Widow - Anne Stuart [3]
He wiped the doorknob with the tail of his shirt. He didn’t have time to do more, and while he didn’t think he’d touched anything else, he figured getting out of there was more important than trying to wipe out any trace of fingerprints. There was no reason why anyone would think he’d been there. Sure, he had a grudge against Pompasse for getting in the way of his story, but it wasn’t a killing grudge.
Maguire was out of the building and halfway down the street before he breathed a sigh of relief, certain no one had seen him. Maybe his luck was going to hold, after all. He had no reason to feel guilty—just because he despised the old man didn’t mean he’d killed him. He despised most of the people he wrote about. Besides, he could come up with a pretty good argument that Pompasse’s death would hurt his book deal, not help it. Now that Pompasse was dead, maybe there would no longer be a market for his salacious history.
Maguire knew otherwise, but he could probably convince the police of it. He’d always been good at talking his way into and out of any difficult situation. Assuming no one thought he had anything to do with the old man’s death, a murder was the best possible thing that could have happened. The old man deserved it, and it would sell books. Maguire was nothing if not pragmatic.
The café near his run-down apartment was empty in the middle of the afternoon, and he had the place to himself. He was halfway through the pack of cigarettes he’d sworn would be his last when he remembered the paintings in the apartment. The young bride—he still couldn’t remember her name. She’d left him years ago, or else Pompasse had tired of her. He no longer painted women with luminous eyes—his models were younger still, pale and frightened-looking creatures.
So who had killed him? He was willing to bet it was one of the women that Pompasse always had around him. The old man had liked his harem—during his research Maguire had found out that he had mistresses from all periods of his life still in residence out at his countryside villa. Any of his castoffs would have had reason to push the old man down the stairs.
He stubbed out his cigarette, then lit another one. He was smoking too much and he knew it, but right now he had more important things to worry about than the state of his lungs. He was putting his money on the one with the golden eyes. The widow, Madame Pompasse herself. She lived in the States, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have come back and killed him. If she was the one who did it he could find proof easily enough—he wasn’t constrained by the kinds of rules that hamstrung the polizia. And it would make one hell of a final chapter.
But for now, he was going to finish the crumpled pack of Gitanes and his cup of coffee, and then put in a call to Gregory. And maybe tomorrow he’d quit smoking.
Charlotte Thomas was in the midst of kneading bread dough when she first heard that her husband had died. It had been a peaceful morning—in the sweet-smelling environs of her apartment kitchen she’d been immersed in dough and yeast and cinnamon, and the calm, rhythmic slap of the dough against the marble counter. She loved making bread—it was a form of meditation, done in an early-morning kitchen with only the sound of birds outside.
She lived in the middle of Manhattan, and the sound of the birds was usually overlaid by the noise of traffic, even at six o’clock in the morning. But serenity was only a state of mind, and she ignored the rumble of engines and the shriek of tires, concentrating on the imperceptible noise of the pigeons that nested in the crevasses of the old prewar building on East Seventy-third Street.
If she’d been listening to the radio she probably would have heard the news, but she didn’t like reality to intrude on her baking time.