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

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  He stood in the elevator for a moment, then stepped clumsily out and stood in front of her. Maggie could smell the alcohol rising from his rumpled clothes like steam. He looked at her through rheumy eyes as though he didn’t know who she was.

  But he knew.

  “So, you’re back,” he slurred, blasting her with a vaporized mixture of cheap wine and garlic.

  She made a face and took a step away from him.

  “Whatza matter?” He leaned toward her in a threatening sway, as if he might topple over onto her at any moment. “You are in Paris to see me, non?” He licked his lips and grinned obscenely. “I am here.”

  Maggie was immediately visited by a vision of awful similarity: Laurent standing in her mother’s garden, his hands open in a disarming gesture, his eyes full of love and relief to see her.

  So, I am here.

  She pulled her eyes away from the tottering, malodorant wretch blocking the lift doorway. As she did, she realized what she had known all along—Gerard was the key. He was always the pivot around which all the pain and confusion spun.

  “Over here,” she said to him, jerking her head to indicate the lobby.

  “You are afraid of me, little peony?” Gerard sneered, but he followed her.

  Maggie walked to the worn settee in the lobby and sat. He heaved himself down next to her.

  “Madame Zouk told me where to find you,” he said, his foul breath blasting into her face.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “How are you thinking I am finding you, eh? The bitch told me where you were!” He smiled, displaying yellow teeth.

  She willed herself to appear more in control than she felt. She took a long breath and exhaled slowly. “Did you kill my sister?”

  He shoved his face close to hers but she did not retreat. His pupils were the size of pinpricks. “I will answer your questions, but you must pay me twenty thousand euros. Tonight.”

  “Sure. Fine. I’ll go to the ATM right after we talk. Let’s start with an easy one. Who was the body I identified in Cannes?”

  Gerard looked at her suspiciously and then shrugged. “A friend of mine who had an accident.”

  “Nadia Golchek.”

  He blinked at her with surprise. “How do you know that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. How did she die?”

  “I told you. An accident.”

  “I saw the bullet hole, Gerard. I’m prepared to give you the money you want, but I need accurate answers to my questions.”

  “We were drunk. It was unintentional.”

  “Unintentional.”

  “What difference does it make? The case is closed. The police don’t care anyway.”

  “I thought it was her father not the police that was the real worry.”

  Gerard’s eyes flashed at her in wary fear. “He believes she is still missing.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure after all this time he knows she’s dead, Gerard. He just doesn’t have proof. I’m also pretty sure people like that don’t care about having all the facts before they reach out to the guilty party.”

  Gerard began to sweat.

  “So you and Nadia got drunk and somehow she got shot in the head—”

  “We were playing Russian roulette.”

  “Charming. And then you remembered who she was and how her dying on your hands was probably going to get you killed, so you put Elise’s bracelet on her, dumped her in the harbor, waited three days so she’d be good and unidentifiable, then called in a missing persons on Elise.”

  He looked at her with amazement. “C’est ça.” That’s right.

  “And when they wouldn’t let you formally ID her, you called Roger.”

  “I called someone who knew him.”

  I wonder who that might be.

  “That bastard, Bennett! He stole my money! I will rip his entrails from his body and make him eat them in front—”

  “You’re pissed off because he took your game a step further by selling my family a fake kid in place of Nicole and you didn’t think to do it. Yeah, it sucks to be stupid.”

  “I will kill him.”

  “Which brings me to the twenty thousand euro question.” Maggie swallowed hard. “What happened to Nicole?”

  “She is here in Paris. For a thousand euros I will bring her to you.”

  “Cut the crap, Gerard.” Her hands tingled with her loathing. “I know the real Nicole is dead. I want to know, did you kill her?”

  His eyes locked with hers. Then, his shoulders slumped forward and Maggie had an awful moment when she thought he was going to weep.

  “It was an accident,” he said. Maggie willed herself not to breathe.

  He pulled out a crushed pack of Gitanes and stuffed a bent cigarette into his mouth. She waited while he lit it.

  “I was drunk. She fell off the boat sometime in the night.”

  Maggie listened to his words, her heart pounding in her chest.

  “Nicole and I lived on a little boat after I took her away from Elise.” He blew a smoke ring at Maggie. “One night, she is falling over the side.” He made a graceful gesture with his hands to indicate the soft fall of Nicole over the side of the boat. “Pshhht!” He simulated the sound of a small weight spilling into the stagnate water. “In the morning we are finding her little body.” He dragged harshly on the filter. “It was very sad.”

  “Did Elise know?” Maggie began to feel cold and distanced from the lobby at the L’Etoile Verte, as if what she was hearing was from a television show, something unreal and unrelated to her. Her mind fought to stop the image of the four-year-old girl sinking to her death in the night-dark Mediterranean Sea with no one to know or care.

  He made an abrupt gesture, as if waving away a fly. “She did not ask.”

  Maggie shook her sadness away. No time for that, she told herself fiercely. “You were at my apartment the afternoon Elise was killed. Do you admit that?”

  “Of course. I came to remind her she was to get money for me. Drug addicts are so forgetful.”

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  “I followed you when you drove away with her.”

  Maggie felt her skin crawl. “Why should I believe you did not kill her?”

  “Mademoiselle,” he said sarcastically, his tongue flicking out over the end of his cigarette like a snake’s. “How would it help me for there to be two bodies identified as Elise Newberry, eh? You think I’m stupid?” He held Maggie’s gaze.

  “Well, why did you bring her home in the first place? I mean, as soon as you did we knew the body we had wasn’t hers.”

  “I did not care what you thought.”

  “I bet you figured you needed to get Elise out of France before somebody found out she wasn’t really dead. Which would make somebody wonder who really was dead. The cremation of Nadia was a nice touch, by the way.”

  He shrugged. “Paperwork mistakes happen all the time.” He dug in his jeans pocket and pulled out a wax paper packet half the size of a deck of cards. He placed it on the sofa between them.

  “What’s that?” Maggie looked at the packet, then reached out to pick it up.

  He grabbed her wrist and held it firmly. “It’s extra.”

  She wrenched her hand away, forcing her dinner to stay in her stomach. Gingerly, she picked up the little packet. Inside was Elise’s gold charm bracelet. A pony, a tiny artist’s easel, a piano, a miniature book. Both girls had been given charm bracelets when they turned ten. Maggie lost hers on a Girl Scout camping trip the following year. Their mother had added to Elise’s bracelet over the years until Elise moved away.

  The gold-braided bracelet made a soft tinkling sound in Maggie’s hands, every loop filled with a tiny, bobbing gold charm. She kept her eyes on the bracelet. “Where did you get this?” Her voice sounded hoarse, full of emotion even to her.

  “A friend of mine returned it to me.”

  A friend at the Medical Exa
miner’s office.

  Maggie looked at the bracelet. How was it possible that Elise had kept the bracelet? Through crack houses, whorehouses, and slums. All these years. And something so bourgeoisie at that. A blatant reminder of her boring, civilized Southern past.

  She looked at Gerard, her fingers closing loosely around the packet of charms. “Why did you take it from her?”

  He smiled. “Because it was important to her. She is always loving her beautiful bracelet. It is from when she was a little girl, non?” He grinned at Maggie, as if expecting her to agree with him.

  She tossed the bracelet back into his lap. “Keep it.”

  “Only five hundred more,” he said, frowning at her.

  “I don’t want it.”

  Gerard looked at her with a stunned expression on his face. “I cannot take less than five hundred euros!”

  “Sell it on the street. Wear it yourself. I think we’re done here.”

  “Mademoiselle.” His face turned into a wheedling mask of pathos and urgent need. He placed the bracelet delicately on Maggie’s knee. “Three hundred euros.”

  “Let me ask you, Dubois, did you ever hit my sister? I mean, not that it matters. You did every other imaginable thing to her.”

  “I...no, I did not hit—”

  “Liar!”

  “I am not lying!”

  Maggie stood abruptly, causing the charms to tumble to the rug in a muffled jangle. “You beat my sister, pimped her, got her hooked on drugs and now you expect me to pay you?”

  “You promised you would pay me!”

  Whatever drugs he’d done prior to coming to the hotel were obviously on the verge of kicking in. Gerard sat transfixed, staring at Maggie as she stood over him.

  “Let me guess. You need money to leave France to escape a certain Russian father who wants to nail your gonads to the top of the Eiffel Tower.” She glanced at the hotel desk. The clerk appeared totally disinterested.

  “Oui, mademoiselle.” Gerard scooted himself closer to Maggie. “It could mean my life.”

  He closed his eyes softly and seemed to go into a trance. Maggie bent down, picked up the bracelet and slipped it into her purse. Gerard’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Time to go,” she said to him.

  “Eh?” He snorted and looked around the lobby and seemed to have trouble focusing.

  “You need to go, Gerard. I’ve called some friends of Monsieur Golchek’s to give you a ride home because I think you’re a little over your limit.”

  He looked at her in confusion and mounting panic. “Golchek?” He struggled unsteadily to his feet and took a few hesitant steps toward the door. The night clerk looked up from his magazine.

  “You are giving me my money,” Gerard said loudly.

  “What I’m giving you, you worthless cretin, is a five-minute head start on the man who’s coming for you. Comprenez-vous?”

  He cursed her, but turned and ran in the direction of the front door. “I will hurt you!” he shrieked as he struggled to wrench open the door and disappeared into the night.

  The clerk gave Maggie a sour look and turned back to his magazine. The clock over his shoulder showed it was nearly two in the morning. Maggie walked to the elevator and punched the up arrow.

  Now I can leave. I have talked to the devil himself and learned every ugly, useless answer to all my stupid, useless questions.

  And I still don’t know who killed Elise.

  As she stepped inside the elevator, the exhaustion of her day bearing down on her, her thoughts turned back to the other little Nicole. The one who died without her maman on a warm summer’s night in the South of France.

  Maggie closed her mind to the image. She would put her grief away in the same little box where she kept thoughts of Elise and push it to the back of her mind, to be brought out and dealt with later—later when she was stronger. When she wasn’t so tired.

  Much later.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Well, I didn’t want to say anything, Maggie, but I thought you should know.”

  Maggie sat in the lobby of her hotel, her bag at her feet, a cup of coffee on the table in front of her. She hadn’t slept much the night before.

  How many times had she seen that tattoo on Laurent? She had always just assumed it was a European thing. The design meant nothing to her. It wasn’t colorful or pretty, just a small mysterious graphic she had traced with her fingers in languid moments in bed, probably hundreds of times.

  “It doesn’t matter, Gary. I guess you and everyone else were right on that score. I didn’t know him very well.”

  When had she started referring to Laurent in the past tense?

  “How was the memorial service?” she said, switching the subject.

  “It was nice. I read a poem by Houseman. Deirdre’s brother gave the eulogy. It was sad. Everybody cried.”

  “I should have been there.”

  “The trip not what you expected?”

  “Not at all. Turns out I solved the mystery of who murdered the woman I thought was Elise in Cannes. Only trouble is, I’m not one inch closer to figuring out who actually killed Elise.”

  “Sorry, Maggie. But, hey, on a brighter note, the movers come in two weeks, and I’m meeting a guy in Savannah tomorrow who’s interested in buying me out of the business. Don’t worry. You’ll be brought in on all that when it comes together. We land in Auckland the week after that. Haley is thrilled.”

  “And Darla?”

  “Darla is committed to our going. Trust me.”

  “Got a job yet down there?”

  “Got a bunch of interviews, and they’re as good as got. New Zealand’s economy has been in bad shape for a while now, but their advertising community is pretty healthy. Plus, they respect outsiders, probably more than they should. They put Yanks and the Brits in all their top spots.”

  “So, you’re expecting to do well on the job market scene.”

  “I am,” he said briskly.

  “Gary, look, I’m not indicting you for moving to New Zealand, so I would appreciate it if you would ditch the defensive tone.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay? But I have to have a certain mindset to pull this thing off. I can’t relax or the whole thing will fall apart. And, honestly, no, Darla is not leading cheers from the sidelines. She’s going to New Zealand with the same attitude the penal colonists went to Van Dieman’s Island.”

  “And you still believe—”

  “With my whole heart.”

  Maggie sighed. From where she sat, she could see a couple of workmen across the street working to restring a shop’s awning. One of the men reminded her of Laurent. He stood on the bottom rung of the ladder and yanked on a long rope pulley. She watched the gray striped awning flap open over the metal scaffolding.

  “Well, that’s important,” she said. “Do what you gotta do, Gary.”

  “I fully intend to.”

  After she hung up, Maggie dialed Michelle’s number, noticing that two more calls had come in from Laurent. Just seeing the calls—both with voice messages that she deleted—glaring at her from her phone screen made her want to throw up, but also made her want to hear his voice.

  To guard against the impulse of answering the next time he called, she knew it was best if she shut her phone off until she was back in the States. Surely, she would feel stronger and better able to speak to him then?

  When her call to Michelle went to voice mail, she hung up and dialed Jack Burton’s number. He answered on the first ring.

  “Burton,” he said abruptly.

  “This is Maggie Newberry.”

  She heard the overly patient sigh across the line. “Yes, Miss Newberry.”

  “I was just wondering if you had any news for me about…anything.”

  “As you know, I was not assigned to the case involving your coworker and I have heard nothing on that front. As for your sister, well, we are still making inquiries.”

  “What about the guy you
have in custody?” It hadn’t occurred to her that they might still be investigating Elise’s death.

  “He was released.”

  Maggie found herself getting excited. “Okay, so now what? Do you have somebody you like better? And what about my crank call? You said you’d follow up on that.”

  There was a hesitation on the line.

  Something had happened.

  “We did follow up on it, and it turns out the call came from a burner phone.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a disposable cellphone.”

  Maggie sat up straighter. “No little old lady is going to buy and discard a cellphone to get her jollies.”

  “No. We are reinvestigating the presence of the air conditioner repair truck that was parked at your apartment that day.”

  “What does that have to do with the disposable cellphone?”

  The sigh he emitted made Maggie realize he was speaking against his better judgment. But he was speaking.

  “They are both possible evidence of a contract killing.”

  A hit man?

  “That doesn’t make sense. Elise couldn’t have been killed by a hired killer. That’s just ridiculous.”

  “In any event, that is the lead we are currently following.”

  Did any of this even matter? Every lead these idiots followed ended with nothing. Every suspect they dragged in was as unlikely as the one before. And now they think a contract was put out on Elise? Next they’ll be calling it a suicide!

  “Well, thanks for keeping me in the loop.” Maggie couldn’t help letting her frustration peek through with her sarcasm. She felt emotionally drained. She just wanted to get on that airplane, take a sleeping pill and not think of anything for about six hours.

  “Well, I’m sorry if we’re not informing you at the level you would like,” Burton said in a clearly annoyed voice, “but I did give all this information to Mr. Dernier a couple days ago.”