Murder in Bel-Air

by Cara Black

  Inside, the nun looked around, checking the confessional before she spoke. Cautious. Had she done this before?

  “We can’t get involved,” said Sister Agnès in a whisper.

  Involved in what? But Aimée nodded. Leaned in to listen.

  “We offer sanctuary to those in need, regardless of their situation. Everyone can find a haven here. We’re a lifeline to those in need.”

  Aimée’s damp sweater stuck to her shoulder blades. “I understand.”

  “Do you? Our mission’s important; nothing can jeopardize the people we help here.”

  “D’accord,” Aimée agreed. “I wouldn’t dream of putting your work at risk, Sister. But my mother’s involved in this somehow. I need to know about her relationship with this woman.”

  The nun glanced at her watch. Whispered quickly, “When I saw you, I knew who you were. You look just like your mother. And I recognized your baby. Such a sweet one.”

  “Can you tell me what you know about the dead woman? Genelle, did you say her name was? That man told you that wasn’t her real name, non?”

  “You were eavesdropping.”

  Aimée shifted in her high-tops. Felt like a schoolgirl. “Forgive me; I overheard some of your conversation.”

  Sister Agnès was still holding the man’s business card. When she looked away to nod to another nun coming down the chapel aisle, Aimée peered at it, trying to make out its contents in the low light. Daniel Lacenaire, some government logo . . .

  “I have to go,” Sister Agnès said. “I’m late for the soup kitchen.”

  “Please, can’t you tell me anything about her? Genelle or Germaine?”

  Sister Agnès looked behind her. “She worked in the laundry room. Everyone has chores in our program. She kept to herself.”

  “How often did you see her with my mother?”

  The nun hesitated. “Genelle introduced us once in the garden. They sat together on a bench to talk. Seems your mother was helping her find a job. It’s why I remembered her. That’s all I know.”

  “Didn’t Genelle associate with anyone else?”

  “Not that I saw.” The nun clutched her rosary. She was holding something back.

  Votive candles flickered. The smell of melted wax made Aimée want to sneeze. “But there must be something. Please, Sister. My mother isn’t answering her phone. She left my baby at playgroup. She just disappeared. Not like her at all.” A lie, though it had been some time since she’d last done this. “I’m worried.”

  “I don’t think your mother has anything to do with us. Our community is a safe refuge.”

  Until one of their charges was murdered on their grounds.

  “Genelle was supposed to meet my mother today, but now she’s dead, and my mother is missing,” Aimée said. “If there’s anything that can lead me to her, I need to know.”

  “I don’t know. Desolée.” The nun turned to leave.

  “What if she’s in danger? Or hurt?”

  Sister Agnès turned back, fingering her rosary, and seemed to come to a decision. “Let me talk to the sisters after prayer tonight.”

  Aimée met the nun’s knowing gaze. “You don’t believe my mother hurt Genelle. That’s why you’re talking to me in the first place.”

  “Your mother wanted to help her; of that I’m sure.”

  Aimée followed her past the chapel pews. “Please, let me talk to the nuns.”

  “Our order is semicloistered, so that could take time.” The nun opened the chapel door. “We feed and shelter everyone. Alors, it’s not for me to judge.”

  Judge?

  “I’m late. Must go now. Call me tomorrow.”

  The nun’s white hem brushed the damp grass, and she disappeared, ghostlike, into the shadows.

  Flicking on her penlight, Aimée set out for the crime scene, following the gravel path to a small door in the wall. A little shove and she’d stepped into a lane of fig trees in another grassy enclosure. Something soft squished underfoot—the seedy purple skin of burst figs. She crossed yet another expanse of grass. Yellow crime scene tape looped around a cedar tree and a hedge by a high stone wall. She shone her penlight. Disturbed gravel, mud, and trampled grass. A struggle? Hard to tell from the mash of footprints.

  Below a shadowed lintel dated 1794, she read: the bloody victims from the guillotine at the place du trône were carted into these gardens of the dames chanoinesses de st. augustin de picpus through this door. here rested the 1,306 mutilated bodies in mass graves.

  She shivered. By the yellow tape, her penlight caught on reddish-brown smears on the aged stone wall. More blood added to this violent history.

  Not ten yards away, she noticed the gate that led to the parking area behind the building on Avenue de Saint-Mandé. So close to where she’d been standing earlier that day.

  She backtracked to the dormitory, passing a bench under willow branches.

  Had her mother sat on this bench when Genelle introduced her to Sister Agnès?

  What had their connection been? Could it really have been as simple as Sydney trying to help the homeless woman find a job?

  Aimée didn’t buy it. What homeless woman in a shelter sported a pedicure with fresh nail polish? Or had her identity uncovered by the intelligence services in under two hours?

  Homelessness was a perfect cover for a clandestine mission by an intelligence operative. Or maybe the woman was an amateur, an unwitting accomplice in some affair Sydney Leduc had been embroiled in?

  Whoever the woman was, if she had a pedicure comme ça, she must have had a stash. A place to hide her other clothes and some cash, like Aimée had read in that article about the working homeless—women who slept in their cars, in train stations, and rotated through shelters.

  Assuming she had another life, where would Genelle/Germaine hide it apart from the plastic Tati bag? Aimée remembered the rumbling from the laundry room, where Sister Agnès said Genelle had worked.

  Theories remained theories until you tested them, Aimée’s detective father used to say. Shoe leather got answers.

  Better check it out.

  Down in the cellar, a strip of fluorescent lights illuminated the industrial-sized washers. Between them sheets hung on clotheslines among old, chipped porcelain basins and wood drying racks. The fresh smell of laundry hung over the whitewashed concrete floor.

  Judging by the rifled piles of laundry and telltale wet footprints, the DGSE suit’s team and brigade criminelle had already searched. What could she hope to find that they hadn’t?

  Yet they had missed things before. Where should she start looking? Her father would have said, Think like the victim—desperate, with something to lose. Aimée opened the built-in, old-fashioned airing-out cupboards, as her grand-mère had called them. Bed linen, mismatched fancy towels with monograms. Donated, it seemed, by the Ritz and Hôtel Plaza Athénée.

  She prowled in the space behind the washing machines and the drying racks, felt the wet slap of sheets against her neck. Humid air and condensation fogged the few windows. Where could one hide something?

  She ran her hands under the worn wood tables and around their backs. She penlight checked every damp corner. Her skin was clammy; fatigue knotted her shoulders. Her hunch had proven wrong.

  Late. She needed to get home.

  As she was about to leave, it hit her. Where did men never look?

  One by one, she opened the large washing machine lids, felt around for the filters. Released the slimy filter tabs. On her third attempt, when she pulled out the filter with a wet mess of lint, threads, and hair, she found a large folded plastic baggie, clouded with moisture.

  She listened for anyone coming. Only the spin and rumbling of another washer’s last cycle. Better hurry. She emptied everything but the baggie into the trash. Set the baggie on a wicker hamper; it wasn’t smelling too fresh. Dr
ied it off with a rag. Her forehead was damp from exertion.

  She tried opening the baggie, but the damn thing’s air-tight seal was melted, so it took her several yanks to rip it open.

  She lost her balance, slipping on the wet concrete and falling into the hamper, which spilled dirty clothes everywhere. At least she hadn’t made much noise. Looking around, she saw papers floating in the air, landing on her sprawled legs. Dollar bills.

  She blinked. Wrong. Hundred-dollar bills.

  A baggie worth of them.

  Monday, Early Evening

  Inside the ripped baggie, rubber banded to a stack of bills, was a damp envelope emblazoned with the return address of the Grand Hôtel d’Abidjan. Curious, Aimée opened it. Inside was a piece of paper with a key taped to it. It was a yellowed, torn-edged page from a book. Aimée unfolded it and picked out the words that had been circled: Use gifts for good, not evil, or suffer their curse.

  Along the paper’s edge, written in black ink, was a series of letters and numbers: GBH*120gdel.

  A proverb, a code, a stack of cash, and a key.

  To what?

  Did this involve her mother or something else? She decided to show it to Sister Agnès to find out; the woman definitely knew something. She stuffed the items back inside and wrapped the rubber band around the whole bundle to keep it closed.

  Back in the soup kitchen, the volunteers were cleaning up, lugging empty pots to the sink. Sister Agnès was speaking to a tall man wearing a blue duffle coat and wool cap. His muscles bulged under the coat as he leaned threateningly over the nun. “Don’t you understand? She left me something . . .” he was saying. Aimée couldn’t place his accent over the kitchen noise.

  Who was he? Why had he shown up? She balled her fists in worry. Could this be about Genelle, or the baggie Aimée had found? Even her mother?

  “We’re a shelter, not a baggage claim, monsieur,” Sister Agnès said. “I’ve never seen you before. You don’t even know her name . . .”

  Aimée couldn’t hear his reply. But the nun had moved to the side of a pillar and caught Aimée’s gaze. Sister Agnès shook her head, pulled her hand from the pocket of her apron, and motioned subtly for Aimée to keep moving, her hand close to her side just out of the man’s view.

  Aimée took the gestured advice.

  Not a taxi in sight. She wasn’t eager to drive her scooter across Paris with this kind of money on her. Still, she needed to get away from there, away from the cruising police car.

  She called René, her partner, at the office, but the call went to the answering machine. Next she tried his cell number.

  “I want to hear all about your speech, Aimée,” he said.

  “Meet me at the office, René. As fast as you can.”

  She hung up, keyed her scooter’s ignition, and scanned the street. Heading in the direction opposite the police car’s, she stopped at the first garbage bin she saw and rooted around. With some pulling and shoving, she extracted some torn birthday wrapping paper and used it to cover the damp baggie. Felt a little better.

  She stuck it back into her bag and slung the bag across her chest. Alert, she kept to the speed limit in the narrow lanes winding through the Bastille area. Checked behind her often to see if anyone was following. Only dog walkers or couples arm in arm on the dark side streets as she entered the Marais. Images filled her mind—the wall smeared with dried blood, the suit from the intelligence unit, Sister Agnès’s deep-set eyes hinting at institutional secrets. That damned fresh laundry scent clung to her leather jacket.

  Stupid. Why hadn’t she left the package with the nun? But Aimée already knew why.

  She thought of the torn book page, the saying that had been circled. Was it a threat? A woman had been murdered.

  Abidjan . . . The word was familiar. Someplace in Africa, though she couldn’t remember where.

  Money—even blood money, which this no doubt was—would feed many of the convent’s clients. But . . .

  Her mind spun. Concentrate, Aimée.

  So hard these days, especially when she got tired at night. Her doctor had cleared her for work but warned of postconcussive symptoms: headaches and memory loss, residual effects of the dissolved blood clot. Nothing she could afford to suffer, not with her job or with a baby.

  A biting chill came up from the river. Goosebumps pimpled her neck. She wove through the back lanes and narrow streets, worried and angry over her mother’s disappearance. Could this be some kind of payoff or payment? For what, Aimée didn’t know.

  Ten minutes later, she’d parked off rue du Louvre. She took the birdcage of an elevator to the third floor. All the lights were off on her landing. She punched in Leduc Detective’s door code and stumbled into the empty office.

  Did a quick count of the hundred-dollar bills, which were bound in currency wrappers . . . Mon Dieu.

  Panic hit her. What if the baggie held a sensor or tracker somewhere in it? Could she expect a special forces raid any minute? An elite Kalashnikov-toting, balaclavaed team pounding up the building stairs?

  Stupid. If there were something like that, whoever had planted it would have been the ones to find the money, not Aimée. Stay calm; stash it for now.

  She hadn’t turned the chandelier on, and she pulled the shade down. Sitting on the floor, she swiveled the swing arm lamp to focus its beam on the baggie’s contents.

  She counted the money again, then ran her hand along the inside of the baggie.

  Her fingers came back beige and gritty.

  She sniffed. Rubbed her fingers together. Sand.

  The office door clicked open. René.

  “So how many contracts did you snag in that new Chanel? Paid for itself, eh?” he was saying. “It’s my birthday next month, but you’re giving me my present early. Alors, dis-moi.”

  Her smiling partner, René Friant, a dwarf in a tweed jacket, had turned on the chandelier, filling the office with light.

  “Turn that off, René,” she said. “Come look.”

  René’s jaw dropped. “Did you rob a bank?”

  “Not quite.”

  “You’re sitting in the dark with money on the floor—dollars?” René’s calfskin briefcase fell to the floor. “Thousand . . . non, hundred-dollar bills?” His voice came out in a squeak.

  “Shhh . . . René, it’s compliqué.”

  He choked. “Compliqué, that’s all you can say? You’re serious? Have you lost your mind, Aimée? Where’d this money come from?”

  Her stomach clenched. “Quick, René, if anyone comes in—”

  Her phone vibrated in her jacket pocket.

  Rigid with fear, she forced herself to look at the caller ID. Babette. News about her mother?

  “Heard anything, Babette?” Aimée asked.

  “Not a peep. Chloé’s ready for bed. Should I put her to sleep?”

  “Merci, mais non,” she said, shooting René a look. “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. René will give me a ride.”

  She hung up.

  “I will?” All four feet of him bristled with fury. “Not on your life. You owe me an explanation. More than that, même—you brought illicit money into our place of business? I won’t have any part of this.”

  She lifted the loose floorboard under her desk and stuck the baggie underneath. Shoved the board back in place and covered it with a trash bin. “René, it’s not what you think.”

  “And what do I think, Aimée?”

  She stood, checked the answering machine. No messages.

  “Some payoff, grand theft, a drug deal gone wrong?” His voice was rising.

  “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  “No way in hell will I aid and abet another crime. Not this time.”

  She’d pulled him into trouble before. Understood his fury. But she had to get him out of the office.

  �
�Suit yourself,” she said. “If the SWAT team arrives, you’re on your own.”

  “What?”

  She packed up and hit the lights. Checked the door alarm.

  And with much clearing of his throat, he followed behind her down the winding staircase.

  Monday, Late Evening

  René downshifted in his prized Citroën DS, a classic armadillo of a car customized for his height, on the Pont Marie. Streetlamps cast shafts of smoky topaz light on the Seine’s black glass surface. Ahead lay the butterscotch stone façade of Aimée’s seventeenth-century Ile Saint-Louis apartment. René pulled over. “How could you blow off the keynote? The networking apéritifs? I can’t believe how important—”

  “Babette’s waiting, René. And I tried calling you.”

  A little white lie. In her panic over Chloé, she’d totally forgotten.

  “If I’d gotten your message in time, I could have done damage control.”

  “It’s my mother.”

  He parked and put on the parking brake. Shook his head. “I should have known.”

  After Aimée’d pulled the covers over Chloé, she checked the window hasps. All locked tight. But nothing felt right.

  With Chloé asleep and the baby monitor on, Aimée set down a bottle of Pernod, whose taste and licorice aroma René loved. Poured a splash, added water from a carafe. She needed his help, and based on the way he was tapping his handmade Lobb shoes on the herringbone floor, it was going to take her more than a Pernod to get back into his good graces.

  Tired, she was so tired. The adrenalin that had been coursing through her since she’d found the money had drained away. After all those hours of conference prep—and for nothing.

  René swirled the milky mixture, sipped as he opened his laptop. “Whose money did you steal?”

  Aimée went to the window, parted the shutter slats, and looked out on the quai below. “Impossible to steal from a corpse, René.”

  René choked on his drink.

  She took a breath. “I got an emergency message right when I was about to deliver the keynote. It sounded like Sydney’d had an accident.”