Murder in Aix (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series Book 5)

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  “Well, probably not as much as your attorney, but Inspecteur Bedard called me this morning to say they’d caught some guy trying to destroy the samples in your case at the lab where they’re—”

  “I know! Do you know where he is now? They won’t tell me whether they’re still holding him or if he’s released or anything.”

  So it’s true, Maggie thought, her shoulders slumping against the warm back of the car seat. She’s with him.

  “I…I heard he was released,” Maggie said.

  “Oh, thank God. Thank God.”

  “So who is this guy, Jules? I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie. I know it looks like I didn’t trust you but you have to understand that after my last fiasco, I felt I needed to hold my cards close to the vest for awhile. Do you see that?”

  “Sure, Jules. So how did you meet him?”

  “He lives in my apartment building. We just kept bumping into each other when we were taking out the garbage and one thing led to another. You know how these things go.”

  “That must have really shocked you to hear he’d broken into a police toxicology lab to destroy evidence pertinent to your murder case.”

  There was silence on the line and for a moment, Maggie wasn’t sure the call hadn’t failed.

  “What are you saying, Maggie?” Julia asked quietly. “Are you suggesting that Mathieu killed Jacques, or that I did it and my lover is trying to cover for me?”

  “Did he know Jacques was trying to get back together with you?”

  “Of course. I showed him the notes.”

  “And the police have those notes now?”

  “I assume.”

  “Did he know Jacques was coming to dinner that night?” Maggie was sure she already knew the answer to this.

  There was another brief silence on the line, and then, “If you do anything to implicate Mathieu,” Julia said, her voice cold and flat, “in some misguided attempt to free me, I promise you I will never speak to you again. He had nothing to do with Jacques’s death. Nothing.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We’re done, Maggie.” The line went dead in her ear, and when Maggie pulled her head back to look at the screen she saw that the hand holding the phone was shaking.

  In the space of the very brief conversation, something repulsive and finite had happened to her conviction and to her faith in her friend. Maybe it had been building on the drive over from St-Buvard, ever since she got the phone call from Roger that morning. Ever since she realized that her good friend had kept a serious boyfriend a secret for God knows how long. When Maggie pulled the phone from her ear after Julia hung up on her, her stomach was roiling with nausea.

  That fact was, it didn’t make sense for Mathieu to break into the lab to destroy samples—if that is what he was trying to do—in order to protect himself. The only reason would be to try to help Julia. And why does he believe those samples are so damning to Julia’s case?

  The answer to that came unbidden and immediately to Maggie as she sat in the stifling confines of her compact car: Because they really are proof of her guilt.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Maman! Can you talk?” Michelle sat in the window seat in her apartment and stared out onto the residential street. It was early and only school children and their parents and au pairs were moving about. Michelle couldn’t help but notice how the little wretches all looked like chimps dressed in human clothes. The way they ran and skipped and thumped on one another reminded her of the last time she had been dragged to the zoo as a child. She wondered why no one else but her seemed to see it. One boy actually stopped and vigorously scratched his crotch, and she half expected to see him begin to pick lice out of one of the other boys’ hair.

  “Yes, of course, my sweet. Is everything all right?”

  Michelle turned from the revolting street scene to the interior of her apartment and began to chew on a nail. She hadn’t slept last night. She wasn’t sure she had slept the night before either. “No, Maman. Everything is not all right. Are you mad? That woman who came to Papa’s service at Lily’s? You know the one? The one who made Lily force me to leave?”

  “Yes, of course, chérie. The pregnant American.”

  “Well, she came to see me.”

  “What?”

  Michelle took satisfaction at the level of agitation in her mother’s voice.

  “What did she want?”

  “She tried to tell me she had money for me. She said she wasn’t really the whore’s friend.”

  “Well, she lied to you, Michelle. My…friend says that she is very definitely connected to the murdering whore. Closely connected.”

  “I know, Maman. When I thought about it later, I realized how she tricked me. And I will ensure that she is never able to do that to anyone else again.”

  “Michelle, do not do anything. Promise me.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? The bitch tricked me! She came into my apartment and lied to me. She will not walk away from that!”

  “Please, chérie, let me handle it. I have friends. I can hurt her. I will hurt her. You do not want to endanger yourself.”

  “How can I not? Even the lying bitch knew how desperately I am in need of money. Even she could see. How is it that my own mother is so blind? I don’t have the money for this semester. I don’t have last month’s rent!”

  “Oh, Michelle, what of the money I gave you last week? I know it wasn’t much…”

  “It was worse than nothing! Enough for a meal out, that’s all. Why do you torment me like this? If you cannot help your only child, please just say so.”

  “Michelle, you know I have no money myself—”

  “But you can get it! And now that goddam Florrie will inherit what should have been mine! Can you not go to him and shame him into sharing it with me? He is like a thief in the night to swoop in and steal my inheritance. Is he so stupid, that he doesn’t realize the crime he has committed against me?”

  “I will talk to him, my love. I will ask him to see reason. You are his cousin.”

  “It is revolting. That old woman has always hated me.”

  “That is not true, Michelle. She is just old and ill.”

  “Well, then, can we not argue that she is mentally incompetent? To give all her money to that fat weasel—and he has so much!”

  “He has been managing her estate for years, Michelle. The courts will not see it as bizarre for her to make him her beneficiary.”

  “Why are you saying this?!” Michelle stood and looked wildly around her room, as if trying to find something to break or throw. “Is it possible you don’t care that the fat wretch is taking money that should be mine? Where am I to go when I cannot pay my rent? Will you tell me that?”

  “We will somehow get the money for your—”

  “Bah! You are as weak as Papa always said you were. I don’t want a few euros here and there. I want the fortune that should be mine!”

  “I know, Michelle. I know, but—”

  Michelle couldn’t hear any more of her mother’s pathetic mewing on the other line. She had been a fool to call her. She never helped. Never! She threw the cellphone across the room and felt the thrill and satisfaction of hearing it smash into the useless antique wall mirror that her grandmother had given her.

  Annette quietly disconnected and sat on the bed in a rumple of sheets and blankets holding the cellphone in both hands. She took a long breath and tried to visualize in what manner her daughter had terminated the conversation. She hoped it wasn’t into the television screen like last time.

  “She doesn’t know?”

  Annette turned to the man in her bed. He had been smoking and listening as she spoke to her daughter. She replaced the cellphone on the nightstand. “I thought it best at this point.”

  “You are probably right. Although she hated him almost as much as you did. She would probably not even care, my love.”

  “I’m not worried about that. He wa
s a pig and Michelle is better off without him.”

  “C’est ça.”

  “I’m only afraid she won’t understand why I kept it from her. She’ll think I don’t trust her.”

  “And why are you keeping it from her?”

  “Maybe I just want something for myself. Just once I want it to be about me and what I need. Can you understand that?”

  He chuckled and drew her closer to him on the bed. “If not I, then who?” he murmured, pulling the drawstring that held her peignoir gathered in a scrunch at her throat. His eyes glittered as the thin top collapsed into a silken puddle in her lap exposing her breasts.

  Annette slipped under the sheets next to him, but her eyes stared unseeing out the window over her lover’s shoulder. “I’m afraid I must admit to not liking my daughter very much.”

  The three tractors inched slowly down the winding routes of the hillsides, each one loaded with crates of the grapes of Domaine St-Buvard and bound for the presses at the co-op. Laurent would have liked to have begun picking at least a week earlier but had held off at the request of his local federation of vintners. The quality of the wine from the region was a reflect on them all. Although it had taken years to learn the lesson, Laurent knew the value of working together as a team—even if the results were often less than could be done independently. He watched the army of young people moving, hunched over, through the rows of vines. Their youth was the only thing that would prevent permanent damage to their postures, he mused. Unless they came back year after year, harvest after harvest as so many would. But labour in the grape fields was not work for any but the young. Exhausting, bent over, tedious work—usually in the punishing heat of late summer—and long days to match the longer periods of light.

  This was his fifth harvest. The first had been poor due to lack of experience on his part, and as the result of ground that had not been cultivated in decades. The second year, all three fields had burned to the ground a week before they were due to be harvested. And then came the recovery years. Last year had been good, but the rains had bleached the sweetness from the grapes. And, of course, there had been the Mistral. This year promised to be better. Laurent smiled to himself. The life of a vigneron. Always thinking to the next harvest, the next season of wines.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket and he grimaced in annoyance. He preferred to leave it at home so that he couldn’t be reached. There were very few things more important than the harvest right now. Maggie at eight and a half months pregnant was one of them.

  “Allo, chérie?”

  “Laurent, do you know anybody by the name of Mathieu Benoit?”

  Laurent squinted at the horizon, watching one of the temporary workers stop to drink from his water bottle. “Is that the name of Julia’s boyfriend?”

  “It is. Can you ask around to see if anybody knows him?”

  “Oui. Did you talk to Julia?”

  “Oh, Laurent, she hung up on me!”

  “Incroyable.”

  “Okay, I know you meant that as sarcasm, but it really upset me.”

  “Did you accuse her boyfriend of killing her other boyfriend?”

  “Not really.” There was a pause on the line. “Maybe.”

  Laurent watched the temporary worker pop a handful of grapes in his mouth and pretend to be strangling on the taste. He could hear the laughter of the other workers from here. He frowned. “Is Grace with you?”

  “She said she wanted to take a nap.”

  Laurent grunted. There was too much napping from people who needed to be kept busy. “And are you coming home now?”

  “Are you making lunch?”

  “Non. I am in the fields until late.”

  “Well, don’t worry about me then. I have one quick errand to run and then I’ll be home to check on Grace.”

  “What errand?”

  “Laurent, don’t worry, okay? It’s just a female thing and I’ll be right home.”

  “You will not try to contact this boyfriend of Julia’s?”

  There was the briefest of hesitations on the line. Clearly, that was exactly what she had intended to do.

  “Not if you don’t want me to.” He could hear the frustration in her voice.

  “Bon,” he said. “Then I will see you tonight.”

  The worker seemed to have returned to his backbreaking task and Laurent motioned to the head tractor as it crept its way toward him. He would examine every precious crate before it went to the presser. He found his heart lightening with each foot that the tractor advanced.

  Well, that was annoying.

  It wasn’t that she had planned to interview Mathieu Benoit this afternoon (although she had thought about it), but she certainly intended to find out a lot more about him before calling it a day.

  Was there anyone in Aix who might know of him? As she walked to the outdoor café facing Julia’s apartment building, it occurred to her that she could talk with Julia’s neighbors without danger of breaking her agreement with Laurent. What constitutes a stranger anyway? She had probably said hello in the narrow hallway and landings to every person who lived in Julia’s building at least once. If they saw her and recognized she was a friend of Julia’s, surely that meant they weren’t really strangers? She took a seat at one of the tables which gave a clear view of Julia’s building and ordered an iced coffee.

  Sometimes sleuthing was just a matter of sitting and waiting. She had learned that a long time ago. You had to talk and talk to people until you just happened to talk to just the right person—the one person who knew something or who had seen something—and you have no idea who that person is. Not really. While it was true Laurent had said don’t talk to people, he didn’t say don’t watch people. And that, Maggie knew, was half the battle.

  As she sipped her coffee she watched everyone who came into the little café, or the apartment building across the street. She watched the waiter (who was watching her) and the young mother with the carriage, and the two students who argued furiously with each other but were clearly lovers. She watched the old man who looked grumpy and miserable, probably because he’d been coming to this café for years and now he couldn’t smoke in it and it was crammed full of tourists and students.

  Maggie shifted her weight in her chair but it was no use. She wasn’t going to find a position that was comfortable. She might as well give up on trying until after the baby was born. Just when she was about to ask for the bill and head to her appointment, she saw him. In truth, she didn’t know what she was looking at for at least the first thirty seconds of seeing him, only that, of everyone on the street, he was the most visually arresting.

  And not in a good way.

  At least six foot two—unusually tall for a Frenchman. He had a shining, bald head, long handlebar mustache, and both shoulders—bared in his sleeveless leather vest—were covered in dark tattoos. It couldn’t be anyone else. Maggie watched in openmouthed wonder as the man strode down the sidewalk to the front door of the apartment building. He looked mad. He looked beyond mad. Maggie could practically see him foaming at the mouth from where she sat forty yards away.

  It had to be him.

  He punched his door code into the keypad on the front door panel and jerked the heavy double wooden doors open as if he’d prefer to rip them off their hinges in the process. He disappeared into the building, the doors slowly, almost reluctantly closing behind him.

  Dear God, Julia, Maggie thought in bewilderment as she watched the doors close. Do I know you at all?

  * * *

  Julia sat on a bare mattress on the floor of her cell at the detention center in the Palais de Justice. She stared at the chipped paint on the wall opposite her. Another woman sat next to her on the mattress, her shoulders shaking with her silent sobs. She was Muslim judging by her robe, but it was torn and stained. If the woman spoke French it wasn’t a dialect that Julia had ever heard before. They had brought her in last night. She had wept most of the time since then.

  Julia estimated that
her cell measured less than twenty feet by twenty, yet she shared it with five other women, including the sobbing Muslim. The floor was filthy, and while there was a sink in the cell, it didn’t function. Neither did two of the four showers in the communal bathroom. The orange jumpsuit she wore had clearly not been laundered since the last inmate had used it.

  Two weeks. Two interminable weeks, broken only by a daily hour long visit from her lawyer, a man who sat opposite her in the visitor’s room and wrote notes, and rarely spoke. Julia was convinced he worked on someone else’s case while he was with her. She had stopped asking him questions after the first week.

  One thing she didn’t need to ask anymore, which had become very clear to Julia, was the fact that she was going to die in this festering hellhole and all the people who cared about her were powerless to do a damn thing about it. She thought of Mathieu and the rising sounds of her weeping companion triggered a sudden urge to cry, too. Stupid, stupid man. What was he thinking? Did he think attempting to destroy the State’s proof would make her look less guilty? She reflected on her conversation with Maggie and was engulfed in an irrepressible resurgent wave of anger. She clutched the fabric of her orange jumpsuit, kneading it until both knees were wrinkled and dirty. Does she not realize he’s all I have left? Would she have me lose him, too?

  An invasive odor of defecation filled the little cell and the other women groaned. Julia breathed through her mouth and edged away from the woman on the mattress, although she had no reason to believe the smell was coming from her. In the two weeks she had been held in this place, she had done her best to remember how much worse it could be and to be grateful for how less bad it was. She thought of her great aunt, who had died in a German concentration camp during the war after having been captured and tortured.

  The story was that Sybil Patrick had volunteered to travel behind enemy lines delivering messages between the French Underground and British Intelligence. Intrepid and beautiful, she was killed, or died of disease, her family never knew which, before she was twenty-four years old—six months before the war ended. Although Julia never knew her aunt, she had nonetheless trotted out her story at parties and dined off her relentless, timeless heroism for as many years as Julia had been an adult. And it was thoughts of Sybil that kept her sane now. When Julia thought of how her kinswoman must have died, brutally hurt and alone, and then compared it to the simple benign neglect of an antiquated, underfunded French prison system, she forced herself to believe her trial was small.