Paris, Before You Die

by Mary Bowers

  Henry seemed to be reading her mind, and after a moment he quietly said, “Want to go check it out?”

  Nettie nodded.

  “I think Nettie and I are going to go out and get a little air,” Henry said, trying to make it sound romantic.

  Audrey opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated, looking straight at Nettie.

  “Just the two of us,” Henry said.

  Kat gave Audrey and elbow shot. “They want to be alone, dope. You two go ahead.”

  Audrey was still holding Nettie’s gaze, and before she let them go, she said, “Have fun, guys. Let me know how it goes. Later.”

  “Uh huh,” Henry said. “Later.”

  After they left the lobby, Kat said, “What are you, their mommy now?”

  “More like their partner in crime. Come on. Your nose is shiny and you need lipstick. That’s a heck of a way for a fashionista wander around Paris. Let’s go freshen up in the room and then go shopping.”

  Chapter 13

  Outside, Henry and Nettie immediately turned to the left and stopped at the mouth of the tiny service alley beside the hotel, but they couldn’t get any further. They were stopped by a gendarme who decided to let a language barrier keep him from having to engage with the curious elderly couple, whom he recognized as being part of the American tour group. He smiled, spread his hands, shrugged massively and urged them to move on in needlessly elaborate French, pretending not to understand what they were saying in English.

  “Come along, dear,” Henry finally said, taking Nettie’s arm in what she could only call an overly-familiar way. Acting a part for the policeman, no doubt.

  She decided to play along. “Oh, all right, honey. We don’t want to get in the way, do we?”

  “No, we don’t, peaches.” He smiled at the policeman and enunciated carefully. “We’re big supporters of law and order.”

  Half a block on, Nettie said, “Did you manage to see anything? Dear?”

  “I think what we suspect would have been possible. I didn’t get a really good look, but there’s got to be an entrance at the back of the hotel. You wouldn’t get a car back there, but there’s obviously enough room for a deliveryman with a dolly, at least. Considering the layout, it has to go into the back of the stairwell area, where there’s a staff restroom and a prep area for the kitchen.”

  Nettie swiveled her head and looked at him. “My, you have got the layout down, haven’t you? That was quick.”

  “Yeah, don’t try to play the addled old lady with me, Nettie Tucker from Sleepy Hollow. You figured out the same things yourself. We’re all in and out of the stairwell throughout the day, and you’re extremely observant.”

  She nodded complacently, then said, “Back behind the stairs, to the right of the little hall there must be a doorway to the alley for deliveries to the kitchen. It would meet up perfectly with the kitchen area next to the breakfast buffet. Is that how you see it?”

  “Has to be. In the normal course of things, as a guest you’d never see it, even from the buffet, but we’re assuming premeditation here. Somebody deliberately looking around for a way in. That still doesn’t get you into the elevator without the desk clerk seeing you. The stairs . . . there are other guests here – at least, there were. You’d be taking a hell of a chance, pounding all the way up to the fifth floor to get at him. You know, maybe we should just leave this to the Paris police. Darling.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we may be suspects ourselves, pussycat.”

  “Nah. Not us. Now, your niece may be another story.”

  She stopped dead in her tracks and glared at him. “What on earth do you mean by that?”

  He took hold of her arm again and steered her back on course. “Ladies’ rooms have notoriously long lines. You were all held up in lines and away from your tables a lot last night – all you ladies that I had with me, the gang over at Le Chat Noir, and also wherever your niece and Jack were. And she’s the only one on the tour who knew the Pimms ahead of time. In fact, she was the reason you two came along in the first place. Twyla obviously has a strong sense of loyalty to Lauren. That man was a lousy husband and a lousy human being. Lauren would have been better off without him, but she loved him. I’ve been on more than a few domestic calls; you’d be surprised what women can manage to love. What does Twyla say about the situation?”

  “Twyla can’t see through the stars in her eyes. As a matter of fact, Audrey and I agreed on that, the first night of the tour. She’s pretty perceptive, that one, and she hasn’t been wrong about anything yet.”

  “Oh, well, then let’s just go ask Audrey what happened. After all, she’s psychic, right?”

  “Stop it. She’s got a lot of common sense. I like her. On the other hand,” Nettie added grudgingly, “she seems to be hearing voices.”

  Henry rolled a look at her and tried to take things down a notch. “Look, all I’m saying is, it’s obvious Lauren wanted to reconcile. For whatever reason, she was willing to live a life of humiliation if she could hang onto Grayson Pimm. Twyla wanted to help her old high school friend, but Lauren wasn’t going to cooperate. What better way to get her out of a bad marriage than to eliminate the hateful husband?”

  “That’s a little over-the-top, isn’t it? And Twyla has been completely distracted by Mr. Hubba Hubba from the moment he mashed into us, that first day. She’s hardly looked at Lauren.”

  “She’s still the reason you’re both here.”

  “This is completely ridiculous. Twyla and I are not the only people who knew the Pimms before the tour. Aren’t you forgetting his mistress? Even if they didn’t have an affair – which they did – Daisy admits she works at his company and had seen him in the office. And you too, Henry. Didn’t you son work for Grayson Pimm?”

  Henry stopped breathing for a moment but didn’t react in any other way, except for dropping his hand from her arm. Finally, he said, “I’d never met the man before.”

  “You have now.”

  They walked on in silence for a while. Finally, Nettie broke the silence.

  “There may be one more person – maybe two – who knew who Grayson Pimm was before they came on the tour,” she said thoughtfully. She explained to Henry about the class action lawsuit Jack had been a part of. “Audrey found it on the Internet, when I got worried that my niece was getting too close to him. He’d mentioned that he had a financial loss. There was no direct mention of Grayson in what we found, of course, but he was a financial advisor, and he tended to puff himself up when he talked about his job. Conmen always talk a good game. And if Jack made a bad investment, odds are his friend Charley did, too.”

  Henry bobbed his head, but frowned. “Okay, but it’s a little vague.”

  “Haven’t you ever worked a murder case where the motive was money? Revenge?”

  “Well, I guess you have a point, but I’m not putting them at the top of my list. You wouldn’t be hoping Jack is going to go away for murder and leave your niece chaste but alone, would you?” He said it with no expression at all, and just a slight inflection in his voice, which Nettie was getting used to. Henry was not a man of big reactions.

  “Maybe somewhere, deep down in my black little heart,” she muttered.

  “You?” he said, disbelieving. “A black heart?”

  “You’d be surprised. Anyway, it’s something. You’ll convince me Jack is a killer a heck of a lot faster than I’d believe Twyla is. Look, you’ve been around my niece for a few days, you’ve seen what she’s like. But even you think she might have gotten too involved with the Pimms and their problems. If you can think of her as a suspect, so can the police. It’s ridiculous, of course, but who says you can’t get ridiculous ideas just because you’re a cop?”

  “You’re right. We need to find out what happened, for our own peace of mind. Hopefully, we’re just going to convince ourselves that the man committed suicide, like we all thought in the first place. After all, he looked like an arrogant jerk, but how could we say he didn’t see
m like the kind of man who would kill himself?”

  “We couldn’t. We really didn’t know him. We only knew of him. So, sweetie pie, where do we begin?”

  Henry cracked a smile. “Where you always begin. Talk to the witnesses. Eric was with him last. Daisy probably had an affair with him. Hannah might be involved with him now. And of course, there’s the widow.”

  “That’s going to be touchy.”

  “It can be done.” He turned to Nettie with a serious look on his face. “Are you all-in with this?”

  She stared back. “You want me to question Twyla, don’t you.”

  “Not directly. Don’t put her under the hot lights or anything. Just pick at her, find out more about Jack. If he’s been talking about his finances with her he’s either very indiscreet or he’s getting serious about her.”

  “Both,” Nettie said, and they walked on quietly.

  In another half block, he took her arm again.

  * * * * *

  “I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve decided I would have made the sacrifice, if I’d had to make a choice.”

  Audrey looked blankly at Kat. She was sitting on the end of her bed, watching Kat sort through the jewelry she’d brought. She seemed to have a lot of it, but she kept saying she wished she’d brought this, she wished she’d brought that.

  Audrey had brought one watch, one pair of gold earrings and a slim gold bracelet. Went with everything.

  Kat turned to her, holding a tanzanite bracelet so that it dangled from her fingertips. “If I’d been given a choice between letting Twyla and Jack fall in love on this trip and having a romance of my own, I would have made the sacrifice. Having Nettie and Henry hit it off has been a nice bonus, too. Kind of a reward for me, giving up my own chance at love.”

  Audrey blinked at all the wormholes in Kat’s reasoning processes. She would have decided Kat’s mind was going, but she’d always been like this.

  “How noble of you,” she said. “Jack’s a clod, and Henry is probably a murderer, but I’m glad you’re enjoying the show.”

  “What do you mean, Henry’s a murderer?” Kat said, snapping out of it.

  “He’s the only one with a real motive. He thinks Grayson Pimm drove his son to suicide. And he’s a former cop. He would know how to commit a murder and get away with it.”

  Instead of refusing to believe it, Kat said, “Oh, poor little Nettie! She’s going to be so disappointed.”

  Audrey closed her eyes and counted to ten. “Well, don’t worry. It probably was suicide. And Henry isn’t connected to life by much of a safety line anymore. If the cops accuse Lauren and he knows she’s innocent, he’ll fess up and save her.”

  “Lauren?”

  “Kat, do you ever put the mirror down and look at the people around you?”

  “But Lauren loved him.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, ah, it takes all kinds . . . I’m sure I wouldn’t have put up with . . . but you have to go by what other people do, and not what you would do.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because we’re not all alike, that’s why. Lauren loved him. She’s devastated by his suicide – his suicide. I’m sure of it.”

  Audrey thought about it and finally gave a shrug. “Yeah, I guess love is stupid sometimes.”

  “Love is beautiful,” Kat said defiantly, “even when it’s stupid.” Then she stopped, looked confused, threw a withering glare at Audrey and finally went back to her jewelry box.

  Chapter 14

  “She’s going to Versailles?” Audrey asked, incredulous. She kept her voice down, since the breakfast room had filled up, but she couldn’t hide her surprise.

  Nettie glanced covertly at Jack and Twyla, at the table for two across the aisle. Then she told Audrey, “If Lauren doesn’t go, they say they won’t go either, and she doesn’t want them to miss out. Or something like that. And the police say they won’t be needing her this morning.”

  “That means they’ve made up their minds it was suicide,” Henry said.

  As yet, Lauren hadn’t come down for breakfast, and Nettie wondered if she wouldn’t change her mind when it came time to actually go.

  As Daisy and Hannah came in, all eyes turned to them and popped wide open. They were like an optical illusion, dressed almost identically. They laughed, as if they’d pulled off a prank, and paused between the table for two and Nettie’s group.

  “We didn’t do it on purpose,” Daisy said. “I swear. It just so happened that we wore almost exactly the same outfits today, and I wasn’t going to be the one to change.”

  “When she came out of the bathroom we took a good hard look at one another and I thought, damn, this is going too far,” Hannah said. “Black leggings and black-and-white oversized tops. It’s like we’re trying to look like twins.”

  “You’re wearing silver jewelry and I’m wearing gold,” Daisy teased, “and you’ve got black sandals and mine are white. Completely different.”

  Hannah laughed. “I suppose I could have thrown on another top, but what the heck. This is getting to be fun.”

  Daisy agreed with a grin.

  They made their way to a table at the back of the room. When Charley came in last, he gaily greeted everyone and then, with a spring in his step, he went right down the room and joined Hannah and Daisy. Kat watched him wistfully as he passed her by.

  “Lauren looks like a corpse this morning, doesn’t she?” Audrey commented into her coffee cup.

  “I’m sure the last thing on her mind today was her make-up,” Nettie said. “It doesn’t help that the chair where he would have been is just sitting there, empty. I wish Charley had sat down there, but you can hardly blame him for preferring the two girls.”

  Not long after that, everyone in the room heard Lauren say, “I’m going to have him cremated,” and nobody said anything at all after that.

  * * * * *

  They took the train to Versailles, and Danny carefully explained to them how to get back to the hotel when they were done exploring the palace and gardens. After the guided tour, they would be left to wander on their own for the afternoon.

  Versailles came into view when they walked around the last corner and they hesitated, gazing mutely at the fairytale vision that lay before them, wide and low, caged by enormous gates of black and gold, looking grand and eternal in the morning light.

  Lauren’s presence cast a pall over the group. Jack and Twyla, her self-appointed guardians, gradually drifted back to sharing happy little confidences in their own little world and forgetting that anybody else was there. Instead, Lauren’s breakfast companions kept themselves near her, guiding her on and off the train and walking her down the streets, talking away brightly and artificially.

  Nettie found herself faintly amused at the way strangers’ gazes lingered on the two matching blonds. It added a bright spot to the uneasy group. Like sorority girls, she thought, and then she decided not to even think about those days. Their shininess was all on the surface, and so much uncertainty lay before young people at that time of their lives. These days were good enough for her.

  They were admitted into the palace as a group, and Danny looked them over sternly, checking for disconnected earbuds or missing blue boxes. Then he lightly corralled them, moved to the head of the group and led them into the fray, talking the whole time. They walked into a world of wonder.

  “They didn’t miss a square inch, did they?” Nettie said to Henry as they climbed marble stairs wide enough to accommodate elephants.

  He cupped her elbow to steady her as she gazed upwards at a gallery ceiling that was writhing with gargantuan figures. Looming above were scenes of godlike grandiosities and other, more important worlds. She wondered if scenes like that wouldn’t have just made the mortals below feel small, including the king and queen. They sure made Nettie feel small. But she quickly realized that from the moment of birth, the royals had been pampered into believing that they belonged up there, among the ceiling people. The conce
rns of those who had passed through here were not those of mere mortals, grubbing through the dirt for something to eat. Here, every whim had been a command and every morsel had been offered up in splendor.

  Across the walls, above their heads, paving the floors and rising with the staircases, themes too large to absorb unreeled around them as they were whisked along by the crowd, trying to avoid collisions with other tourists and concentrate on Danny’s words at the same time. Before Nettie could get to the top of the staircase, she stumbled and Henry tightened his grip on her arm.

  “Careful, dearie,” he said, holding her firmly until she had her balance again. As they hesitated on the steps, people began to stream around them, casting irritated looks back at them. Every minute counted, if they were going to see it all today. For a moment, Nettie had a vision of factory workers tramping grimly off to work.

  “It’s like they’ve been given a job to do and they’re determined to finish it,” she remarked as they began to move again. “I guess it’s hard to just relax and lightly take it in when there’s so much.”

  Marble statues gestured anxiously, cupped naked breasts, or fiercely stood their ground, arms tangled through other arms, legs in flight or standing firm. Everywhere, everywhere – they were everywhere.

  Henry nodded. “People need to gather material for the get-togethers when they get back home, so they can tell their friends all about it. They need pictures to post on their social media so everyone they know will be jealous.”

  They were moving along a landing between staircases, and Nettie stared incredulously at a twenty-something man taking a selfie while sitting on the slanted bannister running along the next flight of stairs. Below him was a sheer drop to hard marble. She had to look away.

  They began to move through a sequence of over-decorated rooms, and Danny droned on, determined not to let them miss anything.

  “This is the Diana room,” Danny’s voice said through the earbud. “In the arches you will see four masterworks, including a favorite of mine, Jason and the Argonauts.”