Harriette felt a final shiver of regret. And then she stiffened her backbone, shut the door, and led her new employee toward her elegant chintz salon.
The woman was crazy, Rocco thought, wishing he could find it funnier than he did. Not only was the woman out of her mind, but life itself was playing tricks, tricks he wasn’t sure if he appreciated.
He hated the looks of her, from her snooty, beaked nose to her swollen ankles to her tiny little feet. Even more, he hated the smell of her and her apartment, the wisp of lavender and mothballs, the trace of a perfume so aristocratic it made his lip curl.
He liked the others better, the poor ones. The ones who were just holding on to their dignity, with their overcrowded apartments and their fading memories, the ones who smelled of old sweat and urine, not flowers. He would have taken special pleasure in this one, not because she reminded him of Grand-mère Estelle, but because she was so far removed from the old woman. Two centuries ago his ancestors would have watched her ancestors being guillotined. Now it was up to him to continue in that tradition.
But it wasn’t going to be up to him. Not when he heard her plan. “I want you to kill me,” she’d said in her poker-up-the-ass voice, looking at him as if he were a cockroach.
“My pleasure,” he’d rumbled, setting his dirty jeans on her fancy sofa and propping his shiny boots on the rickety table, knocking the artfully arranged magazines askew. “When and how?”
“I would like it to appear to be a murder like the other ones,” she’d said, giving him his first taste of uneasiness. “I want you to stab me and lay me out as the other old women, but I want it done at such a time and in such a way as to implicate my son-in-law.”
He’d laughed out loud at that, a rough guffaw that rattled the china in that overbred apartment. “With a mother-in-law like you I’d think he’d be more than willing to do it himself,” Rocco offered maliciously.
Harriette Langlois had smiled, a chilly little smile, and for the first time he saw the connection between her and Grand-mère Estelle. “My son-in-law is too clever for that.” She was unruffled by his rudeness, and he hated her all the more. “If he were to kill me he would make absolutely certain he wasn’t caught. He murdered my daughter and no one ever suspected. He may very well be planning to kill me, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he pay for his crime, that justice be served.”
Rocco reached in his black leather jacket and pulled out the solid gold toothpick he’d stolen off a dead pimp. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about justice,” he said, poking at an old piece of steak that had lodged in a broken molar.
“No, I imagine you don’t. But you care about money, don’t you? And Hubert thinks very highly of you—he thinks you’re the man to carry this off, make it appear like it’s simply one more in the string of murders.”
Rocco grinned. “I think I can manage that.”
He’d finally gotten through to her. She was looking at him warily, out of filmy blue eyes, as if he were one of those big jungle cats in the Paris zoo. “You haven’t … you didn’t …” She stopped on a shuddering sigh. “No. I don’t wish to know.”
Rocco’s grin broadened. “You still haven’t answered my question, lady. Where and when?”
“My son-in-law is on tour at the moment. He should be returning to Paris in another two weeks. We’ll do it when he comes back. You’ll have to plant the knife in his apartment, and I expect Hubert will take care of the anonymous phone call to the police. It should be fairly simple.”
It should be, Rocco thought, his uneasiness increasing. “Who’s your son-in-law?” he asked suddenly. “What’s he doing on tour? I don’t want to get involved with anybody famous—it draws too much attention and the police are much more diligent when they’ve got the newspapers on their back.”
“He’s nothing. He’s a third-class mime with a second-class theater,” Harriette said waspishly. “His name is Marc Bonnard.” And she watched him stonily as once more Rocco began to laugh.
He hadn’t bothered to explain it to her. After all, what could he have said? The irony of it all was so delicious he was bursting, and yet there was no one he could tell. No one, except a man he hadn’t seen in over twenty years. Marc Bonnard.
Rocco doubted he was really out of town. Unless he’d changed drastically he was probably holed up somewhere, watching the old lady, waiting for his chance. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to do it himself, afraid it might call attention to him. Part of the success of their pact had been the random nature of their victims.
Hubert would be able to find him, Hubert could set up a meeting. Together they could lament the demise of that stupid fool Yvon, together they could share a bottle for the sake of old times. Together they could decide who would get the supreme pleasure of wasting the old lady, and who would take the fall for it.
But Rocco still couldn’t rid himself of a trace of nerves. While he could appreciate the irony, he didn’t like the coincidence. And he wondered if his childhood buddy would feel the same.
The phone calls began that night. Claire was lying alone in the big bed, the fresh sheets scratchy beneath her silk nightgown, when the ringing broke through her efforts to will herself to sleep. She leaped for the phone, knocking it onto the floor, and scrambled after it, speaking into it breathlessly.
There was no sound on the other end. No French or English obscenities, no heavy breathing, nothing. Just an eerie silence that caused a rash of goose bumps to travel down Cl
aire’s bare arms.
She slammed the phone down, restored it to its proper place beside the bed, and crawled back beneath the covers. She should be able to sleep—her body was so achingly weary that it was amazing she could keep her eyes open.
But her brain was still clipping along at twice the normal rate. She’d tried to keep it quiet by bustling around, doing all that she would normally do if Marc were there, telling herself that if he happened to return unexpectedly she wouldn’t need to worry. The rumpled sheets had been taken to the laundry, the T-shirt thrown away, every crumb and speck of dust in the house had been banished. Everything was done; she had some breathing space while she decided exactly what she was going to do, how she was going to get out of a mess that was of her own making.
Nicole had watched her panicked industry with maddening calm. She always kept her room neat, she’d said. It was second nature by now. But Claire knew she lied. What was second nature to the nine-year-old was not trusting Marc. If only his thirty-year-old mistress had as much sense.
She shut off the light, snuggling down lower in the sheets. How in the world had she gotten herself into such a fix? Had she no brains at all when it came to men? For two years she’d listened to Brian’s lies and believed them, only coming to her senses when he’d run down an innocent child and then driven away from it.
But she’d turned to Marc, a man who’d mesmerized her sexually and terrorized her spiritually. So that here she was, stuck in Paris with nowhere to go and no one to turn to.
That wasn’t strictly true. There was someone she could turn to, someone she wanted to run to, but that was the last thing she would do. She’d gone from one mistake to another, and she wasn’t about to go tearing into another relationship without thinking first. Her instincts told her Tom Parkhurst was safe, charming, cuddly, and protective, but so far her instincts had done nothing but get her into trouble. Besides, she shouldn’t trade sex for protection.