Murder in Nice (22 page)

“
Are you serious? What’s
going on? What was that call about?”

“
It was nothing,
chérie
. Go on
now.”

Randall piped up. “We can give her a ride to
the train station. No problem.”

“
Bon
,” Laurent said, leaning across Maggie to open her door. “Call
me when you are there. If I can’t meet you—”

“
What do you mean
if you can’t meet me
?”

“
I have a sudden engagement
that may go into the evening.”

“
Laurent, you are so lucky
I’m not the jealous type because you are being seriously mysterious
and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

“
If Maggie is free
tonight,” Randall said, looking over his shoulder where Desiree
appeared in the doorway of the restaurant, “and she could possibly
stay on one more night, we’re doing the final show from Arles
tomorrow. And then we can take her straight to her front door in
St-Buvard.”

Maggie stared at Randall in surprise but
Laurent didn’t hesitate.

“
Bon
,” he said, unhooking Maggie’s seatbelt. “Her bag is in the
backseat.”

Maggie watched in astonishment as her
husband worked in tandem with Randall to hustle her out of the car
and onto the street. Laurent gave her a quick kiss before she
climbed out of the car and then drove away.

She stood on the sidewalk watching his
taillights disappear in the crowded street.

“
Wow. He’s a big guy,”
Randall said as he picked up Maggie’s bag.

She turned to him. “I still might call the
cops,” she said. “Just watch yourself.”

“
I always do, my dear,” he
said, sweeping an arm out to indicate she should precede him into
the restaurant. Desiree stood to the side to let her pass, and when
Maggie looked into her face she saw that Desiree was
smiling.

It was not a nice smile.

No words needed to be exchanged. It was as
clear to Maggie that Desiree had followed her to Nice and stolen
her purse as if the Frenchwoman had stood up and admitted it to her
face.

Desiree killed Lanie and now had possession
of the only piece of evidence that proved it.

Maggie’s stomach roiled as she passed the
Frenchwoman, but she straightened her shoulders and marched into
the darkened interior. It was an African restaurant and smelled of
incense mixed with the fragrance of curry, onions and many
unidentifiable spices.

Maggie allowed her eyes to adjust to the
dark until she saw a large round table with the others gathered
around it. Three bottles of wine pinned the center, with multiple
glasses in front of Jim and Janet. Jim sat with his head propped up
on an unsteady elbow and Maggie saw Janet’s eyes glittering with
excitement from six feet away.

“
You came back!” Janet
said, clearly drunk. “You’ll want to meet our guest of honor. Or is
that the reason you came back? It would be for me.”

Maggie saw the young man sitting to Janet’s
right—the infamous Olivier, she thought as she took a seat next to
him. Desiree and Randall rejoined the table.

Maggie wasn’t surprised that her reentry to
the group had been treated with little fanfare. In fact, she
preferred it that way. Except for smug glances in her direction,
Desiree largely ignored her, spending the rest of the afternoon
nearly sitting on top of Randall at the table. From what Maggie
could see, the Frenchwoman ate very little.

Maybe that’s how French
women really stay slim
, Maggie thought,
pulling at her now snug waistband.
They
just don’t eat. Big secret.

“
Bonjour
, Madame,” Olivier said to Maggie. His easy smile made his
handsome face even more appealing. He was dark-haired with cerulean
blue eyes and full lips. Maggie couldn’t help but think,
Well done, Lanie.

“
Bonjour,”
Maggie said. “You’re Olivier, I guess.”

“
Oui
.” As if the introduction clearly came with reason to sober
his happy expression, he promptly frowned.

“
I’m so sorry about Lanie,”
Maggie said, wondering if anyone else had thought to offer him
condolences.
Innocent until proven
guilty
, she reminded herself.

“
Merci
, Madame,” he said solemnly.

“
Call me
Maggie.”

“
Maggie,” Dee-Dee said,
slurring the word just a bit. “I got a new cell phone.” She held up
a phone with a pink fuzzy cover on it.

“
I know. We’ve been texting
back and forth, remember?”

“
Oh, right. Also? I’m doing
the final presentation tomorrow. Olivier will be able to tape it
too. I’m so excited.”

“
Oh, that’s cool,” Maggie
said, her glance taking in Desiree, who seemed to be working hard
at ignoring the conversation by burying her face in her wineglass.
“Where?”

“
The Arles Amphitheater,”
Dee-Dee said. “I’ve got a kick-ass presentation, too. Everyone’s
going to love it.”

Desiree snorted but said nothing.

A waiter approached the
table with a wide tray of steaming plates and began distributing
dishes around the table. Plates of
bourek
and
pastilla
wraps made the rounds, with
everyone heaping their plates with the fragrant potato wraps.
Although she and Laurent had eaten not two hours earlier, Maggie
felt her mouth water at the overpowering scent of spicy chicken,
almonds, and onions. She put two wraps on her plate and prayed they
weren’t more than five hundred calories a serving.

She turned to Olivier, who poured a glass of
wine and placed it in front of her.

“
Thank you,” she said. “So
did you know they’d put you straight to work when you rejoined the
tour?”

Olivier shrugged. “Bob said I always had a
job. I need the money.”

“
Did I hear right,” Maggie
asked him, “that it was Annie who helped you?”

“
She is like a mother to
me. A wonderful woman.” His eyes lit up as he spoke and Maggie was
struck by how young he really was and what a terrible ordeal the
last few days must have been for him.

“
Do you have family in
France?” she asked. “I think Annie said you were from
Algiers?”

“
No, no family here,” he
said sadly. “And now I am grateful for that so they do not see me
imprisoned like a dog.”

“
When do you have to go
back to Nice?”

“
My lawyer said he would
call me.”

Maggie was aware that the table had gotten
noisier. Only Desiree spoke French well enough to understand her
conversation with Olivier, and she was far enough across the table
that Maggie didn’t worry about her overhearing. Even so, she moved
her chair closer to him and lowered her voice.

“
I need to ask you,
Olivier, if you have any idea of who might have hurt Lanie that
night.”

Olivier put down the wrap
he’d been about to take a bite out of and faced Maggie earnestly.
“I know exactly who killed my precious love,” he said, tears
jumping to his eyes and emotion turning his hoarse whisper ragged.
He fought for control and drank down the contents of his wineglass
before putting his face close to Maggie’s ear. “She calls herself
French, but her real name is
murderer
.”

When Maggie pulled back to look into his
eyes, she saw him glance at the head of the table…where Desiree sat
licking grease from her fingers.

*****

It had to be the noisiest hotel Maggie had
ever attempted to sleep in. She sat up in her bed and worked to
push her earplugs in tighter. She wasn’t sure what kind of rooms
the rest of the people on the tour had ended up with, but hers had
definitely been an afterthought. Her bed—a twin with a wilted
comforter that made her wonder if the linens had been changed in
the last month—was shoved up against the window facing the
street.

She touched the wall and wasn’t surprised to
feel it vibrate with the sound of the live music coming from the
bar across the street. A scream, muffled only by the closed window
and the shouts from the other street revelers, made Maggie hold her
breath until it ended in hysterical laughing. She glanced at her
phone on the nightstand. The screen read three o’clock. That meant
nine o’clock Annie’s time, she thought.

Did she have any real news to tell her? She
swung her legs out of bed and went to the room refrigerator for a
cola. She opened it. Empty. Sighing, she groped in the
semi-darkness for her robe and found her slippers.

Maggie could tell Annie that she finally met
Olivier and she saw why Annie thought he was innocent. He seemed
like a really nice guy. She opened her hotel room door and peered
down the hall. Doesn’t seem like much of a report, though.

She turned back to the room and picked up a
handful of euros and her room key and dropped them in her robe
pocket and then slipped out the door into the hallway. She
remembered seeing a vending machine down past the elevators. She
had no idea if the other members of the tour group were even on her
floor but, if so, she strongly preferred not to accidentally run
into any of them.

The vending machine stuck out into the
hallway like an obscene road bump. Maggie shook her head, wondering
how anybody managed to get past it with suitcases in tow. The
minute she reached it, she heard a footstep on the far side of
it.

Crap
.
Anybody out and wandering the halls
of this dump at three in the morning is probably not somebody I
want to bump into.
She tucked herself into
the shadow of the vending machine to wait for whomever it was to
pass.

It had always been Maggie’s belief that
whispering was more noticeable than just speaking in a low voice.
She had that theory confirmed the longer she stood there.

“
Rot in hell, bitch,” a
familiar voice mumbled loudly. “Glad you’re dead. I’ll show
you
blackmail.”

Maggie’s scalp crawled. It was Jim. Drunk
and clearly half out of his mind, but definitely him.

Was he talking about
Lanie?
Maggie heard a door creak open on
the other side of the machine and held her breath to be able to
hear better.

“
Get in here, you old fool.
What are you doing out there confessing to the world?”

Janet’s voice.

“
Your fault,” Jim said
loudly, not bothering to whisper any longer. “I told her. I said
some things follow naturally, as dawn follows night. I told her
that. Bitches die bashed to death in their own
bathwater.”

“
Shut up! You’ll wake the
whole hotel,” Janet hissed, her whispered voice louder and more
distinct than Jim’s.

“
As natural as the
consequence of being an evil bitch,” Jim said, the tail end of his
words muffled as he entered the room before the door slammed shut.
Maggie eased out the breath she was holding.

Was Lanie blackmailing Jim?

She left the shadows and tiptoed back to her
room, her thirst forgotten. She settled back on her bed still
wearing her robe, her mind spinning and the sounds of the street
party still throbbing through her wall. She wouldn’t call Annie
tonight after all. Not yet.

Not until she found out why Lanie was
blackmailing Jim.

And if it had been enough for him to want
her dead.

*****

God knows he didn’t want to have to do this.
Ben went to his wife’s leather valise and felt in the inside the
zippered panel. If that arrogant Frenchman had left him any
alternative at all, he wouldn’t have to. The pocket held only one
long envelope with several sheets of paper inside. At first he
hadn’t seen the point of all the research—none of it cheap and all
of it time-consuming—but he was glad now that he had it. He pulled
the envelope out and took a step toward the window and looked
out.

Haley was sitting under a
beech tree with both children.
They should
pay her by the hour.
He took a quick step
backward in case she looked up. Satisfied that she was otherwise
engaged at least for the present, he went to the dresser in the
bedroom and found a letter opener in the top drawer.

He slit the envelope open and withdrew the
folded sheets of paper inside. One was a photograph. He didn’t
bother looking at it. He knew what it showed. Another was an old
copy, taken from microfiche, and he treated it gently. As far as he
knew these were all originals. Under the circumstances, copies
would be useless. They wouldn’t stand up in court and they wouldn’t
hold up to scrutiny that they hadn’t been altered. These few pages,
even old and damaged, were worth everything to him. Replacing them
would be next to impossible. It had taken nearly a year of
single-minded, obsessive daily research to obtain these.

He refolded the sheets and tucked them back
away then slid the envelope into his front coat pocket.

Why did he feel guilty about this? What
possible reason could he have for not reveling in his triumph?

He heard the sound of his nephew squeal with
laughter and his heart squeezed at the sound. The boy looked like
his father, but there was something in the eyes…something that told
Ben the child was a Newberry where it counted.