Murder in Montmartre (4 page)

Monday Night

AIMÉE TWISTED GUY’S RING back and forth on her middle finger. The cloudy moonstone in an antique setting reflected the sky’s changing weather. Perfect for her, he’d said. She tried to think of something else. The Commissariat cubicle in which she sat being questioned felt glacial. Several overhead fluorescent panels had burned out, casting uneven stripes of light on the pitted linoleum.

Opposite her at the metal desk, a twenty-something
flic
with a razor-sharp jaw pecked with two fingers at the keys of a black typewriter. Didn’t he have a computer?

“
Voilà
, Mademoiselle Leduc,” he said, pulling the paper out of the roller. His cigarette smoldered in a filled ashtray. He leaned back in his swivel chair and eyed his large sports watch. “Read over your statement to see that it’s correct. Then sign at the bottom.”

She read the five-page statement twice, then nodded and signed. “Please attach this, too.”

“What’s that?” he asked, stifling a yawn.

“A diagram illustrating my statement,” she said. So far she hadn’t seen a computer. “I presume you will scan my statement and this diagram into a computer?”

“Curious type, aren’t you?”

She heard the monotonous thrum of a printer from a back office. “Will you?”

“We know our job, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Now if you’ll come with me.”

She shuddered. Good thing she’d made a copy of her diagram.

He escorted her across the foyer of the deserted Commissariat to a holding cell adjoining the dispatcher’s room. It was more like a cage, she thought, with its steel bars, furnished only with a wooden slat of a bench. The
flic
unlocked her handcuffs and gestured her inside.

“Wait a minute, you haven’t charged me. How long until—?”

“Sit back and relax,” he interrupted and left.

The corners stank of old socks and other things she didn’t want to think about. Across from her, flyers for a police-sponsored community marathon walk and bike security tips sat piled on the counter by the glass-paned reception cubicle.

She rubbed her hands, coarse from the lab soap they’d given her after the gunpowder residue test, and paced three steps across the small cage and back, hoping she wouldn’t really have to stay here all night. So far she hadn’t seen Laure.

She pictured the scaffold skirting the building’s blue-tiled roof. The cape of snow, the angle of Jacques’s body, his turned-out pockets, Laure’s obvious concussion . . . but her mind kept going back to Jacques’s gunshot wound. Had his killer been lying in wait? On a night like this, why had Jacques left a warm café and persuaded Laure to accompany him? Why had he ended up dead on the slanted zinc roof in a storm?

To play devil’s advocate, if in fact Laure and Jacques had continued their argument, and Laure wanted to kill Jacques, easier and less damning ways existed. A blow rendering him unconscious, then a whack of his skull against stone bollards was one method. She’d read about it only last week in the daily
Le Parisien
. Or she could have tripped Jacques on the stairway leading up to Sacré Coeur. There were so many ways to stage an “accident.”

Yet she’d found
Laure
unconscious from a blow! Surely, the lack of gunpowder residue on Laure’s hands would establish her innocence. She hoped the
flics
had questioned the
mec
standing at the building gate. He might have seen something.

. . .

A female officer, wearing a blue jumpsuit unlocked the cage, shaking Aimée out of her reverie.

“You’re free to go,” she said, handing Aimée a plastic bag containing her things.

Just like that? Morbier had put in a word, she figured. She hoped he’d done the same for Laure.

“Like a coffee?”

Grateful, Aimée nodded, accepting a cup of espresso. “
Merci
. What I’d really like now is to find Laure Rousseau.”

The
flic
grinned. “And I’d like to find the man of my dreams. We can all hope, right? Try Hôpital Bichat.”

THE SCUFFED walls and peeling linoleum of Hôpital Bichat needed refurbishing. Laure, her head bandaged, sat on gurney in the hall outside the triage area, accompanied by a tired-looking
flic.
“. . . speak with an attorney,” Laure was saying. Her words were slurred.

“Officer, may I have a few words with Mademoiselle Rousseau?” Aimée asked.

“You’re family?”

“She’s my friend. Please!”

The
flic
adjusted his tie and then tapped his fingers against the metal gurney.

“
Bon.
I’ll check with the Préfecture concerning the charge against her.”

“What do you mean, charge? Check with La Proc. There’s some mistake.”

She saw his noncommittal expression. Then a flush rose from his neck to his cheeks. At least he had the decency to feel shame. After all, Laure was one of his own.

“Let me find out what’s going on,” he said.

“Where’s the physician on call? Look at her. She needs immediate attention!”

“Bad timing. Several trucks collided on the Périphérique. She’s next for intake.”

Aimée saw the caked blood on Laure’s temple, heard her labored breathing, and noted her dilated pupils. The classic symptoms of shock. The officer moved down the corridor, trying to find reception for his cell phone.

“This is all a formality, Laure,” Aimée assured her. “There’s a mix-up.”

“Mix-up?” Laure’s shoulders shook. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “The technicians found gunshot residue on my hands. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Gunshot residue? Aimée was startled. “I don’t understand.” She had assumed Laure, too, would be cleared by the test. “There’s got to be an explanation. When did you last fire your gun?”

“Maybe a month ago,
bibiche,
at the firing range, I think. I can’t really remember,” Laure said, her eyes glazing.

It didn’t make sense. Then how could she have residue on her hands now?

“Tell me what happened after you left the bar.” Aimée put her hand on Laure’s shoulder. “Take it nice and slow.”

Laure shook her head. “Jacques was acting strange. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Aimée smelled the tang of the chemical used in GSR testing and saw Laure’s fingertips, black from the fingerprint test. They hadn’t even wiped her hands off.

“So you went along with him,” she prompted.

“But I wondered . . .”

“What?” Aimée asked.

“His informer . . . Why would he meet an informer there?”

A meeting on a slippery roof on a frigid, snowy evening? Made no sense, Aimée concurred.

“It must have been a setup.” Laure leaned against the wall and rubbed her temples, leaving black streaks. “My head, it hurts to think.”

Aimée’s eyes narrowed. “A set-up. How do you know?” Aimée asked.

“All I know is
I
didn’t kill him.” Laure’s shoulders shook. “Jacques was the only one who gave me a chance. He took me under his wing. You can never return to the force if your partner’s killed and you’re . . . you’re th-the suspect.”

“We’ll straighten this out, Laure,
reste tranquille,
” Aimée said, even as she wondered what she could do.

A door slammed somewhere. The fluorescent lights flickered. Drunken voices shouted in the hall. An orderly ran down the green-tiled corridor, his footsteps echoing.

“You’ve got to help me,” Laure said. “Everything’s hazy, it’s hard to remember.”

Aimée feared they’d saddle Laure with an appointed attorney and conduct a minimal investigation. Or, more likely, just forward the inquiry to Internal Affairs, where police-appointed judges presided.

“They relish making an example of
flics
like me,” Laure said.

The sad thing was, it was true.

But she had to reassure Laure. “It won’t come to that, Laure. Like I said, there’s been some mistake.”

Laure stared at Aimée, her lip quivering. “Remember, we promised we’d always help each other out,
bibiche
,” she said. Laure leaned against Aimée’s shoulders, sobbing.

Aimée held her, remembering how Laure had always had to play catch-up, had been the butt of playground jokes before her cleft palate surgery, yet had dreamed of a career like that of her heroic, much decorated father. Unlike Aimée, who kept the
flics
at arm’s length.

“I swear on Papa’s grave, I didn’t kill Jacques.” Laure gripped Aimée’s arm, then closed her eyes. “I’m dizzy, everything’s spinning.”

“Laure Rousseau, we’re ready for you now,” said a nurse.

About time, Aimée thought. “Looks like shock, a concussion,” she said.

“Diagnosis is our job, Mademoiselle.” The nurse wheeled the gurney toward a pair of white plastic curtains.

“How long will it take?”

“Intake and observation will take several hours.”

The same
flic
walked past her. Aimée caught his arm. “I’ll come back then to pick her up and take her home.”

She recognized a “don’t count on it look” in his eyes as he shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have time to explain.”

“Take my number, call me.” She put her card in his hand.

He disappeared behind the curtains.

AIMÉE STOOD on the gray slush-filled pavement in front of the hospital. She had to do something. She couldn’t stand the idea that Laure, still injured and in shock, would be arraigned at the Préfecture. There had to be evidence to clear her on the scaffold or the roof. There had to be some way out of this nightmare for Laure. She pulled out her cell phone with shaking hands and called her cousin Sebastian.

“
Allô
Sebastian,” she said, eyeing the deserted taxi stop. “Can you pick me up in ten minutes?”

“For the pleasure of your company?” he said. “
Désolé,
but Stephanie’s making a cassoulet.”

Stephanie was his new girlfriend, he’d met her at a rave.

“Remember, you owe me?” Aimée replied.

Pause.

“It’s payback time, Sebastian.”

“Again?” She heard music in the background. “What do I need?”

“Gloves, climbing boots, the usual. Make sure the tool set’s in your van.”

“Breaking in like last time?”

“And you love it. Don’t forget an extra set of gloves.”

Sometimes you just had to help out a friend.

SEBASTIAN, WEARING tight orange jeans, an oversize Breton sweater, and a black knit hat pulled low but with the glint of his earring still showing, gunned his van up rue Custine. His over-six-foot frame was squeezed into the beat-up van he used for deliveries. Beside him, Aimée sat scanning the shuttered cheese shops, florists, and darkened cafés dotting the steep, twisting street. Once this had been a village high outside the walls of Paris. Parisians had flocked to the
butte
, “the mound,” to dance at the
bal musettes
, to enjoy
la vie bohème
and to drink wine not subject to city taxes. Artists such as Modigliani and Seurat had followed, establishing ateliers in washhouses, before their paintings commanded higher prices. Then Montparnasse had beckoned.

“
Voilà
,” she said, pointing to the gated building with leafless trees silhouetted against the lights of distant Pigalle.

The crime-scene unit and police vans were gone. Jacques’s car,too. Sebastian parked by a fire hydrant Parisian style, which meant wedged into whatever space was open on the pavement.

“Bring the equipment, little cousin,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Eighteen rue André Antoine, a white stone nineteenth-century building, faced others like it on a serpentine street. Gray netting camouflaged the upper floor and scaffolding of the roof, which adjoined the other buildings in the courtyard. A red-brown brick church wall partially occupied the rear of the courtyard, cutting off the view. She’d hoped to question the man who’d stood on the steps but he had not lingered. Only a crust of snow crisscrossed with footprints remained.

The wind had died down. From somewhere came the muted squeak of a creaking swing. The crime-scene unit must have left not long after she’d been evicted, evidenced by the light dusting of snow on the cars now parked where the police vans had been. Thank God, the architect Haussmann had been unable to swing the wrecking ball here. No one could tear these buildings down or the ground underneath would collapse. The earth was riddled with spaces and tunnels . . . like a Gruyère cheese, as the saying went. Aimée could never figure that out; Emmenthaler was the cheese with the holes. You received a certificate that the building was sound when you bought a place. But, as a friend had informed her, the latest geological calculations had been made circa 1876.

She rang the concierge’s bell, unzipping her jacket to reveal the blue jumpsuit Sebastian had brought for her, and noted that there were no names inscribed above the upper floor’s metal mailboxes. Several moments later, a sharp-eyed woman answered. She wore a man’s large camel coat belted by a Dior chain, black rain boots, and had a cigarillo clamped between her thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t tell me you forgot the body?” she said, exhaling acrid smoke in Aimée’s direction.

Startled, Aimée clutched a workbag labeled Serrurie and leaned away from the smoke.

“I’m here to change the locks,” Aimée said.

“But the locksmiths were already here.”

Aimée stamped the ice from her boots on the mat. “To secure the windows and skylight access?”

“Far as I know.”

“But we’re doing the
rear
windows. They didn’t finish.” She jerked her hand toward Sebastian. “We had the parts back at the shop.”

“What do you mean?”

Aimée thought fast, wishing the concierge would quit questioning her.

“Tiens .
. . they didn’t tell you . . . the rear windows need special locks?”

The concierge sighed. “The apartment’s vacant. The upper floors are being remodeled.”

“
Bon,
we’ll go home,” Aimée said, turning toward Sebastian. “You can explain to the commissaire why snow blew in through the windows to blanket the apartment like a rug. Squatters will love it then.”