Murder in the Rue Chartres Read Online Free PDF

a storm forms in the Atlantic, we pay attention—a little. I had the Weather Channel playing on my big-screen TV, just to be on the safe side.
    I’d opened the door. “Mr. MacLeod?” she’d asked, an eyebrow raised in a questioning manner, as though I wasn’t what she was expecting.
    She was a tall woman, probably around five-nine in her stocking feet, but she was wearing gray stiletto heels that added a few inches to her height. She was thin—almost too thin in that way some women get, that looks unhealthy. She had a flat chest and almost non-existent hips. She was wearing all gray—skirt, jacket, and silk blouse, with a double strand of pearls knotted at her neck. The hand she extended for me to shake was bony and pale, with long, manicured nails. Her green eyes were almost too large for her narrow, angular face. Her lips were small, and her fine blond hair was swept back into a tight chignon on top of her head. She appeared to be nervous, but then, most of my clients are when they show up for the first meeting.
    I’d invited her in, asked her if she wanted coffee (which she declined), and offered her a seat. She’d sat down and crossed her legs, her eyes occasionally darting around my apartment, taking in my artwork, and judging it—the expression on her face clearly showing that she found my taste in art considerably lacking. “Would you mind shutting off the television?” she asked. Her voice was shaky and high-toned, almost like a little girl’s. She’d gone to McGehee, I decided, and had probably been a Tri Delta at either Newcomb or Ole Miss. “Hurricanes bore me.” She tilted her head to one side. “It’s all anyone has been talking about all morning. No one seems able to get any work done.” She folded her hands together in her lap. “Like talking about it will make it go somewhere else, the idiots.”
    I bit my lip to keep from grinning and obliged, picking up the remote and pressing the power button. “What can I do for you, Ms. Verlaine?” I gave her what I call my reassuring, I-can-solve-all-your-problems face.
    She favored me with a little smile, which warmed her face up a bit. She was, I decided, pretty when she relaxed her face. “All business? I like that, Mr. MacLeod. What I want you to do for me is relatively simple, actually. I could probably have my assistant do it for me, but then Valerie is an incorrigible gossip—it would be all over the office by lunchtime—and I would prefer this to be my little secret for now, so can I count on your discretion?”
    “Yes, Ms. Verlaine. Your secrets are safe with me.”
    “Good.” She started twisting a diamond on her ring finger. “I’m getting married in the spring, and I would like for my father to give me away.”
    “Okay.”
    “The trick, Mr. MacLeod, is that I don’t know my father, and I don’t know where he is. I’ve never met him. He left my mother when she was pregnant with me, and no one has ever heard from him since.” She said it in a rush, as if she’d been practicing at home in front of a mirror, to get it to sound just right. But then, she struck me as the kind of person who always prepared herself, so maybe she had.
    “And how long has that been?”
    The faint smile flashed again. “One should never ask a woman her age, Mr. MacLeod, as you well know, but as this is pertinent to the investigation, he disappeared in 1973.”
    I whistled. “Thirty-two years? You haven’t heard anything from him in all that time?”
    She nodded. “I realize that makes it harder.”
    “Why did you wait so long?”
    She raised an eyebrow. “My mother died a few months ago. She was a rather, um, formidable woman. The mere mention of my father drove her into an insane rage, and when she was angry—” She shuddered at the memory. “Let’s just say it wasn’t possible while she was alive. But she’s dead now, and I am getting married, and I’ve always been curious about my father. My two older brothers barely remember