The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (15 page)

“She was never pretty, you understand,” Monsieur Marquand said. “She was a stocky woman with dark hair, the kind that has no luster. Her eyes were black with heavy brows, and her face was long and narrow with incongruous dimples that rude street urchins would say looked like pissholes in the snow. Of course, she didn’t seem to know she wasn’t pretty. She was protected, you see, and her father always told her how beautiful she was, until I swear she must have seen another face in her mirror. She knew the truth only later, after he was dead and she was alone in the Villa Mimosa.”

Her father had built the house for her in 1922, because she loved the sunshine and fresh air and did not
like their grand apartment in Paris. And now she inherited everything.
La célibataire
was an heiress at forty.

“I remember the first time I saw her. She had sallow coloring and a full-breasted, matronly figure, and she wore 1920s flapper fashions that did not suit her.” He glanced at Nick and added with an expressive shrug, “To tell you the truth, m’sieur, had you put her in the peasants’ black dress and shawl, she would have looked just like them. You would never have known she was an heiress.

“And then love walked into her life. He was American, blond, handsome, and much younger than she. ‘A fortune hunter,’ everyone said, but if he was, then he wasn’t the usual sort. Either that, or he was a very clever young man. When he was out with her, his eyes never left her. Not even a glance toward the young beauties flaunting themselves, flinging themselves at him.

“They were seen everywhere together, at all the smartest cafés and clubs. She bought a new boat, and they would speed around the bay, stopping for a swim or lunch at the little beach restaurants. He accompanied her to the salons to advise her on clothes; he had her old-fashioned jewelry reset. He persuaded her to buy a car, an open-top Bugatti, of course—that’s what everyone wanted then—red with a dove gray leather interior, and she learned how to drive it. No one ever saw him at the wheel; it was always she, so no one could ever say she had bought
him
the car. He seemed to take nothing. Except her heart.

“He returned with her to Paris, and they were married, and then he took her back to wherever it was he came from. My memory fails me on that. Anyhow, a year later she returned. Alone and obviously pregnant. Remember, she was a woman in her forties, and she was considered too old to begin a family.

“Naturally there was gossip. I remember the servants said that she looked pale and ill, that something in her
eyes reminded them of a terrified animal, like the ones they had seen unloaded from the carts and herded into the abattoir in Marseilles. ‘Those animals knew they were marked for death,’ they said.

“I saw her once myself, coming from her doctor’s office in Cannes, and it seemed to me then, being young and impressionable, that she knew it, too. It was there in her big, dark, empty eyes.
Death.

“The handsome husband came back. The servants said he behaved like a saint, that he showered her with attention and kindnesses, with flowers, gifts, love. And she shunned him. She walked in the gardens alone. She took her meals alone in her room. She slept alone. But after all, she was a pregnant woman; it was normal to be tired, distracted, a little off-balance … especially at her age.

“The baby came. A boy. And a few weeks later she fell down the stairs. And I was proved right. Death had marked her.”

Monsieur Marquand shrugged his thin shoulders resignedly again. “A sad tale, you say. Yes. A great sadness.” He fell silent, thoughtfully sipping his drink.

Bea heaved a sigh, close to tears.

“There’s something more, isn’t there?” Nick said. “Something else happened.”

Marquand nodded. “You have a journalist’s instinct for a story. And it’s all so long ago now, what harm can it do to tell you?

“I was very young then, the most junior reporter. It was late, and I was alone in the office, typing up my copy—births, deaths, marriages, small local events. I hadn’t yet graduated to the grand society events and scandals, not to say the news. I was just someone the paper sent when there was no one else to go. A call came through from one of the servants at the Villa Mimosa. There had been an accident.
La célibataire
was dead.

“It was my big opportunity. I flung myself on my
bicycle and pedaled furiously through the sleeping town, along the coast road, up the hill to the villa. Light spilled from the downstairs windows, across the lawns and terraces. There might have been a party going on, it looked so festive. I rang the doorbell and waited. No one came. I found out later that the husband had sent all the servants to bed. The door opened under my touch. I stepped into the hall and found myself staring at the body of
la célibataire.

“She was lying facedown on the marble floor. She was some distance from the foot of the stairs, and I remember thinking someone must have moved her after she fell. My heart jumped into my throat as I glimpsed the sticky mess that had been the back of her head. Then the husband appeared suddenly from the library.

“He was wearing a silk dressing gown, and he lit a big cigar and stood there, staring at the body, smoking coolly. I marveled at his strength because you never know how a man will react to shock and grief. He was a man in charge of his emotions, and I admired that.

“Then he saw me, and anger flared in his eyes. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded. ‘Get out of here. How dare you intrude? No one is allowed in here but the chief of police.’ He rushed menacingly at me, and I ran out, shouting apologies. ‘Don’t you dare come back,’ he yelled after me. But I was a cub reporter with a hot story, and I wasn’t about to let go of it so quickly.

“I hid in the bushes outside the window and waited. The chief of police arrived. He was driving his own car, not the official one, and had obviously dressed in a hurry. He went inside, and the door shut. I peered through my window, straining to hear what was said.

“The husband welcomed the chief genially, smiling, shaking his hand. He poured brandy generously, telling him what had happened. He had not seen the accident. He couldn’t sleep; he had been in the library, reading. But he had heard her cry out and then the
sounds of her fall. The injuries did seem somewhat remarkable, the gaping wound in the back of her head, but obviously there was some explanation. ‘Why don’t you and I go into the library and discuss it, maybe have another drink, a cigar?’ he said.”

Aristide Marquand paused, and his shocked eyes met Nick’s as he said, “And then, monsieur, he did something that made my blood run cold. I have seen many victims, and many murderers in the course of my journalistic career, but I never saw anything to match it for callousness.

“Marie-Antoinette’s body was between him and the chief. She was lying there with her blood and brains splattered all over the white marble floor. And her husband stepped over her smashed head as though she were nothing but a tigerskin rug. Take it from me, monsieur, you watch anyone near a body, normally he will keep his distance, circle it, keep ten feet away from it. He never,
never
steps over it.
And this was his wife.

“I peeked through the window at them talking, smoking their cigars, sipping good brandy. They had smiles on their faces, as though this were a social visit and his wife weren’t lying dead in the hall after all. So I crept back inside and tiptoed over and looked at her again. And then I knew she had not fallen. There was a big hole in the back of her head. A big red hole made, I was certain, by a bullet.

“Well. The chief emerged an hour later. They shook hands on the steps. The body was whisked away to the mortuary and sealed in its coffin. There was no inquest, just the chief’s story that it was an accident. She was buried the next day, and that was that. Except I knew she had been murdered. And I thought the man who had done it was her husband.”

Marquand shrugged as he met their stunned eyes. “A young boy’s wild imagination, you might say. Then tell me how was it that the chief, a local man who had never owned more than a modest apartment, suddenly
took early retirement on the pretext of ill health? He bought himself a grand villa near Marseilles; he had a smart new automobile in his new garage and enough in the bank to allow him to live in luxury the rest of his life.”

Nick was full of questions. He wanted to know who the husband was, where he came from, what had happened to him. And what about the baby?

The old man shook his head. “I never really knew. I told my chief what I’d seen, and he said I was nuts, and if I ever mentioned a word, he would fire me.” He shrugged philosophically. “So that was that I was young, I had my career in front of me…. Besides, there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could prove. And now it’s just the ramblings of an old man. But I can tell you that the husband departed the day of the funeral. And he left his son, just a few weeks old, in charge of an English nursemaid. I can still recall her name, Nanny Beale.

“They lived alone in that ghostly villa, with just the servants. They were a familiar sight along the coast, driving along in Madame Leconte’s big silver Rolls to the promenade in Nice or Cannes. I remember the nanny was very proper. She wore a gray flannel coat and black shoes in winter and one of those funny round English hats with a brim. In the summer she always wore a crisp white apron over a blue dress, with the same style hat, only in straw, and sensible, immaculately white shoes. She never smiled, just nodded a lofty ‘good day’ here and there. They were a bit of a mystery, though I guess the servants must have gossiped about them, as they always do.

“But what I can tell you is that Nanny Beale came back here years later. She had a cottage down the hill from the villa, and she lived out her last years there, tending her roses. And her memories, I guess. Anyhow,
m’sieur, it is still there, her cottage. No one goes there. No one touches it. As far as I know, it is just as she left it. Maybe there you might find some of the answers you seek.”

14

M
ahoney pounded wearily up and down the hills of Marin County. He was light on his feet for a big man, but he had been keeping up a steady pace for three hours now. Sweat soaked his running shirt, and his knees had turned to lumps of lead. He told himself angrily that he was out of shape; he had been too busy to keep up his training, and the New York Marathon was just pie in the sky.

He sighed as he slowed to a jog, keeping up the slower pace for ten more minutes before decelerating into a walk. He mopped his brow with a big red spotted handkerchief, finally allowing himself to sink onto a convenient boulder, breathing deeply and slowly. The gigantic redwood trees in Muir Woods loomed in the distance, and the hillside below him was dotted with pretty houses. Beyond that lay Sausalito and the wide sweep of the bay with the far-off orange gleam of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A plane was making its ascent over the horizon, leaving a faint white trail across the blue sky, and he thought of Phyl Forster, already on her way to Paris. He told himself San Francisco would be a lonelier place
without her and then asked himself what the hell he meant by that. He hardly ever saw her.

The fact that she had called him at the precinct station last night and asked if he was free and if she could come by meant nothing. He had promised to look after the cat for her, and she wanted to drop it off, that was all. And then she had wanted to talk about Bea. Still, goddammit, he liked the woman. He
enjoyed
her. She brought out the best and the worst in him, with her verbal jousting and her undercurrent of vulnerability. She thought she was so goddamn tough, with her cool, uncluttered life. He heaved an exasperated sigh, thinking of last night; he’d just bet she would be a sucker for the wrong guy.

Mahoney lived in a seedy area near the waterfront, but his apartment had high ceilings and brick walls, wooden floors, and space. It was on the top floor and a walk-up, and when Phyl buzzed, he’d run down the stairs to meet her. “Just in case you were scared,” he said with a mocking grin that showed off his good teeth.