Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  “He wouldn’t reveal a thing,” Pamela said. “I fed him every line in my repertoire.”

  “Including the one about you being Jamie’s secret married lover?”

  “The man practically laughed in my face.”

  Annie spoke up. “Pamela … may I call you Pamela?”

  “I wish you would,” Pamela said, “Annie.”

  “What Crang is taking his time about telling you, Pamela, is that Jamie Haddon has checked into the Beau Rivage in Nice.”

  Pamela turned her eyes on me.

  “True,” I said.

  “What’s he doing there?” Pamela asked.

  “Same thing he’s been doing for the last year,” I said. “Generating trouble.”

  Pamela opened her patent-leather purse. She took out the gold cigarette case and the gold lighter.

  “Okay?” she said to Annie. Annie said, “Sure.” Pamela didn’t ask my permission. There was no ashtray in the apartment. Annie got another saucer from the kitchen.

  “What is it you think Jamie has been up to?” Pamela asked me. “And if the details are grisly, don’t spare me them.”

  “Cutting out most of the crap,” I said, “Jamie has snookered you. Not just personally. Your family.”

  Pamela blew some smoke in the air. In the bright light of the sunroom, the makeup failed to conceal the purple smudges of sleeplessness under her eyes.

  I said, “You told me at your house you felt Jamie might have led you on.”

  “Inveigled,” Pamela said. “That was the word I chose.”

  “Your intuition wasn’t false.”

  “Jamie admitted all of this to you?”

  “Some of it is drawing my own conclusions,” I said. “But they’re based on Jamie’s conversation with me. He set out to draw you into an affair with the intention of ultimately pulling the rug out. Or maybe that’s pulling the covers off.”

  Annie elbowed me in the side.

  “Am I being too direct?” I asked Pamela.

  Pamela addressed Annie. “It’s all right,” she said. “Let Crang express himself whatever way he wants. I asked for it.”

  Pamela turned back to me. “Jamie wanted to make a fool of me?”

  “Prove you had round heels. That’s a phrase from the man himself.”

  “The son of a bitch.” Pamela mashed her cigarette in the saucer. “When I think —” Pamela stopped. “Oh, shit,” she said.

  “Pamela,” I said, “I don’t know how much more of this you want. Or need. But one point is clear to me. You shouldn’t bother visiting Jamie at the Beau Rivage or any place else. You should go home. Call it a day. Fold your tents.”

  “That’s your advice?” Pamela said.

  “Cut your losses.”

  “No.”

  I shrugged. From the moment Pamela came into the apartment, I’d been aware of something new about her, some quality I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The quality seemed to be antagonism. I knew it wasn’t directed at me.

  “You’ll get a laugh out of this, Crang,” she said. She gave a hard laugh of her own. “As if I didn’t have enough hassle, Archie flew here with me.”

  I heard Annie breathe a little faster.

  “You couldn’t dissuade him?” I said.

  “Archie and I once had a lovely spring holiday along the coast from Nice to Saint-Tropez. When I told him I was coming over for a few days, he insisted we should recapture that spring. If only he knew.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “Jamie Haddon’s name hasn’t crossed his lips in days.”

  “Right there,” I said, “you have another reason for forgetting Jamie. So you can concentrate on your husband.”

  “For God’s sake, Crang, I have to do something about Jamie, even if it’s only to ask him one question. Why? Why did he do this to me?”

  The coffee cups were empty. “There’s no scotch on the premises,” I said to Pamela. “How about a glass of wine?”

  “Any alcohol,” she said. “I’ve been up and upset since five.”

  Annie opened a bottle of Sancerre in the kitchen. She brought it to the table with three glasses.

  “On the subject of why,” I said to Pamela, “Jamie has a chip on his shoulder about your family. Actually the chip is the size of a board.”

  Pamela’s eyes widened. “What he’s inflicted on me is all about resentment?”

  “Greed comes into it too.”

  “Greed? The money? You found out how Jamie is paying for his three months in Europe?”

  “Jamie’s stash isn’t in the three-month category. It’s good for a lifetime. Not coincidentally, that’s about the number of years he has in mind for his leave of absence.”

  “He’s not planning to go back to the trust company?”

  “For Jamie,” I said, “going back to C&G would come under the heading of returning to the scene of the crime.”

  Pamela held my gaze. It was silent in the sunroom. From outside, I heard the toot-toot of one of the tubby old fishing boats that ply the waters around Villefranche.

  “My God, Crang,” Pamela said. She began to shake her head back and forth. “You’re just a bundle of glad tidings, you are.”

  Annie put her hand on my thigh under the table.

  “My God,” Pamela said again. She drank some of her wine. “There’s no end to this. Now it’s Daddy. A fax from his secretary was in my box at the hotel this morning. Daddy’s arriving late tonight.”

  “He’ll need to speak to me,” I said.

  “Is there a way of keeping Jamie’s theft from Daddy?” Pamela asked.

  I shook my head.

  “This will absolutely destroy him,” Pamela drank the rest of the wine in one gulp. “Destroy Daddy, I mean. He adores Jamie. I told you that.”

  “About now,” I said, “Swotty’s feelings about Jamie will be undergoing a comprehensive and probably permanent revision.”

  I didn’t have Pamela’s undivided attention. “Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps if I speak to Jamie, he’ll return the money.”

  “Pamela —”

  Pamela’s voice crossed mine. “May I have more wine?” she asked Annie. Annie filled Pamela’s glass. She added a couple of inches to mine.

  I tried again, “Pamela —”

  “I know your advice, Crang,” Pamela said. She seemed neither angry nor impatient. She seemed unyielding. “I also happen to think, no matter what you tell me, I still have influence with Jamie.”

  I turned my palms up. “Have a shot,” I said.

  “He was my lover for a year.”

  “But you should understand the money involved isn’t all in the family.”

  “Explain.”

  “He stole from the account at C&G of a company called ErnMax.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “How about Luphkin?”

  “Ernest and Maxie...? Oh, I see. ErnMax. Isn’t that tacky. Like something you’d name a boat.” Pamela made a disdainful face. “Typical of those dreadful Luphkins.”

  “It’s their money Jamie put the grab on.”

  “I’m still going to talk to him.”

  “You’ll be talking about a serious sum.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-three million.”

  “Oh.” Pamela sipped more wine. “Well,” she said. She dropped the gold cigarette case and gold lighter into her purse. “It’s a lot, but not an impossible amount of money,” she said. She took a longer swallow of wine. It emptied the glass. “Yes, all right,” she said. She was trying to sound brisk and organized. “About Daddy, I know he has your number here.”

  I looked at Annie.

  “The big guy and I are moving this afternoon,” she said to Pamela. “The Monarch Hotel in Cannes. We’ll be staying at it until the e
nd of the film festival.”

  “The big guy?” Pamela sized me up. “I never thought of you in those terms, Crang.”

  “Well, maybe not that big compared to Archie.”

  “I didn’t know Archie in the days when I didn’t think of you as big.”

  Pamela went downstairs to her car and driver. Annie and I watched her from the sunroom. The car turned the corner on Avenue Denis Semeria and disappeared on the road that led to Nice by way of Villefranche. I took the empty wineglasses into the kitchen. Annie went into the bedroom to pack. Pamela’s glass had deep red lipstick outlines on the rim.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Late Wednesday morning, Annie and I were drinking cappuccino in a restaurant on La Croisette.

  “Up and down here,” Annie said, “the four or five blocks along La Croisette from where we are, it’s where all the festival action goes on. The public-type action anyway.”

  “Yeah, I noticed the girls doing the poses on the beach.”

  “They’re rehearsing for when the paparazzi start snapping.” La Croisette was a broad boulevard that wound along Cannes’s waterfront. The beaches and the Mediterranean were on the south side of the boulevard; on the north side, it was hotels, shops, and cafes. To the east, the Carlton stuck out as the major landmark, a hotel in the confectionary mode. In the other direction, west, was the Palais des Festivals where most of the films were screened. It was a monolithic cement building with a spectacular flight of stairs up from a large plaza and the aspect of a five-dollar-an-hour parking garage. The cafe we were sitting in had directors’ chairs with illustrious movie persons’ names printed across the backs. I could see a Jack Lemmon, a Luis Buñuel, a Vivien Leigh.

  “It’s swell having your company, sweetie,” Annie said, “but shouldn’t you be waiting on Mr. Whetherhill’s phone call?”

  “I’m delaying the inevitable.”

  “I know what you’re doing. But get it over with and you can resume what this trip’s supposed to be all about.”

  “A holiday.”

  “Right.”

  “But I seem to have these lingering doubts about what all the characters are really up to in this little waltz.”

  “Oh, balls.”

  “Balls?”

  “Listen.” Annie was using her sergeant-major delivery. “I’ve got a screening in ten minutes. You go and report in to Swotty and meet me for lunch. Over and out.”

  Annie stood up.

  “Who’s on the back of your chair?” I asked.

  Annie looked.

  “Catherine Deneuve,” she said. “What about yours?”

  I looked.

  “Who the hell’s M.F. Siegler?”

  Annie didn’t have the answer.

  I walked north on one of the little streets that ran out of La Croisette behind another ornate hotel called the Majestic. Cannes’s main shopping street, parallel to La Croisette, was Rue d’Antibes. I sauntered past windows displaying pieces of chocolate shaped like fish, eyeglasses with lime-green frames, a little mink doggie jacket. At a tabac store, I bought the International Herald Tribune, and turned north again.

  I was on the street behind our hotel. The Monarch was new, utilitarian, and nine storeys high. I sat at a table on the sidewalk outside a shoebox-sized cafe on the corner. More delaying of the inevitable. I asked the proprietor for a café au lait and read William Safire’s column in the Trib.

  The Monarch’s main concession to variety in exterior design was the crisscrossed rows of tiny balconies. I had stood on ours the night before looking at the eastern view toward Cap d’Antibes. While I stood on our seventh-floor balcony, Annie stayed in the room. The balcony didn’t accommodate two. Later we switched places.

  I finished with William Safire and looked up at the hotel. A guy was resting his bum against the railing around one of the Monarch’s balconies. From the back, I could see blond hair and a mauve shirt. I counted down. One, two. The guy was on a seventh-floor balcony, close to the middle, but toward the south end. So was the balcony that went with the room Annie and I were in. The guy had a familiar tilt to his head. The sun was in my eyes. I used my left arm to shade it out. The guy was Jamie Haddon.

  I crossed the street and went in the Monarch’s service entrance. The keys to the rooms were kept in little numbered boxes in back of the check-in desk. Opposite the boxes, there was a swinging gate that led behind the counter. Box 716 was empty. One assistant manager was on duty. He was at the other end marking something on a map for two middle-aged Americans in Ralph Lauren get-ups. I waited until the assistant manager had finished.

  “Did anyone come to the desk for the key to 716 in the last little while?” I asked.

  The assistant manager looked over his shoulder at the boxes. “You are Mr…?”

  “Crang.”

  “Of course, Mr. Crang.” He had a finicky manner, and he was wearing a faultless dove-grey suit. “I believe the lady took her key when she went out. Ms. Cooke? And you have yours?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “That accounts for both,” the assistant manager said triumphantly. “Did you require a third key, Mr. Crang?”

  “No thanks.”

  The assistant manager smiled me away from the desk. I refrained from telling him I had watched Annie hand in her key at the counter an hour earlier. Might shake his faith in the Monarch’s security system.

  The hall on the seventh floor was empty and silent except for the sporadic whir of the elevators. A room-service tray from Annie’s and my breakfast lay on the floor outside 716. I put my key in the lock and opened the door fast. The room had a desk with a lamp on it, a chair for the desk, a double bed, and enough manoeuvring space for two people who were very fond of one another. Jamie Haddon wasn’t in the room. I looked in the closet and bathroom. He wasn’t in them either. The second key to the room sat on the desk.

  Outside, on the street, voices were raised in a faint babble that conveyed something urgent. The glass door to the balcony was pulled back. I walked over and leaned out.

  A man on the neighbouring balcony was looking down. He was a big guy with sandy hair and a sandy mustache. He had on white shorts and was bare from the waist up.

  “G’day then,” he said to me with an Australian accent. “You talk English?” he asked.

  “It’s my best language.”

  The big guy had his muscular forearms folded over the balcony railing. One forefinger was pointing down. “Poor bloke did a right job on himself,” he said.

  Jamie Haddon was sprawled face-down on the sidewalk. From above, I saw blond hair, mauve shirt, and splotches of dark blood. A couple of dozen excited people were keeping their distance from the body. My stomach gave a lurch.

  “He came from up there,” the Australian said. He turned his glance upwards. “Off the bleeding roof.”

  “You saw him, uh, fall?” I asked. My voice had a squeak in it.

  “Nah,” the Australian said. “But it’s the only answer, isn’t it then? The bugger didn’t come out of my room. Or yours. Or any of those others.”

  I looked along the rows of balconies. On some, people were standing and staring down. A woman had a hand over her mouth. The glass doors on the balconies that didn’t have people on them were shut tight.

  “You must be right,” I said.

  An ambulance came from the bottom of the street. The sound of its siren bounced off the walls of the buildings. By now the crowd around Jamie had doubled in size. Two men got out of the ambulance and they stood over Jamie talking like two guys with minor problems in logistics. One had his hands on his hips. The other went back to the ambulance and dragged out a large black sheet. He draped it over Jamie.

  “Waiting for the coppers,” the Australian said. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Or maybe that was just a national characteristic; Australians always sound like
they know what they’re talking about.

  On cue, two police vehicles careened around the corner at the top of the street. One was a sedan, the other was an oddly shaped van, tall and skinny, and both had their sirens on high. They stopped on either side of the ambulance. A total of eight policemen piled out of the vehicles. One wore a suit, the others were in uniform. Once they hit the pavement, none of the policemen seemed in a hurry.

  “Fuck-all’s likely to happen for the next half hour,” the Australian said. His voice was blunt with certainty.

  “It won’t?”

  “Ever met a French copper who didn’t like to natter?”

  “Never met any kind of French cop.”

  “Take my word, these blokes are champions at nattering. Bleeding time-wasters, that bunch.”

  The big Australian straightened up and stretched his arms. “Well, how ‘bout it?” he said to me. “You and your mate want to go downstairs for a shout?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Few beers in the pub.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I’ve got to see a lady about a change in plans.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Annie was on the steps of the Palais holding an armful of schedules and brochures. The two guys she was talking to with great animation carried the same loads of paper. I recognized one of them, Jay Scott, the Globe and Mail’s movie critic. Annie waved me a big greeting. I waited over by a bust of Georges Pompidou. Annie kissed Jay on both cheeks and shook hands with the other guy.

  “Why the long face, sweetie?” Annie asked me.

  “I’m about to rain on the parade.”

  “Oh, oh, now what?”

  I took Annie’s arm and steered her across the plaza toward the water. A line of metal chairs faced into the bay. Further out, inside the sea wall, a seventeenth-century wooden ship sat at anchor. It looked like the kind of boat that pirates sailed when they plundered the Seven Seas.

  “Somebody pushed Jamie Haddon off our balcony at the hotel,” I said.

  “Our balcony? Pushed!”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Well, the seventh floor, I guess so.”