Murder in the Latin Quarter (7 page)

“That’s not much use to you, I know. But you helped me. And well, we should help each other when we can, right?” For a moment, humanity shone in her eyes. “Professeur Benoît’s locker’s in that lab where we met. The
flics
left after they questioned me. Far as I know, his papers will still be there.”

Guilt flooded Aimée at having misled this kind woman.

“
Merci,
” she said. “I am very grateful to you.”

She made her way over the gravel and back to the anatomy building. After searching, she found a small room containing wooden lockers and a file cabinet. She looked around.

Each locker bore a name. The third said PROF AB. At last! But it was locked.

She took the Swiss Army knife from her bag, inserted the tip, and jiggled it. On the second try, it opened. She heard footsteps crunching the gravel. There was no time to go through the contents, so she scooped everything into her bag. Including a lab coat.

Voices came from the courtyard. Her heart sank.

She closed the locker and waited behind the door. The foot-steps came closer. Two people were in conversation. She heard them enter the laboratory. They were right outside the door.

“Professeur Benoît worked in here, Mademoiselle Cadet. . . .” Huby’s voice droned.

Frantic, she looked around the small room. No other door. No way out.

A high oval window emitted slants of light. Too high to reach, unless. . . .

She stepped on the chair next to the lockers, hitched up her dress, reached her arms and elbows over the locker’s top edge, and hoisted herself up. Her knee banged against it as she struggled to lift her body. Once on top, she half-crouched, lifted the old brass latch, and edged through the cobwebbed window opening. Her second window egress in two days.

“Pardonnez-moi,
” Huby said. “I heard something fall in the back room. Let me check.”

Aimée dove through the window, praying no rocks were below. Airborne, she stuck out her hands and let herself fall. She toppled onto thorny branches and came up with a mouthful of dirt, cobwebs streaking her hair. Her bag strap was skewed around her shoulders. Birds scattered, fluttering in alarm.

A shout came from the window.

She staggered to her feet and ran like hell.

Tuesday Noon

LÉONIE OBIN STRUGGLED against her dream, fighting the rhythm of beating drums despite the sticky spilled cane-sugar liquor coating her hands. She tried to turn away from the beads hanging from the skeletal neck of Baron Samedi, his black top hat bobbing in the dance of death. Inviting her,
non,
insisting that she join him. So easy, yes, now to follow him. Succumb, and take the black-beaded necklace he offered her. Like wisps of smoke, the dream faded. A white light spread inside her throbbing head. Léonie shuddered. Bone-numbing tiredness weighed her down.

She opened her eyes and found her feet tucked under a blanket as she lay on the brocaded divan. She’d collapsed again. Someone had taken pity on her and. . . . Then last night came back to her.

Edouard, those men, and then it all grew dim. The weakness took over. Her thoughts clouded . . . the image she sought kept slipping away.

Each day, her illness worsened. The clinic doctor said her memory would be the last to go, once her brain was involved. Agitated, she stared at the painting. The frame was askew. The safe . . . more came back to her . . . she remembered. Fear clutched her as she recalled those black-hooded men and Edouard ransacking the safe. Stealing the bank account records.

Maria Madonna and Ogoun help me.

She must have spoken aloud. Someone stood by her side; a vague outline of a head came into view. She tried to focus.

“Madame Léonie, you work too much.”

A clucking sound. “Second morning this week I find you sleeping here. Are you all right?” Now there was concern in the voice. Marie’s voice. Marie was the cleaning lady. Her short brown hair and wrinkled face became clear as well as the scarred furrows of flesh that descended from under her ear down her neck. She was a burn victim. Marie’s scars put others off. But Léonie had felt the energy, the purity in her heart. Ogoun felt it too.

A wave of lucidity washed over her. Familiar things appeared; her desk, her jacket draped over a chair. It was as if she’d returned to the land of the living. And for a purpose.

By the time Marie brought a tray with lemon tea, the haziness in her brain had subsided. Léonie held the Sèvres cup handle, and not a drop spilled into the saucer.

“Madame Léonie, I came early to clean up from last night,” said Marie. “But you’re so pale, let me help you.”

The Madonna, St. George on his rearing horse, spear in hand, and Ogoun, the warrior, had let her come back. The warrior. Let her come back for a reason. Now it grew clear. Even if Edouard knew the system, legal roadblocks would stall his bank ac-count search. She’d make sure of that.

But in her clumsiness she’d alerted Edouard to the existence of Benoît’s research file. Her fault. She had to reach Benoît before Edouard did.

“Marie, my medicaments, in the drawer, please.”

Her strength ebbed and flowed like a sluggish river. She’d take her time . . . time she didn’t have, as her body rebelled. She injected the anti-viral cocktail, swallowed the black paste pellets from the healer, leaned back and tried to take deep breaths. Let her body absorb them, let these things battle inside her and hope they won. The effects of the potent mix lasted a day, two days at most.

She slept. This time restfully, without dreams or visitations.

By mid-afternoon, she’d managed to change into the dress she kept in the closet and apply rouge to hide her pallor. She folded the one bank statement they hadn’t discovered, next to her will, in her handbag.

She reached for the hated cane. Another sign of weakness. The knob was a carved goat bone, in the shape of a leering mouth. It was her only remnant of Edouard’s uncle, besides the illness he’d given her.

Fatigue hit her again. But she couldn’t succumb. Wouldn’t. As a young woman in Port-au-Prince, she’d started down this trail of lies and now it had grown out of proportion. She had nothing to lose, but Edouard did.

“Call a taxi for me, Marie, if you’d be so kind.”

She’d take care of this; she should have done it years ago. Her legs buckled and she gripped the cane.

Her juju . . . she felt for it around her neck. Gone. Edouard had taken it.

“Madame?” Marie smiled, her work-worn hands folding her apron. “I’m glad you feel better; it’s good you go out. And how nice you look.”

She needed her juju. What if Edouard had tossed it away?

“Marie, I think I dropped something on the floor.”

Marie bent down, embarrassing Léonie for a moment . . . a French woman on her hands and knees for her. “You mean your earring?”

“It’s like a sachet, Marie. A small pouch.”

“Non,
Madame, nothing. I don’t see it.”

“Désolée,
Marie. . . .”

“For what, Madame Léonie?” Marie stood. “You gave me this job. No one else would hire me. The staff don’t treat you right, Madame. Of course, that’s not for me to say.”

“We promised not to go through this again, Marie.”

She nodded, her face now a mask. “Nothing on the floor, Madame.”

The taxi waited. But she couldn’t go without her juju.

She looked at the clock. She had to go now before the place closed.

“Madame, I hear something; there’s a call on your cell phone.”

Léonie took the phone from Marie and hit the button.

“They found Benoît,” the voice said without preamble.

“Then you’ve got the information.”

“He was murdered. The file is gone.”

Shock flooded over her.

“It’s up to you to find it,” the voice continued.

The phone fell from Léonie’s hands and clattered on the parquet floor.

Darkness descended . . .
non,
not now. She breathed, forcing the air into her lungs. If she didn’t go now, it would be too late.

Tuesday Afternoon

AIMÉE ENTERED PIANO Vache, a student dive down the hill from Place Sainte Geneviève on the narrow rue Laplace. The place was dark; the corners smelled of beer. Despite the outside heat, the stone walls kept the interior chilled. Like a cavern, she thought, the blackened sixteenth-century stone walls unchanged, a favored haunt of students for centuries. And hers, too, in her Sorbonne days when she’d spent hours drinking and debating philosophy, trying to sound intellectual like everyone else. Always aware that in the
quartier
they fol-lowed in the footsteps of Descartes, Verlaine, and Camus.

Furnished with flea-market tables and mismatched chairs, the place had a homey feel. Here she could clean up, examine what she’d found, and still reach the database center in time.

In the lull before the aperitif hour, the bar was deserted except for Vincent, who was setting up bottles in rows behind the bar. A good place to sift through the contents of Benoît’s locker undisturbed.

“Long time, Aimée,” Vincent said. Tanned, muscular, in his thirties, all in black except for the silver belt buckle that caught a gleam of light. He hadn’t changed.

He ran an appreciative glance over her. “Rough and tumble,
comme toujours.
” He hadn’t forgotten. A few years ago, their one-night stand had extended for a week. Until she’d found out that he was married. Very married, with a pregnant wife.

“Here for a drink, a chat, or both?” He winked. “
Le strych-nine?
The usual?”

Why not? On second thought, though, she changed her mind. She needed a clear head.

“Without the strychnine,” she said.

He bypassed the absinthe bottle, reached out and knocked the grounds from the metal espresso filter. The machine grumbled to life.

She passed through the stone arch to the cavernous back room and took a seat at a table by the upright piano, below the stuffed cow sticking out of the wall. Beneath them, in the ancient vaulted caves, existed the remains of a torture chamber with rusted iron instruments on the walls, at least according to Sorbonne lore. She’d never explored to find out for herself. On weekends, DJ’s spun here and bands played for a hefty cover charge. Chalk it up to the ambience.

A minute later, Vincent set a demitasse of espresso on the wooden table gouged with initials, and a small shot glass of milky absinthe beside it.

“On me. In case you change your mind.”

She’d almost changed her mind about
him
once. “How’s your wife?”

“Finished law school. And left me. Now I have the kid.” He pulled out his wallet and flashed the photo of a pink-cheeked toddler.

“
Trés belle,
Vincent.“

“Like you, Aimée.” He grinned. “My life’s different now.”

She nodded. “Right, you’re a single dad. And your life’s not your own.”

Like her own father.

“It’s funny, but I kind of like it this way.” Fatherhood became him. He gestured to the seat beside her. “Feel like some con-versation to go with that?”

She felt tempted. After all, the only male in her life right now had a wet nose and short legs, and needed a grooming appointment.

“Only if you’re a world-renowned expert on pig anatomy.”

She smiled and dumped the contents of her bag on the table next to the demitasse.

“I knew I’d picked the wrong profession,” he said, taking the hint.

At least he had someone who waited at home for him . . . albeit with colic or wet diapers.

“The place heats up in an hour or two. But you know that. Take your time.” He strode back to the counter.

Alone, she sipped the espresso. If laced with too much absinthe, it became lethal. It had been outlawed for years; she’d always wondered how the owner obtained the illegal liqueur.

She stared at the few assorted items relating to Azacca Benoît among her Le Clerc compact, kohl eye pencil, day-timer, and broken shells from the Marseilles beach. Not much. Then she got to work.

The loose papers, a notebook, graphs, and charts she put in one pile. The lab coat, folded, in another. A plastic bag with a moldy uneaten piece of something in another.

Touching these things gave her a strange feeling. Stolen. A corpse’s things. A man sprawled lifeless under the gatehouse window, so far a cipher except for his status as a world author-ity on pigs, and for Dr. Severat’s words . . . consumed by his work, passionate, dedicated. She’d found a window onto this man; now she needed to open it, discover his connection to Mireille, and what had put her in danger.

Or what had led her to murder him.

She found the item that had fallen from Edouard’s pocket: a postage-stamp-sized pouch of straw-colored burlap. She sniffed it. It gave off a sage and cinnamon smell. Affixed to it was a red cloth string, similar to the red string she’d observed tied around Mireille’s wrist. Some kind of Haitian amulet?

She’d watched her father once at his desk in the Commissariat, touching a hairbrush, a tattered holy card, a small bottle of Arpège with faded gold letters on the label. “Why do you look in ladies’ purses, Papa?” she’d asked. He’d shrugged; the banal residue of a life was spread over the green blotter on his desk. “It’s to get the feel, the least I can do,” he’d said. Later, she realized he was attempting to discover a person, a sense of them. To accord the victim some respect.

She opened the notebook and flipped the pages. A pencil-scrawled list, left-handed by the slant, named common chemicals like sulphuric acid, lead, and mercury. She could tell that much. Like a shopping list. And lab requisition slips for these chemicals were tucked into the next page. There was no explanation, no notes to help her.

A waste. And now she’d have to figure out how to return it.

In Benoît’s lab coat pocket she found a rolled-up
Pariscope,
the weekly entertainment guide published on Wednesdays. Thumbing through it, she found a page folded back with a red line circling a listing for a baroque music concert at the Roman baths in the Musée Cluny at 5 P.M. the previous night, Monday. Just prior to Benoît’s murder: she’d found his body close to half past eight at the laboratory gatehouse.

But at least it told her—
non,
she thought: it gave rise to the supposition—that a man
immersed
in research had nevertheless attended a baroque music concert at the Cluny. A baroque music aficionado?

She took out her cell phone, checked the listing, and reached the Musée Cluny office a moment later.

“
Bonjour,
I’m inquiring about the evening baroque music concerts.”

“Désolée,
they’ve just ended for the season,” said a high-pitched voice. “We always end mid-September when the weather starts to change.”

“But I missed last night’s concert. . . .”

“A shame, Mademoiselle. The last of the season.”

“Of course it was open to the public?”

“Bien sûr.
Sold out.”

That told her nothing. She thought hard. Perhaps they still had a list. “Do you have a record of the reservations?”

“I doubt that’s still in our computer.”

She thought fast. “I’d like to know if my friend bought me a ticket. I need to repay him if he did.”

“But you could ask him, Mademoiselle.”

Too late for that. “Do you mind checking?”

“Hold on, please.”

A few clicks. A small sigh. “The system’s down, Mademoi-selle. I’m sorry.”

System down? It figured. National museums like the Cluny operated through the Ministry computer system, which was slow, ponderous, and outdated. If René ever got his fingers on it, he’d fix it in a moment. He loved a challenge. He had once threatened to enter the Louvre site, streamline the catalogue and database section up to the fifth century . . . and give the seventy-year-old staff members heart attacks.

“But you do have a printout of reservations?”

“We’re about to close.”

A typical
fonctionaire
answer. Employed by the government to push papers in return for salary, stellar benefits, and secure jobs for life. The joke went: “Work? Of course I don’t work: I’m a
fonctionaire.
”

“This list. . . .”

Voices erupted in the background. “Mademoiselle, I’m sorry, but. . . .” More voices. “I can’t help you. Apart from the usual organizations who reserve. . . .”

Organizations.
She hadn’t thought of that.

“That’s it! He’d have done it through them. Tell me again the names of those organizations.”

“But I didn’t tell you yet.”

Of course she hadn’t. But Aimée had to get this
fonctionaire
to spill. “He just changed jobs, but he. . . .”

“Apart from Charité Saint Vincent de Paul and Hydrolis, who reserve seats for guests and contributors, as usual, I can’t help you.”

But she had. A long shot, but it gave her a place to start. Benoît could have reserved through either of them. It would be a tedious job, but if she located his name she might find a connection to whoever had provided him with a ticket.

Then again, he might have just shown up and bought a ticket on his own. Alone? Somehow she didn’t think so. . . .

Charité Saint Vincent de Paul said no Azacca Benoît was on their guest list, and the Hydrolis receptionist informed her in a curt voice that she’d need to check with Human Resources. She’d have Human Resources get back to Aimée tomorrow at the earliest. Ten minutes on the phone, and Aimée had struck out at both places.

Too bad her laptop was still in her office. Otherwise, she could have hacked in to check their records. But they might not have kept the data, since the season had ended.

She stared at the absinthe. Tempted, imagining the licorice taste, the kick like a knock on the head. But she had to focus. She took a last sip of the now-cold espresso, set her cup down, and then realized she’d left a moisture ring on the notebook cover. Lifting it up and wiping it with her jacket sleeve, she noticed indentations . . . marks,
non .
. . writing . . . she ran her fingers over it . . . then grabbed the eyeliner pencil from her bag, angled the kohl tip, and rubbed it over the cover. Numbers showed in white where the kohl didn’t penetrate. 01 . . . a phone number? Paris land lines began 01 . . . followed by the eight digits of a Paris phone number.

Stemming her excitement, she transcribed the phone number to the back of the envelope. Something? Or nothing. She had to think, to figure her approach.

First she hit INFORMATION on her cell phone.

“Reverse Directory, please.”

“The number?”

“01 43 90 76 82,” she said.

Pause. The shot glass of absinthe caught the light slanting in from the open door. A murmur of voices, the slap of an exchanged high-five, and Vincent’s laughter came from the bar.

“Osteologique Anatomée Comparée, 61 rue Buffon, Mademoiselle.”

“Merci.”

The lab where Benoît worked. Odd that he’d written it down. A reminder to himself? she wondered.

She tried the number. A tired much-played recording came on. “You’ve reached the central lab directory. If you know the extension you want, enter it now. For the office directory, press 2.” She pressed 2, found Assistant Professeur Huby’s number, and entered it. Instead of Huby himself, his voicemail came on. Before the short recording cut off, she left a message asking him to call her.

She glanced at her Tintin watch. Ten minutes to get to the bank’s database center. She slid Benoît’s belongings back into her bag, left the absinthe, and slapped some francs down on the counter on her way out.

Vincent’s good-bye trailed her as she stepped out onto rue Laplace, a twelfth-century street lined with stone and timbered medieval buildings. Already she felt a change in the air taking the edge off the heat. Slight, but a harbinger of fall and of curling leaves on the cobbles.

RENÉ FRIANT, AIMÉE’S partner, all four feet of him, stretched up to reach the data disks on the shelf. A handsome dwarf with a trimmed goatee, wearing a silk shirt with suspenders holding up eggshell-white linen trousers, he reached up standing on the tiptoes of his handmade shoes. Despite the fact that he had a black belt in karate, his short arms and legs made even the simplest tasks a challenge. But she’d never heard him complain.

She kissed him on both cheeks. She couldn’t read the look that clouded his green eyes. She hesitated. He hated being helped. “Everything go smoothly at your La Défense meetings, René?”

“You’re half an hour late, Aimée,” he said, looking her up and down. He pulled over a chair, hiked himself up, and stepped on the seat.

“Traffic, René,
désolée.
” She ran her fingers through her hair. They came back sticky with cobwebs and leaves. She’d been so absorbed, she’d forgotten to clean up.

“And hens have teeth, Aimée.”

“Look, René. . . .”

He held up his pudgy hand.

“Save it. I’ve got another meeting at La Défense. Tomorrow. They love meetings, these bureaucrats.” He scratched his neck. “Did Madame Delmas give us the green light?”

Aimée stepped over the cables running to the bank of computer screens and slipped off her black patent heels. The cold concrete floor sent a welcome shiver up the soles of her tired feet. She set her bag, brimming with reports, on the floor.

“Bright green. ‘Keep going,’ she said, and she complimented you on a ‘thorough data analysis.’”

René grinned.

“Before you rub your hands in glee, René,” she said, glancing at the numbers on one of the screens and clicking open a file, “check this out. She offered a suggestion.”

René tugged his goatee, scanning the comments written in the data analysis report’s margin. “She’s sharp. Makes sense, the way she’s suggested, to back up the data this way.”

“Glad you agree, partner,” she said. “What system report needs running?”

“Done. Just back up these disks and we’re set for tomorrow.”

“Bravo, René,” she said.

On top of his form, too. He relished this private bank job and the prestige that tunneling into a bank system gave him among his hacker students. She couldn’t understand it; some hacker thing.