The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence

by Tracy Whiting

  “Professor Neely, I’d like to pick up where you left off. Sophie has been in police custody for,” Thierry looked at his watch, taunting the murderer, “over four hours. I am certain her version of events will vary greatly from yours.” The professor’s silence told the agent that he was contemplating his options.

  “You have to believe me when I say it wasn’t personal. None of it,” the panic level in Neely’s voice raised a pitch though it had not replaced his peculiar brand of pomposity. “I only sought to protect a noble family legacy,” he continued to reason. “I hadn’t meant to kill that preening prick of a professor. Things had gone too far and then one thing led to another. I had only meant to warn the fool.”

  “That tells me nothing except that you are a killer with a self-serving motive.” Thierry sighed with exhaustion. They’d been at this hide and seek game since the chase on the high seas.

  “It was Sophie,” Neely said almost desperately.

  “Yes, so I’ve heard from you the second time in the wee hours of this morning.” He frowned at the prostrate professor through the darkness.

  “You must understand Sophie wanted to giftwrap the prime minister post for her father and,” he emphasized, “keep her Daddy-financed gravy train going.”

  “So the devil, Sophie Fassin, made you do it? How?”

  “Let me walk you through it, Hercule Poirot.”

  “I’m French not Belgian.” Thierry could see Neely gesticulating wildly up against a rock in a kind of ‘whatever, as I was saying’ gesture.

  “Sophie arranged the flights, trains, and car rental. I arrived in Paris a week earlier as you discovered,” Neely harrumphed, “and then promptly took a train to Switzerland to meet Sophie. We knew the foundation would be quiet on a Sunday evening. No foot traffic from the help staff. And of course, we also knew Laurent liked to go to his condominium in Marseille over the weekends to get away from the Cassis tourists. So after a week in Zurich, I boarded a private jet from Switzerland to Avignon late Sunday afternoon, after which I took the 5:36 direct TGV from Avignon to the St. Charles Station in Marseille—a thirty-five minute ride. At the Marseille train station, I retrieved a one-way vehicle rental and then drove the thirty minutes to Cassis. I was in Cassis by 6:45. I parked near the foundation and watched and waited until the night rolled in. I watched him leave and then return. I used the pass code to enter the grounds and waited near his apartment.”

  Neely paused and cleared his throat. “Might I have something to drink?”

  Thierry radioed for Hervé to bring a bottle of water from the helicopter. They were still awaiting the emergency services unit.

  “I thought I was going to have to roust Kit in his apartment,” Neely continued. “But he made it easy for me when he came out and began smoking. Can you believe he violated our foundation rules about smoking? That right there made him deserving of something, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Neely waited for affirmation on the point. When he didn’t receive it, he soldiered on in a monotone voice as if he were reviewing the night of the murder on a highlight reel in his head. “I watched him smoke almost to the end of the cigarette. I figured I’d let the poor fellow enjoy himself a bit. I whacked him with that flashlight,” he pointed to his bag, “from behind while he was watching the stars from the Perched Terrace. The first blow stunned him, but he didn’t go down; instead he wobbled and I struck him again. He fell fairly hard, but he was breathing evenly. His eyes were shut. He wouldn’t have recognized me anyway in the darkness and I was also wearing black with sunglasses, a hat, and rubber gloves. I dragged him to the Greek Theatre. His shoe came off in my hand. It was made-to-measure John Lobb. Kit always had exquisite taste.

  “Then I heard Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.’ It was his cell phone ringtone. I hadn’t realized that it was the second time it had rung until I retrieved it from his pant pocket. Havilah called as I had been dragging him, obviously. I hadn’t heard the ringing— what with the roar from the sea and my heart pounding in my ears. I imagined all the jostling must have inadvertently pressed the answer button— unless Kit was playing possum. Clever Kit. We’ll never know, will we now? The first call lasted twenty seconds. Naturally I was curious about she might have heard. Then she called again. I let the call go to voicemail. On Monday, I took the train into Paris from Versailles to follow up with Havilah. But you were already at her apartment.”

  Thierry raised an eyebrow. He suspected all along the culprit might seek her out in Paris. He inhaled deeply, glad that he and the captain had reached her first.

  “Kit groaned when I used his shoe to break his fingers— one by one. So you see, he was alive when I left him,” Neely said matter-of-factly.

  “He died from blood loss,” Thierry interjected.

  “That was an accident and not my intention,” the dandyish Neely retorted. “I left immediately afterwards, dropping the rental at the Avignon train station, and took a taxi to the hangar, where I reboarded the private jet that I had taken from Switzerland earlier that afternoon. Sophie charged everything to a bankcard tied to one of the many accounts in Switzerland the Gabonese government maintained. Her father had given her access to one of those accounts. She had also used her father’s plane to fly me from Switzerland to Avignon to the Paris-Beauvais airport. There. Now I’d like to call the family lawyer.” Neely had breathlessly laid out the night of Kit Beirnes’s murder.

  “Lawyer up, then.” Thierry Gasquet handed Neely a bottle of water and his cell phone. He had always wanted to be able to say those words and be understood. He’d picked up the turn of phrase from his time watching Law and Order marathons in America.

  XXVIII

  Havilah had given her statement to the officer, kissed Améline goodnight, and asked to be escorted back to her room at Les Roches Blanches. It was well after 2 a.m. She was exhausted. She readied herself for bed. She was forced to retrieve messages from the hotel room’s phone or else the annoying red light from the telephone would flash all night. The messages— three in all— were from Charles Chastain. She listened to each of his babblings, immediately striking the delete button. He’d requested a 9 a.m. meeting tomorrow.

  She sent a message via email. “Not tomorrow.” Laurent and the Félibrige Board members would fill in Chastain on all the details by the time he arrived in Cassis tomorrow morning.

  She opened the balcony doors in Thierry’s room, which was now hers. Theirs. Slipping between the top sheet and the matelassé Duvet, she smelled him. Thierry Gasquet. She sniffed harder to try to place the essences of the fragrance. Cardamon? But she was so tired she drifted off to sleep.

  At 5 a.m., she heard a tap at the door. She put on the robe at the foot of the bed and made sure to look through the peephole. She was not that groggy. She didn’t want Ansell Neely Redux. She opened the door for the agent. Despite her fatigue, she grabbed him and pulled him into the dark room. She was overcome with an intense relief and desire. She thought about his smell, his strength. She hadn’t minded playing distressed damsel to his knight in shining armor after all. She decided she wanted Thierry Gasquet. That he could be the release she needed after this wild ride. He could be her exhale.

  “I’m so happy to see you,” she yawned. Then she searched out his face to find his mouth. She kissed him lightly on the lips. She liked the way his lips felt against hers. So she kissed him a second time and a little longer.

  She had surprised him. He responded though, by kissing her deeply. He pulled her in closer to his body. The thrilling shocks to her body had every nerve-ending standing at alert. She opened her robe and moved his hand first to her waist and then to her breasts.

  He whispered, “Comme tu es belle,” which had the effect of sending her ardor into overdrive.

  Thierry stopped mid-kiss and asked, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  She let out a sigh at first. She was silent and she knew he couldn’t see her face clearly; she had always attracted the conscientious ones. And the
n she seriously considered what he had asked her. What she knew was that every time he kissed her, she felt like she was closing the door on her past. “I don’t know.”

  So she sat down on the bed and turned on the small night lamp. She now felt a twinge of something between desire and guilt. It was the dilemma of sex and the single woman still acting like she is booed up to her ex-fiancé, even though he had been prodigiously sexing a woman whose name she associated with boiled bunnies and Fatal Attraction. A perplexing dilemma.

  “What happened?” she asked excitedly, distracted suddenly by the bandage on his arm.

  With the hot and bothered moment past, she motioned to him to lie next to her on the bed.

  “You’re hurt?”

  “It’s just a graze, courtesy of Ansell Neely.”

  “Ansell Neely is an awful so and so. And Sophie?” She bit down on her bottom lip. “She had me fooled up until that skinny heifer slapped me.”

  “Ah, oui, Mademoiselle Fassin.” He smiled into the darkness. “She arranged for the hit and run on the New York agent.”

  Havilah jumped up excitedly. She brushed against Gasquet’s arm. He visibly winced. “I’m so sorry.”

  “She arranged for a fake license, the cab decal, everything. Whoever he was, he ditched the cab and is in the wind. She might have gotten away with it had Neely not confirmed everything. He was very unhappy to discover she had put his name on the passenger manifest for the flight out of Avignon the night Lathan Beirnes was murdered.”

  “What will happen to them now?”

  “Fassin will more than likely insist on a trial in France where she will try to use her father’s connections. Neely is trying to get himself extradited to America where he can use his family connections. They turned on each other, each pointing the finger at the other. Oddly, those two created more of an embarrassing scandal for their respective families than Professor Beirnes ever could have.”

  Havilah shook her head at that last remark. “That they did.”

  He then told her about Ansell Neely’s hacking into Chastain’s email to send her the threatening message and the professor-poet’s clever Plan B escape and its abysmal outcome. His voice was deep and calming; it lulled her into a sweet sleep as he stroked her hair. At 9 a.m. when she awoke, Thierry Gasquet was gone. He had left her a cell phone, though. Her father’s phone number had been entered into the directory. Gasquet was still #1.

  * * *

  The Félibrige Foundation Centennial events on Wednesday went smoothly. Havilah saw Charles Chastain over lunch with the remaining board members. He had tried to speak with her privately, but she told him that she couldn’t just yet. When he hugged her with the appropriate near six inches between them as everyone prepared to leave, she whispered that she would call on him once they both were in Paris at the end of the week. She hadn’t liked how he had acquitted himself, but at least he wasn’t a murderer. She could see that he was deeply relieved, but nonetheless wary, for he had also congratulated her on being named the executor of Kit’s literary estate. Kit had employed the same legal firm as Astor. And so, the provisions in Kit’s will were an open secret in academe by Wednesday evening.

  On Thursday, Havilah, standing in for Kit, offered some words of praise and recognition for her late colleague and bid everyone to enjoy the exhibit. She and Améline met for drinks at Les Roches Blanches on Friday at 4:30 before Améline’s train back to Paris.

  “How are you holding up?” Havilah asked Améline, who was eating a sugary waffle.

  “We would talk for hours some nights. He was a good friend.” She looked off absently towards the marina in the distance.

  Havilah didn’t quite know how to respond to Améline’s personal revelation about Kit, so she just nodded. She had never taken Améline for the sentimental type. They had talked for hours themselves, but this was the first time Améline had mentioned Kit and their relationship.

  “As his executor, Kit would have wanted you to have this. This is what I had wanted to meet with you about. Neely never tried to get it from me. I guess he figured once I was out of the way, he could come back for it, or that it would simply disappear with my other personal effects, which reminds me I need to make sure I appoint a literary executor.”

  She handed Havilah a parcel and a signed copy of Seducing Nabokov. “When you get a moment, read it. When are you leaving?”

  “Sunday. It’s back to Paris for more research.”

  “Call me sometime, Havilah. Academe can be a terribly lonely space.”

  “I will.” It was humanizing to see this vulnerable side of Améline. “Maybe we can get together in Paris?”

  “I leave Paris on Saturday to visit my mother in Idaho. It’s been years since I’ve been home. I can’t believe I called Caribou County, Idaho ‘home.’ But thinking about Kit makes me think of Idaho. I cared about Kit. We had a mutual desire to close the door on our past, including our families. But he has no one but us to mourn him. He left you the rights to his literary estate. He left Yale the proceeds from the sale of his homes in Asheville, North Carolina and Nashville. He left Astor the five million in his retirement accounts as well as a rare book collection to the library on the American South. Did you know he had become very sentimental about his family in Kentucky?”

  “No, I hadn’t at all.” Havilah took a sip of the sparkling water.

  “Well, he had. He had a meeting back in Nashville so he took a day trip to visit them. He came back deeply disappointed and guilty. That’s when he decided to name you his literary executor. He was so disillusioned. He thought he could be an inspiration to the young ones, a road map to them on how to leave, as he called it, Whitetrashville. Once he returned, he saw how abject the poverty was in Appalachia. It was worse than he remembered; the violence of that kind of poverty. He realized that white poverty was invisible even as it was rampant and persistent. The family wanted nothing to do with him and his liberal survivor’s guilt. They thought he was condescending with his learned, effete manners. That’s what they said, though they didn’t use those words. He was stunned that they were so perceptive. Sometimes, Havilah, you think you’ve closed the door on the past, and when you try to reopen it, the past won’t let you back in. That’s not the way I want to go out. Kit was lonely. He’d never admit it. All he had was his ambition.” Améline pushed her plate away and crossed her legs.

  Havilah wondered if what Ansell Neely said to Améline about what people could imagine her doing had also resonated, thus occasioning this new outlook. Whatever nudged her in this sentimental direction, she was glad to hear she was going to visit her family. And more importantly, her past was letting her back in.

  “My driver is here.” She dusted the powdered sugar off of her skirt as she stood up.

  They hugged for a few minutes. Havilah walked her to the car.

  “I promise I’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  Havilah stayed on thru Saturday, the day Ansell Neely was to present. As she packed to return to Paris on Sunday, she realized she hadn’t heard from Thierry Gasquet. She now understood what he was asking her. It wasn’t necessarily if she was certain that she wanted to go to bed with him, but could she handle his not calling the next day or four days after? She boarded the 12 p.m.TGV from Marseille to Paris.

  On the three-hour train ride, she was able to send several emails from her subcompact. She needed to be convinced still about a number of things and wanted clarity on others. By the time she had arrived back at her apartment, she had received a response from the Chicago Historical Society. The scrupulous Mr. Allen had come through again. She hadn’t expected his reply on a Sunday. She spent the next three hours reading, and then she placed a phone call to the Park Hyatt Paris in the Place Vendome.

  XXIX

  Charles was already seated at her second favorite café in Paris for aperitifs: Le Café Marly. The hostess had prepared to seat her towards the front facing the Louvre’s Pyramids when she spotted him towards the back. Havilah requ
ested that he be directed towards the table with the views.

  “Are we eating here, Havilah?” Charles Chastain asked as he cleaned his glasses with a starched handkerchief.

  “No one eats here really, Charles. You come for the cocktails and views.” She smiled at him as he took his new seat.

  “I was going to say. I didn’t like where they placed me near the toilets. But it is Paris. So I knew the beauty quotient was at work,” he chortled playfully as he took a sip of the Desperado Red beer. “I can only find this brand of beer here in Europe.”

  He was spot on. The Café Marly was notorious for placing guests with a “bon visage” in the best seats. They even refused to guarantee certain tables when taking reservations for that very reason. But she liked the comfy chairs, the view, and the kir royale with crème de cassis. Besides, her favorite café, Angelina’s, had tourists snaking down the block, and she wasn’t much in the mood for her Chocolat Africain hot chocolate. It was still too warm that Sunday evening.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said and turned to place her order in French.

  “I was hoping we would have an opportunity to talk about things before we returned to Astor,” Chastain said, commandeering the meeting that he did not call. “I wanted to apologize for any lapses in judgment I might have had handling this situation with Kit. I was also hoping to discuss the directorship with you.”

  “I was coming to that. The first part of your admission, that is.” She decided she would go all in on Charles.

  “You sent the third note to Kit in Cassis to ‘Stop.’ Neely had only sent two of those notes while he was in Nashville doing research. You summoned Kit back to Nashville on the pretext of a Warren Institute meeting. While he was there he went to see his family in Kentucky. You told me yourself you asked him about his project. You just didn’t say you had asked him in person. He told you about those notes. And you helped to terrorize him further. Up and down the line inappropriate,” she said the words slowly for emphasis while calmly shaking her head. “It’s okay, Charles. Really. I understand your motives, even if I am terribly disappointed in your conduct.” She then passed him an envelope and the note.