Coq au Vin (18 page)

No answer.

“Come on, sweetheart. Please come. Simard wants to see you. He asked for you especially.”

Nothing.

“You really hate me now, huh, Geechee? Okay. Pistachio it is.”

Ile St. Louis in the rain. Notre Dame hanging behind me in the mist like the fingers of an old hand pointing blackly up at God. There was a time when that would have given the old tear ducts a workout. All out of tears now. Well, there would be plenty of time for that later. Never made love with Andre while it was raining. How could that be?

Simard looked very snappy in his dark suit. He stood as I approached the table, took my hands into his, looked into my eyes for a long time. For a minute there I thought he might kiss me. But no, he was an elderly man who had seen me only twice in his life and that Gallic sense of reserve was too strong. Still, I took note of the kindness in his eyes and was grateful for it.

I extended a fake apology on Andre's behalf for his absence, and the meal commenced. The inspector of course did all the ordering. The food was beautiful and we put off talking about the very reason he and I had ever crossed paths until the waiter was clearing away the dishes.

“So,” he said, “I have seen a copy of the letter your aunt left for you. The anguish in it was painfully apparent. It must have been heartbreaking for you to read.”

I nodded.

“At any rate, the autopsy has confirmed what she told you. She was indeed gravely ill. There was an inoperable cancer of the pancreas. One of the worst sorts, I'm told.” He stopped there, but a minute later added, “I've always said, when the day comes that I'm given a similar diagnosis, I will most certainly consider her way of…”

“Going out,” I said, in English. “Yes, me too, I think. But in a much quieter way.”

I took a long drink from my—what?—third glass of wine. “It's been mighty quiet lately in the apartment. I've had plenty of time these past few days to try out a lot of answers to everything that happened.

“When Vivian was holding Andre and me in that car, she told us a series of lies. But, in her own crazy way, she was telling the truth at the same time. What I mean is, she laid out the cast of characters, and she provided a list of their actions—their betrayals, if you will. What I had to do was juggle the players—switch the names and faces and match them with the crimes committed.

“I think I know what happened to all the players, including my aunt. I don't claim it's the whole story, but it's close enough to explain almost everything—almost.”

“Please,” Simard said. “I am eager to hear it.”

I began. “The time is more than twenty years ago. Vivian is young and gorgeous, and all the players are having the time of their lives. Americans in Paris. Vivian, Jerry, Morris Melon, and Ez. Morris Melon and Ez hit on a scam to make money. Surely Melon was the mastermind for the scheme. Vivian may or may not have been in on the planning of the scam. I say she wasn't; I say Ez was indiscreet and leaked to her what Melon and he were planning to do. That would be perfectly understandable, because Ez was flipping from Morris Melon's bed to Vivian's. Unable to decide which side of the fence he was playing, in Vivian's words. Let's say that little Ez was quite drunk with being desired by this sexy lady
and
this very smart, sophisticated, charismatic older man.

“So now Vivian knows about the scheme. And she tells Jerry about it. Jerry takes it all in, and bides his time to see if Ez and Melon can really pull such a thing off.

“Well, what do you know? It appears to be working. Ez is posing as this blues singer and songwriter from the South with the disingenuous moniker of Little Rube Haskins. He's making a splash in Europe with his songs. Except they aren't his songs. They're tunes stolen from old compilations of folk music gathered by historians nearly half a century before.

“Now, Inspector, here I have to add a footnote to this story that jumps from the present to the past and back again. My friend Andre is a kind of walking archive. Never forgets a thing. But for some reason his memory betrayed him when it came to Morris Melon. Andre knew that he'd heard Melon's name in connection to some kind of scholarship related to the migration of blacks from the South to the North. But he had the story just a little bit wrong. Melon was a scholar all right, a sociologist, but his great interest was in music, and he had taken part in one of the song-gathering missions to the South in the 1940s. I've also had time to make a phone call to a music critic friend back in New York. He found Melon's name and even his photograph in the literature accompanying some of the old recordings. Melon himself had some musical talent, and it was easy for him to take those songs and rework the tunes and lyrics. He and Ez would have been exposed in no time back in the States, but over here it was a different story.

“So, to pick up with the Ez and Vivian story, it seems he's decided at last which side of the fence he wants. He's now head over heels in love with her. And she makes him think she loves him, too. But she's married to Jerry Brainard.”

“Not really,” Simard said, shaking his head. “No record of a marriage between them has ever surfaced.”

“I see. Yet another one of Vivian's lies. Well, no matter. Married or not, she wasn't planning to leave Jerry. And, probably at Jerry's direction, she played Ez for everything he was worth and got her hands on his money. She cleans him out, gets the money to Jerry, and then, in keeping with the plans that she and Jerry have made, she runs.

“Vivian waits for Jerry. And waits. But he doesn't show and he doesn't send for her. Slowly it begins to dawn on her that he never will. Meanwhile, poor Ez is brutally murdered. Vivian hears about it. She thinks that Jerry ran out on her
and
killed Little Rube.

“Now you come onstage, Inspector. You take the murder seriously, pursue what leads you have. But, unfortunately, the police never catch the killer.

“The one and only winner in this story: Jerry Brainard. The murdering bastard has double-crossed everyone. Vivian and Melon can do nothing. For obvious reasons, they can't tell the authorities, or anyone else, a thing. Besides that, they don't even know where the hell Jerry is.

“Curtain on the Little Rube Haskins story. No recordings exist to carry on his legend. A few people know who he was, but in general he's merely a footnote to a footnote in music history.

“The years pass. Morris Melon becomes a kind of elder statesman of the smart black set in Paris. Mister Bon Vivant. It's like he got a second chance. Life didn't turn out so bad for him after all.

“Jerry Brainard, according to you, Monsieur Simard, becomes a career criminal, if not a terribly successful one. A little hijacking, a little smuggling, maybe a gofer for some of the more powerful criminals. Still, he manages to stay out of prison.

“Vivian gets on with her life, too. If we buy her story, she's been bumming around for the past fifteen years or so and the party, as she said, is finally over. Vivian is now older, and bitter, and sick. She hears that Jerry Brainard, the man who used her and deserted her, is living in Paris. And knowing she's going to die soon, she decides to exact a belated revenge, not just for herself but for Ez. Somehow she scrapes together the money to get here.

“Only Brainard always seems to be a few steps ahead of her. He seems to know where to find her before she knows where to find him. When someone comes around to her hotel to try to kill her, she assumes it was Jerry who sent him. She's so spooked that she never returns to her room. Finally, Viv is horrified when Brainard kills a woman, one of his criminal colleagues, and implicates her in the murder. It appears that Jerry is systematically planting evidence against her. She's in a rage now. She's going to get him if it's the last thing she ever does in this world.

“Then something truly unexpected happens. One day Vivian hears from one of her low-life sources that a young woman who claims to be her niece from New York is looking for her. She wants to know what on earth I'm doing here, why I'm trying to find her. Maybe it's a trap. But just maybe the family's worried about her and I've been sent to bail her out—which of course happened to be exactly right. But she can't just walk up to me and Andre. She's in danger, she's being hunted. So she stakes us out. She stalks us for a while.

“Viv is broke by now, desperate. Her last few dollars are back at the hotel, and she can't go back there. But if I do happen to have money for her, she wants it. No conditions. No questions asked. When she gets the opportunity, she forces Andre at gunpoint into this old heap she's gotten from god knows who or where. She makes him tell her about my mission here, and then holds the gun on him while he calls me to come and ransom him back.

“Big confession in the back seat of the Volkswagen. Big lies, rather. But are they?”

“Now,” he said, lighting my cigarette as well as his own, “I think I see where you are going with this story. What your aunt told you in the car was both true and false. She did indeed intend to kill this man from her past. To obtain her revenge. But by the time of her confession to you, this man was no longer Jerry Brainard. She was planning to kill Monsieur Melon.”

“That's right, Inspector. Melon was her target. And she was his!

“Vivian gets over here, intent on killing Jerry, but before she can do much of anything, Jerry is murdered. And it is that murder that leads to the subsequent revelation of who murdered Rube Haskins.

“Viv figures out that it was Morris Melon who killed Jerry Brainard, or had him killed. And suddenly she knows—it was Melon who murdered Ez, too. As you pointed out, there was hatred and passion behind that crime. Who would strike the victim like that and then run over him again and again until there was nothing left—Jerry? No. He was obviously no prize in the morality department. But Vivian's affair with Ez meant nothing to him. But Morris Melon? Not only didn't he get his share of the money from Ez, he was spurned by him as a lover as well. My God, I would think that if Melon could have gotten his hands on Vivian he'd have killed her as well.”

“Melon,” he confirmed. “Of course, Melon. But how did your aunt come so quickly to the conclusion that Monsieur Melon was Jerry Brainard's murderer?”

“It was the Mary Polk murder that convinced her. She read, just as Andre and I did, that the police had questioned and released a small-time criminal named Gigi Lacroix. One of the papers carried a photograph of him. Vivian recognized him immediately as the man who tried to kill her that day in the hotel. She assumed when Gigi first attacked her that he was Jerry's goon. But by the time of the Mary Polk murder, Jerry was already dead. She knew that it had to be Morris Melon who was after her; that Gigi worked for him, not Jerry. From there, it wasn't much of a leap to realize Morris Melon was responsible for Ez's death, too. And so it was still payback time, but not for Jerry. For Melon.

“But of course Nanette and her young man Andre don't know any of that. They walk right into the old man's net. He befriends them, sets them up with a part-time gig in his place, where he can track their progress just by keeping his ears open.

“And who has little Nanette enlisted to help find her aunt? A small-time criminal who knows a little bit about a lot of things. Gigi Lacroix. The very hood who works as a strong-arm man, snitch, or whatever, for Morris Melon.

“Lacroix appreciated so many of life's little ironies. He was taking money from me for the same service that Melon was paying him for—finding Vivian. ‘Just string her along,' Melon probably told him. ‘Take the money she gives you and tell her as little as possible.'

“There was more irony than I knew what to do with, Inspector. For instance—yes, somebody was framing her with those items from her suitcase, but it wasn't Jerry; it was Morris Melon. His man Gigi must have gotten his hands on Viv's address book. Melon sent that telegram asking for money, hoping somebody from the family would come over here and flush Vivian out. It was just a long shot for him. Little did he know, I actually did have a jackpot for her.

“And then there was all Viv's talk about betrayal. But the terrible betrayal wasn't Jerry's betrayal of her; it was her betrayal of Ez. She put the knife in Ez. On and on.”

Simard was doing his duty as taster as the waiter opened yet another bottle of wine. He nodded his approval and our glasses were filled. We drank in silence for a time.

“I know how useless hindsight is,” I commented later. “But, thinking back on everything, I realize how plain some of these things should have been to me. Staring me in the face, almost. Once Andre played that cassette, the apples weren't just falling off the branches, they were practically jumping into the basket.

“But they were all jumbled together, see. I couldn't untangle all the parts of Vivian's story yet. It was impossible to sort out fact from fantasy, or just plain lies. But I knew Melon had to be at the center of everything. Old Satan.

“Big
mistake, my not picking up on that one. Should have known immediately that day in the Volkswagen that when Vivian used that strange phrase she was referring to Melon and not Jerry. But, you know, here's the thing about Old Satan Melon: it's as if he made the decision to be as evil as he possibly could be. He made himself into a Satan. I mean, he must have started out on the side of the angels, and then, once he slipped—pulled that fraud with Rube Haskins—he figured he had to go all the way to the other end of morality—to being a devil. I remember how he talked about the blessedness of black people from the country.
Grace
was the word he used. When he hatched that scheme, it was like he was stealing the grace from his people and renouncing his own blessedness. He must have been so profoundly ashamed of what he'd done that he had to kill everyone who knew about it. He wasn't just killing people, he was killing his shame. First Ez. Then Jerry. Mary Polk. Then Vivian, very nearly. And finally Gigi, who had been Melon's hired assassin.”