Little Death by the Sea (24 page)

There was a time when all this used to get
him charged up, Gerry mused. When the experience of a job well done
would have hit all his feel-good buttons. The new client had loved
the creative presentation, had approved, without reservation, both
the media budget and the suggested placements. Under normal
circumstances it would be one to re-live over agency lunches, to
boast about—without need for hyperbole—to one’s colleagues at all
the ad community functions.

Under normal circumstances.

He sighed and pushed himself out of his
chair. Under these circumstances he couldn’t give a flying damn. He
opened up his office door and peered down the hallway. Awfully
quiet for the afternoon of a great client victory, he thought. On
the other hand, did they expect him to bring out the champagne
every time they won a significant account? At least Maggie had to
take back that business about his mind not being on the clients.
Today’s success story certainly threw that theory in the
crapper.

Gerry wandered down to Maggie’s closed door
and stood there, frowning. The traffic manager, Dierdre, was
passing in the hallway.

“What’s the deal with Maggie?” he asked.

“Private phone call, I guess.” Dierdre said.
“Should I buzz her to be at the condom meeting?”

“Stop calling it that, would you? It’s a
prophylactics client, for God’s sake. You make it sound like we’re
practicing safe sex in the conference room. No, don’t bother
her.”

Dierdre walked away and Gerry lingered for a
moment outside Maggie’s door. He spotted Patti and Pokey making
their way to the conference room for the meeting and ducked into
the supply room to avoid a confrontation. It was easier to deal
with her under the protection of a meeting in progress, he’d
decided.

Jenny poked her head into the room.

“They’re looking for you, Gerry,” she said
sweetly, the light never reaching her eyes.

“Oh, good. Just checking to make sure we’ve
got enough paper. Great. We do! On my way.” He handed her a paper
stack and hurried down the hall for the meeting.

2

The oily little fishbone of a man glared at
Gerard from across the café table. All along the
Rue de la
Clingancourt
, shopkeepers were opening their doors and
beginning the morning ritual of hosing down the patch of sidewalk
in front of their stores. The Sacre Coeur was just visible in the
distance, its bone-white onion dome dotting the horizon like a
bright exclamation point. Gerard thought of his grandmother when he
saw the cathedral, that ferocious old crow who, every Sunday, would
drag him and his brother—unprotesting but unwilling—up the hundreds
of steps to mass. He could still feel the pinched grip of the
withered old hand clamped on his small-boy’s wrist. He did not
remember
Grandmère
with love.

His eyes shifted away from the church and
back to his companion. It was too early to order a drink, even in
Paris, and Gerard would very much have liked to have had something.
He eyed the filthy bundle of flesh and clothes across from him.

“It’s all I have,” he said in French. “It’s
all I could get.”

“That’s not my problem,” the other man, a
foreigner, rasped in much poorer French. “It’s not enough.”

Gerard raked a hand through his thinning,
reddish hair.

“Take it as an installment,” he said. “I’ll
get more.”

“Soon,” the little man wheezed. “Get it soon,
Monsieur
Gerard. Your credit with my boss is...am I saying
this right? My French is not good.” He smiled obscenely, his tongue
darting out to moisten his little beak-like lips. “Your credit is
very soft. You are understanding?”

Gerard stared at the nasty creature. Perhaps
he should suggest that the filthy
crapaud
use some of the
money to have his lungs checked, or his teeth cleaned, or,
peut-être
, some newer rags? He scraped his chair back and
stood up slowly.

“
Je comprends
,” he said.

3

The skirt of Maggie’s stiff cotton sundress
spread out in a fan against the lawn. She drew her bare legs up
under her and sipped from one of the frosty glasses of lemonade
Becka had just armed everyone with. Laurent stood a few yards away,
in khaki trousers and a black polo shirt, holding Nicole’s pony.
The child, her jodphurred legs sticking out awkwardly, sat woodenly
atop the Welsh pony. Laurent chattered to her in French and Maggie
enjoyed hearing his fluency for a change.

She hated to admit that Gerry might be right.
It was possible that the language difficulties did serve as an
impasse to a deeper understanding between them. She didn’t doubt
the passion or the love, but from time to time, she yearned for a
more complicated exchange.

Yesterday, in a rare visit to their local
videotape rental shop, Maggie had been appalled to see Laurent
head—not for the foreign films as she had expected—but to the
horror/sci-fi aisle of the store. They had argued about it.

“I can’t watch this stuff,” she’d said, her
face twisted into her most unattractive grimace.

“Why not?”

“It’s garbage. It’s stupid.”

“Ahhh.”

“’Ahhh’? What does ‘ahhhh’ mean? I mean, come
on, Laurent...blood and guts pouring out of a deadman’s eyeballs?
Give me a break. It’s gross and meaningless.”

“
D’accord
,” he’d agreed, placing his
gruesome choices on the counter to be checked out.

In the end, they’d compromised, if not
happily. Maggie promised not to make retching noises or cover her
eyes too much during his video and Laurent resolved not to sigh too
heavily or yawn during the British drawing room mystery that she
had selected. After all, she consoled herself on the drive home
from the store, it could’ve been a lot worse. It could have been a
Jerry Lewis movie.

As she listened to him now, talking fluently
to her little damaged niece, she made a silent vow to take a French
grammar class at the local community college. Soon.

She turned to her mother who was seated on a
white wrought iron bench next to her.

“Do you think she enjoys that?” Maggie
asked.

Elspeth shaded her eyes against the sun and
smiled at Laurent.

“Watch her left foot, Laurent. She looks like
she’s a little lopsided.”

Laurent waved a finger in Elspeth’s direction
to indicate he had it under control. He trotted up and down the
lawn next to the pony. Nicole clung to the saddle like a tenacious
but somnolent jellyfish. Her little face was screwed into a
squinting mask of concentration, or did Maggie imagine that? As the
child bobbed along, it was hard to tell whether she was
deliberately trying to stay on or was simply hanging on by
instinct.

“Laurent mentioned to your father the other
night that you are planning a trip overseas.” Elspeth took a long
sip of her lemonade and then patted her lips with a lace-trimmed
cotton handkerchief.

“He did?” Maggie was surprised. Laurent
hadn’t mentioned another meeting or conversation with her
father.

“It’s not true?”

“Well, yes, it’s true.” Were Laurent and her
dad becoming buddies or something? “I was going to tell you.”

“He said you were going because of
Elise.”

Maggie cleared her throat and winced into the
sun, trying to keep her eyes on the pony and its charge.

“Well, sort of.”

Elspeth turned and looked at her daughter.
She wasn’t smiling.

“Maggie.”

Maggie sighed. “Look, I don’t know how to
explain to you why I feel I need to go. I just feel it, that’s
all.”

“He said you think you may find her killer
over there.”

“I’ve got a letter that Elise was writing
before she died and I want to talk to the woman she intended it
for. I know it may seem feeble, but I think it’s worth a trip.”

“Will you need any help with money?”

Maggie looked at her mother’s profile. It was
implacable, a little too smooth, a little hard.

“No, thanks, Mom. I’m fine,” she said.

Elspeth stood up, setting her lemonade glass
down on the bench, and applauded the approaching twosome with a
wide smile.

“
Très bien
, Laurent! Nicole!” she
called. “Our own little National Velvet.” She touched Maggie’s head
lightly. “I love you, Maggie,” she said. “Possibly more than
anything on this earth.” She turned on her heel and walked back
into the house.

Astonished by her mother’s words, Maggie
stared after Elspeth’s retreating back. Her drink glass was
dripping blotches of condensation all over her freshly-pressed
frock.

“You are getting wet, Maggie,” Laurent called
to her. He picked Nicole up and deposited her on the ground next to
her pony and led the beast to where Maggie was sitting. He tucked
the reins under the pommel and let the pony graze while he flopped
down next to her. Very slowly, as if she’d just regained the use of
her legs, Nicole moved to where Laurent was seated and lowered
herself to a spot beside him.

“She seems to like you,” Maggie remarked,
indicating Nicole.

“
Ahh, mais oui!”
Laurent patted the
little girl’s hand. “We are very fond of each other,
n’est-ce
pas, mon petite chou
?”

“What else did the detective tell you?”
Laurent asked, smiling at Nicole.

Maggie flicked away the droplets of water
that had pooled in fat beads on her dress.

“I did more telling than he did,” she said,
squinting in Nicole’s direction. “He hadn’t done much work on the
case at all. It’s sort of appalling when you think about it. That
someone can die a violent death and the police only go through the
motions of finding out why.”

Maggie combed her fingers through her hair.
It spilled down onto her shoulders in a shiny sheet of black
silk.

Laurent pulled out some grass and sprinkled
them on Nicole’s lap. She looked at him somberly.

“And so you told the detective everything you
know?” Laurent asked.

“Pretty much. I told him about Alfie and
about Gerard being here at the time of the...at the time.”

Laurent nodded without looking at her.

“And he either didn’t believe me or thought
it was no big deal. It’s so hard to understand...what more do they
want? I mean, I practically have a video tape of Gerard killing
Elise, and the police do nothing.” She looked guiltily at Nicole
and then lowered her voice. “They don’t even want to talk to him
again.”

“But Gerard is not in Atlanta, is he?”

Maggie looked at him with a startled
expression on her face.

“How did you know that?”

“
Mon Dieu
! You have been telling me,
n’est-ce pas
? You said, Gerard, he leaves Atlanta the day
you went to his hotel?”

“Yeah, okay, that’s right. I guess I did.”
She shook her skirt free of remnant grass blades. “But it doesn’t
matter. If the subject is murder, they can question him anywhere on
earth if they want to. But they’re not interested. What it comes
down to is this: Burton doesn’t give a flip who killed Elise unless
it can put his name in the paper. That’s the way I read it.”

“
Tant pis
, Maggee.” Too bad.

“Yeah,
tant pis
, all right.” She stood
up and gave her dress a shake. “Come on, let’s take Nicole inside.
I’m starving and it’s mostly your fault.”

“
Comment
?”

“Your cooking. It’s stretched my stomach. I
used to eat like a bird. Now, if I don’t get multiple course meals
on a regular basis, I feel like I’m on a starvation diet. Thanks a
heap, Laurent. I hope you like your women hefty.”

Laurent hopped up easily for someone of his
height and bulk. He caught her by the waist and swung her
effortlessly into the air and back down again. He kept her pinned
lightly in his arms.

“Not too bad,” he said judiciously.

She smiled and gave him a hug. She felt her
irritation with him dissolve.

Nicole sat quietly between them, staring at
the torn grass bits scattered across the lawn and her bright blue
dress.

4

Burton sat in his Honda and watched the front
of the little cottage on St. Juniper’s Street. He’d watched the
man, Alfie, go in about six o’clock, his arms full of groceries,
and the woman leave about eight. She returned a half an hour later
with a smaller grocery bag. Wine?

Every minute of the investigation was
precious now. In a desperate moment, he’d called the Newberry woman
and admitted that the suspect they had held in custody for her
sister’s murder—the dope peddler—turned out to have been
uninvolved. But it would have been no great loss to the world if
the scum had gone down for it. Might as well be him, for lack of
anyone else. But now, something Maggie had said yesterday on the
phone made him think again about the retard. They’d not interviewed
the mother. If they had, they would have discovered that she was
protective and maybe treacherous. The Newberry girl had uncovered
it. And it was as good a lead as any to follow in a case that
sprouted damn few. With the heat he’d been taking lately from the
Chief, he couldn’t afford to screw up another one.

Jack shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s
seat. He hated stake-outs, hated waiting for something to happen
and half the time you weren’t even sure what it was when you saw
it. He’d already spilled the remnants of cold 7-ll coffee on his
pants. Gluey miniature doughnuts sat in their own sugar and grease
on a cardboard strip on his dashboard. He’d eaten ten of the dozen
in the packet.

Alfie had opportunity. He practically lived
next door to the murder victim. His motive? What kind of motive
does any maniac ever have? Maybe Alfie doesn’t have such a good
relationship with Mama. Burton leaned over and drew out a stale
pack of Winstons from the glove box. He shook one loose into his
mouth and took a long drag on it, unlighted. Alfie was certainly
capable, physically, of the stranglings.