Murder in the Marais (24 page)

F
RIDAY

Friday Morning

H
ARTMUTH'S NIGHTMARE S WERE FILLED
with ice tongs and crying babies. Sleep had eluded him.

There was a slight knock on the door from the adjoining suite. It would be Ilse. He pulled on a robe and shuffled to the door.

"Mein Herr,"
Ilse said, her eyes bright as they quickly swept his room. "You are back! I checked late last night but your room was empty. We missed you!"

Hartmuth forced a grin. "This rich French food, Ilse, I'm not used to it. If I don't walk, it just curdles in my stomach."

"
Jawohl,
you are so right. Myself," she sidled closer to him, "I miss our German food. Simple yes, but so good and nutritious." Without missing a beat, she continued, "I don't mind telling you, mein Herr, that Monsieur Quimper and Minister Cazaux are of the old school. Because of their sincerity, all the delegates have agreed as of tonight to sign the treaty. But of course, this happens tomorrow at the ceremony. And with your signature to make it unanimous."

"What time is the ceremony, Ilse?" he said in as businesslike a tone as he could summon.

"Nineteen hundred hours, mein Herr," and she smiled. "In time for the CNN worldwide news feed. A nice touch, I thought." She lumbered to the door.
"Unter den Linden."

The treaty was as good as signed.

Friday Noon

A
IMÉE KNOCKED TWICE
,
THEN
again. Slowly, Javel opened the door wearing a tattered undershirt.

"I'm busy," he said, not smiling. "There's nothing more to say."

Aimee put her foot in the door. "Just a few minutes; it won't take long," she said and slid through the doorway.

He grudgingly stood aside in the hallway.

"Does this go into your shop?" Aimee said, pointing at a damp, moldly door.

He nodded, his eyes narrowing.

She quickly climbed the three stairs and pushed the door before he could stop her.

"Eh, what are you doing?" he said.

By the time he had painstakingly climbed the steps she was back out the door again and had shot past him down the narrow hallway.

He caught up with her in the parlor and found his tongue. "You're just a nosy amateur detective running around in circles," he said.

Aimee stared at him. "You heard the whole thing, didn't you?"

"What are you talking about?" he asked angrily, gripping the back of his only chair.

"In this shop and around the rue Pavee. The spot's so close I bet you can spit that far," she said.

He spluttered, his eyes furtive. "None of this makes any sense. You're all the same!" He hastily shut the drawer in his pine kitchen table and moved to his rocking chair.

"Is that why you decided to take the law into your own hands, be a vigilante for a fifty-year-old crime?" she said.

He was obviously hiding something. She sidled next to the table, opening the single drawer by its rusted knob.

"What are you doing? Get away from there!" he yelled.

Aimee felt under Arlette's hand-embroidered napkins and reached towards the back. She pulled out a string bag and yarn from the drawer. "Why did you keep it?"

"Keep what?" he said.

"Lili Stein's bag and her knitting," she said as she lifted it out of the drawer.

"I-I found it," he said.

"On Wednesday you overheard Lili and Sarah talking about the past," she said. "From what you overheard, you thought Lili had killed Arlette, fifty years ago. After Sarah left, you confronted Lili. Lili vehemently denied killing her but she called Arlette a thieving, opportunistic blackmailer who had it coming to her. Didn't she?" She paused, looking at Javel's glittering hate-filled eyes. "Or words to that effect. You reached in your pocket for the only thing available," she said and pulled a thin wire out of her pocket. "You followed her, then strangled her with one like this from your shop. Finally, you carved the swastika to make it look like neo-Nazis."

She dangled the metal shoe wire in the air. "See the clear plastic at the end of this that protects and makes it easy to lace through the holes. That bit came off next to Lili. The other end is in the police evidence bag," she said.

Shaking his head, he screamed, "Stop this fantasy. Stop these lies!"

Aimee continued, "It's this that puts you at the scene of the crime with a motive!" She held up Lili's bag with her knitting.

His face was florid and he was panting.

"But you had killed the wrong person. Arlette's killer was back in Paris," she said.

"No! Idiot!" he said, furiously shaking his head back and forth. "Never left, I tell you."

She watched him carefully. "You were about to kill Hartmuth, only. . ."

"Lies, lies," he screamed.

When he rushed at her with an old pipe he'd lifted from behind the chair, she was prepared. Swiftly she twisted the pipe away and tripped him up. He thudded to the ground and she straddled his legs, immediately pinning him down. She felt sorry for him until he ripped out chunks of her hair while he struggled. "Jew lover! Arlette's murderer is still alive!" he said, gasping.

"Are you going to fight me all the way?" she said. "OK, little man, I can fight too." Whereupon she punched him solidly in the head. "That's so you won't cause me any more hair loss."

At least he couldn't fight her now. She stood up, attempting to brush her roosterlike hair down. She lifted his bowlegs and began to drag the semiconscious man awkwardly through his hallway. A stinging whack whipped her off balance and she landed under his old television. She envisioned the TV's rabbit-ears antenna about to spear her as they tumbled off, but she couldn't move.

"Javel, Javel!" she mumbled.

Silence. Then the insistent jingle of bells.

A
IMÉE WONDERED
why they hadn't even bothered to trash the place. Javel's bulging eyes stared at the ceiling. His head was cocked in a way only a dead man's could. He had been strangled by wire from his own shop, just like the kind used on Lili. Someone had tried to make it look like suicide, dangling him from a rafter. The note looked genuine enough, especially if he'd been forced to write it.
I will join you, Arlette.

Only she had heard him scream. She'd come to and passed out again. Why hadn't she been strangled, too? A distant jangling lodged in her brain. The bells. Then she recognized the noise. Bells from the shop door to the street meant customers who came in and out. A voice asked, "
Il ya a quel qu'un?
Somebody here?" Then the bells jingled and she heard the door shut as the customer left.

She struggled out from under the TV table and felt guilty. Again. She'd accused Javel and when he started telling her that Arlette's killer was alive she'd slugged him. The killer, entering through the connecting shop door, had probably stood right there and silently thanked her. Until sending her across the room, knocking her and her theory to smithereens. Not only had she barked up the wrong tree but she'd helped the killer.

But why go to the trouble of making it look like suicide? Unless the killer had been about to do Aimee when a customer appeared, but even then? Maybe now the feisty little Javel would join his Arlette after all this time.

Lili's string bag was gone. A puffy white cat slinked around her ankles like a feather boa and meowed.

"Poor thing, who'll take care of you?" Aimee said, rubbing its head. She staggered through the blue beaded curtain to fetch milk for the cat, then she stopped. What had Lili carried in her string bag beside her knitting? Javel would have hidden anything else he'd found.

She started searching, pulling drawers and cupboards apart to find out. Might as well make it look like the crime she figured it was. Poor old Javel, he had little and threw little away. His one armoire held unworn starched white shirts and two musty suits. A pair of lambskin handcrafted shoes, the kind few people could afford to wear anymore, sat unworn on the lowest shelf. His hall cupboard held an unused bed linen set, yellowed by age and probably embroidered by Arlette.

She searched every grime-infested nook in his apartment. Nothing but the remnants of a lonely old man.

Maybe Lili didn't have anything else in her bag. . .or the killer had known what to look for and found it. Frustrated by another dead end, she slumped against the cupboard. The circumstances of Javel's murder puzzled her.

He'd probably spent most of his time in his shop so she decided to search that next. The sharp tang of leather assaulted her as she entered. Under the display of arch supports, she found his cluttered work tray. Tightly wedged against the wall, it took her several tries before the tray came loose. Under leather scraps lay a small book, beat-up and well thumbed. Black spiders crawled over Lili's handwriting. With trembling hands Aimee lifted the journal as skeins of multicolored wool trailed to the wood floor. She brushed the spiders off and stuffed the journal under her designer jacket.

In Javel's room, she poured cat food into the bowl. As she left, she made the sign of the cross, then whispered to Javel, who gazed sightlessly at the ceiling. "You were right. I'll get him this time."

B
ACK AT
Leah's, Aimee read from a torn page of Lili's journal:

I know it's him. Laurent, the greedy-eyed wonder who sat by me and copied my answers on math tests. The one who sniggered at Papa working behind the counter, who called us Yid bloodsuckers to my face then dared me to do something about it. The one whose family owned a building but acted like he owned the block. WORSE than the Nazis, he made sure that everyone in school who'd ever rubbed him wrong paid. Power, pure and simple. Sarah's parents were the first, he even boasted about it. Earned one hundred francs for each denunciation. But me, I killed my parents the day I took a stand and refused to let him cheat. My big moral standing sent them to the ovens. Jewish or not, he informed on anyone. Arlette, greedy and stupid, laughed at him, her big mistake. And he's going to do it again.

Sarah's hand shook as Aimee passed her the torn fragment.

"Would you recognize him after all these years?"

"If Lili could. . ." She rubbed at the tears in her eyes. "He had a birthmark on his neck, like a brown butterfly."

"Of course he could have hidden it, done something surgically," Aimee said.

"I always wondered who denounced my parents. Laurent was older, in Lili's class. I never said much, tried to avoid him. Something about him I didn't like."

"There has to be proof in black and white," Aimee said. "That's why Lili contacted Soli Hecht. But I need documentation to prove it. Can you recall where he lived, this building Lili mentioned?"

"On rue du Plâtre around the corner from school," Sarah answered right away. "His parents were slumlords; it's the prettiest tree-lined street in the Jewish ghetto."

"Stay here, Sarah. You're not safe on the street."

Frightened, Sarah crossed her arms. "But I can't do that. I have a job. Albertine needs my help, she counts on me."

"Call her," Aimee said. "She'll find someone else for now."

"But there's an important supper party this evening—," Sarah started to say.

"It's not safe for you or anyone with you. You'll put them in danger. Stay here, off the street. Albertine will manage." Aimee could tell Sarah hesitated, still not convinced. "If Lili recognized Laurent and got killed for it"—Aimee paused and spoke slowly—"don't you realize you're next?"

A
IMÉE ENTERED
the schoolyard off busy rue des Blancs Manteaux to see lines of children filing up the lycee steps. Probably just as they had done fifty years ago. This time there were no yellow stars, only clumps of adolescent dark-skinned children with big eyes walking past taunts and insults.

As she approached, a teacher noticed her and quickly admonished,
"Arrête."
The jeers subsided.

"Are you a parent?"

"I have business in the office."

"May I see your identification? We take bomb threats seriously." The puffy-faced teacher looked like she needed another night's sleep. "Ministry of education's edict."

"Of course." Aimee showed her.

"Over there and to the right." Behind the teacher a fight had broken out and she left to break it up.

Inside the school office a rotund ebony-faced woman squinted as she checked the computer. "Records are in the basement if we've kept them and the silverfish haven't eaten them," she said.

"Thanks, can you check?"

"Last name?"

"First name is Laurent and the family lived on rue du Plâtre," Aimee said.

The secretary raised her eyebrow. "Years of attendance?"

"Between 1941 and 1945, during the war."

The secretary looked up immediately and shook her head. "After ten years, everything is sent to the ministry of education." She shrugged. "Check back in a couple of weeks."

"But I need it now!"

"Everybody needs it now. Do you know how many children attended the school at the time?" She looked at Aimee. "Frankly, I'd say don't waste your time, nothing got put on microfiche until the sixties."

"Any teacher or custodian who might have gone to school here?" Aimee said.

"Before my time," the secretary paused, "but Renata, a woman in the cafeteria, has worked here as long as I remember. That's all I can suggest."

In the yellow-tiled cafeteria, Renata, a woman with a thick gray braid wound across the nape of her neck, narrowed her eyes in suspicion.

"Who did you say you were?" she asked.

Aimee told her.

Renata just shook her head.

One of the servers, a prune-faced woman, walked over to Aimee and nudged her. "She forgets to turn on her hearing aid."

Aimee thanked her and pointed to Renata's ear. Renata only scowled.

"She's quite vain about it. Thinks none of us know," the woman, whose name tag said Sylvie Redonnet, confided. "As if we cared. Half the time we go around yelling at her since she can't hear."

Renata stirred the ladle of a steaming pot of lentils.

Aimee turned to Sylvie, who grinned. "Maybe you can help me?"

After Aimee explained, the woman nodded her head. "Believe it or not, I'm too young to have been here in the forties," she chuckled. "Now my sister, Odile, a few years older than me, was. Go ask her—she loves to talk."

"That would help me, thank you."

"You'll be a treat for Odile, she can hear." Sylvie glanced in Renata's direction. "But she's wheelchair-bound. Around the corner, number 19 rue du Plâtre."

Aimee felt a glimmer of hope when she heard the address.

O
DILE CACKLED
from five floors above as Aimee huffed up the steep metal-grilled staircase. "One thing I don't have to worry about."

Aimee reached the landing at last. "Odile Redonnet?" she said. Looks certainly did not bless this family, Aimee thought, looking at the shriveled crone in the black steel wheelchair.

"Pleased to meet you, Aimee Leduc, my sister phoned about your visit. Come in." Odile Redonnet wheeled herself ahead of Aimee into the apartment. "Please shut the door behind you."

After two potfuls of strong Darjeeling tea and exquisite freshly baked madeleines, Odile Redonnet let Aimee get to her point.