Burgundy

by Janet Hubbard

  “He reeks of pot,” Hank said under his breath.

  Anne looked from Hank to Roland, then spoke in English, “Jean-Claude has known this family a long time and says the boy has been a problem. Why is he with you?”

  Max explained, and was unprepared for Anne’s wrath against Roland. “That is private property. Tell me how you got in there,” she demanded.

  Roland gave her a surly look and said, “Lucy and I were hiding because everybody wants to blame her for what happened to Yves. I slept most of the time.”

  Anne could not hide her distaste and dislike of the young man yammering on and on, all the attention on him. “I don’t care about all that,” she said. “Why didn’t you defend Lucy?”

  “Lucy can take care of herself.”

  “Obviously, she couldn’t.”

  Max asked Roland if he was carrying a gun, and he said he was. “You’re a good shot?”

  For the first time he smiled and looked boyish. “The best. My dad had me shooting at age eleven and I started hunting at sixteen.”

  “Why did you turn back when Lucy was shot?”

  He shrugged. “I was scared, I guess.”

  Hank scoffed, and Max thought it was pointless to continue the interview here, as no one had any authority. She went outside when she saw her mother in the yard. She texted Olivier, who told her to bring Roland to the police station in Beaune.

  Hank walked out with the boy. He put himself at the wheel of Isabelle’s car, with Juliette in the front seat, and Max and Roland in the back. Hank said in English, “The boy is guilty of something. Maybe it has to do with sex, or with running away from home, or attempted murder, but guilt is written all over him.”

  Roland sat with his head back on the seat, eyes closed, oblivious.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Olivier met Max in front of the hospital, and listened as she recounted to him the events of the afternoon. He was in a foul mood after meeting with Alain, and on the drive back to Beaune, had pulled over to phone the Lyon prosecutor, Emmanuel Caron, who finally agreed to make the investigation of Yves Laroche’s death official. Caron would agree to Olivier being in charge of the investigation, but with his men operating under him. Olivier didn’t like the idea, as he would have to insist that Max stay removed from this one. Difficult ground to traverse, with her grandmother and Anne Bré feeling responsible for the girl. Not to mention Hank, who hadn’t met a case he couldn’t solve, which were his exact words two nights ago after three beers.

  Olivier’s cell phone rang and he stepped out of the waiting room for a moment to listen to the police inspector of Beaune tell him that the boy, Roland Milne, complained that he had been harassed by two Americans who he understood were detectives from New York. “This is not permissible,” the inspector said in a firm voice. Olivier announced that he, too, was French, and knew the rules. He re-entered the hospital waiting room, and told Max about the call.

  “That brat!”

  “Caron is looking for any excuse to make me bow out of this investigation,” Olivier said. “He would prefer to accept that Yves Laroche committed suicide, and let that be the end of it. It’s going to end up being all about drugs, and I have no compassion for anyone involved.”

  “Let’s face it, Hank and I are part of the problem. Hank is going to follow behind me, no matter what. I tell you what. I will take him to see the medieval ruins in Brancion, and we will bow out of Yves Laroche’s murder case, and maybe the attempted murder of Lucy Kendrick.”

  “She is also a suspect in the death of Laroche.”

  They stood in silence. Were they in conflict over the girl? Olivier wondered. Her lack of response made him uneasy. She had just given him an out by agreeing to go off with her father. At the same time, he felt compelled to explain himself and set out to do that. “I have to move with extreme caution, and follow protocol. The police in Beaune are calling Lucy’s case an accidental shooting. The uncle is bearing down on them, and says he is taking her to Paris tomorrow, and they are glad. It might be in her best interests, as they will do all in their power to get her name cleared of Yves’ death. Saying it was self-defense on her part makes it easier.”

  “That makes sense,” Max said in a fake conciliatory voice. “But it doesn’t explain her getting shot.” She looked at her watch. “I’m famished. I’m going to collect my grandmother and head home.”

  Max was off the case.

  Olivier spoke to the gendarme on duty outside Lucy’s room and entered, with Max behind him. Isabelle looked up and smiled. “We know people in comas are supposed to be stimulated. One of us is trying to read to her fairly constantly. I read a book on winemaking to her.”

  “No wonder she hasn’t opened her eyes,” Max said.

  Olivier laughed in spite of himself.

  “I can stay here for a while,” he said. “A new gendarme will be coming on duty soon.”

  “Come for dinner if you like,” Isabelle said to Olivier. “Progress is being made on the wedding. Lucy knows all about it, don’t you, dear?”

  “And what about her guardian arriving?” Olivier asked. “Has there been any word?”

  “Tomorrow,” Isabelle said. “We heard it from the nurses.”

  Isabelle picked her coat up from the chair and slipped into it. She stopped in the doorway and said to Olivier, “Another of the women from Femmes et Vins will be arriving soon. She is young and happy to stay the night with Lucy.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Olivier said. “The care here is good, I’m sure, and I have a gendarme guarding the door, don’t forget.”

  “But Anne and I do think it’s necessary,” Isabelle said. “I saw the gendarme head to the toilette, leaving no one in charge.”

  Olivier thought he saw a smile flit across Max’s face, which he found annoying. “Very well,” he said. “I won’t be able to make it for dinner tonight. I have a lot of work to catch up on.”

  “D’accord,” Isabelle said. “I will let Juliette know. I’ll see you downstairs, Maxine.” The door closed.

  Olivier, knowing that he sounded grumpy, said, “Those two have taken control. Of what I’m not sure. This girl could be a murderer, and they are acting as though she’s a child.”

  “Olivier, she’s only seventeen. I simply don’t see her as a murderer, or a drug addict, but more as a frightened teenager.”

  There was a light tap on the door, and Hank stuck his head in. Olivier looked at Max as if to ask whether she knew he was due to show up here. This time her face was a blank.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Hank said. “Lucy’s guardian, George Wyeth, called Isabelle’s house and I took the call. He was on a rant and I told him I’d come in and have a chat. We’ve been in the waiting room downstairs. The three of us have a meeting with him in five minutes, in a small conference room on the first floor. You may want to start your line of questioning with the fact that he had the brilliant notion, a few days ago, of offering a reward to whoever turns his niece, Lucy Kendrick, in to him. I have a hunch he didn’t stress ‘alive.’” He formed quotation marks with his fingers.” He had already let the police know she was an escapee from a mental institution. Now he’s up in arms that she got shot.”

  The door closed.

  “I haven’t had a minute to tell Hank he’s off the case,” Max said, embarrassed.

  “Is he implying that whoever shot Lucy did it in order to receive the reward?”

  “Somebody could have gotten a little too enthusiastic, maybe.”

  “He’s probably handcuffed the poor uncle by now,” Olivier grumbled.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The poor man looked anything but poor. George Wyeth was a sartorial wonder, and on top of that, he was a walking cliché, tall and handsome. His smile was warm, and Max smiled back reflexively when she shook hands with him. As did Olivier, she noticed. Maybe, s
he thought, Lucy is a bit like him. Inviting you in with his openness, making it difficult not to respond.

  “Hank has filled me in a little,” George said. “She’s put everybody through quite a lot. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for all you’ve done. I want to plan a night for all of us in Beaune before Lucy and I leave. Dinner in a fine restaurant. I hear you two are getting married. Maybe a dinner in Paris would be just the thing. I’ve been going back and forth.”

  Hank sat on a hardback chair, attentive, quiet.

  “I’m thinking about moving her into Paris,” George said. “All this crap about some guy being pushed off a balcony sounds made up, though, trust me, she’s capable. A nice contribution to the police department in Lyon might speed things up a little.”

  “Before you are put officially in charge of Lucy’s well-being,” said Olivier, “the police need proof of your guardianship.”

  George waved his hand. “The hospital office already has that.”

  “And her mother is deceased?”

  “In a nutshell, her mother died suddenly while Lucy was under my care in a little hospital I run in Westchester County. I’m a psychiatrist. Lucy blamed me for her mother’s death. She pulled a big escape, and now here we are.”

  “You didn’t call the police?”

  “She wasn’t hospitalized officially. Once you get the police involved, you lose all control. I found a P.I. in Lyon, or you could look at it the other way and say he found me. I paid him to keep an eye on her. He told me there was a woman here who wanted to adopt her. That’s when I decided I’d better come get her.”

  Hank said. “This sounds like a sad story, George. Mother dies, and here she was, hoping to find her biological father. No secret to anybody here, so why’d you leave that part out?”

  George laughed. “Lucy invents wild stories, just like her mother. Diane told her about the months she spent in France when she was forty and divorced. No kids. Our mother had died recently and Diane had some money, so off she went. Lucy was the result of a magical union with a Frenchman, but Diane had sworn to never reveal his name. Reads like a movie. The next man in her life was a lamebrain on Wall Street who died five years after they got together. Thank God, they didn’t marry. He always claimed the baby was his, and the truth is, who cares?”

  Max said, “Lucy might care.”

  “You gotta know, little Lucy has a devious side that goes against her Botticelli look.”

  He seemed to notice Max for the first time. “Who are you again?”

  He smiled, and she smiled back. Involuntary.

  Hank deftly jumped in. “She’s the daughter I told you about who’s here to get married.”

  Max understood immediately that she was being presented as bride, not detective. She was dismissed in his mind, Max knew, as George’s attention went back to Hank. “Let’s go check out my niece,” he said.

  Back they trooped to Lucy’s room. A young woman sat reading from Le Petit Prince. She wore round glasses, and her dark hair was pulled back. A don’t-fuck-with-me look on her face, Max noticed, which wasn’t unusual in a French woman.

  “Bonjour,” she said to Olivier. “I’m a winemaker in the area. My name is Estelle, and I am a friend of Madame Bré, who asked me to come and sit with the girl.”

  “No change?” Olivier asked.

  “No.” She looked as if she was deciding whether or not to share anything more, then finally said, “I got to know Lucy a little when she was working for me and found her to be such a vibrant being. She came to observe me making wine. Everyone around here was fascinated by her. Now people are saying she brings bad luck.”

  “Hey, hey,” George said in a quiet voice. “Mind switching to English? I know a few words of French, but not enough to get the details.” He turned to Olivier, “What’s this young woman doing here?”

  Olivier explained that some women friends were taking turns sitting with Lucy, and immediately George said, “Tell her it’s fine now. She can go.”

  She picked up her jacket and left before anyone told her to, and George took her place. “Lucy looks awful. She might not make it, huh?”

  Max thought about Isabelle’s and Anne’s insistence that coma patients could hear everything, which made her feel uneasy at George’s obtuse comments.

  Olivier must have had the same thought, for he said, “Let’s continue this discussion downstairs, shall we?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” George said. “She’s in another world. Always was, in my book. A dreamy child. Encouraged by her mother.”

  Olivier said, “How did you become her guardian?”

  “Long story short, Diane couldn’t handle a teenager. She was the perpetual teenager, for God’s sake. Lucy was in a private school and started smoking a lot of pot, moved with the wrong crowd.” Olivier wanted to give Max an I-told-you-so look, but refrained. “Diane was worried. One night Lucy got picked up with a bunch of kids for stealing soda or something stupid from a deli. I went by to see Diane and she told me she didn’t know what to do.”

  Hank said, “How old was she?”

  “She’ll be eighteen on her next birthday.” He laughed. “I bet she’s told everybody she’s twenty-one. Anyhow, I’m now her only family. I talked Diane into giving me temporary guardianship. That meant I didn’t have to get her permission every time I wanted to administer a medicine. I put Lucy in my hospital for observation. She was pretty depressed.”

  “Her mother was okay about that?”

  “No. But Diane was an enabler. I allowed Lucy to go home one weekend, and that’s when I think she and her mother concocted some scheme. When I arrived to get Lucy, Diane took me aside and told me she was going to court in two days to rescind my guardianship. She had decided to take Lucy to France and would enroll her in school there. She was to meet with a lawyer in a few days. And, of course, she had told Lucy the next big plan.”

  “And you agreed?” Olivier asked.

  He gave his fake, open smile, displaying teeth that were too white. “I’d known Diane since I was ten and our parents married. She could never make a decision and stick to it. She had enough inheritance money to be able to dabble in things. Anyhow, a week later she was dead of an aneurysm.”

  They sat in somber silence. “How did Lucy take the news?” Olivier asked.

  “Oh, the way you would expect. She blamed me. Accused me of murdering her mother. And within a few days she was gone. Escaped.”

  “And Yves Laroche happened to call,” said Olivier, his skepticism obvious.

  “Oh, I ran a little ad in the Lyon newspaper. Looking for blahblahblah.”

  “And now Yves Laroche is dead.”

  “Which is another reason I called this meeting. I paid him a substantial sum of money, and have received nothing in return so far. He betrayed me, as a matter of fact, and told Lucy I was on my way, which is why she was running. You probably know this.”

  Olivier looked grim. “If she survives, Monsieur, I can assure you that because she is an underage girl, the French police will intervene. I still don’t understand why you didn’t notify the police in Westchester County.”

  Hank said, “I forgot to tell you that I’m an ex-NYPD detective, and my daughter here is still active. We will be happy to help you in any way we can.”

  George’s eyes darted around the room and landed on Max. “I feel ganged up on.”

  Olivier said, “You were here in Beaune the night Yves Laroche died, correct?”

  “We’d just arrived. I brought a lawyer, a man named Steve Gates, with me.”

  “He was waiting to grab your niece from Laroche’s party, correct?” said Hank.

  Max saw that George’s control was slipping. “He had every right to be in a hotel there. And the police in Lyon and in Beaune had been informed of what I was doing in the area.” He stood up. “I know my rights. I want the info
rmation from Yves Laroche that I paid him to find.”

  “It’s all in the evidence pile now,” Olivier said. “I will let you know when it is released. You have your niece, so there is no urgency that I can see.”

  “There is as far as I’m concerned. I also paid Yves to find Lucy’s father, though I still don’t believe there is one. But I want to know once and for all.”

  Max thought of the potential financial windfall for George once proof of the father emerged.

  “George.” George raised his eyes to look at Hank. “Who inherits your stepsister’s estate if Lucy is incapacitated?”

  “As guardian, I will manage all of it.”

  “I checked out your mental facility in Westchester County and it looks like there’s a couple of lawsuits against you. Your hospital is in trouble.”

  “This is common with any medical facility. Especially in the States. But what instigated this investigation?”

  “I decided that if the girl is on the run, as she was claiming to be, it wouldn’t be any skin off my back to check out why she might be running from you.”

  “She’s delusional, and needs help.”

  Max could see that Olivier was about to go apoplectic over Hank’s revelation that he was actively on the case.

  “I’m sure you don’t mind if I keep doing my research. I’m an old retired detective with time on my hands. Do you need a lift to the hotel?”

  “I have a car outside.”

  “The Peugeot with the two thugs sitting inside?”

  George gave a nervous laugh.

  Max said, “Okay if I stay with Lucy for a short time? I want to make sure the nurse comes and turns her before we go.”

  “Fine by me,” George said.

  “There are two cranky old women who’ve gotten attached to her,” Hank said. “One of them is the woman who said she wanted to adopt her. My advice is to let them stay here with the girl, and they will be much more accommodating.”