Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (27 page)

Patrick said something to me, but I shushed him. I had to hold on to that thought. Okay. Suppose the smugglers were using the bunker to stash their gold until they could move it along to their buyers. Suppose some of it got mislaid—left behind when they moved the rest along. That would explain why they were keeping the house under surveillance. They were looking for a chance to pick it up. Using a glider because it made no noise. Wouldn’t draw attention to itself even passing low over the house, whereas an airplane would. A plane or a helicopter flying so low would sound like an invading army inside the house. If this were all true, someone at Chateau Merz would have to be in on it. Working with them. That meant Juergen, Gisele or Zoltan, probably. Stephanie? All the American guests seemed highly unlikely. We’d have had to be in on this longer than any of us had been here. Not likely at all.

“Mom? Where are you?” Patrick was pushing my shoulder to bring me back to the real world. “I’ve been talking to you for the past five minutes and you haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

* * * * *

Babs Toomey’s eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. I found her and Brian in the living room, having a
n early shooter. I passed on Brian’s offer to fix me one, and sat down. Babs’s shoes were wet from hiking through dew-heavy grass.

“We’re talking about how much longer we’ll have to stay here,” Brian said. “Babs has big trouble with her job.”

“I told them yesterday I would be flying back, probably today, and they promised not to fire me. I really thought the whole thing would be over . . . oh, I’m sorry, Dotsy. I don’t mean I was glad they arrested you or I thought you really did it . . . of course, I knew you couldn’t have done it. I . . .” Babs was getting herself in a hopeless tangle.

“It’s okay, Babs. I hadn’t even thought how this would be affecting your job back home.” Unlike the rest of us who had salaried jobs or owned our own companies, Babs made ho
urly wages at an insurance company where she hadn’t worked for very long. They might well replace her.

Brian said, “She called them again a few minutes ago and they told her not to bother coming back to work.”

* * * * *

The talk around the dinner table tha
t night centered on one topic: When can we go home? Juergen said he hadn’t heard anything and didn’t know what the standard procedure in a case like this would be. Obviously police couldn’t keep us here forever, but the case hadn’t been solved, and once we left the country extraditing any one of us back would be a lengthy and uncertain process.

Brian said he intended to take a swim after dinner, Erin and Chet wanted to watch a tennis match on TV. Juergen said he would set up his telescope on the ridge north
of the house and invited me to join him. Poor Babs. I recalled how eager she’d been to hang around Juergen and his telescope on the last occasion and thought it insensitive of Juergen to invite only me. Babs had lost her job today, and this was one more blow. One more rejection.

Rather brightly, she swallowed a sip of Riesling, glanced at her watch and said, “What time is it at home now? Oh, good. I still have time to make a few calls.”

* * * * *

Juergen told me to wait at least fifteen minutes for my eyes
to adjust to the dark. Meanwhile, I helped him set up by staying out of his way. Against the background of stars, Juergen and his telescope appeared like black paper silhouettes in a Victorian picture.

“Thanks for hiring that lawyer for me, Juergen. If sh
e sends you a bill, I’ll gladly reimburse you.”

“Anallese? Right. She’s a very capable woman. I’ve known her since we were children.” He handed me a star chart to hold. “If she sends a bill, she’ll send it to Brian. He’s the one who actually retained her.”

“I guess you’ve heard about the jacket button and why they let had to let me go.”

I thought I heard him chuckle. “Odile had to explain it to me a couple of times
, but I finally got it.”

“Odile seems to know a good bit about what goes on at the police stat
ion.”

“I told you, didn’t I? Now that we don’t have to yodel our messages from one mountain to another, news travels even faster by telephone.”

“Odile has a niece who works at the police station. Did you know that?”

“Aha! That explains how she knew about the button before we told her.”

“And my pink sweater. The police came here yesterday with a search warrant and turned my room upside down looking for the pink sweater I told them I was wearing on the night of the murders. I know it was in my dresser drawer the day before, but when the police came in with their warrant, it was gone.”

“Are you sure you haven’t mislaid it? Taken it down to the laundry room or something?”

“I’m positive.”

Juergen opened a folding canvas chair and sat. My dark-adjusted eyes now saw his outline more clearly against the glow from the house lights. “Odile is incapable of keeping her mouth shut. She very well may have told several people about the sweater, whoever was here at the time.” His fancy wristwatch danced and glowed like a di
gital light show. “Watch out for Babs, Dotsy.”

“Babs? Why?” The simplicity of this statement and the gravity in his tone startled me.

“I don’t know anything for sure, but I did notice she was acting strangely when Brian and Patrick and I got back to the house. She was watching us all like a hawk. I’ve seen her and Odile talking . . . whispering, you know . . . more than once.”

Babs. Babs? I tried imagining that Babs was behind all this. She did have a compelling reason to wish Stephanie dead and she, as wel
l as anyone else, could have slipped out that night and run up to the bunker. That very night, Stephanie had told Erin she was going to tell all about Erin’s marital problem and she could have done it at any time. If Erin or her mother intended to do anything about it, they would have had to act quickly. But the big picture with gliders and spies and gold, if indeed these were part of the picture, was beyond anything I could imagine Babs being involved in. They didn’t fit.

“Chet said you took him to the bun
ker today.”

“Right. We’re allowed to go in now. The police have done everything they need to do.”

“You have equipment from World War Two in there?”

“Do you want to see it? I’ll take you there tomorrow.”

“Thanks. I’d love to.”

He called me over to the tele
scope to see Jupiter. Focusing in on the dancing circle in the eyepiece, I saw the planet with its famous Red Spot. Awesome. Juergen explained how to locate Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, but they moved out of the field of vision before I got the hang of it.

Backing away from the telescope so Juergen could refocus it, I noticed his watch again. “Your watch fascinates me, Juergen. Am I imagining things or does the face change colors? It’s blue now with glowing dots, but earlier I noticed it was white.”

“You like it?” He unbuckled it from his wrist and turned it over. On the opposite side was another face, white, and with more dials. The blue face side had constellations and a built-in compass that made one part rotate as he turned it.

“Oh
, you Swiss. You do love your timepieces, don’t you? By the way, why are there no cuckoo clocks in the house?”

“Because I don’t like cuckoo clocks. They drive me crazy.”

* * * * *

Juergen and I were lugging our star-gazing equipment back to the house when we passed Brian, head
ing for the elevator hut. “I’m going to the Black Sheep. See ya,” he said, and kept walking. I helped Juergen stow the telescope in a hall closet and headed toward my room when I heard a sort of “psst” from the stairwell below. It was Brian again. Apparently he had followed us back and come in through the kitchen. I descended to the lower level and found him.

“I’m going to the Black Sheep to meet up with Francois Bolduc.”

“Your spy?”

“Right. He came to town earlier today to talk to Kronenberg and come clean
—almost clean.”

“That’s good!”

“Right. Now I’ve got an alibi just like everyone else. Would you like to come with me, Mom? I’m going to ask him about this other stuff—the landing strip and Anton Spektor and all that. You never know, do you? He’s been looking into the Merz enterprises, so maybe he knows of a connection.”

I checked my watch.
“Sure, I’ll go with you. Let’s take the tunnel key.”

* * * * *

Francois Bolduc turned out to be a slick, mustachioed chain-smoker who, in light of the relatively new local ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, preferred to conduct our meeting outside. Brian and I found him at a table on the Black Sheep’s small patio.

Brian spent the first ten minutes assuring Bolduc that nothing he had told the police would come bac
k to haunt him. They had both told Kronenberg their meeting on that fateful night involved only the farm equipment business and the possibility of expanding into Europe. Neither had mentioned the Merz family. The reason for Brian’s original claim that he hadn’t arrived in LaMotte until the next day, they both said, was simply because Brian wasn’t ready to let his father know about his potential plans.

I said, “Mr. Bolduc, I have reason to suspect a man named Anton Spektor is involved in the problems the Mer
z businesses, particularly MWU, have been suffering. Does that name ring a bell?”

He pulled his cigarette from his lips and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “No. Never heard of him.”

I decided he was probably telling me the truth. I gave him a brief synopsis of what I knew and why I had mentioned that name, Brian butting in frequently to add or clarify something. Bolduc’s eyes darted left and right as I talked, taking in every stroller past our patio, every window, every little electric car. “I know it sounds crazy but there simply can’t be more than a couple of pairs of cordovan red shoes like these on the planet. I saw them in a store in Capri, on the feet of a man who followed me into a women’s clothing store, and on feet dangling from the chair lift between the landing strip and the valley. It can’t be coincidence. The ones I saw in Capri may still be there, but the pair I’ve seen twice while here
must be
the same.”

“Red shoes? With patches in odd places? I’ve seen them, too,” Bolduc said.

“Where?”

He went silent for an inexcusably long time, lit another cigarette, blew the smoke upward straight into his own eyes, blinked, rubbed his eyes, tapped his cigarette on the side of the ashtray. “Getting into a car in the parking lot at MWU enterprises.”

Brian and I looked at each other, stunned.

“I don’t know who he was, I don’t know if he works there or if he was visiting, and I doubt I’d recognize him if I saw him again. But you’re right, Mrs. Lamb. I’d recognize those shoes if I saw them again.”

“When was this?”

Bolduc pulled a Blackberry
phone from his jacket and pushed a few spots with his thumb. “April fifth”—he pushed another spot—“at . . . just a minute . . . I must have it set to the wrong time zone. I was going to tell you exactly what time on the fifth, but I know it was around seven o’clock in the evening.”

“I wish I knew when that gold shipment came in from South Africa,” I hit the table with both fists.
“I wish I knew!”

Brian grabbed his beer glass to save it.

The phone in my purse rang. Startled, I fumbled to find it before it stopped ringing. It was Marco, calling from his hotel room less than a quarter mile away. “Marco!” I nodded to Brian as I said the name. “We’re in town, not a stone’s throw from you. Why don’t you join us?” While saying this, I realized a potential problem. I was inviting an Italian Carabinieri captain, a military policeman, to meet Francois Bolduc, a corporate spy. Definite problem. Excusing myself from the table, I retreated to a row of bushes along the back of the patio. “Listen, Marco. The man Brian and I are talking to is the one I told you about—the one he hired to look into the Merz family business. So he’s a spy, basically, and he might take exception to having a beer with law enforcement.”

“I have nothing to do with business
in Switzerland.”

“I know that, but please don’t show up in uniform. It’s intimidating.”

“I am wearing only my underwear right now. Would it be all right to come as I am?”

I returned to our table, still laughing from the phone call, as Bolduc was saying go
odbye to Brian. I wondered if the call had scared him off or if he really did have to leave. After he had gone, Brian assured me his leaving had nothing to do with Marco’s call.

Marco showed up in wrinkled trousers, T-shirt, and flip-flops. “You said no u
niform. Is this casual enough? Where is our local spy?”

I introduced Marco and Brian.

Brian rose and shook hands with the man he’d heard me mention often. As he recapped our meeting with Bolduc, I interrupted him to say, “So! The red shoes pop up again, this time in the parking lot of MWU enterprises. Still think it’s a coincidence?”

“I nev
er said that,” Marco said, rolling his eyes.