Back in the Real World

by Marvin Albert

  “I’d say. But you know how the gears operate. Once a juge d’instruction takes over a case, the police have to concentrate on searching for what he wants them to find.”

  I said, “But I don’t. Somebody is trying to sew Crow up. And your Xavier Escorel likes that fine. Daughter-in-law of famed Mona Vaillant murdered with lover by Mona Vaillant’s son-in-law. Headlines all the way. With Escorel’s picture in newspapers all over Europe and America.”

  “Be careful,” Soumagnac warned me quietly. “Escorel’s family has highly placed friends. He won’t like you if you break his toy.”

  I felt something stretch my mouth. Almost like smiling too widely, but I knew it couldn’t look pleasant. “He can like it or not, Laurent. If Escorel tries to run with this frame, I’ll make him eat it. Splinters and all.”

  * * * *

  We were approaching La Turbie by then, in sight of the massive stone columns that loomed above it. They were all that remained of a huge monument raised by Caesar Augustus to celebrate the Roman conquest of the region. The rest of the monument collapsed in an earthquake long ago. All the older buildings of the town were built with blocks of cut stone looted from that collapse over the centuries since.

  Soumagnac pulled over across the road from my car, a few feet from a bistro. I climbed out of his car and said, “Come on in and I’ll buy you a double calva.”

  He shook his head. “Thanks, but I don’t drink in the morning.”

  “That’s your sleeping problem,” I told him. “You think this is morning. But for you it’s the end of the day. You need something to quiet your nerves.”

  He was still looking dubious when he entered the bistro with me. I ordered the Calvados for him and a cup of genuine coffee for myself. As we drank I asked what Mona Vaillant had told the police.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Didn’t have time to see their report before I went off duty.” He finished his drink with a smile of embarrassed pleasure. “I hope this doesn’t work. If it does, I’ll be on my way to becoming an alcoholic by the time I stop pulling night duty.”

  “Rest your mind,” I told him. “It’s healthier for you than taking a lot of sleeping pills.”

  I paid and we walked outside. “Remember what I told you,” he said, and his voice had lost its raspy sound. “Be careful about getting Escorel mad enough at you to hit back. He’s the kind of guy that doesn’t forget. And he’s got the patience to wait for an opportunity.”

  “I’ll remember you warned me,” I promised.

  He got in his car and headed for Cap d’Ail, turning the next corner cautiously.

  I crossed the road to my car and drove down toward my place—to meet Arlette and find out what Mona had told her and the police about August Pilon.

  Chapter 10

  She was behind the wheel of a brand new white Porsche, waiting for me outside the locked gate at the top of the private drive that led down the slope below the Lower Corniche to my house. I was one of seven householders who had keys to the gate. That was one reason the little cove at the bottom of the slope was never crowded, even in July and August. People without keys could walk all the way down to the beach there, but it was a long, stiff climb getting back up.

  “Did you get Mona?” I asked Arlette as I got out to unlock the gate.

  “No, but she’s expected back at her house soon. I left word for her to call us here.”

  I opened the gate, and she drove through and continued along the hairpin turns of the drive. I took my Peugeot in, relocked the gate, and drove down after her past the other six houses, each screened from the others by trees and flowering bushes. My house was the last, at the bottom of the drive. An ancient, rebuilt dwelling with solid stone walls and a sloped orange-tiled roof, backed by a wide terrace flanked by fruit trees, palms, and pines. No swimming pool, but it was only a four-minute hike down a path from the terrace to the sea. The climb back up took about eight minutes, if you were in good condition.

  I pulled into the carport next to Arlette’s Porsche. Like the Crowleys and a lot of other rural homeowners, I kept a spare key hidden on the grounds. Arlette had already gotten it and gone inside. She was in the kitchen opening drawers and cupboards when I entered the living room. She didn’t need my help. Everything was in the same general place as two years before.

  The answering machine hooked to the house phone was my substitute for an office and secretary. There were only two messages on it, neither of which I was in a mood to do anything about that morning. Nothing from Mona Vaillant. I went through the bedroom to shower and shave.

  I was getting into a fresh pair of Levi’s and a light blue sport shirt when delicious smells from the kitchen made my stomach growl an angry reminder that I was very hungry. Putting on espadrilles, I headed for the smells. Arlette had squeezed enough oranges to fill two tall glasses, and she was already sitting down to a generous plateful of ham omelet and buttered toast. I sat down to mine. While I ate I told her everything Laurent Soumagnac had told me. After extracting her promise not to reveal where I’d gotten it.

  She listened to all of it without interposing questions. I could almost see the mind behind those attentive eyes going to work on the information, sorting, calculating, rearranging, evaluating.

  When I finished my recital and breakfast I got up to brew some herb tea. Arlette noted which herbs I selected without comment. She was accustomed to men remembering what she liked.

  “Your turn,” I said. “What did Mona tell the police?”

  “That she hired August Pilon to check into whether someone might be stealing the designs for her collections and passing them to competitors. No specific competitors—it was just a possibility that began worrying her. Yesterday morning Pilon told her he was making progress. Expected to soon be able to tell her if her suspicion was justified or not. But he didn’t tell her anything specific, and she’s not sure if he really had any information. And she has no idea what he was doing with Anne-Marie in the Crowleys’ home. Dressed or undressed.”

  “Alive or dead,” I added, and I set Arlette’s tea on the table. I poured myself a cold glass of milk and sat down across from her. “Now,” I said, “that’s what Mona told the police. What did she tell you?”

  “Pretty much the same. Except for some things I already knew. Such as the name of the Paris designer who got the advance information about her last collection. Mona came to Henri and Joelle Bonnet with the problem. They recommended you first, of course. But she said there was a reason in this case why she preferred not to use you. She wouldn’t explain why, but she was determined on that point. So the Bonnets suggested she try August Pilon.”

  “Did he ever report back to the Bonnets about how he was approaching the job?”

  “No. And neither did Mona. She—”

  At that moment my phone rang. I was in the living room picking it up after the second ring. It was Mona.

  “I’m back home now,” she told me. Her voice was strained, but it was a strain she had under control. “At noon I have a business lunch I can’t get out of, and after that several vital meetings. But if you can get here soon—”

  “I’m on my way,” I told her, and I hung up.

  * * * *

  “The fashion house that stole my designs,” Mona told me, “is Lotis. I’m sure you know of it.”

  I did. Serge Lotis, who had founded the company and who remained its president and head designer, had been a big name in fashion longer than Mona Vaillant. “Why would he have to steal from you?” I asked her. “His own designs have always done big business.”

  “They used to. But Serge Lotis has lost his touch. Over the past three years his collections haven’t been well received.”

  Mona looked like she hadn’t had any more sleep than I had. The lines around her eyes and mouth were deeper than usual. But her voice was steady enough, though the undercurrent of strain came through. “You know how fickle the market is. How much the success of a fashion house depends on an ability to spot changi
ng trends far in advance.”

  She’d lectured me on it in the past. Her profession was in large part a matter of long-range guesswork. When a fashion house showed a collection it was predicting what women would want to wear six to eight months later. People like Mona and Lotis began preparing designs for a collection almost a year before their clothes would actually be competing for sales in the retail stores.

  “You’re saying Lotis’s crystal ball has cracked.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Mona said. “He’s been trying to recapture interest by resorting to wilder and wilder styles. Clothes that only a teenager could get by in. Young girls look good in anything. Adult women don’t—and they haven’t been buying his lines.”

  We were out on the veranda of Mona’s home, she and I in deck chairs and Arlette standing against one of the pillars, arms folded on her breast, watching us and listening, alert to every nuance.

  The house was one of the turn-of-the-century mansions on the outskirts of Nice, on the slopes of Mont Boron. A wealthy enclave where the old rich were slowly giving way to the new rich like Mona Vaillant. A high stone wall surrounded her property, enclosing a large lawn and garden and a gatehouse in addition to the main house. A Spanish couple who had worked for her almost ten years lived in the gatehouse. The wife did the housekeeping and cooking. The husband took care of the grounds and maintenance, as well as sometimes acting as her chauffeur.

  The big house was Victorian: dark brick walls, gables and turrets and bay windows, four chimneys connected to separate fireplaces. Half the ground floor space inside had been converted into a multi-roomed atelier for Mona.

  Every successful fashion house has its own way of functioning. The headquarters of Mona Vaillant’s business was in a building in the middle of Nice, where there were also workshops for the women who made her patterns and first samples and room for the storage of materials. The factory that manufactured her clothing was on the other side of town. But the atelier where Mona created her final designs was in her home.

  The veranda where we were meeting was outside a part of her atelier that she called her Nightmare Room. That was where she kept a rack on which were hung past creations of hers that had failed to sell. There weren’t that many garments on that rack, but Mona always said it was a humbling, salutary experience to look at them whenever she began feeling too full of herself. She didn’t look full of herself at the moment.

  “There have been rumors,” Mona told me, “that Lotis was financially overextended and in danger of going under. But then he brought out his new Haute Couture collection. At the beginning of July, three weeks before any of the other fashion houses were to show theirs. It was very well received.” Her tone had gotten bitter. “The orders poured in.”

  “And his designs were yours.”

  “Almost all. Slightly altered, of course. Just enough to get away with it, according to the Bonnets.”

  “In fashion,” Arlette told me quietly, “plagiarism is almost impossible to prove. I guess that’s not news to you. That’s why the Bonnets warned her not to make any claims against Serge Lotis. He could sue her for slander. And possibly win. How do you prove which designer thought up an idea first?”

  Mona was having increasing difficulty containing her anger. “I had to scrap my own Couture show. People would have said I was copying from him. That meant a hard loss of income and big expenses. The firm can survive that this time. I’d only prepared thirty-two garments for that collection. But now I’m preparing for one of my two biggest shows of the year.”

  “In October,” I said. “Your ready-to-wear collection for next spring and summer.”

  “I’ll have prepared over a hundred and seventy different garments for that show,” Mona told me. “If Serge Lotis gets hold of those in advance…

  It was time for me to explain something to Arlette. “She didn’t hire me to find out how Lotis has been getting her designs because she thinks the source is inside her family.”

  Mona had tried unsuccessfully to stop me. Now she was glaring. “I told you that in confidence. I didn’t—”

  I let an edge of irritation into my voice. “Mona, Arlette is your attorney. She has to know what’s going on. It’s not just the theft of your work we’re dealing with now. Crow is in jail, and two people are dead.”

  I watched the bitter anger drain out of her, leaving her suddenly older. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, as though in pain. “I know it’s stupid to blame myself, but…

  She opened her eyes, but not all the way, squinting as though the sunlight bothered them. But the veranda was well shaded against the sun. “I’m the one who hired Pilon. He must have questioned Anne-Marie—though he didn’t tell me so, and I had asked him not to talk to anyone in my family about it. So I’m responsible for Anne-Marie’s meeting him. And she was…vulnerable to men, as you know.”

  “Did Gilles know that, too?” I asked Mona.

  “If he did, he never mentioned it to me. He’s always been so secretive about his deeper feelings. But I don’t think he cared much for her anymore. I cared more. Not only because she is the mother of my grandson. Because of her talent as well. She had become almost indispensable to my work.”

  Arlette suddenly spoke up again, quietly. “Let’s get back to the important point, Mona. Why does Serge Lotis’s source have to be one of your family?”

  “Nobody else knew my entire Couture line. Not early enough for Lotis to use it when he did. I thought so before Pilon flew to Paris to check. What he reported confirmed it: Lotis began working on his variations on my styles well before I had them all ready for the factory.”

  I asked her, “Did Pilon talk to Serge Lotis himself?”

  “I warned him not to—because of what Henri and Joelle Bonnet said. About not stirring Lotis to retaliation. Pilon did talk to somebody who worked for Lotis, though he wouldn’t give me the name. He also told me he was very close to getting me the name of the traitor who gave Lotis my designs. But I’m not sure if that was the truth, or only something he was saying to keep me paying him. Now we’ll never know.”

  “When did Pilon get back from Paris?”

  “Late Saturday night. He phoned me, and we met Sunday morning—when you saw us together. If he was telling me the truth, the timing of the preparation of the Lotis Haute Couture collection doesn’t leave any doubt. Only four people could have given Lotis all the designs: Gilles, Nathalie, Crow, or Anne-Marie.”

  Arlette said, “You have other assistant designers besides Anne-Marie. They must have known your collection, too.”

  Mona shook her head. “They work for me on a freelance basis. I call them contributing designers, rather than assistants. I take similar precautions with them as with my other workers: the pattern makers, fitting models, seamstresses, tailors, fabric buyers. Each contributing designer knows only those few designs he or she actually works on. Either from preliminary ideas I suggest or ones of their own. They bring what they’ve done to me, and I make the final modifications on any I decide to go with.”

  I said, “So the only designer besides yourself who knew all of the line you’d decided on was Anne-Marie.”

  “That’s right. She made detailed sketches of everything for me to work with. And she took part in my conferences with Gilles and Nathalie. During the planning of a collection and when we were working out the publicity and selling campaigns for it.”

  “You implied,” Arlette reminded her, “that Frank Crowley also had access to all your designs.”

  “In this case, yes. I asked him to photograph the Couture line while I was still working on it. To see if photos would be more helpful than the sketches in giving me any final inspirations. They weren’t.” Mona glanced at me nervously. “But Crow could have kept copies of his pictures.”

  “Anyone who could get into your atelier could have taken pictures of your designs,” I told her. “The couple who work for you, for example.”

  “No. When I’m not actually workin
g with design I keep it in a windowless room with an alarm system and a Chubb combination lock on the door. I’m the only one who knows the combination.”

  I didn’t bother explaining the ways that difficulty could be dealt with by someone determined enough. But it would be simpler just to get to someone who knew the designs. And that did narrow down the possibilities. “I’ll have to talk to Gilles and Nathalie,” I said. “Where are they?”

  “Nathalie is on her way back from Paris. I phoned her hotel there last night after the police came, but she wasn’t in. She was staying the night with friends outside the city, but I didn’t know that. I left a message, and she phoned me when she returned to the hotel this morning.”

  “And Gilles?”

  The answer surprised me. “He’s on his way to Australia. We’re considering opening our first boutique there. He left last night.” Mona looked at her watch. “He should be landing about now. I’ve left a message at his hotel for him to phone me immediately.”

  Arlette told her, “He’ll know what’s happened before he gets your message. The French police will have alerted the Australian police. They’ll be waiting at the airport to talk to him when his plane comes in.”

  “In either case,” Mona said, “I’m sure Gilles will take the first return flight he can get a seat on. But even so, he can’t get back before tomorrow.”

  I asked her, “When did his flight to Australia take off?”

  “At nine-thirty last night.”

  That left Gilles out as a suspect. He’d been in the air when his wife and Pilon were murdered.

  It did not, however, erase the possibility of his having a hired professional do it while he was gone.

  I didn’t believe Gilles would do something like that. But I didn’t think Crow had killed them, either. And somebody had.

  Chapter 11

  “Let’s establish one thing,” Arlette said after we left Mona and walked back to our parked cars. “Who do you represent in this mess—Mona Vaillant or Frank Crowley?”