Seen and Not Heard (7 page)

He ducked in out of the wind and started the lengthy climb to his sixth-floor apartment, stumbling just slightly. The question was, why did he need his edges blurred today? Granted, he was cold as hell, and his apartment wasn’t going to be much of an improvement from the icy streets below. But the sun was shining, the sky was dazzlingly blue, and Paris was magnificent as always.

He hated the fact that another old woman had died. He hadn’t wanted to learn the details, but he’d already bought the paper to accompany his croissant and coffee, and his alternatives were to stare at his fellow diners in the small café or stare at his large hands. He’d read the paper.

She’d been in the park yesterday afternoon. He might even have seen her when he’d been talking to … He might even have seen her, he amended to himself as he gained the fourth-floor landing, panting slightly. He might have seen her killer.

The next flight of stairs almost proved his undoing. He’d drunk more wine than he’d realized, the unaccustomed quality of the stuff blinding him to the quantity. He slipped, banging his shins against the iron railing, and sprawled full-length on the stairs.

He considered staying where he was. No one else lived on the top floor—unless he had unexpected visitors he wouldn’t be in anybody’s way. And if someone did have the temerity to visit him unannounced they could damn well help him up to his apartment.

Except that the stairs were a lot less comfortable than his bed with the sagging mattress. And even lying stretched out on the stairs he couldn’t avoid what was bothering him. Not the thought of another old lady being brutally murdered, depressing though that was. It was the memory of Claire.

He’d been cursing himself all night long that he hadn’t found out more about her. He knew all sorts of things—where she grew up, what she ate for breakfast, what writers she read, and what she used to do for a living. He knew she couldn’t understand a word of French and was miserable and embarrassed about her inability to do so. He knew she had a soft, vulnerable mouth, humorous eyes, and the most glorious red gold hair.

But he didn’t know her last name, or where she lived. Or whom she lived with, he added bitterly, pulling himself to his knees.

He’d stayed up late last night. The novel needed something new, a sympathetic female character. He’d worked feverishly, and if the woman with the red gold hair had sounded vaguely familiar, it only added to his inspiration.

He’d called her Elizabeth, a name that suited her. The Elizabeth in his novel had been perfect; warm, glowing, sexually insatiable, and exquisitely beautiful. She’d haunted the book, haunted his dreams, so that he raced over to the
park as soon as he’d finished his coffee and the gruesome details of the latest murder, and stayed there, shivering in the cruel wind, waiting for her to show up.

He never doubted that she would. That pull he’d felt had been too strong to be one-way. She’d come back, looking for him, and he’d be there, waiting.

When he first spotted her, standing alone, too lightly dressed for such a cold day, his first reaction was disappointment. She wasn’t the vision he’d remembered. Her face was narrow, pinched with cold, her mouth thin and unhappy, her slender body graceless as she wrapped her arms around herself. The hair was still glorious, but the fantasy had faded.

He hadn’t moved for a long moment, watching her, trying to reconcile reality with the dream goddess of the night before, when he saw the man. Very handsome, very French, very much her lover, he came up to the woman and put his hands on her.

Tom had waited to see her face light up. It hadn’t happened. She’d smiled at the man, but it wasn’t the same, open smile she’d given Tom just the day before. She kissed the man, her arms around him, seemingly lost in the public embrace. But Tom didn’t believe it.

She saw him just before they left. She looked directly at him, her face blank. In less than twenty-four hours she’d forgotten him. And Tom headed out to get drunk.

He staggered the rest of the way to the top floor, slammed it shut behind him, and headed for the typewriter. Much as it went against the grain to revise before he was finished, this time it was too important. The saintly Elizabeth had to go.

Malgreave was walking, shoulders hunched forward, hat pulled down low on his head, hands shoved in his pockets. He ignored the cold, as he ignored everything when he was thinking. Possibilities and suspicions danced around in his head, and he had every intention of walking in the bitter cold until it all began to make some sense.

Josef was beside him, trotting at his heels like an overeager
terrier tracking a bitch in heat. Malgreave didn’t mind—it gave him someone to talk to, to try his theories on.

When they’d finished up in the park he’d headed home, taking his assistant with him in a misguided hope that Josef’s presence might deflect Marie’s wrath at being abandoned one more Sunday. The effort had been wasted. The small, neat house in the suburbs was deserted, and there were frozen dinners awaiting him.

“Sorry, Josef. It looks as if Marie has gone to visit my daughter after all. We’ll have to make do with these things.” He gestured contemptuously at the brightly colored boxes lining the freezing compartment.

“I would consider it an honor, Chief Inspector,” Josef murmured.

“The tragedy of that, Josef, is that you mean it,” Malgreave said with a sigh. “No, I won’t subject you to that. We’ll find a café with something decent. God knows their food is probably from the freezer also. I don’t know what France has come to. It’s never failed to both enrage and amuse me, Josef, that the Americans have taken haute cuisine and in return given the poor French people frozen dinners with the taste and texture of cardboard.”

Josef nodded solemnly, drinking in Malgreave’s words, and once more the chief inspector sighed. Josef was a bright man, second only to himself in the department, and he combined a slavish adoration with a desperate ambition. The poor man was constantly being torn by those two conflicting emotions, hoping Malgreave would meet with disaster and be forced to resign, giving up his place to Josef, and hoping that Malgreave would once more triumph, bringing credit to the entire department. Malgreave had little doubt it was Josef’s harridan of a wife who was responsible for the ambition. Were it left up to Josef, he’d be perfectly content following in Malgreave’s footsteps, just as he was now.

Malgreave shook his head. “You’d best watch out if that pretty wife of yours starts buying these things, Josef. It’s been Marie’s only act of revenge for the long hours this job
demands. You can tell her state of mind from the food she offers. If she’s feeling generous and forgiving she’ll leave tiny quiches, pastries, even a ragout to heat up. When we were young and just married she’d even wait up for me herself. Nowadays she’s more than likely to reveal her displeasure in frozen fried chicken and peas the size and taste of goat pellets. It’s a sad life, Josef.”

“I’m certain Madame Malgreave loves you very much.”

“Did I say she didn’t?” Louis snapped. “No, you’re right, Josef. But I’ll give you another piece of good advice. There are times when love isn’t enough.” He slammed the freezer door shut. “Back into the cold, my friend. I need to walk.”

And walk they did. Through the empty, windswept streets, they walked and walked until the nagging questions he had began to make sense.

“It was Rocco Guillère,” Malgreave announced abruptly when they’d covered five blocks.

Josef was startled, his ferretlike eyes darting in his egg-shaped head. “What makes you say that? Not that I wish to disagree, Chief Inspector, but there is no proof, no clues, nothing to tie the man to this murder. I agree with you, he must have been responsible for a number of the old ladies, but I can’t see why you suspect him of this one. This was scarcely his area of town.”

“I know.” Malgreave was weary. “I can only go by my instincts, and they seldom fail me. It was Guillère, all right. That elegant old lady in her beautiful apartment had been stabbed by a filthy hoodlum, then laid out on her silk-covered bed like a medieval effigy. God, it makes me sick to look at them. I’d rather there were more blood, signs of a struggle, not that damned formal lying in state, be they a comtesse, a nun, or a cleaning woman.”

Josef shook his head, unconvinced. “It couldn’t have been, sir. We’ve checked with everyone in the building. A man like Rocco would have stuck out like a sore thumb. We showed his photograph to everyone we could find, and not a soul had seen him.”

Malgreave shrugged. “You know what your great strength is, Josef? Your stubbornness and adherence to facts. You
know what your great weakness is? The very same traits. We know there are several people in Paris going around murdering old women, and Rocco Guillère is only one of them. Logic tells us that he isn’t the one responsible for last night’s killing. It wasn’t his area of town, and people like him respect territory. A woman like Marcelle Boisrond would never have let a creature like Guillère near her. It stands to reason one of the other killers is responsible.”

“Exactly,” said Josef, not daring to feel smug.

“So when I insist that it was Rocco, despite everything, what will you think?”

Josef didn’t even hesitate. He huddled deeper into the fancy British coat his wife had made him buy. “I’ll know that Rocco did it,” he said flatly.

Malgreave nodded. “Good man. I tell you, Josef, this was one murder too many. We’re going to get him for it, and nothing is going to get in our way.”

And Josef, torn between conflicting emotions, hunched his shoulders against the encroaching wind and followed Malgreave to the corner bistro.

The wind had finally stopped. There was a quarter moon, hung lopsided in a blue black sky, and the bare branches of the trees stretched upward, looking, Claire thought, like desperate arms reaching for rescue.

Morbid fancies, she thought, not turning away from the ghostly landscape. Marc was asleep in the bed behind her, his suitcase was already packed, and in another few hours he’d be gone. She should be back in bed, curled around his warm body, not standing barefoot on icy floors, staring out into the night.

Claire stared down at her clenched fists, deliberately relaxing them, stretching the fingers out. No rings. She’d told Marc tonight that she’d wear one; she’d marry him when he came back from the tour. It was a decision that had needed to be made, and she’d made it. She only wished she’d made the choice somewhere else, over coffee, in a bistro, even walking in that depressing park. It was a choice
she would have made sanely, rationally. Why did she feel he’d wrung it out of her in bed that night?

She shivered. Was she simply afraid of commitment? Had she gone directly from a married man to a widower, subconsciously hoping both men would be too involved with their wives, both living and dead, to demand too much from her?

The next month would give her time to sort through her feelings, to decide where neuroses began and ended. And when Marc came back, she would tell him about Brian and the accident.

The Paris moon was a mournful one, she thought, looking upward. For all the talk about lovers and Paris, it wasn’t a romantic sight. It was cold and lonely, shining down over the sleeping city, shining down on the corpses of old ladies, murdered before their time.

Claire shivered again, turning back to the bed. If she were very careful, Marc might sleep through the night. And tomorrow her last few weeks of freedom would begin.

“Tell me about this woman Marc lives with,” Harriette ordered, leaning her frail body back against the chintz sofa and surveying her favorite grandchild with well-disguised fondness. “She’s an American, I gather. Is she loud and vulgar?”

Nicole fiddled with her scratchy wool skirt. “Not really,
grand-mère
. She’s very quiet and pretty.”

Harriette snorted her disbelief. “Doesn’t sound like she’s Marc’s type. He always went in for flashy blondes while your mother was still alive.”

Nicole didn’t flinch. She had no illusions about Marc—his fights with her mother had been too loud. Harriette had done nothing to foster the relationship, but most responsible for Nicole’s dislike was Marc himself. Nicole had met him when she was four years old and her mother had gaily introduced him as her new father. She’d looked up into those dark, empty eyes of his and for the first time in her young life she’d felt fear. It hadn’t been the last.

“Claire has sort of red blond hair,” Nicole said. “She’s very smart, very nice, really. She tries too hard, but then, what would you expect of an
Americaine?
”

“Apparently she doesn’t try hard enough. Didn’t you tell me she has no French? Barbaric!”
Grand-mère
sniffed.

For some reason Nicole found herself defending the woman. “Marc says it’s not her fault. It’s something to do with her brain.”

“Heavens, don’t tell me the woman is a mental deficient!”

“No, no. She tried to explain it to me once, but I wasn’t paying attention,” Nicole said patiently. “She said it was like being partially deaf. She could hear the noises but she couldn’t make out the words.”

“She’s deaf?” Harriette demanded, incensed.

“No,
Grand-mère
. It’s like she’s deaf, but only when someone speaks in French.”

“How very convenient,” the old woman said icily. “Are you certain you don’t wish to stay here with me while your stepfather is away? You can hardly be comfortable living with an afflicted stranger.”

“I’m more comfortable with Claire than I am with Marc.”

“That isn’t saying much.”
Grand-mère
picked an imaginary speck of dust from her silk crepe dress. “As long as you’re happy and able to visit me every day I expect we can continue. The moment the woman becomes difficult you let me know, and I will have my lawyers deal with her. I don’t trust Americans.”

“If you met her yourself …”

“I have no need to. You forget, I just spent the last year in California.” The old woman shuddered. “I know just what Mlle. Claire MacIntyre is like without seeing her. I know your stepfather’s taste far too well, and it would take an idiot not to see through him. Therefore, she must be an idiot. Besides, she doesn’t speak French—the interview would be a waste.”