Bones of Paris (9780345531773)

by King, Laurie R.

  “I’m the one who wrote this, Miss Berger,” he told her. “Harris Stuyvesant. I’ve been hired by Pip’s—Phil’s—mother and uncle to find her. Do you know where she is?”

  She shook her head, and kept shaking it back and forth until Stuyvesant sharply repeated the question.

  “No,” she responded. “Sorry. I don’t. She went off with a friend … God, months ago.”

  “Which friend is that?”

  “How would I know? I never met him.”

  “Then how—” Stuyvesant stopped. First things first, he told himself. “When did you see her last?”

  “March,” she said mechanically. “Any idea when?”

  “A couple days after my birthday party.”

  “When is your birthday?”

  “March twelfth.”

  “So you last saw her around the fourteenth or fifteenth.”

  “Later.” The girl’s face contorted with effort. “Maybe the twentieth?”

  “But your birthday party was the twelfth.”

  “My birthday is the twelfth. The party was the Sunday after.”

  Stuyvesant’s hands twitched. If she’d been a man, he’d have grabbed her by the collar. If she’d had a collar. “Fine, the twentieth of March. So if you haven’t seen Pip since then, why have you been taking money from her every other week?”

  She gave him an even blanker look. “Money?”

  “Yeah, you know: francs, centimes. There’s a standing order transferring money from her Paris bank account to yours.”

  “You mean the household accounts? Phil’s terrible about paying bills. I have to do it for us.”

  He still saw no spark of alarm or deceit cross her face—although for the umpteenth time, Stuyvesant wished he had the shrewd eyes of his friend Bennett Grey.

  “Okay, you last saw her the end of March. What did she say then, about being gone?”

  “She had a job. Wait.” Her face screwed up as an idea bubbled to the surface like gas in a swamp. “Phil’s missing?”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “Missing as in, gone?”

  “Missing as in her mother wants to know where she is.”

  “Her mother doesn’t know?”

  “I told you: that is why I am here.” He really was going to shake her.

  “Who are you?”

  “Jesus Christ, lady—are you a moron or do you need me to shove you under a cold shower? My name is Stuyvesant. I’ve been hired by your roommate’s uncle to find her. How complicated is that?”

  “Why should I tell you anything? You could be anyone.”

  It actually was a little impressive, that someone in her condition could come up with an original thought. “Is there anyone other than her family who might be looking for her?”

  The question was too complex for her addled state, but instead of allowing him to push his way past her conversationally as he had physically, she set her lips together and clammed up.

  He smiled, rueful but approving: girls in general were too damned trusting these days. Still, he could’ve done with this one playing dumb a bit longer. He dug out the letter that had bounced from Nice to Warsaw before catching up with him in Berlin, the week before. She stretched her eyes wide a couple of times, and started to read.

  Dear Mr. Stuyvesant,

  If I have reached the correct person, I believe you know—or knew—a young woman named Philippa Crosby, Pip to her friends. You would have met her in the company of another young American, Rosalie Perkins, in the south of France last February. It was Rosalie who gave me your name.

  I write because we cannot locate Pip, and I wonder if you can help. Rosalie said that you worked as a private investigations agent in Europe, and subsequent inquiries assured me that you are both competent and reliable. I also understand that you are fluent in French, and have spent much of the last few years working in that country.

  Philippa is my brother’s daughter (he was killed in the War). She moved to Paris sixteen months ago. She was in the habit of writing home every two or three weeks. However, her last letter arrived in early April.

  We—that is, Philippa’s mother and I—made inquiries in May, but I have recently discovered that our hired agent was, not to mince words, a crook. My sister-in-law, who is not well, was so distraught that she proposed to sail for France herself until I stepped in and said I would find the girl. I am told by colleagues that you might be trusted, as our other investigator could not.

  Pip is a very bright girl of twenty-two who, although cherishing the unconventional attitudes of youth, has always demonstrated a level head and a firm degree of responsibility. (Indeed, those qualities are what convinced her mother and me to permit her to travel to Europe in the first place.) It is highly unlike her to simply cease communicating.

  I have written to the American Embassy in Paris, and directly to the police, as well as to Pip’s own address, but have been frustrated on all counts: by the slowness of the Embassy, the vagueness of the police, and a completely unresponsive roommate. I am told that some of this is due to the widespread August holidays; however, even the building’s concierge was unhelpful. In hopes that having a physical representative there will press my urgency on the various fronts, I ask that you consider becoming my agent.

  If you are willing to take on this job and are free to do so soon, please cable your reply.

  Yours,

  Ernest M. Crosby II

  Stuyvesant kept his eyes glued on Miss Berger, judging her response to the letter. His own reaction to the thing had been … well, a wild mix: a thump of distress at hearing of Pip’s troubles—distress tempered by exasperation—followed by a stronger jolt, this one of apprehension. Was Crosby accusing him of something? Then came a queasy surprise—Pip really had been young. But his final and humiliating gut response, had been: relief. Because Ernest M. Crosby was offering Stuyvesant an escape from the seedy Berlin hostelry where his last job had stranded him.

  So here he was a week later, tracking the eyes of that “completely unresponsive” roommate as they worked their way down the pompous words on the pricey paper. He saw when she reached Crosby’s grumble about her—the dry lips half parted in protest—but at the end of it, her reaction again surprised him. She looked up, aghast.

  “Jesus. Phil’s missing!”

  The distress on her ravaged face hit him straight in the gut. As if someone told him that a no-care-in-the-world starlet had a dying mother, or that the hard-as-nails prostitute leaving the bar was putting her kid through college.

  It’s always a shock, when someone cares more about a thing than you do.

  He’d liked Pip, sure, but a lot of life had washed over those five days in February. Since taking Crosby’s job, he’d thought of Pip mostly as a case—an increasingly frustrating case at that. Suddenly, with a look on Nancy Berger’s face, the missing girl blazed into life before his eyes, vivid and gay and in trouble.

  He really could’ve done without it.

  “I’ve spent the last three days asking about her,” he told the roommate, “and nobody’s seen her for months. I was hoping you might know.”

  She didn’t answer, just went back to the letter, her eyes trailing down the sheet. They caught on something, narrowed, and Stuyvesant didn’t need to be Bennett Grey to read this expression.

  He gave an internal sigh. Another thing he could’ve done without: smart girls who read silly books. A thousand cheap murder mysteries had made the world suspicious of any man who’d been the last person to see someone. Was there any point in trotting out his alibi? He tried picking up where she’d left off. “You were saying that you last saw Pip—Phil—around the twentieth of March. Did she tell you where she was going?”

  “This letter says you knew her?”

  “Briefly.” She waited. He gritted his teeth. “I was working in a bar in Nice—down on the Riviera?—when she and Rosalie came in. Rosalie didn’t speak much French and was feeling kind of lost, so I told them to sit and
listen to the band for a while and I’d introduce them to a bunch of swell Americans who came in every night. When I got off at midnight, they invited me to join the party. The two girls stayed a few days and moved on to Rome. I haven’t heard from her since then.”

  “What was Phil doing in Nice?”

  “Experimenting with the wild life, from what I could see. That’s why I thought a few polite American boys would help.”

  Nancy Berger fixed him with a hard, bloodshot gaze. However, Stuyvesant had yet to meet a girl who could read a lie in his face if he’d had time to prepare. This one seemed satisfied—or if not satisfied, at least willing to suspend judgment. She took another mouthful of coffee.

  “Did she say anything about where she was going?” he asked for the third time.

  “She told me she had a job. Well, she calls them jobs, even if they don’t pay. Which they usually don’t—Phil doesn’t need to earn a living. You’re sure she didn’t go off with those Americans?”

  “Wasn’t she back here after Rome?”

  “Yes, of course, stupid of me.”

  Stuyvesant took out his cigarettes, offered her one.

  “I don’t, thanks,” she said.

  “You mind if I do?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “So, what kind of jobs?”

  “The usual.” His hand twitched again. This time the girl noticed. “I mean, all sorts of things—a little acting, helping out in a hat shop, photographer’s assistant, but mostly modeling. In the nude, for artists, you know?”

  “But she—” Stuyvesant caught himself, changing it to, “I understand she has a nasty scar. There was a letter after this one,” he explained. “With details.”

  Crosby’s follow-up letter had included snapshots, bank information, passport number, and descriptions of the girl, both the mother’s—lively eyes; wonderful sense of humor; dozens of friends; loves books, music, daisies, and chocolate—and the uncle’s: chipped front tooth; mole on her right knee; broken left arm; a big burn scar across her torso, the last two from a barn fire when she was ten. When he’d read the uncle’s description, Stuyvesant had two thoughts: one, it would better suit a coroner than a private investigator; and two, Uncle Crosby didn’t suspect that his investigator might have seen that scar for himself.

  Nancy nodded. “Yes, she was caught in a fire when she was a child. I gather she was lucky to get out alive. You’re certain she’s not, I don’t know, with some traveling theater troupe? Living with a house full of artists in the South?”

  “That’s what I’m being paid to find out,” he said patiently. “But about those artists: I’d have thought that scar would put modeling out of the question.”

  “Yes, it was ugly. But some of the artists, they like freaks, you know?”

  “You think of your roommate as a freak?”

  “I don’t. But have you seen some of their paintings?”

  She had a point. He pulled out his notebook. “Names?”

  “Of the artists?”

  “Painters, writers, friends, boyfriends. People who hosted parties she went to.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! I couldn’t possibly remember—”

  “Miss Berger, I’m trying to find your roommate!”

  She blinked her swollen eyelids, looking sober for the first time. Sober, rather than knowing. Whatever had happened to Pip Crosby—if anything had happened to her—Nancy Berger knew nothing about it.

  “Of course. Sorry, I’ve been gone since May, so … You’re positive that Phil didn’t just go somewhere and her letter got lost?”

  He really was going to smack her. “Five months of letters?”

  She tugged together the front of the robe as if cold, although the room was anything but. “Names. Tom was one, but that was during the winter. There was a Count, and a Marquise, and a Lady something. English, she was. Phil mentioned a fellow named Louis, and Teddy.”

  “Surnames?”

  “Oh. Well. I’m not sure …”

  A quarter hour later, Stuyvesant had a page of vaguely recalled names, only two of which included a surname. “And you two lived together for a year,” he said irritably.

  She turned on him a look of utter misery, and Stuyvesant shut his notebook before those brown eyes could start the waterworks and make him feel even more of a louse. “Look, why don’t you get yourself dressed, we’ll get some lunch and see if you think of anything else.”

  The idea appeared about as enticing as having a plantar wart removed, but after a moment she stood and snugged the ties on the robe. “You’re right, I can’t think without something to eat.” She walked away towards the back of the apartment.

  “You mind if I have a look at Pip’s room?”

  Her hand waved in the direction of the door she was passing, and the brown robe slipped out of view.

  FOUR

  IT WASN’T OFTEN Stuyvesant had to search the bedroom of someone he knew—and yeah, he’d known Pip Crosby pretty much head to toe.

  Pip had been February’s Lulu, one in a string of mostly blonde, mostly young women who made a man glad to be living in 1920s France. Looking back, he distinctly remembered hesitating—she’d looked about sixteen, sitting in that bar, like a snowdrop in the badlands—but in the end, he hadn’t held out for long. Young she might be, but any seduction between them had gone the other way around: Pip Crosby practically tripped him into bed, blinking her big Clara Bow eyes and asking if he knew how to make her a White Lady. Several increasingly off-color jokes later, he had established both her determination to be “fast” and her easy familiarity with the means.

  Pip was no virgin, not by a long shot.

  It had been brief, ships passing in the night, a distant vice in the darkness (now, there was a line for Cole Porter) until Rosalie had gathered her up and taken her off to Rome, leaving nothing behind but a few days of perfume on his pillow.

  A look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

  He shook his head. Enough with the regrets, he scolded himself. You’ve got nothing to beat yourself up about. You pushed the two girls at those friendly Ohio boys, if that was what they’d wanted. Pip didn’t. If you hadn’t slept with her, she’d have gone home with Yves the barman.

  He’d been a little low and she’d been a lot of fun, and that was that until he’d read Uncle Crosby’s letter and felt like a complete heel. Why? What was he supposed to do, follow the girl to Rome shaking an admonishing finger at her?

  And last week—sure, he’d been temporarily washed up in Berlin, broke and beat-up and ground under the city’s heel like the butt-end of a Zigarette, but missing persons was a job he was good at. His last such case had been a doozy—and the reason he’d been in Nice to begin with, thawing out after seven snowy weeks looking for a missing heiress. He’d turned south the minute he delivered that sulking, drug-twitching, possibly pregnant young woman to her brother in Le Havre. It had taken all his self-control not to turn her over his knee as well, and he wasn’t exactly eager for another case like that one.

  But with honest work thin on the ground and a man with expensive stationery offering a hefty per diem, Stuyvesant raised no objections to looking for Pip Crosby. She really had been a pip of a girl, and she really didn’t deserve trouble.

  Plus, he’d have the satisfaction of helping a desperate mother. What kind of a no-good would scam a sickly war widow, anyway?

  He’d scraped together the cost of a telegram and nursed his last deutsche marks and pfennigs until the follow-up letter arrived on Friday. Fortified by Crosby’s bank draft, he got his wrist-watch, winter coat, and spare suit out of pawn, then bought a new shirt and drank a bottle of champagne with his multi-course dinner. That night he slept in a bed long enough that his feet didn’t stick out the end—alone, true, but knowing that state wouldn’t last long where he was headed.

  Saturday morning he’d bought a notebook and caught the train for Paris, scrubbed and shaved and solvent. In his first-class compartment—Crosby was cove
ring expenses as well—he opened the thick envelope and pulled out the photograph of a young woman with blonde hair and a familiar grin of Clara Bow mischief.

  Three days later, his survey of that blonde’s bedroom was interrupted by a voice from the corridor.

  “If you open the window, be sure to shut it when you leave. I’m going to have a shower.”

  A door down the hall closed, the unresponsive roommate not waiting for an answer. He let his thoughts dwell for a moment on the shower—no doubt a device with both hot and cold taps—before deciding the brown girl was right: the room was stifling. Paris had yet to realize the summer was over.

  He tossed his jacket on the bed, rolling up his shirtsleeves as he crossed the blue-and-brown floral carpet to the velour curtains. Once he wrestled the windows open, he stuck his head out, looking across at an identical apartment block, then down to the tree-shaded length of the boulevard de Sébastopol.

  Paris had changed, he decided. This was his seventh—eighth?—trip to the City of Light, and this time around the charm seemed faded, the colors dull, the people edgier than usual. Even the trees looked tired.

  Christ, Stuyvesant, quit mooning and do your job. He went back to the doorway and started over.

  FIVE

  THE LITTLE BEETLES scuttled to the corners when the bone artist pulled open the box. He was impatient at their slowness, but there was no denying, the result was incredibly lovely: the bones they left were more innocent and pure than anything he’d been able to do by hand. Like these ones: freshly cleansed of flesh, they seemed shocked by the caress of cool air.

  Some bones resisted their final separation (the tenacity of flesh was extraordinary!), but once reconciled to this strange new apartness, their soft exterior hardened, their color grew rich. Under his very eyes, raw bone took its first steps to becoming silken ivory: magnificent.

  When the bones were ready, some would be transformed yet again, Displayed for the connoisseur. These phalanges in the box, for example: they were perfect, untouched by years, by injury, by manual labor.