Treasure of Saint-Lazare (14 page)

Eddie thought a moment and answered carefully. “The painting plus, possibly, some gold. The painting would be more valuable but harder to sell. But Americans live for the here and now. We want instant gratification, short sound bites, results now, not later. Or at least that’s what I keep reading in the newspapers.

“On the other hand, I have a friend, a history professor at the Sorbonne, and she and her colleagues see nothing at all strange about wanting to find out what happened to a painting lost so long ago. To Europeans, art is a big part of our patrimony, and you have to remember that some of us are still trying to decide if the French Revolution was a good idea.”

“And when was the Revolution?”

“1789.”

“I have to meet with the chief of detectives in a few minutes, to decide where we go with this next. But I think you two shouldn’t spend the night at Jen’s house until we have some of these people locked up, which may take a day or two.”

Jen looked at Eddie and raised a questioning eyebrow. “No problem for me. How about that place my father and I stayed the last time
we were here? The Hyatt, I think it was.”

Thom said, “The Ritz is newer. The Hyatt is less formal.”

“Not the Ritz,” Eddie said. “I haven’t seen the one here but they tend to be sort of heavy on the marble.”

As they left the police station Eddie called the Hyatt and reserved two rooms on the same floor. They drove to Jen’s house to pack small suitcases for what both hoped would be a short stay. They drove separately to the hotel. During the drive Eddie placed a call to Paul.

“This is turning odd and I don’t really know where it’s going to go. Can you come give me some backup?”

“Sure,” Paul said. “There are some pretty good flights in the morning that connect into Tampa.”

“Let’s do it a little different. Get a flight to Dulles and meet me there day after tomorrow. I’m flying up to talk to Icky, who seems to think he knows something about this art thing.”

“I haven’t thought about him in a long time. Is he still CIA?”

“Yes, and now he’s a division head. Let me know when you’ll arrive but do it by text. I’m not going to tell anyone here that you’re on the way, and I’d like you to keep it a secret on that end as well. Except for Philippe. I won’t have time to call him. You may have to hang around the airport a while.”

“Will do. See you then.”

Eddie pulled into the hotel’s parking lot and parked next to Jen’s BMW just as she was closing the convertible top. They checked in and went to her room, where they pulled down the bedcovers to make it appear slept in. Then they went together to Eddie’s room.

“Let’s go to the bar and talk about the next step,” he suggested.

The lobby bar was half-full of singles out for a good time. The adjacent restaurant had a few tables of older couples. “Earlybirds,” Jen said. “But it’s almost 7, and the earlier birds have been in the restaurants for almost three hours.”

Eddie responded with a smile. “At home we’d just be talking about where we should go to dinner. The restaurants wouldn’t be open for another hour at least, and wouldn’t be crowded until 9:30. You saw how that works when we had dinner with Margaux.”

“I did.” The waitress brought their drinks — Johnny Walker Black on the rocks for him, a Cosmo for her.

“Here’s to sorting out this whole affair in the near future,” he said, and held out his glass to her. She touched it with hers and added, “and with nobody else getting hurt. I hate to say it, but it looks more and more like the people who suffer in this world are the poor unfortunates caught in the middle, like those witnesses. One of them dead, the other homeless and scared to death. And Thom Anderson knows as well as we do who did it. We just don’t know how it all happened.”

“And we’re not going to be able to do much about it tonight,” she said with a warm smile, sliding close to him on the banquette until they sat hip to hip. He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer. He could feel her warm skin under the thin summer blouse she wore and it aroused him immediately.

He whispered in her ear, “What say we go back upstairs and decide what to do for dinner?”

“Outstanding idea.” She slid away from the table as he took out a twenty to leave the waitress. By the time he reached the elevator she was holding the door open.

They sat on the edge of the bed as he slowly unbuttoned her blouse, stopping for a kiss between each button. He pulled the blouse out of her slacks and helped as she shrugged it off, leaving only a thin white bra with a small lace edge. He cupped each breast, then slipped the thin straps over her shoulders and pulled the bra down, kissing each of her nipples.

“They come to attention for me,” he said, looking up with a mischievous grin. She was smiling happily. “I hope you’ll do the same,” she said, reaching for his belt.

“That’s already a done deal.”

An hour later they sat in bed wearing the hotel’s terrycloth dressing gowns.

“You haven’t lost your touch,” she said with admiration.

“Nor have you. It seems like twenty years ago was just last weekend. And now about dinner. The way I see it we have two choices, go down to the dining room or call room service.”

“No doubt in my mind,” she said. I vote for room service. With that she rolled to him and put her hand between his legs. “You?”

He gulped, then turned toward her and pulled the robe from her shoulders. “They’re open until midnight. Let’s decide in a few minutes.”

Room service arrived finally at 11:30, during the Late Show. With it they shared a bottle of Burgundy — “not as good as yours,” was Eddie’s view. At 12:30 she pushed herself away from him and said, “Into the shower for me.” He started to get up and she said, “Alone. I can’t do any more. I’m sore.”

When he had showered he climbed into the bed next to her. She put her head on his shoulder and moved his hand gently from her breast.

He was almost asleep when she moved slightly and asked, “Eddie? Are you still awake?”

“Sort of,” he mumbled.

“Tell me about Lauren. Please?”

He was silent for a moment. He knew his mother had opened the door to this question by showing Jen the family picture and that there was no civil way he could avoid it, but he had no desire to display the barely healed wounds of his past life. But he suppressed a sigh and began to tell the story.

Almost everyone has romantic ideas about Paris, he told her, but Lauren’s were stronger than most because her mother was French and had met her father there. As a young Army officer he’d learned to speak passable French, so he was able to talk to her parents. He insisted that Lauren study it as well.

“We fell in love in college, just a few months before my graduation. It was sudden, a surprise to both of us. She wanted to leave school and go with me, which I thought was a mistake but I was so anxious to have her close that I didn’t fight it. She said she would finish college wherever I was stationed but for one reason or another that didn’t happen. And then when I was discharged she was anxious to get to Paris. We both were.”

But she learned quickly how difficult it can be to adjust to life in a foreign country. She felt trapped in a sort of expat ghetto of anglophones who were even less fluent in French than she. Most of Eddie’s friends were French, and their quick dinner-table give-and-take was beyond her ability to follow. She became more and more withdrawn after Sam was born.

“When they died we were making plans for her to move back to Florida with Sam. Her parents lived in Jacksonville, so she planned to go there. I suppose we were also talking about the divorce that was almost certain to follow, although we never said the word. The marriage really was over. She was desperately unhappy and you know what that brings.

“I resisted because I didn’t want Sam to grow up in Jacksonville. In Paris he was a bright and promising student with a passion for soccer, who also happened to be part American. In Jacksonville he’d still be bright and promising but at another level he’d be just another black boy. Your town appears to be a suburb of the Midwest but Jacksonville, believe me, is Dixie. I didn’t want him to grow up that way.”

He described the guilt he felt after their murder as a “big, stinking black dog sitting on my shoulders day after day after day. It influenced everything I did. It was all I could do to keep it from screwing up my business. It did screw up any number of relationships.”

She asked him gently, “Was Aurélie one of those?”

“She was the best one. But I ran her off, too.”

“That is all so sad. I’m glad you’re better now. Thank you for telling me.”

Neither of them moved again until the sharp chirp of Jen’s phone waked them at 5 o’clock.

“Shit,” she muttered as she turned to the night table to silence the offensive noise. “Hello.”

She sat straight up in bed. “When?” she asked, and then, “I’ll be right there.”

“Eddie,” she said, eyes wide. “My house is on fire.”

Eddie had been listening closely. He introduced himself and asked, “Chief, did the neighbor say how long it was between the broken glass and the fire?”

“Several minutes. Maybe five.”

Jen interrupted to ask Chief Benson to show her the damage. They walked down the driveway toward the back yard and after they were out of earshot Eddie turned to Thom. “Do you see the same pattern I see? First they try to kidnap Roy and fail. Next they try to kidnap one of us in Paris, and as I reflect on how that went down I come more and more to the conclusion they were after Jen. They were confused because I was with two blondes that night. They failed again.

“And now they break into Jen’s house, then burn it — but five minutes later. Enough time to go to her bedroom to snatch her, or both of us. I doubt if they wanted to search the house. They must have done that while she was in Paris. They were here to kidnap her, and it’s probably the same people, or at least the same group.”

Eddie kept to himself his thought that fire had been involved in Artie’s death, and after that the deaths of Lauren and Sam. “We’re dealing with something really evil here,” he told himself. “It’s gone way beyond a painting.”

“I see the connection,” Thom responded. “First thing I’m going to do is call in the state fire marshal to do a complete investigation of just the fire, if the Chief hasn’t already done it. Our lab will look thoroughly at the house and interview the witnesses. The neighbor who called it in may be the only one.”

“Of course that’s your department,” Eddie said, “but it sounds smart to me. After what we found in Arcadia I think I need to know more about Al Sommers. Can you point me toward anyone who might be able to fill me in?”

“Let’s see. He sticks pretty much to himself now, since he retired from the bank, which by the way failed just a few months ago. I hear his health’s been failing.

“For a starter, try Lindy Gaudet. She’s editor of a weekly paper on Longboat Key that specializes in society coverage. It’s mainly picture after picture of couples or groups in penguin suits holding champagne glasses and smiling into the camera. She’s a bit odd — used to be a real social butterfly but got tired of it and dropped out. She likes to gossip, and she’s a little mean.

“You might also talk to one of her part-time reporters. Guy by the name of Woody Matthews. He’s an old-school police reporter, down to the whisky and cigars, but he knows what’s going on in town.”

“When I saw Colonel Sommers yesterday he mentioned a ‘Woody.’ He told his helper to find out what this Woody knew about Roy’s death. He was surprised when I mentioned it didn’t appear to be an accident.”

“Same Woody. He did some investigations for Sommers at the bank. He’s not a completely bad guy, but a rabid right-winger and a hard drinker. He and Sommers belong to the same church — the Church of Hate the Jews. It’s not a big congregation and they keep their heads down because Longboat Key is more Jewish than Manhattan. Woody will expect you to pay him if he tells you anything. I think he makes more as a private eye than as a real reporter.”