Murder in Bel-Air

by Cara Black

  Wednesday, Midmorning

  Aimée slipped away from le Train Bleu during the coffee break and headed downstairs to the station hall. Under the soot-clouded glass roof, travelers hurried to catch their trains, mingling with arrivals on the platforms. The arrival/departure board clicked above her.

  She hurried toward the lockers. All she had to do was check whether the key fit and, if it did, take whatever was in the locker and figure things out from there. Two minutes, tops.

  She kept an eye out for flics or a security camera, even though René had told her the train station’s video surveillance had stopped running due to budget cuts—his friend’s company had previously held that contract.

  So far, so good. No one even looked like a plainclothes police officer.

  But where she remembered the lockers being, she instead found a kiosk with a notice: due to the installation of new facilities, visit our temporary storage lockers. left luggage, level 1.

  Where were the old lockers? Would it be wise to inquire?

  She wound through crowds and down the stairs, then through a vast corridor leading to the Métro lines. On the left lay a long open counter with racks of tagged suitcases and a line of travelers waiting to access a wall of station lockers that had been moved from upstairs.

  Two flics were surveying the crowd. Not good.

  The woman ahead of her in line was fuming. “I’ll miss my train. Why don’t they hurry up?”

  Good question.

  “Does it always take this long?” Aimée asked. “I’ve got a locker key; can’t we just—”

  “I do, too,” the woman said, fingering a locker key. “I heard on the news there was a bomb scare.”

  Bomb scare? Aimée compared the key clutched in her moist palm to the woman’s.

  Not the same at all.

  The two flics stood closer, watching. Aimée noticed another pair stood by the lockers.

  With tiny steps she backed up, almost bumping into a rushing family.

  Melted into the crowd.

  Wednesday, 5 p.m.

  René’s face was still shining after the applause at the conference as he packed up their presentation. He even grinned at Marc by accident—Aimée knew René distrusted their rival, too.

  Marc shook René’s hand. Turned to Aimée. “Join us for apéros later?”

  The last thing Aimée wanted.

  “We’d love to, wouldn’t we, René?” she said.

  René caught her signal. “Tomorrow’s perfect,” he said. “We’ll have time to talk about your idea.”

  Marc shrugged. “Too late, it’s a done deal. I hadn’t heard back from you, so I submitted the proposal myself.”

  Of course he had. He’d been testing the waters. Best of luck to him.

  “I have something else,” he said. “Something much better.”

  Fat chance.

  The calculating salaud wanted something from them.

  René released the parking brake in his Citroën DS, shifted, and eased the car into Boulevard Diderot. He’d updated her on the firewall status—Saj was monitoring their systems.

  “You think Marc’s behind this?” René asked.

  “Wouldn’t put it past him,” she said, her mind on the addresses she’d written down on her to-do list. “Make a right. We’re going to the Gare de Bercy.”

  “Where you load your car on the train? Why?”

  She explained her plan.

  “Do you really think you’ll find a locker where the key fits?”

  “Won’t know until I try,” she said.

  “Another wild-goose chase?” René sighed. “Allez, Aimée, weren’t you going to return the money to the nun?”

  “First I’ve got to locate whatever this key opens.”

  She’d come up with a story for whoever needed to know: She’d found the key in her aunt’s belongings, wondered if it fit their lockers; would they be so kind as to help? Aimée and René didn’t spend long at the Gare de Bercy before she saw the key she had didn’t match the ones for the lockers there. An hour later, she’d checked lockers at two bains-douches, the Reuilly swimming pool, and two public gymnasiums. She’d gotten nowhere.

  “Satisfied now?” René’s eyebrows rose in irritation.

  “I’m missing something.” She pulled out her Paris map and thumbed to the twelfth arrondissement. “I’ve checked all the public access places with lockers I can think of.”

  “What about hospitals? There are three hospitals around Bel-Air, and Saint-Antoine, which isn’t far, is huge.”

  “You mean a staff locker?” Thought for a moment. “If Genelle was masquerading as an SDF, how would she get into a hospital?” Aimée set the map on the dashboard. “Let’s say it’s some place close, here in Bel-Air. Accessible.”

  She stuck her finger on the convent, then used her kohl eye pencil to draw a circle around it with a several-block radius.

  “See, Hôpital Rothschild,” said René.

  She still didn’t buy a hospital—too many eyes.

  “And a Catholic school, another convent adjoining it, apartment buildings, the National Forests Office, the Métro, the Picpus Cemetery . . .” She flicked a dead leaf off her heel.

  The victim, this Genelle, had hidden something valuable that had cost her her life. Where?

  René pointed. “Next door’s the chapel where the Sisters of the Adoration pray nonstop for the victims of the guillotine in the Terror.”

  People were still doing that for the Terror today? “Even now?”

  René rolled down his window. Nodded. “The whole place creeped me out,” he said. “There’s a mass grave there, the pit where they threw in the commoners outside the private cemetery. Even the name is creepy, ‘Picpus,’ fleabite. There’s a bizarre sixteenth-century legend about villagers suffering a plague of red and white blisters until a monk cured them with an ointment for fleas. Some miracle. Picpus—who’d want to keep a name like that?”

  Aimée remembered the sign under the lintel. “And you know all this how?”

  René averted his eyes. “The comte.”

  Curious, she looked up from the map. René rarely spoke of his childhood growing up in the comte d’Amboise’s château, where René’s mother had curated the comte’s mechanical toy collection—among other things. Aimée often suspected René was the fruit of their liaison. She knew so little about his upbringing. “How’s that, René?”

  “He took me when I was young.”

  “The comte brought you there?”

  “He’s a descendant, so a branch of his family got the blade. After the Revolution, noble families bought the land secretly and reburied their guillotined with headstones, in family crypts . . . Even today, aristocratic descendants have the right to burial in those crypts.” He shrugged. “Bien sûr, they left the commoners in the mass pit. The Marquis de Lafayette’s buried there under an American flag.”

  “Go back.”

  René switched on the ignition.

  “Good idea,” he said. “Let’s go home and get takeout.”

  She grabbed René’s arm. “Non, non, I mean the part about crypts. You mean like mausoleums?”

  René shrugged again. “Little locked houses of the dead. Creepy.”

  “That’s it.”

  Why hadn’t she noticed it two nights before?

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Look, there’s only a wall between the convent and Cimetière de Picpus.”

  “Et alors?”

  “Hurry, René, before it closes.”

  Wednesday, Early Evening

  The sign on the tall ancient doors read, temporary closure due to chapel maintenance. Taped beside it was a layout of the chapel and grounds accompanied by detailed instructions for donations to the tronc, the offering box.

  More bureauc
ratic than the tax office.

  “Forget that,” said René.

  Next door she saw the line for the Sisters of the Poor soup kitchen forming. Couldn’t risk the legionnaire watching. Or putting the nun in danger.

  She’d called and left two messages for Sister Agnès the day before. Still hadn’t heard back. Tried again.

  “Oui, mademoiselle, I took down your messages,” said the receptionist at the convent. “C’est dommage, but Sister Agnès already left on retreat.”

  Great.

  “When does she return?” Aimée asked.

  “Ah, it’s her order’s yearly retreat at Mont-Saint-Michel. They’ll be cloistered until next month.”

  There went that idea. “Sister, do you have a list of names of volunteers who help out at the soup kitchen?”

  “No, we don’t keep records.”

  A dead end.

  “Merci,” Aimée said.

  She remembered the street where the ambulance had picked up Genelle/Germaine’s body. Thought back to the layout of the dark convent grounds she’d trailed the crime-scene tech through. The warren of old arcades, the corridors, paths, the chapel and the soup kitchen.

  “These grounds communicate, René. Go around the block and park on Avenue de Saint-Mandé.”

  “I’m not breaking into a cemetery. Forget it.”

  “We don’t have to,” she said. Not really. “Go along with me, René.”

  “When hasn’t that gotten me in trouble?”

  As if her mother wasn’t already in trouble?

  “One last stop, okay?” she said.

  He shifted into first. On the avenue she pointed to a row of Haussmannian buildings across the street from a salon de thé. Cars were wedged in nose to fender.

  “I can’t park,” he said. “It’s jammed.”

  “Pull in where that camionette’s coming out. See? Turn in there.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “There’s parking behind.”

  René eased the fat Citroën inside, barely avoiding scraping his pride and joy on the blue grilled gates. No way in hell could the ambulance have made it through this old carriageway—this was why the nuns had been watching the body be loaded into the ambulance out on the street.

  “Keep going, René.”

  “But it’s private parking here. I’ll get a ticket or even towed away.”

  Nervous as always about his car.

  “We won’t stay here that long. Keep going around to the back. There. See the wall?”

  A few cars and a small backhoe were parked on a lot, half of which was newly paved and giving off the tang of fresh tar. Chestnut trees topped the old wall, the stucco flaking, exposing stone.

  René stared at the notice on the gate, a smaller version of what Aimée had seen on the other side, while Aimée studied the lockpick set she kept in her compact. Useless with a big ancient lock like this.

  “No way in hell will I climb that wall,” said René.

  A red-faced, stout man wearing a blue work coat strode toward them. His footsteps spit gravel. He wiped a smear of something white off his chin. They’d interrupted him either shaving or eating a cream puff.

  “This isn’t public parking,” he said. “It’s private property.”

  “That’s right, monsieur,” she said, reaching into her alias card case. “We appreciate your vigilance. And cooperation.”

  She flashed her father’s old police ID, doctored with new seals and her own photo. Not the most attractive photo, with her mouth puckered as if she’d tasted a lemon.

  “My colleague, the doctor here, and I need to revisit the crime scene,” she said.

  René blinked. The hovering smell of tar layered the air; crisp orange leaves crackled and swirled in the rising wind.

  “No one told me,” the man said.

  “The investigation’s incomplete, monsieur. The doctor, a forensic biologist, needs samples.”

  René pursed his lips.

  “I’m not supposed to provide access without notice,” the man said. “You’ll need to arrange another time.”

  No doubt they’d disturbed his dessert.

  “No one values rules more than I, monsieur. However, we both know murder respects no regulation or timetable.” She shrugged. “I’d appreciate your assistance. I assume you saw the victim. This could provide insight, a vital detail.”

  “But I told the police already; I heard—I mean I just found her.”

  He’d stumbled, caught himself. He knew more than he’d said in his statement. She shot René a look.

  “Correct,” she said. “You’ll show us where, so my colleague can verify the flora evidence in the surrounding area.”

  René coughed.

  “You mean—”

  “Exactement, monsieur,” she interrupted the man, overwhelming him with officiousness, “foliage samples from the grass and trees on the crime site. Please, open the gate while the doctor gets his kit.”

  She heard the keys jangle in the man’s pocket. “I don’t want to get in trouble. The tenants were already disturbed enough.”

  “You won’t, monsieur. You’re helping the police, doing your civic duty.”

  While René gathered his briefcase, she slipped him her eyebrow tweezers, a random toothpick, and glassine envelopes that had once held crumbled teething biscuits, which she had smoothed out quickly. Licked the crumbs off her fingers.

  “Keep him busy,” she whispered.

  “How can I pretend I’m a forensic biologist, whatever that is?” he asked.

  “I just made that up. You’ll think of something.” She winked. “Dr. Friant.”

  Wednesday, 7 p.m.

  The guard led them through the gate to the cedar tree hanging with the rippling crime scene tape. René dutifully crawled and picked with the tweezers. The guard held René’s car flashlight, pointing locations out. With the guard occupied, Aimée hurried under another double row of chestnut trees and found the walled cemetery beyond the site of the mass graves.

  Stupid. She’d passed this wall the other night and hadn’t thought to look inside.

  Inside, she found a tumble of tilted headstones tattooed with lichen, as well as rows of mausoleums and crypts. Some were maintained, others cracked and sunken with age. In the distance several American flags proclaimed the tomb of Lafayette.

  Consulting the legend, she looked for plot 120 and searched among the numbers engraved on the backs of the mausoleums. Little locked houses of the dead all right.

  She passed row after row. Often numbers had worn off. Her boots slipped on the mossed stone ledges.

  Number 120. A rusted metal fence surrounded the limestone mausoleum; dusty plastic flowers were wedged in the door. in memory of georges de larrigue and la famille larrigue.

  Plot 120 . . . gdel.

  She looked around. No one. The rising wind made her shiver.

  Or was it the fact that she was breaking into a crypt?

  She took the key, warm from her skin, out of her bra. Slid it into the large keyhole. A perfect fit.

  Twisted it and pushed the door open.

  The metal door scraped, and she paused. Looked around again. Only the long shadows from the trees.

  She had to hurry. Poor René could pick up only so much with her tweezers.

  Her penlight beam shone on dirty cobwebs and a dead spider that hung over Georges de Larrigue’s coffin. More cobwebs curtained the ceiling and veiled a leaded stained-glass window.

  She stuck the penlight in her mouth and ran her fingers around the sides of the stone-encased coffin. Then behind. Felt something.

  Yanked.

  A manila envelope tumbled to the ground near her feet.

  She took one look at the letters printed on it—GBH—and stuck it in her bag. In a flash, she’d relocked
the mausoleum and was running, forgetting the penlight in her mouth until she realized she couldn’t breathe.

  “I hope you’ve collected enough samples, Doctor,” she said, trying not to pant. “We’ve been called to the commissariat. Now.”

  The guard, now talkative, continued to expound on his theories about the murder all the way to the car. He opened the doors to the street and guided René out, stood waving goodbye on the curb.

  “You’ve got a new best friend, René,” Aimée said.

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “I thought he’d never stop being helpful. Upshot, he heard a car pull out before the victim was found but saw nothing.” René shifted into second. “Hope it was worth it; did you find something?”

  “Hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “Let’s go where we won’t get disturbed.”

  A filmy haze floated across her vision. When this happened, the doctor had warned her, it was important to stay calm. To close her eyes, breathe.

  Calm?

  When she opened her eyes again, the film had disappeared and been replaced by a dull, creeping ache behind her temple.

  She popped two Doliprane and swallowed them dry.

  Wednesday Evening

  Wednesday evenings, Aimée usually had Babette stay late so she could schedule meetings or catch up on work at the office. When Aimée had checked in, Babette had reported that Chloé had loved her yogurt, played with bubbles in the bath, and gone to sleep, mais non, no word from Sydney.

  Aimée sat across from René in the closet-sized back room of la Liberté, the anarchist café. It had a seasonal prix-fixe menu, all ingredients fresh from the local market, the Marché d’Aligre, and, as regulars knew, a select wine list. Farouk, the chef, concocted one superb daily special in the tiny kitchen. The owner worked on a crossword puzzle in Le Parisien with several clients at the counter.

  “You think it’s safe here, Aimée?” René asked.

  “The cabinetmakers fomented the Revolution and marched up to Bastille from here, René. Same spirit, hasn’t changed.” She looked around. Only one old woman reading l’Humanité, the Communist newspaper, over a glass of deep red. “Plus, we’re early.”