AL06 - Murder in Montmartre al-6

by Cara Black

  Wednesday Afternoon

  RENÉ LEANED FORWARD IN his orthopedic chair, staring at their computer screens. On the first, he updated and audited the database-registry settings and user-account configurations, something he could do in a half-sleep. On the other computer, he studied a display of the magnified six-groove rifling and RH twist of the bullet from a Manhurin .32 PP. He scanned the specifications text, wishing he could understand it: a 3.35 barrel length, operating as a direct blowback, double- or single-action semiautomatic pistol, it had a spring/momentum locking system that could take an eight-round box magazine with front blade and dovetailed rear sight. So, in human terms, what did that mean, René wondered. His phone rang and he jumped, knocking a batch of printouts to the floor.

  “Allô?”

  “Find anything interesting in the ballistics, René?” Aimée asked.

  He heard something in Aimée’s voice; the words seemed to catch in her throat.

  “Like I’m an expert?” he said. “Hold on a moment.” He put on a headset, hit the lever lowering his chair, and bent down to gather the papers. The pain in his hip flared and he winced.

  “Didn’t you tell me you wanted to examine the ballistics report and check on something?”

  The bleep of a truck backing up came over the line.

  “I e-mailed the file to you,” she said.

  “I got it. But the autopsy report is not in Laure’s dossier,” René said, setting the papers on his desk. “So it’s impossible to compare.”

  “Compare what? You noticed something, didn’t you, René?”

  Notice? More like a lurking question. Could be off the track but . . . “It’s just a question that bothered me.”

  He readjusted the height of his chair and sat.

  “Come on, René!”

  “Haven’t you wondered why these men used Laure’s gun, if they did?” He pulled his goatee, studying the laptop screen.

  “All night long,” she said.

  “Well, I was thinking, too, after what you said last night. If they saw Jacques had brought backup, and lured him to the roof—”

  “Alors, René,” she said, an impatient edge to her voice.

  “If, as little Paul claims, he saw two flashes on the roof, what about the other bullet?” It was an obvious question, he realized. “In your diagram of the rooftop, the area seemed partially enclosed. It could be in the chimney, or the walls.”

  “Good point,” she said.

  “Meanwhile, I’m updating our new accounts,” he said, placing a hot-water bottle against his hip. Heat eased the pain of his hip dysplasia, which increased in the damp cold. “Someone’s got to work here.”

  Pause.

  “René: Zette, the bar owner.”

  “The one Jacques moonlighted for?” he interrupted.

  “I just found him, René, garroted. Vendetta-style, with a Sicilian necktie.”

  He took a deep breath. No wonder she sounded on edge. Things were going from bad to worse.

  “Then mecs chased me through Marché Saint Pierre.”

  “What?” René clutched the water bottle and listened as she told him.

  “What if Zette was the victim of a vendetta, Aimée? Let the flics handle it.”

  “Or someone made it look like that,” she said. “Zette knew something.”

  From her tone he knew she wouldn’t give up. Not yet. He shivered. “If they were on the lookout, you gave them an eyeful.”

  “I’m giving Laure’s file to Maître Delambre,” she said.

  “Aimée, be careful. Watch yourself.”

  “I will. And you’ve got to arrange for Paul to see him.”

  Wednesday Afternoon

  AIMÉE PACED back and forth in Maître Delambre’s oak-paneled reception foyer, waiting. The fusty paper smell kept her company. The young receptionist, wearing a string of pearls and a blue sweater set, worked on a computer, ignoring her.

  She’d taken two taxis and the Metro to the lawyer’s, to make sure no one followed her. Zette’s murder had convinced her this was part of something bigger.

  Had René hit on something? René viewed things from different angles, tried odd equations. Like a good computer hacker.

  Maître Delambre rushed in, his white-collared black robe trailing. “You said you had some reports? Just leave them. I’ll go over them tonight, at home.”

  “We need to discuss them,” Aimée began.

  “Look, I’m late and I can’t talk.” He unbuttoned his robe, hung it on a wooden coatrack. “Catherine,” he said, turning to his receptionist. “Cancel my next two appointments.”

  “Maître Delambre,” Aimée said, trying to control her voice so as not to show her rising anger. “It’s vital. This can’t wait.”

  “It has to,” he said. His face looked paler than usual. A strange rose pattern mottled his jowl. “The dentist has to finish the extraction and take out the tooth slivers he ‘overlooked’ last week. Otherwise it will abscess and he’ll have to lance my jawbone.”

  Aimée grabbed her coat. “I’ll go with you.”

  IN THE overheated taxi, she punched in the Hôtel Dieu’s number. “Please, can you identify yourself and inquire about Laure’s condition?”

  Maître Delambre waved the phone away.

  “They won’t talk to me,” she said. “Something’s very wrong with Laure. Please ask. That’s all; then you can sit back and—”

  “She’s in a coma.”

  “What?” Fear prickled her spine. Laure, comatose!

  “The message reached me in court this morning,” he said. “She’s stable but nonresponsive.”

  The taxi sped along the quay. Aimée eyed the rising waters of the gray-green Seine, white wavelets lapped against the weathered stone. Things had become murkier like the water below them.

  “Zette, the bar owner Jacques Gagnard worked for, was murdered in Montmartre,” she told the young lawyer.

  “Murdered?”

  She explained finding Zette and her suspicions.

  “Mademoiselle Leduc, you’re convinced of something I’m not sure even connects.”

  “Convinced? The very day after I question him, Zette’s killed. I call that a connection. A big one.”

  Maître Delambre clutched his jaw in pain.

  “Don’t you have the autopsy report yet?” she asked him “Somewhere . . . here in my briefcase,” he said.

  She wanted to yank the case from his lap and open it. Yet she realized his head would be clearer now than it would be after he was treated by the dentist, and she had to show him the files she’d printed out from the DTI disc. “These reports weren’t included in Laure’s file. You should be aware—”

  “What reports?” He winced and clutched his jaw again.

  “The detailed crime-scene investigators’ report, the—”

  “How did you get them?”

  She handed him a Doliprane and fished a bottle of Vichy water from her bag. He hesitated, then popped the pain-killer and uncapped the water bottle.

  “By law they should be in the file you received,” she said. “They can’t really refuse to acknowledge them, can they?”

  He shook his head as a spasm of pain crossed his face.

  “Now you can deal from an equal position, at least, for the moment.”

  “I can’t accept these,” he said. “It would be unethical. I can’t afford to.”

  “You can’t afford not to. After all, it was their duty to furnish you with these reports.”

  He sat back against the taxi seat, closing his eyes. “Are you insinuating they left these out on purpose?”

  “You’re the lawyer,” she said. “Aren’t the police required to furnish you with all pertinent documents relating to your client?”

  The taxi halted in Nouvelle Athenes in front of a soot-stained hôtel particulier now occupied by offices, opposite the building where George Sand and her lover, Chopin, had lived, on the slope below Montmartre. Now the eighteenth-century mansions housed government
ministries, corporations, actors wealthy enough to remodel. Or they crumbled away in decayed splendor, awaiting developers.

  “You’ve put me in a difficult position.”

  Of course she had. However, ethics dictated he act in the interests of his client. How could he ignore the reports now that she’d thrust them in his face?

  “But I can’t take these if you obtained them under false pretenses. A simple case shouldn’t turn me into the Préfecture’s enemy.”

  “D’accord,” she agreed. “Who says I gave them to you? They could have just turned up on your doorstep. For all intents and purposes, they have. You present these files. They can’t very well deny them. The files contain the officers’ names, required filing date, and case number.” She went on. “Besides, they already know the information’s been copied.” She bit her tongue to stop herself from adding that he’d be a fool not to use it.

  “By someone . . . like you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I realize these files come from the police intranet system,” he said, his eyes narrowed.

  “STIC, to be precise.”

  He handed the taxi driver twenty francs and opened the door to a wall of cold air. “I have to think it over.”

  Rain pelted down on them as she ran after him.

  THE WHIR of the dental drill drowned out most of Delambre’s moans in the next room. Aimée gave a small smile to the white-clad dental technician who held a tray of surgical instruments.

  “Valérie, I need the clamps!” said a deep voice from the open office door.

  Valérie disappeared into the office, accompanied by a whiff of mint fluoride, and shut the door. Aimée hated waiting. Maître Delambre’s damp raincoat hung from the coatrack by the receptionist’s desk; his briefcase stood on the floor under it.

  The receptionist sat with her head turned away, talking on the phone. To her boyfriend, from the sound of the conversation and giggles.

  Aimée picked up a magazine, thumbed it open, and slid her leg toward the briefcase, hooked her foot around it, and drew it to her.

  She unclasped the briefcase, found Laure’s file, and stuck it between the pages of her magazine to study.

  Autopsies, as her pathologist friend Serge often said, showed the road map of death. Atherosclerosis, sky-high blood pressure, a wearied heart pumping into arteries constricted by plaque. And the path of a bullet ripping tissue, slicing organs and muscle, too. A good pathologist, like Serge, was like a detective, listening to what the body told him as he probed, weighed, and examined organs, to reveal their secrets.

  The autopsy on the body of Jacques Gagnard, dated Wednesday morning, stated, “Exsanguination due to gunshot wound to left lung and heart. Entrance wound on the left side of the chest. The bullet was recovered in right pleural cavity.”

  The image of Jacques on the snow-topped roof passed in front of her. She didn’t like the man or his manipulation of Laure but she’d wanted to save him. Would have . . . no, not with part of his lung and his heart impacted. His eyes. They’d widened for a brief second and his lips had moved as though he wanted to say something. She finished reading the report, disappointed at the scant findings.

  There was no mention of a second bullet. She sat back on the waiting-room bench to think. Could Jacques have been working undercover? Were the police protecting their own? Would her efforts somehow compromise an ongoing investigation? She was clutching at straws and her grip was slipping.

  Wednesday Evening

  “BIG POUT THIS TIME , Marie-Dominique,” said the longhaired photographer, clicking the Hasselblad. “Show me big lips!”

  Her mouth hurt after two hours of thrusting out her Bardot bee-stung lips. His cigarette was burning in the overflowing ashtray. The Gauloise tang hovered thick in the air. The slick-slack of hangers skeeting over the metal rack raised goose bumps on her arms.

  “That’s it . . . more! Let me see those cheekbones.”

  The techno beat pounded in the antiseptic whitewashed two-story studio, a former dairy reincarnated into l’Industrielle, the cow stalls now home to chrome banks of digital equipment.

  “Lean more . . . good!”

  Marie-Dominique did the model slouch, multiple black layers rising over her nonexistent hips, rubbing her diamond navel ring. She tried to look bored. Not hard, tottering on stiletto sneakers, the laces tied over fishnet stockings. She baked under the klieg lights in her midriff-baring black turtleneck sweater plus a jean jacket worn under a black leather biker jacket.

  “Nom de Dieu . . . she’s shining . . . powder!”

  The makeup artist, his hair in short blond braided tufts, rushed to daub Marie-Dominique’s forehead with matte powder.

  “His girlfriend threw him out,” he said in a low voice to Marie-Dominique. “He’s camping out in back here. Me, I’d never live on the ground floor. Too dark, too noisy, too many break-ins.” He redefined Marie-Dominique’s lips with a chocolate brown pencil.

  “The light’s gone. Impossible!” The photographer ground out his cigarette with his heel. Lit another. “That’s it for tonight.”

  “What about the Vénus de Vinyle shoot?” someone asked.

  In response, the photographer turned the techno up louder.

  Relieved to finish sooner than her booking time, Marie-Dominique hung up the outfit and left her makeup on. Félix would like that, get a kick out of it. Sometimes she thought all he noticed about her was whether or not she’d had a pedicure.

  Back in their apartment, along with the faded gardenia scent in the dark hallway, lay a note from Félix. “Another crisis. Off to Ajaccio. Back tomorrow.”

  He spent more time with hard hats, union stewards, and ministry officials than he did at home, apart from holding catered parties to entertain clients and grease his connections. No intimate dinners with friends. Their social circle consisted of his business partners and clients.

  Another long winter evening alone. Thoughts of Lucien kept coming back to her, his music, the way his hair curled around his ears. His stubborn streak.

  She sighed, taking off her boots and stockings, reveling in the smooth texture of the Aubusson carpet, scrunching it between her toes. Until she was six years old she hadn’t owned a pair of shoes. Hadn’t needed to.

  Félix didn’t understood her loathing of the runway, the numbing club scene where models’ careers were built based on where and with whom they were seen. Her colleagues subsisted on injections, all kinds; she’d rather chew on a hunk of brown-crusted bread and cured olives. Olives from her family’s olive mill. Her mind went back to the bitter olive essence ground by the granite grinding wheel, the dripping amber oil in the shadowed stillness, and the slow scrape of stone against stone. The path circling it worn by generations of mules. Cool, despite the relentless heat outside. The whir of bees hovering in the rosemary climbing the walls of the stone mill. Where Lucien had helped her father every summer until . . . that day.

  Marie-Dominique shoved the image away. At least here she wasn’t the object of constant scrutiny in an isolated hamlet with its archaic code of honor, presided over by a village chief whose other job was running a corner grocery. Paris might be gray, people living on top of one another, yet here the corner café-tabac owner knew her name but not her history. In short, she was free. Until Lucien walked back into her life.

  In the huge gourmet kitchen where she never cooked, she tore off a hunk of baguette and smeared a Corsican brébi goat cheese over it, imagining the look of horror the high-strung photographer would give her if he knew. “Salt! You’ll plump up. Diuretics work too slowly, do something immediately.” She’d heard him say this to a beanpole-figured young girl who’d obediently gone and thrown up in the bathroom.

  A voice came from Félix’s study. Félix! Had his plans changed? Eager, she opened the door to surprise him and then stared.

  Petru, Félix’s factotum, sprawled over the armchair facing the window, murmuring into Félix’s private phone. The way Petru took over in Félix’s
absence irritated her. When Félix had hired him this year, she’d nicknamed him “the bodyguard”. His hair was black today. Yesterday it had been white blond; he dyed it more often than the stylists she worked with.

  “. . . of course, Lucien’s implicated,” Petru said, with a low laugh.

  Implicated? She caught her breath, tugged the smooth brass doorknob back, and put her head to the crack between the door and the wall. What she heard startled her.

  “The flics arrest him at the studio,” he was saying.

  Will arrest him or he had been arrested? Who was being discussed? Lucien? He’d denied being political. But was he telling the truth?

  “Armata Corsa pamphlets, the works.”

  Just as she’d thought. Lucien was with the Armata Corsa. The liar!

  “Everything’s arranged. I put them there myself.”

  Her heart dropped. No wonder his conversation had sounded ambiguous. Petru was sabotaging Lucien.

  “In less than an hour,” he said. Then he turned toward the bookcase.

  She couldn’t hear the rest. She was about to storm in and confront Petru but she realized that bursting in wouldn’t help Lucien in time if evidence had been planted already. She had to warn him. Thwart Petru’s plans. But how?

  Corsicans betrayed each other but never to an outsider. Unless . . . she looked at her Patek Philippe watch, Félix’s wedding gift. She ran to the hallway, grabbed her shoes and coat. Out in the street, she called Félix. Busy.

  She left him a message. Her hands trembled as she pushed the numbers. It was happening all over again.

  Wednesday Evening

  “MADEMOISELLE ROUSSEAU'S condition remains unchanged,” said Dr. Huissard from Hôtel Dieu in a harried voice.

  It had taken Aimée twenty minutes on the phone persuading a liaison at the Préfecture to give her authorization and another twenty being switched around departments at the hospital before she was able to reach the doctor who was treating Laure.