Between nerves, inexperience and language issues, a mistake was made in the identification. Chuy followed Isabelle out of the parking lot instead of me. He waited for her to get into her car, but she was on foot, and instead of driving up the canyon, she walked down PCH.
In the end, having a short attention span and needing a meth hit, out of patience, Chuy saw his chance and just ran her over.
Because of the mistake, the mechanic wouldn’t get paid; his loan was still overdue. So, he tried to take care of the problem himself. He brought me a bomb in a FedEx mailer. And failed again, thanks to studio security. He told Rich that without the funds to make a loan payment to Sergei, Senior, he might be better off in prison where he had friends, than out on the loose and vulnerable to the Russian’s collectors.
Who shot Chuy? Could have been the Russian mechanic, to shut him up or as punishment for killing the wrong person. Or maybe it was just Chuy’s time, and a gang rival took him out. Other than a mother in Reseda, no one seemed too concerned.
“It was a cut-rate deal,” Max interjected. “A bargain struck between amateurs; Sergei had no idea how to pull off a professional hit. None of them did.”
I asked, “Did the mechanic tell Rich who put Sergei up to it?”
“The guy knew better than to ask a lot of questions,” Dauvin said. “He says he doesn’t know.”
Then Dauvin cocked his head to the side and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Do you know, madame?”
“I have a pretty good idea,” I said. He nodded when I told him who I thought was responsible.
“It’s a long-range plan,” I said. “And I’m not the ultimate target, am I?”
He tilted his head to the left: probably not.
I asked, “And Louise?”
Dauvin glanced away, saw the two grandmothers, the abbess and her assistant, and Claude walking toward us on the beach path, headed toward the cars parked at the end of the road. He dropped his head nearer, and in a very low voice, he said, “We conducted a thorough investigation, I assure you. Sadly, the dear woman died by her own hand.”
“Yes?” I challenged.
“Yes.” His posture, the tone of his voice left no room for uncertainty. “Perhaps, however, that event served as a model for one with very different motives. No?”
The grandmothers and their party reached us just then.
“Here you are.” Grand-mère handed me my bag. “I didn’t see you. I was afraid you might have left this behind.”
“I had my eye on it,” I said, slinging the bag over my shoulder.
It was nap time, Grand-mère said, and Claude had volunteered to be their driver. She encouraged me to come with them. When I promised I would be along soon, Dauvin had his hand under my elbow. I wasn’t going anywhere until he said so.
Freddy and Antoine were folding chairs and blankets, preparing to close up the cottage. Antoine turned toward the house, responded to someone, and went inside. I was glad that Freddy was alone. He looked up and saw us approach.
“Big day yesterday,” he said. “I hope my father didn’t keep you up too late last night.”
“We had a lot to talk about,” I said, picking up a blanket and folding it. Max walked across the sand to join Patricia Dutoit, Jacques and Julie at water’s edge, and Dauvin wandered over to watch the kids kick the soccer ball back and forth along the beach.
Though there was some actual sunshine, the day was still cold. I held my hands above the last of the coals in the firepit to warm them.
Clearly, Freddy was curious about my conversation with Claude the night before. I caught him glancing at me, expectant.
“Freddy,” I said. “I read some of my father’s letters last night.”
“Yes?” His brows rose, he paused, and then, trying to be nonchalant, he picked up a chair and folded it.
“You’ve read them, haven’t you?” I asked.
He nodded. “Many times.”
“There are some odd gaps in the collection you gave me. Are there more letters?”
“There’s a drawer full of them in Maman’s Paris apartment. I selected only a few to bring this weekend. I hoped we could talk about some of the things your father said to her, and things she must have said to him.”
“All right. I’ve asked you so many questions, now it’s your turn.”
Freddy, chair in his hands forgotten, shifted his focus to the sea, seemed to steel himself, struggling with something.
“I lied to you,” he said, focus shifting back my way. “I told you I didn’t know who your father was when I met him in New York.”
“How did Isabelle explain the meeting?”
A frown, let me think, it said. “That day, in preparation for dinner with him, I got a haircut. Maman told me that what happened that night might change my life, might change all our lives. She didn’t say how. She was very nervous, and very excited, the way she got sometimes.”
“When she was having problems with her medication?”
The question seemed to surprise him, information he didn’t know I knew. In the end, he said yes. “That night, whatever she expected to happen, well...”
He cast his eyes down, remembering. “There was an argument—that much was the truth—and your father left. And we went back to Paris; nothing changed.”
“Do you know what they argued about?” I asked. He told me earlier he did not, but that was then.
“I heard enough.” His glance fell into the empty space between us. “You read the letters, you know what Maman believed. Is it true?”
“You met Dad, you’ve seen pictures. Have you looked in a mirror?”
He smiled, finally. “I have, and I saw you looking back at me.”
“I look at you,” I said, “and I see my father looking back at me. Hardly scientific proof, though, is it?”
“More important to me than the science is what your father believed in his heart.”
“It seems to me that when Isabelle told Dad she was pregnant with you and wanted him to go away with her, he finally began to think with his head, and not with his heart, or his...” I glanced at Freddy, saw that he knew where that comment was going. “Freddy, there were so many people Dad had to consider. You and Claude among them.”
“I,” he said, and went no further. He opened the chair and sat, heavily.
“Do you know why Isabelle let Dad take me away?” I asked.
His eyes came up, eager for the answer.
Instead of telling him, I asked, “Did Isabelle ever hurt you?”
He nodded, fought for composure; I thought he was angry more than anything. “Once, a beating, after their argument in New York.”
“I’m sorry, Freddy.” I knelt on the sand in front of him. “You do know that Isabelle was emotionally unwell, right?”
Again he nodded.
“Sometimes she wasn’t responsible for what she said or did.”
“Is knowing supposed to make things easier to live with?” His voice rose enough that Dauvin moved in closer. “I was a kid, living with a cyclical lunatic and I wasn’t supposed to mention it.”
He broke my heart. It was after Dad turned her down another time that Isabelle took out her rage and grief on me. Sick or not, she was consistent.
What did Mike always say? In life there is no re-do. A damn shame.
Freddy reached out, took a piece of my hair that had worked free of the alligator clip and tucked it back in.
“I wrote to your father after I read some of his letters,” he said. “After that meeting I snooped around. He wrote back, a short note. He said my father was a wonderful man named Claude Desmoulins. Then he asked the same question you just did, had Maman ever hurt me. I told him what I told you. He never responded to me, but shortly after that Papa had a long talk with Maman, and I essentially went to live with him. I was rarely ever alone with her again until I came back from graduate school. Papa made sure of it.”
“Dad must have contacted Claude after you wrote him,” I said
. “He was concerned for you.”
“That’s what I thought, too. I wanted to believe that even if he denied paternity he cared about me.”
“He was a good man, Freddy.” I sat back on my heels, faced him. “Not a perfect man, but he had a good heart. Like Claude.”
Casey and David spilled out of the cottage and came over to us, checking in.
“How’s the cleanup progressing?” I asked.
“Kitchen’s finished,” Casey said. “Uncle Gérard and Gillian went up to the loft for a nap. Kelly and Antoine fell asleep watching a soccer match. Lena’s catching up on her phone calls. What are your plans now?”
“I want to talk to Freddy for a few minutes,” I said. “Then a nap for me, too.”
She clicked her tongue. “Get all rested up for the big date, huh?”
“Rested enough so I don’t fall asleep in the soup.”
They excused themselves, walked down the beach to join the other young people.
Lena came out onto the cottage porch and summoned her sons from their game, giving them instructions. Reluctantly, they began a good-bye round of la bise with their cousins. Lena had said earlier that she was driving the boys back to Paris that afternoon. I needed to know something before they got away.
“Freddy,” I said, “did you ever tell your wife that you thought my dad was your father?”
“Of course. For a long time, Lena told me not to think about it. But she changed her mind—probably got tired of listening to me. She encouraged me to find out.”
“Did you do anything?”
He wagged his head, yes and no. “A year ago I wrote to your father again. But the letter came back marked Addressee Deceased, Return to Sender.
“I planned to contact you.” He smiled. “But Lena said it would be better to wait until Maman’s illness ran its course, so that we didn’t upset her, and then to speak with you.”
Lena told him to wait. I said, “Lena is short for Hélène?”
“Yes.”
“Hélène what Desmoulins?”
“Godard,” he said, puzzled by the question.
There it was. The initials at the bottom of the royalty account sheets M. Hubert gave me, HGD, Hélène Godard Desmoulins. Lena.
“How long has Lena been managing Isabelle’s accounts?” I asked.
“Oh,” a shrug, a moue, thinking back. “Several years. Since Maman’s illness; she was having more difficulty keeping track of things. And Lena is wonderful with numbers.”
“How many years?”
He shrugged. “Three, maybe four.”
Because she audited Isabelle’s royalty statements, Lena would have known that Dad was already dead when she suggested that Freddy write to him. I leaned back on my elbows, looked up at the sky and thought that over.
“Freddy?” Lena came off the porch and strode toward us, slinging her beautiful bag over her shoulder. “It’s getting late. If I may interrupt your little tête-à-tête, the boys and I need to head back to Paris. When will we expect you home?”
I stood, Freddy rose, both blushing as if we had been caught at something illicit. My thoughts were certainly impure at the moment, but had nothing to do with Freddy.
“I don’t know yet, I’ll call you,” Freddy told his wife. “The bank has given me the week, and I’ll probably need it. There’s a lot to be taken care of.”
“Will you remember to go get the dining chairs back from Kelly?”
“All right,” he said.
She offered me her hand and her cheek. “I’m glad we met at last. You must come to us in Paris before you leave.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I plan to be in Paris Monday afternoon. I’ve been admiring your bag. Maybe you’ll show me where to shop. I want to take some gifts home.”
“Of course,” she said. “How long will you be in Paris?”
“Just the afternoon,” I said. “Some business to tend to. It appears that there has been an error in the distribution of royalty earnings since my father died, and Uncle Max and I need to find the source of the problem.”
I saw something dark cross her face before she smiled. A pale smile.
“I’m sure Monsieur Hubert will clear up any issues,” she said.
“We’ll see on Monday,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned Hubert. “I’ll call you when I’m free.”
She turned from me to Freddy, offering her cheek. He took her upper arm in his hand, an automatic gesture, but he didn’t lean toward her. Freddy had caught something in the exchange between me and Lena, reacted to the mention of royalties. He said, “You never mentioned anything to me about the royalties, Lena.” His glance shifted to me. “From the patents, right? La tontine?”
“You know about them from the letters,” I said.
He looked into his wife’s face, puzzled. “Who is Hubert?”
“For God’s sake, Freddy.” Lena gave her husband a perfunctory kiss as she gestured for her boys to come with her. “He’s just one of your mother’s accountants. I don’t bore you with your mother’s mundane household matters any more than we bored her with ours. Shall I show you her grocery bill next?”
“But you knew I was curious about the patents. More than curious.”
“I doubt Hubert can tell you much about the technicalities of the devices—I certainly can’t.” She called for the boys to hurry. “All he does is keep records and write checks, and all I do is make sure his columns tally. Now, we’re going or we’ll hit traffic.”
With an annoyed toss of her head, she set off toward the cars parked at the end of the road. She called back. “We’ll expect you by Thursday, Freddy.”
Dauvin, with a flick of his hand, summoned a gendarme out of the watch post in the gorse near the cars. When Lena hit the remote to unlock her green Jaguar, the gendarme moved in to intercept her.
Philippe had just come up to Freddy to say good-bye when Lena began to argue with the gendarme. Dauvin walked briskly toward the scene unfolding beside the Jaguar.
I exchanged glances with Freddy, tipped my head toward his son. Freddy was upset, but he was coherent enough to hold his son Philippe by the arm to keep him from running over to his mother.
Freddy narrowed his eyes at me, confusion, a challenge behind them. Still holding on to Philippe, he ordered Robert to come to him, now.
When he had both of his boys in hand, he shushed their questions about what was happening with their mother.
“Routine,” he said. “You know what happened to your grandmother. The police are merely conducting their investigation. Now, please, carry these chairs inside and put them away in the cupboard.”
When the boys were gone, he turned back to me, trying to form the words for the right question.
“Lena injured her left arm,” I said. “I saw the bandage when she passed the bread to Pierre Dauvin at lunch.”
“She cut herself cooking last night,” he said, seeming to be confused—who cares about a cut on her arm? “A knife slipped. That’s why she missed dinner. She showed me this morning.”
Dauvin and the uniformed gendarme walked Lena away down the road. We lost sight of them as they moved behind the heavy gorse.
“Excuse me.” Freddy started to follow. I went after him, stopped him.
“Freddy, be very careful what you say and do here.”
“But my wife.” His face was white; I was afraid he was going to faint. I took him by the hand and walked him toward the water. The tide was coming in. The trotters had been driven home and we had that part of the beach to ourselves. Except for the pair of uniformed gendarmes who stepped out of the gorse in front of us.
“Last night,” I said, pulling his attention away from the road. “I was attacked in my bed by someone with a knife.”
He snapped his head toward me. “When?”
“That’s why I ran outside.”
“We all thought it was the storm.”
I shrugged, moved past complicated explanations. “In the struggle, I got some little cuts.” I
showed him. “But my attacker was cut more seriously. A slip of the knife.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“No. It was dark. Whoever it was took a pillow from my room and tried to stanch the blood with it on the way out of the house.”
“You think it was Lena?” He was incredulous.
“Dauvin does. He has the bloody pillow,” I said. Then I tapped my fat lip. “Actually, he has two bloody pillows, one from the kitchen, one from my room. He’ll know soon enough whose blood ended up where.”
“Why weren’t we told about the attack earlier?”
“Dauvin asked me to keep it quiet.” I touched his arm. “What I said to you earlier I’ll repeat. Be very careful what you say and do here.”
“You don’t think I...?”
I shook my head. “Not you. I lost one brother. I don’t intend to lose another.”
“Promise me you don’t think Lena had anything to do with Maman’s death.”
“I can’t make that promise,” I said. “Isabelle’s death was a mistake. Lena meant for me to die. And Freddy, if she had managed to pull off her plan, I believe that you would have been next.”
24
“Because her handbag was counterfeit you decided your sister-in-law hired a hitman?” Jean-Paul set his cheese plate aside. “Is this an example of female intuition?”
“No,” I said. The beautiful bag Jean-Paul had given me was on the floor, resting against my leg; Grand-mère had insisted that I carry it. “How about an example of brilliant investigative work?”
“Dazzle me further.” He took a sip of the after-dinner drink the restaurant proprietor brought us, lager with a shot of Picon, a sweet and bitter orange liqueur.
“When we were at the hospital last night my cousin Antoine told me that at Easter Sergei, Junior, tried to sell designer handbags, cheap, to family members. No one accepted any that day, but he handed out his card in case anyone wanted something later. Lena wanted a bag, but that contact wasn’t all she wanted from him.”
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