Murder at the Lanterne Rouge (3 page)

“What?” René glared. “A man wrapped in plastic doesn’t point to an affair of the heart.” René’s eyes filled with pain, and something else.

“But who’s the victim?” Aimée asked. His library card had told her his name and that he’d lived in the quartier. She wanted more from Prévost.

Prévost ignored her question. “Where did the Wus go, Monsieur Friant?”

René shook his head. “Like I told you, I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t you question the woman from the tofu shop, the people in apartments overlooking the area, the shop owners?” Aimée shook her head. “Someone noticed. Called it in.”

A long-suffering look filled Prévost’s eyes. “We’re talking to all persons of interest.”

Wasting time, more like it.

“A man’s been murdered,” René snapped. “But you’re grilling us?”

Outside the clear circle in the steamed-up window, Aimée saw a police truck idling on rue Beaubourg. Moments later it cleared the way for the van from the morgue. A lone passerby watched. A sad end.

“More than one way to peel the onion in Chinatown,” Prévost said. “That’s what it’s about here.”

Meaning what, she wondered. “Did you find a weapon?”

“My job’s to ask the questions. Not you.” Prévost stared at René.

An unmarked van pulled up outside on the street, and three men emerged wearing sweaters, no coats. One yawned, stretched, and climbed back inside.

Her shoulders tightened. Now it fit together. “You’re conducting police surveillance in the area,
n’est-ce pas?
The murder’s connected?”

“Not for me to say,” Prévost said.

His gaze flicked over the men hunched at the counter and
darkened. His thin lips tightened. He glared at her—a warning to shut up? One of the
mecs
at the counter half turned as if he were listening.

Turf issues? she wondered. Bad blood between competing forces? Had they stepped into the middle of a rat’s nest?

Aimée noticed René’s short legs dangling from the stool, his dripping handmade Lobb shoes. She caught the wince as he shifted. The damp exacerbated his hip dysplasia.

“Different rules apply here,” Prévost said. “Gangs, protection. The quartier’s infested with gangs and protection rackets. These Chinese glom together like sticky rice.”

His thinly veiled racism didn’t inspire much confidence. Probably a member of the right-wing France for the French party.

“Quite a generalization, Prévost,” she said. He spilled too much for a
flic
. Or he was warning them of the score. Why?

“
Et alors?
I’ve worked this quartier five years,” he said, his tone changing. “My wife’s from Shanghai; she says the same thing.” He thumbed the pages in his notebook. Wrote something. A professional demeanor now. He slid two business cards over the table.

“What avenues are you looking into?” Aimée asked.

“Too early in the investigation to say.” He stood and put his notebook in his coat pocket. “Tomorrow we’ll talk at the
commissariat
.”

She sensed something else. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. What was this surveillance?

The men at the counter smelled of RG,
Renseignements Généraux
, the hydra-headed intelligence branch on Île de la Cité. Not known to cozy up with uniforms at the counter. But if they worked surveillance in Chinatown, had the murder muddied their surveillance? Or was it all connected?

• • •

O
UT ON THE
dimly lit street, she pondered Prévost’s insinuations. Was the murder retribution by a Chinese gang for stepping into the wrong territory? Or for a debt? A woman?

Meizi.

“Zut, René, the area reeks of surveillance. We don’t know what’s going on.”

“We’re going to find out, Aimée.”

“Us?” For once René, Mr. Play-it-safe, wanted to investigate something criminal? Talk about the shoe on the other foot. “You did notice the
mecs
at the counter, René.”

“No answer at the dojo,” he said. “It’s closed.”

“You think Meizi would go there?” she asked.

René’s green eyes blazed. “Meizi’s parents hide in the back of their shop if a customer comes in.”

“They don’t speak French.”

“
Exactement
. Few Chinese here do. Fewer have papers.”

René’s words were filled with implications she didn’t like to think about. “The Wus operate an illegal business?”

René shook his head. “Like we’ve talked about that during the little time I’ve had with Meizi and her parents?” He waved his short arm. “This street’s full of sweatshops. Hear that?” In the dark street, she heard a low thrum. “Buildings tremble at night, Meizi told me, from machines in basements and attics. Sweatshops full of illegals working in secret. The last thing anyone wants to do is draw attention. Didn’t you see how everyone ran away? They’re scared.”

Or guilty. Aimée’s boot heel caught in a drain. She couldn’t let it go. “Yet someone tipped off the
flics
,” she said. “Ask yourself who, if no one wants to draw attention. The word got out, the old woman gave the warning in the
resto
. If Meizi already knew, or—”

“Somebody wanted the body found, Aimée,” René interrupted.

She kicked an iced cobble, regretted it right away. “After she opens your present, serves the soup, Meizi takes a phone call. Disappears.”

René ran his fingers through his hair, then knotted his scarf around his neck. “I know she’s in trouble.”

“An understatement, René. Her … friend was murdered behind her family’s shop.”

“Meizi’s my soul mate. She never talked about anyone else,” René said. “
Zut
, you met her parents. Strict and traditional. Something’s happened, don’t you see?”

Why couldn’t he get it? “René, the victim carried her photo in his wallet.” She wanted to sit him down in the snow, make him understand. “Prévost regards her as a suspect.”

He shook his head. Denial. “
Bon
, I don’t need your help to find Meizi. Not that you offered, Aimée.”

He took off down the iced cobbles, favoring his right leg. He usually tried to hide his slight limp.

Her heart ached. She didn’t want René hurt. Her mind raced with scenarios—Meizi, illegal, maybe owing a debt, finding René, a dwarf, thinking him an easy mark. A vulnerable man, due to his stature. What if Meizi had been playing cat and mouse, giving and withholding? Using her parents as a chaperone tactic to ensnare René into marriage for residence papers?

She caught up with him at the corner. Took his arm and stared at him. “I could have told Prévost. I didn’t, did I?”

He shrugged her off.

“
Mais
, you’re my best friend, René,” she said. “I’m in this with you.”

Aimée followed his gaze to the Wus’ shuttered luggage storefront, the scattered wet plastic bags in the gutter. He flipped open his phone and hit Meizi’s number. He shook his head, his brow creased. “Her phone’s off.”

A light flickered on in a floor window above the shop. Had
the Wus returned? The back walkway was blocked by orange-and-white-striped crime-scene tape labeled
Police Zone Interdite
. But on rue Volta, she saw a side door to the building, grillwork with a lion’s face at its center.

Too bad she’d left her lock pick set at the office. She took out her mint dental floss.

“Flossing your teeth?” René quirked an ironic eyebrow at her.

“Stand in front of me.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, René.”

He stood in the snow caked in the doorway as she knotted the floss and slipped her finger inside the ornate, rusted grillwork. The knot caught on the brass handle, which she knew came standard in these seventeenth-century doors. She tugged, heard a click, and pushed the creaking door open.

“Hurry, René.”

A
IMÉE HIT THE
light switch, illuminating a narrow staircase winding upward like a corkscrew. The timed light clicked in eerie counterpoint to their footsteps on the cracked, upturned linoleum. Fried garlic and sesame oil odors clung in the shadowy corners.

No answer when René knocked on the shop door.

Aimée studied the ancient gas fixtures poking from the hallway ceiling, the metal spigot dripping into a pail. Just like many an old tenement. She imagined more than a hundred people living in this building, one sink per apartment and a communal WC between the floors.

A hum grew louder as they ascended the stairs, like cicadas in Provence at summer twilight. But in this decrepit hallway, cut by sharp drafts, the hum issued from something else.

“What’s the noise?”

“Sewing machines,” René said, his voice low.

Sweatshops.

On the first-floor landing, René pointed to an unpainted door. “This one’s above the shop.”

He knocked. Footsteps sounded behind the door, then muffled Chinese.

“Meizi, it’s René.”

Aimée’s fingers clenched. Now they’d get an explanation, maybe not the one René wanted.

The door opened halfway. A young Chinese man in an undershirt peered from behind. Smells of sleep, of too many bodies and kerosene from a heater wafted out. Behind him she caught a glimpse of a room lined by rough wooden platforms where ten or so men slept. A bared slit of a window, flaking stucco walls. Like a narrow cell. Alarm bells went off in her head.

“I’m looking for the Wus and Meizi,” René said.

The young Chinese man shook his head. With an abrupt movement, he waved his hands as if shooing them away. “
Cuò wù!
”

Shaken, René stepped back.

“We mean from the shop downstairs,” Aimée said, pointing below. “The Wu family?”

He shook his head again. Fear in his eyes. “Wu,
non
.” He shut the door. She heard the bolt slip from inside.

Aimée’s stomach sank. She realized this was the only room above the shop. “I don’t like this, René.”

Heads peered over the banister, figures above them watching.

“
Excusez-moi
,” she said, looking up, trying one more time, “we’re looking for Monsieur and Madame Wu. Meizi Wu.”

Suspicion and fear emanated from the darting shadows; the figures began stepping back and closing doors. She sensed quiet despair in the lives crammed on each floor. Door latches bolted.

An eerie quiet filled the hallway. The Wus didn’t live here. She doubted they ever had. “Let’s go.”

Out in the icy street, René put his gloved hands in his pockets. They walked the block toward René’s car. His mouth was tight, holding something back.

“Talk to me, René.”

“Those men do the jobs no one else will, work like slaves.”

Another side of René, whom she thought she knew so well. The fighter for the underdog. But wasn’t he one himself?

He shook his head. “Meizi’s in danger.”

“What if she’s staying with a friend from the dojo?” Aimée said.

René’s eyes pooled in anguish. “Already left messages. No one’s returned my calls.” Suddenly he snorted in disgust. “Look at that!”

His snow-dusted Citroën DS sat wedged, bumper to bumper, between a Renault and a dented blue camionette. A too common occurrence these days, with tight parking in medieval streets.

After a twelve-hour day, all she wanted was to get warm and sleep. “Skin tight,” she said. “Start the engine. I’ll push.”

She put on her leather gloves, hitched up her coat in the cold. René started the engine and hit the windshield wipers, sending sprays of snow. Aimée tried to push the parked camionette so René could pull out.

No luck.

Standing in the street, she guided René centimeter by centimeter as he edged forward, then reversed.

This would take hours. Cold, her legs numb, she spied a jogger coming down the pavement, his breath puffing.

In this weather?

“Monsieur, mind helping a moment?”

Together, they shoved the camionette’s bumper back a tad. Then again. Every shove gave a centimeter. Aimée caught her breath, perspiring under her coat. She noticed two figures
huddled on the corner. She was about to enlist their aid when she did a double take. She recognized that pink wool cap.
Her
cap. The one René borrowed for Meizi last week.

The darkness shrouded the pair of faces, but she could see the man shove the woman and then shake her. Clinking metal echoed off the stone. He’d thrust a bag into her arms.

Meizi?

Aimée’s heart thumped.

Had René noticed?

But now they’d gone. Aimée took off, wishing to God her heeled boots would gain traction on the ice. Snow fell faster now, little flurries whipping off the stone walls. She skidded, threw out her arms to break her fall. A sickening feeling seized her in the long moment before she hit the wall.

Jolted, she took a moment to stand up. At the corner she looked both ways. No one. Had she imagined it? But in the yellow streetlight she made out mashed footprints in the piling snow.

It had all happened so fast, she thought, hurrying back to René’s car. Did Meizi have another boyfriend? Or was she in trouble?

“Running off, Aimée? But you need to push again,” René said, twisting the wheels. Ice chunks spit and frosted her calves.

Two more shoves of the camionette’s bumper and René’s Citroën broke free of the logjam.

“
Merci
, monsieur,” she called after the jogger, who had already headed off into the shadows.

In the passenger seat, Aimée pushed a wet blonde lock from her mouth and hit the heater. She longed for the leather seats to warm up. “Take a right at the corner.”

He paused mid-shift, stepped on the clutch. “Did you see something?”

She hesitated. Should she tell René? Reveal that Meizi had been two-timing him and stringing him along? But she didn’t know that. Didn’t even know if that was Meizi. Yet.

“My wool hat you lent Meizi—I think I saw a woman wearing it. Up there.”

René ground into first and shot down the street.

For forty minutes they cruised the narrow, winding streets, back and forth, up one end of the quartier, down the other. No woman with Aimée’s cap, no answer from Meizi’s phone.

René pulled up on Quai d’Anjou in front of Aimée’s seventeenth-century apartment on Île Saint-Louis.