Read Online The Prisoner of the Riviera (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) by Janice Law - Free Book Online Page B

and I didn’t want to ask. With night coming on, the shadows of the stone walls started to remind me less of ancient kings and more of local thugs. My bag was a nuisance, too, but if I was to troll the various clubs and cafés of Nice, I needed a dinner jacket and a pair of decent shoes. Another little alley. I’d come down toward the sea again, and I could see the coastal road that I’d last glimpsed from the sidecar of Pierre’s motorcycle. Head west again, remember the turns. Yes, there was the boulangerie , and there was the sign: bicyclettes . My prospects brightened slightly when I saw the black motorcycle with its fishlike and uncomfortable sidecar waiting in front.
    I set down my case and listened. The showroom was dark but the big metal doors of the garage were open and the interior lit. Voices? No. Just the soft clinks of gears being adjusted and the shush of tires being inflated. I walked across the yard, stuck my case behind a trash barrel, and went to the door. Pierre’s curly head—another little echo of the Greeks—was bent over a derailleur. He was moving the pedals by hand and fiddling with the shifting.
    “Bon soir . ” He straightened up with a start, as handsome as I remembered, even without his memorable cycling kit. “Sorry,” I said in French, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
    “Monsieur Francis.”
    “The same. Preserved thanks to your kindness.”
    He looked shamefaced and uneasy.
    “We had such a pleasant evening. I wondered if you might like to go to dinner.”
    “Ah, Monsieur,” he gestured toward the shop, the bicycles.
    “One must eat.” I could see that there were several bicycles finished and ready with their bills attached. He was not busy; he was embarrassed, and so he should be. As a matter of principle, I avoid assisting the police, but how could I reproach him when I was, myself, a prisoner of the Riviera, “helping with police inquiries”? But perhaps not for long, if I could exert my charm. “I can offer you Cannes. A very good restaurant. We begin with a pâté and a salad. A dry wine. We progress to mussels with garlic with, I think, a white Burgundy. And for dessert, I favor a selection of small tarts and some Sauternes.”
    He was tempted. Of course, he was. France had food, but food was expensive and every other person was hungry. Postwar, cuisine, high and low, was on everyone’s mind.
    “Cannes has some fine restaurants,” he said. “But pricey.”
    “I have come into a little money. As an indirect result of being questioned by the police.”
    “Rare good fortune, Monsieur,” he said, and I thought he relaxed a little.
    “Don’t feel bad about les flics ,” I said. “If not you, the hotel concierge or the café waiters or some busybody on the front would have pointed me out. You’re a good citizen, and I’m in a pickle but not in any real trouble.”
    “We’d been seen at the restaurant,” he said quickly. “They said you were a witness to the killing.”
    “If that were true, I’d be dead. I delivered a package to the house just about an hour before you gave me a lift. I suspect the victim was already dead when I arrived that afternoon.”
    “Oh, very certainly, Monsieur. Very certainly.”
    This put my situation in a new light. “How can you be sure?”
    “The smell, of course. The neighbors went to investigate early the next morning.”
    I swore under my breath at Inspector Chardin. “But they told the police they saw no one but me. That can’t have been true. Two men followed me from the villa. If the neighbors saw me, they almost certainly saw the men leave, too.”
    “They are frightened, Monsieur. Everyone is frightened, not of those particular men, but of their employer, who was very big during the war. Very big. Official, almost. People remember.”
    “So the men were known. And known also to the police?”
    “How could they not be, Monsieur?”
    How indeed! A little more of this and I’d be “down the rabbit hole,”