.
Besides, she wasn’t sure Luc was quite ready to live alone yet.
Suffer
by J. A. Konrath
Copyright © 2006 J.A. Konrath
J.A. Konrath’s first fiction publication was in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 2004 and by 2005 he’d won second place in the EQMM Readers Award. The newcomer’s talent was also recognized with Anthony and Macavity nominations for his debut novel Whiskey Sour, which gives a role to Phineas Troutt, protagonist of this story and a character in the forthcoming novel Rusty Nail.
❖
I want you to kill my wife.”
The man sitting a-cross from me, Lyle Tibbits, stared into my eyes like a dog stares at the steak you’re eating. He was mid to late thirties, a few inches taller than my six feet, wearing jeans and a button-down shirt that pinched his thick wrists.
I sipped some coffee and asked why he wanted his wife dead.
“Do you care?” he asked.
I shrugged. “No. As long as I get paid.”
Lyle smiled, exposing gray smoker’s teeth.
“I didn’t think it mattered. When I called you, I heard you did anything for money.”
I rubbed my nose. My nostrils were sore from all the coke I’d been snorting lately, and I’d been getting nosebleeds.
“Any particular way you want it done?”
He looked around Maxie’s Coffee Shop — his choice for the meeting place — and leaned forward on his forearms, causing the table to shift and the cheap silverware to rattle.
“You break into my house, discover her home alone, then rape and kill her.”
Jaded as I was, this made me raise an eyebrow.
“Rape her?”
“The husband is always a suspect when the wife dies. Either he did it, or he hired someone to do it. The rape will throw the police off. Plus, I figured, with your condition, you won’t care about leaving evidence.”
He made a point of glancing at my bald head.
“Who gave you my number?” I asked.
“I don’t want to say.”
I thought about the Glock nestled between my belt and my spine, knew I could get him to tell me if I needed to. We were on Damon and Diversey in Wicker Park, which wasn’t the nicest part of Chicago. I could follow him out of the diner and put the hurt to him right there on the sidewalk, and chances were good we’d be ignored.
But truth be told, I didn’t really care where he got my number, or that he knew I was dying of cancer. I was out of money, which meant I was out of cocaine. The line I’d done earlier was wearing off, and the pain would return soon.
“I get half up-front, half when it’s done. The heat will be on you after the job, and you won’t have a chance to get the money to me. So you’ll put the second half in a locker at the train station, hide the key someplace public, and then give me the info when I’m done. Call from a pay phone so the number isn’t traced. You screw with me, and I’ll find you.”
“You can trust me.”
Like your wife trusts you? I thought. Instead I said, “How would you like me to do it?”
“Messy. The messier the better. I want her to suffer, and suffer for a long time.”
“You’ve obviously been living in marital bliss.”
“You have to hurt her, or else we don’t have a deal.”
I made a show of thinking it over, even though I’d already made my decision. I assumed this was a way to cash in on life insurance, but what life-insurance policy paid extra for torture and rape?
“You have the money on you?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Pass it under the table.”
He hesitated. “Trust goes both ways, you know.”
“I could just walk away.”
Like hell I could. I needed a snort worse than Wimpy needed his daily hamburger. But I’m a pretty decent bluffer.
Lyle handed me the paper bag he’d brought with him. I set it on the booth next to me and peeked inside. The cash was rubber-banded in stacks of tens and twenties. I stuck my fingers in and did a quick count.
Six grand, to take a human life.
Not bad for a few hours’ work.
“When?” I asked.
“Tomorrow night, after ten. I’ll be out, and she’ll be home alone. I’ll leave the front door open for you. I’m at 3626 North Christiana, off of Addison. Remember, rape and pain.”
He seemed to be waiting for a reply so I said, “Sure.”
“And Mr. Troutt...” Lyle smiled again, flashing gray. “Have fun with it.”
After the diner meeting, I called my dealer and scored enough coke to keep me high for a while. I also bought some tequila and refilled my codeine prescription.
Back at my ratty apartment, Earl and I had a party.
Earl is what I call the tumor growing on my pancreas. Giving my killer a name makes it a little easier to deal with. Each day, Earl eats a little more of my body. Each day, I try to prevent Earl from doing that. There’s chemo, and radiation, and occasional surgery. And in the off-times, there’s illegal drugs, pharmaceuticals, and alcohol.
Earl was winning.
Luckily, being a drug abuser has some excellent side benefits, such as not caring about anything, erasing all emotion, and helping to forget the past.
Just a few months ago I had a well-paying job in the suburbs, a beautiful fiancée, and a lif
e most would be envious of. Earl changed all that. Now, not even the roaches in my tenement building were envious of me.
I drank, and popped, and snorted, until the pain was gone. Until reality was gone. Until consciousness was gone.
Earl woke me up the next morning, gnawing at my left side with jagged, rabid teeth.
I peeled myself from the floor, stripped off the jeans and underwear I’d soiled, and climbed into a shower slick with mildew. I turned the water as hot as it would go, and the first blast came out rusty and stung my eyes. I had no soap, so I used shampoo to scrub my body. I didn’t eat well, if I remembered to eat at all, and I could count the ribs on my hairless chest. I made a note to eat something today. Who would hire a thug that weighed ninety pounds?
After the shower I found some fresh jeans and a white T-shirt. I did a line, choked down three painkillers, and dug out an old Chicago phone book.
“Walker Insurance.”
“I had a couple questions about life insurance.”
“I’ll transfer you to one of our agents.”
I took my cell over to the fridge and listened to a Muzak version of Guns N’ Roses while rummaging through the icebox. Nothing in there but frost.
“This is Brad, can I help you?”
“I’m thinking of taking out a life-insurance policy on my wife. We live in a nice neighborhood, but she has this unrealistic fear — call it a phobia — of being raped and killed. I’m sure that would never happen, but do you have policies that cover that?”
“Accidental death includes murder, but not suicide.”
“And rape?”
“Well, I’ve heard of some countries like India and Africa that offer rape insurance, but there’s nothing like that in the U.S. But if she’s afraid of being attacked, a good life-insurance policy can help bring some peace of mind.”
“What if she doesn’t like the idea of insurance? Could I insure her without her knowing it?”
“For certain types of insurance, the person covered doesn’t need to sign the policy. You can insure anyone you want. Would you like to schedule an appointment to talk about this further?”
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006 Page 7
