Murder on the Champ de Mars (5 page)

“Visiting hours ended,” the man repeated. “We follow regulations here for health and safety. Don’t you people understand? I escorted a bunch of you out already, do I need to do it again?”

The receptionist’s look said that he’d be damned if he helped her or a Gypsy.

“The patient’s missing. There’s an alert!” Aimée pointed to the red alarm light above them. As she did so, a loud buzzing began to sound. Down the hallway, she heard Dr. Estienne shouting to the nurses.

“Please be helpful, Monsieur,” Aimée said. “A simple yes or no will do.”

The receptionist sucked in his breath, checked the log. “Only two discharges this evening. Inter-hospital.”

“You mean they were headed to another hospital in the Assistance Publique system?”

He nodded. “But her name’s not on either one.”

“Then how could she have left the hospital within the last hour? Don’t you monitor patients?” Aimée glanced around. No video cameras, of course; why would they keep the technology up-to-date when they were shutting the hospital down next year?

Nonplussed, the receptionist nodded. “
Bien sûr
. But it’s shift change, everyone’s updating charts, finishing paperwork.”

“That’s your excuse?” Nicu pounded his fist on the desk.

“Describe your mother, Nicu,” she said, trying to keep him calm. “Show the man a photo.”

Nicu reached in his messenger bag and pulled out a photo ID, Drina Constantin’s permit to work in the markets. On it Aimée saw an unsmiling woman with deep-set eyes and a strong jaw, her greying hair pulled back. She looked to be in her fifties, but her birth date said she was forty-three. How she’d aged.

“Have you seen her?”

The receptionist shook his head.

Aimée worked to keep her voice rational, free of accusation. “How could a terminally ill woman, presumably in a wheelchair or on a gurney, get by you?” she asked.

“Wheelchairs and gurneys pass by here all the time,” he said. “We’ve had several transfers in the last hour, as I told you. And the lobby was crowded with departing visitors and families.”

That set her thinking. Someone had probably taken advantage of the departing visitors and the shift change to move Drina. Yet Nicu and his uncle had been arguing outside the hospital entrance when Aimée arrived—they would have noticed Drina leaving, which narrowed the window during which she could have passed through.

Her mind went back to the emergency exit behind the staircase. She thought of the dark, cave-like recesses in the hallways on either side. They’d be so easy to hide in for a short length of time.

“Has an emergency-exit alarm been set off near Ward C?”

The receptionist’s eyes grew wide.

She needed to propel him into action. “Can you check with security?”

“
Mais non
, no alarm’s gone off.”

Suddenly she felt her post-pregnancy fog clear and her investigator’s instincts finally kick in. What if Drina wanted to tell Aimée who killed her father, and the killer had abducted
Drina to shut her up? Perhaps she’d known the secret was dangerous, and that was why she had refused to tell Nicu the whole story. She hadn’t wanted to endanger her son.

Aimée drew Nicu aside to the window by a potted palm tree.

“How long were you out front talking to your uncle?” Aimée asked Nicu.

“Five, ten minutes, if that,” he said. “I’d just arrived, so had he.”

“So Drina disappeared between the time the doctor medicated her, an hour or so ago, and when we entered the ward.” She scanned the courtyard through the glass doors. “Would your uncle lie?”

“Him? He lies for a living,” said Nicu.

“I mean to you,” she said. “Could he have taken her and then pretended he’d just arrived? Would he throw a fit to deflect suspicion?”

“My uncle’s a lot of things, but he’s no body snatcher,” said Nicu. “Tradition insists if we can’t bring the dying one back home, we bring the family to the dying one. You heard him.” His worn sneaker tapped on the linoleum. “We observe rituals, seek forgiveness for any wrongs committed. That’s why my uncle came. Maybe he wanted to settle something before she passed to the next life.”

Sounded like woo-woo to her. But what question did Nicu think might have been on his uncle’s mind? “What do you mean?” she asked.

“My uncle and the rest of the family were estranged from my mother. Long story.”

Aimée let that go for now. “Can you remember the last thing she told you?”

His dark eyes fixed on hers. “Tonight she was passing in and out of consciousness. At lucid moments she kept saying the
gadjo
had found her, that he was back.”

“Gadjo?”
The second time Aimée had heard that word.

“You. Outsiders.” He fingered his bag strap. “And she kept saying your name. She tossed and turned, begging me to find you so she could let go, let her spirit travel.”

Did the woman have a guilty conscience? Aimée believed what he was telling her. And that he knew more. “What else, Nicu?”

He hesitated. “It didn’t make sense.”

Aimée’s tongue caught in her throat. She forced her mouth to open, to form words. “What didn’t make sense? Did she tell you about my father’s killer?”

Nicu shook his head. “I didn’t understand.”

“Tell me exactly what she told you.”

“Her words came out garbled.” He looked out the window at the sky, the few stars poking out between puffs of cloud. She saw his face shutting down again, as she’d seen it do before. Direct questions had only gotten her so far. “Look,” he said finally, “she begged me to find you. That’s all I know.”

“To tell me who killed my father,” she said. “Right? To make it right after all these years?” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Why now, after all this time?”

He chewed his lip. “I don’t know.
Désolé.
”

She was frustrated, but she sensed that if Nicu had more to say, he would tell her in due time. However, he might be unaware of how much he knew.

Her father always told her that informers required maintenance. They came at a cost—the cost of withholding incriminating evidence from your colleagues on the force, of looking the other way or providing favors to keep them delivering. Sometimes all three.

“I believe you,” she said, trying another tack. “I think she was one of my father’s informants.” She tried to keep the question out of her voice.

Nicu shrugged. He didn’t deny it.

“You would have noticed things, I imagine. Little things.
Maybe her behavior was different after my father’s visits.” Nicu averted his gaze. “But he trusted her, Nicu. Offered our help. He knew she kept her promises. That’s what she’s trying to do now.”

Another shrug. Somehow she had to break through his anguish, the shock. She scanned the lobby—a few nurses, murmured conversations.

“The
gadjo
she talked about,” she said, probing. “Who could she have meant? Maybe you’d seen him before? Can you remember?”

Again no response.

“I want to find her before it’s too late,” she said. “But I need your help. Give me something to work with. Who knows she’s here, who did she last see, where does she live?”

She sensed a stillness in him. Thinking, or shutting down? She couldn’t tell.

“You came to my house, asked for my help. You insisted I come here,” she said. “Why don’t you trust me now?”

He looked up. “She kept saying the
gadjo
’s back, that he had found her,” said Nicu. “His murderer had found her. And in her next breath, your father’s name.”

Aimée shivered.

“Do you have any idea who she could have meant? Have you noticed any new people around, or why she’d be at risk?”

At first she thought he had shut down again, wasn’t going to answer, but then he suddenly said, “Recently … I’ve felt like we’ve been followed a few times.”

“Followed? By whom?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I just … I could tell. Someone has been watching. A man.”

Two uniformed
flics
had arrived and were speaking to the security guard in the hospital lobby. The guard pointed to Nicu. All she knew was that she had to figure out what had happened—to Drina, and to her father. How, she didn’t know.

Aimée palmed her card into Nicu’s shaking hand. “We need to talk, but not now. Call me after you talk to the
flics.
” Nicu chewed his lip. “Can you do that?”

He nodded.

The two
flics
were working their way past orderlies toward Nicu.

Aimée kept her head down, got in step with a passing nurse and slipped out of the lobby and back down the corridor. Keeping to the wall, she reached Ward C.

The crumpled white sheets showed where a body had lain. Under the hospital bed, she noticed a blue ankle sock on the floor by the machines’ dangling tubes. No other sign of a struggle.

A ball of dread was forming in her stomach. She fought off that old flashback again—but once more her mind flooded with images of her father’s charred remains after the explosion on the blackened pavers of Place Vendôme. And now, just like then, she was arriving too late.

O
UT IN THE
corridor, she hurried away from the nurses’ station and to the emergency exit. She wrapped her scarf around her palm to avoid leaving fingerprints, and then covered her ear with her other hand and pushed the bar, waiting for the alarm’s shriek to blast.

Silence, except for the nighttime trilling of a starling outside in the shadow-blurred hedge. Looking up she saw snipped wire sticking out from behind the exit sign above the door. Fat lot of good the security did here.

Her shoulders tightened. The abductor had known exactly what he or she was doing. Aimée followed the dark alleyway between buildings until she found herself under a narrow canopy of trees that led to one of the ancient courtyards adjoining the hospital wings. The tall trees rustled in the rising wind. At the far end, the courtyard opened to a narrow paved lane. Aimée quickened her step as an ambulance drove by, bathing
her in a flashing blue light. When she reached the lane, she saw that it led to the open gates of the emergency entrance beyond.

She could barely make it out in the dark, but because she was looking for it, she spotted an empty wheelchair shoved into the bushes at the end of the walkway. She felt around its smooth metal frame, its padded arm rests, under the cushion. Nothing. She leaned down into the bushes, running her hands over the rubber wheels and metal spokes, until her fingernail caught on a piece of cloth wedged between the wheel and its guard. Tugged until she heard a rip as it came free. Half of a blue ankle sock, a match for the one under Drina’s hospital bed.

“F
IFTEEN YEARS AGO
, Mademoiselle Aimée?” said Martin, an old informer of her father’s, as he gazed at the photo Nicu had given her. Martin adjusted his large tortoiseshell glasses on his nose. Dyed charcoal hair, skin too taut and unwrinkled for his age. Martin, she suspected, had had some work done since they’d last met.

Calculating roughly based on what she was wearing in the picture, Aimée had narrowed down the year Nicu’s photo was taken to 1984. “Your father, bless his soul, had so much hair then.
Bien sûr
, I had more hair, too, Mademoiselle Aimée. We all did.”

Martin had never forgotten her father, who’d helped him get out of prison before he’d served his full sentence. Aimée never asked for details. Martin had a mass said in her father’s name and put flowers on his grave every year on November 1st, Toussaint, All Saints’ Day.

She tapped her freshly lacquered “terabyte taupe” nails on the wood tabletop. They sat in Martin’s “office,” the only place he took appointments: on the red leather banquette in the back room at Le Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées. He would dispense his knowledge in his own good time. And for a price.

“
Merci
, François,” said Martin to the waiter in a black vest and long white apron who served Aimée a steaming
chocolat chaud
, its deep mocha color pierced by a dollop of
crème
.

“Forgive me for missing Chloé’s christening,” Martin said.
“But I’m getting over
un rhume
; wouldn’t want to spread germs to the little one.”

She slid her latest photo of Chloé over the table. “Six months old, mostly sleeping through the night. She has a fondness for puréed aubergine. Go figure.”

Martin blew a kiss at the photo. A wide grin broke his pock-cratered cheeks.
“Qu’elle est belle!”

“The onesie you sent her is her favorite,” said Aimée.

His eyes softened behind the large lenses. “Your father’s looking down on her.”

If only
, she thought. Maybe he was. How many times in the past few months had she imagined him, a proud
grand-père
, pushing the stroller beside her in the Jardin du Luxembourg? Or the two of them strolling arm in arm on the quai, Chloé on her hip?

Move on. She needed to move on. But Nicu had brought it all back, and she had a promise to keep.

Le Drugstore’s mirrors reflected a Manet-like scene of blurred streetlamps on the Champs-Élysées and tree branches bent in the wind. Aimée and Martin shared the back room with only one other couple. François hummed to himself, drying glasses at the counter. Cigarette smoke spiraled from Martin’s unfiltered Gauloise. Aimée tried to stifle her craving: she couldn’t risk a nicotine patch since she still nursed Chloé. Sixteen months and two days without a cigarette, and she still wanted to tear the Gauloise from his hand.

Martin had no cell phone; he arranged appointments from his “nerve center”—using the pay phone in the lounge downstairs by the WC. Four rings followed by two alerted the toilet attendant,
la dame pipi
, to an incoming request for Martin. He received his clients upstairs at his reserved table. His clientele ranged from ex-cons and gang leaders to prominent officials. A conduit for both sides, he bought, sold and bartered information. His expertise and contacts were too valuable for even the
flics
to compromise. Still, he’d told her once, he had the phone swept for bugs daily.

En route to Le Drugstore, she’d called Morbier for help, but her call had gone to voice mail. Elusive as always, screening his calls. No doubt out celebrating Chloé’s christening
sans
her in a restaurant and couldn’t hear the phone ringing. Or maybe he’d been angry with her for stopping on the curb with Nicu, delaying the party, or for making a scene with Melac, and planned on chewing her out later in private. Knowing Morbier, though, she figured on the latter.