The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (30 page)
Read The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence Online
Authors: Tracy Whiting
Tags: #Crime Fiction, #Cozy Mystery, #contemporary women’s fiction, #African American cozy mystery, #female protagonist, #African American mystery romance, #multicultural & interracial romance, #African American literary fiction, #African American travel
Allow me a personal note. The one and only child of Roselle and yours truly, who has been living and working in Bay City, has decided to leave the area and go live in Paris, France. She will be writing a column, “Paris Patter,” for
Good Look
magazine.
Roselle and I will miss her.
God bless you, Georgia Lee.
I cried all the way home. The next morning, Twinkie and I left for Paris.
Kitty
I cannot honestly say I took to Paris immediately. Twinkie and I arrived in a freezing rain that felt like the dead of winter to a native Floridian, even though it was June. I had pictured people strolling down a sunlit Champs-Elysées, a cute whirlwind of traffic on the Place de la Concorde, and the Eiffel Tower soaring into the blue. Instead, I got a surly and incomprehensible cabdriver, dripping gray facades, and a wallowing, gunmetal-colored Seine. Twinkie’s tranquilizer began to wear off and she started up the most pitiful mewing. Then we ran into an awful traffic jam with police blockades. When I tried, with my jet-lagged tongue and brain, to ask the driver what was going on, he snarled,
“Bombe.”
I sat back. Wonderful. A bomb. Twinkie mewed some more. I felt like mewing right along with her.
The apartment wasn’t exactly perfect, although it had its good features. The Rue Delacôte was a narrow street that seemed fairly quiet, even though it was only a block from the Boulevard Montparnasse. I was at number three, a graceful old structure of gray-gold stone with black wrought-iron balconies. My one room was L-shaped, the windows tall, the ceiling high and edged with a modest frieze of plaster foliage. I even had a tiny balcony, decorated with two clay pots half filled with damp dirt. Judging from neighboring balconies, I could see that I needed to get some red geraniums.
The furniture in the place was sparse and marginal. The modernity of a round butcher-block dining table and four mismatched chairs made an inharmonious contrast to the pseudo-antique sofa upholstered in fading mustard brocade. I couldn’t do much about the sofa, but maybe I could get a long, fringed cloth for the table. I wondered how much fringed tablecloths cost in Paris. I wondered how much geraniums cost.
There was no carpet on the hardwood floor, which creaked and reverberated with every step I took. I tore my mind away from the dusky peach wall-to-wall in my condo and inspected the bathroom, which might have been redone as recently as the twenties. The tile was severe white, the footed tub big enough to hold three people, if that was your pleasure. A halfhearted shower had been rigged up with a thin pipe and flat round head, and a stiff blue shower curtain hung on rusting rings from a wire surrounding the tub. There was a toilet, a bidet, a medicine cabinet containing a few rusty razor blades, and a sink which had separate faucets for hot and cold, something I’ve always hated. With some trepidation I tried flushing the toilet, but it rushed into vigorous action. I filed this under
Thank God for Small Favors.
The bedroom alcove contained a sagging bed with a gray mattress and a huge, gnarled-looking armoire. Gazing at the armoire I realized, with a sinking heart, that there were no closets whatsoever.
While I made this preliminary inspection, Twinkie had been howling in her carrier. The time had come to let her inspect her new home. When I released her, she ran directly under the bed. She didn’t emerge, except for furtive nighttime trips to the litter box and food dish, for two solid weeks.
Imagine it: Twinkie huddled under the bed, fifteen pounds of miserable tortoiseshell. Me on my knees peering at her, pleading, “Come on, Twinks. Come on, sweet girl. Come out, sweet baby.” All to no avail. It was just as ghastly as it sounds.
While dealing with Twinkie’s maladjustment, not to mention mine, I had to do my all-important first column for Loretta. Nothing had ever seemed more impossible. In the first place, my French didn’t prove to be as fluent as I’d thought. Yes, I could go to the awning-shaded greengrocer’s stand down the street and, with some prompting from the bustling proprietress, come away with half a dozen juice oranges or a couple of onions. I could go to a cafe and order a coffee
.
I could buy an umbrella (a necessary purchase) or inquire where the bus stop was. That was a far cry from being able to interview somebody and actually understand what the person was saying.
I didn’t know who to interview, anyway. I was paralyzed by culture shock and sensory overload. I started having nightmares, thrashing around on my saggy bed, Twinkie a mute witness beneath. At three o’clock one morning I stared up through the darkness at my lofty ceiling and decided this venture wasn’t going to work out. I would make reservations tomorrow and crawl back to Luna Beach. Maybe Daddy would give me a job at the
Current.
At this low and desperate point, fate gave a sign that my immediate future did not lie in Luna Beach. While contemplating making my return reservations, I came across a piece of paper on which was written the name and phone number of Kitty de Villiers-Marigny, the friend of my friend Dobie at the Bay City
Sun.
I almost didn’t call her. Her name sounded too French and too fancy. Anyway, I wasn’t staying, so what was the point? But I remembered promising Dobie, and our tearful hug. I’d ruined my cat’s life and my own, but at least I could keep that promise.
I picked up the phone. I wasn’t looking forward to this, since I’d found that phone conversations in French caused me to perspire unduly. I clenched my jaw and dialed, trying to put together the phrases that would explain who I was and why I was calling.
She answered with a French-sounding “
‘Allo?”
but I hadn’t gotten out more than three words when she said, “We can speak English.” Her voice was unmistakably American. I told her who I was. She vaguely remembered Dobie, and she suggested we meet late that afternoon at her office and go for a drink. I thought she sounded distracted, but I figured I sounded distracted myself.
All that day, I was on the verge of calling the airlines. I put on my heaviest sweater and stood on my balcony in the chilly wind. People walked down the street below me. French people. Some of them went into the bakery down the way and came out carrying long loaves of bread in their bare hands, without even cellophane around it. Dogs on leashes pranced along, using the sidewalk as a bathroom at will, and later a man in a motorized cart swept it up with a mechanical brush. Little children ran by, yelling at each other in perfect French. Was there a column in any of this? Could I write my first column for
Good Look
about doggy doo?
I dragged myself to the Montparnasse Metro station to go to my drinks engagement with Kitty de Villiers-Marigny. It looked like rain. Maybe I could do a column about how damn much it rained in Paris. I found the address she had given me, a nondescript office building on the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, near the Opera. She had said third floor, end of the hall. The third floor, I noticed on a directory board in the unimposing lobby, was occupied by the Worldwide Wire Service.
The third floor hallway was lit by fluorescent glare and could have been located anywhere from Tallahassee to Timbuktu. The door to the room at the end was ajar. As I approached, I heard gasping, gurgling sounds. My steps slowed. I had done enough gasping and gurgling myself lately to know acute distress when I heard it. I tiptoed up and peeked in to see a tiny office which was all but filled by two scarred desks. A woman sat at one of the desks, sobbing, head cradled in her arms. Her hair was carrot red, a wildly curly pre-Raphaelite cascade. She was wearing a shapeless, oatmeal-colored sweatsuit outfit that looked chic and expensive even at this disadvantageous angle. Her shoulders were heaving.
The question was whether to slip away, walk around the block, and return for a fresh start, or barge in and see what I could do. I was debating the point when a masculine voice behind me said, “I was afraid of this.”
I jumped a mile. The speaker was a gray-haired, craggy man in his fifties who, I couldn’t help noticing even under the circumstances, wasn’t bad looking although his clothes were atrocious. His socks were drooping over his Hush Puppies, his pants were unpressed, his shirt bagged over his belt, his loosened tie was twenty years old at least. He smelled distinctly of cigarettes. Obviously, a newsman.
At his voice, the woman looked up, revealing the kind of cheekbones we all long for (wet, at the moment, with tears), green eyes, a generous mouth, and a furious pink facial flush. The man said, “He isn’t worth it, Kitty,” as he walked past me into the room. I hovered in the doorway, partly out of timidity and partly because there was no room inside for anybody else.
“Don’t insult me, Jack,” she said in choked tone of outrage. “Do you really think I’d cry like this over Marc-Antoine?”
“Well, you told me this morning the two of you had split. What else am I supposed to think?”
“Think what wonders it’s going to do for my waistline! Who needs a pastry chef hanging around?”
“Why aren’t you laughing, then?”
Her face crumpled and she buried it in her hands. “Felicia told me this afternoon she’s going back to Barcelona.”
The man had worked his way around the desks to the room’s one window. He perched on the sill, fished a cigarette out of his pocket, and lit it. “Is that all? You’ve known for months that was probably going to happen. You’ll get somebody else to share the office.”
“It isn’t just that.” Her voice was muffled by her hands.
“What else?”
“Teddy spiked my piece about the perfume guy.”
Jack tapped ashes into his pants cuff. “The old fellow who mixes the scent especially for each customer? Cute old Monsieur Whatsisname, with his workroom on the Rue St. Sulpice?”
“Yes! Monsieur Dupont will be
so
disappointed. He was really happy about the story, all excited. I could
kill
Teddy. He said it was too lightweight.”
You can believe that my hand was sneaking into my purse toward my notebook while I repeated, over and over to myself, “Monsieur Dupont. Rue St. Sulpice.” If the old boy could talk slowly enough for me to understand him, he might get his story yet.
“It probably
was
too lightweight for Teddy,” the man was saying.
She looked up and said, furiously, “Whose side are you on, Jack?” Her gaze swung toward me. “And why don’t you introduce me to your friend?”
They both looked at me. I froze, my hand in my purse, feeling as if I’d been caught picking a pocket.
Jack, of course, said,
“My
friend?” and then I had to step in and explain that I was in fact
her
friend, if anybody’s.
That was the beginning. With Kitty’s help, I wrote up Monsieur Dupont, the charming perfume-maker, for my first
Good Look
column, and it passed muster with Loretta. After Felicia went back to Barcelona, I moved in to share the tiny office with Kitty. Twinkie came out from under the bed. I bought a fringed tablecloth and a couple of red geraniums. My French improved. And just when I was starting to get comfortable, I witnessed a murder.
About the Author
TRACY WHITING (T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting) is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French and African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a winner of the Horace Mann Medal from Brown University and lives in Nashville, TN.
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Also by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Also by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Table of Contents
Also by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting