I took a bite of my doughnut and thought about crime and tourism.

  “You know,” Hillary said, putting her coffee cup down on the desk. “That Annie had a lot of problems. A lot.”

  I leaned forward toward her. “She did?”

  I wasn’t normally a gossip, but I was trying to help Gladie, and I knew from experience that when Gladie investigated a murder, she liked to find out everything she could about the victim. It helped with clues.

  Hillary looked around to make sure that nobody was listening, even though we were the only ones in the store. “Money problems. That happens with older folks. Their money dries up. We in the jewelry business see all of that. Folks come in to sell their jewelry. Others come in to sell their jewelry and make cheap copies so their neighbors don’t know they had to sell their jewelry.”

  Her eyebrows lifted, and she nodded at me, like she was passing on a juicy secret. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand what secret that was.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “All of Annie’s jewelry was phony baloney, Bridget. It had been that way for years. She sold it all and was wearing paste.”

  “Oh,” I breathed. “Maybe that’s why she was killed. Maybe the burglar was angry that her jewelry wasn’t real.”

  “Then why did he steal it all? Oh, don’t look at me that way, Bridget. I hear things. I know things. All of her jewelry was stolen. Her jewelry boxes were cleaned out.”

  But not on her body. I had heard that she was found loaded for bear with diamonds and gold. Fake diamonds and gold, I realized now.

  “None of this makes sense,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “Oh, Bridget. Nothing’s made sense since 1992.”

  I did the jewelry store’s books as quickly as I could. After, I practically ran outside and whipped my phone out of my purse. “Lucy, Lucy, is that you?” I said breathlessly when my friend answered. “I have big news, Lucy. Big news. I’m going to blow the top off this whole thing. But I need your help. Can you meet me? Do you still have your black ski cap and your taser?”

  “Oh, boy, do I!” she cried.

  It was almost disorienting when I saw Lucy. We had arranged to meet around the corner of the Benoit house. Normally, Lucy wore a lot of peach, but now she was wearing head-to-toe black. I was in my normal clothes because I didn’t know we were supposed to be wearing black for our mission.

  “I’m so sorry, but I came in my regular clothes,” I told her when we met outside by our cars.

  “No problem, darlin’. If shit gets real, just stand behind me. I got you covered.”

  She patted her purse when she said “covered.” I wondered what she had in her purse. I was okay with a taser, but I had protested three gun companies for an extended period of time, so I wouldn’t be all right with her carrying a pistol. But I didn’t ask her because I trusted my friend to understand what I was opposed to and to respect it.

  I gave Lucy a quick rundown about Annie’s jewels. “We have to get in there and snoop, just like Gladie does,” I explained. “Do you think her son is there?”

  “No, I left him and everyone else at the wake,” Lucy said. She was excited. Her eyes were wider than I had ever seen them. “I’m pretty sure the coast is clear. I’ll run to the back of the house and look in the windows. They won’t notice me because I’m dressed in black. Meanwhile, you go to the front of the house and ring the doorbell. If someone answers, just tell them that you’re there to offer your condolences.”

  I swallowed with difficulty. “Okay. I’m not good at lying.”

  “Then, tell them you’re there to look at the house. There are reasons to look at the house besides snooping, right?”

  “There are?”

  Lucy counted on her fingers. “Like maybe you’re there to see if it’s safe now. Like maybe you’re there because you’re interested in buying. No way that son is going to stay there. He’s going to sell in a hurry, for sure.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s not one hundred percent lying. How are we going to break in?”

  “Leave that to me. Just whistle if the coast is clear.”

  “Okay.” I did a practice whistle, just to make sure I wasn’t too nervous to blow. I whistled and then we made our moves around the corner.

  Like a ninja warrior, Lucy slunk around the house while I climbed the stairs to the front door. I looked around to see if anyone was watching, but the street was quiet, and there didn’t seem to be any movement inside the house. I rang the doorbell and waited. My forehead broke out in a sweat, and I wiped at it with my hand.

  Nothing. No answer.

  I rang the doorbell again. Still nothing.

  I waited another minute, and then I whistled. A second later, I heard a crash. Then, I heard movement in the house. I froze in a panic, like a deer caught in headlights. After a couple minutes, the front door opened. Lucy was standing inside, and she pulled me in with her. She closed the door after me.

  I barely recognized her. Her face was smudged with dirt, and her hair was messy, and there were some shards of glass in it. I had never seen her with a hair out of place before.

  “Don’t ask, darlin’,” she said. “It turns out that I’m not used to breaking into houses. We better go fast.”

  “She was killed in the living room,” I said, and we made a beeline for it.

  There was no blood on the carpet, so we had to guess where she died. “Imagine getting murdered in your own living room,” Lucy said and tsked.

  “She was strangled.”

  Lucy spun around. “I’m seeing a television.”

  “An old one, but it’s pretty big.”

  Lucy marched past me, and I followed her. She marched right into the kitchen and looked in the cabinets. “Two mixers and a food processor. Odd.”

  “Yes, two mixers seem excessive.”

  “Not that,” Lucy said. “I talked to a couple at the wake who had been robbed by the same burglars. They focused on their electronics. They took all of their televisions and their mixer.”

  “Oh,” I said, catching on. “Why didn’t they do that here? I know! Maybe they started and heard Annie moving around down here and panicked. That’s when they killed her. It was before they had a chance to take anything.”

  But that wasn’t right because I heard that they stole her jewelry, all except the jewelry she was wearing.

  Lucy and I went upstairs. Sure enough, the upstairs master bedroom had been ransacked. Annie had had a lot of jewelry boxes all over her dresser, and they were all empty. The bathroom drawers had been opened, too.

  “It looks like they were focused on the jewelry,” I said.

  “But not the jewelry she was wearing.”

  “Maybe they panicked after they killed her. Maybe they figured out the jewelry was fake. But why would they have taken all of the jewelry from upstairs?”

  Lucy was rooting around in Annie’s closets, checking out Annie’s wardrobe. “These are all very old clothes, Bridget. Ancient. I thought Annie was well-heeled. But obviously, she was having some major money problems. Old clothes, fake jewels.”

  “And the house hasn’t been updated since the sixties or seventies.”

  “You know what?” Lucy asked. “I’ll bet those burglars sold their ill-gotten goods.”

  “Or tried to. I bet they got a bad surprise when they found out it was all paste.”

  Lucy tapped her chin with her finger. “Where do criminals sell stolen jewelry?”

  I knew. There was a pawnshop just outside of town. It was located in a strip mall next to a smoke shop. I had pointed it out to Jonathan when I was explaining to him about the degradation of communities.

  “I think I know where,” I told Lucy.

  “Let’s take my car. It’s a V-8 and goes fast.”

  The pawn shop wasn’t a typical Cannes shopping experience. Sure, it was small and not corporately owned. In fact, Walley’s was pretty much the only corporately owned store in Cannes. But normally shops in town were quaint, cozy, and beautiful. The pawn shop had none of those attributes. Just the opposite, in fact.

  “What do you want?” There was only one employee in the pawnshop, and he sat behind a glass partition, which I suspected to be bulletproof. The employee was a man, around sixty years old, and I could smell him before I saw him, even with the glass partition between us.

  Lucy smelled him, too. I could tell by the way her upturned nose turned even more up. I felt sorry for the man. Perhaps no one ever explained what good hygienic habits were. Maybe he was mentally challenged, or maybe he had some kind of OCD that prevented him from bathing. Or maybe he was allergic to water! I had heard of people like that.

  “Hurry up, Bridget,” Lucy urged me in a low voice, snapping me out of my thoughts. “If I spend much more time here, I will pass out for sure from the fumes.”

  “Excuse me, sir, we’re here to see if there was a recent influx of jewelry,” I told him.

  “Are you buying?” he asked. Lucy and I took a defensive step back. The man’s breath was worse than his body odor. Perhaps he didn’t think he needed to brush his teeth, since he had so few teeth to brush. He had more gums than teeth. I wondered if we had universal dental care if he would have a bright, shiny smile right now. I made a mental note to protest the county’s Department of Health, just as soon as Gladie was better and Annie’s killer was found.

  “We may be buying,” Lucy answered for me. “What’ve you got?”

  “I got a whole bunch of really nice stuff that just came in.”

  His demeanor changed, brightening with the possibility of a sale. He brought out two bags of jewelry and laid them out on a table next to an old teakettle and a pile of gold rush-era sifting pans.

  “Just came in today. Fresh,” he said with more than a little pride.

  Lucy picked up a necklace and inspected it. “Paste?” she asked.

  “Of course. You don’t think I would toss out a bunch of gold and diamonds, do you?” the man responded.

  Lucy threw me a look, and I understood the message she was trying to convey. It was a lot of fake jewelry, and it was brought in today. It had to be Annie’s jewelry.

  “How much did you pay for it?” Lucy asked.

  “Now that’s between me and the lady who sold it.”

  “A lady?” I asked, surprised. “What lady?”

  “Mary Kay something. Like the makeup.”

  “Mary Kay Polk?” Lucy asked. “I just met the woman today. She works in insurance. What on earth is going on here?”

  Mary Kay Polk burgled Annie Benoit and strangled her to death? Was that possible? An insurance agent? That didn’t match with my assumption that the burglar was a victim of an unfair, archaic class system.

  “I don’t know, but we have to tell Gladie and Spencer, and we need someone to spy on this woman. Someone who doesn’t know them,” I said.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” the man barked. “I thought you were buying.”

  We ignored him and walked out of the store. It was a relief to breathe in some fresh air.

  “Who should we get to follow this woman?” I asked Lucy.

  “I can’t believe I spoke to her, and she probably killed Annie,” she answered, lost in her thoughts.

  “An insurance agent who burgles houses? That doesn’t sound likely,” I pointed out.

  But Lucy wasn’t listening to me. Her attention had turned to a man a half block down the street. “Isn’t that Fred? The cop?” she asked.

  It was.

  “And he’s off duty because he’s in street clothes,” she continued, as if she was thinking out loud and not actually talking to me. “I think he will be perfect.”

  Chapter 8

  Fred Lytton

  I was on a mission. It was my first mission. No one had ever given me a mission before. As a desk sergeant, there weren’t a lot of missions. Those were usually handled by the detectives, either Remington or Margie. Desk sergeants normally just sat at the front desk. And I was a very good desk sergeant. I knew how to sit and greet people and get them to the right officer to help them out.

  But missions? Nobody ever asked me to do a mission.

  Until now. Miss Smythe and Miss Donovan had given me a mission. A very important one. They had picked me because they knew I could handle it. They asked me because they saw in me a talent that no one else had ever seen. They saw a mission guy. They saw a tough man who could track down Mary Kay Polk and do reconnaissance.

  My name’s Fred, and I’m the desk sergeant at the Cannes Police force. I’ve got a good life here. I do my work, and afterward, I come home to my beautiful wife, Julie. We have a great marriage, despite the occasional fire she accidentally sets and that time she stabbed me with a grilling fork. That was an accident too, of course. Julie has a lot of accidents. Like that time at the movie theater when she wanted more butter on her popcorn. But that burn scar on my neck has faded with time, so that’s just water under the bridge.

  I could handle a lot, so I wasn’t scared about my mission. Sure, I was trembling a little, but that was probably because our warm, sunny spring day came with a cool breeze. No, I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t frightened. I was just like John Wayne, and he wasn’t scared of anything.

  What would John Wayne do in this case? He would probably be on a horse, and I was on foot. I wasn’t a big fan of horses, not after the horse incident in eighth grade camp. That didn’t end well for anyone involved. Poor Becky and Johnny. But I guess they shouldn’t have gotten in the way.

  Anyway, I probably didn’t need a horse today. Ruth told me that Mary Kay ate lunch at Saladz every day, and I knew where that was. And they didn’t allow horses there, as far as I was aware. The restaurant was a long walk from the pawnshop, but I didn’t mind walking. It was a nice day, and I liked to spend time alone and just think.

  I’m a big thinker. Huge. Folks don’t know that about me. But it’s true: I’m a big thinker. Today I was thinking about Underwear Girl. Gladie, to most folks. I called her Underwear Girl because the first time I saw her she was upside down on a telephone pole, showing the world her pink underwear. They were really nice underwear. Not the frilly kind. They were the sensible pink cotton underwear, the kind they sell at Walley’s. I had bought some for my wife Julie, but in blue because she didn’t like pink.

  Underwear Girl is just about the nicest person I had ever met in the whole world. On the entire planet. Not that I had been around the world or seen even a small portion of the planet. I was more of a homebody. I stuck close to my town. Why should I leave? It’s not like Paris, Rome, or Bangkok had anything that we didn’t. In fact, I heard talk that a corn dog restaurant was going to open here in the summer. I bet Paris didn’t have any corn dog restaurants! No, siree. I was living in probably the best town in the world.

  And Underwear Girl was the sweetest person in this best town. I would do anything to help her, and now she needed me to save her from her blind day. I didn’t totally understand what a blind day was, but it sounded scary, and I didn’t want her to be scared. I also liked the idea of saving her. Boy, folks would talk about me a lot and for a long time if I saved her.

  I made it back to the Historic District and stood across the street from Saladz. The restaurant was on a corner, and today was their first day after they expanded to offer outdoor seating. They had taken up half of the sidewalk and bordered the area for tables and chairs with beautiful plants and flowers all around. I bet Paris didn’t have anything so beautiful for their French food.

  There was a lot of commotion across the street, like they were doing something big for the grand opening of the outdoor seating. The owner of Saladz saw me and waved. Darn it. I was supposed to be inconspicuous. It wouldn’t be good if the owner told Mary Kay that a cop was across the street, spying on her. I walked a little up the street where there was a tree, and I stood behind it. It camouflaged me, but now I couldn’t see what was happening at Saladz.

  Peeking my head from around the tree, I could see the restaurant again. It was filling up with a lot of women. They were all in groups of twos or threes. Most of them decided to sit outside, and when they sat down, the new flower pots blocked them from view. It was a problem. If Mary Kay showed up, I would never be able to see her. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be able to see her if she sat inside.

  What would John Wayne do in this situation?

  I slapped my forehead. John Wayne would never be in this situation. He didn’t eat salads and wouldn’t know where women went to eat lunch. I would have to switch over to James Bond. He would absolutely know where women went to eat lunch.

  Then, I saw her. Mary Kay looked and was dressed exactly as Lucy described and was a dead ringer for her picture on her website. Just like the other women, she decided to eat outside. Unlike the other women, she was alone.

  I needed to go in and spy on her, close up. Oh my gosh. This mission was dangerous. Mary Kay looked like she was probably armed. After all, she was probably a burglar and a murderer. She was probably a psycho killer. She probably ate people, too. After she tortured them.

  I trembled again. Being James Bond was a heavy burden to bear, but I owed it to Underwear Girl. I needed to be brave for her. I couldn’t back down. I couldn’t let her down. I couldn’t pass out and fall down. There was no down for me. I had to go up. That was the only way. I needed to take a deep breath and walk across the street, but for some reason, my legs weren’t cooperating. It was like they were telling me to stay hidden behind a tree.

  For a moment, I totally agreed with my legs. It was better to stay hidden. I didn’t want to be murdered like poor Annie Benoit! Even if Mary Kay wasn’t armed, there were plenty of knives, forks, and spoons at Saladz, and she could use any of them to maim me. She could gouge out my eyes or saw off my arm. She could do a lot of damage with cutlery.

  I grew dizzy, and I began to see stars. “No!” I cried, fighting off unconsciousness. “I won’t let Underwear Girl down!”

  Somehow, I was able to walk again, and I walked right across the street and asked to sit outside. They seated me just two tables away from Mary Kay. I had a direct line of vision to her, and she had the same line of vision to me.

 

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