Murder in Bel-Air

by Cara Black

  Was she afraid of the teacher or of what she’d seen?

  “Understood,” Aimée said. “Can I call you? Please, my mother’s missing.”

  The woman hesitated. “Florence Triquet. I do upholstery. I’m in the book.”

  Tuesday Morning

  Aimée checked her phone. No messages.

  She shelved the worry for her mother for later. Almost show time, and Aimée hadn’t even done her makeup.

  As Aimée mounted her scooter, she sensed someone was watching her. When she turned, she caught sight of a lurking figure across the boulevard, partially hidden behind a plane tree, but it was gone as soon as she spotted it.

  Tuesday Morning, 8:45 a.m.

  Le Train Bleu’s nineteenth-century salle de toilette was straight out of another époque, when the restaurant’s namesake had departed from a platform below: all polished wood cubicles, brass fixtures, and porcelain sinks large enough to give Chloé a bath in, plus a dame de pipi who counted towels.

  Aimée got to work, applying primer and Dior under-eye concealer and lightly brushing on foundation. With quick strokes she lined her eyes with kohl, smudging it for a smoky effect, and wanded mascara through her eyelashes. Ran Chanel red over her lips and dotted her cheeks for color.

  Much better. She looked human. Time to earn Leduc Detective’s rent.

  Six hours later, Aimée gave a mental sigh of relief as she stuck the business cards she’d collected into her red Moleskine. Jotted stars next to the new appointments she’d made to discuss custom services. Thank God she’d worn the Chanel. She’d gotten serious interest in their computer security maintenance package, René’s brainchild.

  At least that would make him happy.

  She could still taste the fresh Brittany oysters from the CEOs’ lunch. She really had to get out more often.

  As she was putting her bag in her scooter compartment outside the Gare de Lyon, a large hand gripped her shoulder. She’d been followed.

  In attack mode, she gripped her pen, ready to jab it into what she imagined would be a big meaty thigh, and turned.

  “You’re a difficult woman to catch, Aimée.” It was Marc Fabre, from Securadex. His grin faded to surprise, and he released his grip, then stepped back. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Don’t ever sneak up on me, she almost snapped at him. Instead, she managed a smile. Marc had come to gloat, no doubt, over having given the keynote or about his new contracts. His shaved head was shiny but his chin stubble dark, his black-rimmed glasses très courant.

  “Everything okay? I mean, is your mother all right? That’s what I meant to ask.”

  She wanted to brush him off with a flippant reply. But she heard concern in his voice. Who knew if it was real?

  She shrugged. Above them, the granite sky promised rain. She had to hurry. Looped her scarf around her neck and reached for her helmet.

  “Desolé, forgive me for prying,” he said. “It’s not my business.”

  “Non, Marc, it’s just that . . .” She tried to think of what to say. She never revealed anything about her personal life in her business dealings. “You know how it goes, I’m sure.” Keep it vague. “A crisis here, a crisis there, putting out fires at the office . . .”

  “Must be daunting, worrying about your mother when you’re running a business,” he said. “Family issues—I’ve got them, too.”

  She nodded, wondering what he was after. Aiming for her sympathy?

  “Marc, what do you want?”

  His head shone like a cue ball. Kind of sexy, but . . . non, not her bad-boy type.

  “A truce—let’s call off the rivalry,” he said. “There’s a huge project coming up, and if we pooled resources, made a bid together, allez, you know we’d stand a better chance.”

  Now the snake was offering her a piece of the tart?

  “You mean for the ministry?” she said. “I’ve heard the rumors, too.”

  “Interested?”

  It could work. Or not.

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Tuesday, Late Afternoon

  The sky was pigeon grey and full of fat rain clouds. Before going home, Aimée needed to figure out how she was going to return Genelle’s baggie to Sister Agnès and see if the nun had learned anything from her sisters. Aimée had left a phone message but hadn’t heard back.

  The convent was ten minutes away. If she left right then, she could catch Sister Agnès before soup kitchen prep. And she just might avoid the rain.

  She hadn’t bargained on the traffic behind a stalled bus on Avenue Daumesnil. So she wound through the narrow passages near Montgallet. Some shortcut. Just as clogged as everywhere else.

  The sky opened. She gunned the scooter toward a passage and sheltered under a glass marquise overhang in a metalworker’s narrow courtyard. Left the engine running.

  Where had her cell phone gone? Busy searching her damp pockets, she heard the car door shut only when it was too late. The man approaching her under the dripping eves wore the same dark blue duffle coat and wool cap he’d had on the night before when she’d seen him arguing with the nun.

  His large figure blocked her way. His stance exuded training—special forces training.

  Her damp hands froze. Stuck in the rain wearing Chanel and her grandmother’s pearls.

  “You have something for me, don’t you?” he said. “Hand it over and I’ll take it from here.”

  His sentence structure and accent were foreign . . . Dutch, German, maybe South African?

  Aimée’s heart thudded so loud in her chest she thought he’d hear it. She knew he meant Genelle or Germaine’s stash. But how much did he know about the victim? Or her?

  “What are you talking about? Who are you?” she asked.

  “I could ask the same.”

  She felt an alert stillness about him. That of a hunter surveying his prey.

  Play dumb. Not hard. He’d been following her since who knew when—yesterday?—and she hadn’t noticed. She wanted to kick herself.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Don’t play me, chérie.” He’d noticed her grip the handlebar of the still-purring scooter. Probably clocked every escape route that her eyes had found.

  “Come any closer and you’ll be feeling my Taser,” she lied. “This isn’t the first time a type like you has followed me somewhere.”

  He laughed. “I’m just looking for the package Genelle left me. Tell me where it is.”

  The night before he hadn’t known Genelle’s name.

  “Who?” Aimée asked.

  His hands came out of his pockets. Her eyes caught on the tattoos on his clenched knuckles. “I said, don’t play me.”

  He was big and had a tactical advantage. Alors, she needed to find a way out and move quick. Meanwhile, she needed to keep him talking.

  “Quoi, you’re a stranger coming up to me, demanding something,” she said. “I don’t even know what you’re on about.”

  He moved closer. Raindrops trickled from his cap like tears. “Give me Genelle’s package.”

  “I don’t know a Genelle or anything about a package.”

  “You’ve been asking around at the café.”

  “Café? Oh, you mean where I lost my phone?” she said. “What a pain, and it was in my other purse the whole time.” She gave him a look. “Monsieur, whoever you are, I’d say you’re disappointed in love, n’est-ce pas?” Desperate, white knuckles clenching on the handlebars, she kept up the charade. “I know your type. She drops you, and you want the ring back. You think she confided in me?”

  “Quit stalling.”

  “You don’t know much about women, do you?” she said, smiling.

  Pause. “What’s that to do with anything?”

  She’d struck a chord. Thrown him off-balance.

  “
Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Arles.” His answer came too quick. And she’d never heard a Provençal accent like his. Not even close to that musical patois.

  She saw him tense, and his lips moved—he was whispering something.

  Merde. Was he wired?

  With no more of a plan than to get the hell out, she accelerated, veering left as she kicked straight out with her right foot. Counted on the element of surprise. Her stiletto heel got him in the thigh. Wobbling over the cobblestones in the rain, the scooter shot forward and out of the courtyard.

  Right into traffic. Her handlebars scraped a van, and she almost lost her balance. But somehow she kept going, weaving in the downpour with a cacophony of horns blaring behind her.

  Tuesday, Late Afternoon

  She left her Vespa in the Ile Saint-Louis mechanic’s garage where the temperamental Italian scooter lived most of the time anyway. No more pink scooter for now. She ran, drenched, to her apartment, going in the rear entrance via the backstreet.

  As she peeled off her wet clothes, she thought about what she knew. The duffle coat wasn’t French, and he was working for someone.

  Big trouble.

  Where was her mother?

  And how soon could Aimée get rid of the money she’d stashed under the floorboards in her office?

  She called the convent. Only the answering machine. She left another message for Sister Agnès.

  She called Morbier. Voice mail. Tried again.

  This time he answered.

  “What now, Leduc?”

  “Any info on Lacenaire?”

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay out of it?”

  “Hard to when I’ve been followed, Morbier.”

  “Stuck your nose where it shouldn’t go? Again?”

  Merde. Her and her big mouth. If she confessed to following up, he wouldn’t help her.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling, Morbier.”

  That sounded weak.

  “Do as we agreed, Leduc. Focus on your daughter and your job. Got to go.”

  He hung up.

  Helpful, as usual.

  But he knew something. She wouldn’t let up until he came through.

  The sky matched the grisaille tin rooftops as the rain stopped. After she’d jumped in a hot bath and climbed into dry jeans, she had a couple hours before she had to fetch Chloé from across the courtyard.

  In her grandfather’s library, she scanned the shelves and pulled out a book on tattoos. She flipped the pages. Aboriginal, Maori, Hells Angels . . . Not what she was looking for. On the next shelf, she found a volume on naval and sailor tattoos through the centuries. Another on military and paramilitary tattoos.

  She licked her finger, paging through the photos of designs, insignias, Latin phrases, mottoes. Then she found it. The tattoo she’d seen on the man’s knuckles.

  Legio Patria Nostra

  The motto of the Légion étrangère, the Foreign Legion, a special branch of the French Armed Forces composed of foreign recruits. Didn’t ex-legionnaires become mercenaries, hired guns?

  She pushed aside thoughts of what could have happened if she hadn’t gotten away.

  Her grandfather’s library contained three shelves just on l’Afrique. Research would settle her nerves, still jittery after the encounter. An hour’s reading acquainted her with Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire, a French colony until 1960. Once the brightest jewel in de Gaulle’s necklace of Françafrique. After independence, Côte d’Ivoire had boasted a uniquely stable government, relative prosperity, a French-educated elite, and mineral and oil resources. Not to mention the cocoa beans responsible for her favorite chocolat chaud.

  Miles Davis curled up on the floor by her feet, warming her toes while she sat on the brocade Napoleon III chaise and made notes in her red Moleskine.

  She heard the metallic clicking of a key turned in the lock. Bolted upright. Her mother, back and with an explanation?

  Aimée’s heart skipped. The Moleskine fell from her lap.

  Melac, Chloé’s biological father, stepped into the salon, tall, thin hipped, and with those grey-blue eyes his daughter had inherited.

  “Taking it easy. Good,” said Melac, setting down a market bag. Leeks peeked from the top. “Glad you’re following doctor’s orders.”

  Little did he know.

  He’d been with brigade criminelle until a bus accident that killed his older daughter, at which point he’d quit and moved to Brittany. Now he was back in Paris, working high-profile private security. A sought-after former brigade criminelle officer, his experience guaranteed him plum jobs and his own schedule.

  “I’m making Chloé’s favorite, potage de légumes,” he said. “Yours too. And casse-croûte au fromage.”

  Quite the chef these days. After going AWOL to be with his dying daughter, Melac had reappeared at Chloé’s christening with a new wife, wanting in on life with his baby. The last thing Aimée would have asked for. Still, somehow they’d reached an agreement.

  Or at least a truce.

  Miles Davis sprang toward Melac’s shopping bag, sniffing and wagging his tail.

  “Even got monsieur’s horsemeat,” Melac said.

  Melac had been helping out since her concussion a month before, sharing Chloé’s care with Sydney in between his security shifts. For some reason the new wife stayed in Brittany.

  “Have you talked to Sydney?” she asked.

  “She’s not answering. Alors, I need to change tomorrow’s pickup time for Chloé. Wasn’t she supposed to babysit tonight?”

  He didn’t know.

  “Look, Melac—”

  He’d pulled out his ringing phone, checked it. “Attends.” His eyes shuttered. “Must take this.”

  No doubt Donatine, his provincial, organic-everything wife who spun wool from their sheep and milked their goats. Aimée hated how her own green-devil jealousy erupted every time Donatine intruded on her life, every time she was reminded of Melac’s rose-gold serpent wedding ring.

  And yet, why was he camping out in Aimée’s salon? When he wasn’t staying with her, he was at his friends’; from time to time, he even slept in a bunk in the firemen’s caserne.

  Long ago, she’d realized Melac would never change. She wished it didn’t still bother her.

  Her phone rumbled somewhere beneath the chaise’s cushions. A number she didn’t know. Her mother?

  “Allô?” Aimée said, almost dropping the phone.

  Several clicks. The line buzzed. Dead.

  What in the—

  The phone rang again. Once.

  Had her mother called and hung up, suspecting her line was bugged?

  Aimée hit redial.

  Ringing. Ringing. No answer.

  Was it a signal? Signal for what?

  Restless, she stood. Paced. Think. Her blood fizzed. She had to do something. Couldn’t stand the waiting, feeling helpless.

  Better to harness the nervous energy. She’d follow up with the woman from the playgroup, the last person to have seen her mother, as far as Aimée knew. In les pages jaunes, her finger scanned the twelfth arrondissement for upholsterers. Found the name she was looking for near the Bel-Air quartier.

  “Bonsoir,” she said when the woman answered her phone. “I’m Chloé’s mother; we spoke briefly at the playgroup. You said I could ring you.”

  “Now? I’m busy.” Florence Triquet sounded annoyed.

  Like Aimée cared.

  “Please, I’ll keep it brief,” she said. “Can you remember if my mother said anything before she disappeared from the playgroup? Was she acting differently? Did she get a phone call?”

  “My clients—”

  “Won’t like a policeman appearing, will they?” interrupted Aimée. “It’s a murder investigation now.”

  “What?”


  “Please think back. Try to recall whatever you can.”

  “Un moment.” A hand muffled the receiver.

  Aimée paced. A frying-garlic aroma came from the kitchen. She realized several hours had passed since the oysters at lunch.

  “Tell me what happened,” said Florence Triquet.

  “You first.”

  A sigh. “D’accord. But I don’t remember much.”

  Helpful, this woman. Aimée thought back to the setup in the storefront for a detail to help prompt the woman’s memory. “Did she sit near the window?”

  “Must have. That’s where I found the paper with a phone number to call her daughter—you.”

  “You were the one who found it?”

  “Oui, left on the bench. I remember, now, seeing her go outside.”

  “Did she get into a car, a taxi?”

  “No idea. But . . . That’s right. I remember one strange thing. Chloé’s balloon was gone. The children get balloons on their chairs at the beginning of class, and they take them home at the end. But I noticed Chloé’s was missing. Maybe your mother took it with her?” Aimée heard voices in the background. “I handed the paper with the phone number to the teacher. That’s it. Is your mother all right?”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  “Look, I’m really sorry, but I do have a client waiting.”

  Hung up.

  Aimée went to the tall window. An old habit, staring out at the Seine, at Pont Marie, looking for her mother—she’d done it ever since she was eight years old. Since the day her mother had left a note on the apartment door after school telling Aimée to stay with the neighbors.

  Trees cast filigreed shadows over the cobbled quai. On the dark, gel-like Seine, streetlights cast reflections—quivers of bronze. Like always.

  A cold hollowness filled her.

  Until she noticed something bobbing in the air, silhouetted against the Seine. A car’s passing headlight beam illuminated a red balloon tied to the bench across from her window.

  In the brief streak of light, she saw a chalk mark on the wall behind it.