The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (10 page)

Havilah looked back at Thierry who had caught her eye just as she was moving to the terrace. He had an aperitif of some sort in his hand. Améline had him hemmed in. He didn’t seem to mind. Havilah overheard her mention Honoré de Balzac’s
La fille aux yeux d’or
,
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
. Perhaps Gasquet had told her about his Moroccan heritage and this prompted a discussion of Orientalism. Or maybe she noticed the gold flecks in his green eyes.

Once on the terrace, Havilah caught sight of Laurent holding court with a group of six seated at a long candlelit table with a
fleur de lis
runner trimmed with gold tassels. Ansell Neely waved her over. She instead headed for the food table. Two of the men moved from the gathering to speak with Laurent privately.

The table was beautifully decorated. She was suddenly ravenous. There were salmon canapés with butter, green and black olive tapenades, a finely whipped eggplant, garlic and olive oil spread called
caviar d’aubergine
; some cheeses, Roquefort, her favorite, a variety of goat’s milk cheeses, Brie, and Camembert; a terrine or two and a chicken liver pâté.

She skipped the beef carpaccio and the prosciutto; the pandemics of mad cow, hoof and mouth, and her grandmother Naida’s high blood pressure from a pork-laden Southern diet had made her antsy about bovine and porcine eats. On antique white porcelain platters were scallop and avocado carpaccio and smoked duck. She also spotted an endive salad with walnuts and Roquefort. She almost went straight for the desserts: crème caramel, chocolate mousse, crème brulée, and a variety of berries. Laurent had ordered a number of local wines from Cassis and full-bodied reds from the Bandol region. Havilah Gaie was a gourmande. And tonight, she was in foodie nirvana.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Laurent took her hand and kissed it.

“It’s quite a feast.”

“You look fabulous tonight in white. Who’s the beau? The women over there are all agog about a living David in our midst.”

“Thierry Gasquet? He’s a friend from Paris,” she said dismissively. She couldn’t deny that Gasquet looked healthy with his bronzed skin, wealthy from the cut of clothes, and fine with his chiseled features and almost sea-green and golden eyes. In white, he seemed cherubic. He was an exquisite specimen of maleness, no doubt.

“No wonder you didn’t want to stay at the Académie. How good of a friend? Benefits? So you really are broken up with Lucian? He was nice on the eyes as well. You certainly know how to pick them, Havilah.”

“It’s not what you think,” she said, a little too quick and too snappish for her own liking.

“I sure hope it is. Let me have a better look.” Laurent sauntered into the apartment and introduced himself to the police agent. He hurriedly returned.

“Breathtaking. If I weren’t a committed man…” He let the implication hang in the air. “You had better watch Améline. You did say she was on the hunt.”

Havilah had to laugh. “That’s not the hunt I meant. I was talking about the job search. He’s all hers if she wants at him.”

Whatever she said about her and Thierry, Laurent wouldn’t be convinced, which was just as well.

She ventured to change the subject. “What time is it?”

“Time to eat. And then we can sneak off and play Holmes and Watson.” He rubbed his hands together with excitement.

“Laurent, who are the two gentlemen you were talking to?”

“That’s Ellis Wise, he’s the president of the Center for American Scholars. They have a similar residential scholars program in Ravello, Italy. He’s on the board. I just can’t see him shoving Kit into the orchestra pit. He’s damn near seventy. The younger rat bastard, Lowery Jason, is the accountant and treasurer for the foundation. He’s also on the board, of course. He’s a distant cousin or nephew of some sort to William Knowlton. I know for a fact he just arrived this morning; I picked him up at the airport in Marseille.”

Havilah wasn’t so sure she could just rule out Lowery Jason as a suspect. Gasquet’s words when they were in Paris at her apartment about the killer having resources were in the back of her mind now. And Jason Lowery, cousin-nephew to William Knowlton, certainly had the financial means to arrange his travel in and out of France at whim. As far as Wise was concerned, she couldn’t see him thrashing Kit. The guy had a cane. It could be a ruse. So she kept him in the running of suspects as well.
That was four. She made five. So where were numbers six and seven?

“Why did you call the Jason character a rat bastard?”

She was smirking. Laurent had clearly been watching too many mafia movies here in the South not too far from the Italian Riviera. She wondered though if Cassis was like Aix-en-Provence, which was a perfectly beautiful bourgeois town with some questionable
cosa nostra
connects running through it.

“He’s always threatening cutbacks,” he pouted, now trying to justify calling the founder’s relative a misbegotten rodent.

“Who’s missing?” Havilah continued, ignoring Laurent’s childish pique.

“Fassin, of course. She will be in for the meeting tomorrow morning. And Jean-Luc Cabassol. He is a photographer who lives in Marseille. He will be here tomorrow morning as well. He’s doing an exhibit in Bonn. Like you, he’s new to the board.”

She studied the terrace, the sumptuous spread. The whole setup, she decided— dinner, the mingling of social classes, murder, mystery, a plush manse, a quasi-remote location— was beginning to feel like Agatha Christie’s
Thirteen at Dinner
. Oddly, there were thirteen of them at the dinner.
Who would be the unlucky one this time around?
She hoped it wouldn’t be another Astor professor. Also invited to the dinner were two couples who had vacation homes in Cassis and regularly attended Félibrige Foundation events.

Havilah scarfed down at least six salmon canapés, chasing them with the endive and Roquefort salad, the scallop and avocado carpaccio, the black olive tapenade on several pieces of baguette, and the warmed chèvre on toast. She sampled a Bandol red. It was delightful. She finished her meal off with crème caramel, some berries, and a sparkling Muscat from Beaume-de Venise.

Thierry, freed for an instant from Améline’s adoring clutches, strolled over casually. “You’ve got quite an appetite.”

“I aspire to be a growing woman. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“I’m learning a lot, you could say.”

Just as he said those words, Améline returned from the W.C and rushed towards the terrace. “Havilah, why didn’t you tell me that Thierry was an aficionado of American and French writers? He’s brilliant.”

Havilah wanted to say,
because I didn’t know that
. Instead, she just shook her head as if in agreement and sipped the Muscat.

“The next time I’m in Paris he’s promised to show me his Aristide Maillol collection during the years when Dina Vierny was his muse. I visited the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol in 1997. The museum was exhibiting Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work.”

“I saw that exhibition. I had to sit down after viewing it,” Havilah said. She remembered it well. She began the viewing thinking a seven-year old could do this drivel. By the end, she was incredibly moved and disturbed by the childishly drawn skeletal figures and the piercing social commentary. There were sketches involving Sarah Bartmann, the South African woman who was exhibited and dissected in Paris as well. All three of them fell silent; Havilah assumed each was thinking about how young the talented artist was when he overdosed from speedballing heroin and cocaine.

So Thierry Gasquet was a French-Moroccan Renaissance man. Havilah raised her glass in Thierry’s direction. He returned the toast. Améline started up again, much to Havilah’s delight— she had just received a sign from Laurent. She stepped back from Améline and Thierry, bumping into Ansell Neely.

“Excuse me, Ansell,” she said clumsily.

“It’s okay, Havilah.” He leaned in, grazing her ear, as he gently touched her elbow.

A frisson followed by tingles raced through her body.
What the hell?!

Wobbly, she excused herself to go to the W.C., moving quickly and quietly down the Académie’s large staircase to the first floor where Laurent was waiting at the front door. She rubbed both her ears nervously when she reached the landing. She was going to have them checked.

X

“Laurent, when will you be able to move back into the Trianon?” Havilah asked as he pushed open the small wooden door that led to the garden.

“Soon, I hope. They said by Saturday. We were to have a concert in the Greek Theater next Sunday. But we can’t do that now, I don’t think. It would be inappropriate. I’m just glad the other Centennial events begin at the Musée Municipal Méditerranéen in Cassis rather than here. It would have been a logistical nightmare.”

They continued walking, skirting under the caution tape barrier that led directly to Kit’s first floor apartment door. Laurent fidgeted with the keys and then pushed the door open. It was dark inside. The police had shuttered all the windows and the balcony doors. Since it was still light outside, Laurent opted to open a few shutters for natural light rather than draw attention by turning on one of the lamps. Someone surely would notice fluorescent lighting.

The apartment was a mess. Furniture had been turned over and pushed around awkwardly. They moved quickly. Havilah surveyed the kitchen and then the living area. She opened drawers. She moved to his bedroom and then back to the office space he had created in front of the balcony fronting the Mediterranean.
What inspiration. To be writing right above the sea
, she thought.

She walked through again. What the killer or killers didn’t take, the police had. This time she found a note in the bedroom on a bookshelf that read: STOP. Another in the living room on a side table: STOP. And one on the desk: STOP. Two were in large, dark printed fonts. Times New Roman 18, she guessed. The third filled the page with “Stop” in bold letters. Perhaps Kit was using these post-its to let himself know when to quit writing.
Writers and their idiosyncrasies
. She had hers as well. She couldn’t write before taking a shower. And she did her best work in a fluffy pink bathrobe in bed. She crammed the notes into her purse just in case they meant something more and began perusing the desk drawers. Inside she found three plain envelopes whose stamped provenance was Nashville, though there were no return addresses. She scooped those up as well. There was nothing else in the apartment that hadn’t been cleared out by the police or the killer. Her work here was done.

They were in and out in ten minutes.

“Laurent, I’d just like to walk the way Kit would have walked from his apartment to the Perched Terrace.”

He agreed and followed her out the door and down a set of stairs. Havilah walked to the terrace, a masterfully crafted wooden structure, and looked out.
This was his last view
. She saw something small and white in one of the flowerbeds. She reached over the police barrier and snatched up whatever it was— a cigarette butt.

“Do you know if Kit started smoking again?” She stared curiously at the butt.

“You know we don’t allow smoking on the foundation grounds. I never saw him smoking. That doesn’t mean he didn’t sneak off and do it,” he whispered with a bit of agitation that not only had smoking occurred but someone had littered the grounds.

She studied the butt that could have been Kit’s or the killer’s, handling it carefully, so as not to touch the filter where the lips would have. Havilah knew Kit had smoked in his twenties. He had given the habit up not because of health concerns but because it discolored the teeth and left an odor in clothes and hair. He admitted to occasionally smoking as a treat for some accomplishment. She wondered if this was a treat of some sort— his last unbeknownst to him, or if the killer was casually smoking as he or she drained the life out of another human being.
Perish that thought.

Despite the warmth, she shuddered as she placed the butt in her clutch along with her other finds. She debated whether to give it all to Gasquet. It could be important. She couldn’t run any forensics. But then she inwardly blanched at what would undoubtedly be his first response. He would calmly but sternly, as seemed to be his way, name every infraction Havilah had committed: sneaking off, going to the grounds, tampering with an investigation.
Whatever
, she thought dryly.

She knew all roads went through Gasquet if there was to be any headway made in solving Kit’s murder and protecting her ass. But given how he had brushed her aside when she attempted to make her last interventions, she needed to make sure she had something concrete to present to him. The notes, envelopes, and a cigarette were simply not enough, since the police hadn’t even bothered to collect them. She would do some more digging tonight and hopefully be able to present Gasquet with something better by tomorrow, she decided. She didn’t fully understand why she needed Gasquet to see her as more than a ward of the French state in distress. Perhaps because she wasn’t accustomed to being treated as helpless or, worse, useless.

“How close were Améline and Kit?” she asked as they crossed the street.

“Very close. They started seeing each other openly in late March.”

“Was it serious?”

“It’s hard to say. They were certainly adult about it. I think they enjoyed one another tremendously. But you know how these academic affairs go. I don’t think either one considered themselves a couple or were looking for marriage or monogamy. They had a meeting of minds. I think they were both too careerist for sentimentality. But good sex? Well, who doesn’t enjoy that?” He smiled widely, no doubt thinking about the great sex he had with the boyfriend.

That was way too much information.
But she had asked. She just couldn’t see Kit, with his meticulousness about his hair, pleasuring someone.

She and Laurent arrived back in his office at Académie at 8:15, just as Thierry and Améline were descending the steps. Thierry had a quizzical look on his face.