Murder in Aix (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series Book 5) (27 page)

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“I killed
Jacques,” Florrie said. “And then I was forced to kill Annette, too. But of
course, you knew that, didn’t you?” He looked at Maggie and smiled as if he’d
just asked her for her assessment of his latest soup special at the bar.

“Well,” Maggie
said, the exhaustion of dealing with and waiting for each contraction sapping
her strength to the point where she knew she didn’t have the energy to open her
own door, let alone rescue herself, “all I can say is it must be a boatload of
money for you to go through all this.”

Florrie slapped
the steering wheel with his hand, but when Maggie looked at him she saw that he
was laughing. “That’s the absurdity of it, don’t you see? It
isn’t
a boatload at all. It’s the
opposite
of a boatload.” He shook his
head but continued to grin as if the joke was just
too
good.

Maggie stared at
him for a moment before it hit her. “Lily was broke.”

“C’est ca.”

“And you were
handling her money.”

He wasn’t
laughing now. In fact, his face took on a fierce intensity as if he had had
this argument in the mirror many times over. “There was this amazing
opportunity last year. It was virtually a guarantee.”

The Mistral Promise.

“I would have
been rich.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe that it didn’t
turn out like that. “I borrowed the money from Lily’s estate. I fully intended
to return it when I won. No one would ever know. When I lost, I thought, no
problem, I have plenty of time to replace it before anyone discovers it.”

“And then you
learned that she was going to die sooner rather than later.”

“Not only that, I
discovered that I was
not
the one to
inherit. The theft would be discovered in a matter of weeks. Can you imagine
anyone in the world
more
likely to
prosecute me for embezzlement than Jacques? I would go to jail!”

“After all you’d
done for Lily, you must have been bitter.”

“Let’s just say I
won’t mourn her. I wasted enough time on her while she lived.”

Maggie thought it
had been several minutes since her last contraction. She wondered if labor had
stopped.
Is that possible? Maybe it was
another false labor?
But her water broke. To answer the question once and
for all, she was seized by the beginning build of another monstrous spasm. She
grabbed the door handle and bit her lip as the pain charged her.

When it was over,
she felt like she was seeing her situation with a startling clarity that had
eluded her before, had eluded her, in fact, for the last three months of her
pregnancy. It was clear to her now:
Talking
was not going to save her from this madman—as reasonable and measured as
he sounded. If she and her baby were going to survive this terrible day, Maggie
was going to have to actually
escape
.

“So that’s why it
was important for Lily to die
after
Annette,”
she said. “So that Michelle won’t inherit.”

“Yes, but in the
end it doesn’t really matter. I’d hope we could all go back to the way we were
but I can see now we can’t. With me in exile it will all default to Michelle.”

“Who’ll inherit a
big pile of nothing.”

“At least she
can’t sue me. I’ll be unreachable by then.”

“Why…why did you come
after
me
?”

“I told you.
Annette told me that you knew that I’d killed Jacques. Frankly, she and
Michelle had become pretty obsessed with you.”

Annette must have just been talking out of her ass to try to
delay the inevitable.

 
I know how she
feels.

“I needed to
explain to you what really happened. Then, once I’m gone, you’re welcome to
tell the police everything you know.” Florrie said, looking over at her. If the
cold, forced smile he gave her was supposed to be reassuring, it failed. “I was
impressed, you know. Even Annette didn’t guess until the end.”

Neither did I,
Maggie admitted. “And by
the end
, you
mean...”
 

“I gave her every
opportunity to share the wealth with me.”

“The nonexistent
wealth.”

“Yes, well
Annette didn’t know that.”

“You asked her to
marry you so she couldn’t testify against you?”

“C’est ca.”

“I’m pretty sure
that wouldn’t have stopped her.”

“All the more
reason why she had to die. Frankly, I’d originally hoped they would pin
Jacques’s murder on her. She was with him that night, too.”

“The night he
died? Well, they wouldn’t do that because she had a special connection inside
the police force.”

 
“What? Annette was sleeping with someone
on the police force? Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“The
head
of the police, yes.”
She was totally blowing smoke right now but until
she came up with a plan, she would need to keep him talking.
“Why else do
you think she was never considered a serious suspect in his murder?”

“I wondered about
that.”

“So you framed
Julia for it.”

He shrugged
again. “It was easy because of her obsession with mushrooms, and besides, she’s
English. What did Jacques want with an Englishwoman? He certainly couldn’t
marry
her.”

“Oh, right. That
would’ve totally tainted the gene pool. Are we stopping?”

Not good.

Maggie put her
hands on the dashboard to prevent herself from sliding forward as Florrie
steered the car off the road. The light was dying now. Maggie could see by the
dashboard clock that it was 5:45 p.m. She should have realized that they were
not heading in the direction of Aix and the hospital. She’d been so busy
alternately screaming in agony and chatting with a killer that she’d hadn’t
noticed.

It was a dark
stretch of road, and as Maggie sat there with Florrie and the pings and clunks
of the dying engine sounding in the quiet, she realized that there were no
other cars on the road. The bushes and trees on the opposite side of the road
grew tall and dense and blocked out what light there had been from the waning
day. There were a few scrub bushes on the side of the road where the car was
stopped, but no trees.

They were poised
at the lip of a cliff.

Chapter
Twenty-Four

Laurent arrived
at the Alexandre home gasping and out of breath. A mile by road, he had vaulted
over dry stone walls and cut between the vines in the vineyard to make it to
the front steps in under ten minutes. The house was dark, so there was only the
hope now that the phone worked. He entered, absently greeted the two Pyrenean
Shepherds that Jean-Luc doted on like children, and pushed his way to the comfortable
French country kitchen. He snatched up the phone hanging on the wall and
immediately got a dial tone.

As he was racing
over to the house, he had put together in his mind as many scenarios as he
could process, discarding them one after the other as they refused to fit the
puzzle. There was no sense in trying to recreate when he last had his phone or
where he might have left it. He hadn’t seen it in days.

Someone
had texted Maggie three hours earlier using his phone and lured her to
Florrie’s bar.
Why there? It was remote
and often empty, but there could be no guarantee of privacy.
Someone
had disabled the Renault in
order to ensure that Grace was taken out of the picture. The stretch of road
that she traveled was notorious for no cellular service.
Even if she had tried to use her phone she would not have been able to
alert anyone in time to prevent
…Laurent dialed the number and waited
impatiently for the other line to pick up.

Maggie was alone at Florrie’s bar. If it was the crazy woman
who tried to attack her with the cricket bat last week, perhaps today she had
graduated to a knife or a gun.
He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to six.
She wouldn’t need a two-hour window to kill Maggie.

But that was what she had.

“Allo?”

Laurent spoke in
brief, abrupt Parisian French. He tended to alter his speech for the general
comfort of the prickly natives from this region, but today he had no patience
or time for such courtesies.

“I’m sorry, but due to the Aix-en-Provence Policemen’s Ball
tonight, there is only a skeleton staff of officers on patrol this evening and
all complaints must be triaged. A tourist’s complaint—I assume, Monsieur
that you are from Paris? —of a wife lost in a bar would be relatively low
on the priority list even with a full staff of—
”

Laurent slammed
the phone down and dug out the business card from the front pocket of his
jeans. Quickly he punched in the number and stood by the kitchen window watching
as the light faded and the rain came down.

The call went straight
to voice mail.

He left an abrupt
message, hung up then turned to jerk open the front door. He plunged into the
sheet of rain pouring off the roof eaves and ran up the long dark driveway toward
the main road and the village, sheltered from the worst of the storm by the
tunnel of hovering trees.

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When she emerged
naked and dripping from the shower and snapped her fingers at him to get his
attention, Roger had just picked up his phone to check to see if he’d gotten
any messages. It had been four hours since Annette Tatois’s body had been
found. He’d agreed to let that moron, Manet, handle it
for the experience
—plus Roger’s attendance at the ball was
mandatory—but he would need to stay on top of it.

“A towel,
ch
é
rie
?”
he said as he stood up, mesmerized by her confidence and audacity as she stood before
him dripping water on the carpet.

“Later,” she
said, crooking a finger at him and smiling lasciviously.

Roger dropped the
phone on the bed and began unbuttoning his dress shirt.

After all, the ball isn’t for another hour and Manet can probably
handle a lot more than I give him credit for.

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“Something appears to be wrong with the
car,” Florrie said, sitting in his seat and staring straight ahead. He turned
to look at her and shrugged. “It just stalled.”

 
“You know, Florrie…” Maggie tried to keep
her voice as casual and nonthreatening as possible. “I have to tell you that
when my friend gets home, Laurent will know that the text was fake.”

He shrugged.
“Haven’t you wondered why no one has called before now?”

Maggie was
not
going to tell him it was because her
phone was dead.

“I punctured the
gas tank of your car,” he said, matter of factly. “At this moment your friend
is either on the side of the road somewhere in the pouring rain—I must
apologize for the poor cellular reception in this part of the country—or
she’s lost control of her vehicle on the D7 and is in the city morgue. In any
case, she won’t be bringing help. Your husband is
not
worried
or
waiting
for you to return, as he has no reason to believe anything is amiss.”

Maggie felt her
chest hitch painfully. She pulled at the collar of her tunic as if that might
help her breathe easier. She felt the perspiration pop up across her forehead.

Not coming? Was it possible that nobody was coming?

Her stomach
lurched in nausea and she felt her hands start to shake as she watched as
Florrie twist in his seat and pull a backpack from the back, and then jam the
car keys into his jacket pocket.
Something
was about to happen. Something bad.

“Surely you don’t
think you can get away with killing two people,” she said, hearing the fear and
desperation in her voice.
Or three or four...
?
Maggie didn’t know if he was going to strangle her in the car or leave her to
deliver her own child before she died of massive blood loss, but either way the
prospect wasn’t good.

 
“I told you, I just need to delay things
long enough to slip away. There’s a steamer leaving Marseille tonight. I’ll be
in Oujda before the cops even think to look for me.”

“Morocco doesn’t
have a reciprocal arrangement with France?”

“Let’s just say I’ll
be able to live out my life there in comfort and anonymity.”

“Look, if you’re
looking for a head start, I can promise not to speak to the police until you’re
well and truly gone. Trust me, I have many hours ahead of me where I’ll be sufficiently
distracted by other things.” She put both hands on her stomach.

He hesitated. “I’m
sorry if I gave you the impression that I would hurt you,” he said. “I’m not a
killer, you know.”

Of course not! Psycho!

“Of course not,”
she said. “Can you get me to the emergency room in Aix?”

“I would, but the
car is broken down.”

“Oh, right.”
Maggie began to feel the beginnings of the next powerful contraction.

“Do you have a
cell phone?” he asked gently.

“I—I do,
but it’s…it’s dead.”

“May I see it?”

She handed it to
him so he could confirm it was useless.

“Too bad,” he
said. “I was going to take it and call an ambulance for you.”

“Don’t you have a
phone?”

How about Laurent’s phone? Don’t you still have that, you
disgusting rodent?

“Oh, sure!” he
said, patting a pocket that didn’t have a bulge large enough to conceal a
cellphone. “So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll call as soon as I’m down the road a
ways. The reception here is very bad. Well, Madame, I am sorry again, for
everything that’s happened, but I wish you and Laurent and the little one every
possible health and happiness.

Unbelievable!

“Yeah, okay, thanks,”
Maggie said as she felt the next contraction gaining ground on her. “Can I just
ask you, before you go…?” She held her breath—like that was going to be
any good in mitigating the tsunami of pain bearing down on her.

“Of course.
Anything.”

“How did…how did
you kill Jacques?” Maggie knew she wouldn’t be lucid to hear the answer. Her
mind had gone somewhere safe while her body worked to destroy her from the
inside out. But the words rang in the car even so. They embedded themselves in
the very vinyl and plastic and metal of the car’s interior—her own
private torture chamber. And somehow, she heard.

“We met for
drinks every Saturday,” he said pleasantly, as if remembering a happier time.
“For the six weeks before he died, I coated his glass with ground dust from the
agaricus
mushrooms that I acquired
online.

 
“Jacques sickened immediately, but took
six weeks to actually die. The police never looked at my computer. They never
examined my glassware. In fact, if not for you, Madame—a little terrier
with a bone!—I think I could have called this the perfect crime.”

As Maggie pawed
at the dashboard to try to get back her equilibrium, Florrie opened his car
door and heaved out his backpack. “I can see you’re busy trying to get this
baby born,” he said jovially, “so I’ll leave you to it and make that phone
call. Good luck!”

He exited the car
and slammed the door.

It wasn’t until
after Maggie fought her way through another mammoth contraction that left her
sweating and weak that she felt the car moving.