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

Besides, I’d rather have money and peace of mind both, but if I can’t, I’m willing to put up with a little distress in return for cash. “I guess I’ll go ahead,” I said.

Kitty nodded. She’d known I would. “Do you want a guidebook to Provence?”

“I’ve got one.”

I’d read it, too. I knew I was going to one of the most picturesque parts of France. I knew about printed cotton fabric, and Cavaillon melons, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine, and garlic, and the bitter north wind called the mistral, and olive trees, and lavender fields. I knew about the medieval fortress at Les Baux, and the Pont du Gard, and the Roman amphitheater at Nimes, and van Gogh in Arles, and the bridge at Avignon. I knew about the troubadours and the Courts of Love. Spending time in Provence was a wonderful idea, but not necessarily under these circumstances.

I drank the last of my coffee and stood up. Twinkie was dozing, paws curled under her chest. I scratched behind her ears. She wasn’t one for emotional partings.

I stepped out on the balcony and saw, miraculously, the taxi I’d ordered slide to the curb below. I waved to the driver and turned back to Kitty. “He’s here.”

“Listen. Write me. Or call. Or whatever,” she said.

We hugged, I slipped on my coat and picked up my bags. Before I got in the cab I looked up. She was watching from the balcony. She waved. I waved. And then, like it or not, I was on my way.

ON THE T.G.V.

The big clock in the domed tower of the Gare de Lyon said I had plenty of time to make my 10:23 train, but trips panic me, and this one more than most. I strained forward in the back seat, using body language to urge the taxi through the traffic to the side of the station where passengers for the T.G.V., the Train à Grande Vitesse, were supposed to enter. When we pulled up I scrambled out before we’d completely stopped, flung money at the driver, and in seconds was bolting into the station, my shoulder bag and my typewriter, in its canvas carrying case, hanging off my shoulders, a damnably heavy suitcase in my hand, and my totally unnecessary coat dragging behind.

I checked the board, discovered my train was leaving from Track C, and after a few arm-wrenching maneuvers and a short escalator ride, was on the platform searching for car seventeen. Naturally, it was at the far end of the sleek, bullet-nosed orange train. I dashed up to it, stowed my suitcase inside the door, shoved everything else up on the overhead rack, and collapsed in my assigned seat to stare moodily out the window for fifteen minutes while my fellow passengers strolled up in leisurely fashion and exchanged extended farewells with those they were leaving behind. I didn’t stop churning inside until, at exactly 10:23, we pulled out of the station.

I began to breathe again. This was my first ride on the T.G.V., the high-tech wonder that would deposit me in Avignon in less than four hours. The die was cast. Around me people were unfolding newspapers, unwrapping bars of chocolate, snapping open briefcases, making the comforting arrangements that people make when settling in on a trip. The railway yards, bright in the sun, flowed past the window.
“If you help Vivien Howard you’re a killer, too.”

I had never wanted to be a ghostwriter. Some months before, unexpectedly, Loretta Walker had phoned me from New York. Loretta, a former colleague at the Bay City
Sun,
had ascended to become executive editor of
Good Look
magazine. In that post, she oversaw my “Paris Patter” column with a jaundiced eye. But this call wasn’t a request that I drop Parisian cookware and do Parisian Tex-Mex restaurants, or put together a column on the ten most chic unknown dressmakers in Paris and turn it in in three days. Instead, she told me an editor at a major publishing house had called her to ask if I ever did ghostwriting.

I was surprised. “Ghostwriting? Me? Why?”

“She said they like ‘Paris Patter.’ ” This opinion, Loretta’s tone implied, put the editor’s sanity in the “doubtful” column.

“That’s nice. Is it a Paris book?”

“I don’t know. I got the idea they’d heard about the other business, too.”

“I see.” The “other business” to which Loretta referred was my entanglement with Nostradamus’s mirror and the murders that accompanied its theft from the Musée Bellefroide, a notorious incident that had taken place shortly after I moved to Paris. Although not all the publicity I got was negative, Loretta preferred to gloss over the episode. “And you have no idea who I’d be ghosting for? What kind of book it would be?”

“She wouldn’t say, but my impression is it’s a hot topic. Shall I give you her number?”

Naturally, I took the number. It would’ve been against my religion not to take the number.

I thought the would-be author might be a show-business figure recounting struggles against drugs and booze, or some politician’s estranged wife eager to ruin him by telling all. My mind was so far from the criminal angle that when the editor, a woman called Brenda, said “Vivien Howard”, I didn’t immediately recognize the name.

Then it dawned on me. “Didn’t she kill her husband a couple of years ago?” I blurted over the transatlantic wire.

My question was followed by seconds of hissing, which proved the line was still open even though no response had been forthcoming. I had recognized my faux pas by the time Brenda said, carefully, “I grant you that’s what a lot of people thought at the time.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Vivien realizes that opinion is widespread. It’s one reason she wants to do this book. To tell
her
side.”

“Of course. Naturally. I’m so sorry—”

Surprisingly enough, we made it over that hurdle. Vivien really wanted me. She insisted on having me. She liked my writing. She planned to be in France. While we negotiated, a couple of letters were exchanged. Vivien felt the murder of her husband, Carey, was only one chapter in a saga about how the press could ruin a person’s life. The editor, Brenda, seemed to believe the role of the murder should be a bit more prominent. I figured it would all come out in the wash. I also figured I wouldn’t see an offer for this much money again soon. Only after the deal was struck did I get cold feet. After yesterday’s hate mail, my feet were frigid indeed.

We were in the suburbs now, high-rise apartment buildings and older stone villas whipping past the window. The miniature poodle sitting beside me on his mistress’s lap closed his eyes and curled up for a nap. The T.G.V. has fold-down tables like those on an airplane. I folded mine down and got a manila envelope out of my roomy shoulder bag. I could go over the file once more before Avignon. I wondered for the zillionth time why Vivien Howard
really
wanted to write this book and why she’d insisted on having me write it with her. Maybe those answers, too, would come out in the wash.

I pulled out my sheaf of photocopied clippings, some of them provided by Brenda the editor, others gathered through connections like Jack and Loretta. The murder of Carey Hopkins Howard, an unremarkable hometown crime, had become notorious because the hometown in question was New York City, and the people involved had money and prestige. (In New York, I gathered, the two were synonymous.) The juicy element was nothing more than old-fashioned adultery, and the lack of sordid and tacky elements like drugs, orgies, bribery, or misappropriation of funds made it seem practically wholesome.

The clippings were dog-eared from my rereading. They included a few pre-murder background pieces, including a five-page, full-color spread on the Howard apartment in a slick, upscale decorating magazine called
Patrician Homes.
Post-murder, I had screaming sensationalism from the
New York Post,
magisterial pronouncements on the sociological aspects of the case from
The New York Times,
copious coverage in
New York
(the cover),
People, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair.
There were photos of Vivien’s haggard face, flashbulbs reflected in her eyes; Vivien disappearing through a doorway followed by her lover, Ross Santee; Pedro Ruiz, the housekeeper who’d found Carey’s body, grimacing and shielding his eyes; Vivien’s daughter, Blanche, her face half-hidden in her coat’s fur collar. Soon I’d see how these strained, bleached-out images compared with the people themselves.

The facts were relatively simple. On a freezing and snowy night just before Christmas two years ago, Carey Howard, a fifty-five-year-old financier and patron of the arts, was battered to death in the living room of his Park Avenue apartment. The murder weapon was never found, and nobody was ever charged with the killing, which didn’t prevent fingers from being pointed at his wife, Vivien.

I’d thrashed through the story with Kitty, sitting in our office on the Rue du Quatre-Septembre one slow afternoon. “Apparently, the marriage was in trouble,” I said. “Vivien and Carey had quarreled earlier in the evening, and she ran out and slammed the door. That much we know from Pedro Ruiz, the housekeeper.”

“A
man
was the housekeeper?”

“Well, some accounts called him a valet, but I think he generally looked after things. Anyway, it was his night off, and he was in his own apartment in the back, but he heard them shrieking at each other.”

“A typical evening, in some matrimonial circles.” Kitty’s tone was ironic. We both had spent evenings that way ourselves, she with the perfidious Luc de Villiers-Marigny, me with Lonnie Boyette, the good ole boy I’d married right after high school and shed not too much later.

“Now comes the problematical part,” I went on. “Vivien slams out. Soon afterward, one of the tenants in the apartment building starts out to walk his dog, slips and falls on the ice, and has a heart attack. There’s a lot of hullabaloo— CPR, ambulances, and whatnot. The doormen are distracted. During this time, Vivien returns. One of the neighbors saw her in the hall. She claims she came back to pick up her wallet, which she’d forgotten, and left again immediately.”

“So—”

“So nobody saw her leave. She might have stayed around and bopped Carey. The time of death was a couple of hours later.”

“Yeah, but—”

“She did leave at some point, though, because she showed up at the apartment again at midnight, dazed and upset, refusing to say where she’d been. The cops were there already. Pedro Ruiz had discovered the body around eleven and called them.”

I paused to let Kitty ponder. She’d been listening with rapt concentration. Now she folded her arms across her chest and said, flatly, “Sounds like she did it.”

“Kitty!”

“It
does.
Why isn’t she in jail?”

“Because—”

She wasn’t listening. “A male housekeeper,” she said in an admiring tone. “Isn’t that great? It’s so chic, somehow.”

“She isn’t in jail because she finally confessed she’d been with Ross Santee, so she had an alibi. He backed her up.”

“Ross is the lover? The good-looking one?”

“The artist whose work Carey had bought. Not only good-looking, but eight years younger than Vivien.”

“Does it strike you, Georgia Lee, that this woman is loaded with style?”

Loaded with style. Vivien’s first husband, Denis McBride, had been a poet, the father of her grown children, Alexander and Blanche. After his death she’d married Carey, who was natty, jowly, and rich. With Ross, she’d gone back to the artistic type. Once she and Ross confessed to their affair, she’d been home free. Maybe she’d been harassed by the press, but that seemed more desirable than being harassed by prison guards. And who knew? She may have been innocent, as she claimed.

“Pedro testified at the inquest that Carey was planning to divorce Vivien,” I told Kitty.

“Why?”

“Found out about the affair with Ross.”

“So maybe she got rid of him before he could dump her, or change his will?”

“Well—It didn’t work out that way. He hadn’t changed his will, but his relatives have sued to keep her from inheriting. It’s still in court.”

“I see.” She paused, thinking. “Let me ask you something. I’m serious.”

“What?”

“Do you think I should fire Alba and hire a man as housekeeper?”

The rhythmic motion of the train was relaxing. The poodle and his mistress were both snoring beside me. I closed my eyes. The trauma of parting had seeped away, leaving weariness and lassitude. I wanted to talk to Kitty, tell her not to fire Alba, for heaven’s sake. If only I could open my mouth and form the words, I’d tell her.

I slept, and the T.G.V. sped toward Avignon.

MEETING IN AVIGNON

Ross Santee was waiting for me on the platform. I picked him out immediately, not because he looked so much like his pictures, but because he looked so American. His khaki pants, plaid shirt, and running shoes were a giveaway, but more indicative was the way he stood, feet solidly planted and hands shoved halfway in his pockets, as if he owned the platform, the station, and the whole damn town of Avignon.

He was watching the disembarking passengers moving toward the exit sign, obviously trying to pick me from the crowd. I waved as best I could, burdened as I was, and he smiled and came forward.

“Hi, Georgia Lee. I’m Ross,” he said. Instant first names were another Americanism. He took my bags. “The car’s out front.”

He was, as Kitty had commented, good-looking, but in a nonthreatening, boy-next-door way, and he looked younger than the thirty-seven I knew he was. He was of medium height, well-built, with hazel eyes, a sprinkling of freckles, and russet hair that was conservatively cut. I thought he looked more like a stockbroker on vacation than an artist, but maybe my stereotype was dated.

I didn’t know much about his work. One piece had been featured in the
Patrician Homes
article. A photograph showed Vivien and Carey, in presumably happier days, sitting in the living room of their Park Avenue apartment. The decor was starkly modern, with gleaming wood floors and furniture of mole-colored leather. Hanging behind a sofa was the only visible artwork, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa much larger than the painting’s actual size. Surrounding the image, instead of a frame, was a three-dimensional model of a gorilla, clinging with hairy arms and legs. This was no cute cartoon gorilla, but a shaggy beast with bloodshot eyes and a toothy mouth open in a snarl. Its clawed hands and feet obscured part of the painting, and one of the hands was giving an unmistakable middle-finger salute to the Mona Lisa’s famous smile.