Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

Au Bon Coin by Eric Wright

Born in England, Eric Wright emigrated to Canada in 1951. His distinguished career as a novelist and short story writer has earned him Canada’s most prestigious crime award, the Arthur Ellis, four times. His new novel, published in late 2010, is A Likely Story; it’s the third in his Joe Barley series. The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn, in which Barley debuted, won a Barry Award and was nominated for three other awards, including the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar.

“Hello, Daisy. Come in, come in. My, how pretty your hair is today; that lovely silver color really suits you. Come in; sit down. I’ve just made coffee. Good of you to find the time. There. Cream? No? Then let’s get started.

“First, here’s an e-mail I got from Robert two weeks ago. Lots of the usual personal stuff — he still gets very uxorious in his letters. Sorry: got. I’ll miss that. Anyway, after a couple of pages of that and some mentions of the parts of Paris that he and I had seen together — very little, really, though Givenchy was a wonderful afternoon; then the obligatory visit to the Café des Lilas — there was this:

” ‘Last night I took a colleague to one of our favourite restaurants, Au Bon Coin; you remember? Near the Place Monge Métro station. It was as good as ever, especially the herring and potato starter. Last time you and I both had sweetbreads followed by the apple tart. Afterwards we walked along the Rue Mouffetard,remember? All the time I was there I was thinking of you, and hoping we could get back to Au Bon Coin together one day soon.’

“The rest is about the weather, the conference, and his jet lag. That’s the essential passage.

“I was very frightened. You can imagine why. You’re not saying anything. I’ll get on, then. The thing is, dear, I’ve only been to Paris with Robert once, and never to a restaurant called Au Bon Coin,so understand my alarm. You remember about a year ago — no, exactly eleven months ago — I had a small stroke which temporarily affected my memory, though I remember the date of the stroke exactly. However, I was young for that sort of event, and I got over it pretty quickly. I’m not allowed to drive but I never liked driving, anyway, so it was a bit of a relief, sometimes an excuse to avoid doing things I don’t want to do. And the memory thing is manageable. Nowadays I’m careful to write down all appointments, even casual arrangements with friends, and I’m rarely at a loss anymore. So you can understand when Robert’s e-mail asked me to remember something I had no memory of, I got frightened. I thought I had regressed, even had another stroke. Then I decided to reconstruct the event for my memory. That works sometimes, in smaller things. If I can’t remember anything about a movie I saw the previous day, not even the title, I can usually work at it and recover it eventually. I have a lot of trouble with those movies that are all imagery and no plot, foreign movies especially. But my neurologist said the brain is like a computer — it’s all there somewhere, you just have to find a path to it. Sorry, I’m wandering.

“As I say, I’ve only been in Paris with Robert once, and I have no memory of a restaurant called Au Bon Coin,or walking along a street called Rue Mouffetard,some sort of market street, I gather, but I keep a journal when I’m traveling — the same book contains all my travel experiences — so after Robert’s funeral I dug it out and found the trip to Paris. With the help of this journal I could remember and reconstruct everything about that trip, including meeting the nice American girl who asked Robert if he knew the French word for ‘quiche.’ I had to stop him making fun of her. And there was no dinner at Au Bon Coin. No, sir. Dinner was accounted for every night, the name of the restaurant, even what we ate and if we liked it. And both times we stayed a long way away from that Métro station, at a hotel called Hotel des Balcons on the Left Bank. There, see. Even now, I don’t have to look it up. I remember. Paris was like that.

“More coffee? No? So from being frightened, I now started to be worried. What was going on? I can tell you my mind touched on all kinds of possibilities. I mean you never really know anyone, do you? I mean, if other people knew what was going on inside our heads, we’d all be arrested, or at least very hard to live with, I’ve often thought that. So — do you remember that Ingrid Bergman movie about a man who was trying to drive his wife mad so he could get her money? I don’t have any money, of course, but it did occur to me that maybe he wanted to be free of me and was starting some sort of campaign. I mean, once you realise you don’t know all about someone you’ve lived with for twenty years, there might be a lot of things you don’t know. All the rest of the stuff in his head, or his psyche, I guess.

“Luckily, I woke up very clear-headed one morning and realized that if I went on like this I would go mad. So I decided to find out. How? First, I thought, I would fly to Paris, and see if the actual restaurant would bring back memories.”

“You flew to Paris?”

“No, dear, I thought of it, but then I had an idea for a simpler and cheaper way. I found a detective agency in Paris that could make my enquiries for me. You know how distinctive Robert was in appearance. He shaved his head when he started to go bald, and that along with the new goatee and the gold earring he put in when he got his Ph.D. made his appearance at least memorable, if not as distinguished as he hoped, so I dug out a couple of recent pictures of him and e-mailed them to the agency with some instructions. I told them to find out if any of the waiters remembered seeing Robert lately, and who was with him. I suggested they could say he was wanted by the Toronto police, but they said that wouldn’t be necessary.

“It took them two days to reply, saying that all, my dear, all of the waiters as well as the cashier, who was the proprietor’s wife, remembered him, because of his appearance and his clumsy French. And they all remembered that his partner was an attractive woman of a certain age with pretty hair. That was a surprise, but I found a picture of who it might be and e-mailed it to the agency. Sure enough, I’d guessed right.

“Now there was just the mystery of the letter. How had he screwed up? Sit down for a minute, Daisy, I won’t be long.

“Robert may have seen himself as the suave adulterer — I think he did — but he was also an academic so he was a bit of a fusspot, especially, lately, around his computer. He had taken his laptop with him, of course, but I guessed that he had backed everything up, twice over, probably, so I set about looking through his files, you know, his backup discs, where he would have stored everything in case he lost his laptop. It took me a couple of days, but I found it eventually.

“I started searching with the name of the restaurant, Au Bon Coin,you remember? That was all I needed. I found the name mentioned in one letter, in the paragraph I just read to you, and then I had an idea. I found a phrase somewhere else in the letter that was very distinctive. Here it is: ‘I was reminded of a poem by Lamartine: “Le Lac.” ’ I searched for and found exactly the same phrase in two other letters to different people. So I started a real search and, to cut a long story short, I realized what he had been in the habit of, so to speak.”

Now Daisy spoke. “Sending the same letter to different people? Surely not. It must have been a glitch in his address book.”

“No, inserting the same travel-writing chunk in different letters. Harmless enough if he had more skill with his computer, and hadn’t been so obsessive about backing everything up. The thing is, along with the travel bit, he had screwed up and copied — highlighted, probably — more than he intended. Once you realized what he had done, you could see it all.”

Daisy said, “Is there a chance that all of his correspondents would have got the same message?”

“We’ll never know, will we? Let’s move on.”

“Did you kill him?”

“One step at a time. I didn’t mean to kill him, if that’s what you’re asking. It was an accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just wanted to land a symbolic blow before I kicked him out. It seemed appropriate. His field was the French Symbolistes,after all. So I waited until he put down his laptop — I wanted to hit him with that — that’s what I call symbolism — and I picked it up and swung it down on his head. The thing that killed him, though, according to the doctor, was hitting his head on the corner of the table as he went down. He was dead when the paramedics arrived. It was the hall table, not me. So it was accidental. That’s the verdict.”

“You meant to hit him, though.”

“Just symbolically.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“I said he tripped on the rug and hit his head on the table. They were very sympathetic.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Obviously, so that you will know. I think you ought to know how your little dalliance in Au Bon Coinended.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a risk? If I take this story to the police?”

“Not much risk of that, is there? I’ll keep the letters on file. There’s the other story there, isn’t there, the one you wouldn’t want to share with anybody?”

Daisy stood up. “Robert told me all about you. I see now what he meant.”

“Did he? He didn’t say a word to me about you, and that’s rather the point, isn’t it?”

Copyright © 2011 by Eric Wright