Murder in Clichy

by Cara Black

  The Centre Orthopédique was a small taffy-colored storefront nestled in an ancient building. Wooden legs and old corsets filled the shop window. She pulled a pair of heavy brown-framed glasses from her bag. A sleepy-faced middle-aged man answered Aimée’s knock.

  “No more appointments this morning, sorry,” he said.

  “Pardon, I’ll get to the point. Did Monsieur Gassot have a fitting this morning?” she said. “Or was it later this afternoon?”

  “What’s it to you?” His eyes narrowed and he scratched his chin.

  She rooted through her bag and opened her cryptography notebook. She took a moment, pretending to consult it. “We’re doing you a service,” she said smiling. “Our social worker teams now visit in the field. We coordinate directly with the service providers, such as yourself, to expedite the clients’ prosthesis delivery and make less paperwork for you.”

  She thought he’d like the last part.

  “They never did this before. Sounds new to me.”

  “But it is!” she said, eager to keep talking and throw him off balance. “You know we may have made a mistake. Perhaps Monsieur Gassot’s obtaining his prosthesis from someone else, but I’ve checked with all the concerns like yours in this arrondissement, so I assumed he dealt with you.”

  A wonderful scent of rosemary came from inside the shop. The man’s eyes darted away.

  “Look, I don’t want to hold up your lunch,” she said. “Can you just tell me if he’s getting a new prosthesis today?”

  The man shook his head. “No new prosthesis appointments today.”

  A dead end.

  “Merci,” she said.

  She had a bad feeling. Was Gassot so scared that he had run away with his pension check? She turned to go.

  “But the old goat came for an adjustment,” he said. “Won’t get a new leg, always tells me he likes this one, but today he admitted he’s considering a modern one.”

  What did that mean? She kept her excitement in check. “I’ll have to look into our coverage,” she said.

  “He’s been too cheap to admit he needs a new one. Maybe some relative died and he got a windfall.”

  A windfall? Or the jade?

  Or was the orthopédiste trying to drum up business?

  “Aah, so that’s it,” she said nodding, thinking quickly and looking at the number the man at the anciens combattants had written down. “I’d like to follow up with him. Is his number still 01 38 65 02?”

  “Doesn’t have a phone. Doesn’t like them, he says.”

  Whose number had she been given?

  “Well, Monsieur, you’ve nailed the problem for us. Now we know why we haven’t been able to reach him. I suppose he’s still at the same address.” She flipped through her cryptography notebook. “I must have left that on my desk, can you give me his address?”

  “No clue.”

  Did Gassot move around, stay with friends? “Do you treat others from the Sixth Battalion?”

  He shrugged. “You name it, I treat everyone. Few of the old ones talk much. One of them just died, Albert, a crusty old bird. The kind who thinks the world owes him a living since he saw a few bullets in Indochina. He’d gone to the clinic for a routine checkup. Rumor says he got offed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The man shook his head. “That’s all I heard. These old vets imagine things. Who’d go for an old coot like him anyway?”

  “I’ll check into it,” she said, writing on her pad. “What’s his name?”

  “Albert Daudet. Sorry, but my lunch is waiting.”

  Now she had an idea. “We’re pushing for added benefits for the Sixth to make restitution for limited services.”

  “You mean, so they won’t take you to court?”

  The man wasn’t so sleepy after all. And he probably knew all of them. Or at least more than he let on.

  “Did I say that?” she smiled. “But your cooperation would be appreciated. It’s the men of the Dien Bien Phu Sixth Battalion we’re hoping to contact. I’m meeting with a few, informally, not at my office, but at a café. Of course, I’d help with the forms and expedite your insurance claims if you could help me.”

  Short of an out-and-out bribe, that should entice him. At least make him consider it. She pulled out a card from her card file, one with just her name on it. “Here’s my number.” She wrote it down.

  SHE FOUND a phone booth downstairs at a café, nestled between the Sexodrome and the soup kitchen run by priests, where boulevard de Clichy bled into Place Pigalle. Garish life-size faded photos of 1985 big-haired strippers stared back at her in the hall by the phones. Her first call was to Serge, her pathologist friend at the Morgue, to inquire about Albert Daudet’s autopsy.

  “Sorry Aimée, Serge is testifying at the Tribunal in Nantes,” said his secretary. “He took the kids.”

  Serge turned his work trips into a holiday for his twins to give his wife a break. Like two balls of mercury, the twins never stood still.

  “Will he check in?” she asked, disappointed.

  “Last I heard, one of the twins had a fever,” she was told. “But I’ll tell him you called.”

  Serge was the only pathologist she trusted at the Institut médico-légal. She’d wait until he returned and, if she wangled it right, he’d read her the autopsy results over the phone.

  Then she called Division 17 at le Préfecture de Police. If they traced the call, this café was perfect. She waited while the receptionist connected her to the landline search office.

  Why hadn’t she thought of it before? The man must be lying low because of what happened to Thadée Baret. Baret looked old for his age, a hazard of drug use, but he was a generation younger than Gassot. What possible connection between Baret and Gassot existed? So far all she knew was Gassot had written the article about the jade and Thadée had paid for it with his life.

  “Bonjour,” she said, consulting the number the man at the anciens combattants had written down for Gassot. “I’m on detail with Commissaire Morbier. We need a land location for a phone line, 01 38 65 02.”

  “Your authorization code?” a disembodied voice asked.

  She prayed Morbier hadn’t changed his code.

  “Alfa Romeo280,” she said. His favorite car.

  Pause.

  “Checking authorization.”

  Perspiration dampened her collar.

  “Authorization code confirmed. Checking.”

  Morbier would be mad as hell when he found out. And he’d change it right away.

  “Twenty-seven, rue des Moines,” the voice said.

  Encouraged, fifteen minutes later she stood in front of the shuttered townhouse with a wild, unkempt garden at its side. The townhouse, separated only by a wall, stood behind the art gallery. At one time, she figured, the buildings had been joined, like a compound.

  Maybe they still did?

  What if Thadée let old vets live there, or rented them rooms? That could be the connection!

  No one answered the door, and the place looked deserted.

  She tried René’s number as she had all night. No answer.

  Then her cell phone rang.

  René’s kidnappers? Her heart leaped and she looked at her Tintin watch. If she told Léo the time, it might help her track the call.

  “Mademoiselle Leduc,” said a clipped voice. “Commissaire Ronsard would like to speak with you.”

  Her heart sank. Ronsard from the Brigade Criminelle quartered in the Préfecture De Police at Quai des Orfévres. How had he found her?

  “Concerning?”

  “He’ll expect you within half an hour, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

  AIMÉE STOOD in the Brigade Criminelle outer office by a scuffed mustard-colored door. Wet wool, unemptied ashtrays and the sad smell of fear kept her company. She shivered, staring at the ancient brown-tiled floor and the yellowing announcements on the faded green walls. Thick, webbed skylights let in gray diffused light.

  A NO SMOKING sign hung above the m
etal desk and a scratched billy club lay next to binders of the staff shift schedules and a log labelled SICK DAYS.

  A bored zigzag, a low-ranking officer with three stripes, passed by.

  She tapped her high-heeled boot, smoothed down her leather skirt. The chilly waiting room felt like the polar ice cap. And the frigid glare of the young uniformed receptionist, who insisted she empty her pockets and bag twice before passing through the metal detector, didn’t help.

  “Mademoiselle Leduc,” she said, at long last, “go in.”

  Aimée passed a vaulted window in the long corridor. Below, the Seine snaked, pewter and dark khaki, under the overcast sky.

  “You wanted to see me, Commissaire Ronsard?” she said, entering his office.

  Commissaire Ronsard nodded. “Un moment,” he asked, handing a uniformed flic a red labeled file: evidence complete and ready for la Proc’, the Prosecutor.

  The Brigade Criminelle boasted of their 72 percent solved-case rate. That didn’t include the banlieue, suburbs with high-rise concrete projects that the brigade didn’t police—or care to. Even the Paris flics avoided them.

  She noted the wooden desk with stacked folders, two folding metal chairs, and photos of former department chiefs lining the mustard colored walls—one very familiar to her. Bound manuals of the Code Civil sat on a window ledge.

  “Tell me about your relationship with Thadée Baret,” Ronsard said, indicating a wooden chair.

  “Relationship?”

  “Were you l’autre femme? ”

  Quaint, the old expression for the other woman.

  “Not at all.” She stuffed her anger. “Why ask me?”

  “But Mademoiselle, you lured him to the phone cabinet,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Accosted him. Bystanders heard you shouting. Said he seemed desperate.”

  “Thadée was desperate, Commissaire,” she said, keeping her voice patient. “How did you get my name?”

  “Bystanders heard you identify yourself,” he said.

  “Of course, I stood—”

  “Right here,” he interrupted, pulling down a screen with a diagram of rue des Moines. The half-moon-shaped square, the boulangerie and the phone cabinet were outlined in blue. Polaroid photos of Thadée’s body from various angles were tacked up beside the diagram. She winced. Thadée resembled a twisted broken doll.

  “Commissaire,” she said, “he told me someone was following him. And I know he waited for my call in a café. Perhaps his phone was tapped. On top of that, my partner René Friant has been kidnapped.”

  “Mademoiselle Leduc, that’s the first I’ve heard about it.”

  “The kidnapper wants this.” She showed him the fifty-thousand franc check. “They said Thadée owed them. If I didn’t pay, they’d dismember my partner.”

  “Did Thadée Baret say something to anger you?”

  Why was he obsessed with that?

  She shook her head. From the walls dampness emanated through the rectangular office. Goosebumps went up her arms.

  “You yourself admit you pushed him into the line of fire.”

  “Don’t you understand?” she stood up, paced closer to the diagram. “I’d never even met him. If I planned on killing Thadée, I wouldn’t lure him into a crowd to be the target, too. But if someone wanted to stop him talking, it was the perfect way to eliminate him and throw the blame on me.” She stared at the commissaire. “You know that as well as I do.”

  She watched his face. Did a flicker of understanding cross it? She figured right now he had no other leads so he’d jumped on her.

  “Au contraire,” he said. “A witness heard you threatening him. Saw you push him.”

  How convenient. She wondered if they’d find this witness again. She was glad she kept the information about the jade to herself.

  “Like I said, I told him to duck, but too late. What can you do about my partner, René Friant? Commissaire, I’m not a civilian.“ She walked to the wall, pointed to the photo of a tall man, with a gray mustache and sharp eyes. “That’s my grand-père. He left the Deuxième Bureau, as they used to call this section, and started Leduc Detective.”

  Commissaire Ronsard would listen to her now, wouldn’t he? He pulled at a loose thread from his jacket, then looked away.

  “Mademoiselle, how do you explain Baret’s ex-wife Sophie’s disappearance?”

  “Disappearance?” Aimée asked. “That’s a question for you to answer, Commissaire,” she said. “She had been assaulted in her home and tied up. I cut her down from the toilet pipe, otherwise—”

  “Attendez.” He opened a folder, took out more Polaroids. “A courtyard resident called last night and said he saw you carry a struggling Sophie to a taxi.”

  The graphic artist.

  “But I was helping her.”

  “Then where is she?”

  Should she tell him? But he didn’t seem to believe anything else she said. And she worried for Sophie’s safety.

  “Sophie checked into a clinic to rest, she seemed distraught.” A small fib.

  “We need to question her.”

  Sleet silvered his office window, sheeting the barges in the Seine in a gray mist. The office temperature matched the dampness outside.

  “Commissaire, that’s for you to arrange.”

  “I can keep you in garde à vue until you cooperate,” he said. A garde à vue would smell of unwashed socks, vomit, and urine, on a good day.

  “Clinique Parc Monceau,” she said. “At least I dropped her off there.”

  She knew someone would check. That’s why she’d made a reservation there on her cell phone from the taxi the previous night.

  “Why didn’t you help her register at the clinic?”

  “Commissaire, she didn’t want my help,” she said.

  “We found this in the gallery,” he said, slapping it on his desk. “Does this look familiar?”

  Aimée’s black wool scarf.

  Great.

  “Merci, this must have fallen when I helped her,” she said.

  “But Sophie Baret never checked in. We consulted all the registers at clinics and hopitals. Standard procedure. Found a reservation but Sophie Baret didn’t check into the clinic. Matter of fact, her name appears on an Orly flight manifest to London.”

  “London?”

  “On an Air France flight. How do you explain that, Mademoiselle?”

  Wasn’t she still at Morbier’s? “That’s news to me.”

  “So you took her to the airport,” he continued, “or made it appear that way.”

  “Commissaire, I had no idea—”

  “Did you silence her, too?” he interrupted.

  Aimée didn’t like the look in the commissaire’s eye. Or his attitude. She thought fast. “This is the first I heard she went to London. All I know is what I’ve told you. Commissaire, I could have been a victim, too. What if I was the target? Aren’t you pursuing that line of inquiry?”

  “So tell me about your enemies, anyone who would shoot at you,” he said. “Work related issues?”

  “My partner and I do computer security,” she said. ”As I told you, I got a call. He has been kidnapped.”

  “So you say.” Ronsard stared at her.

  “You think I’m making this up? Have you investigated Baret’s drug connections?”

  “You sound quite familiar with him,” he said. “I feel you’re holding something back, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

  What good would it to do to tell him about the jade; he wouldn’t believe a word she said.

  “Aren’t you going to write this down? René Friant, 19 rue de la Reynie, missing since Wednesday evening.”

  “How did these alleged kidnappers make contact?” He pulled out a notebook.

  “They called me on my cell phone from René’s.” She punched in René’s number now but the only response was his voice mail message.

  “How many times have they called you?”

  “Just the once,” she said.

  “The
y’re waiting for somebody.”

  She agreed.

  “Or something. What do you think that would be?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll alert the Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmie Nationale unit,” he said.

  The supposedly elite group that dealt with terrorism? Léo’s help was more promising.

  A look crossed Commissaire Ronsard’s face that she couldn’t decipher.

  “If Sophie Baret gets in touch, we expect to be informed,” he said, his tone dismissive. “You can go.”

  That seemed quick. Too quick. Was he letting her go so they could follow her, see if Sophie got in touch? Or, Aimée shuddered, if she’d lead them to Sophie’s body?

  She walked to the door.

  “Mademoiselle Leduc?”

  She turned.

  “I’m sure you’re aware we have the right to keep you in garde à vue,” he said. His small eyes never left her face. “We can hold you for forty-eight hours. Think of it this way; it’s secure, no enemies could shoot at you.”

  “I’m aware of the law and the legal system, Commissaire,” she said, buttoning her coat. “Matter of fact, I took an oath when I obtained my detective license. Like you, we’re sworn to uphold the law. But thanks for refreshing my memory. I thought it was seventy-two hours.”

  She wrapped the scarf around her neck, hitched her bag onto her shoulder.

  “If there’s nothing more Commissaire?” she said, looking again at the Polaroids, the sad crumpled body of Thadée Baret.

  All the way down the Préfecture’s staircase, she wondered how hard they would try to find René. And why the hell had Sophie fled to London? Why hadn’t Morbier called her?

  Thursday Afternoon

  MORBIER, WEARING A SUIT and tie and carrying a briefcase, locked the door of his Bastille district apartment. The briefcase was one her father had given him long ago. She’d only seen him in a suit once before.

  “Why didn’t you let me know Sophie’d left?”

  Startled, Morbier turned around.

  “Leduc, don’t sneak up on me like that. We’ll talk later, I’m late for the Tribunal,” he said. “Turns out Marc’s other grandparents have called for a mediation to extend their visitation rights.”