Murder in Nice (5 page)

“
Everyone, this is Lanie’s
mother…”

“
Annie,” Annie said softly
as she nodded at the two couples and two single women at the
table.

“
Annie,” Randall said.
“Move over, Anderson,” he said to the distinguished looking man
seated next to a hatchet-faced woman in her mid-fifties with a
brand new face-lift. “Annie, this is Jim and Janet Anderson. They
were playing the part of the tourists for our little experiment.
And there’s Ben and Haley Newberry across there. You may have
already met them.” Maggie noticed Ben still didn’t look
up.

“
To my left is Mademoiselle
Desiree Badeaux, and to her left, Miss Dee-Dee Bell, both of whom
worked with your daughter on this tour.”

“
Competed
, he means,” Dee-Dee said as
she smiled at Annie. She looked a little plain to Maggie, even
dumpy. “We were all going after the same prize. I really admired
your daughter, Mrs. Morrison. She was a total ballbuster, but I
mean that in the nicest way.”

Maggie noticed Annie’s look
of confusion as she turned from Dee-Dee to the French woman next to
her that Randall had introduced as Mademoiselle Desiree Badeaux,
although Maggie did think it had been many years since the woman
could honestly claim
that
title.

“
Madame,” Desiree said,
nodding curtly at Annie. Pencil thin and wearing a bone-hugging
knit dress, Desiree clearly cared very much about her appearance.
Maggie guessed she was mid- forties. Her dark hair was bobbed and
offset high cheekbones and full lips.

“
We are all just so upset
at what happened to our darling Lanie,” Randall said. “My mind is
still blown. I cannot adjust to what happened.” He grinned as if
this were an endearing trait they should all enjoy knowing. Maggie
winced. Celebrities were a special case unto themselves, she
thought.

He pulled a chair out for Annie and Maggie
slipped into a free one next to Haley.

“
Thank you all,” Annie said
as Randall poured her a cup of coffee from a pot on the table. “I
wanted to meet you because you were all important to Lanie.” She
looked around the table, her eyes resting on Maggie as her
touchstone.

“
I was hoping to see
Olivier this morning,” she said, an attempt at a smile trembling on
her lips.

“
Oh, my gosh, didn’t you
hear?” Dee-Dee stopped in the middle of applying lip gloss. “He’s
gone.”

“
Gone? Gone where?” Annie
looked at Maggie as if she might possibly know.

“
They arrested him, I
heard,” Dee-Dee said, snapping her purse shut loudly. “He found the
body, you know.”

What an ass you
are
, Maggie couldn’t help think.

“
Arrested Olivier?” Annie
looked around the table, bewildered. “But Olivier
loved
Lanie. That’s
impossible.”

“
Well, you know the
French,” Dee-Dee said with a grimace. “
Cherchez la femme
. Or in this case, I
guess it would be
l’homme
. Anyway, they wouldn’t have
taken him away if they didn’t know something we don’t
know.”

Maggie watched Desiree’s reaction to
Dee-Dee’s words. The look that Desiree gave Dee-Dee was one of
undiluted loathing.

“
That can’t be,” Annie said
to the group. “I know Olivier. He would never hurt
Lanie.”

“
Love makes you do strange
things,” Dee-Dee said.

“
What would you know of
love?” Desiree sneered. “From what you see on television soap
operas?”

“
You French think you own
the whole love and passion thing,” Dee-Dee said, turning in her
seat to face the Frenchwoman.

“
I imagine anyone might own
it more than a woman who has never known a man’s touch,” Desiree
said.

Whoa! Score one for Team
France
, Maggie thought as Dee-Dee’s face
blushed deep red.

“
All right, ladies,”
Randall said. “We have company. Let’s try not to bicker, shall we?”
He turned to Annie. “And yes, losing Olivier will put a
considerable crimp in our taping abilities for the remainder of the
tour but I feel sure we—”

Maggie spoke up. “You’re continuing the
tour?” She glanced at her brother and Haley. “I was told you were
canceling it.”

“
Of course we’re continuing
the tour,” he said. “I mean, it’s horrifying and all that but I’ve
got a production schedule back home and we need to get this
co-anchor question decided.”

“
When are you leaving?”
Maggie asked.

Randall shrugged. “The police have Olivier
as their man and they see no reason why the rest of us need to
remain in Nice. We leave for Cannes early tomorrow morning. Desiree
will be presenting on our first stop on the Côte d’Azur. I’m not
counting Nice as part of the test because of Lanie dying and
all.”

Maggie saw Annie swallow
hard.
God! These people were
insensitive.
She looked at her brother but
he was studiously working not to look at her.

“
I understand Ben and Haley
Newberry are dropping out of the tour?” Maggie said.

Ben snapped his head up when she spoke.

“
Yes, unfortunately,”
Randall said. “They have other business in France. They were never
scheduled for the coastal part of the tour in any case. Just
Provence to Nice.”

Oh, really?
Her brother returned her steady gaze. Caught in a
bold-faced lie in front of half a dozen people and he stared at her
as coolly as if it had never happened.

“
I’m sorry,” Randall said,
looking at Maggie now. “I didn’t catch your name. You are a
relative of Lanie’s?”

“
A friend of the family,”
Maggie said. She couldn’t resist glancing back at Ben when she said
that and was rewarded with a look of disgust as he rolled his eyes
and directed his attention back to his coffee.

*****

“
Mademoiselle Morrison
drowned to death in her bath,” Inspector Massar said, intoning the
words as if passing sentence. He spoke no English, and as Maggie
sat in front of him, Annie at her side, she couldn’t help but be
amazed that she had come so far in her linguistic abilities that
she was actually serving as translator.

But how the hell was she going to translate
that?

“
Then why do you believe
she was murdered?”

“
The body suffered blunt
force trauma to the upper cranium,” he said, pointing to his own
head. Annie followed his hand motions with her eyes. Maggie was
grateful she couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“
Do you have the murder
weapon?”

Massar fidgeted in his chair. “Not at this
time.”

“
Then are you sure it’s
murder? Isn’t it possible she could have slipped and
fallen?”

“
There was a word written
on her forehead, Madame,” Massar said abruptly.

A burning sensation formed in the pit of
Maggie’s stomach. Any hope she’d held out that it might truly be an
accident evaporated immediately.

“
May I ask what
word?”

His eyes flickered to Annie and Maggie
instinctively clenched her stomach muscles. The word must be a bad
one. And one that Annie might recognize.

“
Slut,” he said. “The
killer wrote the word
slut
across the body’s forehead.”

Annie reacted by turning to Maggie and
gripping her arm. “What’s he saying? Why is saying that word?”

“
He…he’s trying to explain
to me why he believes Lanie was murdered and didn’t accidentally
drown in her bath.” Maggie felt Annie’s nails dig into her arm and
she forced herself not to pull away.

“
Why is he saying that
word?”

“
It’s a little confusing,”
Maggie lied. “I’m not sure what word he’s really saying. I’m sorry.
My French is still a little spotty.”

She heard the air come out of Annie in a
long sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath.

Maggie turned back to Massar. “That’s an
English word.”

“
C’est
ça
.”

“
Well, why do you have a
Frenchman in custody? If it was him, wouldn’t he have
written
salope
or
prostituée
?”

“
Slut
is shorter,” the detective said with a shrug.

“
Do you have any other
evidence that makes you believe it was Olivier Tatois?”

“
We can prove that the key
used to gain access to Mademoiselle Morrison’s room that night was
used by Monsieur Tatois.”

“
Really?”

“
It was found in his
possession.”

“
But that wouldn’t be
unusual, right? Since they were sleeping together?”

“
That is true.”

Maggie couldn’t believe how impervious the
man was to her questions. He not only didn’t seem to hold back
information from her, he didn’t act as if he cared one way or the
other.

Maybe he was close to retirement or
something.

“
May I ask you if the
body…if Mademoiselle Morrison was wearing face makeup?”

Massar frowned. “Of course not. She was in
the process of taking a bath.”

“
If she wasn’t wearing
makeup,” Maggie said, “why do you think she was expecting her
lover?”

His eyes darted away, as if considering
this. He was too French not to see the logic in it. In the end,
though, it didn’t matter. He shrugged—that maddening, classic
Gallic gesture that ended all conversations without satisfaction or
resolution.

Laurent did it all the time.

“
Monsieur Tatois has no
alibi for the time in question,” he said.

Well, jeez, neither do you
and somehow you’re not in a holding cell facing a charge of
murder
.

“
Will that be all, Madame
Dernier?” Massar said, standing, effectively ensuring that it was,
in fact, all. Maggie stood and so did Annie.

“
When will you release the
body to her mother?”

“
The autopsy will be
finished tomorrow. Madame Morrison may make arrangements to have
the body shipped to the United States by Friday.” He held out a
hand for Annie to shake and then offered his hand to Maggie before
escorting them out of his office and down the long hall to the
lobby of the police department.

As the two stood on the street corner,
Maggie put her arm around Annie.

“
Come on, Annie,” she said.
“Let’s find a quiet place to talk.” She glanced down the long
pedestrian shopping street studded with multi-colored and striped
umbrellas over café tables and was about to move toward the closest
one when she noticed a familiar form sitting at one of the
tables.

Desiree sat facing her,
smoking feverishly, focused on her companion, to whom she was
gesticulating wildly. The Frenchwoman’s face was contorted into a
heavy sneer, the force of which nearly made Maggie gasp for how
instantly it transformed Desiree’s features into something ugly and
raw.
Whatever she was
saying
,
Annie
didn’t need to be anywhere near it
, Maggie
decided.

As she tugged Annie away in the opposite
direction, Maggie heard the same cawing bray of laughter coming
from Desiree’s companion that Maggie remembered hearing at
breakfast when Bob Randall had shown his amusement over some
trivial thing.

Four

It looked more like the opening act for a circus
than one of the world’s most famous beachfronts.

Maggie watched a long line of joggers,
cyclists, roller skaters and even a few acrobats walk, ride and
roll two deep past the café table where she sat with Annie. Add the
odd Segway and baby stroller, she marveled, and you’d have a parade
of the strangest collection of narcissists and showoffs to rival
Venice Beach.

Doesn’t anybody in Nice own
a computer?
Maggie had seen tourists with
their noses stuck in tablets and smartphones in as gorgeous and
remote hideaways as Mürren, Switzerland, and yet here in the middle
of civilization it seemed the
Niçois
wanted nothing more than to prance along the
boardwalk, to see and be seen.

Strike
that
, Maggie thought wryly as a mime danced
by, his hands climbing nonexistent walls as he moved.
Nobody cares that much about seeing. They all just
want to be seen
.

The waiter brought the carafe of rosé Maggie
ordered, but Annie put her hand over her wineglass and asked for
bottled water.

“
I’m afraid I haven’t been
entirely honest with you, Maggie,” she said.

Maggie frowned, dragging her attention away
from the circus of people and vehicles along the Promenade des
Anglais. “What do you mean?”

Annie sighed. “Lanie and I were estranged.
Had been for years.”

“
I’m sorry to hear
that.”

“
I’m afraid the reason for
it involves you.”

“
Me?”