Last to Know: A Novel(55)

“Cities are all mere cities until you find their heart,” she explained to Harry, jostling her way into Saint-Germain and parking, illegally one more time, on the narrow rue Jacob, a few paces from her tiny hotel room, where she had been so lonely, listening to nursery school children singing, and longing for Harry. And now here he was.

“Then cities are like women,” Harry said. “You have to wait to find their heart, just like I waited for yours.” He leaned toward her and slid his arms around her as their mouths met in a long kiss.

When she pulled away he said, “Sure about that wine, right now?”

Mal grinned. “I heard that anticipation was the best part of sex.”

“I’m not sure I ever found it that way.”

“I’m parked illegally,” she said. “This might turn out to be the most expensive glass of wine you ever had.” But Harry took a blue tag from his duffel and stuck it on the car window.

“Police,” Mal read, astonished.

“An international code,” Harry told her, more jaunty now than when he’d gotten off the plane. “Gets a guy anywhere, any time.”

“It sure does with me,” she said, linking his arm and striding round the corner into the Café Deux Magots, where a waiter, who had gotten to know her from her lonely evening sojourns, greeted her with a smile. He raised his eyebrows, though, when he saw her with a partner.

“La meme chose, madame?” he asked, pulling back her chair, while Harry attempted to fit his legs under the tiny table, hemmed in by other tiny tables filled with people who seemed completely into their own conversations and their own worlds, except, that is, for the tourists like him who were there to take-in-everything-they-possibly-could-and-happy-for-it, and who threw welcoming smiles of the “we’re all in this together” variety at them.

“Oui, s’il vous plait, le champagne, mais, je crois, deux café aussi.”

“Avec du lait, madame? Du lait chaud, peut-être.”

The waiter obviously knew Mal’s usual order and she impressed Harry by her command of the language.

“Pas moment,” Mal said, showing off and smirking at Harry to see if he had noticed.

“You’ve been here too long,” he said. “You speak the language.”

“What you heard was about it. I can order stuff, buy a baguette—actually a ficelle—that’s the long thin one with two points at the end instead of one. Don’t know why, but it just tastes better somehow.”

“Glad to know you haven’t been starving.”

The waiter came back with two glasses of champagne.

“Maybe we should have gotten a bottle,” Harry said, as they raised their glasses to each other.

“We might not be here long enough for that.” Mal gave him a meaningful smile that meant everything to Harry’s wounded soul.

“This—coming here to be with you—is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he said softly, leaning closer. “Except…”

He paused and Mal waited.

“Except for when I got Squeeze,” he added, making her groan.

“Remember, that dog saved your life,” he reminded her.

She nodded. She would never forget. But that was another story. “You know how much I love him.” She sipped her champagne, looking at him over the rim of her glass. “So, what went wrong, Harry? I know you are in pain, I know you’re at a crisis in your career. Perhaps even with me? I just want to help you work it out.”

Harry took a deep breath, thinking of the thousands of miles between him and Evening Lake and the dead girl with her throat cut and the pearls from her broken necklace littering the bloodstained ground like white spring flowers pushing their way through the dead earth.

“I didn’t really know the young woman,” he said. “Not well, that is. Only for a few days. But she was so alive, Mal. Her name was Jemima. Puddleduck, of course,” he added, remembering that night at Ruby’s. “I guess in a way, she reminded me of you, or at least of the way you must have been before you became the famous TV investigator. Young, curious, nosy in fact, getting into situations, places you shouldn’t.”

“That was me,” Mal agreed.

“She came to me because she knew the young drug runner, Divon, was involved with the woman at Evening Lake. He was working with her, getting and selling hard stuff. He was at high school with Jemima, she said she would swear in court that he would never kill. And I believe her.”

“So then he—Divon—did not kill Jemima?”

“He couldn’t have, he was already in jail. But he was at the Havnel woman’s house at the lake the night it burned. I didn’t tell you before, but she’d also been stabbed. A kitchen knife in her right eye. We assume she was running from whomever it was wanted to kill her, right before the house went up in flames. The odd thing is, though, the daughter, who told us the whole story of how the inferno happened and who was with her mother at the time, never mentioned a kitchen knife.”

“She didn’t see a knife in her mother’s eye?”

“All the daughter said was she saw her mother go up in flames after spraying her hair too lavishly with lacquer then lighting a cigarette.” Harry shrugged. “It’s been known to happen. The girl ran when the house caught fire, I saw her fling herself in the lake to stop her hair burning…”