“Well?” Madame said, smiling at the understanding she read in his eyes.
“I believe I’ve discovered the whereabouts of your necklace and earrings. They are nearby.” He looked directly at the housekeeper. “And presumably safe.”
Defiance burned in Nina’s eyes as she moved to Madame’s side.
“Very good,” Madame said, reaching for the housekeeper’s hand, and drawing it to her to hold against the base of her throat.
“Your husband reported the theft because you must have neglected to tell him that you had given the jewels to a loved one.”
“They were a wedding gift from him, which made it all the sweeter to give them to another.” Madame glanced up at her housekeeper, then raised Nina’s hand to her lips, and kissed its palm.
“Yes, well, that is between you and him,” Radnor answered, then added, “and her. However, someone has to be held accountable for the crime.”
“But it will not be me or Nina,” Madame stated with the authority that wealth and nobility gave her. “Blame it on one of the servants,” she suggested lightly.
Familiar as he was with injustice and oppression, the casual cold-bloodedness of the solution unsettled him every time.
“Blame it on Marie Lasourde,” the housekeeper added. “She deserves to be hanged. For trying to blackmail us. Stupid whore.”
“I’ll deal with her. I think you might find it easier to maintain cordial relations with your husband if the necklace and earrings were somehow found,” Radnor said.
The Cemetery of the Holy Innocents basked in the warm spring sunshine, attracting to its precincts not just the usual mourners, but shoppers browsing and visitors paying their respects at graves.
Vincent de l’Amour had set up his desk in a patch of sunshine and sat hunched over a book, engrossed in his reading while he waited for customers.
How Vincent could be oblivious to the stench of death that saturated the entire area, the tumult, and the babel of chatter, prayers, wails, and weeping was beyond Radnor. Not to mention the insalubriousness of the place confirmed by the Academie des Sciences several years ago when they recommended to the king that the cemetery be relocated outside of the city. No one had paid any attention. Vincent least of all. Parisians preferred their dead at the heart of the living city.
Radnor pulled an empty wooden crate in front of the rough, unsteady table and sat. “You were right. It was love,” he announced dryly.
Vincent looked up, his eyes still far away. Blinking in an attempt to focus his thoughts, he asked, “Pardon?”
“Marie Lasourde and her lover Nicholas Keplin.”
“I told you so.” Vincent’s face crinkled into a smile of satisfaction.
“Of course they were attempting to blackmail her employer as I had guessed.”
Vincent’s relief turned to a worried frown. “Oh dear! I suspected that girl might have fallen into sin. What will happen to them?”
“Who knows? If Keplin senior recovers from his apoplexy, he’ll probably disinherit his son. But that’s the young lovers’ problem. I imagine they’ll manage with Marie’s criminal talents to support them. At any rate, they’ve fled Paris and they’re out of my jurisdiction.”
Vincent’s dark eyes turned bleak. “What a shame.” He shook his head sadly. “They’ll hang for the theft.”
“They may hang, but I think not for the theft of the jewels, for they were never stolen. Madame Marie du Sonton gave Nina Vries, her housekeeper and lover, the necklace and earrings in gratitude for her amorous favors and to spite her jealous and controlling husband.”
“Oh my!” Vincent’s eyes nearly burst out of his head with shock.
His reaction did little to lessen Radnor’s chagrin at losing the reward and refusing the bribe. Radnor would have been more gratified at his friend’s enlightenment if Vincent weren’t so damnably well intentioned and trusting. Radnor smiled without humor. “Still. You were right, old man. It was love.”
The Charge Not Filed
by Bruce Graham
Lori Prewitt tapped the bar on the telephone. “Lori here.”
“County Attorney?”
Lori sighed. She knew she sounded tired, at six forty-five at night, eleven hours and two fast food meals after arriving at her office. “That’s me. What can I do for you?”
“This is Sergeant Bill McNamara, Worcester Police. Do you have business with a John Ricetti, of our town?”
“He’s a witness in one of my cases.”
“He was, but he won’t be. He was found dead about an hour ago here.”
“Say it ain’t so.”
“Yeah, it is. A knife in the chest, at the bottom of a flight of stairs. The fall didn’t hurt him, the stabbing did him in. We found your letter in his pocket. We haven’t confirmed his identity by his prints, but all of his ID fits.”
“Probably is, then.” Lori sagged. The case against Robert Archer had been pending for seven months: bludgeoning two men with a piece of iron in a disagreement over a drug transaction, two counts of aggravated, drug related assault, with a goodly amount of circumstantial evidence, but only one eyewitness, Ricetti, identifying Archer as the attacker. Without Ricetti, the case suddenly became weak.
“That’s all I have.”
“He’s my star witness to put a violent drug dealer away for a lot of years.” Lori’s mind was working. “Could you hold up on releasing this to the media?”
“No. Policy is it goes out as soon as it comes in. It’ll be posted by ten tonight.”
“Can you hold back his name, notifying next of kin, confirming identity, anything like that? I have an idea to salvage something out of this.”
“Okay,” said McNamara. “How about three days?”
“Thursday, at ten P.M.? I’ll call you before that. You’re four to midnight?”
“Correct. If I don’t hear from you, it’ll be out Thursday night.” He rattled off his telephone number.
“Thanks for calling. Goodbye.” She tapped the bar before the dial tone spat back. A fine kettle of fish. Even money that Archer iced Ricetti. If Archer didn’t kill him and hears of the murder, her case was nearly hopeless, but she’d have to try it — and kill three days in court. And Archer would be boss of the street more than ever.
She was feeling the pangs of doubt that would be normal in any county attorney only two years out of law school. Her anxiety was aggravated by knowledge that the county governing board had appointed her only because no one else was available on short notice to replace the almost fifteen-year veteran in the post, who had resigned suddenly for health reasons.
And she was further troubled by her dilemma, which she needed to decide within a few weeks — whether to become a candidate for a four-year term in the office, or to abandon the position and jump into private practice, a career path she’d deliberately avoided by accepting the position of assistant county attorney in the first place. The choices didn’t look hopeful either way: If she chose to seek election, she’d need to raise the five thousand dollars required for a campaign; if she opted for private practice, she doubted that any office in the area would have her, and she would need a bundle of money to open her own office. She was unfamiliar with the fine points of pursuing elected office, and was well aware that she had no strong backing on the all-male county governing board, two of whom she knew were actively feeling out other lawyers to run against her.
Lori did know that letting a sleazy punk get the better of her on two of the charges would not enhance her chances of winning the confidence of the voters. The case had been sound before and had the makings of good publicity, but now it was all but lost.
She stared at the certificates on the wall alongside her desk: college graduation; law school graduation; bar admissions in two states; appointment as county attorney, term to expire at the end of the year. She felt something welling up within her: the determination not to let Don Lewerke and his no-good client best her and the public she worked for.