The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  The facts were relatively simple. On a freezing and snowy night just before Christmas two years ago, Carey Howard, a fifty-five-year-old financier and patron of the arts, was battered to death in the living room of his Park Avenue apartment. The murder weapon was never found, and nobody was ever charged with the killing, which didn’t prevent fingers from being pointed at his wife, Vivien.

  I’d thrashed through the story with Kitty, sitting in our office on the Rue du Quatre-Septembre one slow afternoon. “Apparently, the marriage was in trouble,” I said. “Vivien and Carey had quarreled earlier in the evening, and she ran out and slammed the door. That much we know from Pedro Ruiz, the housekeeper.”

  “A man was the housekeeper?”

  “Well, some accounts called him a valet, but I think he generally looked after things. Anyway, it was his night off, and he was in his own apartment in the back, but he heard them shrieking at each other.”

  “A typical evening, in some matrimonial circles.” Kitty’s tone was ironic. We both had spent evenings that way ourselves, she with the perfidious Luc de Villiers-Marigny, me with Lonnie Boyette, the good ole boy I’d married right after high school and shed not too much later.

  “Now comes the problematical part,” I went on. “Vivien slams out. Soon afterward, one of the tenants in the apartment building starts out to walk his dog, slips and falls on the ice, and has a heart attack. There’s a lot of hullabaloo— CPR, ambulances, and whatnot. The doormen are distracted. During this time, Vivien returns. One of the neighbors saw her in the hall. She claims she came back to pick up her wallet, which she’d forgotten, and left again immediately.”

  “So—”

  “So nobody saw her leave. She might have stayed around and bopped Carey. The time of death was a couple of hours later.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “She did leave at some point, though, because she showed up at the apartment again at midnight, dazed and upset, refusing to say where she’d been. The cops were there already. Pedro Ruiz had discovered the body around eleven and called them.”

  I paused to let Kitty ponder. She’d been listening with rapt concentration. Now she folded her arms across her chest and said, flatly, “Sounds like she did it.”

  “Kitty!”

  “It does. Why isn’t she in jail?”

  “Because—”

  She wasn’t listening. “A male housekeeper,” she said in an admiring tone. “Isn’t that great? It’s so chic, somehow.”

  “She isn’t in jail because she finally confessed she’d been with Ross Santee, so she had an alibi. He backed her up.”

  “Ross is the lover? The good-looking one?”

  “The artist whose work Carey had bought. Not only good-looking, but eight years younger than Vivien.”

  “Does it strike you, Georgia Lee, that this woman is loaded with style?”

  Loaded with style. Vivien’s first husband, Denis McBride, had been a poet, the father of her grown children, Alexander and Blanche. After his death she’d married Carey, who was natty, jowly, and rich. With Ross, she’d gone back to the artistic type. Once she and Ross confessed to their affair, she’d been home free. Maybe she’d been harassed by the press, but that seemed more desirable than being harassed by prison guards. And who knew? She may have been innocent, as she claimed.

  “Pedro testified at the inquest that Carey was planning to divorce Vivien,” I told Kitty.

  “Why?”

  “Found out about the affair with Ross.”

  “So maybe she got rid of him before he could dump her, or change his will?”

  “Well—It didn’t work out that way. He hadn’t changed his will, but his relatives have sued to keep her from inheriting. It’s still in court.”

  “I see.” She paused, thinking. “Let me ask you something. I’m serious.”

  “What?”

  “Do you think I should fire Alba and hire a man as housekeeper?”

  The rhythmic motion of the train was relaxing. The poodle and his mistress were both snoring beside me. I closed my eyes. The trauma of parting had seeped away, leaving weariness and lassitude. I wanted to talk to Kitty, tell her not to fire Alba, for heaven’s sake. If only I could open my mouth and form the words, I’d tell her.

  I slept, and the T.G.V. sped toward Avignon.

  Meeting In Avignon

  Ross Santee was waiting for me on the platform. I picked him out immediately, not because he looked so much like his pictures, but because he looked so American. His khaki pants, plaid shirt, and running shoes were a giveaway, but more indicative was the way he stood, feet solidly planted and hands shoved halfway in his pockets, as if he owned the platform, the station, and the whole damn town of Avignon.

  He was watching the disembarking passengers moving toward the exit sign, obviously trying to pick me from the crowd. I waved as best I could, burdened as I was, and he smiled and came forward.

  “Hi, Georgia Lee. I’m Ross,” he said. Instant first names were another Americanism. He took my bags. “The car’s out front.”

  He was, as Kitty had commented, good-looking, but in a nonthreatening, boy-next-door way, and he looked younger than the thirty-seven I knew he was. He was of medium height, well-built, with hazel eyes, a sprinkling of freckles, and russet hair that was conservatively cut. I thought he looked more like a stockbroker on vacation than an artist, but maybe my stereotype was dated.

  I didn’t know much about his work. One piece had been featured in the Patrician Homes article. A photograph showed Vivien and Carey, in presumably happier days, sitting in the living room of their Park Avenue apartment. The decor was starkly modern, with gleaming wood floors and furniture of mole-colored leather. Hanging behind a sofa was the only visible artwork, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa much larger than the painting’s actual size. Surrounding the image, instead of a frame, was a three-dimensional model of a gorilla, clinging with hairy arms and legs. This was no cute cartoon gorilla, but a shaggy beast with bloodshot eyes and a toothy mouth open in a snarl. Its clawed hands and feet obscured part of the painting, and one of the hands was giving an unmistakable middle-finger salute to the Mona Lisa’s famous smile.

  The caption read, “The Howards collect contemporary art. A recent acquisition is Ross Santee’s ‘Nice Boy.’ ”

  Personally, I thought “Nice Boy” was a smart-ass cheap shot at an overused target, but Ross probably would have said that was exactly the point— always a good all-purpose response to criticism. Since Ross had relieved me of most of my luggage, however, I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  As we descended into an underground passage to the station, the T.G.V. started to move, its two minutes in Avignon over, the next stop Marseilles. We walked through the station and out the front door. A crowded parking lot stretched before us, beyond that a busy street, and beyond that stood the city walls of Avignon, battlements and towers of mellow gold stone looking ancient, and romantic, and all the relevant adjectives according to the guidebook. I was in Provence, in the fabled South of France. The sun was shining, as it was supposed to.

  We crossed the parking lot to a white Renault with a Hertz sticker on the windshield. As Ross was putting my suitcase and typewriter into the trunk he said, “Vivien’s really eager to meet you.”

  I wondered why, if she was that eager, she hadn’t come to the station. He must have seen the question on my face because he said, “She’s scared, too. She decided to wait at the house.”

  Scared? Had my anonymous correspondent sent her a letter, too? We got in the car and I said, “What’s she scared of?”

  He tilted his head back against the headrest. In repose, his face looked drawn. The openness he was exuding could be taking some effort. “You don’t really have to ask, do you?” he said. His manner had an easy intimacy appropriate to good friends. “She’s going to have to relive everything to do this book.”

  I distinctly remembered the editor saying Vivien was looking forward to getting to work. At a
loss, I retreated to inanity. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

  He shook his head with a suggestion of vehemence. “Everything about this has been as bad as it could possibly be.”

  “Then why does she want to do a book?”

  “I begged her not to. You might as well know that.” He spoke firmly, but without rancor.

  “Why?”

  “It’s been tough enough to put it behind us as it is. Tough enough to— not even live, just continue. Raking it up again is a mistake.”

  “If you feel that way, I don’t see—”

  “It’s not how I feel that counts, it’s how Vivien feels.” His ironic smile didn’t quite jell. “She’s had… a lot of expenses. The lawsuit about the estate drags on. We keep hearing rumors of a settlement; then they start wrangling again. Carey’s relatives are being absolutely outrageous.”

  “So she decided to write the book.”

  “Yes. You can imagine how they feel about that.” He started the car, but before we drove away he turned toward me again. This time his smile looked genuine. “Hey— welcome to Provence,” he said.

  His attempt to make me feel better succeeded to an extent. I wondered if any of Carey’s relatives were angry enough to send me the letter: “A killer shouldn’t profit from her crime.” Could be. And the postmark was New York, where the legal battle was going on.

  We were on the traffic-choked street that ran beside the city wall. As Ross maneuvered around a tourist bus I said, “When did you arrive?”

  “Let’s see. We’ve been here ten days, I guess.”

  The letter was postmarked a week ago. If Ross had written it himself to discourage the book project, he’d given it to someone else to mail. I shook myself mentally, disgusted that a letter could have poisoned my attitude this way. I tried to concentrate on the serene gold stone of the wall. Were we near the famous bridge, of the “Sur le pont d’Avignon” rhyme?

  Ross made a right-hand turn onto a street lined with garages, swimming-pool services, and low-rise apartment buildings, obviously heading out of town. “I wish I could show you Avignon, but I promised Vivien I’d bring you right back, and I’ve got to stop and pick up a few things,” Ross said.

  That was fine with me. I wanted to meet Vivien, too. And “picking up a few things” evoked one of the lovely Provencal outdoor markets I’d read about, with ropes of garlic, shimmering black and green olives, gorgeous vegetables, tender goat cheese. I wondered if it was market day in Beaulieu-la-Fontaine, or some other village nearby.

  Fifteen minutes out of Avignon, Ross turned off into the vast parking lot of an establishment billing itself an “Hypermarché.” Soon we were piloting a grocery cart through a store that covered acres and sold everything from computers to Pampers to compact discs to sweat socks. My dreams of a bucolic shopping experience were shattered. Consulting a list, Ross bought Q-tips, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Ban antiperspirant, a bottle of Beefeaters gin, a bag of Fritos. We passed a barrel of plastic flowers, and he selected a hollyhock in garish orange and tossed it into the cart.

  As we stood in one of the fifty or so checkout lines he seemed to have an inspiration. “Say—” He turned to me. “You speak French, don’t you?”

  “I do OK, I guess. I’m not perfect.”

  “Great!” He looked overjoyed. “You can talk to Marcelle.”

  “Marcelle?”

  “The housekeeper. We never imagined she wouldn’t speak English. It’s driving everybody nuts.”

  “None of you speaks French?”

  “Blanche reads it perfectly. I’ll bet she could speak, too, but she’s too timid to try.”

  I knew the feeling, one I’d wrestled with when I first came to live in Paris. “I’ll do my best.”

  We moved through the line. When we’d checked out, Ross bowed ceremoniously and handed me the orange plastic hollyhock. “Now it’s official. Welcome to Provence.”

  I laughed. For some reason, I thought of “Nice Boy.”

  After we left the shopping center behind, the countryside began to resemble the Provence I’d seen in pictures— tile-roofed houses of biscuit-colored stucco, a line of hills in the distance. Once out of bustling Carpentras, the only town of any size near Beaulieu-la-Fontaine, I began to believe I’d arrived. Sweeping vineyards and cherry orchards spread under the impossibly blue sky, and the green bulk of Mount Ventoux, the tallest mountain in the region, loomed ahead of us. Shrubs of broom, bursting with yellow flowers, seemed to leap from the hillsides, cabbage-size roses drooped from walls, huge clumps of purple irises stood waist-high at crossroads.

  Most striking were the poppies, their scarlet blooms sprinkled along the roadside, sweeping up the sides of ditches, decorating the foundations of walls and the bases of stop signs. The first time I saw a field of them, a mass of brilliant red, I gasped and cried, “Look!”

  Ross glanced over. “Not bad, eh? You can see why van Gogh and Cezanne got excited about this part of the world, can’t you?”

  “You sure can.” Making conversation, I went on, “Do you think being here will have an effect on your work? Your— art, I mean?”

  He winced, almost imperceptibly, before answering with a curt, “I don’t know,” and I could see I’d somehow put my foot in it. Was he ticked off because I’d tacitly compared him to van Gogh and Cezanne? God knows, judging from “Nice Boy,” it was outrageous flattery. I retreated into silence.

  We hadn’t spoken for five minutes or so when he said abruptly, “I don’t paint anymore. I don’t do any of that.”

  The words, although matter-of-fact, sounded bleak and sad. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was.

  “It’s OK. I haven’t since— it happened.”

  “Forgive—”

  “Vivien was hoping…” He cleared his throat. “She thought I might be able to get back to it here. She even had my old stuff shipped over. Cost a bundle. Thought it would inspire me, I guess.” His voice trailed off in a desolate, self-deprecating chuckle.

  I felt awful. “I wish I hadn’t said anything.”

  “How were you supposed to know? It’s all right.”

  It wasn’t, though. His square, boy-next-door jaw was tight. I turned away and watched another poppy field glide by, as glorious as the first.

  Mas Rose

  Beaulieu-la-Fontaine was a postcard-pretty village, a collection of tile roofs staggering up a hill to a church whose steeple was embellished by a curlicued wrought iron bell tower. We drove along a main street shaded by plane trees, past shuttered houses, closed shops, a couple of sidewalk cafes with empty tables. The place looked sleepy to the point of being deserted. “Where is everybody?” I asked Ross.

  “God knows. They all vanish from around lunchtime to four-thirty, and then the stores reopen and everything picks up steam again.”

  I was familiar with midday closing from Paris, but had never seen it observed so rigorously. We passed a corner where an imposing fountain stood, overgrown with green moss through which I could still make out a motif of dolphins and scallop shells. “Is that fountain the fontaine in Beaulieu-la-Fontaine?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Blanche. She reads the books and knows all that stuff.”

  We left the village behind and began to climb a forested ridge, stands of low, scrubby oak interspersed with vigorous yellow broom, the grassy shoulder of the road a tangle of wildflowers. “Almost there,” said Ross with obviously forced enthusiasm.

  I toyed with my plastic hollyhock, which looked ever more ridiculous compared with the bounteous natural beauty all around. Why couldn’t Ross have given me a real poppy or a sprig of broom as a gesture of welcome? I hoped I wouldn’t have to meet Vivien with a plastic hollyhock in my hand.

  We rounded a curve. When I saw the slanting tile roof ahead on our left I knew we had arrived, even before Ross said, “There it is. Mas Rose.”

  “Mas Rose?”

  “ ‘Mas’ is the word for farm around here, Blanche tells me. It means pink farm,
or something like that.”

  Mas Rose was indeed pink, a dusky shade more intense than the pale gold of other houses I’d seen so far. I glimpsed its walls and roof above the slanting tops of a windbreak of cypress trees inside a bleached stone wall.

  We turned through an open gate into a stony yard. The house was a rambling structure, probably added on to several different times, and it was solid, rough-hewn, and splendidly at home in its surroundings. “It looks primitive, but it’s been completely done over,” Ross said, unaware that I loved it on sight.

  He parked next to a shed, also pink and tile-roofed. “That’s my workroom,” he said, giving “workroom” a self-mocking twist.

  I wasn’t paying attention. I’d just seen the view. All along the ridge behind the house the ground fell away in a steep bluff covered with scrub oak, broom, boulders, and wildflowers. Farmland stretched below, neat fields and stands of trees reaching to the folded green valleys of Mount Ventoux. The mountain’s barren-looking summit was almost lost in clouds.

  We got out of the car. The property extended a good way, the wall separating the road from a large lawn of hummocky grass. Near the house a stand of twisted, silver-leaved olive trees sheltered a rustic stone table and white metal chairs. On the table sat a Diet Coke can and an empty glass.

  As Ross was taking my bags from the trunk, glass patio doors on the side of the house, an anomaly surely dating from the renovation, slid open. A dark-haired woman wearing a green cotton sundress and a yellow apron rushed out toward us. For a gut-clenching moment I thought she was Vivien, but this lady was plumpish, with frizzy hair— a total contrast to the thin, languorous, ballerina-like look of Vivien’s pictures. Besides which, I couldn’t imagine Vivien wearing an apron.