Next I called Arlette’s office. She was still there, with hours of work ahead of her. She’d had a formal notification from the office of juge d’instruction Escorel.
“He’s going to put Crowley into provisional detention tomorrow. And keep him there while the case against him is further investigated. I’ll meet with Crowley and Escorel in the morning. But I don’t think I’ll be able to make Escorel change his mind. He’s making the point that Frank Crowley is an American, and that there’s no way of guaranteeing he won’t slip out of France and back to America unless he’s kept in prison.”
I thought about the main prison of Nice—officially the Maison d’ Arrêt de Justice et Correction. Its ugly, high-walled bulk covers a large chunk of an unlovely neighborhood of old factories and gimcrack apartments between the back of the Gendarmerie Nationale and a raised stretch of railroad freight tracks. As prisons go, it’s not the worst. Crow could stand it for a while, but he wouldn’t enjoy it. Prisoners have been known to be kept in provisional detention, without trial, for as long as a year and a half.
Arlette said, “Escorel does have a strong case against Frank Crowley. Anne-Marie and Pilon were killed in his house and with his gun. He can’t prove where he was when they were killed. Motive: he was romancing Anne-Marie, became furious when he came home unexpectedly and found her using his place to bed down with another man.” She made a frustrated sound and added, “So if you have anything I can use tomorrow morning against Escorel…
“Not yet,” I told her. “You’ll be the first to know when I do.”
When I hung up the phone I noticed my desk calendar was still on Sunday. I turned the page over to Monday—and saw what was written there: “Maidi.”
It had been the beginning of the year when I’d marked her name in for this date, as a reminder. A good thing I had. In the press of the last couple days it had slipped my mind.
Opening my address book, I turned to her apartment phone number—in Bolivia.
The time difference made it still the middle of office hours there. But Maidi Phillips usually managed to wangle her way out of working on her birthday. Being a civil servant has its advantages, if you know how to manipulate intra-office politics. Maidi knew how.
I dialed the overseas operator and gave him the number. He told me there would be about an hour’s wait. I gave him my own number and promised I’d be there whenever he could put the call through.
* * * *
While I waited I took a shower and tormented myself with bittersweet memories of Maidi. I put on a terry cloth robe and espadrilles and walked out onto the brick-floored patio behind the house, overlooking the sea. The wind was still warm, but increasingly powerful. It was too dark to see the cove below. I could hear the crashing of the surf and the noise of thousands of pebbles being pushed and dragged across the beach. You don’t get surf like that in the Mediterranean except during storms.
The storm hadn’t broken yet, but it was coming. I looked up and saw a few stars dart out from behind one dark mass of cloud and swiftly vanish into another. I remembered a night very much like this one when Maidi and I had spread a beach mat on the patio and made love with the storm building around us.
I remembered a lot of other things about the months we’d been together. With Maidi, it had been the nearest I’d come to wanting to get married again. Our feelings for each other had been ripe for it. But the conditions weren’t.
We had refused to give hardheaded thought to those conditions until the crunch came. Maidi was a State Department foreign service officer. She’d been serving at the consulate in Nice when we’d met and fallen for each other. The crunch had taken the form of a directive transferring her to the embassy in Bolivia. That was when we’d finally had to face the realities. For Maidi the transfer was a promotion in rank, and she wasn’t going to throw her career away in order to stay here with me. I wasn’t prepared to spend my life trailing her around the world.
It was almost four months since she had gone.
The first big drops of rain were hitting my face when the phone rang. I went inside and picked it up.
But it wasn’t the international operator. It was Fritz Donhoff again. His voice was more solemn than normal.
“Serge Lotis is dead.”
* * * *
I said, “Merde…
“You have an indelicate way with the French language,” Fritz said. “But in this case, yes, merde indeed. Lotis fell from the roof of his apartment building. Nineteen floors down to the sidewalk.”
I said: “Fell.”
“Or jumped. Or was pushed. The police are inclined to believe it was suicide. It is the simplest explanation for his going up onto the roof. And they have nothing at all to indicate he was pushed.”
“When did it happen?”
“Almost two hours ago. I just learned.”
“They’re cleaning up,” I said.
“They?”
I told him about my encounter with the cleanup man in the apartment of Gilles and Anne-Marie. If he was the same man I’d glimpsed outside the Dhalsten Hotel, he couldn’t have been in Paris to throw Serge Lotis off that roof. There was more than one man at work on this cover-up.
“The question is,” Fritz said, “what are they covering? It must be more than the theft of some fashion designs to warrant efforts on this scale. Including three killings.”
I agreed with him. And I didn’t have any more answer to the question than he did at that moment.
“There is one positive aspect of the death of Serge Lotis,” Fritz said. “His misfortune will make my work easier.”
“There’s that,” I said. People he would have had difficulty in pressuring into revealing secrets about Lotis would no longer have reason to protect him.
I put down the phone and stared at the wall behind my desk, pondering the big question.
The wall didn’t tell me anything except that it could use a new coat of paint.
The phone rang again.
This time it was the international operator, ready to put through my call to Bolivia.
It wasn’t Maidi who answered. It was a man, distinctly American: “Hello, Norris? I’ve been waiting for your—”
“My name is Sawyer,” I cut in. “I’m calling long-distance for Maidi Phillips. Is she around?”
“Oh, sorry, I thought… Hang on a minute. I’ll get her.”
There was no logical reason to be startled at finding a man in her apartment. Maidi and I hadn’t pledged fidelity to each other. That would have been ridiculous. It could be years before she got transferred out of South America. And then it could as likely be to the Far East as back to Europe.
Maidi came on the phone sounding just a bit awkward about it. “Peter? That was Bill…a friend from the embassy. He just dropped by and was expecting a—”
“Never mind,” I said. “Happy birthday, Maidi.”
“You actually remembered! Thank you.”
“I don’t forget anything about you,” I told her.
“It’s so good to hear your voice, even over this lousy connection. I miss you, Peter.”
“The missing is mutual. Any chance of the embassy there getting tired of having you around soon?”
“No, damn it. And I hate it here. I just can’t work up any real rapport with the Latin American mentality. My fault, I suppose. I don’t feel at home here. I got too used to Washington and Europe.”
There was a short silence between us. Then she said, “There is a possibility I might be able to wangle one week’s holiday in Europe—at the end of this year or the beginning of the next. Is…would I be able to stay at your place?” She meant had I installed somebody else in the house since she’d left.
“You’re always welcome here,” I told her. I didn’t say what I thought: that spending that short a time together would make us both much too tense to enjoy it.
“I may really take you up on that,” Maidi said. “My God, it would be a relief to be back in the real world—even
for just a week. Things are so unpleasant here.”
I didn’t see any point in telling her that things weren’t too pleasant at the moment back in the real world, either.
I turned off all the lamps and got into bed, listened to the rain slashing at the windows, and let myself drop into that solid ten hours’ sleep.
Chapter 19
I hate eating at home alone. Even breakfast. I had mine next morning in Edmonds, one of the three cafes in Cap D’Ail a few minutes from my house.
All three were packed that morning. Tourists glaring at the downpour outside and complaining about how much each ruined day of vacation was costing them.
What constitutes bad weather depends on your point of view. Riviera merchants love the rain. It drives people off the beaches and into shops and bars to spend their money. It also puts out forest fires and makes everything grow faster and greener.
After breakfast I drove west on the Lower Corniche to Nice and along the Promenade des Anglais to the Côte d’Azur Airport. I was dressed for the weather: light corduroy cap, full-length waterproofed Levi jacket, jeans tucked into short leather boots with ribbed rubber soles. I had a small overnight bag with me, in case I couldn’t get back from Marseilles that evening. I also had my Heckler & Koch P7. Until this job was over I wouldn’t be going anywhere without a gun, if I could help it.
The driving was hairy. New waterfalls cascaded down the cliffs onto the road. Every passing car threw a shower of dirty water against the windshield. Now and then a car would skid across the center line into the wrong lane. It was the first rain in three weeks, and a lot of oil that had soaked into the tarmac was rising to the surface. Too many drivers were ignorant of that danger; they get delusions of being Grand Prix drivers when they get near Monte Carlo.
I left my Peugeot in the airport’s underground parking and took the elevator up to the enclosed top-deck lounge. Ordering a cappuccino and slice of tarte aux pommes, I took a table by the glass wall overlooking the runways. Waves were crashing across the ends of the newer runways that had been built out over the sea. All outgoing flights had been canceled. Including the short hops to Marseilles. I’d phoned and found that out before breakfast. My trip to Marseilles would be by train. In this weather it would be too long and unpleasant a drive.
The control tower had its hands full directing arriving planes. Gilles’s Air-Inter connecting flight from Paris was delayed forty minutes. I relaxed and waited. A Pan Am 747 from New York emerged from the fog, coming down too steeply. It leveled off at the last moment, landed halfway down the longest runway, and just managed to brake to a halt before it would have gone off the end into the sea.
The Air-Inter from Paris arrived twenty minutes later and made a perfect landing. I waited until the buses were bringing its passengers to the terminal and then went downstairs to meet Gilles at the baggage claim section.
“I imagine you think I’m a cold-hearted bastard,” he said. “Because I’m not standing here crying. I am sorry about Anne-Marie dying like that. But…
He didn’t finish it. We were standing apart from the crowd waiting around the long luggage belt. The belt was moving now, but none of the bags from his flight were coming out on it yet. Gilles didn’t look like someone who had just completed two days of flying halfway around the world and back. He had special stores of inner strength. Along with that knack essential for international businessmen: an ability to sleep through a flight and arrive prepared to meet people fresh and clearheaded.
He wasn’t going to continue what he’d started to say, so I did it for him: “But the two of you haven’t been happy with each other for a long time.”
“She didn’t love me,” Gilles said stiffly. “She pretended to, in the beginning. Because she wanted to become part of the company. I admit she proved herself of value once she was in it. Mama came to have a great deal of respect for her. But after she became sure of that, Anne-Marie apparently found it increasingly difficult to keep up her pretense with me.”
I said, “I had the feeling you two would have gotten a divorce if it weren’t for your son.”
Gilles grimaced and looked away from me. “Probably.”
“Do you think she had lovers?”
He repeated the word: “Probably.”
“Ever hired a detective to follow her and get proof?”
Gilles looked puzzled. “What would have been the point of that? I could have proved she had dozens of lovers and she would still have obtained custody of Alain if we divorced.”
I said, “But now it’s you who’ll get Alain.”
“Yes.” He hesitated, torn between guilt and a stubborn honesty about what he felt. “I admit that was one of the first things I thought of after I heard what happened. I guess that was horrible of me.”
My own feelings about that were mixed. It wasn’t something I liked hearing him say. At the same time I realized it was a natural reaction for him to have, considering how strained the relationship had become between Gilles and Anne-Marie. Natural, but better left unexpressed. I sidestepped the implied question in his tone by asking one of my own:
“Do you think Crow could have been one of her lovers?”
Gilles thought about it and then shook his head. “No. Crow wouldn’t do that to me. Besides,” he added sourly, “Anne-Marie preferred men who were good-looking. Crow is an interesting man, but nobody would call him handsome.”
“What about you?” I asked Gilles. “Do you have lovers?”
He tensed and didn’t answer.
I took a shot: “In Paris, for example. The one you have dinner with at Chez Solange.”
Gilles turned on me with an astonished, accusing stare. “You’ve been prying into my personal life.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. He stayed tense, but I kept it there. “Do you think Crow killed Anne-Marie?”
There was no hesitation this time. “Of course not!”
“He’s in prison for it. He’s going to spend most of the rest of his life there unless I can prove he didn’t do it. I need everything I can find out about Anne-Marie and every person associated with her. It’s the only way I can eliminate innocent things and get to why Anne-Marie was murdered.”
I felt his body relax a little under my hand. “There’s no longer any reason to hide it,” he said softly. “Her name is Jacqueline Crozet. She owns an antique shop in Paris. I met her at a business dinner. She was with another man, but we got to talking, and… Gilles blushed suddenly. “She cares for me. I don’t know why, but it’s no pretense. She really does.”
I hoped he was right this time.
“We usually dine at Chez Solange because it’s near her apartment and there is no danger of running into anyone I know there.”
“You were scared Anne-Marie would find out and use your affair to get a divorce. And you’d lose your son.”
“Yes. It was hard for Jacqueline and me, always having to be so careful—so furtive.”
I dropped my hand from his shoulder. “Now you don’t have that problem.”
“You suspect me of Anne-Marie’s… He couldn’t say the word murder.
“No, I don’t.” I would still show his picture to people at Chez Solange and check on this Jacqueline Crozet, if I didn’t come up with something more likely. But I didn’t think the answer to the murders was with Gilles. “I need some help,” I told him. “I want you to check on Anne-Marie’s bank balance for me. How much is in it, what she’s been spending. And I want to know what’s in her safe deposit box.”
“Her jewels are there,” Gilles said. “She had a lot even before I began giving her jewelry. And her stocks and bonds. Anne-Marie began buying securities as soon as she was earning sufficient money. She was very thrifty, you know. Her parents had very little money. She was always afraid of winding up poor.”
“I want to know if it’s all still there.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Just find out. And get me copies of her credit card statements and the b
ank’s photostats of checks she’s used over the last twelve months.”
Gilles shrugged. “Okay. The funeral is tomorrow. After that I can decently look into—”
“I want to know sooner than that. By this evening.”
“If it’s that important…
“I think so.”
“I’ll look into it today, then,” he said, and he pointed to the luggage belt. “Here come the bags.”
“I’ll be in touch this evening,” I said, and I went out to take a cab to the train station.
* * * *
Aboard the train I took out my notebook. I wrote three names on one page: Anne-Marie Vaillant, August Pillon, and Serge Lotis. On the page across from it I wrote: “Christian Gardier…cleanup man…Hotel Dhalsten.”
I spent most of the three hours to Marseilles putting together what I had so far that connected them with one another.
When I got off the train at the Gare Saint Charles I made the phone call from one of the public phones in the station lobby. I gave my name and asked for the man Alfani had told me about: Joseph Lepec. He came on the phone with a voice that sounded like his throat had been severely mangled in the past, and he was profusely apologetic.
“I’m very sorry to tell you that the Stella Fortia, the cargo ship Christian Gardier will arrive on, has been delayed by the storm. It is now expected here either tonight or sometime tomorrow. Can you call me again at eight this evening? By then I’ll know which and can arrange to meet you and take you to meet him. I hope this does not inconvenience you.”
It did, but I told him it didn’t. His regret sounded entirely sincere. Lepec might not know I came from Alfani, but he’d been told to be nice to me by someone who scared him. Probably Bernard Salamite himself, currently the biggest man in the Marseilles milieu.
It was a few minutes past two in the afternoon. I decided to check into a hotel. If Christian Gardier got in early enough that night, I could check out and return home. More likely I’d be spending the night in Marseilles.
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