Devil's Breath Page 11

  “They were walk-on parts, sure, but hanging around the sound stage waiting your turn you pick up a lot of good forensic tips. I remember one time I was in this crowd of punks that discovered a body, and it turned out the body had been moved from where it had been killed. Stuff like that.”

  “Useful knowledge for the future, I’m sure,” murmured Max. But the suggestion spurred a thought—after a body had tumbled around the ocean for a bit, wouldn’t the normal pooling of blood, had there been any, be affected? Had she lain on the deck for some time before being sent overboard, or was she immediately deposited in the ocean? Could the experts even tell? He wasn’t sure it was important but he’d ask Cotton to ask the coroner. He looked at Jake with something approaching, if not a new respect, some gratitude for the bits of potentially useful information that could come from the unlikeliest sources.

  Jake seemed to capture the prevailing spirit, for he grinned at Max and said, “I do want to help here. The thing with Margot that nobody got was how endearing she could be. If she liked you, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for you, or try to do.” That tracked what Maurice had been telling him, only Maurice had put a somewhat darker spin on it: Margot, in his telling, was simply being used by one loser boyfriend after another. Did Jake fall into that camp? The age difference suggested it was so but wasn’t it true that people found the missing pieces of their personal puzzles in the most improbable places?

  Max saw the waitress approaching with their meal and paused the conversation as she set their plates before them. She had handled the heavy tray with the ease born of years of practice. He had been well aware of her earlier quickening of interest, but that was all the news of the investigation he was willing to leak for now. It was important at this point that the staff realize if they had any information—if they heard or noticed something odd going on among the guests—it was important that they let the authorities in on it. That this was not just a routine investigation of an accident, as the papers had led people to believe.

  She trundled off with the tray stand in one hand and the now-empty tray tucked under one arm. Max returned his attention to Jake, asking: “And what exactly was she planning to do for you? Before she was killed, that is.”

  Jake stabbed a fork about his casserole, taking his time before answering. “Margot knew all the studio heads, the directors, the agents—everybody. These connections went back years but they still held. Let me speak plainly—I suspected she might be holding information over the heads of some of these people. If you follow.”

  “If you’re talking blackmail, I think I do,” said Max. He sampled the buttery cod, which was delicious. It came with a side of early spring salad seasoned with olive oil and an unusual combination of herbs that reminded him of meals at home. He wondered if the chef had got hold of Awena’s cookbook. It wouldn’t surprise him at all. Her book had quickly become the go-to vegetarian bible for the back-to-nature foodie movement. Her homemade yogurt alone was legendary, and it was said the chef at Buckingham Palace was serving her recipe for roasted brussels sprouts with honey-mustard sauce.

  “I don’t think money changed hands in some arm-twisting way, not really,” said Jake, pausing for a sip of wine. Setting down his glass, he added, “At worst, it might have been a matter of, ‘Can you spare a dime for an old friend?’—that sort of thing. Keep in mind, all these people we’re talking about are loaded. It would have meant little to them to write her a check that might keep her afloat for a month.” He paused and, catching himself up, he added, “Oh, God. Sorry, bad choice of word.”

  “No worries—these old phrases do creep into one’s speech, don’t they? But I gather the implied threat was that she had some kind of sordid information she might share with the world or the authorities, unless she was given, as you say, enough money to keep her afloat.” Max stated the case baldly. It wasn’t going to help Margot if he gilded her actions with fairytale interpretations of those actions. Much more likely it was—and helpful—to realize she may have come to the well too often to suit one of her soft touches. The thought led him to: “How was her relationship with Romero?”

  Jake put down his fork and took another thoughtful sip of his wine. He shook his head, saying, “I never would have thought the English could get a decent wine to grow in this climate, but they’ve managed it. Anyway, you’ve honed in on a perfect example of Margot’s technique. If she was putting the squeeze on Romero for money, it was so subtly done as to be unnoticeable, at least from where I stood. But she was really more interested in getting a part in his new upcoming extravaganza epic bio-spectacle. They were—still are, I guess—going to do what was essentially some amped-up redo of Troy. The new film was complete nonsense, of course, but the people in the bleachers were sure to love it. And I was in the running for a part. Margot may even have put in a word for me—I’ll never be sure now. I just know Romero said I was in.”

  All this was conveyed with what appeared to be a disarming honesty. Jake was neither Margot’s apologist nor was he really her companion in crime, if what she was doing rose to that level, which Max doubted. After all, what actress had not angled for a part in a play or a movie? He imagined that was the norm and not the exception. If she had spared a thought for helping Jake get ahead, that was to her credit.

  This was all-in-all a different shading on what he had expected to learn of Jake’s relationship with Margot. Pragmatic and self-serving it was, yes. And Jake was clearly ambitious. But none of it came across as particularly sleazy, not by the standards he’d heard were the norm in Hollywood.

  “So she may have put in a word for you?” said Max. “That was nice of her.”

  Jake nodded. “She was a good old girl, she really was that. But Romero didn’t want her in the film, you see, so he wanted me to, you know, soft-pedal my good news. It made life a bit awkward.”

  “Did you think of the relationship as long-term?” Max pretended an intense interest in buttering his bread as he asked this, not wanting the skepticism in his eyes to guide Jake’s answer. But Jake seemed unfazed and not in need of visual cues.

  “Lord, no,” he said. “She was ages too old for me. I think she knew that, too. Sort of.”

  “Did you ever talk about it?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Of course not. The golden goose might go away and lay her eggs elsewhere, to apply what Max acknowledged was an outlandish bit of imagery. But from what he knew of Margot, she would need the illusion this was a forever romance in order to stay. Otherwise, as Maurice had hinted, she was more than capable of folding up her tent and heading off yet again to greener pastures.

  “Not to insist,” said Max, “but why do you think she may have been aware of the age difference?”

  “The references were constant,” said Jake. He was rootling through the bread basket, which held an assortment of rolls and slices of fresh-baked bread, looking for the most tempting. “Some song would come on the car radio, and she’d hum along and then say, ‘Oh, of course, you’re too young to remember this.’ Or something would come on TV and she’d go on about the actor, and then say, ‘Of course, this was all before your day.’”

  “Why do you think she did that?”

  “Why? I think it was my cue to rush in and say something along the lines of, ‘Oh, darling, don’t be silly. You can’t be that old—you don’t look a day over thirty.’ But I wasn’t playing that game. She looked her age, a bit older if truth be told. And I wasn’t going to gush at her in some gigolo sort of way. We had the relationship we had and I think it worked for both of us, even though it was never destined to last forever. Well, that possibility’s gone now, anyway, so why belabor the point? As these things go, it was an honest relationship—possibly the most honest relationship I’ve ever had.” He inspected a slice of bread, its crust golden and embedded with seeds, and reached for the plate of soft butter rosettes.

  “Fine,” said Max. “Now, on the night she died…”

  “I was snug asleep. I hear
d nothing. I did wake up once briefly and she wasn’t there. I realize now she may never have returned to the room—I undressed in the light from the porthole and sort of collapsed into my own bed; I didn’t notice if she was in the other. I told the police this.”

  “What time was it?”

  “No real idea,” said Jake with a shrug. “After midnight.”

  “One-fifteen? I believe that’s what you told the investigators.”

  Another shrug. The inconsistency didn’t seem to concern him. “I tend to wake up about two a.m., sometimes three—a maddening form of insomnia. But that’s not proof of the time. In fact, I avoid looking at the clock as it makes me nuts to verify that it’s the middle of the goddamn night and here I am yet again, wide awake.”

  “So, wide awake as you were, you didn’t get up for a stroll around the deck? To use the bathroom, to get a drink of water?”

  “No. It’s a rarity that I fall right back to sleep, but that’s what I did. I completely conked out—that is such a novelty I remember that sort of thing for days.”

  Max wondered if there was a reason for this. Had he been drugged? Either by Margot herself, to keep him quiet so she could keep a rendezvous, or by the killer?

  “I awoke the next morning, late,” Jake continued, “and she was still gone. I thought nothing of it. With Margot, you never quite knew what was up.”

  “But you weren’t worried about her.”

  “Not in the least.”

  Chapter 18

  THE BARON AND THE BARONESS

  Max lingered over an after-meal coffee with Jake. The conversation moved away from the investigation into a wide-ranging discussion of life on a film set. Max didn’t leave for another half hour, by which time the dining room was quite deserted. He came away with a greater understanding of the jealousies and insecurities that fueled the film industry, thinking there must be easier ways to earn a living.

  As Max said his good-byes and started to rise from his chair, Jake surprised him by saying, “I’ll miss Margot, you know. I really will. She wasn’t full of gossip and poisonous misinformation like some of these old ducks you see running around, never happier than when they’re describing someone else’s misfortune. She wasn’t like that. Truth be told, her head was mostly full of concern over her new haircut, her wardrobe, things like that. But she wasn’t mean-spirited—I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. She wasn’t mean about people. I liked her for that. It’s rare, especially in actors.”

  Max had nodded, agreeing that it was an exceptional quality to find in anyone, anywhere.

  He decided it was time for a word with the Baron and Baroness Sieben-Kuchen-Bäcker, the posh nobs on board the night Margot died. He was a bit puzzled by their presence, as they weren’t part of the usual Hollywood crowd. He imagined they’d been included to impart a touch of upper-class polish to the already glamorous proceedings. As he sought out their room in the hotel, he called to mind what he’d gleaned about them from an earlier conversation with Cotton.

  “You ran them through the Interpol database, of course,” Max had said.

  “Well, there’s no of course about it—the privacy laws are in a constant state of flux. But yes, we managed to pierce the bureaucratic walls of both Interpol and Europol, and the baron and baroness appear to be who they say they are.”

  “A dead end?”

  “So far, yes.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It’s odd, though,” Cotton continued. “That business of their having no fixed address. The address they gave out for their passports was the home of a friend they were staying with at the time. That’s not really illegal, of course, but strictly speaking it is odd, given who they are, or who they pretend to be. I guess I’m saying, for someone of their class and background, it is unexpected. Don’t all these people have palaces and mansions to retire to, when they aren’t busy frolicking on the open seas?”

  “In many cases, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs got hold of the mansions—back taxes, gambling debts, the usual. Then there’s wood rot, legitimate heirs dying out: whatever stream of misfortune befell the families. Often the places were given over to the National Trust or English Heritage when the upkeep got to be too much, throwing tens of butlers out of a job. What address did they give when you interviewed them formally?”

  “Another address, another friend.”

  “It must be nice to be so well-connected.”

  “Looked at another way, they don’t stay in any one place long enough to put the friendship at risk. There’s that. Plus, most of the places they stay are like palaces. It’s not like they’re underfoot all the time in some bedsit, leaving the cooker on and setting the curtains on fire, or letting the cat out and forgetting to buy fresh milk. Half the time I’d be willing to bet their hosts have forgotten they’re camping there with them.”

  “It’s not a priority right now, but we may want to look at these friends a little more closely if the investigation warrants. Perhaps they are hostages to fortune, people who are being imposed on because the baron and baroness have some strange and interesting hold over them.”

  “Blackmail, you mean?”

  “I doubt people like this would use the term. More like ‘calling in a favor,’ or ‘belonging to the same club’—the usual rubbish that keeps the masses baying for blood outside the palace walls.”

  It was odd, thought Max, how frequently that concept—blackmail—was coming up in the investigation.

  “N.O.K.D. ‘Not our kind, dear.’”

  “Precisely that sort of thing,” said Max. “Blackmail might be too strong a term but I have seen the nobs close ranks over one of their own kind, particularly when it’s in their own best interests to do so. Look at what happened with Lord Lucan, or so many think—his own kind helped him escape justice. It’s quite expected, when you think about it.”

  Now Max knocked on the door of the baron and baroness’s hotel room and was shortly admitted by the baron himself. He wore a smoking jacket over his shirt and tie—of course he would have a smoking jacket, thought Max—and he carried a cigarette holder in his left hand.

  The baron was as tall and elegant as an old-time matinee idol, mustachioed and dark-wavy-haired, and Max thought he must have fit right in after all with the yacht’s party of beautiful people. He gestured Max into the room and saw him seated in a chair near the balcony, the door to which stood slightly ajar, admitting a cool afternoon breeze. This particular room overlooked the hotel’s outdoor pool rather than the ocean—still a delightful view.

  The baron tucked a cigarette into the ebony holder, lit his cigarette, and drew smoke deep into his lungs. Max, who had never smoked but once or twice when playing a part undercover, still appreciated the scent of expensive tobacco wafting through the well-ventilated room. The baron, he saw, was studying him closely while pretending not to, standing in a sort of dancer’s pose: he cupped one elbow, holding the cigarette away from him and idly watching the smoke unfurl, as if watching smoke unfurl were his entire raison d’être. To Max it was like suddenly finding himself onstage in a Noël Coward play, an impression reinforced as the baroness now drifted in from the bedroom, trailing clouds of perfume. Was it Coco Chanel who had said a woman who didn’t wear perfume had no future? The baroness had taken the advice to heart. She was tall, possibly an illusion created by her heels and her wafer thinness, as blond and fair as her baron was dark, and insubstantial as a dream. The fine bones of her face were beautifully highlighted by her pale pink rouge, and her eyes were tipped in gold at the lashes. She wore a clingy satin dress in a champagne color exactly matching her hair. Max stood politely and shook her hand, which she had languidly held out to him, rather as though expecting him to kiss it.

  Were these two for real? Max wondered. So young and beautiful they were. Gatsbyesque, Cotton had called them: “Like Jay Gatsby, no one knows where he’s from, or where his fortune came from. Presumably, he just inherited it. Like you do—or rather, as one does.”

/>   But Max was as strongly reminded of the couple in one film version of Murder on the Orient Express—the elegant count and countess.

  “We have to go soon,” the baroness informed her husband, who surely knew that already. “The Hugh-Nesbitts are expecting us at the weekend.”

  The baroness now dipped her impeccable blond head in Max’s direction and said, “Mustn’t disappoint, you know.” Despite the triple-barreled German name, her accent was strictly upper-upper British class, as was her husband’s, carrying only a hint—“We haff to go”—of their Germanic ties.

  In the pages of background information Patrice had provided him, the baron and baroness were officially squeaky clean, visas and passports all in order. But she had noted that, according to the MI5 grapevine, their arrival on the doorsteps of various of the U.K.’s landed gentry was not greeted with universal rejoicing. And they had left one lord’s house in rather more of a hurry than had been expected.

  “I almost wonder if they’re blackmailing some of these nobs,” is how Patrice had put it, in a perfect echo of Max and Cotton’s thoughts. But as Max reminded her, the U.K. is still rich in landed gentry and castles to pick and choose from, and as it appeared the baron and baroness made a point of rotating and spacing out the visits on their royal progress, it was possible their stays weren’t as burdensome in most cases as might be imagined. Max did gather from Patrice that they never offered to pay room and board, and of course it would have been rather tricky for their titled host to suggest they do so. Although now, after a few minutes in their united company, he was willing to bet one or two lords had been tempted.

  Although their Christian names were Emma and Axelrod, Max had only heard them referred to by their titles. “I rather gather they insist on it,” Patrice had told him. “And you’ll get much further with them if you play along, is my advice. His father, from whom Axelrod inherited the title, was named Alexis, by the way. He was something in shipping.”