The Wife of Riley (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book 6)

by A W Hartoin

  I let go of the door and it closed. My last image of Monsieur Barre was of him smiling with excitement. That was new. I didn’t know he could get excited.

  The elevator crept up to the third floor and my anxiety increased. I’d been in Elias’s apartment before, but it was always a short-term affair. The Girls liked to check on it to make sure it was in order. We never stayed there and I didn’t know anyone who had, come to think of it. Even when the other Bled properties were filled, we didn’t stay in Elias’s apartment. We went to a hotel.

  Stop it! It’s fine.

  The door opened on Elias’s floor. A round foyer with two doors labeled A and B didn’t look remotely frightening. The inlaid wood floor with its shiny sunburst in six kinds of wood was warm and inviting.

  “Which one?” asked Aaron.

  “Both, actually.”

  Each floor in the building had two apartments. Elias had bought both on the third floor because a single man with zero hope of marriage needed two apartments. Elias was so weird, his father, Balthazar Bled, made him sign a document saying that he wouldn’t get married without family approval or he would be disinherited. I’d seen the document. Surprisingly, it was about love, not control. The Bleds loved Elias, but they clearly knew he was nuts.

  I opened A and the curved door swung open without sound or encouragement. Elias’s apartment proved the nuts theory. It was packed with mismatched furniture. Think early twentieth-century garage sale. Paintings, prints, and engravings covered every inch of wall space. I wasn’t sure what color the walls were. When wall space ran out, Elias stacked canvases against the walls.

  I dropped my purse on the table in the entryway next to a wood carving of Christ on the cross and entered the living room, marveling at the collection and how little it had changed. Elias’s mother, Brina, never bought the suicide story. She insisted that his home be kept just as it was when he left. She believed he would come home. If The Girls were right, he never actually left.

  I pushed that creepy thought away and went through the rooms, turning on the lights and opening the shades. The place was spotless. Monsieur Barre personally supervised a thorough cleaning once a month. There were even clean sheets on the beds.

  “Alright, Elias. If you’re here, I want you to know this isn’t forever. Please don’t haunt us,” I said, peeling off my sopping sweater and flinging it into the claw-foot tub. No shower. Chuck wouldn’t be happy.

  Chuck!

  I whipped out my phone and called him. After three tries, I gave up and left a message, saying it was urgent and to call me immediately. My stomach twisted around into a bow tie. He’d gone to that apartment with the Klinefeld connection. I didn’t know who the suits were, but The Klinefeld Group was my first guess. I supposed Calpurnia could’ve hired them, but why? I reported to her. No, definitely The Klinefeld Group. And where there were two suits, there could be three or four. I called Chuck again and again. No answer.

  “Aaron!” I yelled.

  He didn’t answer and I had to search the apartment, only to find him in the kitchen, staring at what could loosely be called an appliance.

  “Stove,” he said.

  “I guess. Don’t try to turn it on. Nobody’s lived here in over a hundred years.”

  Aaron examined the so-called stove. It was a La Cornue, one of the first, if I had to guess. It was blue and resembled an anvil sitting on a low table with three hot plate-looking disks on top.

  “It doesn’t work,” said Aaron.

  “You tried it. Are you crazy?” I pulled him back from the stove. “Call Chuck. He’s not answering. I’m freaking out a little.”

  “Huh?”

  “Call Chuck.” I managed not to yell, but it was close. “We got away. Maybe he didn’t.”

  Aaron called and then shrugged at me before going back to the stove. I didn’t know what to do. I called our apartment’s land line. No answer there either. I could go over to the building and do what? Ask people if they’d seen a hot guy asking questions about an apartment with a padlock? Yeah, right.

  “Aaron.” I nudged him in the rump with my foot. “I don’t know what to do. Chuck always answers unless he’s mad at me. Is he mad?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I should go down there. I could canvass the building. That’s what he was going to do.”

  “Call Spidermonkey,” said Aaron with his head wedged behind the stove.

  Spidermonkey. Of course!

  I called Spidermonkey without a thought to the time.

  “We were chased and I can’t find Chuck,” I said in a rush the second he answered.

  “What? Mercy?” Spidermonkey sounded woozy.

  “Two guys in suits chased me and Aaron when we left Novak’s place. Now Chuck’s not answering the phone.”

  “Where’s Chuck?” asked Spidermonkey.

  I slapped my forehead. “Are you okay?”

  “Loretta’s trying to kill me.”

  “What the hell?”

  “She made me eat sushi.”

  “That’s not enough to kill you,” I said. “Me, on the other hand…”

  “It was bad. I’m in the ER. I can’t—” There was a horrible purging noise and I almost horked out of sympathy.

  A woman’s voice came on the line, “Hello? Hello? Who is this?”

  I was so shocked I couldn’t speak.

  Then she said, “Honey, where did you get this phone? Is it the nurse’s? Who are you trying to call? Augusta is on her way.” She came back on the line. “Hello? Hello?”

  I hung up. Loretta the wife. I knew of Loretta’s existence, but I was fairly certain she didn’t know about mine and her husband’s alter ego of cyber sleuth.

  “Poor Spidermonkey.”

  “Huh?” asked Aaron, still behind the stove.

  “He has food poisoning. He’s in the ER and Loretta found his second phone because of me.” I plopped down in a rickety cane-bottomed chair. “Oh my god. What’s she going to think? A secret phone and I hung up on her. An affair. That’s what she’ll think. Crap.”

  Aaron popped up. “Where? Who did it?” He was actually looking at me. It was kind of unsettling.

  “Nobody did it. Spidermonkey wouldn’t have an affair.”

  Aaron gave me a look and I realized he couldn’t care less about an affair. “It was bad sushi.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a restaurant?”

  “One would assume, unless Loretta made it at home and she really is trying to kill him.”

  He rubbed his hands together. “We won’t ever go there.”

  “There was never any danger of me going to a sushi place,” I said, pulling out Novak’s phone. Spidermonkey was out. Novak was in. I hoped he didn’t start charging me. Monsieur Barre’s silence was going to cost me plenty. I didn’t need French style. I needed shoes that didn’t fly off when I did a roundhouse kick.

  I left Aaron muttering about incompetent sushi chefs and went to get Novak’s phone out of my purse. He took four rings to answer and I started to get worried about him.

  “Miss Watts,” he said. “I have information for you.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one,” I said.

  “Did something happen?”

  I told him about the chase and our new, possibly haunted, digs. Then he got quiet.

  “Novak?”

  “How do you feel about the Fibonaccis?” he asked.

  “Good as you can about a crime family. It’s not Calpurnia, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Perhaps it’s not her.”

  “There’s no perhaps. I work for her,” I said. “There’s no reason to chase me down.”

  “Tell me about this apartment you wanted information on,” said Novak.

  “I thought you were supposed to tell me about it.”

  He laughed softly. “And so I will. First, I want to know why you are interested in it.”

  I told him everything about The
Klinefeld Group, tracing the trail through the years to the doorstep of the Marais apartment. “I would guess they know about Richter. They have people using Jens Waldemar Hoff as an alias.”

  Novak began typing. “Maybe they’re hoping you’ll lead them to whatever they want.”

  “They have the advantage there,” I said. “At least they know what it is.”

  “You’ve proved resourceful in the past. I’m betting you’ll find it before they do.”

  “I’m glad you’re confident about that. What do you have on the apartment?” I asked.

  The typing continued. “Nothing. It’s a dead space.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dead space, according to Novak, meant the apartment was cloaked. It used no electricity or gas, and mail didn’t go into its box. It didn’t mean no one was there or that the lights didn’t work. It meant that somebody had made it so all usage wasn’t tracked by utilities or any other service. The apartment was dead like it wasn’t even there, except that it was. Some safe houses were like that. If you were going to tuck federal witnesses away, you wanted them to go into a black hole. I pointed out that nobody would pick a swanky apartment in the Marais. An isolated farmhouse, that I would buy. Novak said that plain sight wasn’t such a bad idea. Tourists abounded in Paris. No one would think anything about new people coming and going. I pointed out that there was a freaking padlock on the door. What safe house did that? He reluctantly agreed. Since the apartment hadn’t been sold in thirty years, he was going to have to sift through records by hand. He wasn’t thrilled. Neither was I. Hand-sifting records took time and I didn’t have much, especially if The Klinefeld Group had decided that it was time to take it up a notch and snag me. On the upside, Novak could tell that Chuck’s phone was off. He suggested that I go to the chocolate shop as planned. With any luck, Chuck would be there. Novak seemed to think this cured all my worries. It didn’t. What if Chuck wasn’t there? Novak didn’t have an answer for that. I’d have to go and find out.

  But not for a couple of hours, and I couldn’t go out, even if it wasn’t. I had one shoe and was sopping wet. I went back to the bathroom, wrung out my sad sweater, and draped it on the pedestal sink. The tub taps squealed something awful when I turned them, but hot water did eventually come out. I filled the tub and continually checked my phone. Nothing from Chuck and he still wasn’t answering. I slipped into the hot water and soaked while staring at my phones. I had to call Calpurnia. If I didn’t, she might do something crazy and deploy Fats Licata to Paris to find me or possibly somebody worse. I reluctantly tapped her name and she picked up immediately. It kind of surprised me since she didn’t know the number.

  “Miss Watts,” she said with a relieved sigh after I identified myself. “Where have you been?”

  I decided not to tell her about the suits. I didn’t want Fats showing up to protect me. I couldn’t imagine the kind of attention a guy named Fats would attract. Plus, I was in Paris on Fibonacci business. Calpurnia might not take kindly to my looking into The Klinefeld Group on her time.

  “I lost your phone, but I replaced it with another secure one,” I said quickly.

  “You lost it.” She sounded doubtful.

  “Well…less lost and more stolen.”

  She bristled. “Stolen. By who?”

  “I don’t know. I was at Sacre Coeur and got pickpocketed.”

  “Why were you there?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I have to play the tourist with my boyfriend and Aaron here.”

  She mulled it over and then seemed to forgive me. “You have a good replacement?”

  “From my Paris contact. He’s very good.”

  “Better than Spidermonkey?”

  I started, sloshing water on the floor. “You know him?”

  “I know of him. He won’t work for me at any price.”

  “Oh, well…Spidermonkey referred me to this guy and I think he’s going to be a big help.”

  “Do you have her yet?” asked Calpurnia.

  “I might. I’m waiting for confirmation,” I said, wondering how long I could string her along.

  “But you think it’s Angela.”

  “It could be. I have to get fingerprints to make sure.”

  Calpurnia didn’t say anything and I heard the juicy glug of wine being poured. I imagined her on her deck, sitting next to Cosmo and watching the fireflies in the woods around her house.

  “If it is her,” I said, “what do you want me to do?”

  “Do?” she asked.

  “If Gina’s right and her sister’s alive, that means she pulled off the near impossible, faking her own death. Why?”

  “Do you think you can find out?” asked Calpurnia.

  I checked my regular phone. Nothing from Chuck. “Maybe,” I said. “It’d be worth it to try. If it’s her, this is going to screw up a lot of lives.”

  Calpurnia’s voice went huskier as if she just realized the implications. “I thought this was fruitless. Gina is…an unreliable source.”

  “She has instincts.”

  “But you’re not certain yet.”

  “I will be soon.”

  “When you are, get me all the information,” she said. “I knew I chose the right girl for the job.”

  I smiled. “I’ll get it done.”

  “I know you will.”

  We hung up and I sunk under the water, running my hands through my tangled hair. There was no shampoo, only a cube of green soap, probably Savon de Marseille, chock full of olive oil. I wasn’t sure what that would do to my hair, but, since it was already corkscrewing, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  The cube was so old it took a good ten minutes to get a lather off it. After that, it was smooth and creamy. I rinsed and waited. No corkscrewing. I used the cube on the rest of me and my skin felt like room temperature butter.

  When I finally got out of the tub, I was so relaxed I nearly forgot to worry about Chuck, who still wasn’t answering. I could hear my dad’s voice in my head saying that Chuck was a sight more capable than me. Dad pretty much thought everyone was more capable than me. He had yet to get over me setting fire to the Bleds’ garage when I was seven. It was an accident, for crying out loud.

  The bad part about Elias’s bathroom was the towels or rather the weird fabric squares that I found on a shelf. No terry cloth there and no covering my bits either. I found a dressing gown on the shelf next to the clothes and was surprised to find it was a woman’s, Japanese style in pink silk with wide sleeves that draped nearly to the floor. Strange. All the stories about Elias said he was a hopeless failure with women.

  I slipped it on and found it fit perfectly. Either Elias wasn’t very big or he was odder than the family was willing to let on. I opened the bathroom door and Aaron stood there. I screeched, slipped, and would’ve landed on my rump if Aaron hadn’t grabbed me.

  “You have got to stop doing that. You’re going to…what’s that smell?” I asked.

  “Stove,” he said.

  “Oh my god. You turned it on. Are you trying to kill us? Do you want to die?” I rushed past him to the kitchen and found the middle plate red hot and smoking. I threw open the window in a fit of coughing and cracked Aaron on the shoulder. “What the hell?”

  “Burning it clean.”

  “You are insane.”

  “They’re here.”

  I had a Poltergeist moment and sucked in a breath. “Who? What?”

  “People,” he said, staring to the left of my face.

  “Er…living people?”

  “Yeah.”

  I blew out the breath and leaned on the wall. “Don’t do that to me.”

  “What?”

  “Oh forget it. Who is it?”

  Aaron shrugged and went to stare at the stove, looking for what I couldn’t say. There was nothing for it but to go see whoever it was in an ancient dressing gown, shoeless and wet. Mom would be mortified, but I couldn’t put on wet clothes, could I?

  I crept down the hall to the
living room, listening to soft French voices. One of them was Monsieur Barre, the interfering old toad. I sashayed over and whipped open the door. If you’re going to look inappropriate, you have to do it with conviction and conviction was all I had. I wasn’t even wearing panties.

  “Monsieur Barre, what is going on?” I asked, summoning up my inner Aunt Miriam. Nobody is haughty like her.

  Four people, in addition to Monsieur Barre, turned around and I instantly wanted to run away. I very nearly did. The people, two men and two women, epitomized Parisian style, uber skinny, lots of black, and impeccable tailoring.

  “Mademoiselle Watts?” asked the oldest of the crew, a woman who looked like Coco Chanel at sixty, but with less wrinkles and more pearls.

  “Yes.”

  “We are here for you.”

  “Who are you and what do you plan to do?”

  “To fix you, naturally,” she said.

  I could use a lot of fixing, but that was still pretty insulting. My face must’ve shown it because Monsieur Barre quickly said, “This is Madam Ziegler. She consented to come immediately as this is an emergency.”

  Only in France is bad hair considered an emergency.

  “Well, I do need some shoes, but my credit card is…gone. Stolen at Sacred Coeur.” When you pick a lie, it’s best to stick with it. Dad is right about some things.

  The entire group looked scandalized and apologized like they’d committed the crime themselves. During the apologies, I was measured from head to toe. My hair got evaluated and Madam Ziegler pronounced me, “Not hopeless.” I think that was a compliment, coming from her.

  Madam Ziegler opened the front door and wheeled in racks of clothing—four to be exact—stuffed with everything from coats to dresses to purses. I could smell the expensive and it was a heady experience.

  “But I told you my credit card, it’s gone.” I didn’t say that my credit card probably didn’t have enough space to buy one shoe, forget about a whole pair.

  “We’ll put it on your account,” said Madam Ziegler.

  “I don’t have an account,” I said.

  “But of course you do.”