Murder in Passy (5 page)

“Crime of passion sounds convenient,” she said.

“More like they wanted to warm their
derrières
.” Thesset shrugged.

“Any leads yet?” she asked offhand.

“Not my call. Or my turf.”

A twinge of guilt passed through her. Here she held a photo of the dead woman in her hand. But Thesset could search without making an official report. And if she’d jumped to conclusions, say the old couple at the party had borrowed the Mercedes, no one would be the wiser. No harm done. No record.

“I’m not supposed to do this, you know.”

“But you’re the pro, Thesset.”

Thesset’s expertise lay in navigating
Système D
, the catchall term for getting things done. He was efficient behind the thick-lensed gray-framed glasses mounted on his beaklike nose, his misleading sallow jowls and permanent squint. “Like a pigeon,” she’d once said to her father at the Commissariat, and he’d put a finger over his mouth. “
Shhh.
We call him that, but never to his face.”

“
S’il vous plaît,
Thesset. I’m asking on behalf of Morbier.”

She heard the fax machine come to life behind the wooden partition, tried to ignore the acrid cigarette smoke spiraling from the ashtray on the counter, the empty pack of Mentos crumpled near the phone.

“Let the old coot request this himself.”

“
Très compliqué,
Thesset.” She leaned forward as if in confidence. “A delicate situation, if you know what I mean. Morbier’s lady friend’s daughter fell in with a bad sort—a vindictive type. Now he’s her ex and out on parole. He took her Mercedes tonight. The daughter wants nothing to do with him, no accusations, just her car back. No urge to make a report and land him back in prison and deal with recriminations on his release.
Compris?
A small favor, Morbier said. He counted on you keeping it quiet. Unofficial.”

“Sounds like a soap opera,” Thesset said.

She wished it were, but figured it wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten a request to keep
haut bourgeois
linen clean.

“Me, I’ve got work to do,” Thesset said. “Tell Morbier to get on it himself.”

“
Mais,
Morbier’s in Lyon.” She expelled air from her mouth. Tried to look helpless and without a clue. Not hard. “Some big investigation,” she said, playing it to the hilt. “I don’t know what, but he asked for my help.”

Thesset squinted behind his glasses. Put down his pen.

“Lyon? That circus?” A cough, then he cleared his throat again. “Better him than me.”

What did that mean?

“
Et alors
, in that case,” Thesset said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

The change in Thesset’s attitude intrigued her. “What’s happening in Lyon?”

“Nothing I want to know about.” He shrugged.

She left it for now and flashed a big smile. “Then how about a trace through traffic division? The patrol cars in Bois de Boulogne, little things, the usual.”

“Usual?” He snorted. “If you weren’t taller than me now, I’d take you on my lap, like I used to, and tickle behind your knees.”

She’d loved that. “And give me the hiccups.”

“Like I said, you don’t want much, do you?” A sigh. “I’ll put the alert out to my boys on patrol.”

“How long will it take, Thesset?”

“To find the car?” He shrugged. “Two minutes, two hours, two days. Depends.”

The murderer could have abandoned the car. But casting a wide net, a maxim on the force, would find it sooner or later. Regular patrols cruised the neighboring Bois de Boulogne, a stretch of forest double the size of New York’s Central Park. The big lung of Paris, locals called it, a park honeycombed with roads, horse trails, the Longchamp racing course, and also Brazilian transvestites offering their services on the fringes, a frequent issue with the consular staff of the numerous embassies dotting the 16th arrondissement.
YOU PLAY, YOU PAY,
headlined a recent scandal sheet over a transvestite’s blackmail demand, complete with compromising photos. Immediately hushed up while the junior consul was packed off to his home country.

She wished her shoulders weren’t aching with fatigue. And that she could provoke Thesset into revealing some details about “the Lyon circus.”

“Morbier promised he’d return tonight,” she said, hating to lie.

“Don’t count on it,” he said. “Between you and me, Mademoiselle Aimée, who knows. It’s three branches all jockeying for credit. A mess.”

“Anything to do with the news on the radio?”

“
Salauds
killed a
flic
. And you know what that means.”

A priority. All forces would be centered on a policeman’s killing.

“Morbier’s a Commissaire Divisionnaire now; Lyon’s not his turf.”

“It’s not for me to say.” Thesset’s eyes suddenly seemed shuttered. He was holding something back. Impatient, she tapped her nails on the police blotter and noticed a chip on her newly lacquered pinkie.

Thesset’s jaw tightened. Papers rustled from behind the partition, a filing-cabinet drawer shut. She shivered in the cold unheated reception area at the scuffed wood counter.

“Aaah. But on the radio.” She thought for a moment trying to draw him out. “Those roadblocks?
Bon,
what can you tell me?”

“Every branch’s salivating to get the
flic
-killer, that’s all I know.” Thesset pounded his fist on the counter. “The
flic
’s wife’s eight months pregnant. Poor thing.”

Sad. No doubt the
flics
were seeking vengeance. With all forces concentrating on the murder of one of their own, she realized, Xavierre’s murderer could slip under their radar.

Through the open door in the rear office, she saw a blue-uniformed
flic
pull a fax from the printer. “Thesset, look at this.”

“I’ll ring you later,” she said. “
Et merci,
Thesset.”

Aimée snapped her bag shut. Thesset disappeared into the office. She paused behind the divider, her ear to the smudged glass, and overheard “damned ETA terrorists … acting up again.”

Then the door closed.

* * *

ETA,
THE
B
ASQUE
Nationalists. Xavierre was Basque. Was there a connection? Had that worried Morbier?

The street lay quiet, apart from water rushing in the gutter. Typical of the staid
quartier
: not even a café open. But a perfect
quartier
for terrorists to hide in, in a tony residential district where everyone minded their own business. And never a taxi when you needed one, she thought, scanning the empty street. She shouldered her bag, her only companions a streetlight and the low, distant moan of a cat in heat.

Around the corner, a lone taxi paused at the intersection. Thank god. She caught it before the light changed.

“Île Saint-Louis,
s’il vous plaît
,” she said, giving her address, and popped her last two Doliprane aspirin, dry-mouthed, in the back seat. Fifteen minutes later, she punched in the digicode of her building, a seventeenth-century soot-stained townhouse on the quai, and stepped into the cobbled courtyard. Beyond the ancient pear tree, she noticed with relief, the windows in her concierge’s loge were lit.

“Late and breathless,” frowned Madame Cachou, her concierge. “As usual.”

Aimée leaned down to pet Miles Davis, her bichon frisé. His wet nose sniffed her ankles. “
Désolée,
Madame. Work. Traffic.” Murder, but she left that out.

“Good thing!” said Madame Cachou. “With my bursitis, I can’t walk Miles Davis up and down three times a day.”

Madame Cachou, a chronic complainer, was growing worse in her old age. Framed in the doorway of her loge in the courtyard, Madame handed Aimée the leash from the wall hook. Miles Davis emitted a low growl, which reminded Aimée of her shoes, the dog poo.

“Un moment,”
Madame Cachou said. “There’s a package for you.”

Warmth emanated from Madame Cachou’s loge, a steaming cup by an armchair near the
télé
showing the late-night France2 news. Aimée’s tired body ached and she couldn’t wait to get under the duvet. An announcer spoke as a scene flashed on the screen: dark sky punctuated by lights, yellow crime-scene tape, a narrow lane bordered by high walls. Her shoulders tightened. She recognized those stone walls. The walls of Xavierre’s garden.

“The Police Judiciaire refused to issue a statement regarding the murdered ex-wife of a prominent attorney found tonight in her bedroom in the 16th arrondissement.”

Bedroom?
She dropped Miles Davis’s leash.

“Sources close to the investigation revealed that attention is being focused on the victim’s relationship, referring to it as a crime of passion. The source indicated that a suspect was about to be detained.”

Crime of passion?
The hair rose on the back of her neck. The media and the
flics
had gotten it all wrong.

“Last time,” Madame Cachou said. “Building regulations don’t permit receiving business correspondence here, Mademoiselle.” She pointed to a yellowed paper of building regulations as she handed Aimée a Frexpresse package.

Always a stickler for rules, her concierge. Aimée glanced at the return address. Infologic. Work-related files she could handle tomorrow.

“I bent the rules, but …, “ said Madame Cachou, “seeing as you’re recovered, fit, and back at work, no more.”

She wished she felt fit instead of exhausted. More worry lodged in her head over this turn of events with respect to Xavi erre. The pain of telling Morbier … but he certainly must already know by now.

She trudged up the worn marble stairs to her door. Darkness, a chill, and rising damp from the Seine outside met her in her empty apartment. She kicked the radiator. Then again, until it sputtered to life. She hung up her faux fur, tossed the Frexpresse package on the hall table with her bag, and wedged off her heels. Miles Davis pawed at them. “Not this pair, furball.”

She picked them up. A dark brown-maroon blotch stained the candy-red insole. Ruined. She’d never get the blood out.

And then it struck her, piercing the fog of tiredness in her mind: she was holding the proof right in her hand. The killer’s blood. Her spine stiffened. She took a plastic baggie from the hall escritoire drawer, slipping her high heels inside. “They go straight to the lab in the morning. Good call, furball.”

Tuesday Morning

M
ORBIER’S TOBACCO-STAINED FINGERS
trembled as he lit his second Gauloise. Why couldn’t he feel numb? Numb like the victims’ families he’d broken the same news to countless times, more times than he liked to remember. And he remembered every one. Their shocked faces: “… but it can’t be”; then his words sinking in. The collapse into tears.

Why didn’t he even feel anger, hurt, grief? Instead he floated, as if out of his body. His mind blurred when he should be analyzing Xavierre’s last words, rethinking her every action.

There was so much to do, so many facets to consider in the investigation, so much to concentrate on: the crime-scene results, lab tests, questioning the family, any witnesses, speaking with Aimée. But here he was, spinning his wheels, waiting in the Préfecture’s office for Suffren. The last person he wanted to talk to. Now or ever. Suffren’s office afforded a view of the green-brown Seine. Not a corner office, but a sign of the favor he’d attained in the six years since Morbier had almost sidetracked his career.

The longer Suffren kept him waiting, the more he wondered at the abrupt summons that had taken him from the Morgue, wishing that his last view of Xavierre hadn’t been her wide red-veined eyes, her delicate neck red and bruised as she lay on the stainless-steel morgue table; that the creeping feeling of helplessness would subside; that he could do something to bring the smile back on—

The door creaked open and Suffren, a man in his early forties, whip-thin, brunette with a stripe of white hair showing above his ears, gestured for Morbier to sit down. Suffren kept his cell phone glued to his ear, emitting occasional hmms and grunts. Only once did he look up and give a small apologetic shrug.

Upstart, out to prove himself, has a chip on his shoulder
were the comments Morbier recalled from Suffren’s file. Morbier’s review team, singularly unimpressed by Suffren, had passed on his application based on his low scores on the officer examination.

If Morbier remembered this, no doubt Suffren remembered with venom. Morbier settled in the upright wooden chair, wishing he could go to the crime lab. He tried to push that aside, get the interview over with, a formality. He needed to channel his nervous energy into the anger he knew would come … so as to find out who’d done this.

Suffren hung up the phone and studied the view outside his window for a moment. In the pale lemon morning light, a lone seagull squawked on the quai and clouds floated over the jagged Left Bank rooftops.

“Commissaire,” Suffren said, leaning forward, tenting his fingers. “You had a known relationship with the victim. Physical evidence found.… ”