Sensational

by Jodie Lynn Zdrok

  “I’m afraid we can’t say anything else at this time,” said Christophe, raising his voice so all could hear. “Thank you all for your concern. At this point, the matter is delegated to the police.”

  Rather than silencing the crowd, Christophe’s remarks reinvigorated the clamor. He held his hand up, leading Nathalie and Jules toward the elevator without a word. They were careful not to step in the blood.

  “Monsieur Gagnon, how is it that you’re here?” asked Jules in a faraway voice. He still hadn’t regained his color, Nathalie noticed. Even in the dusk, he looked extremely pale.

  “Cadoret’s own path led me here,” Christophe said. “I had someone follow him when he left work yesterday. He didn’t come in today, but I kept a man on him.”

  Nathalie wrinkled her brow. “Why?”

  “He adamantly refused to let Jules into the morgue yesterday.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jules. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

  The elevator opened. Christophe turned to the onlookers seeking to embark. “Would you mind permitting us to take the car alone?”

  An assortment of apologies filtered through the five or six people standing there as they moved out of the way.

  Christophe gestured for Nathalie and Jules to enter the elevator, then got in behind them. “I never discussed the details of your departure with him. As far as everyone else at the morgue knew, Jules’s power had begun to fade. Dr. Nicot relayed that to Gabrielle in my absence. I even asked him to tell her Patenaude’s newspaper article might not run as a result, to protect the ruse. Did either of you tell her more?”

  They shook their heads. Nathalie silently thanked Gabrielle for never having pried when she so easily could have.

  Christophe steadied his posture for the descent. “No one besides the three of us, Monsieur Patenaude, and the Prefect of Police knew the truth. Not even the men I had following you,” he said. “All three of you, actually. Beginning that very day.”

  Nathalie gaped at Christophe. “You—you had people protecting us?” She stole a glance at Jules, who looked equally dumbfounded.

  How had she not noticed anyone following her?

  Following them, in fact. At Tuileries, a conversation that felt so intimate, so discreet, even in a public setting.

  “The Prefect of Police authorized it for five days,” Christophe continued. “One, to make sure the two of you and Gabrielle were safe. Two, in the event Le Rasoir betrayed himself by approaching you.”

  Jules tapped his fingers on the side of the elevator, chewing the inside of his cheek. Was he embarrassed? “He approached us every day, except with a cordial greeting and a smile. He’d have recognized some or all of the police officers protecting us. No wonder he stayed away.”

  “Yes,” Christophe began, “which ultimately proved beneficial. As it were, Monsieur Cadoret wasn’t in the morning of Monsieur Patenaude’s discovery—I remember this well because it was my last day before going to Switzerland. Monsieur Soucy stood in the display room and Cadoret came during the afternoon. I never saw him, only left instructions for the news to be conveyed to him.”

  “We might have been overheard in your office, and someone might have passed it on to him,” said Nathalie. “I was—not subtle, if you will.”

  Christophe waited as the noisy hydraulic brakes slowed them down. “You weren’t as loud as you think. Dr. Nicot cannot hear much if the door is closed, nor can Monsieur Soucy. It’s very unlikely anyone else heard us.”

  “So you didn’t leave instructions that I wasn’t allowed into the morgue?” asked Jules. “Other than with, uh, the rest of the public?”

  “Not at all. I told the staff the ‘official version,’ as I said. Never that you should be refused entry.”

  Nathalie thought this strange. She still wasn’t clear how Christophe put all of this together, knowing the facts available at the time. “That seems to be a minor infraction at worst.”

  They paused the conversation as they proceeded from one elevator to the next, Christophe again asking for privacy from the nosy crowd that had seen or heard enough to know some drama had taken place. Nathalie’s eyes fastened on the corner of the platform where, not twenty minutes before, M. Cadoret became Le Rasoir who became Samuel Pelerine.

  When the door to the car was closed, she shut her eyes then opened them. The image remained even when she could no longer see the platform.

  “I agree with Nathalie. Why should refusal to let me enter the morgue warrant suspicion?” asked Jules.

  “It wasn’t so much the refusal as his behavior.” Christophe put his palms together. “He was extraordinarily—and atypically—agitated about it for someone who was, supposedly, merely turning away an Insightful whose power had become unreliable. Why was Cadoret so upset?”

  “Because he knew, somehow.” Nathalie thought about it. “Did you write down the real reason for Jules’s dismissal anywhere?”

  “I did. Not in the case documents, and not even in Jules’s file. A separate file I keep under an obscure title, precisely to protect such secrets. I even gave Jules a pseudonym in the documentation.”

  Jules squeezed some water out of his shirt. “So he either found out by some other means … or searched the paperwork. He must have followed me at some point during those five days.” He shook his head vigorously. “He trailed me so well without my notice. The man was like an apparition, it seems. And he might have followed Nathalie or Gabrielle. Seeing police near any one of us on multiple occasions would have made him not only stay away but become suspicious. I don’t think he believed the ‘lost ability’ excuse. Or if he did, he wished to ascertain it and found it to be untrue.”

  “Exactly,” said Christophe, exhaling deeply. “This also illustrates how, prior to that, he’d know whether or not you were honoring your … arrangement. We assumed ‘the killer’ knew from what the newspapers reported. There was a more direct method, wasn’t there? To look in the case files in my office. He’d been studying everything all along.”

  “How better to stay a step ahead, to evade capture,” said Nathalie.

  Christophe glanced back and forth between them. “We can’t know for sure, but I suspect that’s why he broke his pattern at times, with the bodies, the scripts, the way the murders were similar but not too rigidly the same. To keep from being too predictable.”

  Nathalie rubbed her temples. None of this seemed real.

  “The man knew everything, then. Even took our statements at times.” Jules spoke in a hushed voice. “He was obviously a masterful liar. He was interviewed, not by M. Patenaude I’m sure, and weaved whatever falsehoods he needed to.”

  M. Patenaude did some, not all, of the many interviews. Jules was right; he probably hadn’t spoken to Pelerine.

  “He certainly did, and for the most part, he succeeded. But his missteps began to add up.” Christophe pulled on the end of his sleeves. “Claiming illness and leaving precisely when Jules came inside yesterday, then not coming in today—and this is a man who never missed a day since he started months ago—seemed to be … something else.”

  Nathalie shifted her weight. Something else indeed. She was impressed with how perceptive Christophe was. Had always been, really.

  “Even so,” Christophe continued, “it was unusual, but I didn’t know what to make of it. A conversation with Ida Blackwell’s husband proved to be most … insightful, if you’ll pardon my use of the word.”

  They reached the ground. It was no longer raining, and the wind was much less intense than it had been at the top of the Tour Eiffel. Scores of people and police were gathered around where Pelerine had fallen.

  Christophe began walking toward the crowd. “We knew from Jules’s thought reading that Ida had seen her killer before. She and her husband had been at the morgue hours before her death. A ‘nice man with very small glasses and no’—here the man pointed to his eyebrows to demonstrate—‘came running out of the morgue to return a dropped scarf.’”

 
A scarf.

  The irony.

  “They—they asked him for a restaurant recommendation, using a guidebook and whatever French they could manage,” Christophe added. “They took his suggestion. We don’t know whether he followed them, showed up at the restaurant later, or waited near the restaurant and happened to see them again … we can only guess it was one of those three. At some point, Monsieur and Madame Blackwell quarreled after having had too much to drink, then, well. The rest.”

  What if the Blackwells had simply gone back to their hotel together, or never gone to the restaurant at all? Or hadn’t had too much to drink, or hadn’t argued? Any number of scenarios could have happened to prevent Ida’s death.

  And yet Nathalie was all too keenly aware of another truth. If it hadn’t been Ida, someone else would have been cast as the Princess.

  Nathalie put her hand to her throat. “All of this pointed you to Monsieur Cadoret. I mean, Pelerine. He said his real name was Pelerine.”

  “Ah,” said Christophe, holding up a finger. “That brings me to the final element. I’ve been perusing the interviews with the theater professionals. Several actors and a director mentioned Samuel Pelerine, a costumier no longer employed there. He fit Cado—uh, Pelerine’s physical characteristics: forties, brawny, and absent of all hair.”

  A policeman caught sight of Christophe and called out to him. “Un moment!”

  Christophe turned back to Nathalie and Jules. “I thought of him when I read the description, because it reminded me of him. I didn’t suspect him, not at all. When applying for the morgue position, he’d furnished the Prefect of Police and me paperwork ‘proving’ his identity as a civil servant from Fontainebleau; I had no reason to think he wasn’t the man he said he was.”

  His shoulders dropped, and a flash of disappointment crossed his face. Nathalie knew him well enough to know that this oversight, this inability to make the connection sooner and to see through Pelerine, would follow Christophe around.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I added this Pelerine to a list of thirty or so people to be interviewed again or investigated.”

  “And so somehow it all came together,” Jules concluded, his voice weak.

  “Enough for me to be interested in Monsieur Ca—Pelerine’s whereabouts,” said Christophe. “I gave it a low probability of manifesting anything but left instructions that I was to be contacted immediately if he was seen with either of you or Gabrielle. She’s safe—she was at the morgue when I heard from the man I sent to follow him earlier. So here we are.”

  Here they were, at the base of the mighty Tour Eiffel. With Le Rasoir’s body, or whatever was left of it, thirty meters away. Nathalie gave in to the temptation to look and (for once) was grateful the crowd blocked most of it.

  Christophe was called upon again and excused himself to talk to the police. One of the officers stayed behind to take statements from Nathalie and Jules.

  When the policeman walked away, Nathalie studied Jules, still ghostly white, and took him by the hand. “Mon bonbon, it’s over.”

  “Le Rasoir or us?”

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have used a term of endearment.

  Our courtship has been over for a while, she wanted to say. Why hurt him? He knew.

  She hoped.

  They moved away from the crowd. Nathalie had no wish to hear people discussing Pelerine’s remains (as it was, she thought she heard someone throw up), and Jules was in no state to be further upset. They crossed the Seine and walked across the Pont d’Iena. They walked to the Palais du Trocadéro, a relic from a fair decades ago that Nathalie thought looked like a church and a coliseum put together. They sat on a wall beside the fountain in between a pair of puddles on the steps, so soaked they were indifferent to the dampness of the stone.

  “He must have followed me all day,” Jules said, shaking his head. “I went to the morgue after I left Le Petit Journal. By then, Christophe was back. I had the day off, so from there I went home, dressed, read, and made my way here.”

  Nathalie thought of the other ways Pelerine could have ended his play. Would he really have stabbed Jules on the Tour Eiffel, or was that part of his performance tonight? Would she have been next, or was it happenstance that she had a “role”?

  The answer died with him. And it was probably better that way.

  “You know me, always early for an appointment.” Jules ran his fingers through his hair. “I was milling about on the second platform, and he presented himself. Collegial, ordinary Monsieur Cadoret striking up a conversation. He asked what I was doing there, then remarked how this was the second time we’d met at the Exposition.”

  “Second?” Nathalie raised a brow.

  “He reminded me. I met him the night all four of us were here, the night we had the vin de coca, then went up the Tour Eiffel.” He stared at the structure across the Seine as he said it. “The three of you were ahead of me at the Galerie des Machines. Don’t you—”

  Remember? No. She didn’t.

  Jules shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t remember, either—it was just a quick exchange and so much of that night was imprecise. Anyway, that’s when he slipped the note and money into my pocket. I’m sure of it now. The next morning was when the head and body were found in the Guatemala and Uruguay Pavilions.”

  Oh goodness. Jules saw him right before … or after …

  “I was surprised he remembered a chance encounter but didn’t think anything of it,” Jules said. “I told him I was waiting for you.”

  What if I’d changed my mind and didn’t come?

  Would he have stabbed Jules, as he claimed?

  Jules ran his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t suspect a thing until he asked me if I knew he used to be an actor. No, I said. He said, ‘How am I acting now? Could I pass for an executioner?’”

  “Oh, Jules.” Nathalie felt a chill despite the humidity.

  “I was frozen, absolutely frozen with worry. For myself, for you.” He rested his head in his hands. “He flashed his coat so I’d see the gun and demanded that I keep up the ruse when you arrived and more orders would follow. I pulled the knife on him, but he dispensed of it swiftly, kicking it to the corner of the platform.”

  She couldn’t imagine the strain Jules had been under, waiting for her to show up. Seconds must have felt like minutes, and minutes like hours.

  “He rambled. My hearing still isn’t completely back yet, so with the rain … I missed some of what he said.” Jules bit the inside of his cheek. “This I heard: he’d been planning to seek a job on the Exposition grounds, so as to make ‘everything less complicated,’ but considered it a stroke of good fortune when a position at the morgue opened up.”

  Nathalie frowned. M. Robert, the droopy older gentleman who’d often stood inside the display room before, had left for health reasons several months ago.

  “When he found himself in the company of not one but two Insightfuls, then recently a third, he was delighted.” Jules paused. He was silent for so long, Nathalie thought he was done. When he resumed, his voice was quiet. “Then he said, ‘You’d be astonished how quickly someone’s strengths and weaknesses are revealed through observation and polite banter.’”

  Nathalie put her finger in the surface of a puddle, watching the ripples of the shallow water. Pelerine had chosen Jules, not her. Her insides turned to liquid, then rock, then liquid again as she thought of the conversations he must have overheard, the observations in and out of the viewing room, the conclusions he must have derived from the contrast in their clothes.

  “It doesn’t matter what he said up there,” Nathalie said. “He wanted you to feel inferior and helpless. Just another game.”

  His head was still buried; she couldn’t gauge his reaction. She said it to make him feel better. Did it?

  Jules tugged at his chestnut waves. He lifted his head with a sigh. “I can’t describe the state of disbelief I was in, Nathalie. I was still piecing it together when you came several minutes later. I’m still pi
ecing it together now.”

  She put her hand over his. “It will be a while before it feels like the killer is gone,” she said. How dreadful to speak from direct knowledge. From memory. “And it will never leave you. Only grow quieter in your mind.”

  He took her hand and kissed it gently before letting it go. “Thank you.”

  People walked around them, talking about the mess of human remains at the Tour Eiffel. She heard other languages, too, and wondered if they were discussing the same rumors. A suicide, a lover’s quarrel, a worker climbing the exterior falling to his death by accident.

  None guessed that the swamp of blood and flesh was once Le Rasoir.

  “I’ve had enough of these wet clothes,” Nathalie said, getting up slowly. She put her hand to her pocket and felt the outline of the map.

  Jules saw the gesture. “You should give the map to Louis.”

  “Yes. For his collection of ‘morbidities and oddities.’”

  Although she wanted to rip it to shreds, she recognized that Louis would appreciate it.

  “I’m going to hire a carriage and go home,” she said. “If you’d like, I’ll give him enough money to bring you home as well.”

  Jules straightened out his collar as he stood. “That’s kind of you, but I think I’m going to wander the grounds awhile. Clear my mind.” He hesitated, then took a step closer to her. “When will I see you again?”

  Nathalie gave him a demure smile. “At the morgue here and there, I suppose.”

  “I’ve left the hat shop, you know,” he said. “I’m now at Rue du Chocolat six days a week. My future as a chocolatier is promising. I hope to own my own shop someday.”

  “If your early creations are any indication, you’ll succeed marvelously.”

  He beamed. “I’ll still be going to the morgue. For now, anyway. It’s not something I want to do forever.”

  “Me neither,” she said, giving voice to the sentiment for the first time. “At this point, I’m glad our paths will cross there, anyway. We’re—we’re friends again, as far as I can see.”

  But nothing more.