French Fried (31 page)

Jason flipped the
light switch, dropped his briefcase on the bed, and took off his coat while I tried to get into the bathroom, only to discover that the door was locked. “I can’t get into the bathroom, Jason,” I said over my shoulder and rattled the knob. What in the world was wrong with it? And I could hear water running inside. I tried the knob again and asked Jason if he’d left the shower on. He hadn’t. Then the lights went out while I was banging on the door. I thought I’d heard something inside, but I couldn’t be sure what it was.

“Jason, we’d better call the desk. I don’t understand this at all. Could we have caught one of the maids taking a shower in our bath, and now she’s afraid to come out?”

“That doesn’t explain the power outage.” He called downstairs and was told that he could expect the return of electricity shortly. Having reported that to me, he came over and put his ear to the door, where he could hear only the sound of the water bursting from the showerhead. “Considering how slowly the tub drains, we’d better get someone up here to open the door and turn the water off,” he decided.

He called downstairs again and explained the situation to Bridget. In the time it must have taken to climb the stairs, because the elevators were no longer working, a breathless young woman in a maid’s uniform arrived with a key, opened the door, reached behind the shower curtain to turn off the water—and screamed.

“Floor’s probably flooded,” Jason guessed from his wicker chair. The girl stumbled out of the bathroom, stammering in French. “Do you speak English?” he asked calmly. “Perhaps you should get a mop.” To our amazement, she ran out of the room with no indication that she’d be back.

Frowning, Jason went to investigate and remarked that the floor was dry, but she’d forgotten to turn off the water. I had come to the doorway in time to see him reach in. “What the hell?” he said, and he too backed away.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s someone in there,” he answered, and after that he did turn off the water.

In the dim light from the frosted window, I pulled back the other side of the curtain to see for myself, and caught sight of a woman, doubled over, face down, her clothes and hair soaking, and, of all things, a hair dryer in her hand. I looked back to see that it was attached to the wall unit from which it had hung.

“Don’t touch her,” said Jason. “If the hair dryer was going when she stepped into the water, she’s been electrocuted. You could be, too.”

“There’s no electricity,” I pointed out, reaching down to touch her neck in search of a pulse.

“Don’t touch her!”
Jason pulled me roughly away. “The current could come back any minute. Don’t even touch the curtain.”

“Jason.” My voice trembled. “I think it might be Catherine.”

“What the hell would Catherine be doing in our shower with a hair dryer in her hand?” he snapped. “She’s supposed to be on the run.”

“Maybe she came back to kill us. What if she’s only unconscious?”

“Well, she can’t kill us with the hair dryer, and I don’t see any other weapons around.”

“Let’s lock her in and call Inspector Villon.” I was so frightened my teeth were chattering. When Jason noticed, he led me out of the bathroom and locked the door. “Maybe she was trying to kill herself,” I speculated. “Why else would she carry a hair dryer into the shower?”

“Hell of a way to do it,” he muttered. “You’re saying she French fried herself?”

He led me to the rattan love seat and sat me down. My mouth had dropped open at his question.
French fried?
That was an insensitive way to describe Catherine’s death. If she
was
dead. I kept expecting her to burst out of the bathroom. And I don’t suppose she deserved any sensitivity from us.

Jason was on the phone again telling Bridget that we had a woman, possibly dead, in our shower. “Call Inspector François Villon of the local police,” he ordered. “Tell him to get over here. My wife thinks it’s the woman he’s looking for.” He put the phone down and rubbed his forehead. “What I need is a stiff drink,” he muttered and went to the bar, where he found the half bottle of wine we’d shared before dinner last night. “Want some?” He poured wine into one glass and was lifting it to his lips when I dove across the room. The wine spattered on both of us, the glass fell to the floor, and Jason looked at me askance.

“What if she poisoned it?”

“Well, we’ll never know now.” He didn’t sound as if he believed I might have saved his life. Before he could pick up the bottle again, I grabbed it, ran over to the balcony, and poured the remaining wine over the cement wall. “That was a very good red,” be complained, “and I paid a lot for it.”

“Look in the waste basket,” I retorted. I’d just spotted a small vial. “That’s one of the vials we found behind the rice in her pantry. Why would she bring it here if she didn’t mean to poison us?”

My husband swore and called downstairs again, asking them to send up two bottles of wine that had not been opened, two clean wineglasses, and a corkscrew.
What a good idea
, I thought while we were waiting for the wine. There were two small bottles of whiskey in the bar, but they had screw tops, and we didn’t dare try those. However, once the sealed wine arrived, I was certainly happy to join Jason in a drink. In fact, we’d finished off the first bottle by the time the inspector arrived, and I was feeling much more relaxed. Nothing had been heard from the bathroom.

We explained to the inspector what had happened, and he actually kicked the door open. I thought that only happened on television. Then he pushed back the shower curtain and pulled on the cord of the hair dryer until it appeared over the side of the tub, a hand still clutching it. “So this is the woman who tried to kill you?” Inspector Villon asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I can’t see her face, and people look different from any perspective when they’re all wet.”

“Did you electrocute her?” he asked, as unpleasant as ever.

“That does it,” said my husband angrily, as he opened the second bottle. “You’ve harassed my wife one too many times. We’re the victims here, not the woman in the tub. If she’s dead—”

“She’s dead,” the inspector assured us. “
Looks
like she was electrocuted.”

“If she’s dead,” Jason continued, pouring wine into both goblets, “she killed herself by walking into the shower holding a running hair dryer. Don’t blame my wife. And don’t blame Carolyn for Mercedes being shot. Have you checked the gun in Catherine’s apartment to see if it—”

“There was no gun,” said the inspector. “We checked under the silverware holder, where we were told to look, and there was no—”

“That’s not your handbag over there on the floor, is it, Carolyn?” my husband asked.

Of course it wasn’t. Mine was on the bed.

“Why don’t you look in there,” Jason said to the inspector. “Maybe she brought the gun along. She brought a couple of vials of something with her.”

“That’s another thing we didn’t find,” said the inspector.

“Well, one’s in the wastebasket, and there’s another over there on the bathroom floor. You’ll want to test those for tetrodotoxin. It’s highly poisonous, and she was synthesizing it.”

“Maybe you’re the person with the gun and the poison,” said the inspector. “You or your wife.”

“We haven’t touched any of those things, and we’re not going to. If you’re not willing to look at the evidence, I’ll call the consulate in Lyon and make a complaint. In fact, I’ll do it anyway. I damn near got run over by a car, and my wife has been injured twice, not to mention being accused of trying to kill two different women.” Jason picked up the phone.

“Calm down, Professor,” said the inspector. “We intend to investigate.” He waved another officer over to the handbag, and the man, having pulled on gloves, opened it and found a gun.

“Is it a target pistol?” I asked. “If it is, it’s probably the same gun her husband killed himself with. By the way, Jason, the article that Catherine thought killed her husband was one you wrote. Pierre looked it up for me.”

“I wrote?” Jason looked astonished. “I don’t recall writing—”

“Well, it was fifteen years ago, a letter to the editor of
JACS.
”

“Oh.” Jason thought about it and looked upset.

Scowling ferociously, the inspector asked, “You are responsible for the death of the deceased’s husband?”

“Of course he isn’t,” I retorted. “Maurice Bellamee, according to other members of the department, was subject to serious depression. He was already depressed before Jason pointed out the errors in his work. Scientists are always finding problems in each other’s work and writing letters and papers about the errors, and the scientists who made the mistakes just write a retraction; they don’t kill themselves.”

Jason smiled at me and poured me more wine. “Why don’t you just pack up the evidence and take the body away, Inspector.”

“There are fingerprints to gather, and—”

“So do it. Call us when you’ve discovered that my wife solved your crime for you and that the criminal killed herself. Probably knew she was caught and didn’t want to go to jail.”

“There are no bullets in this gun,” said the officer who had opened the handbag.

“Well, that explains it,” I said. “She collected things to kill us when the concierge said the police were in the courtyard, but she forgot to put in bullets. An understandable mistake. Then she walked over here and got into our room somehow so she could wait for our return and shoot us, or me. Perhaps she thought I’d come back first and she’d shoot me and then get Jason with the poisoned wine.”

“What poisoned wine?” asked the inspector.

“The bottle’s in the wastebasket by the desk. My wife knocked the glass out of my hand and poured the wine over the concrete wall so I couldn’t have a drink. Perhaps you should send someone down to get a sample before the puddle dries up.”

Inspector Villon shook his head with dismay. Obviously this was all too complicated for him. I almost felt sorry for him, and thought of offering him a glass of wine, but really, he needed all his wits about him to figure out the whole Machiavellian plot that Catherine had concocted against us.

 

Carolyn and I
took our bottle and glasses to the lounge to watch television while the inspector tried to make sense of the evidence in our room. The news was not good. Rioting had spread across the country, embassies were warning their nationals to stay away from the affected areas, and those included, of course, Lyon and Paris, through which we had to pass to fly home.

Carolyn took the whole thing very cheerfully. She pointed out that the airlines couldn’t refuse to change our tickets under the circumstances, and the extra days, however many there were, would allow us to visit all kinds of interesting places in southern France. I would have liked to see Marseilles and Toulouse, but they were out because their youths were torching whatever they could get to. Carolyn wanted to see Albi, which had an “amazing” fortress church and was the seat of the heresy that so intrigued her, not to mention Carcassone, the largest walled fortress in Europe.

What could I say? Obviously, I’d be taking busses and trains all over the area until the French government got the uprising in hand. My department wouldn’t be pleased when I didn’t arrive back in El Paso for classes, but they couldn’t expect us to make our way home through hordes of rioting kids.