by Cara Black
“Get me up to speed in every way you can, d’accord?” the attorney said.
“I’m on it.”
Hanging up, she realized she was sitting in a Taxi Bleu, the same service Dechard had used. She eyed the taxi’s visor for the driver’s name and badge number.
“Monsieur Poncelet, any chance you had a fare to this same address this morning?”
“My shift started an hour ago.”
That would have been too easy. “Could you find out who did?”
“Didn’t take you for a flic.”
He had that right. Never in a million years. But going with it could work.
“Because of what happened earlier? Flics have babies, too.” She pulled out a police ID she’d faked by copying her father’s old one and doctoring it with the new logo.
“Never seen one like that.”
“I’m with a special branch,” she said, improvising, “but Monsieur Poncelet, it’s almost like we’re friends now after you witnessed my . . . overreaction.” Laying it on too thick?
Poncelet grinned. “I’ve got three sons, six grandchildren. I’m well acquainted with family drama.”
He reminded her a bit of her grandfather Claude. She liked how he kept his foot on the pedal, wove down backstreets on the Left Bank. “Do me a favor: check with your dispatch to see who took a fare to Galerie Tournon.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Life’s about taking chances, non?” she said. “And then, please, after that forget I asked.”
“Galerie Tournon?” He was frowning. “But I heard on the radio there was an incident there.”
“More than an incident,” she said. She’d use this to her advantage. “An attacker’s on the loose. It’s your civic duty to cooperate.”
The taxi swerved as he avoided a tourist bus, throwing her against the seat so that she banged her elbow.
“Don’t get me involved,” Monsieur Poncelet said.
“Too late, Monsieur Poncelet. I’m calling on you as a citizen to expedite my investigation.”
Monsieur Poncelet grumbled, but he radioed his dispatch for Dechard’s driver’s info. No stranger to drama, as he’d said, she sensed that he liked the excitement of being drafted into a police mission. She listened to a lot of banter—he teased the dispatcher about his wife; the return salvo concerned Monsieur Poncelet’s wife, who was a concierge, apparently a busybody like Madame Cachou.
Listening to the back-and-forth, Aimée felt something niggling at her brain, but she couldn’t put her finger on what. At least Monsieur Poncelet wasn’t an existentialist like the taxi driver she’d had a week ago who’d monologued about Sartre the entire ride to Chloé’s pediatrician.
As the taxi maneuvered up narrow rue des Grands-Augustins past Picasso’s old atelier, she rooted around in her bag, pushing aside Chloé’s rattle and finally palmed her red Moleskine. She thumbed past her to-do lists to a fresh page.
As Poncelet relayed what the dispatcher told him, she wrote down Dechard’s taxi driver’s badge number and his contact info. Progress.
She gave him double what the meter read in appreciation of his help.
“Need a receipt?” he asked.
She nodded. Business expenses. With the receipt came his card.
“Bonne chance.”
Alighting, she saw a fermé sign on the gallery door. Her heart sank. In the back, yellow crime-scene tape fluttered.
Guarding the entrance was a blue uniform who shook his head. “No access, mademoiselle. It’s a crime scene.”
As a PI, especially one hired by a suspect’s attorney, she had no legal rights, no right of entrée. It was late. Fatigue dogged her in this torpid heat. And then the sky opened.
But if she was going to let a little rain stop her, she might as well turn in her license and the fat retainer. She covered her head with the folded Le Parisien she’d stashed in her bag and dashed for shelter.
Down a side street, she found a café and ordered an espresso at the counter. Rain beaded on her bare arms. The télé over the counter blared. The news was dominated by heated parliamentary debates concerning French participation in international military action. Her mind went back to what Saj had told her about the ICTY review at le Sénat. She thought of Erich Kayser and the CD holding a report he’d never present now.
On an impulse, she tried calling Suzanne on the burner. Her phone was off. Aimée sighed.
Getting back to work, she confirmed Dechard’s fare with his taxi driver and left the lawyer a voice mail with the info and precise time Dechard had been dropped off at the gallery. That might be enough of an alibi. But it also might not, especially if there was a manslaughter charge.
While the rain poured outside, she took a corner table. She needed to draw a timeline as her father would have, write down every detail, and investigate the holes.
She wrote down every question that popped into her head, hearing her father’s voice reminding her that for every path that dead-ended, one would open up if she looked hard enough. She had to find something that stood out. But she’d rather be bouncing ideas off René than filling the pages in her red Moleskine in this damp, crowded café.
Her spine prickled. She felt eyes on her.
Uneasy, she turned around. All she saw were beer-swilling soccer fans, their faces redder than before.
She tried René. Left him a message and got cut off midway through. Her unease increased—being unreachable for this long was unusual for a communicator like René. Unless she’d ticked him off again without knowing, and he was giving her the silent treatment.
Seconds later he called her back.
“I know it’s crazy, René, but—”
“There’s a bulletin on the télé. They’re looking for you!”
She craned her neck around.
“Police released information that they are following leads in the investigation of the murder of a resident who was pushed from his apartment window by an alleged jealous lover near le Sénat.”
She gulped. Turned back around, but not before she’d seen the police sketch flash on the screen.
“That sketch is so generic,” she said. “It could be any—”
“Any slender woman with your unusual height?” René interrupted. “Aimée, that facial sketch was not so far off, except the bad hair. And people remember you. The concierge they just interviewed was describing a woman with chipped green nail polish.”
A man had noticed her nail polish? Interfering busybody. She hunched down in her chair, dug in her bag, pulled out a packaged nail polish wipe, and started wiping off the remnants.
“I don’t get the spurned lover angle,” said René. “Why are the flics taking the generic route with the investigation?”
“A cover-up, René.”
“Aimée, no knee-jerk reactions right now,” said René. “Let’s think first, act second. Where are you?”
She told him. Explained her work for Dechard’s attorney and the retainer.
“Not bad,” said René. “So your job is just to help him avoid criminal charges related to the attack at the gallery?”
“So far,” she said. “But Sybille was insisting I have to find out who is framing Dechard, because she thinks the school’s reputation is in jeopardy. Meanwhile, I’m sure there’s more to the story than he’s telling us. He said something about plagiarism—is there a way to find out if he’s ever plagiarized?”
“I can do some digging,” René said. “Let me see what I can find this evening.”
“Alors, I can’t forget about Suzanne. She might have gotten it wrong, but the two ‘accidental’ deaths bother me.”
“You should be more bothered about being the suspect in a murder investigation,” he said. “Concentrate on Dechard’s alibi. I’ll get Saj on the rest. You stay away from it.”
From
the window, she watched the closed art gallery through grey sheets of rain. There would be a service entrance behind the gallery. That gave her an idea.
She left some francs on the marble-topped table and headed into the street as the shower stopped. She walked around the block and saw a rear gate and an apartment building next door: 14 bis rue de Condé. As a woman came out, Aimée caught the green door and slipped inside.
She rang the concierge’s buzzer. “Madame?”
The door opened to reveal a man wearing an undershirt, an apron tied around his waist. From behind him, a radio talk show played in a language she couldn’t understand. Guttural and Slavic.
“Madame’s at her other job,” he said, his accent thick. A baby boy sat in a booster seat, beside him a little girl spooned soup at the table. “Come back tomorrow.”
“Sorry to trouble you, but—”
“Don’t you read?” He pointed to the concierge’s on-duty hours posted on the door: 9–12, 2–5. What could she say? She was disrupting dinner and now doubting her idea.
But she couldn’t give up.
“Please, I need a few minutes of her time,” she said.
“Why?”
“Two men were attacked in the gallery’s garden—”
He put a finger to his mouth. “Shhh, my daughter doesn’t know. You’ll have to ask my wife. I was at work.”
“Does she have a cell phone? Please, it would help the investigation,” she said, showing him her doctored police ID.
“Papa, he’s doing it again.” The baby had thrown a slice of baguette in his sister’s soup.
“All right,” he said, harried. “Ready?”
She punched the digits into her phone as he spoke. “Merci.”
The concierge, Gilberte, a trim, petite woman with reddish-brown clipped-up hair, was wiping the mirrors of a nineteenth-century marble foyer when Aimée finally tracked her down. “I clean three buildings on my street and the next,” she said, her accent Slavic but one Aimée couldn’t place more precisely. “If we don’t go the extra mile, we’ll be replaced with the Digicode.”
A hard life. Struggling to survive, to give a better life to her children. In an elite quarter, where residents paid immigrants to clean up their dirt.
“Me, I’m not complaining. It’s better than where I come from. Nothing there, no work.”
“Where’s that?”
“Montenegro.” She noticed Aimée’s gaze on a turquoise Gucci bag hanging from her cleaning kit. “My clients like me. One lady gives me her last year’s models.”
“You’re lucky. I get mine at the flea market.” Aimée smiled, trying to win the cleaning lady over.
It didn’t work.
“Et alors, what’s so important? I’m in a hurry.”
“Gilberte, did you see anything this afternoon in the garden? Did the flics question you?”
“Non, why?”
“Two men were attacked. One’s gone into a coma . . .”
Gilberte shuddered, made the sign of the cross. “I saw the flics. Not for the first time either. Last week in our building an old man opened the door to a fake gas-meter reader and got robbed. But I was lucky. I was out taking my daughter to the dentist.”
“So no one questioned you about what happened today, even though you live next door? Your building overlooks the garden where the victims were found.”
“The garden’s big. What time?”
“Between two and four. It’s hard to be precise. Two men were attacked, including my client.”
“I don’t remember. I was busy— mopping and dropping off the mail, packages.”
Aimée had to get something. “Did you notice any cars, delivery trucks?”
Gilberte paused.
Hopeful, Aimée watched her thinking.
“Regular ones, you mean?”
Aimée pushed a strand of damp hair behind her ear, nodded.
“Vans from Rungis, yes. I think the usual service vans.”
Vegetables, meat and fish came from the giant wholesale market near Orly Airport. “Wouldn’t those deliver earlier, in the morning?”
Further prodding got her more details: sometimes Rungis deliveries came twice a day. Gilberte finally remembered a camionnette with a heavyset man in the driver’s seat.
“Can you remember the color?”
“Dark colored—blue? That’s right, navy blue. Maybe a sign on it, but I can’t remember what it said. When I left to pick up my kids, it was gone.”
Aimée thought. “That was about four-fifteen?” Gilberte nodded. “Merci. One more thing.” Aimée had recalled something from her hazy geography—Montenegro was in the Balkans, sandwiched between Serbia and Bosnia. Might as well give it a try. She pulled out the picture of Mirko. “Seen him around?”
“Non.” Gilberte’s reply came out bullet-like. Her eyes narrowed.
Aimée pressed. “Anything strike you about him?”
“Apart from . . .” She paused. Averted her gaze.
“What? What were you going to say?”
“Look at that mug. Where I come from, no one trusts a face like that.”
Gilberte had seen through the photo to the war criminal.
“Seen his type before then, have you? How’s that?”
Gilberte threw a dust rag in her cleaning bag. Grabbed her turquoise Gucci.
“Wait, take my card. Call me if you remember anything.”
Gilberte stopped in her tracks. Took it.
“You remember something, Gilberte?”
She hesitated. Nodded. “In Kotor, my town, the Serbians put faces like this on T-shirts, like heroes.” Her jaw stiffened. “Along with Arnold the terminator.”
Aimée walked up the Métro steps at Pont Marie and stepped into the rain-freshened evening air. Sodden leaves stuck to her heel. As she paused on Pont Marie to pick them off, her gaze caught on the glow from her apartment window. Chloé awake this late?
Voices and laughter rose from below on the quai; waves lapped against the stones as a bateau-mouche passed. Ahead she saw a figure in a long raincoat emerge from her building’s front door. Passersby jostled her. When she looked again, the figure had gone.
Tired, she climbed the stairs, entered her lit apartment, hung up her trench coat, kicked off her damp heels. Miles Davis’s wet nose rubbed her ankles. Thank God she’d remembered to find a butcher.
She followed the familiar sound of Melac’s snoring to her sofa. Near the pile of folded diapers and a Babar book sprawled Melac, cradling a sleeping Chloé, who looked like a cherub in his arms. A picture that melted Aimée’s heart.
Barefoot she tiptoed through the salon, the dining room, the hallway, noticing the baby-proofing updates. Nice job on Melac’s part. Quite the do-it-yourselfer—an aspect of him she’d never known. In the kitchen, she knelt by Miles Davis’s chipped Limoges bowl and spooned in the horsemeat she’d wrangled from the butcher just before he’d rolled down his awning.
“Voilà, fluff ball. You’ve earned it.”
She picked up Chloé, inhaled her sweet smell, and tucked her into the crib. Pulled up the cotton eyelet blanket, nestled her doudou beside her. The doudou Morbier had given her and which she couldn’t live without. Aimée wanted to burn it.
Childish. And Morbier’s face came back to her, reflected in the long-ago memory of a Printemps window. She’d been eight years old when they’d stopped to look at the stuffed Peter Rabbit, le lapin Pierre, in the window.
“Morbier, please, please,” she’d pleaded, tugging his arm.
“Your birthday’s coming up,” he’d said.
She’d squinted at him. Three long months. Forever. “That’s so far away.”
“Put it on your papa’s list,” Morbier had said.
She’d wet the bed that night. Ashamed, she’d hidden the sheets, like the tim
e before. When the cleaner came, she’d complained to Aimée’s father that she couldn’t find any sheets to make the beds. Her father had thrown up his hands in mock despair. “Buy new ones.”
And then of course her papa hadn’t been there for her birthday at all—he was working surveillance. It was her grandfather and Morbier who bought the raspberry gâteau, sang “Happy Birthday,” and clapped as she blew out the nine candles. The big box from Printemps tied with an aqua ribbon had Peter Rabbit and a card from papa inside. Later, when she was older, she’d asked Morbier if he did Papa’s shopping for him. “Eh, among other things,” he’d said.
Tears wet her cheeks, her eyes stinging with the memory. Guilt stabbed her like a knife. She slid down the wall, hugged her knees, and fought the tears, listening to Chloé’s little breaths of sleep.
She didn’t know how long she huddled there before she felt hands pulling her up, arms around her, holding her tight. Melac whispered in her ear, “Let it go, Aimée. Things will work out.”
But they wouldn’t.
“When I was little, Morbier gave me a bunny like Chloé’s, and I . . . I . . .” Her voice choked.
“Shhh, let’s not wake Chloé.” He guided her to bed. “We’ll go see him tomorrow. You’ll feel better when you’ve seen him.”
“How can I? He betrayed Papa.”
“I know. But sometimes people we love do things we don’t understand until it’s too late. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”
“What is there to understand? It won’t change that he killed my father.”
Melac was rubbing her back, wiping her tear-stained face with his hand. And she hugged him tight. Couldn’t help it.
“I found out he’d always kept in contact with my mother, who knows how? Maybe she was in on it, too. Both betrayers.”
Melac’s arms stiffened. “Playing the judge and jury now? You can’t blame your mother for what happened with Morbier, or your father.”
“How could you defend her? She left us, disappeared, and never even let us know if she was alive . . .”
Her throat caught. For years after, Aimée had looked, hoping her mother would be waiting to pick her up at the end of the school day with all the other mothers. Dreamed her mother would help with homework like the other mothers, attend her graduation. Damned if she’d ever abandon Chloé like that.
