Contents
Copyright Information
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Copyright Information
Copyright © 1986 by Marvin H. Albert. All rights reserved.
Published by
Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
Dedication
To CHRISTINE JOUBERT
and the rest of the gang
at the fashion house of Chloé in Paris
and
to JEAN-MARIE JUY,
chief of the Agence Privée de Recherches
on the Côte d’Azur,
Merci Bien
—M.H.A.
Chapter 1
The approach to Purgatory, according to Dante, resembles the cliffs around La Turbie.
Crow’s house was atop one of those cliffs, high above the stretch of Mediterranean shoreline now known as the Côte d’Azur.
It was eleven o’clock on the last Sunday night in July when I dropped in on him and found the horror somebody had left there.
Crow’s name was Frank Crowley. I still called him Crow because that was what everybody in our squad had called him in Vietnam. Back in those days we hadn’t expected to wind up as neighbors on the French Riviera. Sometimes we hadn’t expected to live to see the next morning.
My house was down near the sea, close to Monaco. Crow’s was way up there near the entrance to La Turbie—a village dating back to the Roman legion that engineered the first road across Dante’s cliffs. More recent roads traverse them now. The three corniches run roughly parallel to the coast. Several narrower roads thread their way up from the Lower Corniche—the one nearest the shore below—to the Moyen Corniche, and then higher to the Grande Corniche.
The cliffs still plunge dangerously below the sides of the roads, and there is not much street lighting. So I was driving slowly as I approached La Turbie at eleven that night.
I hadn’t planned to see Crow that late. I’d spent the evening with friends who lived a few miles east, off the Grande Corniche. I was going home when I passed Crow’s place. But then I saw his lights on, showing through the trees that hid his house from the road. And I remembered what he’d said earlier that day, something about needing to get things off his chest.
Fifty yards further along the right-hand shoulder of the road there was just enough space between a couple of plane trees. I pulled in very carefully, stopping with my wheels four inches from a two-hundred-foot drop.
As I walked back I considered the possibility that this might not be a good time for my visit. There was reason to believe he just might have female company other than his wife—though that didn’t fit his normal pattern. I walked into his driveway first to see what was in his carport.
There was only one car. A four-door Opel Kadett. I didn’t know it. I did know it didn’t belong to either Crow’s wife or the woman I’d thought might be with him. More peculiar was the absence of Crow’s Citroën. Easiest explanation: he’d had trouble with his car, and the Opel Kadett belonged to someone who’d driven him home and was sharing a good-night drink with him inside.
I stood there and called out, “Crow?”
There was no answer. Only the noise of frogs and locusts.
He could be out by the pool behind the house and might not have heard me. I walked around the blind side of his house to the pool. Nobody there.
The pool patio ended at the edge of the cliff, with a view of the lights of Monaco fifteen hundred feet below. From that height you could see all eight square miles of it: from the palace hill across the harbor to its Monte Carlo section. A postage-stamp country, embraced by the last ridges of the Alps running into the sea on either side of it.
I turned my back on the view and looked at the lights of Crow’s living room. They shone out onto the pool area through the sliding glass doors. One of the doors was wide open.
I tried again: “Crow?”
Nothing.
I moved to the end of the pool area and opened the little shed that held gardening tools. I took out a pair of clippers with sharp blades locked together and a short-handled shovel. The shovel I balanced in my right hand like a club while holding the clippers in my left like a dagger. I approached the open door to the living room that way. Feeling a little silly, but not much. There’s a prickly sensation you get when you’ve been in the presence of death often enough. Sometimes it’s wrong, but that’s better than being dead.
There was nobody in the living room and nothing disturbed. I stood there for a time and listened. And heard nothing.
Light was on inside the main bedroom, too. I walked to its open doorway. Stopped there and looked.
They were both naked, their clothes scattered on the floor.
The man was sprawled on his back across the rumpled bed. The blood around the bullet wound below his breastbone still had a wet shine. There was another hole in his forehead from which a little blood had trickled into one of his wide-open eyes.
The woman was huddled on her side on the carpet near the door. She had tried to run away. She’d been shot between the shoulder blades and behind the ear.
A professional job. Just two shots for each. One in the body to knock the victim down, another in the head to insure death.
Two people who had stopped being people a very short time before I’d entered the house.
I knew them both.
I turned and went through the rest of the house, holding my makeshift weapons ready. They no longer felt silly in my hands. Just inadequate. I would have preferred an automatic rifle.
No one else was in the house. I found the front door unlocked. There was nobody lurking outside on the dark grounds. The Opel Kadett was still in the carport. I went back into the house and checked the room the Crowleys used as a study. The pistol Crow usually kept there in the back of the desk drawer was missing.
I returned to the main bedroom and looked again at the man and woman who had been killed there. Sorting out what I could tell the police when they arrived and which things I didn’t want to tell them.
It had been a long Sunday, containing encounters that took on more significance now than I had given them at the time.
I tried to work out what connection each of them might have to the way the day had ended, there in the bedroom of the Crowley home.
Starting with my running into Crow’s mother-in-law, Mona Vaillant, that morning in Monte Carlo.
Chapter 2
I had known Mona Vaillant for much of my life. Since long before her name became a prestige label in trendy women’s wear shops from Paris to Dallas. I’d known her son and daughter just as long, and I was the one who’d introduced them to the people they married. Five people, each of whom I considered a close friend.
But nothing I knew about them, and nothing Mona told me that Sunday morning, held any forewarning that one
of those friends would be dead before the next day and another charged with murder.
It hadn’t been the best of mornings for me before my chance encounter with Mona. Ten minutes earlier I had finished a short-lived investigation for one of the reigning queens of Riviera society. More accurately, my client had terminated my employment, with extreme dissatisfaction.
Monte Carlo was gearing up for the most crucial part of its summer social season: the week that peaks with its Red Cross Gala, one event at which attendance by Prince Rainier and family is guaranteed. It is prime time for upper crust bitchiness and back stabbing. Jet-setters from places like Saint Moritz, Kuwait and Palm Beach converge on the tiny seaside principality that week to reconfirm their status. The game is to get themselves invited to the right parties and dodge those at which, rumors hint, the most coveted guests will fail to show. Excessively rich hostesses jockey for position, their smiles and jewels glittering as they sharpen hidden knives for the infighting.
My client was one of those hostesses. She suspected a sneaky rival of trying to disrupt her plans by bribing her staff. It has been known to happen, so I checked it out. Three days convinced me she was wrong, in this case. My report convinced her I’d been bought by her rival. She decided to hire a more trustworthy detective.
I thanked her politely for taking her paranoia off my back. She was in the middle of an unladylike remark when I walked away from her and out of the building.
Our parting took place in the Casino of Monte Carlo, where she was renting the downstairs Game Room to hold a cocktail party for the cream of her guest list the following weekend. My step felt lighter as I went down the entrance steps into the Place du Casino. I walked around its circle of flower beds and banyan trees to start my morning afresh over a good cappuccino in the Hotel de Paris.
Like the Casino, the hotel was built in the plush years of the late 1800s. The Art Nouveau opulence of the two buildings now forms an oasis of old-world elegance in a growing forest of high-rise office and apartment condos. Entering the hotel’s lobby I always feel I’ve stepped through a time machine into a past era with a more gracious, relaxed life-style.
I picked up a copy of that morning’s Nice-Matin at the porter’s desk and went into the bar.
It’s a soothing room done in muted colors. Dark brown wood and light brown marble and leather; dark green flower-patterned carpet, light green and beige draperies. Tall windows framing views of palm trees against sea and sky. That early on a Sunday I had a free choice of tables. Only three were taken. Mona Vaillant was at one of them.
Seeing who she was with gave me a jolt.
They were at a corner table off to the left of the entrance. The man was a rangy, sharp-faced blond in his mid-thirties. He had what looked like a Bloody Mary in his big hand. Mona was taking sips of tea while she listened with a troubled frown to whatever he was telling her.
She was half-turned from me and I saw her face in profile. It remained the classic profile so often photographed. She no longer allowed cameras to get close enough to register the delicate network of wrinkles. And she never permitted gray to show in her tawny hair. It wasn’t vanity, it was part of her selling image. A lot of women bought Mona’s clothes because they wanted to look like her. She always wore her own creations. That morning it was a pleated silk tunic and slacks, both in a cool floral print that gave a softened line to her lean figure.
She hadn’t seen me come in. The man she was listening to had. The only indication was a narrowing of his eyes. Then he resumed talking to her. Not light conversation. It had to be business—his kind of business.
I ordered my cappuccino and took a table near the bar, settling into a leather-padded chair facing the windows at the rear of the room. That way I wouldn’t be watching Mona and August Pilon.
He had been a stup until he’d quit the police to start his own one-man detective agency in Nice. A stup is what the French call a narc, stupéfiants being narcotics. With that kind of experience Pilon was street-smart and tough enough to handle whatever came his way. I had nothing against him. I just didn’t like seeing him with Mona.
Having a neurotic celebrity-snatcher decide to fire me and hire somebody else that morning had been a relief. But having Mona Vaillant prefer the competition to me—that stung.
* * * *
I’d been thirteen when I first saw her. That was the summer she came to our house below the coast road to ask for work as a part-time housekeeper. One thing my mother, Babette, loathed was any kind of household chores. So Mona Vaillant got the job—for the rest of that summer and the two summers that followed. Summers were the only time Babette and I spent at the house she’d inherited from her father. The rest of the year I went to school in Chicago, where I lived with my father’s parents, and Babette was at universities in Paris, first as a student and then as a professor of art history.
Next to Babette, who was statuesque, Mona looked small and fragile. But she turned out to have a force of character equal to Babette’s, which was considerable. They shared something else. Each had lost her husband to a war.
My father had been a U.S. Air Force tail-gunner in World War II. He’d met and married Babette after bailing out of a crippled bomber and being picked up by her Resistance group. The war was in its last weeks when he died, four months before I was born.
Mona’s husband had been killed the year before she came to us, in France’s Algerian War.
He had been a career officer. There was a pension for his widow and two children, but it wasn’t enough for Mona to keep their house in Nice and raise her kids properly. Doing housework for people like my mother was one of the ways she supplemented that income.
She always showed up with her son and daughter in tow. Gilles was a year older than me, and Nathalie four years younger. Usually I took them down to the cove below our house and we’d spend the day swimming, searching the beach for mussels, fishing off the rocks at the base of the sea cliffs. Sometimes we packed picnic lunches and went on all-day hikes into the mountains behind the Grande Corniche. Our friendship continued after their mother stopped working for mine, and we renewed it as adults when I finally left the States to settle in France.
The reason Mona quit doing housework, for us or anyone else, was that her other means of supplementing her income had turned into a full-time business.
Before her marriage she’d been a student at the Chambre Syndicale school of couture in Paris, expecting to become an apprentice designer-cutter when she finished the three-year course. Her career plans had been dropped to accompany her army officer husband to Indochina, where she gave birth to her children. But she always continued to make her own clothes. And after her husband’s death she began making dresses for women she knew. The first Mona Vaillant creation I ever saw was an outfit Babette bought from her.
It was after she began selling her work through small shops in our area, from Menton to Cannes, that she dropped everything else for her resumed career. By the time I started going to the University of Chicago she had a real workshop in Nice, employing eleven assistants, and was selling her ready-to-wear outfits to department stores in Paris, Milan, and New York. By the time I finished my military service in Vietnam she was opening her own boutiques at choice locations in major cities.
Her choicest, and latest, was just around the corner from the hotel where I was having my cappuccino that Sunday morning: on the Avenue des Beaux-Arts. “Avenue” is an odd thing to call a one-block, one-way street barely wide enough for two cars. But it is flanked by names that make it the showcase shopping street of Monte Carlo.
The new Mona Vaillant shop was on the same side as Cartier, Givenchy and Vuitton, across from Christian Dior, Bulgari and Saint Laurent.
* * * *
It took willpower not to turn my head to look at her and August Pilon. My willpower has more ebb and flow than the Mediterranean. That morning it rose to the occasion. I was proud of it. I drank my cappuccino and concentrated on the front page of Nice-Matin.
&
nbsp; It’s the only daily paper serving the entire Riviera. Disturbing world news gets short shrift on inside pages, hidden among sports events and local social gatherings. It is devoted to soothing its readers. That was fine with me. A man who has been passed over for his competitors twice in one morning can use a little soothing.
As usual, the front page was almost entirely taken up by several large color pictures of people enjoying themselves. A French soccer star relaxing with his family at a beach barbecue in Cannes. A German orchestra conductor trying out his new racing yacht off Saint-Tropez. An Arab prince escorting a Swedish model through an exhibition by a British sculptor at Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
There was also an advertisement for a new luxury condominium under construction a block from the Casino. It promised prospective tenants “the Nostalgic Decor of the Madly Sophisticated Belle Epoque Era and the First Anti-Atomic Bomb Shelter in Monaco.”
Mona was standing beside my table, her smile warm but tentative. “You’re upset with me.”
I glanced toward her table as I stood up to give her a dutiful peck on the cheek. August Pilon had gone. “Not upset, Mona. Try angry. Also puzzled.”
She pulled my face back down to hers and kissed me lightly on the lips. “You’re beautiful when you’re angry.”
“That’s supposed to be the man’s line.”
“Sometimes you sound like the worst mixture possible,” she told me as she sat down. “Stuffy Frenchman and uptight American.”
I found myself grinning. “Blood will tell.” I settled back into my own chair. “Can I order you something?”
“No. Gilles will be picking me up here any minute. We have an appointment to see a luggage manufacturer from California. He wants a licensing agreement to produce a line of handbags using my label.”
Her son Gilles was now her business manager. Though the Mona Vaillant enterprise kept expanding, it remained at its core a family business. Gilles’s wife, Anne-Marie, was Mona’s assistant designer. Mona’s daughter, Nathalie, was chief of merchandising. Only Nathalie’s husband, Crow, wasn’t part of it; and even he pitched in to help when needed.
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