Bones of Paris (9780345531773)

by King, Laurie R.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  THURSDAY MORNING, IT took the combined efforts of the Dôme kitchen and the bathhouse around the corner to restore Harris Stuyvesant to a state where he could even consider a conversation with Inspector Doucet. Having been fed, boiled, pummeled, and shaved within an inch of his life, he settled his fedora on his new haircut and stepped back into the sunlight.

  He felt almost human.

  On his way to the Île de la Cité, he stuck his head in at the hotel. Non, Mme. Benoit reported, nothing had arrived for him. Damn. He should’ve written to Bennett on Sunday instead of going skating with Nancy. Surely the Post & Telegraph reached as far as Cornwall?

  No way around it: time for Doucet.

  The flic was Stuyvesant’s only source of information and protection within the force. He’d been a fool to antagonize him. But arriving at the Préfecture, he was pleased to find Doucet in even worse shape than he’d been.

  Stuyvesant’s immediate impulse was to say something clever like, Looks like Sarah led you on a merry chase last night. Fortunately, his brain caught his tongue, and turned the words to, “Bonjour.” He stuck out his hand for shaking, dropped into the chair, took out his cigarette case, got one going, and set the case and lighter on the desk in front of Doucet.

  “I may be getting too old for parties like that,” he said.

  After a minute, Doucet’s face relaxed a notch. He picked up the case, opened it, used the lighter.

  “What are you going to do about Sarah?” Stuyvesant asked. You, not we, seemed only politic.

  “I have a man on her home. The only person who has gone in or out was her housekeeper.”

  “It won’t be easy to keep her under surveillance without her noticing.”

  “I very much hope it will not be for long.”

  “Can you tell me what you have in mind?”

  “I’m going to take Moreau’s house apart.”

  Stuyvesant put on a thoughtful frown. “When Sarah and I were there, talking to Moreau in the room with all the hands—you know the one I mean?—he gave a sort of meaningful glance at that bookshelf in the corner. It occurred to me there might be some kind of hidden panel behind it. Did you happen to look back there?”

  “No.” Doucet’s expression was eloquent with disbelief, but Stuyvesant’s face gave nothing away. Nor did he tell the big cop to take a can of grease.

  “Well, you might. And what about Man Ray and Charmentier?”

  “Sergeant Fortier has gone to speak with Mr. Ray. But my juge d’instruction has specifically forbidden me to investigate Le Comte.”

  Two men who didn’t trust each other when it came to a woman could nonetheless hold a long and eloquent silent conversation about other matters. Stuyvesant leaned forward to flick off a length of ash. “Well, I may be seeing Charmentier myself.” He held his breath: perhaps offering Doucet a tool his superiors didn’t control would make up for the stupidity of the night before.

  “I must forbid you from harassing him,” Doucet said, in a voice so forceless, he might have been sounding out words on a page.

  Stuyvesant smiled. “I wouldn’t think of it. What about the missing persons list?”

  Doucet, as relieved as his visitor to have negotiated the trickier bits without ending up in a shouting match, tapped the page he had been scowling at when Stuyvesant came in.

  “We have removed sixteen more names.”

  “That’s some good work.”

  “Seven were accidental deaths and four died of natural causes, all of them far from home—Scotland, Germany, America. Three were fleeing arrest warrants that we didn’t know about, and two are a mother and daughter who left at the same time funds went missing from the bank where the father worked. Rumor has them in Mexico.”

  “Which leaves, what? Thirty?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Can I see?” Stuyvesant threaded his fingers together to keep them from grabbing the file.

  “A private investigator is not permitted access to an official police investigation,” Doucet said, in that same forceless voice. He stood up. “I must take my lunch now. I generally am away one hour. I don’t expect to see you here when I return.”

  Stuyvesant was in Doucet’s warmed seat before the door clicked shut, uncapping his pen.

  There was a lot of new information: dates, home, family, education, jobs, physical descriptions. Where a photograph had been added, he noted any distinctive characteristics—hair color, eyes, moles, scars. He hesitated over the men, of whom there were five, but in the end included cursory notes on them as well. Given the time limit, he did not pause much to think about what he was reading, merely winnowed as much information as he could from each pinned-together report before turning to the next.

  Fifty-eight minutes later, he finished recording the sketchy facts of the last missing person in the file (Gabriella Faulon, black hair, crooked eyebrows, small mole on the side of her nose, arrested in 1924 for public drunkenness, married, no children, last seen on Tuesday at the Musée Grévin—the wax museum—on the boulevard Montmartre). He flipped her records shut, put the other thirty cases on top of her, straightened them a little, and closed the file.

  He stretched the kinks out of his neck. This was just the kind of slog he hated, paperwork and cold recorded facts—the thing he missed least about his former job under J. Edgar Hoover. Give him a suspect to grill, any day. But he knew how to handle information, and he did it scrupulously, even though his only pleasure was in the finishing.

  He passed Doucet on the stairs, exchanging a polite nod.

  FORTY-NINE

  STUYVESANT HEADED FOR what was becoming his usual place for reflection, the little pointy park of the Vert-Galant. He gave the bronze Henri le Grand a tip of the hat and settled onto a bench, to let his mind chew on the list. Instead, his thoughts went sideways, to a pair of women.

  He wished to hell women were as easy to understand as rum-runners and anarchists. He’d thought Nancy was interested—more than interested, very nearly promised to him. Was there something about his kiss that put her off? Halitosis? Or was the visitor she’d been entertaining the past three days an old lover whose return pushed Harris Stuyvesant to the side?

  Enough. Turn to something you might be able to understand.

  Thirty-one names, men and women who had walked away, or been carried, from their lives—one of whom was Pip Crosby. (The child on the original list had been located: her father was awaiting trial.) They began on January 3, 1928, when young Katrine Aguillard was now known to have set off to visit a friend in Rouen without telling her parents, and ended last Tuesday or Wednesday with Gabriella Faulon, whose drunken female housemate noticed she wasn’t in her room near the Place Pigalle, then took three days to report Gabriella’s absence to the police.

  Five men, twenty-six women, mostly French, predominantly Parisian, scattered across the city, more or less evenly distributed over the twenty-one months covered by the list. Many of them had some connection with the art world—but then, who in Paris did not? He began to flip at random back and forth through his notes, hoping his eyes would happen across a pattern his brain was overlooking.

  The dates? Half were vague, and some told nothing but the day a disappearance had been reported. Lotte Richter, for example, a blonde woman from Hamburg, was reported missing after a birthday holiday in Paris, when a surprisingly conscientious hotelier brought her belongings to the Lost Property Office in March. He could only say that she had been there on February 13, when she’d paid him.

  What about hair color? Eleven brown, ten blonde, six black (one of those with a question mark), two gray, and one each red and bald. That seemed like a lot of blondes to him, considering how rare it was in France, but then he was bound to be a bit wary of threats to blonde women. Did it make any difference if the blonde hair was bleached?

  How about nationalities, then? Seventeen French, five Americans, three Germans, two each for England and Italy (the Italians were a pair of women, from the s
ame town, who disappeared the same day, leaving an unpaid hotel bill and two suitcases of clothing) and one each for Poland and Spain. The Germans were Lotte Richter, Clara Klein, and Elsa Werner; blonde, blonde, and brunette; Hamburg, Frankfurt, and a village near Berlin. That all three women had dates in the first seven months of 1928—February 13(?), March 26, and July 21 or thereabouts—might be significant, or a statistical anomaly.

  What about the five men—did they have anything in common? Four had gone missing in 1928. Daniel La Plante and a man known only as Joseph (disappeared May 14 and early November, respectively) were older than the others, and worked as a shoe-shiner and a beggar. Marc Dupont (blonde; September 20; born and lived in Montmartre) was twenty-two years old and worked as a waiter and occasional actor. Eduardo Torres, a swarthy, handsome, nineteen-year-old native of Valencia, was believed to be working in Paris as late as November: his family reported him missing in January after he failed to make it home for Christmas. The only man gone missing this year, on March 1, was Raoul Bellamy, a medical student at the Sorbonne, born in Brittany, who supplemented his family’s stipend by the occasional modeling job.

  Five men and twenty-six women. The numbers could mean that women were more vulnerable, or that their absence was reported more often. And, there were a lot of arrests on the lists, mostly for petty theft and drunkenness. And …

  He slapped the notebook shut and dropped his head into his hands.

  How did he expect to make a pattern out of a million unrelated facts? People simply vanished, for all kinds of reasons. He’d taken a job searching for an American girl, and this was where he’d ended up—searching for some kind of madman killer? It was a waste of Ernest Crosby’s money. An honest man would go straight to the Post Office and cable the man to admit he was a failure: that he’d let Pip Crosby walk away from him in Nice, and she’d met somebody bad, and she had died.

  He was crap as an investigator, and he had no business hanging on here in Europe. Pack your bags, sail home. Get a job in a garage, tinkering with engines.

  But God damn it, sometimes there was a pattern. Doucet suspected one here, and Doucet was no flighty fantasist.

  Take the cop’s personal bug-bear, Henri Landru. Landru picked off well-to-do widows for their money. Had anyone happened to notice earlier that each woman replied to lonely hearts notices, lives could have been saved. Or the American known as H. H. Holmes, who’d spent eight years treating an unknown number of women and men—thirty? eighty? hundreds?—as a natural resource, taking pleasure in their torture and cashing in on their wills, their possessions, and even their remains, stripping the flesh from their bodies and selling the skeletons to medical schools. If anyone along the way had asked some questions—insurance agents, the medical school, hotel employees—he’d have been hanged years—and lives—earlier.

  At the Bureau, mere mention of the name could silence a room.

  But it wasn’t always about money. Men killed for the thrill of it. Or to prove they could—look at Leopold and Loeb, a pair of rich kids who’d committed murder as an intellectual challenge. They made Jack the Ripper almost comprehensible: the London monster at least seemed to have been driven by some twisted kind of sexual gratification. And Stuyvesant had heard of a Frenchman who preyed on shepherds, murdering them in the fields, doing terrible things to them first. Insanity didn’t always come from a raving lunatic: if it did, the Ripper would have been caught—and if he’d possessed H. H. Holmes’ means of rendering the bodies down, London’s prostitutes might still be quietly disappearing.

  Disappearing like Pip Crosby, and Alice Barnes, and Ruth Palowski. Holes in the world. Lulu’s family could at least hold a funeral.

  He forced his mind back to the list. What about those points of contact with art and film? Working in a Montparnasse café, taking the odd modeling job, acting a tiny part in a commercial film. One woman was the cleaner in a cinéma.

  He did not know what the numbers would be for a random sampling of Parisians, but he suspected you could find that pretty much everyone had some kind of a link to art.

  In any event, there was no clear arrow pointing at Man Ray’s studio, at Le Comte’s grim theater, or at Didi Moreau’s disgusting projects.

  There was no reason at all, really, to think that the people on this list were related in any way, including their deaths. They certainly hadn’t all been dragged off to be sex slaves. His imagination had been fired by personal matters, and he was wasting his time pursuing monsters under the bed.

  Stuyvesant sat, head in hand, feeling the last few days taking over his bones. It wasn’t even 5:00 p.m.: if he went to bed now, he’d be staring at the ceiling at three in the morning. He had nothing new to tell Doucet. He couldn’t face Sarah. And Nancy evidently wanted nothing to do with him.

  All he could do was go bash something.

  FIFTY

  A CONVERSATION:

  “Sir, a report’s come in that Bennett Grey has left his house.”

  “This isn’t his usual day for the village.”

  “Not the village, sir. Captain Grey was seen cycling towards Penzance half an hour ago. With a valise.”

  “What, he’s traveling? Oh, Christ.”

  “Sir, do you want—”

  “No, I do not want you to pick him up. We may find he’s just gone to buy himself a pair of rubber boots.”

  “Sir, that letter the other day—”

  “The one you lot wanted to open.”

  “Yes, sir. Do we even know who it was from?”

  “Harris Stuyvesant.”

  “Sir?”

  “Before your time. American. Used to work for their Bureau of Investigation. He was the one responsible for—well, everything, come to that. The Bunsen affair.”

  “Oh. Oh …”

  “Yes: oh.”

  “And you think Captain Grey is going to see him?”

  “Possibly. They’re friends. Sort of. The American writes him chatty postcards every few months.”

  “Coded?”

  “I doubt it. He’s the kind who wouldn’t bother.”

  “So, sir, your orders? Concerning Captain Grey?”

  “Keep an eye on him. A discreet eye, damn it.”

  “And if he gets on a train?”

  “Then tell me where he’s going. We’ll decide what to do after that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “God, what a pain in the arse that man can be.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing! Go on, get out of here. Christ.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  THE PUNISHMENT OF the boxing ring was a satisfying counterpart to an afternoon bent over scraps of paper. He’d happened to arrive at the same time as another amateur of about his height but ten years younger and a lot fitter, and it was hard work to keep the guy from wiping the mat with the visiting American. When it was over, and both men were bruised and grinning, he slapped the fellow’s shoulder and took him and half a dozen of his bons amis out for a drink or two, which turned into three.

  He arrived back at Mme. Benoit’s a little before ten o’clock, nice and sore and tired, looking forward to the hard mattress. His first stop was at the toilet—street-side pissoirs got pretty rank by this hour—and the minuterie was still on when he came out. He pushed open his door—and heard something rustle on the floor.

  A petit bleu.

  Thursday 3:00

  Dear Harris, my visitor has left, can you come over for dinner? Bring a clean shirt for the morning.

  I’ve moved to the rue Suger in the VI, look for the place with the orange door—sorry, not yet sure what the phone number is.

  Nancy

  He gave out a cough somewhere between outrage and laughter. He didn’t know if she was working hard to be provocative or if this was just the down-to-earth approach of a modern girl, but it had to be the most remarkable seduction he’d ever been a part of.

  The only blunter propositions he’d ever heard had been standing on a street corner with a price tag attached.


  Who did she think he was? Sure, sex was cheap in the Jazz Age, especially in Paris, but why would she think he’d be so eager to jump into a bed still warm from another man?

  Except … he was. If anything, a good-girl façade over a whore’s lax virtue was every red-blooded boy’s dream. Then again, he wasn’t. Sex with Nancy Berger promised to be a muscular romp, and yet a part of him, that romantic softie he kept well hidden, was sorry she hadn’t at least pretended at the lovey-dovey.

  He was half tempted to set the Ronson to the edge of the petit bleu. Or crawl into bed and claim Mme. Benoit hadn’t delivered it until morning.

  Wasn’t it supposed to be the girl who played hard to get?

  Life could be damned confusing sometimes.

  He liked Nancy. He liked her a lot. He was, he realized as he stood looking at her words, disappointed as much as anything, that she would think a blatant offer was all he wanted from her.

  So, she would be another Lulu—not, he caught himself instantly, that she was going to die in an alley. Nancy would be one of the string of mostly-blonde, mostly-young women he’d bedded. The string of women who weren’t Sarah.

  Why should he feel the least bit disappointed in that?

  He glanced at his watch, and snugged up his neck-tie. She’d probably be awake. Maybe not, depending on how much energy she’d spent on her “visitor,” but it would only cost him a few minutes to find out.

  He put on his coat, and went back downstairs.

  He did not, as she’d suggested, take a spare shirt. He didn’t even take his overcoat. He didn’t expect to be gone long.

  He found the orange door, and banged on it, his fist as implacable as his expression. A light went on in the transom overhead, and after a rattle of locks, Nancy was beaming out at him.

  She was dressed for bed, although not perhaps for seduction, since she wore neither makeup nor silk. At least she wasn’t wearing the ugly brown dressing-gown she’d had on that first day.