Ellen Crosby: The Merlot Murders

I hadn’t.

Eli was waiting for me, as promised, when I pushed my luggage cart through the double doors into the main part of the international terminal. He hugged me in the stiff-armed way brothers and sisters do and murmured in my ear, “I can feel your ribs. You’re a walking X ray, Luce.”

Spoken by someone who’d lost sight of his own ribs some twenty pounds ago. At least. He had the beginning of a small, self-indulgent paunch. I pinched his new set of love handles. “I can’t feel yours.”

So much for the greeting.

“Yeah, well, I added a few pounds but it’s all muscle. I play a lot of tennis now. Come on. Let’s get out of here.” He commandeered my luggage cart. “Can you manage? We could get a wheelchair, if you want.”

The first time he’d ever treated me like I was handicapped. “Why would I need a wheelchair? I can manage just fine, thanks.”

“Don’t be so touchy, babe. Just asking.”

It was also the first time he’d ever called me “babe.”

I’d been expecting the brother who once went a month without brushing his hair to see what it would look like. The Eli who used to wear whatever he found on the floor in the morning, retrieving it from where he’d dropped it the night before as long as it didn’t smell too nasty. Instead I got a GQ model, dressed in a pale pink Lacoste polo shirt, khaki shorts, sockless in doeskin-soft Italian loafers with tassels. Someone who clearly understood the difference between mousse and gel and cultivated a regular relationship with a blow dryer.

We emerged from the terminal into the sizzling white heat of a late-August afternoon. Eli whipped on a pair of Ray-Bans and I blinked in the hard light.

“It’s a hundred and two,” Eli said, staring at his watch.

“Degrees? Don’t tell me that watch is connected to the National Weather Service, too.”

“I wish. I heard it on the radio driving here. I’m just looking at the time. We’re forty-two minutes behind schedule.”

“This is as fast as I go, Eli.”

He looked surprisingly uncomfortable. “Oh. Sorry.”

He stopped behind a black Jaguar XJ so shiny I could see my reflection in it. The license plate said Eli 1.

I’m not a car person. If it moves when you turn the key in the ignition, I’m happy. Two years ago Eli drove a beat-up Honda with a dented front fender.

“New car?”

He gave me the dumb-question look and hit the button on his key to turn off the alarm and unlock the doors. “Yup.”

In the old days I would have razzed him about his new toy and the hair and the clothes. He would have retorted with something in kind in the ego-deflating way siblings have of keeping each other humble. But these were the new days so I said nothing.

The Jaguar purred toward the tollbooth and slid onto the highway. Office buildings in various stages of construction sprouted like weeds after rain on both sides of the road. Red gashes in the clay soil looked like open sores where the earth had been bulldozed and flattened. Two years ago this had been farmland. Maybe if I’d seen the destruction unfold gradually it would have seemed less brutal.

“When did all this happen?” I asked.

“All what?”

“All this building. Why do they have to do this?”

“Do what?”

“Destroy everything.”

“While you were away,” Eli said, and I knew that any sentence beginning with those words was going to end in some kind of indictment, “progress happened.” He emphasized the word “progress.”

“I don’t think this is progress.”

“That’s because you spent the last two years in France in a fossilized village, where they have laws to protect every stone or patch of ground because Joan of Arc or DeGaulle might have walked on it. Look, Lucie, the world didn’t stop just because you weren’t around to watch it change.”

“Don’t start.”

“Don’t you.”

“Say what you want, these buildings are ugly. Look at them. All the same. Who builds this stuff?”

“As a matter of fact,” said my-brother-the-

architect, “we do.” He pointed to a building striped with pink stone and blue-mirrored glass. “My firm built that one. We won a design award for it.”

Frankly he could have turned off the air-conditioning after that remark. The temperature in the car verged on glacial.

“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. “I didn’t mean to insult your building.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.”

I stared out the window. After a while I said, “What was it you wouldn’t tell me on the phone?”

He sighed noisily. “Oh God. Where do I start? It’s Fitz. I want you to talk to him and tell him to knock off spreading these crazy stories about someone bumping off Leland. You’re his goddaughter. He’ll listen to you.”

“What if they’re not crazy stories?” I asked. “You wouldn’t be covering up something, would you?”

He looked at me over the top of the Ray-Bans. “Don’t be an ass.”

“I’m not an ass. I just don’t believe Fitz would say something like that if there weren’t some truth to it.”

“I hate to burst your bubble,” he said cruelly, “but Fitz is a barely functioning alcoholic. Catch him late enough in the day and he doesn’t know if he’s on foot or on horseback. Get it now? The elevator doesn’t make it to the top floor anymore. The porch light’s on but nobody’s…”

“Stop it!” I yelled, covering my ears with my hands. “Please stop it!”

He drove in silence for a while, but a muscle worked in his jaw and I knew we weren’t done.

“Just suppose,” I said after a few minutes, “that he’s right. What about some of Leland’s business partners? What do we know about any of them, except that most of them probably live under rocks? What if Leland owed someone money and he couldn’t pay it back?”

“And some hit man took him out.” Eli looked at me curiously. “That’s a hell of a theory for you, Luce. You, ah, wouldn’t be in financial trouble yourself, would you?”

“Of course not. I’m fine. I got money from the accident settlement, remember?” What little I’d hung on to that Philippe hadn’t spent. Mostly in Monte Carlo.

I still had nightmares about the midsummer’s evening we’d left the casino—he’d won, for a change—when two men wearing ski masks forced us off the Route de la Moyenne Corniche near the medieval mountaintop village of Eze. The view of the Mediterranean was spectacular from that height, especially at sunset. I wasn’t the only one who appreciated it. One of the men held a gun to Philippe’s head and told him in vulgar terms that he would be seeing the water from a much closer vantage point unless he handed over all his money.

After they pistol-whipped him they took his belt and bound my hands tightly to the steering wheel of his Porsche. It took a long time before Philippe came around. When he did, my wrists were bleeding and I was still trying to untie his belt with my teeth. I wanted to go straight to the hospital and the police but Philippe said it was too dangerous. They’d find out. They’d come back for us.

That’s when I knew it hadn’t really been a robbery. He owed someone that money. I realized, then, how much he was like my father, a charming façade masking a complete fake—the kind of man who’d swear over the phone he loved you while making the call from another woman’s bed.

“Look, sweetheart,” Eli was saying as if he read my mind, “Leland’s so-called business partners were flakes who sold stuff like extraterrestrial real estate. Not the mob. I’m talking condo developments on the moon. Buy early for the best view of Earth. Losers. Like he was.”