The Paramour's Daughter

by Wendy Hornsby

  In the car, through Antoine, I told Dauvin about seeing Sergei at the airport the day before, and that, when I confronted him, Sergei had denied being there. I wondered if he had anything to do with the two van incidents and the delivery of an explosive envelope, and whatever that thing was, did it in any way explain why he insisted on being with the family today?

  Dauvin said he would look into it. I also told him that Sergei had argued with someone, though I had no idea who it was—maybe by telephone—immediately before he left the house in a great rush.

  “Stupid kid,” Dauvin said. “That car was more machine than he could control. He put his foot on the gas, hit a patch of ice, and...” He didn’t need to say more.

  The village road was a long straight stretch of pavement. As soon as we turned out of the compound drive we could see the flashing blue and white lights of emergency vehicles in the distance. Summoned by a nearby householder who heard the collision, help had come quickly, and in force.

  France is famous for bloody, deadly car accidents because people drive so fast. Even on country roads, like those around the village, crazy speed is the norm. So when a collision happens, as the French say, catastrophe. The local first responders are well practiced.

  At the crash site, Dauvin pulled over to the side of the road next to a tow truck and we all got out.

  The night was frigid. A steady icy drizzle fell. Icicles dangled from the branches of naked trees and sparkled in the flashing lights, turning the wreckage scene into a macabre fairyland.

  We read the skid marks on the road: Sergei, speeding, hit ice, spun out of control and smacked a tree broadside with enough force to shake loose its icicles. Shards of ice glittered on the black ground around the rear half of the cleaved Lamborghini. The front end came to a stop a hundred yards away, out in a freshly plowed carrot field. Oddly, the driver’s seat and the fragment of chassis it was attached to had broken free during impact. When the rear end of the car came to an abrupt stop, the seat was spit out like a cherry pit and continued traveling, cart-wheeling along the pavement. It landed upright, intact, in the middle of the road, the path it traveled in its crazy trajectory painted in blood.

  Mix a six-hundred-grand speed bomb with naïveté and bad weather, add anger, and you get a yellow Lamborghini sliced in two as cleanly as a knife would halve a ripe banana. And you get its driver in extremis.

  I felt heartsick, imagining what happened to Sergei, strapped in that car seat. The ambulance crew, long gone now, left a litter of bloody dressings in the roadway. Sergei’s beautifully tailored jacket was reduced to shreds and discarded among the medical waste.

  I picked up the jacket, smoothed it over my arm and turned to Dauvin. “You said he is alive?”

  The inspector held up a finger, made a call, asked that question of whoever answered, and then said, “He is alive. In surgery still. Prospects?” He glanced heavenward. “In the hands of the angels.”

  Dauvin took the jacket from my arm and went through the pockets: mobile phone, slender leather wallet, small comb, packet of breath mints. He checked the phone’s call log. Something he saw there interested him enough that there actually was a little twitch at the corner of his mouth. He closed the phone, rummaged in the inner pockets of his overcoat, found a plastic evidence bag and slipped Sergei’s effects into it.

  “Was he drinking before he left the house?” Dauvin asked as he wrote the date, the time, and his name on the bag after he sealed it.

  “Sergei was holding a glass of wine when I came in,” I said. Dauvin stuffed the plastic bag and its contents into a pocket and took out his notebook. He made notes from Antoine’s translation of what I said. “I have no idea how much he drank before I arrived. You’ll have to ask the others. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes after I arrived, Sergei went upstairs. Not long after, we heard him shout, he sounded angry, then he ran out and drove off. My daughter told me that Sergei did not join the other young people upstairs, so I don’t know who or what he shouted at.”

  “Did you know him well?” Dauvin asked Antoine. Antoine did not always translate for me the questions that Dauvin addressed to him. I had to struggle to make sense of what he was asked, and what he answered.

  “No, we did not know him well,” Antoine told Dauvin. “He came with Jemima at Easter, but that is the only time I met him.”

  “Was there any argument at Easter?”

  Antoine shook his head. “The usual, you know. A meal, a visit to the cemetery. The apple trees were in bloom, we took boughs to my grandfather’s grave.”

  “Young Ludanov went with you?”

  “Yes.”

  Dauvin elevated a palm: a question, a prod for any other information.

  “I remember,” Antoine said, “at lunch he told the women he could get designer leather goods for them, cheap. My wife warned him he would get into trouble if he sold bootleg knock-offs. But he said they weren’t knock-offs. When he offered my daughter a little handbag he took from the trunk of his car, my wife made her give it back.” Antoine ran his fingers through damp hair. “The only discord I remember that day was between my wife and my daughter about returning the handbag—Lulu loved it, pink Louis Vuitton.”

  “Did anyone accept bags from him?” Dauvin asked.

  “Not openly,” Antoine said. “Not with Kelly there. My wife is...” He appealed to me. “How do you say it in America?”

  “A regular Girl Scout?” I offered.

  “Exactly. She complained later that she knew the bags were either counterfeit or stolen, and she worried about Jemima hanging out with him. I didn’t see anyone go away with Sergei’s bags, but he did hand out his card, so anyone could have contacted him later.”

  “Who, for example?”

  “The family. All of us except I think Bébé. Some project in Paris he couldn’t get away from.”

  Dauvin raised his eyebrows at Antoine as a challenge and Antoine amended his statement. “Bébé came by the morning before Easter Sunday and stayed only long enough to hang the portrait of Maman in the entry so that Papa would see it first thing when he arrived. And then he left again. We did not tell Grand-mère he was there at all.”

  Dauvin nodded. The new version apparently meshed with his recollection. The men were friends, their boys hung out together. Surely he knew the story of the portrait.

  The inspector gazed away toward the wreckage, apparently oblivious to the nasty weather as he watched the accident investigators go about their jobs taking pictures, measuring skid marks, studying the remains of the car. I ventured to ask, “Could we get out of the rain?”

  Jerked back to focus on his companions, Dauvin was effusive in his apologies. “Of course. So inconsiderate of me, yes.”

  In the car, he turned the heater and defroster on high, and drove away from the scene as soon as the fog had cleared from the windows. I was just beginning to thaw out when we arrived at the clinic, a small modern hospital.

  Sergei was still in surgery when we arrived. A woman police officer stationed outside the surgery suite rose and stood at attention when she saw Dauvin. She reported: internal bleeding, the spleen had been removed, every extremity suffered compound fractures from his tumble along the pavement strapped into the bucket seat. There was some conversation among the surgeons about possible amputations.

  But there was some good news, or, more correctly, some not-so-damned-awful news, good and bad often being relative terms. First, near-freezing temperatures had slowed his blood loss so he survived until the rescue crew arrived. Second, the seat back was high enough to protect his head and neck from significant trauma. Whatever the extent of his injuries, if—a big if—the boy survived, he faced a long and excruciating recovery. But he was talking when he arrived at the hospital.

  “What did he say?” Dauvin asked.

  “His father was going to kill him. And he kept saying something in English about a deer. A goddamn deer. It was difficult to understand him.”

  “He swerved to avoid a deer?” Dauvin a
sked.

  After the officer said “goddamn,” I heard her say a word that Antoine translated as deer, but that I expected him to translate as something else. I asked, “Are you sure she said ‘deer’?”

  “A female deer, a doe,” Antoine said, looking around for help. He asked for the officer’s pad, found the word she had written and showed me: biche.

  I said, “I think he was saying, ‘goddamn bitch.’ ”

  The officer overheard and pointed at me. “Exactement.”

  “He was mad at a woman.”

  “Of course.” Antoine smacked his forehead. “I’ve been back here too long. I’m losing my English.”

  “Maybe just the rude parts,” I said.

  Dauvin and Antoine had a discussion about who should call Sergei’s family in London. Because Antoine spoke English, it was decided that he should be the one. The two of them went off to a small waiting room where mobile phone use was permitted, and placed the call.

  I followed them, went to a far corner of the room, found a perch in a window niche where the phone signal was strong, and called Uncle Max. Casey had already given him the essentials, up to the point where we left the house. I gave him an update, and told him about seeing Sergei at de Gaulle.

  “I don’t like it,” Max said. “I don’t want you two around there for another minute.”

  “You’re a sweet old fusspot,” I said to him. “But we’re all right. I’m in a public place with two flics within arm’s reach. There’s a nice young man staying close to Casey. Don’t worry about us. This accident was just that, an accident. It has nothing to do with us.”

  He groused a bit. I changed the subject, talked to him for a few minutes about making a film in Normandy. “Wish I’d brought at least a little palmcorder to make some rough shots.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Do you want Guido to come and give you a hand?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “When I left LA we had just begun working on the film for January sweeps. Guido needs to stay with it. I’ll be back by the middle of next week.”

  He agreed that we should focus on keeping our current film on schedule. We were midway into the current season’s contract. The Normandy film, my family film, would open the fall season next year, and had to wait.

  I asked Max if he had spoken to Mom, because I had not been able to reach her. He said he had tried a couple of times, but had missed her, and blamed the time difference. He reminded me that she kept her days full. I promised to phone him if I learned anything, and he promised not to hover. Not to hover too obviously, that is.

  Next, I tried Mom at home again; she won’t carry a mobile phone. When there was no answer, I called her friend Gracie Nussbaum. If anyone knew where Mom was, it would be Gracie. They had been close friends since long before I was born.

  “Betsy has been staying with me,” Gracie told me when I asked if she knew where Mom was. “This Isabelle thing has been hard for her. She seemed terribly sad so I invited her to come here for a few days.”

  “You’re a good friend,” I said.

  “I hope that’s so,” she said. “Betsy isn’t here right now, though. It’s Saturday. She’s accompanying a tap dance class at the Senior Center. You might try her again in about an hour.”

  “I will,” I said. “But, Gracie, while I have you, I want to ask you about something you said to me the day after Thanksgiving.”

  “Something I said?”

  “When I met you coming home from the farmer’s market, you told me that Isabelle was always a dark shadow hanging over me. I thought you were being metaphorical. But I found out that from time to time Isabelle actually did shadow me, taking pictures. Did you know?”

  “Of course I did. So did your parents.” She sounded very matter-of-fact. “Remember this place where you grew up, honey? Do you think that if one of the mothers in this town saw someone, a stranger, taking photographs of one of our little hatchlings that she wouldn’t be on the phone to the mother ASAP? I, myself, saw Isabelle hanging around near your school one day—you were maybe in the third grade. I figured out who she was—something about the way Frenchwomen wear their clothes—and told her to keep the hell away from you.”

  “Gracie,” I said, visualizing the reaming out that Isabelle must have received from Gracie Nussbaum. “Your language shocks me.”

  “Bullshit,” she countered, laughing. “Maggie, dear, why do you think your parents parked you in that convent school down in Carmel when you were a teenager?”

  “Because I was an obnoxious teenager and they wanted peace in their house?”

  “Of course you were, and maybe they did. Obnoxious is the teenager’s job,” she said. “But you were no more so than your sister or brother were. Or my kids, for that matter. No, Maggie, they hid you away down there.”

  “From Isabelle?”

  “Yes. Isabelle was spotted at one of your swim meets when you were about fourteen, maybe fifteen. Betsy was afraid that Isabelle would decide that you were old enough to hear the truth—Isabelle’s version of the truth—and approach you.”

  “Maybe I would have understood.”

  “Do you believe that for a second?”

  “No,” I said, remembering how Isabelle had frightened me when she got around to delivering her message to me, and the way I reacted to her when she popped out at me at the market, and I’m far from being a kid. There was no finesse, no gentle, measured approach. Just, Hello, I’m your mother. If she had accosted me the same way when I was a teenager, I would have screamed for someone to call the police.

  I asked, “I’ve heard Isabelle described as eccentric a few times now. Absentminded and doggedly determined. Anything you want to add to the characterization?”

  Gracie thought for a moment before she said, “My darling husband, Ben, was certain that she had some sort of personality disorder.”

  “Some sort?” I could see Dr. Nussbaum making a pronouncement, loudly and with finality, probably waving a fat, ingredient-shedding sandwich while he pontificated. “Nothing more specific?”

  “He never met her, dear. But look up mental disorders in the DSM-IV. You just may find Isabelle’s face in a citation.”

  I love Gracie, forthright to a fault. This time, a morsel or two learned, another few confirmed, and my spirits were buoyed enough knowing Mom was in good hands that I was ready to soldier on.

  Out in the hall, the young woman officer attending the surgery suite’s door had begun to pace; boring duty. When I caught her eye, she raised her palms and shook her head: no further news on Sergei’s condition.

  There was an agitated conversation underway across the room. I looked over and saw both Antoine and Dauvin with telephones to their ears. Antoine looked a bit ill. Whatever he was hearing was not good news. Dauvin, as usual, gave nothing away.

  I dialed Rich Longshore. On the third ring, the desk at the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau picked up for him.

  “Detective Hartunian.” Someone I knew, another friend of Mike.

  “Hey, Kevin,” I said. “It’s Maggie MacGowen. I’m looking for Rich Longshore.”

  “That’s probably why you called his line,” he said, ever affable, acknowledging the silliness of his remark. “You still over in France?”

  “I am.”

  “Any Frenchmen surrender to you yet?”

  “Good one, Kevin,” I said. “You managed to get both sexual innuendo and a shopworn cultural slur into one sentence. Takes skill of a singular variety.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, well, Rich said he was expecting your call so I had time to hone it.”

  “How are Judy and the kids?” I asked.

  “What kids? Our baby made me a grandpa last month.”

  “Congratulations.” After hearing the details, sex, weight, degree of cute, I congratulated him again and asked, “Is Rich around?”

  “He’s involved in a three-way, Maggie.”

  Both Antoine and Dauvin still had their mobile phones to their ears. Dauvin w
ould speak in French, Antoine would speak in English, then they would both listen. So, Dauvin was on the phone with Rich, and Antoine was translating through a conference hookup.

  “I can see that.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Across the room from the two invited to Rich’s party. Tell Rich to call me, please. And say hello to Judy for me.”

  Not thirty seconds after I hung up, both Dauvin and Antoine turned and looked at me at the same time. I waved. Obviously the message that I called Rich had been relayed to them.

  I rifled my bag for something to write on and came across the card that Jean-Paul had given me. He hadn’t told me when he was leaving Los Angeles. He might already be in France. Just the thought of that made my heart do a loop-the-loop. I repeated a caveat to self, Tread with care.

  I was very attracted to Jean-Paul, but he was an acquaintance of Gérard, a polo buddy, Gillian said. Gérard knew Sergei’s family. Sergei was hawking designer-label leather goods of questionable provenance. Jean-Paul had made a gift of a very fine bag to me; I assumed from the label it was very fine, but... Hard to imagine that the French consul would be party to anything as sleazy as handing out fake French designer leather goods, but any Jean-Paul-Gérard-Sergei connection needed to be exorcised before I got any further with the man.

  Antoine and Dauvin closed their mobile phones at the same time. Almost immediately, mine rang. Without looking at the caller I.D., I said, “Hello, Rich.”

  “You called?”

  “I did. I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I understand that there are ways to verify whether a designer knock-off is genuine or not, a pattern in the stitching or something about the lining that would be too expensive for a counterfeiter to replicate.” When he asked if I was doing a little back alley shopping, I explained about Sergei’s out-of-the-trunk enterprise, that I had a bag whose bona fides I wanted to verify, and asked how I could find the information to do that.