The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  “That’s right.”

  “I just wanted to double check that you don’t want to do this one at a time,” Ted said. “This group feeds off each other. You won’t get the same level of cooperation together that you would separately. That’s especially true with Jeremy.”

  “Well,” Maggie said, doubtfully. “I guess you have a point.”

  “How about we call off Diane and Jeremy and just do me and Bijou tonight? You can do the other two another time.”

  “Good idea, Ted. Thanks,” Maggie said. “I’ll text them but if you talk to them first…”

  “No problem.

  “Oh, and Ted?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How about we make it just me and Bijou tonight?”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, you and I already talked last night…”

  “Absolutely. No problem. Good idea.”

  “Thanks, Ted,” Maggie said. “And thanks again for dinner last night.”

  “Pas du tout,” Ted said, a little crisply, Maggie thought.

  Le Bal was not unlike any of a hundred Parisian brasseries. It was at least three hundred years old and had been in service as a place for people to gather and eat and drink for almost all of that time. It was dark with gleaming brass fixtures and ancient chandeliers which hovered over most of the tables. Maggie chose it as a good place to meet because it wasn’t right in her neighborhood but not terribly far either. Plus, it was just far enough off the beaten tourist path—even though the season had deflated now that Paris Week was over—not to be too populated by English-speakers.

  As Maggie waited for Bijou, she was determined to conduct the whole interview—for that was exactly what she considered the evening to be—in French. She had been pleasantly surprised to realize that her language skills had improved to the point that they had. She and Laurent spoke a mixture of French and English at home but she had made a point of speaking more French with him than she had her first two years in France when she had stubbornly refused to speak any. The only slight downside about her new found pride in her language mastery was the fact that she was often received by Parisian shopgirls as speaking what she could only describe as hillbilly French. The patois of the region of France which St-Buvard was a part was very different from the beautifully precise accent spoken in Paris. She felt that the reaction she received was better than if she had been caught speaking American French—or not bothering at all—but she was still enduring that famous uptilt of the Gallic nose for her efforts.

  “Bon soir, Maggie!” Bijou waved to Maggie from the door, stopping only long enough to embrace and vigorously kiss at least two patrons on the way to Maggie’s table. Maggie stood and the two kissed cheeks before Bijou shrugged out of her coat—a full length silver fox that did amazing things for the model’s complexion in any light.

  As if she needed any help, Maggie couldn’t help but think. Bijou was so striking that there was no chance any companion would ever be noticed, let alone favored in comparison. Maggie watched as every head in the restaurant, women included, turned to gawk at Bijou. And this in a city where fashion and beauty permeate, Maggie thought.

  “So smart to get rid of the others,” Bijou said sitting down on the same side of the table as Maggie.

  “Ted’s idea,” Maggie admitted.

  “Ted wants to sleep with you,” Bijou said, her large blue eyes widening as if this was shocking to her.

  “I’m married,” Maggie said, holding up her hand with her wedding band on it.

  “Okay,” Bijou said, shrugging. Suddenly she leaned over and touched Maggie’s hand. “I have a terrible secret to reveal today,” she said in a hoarse whisper, then looking side to side to see if anyone were listening. As far as Maggie could tell, every single person within listening distance was openly staring at Bijou as if they were somehow included in the conversation. Bijou appeared not to notice.

  “About Stan?” Maggie asked, feeling the hand that Bijou held start to sweat.

  “Yes, about Stan,” Bijou said. “Of course. It’s why we’re here, yes? To find out who killed Stan?”

  “So you think he was pushed, too?”

  “Of course! The police are so stupid. Stan was pushed.”

  Maggie’s confidence in her language skills flagged. “Can we speak in English, do you think, Bijou?” She indicated the openly listening diners. “Perhaps it will confuse our audience.”

  Bijou switched easily to English, her voice still a whisper: “I am sleeping with the enemy,” she said dramatically.

  “You mean the killer?” Maggie said excitedly. “You know who it is?”

  “No, the enemy,” Bijou said, sitting up straight and signaling the waiter. “The one everyone hates. The one Stan hated.”

  Maggie held her tongue and waited.

  “Stan knew and it sickened him.” Bijou made a shrug as if to say that this must be accepted, “but I could not stop it.”

  “So you are in love?” Maggie asked.

  Bijou burst out laughing. “Oh, funny! So funny! I see why Stan enjoyed your company so very much. No, I am not in love, Maggie.”

  The waiter came to take their orders and Maggie found herself barely able to wait for the man to leave before she leaned against the table toward Bijou.

  “Okay, who is it?”

  “You cannot guess?”

  Fighting her natural impatience, Maggie smiled and shook her head.

  “It’s Denny, of course,” Bijou said.

  “Denny.” Shit. And she was hoping to like Bijou.

  “You are disappointed in me.”

  “What? Oh, God, no. I mean, you don’t need to worry about what I think.”

  “But I do,” Bijou said, lighting a cigarette.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here,” Maggie said.

  “Stan was so mad at me, he could barely speak to me. Tu sais? He died and he was so angry with me.”

  “Oh, Bijou…” Maggie tried to determine to the best of her ability—which history had shown wasn’t stellar—if Bijou were faking her present unhappiness.

  “Non, non,” she said. “We had not made up. He died hating me.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t hate you, Bijou.”

  Yeah, this was when these investigative interviews got away from her and turned into ad hoc therapy sessions which she was absolutely not qualified to conduct. Nor did she want to. Maggie fought down the annoyance that had begun almost from the moment Bijou joined her at the table. I don’t care if he did die hating you, Maggie thought, watching Bijou puff angrily on her cigarette while surrounding diners made energetic gestures of waving away invading smoke at their table. Were you the one who pushed him?

  “Well,” a loud voice boomed out from behind Bijou, “I am not so sure of that!”

  Jeremy appeared behind Bijou, quivering with rage. His heavy winter coat made him look even larger and more imposing than the last time she had seen him. His face was red from emotion and the cold, his bloodshot eyes darted from Maggie to Bijou and he worked his lips as if rehearsing his next lines before speaking.

  Bijou jumped up from her chair and slapped him before he could speak again. Inexplicably, a few of the surrounding diners began to clap.

  “You bastard!” she shrieked at him. “You encouraged him! He would have forgiven me long before…before—”

  “Before he flung himself to his death because of your crass betrayal?” Jeremy’s French pronunciation was a little awkward, even Maggie could hear that, but his vocabulary was good.

  Bijou gasped dramatically. “I did not kill him!”

  “Maybe you didn’t physically push him, I don’t know,” Jeremy said, looking at Maggie now as if performing for her. “But it was the heartsickness over what you had done that carried him over the railing that night!”

  “You cretin!”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Maggie said, her annoyance finally winning out over her attempt to be civil to these two. “Jeremy, sit down or leave. I don
’t care which. Same goes for you, Bijou.”

  The waiter approached with Maggie and Bijou’s drinks and frowned at Bijou. He muttered something about her cigarette and she angrily stubbed it out in the butter dish on the table.

  “I will not stay,” she said, grabbing the coat off her chair, the blood red talons of her polished nails stark against the fur. She stared daggers at Jeremy. “At least I feel guilt over my part in Stan’s death,” she hissed at him before turning and, without a goodbye or backward glance, sauntered out of the brasserie like it was the downhill run on a fashion catwalk.

  Jeremy sat down in her chair, his coat still on.

  “What the hell, Jeremy,” Maggie said, shaking her head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking forlornly at Bijou’s still smoldering cigarette on the dish.

  “Why are you even here?” she asked.

  He looked up at her, his grief and pain nakedly on display across his face.

  Doesn’t mean he didn’t kill him, Maggie reminded herself, trying not to flinch from the sight. Could be guilt I’m seeing, not sadness.

  “I needed to talk with you about this idea you have that Stan was murdered.”

  “Because you’re so sure he wasn’t?”

  Jeremy reached out and stamped Bijou’s cigarette out until the ember died completely.

  “Stan had a lot of issues,” he said evasively, “more than you were aware. He had things that ate at him.”

  “Like what kind of things? You mean about being gay?”

  Jeremy looked at her, startled. “He talked about that with you?”

  “He did not,” she said.

  “But you knew.”

  “What things, Jeremy?” she asked. “Had he embezzled funds? Fathered a love child? Taken steroids during a bike race?”

  “Things I am not at liberty to tell.”

  “Client patient confidentialities typically terminate with the death of the subject,” Maggie said.

  Jeremy gave her a confused look.

  “Whatever secret you feel you are keeping for Stan cannot harm him now,” she said. “Unless you are also keeping it for yourself.”

  “It has nothing to do with me.”

  “Then who can it hurt to reveal these secrets?”

  “That is not for me to decide.”

  “Okay, I don’t have the energy for this crap. If you say Stan had secrets that were insidious enough to make him want to kill himself but you don’t want to reveal what they were, then I guess we’re done.”

  “He wasn’t murdered.”

  “I disagree. I knew him all of four days and I knew he wouldn’t kill himself.”

  “I knew him three decades,” Jeremy said fiercely, “and I tell you it has been a long time coming.”

  “At a party with all his friends and the niece he hadn’t seen in twenty-five years.”

  Jeremy looked a little uncomfortable. “People in distress do not always have the leisure to pick the time and venue,” he said.

  “Did you try to get into Stan’s apartment last week?”

  Jeremy looked at her. “Is this an interrogation?” he asked.

  “Stan’s neighbor said you came by last week to try to get the house key from her.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Jeremy said. “I haven’t been to Stan’s since you left.”

  Maggie dug a photo out of her purse and slapped it down onto the table. “I found plenty of photos of you when I was going through Stan’s things, Jeremy, to be able to show her and ask if the guy who tried to force his way into her apartment was you.”

  Jeremy looked at her with his mouth open and then reached over to take a sip from Bijou’s drink, his eyes glancing at the photo on the table.

  “I just needed to get something,” he said quietly.

  “Want to share with me what that was?”

  Jeremy looked at her and she could see his lip curl ever so slightly. “So now you don’t trust me.”

  “That’s what happens when you lie.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I guess I may have one or two secrets of my own.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m starting to see,” she said sipping her drink.

  Chapter Eight

  Later that evening as Maggie walked back to her apartment—and she was surprised at how quickly she began to think of it that way—she found herself more confused than before the evening began. Both Jeremy and Bijou had been significant question marks to her before tonight. She knew them only slightly better now but they continued to hold their cards close to the vest.

  They both have something to hide, she thought. Was it the same something?

  As she approached Pont Neuf she thought of how ironic it was that the name translated was New Bridge but it was, in fact, the oldest bridge in Paris. She walked quickly across it, noting that amorous couples were still in abundance on this bridge, even though it afforded no way to affix locks which was all the craze nowadays and thereby help ensure the permanence of a couple’s love. She appreciated the carefully placed lights on the bridge which separately illuminated each of the stone faces carved along the top in great detail. Was there another place on earth so in love with itself? she wondered. She decided it was actually nice to see a city so proud of itself that it refused to allow such a mundane thing as darkness obscure an opportunity to showcase its beauty.

  The weather had turned cold and Maggie turned her coat collar up against a chill that was inching down her neck. There was something else there too. A feeling of uneasiness. She glanced at the preoccupied lovers on the bridge and hurried her pace. The uncomfortable feeling was almost as if she could feel eyes on her. Eyes hidden in the dark, watching her.

  As she turned the final corner of the block with her apartment in it, she saw a lone figure standing under the street lamp as if waiting for a ride.

  “Danielle!” Maggie hurried to her friend and embraced her before she noticed the train case at her feet. “Why didn’t you call me?” she said. “Have you been waiting long? Are you alone?”

  “It’s just me,” Danielle said, goodnaturedly. “I ate at the corner café.”

  “Oh, come up, come up,” Maggie said. “There’s no lift, I’m afraid and the apartment is on the third floor…”

  “I am not fragile,” Danielle said.

  Maggie grabbed her suitcase and found herself genuinely delighted to see her friend.

  Danielle appeared impressed with the apartment.

  “A two-bedroom in the heart of the Latin Quarter,” she said as she settled onto the couch in the living room. “Your uncle was rich.”

  Maggie set down two cups of peppermint tea on the coffee table. She was glad Danielle rejected the offer of wine. It had already been a long night, and while she was looking forward to an in-depth conversation with Danielle—and that in itself surprised her—the day had been a long one and she hoped to postpone the talk until tomorrow.

  “I’m finding out all kinds of things about him,” Maggie admitted.

  “The one who killed him?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “So you still believe it was murder?”

  “More than ever. His friends, if you can call them that, are positively shifty.”

  Danielle laughed. “Well, if anyone can get to the bottom if it, it’s you, Maggie. As I know better than anyone.” Maggie smiled at her friend’s reference to what was a singularly miserable time in the older woman’s life. And although Maggie’s sleuthing had, at that time, caused what Danielle believed to be the end of the life she had known up until then, it turned out to be the best thing that could possibly have happened to her.

  “Thanks, Danielle,” Maggie said yawning. “Although, you know, one thing Stan’s group has got in spades—and it’s actually something I hope to learn from them—is the ability to enjoy life for what it is, whatever it is.” She laughed at the confused look on Danielle’s face. “I can’t explain it,” she said. “But what do you say we do some shopping tomorrow
and eat lunch out and just forget Stan’s problems and Maggie and Laurent’s problems—I assume you and Jean-Luc don’t have any problems—and just enjoy ourselves?”

  Danielle laughed and looked fondly at her friend. “Sounds good,” she said.

  “You’ve called Jean-Luc to say you got in okay?”

  “I was hoping to use your phone.”

  “Oh, goodness, Danielle! Why didn’t you tell me? Jean-Luc is probably on his way to Paris right now!”

  Danielle moved to the telephone on the side table. “Well, hopefully not,” she said. “But it is nice to be missed. It is a new feeling and one I do not think I will ever tire of.”

  As Danielle settled into her phone conversation, Maggie collected the empty tea cups and left the living room to give her some privacy. The press of the long day and the late hour—and even Danielle’s joy—had begun to weigh on her.

  At approximately three in the morning, Maggie was awakened by the sound of the phone ringing in the living room.

  Who the hell? Afraid the noise would awaken Danielle in the bedroom down the hall, Maggie stumbled into the living room and snatched up the receiver, her heart pounding. It occurred to her that if it was Jean-Luc, she was not going to be very pleasant.

  “Yes?” she said into the phone.

  “Leave it alone or prepare to die.” The voice slithered across the phone line into Maggie’s ear. She nearly dropped the receiver, she was so repulsed.

  “Who is this?”

  “Let the poor bastard die. Or join him.”

  The connection was broken. Maggie sank to a seated position on the couch, still holding the phone receiver in her hand.

  “Maggie?”

  She turned to see Danielle standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

  “Is everything alright?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Maggie said, trying to calm her racing heart. “Just a wrong number.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Maggie remained seated until Danielle closed her bedroom door. And then she hung up the phone. She had left the curtains open and could see a hint of light trying to come up from behind the darkened cathedral out the window. Morning was still several hours off but the light from the coming day had already started.