No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! A Dance with Danger Mystery #7 (36 page)

He moved towards the door
and I gave a tiny sigh of relief. It dawned on me I was feeling
things I didn’t think I should feel, things about Bob as a man. I
was suddenly too aware of the line of his jaw and the strength of
his hands. His eyes were on me again.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling
awkward.

“You’re welcome,” he
replied. “Lock the door behind me.”

Long after he was gone, my
thoughts stayed on him. I knew it was wrong. Declan, my fiancé, was
owed my loyalty, my love. And yet I felt an invisible connection to
a man I didn’t even know. Was it that I sensed he understood what
it was like to have a loveless marriage? Or was I getting cold
feet, now that the wedding was only a few weeks away? I paused,
thinking about the man I would soon marry.

“Go to Bermuda. Make your
farewell to Henri. When you come home, we’ll focus on the wedding,
on us.” Declan had driven me to the dock to catch the ship,
unloaded my suitcase, and kissed me passionately. “I’ll be thinking
of you the whole time you’re gone.”

I felt a pang of guilt as I
lay on the bed. I had let my guard down. I had allowed myself to
feel something genuine and real about another stranger. The last
time that happened, I had married Henri.

I was in the Paris metro one
steamy August day, a young college graduate on a tour of
Impressionist hot spots, finishing my last fling before joining the
working world of starving artists. With a bachelor’s degree in fine
arts and a decent portfolio, I would soon begin interning as a
cataloguer for Vente aux Enchères Deloitte, a French auction house
specializing in art masterpieces. My goal was to work there for a
couple of years before heading back to graduate school. Eventually,
I hoped to find a position in a respected museum as a restorer.
Someday, my humble hands might actually touch the canvas of a
Rembrandt or Monet.

Henri took a seat opposite
me as the train rumbled through the dark tunnels of the underground
subway. He was a very handsome man, with long blonde hair and azure
eyes. His white shirt was open at the collar, offering me a glimpse
of a braided gold chain around his neck.

“American?” He spoke to me
in a lightly accented English.

“Oui,” I answered him in my
pigeon French, explaining that my grandmother was from Rouen, so I
had spent a few summers with her, exploring Normandy. When we
reached the metro stop at Saint-Sulpice, I stood up to
go.

“Have a coffee with me,”
Henri insisted. “I want to know more about you.”

That’s how it all started,
and in the next year, not only did Henri sweep me off my feet and
convince me to marry him, I abandoned my dream of becoming an art
restorer. As soon as I finished my internship at Deloitte, we were
married at a little ceremony at a small French restaurant on the
Connecticut shore, where Henri knew the owner. He made all the
arrangements for the thirty guests. All I had to do was show up. We
started our marriage in a small apartment in Greenwich, where Henri
had a position in private banking for Grenois Financial. He was in
charge of several large accounts, managing the money and investing
it to make more.

As I lay on my bed on the
Beauty of the Seas, feeling the throttle of the ship’s engines as
we chugged through choppy seas, I recalled my naïveté all those
years ago. How innocent and inexperienced I had been. There was so
much concealed from me, so much I didn’t know until it was too
late.

I thought about my life
after Henri died, when I suddenly I felt as if someone had thrown
me a life preserver after years of struggling. I so desperately
wanted to reach dry land, to feel safe again. Alas, it was not to
be. Shortly after the police notified me that my husband had
perished at sea, Henri’s skeletal remains had washed ashore, but
there wasn’t enough left of the late Henri Dufours to conclusively
identify the cause of his death. A week later, I was contacted by
investigators from the office of the United States Attorney for the
Southern District of New York. Henri had been subpoenaed the month
before to testify about one of the accounts he managed, Sea Bounty
International, suspected of being a money laundering front for the
Chapo drug cartel. The government had offered him full immunity if
he would testify about his knowledge of the sources of their
income. Henri had met twice with the assistant US attorney, Megan
Plourde, in an effort to come to an agreement.

“We suspect the cartel
killed your husband, Mariem,” a young, overly-earnest agent told
me. “We may never be able to prove it. We want you to grant us
permission to search your husband’s financial records, his
electronic devices, and any safe deposit boxes he held.”

“But I don’t have access to
those,” I was forced to admit. “To be honest, my husband never
discussed to me about his business. I didn’t even know he was
talking to you.”

“Who would have access to
that information?” A second investigator asked. She was about my
age, with a hawk-like manner that made me feel like I was her next
meal. I thought about the question.

“The only person Henri ever
seemed to trust at Grenois Financial was Louis Givernette. They
went to the Sorbonne together and were roommates at the London
School of Economics. If anyone would know what Henri knew, I should
think it would be Louis.”

“Thanks,” I was told. “We’ll
be in touch.”

But they weren’t. Instead, I
got a call from Henri’s lawyer, Declan Dowd, telling me that he
would handle any issues that cropped up, that I shouldn’t be
bothered with any of that. He gave me a phone number where I could
reach him, day or night. Over time, Declan started to call more
regularly, checking on how things were going. It turned out that
Henri had an insurance policy with a two-million-dollar payout. I
was shocked to learn that my husband had taken out such a large
policy. Henri was the one with the financial expertise in our
relationship and he paid all the bills, save for the household
expenses. I called Declan to ask for advice on what I should do
with the money.

“Give me a couple of days,”
he replied. “I will set you up with a financial planner I know and
we’ll put the money into safe investments.”

Within six months, I had
sold our Westport house in favor of a much smaller condo on the
twenty-sixth floor of a New Rochelle luxury building. My plan was
to follow my dream and become a serious, well-respected artist. I
also decided to apply to be a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, so moving to New York would make the commute into the city
much easier. The profits from the sale of the large home went into
the investment portfolio Declan helped me to set up with Maura
Trelawney at Oracle Financial. I received a monthly allowance that
paid the bills, leaving the bulk of the money untouched, safely
ensconced in various financial accounts that would carry me well
into my old age. But that was not to be.

Chapter Three
--

As I was settling into my
new life, no longer carefully controlled by Henri, things began to
fall apart around me. By the fourth month, my investment portfolio
was losing money rapidly, and Maura Trelawney insisted that we
liquidate some of the assets and move them from precious metals to
a new company that offered promising returns, Prevenue. It was a
risk, but Maura insisted that because I had taken such a hit on the
stock exchange, it was important to use the money I had made to
bolster the investments that lost money. Another six months went by
before Prevenue fell into bankruptcy. In ten months, I had lost
just over a quarter of a million dollars. When I found out, I was
stunned.

Declan tried to convince me
it was just because the economy had turned bad. I wasn’t so sure.
Maura was no longer returning my phone calls. I was worried about
losing all that money.

“Have dinner with me,”
Declan suggested. “I’ll have an independent review done of your
portfolio and we can talk about it.”

That dinner led to another,
and then another. Soon I was seeing Declan a couple of times a week
to discuss Henri’s estate as it crawled through probate. With so
many different holdings and investments, and with me as his sole
heir, there was a lot of sorting out to be done. Declan handled it
all for me.

Almost a year to the day
that Henri died, Maura’s bloodied corpse was found in her Manhattan
office. Federal investigators suspected she was working as an
investment manager for a money launderer for the same Mexican
cartel. That would explain why my money disappeared so quickly. It
was revenge on Henri’s ghost for having begun to cooperate with the
Department of Justice. Apparently, the cartel wanted to send a
message to the financial money-laundering apparatus that cleaned
their profits into respectability and they were using us as
examples of what would happen to cooperating witnesses. As the
investigation into Maura’s death revealed the extent of her
criminal activities, the media began to follow the trail. Her
clients were impacted by the public exposé. Once I started getting
phone calls from reporters, Declan became my protector and shortly
after that, my lover as well.

Three months ago, out of the
blue, Declan proposed. I was flabbergasted when I saw him holding
the small Tiffany’s box in his hand as we sat outside on the deck
of a charming restaurant overlooking Long Island Sound on a
pleasant Sunday. When I hesitated, not wanting to be rushed into
another marriage, Declan promised to be patient about setting the
date.

He was, up until the day I
was mugged walking home from the train station. Battered by fists,
robbed of all my identification and my dignity, I called him from
the emergency room of the hospital. That’s when he insisted that I
marry him sooner, rather than later.

“I can protect you. I can
keep you safe,” he told me. How true was that? I still hesitated,
filled with doubts, feeling unsure and unsafe in a world I didn’t
really understand.

A couple of weeks later, as
I was driving down to Baltimore, to visit my sister, Aurielle, and
her husband, my sedan was side-swiped by a white van, sending me
into a guardrail. Although not seriously injured, I was still very
upset. Declan claimed that the cartel was out to get me, that they
wanted their pound of flesh.

That was just before the
Department of Justice subpoenaed me to testify in Maura’s murder
trial. An enforcer for the drug cartel had been arrested for
killing her. The government wanted to prove there was a connection
between her financial dealings with people like me and the cartel’s
money-laundering. It only served to make me more worried about
Henri’s business affairs. Maybe that trip to Myanmar was more
sinister than I thought. I asked Declan if he knew what Henri was
doing on that trip, and the others we took, including one to Mexico
City in 1997, where I was introduced to a woman named Conchita
Herrera Fernando at a pool party. She was the beautiful, but
intoxicated mistress of Jaime Blandon, the Mexican financier, and
shortly after she confessed to me that she saw something she
shouldn’t have seen, she ended up drowning in that very pool, less
than two hours after we spoke. Was Henri working for the Chapo
cartel? Is that how he made his money?

“Let me handle this for
you,” Declan insisted. “Don’t agree to anything without me. Can you
do that? You don’t want the government to think you knew about
anything illegal, and if you answer their questions, you might get
tossed to the wind when one of those bastards tries to inflate his
legal reputation.”

That was part of my reason
for being on this cruise on the Beauty of the Seas. Declan knew
that the grand jury was calling witnesses to appear, and he wanted
me out of the way when they came looking for me. It was his
suggestion that I take Henri’s ashes on the trip and scatter them
on the way to Bermuda.

I couldn’t sleep, even after
a hot shower. I was too restless, too disturbed by the incident on
the deck. There was nothing on the ship channels, save for an old
movie I had seen several times before. I left it on as I tried to
doze. Fitfully tossing and turning through the night, I managed to
tumble into a dreamless sleep sometime after five.

At nine, with the sun
streaming into my window, I opened my eyes. As I gazed around the
room, I came to a decision. I wasn’t ready to marry Declan. I
wasn’t ready to surrender the new me to the old way of life, not
when there were so many questions still haunting me about
Henri.

I got dressed and made my
way to the Windy Cutlass Cafe for a late breakfast of fruit salad,
scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. I felt safe enough in the
interior hallways, knowing that the security team was able to
monitor my movements throughout the ship. As I took my tray from
the buffet, I looked for a quiet table. I wasn’t really in the mood
for a discussion of the weather or the economy or the best place to
buy shoes. I wanted to be alone to sort out my confused
thoughts.

What I wasn’t expecting was
for an elderly lady to wander down the aisle next to me. She seemed
sad and unsure, so I let my conscience decide for me.

“Would you care to join me?”
I asked, putting on a bright smile.

“Oh, I don’t want to bother
you,” she responded.

“Please,” I encouraged her,
“I’d enjoy the company.”