A Temporary Ghost (The Georgia Lee Maxwell Series, Series 2) (17 page)

I was steeled for the news that Jack Arlen, my dear friend the bureau chief, was in Brussels or Barcelona or some even more distant locale. When I asked for him, though, the receptionist said to hold on, and after a gratifyingly short interval, he greeted me.

“Georgia Lee! Come home, baby. All is forgiven.”

“Don’t tell me you miss me, Jack.”

“Nothing as radical as that. But it’s your turn to buy a round at the Café de la Paix.”

“You’ve started hobnobbing with the tourists?”

“Kitty and I have to console ourselves for your absence somehow.”

“I’m touched. Listen, Jack—”

“Yes, dear heart. What favor are you calling to ask me for?”

Leave it to Jack. “Why do you think that? Why couldn’t I be checking in to see how you are?”

“I’m doing great. Thanks for checking. ’Bye.”

“Jack!”

“So what is it?”

“Does Worldwide have a San Francisco bureau?”

“Silly question. Sure.” The answer was muffled. I knew exactly what he was doing. Lighting a cigarette.

“I need to know what kind of investigation was done of Carey Howard’s stepson, Alexander McBride, at the time of the Carey Howard murder. Alexander lives out there.”

“I guess I can ask them to check the files.”

“I’d appreciate it, but I might need more than that.”

“More?”
He implied even that was damn plenty.

“There probably won’t be much in the file. Alexander wasn’t important in the case. It could take one of your people talking to the policeman who looked into it.”

“Goodness me. Well, I expect all they do in the bureau out there is sit around channeling, getting in touch with former lifetimes. This will keep them busy in the here and now.”

“I want to know how strong Alexander McBride’s alibi is for the night of the murder.”

“I’m beginning to be sorry I brought up the subject of favors.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t sniffed a story here, Jack.”

“I haven’t hung up on you, have I? My nostrils are twitching. Is there one?”

“Could be. Don’t blow it for me, all right? Keep it vague.”

“You’re talking to Jack Arlen. They’ll think they’re digging this out for a survey on police procedures in the eighties.”

After we firmed up a few details I asked, “How’s everything in Paris?”

“Right as rain, right as rain,” he said, but all of a sudden he sounded dispirited. I thanked him profusely and we said good-bye.

I stepped out of the booth. Jack was a joker, a womanizer, a man who valued a story more than money or love. He was also sweet, moody, and racked with midlife discontent. I missed him a lot.

Preoccupied, I wandered down to the Auberge de Ventoux. Alexander’s cycle wasn’t there, which was no surprise since I knew he was back at Mas Rose. I had to go back, too, and have my deferred talk with Blanche. I dawdled past the sidewalk tables at the Relais de la Fontaine. I wouldn’t even have glanced over if a carrying female voice hadn’t said, “I’d like another beer, please.” Not only was the request made in English, the accent had originated in my own native part of the world, the Southern United States, or close to it.

My head whipped around. A woman was sitting at the same table near the wall where I’d seen Alexander sitting with someone earlier. Alexander’s companion had been wearing pale blue slacks, as was this woman. She was also wearing high-heeled white sandals and a tight white knit top with a revealing scoop neckline. Alexander’s companion had been wearing a floppy white straw hat. I spotted the hat on the pavement next to the woman’s chair. I made an abrupt ninety-degree turn and zeroed in on a table near hers. She was currently the only patron, so finding a place was easy.

Seated, I eyed my compatriot. Scribbled postcards were spread on the table in front of her, and a ballpoint pen and a pair of glasses lay next to an overflowing ashtray. Had she been sitting here during the several hours since I saw her with Alexander? You can do that in French cafés. You see people nursing a beer or a coffee and reading a book, or writing.

My discreet preliminary survey told me this woman was handsome, carcinogenically tanned, forty, and fighting it. Her blond-streaked brown hair had been crimped with a perm that in my opinion wasn’t worth the fortune it had probably cost, since it made her small, sharp features look smaller and sharper. She had on all the makeup the magazines say we’re supposed to wear, but tastefully applied. Her eyes were pale blue, their expression glazed enough that I thought she had consumed quite a few drinks since I saw her before.

The waiter brought her beer and stepped over to see what I wanted. I forgot French, gave full play to my drawl, and said, loudly and distinctly, “I’d like a beer, please,” managing to turn “beer” into a two-syllable word. The waiter looked confused, as well he might, so I pointed to the woman’s glass and said, “One of those.”

“Oui, Madame.”
He took off, leaving me to smile prettily at her as she took in the fact that I was from God’s country.

It wasn’t lost on her. She leaned forward and said, “Well, hi.”

“Hi.”

“Where’re you from?”

I wasn’t about to say Paris. “Luna Beach, Florida.”

“My God, that’s where my ex-husband lives.”

This was indeed a stunning coincidence. “In Luna Beach?”

“No, no. Florida. Fort Lauderdale.”

“No kidding,” I marveled.

“Yep.” She nodded decisively several times. We were practically sisters already.

My turn. “Where’re
you
from?”

“Texas, originally, but I’ve lived in California for ten years.”

“Really. You like it out there?”

We got acquainted through half a beer, at which point she invited me to join her at her table. When I pulled up my chair she said, “What’s your name?”

“Uh—Rita.” I don’t know why I said Rita. This woman looked like she would have a friend named Rita. “What’s yours?”

“Missy. Missy Blake.” Missy was searching for something in her white straw pocketbook. She pulled out a tapestry cigarette case and a gold-rimmed black holder. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

At this juncture Missy could do no wrong. “Not at all. Go ahead.”

“Thanks. That’s what I love about France. Everybody smokes over here.” She fitted a cigarette into the holder and searched further in her bag. “What are you doing in France, Rita?”

“Sort of— vacation. You?”

She looked up from her search and rolled her eyes. “It’s a long story.” She bent her head to her bag again, said, “There you are, you buggers,” and pulled out a matchbook with a cover of shiny red foil. She lit the cigarette, drawing through the holder until her cheeks hollowed, and tossed the matchbook on the table. “A
long
story,” she repeated.

I leaned forward, willing her to tell me the long story. The bright matchbook caught my eye, and I glanced down at it. Stamped on the cover in white was the legend, “Bingo’s Buckaroo BBQ.”

“Sounds interesting, Missy,” I said.

BITTER EXPERIENCE

Missy took another massive drag on her cigarette and expelled smoke toward the main street of Beaulieu-la-Fontaine. “Let me ask you something, Rita,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Have you ever been involved with a man younger than you? I mean— quite a bit younger?”

I didn’t want to muddy the waters, so I said, “Not really.”

She tapped me on the forearm with a glossy pink fingernail. “Don’t ever do it, honey. That’s my advice to you.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience.”

“Lord, lord.” She shook her perm. “What’s the expression? Bitter experience?”

“Bitter experience. Right.”

“You live and you learn.”

“Right.”

I hoped we’d get off the clichés and into the good stuff soon. Missy took a swallow of beer, and set her glass down on the metal table with a clank. “The things I have done for that boy, given that boy, you wouldn’t believe. To be treated like dirt. Plain old dirt.”

“That’s terrible.”

My sympathetic, if banal, comment finished her off. She said, “Oh, shoot,” and her eyes puddled up.

I searched for a tissue, wondering why my current karma involved people bursting into tears in my presence. I hoped I’d finish this phase of my evolution soon.

She took the tissue and blotted her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m so upset.”

“Sounds like you have a right to be upset.” Missy had no stauncher supporter than I.

“Damn straight.” Anger pulled her together. “He’s nothing but a prick of a waiter,” she continued indignantly. “Bingo didn’t even want to hire him. That’s
one
thing he was right about.”

I was rapt. “Who’s Bingo?”

“My ex.”

Some of it was coming clear. I picked up the matchbook. “He has a barbecue restaurant?”

She gave me a wise look. “It’s
my
restaurant now.”

“I see.”

“Bingo is selling real estate in Fort Lauderdale. I ran that dude clear out of the state of California.” I deduced it had been the satisfaction of a lifetime.

“Good for you.”

Thoughtful again, Missy stared at the tabletop. “I’ve got a problem, Rita.”

“What’s that?”

“I like good loving.”

“That’s not a problem. It’s natural.”

“Yeah, but it gets me into a lot of trouble. You see” —she leaned toward me confidentially, causing another inch of her tanned bosom to escape from her décolletage— “I know this guy Alex is jerking me around. I can see it. I’m not stupid.”

She seemed to want reassurance on the last point, so I said, “Of course you’re not.”

“So why can’t I stop myself? Why can’t I tell him to get somebody else to buy his damn tickets to France, his motorcycles—”

I couldn’t help saying, “You bought him the— a motorcycle?”

“Sure, I bought him a goddamn motorcycle.” She drained her glass. “I bought him a Yamaha, and you know what he did?”

“What?”

“Dumped me in Carpentras at the hotel and rode off on it. Told me he had business to take care of, left me there by myself! On a trip that was supposed to be kind of a honeymoon.”

“You married him?” I croaked in amazement.

“No,
ma’am!
I did say I wasn’t stupid. When I say honeymoon, I mean a lot of— you know. That’s the way he talked when he suggested this trip.”

“Has he ever done this before?”

“Yes. Sneaks off like the sneak he is. Done it ever since I’ve known him. He says it’s business. Doesn’t show up for his shift and leaves me to make the excuses.”

“Business? What business?”

She shrugged, but avoided my eyes. “Business, your ass. He’s probably off screwing somebody else.” The remark was so casual I could tell she didn’t believe it. She looked around for the waiter. “Got time for another beer?”

When we’d ordered I said, “Did he come back to Carpentras, or what?”

“He called and said he’d be a few more days. I said, ‘Uh-uh, buddy boy. You get your butt back here, now.’ But all the good that did was instead of being stuck in Carpentras I’m stuck here in whats-its-name, and he comes around when he feels like it. The hotel room doesn’t even have a TV.”

“It would be in French, anyway,” I comforted her.

“Yeah.” She dug out another cigarette. Before lighting up, she said, “I hadn’t had a cigarette for five solid weeks before we came over here.”

The café was filling up. A group of German tourists gathered at a table and ordered ice cream. The shutters on shop fronts were being raised, the netting taken off the vegetable bins. Missy looked at her watch. “He promised to be back more than an hour ago,” she said.

I had been lolling back in my chair, letting Missy’s confidences flow over me. At her words, I jerked in every limb. She looked at me with concern. “What’s the matter? Something bite you?”

I made a show of rubbing my arm and looking for mosquitoes while I assimilated the idea that Alexander could show up at any second and catch me talking with his disaffected lady friend.

She, of course, didn’t know her sympathetic new chum was now torn between an avid desire for further information and a seething urge to get away. “So tell me about yourself, Rita. Don’t let me talk your ear off,” she said.

I improvised a brief life story, giving myself my father’s job as editor and publisher of the weekly Luna Beach
Current.
Fortunately, Missy was so caught up in her own problems, she’d obviously asked only from politeness. When she got a chance, she turned the conversation back to herself, saying, “Well, I sure hope you never get mixed up in anything like my situation.”

“You had a fling with the wrong man, all right.”

“A fling! It’s been going on for years!” She looked insulted, as if I had impugned her morals.

Years? To my mind, the relationship had “temporary insanity” written all over it. “It has?”

She held up three fingers. “Since before I was divorced from Bingo.” I must’ve looked dumbfounded, because she got defensive. “It wasn’t all bad. There were good times, too.”

“There were?”

“Sure.” She craned her neck to look down the road, and I quailed. When she didn’t see him, the good times she’d touted lost their luster. Her voice turned acid as she said, “A few good times. Very damn few.”

I couldn’t sit here waiting for Alexander to turn up. I said, “Missy, I’ve got to run. But maybe we can get together again?”

Her face lit up. I didn’t like myself for using her loneliness. “Great! More girl talk,” she said.

She searched through her pile of postcards, selected a blank one with a photo of the village church, and wrote on it, “Missy Blake, Auberge de Ventoux, Room 20.” I tucked it away and said, “I’ll give you a call.” I didn’t explain why I wasn’t giving her my address, but she didn’t seem to care.

We shook hands. As I walked away she was gazing down the road, her body taut, looking and listening.

ON THE EDGE

The sky, overcast and melancholy all day, darkened as I trudged up the hill. I could hardly bear the thought of another downpour. I half-ran along the forlorn gray track through tossing trees and rustling bushes.

I couldn’t get the image of Missy, anxiously waiting for Alexander at the café, out of my mind. The rat had used her to get to France, promising sensual delights, and then had the gall to ride away from her on a motorcycle she had paid for. What made me madder, though, was her putting up with it. When he came back, in his own sweet time, would he get the kick in the tail he deserved? I pictured weak recriminations, kissed-away tears. Then she’d be ready to buy him another cycle. I’d played similar scenes myself, I was ashamed to remember.