Little Death by the Sea (32 page)

“I don’t know what other kinda help you want
from me!” Donnell’s hands flew to his mouth where he began to gnaw
the forefinger with some vigor. “I confessed to everything, didn’t
I?” His voice was muffled.

“Man, take your fuckin’ hands outta your
mouth,” Burton said, his eyes flashing at the man seated across the
table from him.

Donnell jerked his hands back to the
table.

“I said I did her, right? I told you who and
how I—“

“And now we just wanna know why, Bob.”
Kazmaroff spoke softly to countermand Burton’ roughness.

“Yeah, Bob,” Burton said quietly. “Why’d’ja
do her? How come, man?”

“How come?” The killer looked at the
detectives with wide eyes as if he didn’t understand the
question.

“Yeah,” Burton said. “Like, instead of riding
your bike ten miles that day...or say, painting your living room,
why did you go out and strangle someone you didn’t know? Why?”

“Why?” the man chirped back at them, a
panicked look beginning to appear on his face.

Kazmaroff didn’t know how much more patience
Burton had for this kind of crap but he knew it was considerably
less than he had and he was about to throttle Donnell with the next
repeated “why?” or “how come?”

“Well,” Donnell crooned softly, staring at
his bad hands, “’cause she never cared about me. That’s the
reason.” He looked down at his shirt front, resting his chin
against his chest. “She only pretended to when he was around but
when he was gone she used to laugh at me or not talk to me at all,
not talk to me or look at me never, just pretend like I
didn’t...like I wasn’t there.”

Kazmaroff eased the front legs of his chair
back onto the ground. Here we go! he thought, a small pulse of
excitement bursting in his chest.

Burton’ calm face hid his own eagerness as he
nodded his head and picked up the pencil from the table.

“Who?” he asked.

Donnell looked up, a mask of misery and
frustration. “Betty,” he croaked. “You know? Betty?”

Burton restrained himself from screaming:
Betty Rubble? Betty Crocker? How would I know what Betty you’re
talking about you stupid prick?!

“Betty?” he said, instead.
“Your...mother?”

Donnell nodded bitterly and buried his
sweating head on his folded arms upon the table.

“Mother,” he said, weeping. “I picked up the
gun, she looked so much like Mother. I had to kill her.”

The gun? Burton covered his face with his
hands.

“He didn’t do it,” Kazmaroff said to no one
in particular over the prisoner’s sobbing. “He didn’t friggin’ do
it. I’ll be damned.”

3

Maggie took a sip of tea from the fragile tea
cup, its roses long faded from the translucent china rim. Across
from her, on a dark red velvet loveseat trimmed with heavy gold
tassels and ropy fringe, sat Michele Zouk, her small, slippered
feet tucked daintily under her. Zouk held her tea cup with both
hands and gazed pensively at the worn, expensive Oriental rug on
the floor. She had wept, briefly, while making the tea, her back to
Maggie as she spooned the loose tea into the large china teapot and
then poured in the boiled water. Now, Zouk sat silently and sipped
her tea.

Maggie waited and watched the French woman.
It didn’t seem odd to her at all to discover this exquisite
creature as the best friend of her sister, Elise. Elise, who had
grown up in old-south-Atlanta, with white-gloved parties and little
friends whose fathers were either colonels or reverends. And
although Elise may have rebelled against the gentility and
sterility of a southern childhood, she’d nonetheless, lived it.
Maggie imagined that Michele Zouk had probably been the
dream-embodiment of all of Elise’s fantasies of who she wanted to
be. The difference was that this woman had grown up in an
environment that had been friendly to her exotic development, had
encouraged her sense of style and presentation. Elise’s ages-old
habit of bucking the system had become so completely ingrained in
her that she couldn’t stop once she’d achieved her dream, her level
of desired sophistication. Unlike Zouk, Elise had turned to drugs
and despair to fill in the gaps for her.

“Your sister was my dearest of friends,” Zouk
said finally, sharing a sad smile with Maggie. “Une amie de coeur,
you are familiar?”

Maggie nodded, knowing the term if not the
sensation.

“She once lived near here. Do you know
that?”

Again, Maggie indicated that she did. This
time the woman shrugged.

“Ahh, but you want to hear what it is you do
not know, am I right?”

“Madame Zouk,” Maggie said, taking a long
breath. “I am trying to find out who killed her.”

Their eyes met and locked. Zouk’s long lashes
fluttered briefly and she looked away. “And you have come to Paris
to do this?” she asked doubtfully.

Maggie pushed her empty tea cup onto the
nearby hassock which was dressed to match the ornately gilded
loveseat. “I’m not quite sure why I’ve come to Paris, to tell you
the truth,” she said, sighing. “I need to talk to her ex-boyfriend
and he’s here—“

“Gerard Dubois?”

“That’s right. Do you know him?”

Zouk shrugged. “But, of course. He is a very
bad man. When he took Elise with him to Montmarte, I cried for
Elise.” Michele poured herself and Maggie more tea. “I was very
sad. I cried and begged her not to leave. But it was l’amour, eh?
She was in love with him.”

“So, you knew her before she met Gerard?”

“As I’ve said, her apartment was very near.
She would shop here, we would talk. We were of one spirit, do you
understand?”

Maggie nodded. Elise had, of course, never
mentioned this woman in any letter or phone conversation to Maggie
or her family.

“I was older but we were both artistes, in
our own ways. We met when she came into the shop one day after her
art classes. Your sister was very beautiful, Mademoiselle. She
would have made a wonderful model. We talked and became friends.
Soon, we would shop together, have dinner together. She was so
different from my other French friends, yes? Her...American-ness
made her blunt and forward. I found it charming.” Michele smiled at
the memory. “Elise wanted so much to be French and, in many ways,
she was very French. But it was the, how can I say this? her
straightforwardness, yes? that I found beguiling and valuable.”

“She shot from the hip,” Maggie
suggested.

“
Exactement
. To be so beautiful and so
honest...”

“Elise didn’t always tell the truth,” Maggie
added gently.

Zouk laughed. “No, of course not. I wasn’t
talking of honesty in that way. Elise had many secrets and some of
them so bad that I feared they would end up killing. But we
resonated, she and I. The beautiful American
artiste
.
Tortured, intelligent. And the most loving of friends.” She glanced
at Maggie to see her reaction. “I loved her very much,” she
said.

“And Gerard?” Maggie prompted.

“When Elise met Gerard,” Zouk said, her
cheeks darkening in anger. “everything started to die for her. We
saw less and less of each other until, poof! Nothing. He moved her
to his apartment—filthy pigsty!--in Montmarte. She would write me.
We live in the same city, but she would only write me!” Michele
Zouk’s eyes were wide and indignant. “Then, he drags her and the
child south—“

“You knew Nicole too?”

Zouk got up to rummage through a bureau
drawer standing against a wall in the cramped little room. She
returned holding a small photograph. She examined it carefully
herself and then handed it to Maggie. Maggie felt her heart squeeze
to see Elise, a few years younger and smiling sweetly at the
camera. In her lap was eight-month old Nicole, a thin and pallid
baby with large eyes and dark hair. Maggie scrutinized the tiny
face of the baby in an attempt to see a resemblance to the Nicole
now living in Atlanta.

“May I keep this, please?” she asked the
woman. “I...I’ll have a copy made and return it to you, okay?”

Zouk sat back down. “Keep it,” she said,
straightening out the long, languid pleats of her skirt with pale,
tapered fingers. “After they moved to the
Cote d’Azure,
” she
continued. “I never saw her again.”

“But she still wrote to you?”

“She did.” Zouk tossed a small wadded-up
paper napkin at the tea tray perched on the tasseled hassock.
“
Monsieur
Dubois is a swine and a jackal,” she said. “He is
your murderer, Mademoiselle. I am sure of it.” Michele Zouk’s eyes
were a deep, frigid blue.

“Do you know Monsieur Dubois very well?”
Maggie asked the French woman.

Michele’s face hardened into a frown. “You
are looking to find him in Paris, are you not?”

“I am.”

Zouk contemplated Maggie briefly and held her
teacup to her lips.

“I know where you can find him,” she said
grimly.

Chapter Eighteen

1

The little china plate that held her two
over-sized croissants was obviously antique, Maggie noted, as she
spread freshly-made jam on her rolls. She had risen early to
breakfast in the hotel before the rush of tourists and travelers,
and had the pleasure of a solitary meal in a very sunny and very
French dining room.

After she had left Chez Zouk, Maggie had come
directly back to her hotel and gone to bed. Now, refreshed and
ready to begin her investigations, Maggie ticked off her to-do list
on a small pad of paper. The walls of the little dining room were
lavishly papered in a country French mini-fleur design combined
with an elaborate border and ribboned panels. It was pretty in a
confusing sort of way, Maggie decided. The same unpleasant young
woman who worked the front desk served her coffee and croissants
and was no less cross in this new role. Maggie was determined to
ignore her while being as cheerful as possible herself during her
stay at
L’Etoile Verte.

After breakfast, Maggie dropped off her room
key at the front desk and left the hotel, heading north again
toward Notre-Dame. There seemed to be even more people out this
sunny, but cool, Saturday morning and Maggie picked up her pace to
join them in their hustle. All their hurry and urgency was in sharp
contrast to the numerous cafés filled with happily idle
coffee-drinkers, smoking and arguing politics and philosophy. As
she hurried along, Maggie had another twinge of missing Laurent and
wishing they were just another couple mooning over each other and a
cup of
café-au-lait
at one of the crowded tables.

She hesitated when she reached Notre-Dame and
had to fight the impulse to again take a seat on one of the stone
benches in the cathedral gardens facing the Seine. The roses, in
tender colors of pink and violet, were still in full bloom in early
October and the air felt cool and invigorating. Even at eight in
the morning, there were lovers strolling the sidewalk bordering the
Seine, and solitaires reading
L’Express
and munching on
crusty baguettes. Maggie forced herself to move on. Hurrying across
the Seine on Pont St.-Louis, she spotted a Metro sign and jogged
down its steep stairs to board the train to Montmartre.

Maggie emerged from the underground station
and entered a seedy world of cheap strip shows, porn cinemas and
sex shops. Although still wearing its late-nineteen twenties
Bohemian artist’s garb of darks and sooty grays, Montmartre had
long since become mired in the oily underworld of drug lords and
panderers. The streets were filthy, the few reputable shops sold
leather-studded costumes or pizza-by-the-slice, and “
Ne Rodez
Pas
” signs hung from most doorways. No loitering.

As Maggie wandered through the squalid
avenues, once teeming with easels and colorful characters and
stories, she could almost believe that she was about to bump into
one of Pinnochio’s “Donkey boys” fresh from Paradise Island.

She could see the milky-white dome of the
Basilica Sacre-Coeur peering between the high windows of tattered
apartment buildings. Her mother had taken her and Elise to Mass
there as well. She wondered if Elise had ever taken her own
daughter there. The church would easily have been walking distance
from their flat. Turning away from Sacre-Coeur, Maggie headed west
up
Rue de Steinkerque
, passing two-penny instant portrait
artists and paper-etchers busily snipping out a living doing
die-cut portraits for the throngs of tourists who were gripping
their cameras and fanny bags. Noisome, shabby hucksters flapped the
air with “original” Montmartre landscape watercolors and etchings.
Maggie kept her eyes on the next street block and trudged
ahead.

She turned north onto
Rue des Martyres
and continued down it until it dead-ended into the
Rue des 3
Frères
, stopping only once to check the address on the slip of
paper that Madame Zouk had given her. There, at the intersection,
was the hospital. A small, dilapidated structure held together by
what paint had not yet peeled off and the oil and grit of the
neighborhood.
L’Hopital des Martyres
. This is where Elise
had gone to give birth to Nicole.

Maggie drew in a long breath and marched up
the front steps. Inside, she had the feeling she was stepping back
in time. The velvet, buttery smell of wood oil permeated throughout
the reception room. So strong and pleasant was the scent, in fact,
that it succeeded in blotting out any aural hint of medicine or
antiseptics in the small hospital. The loose wooden-slatted floor
was polished to a satiny gleam. The admitting desk was as tall and
forbidding as was the severe-faced nun who manned it. Her eyes were
small and unfriendly, and her broad face, though smooth and
unlined—almost like a canvas pulled tight behind her wimple—was
still quite obviously the face of an old woman.

“
Bonjour, ma Soeur
,” Maggie said in a
tiny voice as she approached the woman behind the desk. “
Est-ce
que je vous demande une question, s’il vous plait
?” May I ask
you a question?