French Fried by NANCY FAIRBANKS Read Free Book Online Page B

at the airport and drive you to your hotel.”
    “Oh dear,” I said. “This professor’s name is Robert Levasseur? Is he, by any chance, French Canadian?”
    Jason said he was sure he had mentioned Robert to me after the Canadian meeting. “Well, if you did, I was much too upset to remember after being rescued from the lifeboat,” I retorted. What a terrible story I had to tell these people about a member of their department. “I’m afraid I know what happened to your professor. When I entered my hotel room, I found him seemingly asleep across our beds, having eaten half the pâté delivered to us as a welcome gift. I took him for a thief and had the police summoned.”
    “A thief !” exclaimed Madam Laurent.
    “Well, he did eat our pâté,” I replied defensively, “and I didn’t know who he was. He was lying there on his stomach making funny noises, and then the horrid hotel woman said he was dead.”
    “Dead?” they exclaimed in a ragged chorus.
    “If you didn’t know who he was, why was he in bed in your hotel room?” demanded Victoire, as if I had arrived for an assignation, only to find his body.
    “I really couldn’t say,” I replied. “I’d never seen the man before, or even heard his name until today. You’d have to ask a very unpleasant woman at the hotel desk. She’s the one who let him into our room. Maybe he was a friend of hers.” Madam Laurent looked exceedingly angry.
    “As I was saying, when the medical examiner arrived, he agreed with Yvette that he was dead, so Professor Levasseur was taken away in a body bag.”
    “My God, not another corpse!” muttered my husband.
    “Actually, he wasn’t dead,” I protested, “and if he had been, it wasn’t my fault. After I had lunch with the inspector and the doctor, Doctor Petit went off to perform the autopsy. At that time it was discovered that your friend wasn’t dead after all.”
    “Then where is Levasseur?” demanded the chairman.
    “In some hospital. They sewed up the autopsy cut and sent him off, according to Inspector Roux, who called me with that information tonight. That’s what I was trying to tell you, Jason, when I arrived.”
    All the members of our group then burst into agitated conversation in French while the waiter served a dessert that the chairman had ordered for the whole table, something to do with the Red Cross—a red tart, a red fruit, some white strips, and something that looked like a chile relleno with sugar sprinkled on it. I approached the dish with great caution, while Jason stared at me accusingly, as if I had personally endangered his friend.

10
    “Who, in Lyon, Would Want to Kill Us ?”

Jason
    We were both so tired that we dozed until the cab driver woke us up at Perrache and then the hotel. Much to my surprise, the Charlemagne was nicely decorated. We were given a large key at the desk, after which we squeezed into an incredibly small elevator. When I mentioned that the hotel seemed better than expected, Carolyn admitted that it was, except for the bathroom, where the shower sprayed water everywhere, especially on the floor because there was no curb between the shower stall and the bathroom floor. She also assured me that we were not in the room where Robert had fallen ill.
    Feeling conscience stricken that I had left her to face such a trying situation, I apologized. Then, while I had a shower in the dripping bathroom, Carolyn returned a phone call. When I waded out, wrapped in a damp towel, she told me that Robert was now dead.
    More bad news. “It’s hard to believe that a medical examiner could make a mistake like that,” I said, accepting the pajamas Carolyn had retrieved from my suitcase, which the cab driver had, for a tip, retrieved from the locker at Perrache.
    “Doctor Petit thinks it’s significant that your friend appeared dead when he wasn’t. He’s having the lab follow up on an idea he has about what might have been in the pâté, and of course, he’ll have toxicology