What would I say to those people? Hi, I met your mother/daughter/sister, now she’s dead? You don’t know me, but I’m your daughter/sister’s bastard.... I had no idea what her family knew about me, or how they felt about me. And I was in no particular hurry to find out. I poured Mom a second cup of coffee and kissed her on the cheek.
After breakfast, after Casey and Zia left the house, Mom, Max and Guido—who was slowly getting the gist of the issues—stuck close to me to follow unfolding events. I called Rich Longshore.
I asked Rich, “Know anything more about what happened to Isabelle Martin?”
“Some,” he said. “That little shopping center at that intersection of PCH and Cross Creek where the Martin woman was found? We got the surveillance tapes from a few of the businesses there—called their security providers—and by piecing them together we have a pretty good idea now of the sequence of events, and the events themselves.”
“What can you see?” I asked. I am an investigative filmmaker. Asking questions is what I do for a living. Rich had plenty of experience being grilled by me, so he did not hesitate.
He began: “From the tape we got from the service station on the corner, we see Ms Martin walking along PCH, headed south, toward her hotel, I’d guess—hotel is just around the bend. Time stamp says ten-forty-five. The tape is black-and-white and not good quality and there aren’t a lot of street lights along there, so all we really get is moving shadows. But whenever she walks directly under a light, we can see her clearly enough to identify her.
“The tape also captures a dark-colored, late-model Toyota Camry making a left turn onto PCH just after we first see Martin. The driver seems to be tailing her, driving slowly. She crosses the second driveway of the service station, then we lose her for a bit before she’s picked up by the camera on the end shop.
“Next we see Martin step into the driveway that leads into the shopping center from PCH, and we see the Toyota accelerate into a sharp turn, cross lanes and head straight for her. After the impact, the car drives on into the lot out of range and we see Martin collapsed in a heap on the pavement. Can’t tell if she’s alive at that point. The Toyota circles around, then we see it enter the frame again at high speed. He takes a second shot at her that impacts hard enough to send Martin airborne. She lands out of frame, but we got the tape from the bank on the opposite side of the driveway. From that one we can see a dark figure, sweatshirt with the hood up, no facial detail, drag something across the pavement and dump it in the dirt beside the bridge over Malibu Creek. That something turns out to be Martin’s body.”
I looked at all the faces at the table waiting for me to report what Rich was saying, and decided they didn’t need all of the details.
“Did you get a license number?” I asked.
“We got enough of one to trace the owner. The car had been reported stolen the day before from a home in Encino, out in the Valley.”
“So, this was a garden-variety mugging,” I said.
“The vic wasn’t carrying a purse. All she had on her was an electronic hotel room key and a few bucks in her pockets. The thing is, the guy didn’t bother to find that out.”
“Well, then, why on earth...?”
“Maggie, I could be wrong, but it looks to me like a hit. A professional hit.”
My knees started to go out from under me. Guido grabbed me and slid a chair under me. I had dropped the receiver onto the tile counter. I’m not a fainter, but sometimes enough is enough.
“Maggie?” I heard Rich’s voice somewhere off in the distance, lost in the buzzing in my ears. “You there?”
Guido picked up the receiver and handed it to me. I took a deep breath to clear my head. I said, “I’m here.”
“Pretty tough stuff, sorry,” Rich said. “But you always want all the details. Did I tell you too much?”
“No.” I sat up straight. “Rich, it turns out that Isabelle Martin actually was my mother, just as she claimed.” I glanced at Mom. “My biological mother; I never knew her.”
I gave him the history in short form and the family contact information in France that Mom had given me, and told him we had no idea what that family might consist of anymore. He thought all this over for a while before he asked if I had any useful information at all, any ideas about anyone who might have wanted Isabelle out of the picture. I assured him that I did not, had not known Isabelle existed until she accosted me in the market parking lot Wednesday night, and had no clue about our relationship until my mother told me about her last night.
He said, “Maggie, I should have known when I got a memo with your name on it that this would not be a routine hit-and-run case. Anything more you can tell me about the woman?”
“Hold on.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and extended it toward Mom. “I think you should talk to Rich.”
She hesitated, but she took the phone. After identifying herself and exchanging the usual greetings, she gave him the information she had about Isabelle, and me, but left out the part about my forged birth certificate, though she did courageously tell him that Dad and Isabelle had an affair. I doubt I could have been as sanguine as she seemed to be if I were in a similar circumstance.
It occurred to me that Mom might be relieved that this old secret was finally out. For a woman as honest and forthright as Mom, telling the same lie over and over for forty-some years must have been a nightmare. Dad was beyond protecting, and I was no kid anymore. What was the point now?
As Guido listened to Mom’s end of the conversation lights came on in his face. He leaned over the table toward me and whispered, “Our next film project.”
I agreed that it would be a doozy of a topic, but I wasn’t sure I had the grit to make it. Not yet, anyway.
Mom extended the receiver back toward me. “Detective Longshore wants another word with you.”
“Maggie, how sure are you that this woman is your biological mother?”
“I saw the original birth certificate last night. It has her name and my dad’s name on it, and my original name. And my mom’s word. Short of getting a DNA match, that’s proof enough for me.”
“So, that makes you the closest thing we have to next of kin, and from what you say there are people with you who actually knew the woman. We need a formal I.D., but she’s a foreign national in the country alone.” He paused, seemed to be mulling through something. I waited for him. “You have access to a computer where you are? Email?”
“Yes.”
“If it’s okay with you—and you can say no—I’d like to send you a couple of photos to make sure we’re talking about the same woman you saw last night, and that the woman we found is Isabelle Martin.”
“Coroner’s photos?”
“A couple of those, but they don’t look too bad; not the face, anyway. And the passport photo. Just a formality, but a necessary one.”
I told him to send them. I heard him punch computer keys on his end, and he told me the photos were on their way. He stayed on the line while I carried the phone to my Dad’s office, booted his computer, and accessed my email. I saw Rich’s message line appear at the top of my New Mail file and opened the first attachment. Mom and Max, of course, looked over my shoulder, with Guido behind them craning his neck. The first attachment held the passport photo, clearly showing the woman I had spoken to.
“That’s the woman.” I turned to look up at my mom. “So?”
“That’s Isabelle, definitely. Older, of course, than when I saw her last.” She started to say something else, but her voice trailed off. Her eyes moved from the image on the computer screen to me and rested there.
I said, “What?”
“Definitely, that’s Isabelle.” She abruptly turned from me to look over at my uncle. “Max?”
Max agreed. “Definitely Isabelle.”
“Hear that?” I asked Rich. “Unanimous on passport photo. She’s my market lady and their Isabelle.”
“Dear Lord,” Mom gasped as the second photo appeared, obviously a
coroner photo, showing Isabelle’s face and naked shoulders. There was ugly, blue discoloration on the right side of her face, the side of primary impact, and bright rose contusions on her chin, forehead and points of her shoulders, but clearly, it was the same woman. The last photo was only further confirmation both of her identity and the damage.
“That’s her,” I told Rich, as I hit the Print icon and made copies of all three. “Is that all you need?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d just hit Reply and send me a word or two in confirmation. When I get that, we’re set to inform the family and the French consul general downtown.” As an afterthought, he added, “Ask your mom to confirm the I.D., too, if she will, since she knew Martin. Just have her write a line after you type your name.”
By the end of the phone call, it was agreed that Rich would contact the family in France, whoever they might be—parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters?—to inform them officially. I would place a follow-up call to whomever he spoke with after he called me to report what he had learned from them, if anything. It was eight in the morning in California, so it would be five in the afternoon in France. Rich said he had a case status meeting he needed to attend. He probably wouldn’t be free to call the family in France until nine, our time. That gave me a little over an hour to figure out what I should say to them.
Mom suggested that I take a nap. The house would be quiet because she, Max and Guido were walking into town for the Friday farmer’s market. I decided, instead, to go for a quick run. To think.
It was a beautiful morning. I jogged at an easy pace to the end of our street, a gentle uphill slope at first, and then steep before the street ended at the Grizzly Peak fire road, which I ran along. It’s a tough run, one I had made many times. At the top, I stopped for breath and a drink of water, and to look out at the view. Below, beyond the Berkeley Marina, San Francisco Bay shimmered in morning sunlight. To my left were Angel Island and the Oakland Bay Bridge, straight ahead the singular, spiky San Francisco skyline. Because it was a perfectly clear day, I could see the entire Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, and all the way across the bay to the top of Marin’s Mount Tamalpais. A picture-postcard day.
I had lots of company, runners, walkers—with dogs and without—trail bikers, bird watchers, some photographers. It was a popular trail for the locals and every once in a while a tourist found his way up for the view. Because it was such a clear day, and it was a holiday, there were more people than usual. I certainly didn’t feel alone, but I felt exposed somehow, vulnerable. I thought of Isabelle walking alone, late at night. Had she been afraid? Did she know she was in danger? In the end, why was she in LA at all?
Denial kicked in again. She couldn’t have known she was in danger, or she wouldn’t have gone out in the open late at night the way she did. Certainly she would have said something to me or the huge security guards if she felt endangered. But she hadn’t. And hadn’t I asked her if I could call 911 for her? She was a random victim, or a case of mistaken identity, I decided. Or, decided to believe.
Last night, after Mom went upstairs leaving me to my thoughts, I had Googled Isabelle Martin in case she left any footprints from her life on the Internet. And she had.
I learned that Isabelle was a nuclear physicist whose specialization was domestic uses of nuclear energy, my father’s field as well. No surprise there, remembering how they met. According to an article in the Journal of the World Nuclear Association, Isabelle had retired a couple of years ago after nearly forty years with the French national power company, Électricité de France (EDF), as a high-level civil servant. The company directors had marked the occasion of her retirement with a gala. The article listed prominent guests, including Élodie Martin, Mr. and Mrs. Gérard Martin, and Mr. and Mrs. Frédéric Martin-Desmoulins.
I Googled each of them, as well. Gérard was a development executive with a large global company, and lived in London. Frédéric was a partner in a small, prestigious investment bank in Paris. About Élodie, nothing. Their relationships to Isabelle? No clue.
At the event there were speeches, lots of speeches, and presentations. The photographs accompanying the article were all group photos, making it difficult to see individual faces, though I thought I recognized Isabelle standing front and center wearing a long, dark gown. I printed the article.
The Journal included a brief summary of Isabelle’s career. She had started working in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear power as a graduate student at the École polytechnique. When the first French-designed gas-cooled nuclear reactor, an electrical power plant, built in 1966, proved to be “unsatisfactory,” Isabelle received a fellowship to work with American experts, who would have included my dad, to bring an American-built Pressurized Water Reactor purchased from Westinghouse into service to deliver domestic and industrial nuclear-generated electricity. The lingo in the article was familiar to me because it had been dinner conversation at my parents’ house for many years.
As I read Isabelle’s bio, I kept looking for situations that might have put Isabelle in the crosshairs of controversy, but I didn’t find any. In the U.S. proposals to build nuclear power plants are frequently greeted with noisy, occasionally violent protest, perhaps because Americans associate anything nuclear with “the bomb” and the occurrence of three-headed toads. But in France the possibility of national energy independence was embraced very early on and, it appeared from what I read, continues into the present. Their motto is “no oil, no gas, no coal, no choice” when the alternatives are dependence on Mideast oil or knuckling under to the Soviets in the early years or Vladimir Putin’s Russian thugs now for oil and gas pumped out of the Caucasus region.
I did find references to angry protests twenty years ago over the disposal of nuclear waste, but an acceptable solution was found. Twenty years ago.
There were several references on Google to papers she had published and addresses she had given, but there was nothing to be found about Isabelle’s private life, not a single wild adventure or public disgrace worth noting. She had neither a personal Web site nor a Facebook page. No publicized whistle-blowing. So, who would hire a hit on a civil servant? A retired civil servant, to boot?
Big question number two, why had Isabelle, after forty-three years, decided to come looking for me?
I wheeled around when I heard a couple of men walking on the fire road behind me, speaking French. Two middle-aged men wearing perfect jeans and tweedy jackets, arms clasped behind their backs, heads close together in spirited debate, a thoroughly French posture, walked past me without glancing up and continued down the road. They certainly did not look like stalkers or assassins; probably were a couple of scholars visiting the university, or maybe tourists. Hearing them, associating them by their language with Isabelle, had, however, put me on the alert. I had not been alone since my encounter with Isabelle. I felt suddenly exposed and vulnerable, and decided it was time to get myself home.
When I set off on my run, I’d intended to circle down onto the campus of the University of California—Cal—and run along Strawberry Creek, then over to see the physics building where my Dad’s office had been. Instead, I decided to take the short route back and came down off the fire road a couple of blocks from our house. Along the way, I ran into Gracie Nussbaum carrying a shopping bag, on her way home from the farmer’s market.
“Smell this, dear.” She held her bag open for me to sniff the contents. “Basil. So beautiful, I thought I’d make some pesto. Do you like pesto?”
“Love it,” I said; I was too sweaty to hug her. “Why don’t you join us for dinner tonight and bring some? How do turkey and pesto pizzas sound?”
“Wonderful!” She giggled with delight. I would confirm the invitation with Mom, but I knew that one more at table was always just fine. And I had questions for Gracie, a co-conspirator with my parents and uncle.
“Did you run into Mom at the market?” I asked her.
“Yes.” She gave me a serious study. “She told you.”
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br /> “You are aware that what you all did back then could land all of you in the federal slam for fraud or forgery or conspiracy or something?”
Gracie laughed, sort of a silvery trill. “No it won’t. Your Uncle Max called us the day the statute of limitations ran out on our little crime. We are in the clear.” She put her hand on my arm. “My conscience has always been clear about what we conspired to do, dear.”
“Did Mom also tell you about Isabelle?”
She nodded. “Forgive me for saying this. I did not know Isabelle, but she has always been a dark cloud lurking on your horizon, whether you knew it or not. I am sorry that she is dead, and for the way she died, but I would be less than honest if I said that I was not also relieved that she is gone.”
I tried to make a stern face, a cop’s face. “Where were you between ten P.M. and two A.M. night before last?”
“At home.” She pointed a finger at me. “But don’t think I didn’t consider certain possibilities more than once.”
I walked her home, carrying her shopping bag for her. The rest of the way, she told me about the physical therapy program that was part of her stroke recovery regime. She said she had enjoyed her conversation with Casey the night before and encouraged her to consider medical school. Another doctor in the family, she said, and I knew she was including her husband, Ben, with my sister, Emily, as family.
Interesting, I thought after seeing Gracie safely inside her house. Mom had expressed no hostility toward Isabelle. Gracie had.
The phone was ringing when I walked in the back door. I made a dash for it, expecting Rich to be calling ahead of schedule—I had been gone just over forty minutes. I reached for the receiver with one hand and a water glass with the other.
Breathless from the dash, I managed, “Hello.”
There was a pause before I heard a woman’s voice. “Good morning, Madame. I am Élodie Martin, calling from Paris. I wish to speak with Madame Flint.”
Almost no one called me by my married name. But as this call was coming from the Twilight Zone to begin with, why not?
The Paramour's Daughter Page 6
