Murder in the Sentier

by Cara Black

  She looked down and nodded. She had to find out about Jules. “Call me,” she said and gave him her cell phone number.

  “Is your name Marie?”

  “Non.”

  “I didn’t think so,” he said, his mouth in a lopsided grin. “Like mother, like daughter.”

  SHE CHECKED her messages. Only one from Etienne, to meet at Rouge.

  The bouncer, a massive, bald, ebony-skinned man with an earring and leather vest, stood guard at the door. A line of fashionable people waiting to enter the members-only club trailed around the corner.

  “Your name?” The bouncer gripped her by the shoulder.

  “Aimée, Etienne Mabry’s guest.”

  “Let me check,” he said. He spoke into a walkie-talkie.

  Outside the club, the faded blue letters of an old hotel sign trailed across lichen-covered stone.

  “Just left on his ’arley,” he said in a broad Guadeloupe accent.

  “Alone?”

  His eyes shuttered.

  “Masculine or feminine, that’s all I want to know,” Aimée said, wondering if he’d met up with Christian. “Several of us were meeting.”

  “Very feminine.”

  “For your help, merci.” Aimée smiled. Of course, he’d attract women like Velcro. She’d had her chance, sort of, but the timing had been off.

  The bouncer winked, then turned to open the door of a Mercedes limo that had just pulled up.

  * * *

  AIMÉE WANTED to go home and research Jules but something nagged at her. On her way back, she stopped at Romain Figeac’s apartment on rue de Clery. Despite the darkness, she’d try once more to discover tapes, or anything she might have overlooked.

  She stepped over the police tape. Using her penlight and the one remaining lamp that shone, she pulled latex gloves from her bag and shuffled through the charred debris. Wet ash, muck, and smokiness pervaded the gutted rooms. Romain Figeac’s leather chair was turned upside down. She pulled out her Swiss Army knife, righted the chair, and checked the seams. But someone else had beaten her to it. A clean slice round the leather. She reached in, felt only soggy ticking and wire springs.

  What a waste, she thought. Figeac’s work, gone or destroyed. Everything floated midair, aloft. Out of her reach. She wasn’t even sure of what she searched for.

  This fire made no sense to her … if someone was seeking valuables in the apartment, why burn it up?

  She turned the chair upside down again, leaned against its wooden legs, and thought over what Georges had said. His conversation reinforced feelings she’d kept buried. Or tried to.

  Her mother had risen above a mundane life of domestic worries and child care, devoting her time to fighting injustice. Imbibing new-found excitement in the heady seventies radical existence. Taking lovers, living in a commune, making art.

  Her mother was no innocent. She’d been a drug mule, according to Jutta. A terrorist.

  An addict?

  Jutta had probably touched only the tip of the iceberg. Too bad her brains had been splattered on the stones of the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur before Aimée could find out what she’d known.

  No answers. Only thoughts of a skinny woman with a faint, lingering scent of muguets, who at this moment could be roaming the backstreets of Africa.

  She found a broom in a closet. With slow strokes, she swept the muck into a pile, then sifted it through her gloved hands.

  All she found were blackened rattan and burnt jacquard drapery pieces. Mildewed, and home to a mouse nest.

  But what if the arsonist hadn’t found Romain Figeac’s work either?

  She tried to think as if she were Figeac … tried to relate to a washed-up writer, once a radical, who’d nursed thoughts of revenge upon those who ruined his wife. For the next hour, she raked through every crackled drawer, charred closet, and blistered wallpaper seam, even climbing on piled-up chairs to unscrew the faux ceiling plate from which the blackened and dust-covered chandelier hung.

  Nothing.

  In the kitchen, she checked the bottom of every dish, behind the cupboards, behind the old refrigerator, and in the flour bin in the pantry.

  All she came up with was a white coating on her greasy, blackened latex gloves.

  The pompiers had broken the glass to Christian’s mother’s room; her seventies jumpsuits and Afro wigs were smoke-and water-damaged. Little remained in the musty room besides stained and faded peach satin sheets on the four-poster bed. Despite the years, Aimée felt a disturbing sense of intimacy with this woman.

  Smelling of soot and with blackened bits under her broken nails, Aimée left. Tired and discouraged, she went to the familiar marble stairs. She’d been here three times and grown no wiser.

  She was convinced she’d missed something. Christian had paid her to find his father’s killer and his work and it looked like the fire had been set by an arsonist who couldn’t find the work either.

  And she’d come no closer to her mother. Most of her life she’d been haunted by this woman who, it seemed more and more obvious, wanted nothing to do with her. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have come back?

  Better to get rid of the smoky smell, soak in a long, hot bath, and warm her bones.

  At the foot of the staircase, by the cellar door, a shrunken woman struggled with a case of empty champagne bottles. Whether she was bent over from its weight or osteoporosis, Aimée couldn’t tell.

  “Tant pis!” the old woman mumbled under her breath.

  “Let me get the door for you,” Aimée said.

  “Commes vous-êtes gentille,” the woman said, glad of assistance. Her hair, pulled back in a tight chignon, was bone white and a scarf draped her caved-in shoulders despite the heat. “If you’d be so kind as to unlock it.”

  Aimée turned the big key, shoved the door open, and reached for the light switch.

  “Madame, please let me help you get them downstairs.”

  “I won’t protest, Mademoiselle. My great-grandson’s baptism party,” she said, as if the bottles needed an explanation. “I have to get them downstairs, can’t stand them in my apartment anymore!”

  Aimée hefted the crate and edged down the shadowy, steep steps. She wondered how the frail, elderly woman would have negotiated them. The jiggling bottles and the damp odor of mildew and rat traps on the beaten dirt floor made her regret her impulse. Then she spotted the gated tenant lock-ups with numbers on the rotting wood doors.

  Of course … why hadn’t she thought of this?

  “Voilà.” She set down the full crate. A low-watt bulb illumined one end of the cellar, casting shadows over the vaulted stone.

  “Merci,” the woman said.

  “Do these numbers correspond to the apartments?” Aimée asked, looking around and dusting off her hands.

  “Let me see, it’s been so long since I came down here.” The woman took the glasses hanging from a chain around her neck and peered up.

  Aimée pulled out her penlight and shone the thin beam about her. Stone arches supported an aqueductlike array of storage alcoves. A wonderful chill traveled up her legs.

  “That’s better,” the old woman said, shuffling forward. A faint fragrance of violets trailed her. “My key ring has my storage key.”

  Cobwebs, sticky and heavy with dead insects, caught on Aimée’s sleeve. They clung like skin when she tried to brush them off.

  “Which one’s Romain Figeac’s?” she asked.

  “Number 311, that’s his,” the old woman said, turning the corner of the dank tunnel. “Right here.”

  Aimée pointed her penlight.

  The busted lock shone, hanging by a hinge.

  Beaten to it. Again! Her hopes sank.

  She touched the door, which sagged open. Inside lay balled-up newpapers on the packed dirt. A water-stained plywood piece closed off the old stone wall.

  Beaten at every turn.

  “My storage stall sits over there.” The old woman pointed. “By the old exit. Mind helping me?”

&
nbsp; “The old exit?”

  “Bien sûr,” said the old woman, clutching her scarf around her. “Paris sits on a big Swiss cheese, that’s what my papa used to say.”

  Aimée grinned. She’d never heard it referred to like that before. “Like the catacombs in the Marais?”

  “Older. Underneath here, it’s limestone laced with holes. Much of the quartier’s built on limestone, like Montmartre.”

  Maybe that’s why so much of Paris had stayed the same for centuries—the foundation wouldn’t support new construction. Fascinating, but Aimée didn’t understand the connection.

  “How does that make for another exit?”

  The old woman rubbed her arms in the dank chill. “They all connected at one time. Probably some still do. There was a colony of underground people, rumor had it.” She shrugged. “Stories, eh? But during the war, people came down during air raids when they were too lazy to go to the Metro.”

  Aimée looked at the faded writing on the wood. “Looks unsafe.” She peered closer. “Does this go to Place du Caire?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” the woman said. Stacked plastic boxes stood inside the woman’s coved storage space. “What’s that?” she said. “I haven’t put anything down here in years.”

  Curious, Aimée stepped closer. Papers filled the clouded plastic. Had Figeac hidden his work here?

  “How about we open one, just to check?” Aimée asked.

  Before the woman could say no, she stepped in a puddle, rank and brown, then knelt down. The plastic cover stuck. Keeping her hand steady, she pulled, using so much force that when the top came off she fell back in the dirt.

  Eager, she shone the penlight. Scraps of a browned discharge certificate and war medals attached to crumbling blue, white, and red ribbons.

  “What does it say?”

  “Yvon Edelman, distinguished service,” Aimée said.

  “My uncle,” the old woman said. “I forgot, of course, I asked my grandson to bring these down. He carries the light things, always forgets the heavy ones.”

  Disappointed, Aimée put them back.

  “Madame, did you know Romain Figeac?”

  Aimée was surprised to see the old woman’s mouth purse in disapproval.

  “Of course! The great Monsieur ‘Figeac,’ as he called himself. Alors, try Monsieur Finkelstein—his real name! Maybe that didn’t fit on those book covers. His father was a tailor like mine. From the same street in Lodz even!” She rolled her eyes. “Yet the way he acted, who’d know it. But the old poseur’s gone. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead …” Her voice trailed off.

  That’s why Figeac lived in the Sentier—he’d been born here.

  “Dabbled in politics, didn’t he?” Aimée asked. “Wasn’t he married to an actress?”

  “That’s him,” the old woman nodded. She’d become reenergized. She stood up straighter in the thin flashlight beam. “He played at life. Never read his books so I don’t know about them. But he still could run up a fine inseam, like his papa taught him. The young one, his son, seems so hapless!” She shook her head. “When he was little he was a sweet lost lamb. He’s never gotten his life together.”

  Poor Christian. She could see what the old woman meant.

  Ahead of them hung a rope ladder. Aimée grasped the rope, damp and frayed at the edges, and climbed. But her head hit something hard. She peered up to see a wooden hatch. It didn’t budge.

  She climbed down, dusted her legs off, and escorted the old lady upstairs.

  “Have you noticed anyone hanging around … any strangers,” Aimée asked.

  “Like you, you mean?” The woman shook her head.

  “I work with the arson investigators,” Aimée said, stretching the truth. “If something comes to mind, here’s my card. Please, give me a call.”

  The old woman trundled off to her apartment.

  And then Aimée saw it. A bullet hole in the wall. Like a splattered graphite flower. She sniffed. Gunpowder … fresh or at least recent.

  If a silencer had been used, as with Jutta, would the old woman have heard it?

  She wished she had a fireman’s hatchet with which to chop out the piece of the wall. She knew a .25 didn’t blast a crater like this.

  She found her metal nail file, Swiss Army knife, and clippers in her backpack and got to work. Finally the plaster gave way. By gouging, poking, and levering she managed to scrape down to something metallic. Five minutes later, she’d hooked the curved nail file edge under the bullet and pried it out.

  The slug of a .357. She dropped it in a Baggie, put it in her backpack, and left.

  TIRED, NO taxi in sight, and only few francs in her secondhand Vuitton wallet, Aimée caught the Metro, changed at Chatelet, and exited at Pont Marie. The soft summer night’s wind lofted from the dark Seine. Blue lights of the bateau-mouches glided under her.

  What a night, she thought, crossing the bridge—meeting Etienne at the squat but not Christian; Georges and Frédo’s reminiscing about her mother; discovering the ancient underground vaults in Romain Figeac’s building and then the fresh bullet hole in the wall. More questions and she was still no closer to her mother.

  She strode along the edge of the walkway, kicking a pebble against the low stone wall, when she noticed lights shining in her apartment. And for a moment, time was suspended … someone was home waiting for her … like her papa … or Yves once … but her papa lay in the cemetery and Yves had returned his key…. René? Non, he always called first.

  “Maman?” escaped her lips.

  A woman walking her dog on the quai turned to look at her as she ran, crossing the cobbles at breakneck speed. She hit the numbers on the digicode and barreled inside her building. She bounded up the marble stairs, grooved and worn from centuries.

  In the black-and-white-diamond-tiled hallway her apartment door lay open, the drone of conversation and static from a police radio coming from the foyer.

  Nom de Dieu!

  Of course, her mother wasn’t here … what had got into her?

  She went to the door. Someone caught her elbow. Gripped and held it. She turned to see a middle-aged blue-uniformed flic with a radio to his ear.

  “Where might you be going in such a hurry?”

  She surveyed the foyer. “I live here.”

  “You can prove that?”

  She pulled out her carte d’identite, flashed her detective badge.

  “Merci, Mademoiselle Leduc,” he said. “Seems you’ve had a break-in.”

  Her heart hammered.

  “A break-in … who informed the police?”

  “A concerned neighbor,” he said. “But you’re the best one to let us know what’s missing.”

  “Commissaire Morbier’s in charge?”

  If the flic was surprised at her knowledge he didn’t show it.

  “Lieutenant Bellan’s on robbery detail,” he said. “We just got here, Mademoiselle. It was like this—the door wide open, but no lights on. Sorry for the shock.”

  She studied the man, saw his shoulder stripes. He was more informative than most, downright human.

  “You look familiar, Sergeant.”

  “Helier. I worked under your father briefly, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Before he retired. I was proud of the opportunity.”

  Now she remembered. “Of course, Sergeant, thank you for your kind words. Aren’t you from Quimper in Brittany?”

  He nodded, a big smile on his face.

  Her father always said the best biscuits came from there. He’d buy them from Fauchon for a treat.

  “Mademoiselle, this way, please!” beckoned another flic from her kitchen.

  As she passed Sergeant Helier, he covered his mouth. “I didn’t believe what they said,” he said in a low undertone. “Never. He was a good man.”

  Before she could reply or ask what he meant, a flic holding a squirming and barking Miles Davis approached her. Miles Davis yelped and jumped to the parquet floor.

  “Merci. Where was he?” s
he said, opening her arms and catching him.

  The flic rolled his eyes. “Locked in the bathroom.”

  “Tiens, furball,” she said, ruffling his ears and smoothing the hair from his eyes. His chin dripped. “Drinking from the W.C.?” Miles Davis whimpered. “Of course, you were thirsty and someone bad locked you inside.”

  “How did they get in?”

  “Forced entry, front door.”

  She expected to see furniture turned over, papers strewn about, and linens ripped up. But apart from the flics dusting for fingerprints, nothing appeared disturbed. She checked the high-ceilinged dining room, the corner converted to her home office. Her computer, the zip disks, and floppies, appeared untouched. She did a quick scan of her bedroom, the guest room, bathrooms, the unused parlor piled with her grandfather’s auction-find furniture, the morning room, and her father’s old bedroom.

  Even her Fendi tote bag hung from its hook in the hallway. The sheen of dust in the unused rooms lay undisturbed … for once her lack of housekeeping skills was useful.

  Nothing seemed unusual except the sugar spilled from a canister in the kitchen. Clumps of brown sugar trailed over the blue tiles.

  “A thief with a sweet tooth?” said a voice behind her. “Or scared off by the neighbors?”

  She’d thought the same thing, and turned around to a grim-faced Lieutenant Bellan.

  “We meet again, Lieutenant Bellan,” she said. “Isn’t the 2nd arrondissement your turf?”

  “Par l’habitude,” he said with a shrug. “Vacation schedule, we’re consolidating services. Which means most of the robbery detail lies on the beachfront at Biarritz while we sweat in Paris.”

  She nodded.

  “You know the drill,” he said. “We make a report, you come down to the Commissariat tomorrow, sign it. And stay somewhere else tonight.”

  He seemed downright affable. And tired. Big bags under his eyes. He glanced at his watch. “My wife’s gone into labor … number three, shouldn’t take long. If you’ll excuse me.”

  “One thing, Bellan,” she said. “What’s the case against Christian Figeac?”

  “Confidentiality laws forbid me to talk about that inquiry, Mademoiselle Leduc,” he said. The pager clipped to his wrinkled jacket pocket beeped.