Murder in Saint Germain

by Cara Black

  “May lighting strike me dead before I neglect my baby,” she said.

  Melac lowered his voice. “Not all women are cut out for children.”

  “Unlike you, I wasn’t raised with both parents, a traditional family. Chloé won’t be either. But she’s loved, will always know and have that. She has René, Martine . . .” Her throat caught again. She had almost said Morbier.

  “Put me in the picture, Aimée. I’m her father.”

  “Speaking of, your wife—”

  “And you don’t know when to shut up, either,” Melac interrupted, frowning. “Nothing changes my feelings for you, Aimée.”

  Spoken like a true womanizer.

  His warm hands still held her, and she couldn’t help but remember what it felt like when those slender fingers traced her spine . . .

  Her cell phone vibrated. She glanced at it. Nothing. She realized it was the other phone—Suzanne.

  “Shut the door on your way out, Melac.”

  “Et alors, we’ve got to . . .” Those magic fingers cupped her face.

  She stood. Knowing otherwise she’d end up under the duvet with him and she’d hate herself in the morning. “You know the way, Melac.”

  In the hallway, he grabbed his jean jacket, saw the vibrating phone on the secretary. “That phone is just like the burners Suzanne used to use.”

  Goosebumps broke out on her neck, her arms. Suzanne’s husband, Paul, was Melac’s good friend—at least, had been. Aimée didn’t want this getting back to him—she was sure Suzanne wouldn’t like that. Act casual.

  “Vraiment?” she said. “René keeps a drawerful of these.”

  “Aren’t you going to answer?”

  She shrugged. “Later.”

  His grey-blue eyes, so like Chloé’s, narrowed. “Try that on someone else, Aimée. Are you working with Suzanne on something? Don’t you know what she does is dangerous?”

  Alarmed, she tried to sound offhand. “Suzanne? Why would I work with her?” Hoped the perspiration on her upper lip didn’t show.

  “Alors, whatever you’re up to, there’s Chloé to think of. She should be your priority.”

  She wanted to hit him. “You’re one to talk. You’re such a shining example.”

  Melac paused at the door. “Speaking of Suzanne . . .”

  Her pulse raced. Melac had worked with Suzanne, knew her well. If only she could ask him what he thought of all this! But she wouldn’t betray Suzanne.

  “You were speaking of her, not me,” she said. Yawned. “But how’s she doing?”

  “She and Paul—alors, it’s rocky.”

  Before she could ask more, Melac said, “Need me tomorrow?”

  “I’ll call you.”

  Melac’s steps trailed down the stairs, and she watched him disappear around the curve of the quai. She checked the phone. One voice mail.

  “Call me back if you’ve got news. I’m worried about Jean-Marie . . .”

  But hadn’t Suzanne gotten back to Paris tonight? Aimée had emailed her Jean-Marie’s address—why hadn’t she gone to see him herself?

  The voice mail played on, loud voices in the background. “I’m still in Lyon . . . involved in an operation that’s going down. They’re saying . . .” Two men’s voices shouting. A loud sound like a slamming door, or a gunshot. “Can’t talk.”

  The voice mail ended. Aimée’s hands shook. She didn’t get it. Suzanne had moaned about being stuck in administration. Yet she was out on an operation.

  Saj’s call interrupted her thoughts.

  “Dechard’s attorney faxed me a contract—nice retainer, by the way. But did you see Dechard’s latest email that I forwarded you?”

  She took her laptop to the kitchen table, switched on the baby monitor, and pulled up her mail. Her jaw dropped. “Dechard’s agreeing to meet his blackmailer again after all that? When?”

  “Scroll on. Doesn’t say, but you’ll see his colleague Michel Sarlat has received threats now, too.”

  “Wait, how did you pull this up?”

  “When I was patching the firewall, I got into administrative mode,” said Saj. “Never left. I’ve been keeping an eye out. Dechard’s not savvy enough to think that we keep reading his emails.”

  The blue lights from a gliding bateau-mouche rippled indigo on the Seine outside her window. She pressed her toes on the cool, smooth kitchen tiles.

  “What were you going to tell me earlier about Dechard—how has he been a bad boy?” asked Saj.

  “I know he’s got a terminal illness. And he’s terrified of being accused of plagiarism, but he won’t say what they’re accusing him of having plagiarized.”

  “How can such a famous professor have plagiarized?” Saj said. “The academic community is so critical of its members—scholars all over the world read one another’s work. Surely it would have come to light already. He never would have attempted to plagiarize because he never would have gotten away with it.”

  Aimée thought about this for a moment. “Maybe it happened before he was famous,” she said. “He mentioned something about it all being ancient history. And now he’s worried they’ll take away his Légion d’honneur and his chair endowment.”

  Saj whistled. “Must be big. So someone’s taking advantage of a terminally ill man?”

  “Blackmailers have one Achilles’ heel, Saj.”

  “You mean if they expose Dechard, the ‘whatever’ dries up?”

  “That’s in a logical scenario—Dechard should just tell us what they’re holding over him. But he’s being obstructive; he doesn’t want whatever they know exposed, and he’s willing to put himself in danger to prevent us from finding out what it is. Illogical or not, he’s acting from fear.”

  “Got a plan, Aimée?”

  She’d draft a quick email to René—now she knew how to tell him to refine his search. “I know where to start.”

  Friday Morning

  Aimée pushed Chloé’s poussette over the cobbles, the baby bag strapped around the handle. Chloé cooed, charming the cheese seller on rue Saint-Louis en l’Ile, who pinched her cheeks from the shop’s doorway. René updated Aimée over the phone about his Dechard research as she and Chloé crossed the walking bridge onto Ile de la Cité behind Notre-Dame. They skirted the crowds lining up for Sainte-Chapelle and took a quick stroll through the Place Dauphine, quiet apart from locals walking their dogs under the plane trees. Gravel crunched under her heels. Perspiration dotted her forehead by the time they reached rue du Louvre.

  At the café window red-haired Zazie put down her broom, waved, and tapped her watch. She was good to watch Chloé later that morning. Aimée breathed a sigh of relief.

  She parked the poussette under the stairs, strapped Chloé into her designer sling, and shouldered both her bag and Chloé’s gear, hoping she hadn’t forgotten anything.

  The sign on the wire-caged elevator read out of service. When was it ever in service?

  Not that she couldn’t use the exercise, with that stubborn kilo stuck to her thighs.

  Winded by the third floor, yearning for coffee, and wiping Chloé’s drool off her linen neckline, she hit the security code. Leduc Detective’s frosted glass door buzzed, then clicked open. Light streamed in over her father’s mahogany desk, René’s high-tech terminal, and the marble fireplace holding their shredder.

  “Time for work, ma puce,” she said, undoing the sling. Chloé’s strong legs kicked.

  No René. Or Saj. Both out in the field.

  She rocked Chloé as she warmed up a bottle and brewed espresso. At her desk she fed Chloé, then set her down in the play area designed by godpapa René. Chloé crawled and scooted backward behind the baby gate. Happy as a moule with a frite.

  Aimée monitored virus scans and checked surveillance logs, then scrolled through email. Chloé babbled and Aimée answered back. Su
nlight brightened the wood floor, and happiness filled her—until she read the sidebar in that day’s Le Parisien.

  murder at ministry love nest.

  The sidebar parsed the ongoing investigation of the defenestration of a government employee on rue Servandoni, hinting at a lurid sex life. Mostly a rehash of what she’d heard before. Poor Erich Kayser. The jealous female lover’s height was listed as close to six feet.

  No wearing high heels for a while.

  Her hands shook; her mind spun. She could work incognito, work on Dechard’s case, keep her head down, and keep Chloé safe and happy—couldn’t she?

  But then a thought she’d had the previous day came back to her—the media had been fed a manufactured hush story about a jealous lover. Someone was covering up his death. Could the bees that killed Isabelle Ideler also be a hush story, somehow?

  Was someone taking out Suzanne’s whole ICTY team, one “accident” at a time?

  Aimée had to get to Jean-Marie. She had to warn him just in case.

  It would be her last favor to Suzanne—then she’d be done and would focus on her paying clients.

  She loaded up Chloé’s diapers and her own disguises, checked maintenance systems. All good. Downstairs again, out in the clinging heat on the pavement, Aimée gave Marcel a quick wave and pushed Chloé’s stroller into the café.

  A family affair, the café was run by Virginie and her husband, and Zazie had grown up behind the counter.

  But no Zazie.

  “She ran to the market for me.” Virginie smiled and opened her arms. Chloé smiled, too. “Until she comes back, la petite mademoiselle can charm the customers at the counter.” Virginie pointed at the high chair.

  Aimée left the pureed petits pois and her apartment keys for Zazie, along with a reminder to walk Miles Davis. Gave Chloé a big kiss. Virginie shook her head, eyeing the nail polish Aimée had half-wiped off. “Looks like you’re due for a manicure.”

  The second person to notice her chipped nails. But a manicure fell lowest on the list of her priorities.

  She walked down narrow Left Bank streets, wishing she’d worn a lighter wig. Before she could expire from thirst, she stopped at a small Franprix and downed a chilled Badoit.

  The past surrounded her within the medieval city walls. Locals here still differentiated between dans et hors les murs—inside and outside the walls—despite the centuries that had passed since the walls set the city limits. The narrow passages within the fortifications—remnants of the first of the city’s many configurations—had been walked by kings and cart vendors. They were dark and blessedly cool, even today.

  Aimée knocked on the ground-floor apartment door in the dank courtyard of Théâtre de Nesle, part of a seventeenth-century mansion showing the wear and tear of time. A middle-aged woman, eyeliner thick and face stiff with too-pale pancake foundation, set down flyers by the theater’s entrance. Her made-up face stared from the poster for Chichi Andalou, a production billed as an avant-garde riposte to Don Quixote.

  “Looking for Jean-Marie?” she asked.

  Aimée smiled. “How did you know?”

  “Clairvoyant. Another therapist?”

  Play along. “And you’re an actress?”

  “Why don’t you people give up?” The hostility in her voice belied her smile. “I’m Bella Delair,” the woman said, pointing to the poster. A stage name, Aimée suspected. “Jean-Marie’s like my son. Leave him alone.”

  Wouldn’t she want help for him, then?

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Aimée said. “I’m a friend of his colleague Suzanne Lesage.”

  “Et alors?”

  “Suzanne needs to speak with him.”

  “That woman never stops, does she? Jean-Marie’s recovering in his own way. All these calls, reminders of that hellhole, these visits, just set him back.”

  Aimée noticed the empty bottles of Żubrówka by the pot of geraniums near his door.

  The woman caught her gaze.

  “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m not qualified to say what’s best for him.” Bella loosened the top loop of her caftan, revealing the crease in her ample chest. “But I know him better than anyone—practically raised him.” She pointed first to the door of Jean-Marie’s apartment, then to the theater’s. “His grandfather, a wine merchant, used to own this place—it was a storefront. We bought it and converted it into two theaters after Jean-Marie’s family died in a train accident. Poor kid, contracted the chicken pox and couldn’t go en vacances—and then lost his entire family. He stayed with us and never left.”

  A fine mist wafted from overhead as a tenant sprayed geraniums in a window box.

  “He’s a good boy,” Bella was saying. “The army was his life. Ever since he was in short pants, that’s all he ever wanted.” Then her voice dropped so low Aimée almost didn’t catch the words. “Until Bosnia.”

  Aimée tried for compassion. “Suzanne’s worried about him, Bella. She says Jean-Marie’s in danger.”

  That was true.

  Bella shook her head. “Quit trying to scare him into therapy. It never ends with you people.”

  Aimée’s antenna went up. “Who do you mean by you people? You mean Suzanne?”

  “Suzanne and all your other people who are always calling here, stopping by.” She fanned herself angrily. “It doesn’t help him. It just brings it all back.”

  The hairs on Aimée’s arms rose. “People come to visit him here? Who, Bella?”

  “That’s Jean-Marie’s business. How the hell would I know?”

  Two members of his team had died within days of each other.

  Accidents.

  “All I know is how it upsets him,” Bella said.

  “Don’t you understand, Bella? His life could be in danger.”

  “What do you call Bosnia?” Bella’s brow creased. “Every hour, every day, a sniper on the roof, death around the corner. I hear his nightmares. Now he needs peace.”

  So she’d let him drink himself to death?

  “Where is Jean-Marie?” Aimée asked.

  “Get out. Leave him alone.”

  Aimée took out her card, scribbled a note on it, then wedged it under his door as far as she could so Bella couldn’t reach it.

  She checked the Square Gabriel Pierné, which his handsome physical therapist had mentioned, but it lay deserted in the heat.

  Two members of the ICTY team had died, but she’d found no proof that Mirko had survived the explosion in Foča.

  None of it sat right.

  Dechard’s attorney’s latest email detailed a new turn in the case. Dechard’s name had surfaced in allegations of funds mismanagement in his department, and the lawyer wanted to know if this accusation was related. Plagiarism, embezzlement . . . If it wasn’t one thing with Dechard, it was another. If only the man would come clean, it would save them all a lot of effort.

  Thank God René had been working on the plagiarism accusation. She dialed him now.

  “Any luck?” She’d had him researching what he could about Jules’s published writing to see if he could find some whiff of plagiarism.

  “Hundreds of publications,” René said. “He’s written for every art magazine in Europe and has published books besides. But I might have found your needle in the haystack.” His voice was excited. “I paid special attention to his earliest publications, as you suggested. There’s one very strange coincidence I found. Jules Dechard wrote his doctoral thesis on an incunabulum published in Lyon in 1488, an illustrated text called L’Ocean des Histoires. Dechard wrote about the use of illumination in early French printing.”

  How dry that sounded. Well, Dechard had described himself as a bibliophile. Apparently he’d found a way to bring art history and book obsession together. “Et alors?”

  “C’est bizarre, but in all the database searches I’
ve run, in all the libraries I’ve called this morning, there seems to be only one other published academic work on that particular incunabulum. Or at least, only one other work that mentions the incunabulum in its title.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A dissertation on the use of illumination in fifteenth-century French storytelling. It was written by Gaston Badot, who was apparently a doctoral candidate in the French literature department at the Sorbonne. That might explain why Jules Dechard was never caught, if this is what he plagiarized. The student who wrote it was in a different department at a different institution—completely different review boards—and Gaston Badot never went on to publish this as a book or to write anything else, so it’s never come to light.”

  Aimée turned this over in her mind. “Could the man he stole from—Gaston?—know about the plagiarism? Could he be the one blackmailing?”

  “Unlikely. I’ve looked him up—the man almost completed his PhD, down to writing his dissertation, but he never seems to have defended it or taken the degree. He left France very suddenly in April 1983—moved back to Algiers, where he was born. He still lives there now. He’s running a family sugar company, it looks like. The manuscript was submitted to the library’s collection via the Sorbonne’s French department.”

  “Which library’s collection?”

  “Bibliothèque Mazarine—they’re both there, Jules Dechard’s thesis, as well as Gaston Badot’s. And while you’re at it, you could look at the incunabulum itself—it’s in the library’s collection, too.”

  She hiked up a steep neoclassical staircase surrounded by antique marble and bronze busts niched in the walls. The Bibliothèque Mazarine, part of the Institut de France, was housed in a seventeenth-century palace—an exquisite place to research, all columns, pedestals, and wood paneling. Two gilt rococo chandeliers that had been taken from the Marquise de Pompadour’s home hung from near the head librarian’s desk. Not too shabby.

  The clerk took Aimée’s carte de lecture and smiled. “We close at five p.m.”