The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4 Page 23

  Maggie unpacked her few things and put a call in to Laurent. It seemed to ring a long time before he picked up.

  "Allo?"

  "Laurent--"

  "Maggeee! You are there? How was the trip, eh?"

  "It was good. Oh, I miss you! I wish you were here with me, Laurent. How come we didn't do this à deux?"

  "Ahhh, C’est très cher, n'est-ce pas? Very expensive. It is best you are just there."

  "Not from where I'm sitting." Maggie settled back onto her bed and gazed out the tall, open French windows. "Is everything okay there?" she asked.

  "Ah, mais oui," he said. "But I am sleeping the night without you and that is not good, cherie."

  "Not good for me either, sweetheart. I'll be back soon, though."

  "You are calling from your hotel, yes?"

  "I was just too tired to go find a pay phone. I know it's cheaper. I will next time."

  "Ce n'est faire rien, ma petite." It doesn't matter.

  "I love you, Laurent."

  "Et je t'aime, aussi, Maggee."

  She felt happy and tired and loved.

  "I'll call you tomorrow, okay?" she said.

  "Okay."

  Hanging up, Maggie committed herself to snapping out of her exhaustion. She remembered that all the travel books said not to give in to jet lag until it was your regular bedtime. That was nearly a full day away. Kicking off her shoes, she wiggled her toes and massaged her swollen feet before putting on a pair of high-top running shoes. She wanted to be comfortable for the ground she would need to cover and at 145F a ten-block taxi ride, it was pretty clear she would be doing a lot of walking.

  The sky was leaden with a threat of rain so Maggie slipped into a thin cotton jacket, put a few francs in her pocket, and left her room, locking it behind her.

  She deposited her key with the sullen young woman at the hotel desk, gave her a cheery "au revoir!" and bounded down the hotel stairs with more energy than she felt. Looking westward, she could see the grand boulevard of Saint Germain but decided against taking it this time. Plenty of time to wander all over it before she left Paris, she told herself. Instead, she turned north onto Rue Racine and crossed to the area's other large boulevard, Saint Michel. Along the way, Parisians appeared to be preparing for their weekends with last minute afternoon shopping expeditions. Maggie wasn't surprised to see that most of those preparations seemed to involve food, the preparing of it, the selling of it, carrying it, and eating it--all on the busy, bustling streets in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The buildings that lined the narrow cobblestoned streets were ancient and jammed together. The crumbling eighteenth century architecture was testimony to the fact that little had changed in this neighborhood in many years. Quaint shops and frenzied marketplaces sprang up out of doorways and alleyway entrances. Café fronts and restaurants, one after another, heralded Greek dining, each restaurant advertising itself as better and more delectable than the last. Couscous, coq au vin, pot au feu. The scent of baking rillettes and the ever-plentiful Croque-Monsieurs filled the air. Maggie walked past bookstores, cinemas, art film houses, discothèques and outdoor cafés, all jammed with young people.

  She continued down the Boulevard St.-Michel until she reached the Seine where she stopped and stared across the river. She had passed very near to Elise's first apartment but had deliberately avoided going there. Not yet, she told herself. From the Seine, she turned east and walked parallel to the city's great river until she came to her destination: the Cathedrale de Notre-Dame de Paris.

  The cathedral loomed magnificent and imposing before her, its twin towers as familiar and reassuring to her as if she'd seen them every day in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother had taken her and Elise to Mass here as children and Maggie had been impressed by an exquisite feeling of the glory and power of God. Now, standing in the square before the cathedral, surrounded by the ubiquitous lavender sellers, pickpockets and tourists, Maggie felt the same majesty and magnificence reaching down to her. She settled on a cold stone bench on the parameter of the square and watched the famous church and its patrons for nearly an hour before she realized that, aside from her early morning airport croissant, she'd had nothing to eat all day.

  Circling Notre-Dame, Maggie walked westward again, this time on the Quay de la Tournelle Montebello until she reached Rue Dauphine. She took a seat at a small café called "La Place Americaine.” She ordered the fixed-price menu of paté and roast beef with pommes frites and the house wine, which turned out to be a flinty dry white which tasted like bouquets of flowers without the sweetness. To her relief, the waiter was pleasant and friendly to her.

  She looked out onto the street as she ate her lunch and wondered which of the shops was “Chez Zouk.” The address she had was ll Rue Dauphine in the Latin Quarter. She guessed that Zouk's boutique must be only a few blocks from Elise's old flat. Maggie had an image of Elise, the young American artist, walking home from art classes and stopping in at Madame Zouk's shop. Probably caters to the bohemian-artsy crowd, Maggie figured. Elise's style was definitely not Ellen Tracy.

  When she finished lunch and, again, overtipped, Maggie continued down Dauphine until she found the shop. It was small and looked old. A heavy wooden door with ornate carvings seemed to bar the little boutique from a curious public. The small display window showed antique jewelry amid dark cashmere drapes and sweeping skirts. Nice stuff, Maggie thought. A little on the black and spooky side, maybe, but then, that's Paris. A sign over the door read "Chez Zouk,” with a smaller hand-lettered placard propped in the window which read "Ferme pour dejeuner". Closed for lunch.

  Maggie checked her watch. It was nearly three o'clock. These Parisians ate late, she decided. Undaunted, she turned and headed north on Dauphine until she reached the Seine where the Pont Neuf crossed over to the Quay de Louvre and the Right Bank. The wind had begun to pick up and she felt the rain in the air although it wouldn't fall just yet. The river looked wild and angry.

  She remembered Elise writing about a view of the Seine from her first flat in Paris and Maggie wondered how many times her sister had seen it just like it was now. Exciting and gray and compelling. She held her rain jacket tightly around her, the temperature seeming to dip as she walked. She hurried down the Quay de Conti until it turned into the Quay Malaquais where L'Ecole des Beaux Arts appeared before her. The street where the School of Fine Arts was located was brimming with some of Paris' oldest cafés. Immediately south of the school, Maggie caught her breath to see the L'eglise St.-Germain-des-Pres. Originally built in the sixth century, the church and adjacent abbey were stunning in their majesty and antiquity.

  Maggie returned her attention to Elise's school. So this is where she went, Maggie thought, moving toward the entrance of the school. This is where Dad sent her. And while I was studiously trumping all my classes with A’s at the University of Georgia, Elise was prancing through the massive stone gates of one of the finest art schools in the world. Maggie regarded the impressive façade of the school.

  And then she had dropped out.

  Maggie retraced her steps on the Quays as they flanked the Seine and imagined her sister returning to her flat this way. It was the most direct route to Elise's apartment and would have taken her by Zouk's shop. Maggie was aware that the most "direct route" home would not necessarily be Elise's first choice. Chances are, she'd stop in at one of the smoky, dark cafés packed shoulder-to-shoulder with ponytailed young people who subsisted on thick and harsh demi-cups of French coffee and pack after pack of Gitanes and Gaulouises.

  Maggie walked until she reached the Rue Dauphine and then turned south onto it. She could see before she reached the shop that the proprietor had returned.

  Madame Zouk stood in the doorway of her shop, as if expecting Maggie. A cigarette was held to her mouth and blue smoke encircled her beautiful face. Maggie was not prepared for the intensity of the woman's appearance. Madame Zouk was tall and slim, dressed in black with gray stockings and black velvet slippers. A thin web of black velvet caught
her long dark hair up and carried it gracefully at the nape of her long pale neck. Michele Zouk 's eyes were dark and almond-shaped, her mouth was full yet not too large for her delicate and finely-boned face. The drama of her dark eyes against her swan-white skin was startling.

  Maggie approached slowly. Zouk smiled, then dropped the cigarette gracefully at her feet, not looking to see it fall into the deep Paris gutter. She retreated into the shop without turning her back on Maggie.

  "Bonjour, Madame," Maggie said huskily, unsure of her voice. It suddenly occurred to her that Zouk might not know any English.

  "Bonjour, Madame," Zouk answered in a light, musical voice. She smiled at Maggie and gestured her into the interior of her shop. "You are American, are you not?"

  Maggie nodded, finding it difficult to stare at the woman so openly and not blush.

  "How did you know?" she asked.

  Zouk swept into the shop before her, tendrils of her black chemise wafting behind her like fog on the air. She moved to the other side of a counter in the shop upon which was displayed an assortment of jewelry and hair ornaments.

  "I didn't," she said. "I guessed." Madame Zouk settled herself on a stool behind the counter and looked up into Maggie's eyes. "How can I help you, Madame?...or is it Mademoiselle?" Her eyes danced.

  "It's 'Mademoiselle'," Maggie said, following the woman to the counter. "Your English is so good, you hardly have any accent at all. You are French, aren't you?"

  Zouk laughed, a warm throaty sound that made Maggie smile.

  "Mais, bien sûr, I am French!" she said, shaking her head and gesturing to herself, her shop. Except for the flawless English, the woman was the pure embodiment of Maggie's idea of the quintessential French woman: stylish, beautiful, mysterious, with just a tincture of hard-earned wisdom or sadness.

  Maggie shook her head and blushed.

  "Stupid question," she said apologetically.

  Zouk smiled kindly. "You aren't looking for clothes today, Mademoiselle?"

  Maggie touched her rain jacket and felt distinctly frumpy next to Zouk.

  "No, Madame, I am looking for you." Maggie rushed on in the face of the woman's raised eyebrow. "I think you knew my sister, Elise Newberry, and, if you did, I was hoping you could tell me some things about her."

  As she spoke, she noticed that Zouk's manner had changed. The smile disappeared from her lips and her graceful spine stiffened. Zouk brought her hands together quietly and observed Maggie for a moment.

  "You are Maggie," she said finally.

  Maggie nodded. "And you were...Elise's friend," she said. "That's right, isn't it?"

  The French woman looked at Maggie without speaking. Then, she got up slowly and picked up another handmade sign with the word "Ferme" printed on it. She walked to the front of the store and Maggie watched her place the sign in the window. She carefully turned the lock on the massive front door and returned to where Maggie was standing.

  "Come," she said, leading Maggie to the back of the store. "I'll make tea."

  2

  The man's fingers drummed nervously on the paint-chipped wooden desk, his fingernails bitten and scarred as if he'd actually chewed them completely off his fingers a time or two in the past. Burton watched Donnell's mutilated fingers continue their drumming and vowed to stop biting his own nails just as soon as he had the nicotine thing kicked.

  Dave Kazmaroff sat across the room--with its single table and three chairs--and balanced a legal pad on his knee. He'd heard all this before. A hundred times before. But they had to keep asking. You never knew, something might get said. His stomach growled and he glanced at his watch.

  "Come on, Bob, it's a simple question." Kazmaroff could hear the fatigue in Burton's voice. Usually, it was a feigned weariness to allow the suspect a certain false security, to encourage him to lower his guard. Tonight, Kazmaroff doubted the weary tone was affected.

  "I told you. I told both you guys. I told--"

  "Told us what? What did you tell us?" Kazmaroff chimed in.

  "I told you that I was just walking along and--"

  "Oh, give me a break, man." Burton tossed a pencil down onto the table and Donnell flinched. His partially bald head glistened with sweat. Every so often, he would reach up and smooth the top of his bare crown with his fingers. It was a gesture that repulsed Burton. "You were just walking along and saw this apartment and decided to go knocking on doors. Right. Man, you don't start helping us out here--" The threat hung in the air.

  "I don't know what other kinda help you want from me!" Donnell's hands flew to his mouth where he began to gnaw the forefinger with some vigor. "I confessed to everything, didn't I?" His voice was muffled.

  "Man, take your fuckin' hands outta your mouth," Burton said, his eyes flashing at the man seated across the table from him.

  Donnell jerked his hands back to the table.

  "I said I did her, right? I told you who and how I--"

  "And now we just wanna know why, Bob." Kazmaroff spoke softly to countermand Burton' roughness.

  "Yeah, Bob," Burton said quietly. "Why'd'ja do her? How come, man?"

  "How come?" The killer looked at the detectives with wide eyes as if he didn't understand the question.

  "Yeah," Burton said. "Like, instead of riding your bike ten miles that day...or say, painting your living room, why did you go out and strangle someone you didn't know? Why?"

  "Why?" the man chirped back at them, a panicked look beginning to appear on his face.

  Kazmaroff didn't know how much more patience Burton had for this kind of crap but he knew it was considerably less than he had and he was about to throttle Donnell with the next repeated "why?" or "how come?"

  "Well," Donnell crooned softly, staring at his bad hands, "'cause she never cared about me. That's the reason." He looked down at his shirt front, resting his chin against his chest. "She only pretended to when he was around but when he was gone she used to laugh at me or not talk to me at all, not talk to me or look at me never, just pretend like I didn't...like I wasn't there."

  Kazmaroff eased the front legs of his chair back onto the ground. Here we go! he thought, a small pulse of excitement bursting in his chest.

  Burton' calm face hid his own eagerness as he nodded his head and picked up the pencil from the table.

  "Who?" he asked.

  Donnell looked up, a mask of misery and frustration. "Betty," he croaked. "You know? Betty?"

  Burton restrained himself from screaming: Betty Rubble? Betty Crocker? How would I know what Betty you're talking about you stupid prick?!

  "Betty?" he said, instead. "Your...mother?"

  Donnell nodded bitterly and buried his sweating head on his folded arms upon the table.

  "Mother," he said, weeping. “I picked up the gun, she looked so much like Mother. I had to kill her.”

  The gun? Burton covered his face with his hands.

  “He didn’t do it,” Kazmaroff said to no one in particular over the prisoner’s sobbing. “He didn’t friggin’ do it. I’ll be damned.”

  3

  Maggie took a sip of tea from the fragile tea cup, its roses long faded from the translucent china rim. Across from her, on a dark red velvet loveseat trimmed with heavy gold tassels and ropy fringe, sat Michele Zouk, her small, slippered feet tucked daintily under her. Zouk held her tea cup with both hands and gazed pensively at the worn, expensive Oriental rug on the floor. She had wept, briefly, while making the tea, her back to Maggie as she spooned the loose tea into the large china teapot and then poured in the boiled water. Now, Zouk sat silently and sipped her tea.

  Maggie waited and watched the French woman. It didn't seem odd to her at all to discover this exquisite creature as the best friend of her sister, Elise. Elise, who had grown up in old-south-Atlanta, with white-gloved parties and little friends whose fathers were either colonels or reverends. And although Elise may have rebelled against the gentility and sterility of a southern childhood, she'd nonetheless, lived it. Maggie imagined that
Michele Zouk had probably been the dream-embodiment of all of Elise's fantasies of who she wanted to be. The difference was that this woman had grown up in an environment that had been friendly to her exotic development, had encouraged her sense of style and presentation. Elise's ages-old habit of bucking the system had become so completely ingrained in her that she couldn't stop once she'd achieved her dream, her level of desired sophistication. Unlike Zouk, Elise had turned to drugs and despair to fill in the gaps for her.

  "Your sister was my dearest of friends," Zouk said finally, sharing a sad smile with Maggie. "Une amie de coeur, you are familiar?"

  Maggie nodded, knowing the term if not the sensation.

  "She once lived near here. Do you know that?"

  Again, Maggie indicated that she did. This time the woman shrugged.

  "Ahh, but you want to hear what it is you do not know, am I right?"

  "Madame Zouk," Maggie said, taking a long breath. "I am trying to find out who killed her."

  Their eyes met and locked. Zouk's long lashes fluttered briefly and she looked away. "And you have come to Paris to do this?" she asked doubtfully.

  Maggie pushed her empty tea cup onto the nearby hassock which was dressed to match the ornately gilded loveseat. "I'm not quite sure why I've come to Paris, to tell you the truth," she said, sighing. "I need to talk to her ex-boyfriend and he's here--"

  "Gerard Dubois?"

  "That's right. Do you know him?"

  Zouk shrugged. "But, of course. He is a very bad man. When he took Elise with him to Montmarte, I cried for Elise." Michele poured herself and Maggie more tea. "I was very sad. I cried and begged her not to leave. But it was l'amour, eh? She was in love with him."