A Twist of Orchids (30 page)

Mara said breathlessly, “It’s about the fact that I’ll bet the whole damned farm that Daisy owns the
viager
, and I stupidly told Donny that Joseph’s live-in caregiver starts tomorrow. That’s like saying they have until tonight to finish the old boy off!”

•

It was half past ten when they reached the house. Joseph was sitting in the kitchen watching television while eating a flan that Suzanne Portier had prepared for him. She had brought him vegetable soup and homemade bread, a slice of roast pork, boiled cabbage and potatoes, and the flan. The flan was stuffed with raisins. He had eaten half of it right after his dinner and saved the other half for a late-night movie he wanted to see. It had girls in it, and a certain amount of nudity. He had never been able to watch his choice of television when Amélie was alive. With her, it was always early to bed, early to rise, and she had closely controlled the programs they viewed.

“’Course I’m all right,” he said in reply to Mara and Julian’s question as they burst in on him. His eyes lingered on the television screen. A woman had just stepped out of a shower, letting a towel fall away from her. He seemed to have forgotten about his monsters. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

It is a night of mist, with no wind and no moon. Even the stars are dead. Everything lies wrapped in the kind of absolute obscurity that only occurs deep in the countryside. Here, no lamps illuminate empty streets, no traffic signals flash their mindless red–green cycles, no stain of neon bleeds through the drifting darkness.

The house inside is dark, too, and silent, except for the heavy ticking of the grandfather clock, spelling out the hours in its corner of the front room.

Outside the house, something moves. A pencil beam of light wavers through the hazelnut grove, points momentarily at the black switches of the fuse box in the wood hangar. Now it glances off the concrete surface of the terrace, focuses on the lock fixture of the back door. When the door swings open, the pencil beam moves within, sliding like a sly finger over the flagstones of the kitchen floor, illuminating the leg of a table, the worn flooring of the hallway. It slips across the threadbare carpet of the front room, where the old clock stands, pauses before the dark bulk of the sofa. Now it points back down the hall and glimmers on the handle of the bedroom door. The handle turns, as if of its own accord. And then the pencil beam goes out.

Something has come into the bedroom. It makes its presence known by a slight disturbance of the air, by a blackness that is denser than the blackness that surrounds it. The room pulses with its entry, as if it has been waiting to enclose this moment.

The sleeper lies motionless. The thing has crossed the intervening space to stand so near that its breathing enjoins with the breathing coming from the bed. Another displacement of air betrays movement. Carefully, a hand searches out the sleeper’s face, touches skin.

There is a muffled cry. A roundhouse swing catches the thing a stunning blow. It reels back amid sounds of struggling, of furniture being overturned, of things crashing to the ground.

“For God’s sake, Mara,” Julian shouts. “Give us a bloody light, will you?”

In the sudden flare of the flashlight beam, Mara sees Olivier Rafaillac sprawled on the floor. He is wearing his padded nylon jacket over pajamas and is wrestling with a pair of legs that kick and thrash beneath him. Julian is lying across an expanse of black rubber poncho that covers a large, writhing body. He scrambles to a kneeling position, shifts his hold to grab the front of the poncho and jerks the body upright.

“All right, you bastard,” he yells, fetching Donny O’Connor a mighty sock to the jaw. “Just what the hell do you think you’re up to!”

•

“He came here to murder Joseph,” Mara declared, pointing an accusing finger at Donny.

The pair of gendarmes who had answered their call looked doubtful. Mara told them about the attacks on Joseph and the pivotal importance of the Gaillards’ land to the Montfort-Izawa development, in which she was sure Donny had more of an interest than he admitted. Julian explained that he and Mara had anticipated that Donny would make another attempt on Joseph that night. They had therefore bundled Joseph off to Olivier Rafaillac’s house. Then they had enlisted Olivier’s help and returned with him to lie in wait for Donny.

Donny’s story was that he had come to the house to check up on Joseph because he had heard the old fellow had been troubled by nighttime prowlers. Of course he had a key. Why shouldn’t he? His wife had bought the Gaillards’ property
en viager
years ago. (“I knew it,” Mara growled at Julian.) The Gaillards were practically family. Mara also had a key, he pointed out. So did just about everyone else in the neighborhood.

“If I’m supposed to be the monster that’s been scaring Joseph, shouldn’t I have some kind of costume?” Donny argued. “A mask? Fake fangs? A gorilla suit? So where’s my Halloween outfit?”

“You’re wearing it,” said Mara, pointing at his poncho. She recalled Joseph’s description of his first intruder. Big and black, he had said, with loose, rubbery skin. “All you needed to do was pull that over your head. In the dark, you’d look like the Blob.”

“Give me a break,” snorted Donny, touching a reddening welt on his jaw. “I’m gonna have you charged with assault.”

Olivier confirmed most of Mara and Julian’s account but admitted that he knew nothing about any land deals, nor had he exactly witnessed Donny attacking Joseph—Mara—in the bed. It had been too dark to see. He had merely followed Julian’s order to jump anyone who came into the room. Monsieur O’Connor, as it turned out. Yes, he could confirm the fact that Joseph thought he was being terrorized. However, no one had really taken him seriously.

One of the gendarmes went with Olivier to his house to take down his statement and to get Joseph’s version of events. The remaining gendarme searched Donny. He found a wallet, a wadded-up handkerchief, loose change, keys, a slimline flashlight of American make. Nothing that could be construed as a weapon.

“There’s your weapon.” Mara waved at a cushion lying on the floor. “It’s from the sofa in the front room. He was planning to smother Joseph—me—with it.”

“You’re nuts,” sputtered Donny.

“What’s this?” the gendarme asked, unfolding a piece of paper he had pulled out of Donny’s jacket pocket. In the next moment, the officer became quite excited. He read it aloud:

Translated, with a little poetic licence, it read

The gendarme stiffened like a game dog on the scent. “Monsieur,” he addressed Donny, “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me. There are a number of questions we would like to ask you.”

•

At the local gendarmerie where their statements were formally recorded, Mara protested loudly to the brigade commander.

“Why won’t you listen? Donny O’Connor isn’t the rhyming burglar. He went to the house not to steal but to murder Joseph Gaillard. I think he planned to pass the crime off as a burglary gone wrong, and he was going to leave a bogus poem behind to throw you off the track.”

“She’s crazy,” Donny denied. “I didn’t write any goddamn poem, and if it wound up in my pocket, she planted it there to land me in it.”

Mara threw up her hands. “Can’t you see the MO is all wrong? The rhyming burglar is selective. He chooses unoccupied houses with things of value in them. Joseph’s house is very much occupied and it has nothing worth stealing.” She made a last desperate attempt to convince. “The poem. If Donny O’Connor really is the rhyming burglar, he would’ve come up with something a lot better, don’t you think? The thing doesn’t scan. It’s inconsistent. Before the burglar used
tu.
Here he switches to
vous.
He spells
Hah Hah
and
Hee Hee
the English way. In French it would be
Ha Ha
and
Hi Hi.
Not only is this poem not up to usual standards, it’s plain awful!”

“I’ve been set up,” Donny insisted.

Nevertheless, he remained in custody. Officers hurried past the room where his ongoing interrogation was taking place. An excited buzz filled the hallways. The news spread quickly: the gendarmes had finally caught their man.

•

The sky was bright with morning by the time Mara and Julian’s statements were complete and they were told they could go. Mara, with Julian hurrying in her wake, strode furiously out of the gendarmerie and plunged into the nearest café in search of a badly needed jolt of caffeine.

“He’s going to get away with it,” she fumed as they stumbled into an empty booth. They had not seen bed for twenty-four hours, and both looked drained. “The gendarmes can’t see past their housebreaker, and the bastard is going to get away with it.”

“It’s because the case for Donny as burglar looks stronger than Donny as murderer.” Julian leaned his head wearily against the padded wall of the booth. The atmosphere in the café was warm and comfortable, the smell of coffee strong on the air. A few early patrons paused over steaming bowls of café au lait to glance their way.

“Say the O’Connors work as a team,” Julian went on. “They
get themselves invited to people’s houses. Daisy knows antiques. She does the selecting—you saw the way she scoped your front room when she was there—Donny does the grunt work. Plus, she’s a natural for moving the stolen articles.” He yawned gustily. He recalled that he and Mara had agreed to go orchid hunting that day. At the moment, he wanted nothing more than to get horizontal for about ten hours.

Gloomily, Mara admitted the force of Julian’s reasoning. She thought angrily of Prudence’s bronze animal pieces, her Lalique lamps, her Degas statuette, probably sold by now to purchasers in New York, Philadelphia, London, and Paris.

“All right,” she conceded. “Maybe the O’Connors are behind the robberies as well. But that doesn’t change the fact that Donny went to the house last night to murder Joseph. The police just don’t get it.”

She had been repeating variations of this complaint for the last four hours. Fed up with it, Julian went to the bar for a newspaper. He had to settle for one of the regional weeklies, dating back a few days, but he did not mind. He had not had much chance to read the news of late.

“The problem is,” he said, sitting down again and shaking the tabloid open, “we might have got him if you hadn’t acted prematurely.”

Mara stared at him. “If I hadn’t
what?
”

“You clouted him too soon.” Then he said, “I’ll be damned.” He folded the paper back to show Mara a photograph of a large woman standing on the deck of a boat. “That’s her. Adelheid Besser. On board the Ropax
Bosporus I
on its maiden voyage to Istanbul. Says here it’s the first of a new line of roll-on/roll-off vessels carrying freight as well as passengers and their vehicles between Marseille and Istanbul. Apparently it can do up to thirty knots an hour. So that’s how she went.”

Mara was not interested in Adelheid Besser or the Ropax
Bosporus I.

“So what are you saying? I should have let him smother me?”

“At least given him a chance to attack you properly.”

“Oh, thank you very much. Maybe you should have been the decoy. No doubt you would have done a better job.”

“Hmm?” Julian had gone back to his reading. “Wouldn’t have worked. My beard. Dead giveaway.”

A few days later Daisy came to the house. Mara received her alone since Julian was out, still dealing with a client’s hedge.

“Oh,” said Mara a little nervously, as she opened the door. Was the woman going to scream at her? Attack her with well-manicured nails? Mara had, after all, accused her husband of attempted murder. No, she revised, as Daisy, in her perpetual cloud of scent, marched straight past her into the front room and sat down uninvited on the art deco sofa. She was dressed for the occasion: mid-heels, a tailored plum-colored linen suit, a blouse with a frilly collar—businesslike but conciliatory. She wanted something. Warily, Mara lowered herself into an armchair, one of a recently acquired pair of bergères.

“I came to tell you the police have released Donny.” The Barbie doll fixed Mara with unblinking eyes that today had a cobalt hue. “Donny was absolutely out of the country during three of the break-ins. We both were, which puts him—and me, in case you were going there—out of the picture. And before you ask, the gendarmes have verified all this. I can also vouch for Donny being at home with me on the other four occasions.”

“I’m more concerned about last Friday night and the other times he tried to frighten Joseph to death,” Mara said, equally direct.

“Those incidents never happened,” Daisy snapped. “These monsters you keep talking about don’t exist. They’re all in Joseph’s head. Everyone knows he hallucinates. Look, I’m telling you Donny went over there simply to make sure Joseph was okay.”

“At three o’clock in the morning?”

“He couldn’t sleep. I was in New York, and he often can’t sleep when I’m away. So he decided to go to the house and check things out. The police have cleared Donny of any suspicion of house-breaking.”

“What about the poem the gendarmes found in his pocket?”

“He never wrote it, and the only way it got there is if you planted it. Look, I’m prepared to cut a deal with you. Drop your ridiculous accusation, and we won’t have you prosecuted for trying to frame Donny. Tell the police you were mistaken. You know as well as I do that Donny would never try to harm Joseph.”

It was as close as Daisy would ever get to pleading. Her makeup, Mara observed uncharitably, did not cover the age spots that were beginning to blotch her pale complexion. Papery skin stretched across jutting cheekbones to a narrow jaw. Her knees were knife-sharp and bloodless where they strained against her pantyhose, her wrists impossibly thin. She looked exhausted, as if she were held together by wires, but Mara did not feel sorry for her.