Chapter Eight
Hotel de Paris
Roxanne
The room service staff delivered an enormous breakfast, easily enough for four people or more, to Roxanne and Casimir’s room at seven o’clock the next morning, even though they hadn’t ordered anything.
A steel commercial-sized barrel of coffee with two carafes for the table was wheeled in directly after the food.
Roxanne flopped back into the sheets. “We’ve only slept for two hours.”
Casimir blinked sleepily, dropping a pillow over his head as he grumbled, “Dammit.”
Casimir had briefed Rox on how Arthur had hacked the casino’s security system the night before, which seemed like an odd skill for the Earl of Severn to have but whatever.
She said, “That’s food for four. Arthur and Gen will be here any minute. I need to brush my teeth.”
By the time Roxanne had made herself halfway presentable, found a fluffy robe on the back of the bathroom door, and stumbled back to the living room, Arthur and Gen had arrived and joined Casimir at the small table near the window that overlooked the casino’s courtyard and fountain.
Roxanne sat in the last empty chair at the small table. Casimir hadn’t bothered to find a robe and instead wrapped one of the hotel’s crisp white sheets around his waist and thrown the excess over his shoulder, toga-style. The black flames from his tribal fire tattoo covered his lightly tanned back and arm and disappeared under the crisp, snowy cotton. He was drinking from a coffee mug, one gulp after another, like a frat boy chugs beer.
As he tipped the mug back, drinking greedily, the tattoo on the underside of his right forearm came into view: three shields, all different patterns, around a Celtic knot.
On Casimir’s arm, the orange shield with a white lion pointed down to his wrist.
Across the table from Casimir, Arthur was wearing a short-sleeved tee-shirt. He had the same tattoo on his forearm, but the design was rotated so that the shield pointing down to his hand was dark blue with three yellow crowns on it.
Roxanne remembered Maxence’s tattoo from the last time he’d shown up in California and Casimir had started shoveling food at him. Max’s tattoo was the same but rotated with the shield bearing a red and white diamond checkerboard pattern pointing downward.
If something had happened to Max, that tattoo might identify his body.
Roxanne didn’t want to think about that, and she didn’t want to think about how devastated Casimir would be, either. When he went downhill, he went down hard.
But Casimir was married to her now, and they’d had their daughter Juliana since the last time Casimir had fallen into a metaphorical black pit. He wouldn’t do that anymore, she hoped. Maybe her love and Juliana’s would preserve him.
Across the table from Roxanne, Gen was cradling a small teacup in her hands with her eyes closed and a serene smile on her face.
Roxanne said to her, “I thought you gave up coffee because of the baby.”
Gen opened her eyes just a little, still giving off every impression of a happy kitty. “Issouf brought me more pregnancy tea.”
“Did Issouf say anything about whether Maxence had gone back to his room last night?” Roxanne asked, reaching for toast.
Casimir stared at her, his bright green eyes wide over the rim of his coffee cup. “You didn’t mention that you guys had found out something.”
Roxanne poured herself a cup of the coffee and started dumping sugar and cream into it. “You never asked. Besides, I had crashed by the time you guys finally got back from the casino. Did you mention it to them?” she asked Gen.
Gen shrugged. “I was asleep. I’m growing a baby. I’m so tired. I forgot to mention it.”
Arthur carefully placed his teacup in the saucer and looked at his wife. “Do tell.”
“Last night after you guys bolted out to the casino to find out whatever it was you were looking for, one of the guys who works here opened the café for Roxanne and me because I was about ready to hurl from not eating anything. Anyway, his name is Issouf, and he makes really, really good pregnancy tea.”
“And?” Arthur prodded.
“Because Casimir here,” Gen pointed a silver spoon at him, “has no sense of operational security, he was waving the name Maxence Grimaldi around last night like a hurricane signal flag. Issouf heard him talking and wasn’t fooled at all by my valiant attempt to call him Maxence Robert.”
Arthur nodded. “It was doomed to failure.”
“Hey!” Casimir set his coffee mug on the table. “Nobody said that we shouldn’t throw his name around. Indeed, he’s kind of famous around here. I thought maybe it would get us some information, and it looks like it did. What did he say?”
Roxanne told them, “He said Maxence was staying in the hotel, and they would check his suite this morning because they thought he hadn’t come back last night.”
Gen said, “When Issouf brought me more tea before we came over here for breakfast, he said that housekeeping had entered his suite this morning to do a welfare check, and it looks like he didn’t come back to the hotel at all last night or this morning. He also said that Maxence left his room about eight o’clock yesterday evening.”
Casimir nodded. “See? It did get us some information. We have a confirmed sighting at eight o’clock last night.”
Arthur’s eyebrows contracted over his silvery eyes in a frown. “Surveillance footage from the casino’s closed-circuit security camera system shows one brief sighting of him in the casino around ten-thirty in the evening. He was standing off to one side of a room in a surveillance shadow, but he poked his head into view once.”
Gen said, “But his security people called us just after eleven and said he’d been missing for four hours.”
Arthur twitched his eyebrows and studied his tea. “Either they had lost him earlier in the evening, or they called us directly after the incident.”
“That’s distressing,” Gen said.
Arthur nodded. “Rather.”
“And how did you find that out?” Roxanne asked him.
Arthur sipped his morning tea before he answered. “A friend.”
Roxanne waited for a follow-up question, but Gen and Casimir didn’t comment on Arthur’s obvious evasion.
There was something about Arthur that Gen knew and Casimir wasn’t asking questions about, and Roxanne wanted to know what it was. “Anything else?”
Arthur was sipping his tea again and returned his cup precisely to the center of its saucer and adjusted the handle to its perfect location. “It was difficult to discern from the footage, but it appears that a mutual friend of ours rushed up to him in the casino. Caz, do you remember Simone Maina from Le Rosey?”
Casimir was pouring a waterfall of coffee into his mug. “Vaguely.”
“She was from Mauritius. Stunningly beautiful, and she ended up marrying Estebe Fournier.”
Casimir looked up at Arthur, startled. The hot coffee reached the very rim of his cup, brimming, and he set the coffee carafe aside just before it overflowed. “Estebe Fournier? Estebe Fournier’s wife rushed up to Maxence in a casino in broad daylight?”
“Just after ten o’clock at night, but in full view of everyone,” Arthur said.
Casimir shook his head. “Right, right. But, as a lawyer, you hear things, you know? You hear things about people.”
Roxanne sipped her coffee and tried to remember anything about Estebe Fournier. Emails and tangential references surfaced in her head. None of them were good references.
Arthur and Gen waited quietly and watched Casimir. Roxanne wasn’t entirely sure that she shouldn’t ask Casimir about this in private.
Casimir stared into his black coffee. “Fournier is involved in some unsavory things. He appears to have financial connections to Russian mob bosses in the Ilyin and Butorin organizations, meaning that both his money and name have been involved in the same projects as theirs. Those guys are involved with illegal pornography in Asia and Europe, which is why we
strongly recommend to our clients that they don’t accept roles in films if those people are producing or financing them. There’s been a rash of unsavory funding sources lately, so we’ve been keeping close tabs on them. We don’t let our clients get mixed up with mob money.”
Arthur nodded. “It’s hard to avoid the black hats sometimes.”
Roxanne mused, “I guess we’re left asking the question of why the wife of a man with ties to Russian mobsters would rush up to Maxence and the two of them vanished together.”
“But why on Earth would he leave with her?” Casimir asked the ceiling. “The Russian mob is trying to take over Monaco right now because they love tax havens. Why would he trust the wife of someone mixed up with them and go somewhere with her?”
“The fact that Maxence was in Monaco might be important,” Gen said, still cradling her pregnancy tea and sipping dreamily. “If something happened to him here, the police could be told not to investigate it.”
Roxanne nodded. Little countries sometimes had the same underhanded politics as small Southern towns, as she knew all too well. “I can’t believe Max has disappeared at the same time his uncle is in the hospital and might not make it.”
“What?” Casimir nearly rose from the table. His makeshift toga slipped, and he grabbed the white sheet as it slid down his six-pack of abs.
Arthur raised one dark eyebrow above his pale gray eyes, and Gen hurriedly set her preggo tea back on the table and said, “I beg your pardon?”
“Yeah. Maxence is related to that musician you represent, right, Caz? Max said he was that one time when he was over at the house. He said he was going to call him up to get tickets to a show. Xan Valentine, I think?”
Casimir grimaced and said, “They’re cousins. He was a few years behind us at Le Rosey.”
“Right,” Roxanne continued. “Xan Valentine emailed us a couple of days ago to ask about some inheritance problems he was anticipating because his uncle Rainier, who had no children of his own, had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke and was on life support.”
Arthur was watching the two of them. “Do you mean to tell me that Alexandre Grimaldi, that Alexandre Grimaldi, Maxence’s cousin, who may or may not have murdered at least one person, is Xan Valentine?” He rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling. “Now, I get it. Valentine. He holds the Valentinois duchy, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, Alexandre Grimaldi is Xan Valentine,” Casimir said with a frown and one eyebrow lifted, like this was obvious. He turned back to Roxanne. “Wait, Alexandre thinks he might get ‘an inheritance?’”
“He wanted to know how to refuse an inheritance,” Roxanne said. “I assumed his uncle got into vacation timeshares or something, and he didn’t want to be saddled with them. I replied that you didn’t do inheritance law and forwarded it to Lallie Antic over in wills and trusts. She’s another lawyer in our practice,” she told Arthur and Gen. “I didn’t think you wanted to stray outside of contract law too much.”
“Rainier Grimaldi is dying,” Casimir said, staring at Arthur.
Arthur had settled back in his chair. He had folded his hands in his lap and had a slight frown on his face. “I asked the security people who met us at the heliport about why we’d received a call when Maxence had only been missing for a few hours. That bothered me. They said Pierre knows Maxence is missing, and Pierre was the one who sent for us.”
Casimir blinked hard and drew in a shaky breath. Roxanne held his fingers more tightly.
Arthur continued, “On the surveillance footage last night, I saw at least five individuals stalking one or the other of them. One group was either following or with Simone Maina. The other appeared to orient on where Maxence was standing in an alcove before she was sighted.”
“Damn it,” Casimir said, running both hands through his thick, auburn hair and combing it back with his fingers, nearly yanking it. “We’re here to find Maxence’s body.”
Roxanne reached over to Casimir and touched his shoulder. He grabbed her hand in both of his and held it to his chest. His heart was thumping under his skin.
Gen extended a hand toward Arthur’s shoulder, too. He didn’t grab her but leaned slightly into her touch.
“This is bad,” Casimir said. “We have to find out where Simone took him.”
“If Pierre has coordinated with the Russian mob to kill him, we’re too late,” Arthur said quietly.
“Maybe we’re not too late,” Casimir argued. “Maybe they just took him somewhere out of the way for a few days until Pierre can lock down his inheritance without his younger brother in the mix.”
Arthur nodded, but he didn’t look up.
Roxanne had become good at reading people, and she could tell that Arthur was humoring Casimir about his hope. He thought Maxence was already dead.
Fear inserted hard, brittle needles into her heart.
“We need to find out what happened to him in any case,” Roxanne said. Her voice was a little shaky. “So we need to find out where Simone Maina went.”
“We didn’t see either of them leave the casino,” Arthur said.
“Do you think they’re still in there?” she asked him.
Arthur looked up at her, thinking, and then shook his head no. His tone was still reserved and resigned. “While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I think that we would have found some trace of him if he had stayed in the casino for three hours. I don’t think Simone could have killed him right there.”
Casimir rocked slightly in his chair, still clutching Roxanne’s hand to his warm chest. Fine, auburn hair softened the stones of his pecs and bricks of his abs under her hand. “Jesus, Arthur,” Casimir said. “When were you going to mention this?”
“I was rather hoping to finish my tea, but it appears we’ll be leaving the hotel sooner than I anticipated.” He began buttering rolls and stacking them on his wife’s plate while he continued his deduction of the events of the previous night. “If Maxence had been murdered in the casino, his corpse would have been found within an hour, surely. Hiding such a large corpse in that small pass-through between the rooms would not have been possible, and security would have investigated an inert person on the floor, assumed to be falling-down drunk. That sort of unsavory inebriate would have been removed to a private room.”
Roxanne nodded. She’d been to several high-society events and venues since she’d married Casimir, and drunks who embarrassed themselves were quietly led away from the party. Yes, security would have removed him if they had thought he was drunk or stoned.
Arthur mused, “Finding a dead body would cause a commotion even in the Monte Carlo casino. So, if Maxence wasn’t killed there and he wasn’t still in there, he must have left somehow. He was inside for less than two hours that we know of, and we did find an image of him on the video monitors during that time. If he hadn’t left, we would have seen him within those three hours.”
“So, if you were Simone,” Roxanne asked them, “where would you take Maxence? What hotel would you stay in?”
Arthur blinked. “Estebe Fournier wouldn’t stay in a hotel. He’s paranoid, and he has an enormous mega-superyacht that I would bet is anchored off the coast. It’s one of the largest in the world. It’s twice the length of a football pitch and looks like an aircraft carrier. She must have been ferried to shore on one of the tenders because that ostentatious monstrosity is far too large to dock at Port Hercule. They would have taken Maxence back to the ship the same way, on one of their landing tenders.”
“And then, they pulled up anchor,” Gen said, frowning. “If I had a captive on board, I’d sail away.”
Arthur nodded. “It might take them some time to get that beast moving, though.”
“Jesus, Arthur,” Casimir said, nearly panting. His heart was flailing in his chest under Roxanne’s hand, and she was still clasping Casimir’s fingers. She held onto him more tightly. He said, “Maxence has been taken prisoner or hostage or whatever. Maxence. I swear to God, if Pierre engineered this, even if
it is just for a few days, I’ll kill him. I will take him apart with my bare hands.”
Roxanne was missing something, but she could tell that Casimir was vibrating with violence. He was ready to punch a wall.
“Yes, Pierre does know just how to turn the knife in someone’s back, doesn’t he?” Arthur mentioned lightly.
Roxanne grew more worried.
Arthur told Casimir, “Don’t sully your hands with him. If that’s the case, I’ll call in favors, and I’ll make sure it hurts. We need to go down to the marina to question people, to see if anyone saw a tender take Maxence and Simone Maina back to Fournier’s yacht last night.”
Chapter Nine
Métropole Shopping Monte-Carlo
Gen
That morning, Gen and Roxanne meandered around the Métropole Shopping Monte-Carlo shopping mall, dubbed the “Billionaire’s Shopping Center,” well before the shops were to open at ten.
Only a few people strolled the mall at that hour, a few early-rising tourists in shorts and baseball hats and some hotel employees getting off the night shift.
Four men wearing dark suits lingered on the benches or leaned against walls, watching from behind mirrored sunglasses.
Someone famous or royal must also be window shopping early, Gen mused, and had brought their private security with them.
Gen told Roxanne, “I do not like that those two buckeroos swanned off to the port without us.”
Roxanne nodded. “It was ungentlemanly to leave us at the hotel while they ran off and searched for Maxence.”
Gen nodded. She had known that Roxanne was solid and would agree with her about the men. “Still, we would have slowed them down.”
Roxanne sighed. “Between my short legs and the earl in there,” she pointed at Gen’s burgeoning belly, “we definitely would have slowed them down. Have you decided what to name him yet?”
One Night in Monaco Page 6
