Murder in the Raw (17 page)

“A bit of gossip, some speculation. Nothing provable. The grieving husband drinks himself to death when the wife runs off with a younger man. All the media attention would make me even more bankable. I could have been offered a major movie deal. Now I’ll just have to settle for writing a book about my life.”

“I’ll buy a copy,” Rex told her. “I’m sure it’ll make for a fascinating read.”

A flash of wry amusement illuminated her face. “It will. But maybe you should wait for the movie. I wonder who they’ll get to play me?”

“I’ve always liked Angelina Jolie, myself.”

Jean-Luc snorted in derision from where he sat at the other end of the breakfast bar. “You have no sense of reality, Sabine. They will throw the proverbial book at you.”

“And you are claiming you had no knowledge of any of this?” Rex asked him.

“I helped her get away from St. Martin. She said she had to leave her husband but was frightened of telling him. I had no idea she was going to kill him.
Quel cauchemar!
” His voice broke on the word “nightmare” as his face fell into his hands.

“His speciality is melodrama,” Sabine noted.

“He’s an actor too?”

“Yes, of course. Don’t you know
anything?
Mainly theatre. We were in an adaptation of
Frenchman’s Creek
, where he played the sensitive pirate Aubéry opposite my character, Dona St. Columb.”

“A sensitive pirate?”

“It was a stupid play,” Jean-Luc concurred. “Based on a stupid novel by Daphne du Maurier. ”

“It was a huge success at the box office.”

“Is that when you two met?”

A frozen silence ensued. Rex deduced he had touched on a sensitive subject. At that moment, the churning vibration of the powerful propellers started back up and they began to move.

Ten minutes later, they were in the bay preparing to embark in the dingy with Pascal. The sailboat was already tightly moored and peaceably cresting the waves, which had lost much of their furor. Brooklyn stood on shore, soaking wet, watching the four of them in the boat. Rex wondered what was passing through his mind as he waited for Sabine, and what sort of reception she would receive from the rest of the guests.

Brooklyn escorted the boat party to the main building, where Greg Hastings met them in the lobby and distributed white bathrobes with La Plage d’Azur embossed in gold on the breast pocket.

“Ms. Durand,” he murmured, clearly not sure how to address his previous guest and murder suspect. He looked Jean-Luc over with polite curiosity before making a brief call from reception. “Latour is attending to a traffic accident,” he informed Rex, “but will be over as soon as he can. Shall I inform the other guests of Ms. Durand’s arrival? I don’t think most of them are aware she is alive. I instructed the staff to keep mum.”

“Not yet,” Rex said, reluctant to have the guests crowding in asking questions while he still had some of his own.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Brooklyn finally asked Sabine.

“I don’t have to answer to you.”

The American threw up his arms in disbelief. “I would have thought you have a lot of people to answer to. We all went looking for you. The police were here.”

“Am I under arrest?” she asked Rex. “Can you make a citizen’s arrest in a foreign country?”

“Lieutenant Latour said to hold you for questioning,” Hastings cut in. “In connection with your husband’s death. I hope you understand.”

“I had nothing to do with my husband’s death.”

“Ms. Durand,” Rex objected. “You confessed on the yacht. Your plan was to resurface months later with your new beau and a watertight alibi and claim your dead husband’s estate. You hoped that the notoriety of the case would reignite your acting career.”

“What do you mean, ‘reignite’?”

“Well, it seems you haven’t been in anything lately.”

“I’ve been resting. Mr. Graves put words in my mouth,” she told the manager, appealing to him with her cat eyes. “I did not have my own lawyer present. The trauma of nearly drowning when our catamaran capsized …” She put a hand to her throat, ever the consummate actress.

“My poor dear. Perhaps a snifter of brandy?”

“All round,” Brooklyn suggested.

“Right.” Hastings paced off in the direction of his office.

“Pascal and I swam to the sailboat,” Brooklyn informed Rex.

“You’re soaked through. But you got her in okay. The passengers must have been right grateful.”

“An older couple from Maine. They offered us the use of their St. Thomas villa whenever we like.”

Sabine gazed at Brooklyn in overt admiration, probably thinking she would have had a better chance of escape with him. “You don’t really think I murdered Vernon, do you, Brook?”

“Jean-Luc is a witness to your confession,” Rex reminded her.

“I do not remember anything that was said, except that I had nothing to do with anything,” the Frenchman said.

“You remember that much,” Rex remarked with a lash of irony.

“I only helped Mademoiselle Durand escape from her husband. You must believe me.”

“It’s not for me to decide. For now, you must consider yourself a guest of the Gendarmerie.”

“Take the young man to my office and keep an eye on him until the police arrive,” Hastings instructed Winston, returning with the security guard and a cut-glass decanter. “I left a glass of brandy in there for you,” he told Jean-Luc. “There’s a divan bed and a blanket. Make yourself comfortable. We’ll put Ms. Durand in the small office.” The manager led her behind reception.

“How long will I be in here?” she asked Rex, glancing around the functional space. “Can I use the phone?”

“Whom do you wish to call?”

“My father in Paris.”

“Go ahead.”

Minutes later, from outside the room, he could hear her agitated voice talking in French. “I’ll go and see the guests now,” he informed Hastings.

A throng of voices arose from the third cabana, occupied by the Winslows. Elizabeth was sobbing on the sofa. “I must go to her,” she cried into a handkerchief.

Paul sat beside her, patting her hand. He looked up at Rex. “We saw you come back in the dingy with Sabine. Thought we had all better sit tight and wait for you, though it was all I could do to prevent my wife from running out to the beach in the rain.”

“Is it true she had something to do with Vernon’s death?” Dick Irving asked from an armchair.

So much for keeping the guests in the dark. The turn in the weather had prompted them to put clothes on, not that the air temperature had dipped significantly. It was probably a psychological reaction to the element of danger posed by the storm—or else they felt uncomfortable and vulnerable being naked in front of the authorities.

“Duke spoke to one of the guards,” David Weeks said. “Seems the maid saw Sabine in the cabana at around the time Vernon died.”

“Ms. Durand did say she spoke with her husband,” Rex confirmed.

“How is she?” Elizabeth asked, her eyes red-rimmed from crying. “She must have got drenched in the storm. What happened to their catamaran?”

“They had to abandon it, but we got her on our yacht, and she was able to get dry.”

“I don’t know why she left two weeks ago without saying goodbye!” Elizabeth broke down again.

Toni Weeks gently pulled her from Paul’s arms and assisted her to the bedroom. Glancing around the open-plan room, Rex noticed the von Muellers installed at the kitchen table with Pam Farley and Nora O’Sullivan. A pot of tea and a half-demolished apple strudel stood on the pine surface.

“Would you like a cup?” Nora asked. “You look blue.”

“Aye, I would. I’m just beginning to thaw out. It’s the wind chill factor makes a difference.”

“How brave of you to go out on the water in this weather.”

“Daft,” Sean corrected his wife.

“The worst of the storm has passed,” Duke Farley commented from the glass sliders. “Wasn’t Brook with you?”

“I think he wanted to speak with Sabine alone.”

“To think we’d given her up for dead,” Nora exclaimed.

“When can we see her?” Paul asked from the sofa.

“I have no wish to see her,” Penny Irving said, filling the kettle. “She murdered her husband.”

“You think that’s what really went down, Rex?” the Texan asked, pulling a cigar from his pocket. “Hell, I can’t believe my racquet ball partner is lying dead in a morgue somewhere. Here’s to you, buddy,” he said, knocking back a tumbler of liquor.

Rex looked across at the Austrian doctor, who sat gravely silent at table. “Ms. Durand mentioned he took a barbiturate with his rum.”

“Ah, I see.” Von Mueller tugged his white beard thoughtfully. “
Ja
, a barbiturate administered with alcohol would have a compound effect, especially if the person is not used to the drug. It can take effect within twenty minutes.”

“And cause death?”

“In a large enough dose. Some barbiturates are very potent. Pentobarbital is used to euthanize animals. Thiopental, another barbiturate, is one of three drugs used in the United States to execute inmates on death row.”

“
Mein Gott!
” his wife exclaimed. “Max, you are scaring people! My husband gets carried away,” she apologized to the guests.

“I didn’t find any drugs in the medicine cabinets next door,” Rex assured her.

Gaby was busy scribbling away in a notebook. “How does it work,
Vater?
” she addressed her father.

“An overdose causes heart and respiratory failure,
und
then the person falls into a coma
und
dies.”

“Would pentobarbital be used to treat horses?”

The doctor nodded. “For anesthesia
und
euthanasia,
ja
.”

Rex thought it quite possible Sabine had been the one to break into the Sundown Ranch dispensary and had gotten hold of a drug like pentobarbital before she left for St. Barts. Jean-Luc could have kept it until she joined him on the catamaran. Hard to know how deep her leading man was implicated in all of this. Perhaps he was just
acting
the part of a spineless twerp.

“Poor Vernon,” Winslow said. “I wonder when she decided to murder him.”

“She didn’t bring her best clothes or jewellery to St. Martin,” Rex stated. “So it’s my guess she planned it ahead of time, before she even left the States. There’s little question of culpable homicide.”

“Culpable homicide?” Duke Farley asked.

“Our term for involuntary manslaughter. No, it was definitely premeditated. On the trips to Philipsburg to see a make-believe chiropractor, she purchased clothes willy-nilly, sometimes in a size too large, to explain away the time she’d been spending with her boyfriend. I found such clothes in her closet.”

“Is that when you began to suspect she was alive?” Pam inquired.

“No, although I did think another man might be involved at that point. I thought perhaps she was pregnant and was seeing another sort of doctor. It was my friend from the cruise who suggested that the name of the chiropractor might be a ruse for a secret lover, used to dupe the husband.”

“Is that the man we saw on the dingy?” Penny Irving asked, sipping tea at the counter. “He seems very young.”

“He’s a French actor. They worked together.”

“She kept very quiet about it.”

“She always was a secretive one,” Nora noted.

Penny shook her head. “None of this really surprises me.”

“It does make sense when you view it objectively,” Rex agreed. “Who had more motive to kill Vernon than his wife? It was the only way she could get his money. Not content with simply leaving him, she wanted to embarrass him with the taint of scandal, perhaps even incriminate him. But to be completely free of him she had to come back and finish him off.”

“Sweet Jesus, it sends chills down my spine,” Nora said.

“It was Gaby who gave me the first real clue that she was still alive, though I did wonder how a murderer could have carried or dragged a body over all that soft sand when the tide was out.”

“So lucky we went to St. Barts,” the doctor agreed.

“We wouldna have her in custody now if you hadna, and if the maid hadna returned unexpectedly to Vernon’s cabana. No one would have been the wiser until Sabine Durand reentered public life months later, when it might have been too late to prove that she had caused her husband’s death.” Rex set down his empty cup. “I should like to find out a bit more if I can before Lieutenant Latour takes her in. I’ll see Elizabeth on my way out. If you’ll excuse me …”

This was the hard part. Confronting a mother’s grief suddenly struck him as worse than facing a storm at sea.