Murder in the South of France, Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

Chapter Twenty-four

  Once at the train station in Paris, tired and unwilling to decipher the bus schedule that would take her the rest of the way to her hotel, Maggie grabbed a taxi and handed the driver the address of her hotel on the Left Bank. The driver, a large, malodorous woman lolling on a seat cover made of rolling wooden beads, seemed irritated either with Maggie’s lack of bags or, perhaps, her destination. At any rate, she snorted continually throughout the long drive to the Hotel de L’Etoile Verte on Rue Tournon. Maggie tipped generously and left the taxi with relief.

  The French windows in her room opened outward onto the roof, with Paris pigeons and a melancholy view of more Paris roofs. Spotting the unmistakable dome of the Pantheon from her window, Maggie felt the energy return to her after her trip.

  Leaving her hotel, she turned north onto Rue Racine and crossed to the area’s other large boulevard, Saint-Michel. Along the way, Parisians appeared to be preparing for their midweek dinners with last minute afternoon shopping expeditions. Maggie wasn’t surprised to see that most of those preparations seemed to involve food: the cooking of it, the selling of it, carrying it, and eating it—all on the busy, bustling streets in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

  She continued down the Boulevard Saint-Michel until she reached the Seine, where she stopped and stared across the river. She had passed very near to Elise’s first apartment, but had deliberately avoided going there. Not yet, she told herself. From the Seine, she turned east and walked parallel to the city’s great river until she came to her destination, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

  The cathedral loomed magnificent and imposing before her, its twin towers as familiar and reassuring to her as if she’d seen them every day in Atlanta. Her mother had taken her and Elise to Mass here as children.

  Now, standing in the square before the cathedral, surrounded by the ubiquitous lavender sellers, pickpockets and tourists, Maggie felt the same majesty and magnificence reaching down to her. She settled on a cold stone bench on the perimeter of the square and watched the famous church and its patrons for nearly an hour before she realized that, aside from her early morning airport croissant, she’d had nothing to eat all day.

  Circling Notre-Dame, Maggie walked westward again, this time on the Quai de la Tournelle Montebello until she reached Rue Dauphine. She took a seat at a small café called La Place Americaine. She ordered the fixed-price menu of paté and roast beef with pommes frites and the house wine, which turned out to be a flinty dry white that tasted like bouquets of flowers, without the sweetness. To her relief, the waiter was pleasant and friendly.

  She looked out onto the street as she ate her lunch and wondered which of the shops was Chez Zouk. The address she had was 11 Rue Dauphine in the Latin Quarter. She guessed that Zouk’s boutique must be only a few blocks from Elise’s old flat here in Paris. Maggie had an image of Elise walking home from art classes and stopping in at Zouk’s shop. Probably caters to the bohemian-artsy crowd, Maggie figured. Elise’s style was definitely not Ellen Tracy.

  After lunch, Maggie headed north on Dauphine until she reached the Seine where the Pont Neuf crossed over to the Quai de Louvre and the Right Bank. The wind had begun to pick up and she felt the rain in the air, although it wouldn’t fall just yet. The river looked wild and angry. A block further south on Dauphine, she found the shop. It was small and looked quite old. The small display window showed antique jewelry amid dark cashmere drapes and sweeping skirts. Nice stuff, Maggie thought. A little on the black and spooky side, maybe, but then, that’s Paris. A sign over the door read Chez Zouk.

  The door opened before she had a chance to reach for the doorknob and Madame Zouk stood in the doorway. She was tall and slim, dressed in black with gray stockings and black velvet slippers. A thin web of black velvet caught her blonde hair up and carried it gracefully at the nape of her long neck. Michelle Zouk’s eyes were dark and almond-shaped, her mouth full yet not too large for her delicate and finely boned face. She made Maggie think of a beautiful gypsy fortuneteller.

  “Enchanté, Maggie.” Zouk spoke in a light, musical voice. She smiled and gestured for Maggie to enter. “You had a good trip from Nice?”

  “Yes, thanks.” Maggie stepped into the shop and noticed that Zouk locked the door when she slipped in behind her .

  “So we are not being disturbed,” she said. “If you will follow me?”

  She led Maggie to a back room, where a table had been set for tea. The room was obviously used as a sort of sitting room, with a dark red velvet loveseat trimmed in tassels and ropy fringe parked in front of an antique coffee table.

  Zouk gestured for Maggie to sit and she put her hand on the teapot. “You do not look like your sister.”

  “I know. Nor any of the rest of my family. I’m the changeling.”

  “Adopted?”

  “No, no. Just a throwback to an ancestor nobody looks like anymore.”

  Maggie took a sip of tea from the fragile teacup, its roses long faded from the translucent china rim. She waited and watched the French woman. It didn’t seem odd to her at all to discover this exquisite creature was a dear friend of her sister. Elise, who had grown up in old-South Atlanta with white-glove parties and friends whose fathers were either colonels or reverends. And although Elise may have rebelled against the gentility and sterility of a Southern childhood, she’d nonetheless lived it.

  “Your sister was my dearest of friends,” Zouk said, sharing a sad smile with Maggie. “Une amie de coeur, you are familiar?”

  Maggie nodded. Friend of the heart.

  “She lived near here. Do you know that?”

  “I did.”

  “Ah, but you want to hear what it is you do not know.”

  “Madame Zouk,” Maggie said, taking a long breath. “I am trying to find out who killed her.”

  Their eyes met and locked. Zouk’s long lashes fluttered briefly.

  “Please, call me Michelle.”

  “I know this must feel very strange to you for me to turn up like this, but there are a lot of holes in my sister’s life that, if I could fill them, might help me find out why she died.”

  “And you are looking for help from me to fill the holes.”

  “Well, if anybody can tell me what she was doing the last year, I figured it would be you.”

  “Yes, I can tell you.” Michelle folded her hands in her lap, as if that was all she was prepared to say.

  “Did you know I came to Cannes in April and identified a body as hers?”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Well, the body had been in the water too long to really identify it by its face, so I confirmed it based on the fact that Elise’s bracelet was found on the body.”

  “Her charm bracelet?”

  “Yes! You know about her bracelet? When I asked Elise how it was found on an unidentified body fished out of the Cannes harbor, she said she thought she had sold it to someone named Delia. You know, for drug money.”

  Michelle looked like she had been slapped. Her hand flew to her face and her eyes filled with tears.

  Maggie put her teacup down with a clatter. “I am so sorry, Michelle! I thought you…you must have known that Elise…”

  “Yes, yes. She was an addict. I knew.” Michelle took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “It’s just that the last time I saw Elise, she was wearing the bracelet.”

  “Oh?”

  “So if she sold it for drugs it would have been after that.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “In January.”

  “In Cannes?”

  “No, my season does not begin down there until April. We met in Lyons.”

  “In Lyons? What was she doing there?”

  Michelle gave a heavy sigh and looked out the doorway to the large picture window at the front of the shop. From there, she could just see the movement of shoppers as they walked down the street.

  “I was older than Elise, but we were both artistes in our ow
n ways. We met when she came into my shop one day after her art classes. When she was still living in Paris. We became friends. She wanted so much to be French, but it was her straightforwardness that I found so beguiling.”

  “She shot from the hip,” Maggie suggested.

  “Exactement. To be so beautiful and so honest is an intoxicating combination.”

  “Except she didn’t always tell the truth.”

  Zouk laughed. “No, of course not. I wasn’t talking of honesty in that way. Elise had many secrets and some of them were very bad. But we resonated, she and I.” She glanced at Maggie to see her reaction. “I loved her very much.”

  “And Gerard?” Maggie prompted.

  “When Elise met Gerard,” Zouk said, her cheeks darkening in anger, “everything started to die for her. We saw less and less of each other until, poof! Nothing. He moved her to his apartment—filthy pigsty!—in Montmartre. She would write me. We lived in the same city, but she would only write me!” Michelle’s eyes were wide and indignant. “Then, he dragged her and the child to the south.”

  “You met Nicole?”

  Michelle got up to rummage through the drawer of a bureau standing against a wall in the cramped little room. She returned holding a small photograph. She examined it carefully and then handed it to Maggie. Maggie felt her heart squeeze to see Elise, a few years younger and smiling sweetly at the camera. In her lap was eight-month-old Nicole, a thin and pallid baby with large eyes and dark hair. Maggie scrutinized the baby’s tiny face in an attempt to see a resemblance to the Nicole now living in Atlanta.

  “May I keep this?”

  Michelle sat back down. “Of course.”

  “I’m particularly interested in Elise’s whereabouts earlier this year,” Maggie said, tucking the photo carefully into her billfold. “Dubois filed a missing persons report on her when I have every reason to believe he knew she wasn’t missing at all.”

  “Why would he do that?” Michelle frowned.

  “Let’s just say he needed an inconveniently dead body to be identified as Elise for his own purposes.”

  “Incroyable.” Michelle tossed a small wadded-up paper napkin at the tea tray. “Monsieur Dubois is a swine and a jackal.”

  “We’re on the same page there, but can you tell me why he felt comfortable reporting her missing?”

  Michelle nodded. “It is because he knew that for several months this year she ceased to exist.”

  “Ceased to exist? What are you talking about?”

  “Elise was in a rehabilitation sanatorium in Lyons under a false name.”

  “What for?”

  “To kick the drugs.”

  “You paid for that?”

  Michelle nodded miserably. “Dubois knew she was there. So, of course, he knew it was safe to report her missing. But he must have come for her. All I was told was that she checked herself out.”

  “And I guess hearing that she sold her bracelet pretty much tells you she never got clean.”

  “Or if she did, it didn’t last long when Gerard Dubois showed up again.”

  “I really would like to get this scumbag. Even if he wasn’t the one who strangled her, he was definitely the one who killed her.”

  By the time Maggie had walked back to her hotel, she was too tired to eat. She had bought a jambon crepe at one of the outdoor kiosks, but it sat uneaten on her bedside table. Laurent hadn’t called all day, but that was just as well. She was exhausted and her mind was spinning from all the things she had learned from Michelle.

  She showered and fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

  The next morning after breakfast, Maggie dropped off her room key at the front desk and left the hotel, heading north again toward Notre-Dame. There seemed to be even more people out this sunny but cool Thursday morning, and Maggie picked up her pace to join them in their hustle. Their hurry and urgency was in sharp contrast to the numerous cafés filled with happily idle coffee drinkers arguing politics and philosophy. As she hurried along, Maggie had another twinge of missing Laurent and wished they were just another couple mooning over each other and a cup of café au lait at one of the crowded tables.

  She hesitated when she reached Notre-Dame and had to fight the impulse to again take a seat on one of the stone benches in the cathedral gardens facing the Seine. The roses, in tender colors of pink and violet, were still in full bloom in early October, and the air felt cool and invigorating. Even at eight in the morning there were lovers strolling the sidewalk bordering the Seine, and solitaires reading L’Express and munching on crusty baguettes. Maggie forced herself to move on. Hurrying across the Seine on Pont St-Louis, she spotted a Metro sign and jogged down its steep stairs to board the train to Montmartre.

  Maggie emerged from the underground station and entered a seedy world of cheap strip shows, porn cinemas and sex shops. Although still wearing its late-nineteen twenties Bohemian artist’s garb of dark and sooty grays, Montmartre had long since become mired in the oily underworld of drug lords and panderers. The street she came out on was filthy. The few reputable shops sold leather-studded costumes or pizza by the slice, and Ne Rodez Pas signs hung from most doorways. No loitering.

  As Maggie wandered through the squalid avenues, she could see the milky-white dome of the Basilica Sacré-Coeur peeking between the high apartment buildings. Her mother had taken her and Elise to Mass there as well. She wondered if Elise had ever taken her own daughter there.

  Turning away from Sacré-Coeur, Maggie headed west up Rue de Steinkerque, passing two-penny instant portrait artists and paper etchers snipping out a living doing die-cut portraits for the few brave tourists gripping their cameras and fanny bags. Noisome, shabby hucksters flapped the air with “original” Montmartre landscape watercolors and etchings. Maggie kept her eyes on the next street block and trudged ahead.

  She turned north onto Rue des Martyres and continued until it dead-ended into the Rue des 3 Frères, stopping only once to check the address on the slip of paper that Michelle had given her. There, at the intersection, was a small, dilapidated structure held together by what paint had not yet peeled off and the oil and grit of the neighborhood. L’Hôpital de Martyrs. This is where Elise had given birth to Nicole.

  Once inside, Maggie had the feeling she was stepping back in time. The velvet, buttery smell of wood oil permeated throughout the reception room. So strong and pleasant was the scent, in fact, that it succeeded in blotting out any aural hint of medicine or antiseptics in the small hospital. The loose wooden-slatted floor was polished to a satiny gleam. The admitting desk was as tall and forbidding as was the severe-faced nun who manned it. Her eyes were small and unfriendly, and her broad face, though smooth and unlined, was still obviously the face of an old woman.

  “Bonjour,” Maggie said as she approached the woman behind the desk. “Est-ce que je vous demande une question, s’il vous plait?” May I ask you a question?

  The nun, dressed in blue-black capes and a starched white headdress, looked at Maggie as though she did not understand.

  Maggie berated herself for not taking Michelle up on her offer to come along and interpret. She had been so keen to do this alone, almost as if the errand was a crusade for a final understanding of her sister. Maggie took in a determined breath.

  Before she could continue, the nun replied, “Yes, of course.”

  “Oh, thank God, you speak English.” Maggie said, smiling at the face of the stone wall in a habit. “Might I see the files for any American patients giving birth six years ago?”

  The nun looked away from Maggie and flipped through a large book on the desk. Abruptly, the sister left her post altogether, leaving Maggie standing on tiptoe on the other side of the counter not knowing whether she was heard and understood or dismissed. She noted there was very little activity in the waiting room area.

  A young mother sat with her baby, both gazing as if hypnotized out the front window. The waiting room chairs were rickety and wooden, but brutally p
olished and oiled and topped with handmade green velveteen cushions. Maggie got a mental image of a whole convent full of women sitting around stitching green velour pillows for the hospital waiting room, when it was certainly cheaper to buy pre-fab foam seat pads. Her eyes met those of the young mother.

  After a few moments, the stern-faced sister returned. She looked directly at Maggie. “Which year?”

  “Two thousand five,” Maggie said.

  The nun slapped a piece of paper and a pencil down on the counter and Maggie scrawled out the date and under that, the name “Newberry.” The woman looked at it and then twisted on her heel and disappeared again.

  Maggie turned to look around her and noted the bored young woman in the waiting room was now watching her openly.

  Within moments the nun was back with a folder. She indicated that Maggie was to take the folder to a straight-back wooden chair to the immediate left of the counter, where the nun would be able to keep her in sight at all times. Maggie settled into the uncomfortable chair, smiling gratefully at the sister.

  She opened the folder and found only one slip of paper inside. It was Nicole’s birth certificate. It read: Né l8 May. Mere: Elise Stevenson Newberry. Pere: inconnu. Unknown. Maggie felt a surge of anger at Gerard’s refusal to be accounted as the father and then corrected her emotion. The last thing any child would want was a document that linked her to that creep. Her face lightened into a smile. This meant that Gerard had no legal claim to Nicole!

  In the middle of the certificate was the full name of Elise’s baby, handwritten no doubt by one of the nuns, in full-flowery scroll: Margaret Nicole Newberry. Maggie stared at the words. Elise had named the baby after her.