Paris, Before You Die Page 19

  “No,” Ashley said quite steadily. “No, I don’t think it was innocent at all. Eric always had a wandering eye. He thought Hannah was pretty hot. I could tell.” Quietly, wearily, she added, “I could always tell.”

  Kat shamelessly prodded again. “They were having an affair right under your nose?”

  “No,” Ashley whispered. “Not yet. He wasn’t finished yet.”

  “Finished with what?”

  “His last affair. The one he was having with Lauren.” She turned to look steadily into the eyes of the woman across the table from her. “You may as well admit it now. Now that they’re both dead.”

  “Oh, God,” Lauren whispered. “You killed them. You killed them both. My husband’s suicide was just . . . a suicide. But the others – you killed them.”

  Ashley angled her head like a cat. “Somebody did. You poor little fool,” she went on, still talking only to Lauren. “Do you know, I actually prayed for you? I knew the heartbreak you were letting yourself in for. If he cheated on me, what made you think he’d be faithful to you?”

  “Ashley, I swear – ”

  “Don’t. Don’t even try it. Pretending you’d never seen me before in my life when I said I thought I’d seen you before. If you had admitted then and there that we’d seen one another at the restaurant convention in Houston, I might have been able to put my doubts to rest, but you denied it. You even denied ever seeing Eric before. That’s when I knew. Grayson wasn’t at the convention, of course. He never went anywhere with you if he could help it, did he? But we were there, and you were there, and I saw you and Eric, accidentally-on-purpose bumping into one another, over and over again, all three days of the convention. Hanging out at the bar together that night I went to bed early with a headache. I knew that look of his. I even followed him to your room that night, when he thought he’d left me sleeping. When I saw you were on this tour, I couldn’t believe he’d do that to me, but when you denied seeing either me or Eric before and he denied it too . . . I knew.”

  Lauren’s face softened and she said, “You’re in shock, Ashley. I am too. After all, we’ve both had a terrible loss, and the worst isn’t over yet. We’re so far from home, and there’s so much red tape we have to go through. It isn’t going to help to have you imagining things. My husband wasn’t the faithful type, either. I suppose I can understand why you did it. I can even forgive you. But it was wrong, Ashley. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to face the consequences of what you’ve done.”

  Ashley regarded her cynically and almost laughed. “You really are a piece of work, aren’t you? Nice try. But I believe in consequences too, Lauren. I believe in right and wrong. In a way, I’ve been admiring how you’ve kept your chin up, because I also believe in forgiveness. I’ve never been able to handle Eric’s affairs well. I tried to cope with them. I prayed for help. When Grayson died, I thought I had my answer. The way was clear now for you and my husband to be together. Eric was never going to be faithful, and I needed to give him up. But it didn’t take me long to realize how wrong that was. Marriage is a sacrament. It’s something indestructible before God. I’d never have given him up.”

  “So you killed him.”

  Ashley became dreamy, remembering. “During the time your husband was killed, I was sitting at a table in a bar, waiting for my husband. When he came in with you on his arm, I tried to tell myself it was for the best. In spite of everything, I knew that getting you away from that monster was the right thing to do. I didn’t know Grayson was dead yet, of course, but he was, wasn’t he? I don’t know how you two did it, but you actually recruited my husband to commit a murder. You must have had Eric hypnotized.”

  “Actually,” Nettie said matter-of-factly, “it was Grayson Pimm’s money that had him hypnotized, not that that’s going to make you feel any better about it. With him out of the way, Lauren would have inherited everything. If they got back to the States and he divorced her, who knows what she would have gotten? There was a pre-nup, I believe? You might not have gotten anything. But with the promise of your inheritance, and believing that he could manipulate you, he went along with your plan to kill your husband.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it,” Lauren said. “Maybe Eric was planning something like that, but I never suspected it.”

  “Oh?” Henry was sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed, very relaxed. “Then who killed Eric?”

  There was a sudden vacuum in the room, nobody speaking, nobody moving. Around the back corner in the tiny kitchen, just beyond the breakfast buffet, French detectives were quietly listening, just as Henry had asked them to do.

  “Why would I want to kill Eric?” Lauren said. Looking defiantly at Ashley, she said, “He loved me.”

  “Eric was beginning to realize what a horror you are,” Ashley said. “And he was beginning to be attracted to Hannah. He was even chasing down purse-snatchers for her.”

  Nettie and Henry exchanged a lightning glance, and Nettie made a slight nod at him, telling him to take the lead.

  “Oh, there wasn’t any purse-snatcher,” he said. “You two realized that Hannah was watching you. And she’d been having private conferences with Grayson. You needed to know how much she knew about you – who she really was. So Eric pretended he’d seen somebody run off with Hannah’s purse, grabbed it from the back of her chair as he ran around behind her and took off down the street. Then, when he was a safe distance away, he went through the purse and checked her cellphone. He looked at her texts. He looked at her calls log. He looked at her email. His fingerprints were all over everything in her purse. He found out that what you’d suspected was true: she’d been working for Grayson Pimm, and she knew all about the two of you.”

  “It was a bit of luck for you,” Nettie said, “that somebody at Versailles tried to hijack our phones and locked them all down. Or was it luck? What do you think, Henry? Was it Eric? Did he disable all the phones? He would have had plenty of time afterwards to get rid of whatever device he used.”

  Henry shrugged. “We’ll probably never know now, but it was awfully convenient.” He turned back to Lauren. “So now the only thing you didn’t know was whether or not she’d told the Paris detectives about the two of you yet, but you figured she probably hadn’t or you would have been questioned about it by then. Grayson’s death still looked like a suicide, and Hannah probably wanted to think it over first. She wouldn’t want to get all tangled up with the Paris police if she didn’t have to. It might have meant having to stay in France much longer and going through an endless series of interviews. So you were probably safe, but she might change her mind at any time. You needed to do something about Hannah. What I can’t understand,” he said, cradling his coffee cup and looking casual, “is why you killed Eric. After all, you loved him.”

  Lauren said nothing, so Nettie picked up the story, as if she were explaining it to Henry. “Oh, all that deep-throat kissing with Hannah probably did it. Lauren was getting to know Eric just as well as he was getting to know her, and she realized what a risky man she’d picked as a co-conspirator. He fell in love every time a pair of long legs walked by. And he knew she was capable of murder; she’d already killed her husband.”

  Conversationally, Kat broke in. “I thought Eric killed her husband.”

  “Oh, no,” Henry said. “He had the desk clerk for an alibi. Grayson was alive, if not exactly well, when Eric put him into the elevator. Eric even pressed the button for the fifth floor for him. And he pressed the button for the second floor at the same time.”

  “But nobody’s on the second floor,” Kat said. “It’s under construction.”

  “Oh, somebody was on the second floor, all right,” Henry went on. “Lauren. When everybody had left for their various bistros, Lauren faded back into the alley and slipped into the hotel through the service entrance, which she’d wedged open earlier, ran up to the second floor and was waiting when the elevator doors opened on the second floor. Grayson, confused at seeing her standing t
here when the elevator stopped on the wrong floor, just stood there while she lunged in with the knife. Then, shocked, he took hold of the knife’s handle and slid down as she got herself out of the elevator and let it go on up to the fifth floor, carrying a dying man along with it. You didn’t even need to wipe your fingerprints off the handle, since Daisy had seen you holding the knife before that.”

  Others in the room were beginning to see the picture now, and Daisy said, “That’s why you made sure I saw you holding the knife. You claimed you had just found it in Grayson’s underwear drawer, but really, you were just holding it over the open drawer when I came in.”

  “I had just found it there,” Lauren said through her teeth.

  “Let’s think about that,” Henry said. “Assume Grayson did take a knife from the restaurant. Now he wants to hide it someplace where neither his wife nor the hotel staff will find it. But he also wants it handy, for whatever he’s decided to do with it. Grayson carried a man-bag. We were going to a city that day, not a museum, so his bag wouldn’t have been searched. Why not just carry it along with him, if he was already so close to the edge that he was thinking about using it soon? After all, it was that same night that he allegedly committed suicide with it. Why would he leave it in his room, in his underwear drawer?”

  “So it was Lauren who stole the knife,” Daisy said. “You were planting it in his drawer when I saw you.”

  “Oh, she wouldn’t have left it in his underwear drawer,” Nettie said. “Grayson would have found it right away. That whole scene was played out for your benefit, Daisy. Why did you go back to your room so soon after leaving it?”

  She gave it a moment’s thought, then said, “I wanted to change my shoes. We were going to Montmartre that day. I’d worn heels, and I’d realized I wouldn’t be able to walk in them all day, so I turned back to change into my old walking sandals.”

  Nettie nodded with satisfaction. “She heard your heels clicking on the wooden floor of the hall. She knew it would be one of you two girls coming back, not her husband. So she opened a drawer – any drawer, as long as it was Grayson’s – and made sure you saw her standing there holding a knife. Of course you’d come in. After playing her scene for your benefit, she put the knife back somewhere safe, probably in her own handbag. She’d already realized that when she killed Grayson, it would be easier to just leave her fingerprints on the knife. Now she had a witness to the fact that she’d innocently handled it just that morning, in her room.”

  “Exactly,” Henry said. “Grayson would naturally take hold of the handle after she stabbed him, putting his fingerprints just where they’d have been if he’d stabbed himself. So she wouldn’t even need to wear gloves and then try to get rid of them somehow. There wouldn’t be much blood. She was on a tight timeline, and it went exactly as planned. After she stabbed him, she got back outside, letting the service door close securely behind her, making sure to wipe the door handles. Right on cue, she was outside in the street waiting for Eric after he got done arguing with the desk clerk about not letting poor Mrs. Pimm go up to her room while her husband was in a murderous rage. That tied up the clerk so he wouldn’t be inconveniently visiting the staff restroom in the stairwell while you were trying to make your getaway, and it delayed things enough for you to complete your part of the plan. In fact, it delayed things enough for you to be standing there all alone, huddled by the hotel entrance, when Margery came back and found you there. Once Eric had given you enough time to get outside again, he left the hotel and found you talking to Margery. He simply took you by the arm and went off to meet his wife at the bar.”

  There was a dead silence. As everybody else in the room stared at Lauren, Nettie noticed a police detective peeking into the room. She gently shook her head at him and he withdrew. It wasn’t over. Lauren hadn’t actually admitted anything yet, and there were more murders to explain.

  Turning back to the corner table, Nettie said, “It was clever of you two, arranging it so that you would be buddies on the tour. Of course, it was easy to sit down at the table with Eric and Ashley, and when it came time to pick buddies, it was natural to pick one another’s spouses. Then Eric could give you an alibi, claiming that as his buddy, he was in the habit of watching you all the time. You actually didn’t need an alibi for your first crime, but boy did you ever for the second: the one at Versailles. All that talk about keeping an eye on everything and everyone in a commercial kitchen. Very clever. While you were bumping Hannah over the bannister, he was somewhere else with his wife, keeping her occupied. Then when the time came, he gave you an alibi, just like you planned.”

  Henry nodded. “Just like you planned,” he repeated.

  “But,” Nettie went on, “there is one part of this that I find even more distasteful. Downright ugly, right, Henry?”

  “I would’ve said worse than that,” he said, deadly quiet.

  “The moment you decided to make Henry the fall guy. I believe I even witnessed that very moment – it was at the first group meeting when you realized who he was.”

  Startling everyone, Audrey spoke for the first time. Her voice sounding hollow. “Yes. Yes. I saw it too. At the time, I thought that all the deaths in Henry’s family reminded you of some tragedy in your own, but even then, I knew that wasn’t it. You’d suddenly figured out who he was – the father of a man your husband drove to suicide, a young man named Aaron Dawson. It brought back a memory of something really heartbreaking. You must have liked Aaron, and been shocked when he died. I sensed that part of it, but I missed it when you quickly realized that now you weren’t the only one on the tour who would have a motive for killing your husband. The police always look at the spouse first, don’t they?” she had a wistful smile on her face. After a moment, she passed a hand over her forehead as if she had a headache.

  Realizing Audrey wasn’t going to go on with it, Nettie spoke. “I saw it, too. And the next morning, you made good and sure that we all knew that Henry had a reason to hate your husband. You made a spectacle of yourself – very out of character for the wimpy little wifey you were trying to portray – by standing here in the middle of the breakfast room and giving Henry your condolences on the death of his son, the young man so full of promise who had been worked to death by your husband.”

  “So you figured it out too,” Lauren said evenly. “I didn’t want to expose Henry. I couldn’t bear it, after what had happened to poor Aaron, but that was the reason my husband had to die, wasn’t it? I believe you even cancelled out on an earlier tour before you finally took this one. Were you fishing around, trying to get on just the right tour so you could get at Grayson?”

  The focus shifted to Henry, and he sat quietly for a moment. “I came to Paris because I wanted a good look at the man who killed my son, or at least made him want to die. I wanted to see him, hear his voice, try to understand. Is that why you were so precise in your Facebook postings? Hoping somebody like me would book onto the tour and come along?”

  Lauren Pimm was shaking her head. “You poor man. You poor, poor man. You were reading my Facebook page? How sad.”

  “No,” he said, watching her. “That was just a bit of luck, wasn’t it? You said you were taking a Carmichael Global Paris tour, and I booked the next one. It wasn’t until later that you gave the dates, and I realized I was on the wrong tour. I had to rebook. Luckily, a man my age has an easy time getting a letter from his doctor saying he needs to cancel a trip because of back problems. And so, an unlucky little fly, I walked right into your spider’s web.”

  “How did you react when you finally saw Grayson?” Kat asked, brightly interested.

  “I felt nothing,” he said, almost to himself. “I don’t know what I expected, but when it came right down to it, I didn’t feel anything at all. Not hate, not anger, nothing. Well, maybe contempt. People like Grayson Pimm are never really happy. No amount of money is ever enough, nobody around them is ever good enough, they spend their whole lives judging everything they’re given and thinking th
ey deserve better. Being Grayson Pimm was punishment enough. Once I realized that, I didn’t care about him anymore. As for my son’s death . . . I know now that what I need to do is the hardest thing there is: stop trying to figure it out and just hold onto my memories. There are so many good ones.”

  “I suppose murdering my husband gave you the closure you needed to be able to find peace,” Lauren said, sounding satisfied, as if Henry had just confessed to murder.

  Henry studied Lauren carefully. She wasn’t cracking. He needed to take a chance. He decided to bring in Twyla.

  He turned completely around in his chair to look at her, sitting with Jack at the table for two, and said, “You knew her the longest. Is Lauren the wimpy type who would let a man like Grayson Pimm turn her into a dishrag?”

  For a few tense moments, Twyla locked eyes with her old high school girl-crush. “No,” she said finally. “Lauren was bold, strong, independent. A high-flyer. She was a good match for a man like Grayson Pimm, actually. They were two of a kind. They were both winners.”

  “A man like that can break any woman,” Lauren said, still staring at Twyla.

  “You know,” Twyla said, “that’s probably why I wasn’t watching over you on this tour the way I intended to. The woman you were pretending to be just wasn’t my Lauren. Lauren Zimbalist from Jefferson High, captain of the cheerleading squad, valedictorian. I didn’t even recognize you. And it wasn’t because Grayson changed you. You were playing a part. It was all phony. I wasn’t really analyzing it. I think what finally convinced me was the fact that I could see that on the morning after Grayson died that you deliberately didn’t wear make-up. You were always so good at make-up. Even at your grandmother’s funeral, your face was beautiful. But after Grayson died, you actually put dark circles under your eyes and put concealer on your lips to make yourself look worse. I noticed it, but I didn’t stop to think about it. I just realized it was phony.”

  “I’m sure you must feel very guilty,” Lauren said persistently. “Neglecting me the way you did and running after a man. Not even a very attractive man, just someone who paid attention to you, for once. Don’t feel guilty about it, Twyla. You’re not the type of person who could have helped me anyway.”