by Cara Black
She surveyed the driveway, the back gate. “Did you notice a catering truck when we arrived?”
René shook his head.
“Neither did I.” She paused. “Something’s different.”
An empty space lay ahead of a dark maroon two-seater Mercedes coupe. “Another Mercedes was parked here, remember?”
René stomped his feet in the cold, nodding, interest in his eyes. “That’s right. Sedan. Nice model, too.”
She glanced at the window, pulled the photo from her pocket. She stared at it, then showed René. “Like the one in this photo?”
René nodded.
She ran over to the flic, who was now striding ahead to a waiting police car. He was speaking into the microphone clipped to his collar.
“Officer, may I speak with Hénard?”
“Hénard’s gone. We’ve been called to an incident, Mademoiselle.” “Another Mercedes was parked here.” She pointed to the tire tracks.
“A priority call. But we have your statement, Mademoiselle,” he said, static erupting from his collar microphone.
“But you don’t understand. I think this car—”
“The crime-scene technicians examined the area, Mademoiselle.” Blue lights flashing, siren whining, his car shot over the gravel and out the driveway.
* * *
“WHAT A RATS’nest, Aimée,” René said, gunning the Citroën into the narrow lane. “Poor Morbier.”
Sadness weighted her down, thinking of her godfather hearing the news via officialdom.
René hit the brakes as a cat, a charcoal shadow, streaked across the street. He downshifted into second and hit the horn, turned the corner, and sped up.
“Don’t you think it’s better if the news comes from you?”
She took a deep breath and tried Morbier’s number again.
“No answer, René.”
“Give it a few minutes. You need to explain what we saw. He’ll know what to do.”
She was prepared to do just that, but for a couple of small problems: his phone didn’t answer; he was in Lyon. And he’d enlisted her help; he’d suspected something.
She cleared her throat. “Of course, but that missing Mercedes.… ” She sucked in her lip. “I heard it pull away.”
“Me, too.” René nodded. “A diesel with a knock, right before you found Xavierre. I know what you’re thinking. But would the murderer be stupid enough to steal the car and think it wouldn’t be traced? That Irati wouldn’t notice?”
She needed to think about that.
“That is, if the murderer took it,” René said. “Doubtful.”
“No harm in finding out, René.”
“What can you do, Aimée?” René stopped at a red light. “Trace the car?”
“Not officially. The flics made it clear they don’t appreciate interference.” But with a little charm and luck, she could. “Take a right.” She switched on the interior light, reapplying her lipstick in the visor mirror, and dabbed Chanel No. 5 on her nearest pulse points.
René shook his head.
“Any other ideas, René?” She snapped the compact shut. “I’m playing it by the—”
“Hem of your skirt. Like usual, Aimée.”
He shifted into first. She saw the set of René’s jaw. His white-knuckled hands on the steering wheel. “What’s wrong?”
“Xavierre’s Basque, non?” He checked the rearview mirror. “Last week in Biarritz a Basque was murdered after church, right in front of his family. Some ten-year-old vendetta.”
Another angle to consider? “Nothing points to politics here, unless I’m missing something.”
“Everything’s political with the Basques. Murdering tourists on the Costa Brava is their specialty.” René pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “Like my cousin. He was fifteen, on a school holiday on the Costa Brava, when a bomb ripped his bus apart.”
She’d had no idea. “I’m so sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ doesn’t bring him back,” René said.
“You never told me. But that’s ETA, the Basque terrorists,” she said. “Pull over there.”
She pointed to the small, storefront-like Commissariat de Police across from the darkened Marché de Passy, the indoor market. The Commissariat, a vestige of the old neighborhood, had a blue, white, and red flag whipping in the wind in front of it and a plaque on the light blue door. This remnant of the former village faced the market, not the designer shops and haunts of the wealthy.
René exhaled. “I don’t get it. Didn’t you already give a statement to the flics?”
She nodded, combing her fingers through the blond streaks wisping behind her ear.
“Yet we’re parked in front of the Commissariat and nothing else looks open.” René pulled on the parking brake.
Outside the car window, a figure walked by on the pavement. Alert, she watched. Only an older man, his cap low on his head, wearing a long wool coat, walking his dog, pausing every so often by the gutter. Otherwise, the street lay deserted.
“Time’s crucial,” she said. “Investigational red tape bogs everything down. Filing crime-scene reports can take up to twelve hours. I need to know whether the missing car’s important or not.”
She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt, that he didn’t notice the trembling in her knees.
The Mercedes. She had to find the Mercedes. An hour and a half head start, and the flic hadn’t even listened to her or noted it down. Irati wouldn’t notice that the car was missing until too late.
“Irati’s under sedation,” she said. “When she wakes, she’ll be desperate. Frantic.”
“Exactement,” René said. “Who wouldn’t be? A daughter losing her mother.… ”
She felt the buried pain in her heart. That little pain that never went away. Aimée’s American mother had abandoned her when she was eight years old.
René averted his gaze. “My turn for sorry.” His mouth tightened.
She smiled and touched his hand. “It’s all in the timing.”
“Timing? How?”
She shouldered her bag. “I don’t know yet.” She reached for the door handle. “But I’ll find out.”
She paused and caught his hangdog look. His pale face.
“Your hip bothering you, again? What’s wrong?”
“What’s right, Aimée?”
The windows fogged, and he hit the defroster.
“This murder. Morbier,” he went on. “But I worry about you,” he said, “that you’ll get involved just as you’re recovering your health.” René turned on the defroster full-blast. “Not that worrying does any good.”
She shuddered. This was the last thing she wanted, with a business to run, ongoing projects, clients, and pending proposals. She’d just spent a month on her back, and she needed to catch up. “Did I go looking for this?”
“Xavierre’s murder’s not your fault, or your responsibility,” René said.
“But I owe Morbier,” she said, biting her lip. “I failed.”
“Failed? She kicked us out, remember?” René said. “It’s more important for you to support Morbier in his grief.”
She nodded. But if she didn’t track down this car, do something, she’d get no sleep.
“‘In the river of life,’ as Saj says, ‘all things merge,’” René said.
“And that makes it easy?” she said. “Have you heard from him yet?”
Saj, their part-time hacker, had gone on a well-earned vacation: a meditation retreat in southern India.
“He’s at the ashram in Pondicherry, as far as I know. He won’t respond to e-mail during meditation courses.” René’s clenched fists gripped the steering wheel. A faint sheen of perspiration showed on his face.
Best to keep his mind off what had happened. She remembered him in the hospital, how she’d almost lost him. Never again. “With Saj away, you need to check the data sniffer feed, René.”
“For once, you’re being practical?”
She twisted the le
ather strap of her bag. “Don’t you need to prepare?” She squeezed his hand. “I know you, René.”
“You do?”
The atmosphere became grave. For a moment she couldn’t read his expression. But she couldn’t think about that now. She had things to do. She opened the car door. “Places to go, René.”
And miles before I sleep, she thought, keeping her trembling hands in her pockets as she traversed the zebra-striped crosswalk.
* * *
“36 85 RS 75.” Aimée read the Mercedes license plate number from the photo in her hand. A smiling Xavierre and Irati posed with a red-and-white picnic basket and rolling hills in the background. “A maroon Mercedes sedan, say two years old. Diesel.”
“You don’t ask much, do you, Mademoiselle Aimée?” Thesset cleared his throat. “Me, here in the Commissariat with two men, two others out responding to calls. Do you think I’ve got nothing to do?”
Thesset was approaching his mid-fifties. A career flic who’d graduated from the Police Academy with her father and Morbier, now edging toward retirement in the Commissariat, mostly preoccupied with disturbances of the peace or robbery by a disgruntled servant.
“Looks quiet to me, Thesset.”
“Heated up tonight,” he said. “Murder of some haute bourgeoise matron. They’re calling it a crime of passion. Shows you never can tell what’s going on behind the gilded doors.”
Her shoulders tensed. Not good. It sounded like the crime-scene techs wanted to go home early, shelve the investigation to low priority, and discount other motives.
But she’d worry about that later. The timing between the car pulling away and Xavierre’s murder wasn’t a coincidence. She needed Thesset to trace the car before he or the investigators finally connected the dots tomorrow.
“Crime of passion sounds convenient,” she said.
“More like they wanted to warm their derrières.” Thesset shrugged.
“Any leads yet?” she asked offhand.
“Not my call. Or my turf.”
A twinge of guilt passed through her. Here she held a photo of the dead woman in her hand. But Thesset could search without making an official report. And if she’d jumped to conclusions, say the old couple at the party had borrowed the Mercedes, no one would be the wiser. No harm done. No record.
“I’m not supposed to do this, you know.”
“But you’re the pro, Thesset.”
Thesset’s expertise lay in navigating Système D, the catchall term for getting things done. He was efficient behind the thick-lensed gray-framed glasses mounted on his beaklike nose, his misleading sallow jowls and permanent squint. “Like a pigeon,” she’d once said to her father at the Commissariat, and he’d put a finger over his mouth. “Shhh. We call him that, but never to his face.”
“S’il vous plaît, Thesset. I’m asking on behalf of Morbier.”
She heard the fax machine come to life behind the wooden partition, tried to ignore the acrid cigarette smoke spiraling from the ashtray on the counter, the empty pack of Mentos crumpled near the phone.
“Let the old coot request this himself.”
“Très compliqué, Thesset.” She leaned forward as if in confidence. “A delicate situation, if you know what I mean. Morbier’s lady friend’s daughter fell in with a bad sort—a vindictive type. Now he’s her ex and out on parole. He took her Mercedes tonight. The daughter wants nothing to do with him, no accusations, just her car back. No urge to make a report and land him back in prison and deal with recriminations on his release. Compris? A small favor, Morbier said. He counted on you keeping it quiet. Unofficial.”
“Sounds like a soap opera,” Thesset said.
She wished it were, but figured it wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten a request to keep haut bourgeois linen clean.
“Me, I’ve got work to do,” Thesset said. “Tell Morbier to get on it himself.”
“Mais, Morbier’s in Lyon.” She expelled air from her mouth. Tried to look helpless and without a clue. Not hard. “Some big investigation,” she said, playing it to the hilt. “I don’t know what, but he asked for my help.”
Thesset squinted behind his glasses. Put down his pen.
“Lyon? That circus?” A cough, then he cleared his throat again. “Better him than me.”
What did that mean?
“Et alors, in that case,” Thesset said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
The change in Thesset’s attitude intrigued her. “What’s happening in Lyon?”
“Nothing I want to know about.” He shrugged.
She left it for now and flashed a big smile. “Then how about a trace through traffic division? The patrol cars in Bois de Boulogne, little things, the usual.”
“Usual?” He snorted. “If you weren’t taller than me now, I’d take you on my lap, like I used to, and tickle behind your knees.”
She’d loved that. “And give me the hiccups.”
“Like I said, you don’t want much, do you?” A sigh. “I’ll put the alert out to my boys on patrol.”
“How long will it take, Thesset?”
“To find the car?” He shrugged. “Two minutes, two hours, two days. Depends.”
The murderer could have abandoned the car. But casting a wide net, a maxim on the force, would find it sooner or later. Regular patrols cruised the neighboring Bois de Boulogne, a stretch of forest double the size of New York’s Central Park. The big lung of Paris, locals called it, a park honeycombed with roads, horse trails, the Longchamp racing course, and also Brazilian transvestites offering their services on the fringes, a frequent issue with the consular staff of the numerous embassies dotting the 16th arrondissement. YOU PLAY, YOU PAY, headlined a recent scandal sheet over a transvestite’s blackmail demand, complete with compromising photos. Immediately hushed up while the junior consul was packed off to his home country.
She wished her shoulders weren’t aching with fatigue. And that she could provoke Thesset into revealing some details about “the Lyon circus.”
“Morbier promised he’d return tonight,” she said, hating to lie.
“Don’t count on it,” he said. “Between you and me, Mademoiselle Aimée, who knows. It’s three branches all jockeying for credit. A mess.”
“Anything to do with the news on the radio?”
“Salauds killed a flic. And you know what that means.”
A priority. All forces would be centered on a policeman’s killing.
“Morbier’s a Commissaire Divisionnaire now; Lyon’s not his turf.”
“It’s not for me to say.” Thesset’s eyes suddenly seemed shuttered. He was holding something back. Impatient, she tapped her nails on the police blotter and noticed a chip on her newly lacquered pinkie.
Thesset’s jaw tightened. Papers rustled from behind the partition, a filing-cabinet drawer shut. She shivered in the cold unheated reception area at the scuffed wood counter.
“Aaah. But on the radio.” She thought for a moment trying to draw him out. “Those roadblocks? Bon, what can you tell me?”
“Every branch’s salivating to get the flic-killer, that’s all I know.” Thesset pounded his fist on the counter. “The flic’s wife’s eight months pregnant. Poor thing.”
Sad. No doubt the flics were seeking vengeance. With all forces concentrating on the murder of one of their own, she realized, Xavierre’s murderer could slip under their radar.
Through the open door in the rear office, she saw a blue-uniformed flic pull a fax from the printer. “Thesset, look at this.”
“I’ll ring you later,” she said. “Et merci, Thesset.”
Aimée snapped her bag shut. Thesset disappeared into the office. She paused behind the divider, her ear to the smudged glass, and overheard “damned ETA terrorists … acting up again.”
Then the door closed.
* * *
ETA, THE BASQUE Nationalists. Xavierre was Basque. Was there a connection? Had that worried Morbier?
The street lay quiet, apart from
water rushing in the gutter. Typical of the staid quartier: not even a café open. But a perfect quartier for terrorists to hide in, in a tony residential district where everyone minded their own business. And never a taxi when you needed one, she thought, scanning the empty street. She shouldered her bag, her only companions a streetlight and the low, distant moan of a cat in heat.
Around the corner, a lone taxi paused at the intersection. Thank god. She caught it before the light changed.
“Île Saint-Louis, s’il vous plaît,” she said, giving her address, and popped her last two Doliprane aspirin, dry-mouthed, in the back seat. Fifteen minutes later, she punched in the digicode of her building, a seventeenth-century soot-stained townhouse on the quai, and stepped into the cobbled courtyard. Beyond the ancient pear tree, she noticed with relief, the windows in her concierge’s loge were lit.
“Late and breathless,” frowned Madame Cachou, her concierge. “As usual.”
Aimée leaned down to pet Miles Davis, her bichon frisé. His wet nose sniffed her ankles. “Désolée, Madame. Work. Traffic.” Murder, but she left that out.
“Good thing!” said Madame Cachou. “With my bursitis, I can’t walk Miles Davis up and down three times a day.”
Madame Cachou, a chronic complainer, was growing worse in her old age. Framed in the doorway of her loge in the courtyard, Madame handed Aimée the leash from the wall hook. Miles Davis emitted a low growl, which reminded Aimée of her shoes, the dog poo.
“Un moment,” Madame Cachou said. “There’s a package for you.”
Warmth emanated from Madame Cachou’s loge, a steaming cup by an armchair near the télé showing the late-night France2 news. Aimée’s tired body ached and she couldn’t wait to get under the duvet. An announcer spoke as a scene flashed on the screen: dark sky punctuated by lights, yellow crime-scene tape, a narrow lane bordered by high walls. Her shoulders tightened. She recognized those stone walls. The walls of Xavierre’s garden.
“The Police Judiciaire refused to issue a statement regarding the murdered ex-wife of a prominent attorney found tonight in her bedroom in the 16th arrondissement.”
Bedroom? She dropped Miles Davis’s leash.
