“Hey, kiddo,” Trixie hailed her. “It’s a little early for any action. If you and your friend want to come back around midnight, we are having a Rocky Horror Picture Show theme tonight. It’s a classic for a reason.”
“Thanks, but I’ll probably be working. Do you have any idea where I would find Victory at this time of day?”
Trixie poured some detergent into the dishwasher and set it going.
“Not here, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t mind waking her up. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.”
“Waking her up?” Trixie laughed. “You mean you don’t know her secret identity? Victory is a dominatrix by night, but a high-powered executive by day. She works at the Tourism Board in uptown Lafayette. You’ll catch her at the office now.”
“What name does she go by there?”
“Victory is the name on her birth certificate, believe it or not. You go and ask for Vicky Merriweather. I’ll text her to expect you. And listen – not everyone knows what she does with her after-hours time, so watch what you say.”
“I’ll be discreet. Thanks, Trixie.”
“Any time. Love to your Grandma.”
Twenty minutes later, Eulalie was accepting a double espresso in a tiny white porcelain cup in Victory Merriweather’s private office.
“You have more questions about Marcel?” Victory seemed resigned to this intrusion on her afternoon. She looked startlingly different to her dominatrix persona, but no less impressive. Her tailored skirt-suit was chic enough to earn praise from Angel herself, and her heels were vintage Miu Miu. Her hair was tied back in a sleek chignon.
“I came here to ask again if you know of anyone who wanted a more permanent arrangement with Marcel? You say that everyone was fond of him, but was there anyone who wanted more? Someone who believed that Stella wasn’t the right wife for him, perhaps? Maybe someone like you?”
Eulalie watched as the realization hit her. Color flooded into her face under the carefully applied makeup. Her body became more rigid than usual, but her eyes never wavered from Eulalie’s face.
“How did you know?”
“Just the way you spoke about him. Your tone when you told me how sure he was that Stella was the love of his life - Stella, who only shared half his life with him. You shared the other half, didn’t you?”
The color began to fade from Victory’s high cheek bones as she got herself under control.
“Not only me. We all shared that side of him, but he was more alive when he was with me than any of the others.”
“I believe you,” said Eulalie. “And yet still he clung to Stella. The question is, how far were you prepared to go to make him change his mind?”
Chapter 24
The silence in the office went on and on. Eulalie was determined not to break it.
While Victory struggled with her answer, Eulalie looked around at the framed posters advertising the attractions of Prince William Island as a tourist destination. The Tourism Board was more strategic than ever about exploiting every opportunity. If most of that was the brainchild of this woman, she was clearly a long-term thinker. Had she turned that strategic brain to bear on the problem of Marcel Faberge?
“I tried to persuade him to leave her,” she admitted. “I tried to convince him he would have been happier with me. And I wasn’t wrong. I know that. He would have been happier. But nothing I said would budge him. He claimed to love me.” Her short bark of laughter was ugly. “He claimed to love all of us. But his heart belonged to Stella.”
“Did you ever visit him at his apartment? It must have occurred to you to try?”
“Oh, I fantasized about it. I imagined turning up at the penthouse, and sweeping Stella away with my spike-heeled boots. But somehow, I never quite had the nerve.”
“What about one of the other women he was seeing? Would one of them have gone to visit him at home?”
Victory’s hands tightened against the desk.
“I doubt it. They knew I was his favorite. Protocol dictated that I should be the first to visit him at home.”
In Eulalie’s experience, protocol was the first thing to go out the window where passion was involved.
“You told the police you were at the club on the night he was murdered. There were witnesses who remember seeing you during the course of the evening, but not …”
“Not specifically at the time that Marcel was murdered,” Victory finished for her. “That’s right. I can’t prove that I didn’t sneak uptown that night to murder Marcel under the guise of playing his favorite game. Mind you, being strangled was his favorite game, and I’m told that’s not what happened to him. So, no, I have no proof. All I know is that I didn’t do it, so there can’t be a shred of evidence linking me to his death. I was very sad to hear that he died, but I’m starting to think it might be the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m finally free”
Eulalie did what she usually did when her interviews were done for the day – she reviewed the evidence. But first she would need to update her murder book. She knew there was physical evidence that she was missing. She would phone the police station and hope that Mrs. Belfast’s softened attitude towards her was still lasting.
“Queen’s Town Police Station, can I help you?”
It was strange to hear a different voice answering the phone. Eulalie glanced at her watch. It was already five o’clock, but it wasn’t like Mrs. B. to knock off duty so promptly.
“May I speak to Mrs. Belfast?”
“I’m afraid she doesn’t work here anymore.”
Eulalie thought she must have misheard.
“What? Of course she does. I spoke to her a few hours ago.”
“Today was her last day. She has retired. We’re having a little going-away party for her this evening.”
Eulalie was almost speechless. Why would a woman so dedicated to her job retire just when she was at the top of her game?
But it was none of her business. She forced herself to refocus.
“I need an updated version of the Marcel Faberge murder book. Could you ask Chief Macgregor to send me anything that might have come in over the last four days?”
The person on the other end of the line asked her to spell Marcel Faberge. Then they asked her to spell her own name, before finally agreeing to pass on the message.
The information Eulalie was waiting for began to appear in her inbox within half an hour. She printed out the new information and slipped it into her copy of the murder book. Then she made herself a pot of strong coffee and sat down to review the evidence.
She was most interested in the items that had been collected at the scene of Faberge’s murder. She laid the photographs out on her desk and tried to make sense of them.
There was the portion of lasagna, neatly wrapped in its paper napkin and accompanied by a bottle of water. There was a photograph of Faberge’s hands, loosely bound in front of his body with soft rope. There was a head and shoulders photograph, showing how the plastic bag had been fitted over his head and carefully taped into place to cut off all oxygen.
Eulalie flipped through the images. There was a photograph of Faberge’s body in its unglamorous, old-man pajamas. There was the tray with the detritus of the last meal he had eaten.
She packed away the photographs from the apartment and laid out fresh ones.
There was the limousine that had taken Stella Faberge and her friends to their charity dinner and auction. The limo’s on-board computer clearly showed that nine minutes passed from the limousine drawing up at the Faberges’ apartment building until the emergence of Stella Faberge screaming from the building. A 911 call was immediately made from the driver’s phone.
There were photographs of Stella and her friends in their fancy-dress finery for the night. Stella Faberge was wearing a 20s-style dress with beading on the bodice, a dropped waist, and ribbon-detail on the skirt. Her shoes were authentic for the era, with a button clasp and a small block heel. Her famous pearls were loo
ped twice around her neck. There was a discreet diamond pin in her hair, which had been professionally styled to suit the era.
Her friends were in similar outfits, each one more authentic and understatedly expensive than the next.
Sometimes, Eulalie thought, the most interesting thing about a photograph was not what it showed but what it didn’t show.
She replaced them carefully into her murder book and took out the photographs from the scene of Henri Popov’s murder. Most of this was new to her. There were close-up photographs of the injury to the side of his head that the medical examiner believed had been used to subdue him. One hard blow had been administered to the temple, one of the weak spots of the human head. Because it had been inflicted before death, there was a great deal of swelling, bruising, and bleeding.
Henri Popov would have been out for the count when the bag was taped over his head and onto his neck. He would have known nothing about it.
Just like Marcel Faberge, he had died of suffocation. Eulalie scrutinized the photographs of the knife sticking out of his chest. It too had been inflicted post-mortem, when the victim’s heart had just stopped. The small amount of bleeding around the wound testified to that. The knife was clearly inferior to that used on Faberge. Fleur’s branded chef’s knife was much sharper and stronger than this cheap object.
Unlike Faberge, Henri Popov had been dressed in his street clothes. He had been wearing a pair of well-worn jeans and a T-shirt under a leather jacket. The leather jacket was unbuttoned, and the knife had penetrated through the T-shirt, just as the chef’s knife had penetrated Faberge’s shabby vest.
Eulalie put all the photographs away and sat staring out into the twilight of Bonaparte Avenue. She thought she knew what had happened now. It was the only thing that made sense. But she would never be able to prove it without more physical evidence and a confession. Deep in thought, she stood up and went to her computer where she googled the garbage collection times for a certain upmarket neighborhood on Upper Lafayette.
Tension gripped her when she saw that the weekly garbage collection was scheduled for that night. This could ruin everything. She phoned Chief Macgregor and nearly sighed with relief when he answered his cellphone for the first time that day.
Speaking quickly, she asked him to get a team together to do some dumpster diving within a three-block radius of the Faberge’s apartment on Upper Lafayette.
The next two hours crept by slowly as Eulalie went over the evidence again and again. She double-checked the notes she had made in her interviews. She had to be right about this. There was no other explanation that fitted all the facts.
Confirmation came at seven that night in the form of a text from Chief Macgregor.
Chief Macgregor: We found them in a dumpster a block and a half away from the Faberge penthouse. Just as you suspected. We should have a preliminary match in under an hour and then we can make an arrest.
Eulalie frowned. That wasn’t exactly what she had been counting on.
Eulalie: That’s great, but please hold off on making the arrest. I need to speak to Stella Faberge first.
It wasn’t hard to persuade Stella to meet her for a drink that evening. As soon as Eulalie mentioned the Versailles Room at the Queen Anne Hotel, Stella said she would be there. It was the premier spot to see and be seen in Queen’s Town – at least in the circles in which Stella moved.
Eulalie got there first and ordered a carafe of lime and soda, knowing that it was her guest’s favorite soft drink. It arrived in Waterford crystal, which was sure to please her too.
“This is such a treat,” Stella said as she sat down and waited for the waiter to pour her a glass of the mild beverage. “I love the Versailles Room. My husband and I came here for one of our first dates.”
“That must be a nice memory.”
Stella’s eyes filled with tears, but she refused to let them fall.
“Memories are fine, but at this stage I’d rather have a body to bury. This period of limbo is very hard on me, and on our children too. They have busy lives of their own, but they are waiting to drop everything and fly out for their father’s funeral. And no one, absolutely no one, can tell me when that’s likely to be.”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you either,” said Eulalie. “But I did want to let you know that there has been a development in the case. It might help you understand why the medical examiner has needed to keep your husband’s body for so long.”
Stella leaned forward, all attention. “What is it?”
“It turns out that your husband didn’t die of suffocation after all.”
“What? Of course he did. The police said so from the beginning. That was what killed him – the plastic bag over his head.”
“No, the medical examiner has established beyond a doubt that your husband died from the knife wound to his chest. The plastic bag didn’t kill him at all. It just depressed his vital signs.”
Stella Faberge’s face turned the color of stale milk. “That’s not true. It can’t be. He was already dead when the knife entered his chest. That’s why there was so little blood. The police told me that from the beginning.”
Eulalie shook her head. “The police were wrong. The plastic bag had reduced your husband’s breathing and heartbeat to such an extent that they would have been undetectable to the ordinary person. There was very little blood because his heart was beating so sluggishly. But it was still beating. Before that knife was plunged into his chest, all one would have needed to do to revive him was remove that plastic bag and give him some air.”
Stella Faberge staggered to her feet, almost knocking the crystal jug over. “He was dead, I tell you. Dead! You didn’t see him through that plastic bag. He was dead.”
“The medical examiner is a hundred percent sure that he wasn’t. She sent her results to a top forensic pathologist in New York, and he agrees. Your husband was still alive. It was the knife that killed him.”
Stella sank to her knees in the middle of the restaurant, as the tears poured down her face.
“It was me. I killed him. I stuck the knife into his chest to make it look like a murder. I was so sure he was already dead. I killed him. I killed my beloved Marcel.”
People were starting to stare. The head waiter took a step towards them, but retreated when Eulalie sent him a warning glance.
“You arrived home from your charity dinner to find your husband passed out on the bed with a bag over his head and his hands tied in front of him?”
“Yes, I tell you,” she moaned. “Yes!”
“You quickly realized he had been indulging in erotic auto-asphyxiation – a hobby of his. But this time he had taken it too far and had passed out before he could free himself. As far as you could tell, he was already dead.”
“Yes,” she sobbed into her hands. “I begged him to stop that stupid game. I knew he would take it too far someday. But the alternative was for him to visit those whores at Trixie’s. He said at least this way he wasn’t being unfaithful to me.”
The anger that Eulalie had detected inside this woman from the beginning came bubbling to the surface.
“Stupid, selfish man! Why couldn’t he see that his whole attraction to that lifestyle was a betrayal of me? I wanted to make his death respectable. I couldn’t bear the thought of the scandal that would result if the police were to find him like that. It would have tainted the rest of my days. My friends would have pitied me. I would have been the object of never-ending gossip and rumor and innuendo. It would have blighted my life. It would have blighted the lives of my children. I had a split-second to think about it. No more than that.”
“So you went to the kitchen and found the chef’s knife and stabbed it into your husband’s chest to make it look as though someone else had been in the apartment with him.”
“Yes, yes. How did you know? How did you figure it out?”
“The first time I interviewed you, you told me you had been wearing long evening gloves to the fancy-dress party. Then
I noticed that they didn’t appear anywhere in the crime scene photographs. And there wasn’t a speck of blood on you. The police found the gloves in a dumpster a block and a half from your apartment. The blood on them matches the blood type of your husband. A DNA match should be confirmed in a couple of days.”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except that I killed him. I was so sure he was already dead. I just wanted to save his reputation, his legacy.” The anger flared again. “Goodness knows he cared little enough for that himself. That disgusting fetish of his ruled his life. I was supposed to turn a blind eye - and I did, for so many years. Then one night I come home from a lovely party and find him with his pants around his knees and a stupid plastic freezer bag over his head. What was I supposed to do – let him ruin my widowhood as well as our marriage?”
“That wasn’t the only thing you tidied up, was it, Mrs. Faberge?”
“What do you mean?”
“You hired three men to warn me off the investigation, and you ordered them to speak Russian.”
“But how do you…?” She caught herself.
“How do I know? It wasn’t hard to figure out. The only person who kept trying to point me in the direction of the Russians was you. You tried it with the police as well. You wanted us to be looking at that side of your husband’s life, rather than his visits to Trixie’s Bar.”
“I had to protect myself, obviously.”
“Obviously. But then the leader of the three men turned up dead - murdered in exactly the same way as your husband. It was a brilliant piece of misdirection, but it didn’t quite work. He was the only one of the three who knew who had hired them. He was the only one who could have pointed us to you.”
The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 1 Page 22
