Murder at the Lanterne Rouge ali-12
Page 12
Saturday, 4 P.M.
THE FIRST FORTY-EIGHT hours of an investigation were crucial. After that the trail iced up, the odds lowered for tracking down a witness, a name, an accurate memory. As time passed, leads dropped to zero. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since Pascal’s murder.
Aimée pulled out her cell phone and made two calls. Both went to voice mail. Frustrated, she left messages as she skirted past the old covered market, the Carreau du Temple.
A homeless man—or SDF, sans domicile fixe, the politically correct term—camped on a ventilation grate. Most people still referred to the homeless as clochards. This man held a cracked transistor radio to his ear. The radio weather report cackled in the afternoon air.
“Clear afternoon skies, crisp, and ten degrees warmer tomorrow, ma chère.” He winked at Aimée. “Plan ahead.”
She was trying to. “I’ll get out my beach umbrella,” she said, reaching in her pocket and handing him change.
“Me too. Merci, ma chère.” He grinned, a weathered look on a youngish face. Fallen on rough times, as so many had these days.
And then she got an idea.
“Haven’t I seen you over there?” Aimée asked, gesturing back across the park of Square du Temple.
“Dry and warmer here,” he said.
“And no problems, eh, like last night? The murder.”
He shrugged. Turned the radio volume down. After all, she’d paid—the unspoken rule—and it was time to deliver. “I heard about it.”
She crouched down, careful to keep her stilettos out of the grate holes. “What did you hear?”
“The regulars scattered. Won’t go back.”
“Like Clodo?”
“Clodo? We’re all Clodo to the flics.” His mouth turned down in a frown. “Tell me you’re not a flic, ma chère.”
“Moi? You’re joking.” She took more change from her pocket. “I mean the mec sleeping on the steps behind the building near rue au Maire. Fur coat, pink scarf.”
“The crazy one?”
Weren’t half the ragged men on the street crazy? Shuffling and mumbling to themselves? But then sometimes she did too.
“Angels worried about devils?”
“C’est lui,” she said. “I’d like to talk to him.”
“Usually goes underground at the Fantôme. Most do.”
Some code? “Where’s that?”
“Métro at Saint-Martin.”
She thought. “But there’s no station there.”
“Closed in 1939. A shelter in the war. Abandoned now, but they know ways in.” He shook his head. “Not your type of place, ma chère.”
She grinned. “But I’m a Parisian rat.”
He shrugged. “Up to you.”
“So how can I talk to Clodo?”
“The Métro opens at five thirty A.M.”
“But why don’t you go to the Fantôme?”
The crow’s feet in his weather-beaten face deepened. He pointed to a window of the third-floor apartment building across from the Carreau, rose-colored curtains. “My daughter lives there. I don’t like to be far away.”
“Could this help?” Aimée said, laying fifty francs on his sleeping bag. He gestured with a grimy hand for her to come closer. Welcome heat from the grill vent toasted her face.
“I heard Clodo’s in a bad way,” he said. “In the hospital.”
Startled, she leaned closer, trying not to breathe in his unwashed smell. “After last night?”
“Clodo sidelines in cell phones. Where he gets them …” A shrug.
So that was where Samour’s cell phone went.
“Word says a dealer confused Clodo’s stash niche for his powder, ma chère,” he said. “A misunderstanding.”
News via the homeless grapevine traveled fast. “That put him in the hospital?”
“Got him pushed on the Métro tracks today.”
“A bit harsh for a misunderstanding,” she said, interested. “Sounds like retribution.”
“That’s life on the street.”
“More like under.” She didn’t buy it. “Sounds to me like someone wanted to silence him after he witnessed the murder.”
“Tell me, ma chère, would you believe Clodo, who talks to angels and devils?”
More than she’d believe the flics.
The man peered around her shoulder, his attention on the window. His face crinkled in a smile. For a moment he looked almost lordly, as if surveying his territory from his rumpled sleeping bag. “Light’s on. My daughter’s doing her homework, nice and early. Good, she looked tired today.”
His voice was like that of any father. And it saddened her. But she sensed he knew more. “Could we trade a new radio for that phone Clodo found?”
He shrugged. “Not my thing, but I’ll check into it. No promises.”
“But I’ll depend on you for the weather forecast so I know what to wear.” She winked. Slipped him her card. “Why don’t you use that and let me know.”
He winked back.
This smelled like it went somewhere.
Saturday, 4:30 P.M.
AIMÉE PICKED OUT Coulade, surrounded by students, in the office at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, adult division. The narrow two-person office he’d shared with Pascal—she recognized it from the photo. She sat down to wait in the anteroom, a high-ceilinged affair painted a faded institution green. A welcome warmth radiated from the chipped heater. She took off her coat and rolled up her sweater sleeves. A few minutes later, the students left, papers in hand.
“Oui, Mademoiselle?” Standing at the office door, Coulade gave a quick glance at the card she handed him. He was in his late twenties, black hair sprouting from a widow’s peak, stocky of frame under a dark sweater and tweed jacket. A typical academic. He looked rattled. “I’m sorry, nothing to do with me.”
“But I think it does,” she said.
Coulade took in her stovepipe suede leggings, his gaze resting a moment on the low V-neck of her black cashmere sweater.
“Since Pascal Samour’s murder—”
He stiffened and put his finger over his mouth. “Inside.”
Mock drama, a chance to grope her? She didn’t like him already. But she stepped inside the office. She needed answers and access to Pascal’s work computer.
Coulade’s face blanched in the hanging fluorescent office light. “We kept this terrible news from the students. I took over his symposium today. There are thirty-five students finishing their exams. And my notes …” He scrambled around amongst the papers on his desk. “… somewhere …”
Overwhelmed, she saw that. Nervous? Or guilty?
“This won’t take long,” she said, scanning the two cluttered desks. “Where’s the green dossier?”
“Eh?” His eyes gravitated again toward her neckline.
Her dislike for Coulade grew by the minute. “Pascal said you had the green dossier.”
“He told you that?”
Why couldn’t Coulade answer a question?
Coulade grabbed a pile of notebooks. Checked his watch. “Listen, I’m late. There are waiting students.”
“But Samour—”
“Zut! We share this office, but I’m only here part-time. My day job’s teaching at the lycée. I don’t know of any green dossier.”
“Two weeks ago there was one,” she said.
He expelled air from his mouth. “Et voilà.” He gestured to the files. All blue. “I’ve got no clue what Samour meant.”
Her stomach turned. “You really don’t know?”
“No idea,” Coulade said. “He was an absentminded type. Half the time, his head spun with ideas and he’d forget to write anything down. A dreamer.”
But it still didn’t explain Samour’s letter. “When did you last see Pascal Samour?”
Coulade hurried to the door and beckoned her to follow. “Last week, non, Monday. We were supposed to meet here yesterday, but …” His face fell. “I couldn’t.”
Coulade
had to know more. Even if he didn’t realize it. She wouldn’t give up. “Meet regarding what, Coulade?”
“He didn’t tell me.” Coulade shrugged, eyed the door.
“Think back to the green folder.”
“Green folder?” Coulade shook his head, his face blank. “Color-blind, Pascal. All our folders are blue.” He waved toward the file cabinets. “But these folders, all they have are student grades. No way you’re allowed to look at them. Compris?”
Another bump in the road. A road going nowhere. She wanted to get Coulade’s eyes off her chest and nail his feet to the floor.
“Alors, Coulade, last night my partner and I discovered Samour’s body chewed by rats in the snow.” She stepped closer and pointed out the thick bubbled-glass window. “Juste à côté, not far from here. I think you know more than you’re letting on.”
“Eh?” Coulade ran his hand nervously over his neck.
“He told me to talk to you.”
Coulade reached for the door handle. “But I don’t—”
“Bon,” she said. “I’ll let the flics know you’ve got something to tell them. Let you sweat it out at the commissariat.”
Coulade stiffened. “Nothing to do with me, I tell you.”
“Too bad. I’m surprised they haven’t questioned you.” She shrugged. “I play fair, but they don’t.”
Coulade blinked, hesitating. “Half the time I didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not. He’d found this document misfiled in the Musée’s holdings. Or so he said. Ranted about how he’d found a link. But he needed more.”
She suppressed a shiver. “A link to what?”
Coulade shrugged. “Some design he worked on. But it never made sense.”
“I need something more specific.”
“He hadn’t put the pieces together. Or so he said.” Coulade shrugged again. “Yesterday he left me five messages here at the office. I’d turned off my cell phone.”
“Messages saying what?”
“To meet him here. He sounded excited. Paranoid, if you must know. Couldn’t leave specifics on the message, he said. Mentioned a fourteenth-century document. That’s all. But I’d taken my students on an all-day field trip to the Meudon Observatoire.” Coulade looked shaken.
“What time did he leave the last message?”
Coulade checked the pile of pink message slips on his desk. “Looks like five P.M.”
“Did he mention Becquerel?”
Coulade shook his head.
There was a knock on the office door.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said.
Aimée looked around the office. Sparse. Only one computer, on Coulade’s desk. Her heart sank.
“Didn’t Pascal work on a computer?”
“His laptop,” Coulade said. “Refused to use these antiquated ones the department furnishes. But he kept his at home, I think.”
He ushered her out and locked the door behind them. His footsteps beat a quick tattoo down the drafty hall toward a crowd of waiting students.
What wasn’t he telling her, she wondered. She waited until he turned the corner, reached in her bag and took out her lock-picking kit. Into the old-fashioned door lock, she inserted the snake rake, then the W pick, and jiggered the mechanism. She heard the tumbler turn.
“Mademoiselle?” a voice called from the hall.
She whipped around, keeping her back to the door and her hand on the lock picks.
An older woman, her hair in a bun held in place with a pencil, waved at her. “Professor Coulade’s received an urgent message.”
Aimée smiled. “If you hurry you’ll catch him. Left at the end of the hall.”
The woman clucked like a hen. “If it’s not one thing, it’s the other. We’re swamped. I don’t suppose you could bring him the message?”
“Desolée, Madame, I’m en route to the archives,” she said.
The woman’s ample bosom heaved, perspiration beaded her brow. She shrugged, then hurried past Aimée.
After the woman’s footsteps faded, Aimée turned the knob, removed the wires, and entered the office. That done, she reinserted the wires and locked the office from inside.
She needed to hunt for this green dossier.
But Coulade’s computer screen blipped. A swirling desktop image of a trebuchet, the medieval slingshot-like weapon used to hurl boulders at fortified battlements, floated across it. In his hurry Coulade hadn’t logged out. She hit the cursor. Apparently he didn’t have time to organize his files. There was data info all over the screen. A bonanza.
The key turned in the lock. Merde! Coulade had come back.
She depressed the key combination to store his log-in, then dove under Pascal’s metal-frame desk at the end of the narrow office.
Not a moment too soon.
“Everything’s handled,” Coulade was saying. “We’ll shift assignments, I found a substitute—”
A woman’s voice broke in. “Professor Coulade, the last exam’s begun. The departmental guidelines outline specific procedures.”
Aimée pulled at her sweater, which was bunching up her back in the cramped space. Her hands were coated in dust. At least the desk panel hid her from view. She wished she could hear their conversation better.
“But my mother-in-law suffered a heart attack.” Coulade opened his desk drawers.
“What can you do for her at the hospital?” The woman’s tone indicated his duty was here to the students.
Aimée agreed. She’d never understood the clannishness of French families. Perhaps because she’d only known it from the outside.
“If the department questions or invalidates the exam procedures, the students will have to postpone until a retake next semester,” the woman pleaded. “We can reschedule the evening symposium session, but—”
“If none of this had happened …” Coulade’s words trailed away.
As if he blamed his murdered colleague for the inconvenience.
“Jean-Luc’s substituting, thank God,” he said. “He’s more qualified than I am. A grande école graduate and friend of Samour. No problem. I confirmed with the registrar.”
“But Professor Coulade—”
“Madame Izzy, for the tenth time, I’m part-time, not a professor, and all of this takes too much time from my family. My wife’s distraught.”
Or did Coulade want to distance himself from the murder, the complications?
Aimée heard the trilling of a cell phone.
“Oui?” Coulade’s voice rose. “But you don’t mean … I’ll try.”
Then the shuffling of feet as they left the office. The light switch flicked off and the office plunged in darkness, and the lock clicked. She didn’t have much time to trawl Coulade’s desktop for a misnamed file. She hoped, since Samour suspected danger, he’d have sent this file to an unsuspecting Coulade. Made a backup.
Coulade’s password prompt yielded to her keystrokes, and seconds later his swirling screen saver appeared: Engineering Tech. Slide Rule. Calculation Theorems.
In the heated office, which now felt stifling, she rolled up her sweater sleeves higher and pulled out discs from her bag. The heat made her sleepy. She needed an espresso, but there was no machine in the sparse office. Trying to stay alert, she inserted a disc and let the machine go to work copying the data. Later, Saj could weed through the program for a link to Pascal.
Now to Samour’s metal desk, which was cluttered with administrative memos, requisition lab slip receipts, and student papers. She picked his locked desk drawers to find more of the same. No laptop. Nothing to do with the museum holdings.
Frustrated, she searched his bookcases, documents, the blue files. Engineering manuals, phone books. Nothing interesting, until she found a frayed leather volume, nineteenth-century by the look of it, entitled Guilds in the 14th Century.
Had Samour meant this, she wondered, leafing through the gilt-edged, tissue-thin pages. A bookmark inside bore the logo of the occult bookstore on rue aux Ours.
There was a click and whir as the copied disc ejected. She slipped in the second disc, which installed a spyware tracking bug. Hoped to God it worked as fast as René promised it could.
Her cell phone rang in her pocket. Quickly she hit mute. She debated not answering it, but Prévost’s number showed.
“Mademoiselle Leduc. You left me a message?”
“Oui.” She stepped to the back of the office, lowered her voice. She needed an excuse to discover more about his investigation. “I’ve remembered something.”
“Un moment,” Prévost said. She heard rustling, what sounded like his hand over the receiver.
In the meantime, she checked Coulade’s computer. A long moment until INSTALLATION COMPLETE popped on the screen. She hit eject. Another whir as the second disc popped. She scooped them both in her bag.
“Mademoiselle?” Prévost was back on the line.
“Doesn’t procedure dictate the Brigade Criminelle handle Samour’s murder?” she asked. From the crime report on Demontellan’s desk at the prefecture, she knew Prévost had inserted himself in the investigation. But why? She wanted to know more.
“Who says they’re not, Mademoiselle Leduc? For now you deal with me as chef de groupe of Police Judiciaire. Things have come up,” he said, suddenly hurried. “I don’t have time. Come at seven to the commissariat.”
She checked her Tintin watch. More than an hour. Almost enough time, if she left now, to check out Samour’s apartment and visit the museum.
The line buzzed. He’d hung up. Great.
Minutes later she strode down the overheated hallway. Students blocked the corridor, grumbling over the late-afternoon symposium postponement. Near the open door of the back exit, several students wearing parkas stood around smoking, instead of venturing into the chill, moss-carpeted courtyard outside.
And the feeling of being watched hit her. She shuddered. But among all these milling students? Had she grown paranoid?
She passed a classroom and peered in the open door. Heads bent down over wooden desks built in the last century. She remembered those small desks. Murder on her long legs.
“Time’s up,” said a clear male voice. “You’ve earned a five-minute break.”