*****
Maggie told the taxi driver to drive to the airport by way of Montmartre. A check on her cellphone had showed that her flight was going to be delayed by at least three hours.
Whatever.
So Laurent had taken the information from Burton about the threatening phone call and deliberately kept it from her. What other information had he known and concealed? Had he been steering her away from the truth all along? An unwelcome and nauseating thought occurred to her.
Burton thinks a professional killed Elise.
Laurent is a professional.
She dialed Michelle’s number one more time, noticing as she did that she had another call from Laurent. In spite of the mounting evidence against him, she perversely felt her resistance to him, to his efforts to connect with her, weakening. I need to shut this thing off!
“Allo?”
“Michelle. Hey, it’s Maggie.”
“Maggie! Did you see him?”
“I did. He came to my hotel. Did you send him?”
“I knew you would be safe, chérie. It was a public place. And you needed to talk to him.”
“Yeah, well, it was very informative,” Maggie cradled the telephone against her cheek as she watched the streets of Paris streak by. “He denied killing Elise, of course. But admitted to being responsible for the other death. I mean, this whole trip was nuts. I solved a murder three thousand miles away that means nothing to me, and I still don’t know who killed Elise.”
“Do not give up, Maggie.”
“I am giving up. After what I’ve learned about Elise and...and Laurent, I just don’t have the energy to go any farther.”
“Perhaps Gerard did not strangle the life out of Elise on that night, chérie, but he killed her as surely as if he held the wire that tightened around her throat. He put an end to her art. He put an end to her friends. Elise was alive with her friends. She could not live without her art. She was an artiste!”
“I just don’t think I care any more. Elise lived her life the way she did. Gerard or not. Trust me, Michelle, her responsibility for this disaster is in there somewhere. Let me ask you, Michelle…”
“Yes, chérie?”
“What do you think of Gerard’s brother, Laurent?”
“I do not know the man very well. Only that he makes his living as le voleur...the conman. But what is it mattering now? Oh, I see. You must get to the bottom of this Laurent fellow, absoluement! There are too many questions, eh? But if it is love...”
Truly, the French are not like the rest of us, Maggie thought as her heart twisted in pain. She said goodbye to her new friend amidst promises to write and wished she could somehow believe the same philosophy. Then she turned off her phone.
Maggie told the driver to wait and stepped out of the cab. From where she stood at the entrance to the cemetery she could see oversized granite urns and what looked like miniature Washington monuments punctuating row after row of plain stones—which looked like a field of gray surfboards jammed into the ground. The wind picked up. White crosses jutted out from the hard ground. Stone angels and fierce cherubs guarded long-dead babies under the ghostly great trees, their leaves shed onto the patient graves and markers.
Montmartre Cemetery.
Maggie entered the cemetery through the arched gateway. She moved between the headstones, careful not to trample the flowers mourners had placed next to the graves, and took a seat on one of the many wrought iron benches. She thought for a moment of the ancient artisan commissioned to create these graveyard thrones.
She thought of her father telling her and Elise ghost stories when they were girls. Elise seemed to want to believe in witches and spirits and supernatural things. She had paid close attention to her father’s stories, jumping at the appropriate spots, eyes widening in fright. Maggie hadn’t seen the point. If someone was dead, he was dead. Elise told her she had no imagination.
Maggie turned to find the window of Elise’s apartment in the building across the street. Gone forever, Maggie thought. Elise gone, her little girl gone. And here was Maggie, sitting in the scene Elise had painted maybe a hundred times.
Why had she come here? To say good-bye to Elise? Why not the Elise who had lived in the Latin Quarter? At least that was an Elise she might have understood. Not the drug-addled wretch who had lived here.
Maggie’s eyes filled and she opened her purse to search for a tissue. And, of course, the Latin Quarter Elise was an Elise who hadn’t felt at all understood. She was an Elise who’d packaged herself in such a way as to be accepted by her family—but who had compromised herself to do it. This Elise was the real Elise, Maggie realized. This Elise, who had lived in Montmartre and taken drugs and had brutal lovers.
Maggie’s fingers found the little scarf ring Brownie had given to her at Nicole’s birthday party. She thought of that little girl and her heart squeezed. What’s to be done about all that?
She shook herself out of her blackening mood. Plenty of time for all of those questions back in Atlanta, she told herself,. She tucked away her tissue and held the scarf ring for a moment and thought of Brownie. Poor Brownie, who loved her so much and who she knew would never lie to her.
Suddenly, as she looked at the little gold-painted scarf ring in her hand, Maggie felt a realization so swift and undeniable that she snapped the ring in two with her fingers. Sitting there on that bench in Montmartre Cemetery with no one but the dead to see or hear, she emitted an audible gasp.
She knew who Elise’s murderer was.
Murder in the South of France, Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries Page 39
