The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (11 page)

“Would you care for a
digestif
, Havilah?” he asked attentively. “You look a little out of sorts.”

“Actually, Thierry, I’m exhausted. I’d like to go back to my room.”

She was exhausted. Being in Kit’s apartment, those odd but perhaps explainable notes, touching that cigarette, left pits in her stomach and chest that felt like forebodings.

“But Havilah, it’s so early,” Améline pleaded as she looked longingly at Thierry.

“I know, but I’ve had a long day. Thierry, don’t feel compelled to leave because of me. Laurent can give me a ride back to the hotel. That’s not a problem. Before I forget, Laurent, where and what time is the board meeting tomorrow?”

“At the civilized hour of 9 a.m. in the library.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose on Laurent, Havilah.” Thierry Gasquet gave Améline a kiss on each cheek. “Besides, Améline and I will see each other tomorrow evening at Bar de la Marine.”

Havilah’s head swiveled around like it was on rolling coasters.
He didn’t. He got himself invited to her meeting with Améline
. The smoke billowing from her nostrils distracted her from thinking about the despair in her stomach.

“Yes, of course, dear,” Améline agreed.

Dear! Dear!
Havilah stared evenly at the both of them. Thierry shrugged his shoulders. He held open the door and then put his hand on her back; they moved silently towards the car. She couldn’t snarl or glower while Laurent and Améline were watching their every move. He assisted her into the car and then took his seat.

“Buckle up, Havilah.”

She glared at him. He started the car and did a U-turn to head back in the direction they had come. As soon as they were at the end of Avenue Jermini, they both started snipping.

“What are you up to?” he bellowed first.

“How dare you weasel in on my evening with Améline.”

“I didn’t know you were that way for Améline,” he deadpanned.

“You’re making jokes, now?” She rolled her eyes.

“You left the party. Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Did you think I didn’t notice you pawned me off on Améline? Then the unbearable flirting with that foppish Neely character. We are trying to solve a murder and prevent another one. And I am here to protect you. Where you go, I go, until this is over.”

“Which question would you like me to answer, Agent Gasquet? A bit possessive aren’t we? And so soon. This could be worse than marriage.”

“Til death do us part then, Havilah.”

Havilah thought about going all Scarlett O’Hara on him. Living in the South among the Southern belles had taught her a good deal about the arts of feminine artifices and mock umbrage. It would have been amusing to hurl words like “bastard,” “inconsiderate jackass,” and throw in a high-pitched “How dare you?” and a few unquestionably unladylike WTFs to boot. She could have also deployed the old standby: the silent treatment. It would have all been too exhausting. She thought about all the ways women smacked men on the nose for their misdeeds. She knew he hadn’t meant what those words had come to mean since she met him almost eight hours ago. She decided that some things didn’t require a riposte. You just let it go. She choked back a giggle— it was the sparkling wine, the Bandol, chased by the Muscat. She’d never been much of a drinker. She was a consummate sipper of varietals, never ever finishing a glass. She had drunk two glasses of the dessert wine way too fast. Plus she had that nice red with the salad and cheese. The red was her artery opener after all that sinfully creamy butter and cheese.

Then she just let it rip. She needed to release a range of bottled emotions, a kindling rage, fear, and frustration. It started as a low snicker, then a whoop; but by the time they reached the hotel, she was howling with laughter. She thought she must have appeared delirious to Gasquet, who looked at her neither smiling nor grimacing. It was not a judgmental look. She supposed he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, as the saying goes— for her to slap him still because of his callous remark.

By the time they reached the elevator she didn’t even mind its coziness. She was feeling kind of wowsy-wowsy-woo-woo from the wine. She felt like she was coming down fast. Thierry took her room key and opened the door. She had now moved from hysterical laughter to profound melancholy. She was on the verge of sobbing. She stepped in the door just as Thierry gently touched her shoulder. It was one of those compassionate touches that could set off a torrent of tears. She held steady.

“I’m sorry. I was thoughtless.”

“Really, it’s okay.” She closed the door. The first wave of sobs quietly erupted.

XI

Havilah lay down on the bed. She had had a good laugh and a good cry. She undressed and decided to take a quick shower. It was only 8:25. The sun had gone down but there was still a good hour or so of daylight left. She had plenty of work to do this evening; she needed a shower to revive her energy. She looked over her assortment of aromatherapy, wondering which one— the orange ginger for energy or the eucalyptus spearmint for stress relief— would give her the biggest boost. She went for the orange ginger. Soothing her would have made her feel vulnerable. The stress wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. She needed energy, even if it was the nervous kind. That state at least made for sharper thinking.

After the shower, she made her favorite tea— African Red Rooibos. She carried a canister filled with the loose leaf tea and an electric French press whenever she traveled. While the tea steeped, she opened her clutch and emptied out its contents. She placed it all on the table and booted her computer. She wanted to reconstruct Kit’s last hours as best she could.

Havilah listened to his message again. He had called at 8:40, according to his message and her time-date stamp. He said he was going to meet Améline. Either he never made it to the harbor, or she met up with him at the Perched Terrace. She could just call Fitts and ask. But she would have had to explain how she knew they were meeting; if she were the murderer, she would wonder what else Kit said in his message to her. It would have been all cat and mouse from that point onward. Havilah had to broach the subject gingerly tomorrow evening; she could even make use of “Dear” Thierry, as Améline called him, as a seductive primer.

She scrolled through her cell phone calls. She had called Kit at 9:40 and again at 9:42. According to Captain Noubard, the killer or somehow Kit answered the telephone when she called the first time. The second time she called, Kit’s voicemail answered.

She was certain that the cigarette was fresh. The Félibrige grounds were normally immaculate. The groundskeeper would have spotted an old cigarette butt and snatched it up immediately. And if the cigarette was Kit’s, she was also certain, given his other idiosyncrasies, that he would have smoked it at nightfall so that no one would know about his transgression; his sense of decorum would not have allowed him to leave trash on the foundation’s grounds. She decided to watch the night fall. It was still light at 8:40 when Kit called.
At 8:40 Kit’s alive; by 9:40 he is being murdered and I become all at once a witness and potential victim. One hour.

She retrieved from her larger white patent leather bag the lists Laurent had given her and a pad of paper for note-taking. She booted up her subcompact. And then she was out of the gate with DMX’s
…And Then There Was X
. He was better than caffeine and dark chocolate; neither of which her system could tolerate without sleepless nights on end. She began doing research on the Félibrige poets. Each, in his own way, contributed to the Provençal movement with poems and other writings. But none was particularly scandalous except for their desire to celebrate the sing-songy Occitan language rather than French— which was probably considered quaint if not mildly annoying to the Académie Française. It was certainly not an offense that occasioned violence.

The
Félibrige
, it seemed, were primarily poets of regional repute, with the exception of Frédéric Mistral. Most were born, lived, and died in Avignon, France. She could see why Kit would want to write about the Provençal poets, particularly after Clarence Towdaline ravaged him in his review by calling Kit “a poet of mere regional celebrity.”

He would want to elevate and reclaim those, like himself, disparaged and marginalized by such defining terms. Like Knowlton, who had celebrated the region through various mediums and memorialized the poets with the Félibrige Foundation’s seven-pointed star, Kit evidently wanted to rejoice in the importance of regional artistic expression in his poetry. Havilah got that. She even smiled at his moxie. But there had to be something more.

Without Kit’s project or remarks for the Centennial, she didn’t know exactly where to turn for answers. So Havilah decided to turn to the board members. She moved quickly through web pages, noting information about each member of the board. She was able to strike out over 80 percent of the special invitee list after she carefully examined the names. It was comprised of a few fellows who were invited back to the Centennial and local Messieurs and Mesdames who had always attended Félibrige musical events and exhibits like the Bérenguiers and Tatilons from this evening’s dinner.

Lacy Able from Williams was on a fellowship at some university in Australia. That was a long way to come to kill Kit. And Amherst College’s president had been on Capitol Hill all last week and had obviously headed directly off to Japan for some conference on biophysics. The conference program was posted online, and there was her name, Jeanne Priznick, for a panel.
Today. She’s probably more jetlagged than I am.

Despite the absurd attraction her ears felt for him, she googled Ansell Neely. His homepage at UT-Austin came up:
Ansell F. Neely, Distinguished University Professor, BSc 1985, Amherst College; MFA 1988, University of Iowa; PhD 1992, University of Cambridge. Interests: Creative Writing, Poetry, Contemporary Poetics, Modernism, English Poetry; American Poetry; Film Theory; Painting. Professor Neely is author of over 12 books of poetry; his latest is
Errant Lovers
. He has also published widely in film theory and art criticism. He is a New York Library Literary Lion, MacArthur Foundation awardee, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, and an American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow.

Havilah was quite impressed with Professor Neely’s credentials. She logged on at Amazon.com to see if she could “Look Inside” Neely’s latest work. Unfortunately, his publisher hadn’t authorized a peek inside. She ordered it anyway. She had it delivered to her Paris address. There was no way it would get to Cassis in enough time to be of any use.

Errant Lovers
was given a fourstar reviewer rating. She read the two reviews. Only one provided some insight into the work:

Neely’s errant lover torments him; she is his dark-haired muse, a woman split into light and dark and their encounters are often brief but intense. Enough to keep the poet’s imagination going for a full 127 pages of prose poems.

The product description was thin as well:
In Neely’s twelfth book of poetry, the poet has reached the pinnacle of the poetic craft;
Errant Lovers
is uninhibited as it expresses passion, tenderness, torment, and astonishment at his longing for his errant lover.

She was
astonished
that Neely was such an erotic firebrand. No wonder her ears had perked up. Reading his poetry could be a real pick-me-up on a lonely Saturday night. She was glad she had ordered his book. From the Renaissance man Gasquet to Neely, the epitome of eros, to Kit, with his clandestine Améline Fitts’ trysts, all of these men spilled out of the boxes into which she had so neatly placed them. She had never been good at reading men.
Lucian Patrick was proof of that.

She moved on to the odd and odious pair, Valens and Betts. They were not as interesting as Neely.
That didn’t make them any less murderous
, she wagered. Valens had served under George H. W. Bush as the executive director of the president’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities; she was also a board of trustee member at the Institute for Educational Equality in New York. She lived in Montauk, New York. Betts, besides serving as chair of the Félibrige Foundation’s board, was also president and chief executive officer of Betts, West, and Channing, a capital investment firm in New York. He had a summer home in Monteagle, Tennessee, where Astor’s president had a home as well. Chastain also served on the Betts’ corporate board.
What a small, incestuous world.

Lowery Jason, the “rat bastard” treasurer, was actually the chairman of the philanthropic Knowlton Foundation. The Félibrige fell under the purview of the Knowlton Foundation. More web clicks revealed that he was, as Laurent had said, Knowlton’s nephew twice removed. He had stayed in the family business. The lanky Jason was reserved. He certainly wasn’t flummoxed by the latest events. He was fair-haired like his late relative; and from his bio on the foundation’s website, he was at least 44 years old. He might have had a clear motive in protecting the family name from Kit’s research project, if that was why Kit was murdered. But Lowery Jason would have had to be living under a rock if he didn’t know about his uncle’s sexual orientation; besides, there was nothing scandalous about that. It could be, though, that the family didn’t necessarily want the philanthropist’s private life blasted out to the high heavens. William Knowlton was a discreet man, not given to flamboyance.

Havilah’s cell phone pinged with an appointment reminder. She did the bathroom water-running routine and placed a call to Astor.

“Hezekiah Johnson.”

“Hezekiah, it’s Havilah Gaie.”

Hezekiah Johnson was a baby-faced, tall, dark, broad-shouldered whiz kid. He knew his way around anything having to do with technology. He was head of Astor’s Information Technology Services. He was a hipster, at least four years younger than Havilah, who spent his free time checking out the Nashville music scene along with every new trendy coffee shop that sprang up in the city. They had met on one of the many committees on which she had served. Whenever some new gadget hit the market, she rang him up for advice.