“Hello?” Harry called out.
The only sound was the ticking of a large clock in the corner.
“Mr. Reyer?” I cried. Still nothing.
“Wait here,” Harrison said. “I’m going to see if I can find a light switch.”
“Okay,” I said. Mostly, because the shapes and shadows creeped me out. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing on end.
There was a bad smell to the shop. It hadn’t smelled like this yesterday. It made my stomach hurt and my eyes water. Unconsciously, I began to walk back toward the door, craving fresh air.
The lights snapped on and the shadows evaporated except for one. Creeping out across the floor, from behind a bucket of colorful paper parasols, was a deep crimson puddle.
Chapter 19
A shriek broke the silence. It took me a second to realize it had come from my mouth, then I started shaking. Sadly, I had stumbled upon ominous red pools before in my life and it never turned out well.
Harrison spun around from his spot by the wall, and I pointed. My hand was shaking so hard I tucked it back against my side. We both stepped forward toward the blood. Yes, I knew it was blood just like I knew there was going to be a body nearby.
Harrison got there first. He knelt beside Reyer and checked his outstretched hand for a pulse. He put his ear to the man’s chest, but really there was no point. Reyer was dead.
Jacques Reyer’s sightless eyes were gazing up at the ceiling, his mouth was slack, his body seemed cold and stiff. I didn’t want to look, but it seemed disrespectful not to acknowledge the man’s passing. The pool of blood seeped out from under his head and I could only assume that he had been bludgeoned by something in his own shop. I glanced around the floor until I saw a brass statuette of a woman in a toga, holding a basketful of grapes. There was a tuft of gray hair on the basket as well as congealed blood.
I felt my stomach roll and I lurched back away from the smell of death and did some serious mouth breathing.
Harrison joined me. I turned toward him, looking for a hug of comfort, but he blew past me into the back of the shop. Huh?
I grabbed my phone out of my purse. We needed to call the police, an ambulance, the consulate? I was unclear.
“Harrison, where are you going?” I asked. “I need you to do the talking.”
I frowned at my phone. Viv had told me the number for emergencies in France. I hadn’t committed it to memory as what were the odds I would need that information again? I tried to remember but my head was fuzzy and I still felt ill.
I hurried toward the back of the shop where Harrison had disappeared and found him in what must have been Reyer’s office. He was searching the man’s desk.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “We have to call the police.”
“We will just as soon as I find what I’m looking for,” he said.
“What are you looking for?”
“Colette Deneau’s address,” he said. His voice was grim.
“Good thinking.”
I hurried around the desk and started to help him. Reyer was not a tidy man and his desk was covered in odds and ends. A closed laptop computer, pens, pencils, a magnifying glass, scissors, a calculator, all of the things that helped him do his job as the seller of secondhand treasures.
My chest felt tight as I realized he wouldn’t be using any of this stuff ever again. He hadn’t been very pleasant to us yesterday, but he certainly didn’t deserve this horrible end.
“Do you think someone was trying to rob the place?” I asked.
“No,” Harrison answered. He had moved on to the desk drawers and was sifting through the contents.
“Then who—” I began but he interrupted.
“Search now, chat later, Ginger,” he said.
He sounded worried. It made me nervous and I began to check over the desk again, looking for anything that had the name “Colette Deneau.” There was nothing. I read all of the scraps of paper but there was nothing with her name.
Beside the phone was an article clipped from the evening newspaper Le Monde. I wouldn’t have noticed it except for the fact that several lines in the article were underlined, one of which included the name “Colette Deneau,” and an address was scribbled in the margin. It had to be for her.
“I found something!” I cried.
Harrison looked at me and I held out the paper to him. He scanned the article, which, judging from the little I could understand of it, was the story about the Renoir being bought by Colette Deneau and how it turned out to be a missing painting worth a fortune.
It occurred to me how frustrating that must have been for Reyer. Here he was, a man of collectibles, and he stumbles upon a painting that is sold to him for nothing so he assumes that it has little value and then he sells it for even less to a woman who obviously knew she had found something. It had to be galling. No wonder he had been so curt with us.
“Excellent!” Harrison said. “Now we can pay her a visit.”
“After we call the police,” I said.
I was feeling very guilty for leaving Reyer’s body unattended. It seemed heartless somehow. Harrison squeezed my shoulder with one of his big man hands.
“There was nothing we could have done for him,” he said.
“Should we slip out the back?” I asked. “The front door is unlocked. We could call it in when we’re away from here or let someone else discover the body.”
He stared at me.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “That would be pretty lousy, but I’m a little worried about what Inspecteur Lavigne will think of us.”
“It’s a concern,” he agreed. “But if there are any security cameras or a CCTV around here, we’re already on film and I don’t relish explaining to the police why we chose to do a runner.”
“Good point,” I said. “Can you call the police? I will go stand by the door and make sure no one else comes in.”
He used his phone to snap a picture of the article before putting it back down on the desk, and I went out front. I was very careful not to look at Reyer as I passed. I knew that I was going to have nightmares for weeks about this one. The man had been alive yesterday and now he wasn’t. Just like that, life could be snatched, or in his case clobbered away. It made me a bit dizzy to think about it.
I watched people hurry past on their way to work, off to see the sights, gazing into the windows they passed with no idea that death lurked so close by. I fervently hoped no one was going to stop in at the shop. I didn’t want to have to explain about the man lying on the floor just a few feet away from me. I hugged my middle trying to ease my shakes.
* * *
The police who came to the scene treated us as if we were poor unfortunate tourists who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and we let them. We gave them an exact accounting of what had transpired except for the part about searching Reyer’s office, natch.
After an hour of questions intermingled with waiting, we gave the inspector who arrived our information and we were free to go. There was no question that Harrison being a well-respected businessman and fluent in French helped us tremendously.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We are going to find Ms. Deneau and talk to her,” Harrison said as we left Boutique Reyer.
He was tapping on his phone and I imagined he was searching for her location on a map. I had a million questions, like, were we going to tell her about Reyer? Were we going to pretend to be someone else and keep our identities a secret? If we were, maybe we could pretend to be man and wife. I shook my head, yeah, no, that was a different daydream.
Focus, Scarlett. I mentally slapped myself.
Without looking up from his phone, Harrison grabbed my hand. “We need to catch the Metro, come on!”
I let him drag me down the street toward the Metro stop. While the Paris
Metro was fine, I have to admit that I missed the London Underground. I missed having a voice tell me to mind the gap in a language I understood, and I missed giggling like a dumb American every time I rode the line that ended at Cockfoster’s. Yes, it’s a real stop, and ever since I bumped into two American boys on the Piccadilly line, snickering over the name, I’ve never been able to keep a straight face when I see it on the board or hear it called out as the stop.
Once we were in the station, we used our passes to access the platforms. Harrison studied the map, while I stood beside him, having no idea where we were going. It occurred to me that this week would have been much more difficult, and possibly deadly in the case of Emile St. James, without him.
“Are we taking the Metro or the RER?” I asked. There are two train systems in Paris, as I had learned when I got lost briefly on my first day here.
“The Metro,” he said. “The address we’re looking for is in an old neighborhood on the Right Bank, so we’ll have to change trains to get there. Come on, I think I’ve got it.”
As if it were perfectly natural, he took my hand in his and we hurried to the platform. I had to admit, I liked that he felt the need to take my hand, especially as it wasn’t peak season and the Paris Metro was nowhere near as hot or crowded as it got in the summertime.
We hurried along the white-tiled tunnel until we got to the platform. The sign overhead flashed the estimated time of our train. I had to give the Paris Metro serious props for its punctuality. If it said it would be here in several moments, it would.
While we waited for the white and green train to arrive, I squeezed Harrison’s hand in mine. He glanced from the tunnel to me and I smiled at him.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” I said.
His returning smile glowed like the sun just tipping the horizon.
“Me, too,” he said.
I felt the warmth of his affectionate gaze all the way down to my squishy center. Luckily, the train chose that moment to arrive, before I did something really dumb like throw myself at him.
The train stopped and Harrison unlatched the door so we could step inside. There were several people already on board but we managed to grab two seats. I noted that Harrison was still holding my hand and I let him.
There was no denying that it gave me great comfort given the morning’s events. Images of the pool of blood seeping out from under Jacques Reyer’s head made me queasy. A few years ago the sight would have sent me into a panicked, dry-heaving, eyes-rolling-back-in-my-head sort of tizzy, but now I was different.
Partly, I knew it was because the man beside me was keeping me centered and balanced. It was hard to go off the deep end when you had a solid rock to which to cling. But I also knew it was because ever since I had arrived in London, crazy things had happened. People had been poisoned, stabbed, thrown off roofs and strangled. It struck me then that maybe I was becoming desensitized to death. The thought horrified me.
“Ginger, hello? You in there?”
I turned to find Harrison frowning at me with concern.
“Sorry, what?” I asked.
“You all right?” he asked. “You look a bit knackered.”
“I’m all right,” I said. “But . . .”
He leaned forward, encouraging me to finish my sentence.
“Do you think it’s possible that there’s something about me that makes all of these horrible things happen?” I asked. Yeah, I knew it was a dumb question, still . . .
“No! God, no,” he said. “It’s just been a really weird year.”
“I just feel like every time I turn around, someone is getting murdered, and it does seem to be every time I turn around, why do I always have to find the body?” I asked. My voice was getting higher with each word until I was pretty sure I was squeaking as loudly as the one train wheel that always seemed to lack sufficient grease.
Harrison let go of my hand and put his arm around my shoulders. “I think you might be in a bit of shock.”
I leaned against him. I didn’t care if proximity made it even more difficult to keep him in the friend zone; right now I needed comfort.
“The fact is we have no idea who Reyer dealt with on a regular basis,” he said. “We are busy trying to figure out what happened to William and a painting, and maybe Reyer’s death had something to do with that but likely not. He dealt with loads of people and volumes of stuff. His death could be completely unrelated to our search.”
I nodded. He was right. Given how much Reyer had made us pay for the peacock broach, who knew if he’d done the same to someone else and that person had come back in a fit and clocked him with his own statuette.
“This is us,” Harrison said.
We moved to stand in front of the door while the train was still moving. There was an urgency to underground travel that made me a teensy bit anxious. It was all about catching the train, getting on the train, getting off the train, all at top speed, no lollygagging. It was unfortunate because really I could have an advanced degree in lollygagging, I was that good at it.
As soon as the train stopped, Harrison unlatched the door and we stepped out. We had to catch another train from the platform and I followed him, yes, still holding hands, as this station was much more crowded than the last.
The interesting thing about being underground is that when I ride the escalator to the Sortie, French for “Exit,” I find that when I step back outside into the sunlight, I have lost all sense of time. I knew it was now around midday, but it felt weird as if my time underground had erased an hour or two of my life, which was ridiculous because we hadn’t been down there that long.
“This way,” Harrison said. We left the large Metro stop behind us as we walked along the busy street. “We are headed to the Marais.”
“My French is rusty, I know,” I said. “But doesn’t that mean ‘swamp’?”
“Marsh, actually,” he said. “Centuries ago, this area of Paris used to flood, but it has long been a favorite of aristocrats, and it was revitalized in the sixties and is considered quite hip now.”
As we worked our way onto the smaller, quieter streets of the third arrondissement, I noted the exclusive-looking townhomes and pretty streets and wished that I were here for any other reason than to track down a missing cousin-in-law and a rare and valuable painting.
“Here,” Harrison said. He pushed through an iron gate into the courtyard of a large red brick building. On the lower patio there were several stone benches and raised flower beds that were presently barren.
There were two main doors on the lower floor and Harrison glanced at them and then shook his head. Still holding my hand, he led me up the staircase to the upper level. Again, there were two doors. One was painted a rich red, much like the brickwork around it, while the other was sunflower yellow, cheery and optimistic, especially in this January gloom.
“There, that one,” Harrison said, pointing to the yellow door. I hoped this was a sign that Colette was friendly.
We paused in front of her door, listening. I didn’t hear anything and leaned back and shook my head at Harrison. He nodded, his expression grim.
He let go of my hand and rapped on the door. It was thick wood and the sound echoed in the quiet courtyard. We waited for several seconds but no one answered. He knocked again. This time I heard someone moving inside.
I saw the curtain in the window by the door move and I got the feeling we were being checked out. I tried to look as innocent as possible; this was actually harder to do once I thought about it. I smiled in the direction of the window, hoping I didn’t scare her away.
I heard the lock on the door being undone and took it as a good sign. A woman I would guess about my age answered the door. She was pretty with an upturned nose and full lips, a heart-shaped face framed by thick blond waves. Her figure was all lush curves, which certainly matched the description Reyer had given with
his wolf whistle of appreciation.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle,” Harry said.
I saw the girl look him over like he was a tasty crème brûlée. I moved in more closely so that she’d have to register my presence whether she liked it or not. A little frown appeared when her gaze turned toward me. So that would be not, apparently.
Harrison continued speaking to her in French and she responded, her eyes going wide, and she gestured with her hands like she was a traffic cop working an intersection. Amazingly she also managed to draw the attention to her lush figure. She was dressed in a pencil skirt and a snug blouse, which framed her assets perfectly, although not in a slutty way. She was sexy but refined. Again, you simply cannot outdress the French.
I caught a smattering of words but not enough to keep up. I tugged his sleeve. He ignored me. I tugged his sleeve again. And he looked at me impatiently.
“What is she saying?” I asked.
“Quite a bit, actually,” he said. “She hasn’t seen the painting since the court gave it to O’Toole Insurance to be kept in their vault until the court made a ruling on who rightfully owns it. She is stunned about Reyer’s death but doesn’t see how it could be related to the painting.”
“Really, did she say anything about Will?”
“Not yet,” he said.
The woman looked at me. She seemed curious and a little wary, which I thought was an interesting reaction.
“You are married?” she asked in English. Her accent was very thick but the question was an easy one.
“Me?” I asked. I gestured between Harry and me. “Us? No, no, just . . . uh . . . er.”
“Stop now, before you strain something,” he said. He sounded amused. He turned back to Colette. “I’m sorry, how rude of me not to introduce you to my . . . friend. Colette Deneau, this is Scarlett Parker.”
“How do you do?” I asked. I didn’t really like being his “friend,” especially when Colette’s eyes lit up just a little, no doubt at the thought that he was available or edible judging by the way she was looking at him. Hmm.
Assault and Beret Page 15
