French Fried

by Nancy Fairbanks

  “Don’t you have to be there yourself?” I asked. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “I will not be her student after this semester. I have made arrangements with another university. Why should I work for a woman who would hate me if she knew . . . about me?”

  Was he leading me into an accusation against Catherine because he hated her? I wondered. “How did you get her key?”

  “Every day she sends me for something she forgets. I am her errand boy,” he replied bitterly. “When I found the fish paper in her desk, I know something is wrong, so I copy that and her key at a key store in case of need. Now I never eat or drink near her. You and your husband should not, either.”

  “Can you be at my hotel tomorrow at nine with the key?” I asked.

  “Oui, madam. I will come. But I will go to the apartment with you. What if she comes back? You would be at her mercy.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, deciding to invite Albertine, just in case I needed protection against Martin. Poor fellow. I’d become paranoid. If Jason and I survived this trip, it would be due to Martin’s loyalty. And I wouldn’t mention our breaking-and-entering foray to my husband, since he didn’t take the idea of Catherine as a murderess seriously. Albertine, however, was delighted when I called her. She promised to join us, with her dog. And to think that I had once disliked her intensely.

  51

  Illegal Entry

  Carolyn

  Albertine parked her car at the gate to the complex, where each apartment for seven or more floors was a concrete square, open in front above the balcony edge, as if someone had piled the apartments on top of each other and side by side on three sides enclosing the courtyard, with its zigzag pattern in red and brown. The crowning touch was a red metal clock in the shape of a lobster. At least it looked like a lobster with the usual legs and claws, not to mention black metal gears sticking out. Presumably the gears ran the black clock hands, one of which appeared to be topped by a pair of spectacles. The sign in front said the gates were locked at night, and I imagined with a shudder being locked in there, with Catherine hunting me through the corridors and stairways.

  We had to cross the courtyard, wondering who might be watching as we prepared to enter Catherine’s fourth-floor apartment illegally. What a sight we must have made—two middle-aged women, a towering, redheaded youth, and a large black poodle, pulling excitedly at his leash. It was a relief when Martin used his copied key to open the door and we slipped inside.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” said Albertine, looking at the starkly modern décor. “Catherine and Maurice loved antiques, or maybe it was just Maurice.”

  There were four rooms and a bath, a combination living and dining room decorated in burnished steel, glass, and black canvas, a kitchen with stainless steel appliances and gray granite counters, a bedroom all white with unfinished wood furniture, and a study lined with glass-doored book-cases and a black desk under a window with gray blinds. The impression was cold, grim, and industrial. I’d have hated to live here. Martin showed us the drawer where he’d found the paper on tetrodotoxin. The original was still there. I took a photo with my digital camera.

  He continued to search in the office and found a photocopy of Jason’s letter to the editor about Maurice’s mistakes. I came in from the bedroom to photograph that. Meanwhile Albertine was poking around the living area and remarking on the paucity of decorative interest and drawers in which to search. She gave up there and went into the kitchen.

  Having opted for the bedroom, I found nothing in the nightstand or in the top dresser drawer. However, in the second drawer, beneath some plain underwear and two nightgowns, I discovered a fragile, illuminated prayer book swaddled in gauze and nested in a wooden box. The language, I thought, was Latin, which meant it dated from the Middle Ages, before religious books were translated into the vernacular. There had been a prayer book on the list of items stolen from Catherine’s Lyon apartment the day I was pushed down the stairs. I carried the box to the bed and photographed it, then returned it to its drawer and placed it carefully under the nightgowns. The chest yielded nothing else.

  I was studying the closet shelves, which contained several stacked boxes, when Albertine arrived with a handgun wrapped in a dishtowel. “I found this under a silverware tray,” she announced. Martin looked in, but none of us knew whether it was a target pistol. I snapped a picture of the gun and began to hand down boxes to Albertine. One contained a hat, black of course. Another housed a locked jewelry box, and the third, bundles wrapped in soft gray cloth—a set of silver candlesticks and six engraved gold forks.

  “She pushed me down the stairs, then left her apartment door ajar, and took the items with her that were reported stolen by her aunt,” I concluded. “And I felt so terrible about the loss of her heirlooms! Martin, can you get that jewelry box open? There were several pieces of jewelry on the list.”

  Martin tried, but his fingers were too large to fiddle with the tiny lock. Albertine pushed him aside, retrieved a hairpin from her chignon, and had the lock open in seconds. Among other things in the box were a gold cross with inlaid blue stones and a pearl and ruby necklace and earring set. I thought those had been on the list, but I’d have to ask Inspector Roux to fax it to me. In the meantime, I took more photographs. Then we carefully put everything back where we’d found it, including the gun in its dishtowel, and prepared to visit Inspector Villon to report our discoveries.

  He’d have to get a warrant and come back. I did hope the gun was the one that had been used to shoot Mercedes. Perhaps it was also the gun with which Maurice killed himself. Catherine would probably find killing one of us with Maurice’s gun a fine symbolic revenge.

  “Oh, and Martin, would you look at some little vials I found in the pantry?” Albertine asked. Martin wanted to leave, but there was no denying Albertine. We went to the kitchen, where we found Charles de Gaulle with his nose in the refrigerator, eating a sausage. On the floor were two rounds of partially eaten cheese.

  “Naughty dog,” said Albertine. “He is so clever. We had to have special handles put on our refrigerator. He simply clamps his teeth on an ordinary handle and pulls the door open.”

  While Albertine showed Martin two tiny vials of colorless liquid she’d found behind a box of rice in a pantry, I cleaned up the dog’s mess. He hid under the kitchen table, looking out at me sadly because I’d taken the sausage away from him.

  “These could be samples of the toxin,” said Martin.

  Just in case, I took pictures of those, although they were barely visible between Martin’s very large fingers. I just hoped that we could convince Inspector Villon to seize the evidence before Catherine got home from the meeting and noticed that her refrigerator had been raided, or that something was out of place in her obsessively tidy and austere apartment.

  52

  Convincing the Police

  Carolyn

  Inspector Villon was too busy to see us—no surprise there. Albertine tried to make an appointment, but I was tired of being a suspect, so I took Charles de Gaulle, just in case there were criminals lurking in the hallways, and marched off in search of the inspector’s office with two policemen chasing me, shouting in French, and Albertine behind them. The five of us piled into Villon’s office in a noisy clump. Evidently Martin, now worried about his possession and use of Catherine’s key, had stayed behind, or perhaps decamped entirely.

  Over the babble of the pursuing officers, who were now trying to explain why they hadn’t been able to keep me out, I said loudly, “Inspector Villon, Madam Guillot and I have discovered who shot Mercedes Lizarreta.”

  “That is no longer of interest to me,” he snarled, “since, as your husband warned, the young woman has left the city without filing charges. I shall, however, determine whether you frightened her away. That, too, is a crime.”

  I plopped myself down on a chair, so clearly angry that the dog pushed his head onto the desk and growled on my behalf. Villon gave an order to his s
ubordinates, but they backed away. When the order was repeated in booming tones, they drew guns, upon which Albertine placed herself in the line of fire and railed at them in French. She took no time to translate, so I turned back to Inspector Villon.

  “You don’t care that a murderer is at large? She’s killed one man in Lyon, a professor who ate poisoned pâté she meant for us. This morning we found what may be vials of it in her pantry. She tried to run my husband down with her car. On another day she lured me to her apartment and pushed me down the stairs, then took away some possessions of hers so that it would look like a robbery. We found those items in her apartment here in Avignon.

  “Once we arrived in Avignon, she made me feel so bad that I left the banquet, and then she attempted to shoot Jason and hit Mercedes instead, making it look as if I’d done it when I wasn’t even there. We found what may be the gun in her apartment; and in fact—this hadn’t occurred to me before—Albertine, do you remember when Charles de Gaulle knocked her down at Fort Andre? Maybe he realized that she planned to push me off the tower.”

  “Of course,” Albertine agreed. “That explains his behavior.”

  “Madam Guillot, you give your dog too much credit. You think he can read minds?” asked the inspector.

  “Why not?” I said. “He can open refrigerators.”

  “Well,” said Villon, “I can believe that a woman would fail in so many attempts on the lives of you and your husband, but you have given me no motive. Is this a ménage a trois that has—”

  “Of course not,” I snapped. “She blames my husband for the suicide of hers fifteen years ago. We can show you the paper Jason wrote calling Maurice Bellamee’s work in question. It’s a matter of science, and all in her head anyway.”

  Villon snorted with laughter. “Attempted murder over science? Sex, I could believe. Money, I could believe. Did the suicidal husband lose money because of your husband’s criticism?”

  “No one makes money on scientific papers,” I retorted. The inspector obviously knew nothing about academia. “In fact, the author or his university pay to have papers published. I insist that you search her apartment. I can show you pictures of the evidence, but it is all in place for you to find and document properly.”

  “And how did you, madam, get into this lady’s apartment? Did she invite you in to find evidence against her?”

  “She’s at the conference. A student of hers had a key and let us in.” This was the tricky part. What we’d done was probably against the law, especially since Martin had had the key copied without permission. Maybe it was a good thing that he’d left.

  “Your theory of the crime is ridiculous, and how do I know that all these other things happened? Please leave my office and take the canine with you. He has drooled on official documents.”

  “All you have to do is get hold of Inspector Roux in Lyon. He can outline the whole case for you.”

  Sneering, Inspector Villon picked up his phone and told someone to contact Lyon. Obviously be expected to learn nothing. However, Roux came on the line and, when he heard what Villon had to say, asked to speak to me. I told him about the evidence, and he congratulated me on my persistence, then told Villon that he would have someone fax the case file, which he hadn’t time to go over in person because Lyon was under attack by midnight rioters, who were being rounded up, when possible, the next day. Then he asked to speak to me again and complained that a famous Toulouse industrialist had dragged him away from a burning school the night before, furious about being attacked by a dog and identified as a terrorist.

  “He looked just like your fax,” I said. Evidently Monsieur Dubois had also called several of Roux’s superiors. Then Roux asked to speak to Villon again and told him, loudly enough that Albertine could overhear and translate, that if the mad female professor from Lyon killed either of the American tourists, our deaths would be on Villon’s head.

  Thoroughly outraged, Inspector Villon ordered me to leave my camera with him and wait for a call in case the faxed files made it necessary for him to search the apartment of Professor de Firenze. Albertine gave him her cell phone number because I didn’t have one, and Villon expressed his disdain for Americans who felt it perfectly proper to attack Iraq on the basis of false information and to travel around Europe without cell phones, which all civilized persons carried. I provided my hotel and room number, scowling all the while, and then we headed for the door, with the two officers, who were afraid of the dog, trailing behind to make sure that we actually left the premises.

  Before we could enter the hall, another officer appeared carrying a large Styrofoam box. Charles de Gaulle leapt forward and snatched it between his teeth, after which he dashed into the hall, dropped the box, and tore into it. Before he could be stopped, he had wolfed down a sausage and started on the inspector’s French fries.

  There was, needless to say, another heated argument between Albertine and the inspector, who resented the poaching of his lunch. “We have just solved the case,” she said. “If you attempt to imprison my dog, you may be sure I shall tell the newspapers that your case was solved by two ladies, a graduate student from Normandy, and a dog.” The inspector, face dark red with fury, decided not to punish the dog, and we were allowed to leave.

  Martin was lurking outside, looking abashed, so we took him to lunch and plied him with delicious food and wine until he was much less stressed about the possibility of being arrested for letting us into Catherine’s apartment.

  53

  Evidence of Intruders

  I couldn’t find my tame Norman anywhere and had to skip a lecture to pick up papers I’d left at home. The stress of recent days had made me forgetful, but that was no excuse for him. I knew as soon as I opened the door that something was wrong, even the smell, although I couldn’t identify the odor. And the four books on the coffee table were piled in the wrong order. The top one should have been the one I was reading.

  With the hair on my arms prickling in alarm, I hurried to the kitchen and fished the gun from beneath the flatware container in the drawer. At least it was in its place. Holding it in my right hand, I moved silently from room to room, but found no one. What did I have here that I wouldn’t want an intruder to see? I’d brought things from Lyon but found it hard to remember what—ah, the items supposedly stolen from my apartment. I had to put the pistol down, which made me uneasy under the circumstances, in order to pull the boxes from the closet shelf.

  The spoons and candlesticks were in the proper box, wrapped in silverware cloths. I couldn’t be sure that they hadn’t been disturbed, but they looked as they had when I arrived and put them away. The jewelry box was still locked and showed no signs of having been pried open. Nonetheless, I checked for the cross and the jewelry set that had belonged to the first Catherine of Avignon, the one who had married a wealthy moneylender of the papal city and moved here from her family home in Lyon.

  After putting the boxes back on the shelf, I checked the drawers of my plain wooden dresser. How the aunt who left me this place would have hated the décor, but I found it soothing. It did not remind me of happier times. My medieval prayer book was swaddled carefully in its carved walnut box, much to my relief—until I remembered that it should have been beneath the nunlike underwear, which had replaced the silken lingerie I once wore to please my love. Now the box lay beneath heavy cotton nightgowns. In the wrong place!

  Why would a thief enter my apartment and steal nothing? If the intruder were a pervert, ransacking my underwear drawer, why not take a sample with him? I hurried to the laundry container in the bathroom but found everything that I had worn and discarded since coming to Avignon piled within, perhaps not in a particular order, but I could be responsible for that. Not even I fold unwashed laundry and put it away in any order, although Maurice used to laugh about my compulsive neatness.

  The desk. My books! I had first editions of early scientific treatises that had belonged to—I ran into the other bedroom, heart pounding, but they too were in their
places in the glass-fronted cabinets that protected them. Nor could I find anything amiss in my desk, yet I knew that someone had been here. Could Martin have been nosing through my things? I’d have his head if he’d done anything here but what he was sent to do—fetch papers for me from specified files.

  The intruder had come today. If someone, Martin, for instance, had visited my apartment while I was at the palais, Marie-Solange might have seen him. Our concierge is a nosy woman, always looking out her window. I had had to bring my treasures in by the back stairs to avoid questions. Whipping my cell phone from my handbag, I called her. She had indeed seen strangers entering the compound a bit after nine, two women, a large black dog, and a tall, redheaded man, whom she had seen here before.

  I might have been unsure about the women had it not been for the dog and Martin. Had I failed to retrieve my key from him yesterday? The women must have been Carolyn and Albertine, searching for something in my apartment. What did they know? What did they suspect? And what had they found? The prayer book, but if Albertine or Martin found it, it would have meant nothing to them. The inspector in Lyon, however, might have told Carolyn what was reported stolen from my apartment. Or had I told her? I was losing track of my actions—due to the stress of my failures.

  “My goodness,” said Marie-Solange. “A police car just pulled into the courtyard. Fools! It’s not for cars. I must go and send them away.”

  She hung up, and I rushed to the window, where I saw four men pile out of the car and Marie-Solange, waving her arms and berating them. Mon Dieu. Were they here for me? I had things yet to accomplish. Perhaps I could still kill the woman if she was at her hotel. The man no, he was at the palais. I could not embarrass my colleagues by killing him in front of everyone. And there were things I would need to take with me. No time for everything, even things that might incriminate me if the police came here, but things I’d need. Even as I thought this, I began to collect, in my haste to escape down the back stairs, the things that would suit my purposes.