The Paramour's Daughter

by Wendy Hornsby

  The Paramour’s Daughter

  A Maggie MacGowen Mystery

  Wendy Hornsby

  2010 Palo Alto - Mckinleyville

  Perseverance Press • John Daniel & Company

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Wendy Hornsby

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

  A Perseverance Press Book

  Published by John Daniel & Company

  A division of Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

  Post Office Box 2790

  McKinleyville, California 95519

  www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance

  Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

  Cover design and illustration by Peter Thorpe, www.peterthorpe.net

  ISBN 978-1-564747-38-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hornsby, Wendy.

  The paramour’s daughter : a Maggie MacGowen mystery / by Wendy Hornsby.

  p. cm.

  ISBN [first print edition] 978-1-56474-496-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. MacGowen, Maggie (Fictitious character)--Fiction. 2. Women motion picture producers and directors--Fiction. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)--Fiction. 4. Normandy (France)--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.O689P37 2010

  2010006360

  Paul—Encore!

  The Families

  In California

  Maggie MacGowen

  Casey MacGowen, her daughter

  Detective Mike Flint,* LAPD, her husband

  Elizabeth and Alfred* Duchamps, her parents

  Mark* and Emily* Duchamps, her brother and sister

  Max Duchamps, her uncle, lawyer and agent

  In Normandy

  Élodie and Henri* Martin

  Isabelle Martin, their daughter

  Claude Desmoulins, Isabelle’s ex-husband

  Freddy Desmoulins, son of Isabelle and Claude

  Lena Desmoulins, Freddy’s wife

  Gérard Martin, son of Élodie and Henri

  Louise Foullard Martin,* Gérard’s first wife

  Antoine Martin, older son of Louise and Gérard

  Kelly Martin, Antoine’s wife

  Bébé (Charles) Martin, younger son of Louise and Gérard

  Gillian Martin, Gérard’s second wife

  Jemima Martin, daughter of Gillian and Gérard

  *deceased

  1

  “My dear girl!”

  The woman, a phantom clothed in shades of gray, rushed toward me out of the shadows at the edge of the parking lot, her arms outstretched as if she expected me to fall into her embrace. I took a quick glance at her, in case she was someone I might know or should be worried about, didn’t know her, also didn’t see any of the primary reasons to flee: blood, weapons, or the clipboard of some fanatic looking for signatures on a petition.

  She was too well dressed, clean and expensively coiffed to be a homeless panhandler—even in the rarified environs of the Malibu Colony, where we were, the homeless don’t wear cashmere sweaters.

  It was ten o’clock, the night before Thanksgiving. Whatever her issues, I didn’t want to hear them. I’d had a long and brutal day and all I wanted was to get some groceries and go home. I hurried toward the market’s lighted windows, hoping to find sanctuary among other cranky, late-evening shoppers, doing my best to ignore her.

  Normally, I would not have parked so far away from the market, but the lot was packed. There are only three supermarkets within the twenty-seven-mile-long oceanfront snake of land that makes up the City of Malibu. Beyond this market in the Malibu Colony, the next was eight miles up Pacific Coast Highway at Point Dume. So, for any local like me still in need of a turkey or any of the trimmings, this was the place.

  I dodged a car backing out of its space, the spikey-haired driver distracted by his conversation via hands-free telephone. Or with voices only he could hear; the effect is the same, either way.

  “Please, my dear,” my pursuer called, slowed by the same car swerving into her path, then picking up her pace when it was past. She seemed to be in pretty good shape for someone I guessed to be at the upper end of her sixties. “Just a moment, please.”

  I kept walking. She appeared to be benign enough, but the pure delight in her face when she looked at me, as if she were the birthday girl and I her entire party, set off my alarms. Never before had anyone, not even my dear mother, ever been that happy to see me. Frankly, the happy sparkle in her eyes scared me.

  Maybe she just had a snootful of holiday cheer. If so, I didn’t want to share her joy. I was not feeling the rise of holiday spirit, did not want to. I had lost my husband, the notorious and wonderful Detective Mike Flint, Robbery-Homicide Division, LAPD, to cancer the previous spring and absolutely dreaded going through the holidays ahead without him. With all the Ho-ho-ho junk all of a sudden popping up everywhere again, it took a lot of effort for me to keep up a façade of composure, and this annoying old girl hovering at my elbow was pecking away at fragile edges. I wanted to brush her off, get my groceries and go. But, because I was brought up by a proper Bostonian who taught me to respect my elders, instead of letting loose with any of the colorful, blistering versions of “Piss off” that occurred to me, I turned toward her, smiled blandly and asked her, “Do you need me to call 911 for you?”

  The question seemed to confuse her for a moment, made her step falter. Then she shook her head and resumed her pace again. “No, no.”

  “Then please excuse me.” I turned from her and kept walking.

  “I need to speak with you.” She began to lope along beside me. “My dear, please, wait, just a word.”

  I knew better than to stop. Now and then I am accosted by strangers because of my line of work. I produce pithy documentaries, “Maggie MacGowen Investigates,” for one of the big television networks. The series not only bears my name but also frequently shows my face, and that sometimes makes me a target. The people who are happy about my reports occasionally send me nice notes, addressed to the studio. But people who are angry about what I dig up have on occasion come gunning for me, usually verbally, a few times literally. I have learned to be wary. And, of course, a parking lot at night is not a place where a normal person would go hoping to initiate some chipper conversation with a stranger glimpsed on television.

  “Do you not know who I am?” she implored. She had a pretty little accent that became more pronounced the more agitated she became. “Please, just for a moment, look at me.”

  I glanced at her, saw not one scintilla of familiarity. I said, “Sorry, I don’t know you. Please excuse me.” And walked on.

  “This is not where I wanted for our meeting to take place, my dear,” she persisted, taking the lead and then walking nearly backwards so that she could watch my face, or maybe, I, hers. “But this is where I find you. So...”

  “Please,” I said, leaning away from her.

  “You must know me in your heart.” She grabbed my forearm and pushed her face up close to mine, so close I could smell her shampoo. Stunned, I put my hand over hers to pry away her fingers, and as I did I glanced from the hand to her face, saw tears in her eyes.

  She gasped, imploring, “Marguerite, I am your mother.”

  Obviously, th
e woman was what the LA police call a fifty-one-fifty, a mental incompetent. Someone’s crazy aunt out on the loose the night before Thanksgiving.

  “Two mistakes there,” I said as I shook my arm free from her grip and backed away from her. “First, I spoke with my mother ten minutes ago on the phone. She’s at her home, setting the table for dinner tomorrow. And two, my name is not Marguerite.”

  She wagged a finger at me, smiling in the wry yet gleeful Caughtya way that my old dragon of a teacher, Sister Agnes Peter, would when I proffered a wrong answer. “They call you Maggie, but that is not the name on your birth certificate.”

  True enough, but the name on my birth certificate was not Marguerite, either. I looked around for some help, got a nod from a checker who had been watching this scene unfold from inside the store. He had a phone to his ear; I hoped he had called Security.

  If things got ugly, I knew I could push my way free of the old dear, but, again, that proper upbringing made me hesitant to deck a senior citizen. Better to let the pros do it for me, I thought. I knew from experience that, out of necessity, the market plaza kept a good security detail so that its local patrons could pick up their groceries and dry-cleaning unmolested. Malibu is a strange alternate universe where paparazzi, fans, Hollywood wannabes and stalkers abound. All of the above are on the lookout for celebrity prey because, in Malibu, if the guy behind you in the check-out line holding a carton of Häagen-Dazs looks like George Clooney, he probably is George Clooney.

  I am not a big-name celeb like Mr. Clooney. Off screen and out of makeup, I am rarely anything more than a vaguely familiar face to anyone except my near and dear, an unlikely target for paparazzi, wannabes, or fans. But stalkers can fixate on anyone; it has happened to me twice before.

  The market entrance was only a few yards ahead. I picked up my pace. Sternly, I said, “Good night, ma’am. I hope you find whomever you’re looking for.”

  “I have. It is you. And I have waited for this moment for a very long time.” She sounded exasperated, scolding; not a good development.

  As a reflex, for protection, I pulled a shopping cart from the end of a rank in front of the market and wedged it between us as a shield while I closed in on the entrance. Whatever the woman’s issue, I was not going to wait around to hear about it. I didn’t want to be rude to her, I didn’t want to start a scene. All I wanted was for her to go away and let me get about my business. Not only was my larder bare, but that night I was also running short on the milk of human kindness.

  My day at work had peaked in the morning with the completion of a film project, on time even. It was the second installment of “The Legacy Series.” Each episode we produced this season featured a different retired police investigator presenting that one unsolved case that he or she most regretted never closing. We weren’t doing “Cold Case,” or even trying to solve these old crimes. Instead, we examined the cases as pieces of social history, focusing on the culture of law enforcement and the culture of the city at a particular moment, and looked at the reasons why a particular case touched some deep place in even the most hardened of investigators.

  Usually, at the project hand-off there would be huzzahs from my studio bosses, general back-patting, followed by celebratory drinks and dinner somewhere posh with my small staff and some of the people we met during the production. But this time the hand-off occurred at a private meeting, just me and the bosses. After truncated congratulations, the meeting segued into a bruising budget session where I was threatened with staff and funding cuts for my unit that could be so deep I did not know how we could do justice to the remaining episodes on our contract. And by the way, I was told on my way out, the completion date for the next project had been moved up.

  Instead of an evening swapping tales and gossip over martinis and steaks-frites at Morton’s, I ordered in pizza and beer for my little crew and let them know that they should take time during the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend to revise their résumés, a task I intended to work on myself. Then I called my agent and filled him in on the meeting.

  My agent and lawyer is Max Duchamps, my Uncle Max, AKA the Shark, my late dad’s younger brother, the offspring of my grandfather’s second marriage. He told me we’d talk after dinner tomorrow at my mother’s house, or sometime during the weekend. I did not hear abundant optimism in the tone of his voice.

  Tough times all over, I thought, risking a glance at the woman in gray as a new notion occurred to me. Was she trying to provoke me into doing something that she could sue me for? In Malibu it happens all the time. Paparazzi and litigious others push and provoke people they assume have deep pockets, hoping to be rewarded with a potentially million-dollar punch in the nose. If a lawsuit was this woman’s intention, she had chosen a damned shallow pocket to go after. For God’s sake, I had a daughter in college and an uncertain work future.

  “Wait, please, just a moment.” The woman grasped the far end of my cart and tried to move it out of her way. A car pulled up alongside us, the driver’s window went down, and our little scene was suddenly illuminated by a camera flash. We both turned toward the flash, a reflex, and were hit by a second flash as the car sped away. I thought, Goddamn paparazzi, always lurking, ever hopeful of catching the shot that will launch the next celebrity scandal and earn themselves a nice paycheck. Thinking this guy would be sorely disappointed when he discovered that his pix caught no one marketable and had only called attention to my dance with a stranger, I let go of the cart and made a dash through the market’s automatic doors, with the stranger close on my heels.

  Two enormous, well-muscled men with SECURITY discreetly embroidered in gold over the pockets of their black polos, swept in through the big doors right behind us. I could feel the air they displaced as their bulk moved into position to barricade us from moving further into the market. I relaxed right away; they both had necks as thick as bulls, biceps like the trunks of mighty oaks, chests that challenged the knit fabric of their short-sleeved shirts. From the look of them, these rent-a-cops came from the high-rent end of the security spectrum.

  “There a problem here?” one of the guards challenged, sotto voce, looking between me and the stranger. He had dark, short-cropped hair and jaws so gnarly he could munch boulders for breakfast. I felt better, certainly safer, immediately. Either of them could have picked up the woman with one hand and carried her away.

  “This lady seems to have lost someone,” I said. “Maybe you can help her.”

  “You don’t know her?” Gnarly Jaws asked me, eyes narrow, skeptical.

  I shook my head. “Never saw her before.”

  “Yes.” She nodded vigorously, agitated, anguished even, shaking as she looked from one mountain of a man to the other. “She simply doesn’t remember.”

  I raised my hands, shrugged: I didn’t know what she was talking about, didn’t want to know; your problem now, fellas.

  Gnarly Jaws put himself between the woman and me, facing her. She tried to see around him, to keep track of me.

  She pleaded with him. “I have been searching for my Marguerite for so long. And here she is.”

  He looked over his shoulder at me, asking a question with a bobble of his head in her direction. When I shook my head no, he turned back to her, crossed his muscled arms over his bulwark of a chest, an intimidating gesture that should have made her cower. It didn’t. She kept up her plea.

  I turned to the second man, a blond, azure-blue-eyed version of Gnarly, who was keeping an eye on me. I pointed to myself and then toward the back of the market, a request to be excused from what promised to be an ugly meltdown. Azure Eyes nodded assent and I started to walk away. The woman made a desperate lunge for me, but the security men blocked her.

  “My dear,” she called out to me, loud and distraught, as I retreated farther into the market. “Please. I don’t mean to frighten you.”

  Gnarly never raised his voice to her: “Ma’am, you need to leave the premises.”

  “You don’t understand,” the woman pr
otested, weeping now. “I need to speak with Marguerite.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but the lady doesn’t want to speak with you. And you need to understand this: you will leave on your own, or you will be escorted away, but you are leaving, right now.”

  I was so grateful to be rescued from watching any more of that poor woman’s desperation and grief, and was so genuinely fatigued and had-it-up-to-here, that I nearly wept. As I said, it had been a rough day. But I managed to pull myself together enough to go about gathering the things I had come for. I wanted to get home, have a glass of wine, something to eat with my daughter, Casey, a hot bath, and to bed. But first I needed to get the ingredients for sweet potato mousse and the fixings for Friday’s breakfast. Early Thanksgiving morning, Casey and I would be in the car, headed over the river and through the woods to my mother’s house in Berkeley, a minimum eight-hour drive if traffic wasn’t too awful.

  I was at the back of the store by the dairy case reading yogurt labels when a box boy I had known for a couple of years, a kid named Nick, brought me a replacement shopping cart. He was a good-looking young man, a sophomore at Pepperdine University just up Pacific Coast Highway from the market plaza. He was polite to everyone, but I usually got special attention from Nick because of his interest in my daughter, a dance major at UCLA.

  After Nick inquired about Casey, he asked, “You okay, Miss MacGowen?”

  “Yes, thanks,” I said.

  “See what happens when you get your face in the tabs?” he said, teasing, as he turned to walk away. “Now all the nuts know where to find you.”

  What he said gave me pause. A few weeks earlier, out in the same market parking lot, I had been mowed down by a paparazzo when I inadvertently walked between his viewfinder and his target, a notoriously misbehaving multi-bazillionare hip-hop princess named Tiffy. In the photographer’s forward rush I got knocked on my ass with Tiffy, obviously sans underwear and apparently a natural blonde, sprawled across my lap, miniskirt around her waist. Someone took a picture that instantly became a worldwide media flash, seemed to be everywhere at once, briefly. I seriously doubt, however, that anyone who saw that picture paid the slightest attention to me, not with the exposed privates of that particular young woman at the center of the frame. But, as I said, stalkers can fixate on anyone.